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“12 years ago today, I finished writing Hacker News”
- john37386 8y agoReally nice place here. I read it daily and constantly learn new technos and trends. Thanks Paul
- pavlov 8y ago"Finished" is the right word. Apart from small UI tweaks it's still the same site as in 2007... 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?)
- LiterallyDoge 8y agoThese are all marketing gimmicks demanded by PO's. UX people do the opposite.
- alzoid 8y agoI agree. The only changes I would make to the UX is a larger font by default and make the visited links a different colour. I find it hard to easily see what I visited when looking at the list.
- LandR 8y agoI have to browse HN at 150% magnification but it zooms really well, since it's basically just text. The dark theme makes clicked on links pretty obvious, grey vs white.
- anothergoogler 8y agoHere's a vote for a smaller font, I browse at 90%. Font size on mobile is good though.
- elorant 8y agoWell just look at the recent Reddit redesign. It made the site much slower without adding any apparent improvement to usability.
- prokaktus 8y agoThey have also added a lot pop-ups, incredible amount of JS, suggestions to login (I use it mostly in incognito) and install their mobile app (if you use it on mobile). Such a mess.
- bhandziuk 8y agoI don't know how you can use reddit while not logged in. The all the default subreddits, I find, are garbage. It's just page after page of memes.
- cabalamat 8y agoWhen they did the redesign, the first thing I did was Google on how to get the old interface back. That, and some custom CSS, means I get to see Reddit how I like it.
- Cthulhu_ 8y agoThey really dropped the ball, going for a single page application approach without emphasizing performance. I mean I believe SPA's can be more performant and snappy than non-SPA's, but you have to have server-side rendering for the initial page load and minimize the amount of JS used. And then make sure rendering is fast; iirc they had inline styling everywhere a while ago (styled components?), and now nonsensical css classes (which, if they're unique, is probably good for css performance but probably still suboptimal).
- laichzeit0 8y agoLike when they re-did the Slashdot interface. I remember it was crap and I stopped using it then. That's probably 10 years ago now.
- tonyarkles 8y agoThe giant ad at the top definitely doesn’t help things, especially since it seems to randomly expand and contract as you go about your business...
- Bartweiss 8y agoThe whole pattern of ads that 'scale down' as you scroll is horrid. It's a jarring event, usually doesn't happen smoothly as intended, and it almost always heralds an object that's going to follow you down the page. Nothing except maybe tactful menu bars should follow a user scrolling down a page of static text.
- baud147258 8y agoMore recently there's the imgur redesign. But it's still usable at least.
- dd36 8y agoThe Reddit redesign has been a turn off.
- Bartweiss 8y agoIt doesn't help that it was rolled out as the default well before simple existing features like "rankings other than 'hot' on user pages" were implemented. But destroying old CSS and then not displaying sidebar text in the new default view is what's going to have serious consequences. For all the talk about customization and moderator tools, they've made it so that new users won't see sidebars of rules, useful links, or related subs. Talk about undermining engagement and useful contributions...
- asaph 8y agoI for one would like to see some improvements. Here is my wishlist: 1. Markdown support 2. More profile capabilities. e.g. avatars, vanity URLs, link to your GitHub, Twitter, Stack Overflow, blog, etc. 3. Automatically create cache link for articles in case their hosts go down after being linked from HN. 4. Revision history for comments.
- anjc 8y agoAvatars! Just use Reddit..?
- leemailll 8y agoI never get the idea for avatars. And in fact I more than often use Adblock to block any of those on the websites I visit frequently. Can any one shed the light on why they like it?
- asaph 8y agoIt's a way to personalize your account and a way for people to easily recognize an online identity across comments, articles and communities. It helps you discover that @asaph on HN is the same person as @asaph on GitHub, Twitter, Stack Overflow, etc.
- huntie 8y agoWhy does it matter if they're the same? Identity is vastly overrated in my opinion.
- thrower123 8y agoOne of the features of HN is that identity is downplayed. Personally, I think that this encourages engaging with the arguments that someone makes, rather than who they are. It's also a throwback to the old internet where pseudonymity was normal. It's refreshing to see usernames like AdmiralAsshat and TooMuchToDo.
- java-man 8y ago
- brightball 8y agoIt really is so much better without all of the "modern" cruft.
- scarface74 8y agoI didn’t join until 2015, but I often go to http://tenyearsago.io/ http://tenyearsago.io/ [1] and I’m amazed about how little HN has changed in ten years. [1] I have nothing to do with that site. I found out about it via a “Show HN” a few years ago.
- tannhaeuser 8y agoNot only hasn't the GUI changed, the reposts and comments are the same, too (sorry couldn't resist).
- babuskov 8y agoThe only thing I miss are comment reply notifications. Someone might reply to something I wrote in comments a week ago and I have to visit my comment history periodically to check that. It doesn't have to be an active notification. Just add a numeric field added to user account that means "you got N new replies" and show it in the top-right corner next to my username. Once I see it, I will go and browse through comments to find it. When you open your comments page, it would reset this number to zero.
- shittyadmin 8y agoI honestly don't mind the lack of comment reply notifications because I find that it makes conversations less aggressive than on sites like reddit which do that. Less of a feeling of a mandated reply, more opportunities for other users to speak up on your behalf.
- BOBOTWINSTON 8y agoIf someone engages with me near the post time on Reddit, then I have no issues ignoring them or responding respectfully. If someone counterpoints something I wrote 30+ days ago... nobody else is reading so it is now a cage match.
- vinceguidry 8y agoI like Quora for this. The threat of a BNBR ding is eternal and the panopticon unwavering. As a result every interaction becomes an opportunity for reflection.
- hyperpape 8y agoWhat is a BNBR ding? DuckDuckGo didn't turn anything up for me.
- petecooper 8y ago>BNBR Be Nice, Be Respectful https://www.quora.com/What-is-Quoras-Be-Nice-Be-Respectful-policy https://www.quora.com/What-is-Quoras-Be-Nice-Be-Respectful-p...
- wenc 8y agoDoes HN still run on a single server? [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229522 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229522
- dang 8y agoYes.
- 0xmohit 8y agoToo bad that you guys don't write software that makes current hardware appear inadequate :)
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- mnw21cam 8y agoI'm not sure that describing Cloudflare's massive worldwide network as a single server is completely accurate.
- dang 8y agoWe stopped using Cloudflare a while ago.
- ValentineC 8y agoCurious: why?
- cowmix 8y agoAs my kids grow up, go to college and move away... at least I can count on the HN gui to be the same until I die.
- nothis 8y agoWhen you'd load the page, you'd see blank, gray bars where the text should go while a "now loading" icon spins for a good 5 seconds, slowly feeding in the text. On mobile, text would be so big it only fits 7 lines on screen, 5 words on each. The menu bar at the top would stay up there as you scroll and eat a good 20% of vertical space at all times. Articles would load in thumbnail images that sometimes break and push the text outside the window and you couldn't scroll to read it because that's disabled for some CSS hack.
- christophilus 8y agoThe bottom half of the page would be covered by a popover that says, “Please download the mobile app. Pretty please?” And it would pop on your screen every time you view a new page.
- Bartweiss 8y agoIt would scale to your screen, and tapping anywhere on the message body would take you to an app store. The 'close' button would be a fixed 10px square, grey on a black background. It would take at least 2 seconds to load in, and would jump around several times during that process with the button already active.
- bhandziuk 8y agoAnd once you manage to close out of that/click on it and back out of the app store there will be a small ovular request to open in the mobile app with an even tinier Close button.
- nkrisc 8y agoHey now, as a Don't-Take-Myself-Too Serious Moderately-Well-Paid UX Professional much of my job is trying to get sites to something as simple as this one. I would do something about some of the text contrast here though. Maybe an additional form of feedback when editing a comment as well.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- thinkingemote 8y agoI'd only improve how it works on mobile devices, specifically making the collapse buttons [-] wider and some links larger. Just to make it easier to use for fatter fingers. I wrote a firefox extension to do this for me, bit buggy but it helps a lot.
- strikelaserclaw 8y agoit does what its meant to do and nothing more. I would never frequent it as much if it got ux and ui updates a la new reddit and new gmail.
- flycaliguy 8y agoI can't help but think a solid UX pro would know that the site's audience is a bunch of coders who dream in .txt files and would have acted accordingly. Wasn't this site designed to attract the hoodie and conference Tee crowd to YC projects in the first place? (PS: this post is loving and in jest)
- zerr 8y agoAgree. Techwise, interesting - what were some challenges that were solved? From the outside it seems like a webapp you could find in some PHP beginner's tutorial.
- bromuro 8y agoActually, I wouldn’t read HN if it wasn’t for the “professional UI designers” who built apps on the top of HN :)
- peregrine 8y agoAnd he made his last comment 3 years ago.
- k__ 8y agoI still remember reading his posts here, didn't expect them to be so long in the past.
- supahfly_remix 8y agoDo you think he might post under another account?
- jonny_eh 8y agoI doubt it, since he's still active on Twitter.
- jermaink 8y agoHN is a perfect example of an classic, evergreen product. Or call it a crocodile product, as crocodiles are somewhat location-loyal. Are there more examples of products that did (on purpose) not change significantly? 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..?) @pavlov your examples capture the could-be quite well.
- Scarblac 8y agoIn the Netherlands an early very (1998) popular web page is http://www.startpagina.nl http://www.startpagina.nl , and it's still popular with non-tech savvy people. http://www.nu.nl http://www.nu.nl (1999) is the country's most popular news page, http://www.marktplaats.nl http://www.marktplaats.nl (1999) the most popular Craig's list / Ebay equivalent. They have all tweaked their UI over two decades if you look closely but make sure they look more or less the same as ever. Actually Teletext ( https://nos.nl/teletekst https://nos.nl/teletekst ) is still used by many and it looks exactly like it does on TV.
- GijsjanB 8y agoTeletekst is an outlier, because it did not start as a web page, but the design has been consistent over the years and I still use the site and the app for news, TV guide and weather forecast daily!
- aequitas 8y agohttps://www.gratiz.nl/ https://www.gratiz.nl/ (1996) also never changed its winning recipe.
- jacquesm 8y agoMP got reworked extensively, they did keep their colorscheme.
- japhyr 8y ago
- mywittyname 8y agoDoes HN make money?
- neolefty 8y agoDoes it perform an important function for YC?
- Cthulhu_ 8y agoIt's funded by a VC who has made billions off of being an early investor in e.g. dropbox, reddit, heroku, stripe, airbnb, firebase, gitlab, etc - they make a shitton, maybe not directly from HN but definitely indirectly.
- ricree 8y agoIf nothing else, it probably is/was a fairly good marketing tool for YC.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- babuskov 8y agoWell, it probably does indirectly.
- scarface74 8y agoHN is marketing for YC startups and also a hiring platform for YC.
- hiccuphippo 8y agoCan I turn around this question and ask how much does it cost to run HN?
- giancarlostoro 8y agoThis I definitely want to know. I figure PG has no problem funding HN but how much does it cost to run HN? It wouldn't surprise me if it's bills are footed by someone else though, like reddit or somebody whose grateful to ycombinator.
- jnordwick 8y ago1- 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
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- nathell 8y agoPrevious submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18178889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18178889
- furicane 8y agoAs someone who started using internet in 1997. (I still consider myself green) - this is a perfect website. Could it use improvement? Yes. Does it need it? No. Simple, fast, does one thing and does it great, has no featuritis and overblown annoying "UX" that current web suffers from.
- Loughla 8y agoGod, exactly. I don't come to news aggregators to see user profiles. I don't come for chat. I don't come for suggested articles. I don't come for any of the 'new' features people seem to want to cram into every god damned thing (Reddit, I'm looking at you). I come because there will be insight into articles/stories that I won't get from any other site. And all you need for that is a simple threaded discussion.
- DanielBMarkham 8y agoAnd six months after it was released I joined, coming in from a google search "startup advice", I think. Twelve years. Wow. Dang some of these other guys are old.
- bluedino 8y ago>> (I delayed launching it till Feb 07, IIRC because the Reddits worried it would mess up their acquisition by Conde Nast.) Did they think it was a competitor or something?
- jeremy7600 8y agoAnd 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".
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- extremum134 8y agoAnyway, it feels somewhat more scholarly than reddit.
- sbr464 8y agoOne 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. 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)
- quxbar 8y agoAnyone else using http://hckrnews.com/ http://hckrnews.com/ ?
- joaomacp 8y agoThat is the main way I interact with hackernews. Before using it, I was checking the website more frequently, fearing I might lose some popular post. Much like other social apps make you do - facebook, twitter, reddit... But with the 'top 20' and 'top 10', I know I can be 2 days without checking it, and I will still see the most popular posts. I don't like when apps incentivize/reward time on the app. It's the same reason why I've never played MMOs.
- tomerbd 8y agoand it's a beauty! no more features needed! not even markdown! it's finished!
- adioe3_14 8y agoAside 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.
- growtofill 8y agoI see five in mine.
- rhacker 8y agoI test my internet connection with HN. It is more reliable than Google these days.
- gomox 8y agoCan we please have blockquote syntax now?
- dandr01d 8y ago+1
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- kaizendad 8y agoI love how HN is actually done. How often does one give oneself permission to call anything but the smallest project done? I know I rarely do. It seems very healthy, for both the community and for Paul Graham individually, that something like HN can be done.
- andromaton 8y agoTranslation: I'm proud of what i created. It's holding up well.
- romwell 8y agoPotato, potato.
- DoreenMichele 8y agoThis actually seems to be a duplicate, though it got a lot more traction than the previous post I know of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18178889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18178889
- chmaynard 8y agoHacker News can achieve perfection only after they figure out how to automate the merger of duplicate posts and their comments. This might be a problem for machine learning.
- DoreenMichele 8y agoI happen to like its messy imperfection. Wo unto us should they ever achieve perfection and stop having tolerance for imperfect people and their endless typos, auto-corrupt BS, misreadings of what the other commenter meant and myriad other human shortcomings.
- fha 8y agoWow, 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. Thank you Paul and everyone else involved. Thank you fellow HNers <3
- barryp 8y agoI 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."