HN: Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲

[andrethegiant]

This will make the upvote triangle look crisp on high-resolution displays. Thanks!

[daliusd]

Very good proposal. There are more unicode symbols to choice from: http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/geometric_shapes.html

Down arrow/triangle: ▼

It is not only matter of resolution but I personally like bigger fonts and have zoomed in HN so triangles look bad:

http://i.imgur.com/fpA7N.png

[jawr]

I also zoom in to 125%, not sure if it's just me, but for a textual site the default font size seems too small. Maybe my eyes are just giving up.

Out of curiosity, I was wondering why the triangle wasn't a CSS triangle.. wouldn't that be more efficient than a gif?

[tunnuz]

We could use the "pile of poo" (http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f4a9/index.htm) character for downvote instead!

[silon3]

I use Firefox "Zoom text only" which only zooms text.

[mark-r]

How does simple zooming produce that horribly mangled graphic on the left of that screenshot? That seems like a deficiency in your browser.

[maggit]

It is also a matter of subpixel anti-aliasing, and that makes a surprisingly big difference in my experience!

http://i.imgur.com/sFrFT.png

[rythie]

TBH, it's very optimistic to think that anything really will change in the HN code. People have suggested tons of improvements and nothing ever changes - perhaps it shows that even if we don't improve our products people still keep coming back anyway.

[pbhjpbhj]

The product here is not the interface it's the social network - the people - and interactions that enables.

There is much to improve (page titles, semantic urls, recording of moderator edits, ...) but none of that is likely unless a sufficient quora of top contributors force the issue or decide to move (r/hackernews anyone!?). That in turn is unlikely because of the association with pg and ycombinator.

That's my take.

[TillE]

Vote totals were hidden not too long ago, though I suppose that's a very small change in terms of the amount of code altered.

[briandear]

Is Hacker News Craigslisting? Def Craigslisting: adhering to what has been working despite the howls of people that 'know better'

[coderdude]

Using Unicode shapes and vector-based icons is a great step forward. They're not suitable for every use-case but for most purposes they work well. Lately I've been using Font Awesome[1] to a great extent.

Is there a tool that lets you simulate what a site would look like on a high-DPI/Retina display? Is it simply enough to zoom the page in to get a feel for it?

[1] http://fortawesome.github.com/Font-Awesome/

[alx]

Could you give us some use-cases where it's not suitable? Thanks :)

[iamben]

I've been using fontello.com to make custom icon font sets - it's great for keeping the bandwidth down.

[alt_]

Your best chance at getting it implemented is posting it as a feature request[0] and getting it voted up there.

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363

[billiob]

i use a custom css with pentadactyl and the following:

  @-moz-document domain("news.ycombinator.com"),
                 domain("news.ycombinator.org"),
                 domain("news.ycombinator.net") {
    a[id^=up_] {
      padding: 0px 4px 0px 4px !important;
      color: #cb4b16 !important; }
    a[id^=up_] img {
       display: none; }
    a[id^=up_]:before {
       content: "▴"; }
  }

[jayfuerstenberg]

And please put more whitespace between links so us iPhone users can press on links without accidentally hitting the comments link. Thanks :)

[arnsholt]

That's one of the reasons I really like Opera mobile and Opera mini: if you fat-finger and there are two possible links you could've hit, it zooms in so that you can disambiguate the click.

[jonwinstanley]

On iPhone I always use - http://ihackernews.com/

[jln]

http://cheeaun.github.com/hnmobile/

[wangweij]

It will also look crisp on my normal-resolution display. This website's font is too small for me so I always open it in 150%.

[lupatus]

Try emailing "[email protected]" with this suggestion.

From the guidelines:

Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something (e.g. to ask us questions about Y Combinator, or to ask or complain about moderation). If you want to say something to us, please send it to [email protected].

I think the mods frown on this sort of HN meta-discussion; so, don't be surprised if they kill this post.

[tezza]

I have a bookmarklet that makes the Up arrow large enough to click on an ipad. ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1398539 )

I've adapted it to change your preference for the vector up:

  javascript:{im=document.images;iml=im.length;for(i=0;i<iml;i++) {if(im[i].src=="http://ycombinator.com/images/grayarrow.gif"){var old=im[i]; var p=old.parentNode; p.removeChild(old); iml--; p.innerHTML="▲"} } alert("Done"); void(null);}

Down arrow left as an exercise

[captn3m0]

Browsing HN with images disabled is impossible(no voting) for this reason (I wrote about it at https://gist.github.com/2947068)

[kellros]

True, the 'icon' for up-voting is an image and can be easily replaced by the unicode equivalent.

HN uses an image in javascript to simulate a HTTP GET request to signal that you have voted.

ex. var img = new Image(); img.src = 'http://ycombinator.com/signal-voted?id=12345;

Makes sense because HN is not using jQuery or similar and it would be a lot more javascript to do it in a cross browser way (just source view hacker news - it's almost as small as it gets)

[ajuc]

Strange, I sometimes browse hn with links (lynx-like console browser), and voting works ok .

[nsns]

And please make the up-vote button larger than the down-vote one. (They're not really logical opposites and their use frequency is quite different.)

[tokenadult]

A lot of the comments below engage in back-and-forth (up-and-down?) about whether or not it is permitted to use downvotes to indicate disagreement. Pretty much every time long-time users of Hacker News participate in a discussion on this issue, someone remembers to bring up pg's comment in an early thread from 1608 days ago.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

"I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness."

If you check the currently posted site guidelines,

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

the only guidelines you see about downvoting occur right at the end:

"Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

"Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downmod you."

A thread opened by pg 466 days ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696

asked, "How to stave off decline of HN?" He wrote, "The problem has several components: comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted."

So at that time, he thought that a significant subset of comments was getting too many upvotes (and, by implication, too few downvotes). That led to a software change such that users can no longer see the net comment karma totals of other user's comments. (You and I can still see the individual net karma totals for each of our own comments.)

To sum up, what I really like to do is upvote good comments. But there is no rule against downvoting a comment if it is mean (definitely not), nor is there a rule against downvoting a comment if it is dumb (the trick is perceiving whether or not a comment is dumb), and especially there is no rule against downvoting a comment if it is both mean and dumb. And if a comment is just a snarky remark that doesn't advance the discussion, or a lame attempt at a one-liner joke, or otherwise doesn't add value to the discussion, it doesn't harm the community to downvote such a comment without further reply.

(They're not really logical opposites and their use frequency is quite different.)

I'm happy to upvote more than downvote. I get the sense that some of the best stuff here on Hacker News still isn't upvoted enough.

[nextstep]

How are they not logical opposites? Isn't an upvote exactly the opposite of a downvote?

[hsmyers]

Excellent idea! Now if we could only convince w3C that the entire Unicode Symbol Set deserves names and not hex or octal then I'd be very happy indeed ♞ should be bnight and so on...

[Yaggo]

You can use the actual unicode symbol (on Mac, Edit -> Special characters) in html/css, no need for hex code. It isn't 1996 anymore.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

No, I don't think it's a problem. I believe HTML only had symbol names because of incompatible character sets, allowing Unicode characters in ASCII and other encodings. But modern text editors and sites can use Unicode symbols just fine, why avoid them?

[cheald]

Or go contentless via CSS triangles:

http://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/css-triangle/

[troels]

Don't remember if it applies to this particular glyph, but I've had some issues in the past with some configurations of IE and/or Windows, where the unicode symbols wouldn't render. Just something to be aware of, if you're blindly using these in web sites aimed at the general population.

[tomerv]

Am I the only one here against this proposal? I sometimes browse HN from my phone (outdated Nokia with Opera Mini), and I get a rectangle instead of an arrow.

[delinka]

What's with all the "CSS bad" comments? Who needs CSS to put a Unicode character in a web page? Based on some of the logic I am reading, we'd all be better off displaying every letter of text as GIFs. For a technical crowd, you people have some funny ideas.

[ipostonthisacc]

Also - collapsible threads like reddit has would be really good for skipping threads.

[FreebytesSector]

Perhaps an icon to the right that is an X or minus sign that would collapse the thread could work.

[philwelch]

Huh, I didn't know Arc was that good at Unicode. It even renders the flip table emoticon.

[viraptor]

Alternatively it doesn't care at all. I mean, it may not even try to check the incoming encoding or do anything with it and you'd still get the right result if your browser behaves in a sane way (that is sends utf form contents to this site). It's just some bytes after all.

But I don't know the arc internals - does it do anything interesting with unicode?

[redthrowaway]

(╯ಠ益ಠ)╯︵ ┻━┻

So it does. This may or may not be a good thing.

[michaelkscott]

Yes, this. It will also make the pages render faster. On the homepage alone there are 30 instances of grayarrow.gif.

[masklinn]

The image is only loaded once and does not block anything (in fact it's loaded in parallel with — and the same size as — the orange Y logo at the top-left, and the tracking gif).

Furthermore the images on YC have extremely low dynamicity and size, so there's little chance they'll be evicted from the browser's cache (short of a manual cache clear), so their 100 bytes will only be loaded once the first time ever you visit YC.

So no, it won't make pages render faster overall.

On the other hand, it will make pages look better on zoomed or high-DPI displays.

[zalew]

right, because a page made on tables feels like needing micro-optimization for the arrow

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[readme]

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[antidaily]

Ugh