hckrnews.com is a river for news.ycombinator.com, but it doesnt use the term. they just describe it as "a chronologic list of items" vs the most popular/upvoted.
For those outside the UK and/or are unaware, this is a real business. The owner, Ling Valentine [0], even appeared on Dragon's Den seeking investment of £50,000 [1].
And in similar style from a similar era, Ian's Shoelace Site: https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/ (the Ian Knot will change your life, though I use the double-Ian Knot to never re-tie laces again).
It's often said but the revamped design is excellent and the designers should be commended. I used to have to assist my parents whenever they needed to fill in a government form online and my mum in particular found it stressful, with pages having all sorts of timeouts and conflicting instructions. A lot of services used to be very fragmented and lacked cross browser compatibility. They manage it easily themselves since the UI became much more accessible.
I'm very pleased with how my own website[0] has turned out. It uses no JS and a very small amount of CSS. I think it has just enough styling to give it a distinct look and make the reading experience pleasant on all devices. Pages average around 10kb
I like it, especially the colors. Would have added some margin to the top, though. But very pleasant.
I recently rebuilt my blog and used similar ideas; minimal CSS, no JavaScript, static site generator. It's actually interesting to see that some (front-end) developers tend to have very minimalistic sites.
Nice content but had forgotten what the site looked like. It literally kills the eyes and gives a headache when the green on black index page suddenly changes to black on white text file page.
http://amasci.com/ - Science Hobbyist, the homepage of Bill Beaty. I've been perusing it off and on for 15 years and keep discovering neat things. First found it via "Evil Genius Hoaxes" http://amasci.com/hoax.html
Normally those bug me a great deal but because the page loads so fast and the focus is on resource constrained users the `read more' option doesn't bother me at all. I'm constantly frustrated by JavaScript `read more' links though, which take an age to render the rest of the text on mobile devices which is where I do an ever increasing percentage of my reading.
I really don't like the whole AJAX thing they did after they went down. Now if I visit in a text-only browser (w3m), I just see "[sping]" (the alt text on their spinner). Kind of sad for a static website, especially a wiki.
When I was looking into advertising there, it was $2,000. Guess he's doing well. I don't envy him though. Being a full time blogger has to be one of the most soul-killing jobs. All that keeping up on the most boring and annoying bits of latest information, and repackaging it, all the while trying to not look biased. I just couldn't do it even if I wanted to.
I was always under the impression that he's not full time. He posts sporadically, usually around big Apple news, and it seems more out of personal interest than dedication to his job.
Plus, I don't see him as trying not to look biased. If anything, he completely disregards attempts to -- he frequently states that something is his opinion, that seems to be the appeal of the blog. That it's completely biased and all one man's opinion is what makes him so polarising.
Blogging is his full time job. All his revenue is through sponsorship, but he maintains a high reader count through active posting, which is why he can charge so much for advertising.
As neither a professional designer or developer, I wanted a site that was very clean and easy to build (and adaptive) but shared critical information. The end result has made me quite happy.
NoScript by default blocks third-party scripts (of which this site has plenty). In this instance it's some JS from shopify that's required for basic functionality.
There is so much good machining stuff there. I remember reading all the posts when I discovered frets. I am going to see if there are any new posts right now...looks like all the machining content has moved to http://www.frets.com/HomeShopTech/ShopTips/tiplist.html
Mesmerizing and misleading. Looks like it was designed by the Dr. Bronner's soap guy (lists of links are organized by string length) but it turns out to be a giant buffet of bite-sized but well-presented scientific factoids.
http://mediagazer.com/river
http://memeorandum.com/river
http://aldaily.com was already mentioned
http://scitechdaily.com aldaily sister science site
http://hckrnews.com
https://longform.org
https://longreads.com
..
https://redef.com doesnt fit the criteria, but its close, and i wish it had an option to turn off images.
two i dont actually visit very often - http://www.jimmyr.com http://popurls.com
..
as for page design itself.
http://lucumr.pocoo.org/
http://http2.info/