Hacker News Reader

The basic problem is that it is "labeled" as a form of quote...

I'm curious as to why you find this unreadable... it renders pretty readably for me? (https://pasteboard.co/HlW8oMh.png).

As far as I can tell, formatdoc[0] doesn't provide a "semantically correct" method for formatting quotes. Hence, the age-old usenet quote (as codified in RFC3676[1]) seems to me to be the best way of indicating a quotation, and rendering it via a verbatim block ensures that the line-based quotation indication isn't disrupted by the text all being in a <p> tag when rendered in HTML.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc [1] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3676.txt

It’s great on desktop, but ubreadable on my phone.

Not always great on desktop either, unless one have a movie width screen...

Even on my desktop, unless I shrink the text down to a size that's too small for me to read, it's displayed as a horizontally scrolling block. (Using Firefox.)

If you zoom in, you'll see the problem: https://i.imgur.com/NXbRpN1.png. It's even worse on mobile.

Semantically wrong or not, it's all the HN developers have chosen to give us for blockquoting. That's not the users' fault.

For mobile, it helps if you manually truncate lines, like so:

   One puzzling feature of the shift register 
   is that there is no wiring between the stages!
   How do bits get from one stage to the next? 
   Did the chip have another layer of wiring that 
   wasn't in the photos? Was there some sort of 
   hidden connection? Eventually I noticed that 
   there wasn't an isolation ring between the 
   stages—a silicon barrier that separated most 
   I2L circuits. Without this isolation ring,
   an "invisible" PNP transistor exists between

The site is called "Hacker News," after all. Apparently that's because we're expected to, well, hack.

Italics are more readable.

And semantically just as broken.

Would it be that hard for the '1337 h4x04s at YC to support '>' blockquote markup like so many other forums?

So what's more important "semantic correctness" or having a readable post?

> For mobile, it helps if you manually truncate lines, like so

Mobile user here, your manual truncation was not enough unfortunately; it still gets cut off.

Leading white space is for code.

I wish everyone stopped making “blockquotes” with leading whitespace. It makes the text hard to read on mobile and it looks strange to have it in monospace font anyway.

Instead, prefix each paragraph of quoted text with the “>” but no leading whitespace and it’s clearly visible that you are quoting.

> One puzzling feature of the shift register is that there is no wiring between the stages! How do bits get from one stage to the next? Did the chip have another layer of wiring that wasn't in the photos? Was there some sort of hidden connection?

> Eventually I noticed that there wasn't an isolation ring between the stages—a silicon barrier that separated most I2L circuits.

> Without this isolation ring, an "invisible" PNP transistor exists between the stages, apparently allowing one stage to flip the next stage to the right value.

> Each shift-register stage is constructed from two NAND-gate latches. When the clock is low, the first latch is forced into an indeterminate state. When the clock goes high, the latch ends up as 0 or 1 based on the bias it receives from the previous stage through the "invisible" PNP transistors.

> Thus, the latch becomes edge-sensitive since it will change right on the clock's rising edge. I found a paper ("Injection-Coupled Synchronous Logic", 1978) that describes a similar technique for an I2L shift register9, so I think this is the right explanation, even though the circuit seems a bit sketchy.

On HN, you can just "star" the paste at the beginning and end.

One puzzling feature of the shift register is that there is no wiring between the stages! How do bits get from one stage to the next? Did the chip have another layer of wiring that wasn't in the photos? Was there some sort of hidden connection? Eventually I noticed that there wasn't an isolation ring between the stages—a silicon barrier that separated most I2L circuits. Without this isolation ring, an "invisible" PNP transistor exists between the stages, apparently allowing one stage to flip the next stage to the right value. Each shift-register stage is constructed from two NAND-gate latches. When the clock is low, the first latch is forced into an indeterminate state. When the clock goes high, the latch ends up as 0 or 1 based on the bias it receives from the previous stage through the "invisible" PNP transistors. Thus, the latch becomes edge-sensitive since it will change right on the clock's rising edge. I found a paper ("Injection-Coupled Synchronous Logic", 1978) that describes a similar technique for an I2L shift register9, so I think this is the right explanation, even though the circuit seems a bit sketchy.