Not to a moderator; to a YC partner. Moderators' Hacker News looks different, and you're going to have to wait till one of us leaks another screenshot to see it.
I feel like since it was we who slipped up, fair game rules say we owe you guys an explanation of what those bells and whistles do (warning: you may find it disappointingly mundane), so I'll come back and post some more in this thread later. By coincidence, however, I was out all day, so had better catch up with anything important first.
Edit: Ok, I think I've answered all the questions about details. But let me add the most important point here.
The interface that you see in that screenshot is not actually used by anyone [1]. Those links are there for legacy reasons. Their principal role at present is to lure YC partners into accidentally fat-fingering things. (Don't worry; that doesn't happen often, and we see it in the logs and correct it.) They don't exist in the YC-partner version of Kevin's new HN markup, so they won't be around much longer.
1. The only exception I can think of is that Trevor occasionally helps out with moderation.
I don't know if it's all YC founders or all YC employees, but at least at one point it was public knowledge (as in, Paul Graham repeatedly posted about it) that everyone in YC had an orange username.
It was at least leaked 1 year ago by Techcrunch[1,2]. The search string is: "If you are a YC founder, your username will show up in orange to other YC"[3]
Definitely all founders, and definitely some employees who aren't also founders, but I'm not sure if all employees have it. They may; there aren't that many.
Although I'm guessing that was facetious, it's actually a variant of the truth: it's there to foster the YC network. PG added it years ago when he realized that the number of YC founders had gotten too large for them to know who each other were.
> Wouldn't that have the same effect as a voting ring?
Perhaps, but those votes are caught by the ring detector the same as others, and the same penalties are applied.
It may interest you to know that when PG added the orange name thing, he also added a page showing stories submitted by YC founders. That really did have the same effect as a voting ring—which wasn't the intent, so he got rid of it. (This has also been discussed on HN in the past, btw.)
> One wonders what the difference in behaviors these have is?
"Kill" makes an item be "[dead]", i.e. hidden from users who don't have the "showdead" setting turned on in their profile. A typical case is killing duplicate posts when they don't have an ongoing discussion. "Blast" is like "kill", but also bans the user. A typical case is banning trolls. "Nuke" is like "blast", but also bans the site. That is for spammers.
Oddly enough, no one asked about the most important by far of all these links, perhaps because it also has the blandest name: "edit". That goes to a page where we can edit an item's title or url, or put some moderation flag on a story.
"Delete" is like "dead", except that the posts aren't visible even if you have showdead turned on. We don't ever delete things unless users ask us to—typically because the window for deleting their own post has expired—and then only when they have a good reason for asking. Otherwise HN's bias is toward preserving history.
dead posts are hidden by default. I believe once you have enough kamra there is a "showdead" option you can enable in your preferences. Dead posts/comments will be marked as [dead], but you can at least still see them.
funny how H N users were up in arms about the recent Facebook mood experiment yet they are in one of the most controlled environments on the internet ...
You may not believe it, but the feeling evoked by using those tools is not "mad with power" so much as "is this really what I want to be doing with my life". It's not dictatorial, it's janitorial. Other aspects of the job are better.
I'm not just speaking for myself here, but for everyone who's done it.
> I wonder what the percentage means. upvote/flag ratio?
Good guess, but no. It's a score generated by the ring detector. It's rather out of date, because the code has changed a lot since that computation was written.
Whoa, that's misleading. You're quoting part of this thread where people were having fun speculating about what the terms might mean. All these guesses were wrong. Please see my explanation elsewhere in the thread.
Am I really the only one who noticed that there are now women in some of the photos, as well as someone who is non-white/Asian? The design changes are great, too, but this seems a little more significant in terms of messaging. YC has been making more of an effort recently but it was always difficult for me to get past the fact that, according to their own photos, JL is the only woman there, or the only one worth showing in a photo. (This is coming from someone who was wanting to be able to like YC whole-heartedly, not someone looking for controversy.)
I do actually think it's something that gets noticed, just maybe not always on a conscious level, so this is a great and welcomed (and more welcoming) change. Well done, y'all.
One of my mottoes is that if you want to get unusual
results, work fast and work cheap, because there's more
of a chance that you'll get somewhere that nobody else
did.
Nearly always, the effect of spending a lot of money is
to make things more normal.
- Brian Eno
The "partners" page doesn't mention the founders of YC or differentiate them from the other partners. Obviously there was a reason for this. Can you elaborate?
Probably because it shouldn't matter. Labelling some of the Partners as 'Founders' would be akin to saying they're 'more equal' than the others. Besides that, everyone here probably knows who they are anyway (or can trivially find out).
Yes! Kevin is amazing. He gave me a sneak peak of the design last week, but it's really amazing. I love all the wonderfully thought out but small details, like how good the FAQ page is.
Seems odd to say "application period is over! Here's an APPLY button!"
Also, S14 seems like an abbreviation that wouldn't be meaningful to non-YC-faithful. Curse of knowledge?
Suggest something like: "Applications open for Winter '15 soon. <link>Get notified</link>" (allowing people to get an email ping when it opens up?) You could have a link to the (non-useful but still educational) "apply" link in the FAQ? Or better yet, if they choose to get notified, say "great, we'll let you know. In the meantime, check out <link>last session's application</link>."
Minor nitpick. I didn't like the alignment of the YC logos on the top and bottom. They look a little misaligned. Maybe something like this is better ?: http://i.imgur.com/J1mzwJk.png (Removed all content except top and bottom)
But the logo at the top of the page looks left-aligned in the column, while the logo at the bottom of the page looks right-aligned (honestly, I wouldn't have noticed if my GP hadn't brought it up :).
The one thing I did notice, though, is there are no titles on the anchor tags for the YC funded companies' icons. Some of them don't have their company names in the icons, and needing to enable the status bar to look at the URLs to get the names via the URLs is more work than a lazy person like myself likes to do.
Looks like the images only get loaded as you scroll down, which is a good feature that more sites should do. Seems like there's a fair amount of JavaScript being loaded here, I wonder what non-obvious stuff is happening?
Yeah, I've started using the 'load on demand' approach by default, unless the images are important. It can drastically improve load speed in a very simple way.
Do you have any resources you'd recommend to get started learning this? It's a nice feature and I noticed it when the new YC page first loaded but have never investigated it myself.
There are probably jQuery plugins for 'lazy loading' images, but if you're familiar with javascript, and especially if you're using jQuery too, it's not too difficult to write a bit of code that takes care of this.
The nice thing is that you can then combine this with responsive image loading (i.e. big images for desktop, small for mobile). I've agonized over the different solutions and concluded that, in most cases, a js-based solution to the image loading problem is the best (although I'm open to other opinions!).
What it boils down to is this:
- use markup that are either just divs with data-attributes, or image tags with the low-res images (if images are important for SEO or whatnot).
- detect the device type or screen size
- use javascript to calculate if the element is in view (usually calculating the image's offset from the top of the page is enough, since most sites are, uh, vertically-inclined)
- load the appropriate image from the data-attribute with javascript if the image is visible.
If you use placeholder images initially, I've noticed that the effect can actually look better than just showing the images right away. There's something about the images popping into view that makes the page feel more alive.
For specific resources, I'd search 'check if image is visible' (with or without jQuery). You'll probably find some plugins or some code that might show how to do this. Feel free to approach me if you can't work it out.
Where can I view a list of all of the past and current startups, their funding, their performance, their current status/worth, current employees, and links to their website in a nice sortable table?
Also, what would it take to get a page of old articles that I didn't view that might be interesting to me based on my previous article upvotes? That would be valuable.
The admin screenshot had several articles from a few months ago that I never saw and the only way for me to see them would be to manually search.
Nice,
in my opinion,Sans is better for Titles,and a serif font is better for the body of an article.
Also either push the header to the left,or align the left column with the top of the header,because right now the layout looks unbalanced.
EDIT :
In my opinion the left column is unnecessary.The site could work with 1 column,and the content of the left column could either be push in the header or a footer.
Just my 2 cents ;) Nice Job again,it's responsive !
I personally find serif harder to read as a body font on web pages, so I think their combo is fine. My gripe with the layout is that it's aligned to the left, so with my high-resolution monitor there is a ton of white space on the right side.
I think sans-serifs are better for small body text because of the limited amount of available pixels, especially ones that are created with screens in mind and are specifically handhinted to facilitate clarity and crispness.
Serifs are generally more appealing to the eye, but with limited resolutions (say, to 150ppi) can be shown in their full glory only in bigger sizes, making them great for titles on websites. My favorites are slab-serifs (Rockwell and Chunk Five work nice) or transitional serifs (I like Playfair Display) for titles, and something like Open Sans or Helvetica Neue for body text. Looks great :)
I love the new site design (on a macbook), but on windows, the font is not as crisp. I love that font on mac though. Which font should developers use if they want crispness in both mac and windows?
HTTPS giving me troubles, e.g. clicking through on footer links from HN: http://imgur.com/59cQ7G3
On an unrelated note (careful, Inception-style sentence coming up, and apologies if this has been mentioned before/isn't helpful), most of the footer links in the footer of the pages linked to in the footer of news.ycombinator.com lead to 404. Id est, click on a link in the footer, then click on a link in the footer of the page you just clicked to, 404 hey presto.
Solid redesign. Can't wait for a responsive version on hacker news. I use ihackernews.com now but I occasionally have trouble upvoting or commenting due to api rate limits.
Hacker News 2 allowed you to leave comments; unfortunately, the author disabled them in the last version due to some HN change, but I'm hopeful they'll be re-enabled soon.
Probably so that there can be a 13px right border when there is no scrollbar and the left border makes it not look weird. The right border would be to prevent the page from "jumping" when the scrollbar goes from visible to not visible.
Its actually a deliberate 13px border, I initially thought it was a margin caused by a chrome extension. I guess it makes it feel a bit more like the news page
Looks really nice and clean.
The only issue I have is - the margin on the image which makes it look not in line with a set of images from the block above: http://bit.ly/1qh58NC
Why have the "Apply" button link to the expired "Apply to Y Combinator" page? Maybe show it only during the application period, or have the applications submitted after the deadline go to the next funding cycle?
Great refresh - clean and crisp. The 'Blog' section looks a bit out of place on the home page with the white background and blue text, but other than that I think the new design suits YC well.
I sometimes wonder how many of these startups made it, and if the success rate inside YC is larger than outside of it (i.e. self funding, crowdfunding etc).
In addition to the lists of what companies have gone through which programs and when, I also have an Investor Graph to open up who's investing in companies from which programs, and at what stages. (http://www.seed-db.com/investorgraph)
Useful website, but only 6.57% of YC companies have "died" according to that data. Even for a (beyond) successful fund, that number/dataset seems a bit contrived, and it should perhaps be taken with a grain of salt.
Also curious on that, because as a "company", they will naturally interprete their own statistics the way it's promotable or advantagous for them. The truth is always ugly.
Really does look great, very clean well done. Is there any plan to update hacker news? While it's minimal design has some appeal I think the UI really is in need of a makeover.
Cue patio11 bitching about the call to action and tptacek explaining how the site fails crypto commandments x, y, and z, followed by grellas writing a 750 word essay on the intricacies of the design from an impassioned and impartial point of view.
So Y Combinator has gone from 1995 to 2007, wow so amazing guiz. Maybe try again and we might get to 2012. Does HN even use CSS? Probably try that next.
http://www.ycombinator.com/images/home/HackerNews.png