Hacker Newspaper: reformatted Hacker News
hacker-newspaper.gilesb.com
More information about this here:
http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/04/miniapp-hacker-newspaper.html
hacker-newspaper.gilesb.com
Hacker Newspaper is a superior user interface for Hacker News.
I beg to disagree - see below.
It's more performant, more readable
It's hard to skim.
it doesn't turn visited links damn near invisible for some insane reason
I don't need to read the same thing again. Visited links can be invisible for all I care. I visit them less than 5% of the time.
and it makes it much easier to skim the headlines
No way. Suddenly I have to scroll through screens of large-font nonsense instead of just getting it all within about 1.5 screens.
and avoid getting into useless, time-wasting blather
Comments, to me, are more than 50% of the value of HN. I often read the comments before the article, and sometimes don't bother reading the article at all.
To me, this "reformatted layout" is very, very inferior.
Same here. To me this is essential. The comments tell me quickly if the article is going to be a waste of time.
This one's interesting to take a glance at, then move on.
It's surprising that in the world of programming, in which precision is essential, there are so many advocates for cruftiness in English.
In programming, precision is essential. In human communication, it is often inconsequential. We sped our time railing against our arbitrary and fickle natures, demanding precisely worded specification, imposing workflow and permissions straightjackets on programs, when in reality all that matters is that people feel happy when they use what we build.
If someone feels happy saying the words "performant" and "utilize" to me, that is enough.
Boy would you not like my code. It's full of neologisms. Undivify. Wipeage. Calcval. Zillions of them! I'd say this makes my code better English, not worse. I choose words carefully and do not hesitate to make a new one if existing ones don't communicate just what is wanted. It's not an arbitrary process and has nothing to do with sloppiness or vanity. It has to do with making the language fit the problem.
Oh, and I use "performant" all the time, too. What other adjective signifies the qualities that programmers have in mind when they say "performance"?
This whole argument is silly, of course. Natural language is so heavily overloaded that you could never regularize it in the way people seem to be proposing, and if you could, you would ruin it.
Instead, you can rearrange the wording a little to convey the exact same meaning. By working within the constraints, an elegant solution emerges. By all means add words if they are clever or pleasing or convey a nuance that can't be achieved with what already exists. Performant and functionality don't meet those criteria.
Remove all synonyms
Example: fine -> good
Remove antonyms and just negate the word
Example: bad -> ungood
Remove special-case nouns: just combine a noun and one or more adjectives to reach the same meaning with fewer fundamental words.
Example: great -> doubleplusgood; murder -> collateral damage
I did. The masses were not amused.
It's more readable, performs better, doesn't turn visited links damn near invisible for some insane reason, and ...
This needs to be cloned by someone who is willing to at least link to the HN comment threads. I know that Giles regards such things as deadly dangerous OMG-someone-is-wrong-on-the-Internet time-wasting poison -- and he's got a point -- but some of us have an odd love of the medium and primarily read HN for the comments.
Some headlines just work better in giant Newspaper Type than others. In his example, Giles has picked right up on "Bill Gates Applies for Patent on Electromagnetic Engine", which reads like a steampunk April fool's joke when you print it on a newspaper page. It's great.
This project is doomed [1] because the average article on the web is miserably structured for being teased on a newspaper page. My favorite example is up there right now:
HOWTO: Stop procrastination (Dan Ariely)
We're sorry, but something went wrong. We've been notified about this issue and we'll take a look at it shortly.
That's so perfect it's like poetry. On the other hand, "Ruby Style Guide" reads like the Associated Press conception of a modern online newspaper:
This repository is private. All pages are served over SSL and all pushing and pulling is done over SSH. No one may fork, clone, or view it unless they are added as a member . Every repository with this icon () is private.
That's art, but it isn't exactly in the spirit of the actual Ruby Style Guide.
But, seriously, there's a reason why newspaper writing has traditionally been in inverted-pyramid form, with the most important sentence at the top and very little preliminary throat-clearing: Newspaper articles have to make sense when you chop off the first one or two lines and blow them up huge, or isolate them on the front page. Web links do not. And they don't.
You can't replicate the awesomeness of a well-designed newspaper with AI-mediated typography alone. The prose and the priority of the stories must also be carefully designed by humans.
The reason why HN is a big flat pile of headlines is that such a display accurately reflects the output of its ranking algorithm: Most likely the top N stories include a certain number of interesting stories, but the algorithm doesn't know which specific ones they are. You don't want to blow up some stories bigger than others unless they really are bigger stories, and who is making that call? Some Python or Ruby script? Please.
---
[1] But maybe not for long. Add a human editor tweaking the headlines and the teasers and I believe you might have something.
I believe it is called "The Drudge Report." :)
Obligatory 37signals link: "Why the Drudge Report is one of the best designed sites on the Web":
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1407-why-the-drudge-repor...
It's painful to contemplate. [1]
---
[1] The truth embodied in the 37signals essay, that is. It goes without saying that the Drudge Report is painful to contemplate.
I believe it is called "The Drudge Report." :)
Isn't it called "Techmeme" ?
I added HN to my Times app. But i still prefer viewing it in Firefox.
@-moz-document url-prefix(http://news.ycombinator.com/) {
td { color: #000000 !important; }
a { color: #000055 !important; }
}
Giles -- thanks for linking to me in your blog post about this new visual.
However it is a different way to look at things and I'm very interested in learning about Typogridphy (http://csswizardry.com/typogridphy/).
If I can get voting on there, I'll use this instead of vanilla HN.
Good innovation. He went further than simply displaying a pretty bullet list, like others do(digg, etc.).
Plus he included minors innovations that are very clever. For example, the size of the headlines are proportional to it's number of votes. It allows you to see how liked(important) a piece is regardless of it's rank.
It would be cool if the headlines would keep their current style and become links.
Also, I think the goal ought to be to make HN more readable (which you do, to some extent), rather than mimic a newspaper down to the pixel.
theres no alignment, it dynamically resizes - your eyes dont know where to snap to.
grey on white text, ugh why?
they aren't quite columns and they aren't quite not columns.
I would like to offer up a raw php "feed" of hacker news and let anyone redesign it with their own css & domain.
I think that is a more featured platform than arcforums.