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Comment by delegate | Hacker News Reader

Honest question - have you read this entire article ?

...

I'm sure it's written by a smart and talented journalist - but it's just too long. I cannot possibly allocate so much of my time to read a single news article!

I know it's kind of my problem, but I'm sure lots of others are just like me - it's just the nature of our tech-provoked ADD.

I skimmed through it all right, but I didn't get too much out of that. If I need to go deep, I grab a book!

Good journalism doesn't get through, because it asks too much attention of its (busy) readers.

A TLDR version of good articles is a must. That's a good problem for AI isn't it ? For the moment, though - I'm sure the authors themselves could make a nice summary readable in maybe 3-5 minutes.

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I hear you. I guess long form journalism has its place, but for me it's in the library next to the novels. When reading news I want to go straight to the point. In fact, I'd pay for an API that returns an array of news, and for each one the Five Ws (and 1H) [1] in a machine readable format, at most two sentences long.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Ws

I read the whole article, but I didn't read it all at once. It was interesting enough that after I'd read the first half, I kept thinking about it, and made sure I finished it the next day.

Same here. Actually read it twice, with the pauses in different spots.

The NY Times Magazine does this every week. Each issue's big story is the length of a book chapter.

Frankly I love it. It reminds me of the gogo days of WiReD Magazine, when so much was new in the Net it was impossible to do justice to a topic in fewer than 6000 words.

And now due to Deep Learning, AI/ML is gogo too.

There are services like http://smmry.com/about which offer an API. Some sub-reddits I frequent already have bots that auto invoke this API and post the TLDR as a comment on every original post, and it seems to work acceptably well.

The article was so good that I read it through to the end, but it was definitely a bit long to conveniently fit into my normal work/non-work flow.

Hi, I can recommend using the Chrome extension 'Reedy' which allows you to blast through this at 800-1200 words/minute. You can start slower and gradually increase the speed, but once you get the hang of it, an article like this takes no more than what an ordinary article would have taken to read normally.

If your bottleneck in reading text is in scanning words from the screen, then you either don't reflect on what you read or you're reading boring things.

Mostly agree with you, but those apps can be handy when the page is formatted with 50 word lines, instead of say, 10 word lines.

I read your comment before the article. I decided that if this had some "it was a dark and stormy night" opening I wasn't gonna bother. Made it 1 sentence into the piece.

It's terribly long and incredibly riveting. I read the whole thing.

Agreed; it was more than twice as long as it ought to be.

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