Same here. To me this is essential. The comments tell me quickly if the article is going to be a waste of time.
This one's interesting to take a glance at, then move on.
It's surprising that in the world of programming, in which precision is essential, there are so many advocates for cruftiness in English.
In programming, precision is essential. In human communication, it is often inconsequential. We sped our time railing against our arbitrary and fickle natures, demanding precisely worded specification, imposing workflow and permissions straightjackets on programs, when in reality all that matters is that people feel happy when they use what we build.
If someone feels happy saying the words "performant" and "utilize" to me, that is enough.
Remove all synonyms
Example: fine -> good
Remove antonyms and just negate the word
Example: bad -> ungood
Remove special-case nouns: just combine a noun and one or more adjectives to reach the same meaning with fewer fundamental words.
Example: great -> doubleplusgood; murder -> collateral damage
I did. The masses were not amused.
Boy would you not like my code. It's full of neologisms. Undivify. Wipeage. Calcval. Zillions of them! I'd say this makes my code better English, not worse. I choose words carefully and do not hesitate to make a new one if existing ones don't communicate just what is wanted. It's not an arbitrary process and has nothing to do with sloppiness or vanity. It has to do with making the language fit the problem.
Oh, and I use "performant" all the time, too. What other adjective signifies the qualities that programmers have in mind when they say "performance"?
Instead, you can rearrange the wording a little to convey the exact same meaning. By working within the constraints, an elegant solution emerges. By all means add words if they are clever or pleasing or convey a nuance that can't be achieved with what already exists. Performant and functionality don't meet those criteria.
This whole argument is silly, of course. Natural language is so heavily overloaded that you could never regularize it in the way people seem to be proposing, and if you could, you would ruin it.
It's more readable, performs better, doesn't turn visited links damn near invisible for some insane reason, and ...
Hacker Newspaper is a superior user interface for Hacker News.
I beg to disagree - see below.
It's more performant, more readable
It's hard to skim.
it doesn't turn visited links damn near invisible for some insane reason
I don't need to read the same thing again. Visited links can be invisible for all I care. I visit them less than 5% of the time.
and it makes it much easier to skim the headlines
No way. Suddenly I have to scroll through screens of large-font nonsense instead of just getting it all within about 1.5 screens.
and avoid getting into useless, time-wasting blather
Comments, to me, are more than 50% of the value of HN. I often read the comments before the article, and sometimes don't bother reading the article at all.
To me, this "reformatted layout" is very, very inferior.