Hacker News Reader

Comment by ramblerman | Hacker News Reader

It's fine. It does what it's supposed to that's true. There are a few items however, that should really have been tackled in the many years this site has now been running imo.

- You can't take away an upvote. Misclick is just bad luck

- user settings have some really obscure settings that aren't explained like showdead / noprocrast / maxvisit / minaway

- The "Unknown or expired link" is just a bad solution, either redirect me to the front page when that happens, or find an alternative way to deal with it.

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That last one always gets me... Cant believe its been that way for so long, considering the type of people who visit this site....

There's "not having time to work on it" and then theres "complete abandonment."

I do sort of agree with OP that at least adding a few more people onto a team would be good, if not full on opensourcing it.

But hey, Reddit is always open source. And someone could always open their own site out of its source code and try to one-up HackerNews. Competition breads innovation.

I was hoping someone would mention it: https://github.com/reddit/reddit/wiki

thanks!

Except it's impossible to set up without AWS and IndexTank. We tried that in our local Hackerspace and failed miserably.

By the way, our Hackerspace is looking for a sane, reddit-line threaded discussion engine. I'd use HN engine, but it doesn't support "subreddits". Anyone knows something that could work? We had hard time finding anything.

I use http://hckrnews.com/ to avoid the expired-link error

I just recently stumbled on it and boy oh boy, that's much better than HN itself. Not complaining about HN but I'm from the time of the web when things got a little better than the table-like structure of HN. I do feel comfortable when there's a better interface/design.

On a slightly off-topic talk, I think the whole thing basically boils down to the crux. People aren't too bothered to change the looks of HN because it just works good as it is and that's most important. Now, ages from now Apple's design philosophy might look pretty old but may be people will be okay with that because it's a brand. I tend to think of HN like that.

Excellent! Just what I was after having been on holidays and wanting to see what I missed. Also, is there a list of HN interfaces and related sites somewhere? HNSearch etc?

I also use hckrnews.com, its a much better interface for HN.

Particularly its useful, if I have not used HN for some days, and come back to see 'what great items have I missed?'.

edit: minor rephrase

Just because of this "Unknown or expired link" thing, i fill up my browser with lots of tabs.

When i open HN, i open the links that interests me in new tabs. And immediately click on "More" to see the next page.

Wow. The "Unknown or expired link" is a horrible solution. How bad is it? So bad that even though I've been browsing hacker news for over a year, only just now after reading this did I realize that the "More" link was inaccessible only because of a timeout. It occurs to me that every single time I clicked More in the past, it was after reading comments on the first page for a while, and so it always timed out for me. But the error page made me just assumed it was a bug and that the next page of results would not be possible to retrieve. Was always surprised when I periodically checked the second page and found that this "bug" was never fixed. Why not just show page two of the results, as they are at the time the more link is clicked? Seems pointless to have an expiration for this. So what if the pagination gets a little off-sync and I either miss a post or re-read something? That's much better than getting an error page.

showdead / noprocrast / maxvisit / minaway are explained in FAQs and are must use features of HN.

http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

I always liked the obscure settings. I like that HN doesn't try to pamper me.

You feel special because you're in an 'elite' club of people that know what the noprocrast setting does?

It's easy to find out by searching hn.

Still, an explanation would be nice, for example on the guideline page.

Are you also browsing the web by issuing HTTP commands directly in a telnet session?

Also: After voting on a comment, you cannot see whether it was an upvote or downvote. While on a touchscreen, I always hesitate while clicking the small arrows.

That being said, I'd prefer no change to the HN system.

using hn with a small touchscreen (phone or tablet) makes you really appreciate the magnitude of the irrevocable misclick problem.

the UX on tablets is sometimes just absurd, isn't it? I thought it is a practical joke. Thousands of tech savy folks driving the internet use an interface from the nineties.

how often I missed this upvote button or saw expired session..

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