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Show HN: Showing HN

showinghn.com

66 pointsddod40 comments

I agree to some extent (on this particular page the contrast is far too low). But low contrast has some benefits too--specifically, reduced eyestrain. On most sites, high contrast is fine, but if something is meant to be read--blogs, articles, code, etc.-- I much prefer a more subdued colorscheme.

Can't believe no one has complained about the font-weight/font-color being eye-straining...was HN down or something the past hour? :)

Rather than just a list, it'd be great (as someone else pointed out) to show upvote score. And then a way to show most upvoted in past week/month/year/all-time, as that is a view that is not-at-all easy to get from HN's interface.

Sorry for the eye-strain; I switched it from #777 to #444 just now, so hopefully there's a marginal improvement.

My scraper isn't currently set to get that deep, but the most upvoted per time period is a good idea that I'll look into.

The site is still virtually unreadable for me. In case you're seeing something different, I'm at work on Windows 7 with Chrome. I wear glasses. I pretty much cannot read the smaller text. That is to say, I can do it, but it physically hurts a bit. Screenshot: http://imgur.com/h9wNl

It's worse than just contrast. The text is so thin, light, and small, that parts of the glyphs can't even be rendered. There are literally not enough pixels to draw the open area of the top half of an "e" in the usernames below the titles.

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

Part of it is Chrome's messed up subpixel antialiasing (for which I've had an open bug report since September when they broke it), part is just making text way too small for anything but a 30" Retina display, if that exists.

I've upped all the sizes so hopefully it's a bit better now. I had only tested it on an old Macbook and a Nexus 7, where the original font, size, and color were all very readable to me. Thanks for the heads up.

Still no good on Chrome. Remove Lato from body font.

Yes, oh god, yes, this. It looks perfect in Helvetica Neue.

Right! Just by removing "Lato" font in body {} and no more configuration, "Hevetica Neue" looks very nice to me.

No noticeable change (still cannot read it).

fwiw, very hard for me too (I am astygmatic), at +1 zoom it's better

Is there a reason you're using a scraper instead of http://www.hnsearch.com/api ?

pls change the contrast..its still very hard to read..I dont know how you have been reading it

Can you read this well? Is this just a fad that everyone is getting on, or is there a legitimate reason for having a gray background with a slightly darker gray text color?

Short of that, cool site. It'd be nice to see how many comments are on a submission, and if clicking 'comments' didn't load a new tab.

Are you scraping the site directly? Have you heard of the official api? http://www.hnsearch.com/api

> Can't believe no one has complained about the font-weight/font-color being eye-straining

Thank you for posting this.

I've pretty much given up mentioning it.

Designers tend to have good eyes, and excellent calibrated monitors. Most people don't have such good monitors. Some people even have really cheap lousy tn panels with smudges and smears and such all over.

I'd be interested to know what everyone thinks is a good size and what good colours are.

I like massive fonts - make it big enough so you think it's too big, and then make it a bit bigger. And I like a pale off white background with black or very dark text. (Something #ffffdd and #003300)

I'm using plugins at the moment to fix stuff.

> Designers tend to have good eyes, and excellent calibrated monitors. Most people don't have such good monitors. Some people even have really cheap lousy tn panels with smudges and smears and such all over.

Here's an idea for a service: something that would simulate how given thing looks on different cheap, poorly calibrated monitors and TV screens.

It's more than that. Designers tend to use Macs. OS X's Quartz font engine renders text more heavily (and wider) than Windows' or Linux's does, and Chrome on Windows in particular suffers because it uses GDI for font rendering rather than DirectWrite like IE and Firefox do.

Chrome on Windows also happens to be the single largest web browser demographic, making it particularly hilarious that designers on their Macs end up designing these websites with utterly illegible fonts.

Arial and Helvetica may not be cool, but they're readable.

Here's Chrome 25 on Windows: http://cl.ly/image/000u2i2C0S3Q

And here's Chrome 24 on OS X: http://cl.ly/image/0t132S3b3k0d/o

Increasing the letter-spacing CSS property by 1px in Chrome made everything a lot easier for me to read.

I made http://www.hnshowcase.com that shows thumbnail/comment count/vote count of all "Show HN" posts. You can sort by comment and vote count but right now it doesn't let you filter by time range. I think I'll look into adding that to the next version.

copythisproject.appspot.com

Great job. I can see myself checking this as Show HN are some of the most interesting posts I see here.

Here is some feedback:

- I second the opinions that the text is a bit unreadable.

- A lot of white space especially at the head of the page. On 1366x768 the first post is almost in the middle of the page.

- Would be great to have more posts. Paging would work.

Additional features you may consider:

- Maybe a screenshot of the page would make your site less plain. Checkout html2canvas http://html2canvas.hertzen.com/

Great stuff :)

Nice concept. But I would like if you could display much more far back. And perhaps also how much upvotes each one got. Look at hneasy.com and maybe contact him.

Thanks for the feedback! It's actually creating its own database so as time goes on, it will show everything since it's been running. I didn't want to scrape through the backlog as I've already gotten banned a couple times while making this (prompting pg's recent unban post) and I didn't want to push my luck.

The upvotes thing is tricky because it's very time sensitive. I thought about it for a bit, but besides the difficulty in judging when to update the points, it also goes against the goal that all Show HNs are given the spotlight even if they didn't do so well.

Makes sense. I will use your site.

Don't know how you're scraping this...but why not just keep track of the current upvote totals everytime you crawl the list (up to a certain cutoff point...I don't think upvotes more than three weeks from now really mean anything)...It's nice to see all the Show HN's in one place, but if some of them were flops, then they won't be more interesting when viewed from this app. However, I think it is always useful to see what great Show HN's we might have missed in the week or month...not all of us check the frontpage every day or mark down all the things we wish we had time to visit later.

It seems good, as others have stated it is a bit low contrast.

I just have one small problem with the header/title. Right now it's click able on the whitespace surrounding the title. I've outlined this http://i.imgur.com/isRbJ.png

The red box is where it's click able now, and the green box is where I think it should be click able.

I frequent this one http://www.hnshowcase.com/

That justshowHN blog on Tumblr is no longer active.

If anyone knows a good replacement show HN feed I could add to http://skimfeed.com let me know!

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=6b3cef212d7de87581...

This is the perfect job for Pipes. It's literally the only Yahoo service I still use, but it's awesome. I wish I could write my own modules, though.

Check out Show HN filter on hnapp.com: http://hnapp.com/filter/9205b686fc8b9b396a0d40e43663116f

also check out hnshowcase.com (not mine)

knocked over by all the meta in hnshowcase showing showinghn showing Show HNs while showing other Show HNs

Can you have a filter to rank by points? Would love to sort based on that to see the best "Show HN". :)

Suggestion: Enable an RSS feed.

I created ShowHNDaily.com to email Show HN postings. Feel free to use our RSS feed if you'd like @ http://www.showhndaily.com/rss.xml

did this a month ago. my site is still in alpha copythisproject.appspot.com

What did you build this in?

Node.js with nothing fancy. It's only about 80 lines of code serverside.

Yo dawg.

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