HN: Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲
This will make the upvote triangle look crisp on high-resolution displays. Thanks!
Down arrow/triangle: ▼
It is not only matter of resolution but I personally like bigger fonts and have zoomed in HN so triangles look bad:
Out of curiosity, I was wondering why the triangle wasn't a CSS triangle.. wouldn't that be more efficient than a gif?
++, although my eyes are giving up, and getting a high resolution / small screen size MBA didn't help.
It is amazing how many sites have css that does not work properly when zoomed.
I can't even read HN on my iPad because of the font issue.
Also, the margins are way too big for my taste. I feel like 1/2 of the screen is unused white space. Is there any way to tweak it?
The CSS triangle would get rendered over and over again.
(If I have misunderstood some step of the rendering process, I would love to know how, or what. I don't know much about graphics processing, so I am unaware of any caches beyond what the browser maintains.)
With SVG, the browser will render it once and keep a bitmap, then composite it.
With a CSS icon, there is no way for the browser to know that it's an icon at all. There is no clear delimitation between it and the rest of the page. The browser has no choice but to re-render it every single time.
Images or SVG are much better choices for icons than a bunch of CSS.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2011/11/17/10238146....
http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/02/unicode-character-pile-of-po...
You don't downvote submissions. You just don't upvote if you don't like it.
Downvotes are disabled for any comment more than 24 hours old, but upvotes are still allowed after more than a day. Emphasize the positive.
My main point would have to be that you have to work all of this out. Shouldn't it just be written in the FAQs. You could make the UI more helpful, like keep the reply link but disable it (eg with strike through) or have it popup a note "new comment: reply disabled for 5 minutes" or whatever. Or on pages with no downvote have a header comment in a box saying "downvoting disabled; all stories have down-voting disabled after 24 hours".
Gah, I have to stop before I get on to not having collapsible threads and the lameness of greying out comments and not having vote count displayed and ...
There is much to improve (page titles, semantic urls, recording of moderator edits, ...) but none of that is likely unless a sufficient quora of top contributors force the issue or decide to move (r/hackernews anyone!?). That in turn is unlikely because of the association with pg and ycombinator.
That's my take.
Exactly. Plenty of people cry foul every time Facebook update their UI or make another attempt to violate everyone's privacy, but as long as a critical mass of people continue to use it, Facebook will remain the default tool for the social networks of those people. If it works at that scale, it surely goes for small/niche discussion sites as well.
Is there a tool that lets you simulate what a site would look like on a high-DPI/Retina display? Is it simply enough to zoom the page in to get a feel for it?
Edit:
One thing I hadn't thought of that was brought up by another commenter is that some people override the fonts used in a site's stylesheets and force only their font preference to be used (mostly for readability). This would mess with font-based icons. I can't think of a way to detect this but it's something to consider when choosing font-based icons. Maybe JavaScript betrays the actual font being used and you can detect and patch it at run-time for those users.
Sticking to glyphs that are part of standard Unicode should be fine - those should render no matter what font the browser happens to use by default.
As long as your font includes the entire Unicode character set, that is.
It would be a good idea to check that any glyph you were going to rely on for a site like HN was universally supported among common system fonts. Different platforms provide different fonts as standard, and even the likes of Arial and Verdana don't have 100% coverage.
@-moz-document domain("news.ycombinator.com"),
domain("news.ycombinator.org"),
domain("news.ycombinator.net") {
a[id^=up_] {
padding: 0px 4px 0px 4px !important;
color: #cb4b16 !important; }
a[id^=up_] img {
display: none; }
a[id^=up_]:before {
content: "▴"; }
}I've hit "flag" when I meant to hit the story. I've hit the story when I meant to hit the comments. We need a HN hosted CSS layout for mobile users. This site is pretty simple, how complicated could a mobile CSS file be?
Specifically, look at the Facebook comments on Techcrunch. I can zoom in all I want (command-+) but the comments-font stays tiny.
My eyes are bad.
From the guidelines:
Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something (e.g. to ask us questions about Y Combinator, or to ask or complain about moderation). If you want to say something to us, please send it to info@ycombinator.com.
I think the mods frown on this sort of HN meta-discussion; so, don't be surprised if they kill this post.
I've adapted it to change your preference for the vector up:
javascript:{im=document.images;iml=im.length;for(i=0;i<iml;i++) {if(im[i].src=="http://ycombinator.com/images/grayarrow.gif"){var old=im[i]; var p=old.parentNode; p.removeChild(old); iml--; p.innerHTML="▲"} } alert("Done"); void(null);}
HN uses an image in javascript to simulate a HTTP GET request to signal that you have voted.
ex. var img = new Image(); img.src = 'http://ycombinator.com/signal-voted?id=12345;
Makes sense because HN is not using jQuery or similar and it would be a lot more javascript to do it in a cross browser way (just source view hacker news - it's almost as small as it gets)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
"I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness."
If you check the currently posted site guidelines,
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
the only guidelines you see about downvoting occur right at the end:
"Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
"Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downmod you."
A thread opened by pg 466 days ago
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696
asked, "How to stave off decline of HN?" He wrote, "The problem has several components: comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted."
So at that time, he thought that a significant subset of comments was getting too many upvotes (and, by implication, too few downvotes). That led to a software change such that users can no longer see the net comment karma totals of other user's comments. (You and I can still see the individual net karma totals for each of our own comments.)
To sum up, what I really like to do is upvote good comments. But there is no rule against downvoting a comment if it is mean (definitely not), nor is there a rule against downvoting a comment if it is dumb (the trick is perceiving whether or not a comment is dumb), and especially there is no rule against downvoting a comment if it is both mean and dumb. And if a comment is just a snarky remark that doesn't advance the discussion, or a lame attempt at a one-liner joke, or otherwise doesn't add value to the discussion, it doesn't harm the community to downvote such a comment without further reply.
(They're not really logical opposites and their use frequency is quite different.)
I'm happy to upvote more than downvote. I get the sense that some of the best stuff here on Hacker News still isn't upvoted enough.
Thats the way it should work, and is part of what makes HN different to say Reddit. In reality, its becoming increasingly common for people to downvote something simply because they disagree with it.
Edit: Would whoever downvoted this care to explain why? I'm genuinely interested.
It would be nice if Upvote meant "This is good quality (whether I agree with it or not" and downvote meant "this is low quality, and should not be here, but is not spam, nor flagable". But since PG has said (something like) downvote can be simple disagreement you're going to meet people who use it for exactly that.
Also, reddit is trying to move away from "downvote to disagree" - they have a lot of hover text saying this.
The reasons for clicking may not be symmetrical, but the actions when clicking are symmetrical. The points go down with the down arrow and the points go up with the up arrow. This is symmetry even if the reason (agree, disagree, quality, spam, etc.) for the increase and decline of the points is asymmetrical.
However that norm changed when people realized that was a bad idea.
The UI didn't change with the norm change.
At one point the norm was you could downvote to disagree if the comment had a score greater than 1. But now that comment scores are no longer displayed, that norm changed too.
Now the downarrow basically means spam/stupid/useless, etc. Actually for spam you also need to click on flag.
But I don't know the arc internals - does it do anything interesting with unicode?
So it does. This may or may not be a good thing.
┬──┬◡ﾉ(° -°ﾉ)
Furthermore the images on YC have extremely low dynamicity and size, so there's little chance they'll be evicted from the browser's cache (short of a manual cache clear), so their 100 bytes will only be loaded once the first time ever you visit YC.
So no, it won't make pages render faster overall.
On the other hand, it will make pages look better on zoomed or high-DPI displays.
There's no Expires header being set, so your browser is not caching these images. A full roundtrip to the HN server to get back the "content hasn't changed" status code (304) is required for each.
That is not in the slightest correct.
It has both a Last-Modified and an Etag so it's definitely cached.
> A full roundtrip to the HN server to get back the "content hasn't changed" status code (304) is required for each.
Also incorrect. The roundtrip is done once per session. A session is not well defined, but it's basically till you close the browser or till you click reload. Merely clicking on other stories will not trigger another roundtrip.
(Also pressing enter on the url line will not trigger a roundtrip, but reload will. This is important sometimes.)
Even without that, it'd still be cached: pretty much all browsers will cache things by default.
Last-Modified and Etag only come into play when the internal cache expires (this expiration time can be configured with the HTTP/1.0 Expires header or the HTTP/1.1 Cache-Control: max-age attribute, but the timeout does not default to "don't cache anything").
No, it most definitely does not does not.
> There's no Expires header being set, so your browser is not caching these images.
You're out of your mind, of course the browser caches it, the browser caches everything it can by default: http://i.imgur.com/hrmIs.png
> A full roundtrip to the HN server to get back the "content hasn't changed" status code (304) is required for each.
That is not even remotely close to what happens in the actual reality we're part of.
/a></u></font></td></tr></table></td></tr><tr><td><table border=0><tr><td><img
▲
▲ ▲Personally I prefer a slightly larger serif font when reading comments on here which is why I wrote a quick dotjs [1] script that now also replaces the upvote arrow GIF:
Preview: http://cl.ly/I3o0 Script: https://github.com/max/.js/blob/master/news.ycombinator.com....
<span style="border:1px solid white;color:white;padding:1px 3px;display:block"><b>Y</b></span>
http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/imurray2/code/user_scripts/hac...
The up and down arrows are slightly further apart than before.
FYI, this illustrates the solutions impact pretty well: http://cl.ly/0C0C1j3U1e2G0a193F35
I know it "works", but it ain't "clean".
I guess the question is: Do users get confused about the arrows?
It might be mistaken for a collapse/expand option, but people have been conditioned that + and - or the down arrow and right arrows are for that.
If it had a stick indicating the bottom protruding from it, it would appear to be a direction rather than an action link.
>>> document.getElementsByTagName('font').length 348
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