Hacker News Reader

Comment by daliusd | Hacker News Reader

Very good proposal. There are more unicode symbols to choice from: http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/geometric_shapes.html

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:

http://i.imgur.com/fpA7N.png

View on HN

I also zoom in to 125%, not sure if it's just me, but for a textual site the default font size seems too small. Maybe my eyes are just giving up.

Out of curiosity, I was wondering why the triangle wasn't a CSS triangle.. wouldn't that be more efficient than a gif?

Not necessarily. The gif is requested once and cached, and then rendered once and cached.

The CSS triangle would get rendered over and over again.

Rendered once and cached? The cached GIF is rendered each time as well. As far as I know, it's not possible to cache a rendering. There are still calculations to do each time you want to convert the cached data into an image. The question then becomes, which calculations take longer. The calculations needed to convert the CSS into a bitmap for the screen, or the calculations needed to convert the GIF data into a bitmap for the screen. I'm betting the difference is negligible.

(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.)

Of course there are way to cache renderings, this is the reasons firefox used to use so much memory, it would cache the uncompressed images. Why would you think that was not possible?

Afaik, the browser will read GIF once and keep the bitmap in memory, then composite it into the right place when it needs it, which is a lot cheaper.

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.

The rasterization of the Unicode character will be cached in the glyph cache just like the rest of the glyphs, so the GIF is not really any cheaper.

Ok, SVG, character and GIF are better than a bunch of CSS :)

You misunderstood a lot of things. Most importantly that replacing a graphic with a unicode char has something to do with CSS :-)

My original comment is a reply to the suggestion to use a CSS icon.

Well, using the :before or :after pseudo-selector and content property is a possibility.

All that for a difference that would be negligible anyway. I'd say that's a premature optimization if I've ever seen one.

> for a textual site the default font size seems too small. Maybe my eyes are just giving up.

++, although my eyes are giving up, and getting a high resolution / small screen size MBA didn't help.

There are a few Chrome plugins to improve the readability of HN. I personally use Georgify: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ofjfdfaleomlfanfeh...

+1000 for Georgify chrome plugin!

I just tried it out. This font is... massive! It's pretty to look at, but tough to quickly parse, IMHO. I think I prefer HN's micro font.

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?

I use AutoZoom for Chrome. Although the fonts here are too small for me, so too at some other sites.

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.

The GIF is 111 bytes. A CSS triangle might be smaller, but it's probably not much of a win.

While 111 bytes is small, it is actually 111 bytes + size of the image HTML tag (82 bytes) = 193. When I checked (at 08:08 PST on Friday) there were 163 instances of the image tag in the code. That means that the way it is today 11 bytes the first time and 13,366 (82 * 163) bytes of extra HTML every time. If we changed it to the unicode character if would be 163 * 2 (2 bytes for the unicode character) which is 326. 326 is way less than the 13,366 bytes currently being served.

We could use the "pile of poo" (http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f4a9/index.htm) character for downvote instead!

or for flag

I have no downvote :S

How does one get down-vote?

I'm pretty sure you get downvoting powers at 500 karma. (At least, that's about when I got them. I have heard rumors that it fluctuates, and like all the mechanics of Hacker News, the precise rules are proprietary secret sauce.)

I think it might be 550 nowadays (I think I got it at that mark a couple of months ago)

Nope. I got it recently and can say for sure that it happened at exactly 500.

I have downvote in this thread but not always. I find the removal of edit, reply and voting privelege at seemingly arbitrary conditions to be very annoying.

Downvoting is disabled for very new comments and for replies to comments you've upvoted, iirc. Editing is disabled after a "reasonable" time. I don't think replying is ever disabled.

I think that downvotes are also disabled for old comments

I think that downvotes are also disabled for old comments

Downvotes are disabled for any comment more than 24 hours old, but upvotes are still allowed after more than a day. Emphasize the positive.

Ha, and there we go, so I couldn't reply to you (no reply link) within the discussion but I can by following the "link" link and then replying. What's that all about?

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 ...

You also can't downvote people that reply to your comments, though you can upvote them.

Commenting is disabled for the job-ads that are mixed with the stories on the homepage. Maybe thats what pbhjpbhj meant with reply?

New comments have a brief time without a reply link - although you can still get to it by going to the comment itself through the "link" URL. The purpose is to slow down the back-and-forth arguments between two people that become "Nu-huh!" "Yeah-huh!"

500 karma according to this infrequently-updated FAQ: http://jacquesmattheij.com/The+Unofficial+HN+FAQ#karma

As of 3 weeks ago, this is true. I checked mine at 501

Anyone know when you get to downvote submissions? I still don't have that yet.

You can flag submissions, you can't downvote them.

Replying beside untog because I'm not permitted to reply to untog.

You don't downvote submissions. You just don't upvote if you don't like it.

So upvote every submission except for the one you don't like.

This seems like a bad idea, since at small font sizes it will be a similar shape to the up-triangle, especially in fonts which (mostly) fill it in.

♥ and 💩 have a nice symmetry.

yes, a heart and the box with 01f489 look very similar (Firefox on Snow Leopard)

Take this: http://users.teilar.gr/~g1951d/Symbola702.zip

And the fact that it's a pile of poo.

Site is hacker-newsed / hack-noosed / h-neutered. Try alternatives:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2011/11/17/10238146....

http://chryss.eu/?p=331

http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/02/unicode-character-pile-of-po...

I use Firefox "Zoom text only" which only zooms text.

I like how you felt the need to explain the meaning of the phrase "zoom text only."

NoSquint is pretty good for this as well.

How does simple zooming produce that horribly mangled graphic on the left of that screenshot? That seems like a deficiency in your browser.

It's because the GIF arrow is anti-aliased. You always want to anti-alias after sizing, lest it look like that, but you can't do that in a bitmapped image.

I don't think anti-aliasing is the explanation. I had a look at the GIF zoomed up in Paint.NET and there's nothing unusual about it, just the gray triangle with some lighter-shade pixels around the edges. I think the browser has a flaw when enlarging images with transparency - eliminating the transparency around the arrow would probably fix everything.

It is also a matter of subpixel anti-aliasing, and that makes a surprisingly big difference in my experience!

http://i.imgur.com/sFrFT.png

Reply on news.ycombinator.com