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This isn't to criticize your design itself, but I've always suspected HN was designed to be less than aesthetically appealing for a reason: to prevent a culture
by brandonhsiao 12y ago
This isn't to criticize your design itself, but I've always suspected HN was designed to be less than aesthetically appealing for a reason: to prevent a culture of focusing on appearances. HN that looks sexy (for example, I noticed you increased the padding between items in the navigation) isn't HN, the way Cambridge with good weather isn't Cambridge.
- krapp 12y agoI've seen this argument made quite a bit but I suspect it's overblown. Only pg could answer for certain, but from what I understand, the site is essentially a test application for the language it's implemented in (Arc). I think it's more likely that pg simply didn't find the frontend interesting, so he put as little effort into it as he felt necessary. I would also question the validity of the assumption that aesthetics and mindlessness are necessarily correlated. If anything, a better looking Hacker News would just have fewer people complaining about its surface flaws.
- npsimons 12y agoNot to second guess someone else's motivations, but I would have to disagree. To me, current HN design feels perfect, and I'm sure if pg had wanted it to be "shinier" he would have done so. After all, it's implemented in the language that makes everything else look like Blub, so it would have been easy. HN epitomizes the substance over style school of design.