Devstash.io – Hacker News alternative focused on computer science | Hacker News Reader

Devstash.io – Hacker News alternative focused on computer science

devstash.io

112 pointsjavinpaul28 comments

Firstly, anyone who creates something and puts it up for people to see deserves congratulations. Nicely done. I look forward to reading this and have bookmarked it to return to regularly.

And now this is going to seem really harsh, but I've learned, as I produce specialist sites and facilities for other people, that immediate and instant reactions are incredibly important. So here are mine.

True design has usability at its heart, appearance being secondary to that. Things can look gorgeous, but without usability it's art and nothing else.

It's a nightmare to read - please, please, increase the contrast. It's wishy-washy and bland.

The text is small, and there's just so much wasted space. Increasing the text size to something sensible means there's also nothing on the screen, leading to endless scrolling.

Beautiful to look at, provided you don't actually want to use it. Additionally, the "1" and "2" links at the bottom are really hard to hit.

Other questions, then:

How are you going to enforce the focus on CS?

Do usability issues fall in the remit?

Looking at one entry:

    AllTheFreeStock (http://allthefreestock.com/)
    Get all the Free Stock Images
    By SaijoGeorge | 0 comment(s)

How is this "Computer Science"?

========

Edit: Typo:

    You have been sent an email,
    please confirm you account.

That should be "your account".

========

Edit:

When posting extra information to accompany a post, it's not clear that there is a 140 char limit until you fail. More, if it does fail there's no indication of how much it's missed by.

All very fair feedback. I actually appreciate the comment from the perspective of 'simple things to keep in mind when making a specialist site'.

I have criticized a number of sites in the past for poor readability, and I agree with you that this page has a lot of wasted space.

On the other hand, I didn't find the contrast of the text to be all that bad, and the font size appears to me to be at least as large as the font used in Hacker News.

"Additionally, the "1" and "2" links at the bottom are really hard to hit." I think the upvote and downvote icons in Hacker News are even harder to hit.

With respect, I disagree. Here are two screenshots:

http://www.solipsys.co.uk/HackerNews/SS_20151225.html

Your local browser settings will change these, but that's how they appeared on my machine.

Sorry. It must be my browser settings. I tried looking at the CSS used by both this site and Hacker news, and it appears that Hacker News is using points as the default body text size, and the other site is using ems as the default body size. Edit: I'm not enough of a CSS expert to know how these differences work out in actual use.

All I know is, the text I see on Hacker News is smaller than the text shown in your screenshots.

Points are absolute, ems are relative. [1]

[1] http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css_units.asp

Hello there! I'm the creator of Devstash and I'd like to thank you for your feedback! I'll be getting a lot of bugs here fixed as well as design issues as soon as possible. To enforce the focus on CS (Although the mission states that the focus is on CS, I personally allow posts that convey the use of software in some way) I'll mostly be moderating the site quite heavily, which isn't a hassle really since I visit my own site every day. I also do plan on doing some automation in terms of moderating posts that come into the site. And can you clarify your last question please?

I submitted a link, including some extra text. The submission failed, telling me that the extra text can only be 140 chars. That wasn't obvious, and it didn't tell me how much I missed by, so I didn't know how heavily I would have to edit what I'd put.

Edit: Now I see that it says there's a 140 char limit - I didn't see that first time round. It's part of the same contrast issue - really hard to see.

Edit: OK - you changed it. Thanks.

That has now been fixed. :)

If you are strict with the terms, 1(!) article seems to actually be about "computer science", the others are random software development stuff. You might want to make the focus clearer to avoid confusion and misunderstandings (HN has this kind of discussions all the time because people think it is "startup news" or "development news" or ...)

Thank you for your feedback detaro! I'm not too strict on what is posted, in fact I simply adore finding projects that other people have made and so I allow users to post their side-projects, podcasts, and other resources. I do agree that I'll have to make the about page much more clearer.

That's like the subreddit "cscareerquestions" which is mostly about software engineering jobs.

While I like the idea of a computer science news aggregator, I don't like the design of this at all. The light green/orange/blue color scheme is repelling and as pointed out before the site contains way too much white space. I'd say take (a lot) more inspiration from HN/Reddit.

I'm also curious as to how the computer science subject is enforced on the links submitted. Either you have to manually moderate the forum (which will be hard to scale) or you could check submitted websites for <code> tags for example. Keyword filtering is also an option.

My first impression was that the author cares more about the design than the content.

How would the site handle spam and/or voting rings?

The view is pretty broken on iphone 5s.

I'll test that particular device and get that fixed as soon as I can. Thanks. :)

I feel like a site like this should be themed in solarized, mono.

You may want to base your site on the source code of https://lobste.rs Built for a similar use case, but lots of github activity.

lobste.rs code https://github.com/jcs/lobsters

Yea this site appears to be about software development not CS. YCombinator is a CS term. Dev and Stash are both development terms (I hesitate to even call it software engineering actually).

Even the name doesn't make sense.

Following up on ...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791675

Is there any way I can reply to someone's comment on an item I submitted? Clicking the "Reply" button does nothing.

The "Reply" button isn't working for me. I submitted an item, someone replied, I'm trying to reply to them, the cursor shows that I'm hovering over the button, the button changes color, but clicking does nothing.

UI not usable, list is too big; For example on my 13" retina with browser window full size, only 4 entries is visible.

Please add API in near future :)

I definitely will, and I'll let you know when it's done. :)

Links dont work on my iphone :(

The design sucks it is not minimalist and most elements are too big. Do you even use Vim/Emacs?

Just as a random contributor here on HN with no formal role or standing, could I ask that you make the effort to be constructive. Your comments here may or may not be accurate, but it's expressed in a manner that's just plain nasty.

I'm sure you have a lot to offer - please make the effort to be helpful with your criticisms.

I think he was mocking other commemters?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com