zlacker

It's simple but effective. The pages load quickly and look pretty decent in many different browsers.

I'm really happy that HN isn't your typical constantly-mutating, constantly growing news site, adding a new social share button and 2KB of new Javascript every week. Please, pg, don't start taking pull requests or anything like that, it's great the way it is.

Edit: look at the current top story. A pretty but not especially functional Facebook redesign, proposed as the latest in a long line of changes that the users pretty much always disliked. There's my point.

>>jff+(OP)
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.

>>jff+(OP)
That's a red herring, and a silly reason to choose not to free code.

pg could open source HN and then never ever accept a pull request, and he would still have made a positive change in the world.

>>ramble+y
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.

>>ramble+y
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.

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

>>jff+(OP)
i agree the site is simple and effective as it is. but it's not perfect. there is always something that can be improved. this probably doesn't include adding social share buttons and 2KB of new JavaScript every week. Like you said. And I agree, so would many people, so would pg, and this would also be the conclusion of an open feature discussion and wouldn't result in a successful pull request.

but think about it from a different perspective: there is a feature that many people agree would make the site better. e.g. a new job board for non-YC-companies, like discussed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4993571. lets assume that after openly discussing the problem, pg and the majority of the community agrees upon a solution. now lets assume that there are more features like this, and that pg hasn't the time to implement them all. wouldn't it be nice if the community could help out?

>>muelle+11
Job posts on HN are a perk for YC companies. Adding job posts for non-YC companies essentially kills that perk.

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

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

thanks!

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

http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

>>jff+(OP)
A big problem is: Comments are too deep for mobile devices.

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

>>chj+M2
Agreed, the site isn't all that usable from mobile devices. I use the Hacker News Reader app [0] for Android, it has a very nice interface and it's open source. [1]

[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.manuelmaly...

[1] https://github.com/manmal/hn-android

>>chj+M2
works well enough with opera mobile. it reflows them so they fit the screen.

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

>>ramble+y
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.

>>jff+(OP)
People probably said the same about the horse and buggy when the car was invented. Not that I'd personally like a shit ton of social media buttons, just sayin'

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

>>olivie+X3
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.

>>zem+C7
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..

>>kn0thi+32
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.

>>pyre+22
It's easy to find out by searching hn.

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

>>olivie+X3
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

>>tptace+g1
Could be a revenue source, like a daily auction for a non-YC job post slot. YC companies would still get it for free.

>>olivie+X3
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?

>>ramble+y
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.