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Looks great! Good work.
Very nice! It has a modern feel and stands out from the average.
I love the new look! A much better, refreshed design that was needed.
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.
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.

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.
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.
Are all YC founders' usernames orange?

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

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.)

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

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

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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 completely 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.

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).
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.
Super clean, Super cool, super intuitive.

Thanks!

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

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...
How about a mobile friendly version of HN? :)
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.
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.
connection is timing out for me.
Looks great, well done to your team!
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?
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 :)

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That big "Apply" button screams Wufoo. :-)
> 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.
The choice of a geometric Futura-like font as primary face for body text always surprises me. Seems like it's just me, though.
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