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(off-topic) What is wrong with Coderwall? They're worse than Google+ and the stupid "Join Google+" bar... If someone wants to join, they will. No need to rub it in their face. At least have the decency to show a close button...

In case it's not clear, I'm talking about the stupid, 105px tall black bar that asks you to "Join Coderwall" when you start to scroll

I literally couldn't finish the article, thanks to that bar, and I normally care alittle to none about things like formatting if the content is good.

Unfortunately, having a massive black bar overhead gave me a feeling of claustrophobia. Made the reading intensely uncomfortable.

Founder here...we have been experimenting on variations of a bar with the goal that someone that stumbles upon a pro tip like this one can discover more about Coderwall. I agree that it looks a little big, intentions were not to be obnoxious - we'll be fixing that.
Wow, I didn't even notice it. I wonder if you or I are the majority here?
OP here: I just opened the site on a fresh machine and it is big! I hope the team fixes it in the future.
We go through this every now and then. Hell, I even replicated the exact HN look, on a project that pg asked me to shut down a couple years ago, using a much simplified div/CSS structure.

Point is, it doesn't matter.

Yes, could HN be totally revamped? Sure, there are thousands of capable engineers in the community that could and have done it. Should it be? Meh.

Honestly, it just works. Its pretty stable. I read HN as much from my phone as a laptop. I've tried the various alternate UIs and iOS apps, but I always just come back to the site.

I'm probably not the only old-timer that feels this way, but there are plenty of alternative UIs for those that want them, and indeed they use them.

HN is a great lesson in the "don't fix it if it ain't broke" methodology of engineering. 2000+ year old Roman aqueducts are still used in some places in Europe. If somethings doing the job it was designed for, you don't have to upgrade the concrete just because you have newer cement.

> Honestly, it just works.

Honestly, it's a pain. My personal experience is vastly different. I have a 40min (one-way minimum) commute to work and I use that time where I can't create things to read news, so that I can spend time working at work and doing stuff at home. HN is simply an excruciating pain on a touch device. I regularly hit flag by mistake. I regulary miss the upvote arrow. I regularly downvote instead of upvote. It's just text and on my laptop I can see the content render like in those "Chrome is Fast" slow motion videos, except it's in real time (Chrome says 1+ second). Proxy apps simply don't cut it: they're either read only or have access to my credentials, and generally they appear to reach 90% of their development, and leave the remaining 90% undone.

> We go through this every now and then.

I'd take that as a clue that something's amiss.

> "don't fix it if it ain't broke"

But it is broken. It regularly times out on me, whether I load the site or I try to post a comment. I know it times out on me on votes, because I vote and then I come back later, and the vote arrow is there again. I don't know why, if that's because I'm across an ocean or whatever, but I have the feeling that ~3K characters of human text should not inflate by an order of magnitude with markup. I feel a code smell every time I browse here, the kind of which that could have an impact at scale. I'm not saying I know how to fix it, I'm not bragging I could do better, but hell yes is there something wrong. The only reason I put up with it is that the voting system is smart, and the content and community are great.

Now I will click 'reply', and as always I will take great care of copying the content of my reply, just in case.

</rant>

I think the UI matters. HN is great but I feel the commenting system could be greatly improved. Collapsable threads anyone? In general I wish HN would use a StackOverflow-like system (rep and votes on comments).
But it is broken.

No thread collapsing. Screen readers don't work well here. Renders poorly on mobile devices.

I would love it if the site were responsive. Reading and commenting via iPhone is an exceptional pain.
The current HTML/CSS of HN acts as an API for third-party services and apps that depend on HN's data. If you change this API, you break all these services.

So in my opinion, it's not worth the change.

While you're at it, change the "static" up-vote triangle to this unicode character: ▲ http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/25b2/index.htm so it scales nice on high-dpi devices, or simply when you zoom-in in a desktop browser.
I don't feel like firing up my IE VM to test it myself, but are you certain that character is browser safe? I've run into a lot of issues with unicode glyphs not working on vanilla IE8 machines that didn't ship with fonts containing them.
It's not just an argument of preference when programmers suggest not using tables for layout - it's about using a best practice and a standard instead of an old hack that is a habit many are lazy to break in an age when most browsers have excellent CSS support.

This is what a screen reader emulator tells me the front page of HN sounds like:

"Page has one hundred thirty links Hacker News dash Internet Explorer Table with one column and ninety-eight rows Table with three columns and one row Link Graphic slash yeighteen .gifLink Hacker NewsLink new vertical bar Link comments vertical bar Link ask vertical bar Link jobs vertical bar Link submitLink login Table end Table with three columns and ninety-two rows"

Of course, anyone actually using HN with a real screen reader will probably only get the links list from their reader, knowing how useless the supporting markup is (aside from the table layout, HN doesn't use meaningful heading tags).

There are many more reasons not to use tables for layout, but accessibility should be enough of a reason alone to stay away from layout tables.

This comes up from time to time. From over a year and a half ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2019950

And from almost five years ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50159

Instead of numbering the articles, you should put them in an OL instead of a UL, then you'll get automatic browser generated numbers and save a few more bytes.
That would only work on the front page though, wouldn't it? Once you click the "more" link it would just start from 1 again.
How would that work exactly? That would make the HTML really cumbersome and clunky. Normally I'd agree, but in this case, imagine you're using a View engine to render the html against populated objects, it's easier to just output the number and not rely on the browser.

Can you illustrate what you mean?

This change would also make a line wrap on a narrow interface wrap to the right of the number, helping the numbers stand out.
Nitpick: what's up with the underlines to the right of the up-arrows? http://i.imgur.com/PSPES.png (OS X 10.7.4, Chrome 21.0.1180.57)

Bigger nitpick: I'd rather have a fix for functionality than for loading some extra data. The "next" page problem still occurs, and it would be nice to know when someone responds to a comment.

"...and it would be nice to know when someone responds to a comment."

http://hnnotify.com/

>> but the browser will render it faster because it has less to do

Is that strictly true? My thinking is that you may be able to express something in less notation, but the browser may have to calculate more to render it (such additional reflows or CSS lookups). Just saying. Reality is that it probably will be faster.

But I like the point that table-less designs do save on bandwidth and maintainability.

You should replace the <li>|<li> with li:after { content: " | "; }
Doesn't load at all on two of the browsers I use. Yes, no doubt you'll say "Well, upgrade to a better browser!" but I can't upgrade on those platforms.

So you're advocating making the site genuinely unusable for me.

The problem I have with HN style by default is:

1) It is hard to tell what has changed recently (new comments, votes, changes in ranking)

2) The information is kind of crammed together and not lined up.

3) I hit refresh every few minutes

Am not a a designer, so had my son who has an eye for it help out on styling: http://hn4d.com/

Not to nitpick, but - http://imgur.com/6xgeK
This is a nice idea, but your css is horribly inefficient (using `.nav ul.actions li a` as a selector for example). I'm also a bit of a convert to http://smacss.com/ - make your html/css a bit more declarative rather than relying on nested selectors to apply rules.
> The point I'm trying to make is that using <table> elements for layout is bad and you should feel bad for using them. If you tried modifying something in original HN it would take a long time.

If you made the same point but removed the "should feel bad" bit, the point would be even better.

I use Georgify (Chrome Extension) makes things a lot better, I've actually forgotten what HN is like without it (yuck!) https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ofjfdfaleomlfanfeh...
Hacker News should have an API.
As another example, I wrote a HN clone the 'right' way: https://bitorama.com. It even supports right-to-left!
Probably get down voted. But this makes it bearable for me at least. No Firefox Allowed Club

http://userstyles.org/styles/70289/hacker-news-w-gsu AND https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylish/fjnbnpbmke...

This is the right time for nReduce to start a news aggregator site, with the latest bells and whistles, and start competing with HN in quality content.

Show the latest startups they're incubating, the best advice from their investors, that would be the best place to follow up on what's going on over there.

One last thing, add a little red envelope to the header and you win my upvote.

I agree with removing tables for layout, but I think it's OK to use them for the posts.

Maybe an unordered list would work even better.

The point is, tables are good for what they are made for: tabular data.

We don't have to cheat anymore, CSS and HTML have had moved forward a lot.

Changing HN wouldn't be too much work and would help keep it with the times.

Tables are easier to code for a functional programmer. That's why.
The main things I dislike about HN:

* Comments are allowed to get too wide for easy reading.

* OP text color is too uncontrasted from the background.

Other than that, I don't see a reason why it needs a revamp.

Anybody care to comment on whether this is intended to be ironic? It replaces a clear, concise table layout with a somewhat more verbose CSS version for seemingly no reason.

Had the author attacked the threaded comment page (which might actually benefit from using nested lists) rather than the tabular submissions page, I might be less confused.

As it stands though, I find I'm confronted with the least convincing attack on tables I've seen in a while (and I tend to put myself in the "CSS over tables" camp normally).

I made some tweaks: http://jsbin.com/ewufof/366/edit
Bravo!

The infinite reasons for not doing this:

1) PG has much more important things to do.

2) It would break every other hack ever done based on HN.

3) Recurs back to 1.

Alignment problems on opera/android 2.3
If I were making changes to HN it would be to add a "Nuke From Orbit" button to posts.
I'm reading hackernews on links right now. It works. This new version doesn't.
Love the search function.
I don't have to turn on Javascript to read HN. Why should I have to with this?

Hell, I had to turn on Javascript just to not see a wall of text on coderwall. Honestly, HTML and CSS for layout people.