Comment by read | Hacker News Reader

Comment by read | Hacker News Reader

The most important thing you can understand is that these concerns aren't the most important thing to worry about. Content is more important. Though, if you had to pick only one feature to work on next, mobile might be it. As for the rest:

2. they are 0 pixels from the side of the page, why? Are those numbers needed anyway?

Why not? Besides the numbers telling you which page you are on, they also show how a story progresses in time.

3. With more padding and a bigger font everything should get much better to read and process

Bigger does not equal better.

4. The colors seem old-fashion

The colors make the site readable. Readability is more important than fashion.

7. it is so close and compact.

That could be intentional. It focuses attention, for example.

8. If the limit is 2000 characters why i have to hit submit to find that out?

Not displaying unnecessary things reduces cognitive load. Anything that takes 2000 characters to express is something that could be reduced in length anyway.

9. Ah, TABLE seriously?

Tables are the lists of html. The ambiguity they introduce is not always an error.

http://paulgraham.com/arc0.html

2. Agreed, so we leave the numbers along, but some spacing won't harm.

3. Right, not always, but in this case i think it will, things will get more readable.

4. Well, i think the current colors doesn't make the site specially readable, not that it makes it unreadable, just that it doesn't specially help with readability.

7. In my experience if you put a lot of content on top of each other with almost no spacing people will just get lost, luckily HN's audience is not the common folk, but does that justifies this?

8. I don't think adding a character counter or just a message letting you know will overflow the cognitive load, and the user hitting submit to find it out is just wrong IMHO.

9. Hmm, tables are the tables of HTML, <ul> and <ol> are lists of HTML.

>Bigger does not equal better.

It doesn't equal bloat either. But where typography is concerned, particularly on mobile, it can definitely equal "more legible." Readability should certainly be a concern on a forum. I would argue it should be one of the top concerns.

For instance, to me, the leading between lines here is way too small. That's an easy thing to fix.

>Not displaying unnecessary things reduces cognitive load. Anything that takes 2000 characters to express is something that could be reduced in length anyway.

It would not tax anyone's mind to the breaking point to tell them what the character limit is, even assuming your latter statement tends to be correct. The ultimate expression of that philosophy is twitter anyway - longer comments are not necessarily worse, and a word limit doesn't necessarily guarantee quality.

>Tables are the lists of html. The ambiguity they introduce is not always an error

Actually, lists are already the lists of html. Tables are meant for rows and columns. Using them to show comment trees seems unnecessarily redundant because there's already an element for that.

Although, granted, that is the least important of the issues at hand.

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