Echo JS - JavaScript News | Dark Hacker News

pdx 13 years ago |

Things that annoy me on most forums are the clutter added by signatures, join date (which I always confuse with posting date), and the ubiquitous avatar.

I really enjoy that HN lacks these distractions, so the presence of the avatars at the posted site was a disappointment. Still, it was much better than most.

lifeisstillgood 13 years ago |

I don't get it?

Part of the appeal of HN is I get interesting stuff from all over (#) not just my niche.

TO do an HN, but have it on one niche seems missing the point.

(#) less of it now, these kids today, back when I were a lad ... shoebox .. motorway.

pmelendez 13 years ago | |

Well you are right when you say that's part of the appeal of HN. The thing is, that's part of the appeal for a hacker. I bet that for a JS professional, part of the appeal of this site is to have restrict the news just to that domain.

At the end, the success or failure of these kind of web sites tend to be more related to the community rather than the look or the features.

porker 13 years ago |

Please add yourself to the "Ask HN: like HN, for other disciplines/topics?" thread from yesterday - thanks!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5399879

akakey 13 years ago |

what's with JavaScript community to make everything end in "js"? You don't see Ruby guys ending every one of their product names in "rb" or Python guys in "py".

yen223 13 years ago | |

The NumPy, Scrapy and SciPy folks may disagree :)

milkshakes 13 years ago | | |

don't forget the web.py folks!

yen223 13 years ago | | |

And the ultimate: PyPy!

bazzargh 13 years ago | |

The java equivalent was '4j'. It's mildly useful on a mixed community like HN, you've got some idea before you click through what the target developer audience is.

bhauer 13 years ago | | |

Or worse, some incredibly eyeroll-worthy pun about coffee.

petercooper 13 years ago | |

JavaScript is rather long. This can be an issue with domain names, event names, Twitter handles, etc. "Ruby" is a lot more succinct which is why we tend to use it as-is.

pcote 13 years ago | |

Same reason there are still plenty of Java projects out there that stick a "J" in the start of the name.

d0vs 13 years ago | |

Maybe to avoid name collisions?

k__ 13 years ago | |

but the .net guise did such stuff

shaneeb 13 years ago |

Apart from the fact that its JS only, how is it better than HN? Why not just use HN to follow topics you like (JS in this case)?

pqdbr 13 years ago | |

I think it's a simple matter of focus. One could extend your logic and say 'Why don't you get your tech news from NY Times instead of Hacker News, since they have a tech section in their website ?'

shaneeb 13 years ago | | |

True, but making a NY Times-like website for tech news wouldn't work either. HN works for techies because its clean and simple, and the karma/upvote mechanism keep the content relevant. So there is a difference from NY Times.

My question then remains, what is different?

joshuacc 13 years ago | | |

The advantage is precisely the thing that you excluded, the focus on one technology.

fakeer 13 years ago | |

I do not see OP mentioning "better" and neither on the website it's mentioned.

>>Why not just use HN to follow topics you like (JS in this case)?

It's a very subjective question. One answer can be why there's HN or why there's StackOverflow or why there's both.

It's actually good to have a dedicated JS forum, even if there are already many out there. Besides, on HN everything is posted - everything. People participating here are https://twitter.com/thejayfields/status/235074734163898368

shaneeb 13 years ago | | |

I never said it claims to be better and it isn't. Let me rephrase the question: why would anyone want to be on echojs instead of HN, given that it's essentially an HN clone for JS and HN community is bigger at the moment? Why would you use it?

I am just trying to understand its value for myself.

pcote 13 years ago |

The first thing this has me thinking is that it looks like a "subreddit" of HN. I'm surprised to not have seen or heard of a Reddit style site with HN voting rules on it.

Kiro 13 years ago | |

HN voting rules? I thought reddit used the exact same voting system as HN.

untog 13 years ago | | |

Not quite, no. You can't downvote stories (only comments, when you reach an appropriate karma level) and the algorithms for story/comment decay seem to be wildly different.

rschmitty 13 years ago | | |

Reddit downvoting is ridiculous at times. People just downvote whenever they see something they don't like or disagree with.

For example, anyone that dislikes {lang} will just downvote any {lang} article

vs

Reading the {lang} article and downvoting it if it's just linkspam

untog 13 years ago | | |

Hacker News isn't really that different- people flag the article instead of downvoting it, so it takes even fewer people to bury a story. It's happened more times than I can count.

duiker101 13 years ago |

It's all a little.... too large...

dreen 13 years ago | |

If you browse at 67% scale it looks exactly like HN

metastew 13 years ago | | |

One problem with zooming to 67% is the comment text are too small to read for me.

rschmitty 13 years ago | |

Too big a font and too much whitespace imo. Good you did not copy the 1. 2. 3. ... etc to the left of post titles tho :)

vaidik 13 years ago |

+1 for the effort. But there is already a project like that which you could have used for this purpose if your purpose was not to build something like HN but build something like HN for only JS: https://github.com/SachaG/Telescope

This would have saved a lot of programming effort.

resu_nimda 13 years ago | |

There is a 'source code' link at the bottom that leads to https://github.com/antirez/lamernews, which looks mostly the same with a different stylesheet, so I think they did save that effort ;)

And FWIW, Telescope may preserve the functionality of HN, but I like the design a lot less (though the Echo design could use some work).

imwhimsical 13 years ago |

The design in a little (more than a little, tbh) overwhelming. But that's cool for v.0.11.0

sktrdie 13 years ago | |

It's horrible: big fonts, 100% wide and awful spacing of elements. Gives me a headache just reading it. I like the topic though. Hope a designer can jump in and improve the overall experience.

btipling 13 years ago | | |

I hope it stays ugly and keeps people who care about this away. Will improve the quality of the contributions I think.

nwh 13 years ago | | |

I'm sorry, what? You want front end designers (a major use-case for JavScript) to be disgusted enough to stay away?

btipling 13 years ago | | |

I am a software engineer who writes a lot of JavaScript and I care about software engineering topics. I am not interested in the latest jQuery library or basic JavaScript howtos and I want more meaningful discussions about JavaScript libraries than "wow nice!"

Semaphor 13 years ago | |

I think it's mostly okay. I made the titles smaller and bold and gave the articles a slightly higher bottom margin locally and it's great :)

davidw 13 years ago |

A thought: I think you're doing it wrong if you think of yourself as an "X" programmer. Because those X's will come and go over the years.

resu_nimda 13 years ago | |

But those X's do exist, if only temporarily. At any given time, you probably are an X programmer, and a community around X is useful to you. People may drop in and out, but it's still a (potentially) valuable resource.

davidw 13 years ago | | |

> it's still a (potentially) valuable resource.

Indubitably!

nkuttler 13 years ago |

There are barely any comments. Oh btw, I couldn't figure out how to add one anyway. If that requires registration... make it obvious.

ericcholis 13 years ago |

I had to do a double take, I thought somebody had registered a domain using my first initial and last name (echolis).