Hacker News Reader

Comment by btipling | Hacker News Reader

Instead of calling it a donation, just call it the 'pro' version and add like a supporter badge on the header or let them do something silly like change the color of their header like on HN. Will probably get more funds that way and won't get cynical people to roll their eyes at questionable use of the word 'donation' whether it is or not.

View on HN

Yeah, but we're all geeks here. It can't be that hard to splice together some custom CSS to make hacker news look like whatever you want. Let me just click view source and OH GOD PG FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY WHY ARE YOU USING NESTED TABLES IT'S 2013!!?!?!!111questionmark!

Sorry, blacked out for a minute there.

You'd think a site called Hacker News would be more hackable...

Maybe they're so l33t they've wrapped around, and thats why they're using tables...

ahhahahahahha! You're funny

been there, tried that. ended up just using some basic css rules to keep it from crawling apart to 1080p :(

  @namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
  @-moz-document domain("news.ycombinator.com") {
    body > center > table {max-width: 960px;}
    .default {padding-right: 22px;}
    textarea {width: 100%;}
    form {padding-right: 18px;}
  }

= less eye strain

Actually this has been asked here before and pg himself did answer the question [1] (you may have to scroll a little to see pg's response). pg also argues in one of his essays [2] that tables are the (lisp) lists of html, being very dynamic and flexible which is perfect for explanatory programming despite being unclear (in its purpose/structure) sometimes.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=100460 [2] http://paulgraham.com/arc0.html

Wouldn't divs be a more appropriate analogy?

I was calling it a donation, because I do offer the service for free.

I wanted to offer the service to people that might not be able to afford it, and not have them punished by having fewer features.

That's the point - the "pro" version only gives you a silly, feel-good feature, but it (might) increase revenue when people feel they're actually getting something.

"I wanted to offer the service to people that might not be able to afford it, and not have them punished by having fewer features."

That's neat, why don't consider some kind of sponsorship program? A user that can pay, can sponsor one or two more users who can't, that would be nice :)

That's an AWESOME idea, actually!

It's difficult to scale an RSS reader as you could quickly start having to crawl orders of magnitude number of feeds more than you are now as you get more users, if power users like your thing. I know because I worked at Bloglines. You're either going to need money or you will shut it down eventually.

I have faith people are going to pay if they use it and like it.

Alternatively, keep calling it a donation and let people donate whatever they want, with $9 as the minimum. A good RSS reader is worth a lot more than $9 a year to some people.

I like this :)

I don't want to differentiate people who can't pay.

i like this idea vs "pro"

I agree with this. PLEASE make a paid version, otherwise your project will end in the same place where all those other free RSS readers ended: in archive.org

The problem with these kind of services is that if they are free, a lot of people won't pay for them and might use so many resources that the money paid by the few people who donated or paid will not be enough to sustain the service.

Sorry for the tone, but I am so tired of seeing lots of mini-web services turned off because they were free... Nowadays I downloaded Vizzy for Mac: although it is not the most pretty RSS reader, I know it will be working forever.

Please. Make it a paid service and charge $9/month, not year.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com