Show HN: Hacker News Redesign - <AUTHOR> http://hilapeleg.io/2014/06/01/hackernews-redesign/ <comment><USER2> As a heavy HN user, I often skim the front page to see what's happening. The point/comment ratio often tells a lot about an article.

First thing I don't like: the Y meter. Most HN readers are nerds, and nerds like exact values (same reason I have the percentage on for my devices's battery)

Second thing I don't like, which breaks the design completely for me: my eyes have to travel a huge distance to see how many comments stories have. It makes skimming the front page much, much worse.

HN's design is about extreme conciseness. There are a few things that could be done better, but if you redesign it that has to be your #1 goal.

<comment><USER3> I disagree, the Y meter is the best part. I rarely ever look at the number of points until after I look at the article. I just click on what looks interesting on the front-page. Having an easy up-front visible way to discern new vs established articles would be much more helpful than an exact number buried under too much information.

<comment><USER4> A point made is that the Y meter obscures an otherwise instantly understandable metric with a visualization that must be deciphered. If you don't care about that number, sure, it's less information and thus perhaps less clutter. For myself, it's chart cruft.

<comment><USER5> > the Y meter obscures an otherwise instantly understandable

I'm not sure I agree with that, because it takes me a noticeable amount of time and effort to look at the scores for two different stories, located at two different parts of the page, and to compare them. It's _far_ easier to get an instant notion of how a story is performing compared to other stories using the Y meter, for me at least.

My recommendation for the Y meter is dead simple: just also show the number.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I never feel like any HN redesign is actually needed [1]. Although well presented (as is usually the case for unsolicited redesigns), it fails at acknowledging the primary audience of the website (hackers), and disrupts the information hierarchy (emphasizing the score at the title's expense, harming the connection between an article and its comments…).

On a side note, I'm always concerned with self-proclaimed _" UX experts"_ who, by using an ultra-thin font, make it really hard to access the core content of the Web: text.

[1] [http://jgthms.com/why-hn-doesnt-need-a- redesign.html](http://jgthms.com/why-hn-doesnt-need-a-redesign.html)

<comment><USER7> Ever used HN via mobile? It's an awful experience. I've accidentally flagged more than one article that I meant to click on instead, due to clumsy thumbs.

<comment><USER8> Why not just use one of the apps? I know we have half a dozen on Android, and I've seen at least one iOS one, and a couple mobile targeted web versions...

<comment><USER9> > _Why not just use one of the apps?_ //

Why use one of the apps though, isn't this a website, shouldn't it be made accessible through the common web browsers. Individual apps which just apply a style, sample and modify a website and pipe it through a hidden browser object seem strange - we don't need apps for every different bit of content, that's one of the great things about a properly standardised web and high quality browsers.

Different apps for every bit of web content seems perversely inefficient to me.

<comment><USER10> I've switched to [http://hn.premii.com/](http://hn.premii.com/) on mobile. Give it a try.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The text on hilapeleg.io is nearly unreadable on Windows 7 with Firefox 30. The font is rendered strange, way too thin and uneven with gaps in the strokes.

The link color is just as washed out as the very light grey of the body text.

Maybe they could design their own site properly before re-designing HN?

<comment><AUTHOR> fixed, sorry :)

<comment><USER12> No, it's not - [http://imgur.com/yeLrLlY](http://imgur.com/yeLrLlY) \- W8/FF30

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Few comments, take these with a grain of salt.

\- This should be coded and turned into a working prototype! I imagine an HN reader with some spare time on their hands might attempt this.

\- The square "y-meter" idea is neat, but it's difficult to parse at a quick glance. A circle might be a better alternative, where the size and intensity of the circle indicate the strength of the story.

\- The order of each story element in your comp goes like this: Title, username, URL, and finally comments. I think the URL is a lot more important than the user who submitted it.

\- The orange •'s in the string are distracting. A significant space, something like three or four  's might be a better way to separate those components.

\- Having an arrow in addition to the y-meter is kinda noisy. Those could be combined. Sorta like Svbtle's hold-your-mouse-here-to-vote ... if the y-meter was replaced with a circle, it could expand or :hover into an arrow to vote. Not suggesting hovering will cause a vote, but rather a hover will indicate that you can vote.

\- Having the comments encapsulated in the little comment bubble is fun, but at first glance the type looks way too tiny and having it orange is tough on the eyes. It's doing more harm than good.

\- The stories could use a bit more vertical padding between them.

Finally, don't take these comments the wrong way. I think 90% of the time something feels great inside of Photoshop, especially after mucking around with it for hours or days, but the only way to prove that the UI is great is to actually build it and play around with it.

I hate to say it, but people keep "redesigning" HN without actually solving any significant problems. The only problem this site has right now is that it's unfriendly on mobile devices. Every other attempt has just been putting lipstick on a pig. That being said, it's a fun exercise and thanks for sharing your version. You put a lot of great thought into this and it's fun to read these.

<comment><USER14> > The square "y-meter" idea is neat, but it's difficult to parse at a quick > glance. A circle might be a better alternative, where the size and intensity > of the circle indicate the strength of the story.

Yes, yes, yes. It's funny because the "y-meter" is at the same time the thing that interests me the most & the thing that I find the most inscrutable.

* The scaling feels off. Half the box means 51 points and the whole box means 401? In eighths, the transitions go {1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8} which just makes my head ache.

* When you have crummy eyes some of the transitions are hard: [51,100] looks too close to [101,200] and [201, 400] and [400, +inf) is just impossible without squinting.

Overall it feels like there is more noise than information, which is a bummer. Maybe if it scaled a little more smoothly or changed lightness as an added visual indication it'd work better for me.

Of course if there's one thing everyone loves to do, it's bikeshed!

<comment><USER15> Given that it's eighths, I would have expected an appeal to the 'hacker' part, and use powers of 2 for the scaling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I didn't like the position of the comments. For me, I like to read the article, then jump into the comments. With it being all the way on the other side of the screen, I could easily see myself getting lost and clicking the wrong comment button.

Otherwise, I enjoyed the look.

<comment><USER17> Agree.

To add to what you've said, 9 times out of 10 I'll actually click to scan the comments first, not the article. Comments often provide some summary that indicate whether an article is worth reading or not.

<comment><USER18> Yup. When I discovered HN about 3 years ago, I read most of the posts and maybe some comments.

Now, it's opposite. I read a lot of comments and usually don't read the links themselves. From my experience, the value of the links decreases after some time as things inevitably start repeating. Not the same links, but the same ideas, concepts (not always, of course).

I view HN as a forum, where the title of the link is the topic for a thread.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Even though I have implemented [http://hn.premii.com/](http://hn.premii.com/), I think current YC is much better. It should be more mobile friendly and remove tables for better accessibility. And also provide APIs so people don't have to scrap for alternate behavior.

<comment><USER20> That's a really cool re-design. Two things I liked about it: collapsible comment threads, and comments that are readable on mobile. Honestly, if the HN design remained exactly the same but fixed those two paint points I'd be happy.

<comment><USER21> > Honestly, if the HN design remained exactly the same but fixed those two > pain points I'd be happy.

Exactly. No bullshit. Keep the same visual styling. And improve how the layout breaks at a narrow width. _This_ is how you improve/redesign HN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I do a lot of website critiques for others and thought I'd take a look at your redesign. Here is a quick run-down of my thoughts and a few suggestions.

The Y-meter is visually complex with all of its variations so when you look at a full page of articles, it is very messy looking. As you mention you would like to visualize the story points, and I think this is a good goal. The visual should add weight to an article while still enableing the eye so casually slide past articles. A simple light gray bar next to the story points under the title would do this well. Also, given the amount of explenation of how it works and the fact that there is a "key" at the bottom of the page is a clear indication that the Y-meter as designed isn't going to be intuitive and is not likely a good direction to go.

The white HACKERNEWS title is hard to read. The white color works well and lightens up the header. I see that NEWS is slightly more bold, but not enough to distinguish it from HACKER very well. Still, all caps for words of length 4 or more impairs readablility and in this case unnecessarily.

The header links in white and slightly smaller font-size, do look more readable, so that is nice. Getting rid of the vertical seperators was a good choice as it de-clutters the header.

Search bar at the top, thank you! The current location at the bottom is terrible and this would be a welcome addition.

I'm confused by the meter next to the username. This seems to behave differently than the Y-Meters next to the stories. I'm not sure where to go with that one. The current numerical value in parenthisis are not great as there is no label, so it would be worth exploring additional options there.

The comment numbers on the far right are very far away from the story title which makes it difficult to tell what number goes with what story. It is especially difficult with short story titles. Perhaps your intention is that as a user hovers over the story title, the line is highlighted? While highlighting assists with tabular data such as in spreadsheets, it doesn't work on touch devices and is typically used in conjunction with other horizontal means of deliniation.

While placing all of the story meta-data on a single line allows you to make the font larger, overall the readability suffers as a result. Consider alternatives where the meta-data is shown below the story title, but in a lighter font. As you did with the header links, simply removing the pipes | and adding a little space would increase readability.

The "more" text at the bottom is burried on the far left on the same line as the Y-Meter Key and there is no whitespace above or below it. Give it some room to breath. The current Hacker News more button doesn't look clickable, so that is one area that could certainly use improving.

As per the upvote arrows sticking out to the left of the header, it looks like a mistake. I'm sure the intention was to do that, however it comes across as mis-alignment.

Overall, keep it up. I enjoy seeing design alternatives as there are so many ways to design a good website that has its own unique style and branding.

Cheers, -d-

<comment><USER23> > Search bar at the top, thank you! The current location at the bottom is > terrible and this would be a welcome addition.

I think this was originally intended to limit it's use. Before they switched to the current search system it was very heavy/slow. Assuming they achieved that end it was brilliant design but terrible UX.

<comment><USER24> I have just now reliazed there is a search box at the bottom.

<comment><USER25> Yeah I honestly always thought HN never even HAD search. Crazy

<comment><USER26> For a long time, it didn't. It was added a couple of years ago. Prior to that, people would attempt to scrape HN, and create separate sites for search / rest api, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The Y-meter isn't very useful to me.

Respectfully, I don't care about an abstract graph, nor about having to remember point ranges for its various states. I care about the actual points, and seeing their numerical value is faster and easier to comprehend.

<comment><USER27> And the fact that it requires a legend… probably adding the values directly into the meter could do the job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> 1\. Hard to grasp concept of Y-Meter as a new user, and even for those in the know, it's a visual overload. Numbers provide greater clarity. 2\. The white is hard to read, because of font and font-weight. 3\. Comment bubble to the side is out of direct sight and forces me to divide my focus, thus making it harder to scan.

It's nice visually, but needs more love in the UX area.

</comment><comment><USER29> I find the Y-meter a bit gratuitous and not very readable. For a better solution that works right now, check out HN Colors: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news- colors...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news- colors/adailobllebnhioglgkmaioilhlkdden?hl=en).

I also agree with gamerDude that deemphasizing the comments by putting them on the right is not a good idea.

It's funny, despite all its flaws, I don't think I've seen an HN redesign that I like better than HN.

</comment><comment><USER30> I like it, here some few points though.

\- Time ago is important when you are checking out the "new" items on HN

\- Domain from where the article came from, seems to be more important then the user

\- The HN Meter is nice, but it's more dificult then the point system for new users.

\- The ammount of points are too far on the right, to see this, people have to see the right corner and there will be difficulty to see which comment_count belongs to which post.

Although i really like the redesign, it's a hard thing to do for something like HN.. Where it's beauty lays in its simplicity...

Good job though!

</comment><comment><USER5> I actually really like the Y-meter, though I'm not a fan out completely hiding the numerical rating of the topic. It might be worthwhile to still show the number for those who are curious.

<comment><USER31> I agree. Actually, showing the number inside of the meter would be nice. I also agree with another commentor, oftentimes im after the comments link, dont stick it on the other side of the page. Id really like the ability to click one link that opens the source and the comments at the same time (RES adds this functionality to reddit for instance)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I believe that your proposed placement of the comments link (or button) would be a big downgrade in the UX. Mostly because it is positioned very far from the main link but also because it seems small. It would be a hard "hit target".

If we assume that HN users value other users' comments as much as the linked content, this could be problematic. Also, as typical heavy users, they would _surely_ value efficiency (faster selection of hit targets, less errors).

Go check Fitt's law (I would call it a model, but it is known as "law"). You don't really need to know the formula, but its implications seem to be very generalisable to HCI in general:

1) Ease of target acquisition is directly proportional to size; 2) Ease of target acquisition is inversely proportional to distance; 3) Targets at the edges of the screen can be considered infinite width, making them a lot easier to acquire (i.e. you can move the mouse in that direction indefinitely). This one should be taken with a grain of salt (and it's not taken directly from the original article).

I know it seems obvious but people tend to forget the basics. :)

tl;dr: you should make the comments button a lot easier to hit.

</comment><comment><USER33> I absolutely disagree.

The comments on the far right is bad.

The boxes are worse.

I'm a numbers guy, visual aids like the box do NOT help, but a comment count below the article is already perfect.

All HN needs is to be responsive so it loads on mobile properly.

</comment><comment><USER34> Some thoughts:

\- The Y-Meter is inconsistent, why is 50 votes half the filled in space whereas 400 is the full space?

\- The comments are really far to the right. I often read the comments for every article I click on so this forces me to move my mouse far right/back to left then far right again. Going down the list vertically is more natural and efficient for me.

<comment><USER35> The Y-Meter is sorta logarithmic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I think there are good takeaways here. I think having the comments-button contain the # is efficient, and I believe placement on the right side will encourage reading the article first, before diving into the discussion. Perhaps there will be a bit less discussion, but it should be of higher quality. It's worth trying, anyway.

To be honest, though, I'd rather see a better mobile experience _first_ , before a re-design of the normal experience.

Or, ensure the re-design includes an improved mobile experience. No more itty- bitty links (I too often tap the wrong thing), no more itty-bitty text (to be readable, I have to scroll sideways a lot, and please please please no more triangles so small I have to tap the screen like 5x to be sure I don't accidentally hit "down" when I want to "up".

... and do I spy a gradient in the orange header?! I like gradients, when used minimally. 8-)

</comment><comment><USER37> If you just want a prettier HN, try this Chrome plugin: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hn-special-an- addi...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hn-special-an-addition- to/cchaceegbflphbdpfocjalgjhjoahiia?hl=en-US)

<comment><USER38> I'm a massive fan of [http://hckrnews.com/](http://hckrnews.com/) for viewing the "front page".

I then use the hackernews enhancement suite to allow for collapsible comment threads and other niftiness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> This post was posted in #startups.

Nice effort. A larger font is definitely something HN needs (considering a significant amount of HN readers are 30y+)!

It is difficult to determine which comments-count "box" belong to each title, and the reader should not be forced to move her/his eyes/head to the right, considering this information can fit perfectly on the left.

While I like the idea of the Y-Meter, it is more likely HNers like and are used to know the exact amount of votes. I do understand you wanted to make it minimalistic, but an UI should never need an explanation (referring to the Y-Meter explanation in the bottom).

</comment><comment><USER40> I am one of few who thinks that HN has to have a redesign but it should not be that much radical. Typography, responsivity and let's call it a day.

P.S. OP font is so thin, I had to stop reading after first few paragraphs.

</comment><comment><USER41> Quick note about your own page.

Your font size is way too narrow for either retina or non-retina. This is what it looks like on my cinema display, [https://www.dropbox.com/s/2ialdcjqba0wthr/Screenshot%202014-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/2ialdcjqba0wthr/Screenshot%202014-07-08%2012.14.45.png)

The YMeter doesn't make any sense. Even after reading the description, it doesn't do anything to expose information (up votes) in a meaningful way. Its like trying to read a binary clock.

</comment><comment><USER42> Uhm for me says a lot about design when the website can't be even read [http://i.imgur.com/vzDeQuW.png](http://i.imgur.com/vzDeQuW.png)

</comment><comment><USER43> To this day, i still find the HackerNews+ (or simply HN+) chrome overlay by @jarques quite awesome. It has a Google-esque look to it and does a great job in keeping the overall style readable, breathable and minimalistic.

Get it here: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker- news-+/oiee...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker- news-+/oieefcckcbbgniifdhhialgkmghahjgl)

</comment><comment><USER44> That hotness meter is pretty spiky and cornery. Not at all inviting. If you want to be minimal and engage the non-visual brain to transmit "hotness", why not create a palette ramp from, say, a deep purple, to the HN orange, and color the entire title link based on hotness? (Warning: Do NOT make the 'cold' color fade into the page. Keep it contrasty but still different.)

Putting all the comment counts in a column on the right makes it completely impossible to tell how which story has however many comments. (I also suddenly have the idea of coloring the comment balloon to show the "hotness" of the discussion - decide for yourself how to measure that.)

Also your presentation of the concept is a bit style-over-substance; having tiny images of the top left of the page, rotated 45º, with a spurious grey edge to make it look like it's on a slab of thick plastic, and in a circle, tells us nothing about how it actually works in practice. When I saw the list of features your design has versus the actual one, I did a double-take when you said it shows the comments, because not a single picture I'd seen so far had any hint of comments.

</comment><comment><USER45> Most comments are focused on the y-meter... and I understand why: it's the most different from the current page and is visually complex so it draws attention. I'm also not sure what all it adds outside of some graphical interest... I don't actively really need to know the # of votes as the current rank is supposed to be a better indication of what I should pay attention to. The argument over remembering 5-7 things doesn't really apply to the y-meter, but simplifying the numbers to give some relative scale can help I suppose.

I liked the minimization of the name & domain and making that & the comments all in one line. It helps focus the attention on the titles themselves.

However, the issue I have is that the font choice is not legible for scanning. I think Vellum, an NYT project recently posted to HN, does a much better job of making a list of articles easily scannable. Screenshot here: [https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/779054/Screen%20Shot%202...](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/779054/Screen%20Shot%202014-07-08%20at%2012.18.44%20PM.png)

</comment><comment><USER46> 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.

<comment><USER47> I'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.

<comment><USER48> Not 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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Not a fan of the Y-meter on first glance. Maybe I would like it more after getting used to it.

\- One thing that I think would improve it is putting the starting point in the bottom left corner. It's weird to have that half segment on the bottom.

\- I want to see the exact number of points, not a fuzzy visual cue. The first visit each day I am going to look at every story on the front page, and subsequent visits are generally to look at replies to comments I've made. Prioritizing past "here are the stories on the front page" is useless to me.

\- From [http://hilapeleg.io/media/mockup_720x1981.png](http://hilapeleg.io/media/mockup_720x1981.png) I get the impression that the new layout is much brighter than the old. I generally prefer off-white to full-white. It feels easier on the eyes. But without seeing the actual layout its hard to tell which I like more.

\- Does this redesign come with comment hiding? This one feature is infinitely more important than an improved visual look.

</comment><comment><USER50> Of all the Hacker News redesigns and variations I have come across, I still prefer the Georgify extension for Chrome. It's 99% original Hacker News with Georgia as the default font, bigger fonts and more subtle colours that are easier on the eyes.

Screenshot: [http://i.imgur.com/qft9Y6q.png](http://i.imgur.com/qft9Y6q.png)

</comment><comment><USER51> Right or wrong I use the comment count as a proxy of how interesting the link is - moving it way over to the left breaks that.

</comment><comment><USER52> The font on that post is pretty unreadable on my high dpi screen. Even zoomed in a few times and the font was still too thin and gray to read comfortably.

Just skimmed the text and pictures as a result and it feels like it's over simplifying things and hiding too much information(which seems to be the trend with redesigns these days).

</comment><comment><USER53> Not feeling the square meter to indicate interest at all. Actually, that's the only thing I don't like about it. I'd rather see things with more gravitas given larger sizing, similar to how twitter's treating retweeted and favorited tweets on their new profile pages.

Otherwise, i think it's excellent.

</comment><comment><USER54> Dunno about the y-meter... Would rather see a number than something visually unintuitive (for me). Also from afar it looks like a bunch of checkboxes.

Also from an eye tracking/heat map standpoint the number of comments being entirely on the right is really tiring... I want to easily just sweep my eyes down on the left to click on articles and the voting score + number of comments are good indicators.

I like the color/font changes that make the site pop a bit more but that's a minor thing. I also appreciate these design docs for their discussion of visual value but these changes also reflect a certain lack of awareness from a usability standpoint -- it just doesn't add much in value, but rather detracts from it by pushing in new design. I'm thinking more Digg 4.0 than FB revamp here.

</comment><comment><USER55> What bothers me personally the most is aligning the comments link right. This works well on almost square browser windows, as in the mockup, but considering that hackers may (probably?) have _huge_ screens at work... That's too far away from the other links. Fitt's law etc.

</comment><comment><USER56> That big empty square in the middle of the point meter would be a perfect place for the comment count to go. That way it would be communicating both the rank and activity in one place. Having it flushed right makes it a chore for your eyes to correlate which article has which comments.

<comment><USER57> Hi there Shaunxcode - Check out my response earlier ;)

"Hi mzarate - In the first draft, the comments were inside the "Y-Meter" \- I do too check out the comments first to see the buzz around the article. Later it was overload with information right at the beginning. Thanks :)"

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> From a visual perspective, I like it.

For what it's designed to communicate, I like the Y-Meter. However, I question whether what it's trying to communicate is in line with the HN ranking system.

The ranking system combines several signals to give the front-page order and is designed to give new, possibly interesting but currently low point links more prominence by being higher up the ranking. This gives them visibility so people can then vote on whether they're interesting, and hence should be kept at a higher rank for longer.

Without promoting new low point content, it's difficult for anything to rise to the top.

By making the current ranking more prominent, the Y-Meter would have the effect of reducing views for newer low point content.

</comment><comment><USER59> I actually prefer the current design, and here's why:

\--navigation: putting the comments button so far to the right, away from the title, makes it annoying to navigate between the two. I often like to open both in new tabs.

\--visual complexity: humans understand numbers well, especially hackers. scanning down a page, I can read and understand numbers much more quickly than charts.

While I really think the ideas behind some of your aesthetics in the redesign (like the score meter), I think these take away from the usability of HN. HN is a site mostly visited by HN experts, people who use HN everyday, and, as such, I think navigation, especially quickness, is one of the most important principles in the design of its layout.

</comment><comment><USER60> I've seen a couple of redesigns of HN in my time and I have to say, your redesign is by far the best I've seen of any HN redesign. You've obviously put a lot of thought and effort into this, the complexity of the Y meter is just crazy. Great job on the design thinking, I think regarding the use of the Y meter in some places is confusing and contradictory to how you've used it elsewhere. With exception of that, I can't fault your redesign, nice and clear.

And can I just say, the inclusion of the search bar at the top pleases me. I hope one day HN has a search bar because sometimes I like to search for content on HN, but have to use third party sites.

<comment><USER57> Thanks, Happy to hear :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> You can tell it's going to be a superficial designer exercise when presentation starts with an isometric projection over a gradient background with a thick edge and a wrap-around color bleed. That's Dribbble's most popular trick for sprucing up shots that otherwise are too bland or flat to get to the front page just on the merits of their design. Such manipulative presentation gimmicks is a bane of Dribbble and Behance and I really hope they don't spread to projects that are aimed at the HN crowd.

Otherwise, this looks like a solution in a search of a problem. Not the first redesign of this kind and certainly not the last one.

</comment><comment><USER61> If you're going to redesign the site, please make it mobile friendly. I frequently read items on my iPhone using apps like Pulse and Feedly. The current implementation is far from ideal and could use some significant work.

</comment><comment><USER62> The font you are using in the body of your blog post is bearly readable on my computer :

[http://i.imgur.com/5WJwMUC.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/5WJwMUC.jpg)

You should really use light weight fonts carefully.

<comment><USER63> Suggest switching font weight 200 to 300 - still light, but readable

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Love seeing the reasoning behind the curtain of design. I like the idea of the Y-Meter, with the current system the points are somewhat meaningless unless compared against each other and the meter makes that a lot easier to visually parse. Let's try it!

Side notes on my own user preferences: I personally like seeing how fresh something is, as if something's on the homepage and brand new it's probably pretty important -- I also use the number of comments as a gauge, and splitting them to the side might make this harder.

How will this layout work on mobile?

</comment><comment><USER65> For me (and many others, I'm sure), the top requirement of a redesign is to get the flag link far away from the title and comments links. When using on a small mobile device, I frequently find myself accidentally hitting the flag link. It's why I'm currently using the "Hacker News 2" app (which frustrates me in different ways) instead of the website.

This design at least has the link far away from the title; I can't see the flag link or the comments link, so I don't know whether those are good.

<comment><USER36> Agreed (see my mobile comments). I would prefer putting the "upvote" link on one side, and the "flag" link at the opposite side of the page, so that there's little room for accident. Same for comments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> In my opinion points are not as important as the creator of this apparently thinks (as to warrant the y-meter).

Once a story hits the front page, its points are irrelevant. I rarely notice the difference between, say, 20 and 200 points for example. Comment count is far more important, this is a discussion site more than anything else. The only time I ever notice or care about points, is when it's really extreme.

All that effort put into the premise behind the y-meter, and it's among the least valuable things you could focus on here.

</comment><comment><USER67> There's no reason I should have to scroll a bunch of stuff that I don't care about before I see the design. The ingredients are less important than what they look like put together

</comment><comment><USER68> Great Idea! But why not try out the Social Hotness Chrome extension which already has a usable "social meter" for Hacker News.

Chrome Extension: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/social- hotness/aha...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/social- hotness/ahabkiagphnfbeehielogfcdkfhkonjh)

Firefox users check out [http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/117780](http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/117780)

</comment><comment><USER69> For me the emphasis on the amount of votes is weird. When I browse HN, I look at what the topic is, and whether the thread has any comments. The more the comments, the more likely I am going to check them out. Then I open the comments view, and the actual website in another tab.

The Y meter for me is not important, and would be unnecessary visual noise. Sure, the amount of (up)voting decides whether I will even see the topic but I don't need to know the amount.

I have no idea whether this makes sense to others.

</comment><comment><USER70> It's a nice idea, but I think the ratings squares are way too distracting and don't provide any additional functionality to warrant that much of a distraction IMO

</comment><comment><USER71> Looks good, and great comments so far.

Personally, I'd like a fixed header and footer (always visible). Didn't see it mentioned.

And for me I think it's going to be tough to move my eyes across the page to see comment count. Would zebra-striping help?

Relating to zebra-striping, alternating colors are still hard to scan with sometimes on long lists. Would a three-shade (or four? or five?) zebra-stripe setup work artistically? And would it help with scanning across the page? I don't know.

</comment><comment><USER72> The only thing I don't like is the Y-Meter and the comments being all the way to the right, that's such a far distance just to click on comments...

</comment><comment><USER73> I think the Y-meters are distracting. I like to judge articles on their title.

I can see the different values on the Y-meter get a nickname btw, dash, L, C, O...

</comment><comment><USER74> I really dislike the conversion from text/numerals to graphics in this and many other redesigns. It turn web-scraping of the page from a trivial process into a view-the-source trial and error one. Given the primary audience of this site is hackers, I'd suggest we're more inclined to favour the accessibility of data over the superficial gloss of a new design.

</comment><comment><USER75> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7996271](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7996271)

</comment><comment><USER76> I feel the Y meter is too complected to the eye; especially if you are doing a quick scan to see the top voted posts that you've missed. Even with a number you can make a rough guess without actually reading the number by the length (number of digits). I think a subtle horizontal bar, or a boxes with varying color intensity would do a much better job.

</comment><comment><USER77> the current design is perfect. it just needs a larger i upvote button and allow for mobile browsers to wrap long lines.

</comment><comment><USER78> I like it -- it's certainly better than what we have.

You will catch a lot of flak, because everyone has their own opinion. A significant amount of people read HN with Lynx but will still comment on your design.

There are, however, some nuggets of truth buried in even the most abusive criticism so try to focus on that, and not the negativity.

<comment><USER57> Hi there. I think there is always a room for criticism. As a designer i have the tendency to listen for what the Dev side have to say and what other aspects i can draw from and use.

Thanks for the comment :) Cheers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> I agree, the "y-meter" it's too complex, looks like a loading status instead of "rating meter"

the great thing of HN is that shows the "news" as a links, simple, human brain likes lists, makes easier to follow.

I think that accessibility and reading are the main improvements that can be done and HN needs

</comment><comment><USER80> Cool design, the y-meter reminds me a lot of the hubwheel we have at hubski[1]. In that vein you could remove the up arrow on the left side of the feed and differentiate on the y-meter itself whether or not you've clicked it.

[1]: [http://hubski.com](http://hubski.com)

</comment><comment><USER81> I thought it was weird/annoying how the Y Meter fills up inconsistently. Sometimes when you go up a tier in points, the bar extends 1 unit (half a side) and other times it extends 2 units (an entire side). It doesn't event alternate between those. What's up with that?

<comment><USER82> It looks like what you might imagine phases of a moon to look like if the moon was a square.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> Y-meter seems like a great concept from the UX perspective. Reddit should take notes from this one too.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, the original post is my friends, I just called her to come online and give back explanations / background if anything would like to know more

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> The Y-meter thingy seems much less intuitive in order to keep track of the points compared to a count.

</comment><comment><USER85> Here's a very simple stylesheet for HN tweaks that I forked from another one: [http://stylebot.me/styles/2800](http://stylebot.me/styles/2800)

I've been using it for just over a year, and find it extremely pleasurable to use.

<comment><USER86> hmm.. I'd not heard of stylebot. Feels like a nice thing if you want to easily tweak some css on a website for personal use. Thanks for the tip.

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> I might prefer a filling circle instead of just a box that is hollow all the time. To be honest the number system works just fine, perhaps change the up arrow to another symbol once the number of up votes passes a threshold, or comment level does

</comment><comment><USER88> Black text on orange was never great, so I'm with you on the white text in the header.

Overall, way too much orange going on. Y Meter is a good concept, but I think it detracts from the title of the post too much (being orange and all).

Are you going to do more versions?

</comment><comment><USER89> This looks exactly like Hubski's layout, but it isn't so rounded. Aside from the comments link being too low-profile and all other info besides the title being squished and inline, it's alright I guess.

</comment><comment><USER90> I use a Stylish theme called "Georgify for Hacker News (Solarized)", and it looks superb! Sample: [http://i.imgur.com/6RvxQVT.png](http://i.imgur.com/6RvxQVT.png)

</comment><comment><USER91> I think you picked a great way to present this -- the strategy between how and where (HN specific) is great. I love when designers can think this way.

Kudos, and good luck. I hope PG himself, or someone from YC, contacts you :)

</comment><comment><USER92> The only thing i would really like to change on HN is the Up arrow dart image.

I would like to change it to a Unicode char cause the current image is to low res and there is a Unicode char that is that exact icon.

</comment><comment><USER93> I would love to see hackernews be more tablet friendly. For voting and clicking through to comments, its not always intuitive to click the links with my finger since the target is so small.

</comment><comment><USER94> Somebody should make a mobile redesign proposal. The fact that HN has no media queries added is unfortunate. (yes, I'm aware that there are some 3rd party implementations out there)

</comment><comment><USER95> I don't know, you could have easily made this a userscript or browser extension, so that everyone could try it out and see how it feels instead of speculating about usability.

</comment><comment><USER96> > font-weight: 200;

Don't do that.

</comment><comment><USER97> Nice idea, I'd really miss the numbers for upvotes though

</comment><comment><USER98> The website doesn't renders properly Chrome on windows, i know its a bug, which involves something with trutype rendering, does anyone knows a fix.

</comment><comment><USER99> Nice effort but bad idea: leave the number at the left and the number for the points. The visual icons don't give the same amount of information.

</comment><comment><USER21> Interested concept and attractive presentation at the top, but it doesn't make sense to present a "redesign" in a scaled 720px image.

</comment><comment><USER100> A redesign on mobile would be a more useful exercise. The way the comments get smaller and smaller when nested makes HN almost unusable on my Nexus 4.

Mobile first!

</comment><comment><USER101> I only have 1 change request:

Please make the fonts and arrows bigger.

</comment><comment><USER102> First HN redesign I like. I would actually use this.

</comment><comment><USER103> To help with the lightness of the font: document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0].style.fontWeight = '400';

</comment><comment><USER104> Why do so many visual designers for web use Helvetica Neue when it is such an expensive font to actually use for web?

</comment><comment><USER105> I want this thin grey body font trend to die. This blog is really not easily readable, and I have a high DPI display

<comment><USER106> I went to the comments to say the exact same thing... it is completely illegible and for being a "designer" / UX expert, it makes me think that the author doesn't know what he is doing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER107> Looks great! But I am actually not sure whether I like the redesign, or the way you presented your redesign.

</comment><comment><USER108> Looks tidy. No GreaseMonkey-scripts or similar to make this a reality?

<comment><USER57> Thanks :)

Hila.

</comment></comment><comment><USER109> Very slick. Would love to see HN updated someday soon.

</comment><comment><USER110> Oh yes please, that looks very good in my opinion.

<comment><USER111> Maybe this could start as a chrome extension?

</comment></comment><comment><USER112> Please make this happen. We need ... something.

</comment><comment><USER113> Thank you for showing us. I have two pieces of feedback.

1) The score isn't most important. The headline is. This is why the headline is in black, and the score is in gray. We don't come here to compare news importance, the site already does this for us by sorting. We come to read news. And having a small pale gray score replaced by a big attention-drawing glowing orange square goes against where the focus should be.

2) I do part time design and understand the temptation to style your presentation so it enhances your concept, like add perspective, drop shadows, and so on. My team does this when presenting business card designs to clients, because the actual graphic looks so simple and boring on a monitor, the client won't "get it", if we'd show it as is.

But a website isn't a 3D slab floating in space, so in this case the styling is a distraction from your presentation, not an enhancement. Keep it simple, when simple works.

</comment><comment><USER114> I love the Y-meter, but the font that you chose physically hurts me when I try to read it.</comment>


Britain Moves to Criminalize Reading Extremist Material on the Internet - <AUTHOR> https://jonathanturley.org/2017/10/05/britain-moves-to-criminalize-reading-extremist-material-on-the-internet/amp/ <comment><USER3> Sometimes it seems to me that the British government is intent on making V for Vendetta or 1984 happen in real life. The things they are doing are so scary and openly oppressive that I can only hope that they are trying to be a parody of themselves.

<comment><USER4> The real oppression is terrorist attacks that leave people in fear of their safety.

Not oppression: arresting some radicalised extremist for preparing themselves with terrorist training manuals and suchlike.

<comment><USER5> I find it a little strange that people don't look into the reasons why terrorism exist. Wouldn't it be more efficient in trying to stamp out the root causes of terrorism?

People don't just wake up one morning and go, "Ah. Such a beautiful morning. I think I'll start terrorising people today."

Do they?

<comment><USER6> Its far harder for western societies to contend with the fact that they are creating the terrorist threat by their own actions, than it is to just "blame religion" for the problem.

But the truth of the matter is, we are creating the conditions for terrorists, every single day - by delivering our own form of terror: the (Imperial) Coalition forces currently demolishing Syria/Iraq/Afghanistan/Yemen are, indeed, terrorising entire populations in the rush to be the most efficient war-fighting machines on the planet.

If you want to stop terrorism, its quite simple: stop letting your governments get away with murder. The way they do it, is couch everything in secrecy, while we the citizens decide that ignorance of the war our societies are waging is worth the luxury and decadence those wars provide.

POP QUIZ: do you know how many people the state killed, in your name, today? Yesterday? Last week? Until you start paying attention to this statistic, citizen, you cannot cry when the terror comes home to roost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I hope this will efficiently solve the problem the same way problem of hard drugs has been solved for decades!

<comment><USER8> I've been involved peripherally in working with anti-radicalisation programmes in UK schools. I imagine that the issue that authorities are bumping up against are the situations, where you _know_ someone has been radicalised, but there is nothing effectively you can do because no law has been broken until there's evidence that they start assembling the components for the bomb or whatever.

This is a hard problem and leads to all those 'the bomber was described as being on the intelligence services radar' lines in news stories.

The benevolent reading of these kinds of moves is that it at least gives the authorities to intervene, though I recognise the risks to liberty.

<comment><USER9> Then they should create a program where specific individuals can placed on a deradicalization program and be banned from extremist material. And then make it a crime to view the material while you are on that program.

<comment><USER10> In a democratic society, you generally can't put adults in "programs" without their consent, _unless_ they already committed a crime.

<comment><USER11> > you generally can't put adults in "programs" without their consent, unless > they already committed a crime.

Sure you can - there's plenty of precedent for e.g. sectioning people into mental hospitals for their own safety or removing people's driving licenses when they might be a danger (without committing a crime - bad eyesight, bad motor control, drug regimen, etc.)

<comment><USER10> A driving license is a privilege that comes with rules, taking it away is not the same as imposing unilateral restrictions.

Sending people to mental hospitals is a fair example, but that's why I wrote "generally", acknowledging the existence of exceptions. In that case, it's accepted that consent is an oxymoron, which doesn't really apply here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is the same minister who was talking about the "necessary hashtags" a few months ago. She's certainly not a _digital native_, or indeed even competent.

> Speaking about preventing the upload of objectionable content, Home > Secretary Amber Rudd said the government needs to get people who "understand > the necessary hashtags" talking.

> That was of course in addition to Rudd's widely criticised remarks that > encryption has no place in citizens' hands, in the wake of revelations that > Westminster attacker Khalid Masood was using WhatsApp shortly before > murdering pedestrians with his car.

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/03/uk_home_secretary_a...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/03/uk_home_secretary_amber_rudd_hashing_not_hashtags/)

</comment><comment><USER13> Does that mean it will be clearly labelled ?

Will I be able to check my remaining allocation at far-right- views.direct.gov.uk ?

They labelled Le Penn and AFD as "far right extremists", can I only read their websites so many times ?

Is Islamofacism far-right ?

Can Jews be far-right ?

<comment><USER14> Can the Conservative Party of the UK be far right? Many would say that at times they are, and around now is one of those times.

I'm not just talking about this proposal, there's a long list of things from Theresa May's "Racist van" initiative through to her "citizen of nowhere" comment.

<comment><USER15> The Conservative Party in the UK introduced introduced gay marriage and support the NHS, they're definitely not "far right".

<comment><USER14> Gay marriage: David Cameron introduced that, but more Conservative MPs voted against it than voted for it. It passed because of 90% of the Labour MPs supporting it

here are the numbers: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_(Same_Sex_Couples)_Ac...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_\(Same_Sex_Couples\)_Act_2013#First_Reading)

And if I'm specifically talking about Theresa May's tenure, then that's after David Cameron's leadership.

"support the NHS" is a much vaguer statement, but I don't think that's entirely true either, see e.g.

[https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=doctors+fight+jeremy+hunt](https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=doctors+fight+jeremy+hunt) [https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=nhs+privatisation+virgin+c...](https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=nhs+privatisation+virgin+care) [https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=winter+hospital+crisis](https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=winter+hospital+crisis)

My opinion is that the Conservative party currently does not "support" the NHS, but would not dare move openly against it, that would cost far to many votes. Rather they follow, the model of "defund, induce crisis, introduce a privatised solution"

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/06/27/government- delibe...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/06/27/government-deliberately- creating-health-crisis-privatise-nhs/)

[http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/nhs-deficit- cr...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/nhs-deficit-crisis-one- chart-that-shows-how-the-nhs-is-headed-for-financial-ruin-a6687926.html)

[https://nhsreality.wordpress.com/2015/12/03/thats-the- standa...](https://nhsreality.wordpress.com/2015/12/03/thats-the-standard- technique-of-privatization-defund-make-sure-things-dont-work-people-get-angry- you-hand-it-over-to-private-capital/)

<comment><USER15> >>> Gay marriage: David Cameron introduced that, but more Conservative MPs voted against it than voted for it. It passed because of 90% of the Labour MPs supporting it

And how does that contradict anything I said? Did Labour, with all that aparent gay marriage support, actually do it? No, they didn't.

>>> Conservative party currently does not "support" the NHS, but would not dare move openly against it, that would cost far to many votes.

That's like complaining companies only do things "for money". Well _of course_ they do what the people want, that's what they're there for.

>>> Rather they follow, the model of "defund, induce crisis, introduce a privatised solution"

I would believe it if the NHS actually got less funds year over year. But they don't.

<comment><USER14> > And how does that contradict anything I said?

But has the conservative party moved to the right after Cameron resigned? Cameron formed a coalition with a centrist Party (LibDems), but May courted the voters of one extreme right-wing party (UKIP) quite successfully and formed an alliance with another (DUP).

And May's instincts, as pointed out in her actions above, are nowhere near as liberal as Cameron's.

<comment><USER15> >>> But has the conservative party moved to the right after Cameron resigned?

Yeah probably, I don't know. But I'm not gonna trivialise what far right means.

>>> May courted the voters of one extreme right-wing party (UKIP) quite successfully.

By being anti-Brexit? How exactly did she court UKIP voters?

Labour gained more seats than the Conservatives lost, it's quite clear where UKIP voters went.

You, as well as the polls, assumed UKIP voters are all right wing. You're wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Where do you even start. Firstly, this is just a law Amber Rudd wants to make, it's not anywhere _close_ to being made into actual law, it's very unlikely it will be. It's probably more a bit of signalling/posturing by Amber Rudd to appear as the "Tough on extremists" candidate in the forthcoming Tory leadership (and hence Prime Ministerial) election.

Secondly, even if this law was passed, it would never be actively used against the public. It would be used to throw more charges at people they have arrested already, or to have some charges to throw at people who they have arrested but can't charge. It's a handy catch-all (along with vague bans on pornography) that criminalises many normal people who have internet-connected devices. It means they can haul you over at Heathrow, search your device and say "Ah! You've looked at this naughty thing! Too bad!", for example - <USER2> the state an easy way to reject people they don't like much more easily.

A lot of this approach stems from Theresa May herself, who spent many years as Home Secretary struggling to deport Anjem Choudary.

<comment><USER17> > it would never be actively used against the public.

> or to have some charges to throw at people who they have arrested but can't > charge.

I don't understand who else it would be used against?

<comment><USER16> Sorry for not being clearer, I'm trying to distinguish between active and passive use of the law. Active implying trying to track down those who are breaking it vs. passive implying using it against those who have been reprimanded already.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> How do you know it's extremist until you've read it?

<comment><USER3> Exactly, a very good point. You could make websites that start out with:

"Once upon a time there was a girl who always wore a red riding hood...grand ma was sick... wolf... 'We should just have a big genocide' screamed grandma as she pointed her right arm in the air."

<comment><USER19> ah man! :) you just made HN an extremist propaganda website

(but yes exactly what you write, plus, its quite an extremist measure to say you can't read something of other extremists)

<comment><USER3> I find that to be a bit extreme. Better not read it anyone ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Welcome to 1984. Really ironic that is happening in Britain (not that its not happening elsewhere).

<comment><USER21> I would argue that it is not happening in EU.

<comment><USER22> It's happening here in France. A report in the free commuter newspaper in Lyon this morning recounted the arrest of a guy who had watched videos of decapitations (I presume ISIS-produced). Perhaps he downloaded the video, but likely he just viewed it online.

<comment><USER3> People often say 'downloading' and 'viewing online' are the same because technologically there isn't much to differentiate the two. We could start saying 'he saved the files on his computer' vs 'watched it online'. That way the difference in intent is more clear. Saving the files on your harddisk so you can look at them later and building up a collection of ISIS videos should be considered different from looking at the same videos online.

<comment><USER23> I don't understand, what's the difference in intent?

Do you think it should be illegal to save a collection of isis videos?

<comment><USER3> No. I am just saying there is a difference that is often ignored in order to make people seem more guilty or untrustworthy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Can we not just make a worm that does this thereby rendering everyone guilty? Better: target devices in Westminster exclusively so their own names turn up on the list.

I personally like how they've attempted to distinguish downloading and reading as if when you browse to a website it doesn't download the HTML and store it in a temp cache on your local disk. This suggests that today the difference between innocent and guilty is the directory path of an illicit file. :D

<comment><USER25> Downloading is saving something that's online for later offline use. I think that's pretty easy to tell apart from reading something online?

<comment><USER24> the temp cache still exists offline. This means that if I wanted to store "illicit" files I'd just store them in my temp cache under a plausibly temp- cachy sounding file name. Effectively the crime is distinguished by the directory path. In both cases the effect on your machine is identical. It loads the content to disk, then into memory and then displays it in your viewer/browser.

<comment><USER25> What I was trying to say was that the intention and the reason for the action that make a difference.

<comment><USER24> and what I was trying to say is that the intention and reason are derived from merely the directory path of a file.

<comment><USER25> Okay. So what's wrong with that? It's like saying the difference between protected and unprotected speech can be the location of the speech in question. Yeah, it very much can be. What's wrong with that?

<comment><USER26> Because path of the file is not determined by the user in all cases. This means the prosecutor will have to prove that the user deliberately stored it for later consumption.

For example, if a web browser has a semi-permanent cache by default for all pdf files, and the browser downloads a pdf to this cache, it's not possible to determine if the user "downloaded" it (ie. deliberately, to access later or repeatedly) or "streamed" it (ie. accidentally accessed it and closed it after viewing the content)

The fundamental issue is that politicians and the general public do not understand how software works. Many applications access and store data by default which the user has not implicitly asked them to do. If the law is determined so broadly, it can put any user with an application that accesses content without somehow validating that it is legal (how you do that without accessing it I do not know) into a grey area which the state can choose to exploit/prosecute with if needed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> far-right but not far-left, and the left will decide how far right you are.

also will certain passages or holy books be deemed extremists or not.

what of movies that they don't like, will those be banned?

<comment><USER28> > far-right but not far-left

This often comes up in these discussions. You need to realise that the far- right spawns much more violence (against individuals; against groups; against the state) than the far left.

In the UK we recently saw an MP being murdered by a far right extremist; we've seen an increase in racially motivated violence against Muslims and Jews; we've seen small but violent demonstrations by far right organisations.

This kind of stuff just isn't happening from the far left.

<comment><USER29> > You need to realise that the far-right spawns much more violence (against > individuals; against groups; against the state) than the far left.

In the UK perhaps.

The most recent attempt on a US Congressman's life:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Congressional_baseball_sh...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Congressional_baseball_shooting#Perpetrator)

On May 22, 2017, Hodgkinson wrote "Trump is a Traitor. Trump Has Destroyed Our Democracy. It's Time to Destroy Trump & Co." above his repost of a Change.org petition demanding "the legal removal" of Trump and Vice President Mike Pence for "treason". He belonged to numerous politically-oriented Facebook groups, including those named "Terminate the Republican Party," "The Road To Hell Is Paved With Republicans," and "Donald Trump is not my President."

When the media normalizes that "punching Nazis" is A-OK, this violence from very unhinged, disturbed individuals is the result.

<comment><USER28> Ignoring for the moment this article is about a UK politician wanting to make changes to UK law - you might want to look at THE FBI lists. They haven't featured left wing groups since the 70s. They still regularly feature extreme right wing groups.

Most "lone wolf" mass shooters are on the far right; we've seen far right activists shooting into crowds of demonstrators, or driving vehicles into crowds of demonstrators.

For all the talk of "punching Nazis" it's not the left wing who are perpetrating violence in the US.

<comment><USER29> > They haven't featured left wing groups since the 70s.

The Times They Are A-changin':

[http://www.politico.com/story/2017/09/01/antifa- charlottesvi...](http://www.politico.com/story/2017/09/01/antifa- charlottesville-violence-fbi-242235)

> Most "lone wolf" mass shooters are on the far right;

The former deadliest shooter, Omar Mateen was a registered Democrat.

> it's not the left wing who are perpetrating violence in the US.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/10/01/...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/10/01/dont- criticize-black-lives-matter-for-provoking-violence-the-civil-rights-movement- did-too/?utm_term=.979c1cb5e9ae)

Is BLM a right-wing group? What's more astonishing here is that the media is A-OK with left-wing violence. They try to portray them as some kind of freedom fighters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> "The law would move from criminalizing the downloading of information to simply reading it."

I cannot find the sources of that statement. Which law? Where is the text?

<comment><USER31> There's no text, it's just a Conservative party conference speech. It may not even happen given that the legislative timetable ought to be full of Brexit- related material.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I don't much get the point - you 're making sure that journalists and ordinary people cannot use this material to extract information and in general find ways to deal with this plague. If anything you should find the people who read this material and send them to school.

<comment><USER33> _you 're making sure that journalists and ordinary people cannot use this material to extract information and in general find ways to deal with this plague._

According to the official statement they're still going to allow a "reasonable excuse" defense for journalists, academics and others who can convince the courts that they're nice people really.

</comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady Amber Rudd also said this week that techies were 'patronising' and she doesn't need to understand encryption. She wants them to give her access to terrorist messages on WhatsApp etc. - but she's not asking for a backdoor.

</comment><comment><USER34>
        > Britain has long relied on the
        > presumed benevolence of the
        > government

Yes. That's what parliamentary sovereignty actually _means_. We don't have an actual constitution. In fairness, we've been at it for 90 years longer than the US has had a constitution, and so far it works.

Most of the worst excesses of US politics seem to go back to deep mistrust of government and people taking about their "rights".

<comment><USER35> >Most of the worst excesses of US politics seem to go back to deep mistrust of government and people taking about their "rights".

And what would those be?

<comment><USER36> Presumably something to do with heavy resistance to even very watered-down gun-control laws.

<comment><USER35> Every month goes by and the hood in Chicago kills more people than died in Las Vegas, and no one says anything about gun control. Probably because most of the people in the hood already have illegal guns.

Anyways it is very rare to die by illegitimate gunfire (not from the state). You are more likely to die in falls, slips, choking, drowning, cars, motorcycles... The list is never ending.

In the West we are conditioned to be terrified of guns and terrorists, but it is incredibly rare to die of either, especially if you stay out the hood.

Why not campaign against something that kills more people but which doesn't serve an arguably necessary purpose? Why try to jump for one of the highest and most questionable fruits on the tree?

Tyrants always will seek to consolidate power. If your intention is altruism, try to save lives by an easier means.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> this article is wrong. reading extremist material is already illegal in the UK.

the changes are to increase the sentence for repeated visits to 15 years.

since reading extremist material is already illegal the article could point to all the miscarriages of justice caused by people convicted for mere possession of a chemistry textbook or for journalistic research into terrorist organisations.

</comment><comment><USER14> If you can be arrested and imprisoned for what appears in your browser, this is going to take rickrolling to a whole new level.

Also since this would be inspected from the ISP's end of the pipe, it's easy to simulate the network traffic of a lot of page views without the user ever seeing anything. See also "curl".

<comment><USER37> The dawn of a new type of troll?

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I was concerned by the lack of technical expertise in the home office when Theresa May was Home Sec. Now with Amber Rudd I am terrified. Here is a person who admits she doesn't understand that which she is attempting to regulate, and doesn't care either

</comment><comment><USER38> Britain has frequently been regressive when it comes to freedoms. It's the classic nanny state and both the parties play into it. Labour want welfare to help people into work. Conservatives want to ban everything nasty to make people nice.

But while censorship in the UK is nothing new, I feel like we're entering grand new era where I can send you a few links to extremist material, an encrypted USB stick without keys and you disappear into a black hole. Forever.

If that —or even the heightened fear of that— isn't terrorism, I don't know what is. I certainly feel more threatened by accidentally breaking a law than terrorists where I am.

</comment><comment><USER39> Amber Rudd is a lightweight. She almost lost her seat at the snap general election - she's deluded if she thinks the CCHQ would let her become the PM whilst in her "unsafe seat".

</comment><comment><USER40> This is just ridiculous. Where do you draw the line? Today is religion, tomorrow maybe a technical paper on hacking or whatever.

We need to discuss this as a society, not hiding it.

</comment><comment><USER41> It's an unpopular view but I think this is a good start.

Why? Violence is supported and enabled by the narratives people use to justify it. Some element of policing & countering the narrative is going to control ideas that embolden people to commit crimes or to harm others.

It's really no different than saying the way we talk about women, or PoC, or gender, or sex helps constructs the reality of how we behave. A lot of people are already shouldering the burden of trying to police and counter how other people speak and think, but they are often not backed up by legislation in doing so.

Trying to stamp out the wrong ways people talk and think about other people is part of making a society that is more free and just.

I think actually in this case 1984 has the unfortunate chilling effect of making it so easy to equate any sort of control with dire, evil and illogical totalitarian government. It's the sort of "short circuited" thinking that i think impedes people actually thinking clearly or deeply or even at all about these things. In that sense, having neat metaphors from literature to reach for actually harms the public discourse, because it is silenced before it can start.

We do need to be talking about these things, and looking at them, not stereotyping and simplifying them, so I think a proposed piece of legislation is a good start and a sign that people are waking up to the importance of the stories we tell each other about who we are, and what's okay, in shaping and normalizing the culture and society we have.

<comment><USER42> The best, less biased and least slippery slopey way to do this would be to provide _more_ information, not _less_. If people are in a position to justify violence through something they read online, they also need to learn the opposite side and why that something they read might be wrong.

Of course this assumes things happen in a vacuum, but in reality people don't really justify violence by reading a thing as much as they confirm and reinforce pre-existing ideas they have. In which case all you've managed to do is to give power to already too powerful people (government) for silencing thoughts they disagree with.

Also FWIW i disagree with the notion that trying to restrict the ways people talk and think has anything to do with freedom. And consider that your thoughts about 1984 might also be your inability to see yourself being wrong (i mean if you cannot consider yourself being wrong in this case and since what you consider a good solution is shown as a bad one in 1984, then you consider 1984 to be bad instead of your solution).

<comment><USER41> I think theoretically _more_ not _less_ sounds technically correct, the problem is we seem to already been enveloped in too much information. So there has to be some filtering, and filtering is basically editorializing, so who decides?

I don't know if I'm right. And I don't know if I'm advancing even a coherent idea about this.

I think in reality people do justify violence by the narratives they are exposed to. I think they see other people justifying hate and violence with these narratives, and they think to do it as well. I think narrative can give a concrete form to a pre-existing hate, frustration, anger or disatisfaction, and narrate a villain responsible for that feeling. These narratives inform and shape a person's worldview and their notions of who or what is responsible for how they feel and things they see happening. Narrative is an incredibly powerful way to guide people's actions.

Observe this: your narrative about the weakness of narrative in determining action, guides us to believe we ought not regulate narrative. You're shaping reality using the very tool you are saying cannot be used to shape it!

Double-think extraordinaire! No offence to you, just trying to (en)lighten this up.

<comment><USER31> > I think in reality people do justify violence by the narratives they are > exposed to. I think they see other people justifying hate and violence with > these narratives

This is true, but the question is then Plato's: who guards the narrative guards? What narratives do they tell themselves in their righteousness? Pretty much everyone ends up with a narrative about how they're doing X for the good of society, even the Nazis.

<comment><USER41> It's a very good question.

As to a condition required for this to operate safely, I think it depends on having a clear set of morals and values in society that we agree on. The West has lost that after the boom post WWII. Maybe it will find its way back, and "moral authority" will be something people mostly agree on again. I think the way we get there is by debate, so we need to be able to openly talk about and criticise a whole range of ideas, nothing should be off the table during the debating phase.

As to the operation of it with supervision, hopefully, for those of us in democracies, it operates in the same way that our democracies operate, where the guards of the people are guarded by the people. At least, that's the idea, right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I can't wait for them to start defining what extremist material is.

<comment><USER44> Don't wanna point any fingers but that sounded a little bit extremist to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Where is the actual text of the law? Link or it didn't happen.

<comment><USER46> It's a conservative party speech, so it's not law yet. But the censorvatives can pretty much push through any law they want at this point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If someone is repeating watching beheading videos, engaging in terrorism forums, reading bomb-making instructions, and other such material, then I would rather prefer the police and the justice system to get involved. Better that than another terrorist attack that could have been stopped.

It saddens me that a rational move to prevent terrorism in its formative stages leads to such a knee-jerk negative reaction, with commenters ranting about "1984" and "infringing our civil liberties" and "leftist censorship" and other such overreacting nonsense.

<comment><USER47> What counts as bomb-making instructions? You could probably acquire enough knowledge from chemistry books (stocked in every good government library) and common sense (please correct me if I am wrong).

<comment><USER4> Unless the chemistry book has a chapter titled "how to make a bomb to kill lots of people" with full instructions on how to assemble and detonate one using readily sourced materials, then I'm sure such books will be entirely unaffected by police investigations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> How would you enforce something like prohibiting reading content online? You just watch what everyone's reading all time

<comment><USER46> In the UK, your internet browsing history is stored by your ISP for one year.

<comment><USER49> Except if they invest a whole $0 in a letsencrypt cert or any service with one.... or have they persuaded the services to allow them to MITM their own citizens?

<comment><USER46> What? Why would HTTPS prevent logging. Do you mean a VPN?

<comment><USER49> Https encrypts the path and headers. How would they know which site you're on? I doubt they're going to RadicalBombPlans.com.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Next thing to criminalize is thinking "extremist" thoughts. All for the benefit of her majesty's subjects, of course.

</comment><comment><USER51> Burn the books too! :D

</comment><comment><USER52> I wish we had a constition in this country; if a Donald Trump ever got in here he would have literally limitless power to lock up journalist or anyone he didn't like really.

<comment><USER34> You deeply misunderstand how the parliamentary system works.

The PM does not have that power, but yes, parliament does (modulo EU Human Rights), and that's considered a feature not a bug.

<comment><USER31> Considered by whom? The British constitution _functions_ , yes, but not very well. It's a huge legacy mess of patch sets and emergency bug fixes.

<comment><USER34>
        > Considered by whom?

... the people who put it in place 300 years ago?

<comment><USER31> Isn't it more relevant what people alive today consider?

<comment><USER34> In determining if the system is a good one or not, yes.

But in determining if it's working how the creators wanted it to, and hence whether it's a feature or bug? No.

<comment><USER31> The intent of the original creators was, among other things, vehement anti- Catholicism. That's what the line "That the Subjects which are Protestants may have Arms for their Defence suitable to their Conditions and as allowed by Law." is doing in the original text.

Sectarianism: bug or feature?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Meanwhile we are lobbying for net neutrality legislation which gives out own government (famous for freedoms like the patriot act) additional power over ISPs by reclassifying them as common carriers.

Do you really want your government deciding what is and is not neutral content delivery? No one sees any way in which it can go wrong?

<comment><USER54> Do you mean legislation abolishing net neutrality? Because AFAIA the point of net neutrality is that only the delivery of _all_ content is neutral. (Note that it's not the content that's supposed to be neutral, whatever that would mean, but the delivery.)

<comment><USER53> How are people so niave as to not understand that such a broad concept like "neutrality" can easily be abused? Legislation is slow to change and adapt as is, you want to give government further power to apply law to an industry which has already been captured? Never mind the quickness with which tech like the internet changes.

I feel like I'm the only sane person on HN. How are people so oblivious to the downsides of broad, sweeping regulation?

<comment><USER54> It sounds like you mean that people can redefine the word neutral to suit their use case? Because "net neutrality" is pretty well defined, and basically means "nobody should have the power to interfere with our communications". The government already has the power to apply law - what we're supposed to care about is what law they're applying, and whether those are good laws.

I think the reason people are "oblivious" is basically because they're __also __(i.e. not __only __) aware of the downside of the absence of regulation, and feel that those downsides outweigh those of regulation.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address - <AUTHOR> http://vidinterest.com/video/4594/drawing-from-some-of-the-most-pivotal-points-in-his-life-ste Drawing from some of the most pivotal points in his life, Steve Jobs, chief executive officer and co-founder of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, urged graduates to pursue their dreams and see the opportunities in life <comment><USER2> Most inspiring speech ever !!</comment>


Iter - 100+ Go implementation of C++ STL iterators and algorithms - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/disksing/iter <comment><USER2> This is just amazing. Thank you for sharing this project!

</comment><comment><USER3> thank you for your work.</comment>


Dear Every Site That Paginates Articles - <AUTHOR> http://www.marco.org/237630497

<comment><USER2> Well, not _all_ pagination is bad. On very long articles (like the Ars review of Snow Leopard[1]) the pagination is actually useful. It's the exception to the rule, granted.

[1] [http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac- os-x-10-6.a...](http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac- os-x-10-6.ars)

<comment><USER3> Great point. Pagination in harmony with the content (splitting across sections or chapters of a longer article) is valuable to a user. It's easier to bookmark or remember I was on page 4 of that Ars Technica review, or to send a specific URL of a relevant page in a long-form article to a friend.

The problem is with arbitrarily introduced page breaks, where it is doing a disservice to the user in favor of inflating page views.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This was an annoyance for me, until I started using AutoPager.

If you use Firefox, I highly recommend it: <https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/4925>

<comment><USER5> How does AutoPager work with sites (such as certain hardware review ones) which paginate content above the fold? I.e. how can it tell when I've finished reading and need to page?

<comment><USER6> AutoPager does an optimistic pre-fetch of extra content, meaning that while you're reading page 1, it's loading page 2; once you hit page 2 content, it begins fetching page 3, etc. It's likely a bit more complex than that, but ideally, with AutoPager in effect, you shouldn't ever realize you stopped reading page 1. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This has been said before, but bears repeating. I like reading articles on Google News more than on most "non-aggregator" news sites just because Google News makes the news readable. What a lot of content creators don't seem to understand is, I don't care where the content comes from if it's a pain to read it.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'd agree that artificially inflating page views is the primary reason for this practice, but I do wonder if any other things contribute. For example, I believe there is an antiquated and probably flawed notion out there that readers dislike really long pages, so they like their content broken up. Does anyone think something like that has anything do with it as well?

<comment><USER9> I don't see how this is "artificial." If you read a two page article, then you viewed two pages. And if the design is so hideous that you don't click to view the second page, well then the number of page views isn't inflated at all.

<comment><USER10> The page view isn't "artificial" the need to have a second page (as opposed to one long page) is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _...only a tiny percentage of viewers will actually read page two..._

Actually, quite a large percentage of my readers click to page two. If only a tiny number of your readers are bothering to click a link to get the rest of your content, perhaps your content isn't very good.

<comment><USER11> This makes me wonder: Is it possible that some sites paginate their articles not just to increase ad views, but so that they can measure how much of the articles are being read?

<comment><USER12> With tracking software that I've used (omniture site catalyst) you can track the average length of time on spent page, which gives you a really good idea if the article is being read through or not, without pagination

<comment><USER13> Given the vast differences in reading speeds though there's no way to be sure that someone read all the way through a page if it's one page and they spent half an hour there - they might have been looking out the window. Whilst if they clicked through 1-2-3-4 then you can be pretty sure they at least skimmed each page.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> They're doing it to increase adviews.

Why not just put more ads on each page? At the point where the page would get split, just put an ad.

<comment><USER10> "At the point where the page would get split, just put an ad."

Most pages have more then one ad (header, sidebar etc) so its not as simple as that.

Also, like it or not, page views are the unofficial "Nielsens" for websites, the more page views the more popular you are when you're pitching your ad offering.

<comment><USER15> Is that still true? I think advertisers everywhere are realising that page views are a pretty worthless measure. Just my own narrow perspective: I have been reading all the major ad business magazines in Germany lately, and there, everybody seems to be eager to ditch page views in favour of length of stay, visits, unique users and the like. Everybody feels betrayed by everybody's use of page views.

<comment><USER10> There's argument whether its the best way to do it but CPM is still the standard for selling ad space and that's based on page views.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I really liked the zoomed out screenshot of the demo website. When you look at it like that it is amazing to see just how little "content" there is and just how much sidebar and advertising there is.

<comment><USER17> See also, Merlin Mann's "Noise-to-Noise Ratio" series:

[http://www.flickr.com/photos/merlin/sets/72157622077100537/d...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/merlin/sets/72157622077100537/detail/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have always wondered how they can charge per page view for ads yet the advertisers be OK with this practice. Apparently they just turn a deaf ear to this problem and the consumer/reader suffers. You'd think they'd realize that if the person didn't click the ad the first time, they're likely not going to click it on the next page.

<comment><USER9> Well, it's still two impressions. And if the second page has different ads then you have a new chance to click on one.

Also, some advertisers are interested in brand awareness; they don't care much about whether you click, they just want you to see their logo as many times as possible.

And look at it this way: if you have a long page of content, your ad is gone once the user scrolls down. If you have several short screens, your ad stays in view much longer.

</comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 _I know you're double-charging your advertisers for the same story by artificially inflating your pageview count. It's just like the old auto-frame- refresh trick, but this one's better because most of the ad networks haven't banned it yet._

So I don't have any direct experience with this, and I'm not an advertiser, but I would think that advertisers would be happy with this, no?

It's a chance to get more ads in front of the viewer (of the same content).

Frame auto-refreshing sounds like an out-and-out way to cheat the advertisers, but this is really just increasing the ad to content ratio in a way that isn't always directly obvious to the end viewer (and is not as nasty as covering 95% of the screen in ads).

Do advertisers actually dislike this practice?

</comment><comment><USER19> Pagination breaks my articles in Instapaper, making it even more horrible: start reading an article on the train only to realize there's no page 2.

<comment><USER20> Fortunately most sites have a "print" view of their articles that puts it all in a single page that works fine with InstaPaper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It doesn't bother me at all unless each page is < 500 words or something. A giant slab of text turns me off.. too long to read, etc. Cut into bite size portions of a minute or two each, it seems more readable, even if it's really more annoying.

</comment><comment><USER22> A one-size-fits all design philosophy generally fails...

 _But it doesn't really work as well as you had hoped because only a tiny percentage of viewers will actually read page two._

Uh, perhaps only the same tiny-or-not percentage who go to page two will page down to the bottom of a long one page article. But breaking up the page, you can tell who's seeing what.

Real print magazines would make things more straight forward if they broke up their articles but the approach is pretty well established by now.

 _Once_ you yave content the people want, they will work to get it and you've got an incentive to monetize that search. That might not be every site but it's certainly some sites. Everyone's asking how you monetize content that is better than some minimal effort. Multiple pages is one idea...

<comment><USER23> On the internet very little content is really worth working to get. If it's too annoying to read it, there's always other pages available. And if it is worth working to get, I, at least, am not likely to be paying much attention to the ads around it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> You have no room to be picky about pagination if your URLs look like that.

<comment><USER25> Somehow that makes sense... oh wait, no.

Also, why does the URL need to be human-readable? URLs are for computers. The content is for the human.

<comment><USER26> _Also, why does the URL need to be human-readable? URLs are for computers. The content is for the human._

Disagreed. I can't stand sites with ugly, incomprehensible URLs: even if they're just appending parameters ad infinitum, it's unnecessary drag on the process of editing, sharing, and typing the URL. E.g., something like

      http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Books/b/ref=sa_menu_kbo0/187-1539918-5044028?_enc
      oding=UTF8&node=1286228011&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=left-nav-1&pf_rd_r=05
      F7VG5R8T4MBDH7QQ6N&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=328655101&pf_rd_i=507846

is, near as I can tell, mostly equivalent to

      http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Books/b/ref=sa_menu_kbo0/187-1539918-5044028?node
      =1286228011

and could probably be made even simpler. Of course sites need to carry some amount of incomprehensible information (YouTube's video IDs, reddit's story IDs, marco.org's blog post numbers, etc.), but shoving as much as you can into the URL isn't the way to do it. I type specific URLs like en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic and news.ycombinator.com/newest all the time. If the site author neglects to even have this sort of basic functionality, I tend to consider it a bad interface.

<comment><USER27> The context of a hyperlink is meaningful, but the text of the corresponding URL is of little relevance.

'Clean' URLs tend to be a REST anti-pattern, as they are tied up with the notion that the ability to edit an known URL to refer to a different resource constitutes an API, much less a REST-ful one. _HATEOAS Motherfuckers!_

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Dear Every Blogger Whose Post Title Starts with the Word "Dear":

Find a new linkbait gimmick. This one's played out.</comment>


Clash of the Titans: Telegram vs. WhatsApp vs. Utopia - <AUTHOR> https://utopia.fans/tools/clash-of-the-titans-telegram-vs-whatsapp-vs-utopia/ <comment><AUTHOR> At least a good comparison to choose the best messenger

<comment><USER2> >Clash of the Titans: Telegram vs. WhatsApp vs. er... 'one nobody's ever heard of'. Strange definition of a 'Titan' there.

And a comparison of 3 messenger apps on a domain "utopia.fans". Hmmm... I wonder which one they'll end up recommending?</comment></comment>


Ember.js 1.0 RC4 released - <AUTHOR> http://emberjs.com/blog/2013/05/28/ember-1-0-rc4.html

<comment><USER2> Can anyone who has tried Ember and Angular on moderately sized apps (500-1k+ LOC) compare their experiences?

I'm using Angular, I love how little code I have to write to make testable apps with their two-way binding, and dependency injection. I went from 0 to Todo App in about an hour after I started to learn Angular. Should I give Ember a try?

<comment><USER3> Ember is a lot harder to go from 0 to Todo App in an hour. There's a fairly steep learning curve, but once you've grokked the "Ember Way", building more complex apps is significantly easier.

With Angular, you can build a Todo App in no time, but building anything more complex requires you to understand e.g. Services, Directives, and Transclusion.

With Ember, you are just learning about Models, Views, & Controllers -- it doesn't get significantly more complex than that initial learning curve.

<comment><USER4> Learning directives, services, and the scary sounding "transclusion" has not been an issue at all for my team and I who are using angular on a very large project and loving it. Directives are quite simple once you understand the basic principles. Transclusion when actually explained (<http://www.egghead.io/video/cjrBTjMvruI>) is a trivial and obvious concept. I understand the confusion one may have around services/factories/providers because they are all very similar and in some ways little more than syntactic sugar for a single API, but once their differences are sorted out as in this blog post ([http://iffycan.blogspot.com/2013/05/angular-service-or- facto...](http://iffycan.blogspot.com/2013/05/angular-service-or- factory.html)) they too become very natural.

<comment><USER5> For me it wasn't learning the terms, I didn't have an issue there. The problem was how limited Angular was in comparison to Ember, particularly the idea of directives. I actually spent a large amount of time on freenode discussing in the Angular chatroom how I might construct a directive to replicate a common jQuery plugin like Zurb's Joyride. In short it couldn't be done in anyway that seemed remotely non-hackish.

Ember has jQuery included, so using existing plugins is generally easy or at least possible. Beyond that, it has a far more powerful router (try doing deep routing with Angular. Angular UI's router may be changing this, but you would still have to include outside code to get the power of the standard Ember router) and in the future much more powerful REST support with Ember-Data (currently volatile, but still very powerful).

I started building a large application with Angular using FuelPHP for the REST server. Angular simply didn't have the power to do the things I needed it to at that time. Hopefully that's changing, since it seems to be the dominant framework these days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm happy to see RC4. Ember has really come a long way since I started using it. Ember itself has really stabilized. I'm really looking forward to 1.0.

There is one more thing I'd really like to see before hitting 1. <https://github.com/tildeio/router.js/pull/19> is probably the most important thing happening right now. 1.0 will not be there until these problems are addressed. I hope to see the PR make it to 1.0.

<comment><USER7> Agree. The router needs a little more power and then 1.0 will be pretty sweet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Scary breaking change though. Something that was called automatically before isn't anymore. I personally would have opted for a safer alternative to implement this breaking change. I guess it's a little detail in the _grand scheme of ember thing_ , but for the poor developers who will have RC4 on prod, there could be some very sneaky bugs.

That being said, happy to see ember getting closer to 1.0 Final, it's a beautifully designed framework.

</comment><comment><USER9> For those wanting to give it a quick try, you can easily fool around with a simplistic Ember.js app on Plunker: <http://plnkr.co/edit/gist:5206526?p=preview>

I would love to see more of the Ember community on Plunker!</comment>