Maybe it's just me, but the layout is much worse for a link site. This is not a site with a bunch of articles, it's just a list of links. A simple list is easy to scan and it's easy to spot things you may be interested in. The left right laying out does not improve things in any way, in my opinion.
I don't experience slow-downs as frequently with HN as I used to, so I can't quite agree with it being faster. Also while it is definitely quick (as it's static HTML) it could also get out-of-date, HNs low score threshold for front-page items means that the front page is updated more often than other sites, e.g. reddit.
However it is a different way to look at things and I'm very interested in learning about Typogridphy (http://csswizardry.com/typogridphy/).
Pretty cool. I'll try reading that for a couple of days to see how the experience compares to reading HN. Giles, can you add the link for the HN comments as well?
Yes, it's just what I thought using the web. I like the idea and that I can start reading the articles without clicking but having to go back here to see the comments (which are almost as important, or even more, as the link) make the site much less usable.
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.
This thread is a great case-in-point for me. I read comments to here (this is the top thread at this moment), and now am moving on. I won't bother to read the OP at all.
It's just like utilize. Crotchety old folks will bitch and moan that it is not a real word and unnecessary in any event, but the world will ignore them and use the words it wants to use. English is a living language, and sometimes that means it suffers from unsightly warts.
There's a distinction between completely useless, bogus words which duplicate the functionality of existing ones and new words which convey some new meaning (e.g. bromance).
It's surprising that in the world of programming, in which precision is essential, there are so many advocates for cruftiness in English.
It's surprising 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.
It's surprising that in the world of programming, in which precision is essential, there are so many advocates for cruftiness in English.
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"?
I would say that "performant" is a narrower term than "efficient", so no, the two don't coincide.
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.
It's an aesthetic argument. If you make your constraint tight enough, you're forced into concocting a new word to fix some imagined failing of the existing language. We don't need an adjective that signifies performance and we also don't need an adjective that signifies performance that starts with "perform".
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
We could call this doubleplusgood language newspeak.
The meaning is obvious to me, although I've never seen it before. What would be a good real word to use instead? ("Efficient", "effective", "harmonious" all seem a bit off. "High performance" almost makes sense, but it's not comparable, you can't say "more high performance".)
Agreed. It seems as if the page has simply been re-engineered to put stories in an arbitrary number of columns. Readability is all but slain. My eye jumps all over the page before focusing on a single story. The only thing I really like from it is the display of the descriptions on the front page. A one-liner summary or something of the sort would really help (although I suppose my RSS feed already does that).
Not totally relevant, but there is an OS X app that creates a similar newspaper format (but addresses most of these concerns) for reading RSS feeds. Got it as part of the MacHeist Bundle and have been addicted ever since. I personally like it much more than a standard RSS reader -> http://www.acrylicapps.com/times/
I also got Times as part of the MH bundle but I've had no luck with getting it to actually display any feeds. I've tried adding each one individually and importing a OPML file from Google Reader. What could I be missing?
_Comments, to me, are more than 50% of the value of HN._
give me a break, dude. the vast majority of discussion here concerns the etymology of "performant." there's no value in that, or at least very little for me, as I learned Latin and Greek in high school and this unfortunately gives me a permanent lifelong head start on damn near everyone, when it comes to etymological discussions.
I'll tell you how detrimental comments are for me. I started writing a point-by-point rebuttal for you before I came to my senses and realized that I don't have time for that shit, and anyone who disagrees with me about typography is an idiot anyway. study Jacob Nielsen, for fuck's sake. you can prove this stuff like math. your opinion doesn't mean a damn thing when it's up against science, so fuck off and die.
_No way. Suddenly I have to scroll through screens of large-font nonsense instead of just getting it all within about 1.5 screens._
I guess your machine must make scrolling harder than mine does or something.
_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._
by all means work with what works for you. but this is just completely different from how I use Hacker News. there's a lot of shit on here which doesn't mean a damn thing to me and never will. there are a few interesting things which I'll read, and then want to re-read, or quote, or link to, or compare against something else. for my use case, turning visited links near-invisible is a very irritating obstacle to usefulness.
_It's hard to skim._
I guess skimming is the incredible talent I have and I never realized how amazingly good I was at it. OR I guess you haven't figured out how to hit the space bar.
_I beg to disagree - see below._
Keep begging. You're a fucking moron in my opinion and the whole reason I built this thing was so I wouldn't run into idiots like you ever again. Obviously it's not solving 100% of that problem, but it's certainly about to make my life much, much better.
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.
"You don't want to blow up some stories bigger than others unless they really are bigger stories, and who is making that call?" - Points are a pretty good indicator of how big a story is. And since stories with the most points aren't necessarily at the top (due to the algorithm) it's a good way of indicating which stories are "big".
this isn't AI-mediated, homie. that's my May miniapp, maybe. I've already got proofs of concept that solve the low-hanging fruit in your objections with enormous success for very little effort.
however, there is no way in hell I will ever add links to HN discussions. I'm only here because somebody commented on my blog with the link. I HATE THE COMMENTS ON HN. I have stuff to do with my day. I deleted the blog comment and I think the absence of the discussion links is a MAJOR feature. for every mechanical fish there's a billion whiny little nimrods blaming Paul Graham for the fact that they can't get a job. I don't see how filtering your way through that kind of sludge could ever be a win.
although, I do have a (very simple) AI system for distinguishing intelligent and unintelligent comments. it would be trivial to filter all HN discussions through that on Hacker Newspaper. but it would also consume a lot of resources, computationally speaking, and it's the opposite of the 80/20 rule: huge effort for minimal gains. there's no baby in that bathwater. at the most there's some jizz. I don't need to save the jizz.
Maybe it's just me, but i see a little inspiration from http://www.acrylicapps.com/times/ , one of the Apps in the last MacHeist, that is also a feed reader.
I added HN to my Times app. But i still prefer viewing it in Firefox.
Wow, if the screen shots are any indication, that looks like a much more polished implementation of this idea. I think if someone ripped off the interface ideas and implemented as a web app, they would get a lot of users quickly. (I don't know if a free web app is a better business model than $30 for a Mac application, however.)
I wonder if you could include comments and make the headline fonts smaller? Newspapers are meant to be readable to everyone; but the mean hacker age will be much lesser (there was a poll on this elsewhere on HN)
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.
This execution isn't addressing the readers needs, but it would be interesting to see several different attempts at a redesign. It would be a fun challenge for interaction designers.
this is really interesting -- the process of automating a newspaper is quite a task. did you use any shortest path algorithms to make the articles fill up the whole line?
So I had thought about using my modified RSS feed for HN (available at: http://hacketal.com/#hnrss ) for this purpose but decided against it because I have very different use cases for RSS versus the HN homepage. The homepage, for me, is great for going back to stories and seeing which ones have jumped up because of a great conversation while Google Reader is where I can quickly jump through all of the stories and quickly read the first paragraph of every story.
Giles -- thanks for linking to me in your blog post about this new visual.
Brilliant! Much better use of space. I can sort out the heap of information easily.
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.
People are going to be nitpicking this to death, but I'm happy that people are willing to put it on the line and actually experiment with things like interface and interaction.
No, my comments are being deleted because I don't have any respect for this community. That's different from being an asshole. If you're nice to somebody but you don't show them respect, then you don't respect them but you're still not an asshole. I think I've given everyone here a nice little present. You might not want it, but you don't have to use it if you don't want to. You perceive me as an asshole because you believe your community is entitled to more respect than I believe it has earned. I don't think that has anything to do with me being an asshole, although if you had said "rude," I would have had to concede that point right away.
If HN's community had saved my life, or you had made incredible sacrifices for my benefit, or something like that, then my not showing the discussion much respect would have been an asshole move. But I like this site, sort of, and I'm doing something to make it better. In my own way I'm doing something to increase the signal-to-noise ratio of discussions here, by making it harder for me to get in them.
you know what, actually, I wrote a big comment justifying the same point of view (currently right below this very comment) but the irony is that as far as I can tell none of my comments were deleted at all.
Weird thing about this project, it is an epic feature-request magnet. Number one most requested feature: links to the discussions/comments. Absolutely not going to happen. I might put it up on GitHub, where you can fork it and do whatever the fork you want with it, but I firmly believe the lack of comments and discussion is a FEATURE.
Hacker News aims to have more civilized discussion than most sites of this nature, and that goal is very well-intentioned. Good intentions pave the road to hell. Hacker News does NOT in my opinion have a better signal-to-noise ratio than other sites of its type. The fundamental mechanism kills diversity of opinion and encourages mean-spirited nit-picking the same way it does on any other site of this type.
Consider: this community organizes around entrepreneurialism and hacking. I set up a project which challenges the status quo in this community. I did some bold, innovative, controversial, and aggressive hacking. This project reflects entrepreneurial values.
A guy who posted a list of bitchy quibbles is at the top of the comments here, with 83 points at the current time. He defends the status quo, he did no hacking, his comments are provably false and UX research probably already exists refuting them. And people upvoted his comments over mine, by a factor of 83 to 1.
It is impossible to build a community which upholds entrepreneurial values using the mechanism that drives Hacker News. I've ranted about this before, so it's not worth going into detail about. If you missed the rants, here's some links:
My goal isn't to rehash my point. My goal is simply to make is absolutely clear that I WILL NOT enable comment links on Hacker Newspaper. However, I do intend to put it on GitHub, and please by all means nag me about it on Twitter (@gilesgoatboy) if I forget. I will be thrilled to hear if it somebody's doing something cool with my code.
73 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 161 ms ] threadHowever it is a different way to look at things and I'm very interested in learning about Typogridphy (http://csswizardry.com/typogridphy/).
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.
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 ...
_Comments, to me, are more than 50% of the value of HN._
give me a break, dude. the vast majority of discussion here concerns the etymology of "performant." there's no value in that, or at least very little for me, as I learned Latin and Greek in high school and this unfortunately gives me a permanent lifelong head start on damn near everyone, when it comes to etymological discussions.
I'll tell you how detrimental comments are for me. I started writing a point-by-point rebuttal for you before I came to my senses and realized that I don't have time for that shit, and anyone who disagrees with me about typography is an idiot anyway. study Jacob Nielsen, for fuck's sake. you can prove this stuff like math. your opinion doesn't mean a damn thing when it's up against science, so fuck off and die.
_No way. Suddenly I have to scroll through screens of large-font nonsense instead of just getting it all within about 1.5 screens._
I guess your machine must make scrolling harder than mine does or something.
_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._
by all means work with what works for you. but this is just completely different from how I use Hacker News. there's a lot of shit on here which doesn't mean a damn thing to me and never will. there are a few interesting things which I'll read, and then want to re-read, or quote, or link to, or compare against something else. for my use case, turning visited links near-invisible is a very irritating obstacle to usefulness.
_It's hard to skim._
I guess skimming is the incredible talent I have and I never realized how amazingly good I was at it. OR I guess you haven't figured out how to hit the space bar.
_I beg to disagree - see below._
Keep begging. You're a fucking moron in my opinion and the whole reason I built this thing was so I wouldn't run into idiots like you ever again. Obviously it's not solving 100% of that problem, but it's certainly about to make my life much, much better.
bye!
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" ?
however, there is no way in hell I will ever add links to HN discussions. I'm only here because somebody commented on my blog with the link. I HATE THE COMMENTS ON HN. I have stuff to do with my day. I deleted the blog comment and I think the absence of the discussion links is a MAJOR feature. for every mechanical fish there's a billion whiny little nimrods blaming Paul Graham for the fact that they can't get a job. I don't see how filtering your way through that kind of sludge could ever be a win.
although, I do have a (very simple) AI system for distinguishing intelligent and unintelligent comments. it would be trivial to filter all HN discussions through that on Hacker Newspaper. but it would also consume a lot of resources, computationally speaking, and it's the opposite of the 80/20 rule: huge effort for minimal gains. there's no baby in that bathwater. at the most there's some jizz. I don't need to save the jizz.
I added HN to my Times app. But i still prefer viewing it in Firefox.
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 think that is a more featured platform than arcforums.
Giles -- thanks for linking to me in your blog post about this new visual.
I would like to offer up a raw php "feed" of hacker news and let anyone redesign it with their own css & domain.
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.
If HN's community had saved my life, or you had made incredible sacrifices for my benefit, or something like that, then my not showing the discussion much respect would have been an asshole move. But I like this site, sort of, and I'm doing something to make it better. In my own way I'm doing something to increase the signal-to-noise ratio of discussions here, by making it harder for me to get in them.
Hacker News aims to have more civilized discussion than most sites of this nature, and that goal is very well-intentioned. Good intentions pave the road to hell. Hacker News does NOT in my opinion have a better signal-to-noise ratio than other sites of its type. The fundamental mechanism kills diversity of opinion and encourages mean-spirited nit-picking the same way it does on any other site of this type.
Consider: this community organizes around entrepreneurialism and hacking. I set up a project which challenges the status quo in this community. I did some bold, innovative, controversial, and aggressive hacking. This project reflects entrepreneurial values.
A guy who posted a list of bitchy quibbles is at the top of the comments here, with 83 points at the current time. He defends the status quo, he did no hacking, his comments are provably false and UX research probably already exists refuting them. And people upvoted his comments over mine, by a factor of 83 to 1.
It is impossible to build a community which upholds entrepreneurial values using the mechanism that drives Hacker News. I've ranted about this before, so it's not worth going into detail about. If you missed the rants, here's some links:
http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/summon-monsters-ope...
http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/04/we-didnt-start-flam...
My goal isn't to rehash my point. My goal is simply to make is absolutely clear that I WILL NOT enable comment links on Hacker Newspaper. However, I do intend to put it on GitHub, and please by all means nag me about it on Twitter (@gilesgoatboy) if I forget. I will be thrilled to hear if it somebody's doing something cool with my code.