Hacker News is refreshingly constructive compared to other discussion forums. Seriously!
For example, the very popular German computer magazine c't has a news ticker where public contributions are allowed. Reading the comments there is extremely frustrating and depressing. Most posts almost always follow the same pattern: something in the news article is wrong or not clear enough, which is then complained about in a smug way. Next comes the wiseacre comments. If that's not enough, people express their own displeasure or negative view of something in connection with the article, in other words: rant. Keyboard warriors often have a rendezvous there. Information or constructive criticism is by now extremely rare there, at least compared to Hacker News. I've stopped reading the comments there!
...and that's exactly why I like being here and why I also enjoy reading your comments, because they often usefully complement the actual topic. :-)
It understands CSS, so it can show HN in its full orangeness :) Also, it has
color contrast correction by default, so downvoted comments are readable.
(If you enable JS, even thread collapsing works. But JS breaks upvoting,
because images are not supported yet and JS-enabled HN upvoting is implemented
using the Image constructor.)
w3m also works well with HN, but you have to enable images for comment nesting
to work. (Otherwise it ignores the spacer gifs.)
I guess I'm doing something wrong, but I installed it with pipx and it's saying "[Errno 8] nodename nor servname provided, or not known" when I launch it without loading any info.
I was somewhat reminded of Larry Wall's newsreader, 'rn', as I read the description of Orange Site Hit. I invested a lot of hours on Nutnews back in the day.
Readit News
For example, the very popular German computer magazine c't has a news ticker where public contributions are allowed. Reading the comments there is extremely frustrating and depressing. Most posts almost always follow the same pattern: something in the news article is wrong or not clear enough, which is then complained about in a smug way. Next comes the wiseacre comments. If that's not enough, people express their own displeasure or negative view of something in connection with the article, in other words: rant. Keyboard warriors often have a rendezvous there. Information or constructive criticism is by now extremely rare there, at least compared to Hacker News. I've stopped reading the comments there!
...and that's exactly why I like being here and why I also enjoy reading your comments, because they often usefully complement the actual topic. :-)
[1] https://neonmodem.com
https://blog.davep.org/2023/12/19/tinboard.html
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26929588 (160 points | April 25, 2021 | 31 comments)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)
It understands CSS, so it can show HN in its full orangeness :) Also, it has color contrast correction by default, so downvoted comments are readable.
(If you enable JS, even thread collapsing works. But JS breaks upvoting, because images are not supported yet and JS-enabled HN upvoting is implemented using the Image constructor.)
w3m also works well with HN, but you have to enable images for comment nesting to work. (Otherwise it ignores the spacer gifs.)