

Turning Hacker News into Spam - raganwald
http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2010/02/turning-hacker-news-into-spam.html

======
petercooper
Big Giles fan - as he well knows - but the constant beating about how the
newspaper format is "better" than vanilla Hacker News grates on me. Better for
him (and a bunch of others, I'm sure) and his reading style but I far prefer
the vanilla HN site.

I don't want to use a client that's arbitrarily censored at the whim of
whoever built it - that's what the upvotes and flagging are for. Further, the
newspaper site doesn't seem to properly laid out horizontally (all the cells
seem to have differing, inconsistent widths) so it's even harder to scan than
HN's simple list (which isn't perfect, I know).

~~~
aaronblohowiak
You can tweak it here: <http://github.com/gilesbowkett/hacker_newspaper>

------
fjabre
It's a cool spin on the HN look and feel but the value HN brings to me is the
comments users post.

The whole point for me is seeing the conversation that takes place on HN after
an article is posted.

~~~
edd
I know what you mean, I will often check the comments here before following
the actual links. More often than not the comments provide more facts and
better commentary to the issues.

~~~
Psyonic
I've been doing that since my slashdot days. I completely agree that the
comments are generally quite a bit more interesting than the actual page being
linked to. Quite often I don't even bother following the link, because I know
what I'll find, but I still read the comments.

------
mattwdelong
A suggestion for Giles would be to link back to the HN conversation of each
link. I think its not the foreign content that people find useful on HN, its
the conversation around it. (fjabre also pointed this fact out.) Especially
considering that the majority of content on HN derives from a few websites -
something which I think should be a goal to change. Personally, I love the
fringe stuff and being introduced to new blogs that I don't normally come
across. Through these fringe postings, I have found some very interesting
people that I now follow. Alternative insights are awesome.

~~~
steveklabnik
I'm pretty sure that not participating in the conversation was one of the
goals for Giles. I think I remember him saying that it's a huge timesink.

~~~
Psyonic
If that works for him, more power to him, but I probably wouldn't even bother
visiting this site without the discussions.

~~~
steveklabnik
I find myself in various states of agreement and disagreement. Sometimes I
find the conversation really valuable, other times, I feel like I'm wasting my
time. I'm talking about comments in general, not HN specifically. I still feel
HN is generally worth it. We'll see.

~~~
Psyonic
In general I agree with you. Youtube comments, for instance, are almost always
completely retarded, and I'd be happy never to see one again.

------
runn1ng
"A story on Hacker News which comes from codinghorror.com or techcrunch.com
will never appear on Hacker Newspaper..." - this made me actually laugh out
loud.

------
aditya
You know Hacker Newspaper does look nice :-) <http://hacker-
newspaper.gilesb.com/>

~~~
netcan
I just poked around for a few minutes looking at the css grid he used for
making it. It's interesting stuff. I think that what the newspaper layout does
is make the newspaper readable while you walk by, over someone's shoulder,
from various distances, etc.

These are newspaper problems. They don't exist when you're reading a screen.
Novels or magazines aren't formatted this way. Why should sites be? It's not
about content. It's about how/when you read it.

That said, I have learned something about how to layout a page in a way that
looks like news. I suspect the main value of this is creating a mental
association with a newspaper.

~~~
raganwald
That and the filters. It's kind of interesting to think about those posts that
appear on HN but not on reddit.

~~~
netcan
Sure. The filtering may be added value though it feels like it goes against
the concept to me. The newspaper snapshot is almost a representation of the
zeitgeist. Using those associations and filtering at the same time seems
almost like propaganda.

I was talking about the layout mostly though.

------
datasink
Throwing another hat in the ring, I've been working on a lightweight
Hackernews reader. The major goal was to reduce tab overload for light
browsing: <http://hnaddict.com/>

It's a bit green but fairly usable.

~~~
mnemonicsloth
Give me the option to hide uninteresting stories (maybe ones I've already
clicked), and I'll use this.

Minor suggestion:

A better format for the line below a link title would be:

    
    
       9 Points  |  2 hours ago  |  5280 Comments.
    

b/c the comment link is the only one that's clickable, and the whole site is
dominated by passing your attention back and forth across the frame boundary.

EDIT: What about some kind of sparkline for points & comments?

~~~
datasink
Thanks for the suggestions. I popped in the change for that comment reformat.
I'm currently looking into adding filters and visited link hiding.

