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Comment by cawel | Hacker News Reader

Then, when editing one's HN profile, it could indicate it better (whether the info is shown publicly or not).

What kind of site calls a feature "noprocrast" without giving any detailed information about what it does?

A site for the kind of people who'd try it to find out.

Actually, it is explained in News News (http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html), but maybe most people don't bother looking at that.

I honestly like it better without any explanation. It reminds us that HN is not for everyone, but only those who will actually dig to find stuff out. I googled those features after I joined to learn about them, and I like it better that way.

But News.YC prides itself on having both a terrible user interface and a terrible user experience.

What kind of site calls a feature "noprocrast" without giving any detailed information about what it does? Only news.yc!

--edit

I wonder why I am being modded down. Maybe I said it too sarcastically. News.YC really does have a terrible interface. Look at the account settings page-- imagine yourself as a user who has never been there before. It's confusing and poorly documented. I love this site for the content and the simplicity, but Paul Graham is a programmer and spent very little time on the user experience, which makes sense. I don't blame him.

But it is still a bad interface. I'm pretty sure 99% of people who fill out the "email" field expect their email to somehow be visible to other users. It's right next to another field that IS visible.

Don't sweat the small stuff.

Think of it as a filter for non-technical types.

Shiny graphics do not a user experience make.

Of course not. Craigslist has an amazing masterpiece of an interface and uses no icons/pictures at all.

There seems to be some disagreement over what we mean by 'user interface' and 'user experience'. Those who downmodded you probably thought 'I like using YC news just fine thanks.'

When I hit the little ycn button on my dash, i'm immediately greeted with a list of interesting articles, flanked by comments that are worth reading. That's the most important part of the user experience for us, so here we stay.

Ah. The content here is great. I'm not denying that YC is awesome.

It just has a sub-par interface. Compared to other sites, it has a terrible UI. It's not very user friendly, and it could be much more so.

Yeah, I'll add a note about that.

By the way, while we are on this topic--can you confirm that passwords are not stored in plain-text?

Sure. You can see for yourself in the source: http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc1.tar

On disk at least. They're temporarily logged to memory in the clear:

  (def good-login (user pw ip)
    (let record (list (seconds) ip user pw)
      (if (and user pw (aand (shash pw) (is it (hpasswords* user))))
          (do (unless (user->cookie* user) (cook-user user))
              (enq-limit record good-logins*)
              user)
          (do (enq-limit record bad-logins*)
              nil))))

It might be good to pull the pw out of the record list:

  ...
   (let record (list (seconds) ip user)
     ...

Ok, I took it out. Turns out nothing later ever needs the pw anyway.

I hope you are not reusing an important password for this site.. Even if they are hashed on the disk, they are sent insecurely to the server when you log in.

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