So it's not that simple. Real changes to make the site truly responsive are larger and I can't promise they'll come soon.
I personally use http://hn.premii.com on mobile & it has a good reading experience.
(My personal view is that 'mobile' is very difficult to define. If I connect a bluetooth keyboard to a Galaxy Note then why the hell should I be discouraged from posting on the grounds I might post lower quality comments?)
Worst of all are sites that don't provide a "Full site" link, and don't cooperate with my browser's "View desktop site" option. And don't get me started on "Try our mobile app"...
I use the HN Enchancement Suite chrome extension[1] now instead on my desktop and cheeaun.github.io/hackerweb on my mobile.
[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bappiabcodbpphnojd...
The viewport meta tag is essentially a switch which tells mobile browsers to not provide a default page width of 980px, auto zoomed out, but to instead use the device's CSS pixel dimensions, with a zoom you define with initial-scale. Note that this is not physical pixel dimensions. A mobile device's CSS pixels are the physical resolution divided by the device's devicePixelRatio, which currently can range from 1 to 3.
Examples:
On an iPhone 5s, which has a physical resolution of 1136x640 and a devicePixelRatio of 2, a viewport with "width=device-width" will create a page that only has 320px in portrait and 553px in landscape in CSS pixels.
On a HTC One, which has a physical resolution of 1920x1080 (1080p) and a devicePixelRatio of 3, the page will have only 360px in portrait and 640px in landscape.
On tablets, CSS pixel portrait width can range from 600px on a Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire HDX, to 768px on an iPad mini non-retina, to 800px on a Nexus 10 or Kindle Fire HDX 8.9".
Using a viewport meta tag needs to be done in combination with CSS media queries (or a very flexible design that doesn't use px for sizes) to ensure that your web page design responds to the various screen sizes without breaking.
Hope that helps clarify things a bit - trust me, it's a common misunderstanding.
The other thing that could be fixed is when someone puts a very long unbroken string in a comment without putting it in a code block. This makes the page very wide, and creates an unpleasant experience.
Throw the template and CSS, and some sample data on GitHub. HN'd have a working version in 24 hours.
("news.ycombinator.com" === window.location.hostname) &&
(function () {
var meta = document.createElement("META");
meta.name = "viewport";
meta.content = "width=device-width, initial-scale=1";
if (document.readyState === "complete") {
document.head.appendChild(meta);
} else {
document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", function () {
document.head.appendChild(meta);
});
}
})();If you don't understand what I mean by "manage", then consider yourself lucky as you have not worked in the digital agency world.
Is there an extension/app for HN that categorizes the posts into topics (based on some text analysis) & enables the user to filter them out from the feed? Feature akin to what lobste.rs provides.
This will basically enable me to filter out fluff stories that manage to rise up.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/news-yc/id592893508?mt=8
Oh yeah, and it's entirely open sourced, including my libHN library for interacting with HN in your own app you make:
A pair of before-and-after screenshots would be helpful.