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 dea

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.