New Y Combinator Website | Hacker News Reader

New Y Combinator Website

blog.ycombinator.com

432 pointskevin133 comments

If you've ever wondered what Hacker News looks like to a moderator, now's your chance.

http://www.ycombinator.com/images/home/HackerNews.png

Kill | blast | nuke

One wonders what the difference in behaviors these have is?

Probably kill = hide from front page, blast = hide from all, and nuke = delete from database (maybe soft-delete). Pure speculation though.

Kill makes it dead, blast makes it trend down the front page fast, nuke is delete/hide. So I believe.

What does "dead" mean?

"dead" on HN is like locking and hiding a thread -- no more voting or commenting and the thread disappears.

dead posts are hidden by default. I believe once you have enough kamra there is a "showdead" option you can enable in your preferences. Dead posts/comments will be marked as [dead], but you can at least still see them.

If nuke is "delete/hide," then what is "delete?"

"Delete" is like "dead", except that the posts aren't visible even if you have showdead turned on. We don't ever delete things unless users ask us to—typically because the window for deleting their own post has expired—and then only when they have a good reason for asking. Otherwise HN's bias is toward preserving history.

Coincidentally, I posted something else about "delete" a few hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7975137.

> One wonders what the difference in behaviors these have is?

"Kill" makes an item be "[dead]", i.e. hidden from users who don't have the "showdead" setting turned on in their profile. A typical case is killing duplicate posts when they don't have an ongoing discussion. "Blast" is like "kill", but also bans the user. A typical case is banning trolls. "Nuke" is like "blast", but also bans the site. That is for spammers.

Oddly enough, no one asked about the most important by far of all these links, perhaps because it also has the blandest name: "edit". That goes to a page where we can edit an item's title or url, or put some moderation flag on a story.

The Ego of the Mod who uses this. Someone's feeling powerful there.

My 1234th day……

You may not believe it, but the feeling evoked by using those tools is not "mad with power" so much as "is this really what I want to be doing with my life". It's not dictatorial, it's janitorial. Other aspects of the job are better.

I'm not just speaking for myself here, but for everyone who's done it.

kill: - 10; blast: + 10; nuke: - 100;

/conjecture

funny how H N users were up in arms about the recent Facebook mood experiment yet they are in one of the most controlled environments on the internet ...

What are you referring to?

how HN regularly buries posts that critique the startup scene

I'm not sure what you're talking about, but moderators don't do anything of that sort.

Such a bias may be the result of the community's opinions and consequent voting.

I wonder what the percentage means. upvote/flag ratio?

Comments/Points

Item 10 has 439 points and 140 comments. 140/439 = 32%, but it shows 40%.

I'm guessing it's the ratio of older user upvotes vs total upvotes.

huh.

I built a clone at news.intelmap.com a year or two ago, and I don't have the percentages in my admin console. Perhaps an addition since pg's exit?

I believe there's a bunch of unreleased code to do with voting rings and other abuse protection.

> I wonder what the percentage means. upvote/flag ratio?

Good guess, but no. It's a score generated by the ring detector. It's rather out of date, because the code has changed a lot since that computation was written.

no downvote superpowers ?

>blast makes it trend down the front page

Whoa, that's misleading. You're quoting part of this thread where people were having fun speculating about what the terms might mean. All these guesses were wrong. Please see my explanation elsewhere in the thread.

You killed the magic

I wonder what "hours(51)" means?

The HN accounts of YC founders show an "hours" link at the top of the page that allows them to book office hours with a YC partner.

Thanks. Mirror: http://imgur.com/ge3ZBgt

Are all YC founders' usernames orange?

Wouldn't that have the same effect as a voting ring?

yes, yes

I don't know if it's all YC founders or all YC employees, but at least at one point it was public knowledge (as in, Paul Graham repeatedly posted about it) that everyone in YC had an orange username.

It was at least leaked 1 year ago by Techcrunch[1,2]. The search string is: "If you are a YC founder, your username will show up in orange to other YC"[3]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5730720

[2] http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/18/the-evolution-of-hacker-new...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=If+you+are+a+YC+founder%2C+your+us...

I don't think you can call that "leaked"—it was an interview with PG!

Also, the orange name thing had been discussed on HN long before then. More than once, IIRC. (Sorry, I don't have citations—too tired to dig them up.)

Thanks for the clarification! I agree, leaked was not a proper way of describing it.

Definitely all founders, and definitely some employees who aren't also founders, but I'm not sure if all employees have it. They may; there aren't that many.

It's actually more so we don't get into unnecessarily acrimonious arguments with one another.

Sounds like a feature the whole site could use. ;)

Although I'm guessing that was facetious, it's actually a variant of the truth: it's there to foster the YC network. PG added it years ago when he realized that the number of YC founders had gotten too large for them to know who each other were.

> Wouldn't that have the same effect as a voting ring?

Perhaps, but those votes are caught by the ring detector the same as others, and the same penalties are applied.

It may interest you to know that when PG added the orange name thing, he also added a page showing stories submitted by YC founders. That really did have the same effect as a voting ring—which wasn't the intent, so he got rid of it. (This has also been discussed on HN in the past, btw.)

Nice thumbnail image O_o

(EDIT) - Whoops! was looking at the old site still!

Nice improvement! Much better than the old site! ;-)

What does the % at the end signify?

EDIT: % after 'delete' on every submission

Not to a moderator; to a YC partner. Moderators' Hacker News looks different, and you're going to have to wait till one of us leaks another screenshot to see it.

I feel like since it was we who slipped up, fair game rules say we owe you guys an explanation of what those bells and whistles do (warning: you may find it disappointingly mundane), so I'll come back and post some more in this thread later. By coincidence, however, I was out all day, so had better catch up with anything important first.

Edit: Ok, I think I've answered all the questions about details. But let me add the most important point here.

The interface that you see in that screenshot is not actually used by anyone [1]. Those links are there for legacy reasons. Their principal role at present is to lure YC partners into accidentally fat-fingering things. (Don't worry; that doesn't happen often, and we see it in the logs and correct it.) They don't exist in the YC-partner version of Kevin's new HN markup, so they won't be around much longer.

1. The only exception I can think of is that Trevor occasionally helps out with moderation.

Do I get to be as brutal as Kevin giving design feedback on the new site? :)

The JS affix doesn't trigger off at the bottom so the sticky nav stays fixed http://i.imgur.com/YAqGVoL.png

Mixpanel's logo is forced display:none; on the homepage so it offsets the grid http://i.imgur.com/SV2dLq8.png

Overall this redesign is absolutely fantastic.

PS. Did the valuation required to get on the homepage go up a bit?

Also, Dropbox's image is using the old logo. Not sure if that was intentional or not.

same with the PagerDuty one

I just realized the Mixpanel issue might just be because I use AdBlock...

Am I really the only one who noticed that there are now women in some of the photos, as well as someone who is non-white/Asian? The design changes are great, too, but this seems a little more significant in terms of messaging. YC has been making more of an effort recently but it was always difficult for me to get past the fact that, according to their own photos, JL is the only woman there, or the only one worth showing in a photo. (This is coming from someone who was wanting to be able to like YC whole-heartedly, not someone looking for controversy.)

I do actually think it's something that gets noticed, just maybe not always on a conscious level, so this is a great and welcomed (and more welcoming) change. Well done, y'all.

"If what you see makes you worried for Hacker News, I want you to know that I have very different design goals for HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7960105)"

I am worried for Hacker News.

  One of my mottoes is that if you want to get unusual
  results, work fast and work cheap, because there's more
  of a chance that you'll get somewhere that nobody else
  did.

  Nearly always, the effect of spending a lot of money is
  to make things more normal.

  - Brian Eno

kevin is basically just unbelievably good at everything.

Yes! Kevin is amazing. He gave me a sneak peak of the design last week, but it's really amazing. I love all the wonderfully thought out but small details, like how good the FAQ page is.

Yeah I agree. The FAQ page is a huge win. All of the content is super useful and I only ever found it before from pecking around.

The "partners" page doesn't mention the founders of YC or differentiate them from the other partners. Obviously there was a reason for this. Can you elaborate?

http://www.ycombinator.com/partners/

Probably because it shouldn't matter. Labelling some of the Partners as 'Founders' would be akin to saying they're 'more equal' than the others. Besides that, everyone here probably knows who they are anyway (or can trivially find out).

Love it! So much awesome design thinking packed into this.

This feels odd: http://monosnap.com/image/koDS9m3j3pz43AQVb2nHpuWwp4CGaq

Seems odd to say "application period is over! Here's an APPLY button!"

Also, S14 seems like an abbreviation that wouldn't be meaningful to non-YC-faithful. Curse of knowledge?

Suggest something like: "Applications open for Winter '15 soon. <link>Get notified</link>" (allowing people to get an email ping when it opens up?) You could have a link to the (non-useful but still educational) "apply" link in the FAQ? Or better yet, if they choose to get notified, say "great, we'll let you know. In the meantime, check out <link>last session's application</link>."

Right now, it doesn't make sense. You're right. Hover over the S14 text and you should get a tooltip.

no tool tip for me in chrome.

Minor nitpick. I didn't like the alignment of the YC logos on the top and bottom. They look a little misaligned. Maybe something like this is better ?: http://i.imgur.com/J1mzwJk.png (Removed all content except top and bottom)

The site is designed on a 9 column grid. The YC logo gets its own column. I also use that column for side notes on the left side.

But the logo at the top of the page looks left-aligned in the column, while the logo at the bottom of the page looks right-aligned (honestly, I wouldn't have noticed if my GP hadn't brought it up :).

The one thing I did notice, though, is there are no titles on the anchor tags for the YC funded companies' icons. Some of them don't have their company names in the icons, and needing to enable the status bar to look at the URLs to get the names via the URLs is more work than a lazy person like myself likes to do.

Seriously, though, great work. Looks really good!

The alignment I should fix. Thanks for catching that.

Looks like the images only get loaded as you scroll down, which is a good feature that more sites should do. Seems like there's a fair amount of JavaScript being loaded here, I wonder what non-obvious stuff is happening?

Yeah, I've started using the 'load on demand' approach by default, unless the images are important. It can drastically improve load speed in a very simple way.

Do you have any resources you'd recommend to get started learning this? It's a nice feature and I noticed it when the new YC page first loaded but have never investigated it myself.

There are probably jQuery plugins for 'lazy loading' images, but if you're familiar with javascript, and especially if you're using jQuery too, it's not too difficult to write a bit of code that takes care of this.

The nice thing is that you can then combine this with responsive image loading (i.e. big images for desktop, small for mobile). I've agonized over the different solutions and concluded that, in most cases, a js-based solution to the image loading problem is the best (although I'm open to other opinions!).

What it boils down to is this: - use markup that are either just divs with data-attributes, or image tags with the low-res images (if images are important for SEO or whatnot). - detect the device type or screen size - use javascript to calculate if the element is in view (usually calculating the image's offset from the top of the page is enough, since most sites are, uh, vertically-inclined) - load the appropriate image from the data-attribute with javascript if the image is visible.

If you use placeholder images initially, I've noticed that the effect can actually look better than just showing the images right away. There's something about the images popping into view that makes the page feel more alive.

For specific resources, I'd search 'check if image is visible' (with or without jQuery). You'll probably find some plugins or some code that might show how to do this. Feel free to approach me if you can't work it out.

Where can I view a list of all of the past and current startups, their funding, their performance, their current status/worth, current employees, and links to their website in a nice sortable table?

Also, what would it take to get a page of old articles that I didn't view that might be interesting to me based on my previous article upvotes? That would be valuable.

The admin screenshot had several articles from a few months ago that I never saw and the only way for me to see them would be to manually search.

Nice, in my opinion,Sans is better for Titles,and a serif font is better for the body of an article.

Also either push the header to the left,or align the left column with the top of the header,because right now the layout looks unbalanced.

EDIT :

In my opinion the left column is unnecessary.The site could work with 1 column,and the content of the left column could either be push in the header or a footer.

Just my 2 cents ;) Nice Job again,it's responsive !

I personally find serif harder to read as a body font on web pages, so I think their combo is fine. My gripe with the layout is that it's aligned to the left, so with my high-resolution monitor there is a ton of white space on the right side.

Are you seeing Serifs for Titles? Should be all san-serif. If so, can you send me a screenshot and browser you're using?

Here's how it looks for me: http://cl.ly/image/1M04253f2w2n

Oh, you're referring to Posthaven's styles.

The fonts spacing on posthaven (eg 'facelift') seems a bit unique/interesting. Its not the serifs itself, IMHO.

I think sans-serifs are better for small body text because of the limited amount of available pixels, especially ones that are created with screens in mind and are specifically handhinted to facilitate clarity and crispness.

Serifs are generally more appealing to the eye, but with limited resolutions (say, to 150ppi) can be shown in their full glory only in bigger sizes, making them great for titles on websites. My favorites are slab-serifs (Rockwell and Chunk Five work nice) or transitional serifs (I like Playfair Display) for titles, and something like Open Sans or Helvetica Neue for body text. Looks great :)

Looks good. I was half expecting to see the hipster design that everyone and their cousin seems to be using! I'm glad they chose better!

I was fully expecting the infinitely annoying background-photo-that-changes-when-you-scroll gimmick. Such a pleasant surprise.

What's the tech stack for the new website?

> paulg: @joe_blau www is just static html. You're probably thinking of news, which didn't change.

- https://twitter.com/paulg/status/484028786120216576

I use http://middlemanapp.com to generate the static site.

And it's hosted from an S3 bucket with CloudFront.

Looks great. Meanwhile I'd sell my first born for a few media queries and a max-width over here at Hacker News.

I love the new site design (on a macbook), but on windows, the font is not as crisp. I love that font on mac though. Which font should developers use if they want crispness in both mac and windows?

Looks great!

HTTPS giving me troubles, e.g. clicking through on footer links from HN: http://imgur.com/59cQ7G3

On an unrelated note (careful, Inception-style sentence coming up, and apologies if this has been mentioned before/isn't helpful), most of the footer links in the footer of the pages linked to in the footer of news.ycombinator.com lead to 404. Id est, click on a link in the footer, then click on a link in the footer of the page you just clicked to, 404 hey presto.

Solid redesign. Can't wait for a responsive version on hacker news. I use ihackernews.com now but I occasionally have trouble upvoting or commenting due to api rate limits.

The new design is good, but thanks for keeping the old one up too.

The old design gave YC an identity in my mind, and differentiated it from the rest of the web.

It conveyed to me that YC didn't have to follow web trends to get people on their website. I visited the website for its superb content.

Rather than making text harder to "digest", the simple display of useful information appealed to me, and was a refresher.

Perhaps, this may not be the preference of many other users.

That big "Apply" button screams Wufoo. :-)

Am I the only one who sat there and watched the entire slideshow thinking: "I wish there were captions to all these pictures"?

No. Kat and I working to add captions to them. We'll probably add them to the gallery page: http://www.ycombinator.com/gallery/

The choice of a geometric Futura-like font as primary face for body text always surprises me. Seems like it's just me, though.

How about a mobile friendly version of HN? :)

yes please!

We're working on it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7960105

Is there a reason, why you didn't start with mobile first?

Hacker News predates reasonable web browsers on phones by a few years.

Seriously? HN is primarily for developers. We use desktops heavily for development.

There are good android apps for HN

Are there? I've tried HN and HNdroid, and neither allow you to leave comments. HN in particular fails to load comment pages where you have a comment.

Hacker News 2 allowed you to leave comments; unfortunately, the author disabled them in the last version due to some HN change, but I'm hopeful they'll be re-enabled soon.

The white on the left side is a bug right?

http://inft.ly/WZPr4sk

That's a feature!

Probably so that there can be a 13px right border when there is no scrollbar and the left border makes it not look weird. The right border would be to prevent the page from "jumping" when the scrollbar goes from visible to not visible.

Its actually a deliberate 13px border, I initially thought it was a margin caused by a chrome extension. I guess it makes it feel a bit more like the news page

With that there the page centers in my browser window with the scrollbar. Maybe that's why. But I'm not sure if it does the same on every platform.

Looks really nice and clean. The only issue I have is - the margin on the image which makes it look not in line with a set of images from the block above: http://bit.ly/1qh58NC

Why have the "Apply" button link to the expired "Apply to Y Combinator" page? Maybe show it only during the application period, or have the applications submitted after the deadline go to the next funding cycle?

Great refresh - clean and crisp. The 'Blog' section looks a bit out of place on the home page with the white background and blue text, but other than that I think the new design suits YC well.

> Since 2005, we've funded over 700 startups

I sometimes wonder how many of these startups made it, and if the success rate inside YC is larger than outside of it (i.e. self funding, crowdfunding etc).

Also curious on that, because as a "company", they will naturally interprete their own statistics the way it's promotable or advantagous for them. The truth is always ugly.

This helps shed some light on some of that information: http://yclist.com/

Useful website, but only 6.57% of YC companies have "died" according to that data. Even for a (beyond) successful fund, that number/dataset seems a bit contrived, and it should perhaps be taken with a grain of salt.

Check the data out for YC (and any other accelerator) here: http://www.seed-db.com/accelerators

In addition to the lists of what companies have gone through which programs and when, I also have an Investor Graph to open up who's investing in companies from which programs, and at what stages. (http://www.seed-db.com/investorgraph)

I love the new look! A much better, refreshed design that was needed.

Really does look great, very clean well done. Is there any plan to update hacker news? While it's minimal design has some appeal I think the UI really is in need of a makeover.

Looks great! Good work.

Very nice! It has a modern feel and stands out from the average.

who wrote the copy for the new site? (it's great!)

Am I the only one who feels lost without proper navigation options above the fold? The nav menu is right at the bottom. Feels very odd to me.

Looks really clean and nice. And ... It's responsive!! Awesome!

Photo gallery, near the bottom, first YC Class.

Sam standing next to Paul.

Looks great Kevin!

That 1px dark border around the photo slider...

Damn it now xycombinator.com is out of date.

Looks great, well done to your team!

Looks great, super clean and crisp.

connection is timing out for me.

Super clean, Super cool, super intuitive.

Thanks!

Great.

Finally

Cue patio11 bitching about the call to action and tptacek explaining how the site fails crypto commandments x, y, and z, followed by grellas writing a 750 word essay on the intricacies of the design from an impassioned and impartial point of view.

It matters in high performance Python.

So Y Combinator has gone from 1995 to 2007, wow so amazing guiz. Maybe try again and we might get to 2012. Does HN even use CSS? Probably try that next.

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