

Show HN: Hacker News 2 - A HN clone built on Node.js, Backbone, and MongoDB - mappum
http://hackernewstwo.com/

======
aditiyaa1
I am sorry, But I don't find it better than HN in anyway. Two main reasons
why:

1\. Too much noise, real strain to focus on each title. The reason why I say
that the thumbnails as noise is because it is in no way helping me to decide
whether to read an article or not. The only reason I choose an article to read
is the title so anything else is mere distraction.

2\. Due to the first reason,Skimming is not as easy as the original HN, which
is important for all of us here.

But let this not discourage you in anyway. The good thing from what I can see
from your work is, you know what you want and you know how to do it.

Thinking of an application based on this UI that you have designed might be
browsing pictures in reddit.com/r/pics or imgur. Here the thumbnails of the
image at the back will not be a noise, but a useful info to decide on whether
to look at the picture or not.

------
henrikeh
Most of the month (all but a few days) I've only got a 20 kbit/s connection.
Let that sink in. Twenty. Kilobits. Per. Second. That's less than the voyager
spacecraft (but probably a better ping).

\---

The front page of Hacker News is 27.75KB and 7 requests.

Hacker News Two is in comparison 2.07MB and 60 requests.

\---

Hacker News loads in 2.26 seconds.

Hacker New Two loads in 2.5 minutes.

\---

I'm an edge case. Of all the users on Hacker News, only a handful are on sub-
dial-up connections, but does all the added stuff really add so much to a
website like Hacker News?

~~~
tokenizer
I know this is somewhat off topic, but could you talk a little about your
browsing habits? I'm curious as a web developer who's never had less than 50
kbit/s and that was when I was 6 or 7.

I'd like to know which sites you find useful with the speeds you have (Hacker
News, Reddit, SSL enabled sites, etc)?

On topic, I'd like to say that your I'm sorry for your speed, but it has no
relevance for this app at the moment. Developers should push boundaries and
try new things, and to cater to your speeds means doing nothing but simple
simple stuff IMO.

I'd recommend building a mechanism that switches to the mobile site using a
ping from the server based on response time for developers out there, and for
you to either upgrade if you can, or to switch to mobile views as default (I
know chrome can do this while in dev tools, but I haven't tested it while
turning the dev tools off).

But seriously, I don't want to be a dick or seem agressive... but really? He's
trying to do something cool. I'm sorry you can't see stuff like that, but
accessibility means sacrifice almost always.

~~~
gurkendoktor
I'm sorry to rant but this is how bloat happens. HN2 offers no relevant
information over the current HN and is almost a hundred times as big. People
will probably throw more hardware at it just as you say. I always wonder why
people are desperate to ruin their battery life with LTE when I used to surf
the web on GPRS not long ago; then I realize how current websites work and I
get it.

------
tferris
Absolutely love your stack and you should tell more about how you did and
write a decent blog post.

And I like and appreciate the idea of improving HN: we all love HN, are
addicted and know that there is room for improvement.

But did you make before you started to code any kind of design mockup? In
Fireworks or Photoshop? And looked at it a few days? If not you should. It's
tempting and often faster to hack and test layouts in Jade and Stylus (or HAML
and SASS) but I made the experience that if doing a mockup in Fireworks and
just watch and get used to it a few days you get a much better feeling of your
product. After a few days you realize bad design choices, start to change and
your design and UI slowly matures into something perfect. Usually this takes
up to 7 to 14 days.

Current flaws:

\- Headers much too small in relation to thumb size and overall layout

\- I question the thumbs: do they really offer any benefit? HN articles are
often more about text than great visuals and even if i's about images: you'd
have just to take one dominating pic of the site and not the whole site

\- Too low content density compared to HN

\- When showing rankings a single column list always works better than a grid
layout because the reader instantly gets who is on #1, #2, #3, etc.

~~~
Dysiode
I felt the same about the thumbnails. Then I checked out the new articles and
could easily pick out the spam (Indian Party Wear Sarees in this case). I
don't think it's so useful for the top articles since most are primarily
textual but it brings out an interesting use case for unfiltered content.

------
tantalor
Non-linear layouts (Facebook, Pinterest) are difficult to scan quickly, it
requires a lot more concentration.

(I read an article about this property back when Timeline was introduced but I
can't seem to find it now.)

------
charliesome
I don't like it at all.

I have a fairly fast connection, but I live in Australia and latency is a real
issue.

Hacker News loads pretty much instantly. This takes 6.78 seconds to start
loading the links - even on a warm cache. Most of that time is spent waiting
on a web socket. There's absolutely no reason in the world why a link
aggregator needs web sockets.

~~~
tferris
> Most of that time is spent waiting on a web socket.

Is the delay after the header loaded caused by websockets? Is this always with
websockets or are there ways to avoid delays?

~~~
charliesome
It appears so. Open Chrome's Network Inspector and reload the page to see for
yourself.

This could be resolved by sending the links in the HTML rather than pulling
them down over the web socket

------
mischov
I can see 18 headlines when I arrive at Hacker News. I can see 6 headlines
when I arrive at Hacker News Two.

The headlines are obvious when I arrive at Hacker News. There is a lot of
noise between me and the headlines when I arrive at Hacker News Two.

I am going to stick with the original.

~~~
andrewfelix
On top of this, the eye tends to move from top left to bottom right. This grid
layout forces the user to read left to right across the entire screen, drop
down and start again in an unnatural way. The problem is amplified when
scrolling.

I would suggest moving towards a standard top down list (ironically like the
existing HN). I would avoid using screen grabs, as HN articles tend to be
about written content.

------
chaffneue
This project is awesome mostly because you can see blogspam and linkbait
immediately. There are some glitches of articles with no screenshots and the
borders on images are HUGE. The github link really should open a new window as
the socket connection can take a bit of time when you click back. A link to
flag a post and endless scrolling/more would be great. I've used it for a few
hours and I'm relieved it gets around the expired or missing link bug that HN
suffers from.

------
tantalor
Source code: <https://github.com/mappum/hackernewstwo>

------
benologist
It's very difficult to read or focus on anything in particular, or to skim
through everything in general.

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technojuicy
Not sure if it's me, but the different width sizes makes it messy and
cumbersome to read. I think it would be a lot more organizes if there was some
more order to this. Also, not quite sure what the orange bordered stories
means.

~~~
mappum
That seemed to be the consensus, so I just gave them all the same width.
Better?

Idk how to make it obvious, but grey is visited links, orange is unvisited.

------
pbreit
Awful.

Firstly because it is not an "HN clone" at all but merely the front page.

Secondly, the thumbs are a terrible way to display HN content.

------
aaronpk
I don't find the screenshots useful at all.

