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Comment by krapp | Hacker News Reader

HN is a success despite its UI because it was written in a Lisp and because it has the cachet of Y-Combinator behind it. If this exact site were written in PHP, and posted as a Show HN in an alternate universe, no one would consider it anything but a toy, and no one would be defending the layout with the same cargo cult mentality that HN seems to inspire.

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Why compare the margins of nonsense (lisp and php)? If a site like this were written in Node.js and with mobile users in mind, it would be in all means superior to what we see right now.

And right now I see yellow outline around this textarea, which is WebKit's default and they didn't even bother to remove it to make this textarea look the same in all browsers, let alone adapt it for mobiles.

I'm implying that language elitism and faux-intellectual posturing are among the reasons this community seems to correlate the simplicity of the layout with its own intellectual purity. That same elitism would cause the same community to dismiss the same site out of hand, were it written in a language it was popular to hate.

But yes, it could be written in any language and still have a more progressive layout, and people would hate that the site appears mainstream or, heavens forbid, looks and acts more like Reddit.

Now I get the picture and totally agree. For me, even this yellow outline is a sign of totally ignoring real-world user needs.

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