A lot of these redesigns share the common look of spacing everything out, which looks good. But I've gotten used to the compact layout of HN that lets me browse through stories really quickly.
I think the large, bold story numbers draw too much attention that would otherwise be focused on the headlines. What a story is about is more important, and contains more information, than its ranking on the front page.<p>Hacker News may not be all that pretty, but it's designed to bring out the important parts and communicate them quickly. Less relevant, less commonly accessed bits or information like numbers and usernames are available but don't stand out.
What is the reasoning behind making the story number so big?<p>We now that it is an ordered list so we don't really care much about the story number.<p>The most important thing on the page should be Story title > Story source / Submitter / Comments<p>I like the idea of having the top 20 of both websites side by side though.
I like the concept, but the site optimizes "beautiful" over functional. It is very hard to scan titles versus the standard news.ycombinator.com<p>1. make the text bigger and bolder<p>2. cut out colors<p>3. less padding on everything<p>4. the "numbering of the post" matters very little to me. it doesn't need to be so prominent
As a designer, I don't get a lot of value for DN that HN doesn't already provide. With the membership being closed down its too cliquey - -<p>It feels like these design sites are offering design for design sake instead of designing something usable on a daily basis. This is one area where HN has done quite well in my books. Once our arrows are unicode we're set. :)
Why are you using quickfit if you're not changing font sizes? use jquery-ellipsis-interactive if you just want reversible truncation.<p>You could also consider having some way to load more stories, there's more to hackerne.ws than just the first twenty.