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HN: Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲

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Re: HN: Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲

#71

Post by andyjohnson0 »

sandGorgon wrote: post #67
andyjohnson0 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Upvote = I like this. Downvote = This is noise/off-topic/abusive. Thats the way it should work, and is part of what makes HN different to say Reddit. In reality, its becoming increasingly common for people to downvote something simply because they disagree with it.

Then upvote/downvote are the wrong semantics for what you are proposing. Change them to "like" and "spam". For a multi-lingual audience, that is easier to grok than to hash the up/down arrows.

I'm not proposing anything. "Upvote" and "downvote" are the names given to functions of the HN site. My descriptions of those words are my understanding of the consensus among HN users on what they mean and how they should be used. If my understanding of that consensus is wrong then I hope that others users will put me right.

Edit: Would whoever downvoted this care to explain why? I'm genuinely interested.

Re: HN: Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲

#72

Post by rmc »

tunnuz wrote: post #70
daliusd wrote: post #3

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

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

or for flag

Re: HN: Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲

#74

Post by ars »

gamzer wrote: post #56
nextstep wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

One could argue that an upvote is more often about agreement than a downvote is about disagreement.

People do it that way, but it's incorrect. You are not supposed to use downvotes to disagree. (Initially it was like that, but not anymore because it stifled the conversation and caused groupthink since people were too scared to post anything controversial.)

Re: HN: Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲

#76

Post by ars »

getsat wrote: post #20
masklinn wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 vi…

The image is only downloaded once, but each page you load re-requests it. If your account has enough karma to downvote posts, you're requesting two array gifs per page view. There's no Expires header being set, so your browser is not caching these images. A full roundtrip to the HN server to get back the "content hasn't changed" status code (304) is required for each.

> There's no Expires header being set, so your browser is not caching these images.

That is not in the slightest correct.

It has both a Last-Modified and an Etag so it's definitely cached.

> A full roundtrip to the HN server to get back the "content hasn't changed" status code (304) is required for each.

Also incorrect. The roundtrip is done once per session. A session is not well defined, but it's basically till you close the browser or till you click reload. Merely clicking on other stories will not trigger another roundtrip.

(Also pressing enter on the url line will not trigger a roundtrip, but reload will. This is important sometimes.)

Re: HN: Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲

#78

Post by munchor »

tunnuz wrote: post #70
daliusd wrote: post #3

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

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

I have no downvote :S

Re: HN: Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲

#79

Post by rimantas »

dewiz wrote: post #61
cheald wrote: post #7

Or go contentless via CSS triangles: http://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/css-triangle/

I think it would be incorrect to use css to create an interactive object, a page should be 100% usable without css. And probably font rendering is a lot faster than css rendering, though I couldn't find a similar benchmark

"Interactive object" in question is just a link. It would work without CSS just fine. But it would not work without JavaScript (in current implementation). As for rendering efficiency: it just does not matter. There is a lot of things that could be improved on HN that would have orders of magnitude larger impact on performance.

Re: HN: Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲

#80

Post by megablast »

nslater wrote: post #68
lucian1900 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. The gif is requested once and cached, and then rendered once and cached. The CSS triangle would get rendered over and over again.

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…

Of course there are way to cache renderings, this is the reasons firefox used to use so much memory, it would cache the uncompressed images. Why would you think that was not possible?
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