Comment by dtx1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dtx1 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Doesn't surprise me at all. The reality is that journalists are just that, journalists. They rarely have any relevant expertise about what they write. Coupled with strict limits on content size enforced by publishers and an audience that often understands even less about the topics discussed you get major errors like these.

The amount of text necessary to explain to the average NYT reader what a rendering engine is probably more then the allotted text size for this piece of pseudo-intellectual garbage. Should make you worry about everything else journalists write with the same lack of care and understanding of details.

This is why podcasts and longform youtube content form actual experts is thriving while traditional media is dying. They have optimized so much for short attention span, clickbaity and inflammatory content that they have lost all resemblance of quality and expertise. In short, for any given topic, if the explanation is less than an hour long discussion piece, it's almost guaranteed to be simplified to the point of being wrong and useless.

> This is why podcasts and longform youtube content form actual experts is thriving while traditional media is dying.

It is kind of sad that the "longform content" that you mention as the new thriving alternative to traditional media, is rather time-infefficient audio and video. I regret the dearth of longform reliable text.

I don't know why he would think that, you can see good longform text examples on HN every day.

Yes, for the subjects that Hacker News is concerned with, but there is a lot more out there than just what appeals to this techie crowd. As someone who has been involved in travel blogging, for example, I have witnessed long-form text becoming less and less popular, and instead images or video are taking over. Obviously it is all well and good to show people things, but there was a lot of useful detail expressed in longform text that you don’t get from the low-information-density formats popular today.

> "The amount of text necessary to explain to the average NYT reader what a rendering engine is probably more then the allotted text size..."

it's not that hard to summarize: a rendering engine transforms html into pixels on the screen. most people will have at least a vague idea of what html and pixels are. there's no further need to dive into the details where that description is less than 100% accurate (e.g., sreen readers).

that's to say, the reporting is just lazy and uninformed. no need to bail them out with a technical excuse.

> most people will have at least a vague idea what html and pixels are. there's no further need to dive into the details where that description is less than 100% accurate (e.g., sreen readers).

I doubt very much the average person on the street has a clear idea what a pixel is, let alone what HTML is. And even your description is so incomplete it's wrong since the safari engine also includes JavaScript execution, media rendering etc. on safari, proving my point: if you try to simplify it for the average reader, your description ends up wrong

yes, i said vague idea, not clear idea.

but none of that stuff matters for reaching a reasonable conclusion. we don't need to know how a transmission works to reason about speed and acceleration, only that it converts power from the engine into velocity somehow. the whole purpose of abstraction is to take advantage of such decouplings within a brain limited in how much information it can hold in working memory in any one instant.

I think you can do an ok job. Something like the "The rendering engine's job is to translate the computer languages of the web into the picture you see on the screen. Like human translators two rendering engine's might not understand the same things the same way and differences can occur."

Screen readers are a distraction. Even completely blind readers would have a concept of what is displayed on a computer monitor even if they've never seen it.

I read the comment you’re replying to as being sarcastic, but good points nonetheless.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com