Hacker News Reader

Comment by pubby | Hacker News Reader

> this website comes across as very unprofessional due to the total lack of any design elements

Really? I've always viewed plain HTML sites in the complete opposite way. They tend to have really good, well thought-out content. There's no filler or clickbait with them.

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I think this (humorous) site is relevant, here: http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/

Excessive CSS is, well, excessive. That said, a tiny pinch of CSS goes a long way towards making a page readable and aesthetic.

I liken CSS and JS to salt: putting a little on makes things better. But pouring a lot on quickly makes things worse. Scarcity is the key

"CSS is the spice of HTML"

"A little bit helps, don't use too much, and don't use flavors that don't mix"?

Compare LWN and Hacker News. Both are very simple, but the comment section of Hacker News has an emphasis on content, and metadata is showed in a very simple and toned down way. ("7 minutes ago" vs TIMESTAMP).

On LWN there is unnecessary and redundant metadata accentuated!

Everything on HN is clearly thought out, and almost nothing on LWN is.

Some of us vastly prefer a time stamp to an utterly useless relative measurement displayed.

> Some of us vastly prefer a time stamp to an utterly useless relative measurement displayed.

Ditto. Maybe I loaded the page yesterday. What does '1 hour ago' mean? Was it updated by JavaScript? Is it an hour from now, or from yesterday, or what?

Give me a timestamp, and I know.

It gets even less useful as time goes on. Eventually it'll say one year ago. A timestamp would give the exact time rather than a huge range.

I find most timestamps useless. It's rare that they include the time zone, so I'm always left wondering if they mean my browser detected time zone (through some JS), the TZ that the server uses, UTC, or whatever.

"N minutes ago" is compact and does not require any client-side JS to provide an unambiguous value.

At least LWN includes the timezone, which is a step ahead of most of the sites I've used.

I suspect the "traditional" readers of LWN hold similar views and would resist anything less functional than the current site, regardless of its flashiness.

Disagree, even Hacker News has some attempts to have a better design while keeping the HTML site look.

> the HTML site look.

I love that phrase for all it implies about the point of view of the user thereof — to my knowledge, every site is an HTML site.

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