And please put more whitespace between links so us iPhone users can press on links without accidentally hitting the comments link. Thanks :)
HN: Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲
111–120 of 190 posts
Re: HN: Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲
#112And 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.)
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.
Re: HN: Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲
#113Very 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
I use Firefox "Zoom text only" which only zooms text.
NoSquint is pretty good for this as well.
Re: HN: Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲
#114[deleted]
Re: HN: Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
We could use the "pile of poo" ( http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f4a9/index.htm ) character for downvote instead!
This seems like a bad idea, since at small font sizes it will be a similar shape to the up-triangle, especially in fonts which (mostly) fill it in.
And the fact that it's a pile of poo.
Re: HN: Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲
#116Using 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/
I've been using fontello.com to make custom icon font sets - it's great for keeping the bandwidth down.
Re: HN: Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲
#117How does on estimate the probability for a unicode character ▲ to be included in a majority of fonts? Is the triangle available on all devices?
Re: HN: Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲
#118I 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;iRe: HN: Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rendered once and cached? The cached GIF is rendered each time as well. As far as I know, it's not possible to cache a rendering. There are still calculations to do each time you want to convert the cached data into an image. The question then becomes, which calculations take longer. The calculations needed to convert the CSS into a bitmap for the screen, or the calculations needed to convert the GIF data into a bitm…
Afaik, the browser will read GIF once and keep the bitmap in memory, then composite it into the right place when it needs it, which is a lot cheaper. With SVG, the browser will render it once and keep a bitmap, then composite it. With a CSS icon, there is no way for the browser to know that it's an icon at all. There is no clear delimitation between it and the rest of the page. The browser has no choice but to re-ren…
The rasterization of the Unicode character will be cached in the glyph cache just like the rest of the glyphs, so the GIF is not really any cheaper.
Re: HN: Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲
#120Am 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.
You'll be fine with the uprectangle and the downrectangle!