"Finished" is the right word. Apart from small UI tweaks it's still the same site as in 2007...<p>And that's part of what makes HN great! I can't help but think that a team of Very Serious Expensive UX Professionals would have made a mess of HN thrice over by this time. (Can't you just imagine the 2010 rewrite in Java and GWT, and the 2014 redesign as an Angular SPA with sophisticated giant web fonts all over the place?)
HN is a perfect example of an classic, evergreen product. Or call it a crocodile product, as crocodiles are somewhat location-loyal.<p>Are there more examples of products that did (on purpose) not change significantly?<p>If you consider the sentiment on the recent GMail redesign, Facebook, .. it often appears that product managers are the only ones that want to change the product and its appeal. I think Reddit also had the crocodile concept for long time. Google‘s main search page changed minor since the past 10 years. I guess there are more examples (Quora, Craigslist, Wikipedia..?)<p>@pavlov your examples capture the could-be quite well.
As someone who started using internet in 1997. (I still consider myself green) - this is a perfect website.<p>Could it use improvement? Yes.
Does it need it? No.<p>Simple, fast, does one thing and does it great, has no featuritis and overblown annoying "UX" that current web suffers from.
I love how HN is actually <i>done</i>. How often does one give oneself permission to call anything but the smallest project <i>done</i>? I know I rarely do. It seems very healthy, for both the community and for Paul Graham individually, that something like HN can be <i>done</i>.
1- Better comment markup support
2- More comments per page
3- Start page auto collapsed so only to level shows
4- verbatim sucks especially on mobile and too difficult to actual use for code
5- This was a list with numbers and is now trashed
6- make hiding work across devices
Wow, I wish I found HN when it launched. I can't begin to describe how much it has shaped my life, my outlook and my career in the few years I've been (mostly) lurking here.<p>Thank you Paul and everyone else involved.<p>Thank you fellow HNers <3
One bug, which I think can be fixed in css, is losing scroll position on device rotation (iPhone). I think iOS should fix it for sites, but until then.<p>One feature that would be nice is seeing new comments in popular posts without having to look for them. (Not threads, just unrelated new ones)
And I'm still the only one in the last two jobs I've had that even knew of this sites existence, which he aptly points out in his tweet about the value of Reddit vs "Startup News".
>> (I delayed launching it till Feb 07, IIRC because the Reddits worried it would mess up their acquisition by Conde Nast.)<p>Did they think it was a competitor or something?
I wish the login page, which contains two <form> tags, didn't have identical fieldnames in the two forms, "acct" and "pw" - it confuses 1Password, which always wants to fill in and submit the "Create Account" form when I'm trying go log in, which naturally then gives me an error "That username is taken. Please choose another."
This actually seems to be a duplicate, though it got a lot more traction than the previous post I know of:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18178889" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18178889</a>
Aside undeadly.org the only other website on the internet in 2018 that doesn't leave any cookies in my browser. I am still amazed by that fact and applaud it.
And six months after it was released I joined, coming in from a google search "startup advice", I think.<p>Twelve years. Wow.<p>Dang some of these other guys are old.