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[stub for offtopicness] All: "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They
by dang 1y ago
[stub for offtopicness]
All: "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."
It's not that these things aren't annoying—it's that they are annoying, and that drives tons of dyspeptic, offtopic discussion that in the end drowns out anything that's actually interesting. Since that's a bad outcome, we need to refrain from driving the thread there.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- pards 1y agoThe random word highlighting makes it hard to read for me.
- 000ooo000 1y agoYeah the 3 word lines one after another is god awful.
- jcolman 1y agoThis is a table of contents. Those are the names of sections. You can click on them to go to pages of more normally formatted paragraphs.
- WaltPurvis 1y agoThe paragraphs on all pages are formatted quite narrowly, displaying only 3 - 6 words per line. If this bothers people, it can also be changed with Stylebot or the like, using a rule like this to change the max-width, which is set to 400px, to a larger value: p, ul, li { max-width: 800px; }
- 000ooo000 1y agoThanks - my mistake. I thought this was some really bad LinkedIn style content.
- roxolotl 1y agoI suspect that’s how they help you make sense of a mess. If you can get through the styling you can survive anything.
- frereubu 1y agoThis should definitely be an option you can turn on or off.
- SilverSlash 1y agoSo far I'm not finding it that bothersome but I'm thinking of vibe coding a chrome extension to remove the highlighting.
- latexr 1y agoThe solution is literally one line. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45386340 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45386340
- bildung 1y agoFrom the start of the book: "Each time you see a word that is highlighted, [...] it means that this term is a lexicon enabled term. By clicking on that term, you will see a page listing all other uses of that term within the book."
- gowld 1y agoVery helpful for people who need to be constantly reminded to have top-of-mind instant access to the definition of words like "thing" and "what", at all times.
- WaltPurvis 1y agoIf you have Stylebot or the like installed, you can get rid of the highlighting with: a { background-color: transparent; }
- nodoodles 1y agoHere's a bookmarklet: javascript:document.querySelectorAll('a').forEach(el => el.style.backgroundColor = 'transparent')
- jennyholzer 1y agoI am highly impressed by the lexicon feature, but I think it would be nice if you could disable the highlighting
- raincole 1y ago[flagged]
- velcrovan 1y agoIn what ways did 37signals innovate in any of those 3 areas?
- raincole 1y agoThey didn't. 37signals books are basically "how to make self-help books that look like slideshows." And this site looks like their uglier cousin: https://www.howtomakesenseofanymess.com/chapter1/19/every-thing-has-information/ https://www.howtomakesenseofanymess.com/chapter1/19/every-th... I think most people can't write nothingness like this even if they try very hard. And if they achieve that they can't make the emphasis this ugly.
- velcrovan 1y agoYou could take a page out of "The Timeless Way of Building" and make the same comment. True, a page of writing that goes all the way down to the axiomatic and obvious comes off as low-effort. But as part of a much larger project, it can also indicate someone who has thought deeply about a topic and is willing to spend time constructing it from first principles.
- abtinf 1y agoThis is such a difficult to read site. I can’t quite put my finger on it… maybe it’s the vertical spacing that requires a ton of scrolling and lets you see only limited context. The word highlighting doesn’t help. I suspect it’s intentionally designed to be unpleasant to encourage book sales.
- latexr 1y ago> I suspect it’s intentionally designed to be unpleasant to encourage book sales. If you’re reading a book preview and have an awful time of it, why would that encourage you to buy the book? You’re more likely to close the site and move away.
- prashantsengar 1y agoIt is also a lot of work (and intuitive) to publish all the content on a website and then intentionally make it unpleasant to read just to encourage book sales.
- ssl-3 1y agoWhen the presentation of the website has the appearance of being deliberately terrible, then I (for one) am lead to presume that the corresponding book will be just as disdainful.
- zahlman 1y agoI actually quite appreciate the use of hypertext.
- DrewADesign 1y agoSure, but you could also have a more useful visual design while maintaining that. The problem with the site, on mobile at least, is the lack of visual hierarchy through spacing, text weight, and implied lines because you might only see one or two red chapter titles on screen at any given time. I get that they were trying to stick with a visual motif and the red text does make the chapter titles stick out— it would work great in print or maybe on a big monitor when you could see it all at once. But if you have to scroll through it, I found it pretty irritating to have no way to visually orient yourself.
- chrisweekly 1y agoThe website is a hot mess, mostly bc its layout is strangely "off"; its text requires just a little horizontal scrolling to reach the end of many lines. I'll never understand the lengths people go to to break the standard default rendering of text on the web. There might be good ideas here but the mobile presentation is ~unusable.
- ryandrake 1y agoSeriously. Just using plain HTML would have resulted in readable text lines. All the web designer had to do was: “not do whatever he deliberately did that made it worse.”
- jennyholzer 1y agoI want to provide a counter perspective, which is that I am very happy with way in which the website deconstructs the book into short "articles". What I mean is that I think this website (at least from my perspective) has a successful, novel approach to representing books on the web. I don't mean to discount your point. UX issues are very serious and can ruin an otherwise carefully presented work. My point is that despite these issues, I am impressed by the creator's approach to the website.
- procaryote 1y agoIt renders as individual pages for me. An article (as in one html page) per chapter would probably be easier to read. Now they've forced constraints onto it that makes sense for paper but not a website
- Mistletoe 1y agoIs this website a satirical art piece?
- lowbloodsugar 1y ago[flagged]
- Lammy 1y agoI just miss the days when Hyperlinks were underlined to show that they were clickable. I thought this was, like, a poem or something at first until I realized they were chapter links to other pages.
- cheema33 1y ago[flagged]
- groby_b 1y agoAnd you start with the mess that this website is... Seriously, a paginated interface for longtext? Hyperlinks not styled as hyperlinks? Text with random highlights? And most of the short blurbs really just more words without any additional clarification? You make sense of a mess by having the ability to organize thought & data, and I am 100% convinced that the author does not have that ability.
- arduanika 1y agoSorry dang, but I have to disagree. Nothing about this site design is "too common to be interesting." The whole thing is highly irregular. In an extreme case like this, the weirdness of the layout has to be considered a *principle feature* of the website, not a side distraction. Another commenter mentioned Time Cube, and that's not far off. Commenters are correct that the whole thing reads like a meta joke, where the site itself is a mess. We have to at least consider the possibility that the author is in on the joke. Petition to eliminate this stub, and merge this discussion of *the website's primary distinguishing feature* into the main conversation.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- sundarurfriend 1y agoJust wanna express my thanks to all the complaining comments here, they helped me set expectations so that I wasn't too disappointed when the site actually did turn out to be an unreadable hot mess.