
Text-only CNN - ekimekim
http://lite.cnn.io/
======
SubiculumCode
When Google first came out and we tried it there were two things we liked
about it.

The first: Good search results. Yeah everyone knows that right. But young
people today might have forgotten the second reason we liked Google search
back then:

The Second: A clean page with a single logo and search field. It loaded quick.
There were no banners everywhere, no bs.

HackerNews has that feel. It is clean, information dense, and does what it
needs to do.

~~~
kalleboo
The Swedish public broadcaster still keeps their Teletext[0] service running.
One of the cleanest way to get your news (especially on a TV where load times
are zero). You can access it on the web as well
[https://www.svt.se/svttext/web/pages/100.html](https://www.svt.se/svttext/web/pages/100.html)

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext)

~~~
akira2501
It makes me pine for the days of Gopher.

~~~
err4nt
What do you miss about Gopher?

~~~
Karunamon
All data, simple navigation, no BS.

------
jackschultz
Someone pointed out below, but in a comment way down in the thread, but CNN is
actually who's behind this:

[https://twitter.com/CNN/status/906821174805630976](https://twitter.com/CNN/status/906821174805630976)

I'm not sure if the reason behind this is because of possible weak phone
connections or that the hurricane is a good way to promote the text only site,
but either way, huge shoutout to CNN for going forward with this themselves.

I've thought for a while about scraping news sites to just show their text, or
something like classifying articles based on their subjects from different
ones. On this front, they did it first.

~~~
aiyodev
This is what CNN looked like on 9/11:

[http://i.imgur.com/tqnVwp6.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/tqnVwp6.jpg)

All the major sites switched to something like this when the internet slowed
to a halt. I assume they've always had a minimal version ready in case
something like it happens again.

~~~
gravypod
I'd pay $5/month for a reputable news site to provide this all year long.

~~~
knz
[http://www.npr.org](http://www.npr.org) ?

It's not text only but it's considerably more minimal than most news websites,
loads almost instantly, doesn't have auto play content, and is considered a
reputable source.

The BBC used to be similar but their international website is awful now (slow
to load, more adverts, and less emphasis on actual news).

~~~
mallaidh
It's text-only when you use [http://thin.npr.org](http://thin.npr.org)

~~~
wyldfire
The full npr.org provides transcripts for many or all of their stories. This
site leads me to stories that only contain bylines and no other content. Seems
like a bug to not include at least a link to the audio or the transcript.

------
rwbt
Also, NPR has had a text only site for ages

[http://thin.npr.org](http://thin.npr.org)

~~~
fletchowns
It's so fast, feels like it's hosted locally

~~~
throw89825
if you click Topics -> News[0] it takes 2.7 seconds. They should throw that
subdomain behind [https://memcached.org/](https://memcached.org/) (and not use
php lol).

Unrelated, seems like I can't listen to podcasts. There's an <audio> tag
(which doesn't use data unless you click on play if you set preload="none"
[1]), so that's an interesting choice.

    
    
        $ curl http://thin.npr.org/t.php?tid=1001
        [...]
        Total wall clock time: 2.7s
    
        $ ping thin.npr.org
        [...]
        round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 76.407/78.359/86.985/2.442 ms
    
    

[0] [http://thin.npr.org/t.php?tid=1001](http://thin.npr.org/t.php?tid=1001)

[1] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/au...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/audio)

~~~
Jgrubb
You don't put things behind Memcached. You put Memcached behind things.

~~~
1123581321
Varnish is an in-memory cache that sits in front of a site.

~~~
Jgrubb
Correct.

------
Osiris
The absolute worst thing about cnn.com is the auto-playing videos. I've been
in quiet places and clicked a CNN news link only to have a video start
blasting on the speakers. It's not only annoying but a huge waste of mobile
bandwidth.

Now I just need an extension that rewrites all CNN urls to this site.

~~~
tim333
Disable HTML5 Autoplay [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-
html5-auto...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-
html5-autoplay/efdhoaajjjgckpbkoglidkeendpkolai?hl=en)

works for me at the moment. You never know when the blighters will change the
format though.

~~~
alecco
In Firefox:

about:config

media.autoplay.enabled False

------
ascom
EDIT: As I wrote this, someone deployed a server-side rendered version of the
site. Now the site is perfect. :)

This site appears to load ~350 KB of JavaScript, which I think is a bit
excessive for a "lite" text-only site. From the sourcemaps, I found a long
list of libraries, including:

* react

* redux

* redux-thunk

* react-router

* axios

* base64-js (why not window.atob/btoa?)

* core-js

* fbjs

* react-hot-loader (should not be in a production build)

* ...a bunch of other smaller modules

There's only about 10 KB of non-library application code. Note that I ignore
gzip when evaluating this sort of stuff, since that many bytes of code still
need to be parsed, no matter how much it compresses.

For the person who made this site, I would replace React with Preact (or
Inferno), which should remove most of the bloat. Server side rendering would
also be nice for those who don't have JavaScript enabled and would also
improve the loading time.

At least it's still better than cnn.com.
[http://www.webpagetest.org/result/170910_C8_e78305788a19b0fb...](http://www.webpagetest.org/result/170910_C8_e78305788a19b0fb12e2413251baf9b2/)

~~~
jordache
WTF? why any JS at all for something that's pure content?

~~~
dom0
Because this site is clearly in need of 250 KB surveillance JavaScript.

So even this "plain text" site still transfers ~98 % bloat and just ~2 %
content.

~~~
AndrewCHM
transfer is different from filesize

its more around 90% JS, 10% content

After the first page load (with scripts cached) its around 87% content
(unfortunately they don't seem to be caching CSS)

------
thunfisch
This is what the world needs.

Seriously, I hate this trend to bloat up websites with the rage of a thousand
suns. There is absolutely no value, but it increases bandwith usage, load
times and CPU/RAM usage. News websites having "fancy, modern" websites
actually make me think less of them.

Fuck this web-bloat shit. The web is broken.

~~~
mattwoodnyc
This format is ideal in this context, but the web is far larger than a digital
ticker tape dispenser.

Some publishers are seeking to create a modern version of Life magazine. What
do imagine that would look like? How about National Geographic?

I love, for example, what the teams at The New York Times are doing to enhance
stories with creative uses of the modern web.

The web is not broken, it’s simply revealing that this is a better way to
consume breaking news.

~~~
kevmo
This is the highest-impact format with which one can consume news, though.
Magazines are great, but lots of people are just looking for a quick shot of
the current news. This sort of UI is ideal for that need.

This is exactly why the Drudge Report has stayed relevant for 20 years.

~~~
SQL2219
But behind the curtain, Drudge is a freaking advertising hog.

~~~
kevmo
Doesn't detract from the fact that his information design is A+.

------
gamedna
There is a signifiant value prop for this type of clean interface when
considering users that use accessibility tools to browse the web. I had the
pleasure of working with an engineer whose vision was impaired. Truly inspired
with all the self-engineered tools and software that he created to sanitize
sites of all the bloat for his consumption with a screen reader. This type of
site will make his life a little easier.

------
mdibaiee
I just created an awesome-lite-websites list to be filled with lightweight and
usable websites alike:

GitHub: [https://github.com/mdibaiee/awesome-lite-
websites](https://github.com/mdibaiee/awesome-lite-websites)

Hacker News thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15212155](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15212155)

------
visarga
From the title I thought it would be a Convolutional Neural Network for text,
not the Cable News Network in plain text.

An example to show that text CNN's are a thing:
[https://github.com/dennybritz/cnn-text-classification-
tf](https://github.com/dennybritz/cnn-text-classification-tf)

~~~
molticrystal
I feel your pain, I thought it was either a Convolution or a Cellular neural
network, was very disappointed. But thanks for pointing to some actual good
material to read and look over.

To add to your trend, here is an article [1] about "Texture Classification and
Segmentation by Cellular Neural Networks Using Genetic Learning" , texture not
text though as they are more vision related, though it would be interesting to
see by what methods they could be applied to text.

[1]
[https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tamas_Sziranyi/publicat...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tamas_Sziranyi/publication/222465158_Texture_Classification_and_Segmentation_by_Cellular_Neural_Networks_Using_Genetic_Learning/links/02e7e524ebe4f5d523000000.pdf)

~~~
a_bonobo
The Keras blog also has a good post on using CNNs to label text from
newsgroups with their respective newsgroups: [https://blog.keras.io/using-pre-
trained-word-embeddings-in-a...](https://blog.keras.io/using-pre-trained-word-
embeddings-in-a-keras-model.html)

It achieves 95% accuracy without many tricks, but the newsgroups themselves
are quite different so it's not the hardest problem.

------
midnitewarrior
...and the World Wide Web goes full circle and mimics the service it replaced.
#gopher2017

~~~
sogen
a 16GB RAM machine to run something that ran on 16MB

~~~
JetSpiegel
So that you can open 1024 pages before swapping to disk.

People asked for hundreds of open tabs, they got it.

~~~
sogen
Even on a 16MB machine I had open tens of tabs without much problem, browser
responsiveness on Firebird(?) was the same as this multi-core machine

------
a9entroy
Wow. After all these years of taking steps backwards, finally 100 steps
forward.

~~~
vortico
Is there a collaborative community effort for "fixing" websites to make this
"100 steps forward"? The relative ease and the large benefit of doing so make
it surprising I haven't seen a list of lite websites maintained by volunteers.

~~~
jagger27
Firefox's reader mode?

~~~
newscracker
In my understanding, Firefox Reader Mode (and similar features in other
browsers) reads in the entire page and, based on analyzing the page for cues,
then decides to offer the user an option to choose reader view (or not).

So while it helps improve readability, it doesn't cut down the time to load,
the amount of data downloaded, and probably helps improve the battery life
only marginally (this is debatable, depending on the amount of active JS,
auto-play videos and also at what _time offset t_ the user chooses reader mode
after the page loads).

~~~
digi_owl
The impression i have of this reader mode is that it relies, in part, on pages
offering markers for printing.

I have in the past noticed that reader mode will not be available of i have
killed the JS on a site that enable their print format.

------
mmcnl
I love this. Pure information without bloat. One of the reaons I love
"Teletekst" "teletext"). It also looks very nice, despite the fact that is 30
years old. 101 is news. 818 is domestic football. It's actually still very
popular in The Netherlands, and the app is one of the most used apps here.

[https://nos.nl/teletekst#101](https://nos.nl/teletekst#101)

------
LeoPanthera
The BBC News site used to have a wonderful text-only version which disappeared
a long time ago. I still miss it. It even worked really well in lynx.

~~~
roter
As did the CBC; it is still available but with zero content [0]. It now
directs you to a bloated mobile site.

They do have RSS however [1].

[0] [http://www.cbc.ca/m/text/](http://www.cbc.ca/m/text/) [1]
[http://www.cbc.ca/rss/](http://www.cbc.ca/rss/)

------
booleandilemma
This is awesome. Major props to CNN. Reminds me of an article that appeared on
HN not too long ago about Conde Nast needing Google AMP because their site is
so bloated.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15136525](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15136525)

------
a012
Does this belong to CNN? It's great to read news without clutter, just clear
contents. I hope there are many sites like this, it saves you from load the
whole page then click the reader mode or similar.

~~~
pvg
Seems to be using the same CDN with the same hostnames as regular CNN, has
their logos, their content, looks theirs.

~~~
0x0
Then why is it not on a subdomain of cnn.com? Anyone could copy their logo and
their content.

~~~
pvg
Because it's a separate site? I have no idea. It takes 30 seconds to convince
yourself it's theirs, though, so I'm not sure what you're asking me.

~~~
0x0
How did you manage to convince yourself it's theirs?

Why couldn't they just put it on lite.cnn.com?

If you try to look up the whois for cnn.io, you only get:

    
    
      Registrar: CSC Corporate Domains, Inc.
      Registrar IANA ID: 299
      Registrar Abuse Contact Email:
      Registrar Abuse Contact Phone:
      Name Server: NS-24.AWSDNS-03.COM
      Name Server: NS-630.AWSDNS-14.NET
      Name Server: NS-1845.AWSDNS-38.CO.UK
      Name Server: NS-1268.AWSDNS-30.ORG
    

There is nothing here that indicates this is legit CNN?

~~~
pvg
I said they use the same CDN hosts with the same forward and reverse names.
Which I find quite convincing, on top of everything else.

    
    
        dig lite.cnn.io
        
        lite.cnn.io.		18	IN	CNAME	turner-tls.map.fastly.net.
        turner-tls.map.fastly.net. 20	IN	A	151.101.1.67
    
        dig www.cnn.com
        www.cnn.com.		39	IN	CNAME	turner-tls.map.fastly.net.
        turner-tls.map.fastly.net. 18	IN	A	151.101.1.67

------
vijaybritto
Okay, now the server side page is being rendered. The content weighs 6.7kb
HTML + 877B CSS + frikkin 52.7kb analytics!!

Very fast, but still analytics on this lite site is bothering to see!

~~~
allover
Analytics is loaded asynchronously so it doesn't block rendering or
interactivity.

Yeah it'd be nice if they used server-side analytics instead, but
cost/benefit.

------
loudandskittish
This is great. I'm sick to death of clicking to links on news articles and
having some auto-playing video read it to me...

------
unreal6
It's amazing what happens to rendering times when only the actual content is
being loaded.

------
schmappel
I realize this kind of defeats the purpose, but I applied just a tiny bit of
CSS (and Open Sans) to make it look slightly better. Here's the userstyle in
the hope it's useful to some:

[https://gist.github.com/appel/7a475dcbd3f469d73c756385b2c7cf...](https://gist.github.com/appel/7a475dcbd3f469d73c756385b2c7cf06)

------
rajandatta
An important feature is that the article pages don't have an article title.
Annoying if you like to open a set of pages from the main page to read as an
initial action prior to reading. Current pages at lite.cnn.io don't seem to
have extra JavaScript.

------
ThisNameNotUsed
This might be counter-intuitive to types who comment here but the CNN Snapchat
thread should also be appeasing to you for the same reasons this text-only
site is. You go through their stories until you find the one you want and
that's all you get. No ticker tape. No flashing "BREAKING NEWS" decorations
and no fluff. It's the same concept only in a visual medium.

------
AJRF
This has been top of hackernews all day. Funny how as we move further and
further into the future, developing all these interfaces as we go, we still
can't beat a format that has been here since the beginning.

------
lwhi
Brilliant. This achieves some key user-centred aims; content is easily
navigated, and given prominence above any other feature. I wonder if the
addition of aria-roles might add some useful context for screen readers?

In an age when personal assistants are gaining populating, maybe sparse text-
centred interfaces are set to gain more popularity?

------
lousken
Unless it's real web app like gdocs, this is how sites should be - no need for
js, works perfectly on my 64kbps.

------
amiga-workbench
It would be nice if there was a TLD for text-only, javascript free websites.

~~~
corgihamlet
.txt

------
tptacek
This is better than CNN.com, but the big problem with CNN is that it simply
isn't very good. If you're haven't tried it again, let me again strongly
recommend a subscription to the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, or
the New York Times. You might be as surprised as I was, once I was free to
click around the sites without thinking about paywalls, how much better the
reporting is at real newspapers than it is at free news sites.

~~~
erikbye
Beware, you cannot cancel your subscription to Wall Street Journal without
calling them.

------
sverhagen
I the only one whose mind crossed the idea that maybe this is just a temporary
service during the natural disasters in the south of the US?

~~~
eadmund
Maybe they'll quietly keep it up forever. A man can dream …

------
rjbwork
Bookmarked. Please drop the excessive JS and image tho cnn.

------
Buge
There seem to be no ads. How do they plan to make money with this?

~~~
eadmund
Honestly, with a few tweaks (RSS support, titles on pages, getting rid of the
'Breaking News, Latest News and Videos' in every title) I'd pay $12/year for
something like this. I'm pretty sure that CNN gets less than that from a
statistical viewer of its pages.

Wouldn't it be awesome if pure text, static pages became the new normal, and
we looked at video-and-image, JavaScript-laden SPAs in much the same way that
we look at parachute pants, bowl haircuts and rhinestone-studded jean jackets?

------
et2o
I was trying to figure out what was different about this convolutionao neural
network for about 60 seconds.

------
jim-jim-jim
Sweet. I'd prefer it if every site looked like this.

------
qbaqbaqba
I really miss RSS.

~~~
jim-jim-jim
I still don't understand why it fell out of favor.

~~~
thousande
not enough advertising?

------
discordance
This + reader mode in Safari is heaven.

If any other news org is tuning in, please do this!

------
stewbrew
I honestly applaud the endeavor. Too bad though they only include the main
headlines.

I personally very much like the approach of my preferred newspaper that offers
full, mobile, text only editions of its web site.

------
thousande
If someone is missing a universal ui language for the web, this is it.

------
aaronbrethorst
They're still loading an analytics javascript file that is 230KB minified.
That's literally two orders of magnitude larger than anything else that gets
loaded from that URL.

~~~
pearjuice
You don't know how to block these?

~~~
aaronbrethorst
Of course I do. That’s not the point.

------
CaptSpify
Any rss feed for this?

This is awesome. It's quick, to the point, efficient, and allows me to get
what I need, then it gets the fuck out of my way.

I'm even willing to put money into this. Is that possible?

------
piinbinary
I love it.

The only improvement I could ask for is about 100 bytes of CSS to limit the
column width, change it to a serifed font, and increase the font size.

------
thecopy
I can recommend [https://cor.ax](https://cor.ax) which is similar to this

~~~
djur
Except with a political slant:

> We provide an alternative startpage for news, free from left-wing bias.

~~~
thecopy
Yep. I find it refreshing with news provides which does not pretent to be
unbiased, none are.

------
_ix
Glad to see they have the Spanish version alongside English. Now, how about
some other languages... Arabic please!

------
tostrstrudel
I messed around with aggregating a few big news sites' RSS feeds and
generating a static site from them after being in areas with choked cell
reception. Turns out it's still plodding along!

[http://104.236.56.7](http://104.236.56.7)

------
ausjke
Nice format, hopefully with some real unbiased content but I am not expected
that at CNN though, nowadays the news has to be a mean value of (Reuters + NYT
+ CNN + Foxs + ....)/N, but I just do not have enough time to read them all,
so I read HN instead.

------
mattacular
It's great that they included an easy toggle to Spanish language. If you're
trying to learn Spanish and already know English or vice-versa being able to
read topical news every day and switch back and forth easily for both
languages is a great tool!

------
pamicel
The article "This is what South Florida looks like now" kinda loses its
purpose here

------
johnlorry
I quickly created a basic userstyle to use a better font and a paper-like
which is easier on the eyes.

* { font-family: 'Open Sans', Helvetica; color: #222; font-size: 1rem; line-height: 1.4; }

body{ background: #dac3a8; }

main{ max-width: 920px; margin: 0 auto; }

------
commenter1
The analytics company I used to work had a private news archive for pretty
much every news paper/magazine you could imagine. All text, all searchable.
I've long wondered how come no one makes a site like that for everybody.

------
bradezone
I made this thingie based on Google News and the design of Newsmap:
[http://news.bradezone.com/](http://news.bradezone.com/)

It's one of my few side projects I use every day.

------
jordache
The link to the full CNN experience at the bottom of each article doesn't deep
link to that article's full experience. It just goes to the cnn home page. big
fail

------
erickhill
I'm totally going to hit this with my Amiga. This is great!

~~~
bobsil1
Big spender. Using my Vic-20

------
pmlnr
How about no google analytics and making it truly text only? :)

------
cmac2992
I'm getting a totally blank page on Android 7.0 chrome 61.

------
nyolfen
i'd love to make a little userscript to redirect articles from cnn.com to
here, but i don't think there's any way to extract the .com url from the .io
pages.

also -- compare to cnn.com from 1999:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20000817204102/http://www2.cnn.c...](https://web.archive.org/web/20000817204102/http://www2.cnn.com:80/)

------
mungoid
I'm curious though. What's the root domain going to be if this one is lite?
Being a .io I'd like to think it will be an api site or something?

------
marmshallow
Facebook too has a mostly-text lightweight version:

[https://mbasic.facebook.com/](https://mbasic.facebook.com/)

------
rocky1138
I get "Not found" as the only content served.

------
cafard
Nice, but it would be good to know who wrote what. Not for standard wire-
service stuff about floods etc., but anything with an element of opinion.

------
cdevs
Love it, now Yahoo!'s disasterous bloated website needs it but it's mostly
clickbait anyway but attests load clickbait faster

------
MilnerRoute
I like how if you click on a link, that link is _also_ text only.

The regular CNN site sometimes starts auto-playing videos without asking
first.

------
kristianc
If someone could write a wrapper to do this with any major news website,
they'd have a hugely popular and profitable product.

~~~
mrmekon
I can't believe wayback machine has this. I ran a text-only scraper for ~200
websites back in the early 2000s.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20060803053549/http://inr.cjb.ne...](https://web.archive.org/web/20060803053549/http://inr.cjb.net:80/)

Most were RSS feeds, since those used to exist. The rest were hand-written
parsers, which were highly temperamental.

------
tomahunt
Is there somewhere an index of text-only pages?

------
kyleperik
I've been thinking about introducing a similar alternative to my webpage, but
in order to support terminal browsers or IE

------
agumonkey
I clicked without thinking. The landing list is a bit too bare, but I love it
anyway. Thank god for text (even unicode text)

------
coupdetaco
Historical text here

[http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS](http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS)

------
eljee
Text-only independent news: [http://levelnews.org](http://levelnews.org)

~~~
hk__2
What’s your affiliation with this site? All your submissions and comments on
HN are about it.

~~~
eljee
I built the site because independent news is being increasingly
censored/filtered out by monopoly platforms.

~~~
hk__2
Thanks; you should mention that in your comments. There’s some irony in the
fact you hide your affiliation when promoting a website about independent
news.

------
rsp1984
This is cool but for some reason (maybe reading too much HN!) I clicked and
expected a demo or research paper about a Convolutional Neural Net (CNN) that
you can feed lots of text and it would figure out the content and semantic
relationships of all the texts on its own and it would get better with every
new text that you feed it.

Actually I wouldn't be surprised if someone's already done that...

~~~
ourcat
You should see this. "Epic 2014" :
[https://youtu.be/Bt3TmUW90B8](https://youtu.be/Bt3TmUW90B8)

------
ramphastidae
If only this kind of view was available for all sites, but via a simpler, more
syndicated format.

------
SimeVidas
I wish feedly.com (my RSS reader) had a light interface. It feels so bloated
and slow.

------
codecamper
awesome. i was getting very tired of a video every time i looked at an
article.

------
rajeshmr
This is awesome! Maybe its time to get the fluff out and get back to basics :)

------
Supermighty
It's so fast. More websites should strip down their size to favor speed.

------
javasecurity
This is awesome. I really don't understand why a new page would load so many
stuff and then it hangs at some place. Sometimes I was wondering whether it
was loading the whole world. Maybe we should take some steps back now to keep
our site SIMPLE but COMPLETE. Just like Hacker News itself or
Lobsters([https://lobste.rs](https://lobste.rs)) or
Pxlet([http://www.pxlet.com/](http://www.pxlet.com/)) so that we would not be
distracted too much.

Maybe technically Google's AMP is a good help on boosting the loading speed
but it only works on mobile devices and it takes much effort to make the site
adaptable to AMP.

Usually a modern website would load lots of third party libraries, ads from
different advertising platforms, social media sharing modules and analytic
modules etc. All these would make lots of HTTP requests and increase the
response time. How would they not be SLOW?

------
DalekBaldwin
My laptop can run computationally-intensive physics simulations and play
streaming hi-def video with no problem, but if I click a link to a mainstream
news article it just about keels over and dies. How did our grandparents ever
manage to load the news on an underpowered machine called "paper"?

~~~
foobarian
It works like a gas; the performance-sapping computations on the articles
expand until they fill up all available human latency tolerance.

~~~
B-Con
That and the abomination of the technology stack that we use for said process.
HTML/CSS/JS is absolutely not the answer for "I want to make a UI", never mind
the fact that many UI designers have no clue how the stack works and abuse it
horribly.

The idea may be "paper", but what's actually being done is far from it. The
browser may paint and repaint a pixel a dozen times before it's ever rendered.
DOM-traversal is one of the most important parts of a browser's optimization
because of the tens of thousands of times it can happen to paint a screen.

~~~
yoz-y
React and similar libraries were made to alleviate exactly this problem.

------
akamaozu
All this needs is a search field and it's complete.

------
em3rgent0rdr
"This is what South Florida looks like now"

 _text only_ :P

------
zaszrespawned
Why not just use RSS? This is time and effort wasted.

Given RSS is old, text only and has XML its very lightweight, has good support
and fast readers.

No heavy javascript needed as readers of RSS are often native apps or browser
plugins

~~~
shakna
> as readers of RSS are often native apps or browser plugins

That's probably why.

Most people can barely drive their web browser, and many tech people are
reluctant to install new extensions, because of trust issues.

A web page, in a nice pure form like this, is fast, responsive, and easy to
use.

~~~
scholia
You can get news feeds as a web page in various places such as Dave Winer's
River of News [http://radio3.io/rivers/](http://radio3.io/rivers/)

Light, ad-free and totally trustworthy ;-)

------
GoKnight
This format is the best for low bandwidth access.

------
pizzaknife
This is truly a treat. thank you

------
emivvv
Imagine how much better it would be with margins. Same for HN. Lobstes gets
this right [https://lobste.rs/](https://lobste.rs/)

------
chewzerita
doesn't work in emacs eww

0/10

------
gnarbarian
Now if only I could get this from a decent news organization.

~~~
scholia
CNN is a decent news organization. It may not be the best, but it's a very
long way from being the worst....

------
cronjobma
If you could summarize, what are the key takeaways to create awesome, fast and
minimal sites like this lite CNN?

------
banned1
If only CNN would go back to being the old but trusted, amazing CNN, with
Christiane Amanpour at the landing in Mogadishu during Restore Hope, or Bernie
Shaw at the hotel in Baghdad for Desert Storm.

Now, a shell of its old self, CNN is just MSNBC's cousin, with people who say
"we, ahem, I mean, the Democrats, are losing Michigan" live on screen.

Oh well. It's been years since I relied on CNN.

But on the technical front, good for them.

~~~
DesiLurker
its been ages I have watched any news from a narrated source. My advice (more
so after last election) pay money for news. free is way worse!

------
BucketSort
Let down. I thought this was a convolutional neural network applied to text
analytics.

------
kbrtalan
Imma crawl the shit out of this

------
blocked_again
You know hacker news people live in a world of their own when a post regarding
stripped down Cable News Network website gets more up votes than all the posts
on convolutional neural networks combined

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=convolut&sort=byPopularity&pre...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=convolut&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

