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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

[stub for offtopicness]

This looks to be some fashly extra content to go along with the recent and wonderful John Wheeler retrospective. [1] But truth be told I couldn’t get through more than a few links before I got frustrated with the design.

[1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/john-wheeler-saw-the-tear-in-...

I come here for the plaintext.

Scrolling through that site is like geek kryptonite. Terrible. I will monitor this comment thread for other articles which cover the same content.

Wow, hot takes. All of this is because the intro quotes appear and dissapear? Otherwise it doesn't actually hijack your scrolls other than to slide in some incidental images, and this is just the index, anyway -- all the articles are plain print articles with no animations at all.

I had just whitespace on mobile for pages and pages before text started appearing.

This site deserves my wrath, and the wrath of others. You have a browser which works with it obviously.

I am not sure what this article is about. I assumed it would be redundant but didn't get to find out because of the weird intolerable formatting.

It does not display at all for me. If they have a plain text file available then I might try to read it.

In my case there was a floating nav bar bouncing around at seemingly random vertical heights over top of the document as I scrolled, which I found very distracting. Additionally, the buttons that are meant to link to the subtopics did not work, the vertical line height and scroll-jacking necessitated excessive scrolling, and and no scroll bar was visible. I've since figured out that FF mobile's reader mode makes it workable.

I really am over the stupid scroll hijacking sites.

Seriously. This page looks and interacts like shit on my iPhone. Gave up and went to reader mode. Still sucks.

Agreed. Quanta has great content, but man alive, this particular "article" (?) is completely unbearable. I wish they'd just release these special issues as actual print magazines. I'd love to have them in the flesh, but Quanta very rarely publishes their stuff on paper.

It's just gonna get worse now that it's easy to implement with CSS.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_scroll-...

Firefox and Safari don't support it.

https://caniuse.com/mdn-css_properties_animation-timeline_sc...

That link mentions that Firefox already supports it if you change a setting, and Apple is literally currently implementing it.

https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2020-June/0312...

https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/pulls?q=Scroll+animations

Fucked up my phone jeez.

This "stupid site" is a national treasure.

This is Quanta Magazine, which is printing high quality science stories that no one else approaches. If they went under those stories, like this one, would simply be lost.

How can Quanta Magazine do that, when no other magazine can? It's because they're bankrolled by Jim Simons, the MIT-trained mathematician who co-founded Renaissance technologies and was called the "greatest hedge fund manager of all time" (he died this year). It's basically his gift to the world. We are lucky to have it.

I love quanta magazine!! Always exciting to see quanta articles pop up on hacker news. They’re usually technical enough to be fascinating, but also accessible (and well-explained) enough that I can send them to my dad lol.

I had no idea about Jim Simons. What a legend.

I recently was looking to see if they had a physical subscription, and couldn’t find one. I actually didn’t even see anywhere to donate on the site!

Thanks for this context!

After waiting for a few seconds I gave up and came here to determine if it was just me… nope. The site just sucks on mobile.

Personally I agree; however:

"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sorry, folks.

I think Quanta discovered people like me rarely get past the third paragraph, and they made this to keep my attention. And it's working.

—By "working", I mean I can experience it in Chrome and I feel like I'm retaining information. In Safari 17.5, the images don't load.

No need to apologize. You did nothing wrong.

I know it is not going to happen, but ideally the browser would be more configurable than they actually are so that you could configure yours for high visual stimulation whereas I could configure mine to make pages standardized and plain for rapid "navigation" (scrolling, searching in the page, copying): i.e., ideally the site would publish just the words and the browser would be responsible for almost all of the UI.

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