7 ms·

Hacker Newspaper: reformatted Hacker News

154 points by chrislo 17y ago

More information about this here: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/04/miniapp-hacker-newspaper.html

chrislo 17y ago
Giles talks about his motivations and the technology behind this on his blog: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/04/miniapp-hacker-newspaper.html http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/04/miniapp-hacker-news...
markessien 17y ago
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.
RossM 17y ago
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 Also while it is definitely quick (as it's static HTML) it could also get out-of-date, HNs low score threshold for front-page items means that the front page is updated more often than other sites, e.g. reddit.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/ http://csswizardry.com/typogridphy/).
zhyder 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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.
- edu 17y ago
  Yes, it's just what I thought using the web. I like the idea and that I can start reading the articles without clicking but having to go back here to see the comments (which are almost as important, or even more, as the link) make the site much less usable.
swombat 17y ago
Er... from http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/04/miniapp-hacker-newspaper.html http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/04/miniapp-hacker-news... (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 17y ago
  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.
  - dhimes 17y ago
    This thread is a great case-in-point for me. I read comments to here (this is the top thread at this moment), and now am moving on. I won't bother to read the OP at all.
    - mechanical_fish 17y ago
      Oh, I wouldn't make that mistake. The OP is lots of fun, even if you aren't someone who would use it as their primary HN interface.
      - axod 17y ago
        I agree... The times when the comments are a good indicator of when to skip something is when the article is pages of text, or a very long video. This one's interesting to take a glance at, then move on.
mechanical_fish 17y ago
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 17y ago
  "[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." :)
robin_reala 17y ago
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 17y ago
Maybe it's just me, but i see a little inspiration from http://www.acrylicapps.com/times/ 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 17y ago
  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.)
kulkarnic 17y ago
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.
pclark 17y ago
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.
tipjoy 17y ago
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.
pibefision 17y ago
Any insight about Why hacker news is not running on Reddit Open Source? I think that is a more featured platform than arcforums.
- icey 17y ago
  Because pg wrote Arc and would like to use it?
- pmarin 17y ago
  The reason is simple: PG needs a middle size proyect to test his Programming Language (arc) and HN is the result.
thorax 17y ago
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.
- gilesgoatboy 17y ago
  see, that's why there should be an API.
jacktang 17y ago
I like it!
omarish 17y ago
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?
nirmal 17y ago
So I had thought about using my modified RSS feed for HN (available at: http://hacketal.com/#hnrss 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.
- gilesgoatboy 17y ago
  de nada, thanks for the awesome script
racerrick 17y ago
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.
Rob15283 17y ago
Yuch. Go back to the drawing board.
ynd 17y ago
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.
jfarmer 17y ago
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.
blasdel 17y ago
Giles has been in this thread, but his comments are being deleted because he's an asshole.
- gilesgoatboy 17y ago
  No, my comments are being deleted because I don't have any respect for this community. That's different from being an asshole. If you're nice to somebody but you don't show them respect, then you don't respect them but you're still not an asshole. I think I've given everyone here a nice little present. You might not want it, but you don't have to use it if you don't want to. You perceive me as an asshole because you believe your community is entitled to more respect than I believe it has earned. I don't think that has anything to do with me being an asshole, although if you had said "rude," I would have had to concede that point right away. If HN's community had saved my life, or you had made incredible sacrifices for my benefit, or something like that, then my not showing the discussion much respect would have been an asshole move. But I like this site, sort of, and I'm doing something to make it better. In my own way I'm doing something to increase the signal-to-noise ratio of discussions here, by making it harder for me to get in them.
- yters 17y ago
  Despite his rudeness, he's also making good points. His comments shouldn't be killed.
  - gilesgoatboy 17y ago
    you know what, actually, I wrote a big comment justifying the same point of view (currently right below this very comment) but the irony is that as far as I can tell none of my comments were deleted at all.
gilesgoatboy 17y ago
Weird thing about this project, it is an epic feature-request magnet. Number one most requested feature: links to the discussions/comments. Absolutely not going to happen. I might put it up on GitHub, where you can fork it and do whatever the fork you want with it, but I firmly believe the lack of comments and discussion is a FEATURE. Hacker News aims to have more civilized discussion than most sites of this nature, and that goal is very well-intentioned. Good intentions pave the road to hell. Hacker News does NOT in my opinion have a better signal-to-noise ratio than other sites of its type. The fundamental mechanism kills diversity of opinion and encourages mean-spirited nit-picking the same way it does on any other site of this type. Consider: this community organizes around entrepreneurialism and hacking. I set up a project which challenges the status quo in this community. I did some bold, innovative, controversial, and aggressive hacking. This project reflects entrepreneurial values. A guy who posted a list of bitchy quibbles is at the top of the comments here, with 83 points at the current time. He defends the status quo, he did no hacking, his comments are provably false and UX research probably already exists refuting them. And people upvoted his comments over mine, by a factor of 83 to 1. It is impossible to build a community which upholds entrepreneurial values using the mechanism that drives Hacker News. I've ranted about this before, so it's not worth going into detail about. If you missed the rants, here's some links: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/summon-monsters-open-door-heal-or-die.html http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/summon-monsters-ope... http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/04/we-didnt-start-flame-war.html http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/04/we-didnt-start-flam... My goal isn't to rehash my point. My goal is simply to make is absolutely clear that I WILL NOT enable comment links on Hacker Newspaper. However, I do intend to put it on GitHub, and please by all means nag me about it on Twitter (@gilesgoatboy) if I forget. I will be thrilled to hear if it somebody's doing something cool with my code.
kineticac 17y ago
that's kind of fun to look at =)
ralph 17y ago
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.
gilesgoatboy 17y ago
If you want to fork it, it's <a href="http://tinyurl.com/c6mbpy http://tinyurl.com/c6mbpy">here</a>.

154 points by chrislo 17y ago

More information about this here: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/04/miniapp-hacker-newspaper.html

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

markessien 17y ago

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.

RossM 17y ago

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/ http://csswizardry.com/typogridphy/).

zhyder 17y ago

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 17y ago
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.
edu 17y ago
Yes, it's just what I thought using the web. I like the idea and that I can start reading the articles without clicking but having to go back here to see the comments (which are almost as important, or even more, as the link) make the site much less usable.

swombat 17y ago

Er... from http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/04/miniapp-hacker-newspaper.html http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/04/miniapp-hacker-news... (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 17y ago
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.
- dhimes 17y ago
  This thread is a great case-in-point for me. I read comments to here (this is the top thread at this moment), and now am moving on. I won't bother to read the OP at all.
  - mechanical_fish 17y ago
    Oh, I wouldn't make that mistake. The OP is lots of fun, even if you aren't someone who would use it as their primary HN interface.
    - axod 17y ago
      I agree... The times when the comments are a good indicator of when to skip something is when the article is pages of text, or a very long video. This one's interesting to take a glance at, then move on.

mechanical_fish 17y ago

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 17y ago
"[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." :)

robin_reala 17y ago

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 17y ago

Maybe it's just me, but i see a little inspiration from http://www.acrylicapps.com/times/ 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 17y ago
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.)

kulkarnic 17y ago

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.

pclark 17y ago

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.

tipjoy 17y ago

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.

pibefision 17y ago

Any insight about Why hacker news is not running on Reddit Open Source? I think that is a more featured platform than arcforums.

icey 17y ago
Because pg wrote Arc and would like to use it?
pmarin 17y ago
The reason is simple: PG needs a middle size proyect to test his Programming Language (arc) and HN is the result.

thorax 17y ago

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.

gilesgoatboy 17y ago
see, that's why there should be an API.

jacktang 17y ago

I like it!

omarish 17y ago

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?

nirmal 17y ago

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

gilesgoatboy 17y ago
de nada, thanks for the awesome script

racerrick 17y ago

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.

Rob15283 17y ago

Yuch. Go back to the drawing board.

ynd 17y ago

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.

jfarmer 17y ago

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.

blasdel 17y ago

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

gilesgoatboy 17y ago
No, my comments are being deleted because I don't have any respect for this community. That's different from being an asshole. If you're nice to somebody but you don't show them respect, then you don't respect them but you're still not an asshole. I think I've given everyone here a nice little present. You might not want it, but you don't have to use it if you don't want to. You perceive me as an asshole because you believe your community is entitled to more respect than I believe it has earned. I don't think that has anything to do with me being an asshole, although if you had said "rude," I would have had to concede that point right away. If HN's community had saved my life, or you had made incredible sacrifices for my benefit, or something like that, then my not showing the discussion much respect would have been an asshole move. But I like this site, sort of, and I'm doing something to make it better. In my own way I'm doing something to increase the signal-to-noise ratio of discussions here, by making it harder for me to get in them.
yters 17y ago
Despite his rudeness, he's also making good points. His comments shouldn't be killed.
- gilesgoatboy 17y ago
  you know what, actually, I wrote a big comment justifying the same point of view (currently right below this very comment) but the irony is that as far as I can tell none of my comments were deleted at all.

gilesgoatboy 17y ago

Weird thing about this project, it is an epic feature-request magnet. Number one most requested feature: links to the discussions/comments. Absolutely not going to happen. I might put it up on GitHub, where you can fork it and do whatever the fork you want with it, but I firmly believe the lack of comments and discussion is a FEATURE. Hacker News aims to have more civilized discussion than most sites of this nature, and that goal is very well-intentioned. Good intentions pave the road to hell. Hacker News does NOT in my opinion have a better signal-to-noise ratio than other sites of its type. The fundamental mechanism kills diversity of opinion and encourages mean-spirited nit-picking the same way it does on any other site of this type. Consider: this community organizes around entrepreneurialism and hacking. I set up a project which challenges the status quo in this community. I did some bold, innovative, controversial, and aggressive hacking. This project reflects entrepreneurial values. A guy who posted a list of bitchy quibbles is at the top of the comments here, with 83 points at the current time. He defends the status quo, he did no hacking, his comments are provably false and UX research probably already exists refuting them. And people upvoted his comments over mine, by a factor of 83 to 1. It is impossible to build a community which upholds entrepreneurial values using the mechanism that drives Hacker News. I've ranted about this before, so it's not worth going into detail about. If you missed the rants, here's some links: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/summon-monsters-open-door-heal-or-die.html http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/summon-monsters-ope... http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/04/we-didnt-start-flame-war.html http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/04/we-didnt-start-flam... My goal isn't to rehash my point. My goal is simply to make is absolutely clear that I WILL NOT enable comment links on Hacker Newspaper. However, I do intend to put it on GitHub, and please by all means nag me about it on Twitter (@gilesgoatboy) if I forget. I will be thrilled to hear if it somebody's doing something cool with my code.

kineticac 17y ago

that's kind of fun to look at =)

ralph 17y ago

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.

gilesgoatboy 17y ago

If you want to fork it, it's <a href="http://tinyurl.com/c6mbpy http://tinyurl.com/c6mbpy">here</a>.