1) Please replace "grayarrow2x.gif" with Unicode arrows ▲ and ▼
2) Please replace "y18.gif" with a higher-res YC logo image, or text "Y" with FF Meta Pro Normal web font
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I've been a regular reader, and very occasional poster, on HN for nigh on ten years now.
I always loved PG's iconoclastic/idiosyncratic "brutalist" aesthetic, but the UI GIFs have felt obsolete since I got a smartphone. I remember the up/down voting arrows started looking blurry on my iPhone 3G, and then sometime later they got better on mobile with the introduction of the higher-res "grayarrow2x.gif".
Now on a retina display, by now I just take the blurry arrows (and YC icon) for granted. I was building an HTML table with column sorting today, and made use of Unicode characters ▲▼ "BLACK UP-POINTING TRIANGLE" (▲) and "BLACK DOWN-POINTING TRIANGLE" (▼). How about swapping out grayarrow2x.gif for these text arrows? I just tried the substitution via Chrome dev tools, and it was a trivial change and looks crisper to me. I'm not aware of any compatibility/support issues with these Unicode chars, but maybe some technical reason not to make this change...
The blurry 18×18 "y18.gif" could be replaced either with http://www.ycombinator.com/images/ycombinator-logo-fb889e2e.png, or with a box containing a text "Y" – looks like the YC logo's FF Meta Pro Normal is available on Typekit: https://typekit.com/fonts/ff-meta/details/meta-pro-normal
These might seem like niggling issues, but unlike other seemingly low-hanging UI improvements (e.g. increasing font size, which looks kinda tough with how the CSS is structured), I think both of these changes could be made in just a few minutes, and I'd appreciate it on every upvote!