Er... from <a href="http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/04/miniapp-hacker-newspaper.html" rel="nofollow">http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/04/miniapp-hacker-news...</a> (posted by chrislo)<p><i>Hacker Newspaper is a superior user interface for Hacker News.</i><p>I beg to disagree - see below.<p><i>It's more performant, more readable</i><p>It's hard to skim.<p><i>it doesn't turn visited links damn near invisible for some insane reason</i><p>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.<p><i>and it makes it much easier to skim the headlines</i><p>No way. Suddenly I have to scroll through screens of large-font nonsense instead of just getting it all within about 1.5 screens.<p><i>and avoid getting into useless, time-wasting blather</i><p>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.<p>To me, this "reformatted layout" is very, very inferior.
Random observations:<p>This needs to be cloned by someone who is willing to at least <i>link</i> 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 <i>love</i> of the medium and primarily read HN for the comments.<p>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.<p>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:<p><i>HOWTO: Stop procrastination (Dan Ariely)</i><p><i>We're sorry, but something went wrong. We've been notified about this issue and we'll take a look at it shortly.</i><p>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:<p><i>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.</i><p>That's art, but it isn't exactly in the spirit of the actual Ruby Style Guide.<p>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.<p>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.<p>The reason why HN is a big flat pile of headlines is that such a display <i>accurately reflects the output of its ranking algorithm</i>: 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.<p>---<p>[1] But maybe not for long. Add a human editor tweaking the headlines and the teasers and I believe you might have something.
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.
Giles talks about his motivations and the technology behind this on his blog:
<a href="http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/04/miniapp-hacker-newspaper.html" rel="nofollow">http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/04/miniapp-hacker-news...</a>
Maybe it's just me, but i see a little inspiration from <a href="http://www.acrylicapps.com/times/" rel="nofollow">http://www.acrylicapps.com/times/</a> , one of the Apps in the last MacHeist, that is also a feed reader.<p>I added HN to my Times app. But i still prefer viewing it in Firefox.
I think having ~/.mozilla/firefox/$foo.default/chrome/userContent.css containing<p><pre><code> @-moz-document url-prefix(http://news.ycombinator.com/) {
td { color: #000000 !important; }
a { color: #000055 !important; }
}
</code></pre>
helps an awful lot with news.yc's appearance. The main improvement being the banishing of that awful low-contrast gray on gray text.
So I had thought about using my modified RSS feed for HN (available at: <a href="http://hacketal.com/#hnrss" rel="nofollow">http://hacketal.com/#hnrss</a> ) 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.<p>Giles -- thanks for linking to me in your blog post about this new visual.
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.<p>However it is a different way to look at things and I'm very interested in learning about Typogridphy (<a href="http://csswizardry.com/typogridphy/" rel="nofollow">http://csswizardry.com/typogridphy/</a>).
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 <i>experiment</i> with things like interface and interaction.
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.
Brilliant! Much better use of space. I can sort out the heap of information easily.<p>If I can get voting on there, I'll use this instead of vanilla HN.<p>Good innovation. He went further than simply displaying a pretty bullet list, like others do(digg, etc.).<p>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.<p>It would be cool if the headlines would keep their current style and become links.
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?
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)<p>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.
different font sizes (let alone serif fonts) are not more readable on computers<p>theres no alignment, it dynamically resizes - your eyes dont know where to snap to.<p>grey on white text, ugh why?<p>they aren't quite columns and they aren't quite not columns.
Interesting study. I think that design is hard to read.<p>I would like to offer up a raw php "feed" of hacker news and let anyone redesign it with their own css & domain.
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?