Show HN: Paste a link to an article, get a minimal version to read (opens in new tab)

Anyone who thinks speedreaders like this are a good idea should look into the opthtamologist Bates' research and method. Reading without moving your eyes equals tension and stress on your eyes and related muscles (neck, shoulders.) It's a great way to increase your need for glasses.

Not sure if this practically possible to read a whole article this way or not but this is an awesome tool.

How come I never stumbled upon this!?

Thank you very much.

I've added bookmarklets for both, and you can Clean (which sorts out multi-page articles, sidebars etc.) then Squirt to speed-read the resulting article. They really do go hand-in-hand.

oh my god. that is an amazing tool. really hard to say but I don't think I caught everything or remember everything I read but do feel like I can understand what I am reading. I keep trying to sound out the words and give up and begin look at the words only like pictures. its a surreal experience.

My suggestion would be to understand the Boilerpipe algorithm, which as far as I can see is the best available solution (and much clearer than readability): http://www.l3s.de/~kohlschuetter/publications/wsdm187-kohlsc...

You can then easily adapt it for your requirements.

Umm... anything that uses xpaths should work I would think.

Apologies for blowing my own horn but I've had some luck filtering HN and reddit with this project I built (I used to have an example in progress online but i've taken it down): https://github.com/kennethrapp/embedbug

Could the browser tackle this? If I understand it correctly, in broad strokes, nothing comes down unless the browser asks the server for it.

I'm dating myself, but when I first learned about HTML, the idea was that text would be organized so the browser could make it more readable for you, based on your needs. For instance, a deaf person could use a text-to-speech browser, and perhaps the heading tags would help them navigate the document.

Today's web page simply treat the screen as a graphical canvas.

In those old days, I also learned that having a crummy obsolete browser for my crummy obsolete computer actually sped up browsing because my browser was simply incapable of downloading the stuff that ate bandwidth.

That is correct. justread will save you data compared to loading the original page. No javascript, ads, extra images unrelated to the article etc. It does, however, keep the images, since often they are an interesting part of an article.

This project directly uses the Readability api.

I created this as a more simple interface than Readability offers, primarily for my own personal use as a bookmarklet.

I see website after website make this mistake. How is this not painfully obvious?

Ugh, I need to set up an extension to automatically rewrite all Techcrunch urls.

That is a nice idea. I'll have to prepare the code a bit for this but will likely do so. In that case, I will let you know.

justread is written with golang!

> Built by mpgarate with the Readability API.

Is noted in the footer.