mklopets

Heh, nice to stumble on this here; I wrote the post – happy to answer any questions!

Hah, I was building something almost identical to this a few months ago. Very nice!

Might be good to share your background first.

At least their status page (https://status.aws.amazon.com/) is as unreliable as ever.

This is really neat!

What's your thinking behind how this works? What makes the 'after' sites more beautiful?

The increased padding on the Chromium site is great, but to me the HN 'after' looks quite a bit uglier than the 'before'.

Though I now have an extra if statement in my code to detect and log this type of 'hacking' attempts in addition to some others, the code was never vulnerable to this in the first place. No file contents are displayed at any time anyway.

It's not showing x minutes AND y seconds, it's x minutes OR y seconds. Minutes is just there for someone who doesn't need precision and can let the API handle the rounding. Seconds is for people who want to do more advanced stuff.

Aaaaand now there are tens of IPs trying to access /etc/passwd. Tailing my "failed hack attempts" log is kinda fun now.

But if you wrote this to warn me, then thanks!

Thanks for sharing! The point here isn't just calculating the reading time based on a WPM metric, it's fetching a remote page, analyzing it to find the main content and then doing the maths, among other stuff taking into account any images.

I'm aware of it, thanks. The current approach isn't really that flexible. For example, I've seen the NY Times and The Atlantic not working. I've considered some different potential fixes but haven't implemented them yet. Thanks!

This is just that - a demo right now. I'll most likely keep this as a pet project of mine, trying to make the underlying algorithm a bit more intelligent. I'll then probably release it on GitHub (https://github.com/mklopets).

We definitely don't need an API. Then again, we basically don't need most APIs. This doesn't estimate the article's complexity as of now, but its main point is not just getting the length of the entire site, but locating the most likely main content area and THEN doing the /250.

Also, Facebook itself, not taking into account its Messenger, is dying out - 90% of the newsfeed is covered with posts from sites like The Verge or any other sites that you follow. The actual amount of stuff that you care about is 2% of it all. Can't honestly remember someone posting a legitimately interesting status update. Instead, I see selfies and news.

Not a fan. Almost everyone I know has stopped using Snapchat. Its servers are god-awful - don't work 50% of the time here and people have got tired of seeing friends' sushi pictures & selfies 24/7.

Also, choosing not to support Windows Phone (and apparantly not even recording WP users' requests) is a really stupid move in my opinion.

Furthermore, I see no reason why Snapchat should be preferred over Facebook Messenger. If you want to share a moment with a friend, you might as well share it for more than 10 seconds. Messenger always works reliably for me. Snapchat doesn't. Case closed.