I've been a HN member for a while now, and while I love the community (well, most of the time anyway), I personally find the User Experience quite wanting. SachaG's telescope (http://telesc.pe) would be a far better choice IMO. The site is young enough that a change would be possible at this stage without rocking the boat too much.
1. If you've used Hacker News before, you might be aware of the "Expired Link" issue.
2. There's also a problem with the size of the voting links on most mobile devices - it's quite easy to hit the wrong one.
3. On long threads, it's virtually impossible to follow the conversation on mobile devices.
4. hacker News is built on Arc, an obscure Lisp dialect, which is a barrier to feature contributions.
Fair point. This is more an objection against Telesc.pe than a vote of confidence in HN, though. A lot of problems we have in our software stem from accepting suboptimal solutions.
I absolutely agree with you. I will plan to move it to telesc next weekend. I used HN software because that is what I was aware of at the time and the instructions for setting up were fairly straight forward.
I would prefer you reconsider decision of porting the system especially since the op's proposed alternative does not seem well supported on low end phone browsers (opera mobile ) which i'm on.
Also considering that opera mobile has a larger share in this market.
Agreed, also because of the extremely low-bandwidth/low-reliability links that no one else seems to still be designing for. HN works on my GPRS uplink even when nothing else will.
Agreed, also because of the extremely low-bandwidth/low-reliability links that no one else seems to still be designing for. HN works on my GPRS uplink even when nothing else will.
We can wait a little for the community to build up then put it to a vote. I also prefer a slicker looking UI but I am aware there are various Hacker News apps that can layer skins with a nicer look and feel on the site.
Awesome. Let me know if you need a hand. Importing accounts and threads will probably be painful though. I don't envy you :) Great work. Would be happy to help from Friday morning (EAT). Shoot me an email if you'd like [okal at justokal dot com]
