

Hacker Newspaper: reformatted Hacker News - chrislo
http://hacker-newspaper.gilesb.com/
More information about this here:
http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/04/miniapp-hacker-newspaper.html
======
swombat
Er... from [http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/04/miniapp-hacker-
news...](http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/04/miniapp-hacker-
newspaper.html) (posted by chrislo)

 _Hacker Newspaper is a superior user interface for Hacker News._

I beg to disagree - see below.

 _It's more performant, more readable_

It's hard to skim.

 _it doesn't turn visited links damn near invisible for some insane reason_

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.

 _and it makes it much easier to skim the headlines_

No way. Suddenly I have to scroll through screens of large-font nonsense
instead of just getting it all within about 1.5 screens.

 _and avoid getting into useless, time-wasting blather_

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.

To me, this "reformatted layout" is very, very inferior.

~~~
davidmathers
_I often read the comments before the article, and sometimes don't bother
reading the article at all._

Same here. To me this is essential. The comments tell me quickly if the
article is going to be a waste of time.

~~~
Dilpil
I find that actually looking at the article provides a far better indicator of
quality, but to each his own.

~~~
Hexstream
In general, determining the quality of an article with any accuracy by looking
at it is well more time-intensive than just looking at the comments.

~~~
swombat
Yep. Especially when the content is the longer kind.

------
mechanical_fish
Random observations:

This needs to be cloned by someone who is willing to at least _link_ 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 _love_ of the medium and primarily read HN
for the comments.

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.

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:

 _HOWTO: Stop procrastination (Dan Ariely)_

 _We're sorry, but something went wrong. We've been notified about this issue
and we'll take a look at it shortly._

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:

 _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._

That's art, but it isn't exactly in the spirit of the actual Ruby Style Guide.

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.

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.

The reason why HN is a big flat pile of headlines is that such a display
_accurately reflects the output of its ranking algorithm_ : 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.

\---

[1] But maybe not for long. Add a human editor tweaking the headlines and the
teasers and I believe you might have something.

~~~
jimbokun
"[1] But maybe not for long. Add a human editor tweaking the headlines and the
teasers and I believe you might have something."

I believe it is called "The Drudge Report." :)

~~~
mechanical_fish
Touché.

Obligatory 37signals link: "Why the Drudge Report is one of the best designed
sites on the Web":

[http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1407-why-the-drudge-
repor...](http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1407-why-the-drudge-report-is-
one-of-the-best-designed-sites-on-the-web)

It's painful to contemplate. [1]

\---

[1] The truth embodied in the 37signals essay, that is. It goes without saying
that the Drudge Report is painful to contemplate.

------
markessien
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.

------
chrislo
Giles talks about his motivations and the technology behind this on his blog:
[http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/04/miniapp-hacker-
news...](http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/04/miniapp-hacker-
newspaper.html)

------
robin_reala
While it’s a neat experiment, you really should be using UTF-8 as your
character encoding to mirror Hacker News. I’m already seeing broken
characters.

------
juliend2
Maybe it's just me, but i see a little inspiration from
<http://www.acrylicapps.com/times/> , one of the Apps in the last MacHeist,
that is also a feed reader.

I added HN to my Times app. But i still prefer viewing it in Firefox.

~~~
jimbokun
Wow, if the screen shots are any indication, that looks like a much more
polished implementation of this idea. I think if someone ripped off the
interface ideas and implemented as a web app, they would get a lot of users
quickly. (I don't know if a free web app is a better business model than $30
for a Mac application, however.)

------
ralph
I think having ~/.mozilla/firefox/$foo.default/chrome/userContent.css
containing

    
    
        @-moz-document url-prefix(http://news.ycombinator.com/) {
            td { color: #000000 !important; }
            a { color: #000055 !important; }
        }
    

helps an awful lot with news.yc's appearance. The main improvement being the
banishing of that awful low-contrast gray on gray text.

------
nirmal
So I had thought about using my modified RSS feed for HN (available at:
<http://hacketal.com/#hnrss> ) 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.

Giles -- thanks for linking to me in your blog post about this new visual.

------
RossM
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.

However it is a different way to look at things and I'm very interested in
learning about Typogridphy (<http://csswizardry.com/typogridphy/>).

------
jfarmer
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 _experiment_ with things like
interface and interaction.

------
tipjoy
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.

------
ynd
Brilliant! Much better use of space. I can sort out the heap of information
easily.

If I can get voting on there, I'll use this instead of vanilla HN.

Good innovation. He went further than simply displaying a pretty bullet list,
like others do(digg, etc.).

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.

It would be cool if the headlines would keep their current style and become
links.

------
zhyder
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?

~~~
baddox
I second that. You could keep the link subtle, for example use the title as
the hyperlink to the comment page, but don't underline it on mouseover.

------
kulkarnic
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)

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.

------
blasdel
Giles has been in this thread, but his comments are being deleted because he's
an asshole.

~~~
yters
Despite his rudeness, he's also making good points. His comments shouldn't be
killed.

------
pclark
different font sizes (let alone serif fonts) are not more readable on
computers

theres no alignment, it dynamically resizes - your eyes dont know where to
snap to.

grey on white text, ugh why?

they aren't quite columns and they aren't quite not columns.

------
racerrick
Interesting study. I think that design is hard to read.

I would like to offer up a raw php "feed" of hacker news and let anyone
redesign it with their own css & domain.

------
thorax
Heh, I just want a view of Hacker News front page that sorts the list of links
by the topics that have the highest-rated comment in them.

------
pibefision
Any insight about Why hacker news is not running on Reddit Open Source?

I think that is a more featured platform than arcforums.

~~~
pmarin
The reason is simple: PG needs a middle size proyect to test his Programming
Language (arc) and HN is the result.

------
omarish
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?

------
Rob15283
Yuch. Go back to the drawing board.

------
kineticac
that's kind of fun to look at =)

------
jacktang
I like it!

