Consider quoting the text directly though. Making images of text is probably the most inaccessible thing imaginable. Should take less than a hundred lines of CSS to create a believable HN container in a div.
Agreed. I love the concept of this site, but it would load significantly faster and provide better user experience if it utilized text instead. Loading this website took me 9.41 seconds.
Images don't scale, and people using screenreaders would be out of luck, for starters.
While load times for images are worse, this format provides some handy advantages, namely the ability to look through that thread and see more context, read the related article, etc.
This is just "the easy way out". Justifying it otherwise is wrong, in my opinion...
A good example is Raymond Chen's blog The Old New Thing; just look at the Windows dialog in this post: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20181016-00/?p=... It's all pure HTML.
The script probably utilized an integration with a screen capture library. I'd imagine someone can write a script to parse html and dig out the comment, but the screen capture script was probably faster to write.
A slower method would be to copy and paste the text by hand...
Because HN readers are more likely to engage with the comments themselves?
a) Who is 'our'? And why is HN typically opaque like this? [1]
b) Why are they some of your favorite comments? Reasons?
[1] As I have noted in the past in comments I have made the mods don't even say they are mods. It's like a secret society where you have to figure it out over time or be clued in. Example dang's profile [2] doesn't say he is a mod. Even PG's profile said 'bug fixer'. [3]
Why have people infer the relationship. What's preventing anyone from coming up with a handle and the acting like a mod?
b) 'Cause we thought they were interesting. Don't you think some of these are interesting?
> Why have people infer the relationship.
'Cause It's like a secret society where you have to figure it out over time or be clued in.
> What's preventing anyone from coming up with a handle and the acting like a mod?
Nothing! It's a community site, and communities can function surprisingly well without too much ceremony.
Because there is so much that someone can read it is usually helpful to have additional information so you can decide if it's worth reading.
Now I am not a Bill Gates fan in any way, and I am not saying you should go into the depth that he does, but as an example look at what he does when he recommends a book. He doesn't just say 'this is something I find interesting'.
https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Educated
> 'Cause It's like a secret society where you have to figure it out over time or be clued in.
Hah well this thinking is similar to, say, Twitter which on purpose makes things difficult for the ordinary man and the beginner. Will note that Apple took a different attitude with the iphone in 2007 and we know how that ended up.
So sure why not be more welcoming to newcomers?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073675
(“dang” being the only other active mod that I am aware of)
https://twitter.com/AustinGWalters/status/104189476543920128...
It was fun / exciting to see it work, plus from all the emails I got there was a lot of interest. I personally enjoy the collaborative nature of Hacker News, although these posts are also interesting and highlight the breadth of knowledge here.
From the list in the post, my personal favorite was meeting Rick Jay: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18555353
Here's the link to the comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17942981
I would appreciate other contributors.
I also would prefer if the comment text were rendered in actual text instead of screenshots, as the low resolution is really obvious. Hope true text makes it into the next one of these.
Don't mean to discourage the authors, simply saying how I felt.
They didn't pick the best comment from the thread on bad codebases, but that whole discussion was ... enlightening.
