I'm hoping that this makes HN's front page just to see the fun recursion of the site displaying a screenshot of itself. (And I do appreciate the experiment in user experience design, too.)
A huge part of the appeal of the standard HN page for me is the simple, straightforward, sensible headline without the discration of images. The title guidelines and the insistence on adhering to them are a big plus in this regard.
I really like that HN is so low bandwidth. I often check the fp on shitty mobile connection and while I can't read most stories until my rss reader catches up, at least I know what people are talking about.
Whenever I see something like this, I sigh and wonder, "Why should it be so hard for the average internet user to create a live 'grid of thumbnails' for 'a list of links to webpages'? Why should it take a whole developer to code and deploy an entire website, just for this one use-case?"
Software today is not as "soft" as one would've hoped, fifty years ago. It's not malleable. It's not composable. It's barely reactive.
Every time someone says "Why should it be so hard to.." with software it's because they've not thought about the requirements. If you break down "a live grid of thumbnails" it's actually a relatively complex app even if you're just making an MVP. Even if you're prescriptive about things like the number of links in the list, the size of thumbnails, the layout of the thumbnails, the way the user manages what links they see, the regularity of updates, you're still left with an application that needs a basic list CRUD UI, a grid of thumbnails, something to render a screenshot of the website to a thumbnail, code to handle the site being unavailable or un-rendererable, a backend to store the list data and thumbnail images, maybe something to check to see if the site has actually changed (which can be tricky if it loads content with JS). And that's before the user's ask for features like drag and drop grid reordering, update scheduling, etc.
That's not to suggest it'd take more than half a day to knock something together, but that's more down to the awesome ecosystem of software libraries than it being a simple project. To write an app from scratch in, say, C++ would be a huge project.
Given that the word 'software' only really started appearing around 50 years ago [1], that might be a stretch, but nonetheless, I think you do our current set of technologies a disservice.
I'm sure it would be relatively incidental for the majority of HN readers to cobble something together that fulfils this sort of functionality without much work. If your complaint is that languages don't form higher abstractions of things like 'thumbnails', I think that is just due to us collectively preferring the flexibility of lower level code - it's certainly not because it would be difficult to create a language with such abstractions.
Before I try to address the idea that "software" should just be fully adaptable to the needs and wants of the average internet user, let's stick to this more specific use case.
If you want a web site that allows you to create your own personal grid of thumbnails for a list of links (from a URL), that is something that can be built with software (with relative ease). If this particular developer created that tool, the considerations would certainly elevate rapidly - now it's useful to a lot more people, so you need to provide hosting for your larger audience. Instead of a novelty, you've created a burden on your resources. Particularly if they want a "live" grid of thumbnails, and thus it updates "constantly", the resource costs could quickly become staggering.
What are reasonable expectations for software, and if they are not being met, what is the roadblock? What exactly were the predictions and hopes for software in the late 60s?
A relatively average user can use WYSIWYG editors (including word processors, web editors, and apps that provide text, photo and video editing at your fingertips.) What else should they be able to do?
Are we merely discontent with the rate of progress? People who are not in the line of work of home automation are able to purchase hardware and configure it in their homes. People can buy inexpensive, versatile computer chips off the shelf and program them to be unique devices, meeting specific needs. We can already imagine, predict and hope for a future where the functionality of a web site or device is wildly configurable to the individual. What metrics do we have to reach before we're satisfied?
I dread the day when the average Internet user can do such things. Or even _want_ to do such things. Please hire a good developer to do this and pay good money :)
I recollect a conversation I had with a recruiter around 12 years back. He was predicting that a day will come when a "manager" can drag and drop objects and create any kind of software application. That day has not come and it will not come.
I don't think it's that difficult if it's rendered live. You could have a similar site with a series of iframe. Could spoof it as an image by overlaying a div that captures and discards all clicks.
I bet the whole thing could be done with a couple lines of JS.
What does require real dev work and infrastructure is prerendering the web page screen shots and serving them up.
We have done something similar for the hn search at Algolia but flagged it under style -> experimental in the settings panel. It's not a grid layout, but more a refresher to the current design. https://hn.algolia.com
You really, really need to update the screenshot for hackernewsgrid.com for infinite recursion, now that you're on the HN home page the screenshot should include a picture of itself.
> The Droste effect (Dutch pronunciation: [drɔstə]), known in art as mise en abyme, is the effect of a picture appearing within itself, in a place where a similar picture would realistically be expected to appear. The appearance is recursive: the smaller version contains an even smaller version of the picture, and so on.
Thanks for posting this - I quite enjoy browsing hacker news using thumbnails from mobile after trying it. On my laptop, I think I prefer the original homepage. I like to check the news once a day, but some days I'm short of time and use an alternative that cuts down results shown [1].
Overall I'm very happy to have now three good options for checking out what I consider to be a very good source of fuss free tech news and discourse.
[1] hckrnews.com - hopefully it isn't a faux pas to mention a potential competitor to your site in this thread.
I use hckrnews too. You can set it to show everything, but its more of a nice CSS skin for the main site.
This one seems to do a bit more, and changes things more dramatically. I don't think the subgroups of HN that like hckrnews would overlap much with the one that would like this site. Its much more visual.
I definitely clicked a couple more just by looking at the screenshots than reading the plain text index. I wonder if there's psychological lure in graphics. Thank you!
That's nice. I thought about using thumbnails to linked sites before, but I wonder about the legal dimension.
What if someone puts something illegal, or copyrighted on one of the linked pages? Does anybody have advice (internationally / US / Germany)?
I'm based in Germany, and here there is strong legal protection for "quoting" excerpts. However, it is often debatable what counts as a quote. German news sites often take a photograph of a screen, instead of a screenshot. There seems to be protection for search engines (e.g. Google Photo Search), but the situation is not clear. There is also no "fair use" or safe harbor like in the US.
I'm especially afraid of cease and desist letters (Abmahnungen) - there is an entire industry of people who crawl the web and find copyrighted images with image recognition. The mean thing is that they don't let you use their tool to check for compliance - I would gladly buy a license for images I accidentially use, or remove them - but it is more profitable for them to send you a letter.
(Rant: I once had a case where someone accidentially printed a copyrighted image on a document and put a scaled down picture of that document on a domain managed by me. The copyrighted image was about 50x50 pixels, mirrored, and black and white, but they had me pay ~800 Euros for it. Funny thing is that they never ever contacted us via the contact email. They didn't care about their client's rights or about selling an image, they wanted to milk us. They sent physical letters to people they thought related to the site, until they grabbed me (the Admin-C of the domain).
Now I heard they are going after people rewteeting or liking copyrighted images - IMHO that is ridiculous, there should be a difference between "including" and "linking to" an image.)
If I were to add another feature to HN I would add color coding of how content dense a link is. Sometimes a link is a big long essay, and I might not want to click on it just yet.
I keep seeing sites shifting to high-graphics, low-text content. HN is an interesting exception in that it's zero-graphics, low-text -- the only indication of content is a <80 char subject, the originating site, user, and current votes.
What I'd prefer is deeper textual context, a'la Jacob Nielsen's long-standing microcontent guidelines. A 140 - 500 character introduction a strong title, and maybe an accompanying thumbnail or avatar.
This is awesome, but I would really appreciate if it would use all of my screen estate (i am using a 1920x1200 screen) instead of using only three columns.
What browser are you using? The site seems to be responsive in Chrome (1440 width shows four columns, 1920 shows five, not sure where the breakpoints are exactly).
EDIT: It's using a flexbox grid layout so it shouldn't actually need any breakpoints. Maybe the layout changed since you checked it or your browser is triggering a fallback?
Thank you for mentioning this. There are couple of similar patterns between the projects, but feels that hnews.xyz it's faster and has more features.
Congratulations to the creator for having fun building this and please share the code!
and the URL domain, I thought "Shop Walmart and more of your favorite stores, faster" was an inserted ad till I noticed it was on blog.google on the real front page.
[+] [-] helloworld|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] helloworld|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aembleton|8 years ago|reply
http://hackernewsgrid.com/screenshots-compressed/52bbadf90a3...
[+] [-] jacquesm|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nemoniac|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AnkleInsurance|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AriaMinaei|8 years ago|reply
Software today is not as "soft" as one would've hoped, fifty years ago. It's not malleable. It's not composable. It's barely reactive.
This is not how it was meant to be.
[+] [-] onion2k|8 years ago|reply
That's not to suggest it'd take more than half a day to knock something together, but that's more down to the awesome ecosystem of software libraries than it being a simple project. To write an app from scratch in, say, C++ would be a huge project.
[+] [-] AliAdams|8 years ago|reply
I'm sure it would be relatively incidental for the majority of HN readers to cobble something together that fulfils this sort of functionality without much work. If your complaint is that languages don't form higher abstractions of things like 'thumbnails', I think that is just due to us collectively preferring the flexibility of lower level code - it's certainly not because it would be difficult to create a language with such abstractions.
[1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=software&year_...
[+] [-] neogodless|8 years ago|reply
If you want a web site that allows you to create your own personal grid of thumbnails for a list of links (from a URL), that is something that can be built with software (with relative ease). If this particular developer created that tool, the considerations would certainly elevate rapidly - now it's useful to a lot more people, so you need to provide hosting for your larger audience. Instead of a novelty, you've created a burden on your resources. Particularly if they want a "live" grid of thumbnails, and thus it updates "constantly", the resource costs could quickly become staggering.
What are reasonable expectations for software, and if they are not being met, what is the roadblock? What exactly were the predictions and hopes for software in the late 60s?
A relatively average user can use WYSIWYG editors (including word processors, web editors, and apps that provide text, photo and video editing at your fingertips.) What else should they be able to do?
Are we merely discontent with the rate of progress? People who are not in the line of work of home automation are able to purchase hardware and configure it in their homes. People can buy inexpensive, versatile computer chips off the shelf and program them to be unique devices, meeting specific needs. We can already imagine, predict and hope for a future where the functionality of a web site or device is wildly configurable to the individual. What metrics do we have to reach before we're satisfied?
[+] [-] arc_of_descent|8 years ago|reply
I recollect a conversation I had with a recruiter around 12 years back. He was predicting that a day will come when a "manager" can drag and drop objects and create any kind of software application. That day has not come and it will not come.
[+] [-] koolba|8 years ago|reply
I bet the whole thing could be done with a couple lines of JS.
What does require real dev work and infrastructure is prerendering the web page screen shots and serving them up.
[+] [-] darrenf|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] viach|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jonas_ba|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cheeaun|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grey-area|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noamhacker|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rvanmil|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|8 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droste_effect
[+] [-] omni|8 years ago|reply
> The Droste effect (Dutch pronunciation: [drɔstə]), known in art as mise en abyme, is the effect of a picture appearing within itself, in a place where a similar picture would realistically be expected to appear. The appearance is recursive: the smaller version contains an even smaller version of the picture, and so on.
[+] [-] sidcool|8 years ago|reply
E.g. https://news.ycombinator.com//item?id=15080693
Resulting in Unknown page.
[+] [-] hiisukun|8 years ago|reply
Overall I'm very happy to have now three good options for checking out what I consider to be a very good source of fuss free tech news and discourse.
[1] hckrnews.com - hopefully it isn't a faux pas to mention a potential competitor to your site in this thread.
[+] [-] Qub3d|8 years ago|reply
This one seems to do a bit more, and changes things more dramatically. I don't think the subgroups of HN that like hckrnews would overlap much with the one that would like this site. Its much more visual.
[+] [-] Bobbleoxs|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] captainmuon|8 years ago|reply
What if someone puts something illegal, or copyrighted on one of the linked pages? Does anybody have advice (internationally / US / Germany)?
I'm based in Germany, and here there is strong legal protection for "quoting" excerpts. However, it is often debatable what counts as a quote. German news sites often take a photograph of a screen, instead of a screenshot. There seems to be protection for search engines (e.g. Google Photo Search), but the situation is not clear. There is also no "fair use" or safe harbor like in the US.
I'm especially afraid of cease and desist letters (Abmahnungen) - there is an entire industry of people who crawl the web and find copyrighted images with image recognition. The mean thing is that they don't let you use their tool to check for compliance - I would gladly buy a license for images I accidentially use, or remove them - but it is more profitable for them to send you a letter.
(Rant: I once had a case where someone accidentially printed a copyrighted image on a document and put a scaled down picture of that document on a domain managed by me. The copyrighted image was about 50x50 pixels, mirrored, and black and white, but they had me pay ~800 Euros for it. Funny thing is that they never ever contacted us via the contact email. They didn't care about their client's rights or about selling an image, they wanted to milk us. They sent physical letters to people they thought related to the site, until they grabbed me (the Admin-C of the domain).
Now I heard they are going after people rewteeting or liking copyrighted images - IMHO that is ridiculous, there should be a difference between "including" and "linking to" an image.)
[+] [-] thiht|8 years ago|reply
I think a better thumbnail system would be to use an actual image of the article (for example, the thumbnail for the page https://www.gobankingrates.com/retirement/1-3-americans-0-sa... would be a crop of https://cdn.gobankingrates.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/sh...), or simply a favicon in case there's no image available. Hell, you're experimenting so why not even a carousel of all the images in the article? (moving on mouse hover ideally)
Also the title should not be secondary, below the thumbnail. Maybe it should be over the image in some way?
[+] [-] aaronhoffman|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cjr|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] owens99|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jhsto|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Waterluvian|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dredmorbius|8 years ago|reply
I keep seeing sites shifting to high-graphics, low-text content. HN is an interesting exception in that it's zero-graphics, low-text -- the only indication of content is a <80 char subject, the originating site, user, and current votes.
What I'd prefer is deeper textual context, a'la Jacob Nielsen's long-standing microcontent guidelines. A 140 - 500 character introduction a strong title, and maybe an accompanying thumbnail or avatar.
[+] [-] znpy|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pluma|8 years ago|reply
EDIT: It's using a flexbox grid layout so it shouldn't actually need any breakpoints. Maybe the layout changed since you checked it or your browser is triggering a fallback?
[+] [-] kleptako|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] max23_|8 years ago|reply
If Puppeteer[1] is used to screenshot the site, probably need to use the page.click API to close it.
But, one problem with that is you need to know the exact selector name which maybe is not a generic one.
[1] https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer
[+] [-] aaronhoffman|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 97-109-107|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] valentinvieriu|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] have_faith|8 years ago|reply
My main UX issue with HN is the comment nesting. Would much prefer less nesting and something akin to 4chan's backlink post referencing.
[+] [-] RickS|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] senectus1|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sleepychu|8 years ago|reply