My grandma always had the morning paper delivered. When I stayed with her during the summer I’d start in the top left corner of the first page and read all the way to the bottom right corner of the last and everything in between. What a 10 year old kid got out of the grain report? I’m not sure. But I was amped up on her homemade cinnamon rolls and multiple glasses of orange juice. It was wonderful. These days I’m more selective about what information I take in!
I remember reading the newspaper in the break room and at lunch. About 2013 or so. That's all their was. Well, for me, because I was a late smartphone adopter.
I kind of lump in "internet" (late 90s) with "internet in everyone's pockets at all times". But there was a fairly large gap there. Especially when you consider the limits of 3 and even 4g.
Do you subscribe now? I’ve toyed with the idea — I think I’d be more aware of local news / serendipitous things I normally wouldn’t seek out.
I’ve been considering subscribing to some high quality signal / low to no ad type written publications. Asterisk, IEEE spectrum, NOEMA. Make getting mail fun again.
I subscribe. There's a newspaper downstairs, I'll fetch it later. The paper news is better than the screen news, and I'm not going to try to explain what better means.
Notably, I read this on both my iphone and mac (LG Ultrafine 5k). It is was enjoyable to read in a fun way on my phone, it did not really bug me as a fun blog font. I was more excited about the theme/design than the content. But on my main screen, which is hi res, it _did_ bug my eyes quite a bit. Interesting.
Can we add “I think it sounds like AI writing” to the list of off topic tangential annoyances? Clicking into an HN thread and having the top comment being about em dashes or something is obnoxious.
Good dang, you're right but the annoyance with this one is far from tangential or "common"...
If the site used a black font over black background it would be more readable as I could at least select the text and read it.
To add insult to injury, the site's name flashes. I'd say that the ONE interesting thing about this link is exactly how exotically bad the presentation is!
I think people may disagree with you on what constitutes a tangential annoyance. Is there any point at which the format is, in fact, a legitimate annoyance?
tangential and legitimate are not mutually exclusive. the majority of the grievances are infact the latter; they are legitimate
what makes them also the former is that (and surely the reason for the rule) is that because these grievances are so commonly expressed when links are shared they create a near constant 'noise' in the signal to noise of each discussion, with signal being the idea or message intended to be shared by the poster rather than the medium it arrived in
a better way to discuss the tangent or the medium would be by submitting its own HN post. that way theres a better S/N ratio for everything
example: scientific breakthrough is shared on fbook
signal: any discussion about that breakthrough or its Nth order effects on anything
noise: any discussion about the fbook website, walled gardens, zark muckerburg, anything that would be on any link for that site regardless of the message inside the medium
those discussions arent illegitimate, they are better served by targeted discussion on their posts like..
some websites are stylized the point of illegibility
fbook website dark patterns
popups make alt F4
..rather than increasing noise across the whole of HN. this rule is closely related to another site rule: "use the best possible interpretation of the parent comment" because it too is a rule that is in place as an attempt to steer toward "curious discussion" (high S/N ratio)
( i will agree in this case the illegibility warrants a comment chain, holy smokes! )
What's the point in linking unreadable website? I just opened it, saisd "Jesus!" and immediately closed it, I like my eyes. People should just flag unereable mess like this.
This is like saying, "I'm not addicted to smoking, I'm addicted to the happiness cigarettes give me." Addiction is a harmful dependency you pursue to achieve some desired outcome. The harmful dependency is the endless browsing, scrolling, and searching you engage in to obtain it, all the time wasted doing it and doing it in a way that consumes a significant amount of time that could be spent acquiring that same information in a more productive manner.
I'm not sure there's always a more efficient way to find that same information. If you already have a question, sure, you can look for an answer. Sometimes you stumble across a post about something you hadn't even thought to look into, though. I think that's part of what he's talking about when he mentions finding things that changed his life.
If you are browsing, you aren't searching for any specific piece of information. You're just looking at whatever is presented to you via whatever algo in use. In this case reading a book would, IMHO, be better. You stumble across all kinds of interesting pieces of knowledge, thoughtfully written prose, facts (in some books), great stories and characters in other. Though I do now have to condition this with; books written before say 2022 to stay clear of AI slop books that are flooding the space as we speak. Those books are worse than browsing the internet.
I think he misses the old forums where he'd just drop in to see what people were talking about. Not necessarily looking for an answer to something. Actually, he didn't need a recommendation feed to find a thread worth reading. But I do agree with you: books always win.
This is like saying, "I'm not addicted to smoking, I'm addicted to the happiness cigarettes give me."
No, it's like saying you're addicted to nicotine or routine or a break with people, because that's what cigarettes give you and there are other sources of that.
It is possible to get information from other sources just as it is possible to get nicotine or a break with people from other sources. Because of this your metaphor breaks down.
Moreover, the "content" isn't always information. It can be informative and it can be news you need to know about. But it's often garbage, disinformation and the information analogue of empty calories in food.
I doubt you are addicted to information. I highly suspect like many users of digital technology who are able to consume near infinite streams of said, that you are like a wasteful software program "polling" these data sources hoping that something really important will surface or that some underlying truth will be revealed through identifying patterns in the information.
I dont think you would need someone to publish that your hair was on fire on the web before you would believe it.
The wasteful part is that repeating the behavior (addiction or not) can become self-repeating even in the absence of the fix. Also one has to realize that at least in the case of news there is very little every day and most of what is distributed is rehash, or ancillary, or bloated and repeated to sell ads. You can go without watching or consuming news on the internet and not miss much for a pretty long time.
As far as tech goes, it moves very slow you can take a couple years off a software eng job and come back and not much has changed with very few exceptions. (Yes LLMs were one)
When you are done staring at your phone/computer at the end of the day reflect on whether or not you got anything really worthwhile out of it and put it in perspective. The signal vs noise ratio is not in your favor and getting less so every day.
I personally stare at my phone alot for the same reason as many people do. Im bored. But I dont do it at the expense of anything else Id rather do.
There’s so much more information to consume than news — or worse, tech news. Every day I find new things to learn about physics, history, geology, paleontology, biology… and not just things we discovered today, but decades and centuries worth of findings.
There is so much more to learn than any one person could even skim in their lifetime, even if you ignore absolutely all news. And heck yeah, it’s addictive.
People are complaining at that font should take another look.
I think there's something maybe special going on there.
Probably unintentional ... but I swear reading 'word at a time' the words are in a way clearer, like your mind is able to abstract them out of the background.
Wild!
And yes, information is 'the thing' but it depends on how it's presented obviously.
I think I'm similar. But why didn't people talk about newspaper addiction back then? Sometimes I wonder—even before smartphones, people spent that time reading books, looking up information, and reading newspapers. That kind of addiction was seen as "positive." But in reality, it was probably disrupting daily life too, in its own way.
When I see things like this, it sometimes occurs to me that the people who create "addiction" are the ones in power. Come to think of it, it makes me wonder why there was never any such thing as newspaper addiction.
But when I think about it, communities like HN don't exactly have only the taste I want either, do they?
That's always the case, really. There are people whose daily lives fall apart because they read too many books, but that usually isn't categorized as a form of addiction. So sometimes I wonder how addiction is actually defined.
For how addiction is defined, google ICD-11, it's: Impaired control over the behavior, the behavior taking increasing priority over other interests and daily activities, and continuation or escalation despite negative consequences, plus distress or functional impairment.. (I'm an alcoholic, 5 years sober)
I don't think I've seen a less accessible *font* in my life, including all the dark grey on black and yellow on white ones. Those are hard to read, but this one makes my eyes hurt, they actually started to hurt after I tried reading it despite discomfort. How come? Reading random text for 10 seconds can cause people physical pain? I wear glasses for near-sightedness and slight astigmatism, I wonder if it's related, and if people with 20/20 vision experience it differently.
I thought it was me, I literally think there are things that should no longer be acceptable and this font is one of them. It serves no purpose and I would like to ask medical professionals if it is potentially harmful.
Edit: While fuzzy or blurry text itself is highly unlikely to trigger an epileptic seizure it is a major cause of optical strain, headaches, and reading barriers across various accessibility needs. Given the amount of screen time we all incur in our daily lives, I do not see why this should be a "thing".
My site shows black with yellow background and white text boxes. Highly visible. Maybe you're referring to dead comments? There are options to hide those.
I know this because the first thing I did when I got to the page was hit F12 to bring up the debugging tools and turn these styles off so I could read it. :)
I have 20/20 vision and this presentation hurt my eyes. I'm glad my browser has "reader mode" to normalize things like this. I'm not trying to yuck someone else's yum. I simply appreciate the technical ability to read someone else's post in a way that doesn't cause discomfort.
> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
I think parent is within bounds to complain here.
This is a pretty horrendous font that is an accessibility issue not just a “tangential annoyance”— this is also a uniquely nauseating multi color font with flicker effects that is both interesting in its own right and hardly common.
you shouldn't take it into consideration, they aren't a mod and clearly have nothing better to do with their time. the pedantry on this site sometimes...
If you zoom in its actually 3 fonts. It looks line one of those Lain fan sites.
I actually like the font even though my eyes hate it. Its a short read so no biggie. Maybe remove the transparency for a sharper look and make the spacing of the 3 fonts slightly closer to each other.
My grandma always had the morning paper delivered. When I stayed with her during the summer I’d start in the top left corner of the first page and read all the way to the bottom right corner of the last and everything in between. What a 10 year old kid got out of the grain report? I’m not sure. But I was amped up on her homemade cinnamon rolls and multiple glasses of orange juice. It was wonderful. These days I’m more selective about what information I take in!
I remember reading the newspaper in the break room and at lunch. About 2013 or so. That's all their was. Well, for me, because I was a late smartphone adopter.
I kind of lump in "internet" (late 90s) with "internet in everyone's pockets at all times". But there was a fairly large gap there. Especially when you consider the limits of 3 and even 4g.
Do you subscribe now? I’ve toyed with the idea — I think I’d be more aware of local news / serendipitous things I normally wouldn’t seek out.
I’ve been considering subscribing to some high quality signal / low to no ad type written publications. Asterisk, IEEE spectrum, NOEMA. Make getting mail fun again.
I subscribe. There's a newspaper downstairs, I'll fetch it later. The paper news is better than the screen news, and I'm not going to try to explain what better means.
> What a 10 year old kid got out of the grain report?
ocular pattern recognition, clumping of letters into words, then ideas. vocabulary. grammar. sentence structure.
reading, especially early, leads to so many good things.
Hey all: "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, [etc...]. They're too common to be interesting."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Notably, I read this on both my iphone and mac (LG Ultrafine 5k). It is was enjoyable to read in a fun way on my phone, it did not really bug me as a fun blog font. I was more excited about the theme/design than the content. But on my main screen, which is hi res, it _did_ bug my eyes quite a bit. Interesting.
Can we add “I think it sounds like AI writing” to the list of off topic tangential annoyances? Clicking into an HN thread and having the top comment being about em dashes or something is obnoxious.
Good dang, you're right but the annoyance with this one is far from tangential or "common"...
If the site used a black font over black background it would be more readable as I could at least select the text and read it.
To add insult to injury, the site's name flashes. I'd say that the ONE interesting thing about this link is exactly how exotically bad the presentation is!
I think people may disagree with you on what constitutes a tangential annoyance. Is there any point at which the format is, in fact, a legitimate annoyance?
tangential and legitimate are not mutually exclusive. the majority of the grievances are infact the latter; they are legitimate
what makes them also the former is that (and surely the reason for the rule) is that because these grievances are so commonly expressed when links are shared they create a near constant 'noise' in the signal to noise of each discussion, with signal being the idea or message intended to be shared by the poster rather than the medium it arrived in
a better way to discuss the tangent or the medium would be by submitting its own HN post. that way theres a better S/N ratio for everything
example: scientific breakthrough is shared on fbook
signal: any discussion about that breakthrough or its Nth order effects on anything
noise: any discussion about the fbook website, walled gardens, zark muckerburg, anything that would be on any link for that site regardless of the message inside the medium
those discussions arent illegitimate, they are better served by targeted discussion on their posts like..
some websites are stylized the point of illegibility
fbook website dark patterns
popups make alt F4
..rather than increasing noise across the whole of HN. this rule is closely related to another site rule: "use the best possible interpretation of the parent comment" because it too is a rule that is in place as an attempt to steer toward "curious discussion" (high S/N ratio)
( i will agree in this case the illegibility warrants a comment chain, holy smokes! )
What's the point in linking unreadable website? I just opened it, saisd "Jesus!" and immediately closed it, I like my eyes. People should just flag unereable mess like this.
Just use reader view in your browser.
It's a good tip, but if author can't be bothered to provide normally readable website, I am not interested in reading whatever he writes.
Random blogs are the magazine racks of today. Walk on.
In this particular case the content is arguably related I mean I think it's essentially a performance art piece
This is like saying, "I'm not addicted to smoking, I'm addicted to the happiness cigarettes give me." Addiction is a harmful dependency you pursue to achieve some desired outcome. The harmful dependency is the endless browsing, scrolling, and searching you engage in to obtain it, all the time wasted doing it and doing it in a way that consumes a significant amount of time that could be spent acquiring that same information in a more productive manner.
That's the addiction, not the information.
I'm not sure there's always a more efficient way to find that same information. If you already have a question, sure, you can look for an answer. Sometimes you stumble across a post about something you hadn't even thought to look into, though. I think that's part of what he's talking about when he mentions finding things that changed his life.
If you are browsing, you aren't searching for any specific piece of information. You're just looking at whatever is presented to you via whatever algo in use. In this case reading a book would, IMHO, be better. You stumble across all kinds of interesting pieces of knowledge, thoughtfully written prose, facts (in some books), great stories and characters in other. Though I do now have to condition this with; books written before say 2022 to stay clear of AI slop books that are flooding the space as we speak. Those books are worse than browsing the internet.
I think he misses the old forums where he'd just drop in to see what people were talking about. Not necessarily looking for an answer to something. Actually, he didn't need a recommendation feed to find a thread worth reading. But I do agree with you: books always win.
Also, it's not addiction to information, it's addiction to entertainment. Looking for interesting/fun things is a form of entertainment.
This is like saying, "I'm not addicted to smoking, I'm addicted to the happiness cigarettes give me."
No, it's like saying you're addicted to nicotine or routine or a break with people, because that's what cigarettes give you and there are other sources of that.
It is possible to get information from other sources just as it is possible to get nicotine or a break with people from other sources. Because of this your metaphor breaks down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopamine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reward_system
Moreover, the "content" isn't always information. It can be informative and it can be news you need to know about. But it's often garbage, disinformation and the information analogue of empty calories in food.
I doubt you are addicted to information. I highly suspect like many users of digital technology who are able to consume near infinite streams of said, that you are like a wasteful software program "polling" these data sources hoping that something really important will surface or that some underlying truth will be revealed through identifying patterns in the information.
I dont think you would need someone to publish that your hair was on fire on the web before you would believe it.
The wasteful part is that repeating the behavior (addiction or not) can become self-repeating even in the absence of the fix. Also one has to realize that at least in the case of news there is very little every day and most of what is distributed is rehash, or ancillary, or bloated and repeated to sell ads. You can go without watching or consuming news on the internet and not miss much for a pretty long time.
As far as tech goes, it moves very slow you can take a couple years off a software eng job and come back and not much has changed with very few exceptions. (Yes LLMs were one)
When you are done staring at your phone/computer at the end of the day reflect on whether or not you got anything really worthwhile out of it and put it in perspective. The signal vs noise ratio is not in your favor and getting less so every day.
I personally stare at my phone alot for the same reason as many people do. Im bored. But I dont do it at the expense of anything else Id rather do.
There’s so much more information to consume than news — or worse, tech news. Every day I find new things to learn about physics, history, geology, paleontology, biology… and not just things we discovered today, but decades and centuries worth of findings.
There is so much more to learn than any one person could even skim in their lifetime, even if you ignore absolutely all news. And heck yeah, it’s addictive.
>like a wasteful software program "polling" these data sources hoping that something really important will surface
This is me on eBay :)
People are complaining at that font should take another look.
I think there's something maybe special going on there.
Probably unintentional ... but I swear reading 'word at a time' the words are in a way clearer, like your mind is able to abstract them out of the background.
Wild!
And yes, information is 'the thing' but it depends on how it's presented obviously.
makes me think of https://accelareader.com/
I thought the font was great.
It's not information, it's emotion.
Roughly I think is probably in the right direction
I think I'm similar. But why didn't people talk about newspaper addiction back then? Sometimes I wonder—even before smartphones, people spent that time reading books, looking up information, and reading newspapers. That kind of addiction was seen as "positive." But in reality, it was probably disrupting daily life too, in its own way.
When I see things like this, it sometimes occurs to me that the people who create "addiction" are the ones in power. Come to think of it, it makes me wonder why there was never any such thing as newspaper addiction.
You can read a lot of the newspaper and still finish by the end of breakfast.
It isn't personalized, so many sections aren't of much interest.
But when I think about it, communities like HN don't exactly have only the taste I want either, do they?
That's always the case, really. There are people whose daily lives fall apart because they read too many books, but that usually isn't categorized as a form of addiction. So sometimes I wonder how addiction is actually defined.
Well... https://aeon.co/essays/contagion-poison-trigger-books-have-a...
and: https://archive.org/details/americannervousn00bearuoft/page/... - one note on this, Beard blamed nervous exhaustion on steam power, the periodical press, the telegraph, the sciences, and uh... the mental activity of women... This excerpt for a tl;dr: https://english.web.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/english/doc...
For how addiction is defined, google ICD-11, it's: Impaired control over the behavior, the behavior taking increasing priority over other interests and daily activities, and continuation or escalation despite negative consequences, plus distress or functional impairment.. (I'm an alcoholic, 5 years sober)
But newspapers end and then each one cost money.
you could also just like being distracted
possibly
The one who owns the information owns the world. But with ai slop it became a bit harder to look for an alph.
You are addicted to avoiding your inner self
Probably this is more precise
100%
I noticed this about myself about 25 years ago... before the internet really took off on the dopamine rollercoatser it is now.
HA.Ha.Ha. Interesting
neither smartphone nor internet will help you get information these days. there is too much of it and anything there is too much of becomes worthless.
This is another way to say you have ADHD. (I say this as someone with ADHD behaviors myself)
I don't think I've seen a less accessible *font* in my life, including all the dark grey on black and yellow on white ones. Those are hard to read, but this one makes my eyes hurt, they actually started to hurt after I tried reading it despite discomfort. How come? Reading random text for 10 seconds can cause people physical pain? I wear glasses for near-sightedness and slight astigmatism, I wonder if it's related, and if people with 20/20 vision experience it differently.
I thought it was me, I literally think there are things that should no longer be acceptable and this font is one of them. It serves no purpose and I would like to ask medical professionals if it is potentially harmful.
Edit: While fuzzy or blurry text itself is highly unlikely to trigger an epileptic seizure it is a major cause of optical strain, headaches, and reading barriers across various accessibility needs. Given the amount of screen time we all incur in our daily lives, I do not see why this should be a "thing".
And I got reprimanded by some rando pretending to be a mod for my previous comment. What is actually going on here?
You guys are saying this on a website which puts light grey text on light grey background.
My site shows black with yellow background and white text boxes. Highly visible. Maybe you're referring to dead comments? There are options to hide those.
I'm sorry, what is your username again? I can't read it, because it's tiny light grey text on a light grey background.
Controversy shouldn't give me cataracts either.
and tiny buttons
It hurt for me too. I stopped reading it because it gave me a serious headache.
Not a font. The VHS line striping is just a repeating gradient applied over the whole page:
The red glow is a red text shadow applied to every element on the page: Surprisingly, the glitchy logo is also done with CSS, with animations over two different versions of the text overlain atop one another: I know this because the first thing I did when I got to the page was hit F12 to bring up the debugging tools and turn these styles off so I could read it. :)I have 20/20 vision and this presentation hurt my eyes. I'm glad my browser has "reader mode" to normalize things like this. I'm not trying to yuck someone else's yum. I simply appreciate the technical ability to read someone else's post in a way that doesn't cause discomfort.
I had to stop reading the first paragraph because of how bad it is.
this font is the stupidest thing ive seen in ages
I feel you. I had to brave through the font that you're using but I feel you.
Maybe try to avoid making a statement using a font which literally hurts my eyes, and possibly the eyes of many others. That's messed up.
Also information addiction should be a human "feature" I suppose, shouldn't it?
Knowledge for the sake of knowledge and so forth.
The font is actually cool but it belongs in games like Alien Isolation (and possibly others) it's just not good for blogging methinks.
> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(reader mode works perfectly well on this site afaict)
I think parent is within bounds to complain here. This is a pretty horrendous font that is an accessibility issue not just a “tangential annoyance”— this is also a uniquely nauseating multi color font with flicker effects that is both interesting in its own right and hardly common.
And by the way I like, read and upvoted OP's article. I'm starting to feel like a reprimanded student at this point and it's a bit weird to be honest.
I wasn't really complaining. I was responding to the OP. The font thing was just an aside but fine I'll take this into consideration going forward.
you shouldn't take it into consideration, they aren't a mod and clearly have nothing better to do with their time. the pedantry on this site sometimes...
Interesting. I thought you were a mod but you're not. I'm sure there are better ways to spend your time.
This comment gives pretty wild middle manager/micromanager vibes and it is more offensive than whatever it is you think you're policing.
Lol I sorta enjoyed the pain of it though and had to let my eyes just accept it
quick fix on my chrome: select all to fix the contrast.
BFDR bad font, didn't read
I did read but perhaps put too much emphasis on difficulty of reading rather than responding to the article. My bad.
I was concurring! Personally, I couldn't read it due to the font.
Thank you. Simple misunderstanding and I'm stupid I think. Or the font busted my brain.
Just a small note and I'm guessing this is an intentional aesthetic choice but the chromatic aberration makes the text very uncomfortable to read.
Literally hurt my eyes. Didn't make it past the first paragraph
As someone with keratoconus, I hardly noticed! This is what all text looks like for me.
Get some hybrid mini-scleral lenses fitted and your life will improve significantly :)
reader mode button works wonders for me
Curb cuts for the win!
[flagged]
[dead]
That font will cure my addiction!
I imagined bad. I couldn't imagine something that bad.
It looks gorgeous as an art piece, but it's impossible to read.
Form over function to the extreme.
[dead]
Good news for those horrified by the font: reader mode seems to work just fine, fwiw.
Thank god for reader mode to unfuck that font
Damn you beat me to it, I was going to say exactly that. What a nightmare!
If this is a marketing stunt to use such a bad font; honestly, I'm impressed.
possibly the most unreadable website I've ever seen.
duh
On bear blog, how do you utilize this font?
If you zoom in its actually 3 fonts. It looks line one of those Lain fan sites.
I actually like the font even though my eyes hate it. Its a short read so no biggie. Maybe remove the transparency for a sharper look and make the spacing of the 3 fonts slightly closer to each other.