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Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

And yet quotes don't wrap to any specific size, so you end up with an awful horizontal scroll bar.

There is no way to format your text, even stuff that's available since MS Word 1.0, such as bold or italic. Even science papers have formatting so I don't buy the "overuse of styles" BS.

There is no way to have avatars or some other ways to distinguish users (or mods!) to make this place feel more like a community in real life. I've gotten used to it but it still sucks.

The contrast is super low.

HN is an MVP for a super minimalist forum that wouldn't fly for any other kind of community except for the intersection between hackers and wannabe entrepreneurs.

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>And yet quotes don't wrap to any specific size, so you end up with an awful horizontal scroll bar.

HN doesn't have a "quotes" feature. Some users here have the unfortunate habit of abusing the code formatting feature for quotes.

>There is no way to have avatars or some other ways to distinguish users

Thank god. There's a lot I miss about forums, but avatars and huge signature blocks are better left in the trashbin of history.

Yes, because avatars and signature blocks (which are useless, I agree), couldn't possibly be designed to be tasteful and fast to load. Especially avatars. A 30x30 image of any kind would be enough to convey more info about the speaker.

> There is no way to format your text, even stuff that's available since MS Word 1.0, such as bold or italic

Are you entirely sure about that?

Ok, now do bold ;-)

You mean 𝗹𝗶𝗸𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀?

ʇxǝʇ uʍop ǝpᴉsdn sʇɹoddns uǝʌǝ NH 'uɐǝɯ I

There is no formatting support for it, it seems you can use Unicode bold formats or something. Doesn't seem approachable or trivial...

Yes, I know people do things like that (mostly on Twitter, it seems), but I wouldn't recommend it; it'll interfere with searchability, copy/paste, etc., and generally make the text less interoperable. The mathematical alphabets in Unicode are intended for specific technical uses where the typeface is an inherent part of the symbol's identity, not for styling normal text.

Now try a screen reader (on a mac, Edit > Speech > Start Speaking will do nicely).

Spoiler: You mean mathematical sans-serif bold small l, mathematical sans-serif bold small i, mathematical sans-serif bold small k, mathematical sans-serif bold small e, mathematical sans-serif bold small t, mathematical sans-serif bold small h, mathematical sans-serif bold small i, mathematical sans-serif bold small s?

If screen readers do that, why? That seems useless even when those characters are used for their intended purpose.

They're just reading the character name. I don't know of any screen reader that actually makes an attempt to read math reasonably.

Why don’t people point out how terrible screen readers are then, instead of criticizing people posting online who cannot be reasonably expected to stay up to date with Unicode and screen reader functionality?

I’m much happier that it isn’t a “proper” community with avatars & such, fwiw. Much like I’m not fond of small talk, I’m also not fond of the obligations that come with social media.

If you weren't aware https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc may be helpful. There are some basic options for text formatting on HN, including italics and bold.

There is no bold.

𝗔𝗿𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝘀𝘂𝗿𝗲?

Stop tricking people. Yes you can use unicode for all kinds of fun stuff, but that's not formatting, it's a hack.

I’m sorry, it was not my intention to mislead anyone. Yes, it’s all trickery with copy-and-pasted Unicode bold characters.

You would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for those meddling kids!

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