The 8-mile hole in a Hawaii national park that no one can explain | Hacker News Reader

The 8-mile hole in a Hawaii national park that no one can explain

sfgate.com

94 pointselsewhen59 comments

Do the makers of sites like this know how terrible it is to try to actually read an article on them? Just tried on iOS. As you scroll, the ads load and change and throw you to a different part of the page and you lose your place repeatedly.

After about 4 times, I bailed.

The Hearst papers uses some pretty terrible ad networks and it’s done so for years so one would have to assume it’s on purpose, like torrent tracker website ads. I only put up with it cause it’s free for now.

(Un)ironically, it's free precisely because of all of the ads and data harvesting

On most news sites, the ads are annoying and the sheer weight of the third party tracking and ad javascript make them unusable.

But I've found that a lot of news sites are bearable with javascript disabled. On chrome desktop, you can do that per site via the site settings in the location bar. On iOS, I'm using Quiche browser. It's subscription, but it can disable javascript per site and has auto dark mode functionality.

I wouldn't necessarily mind a paid browser if there were a lifetime option. Apparently you weren't kidding about subscription.

I like to just have JavaScript disabled by default, and as I encounter a site rarely that isn't usable with JavaScript, I just explicitly allow JavaScript for that domain

It's incredible to see how fresh the web feels and how much better your battery life is when you're not running a bunch of code in every tab you have open

Oh they know I am certain. For these sites it's a game of reload and go into airplane mode before too much crap loads.

If you haven't tried it, Reader mode in Firefox is perfect for this.

there we go - thank you.

And safari

Its fine on PC with AdBlock. Possibly that's all they test. I sometimes wonder how these devs can sleep at night - random news websites. in the UK the sun or similar - unreadable nonsense auto play videos pop over ads etc etc. I imagine they start at - don't block ads somehow - your problem.

> I sometimes wonder how these devs can sleep at night

You might be surprised. I met a guy in Berkeley who lived out of a van. He told me that he ran a horrible ad distribution thing as a way to make his living. There was some fly-by-night colo or homelab setup he had to run some cheap pizza box hardware. "I'm basically always playing a game of how can I serve the most ads on this shitty CPU I have." All kinds of nasty stuff ran on his ad network, he totally didn't care.

I asked him how did he get paid and of course he received Bitcoin and other crypto. I asked him what did he usually buy with that crypto? He looked me dead in the eye and said: "coke and heroin."

Some people truly, truly, truly don't care about the consequences of their actions.

Ads will also bring you zero-click exploits.

Just install ad blocker and js blocker on all devices.

Have you heard of the existence of adblockers?

The article itself feels like clickbait.

I actually got hit with a captcha before I could even read the article, and promptly clicked the back button. Sounds like it was for the best.

This is why I use Firefox on mobile; I'm addicted to the ad-free browsing life.

You saw the ads, right?

Job done. Who cares if you read the article.

Use reader. That’s what it is for.

It is against HN guidelines to post complaints like this. We all had the same experience reading the article; yes it sucks, but it sucks in a completely common way that has nothing to do with the unique content or why it was posted to HN.

And complaining about it here adds no substance to the conversation, nor does it do anything to fix the problem.

In the spirit of the subject of the article, perhaps view the terrible UX as a sort of difficult wilderness you have to cross in order to reach the interesting info in the article text. Take pride in your ability to forge ahead and reach your goal. :-)

Yes, against guidelines, yet, at least right now voted to the top, go figure.

Yes, exactly, it’s hard for people to resist the temptation; that’s why it is against the guidelines.

If no one engaged, it would not need to be addressed in guidelines. It just wouldn’t happen.

Also on iOS, using native content blocking and Wipr 2 w/ Wipr Extra extension. No ads.

https://kaylees.site/wipr2.html

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wipr-2/id1662217862

// by solo dev making this for some 15+ years now, worth supporting even if u prefer e.g. 1Blocker or AdGuard or etc.

I'll add another endorsement for Wipr 2, especially as one purchase grants adblocking on both iOS and Mac Safari.

Viewing the article in my HN reader app and there are no ads to be found. Quite a nice experience, I can't recommend Wipr enough!

On iOs with BlockBear and AdBlock works fine.

My phone always routes through my home internet connection via wireguard. So I’m using both my home DNS resolvers ad blocking as well as uBlock origin lite on my iPhone. I see no ads on the page and it scrolls fine.

> Editor’s note: SFGATE recognizes the importance of diacritical marks in the Hawaiian language. We are unable to use them due to the limitations of our publishing platform.

I'm struggling to imagine how this can be the case in 2026 on a news website covering, of all places, San Francisco. What COBOL mainframe do they have rendering this page?

At a guess: The articles are stored in some oldass MySQL DB that doesn't support Unicode, and they've somehow never gotten around to migrating the tables to a new schema.

The default collation on MS SQL Server didn’t support Unicode until some fairly recent releases. Even though the database itself fully supported Unicode (you just had to pick a different collation).

So it’s entirely possible that they are using a fully up-to-date database, but the software depends on using a database collation that doesn’t support Unicode. I’ve seen software like that in active use even now. It can definitely get frustrating, and it’s not that hard to fix if you can just get some management buyin.

Yes, thank you -- I didn't express it very well.

As penance we should infill said hole with San Francisco. Pretty much fits with room to spare.

They say that as if that makes it ok.

Calling attention to it kind of makes it worse. If they didn’t have that note anyone who saw and was bothered could chalk it up to them not caring or not knowing like so many other publications would be. But by dropping this statement at the end, they’re saying they know, they’re claiming they care, they just don’t care enough to actually fix their systems to handle apparently anything other than ascii text despite the fact that even if that was all they could store in their database HTML has support for Unicode escape sequences and they could use that.

So it gets a little weirder too because here[1] is an article on their site where they are very clearly using a diacritical character in the main body of the text for "Hernándas" which means whatever backend they're using must support something other than plain ascii. If it was Latin-1 or a similar code page that might explain why they couldn't use the "macron" or "overline" diacritic characters directly, but it doesn't explain why they couldn't just use the HTML escape sequences then, since they can clearly inject them like they did between "Kau Desert" in the Hawaii article.

And while it doesn't say what their backend can do, certainly if you edit in the &#773 escape sequence after the U into the page HTML it seems work, so nothing in the page content itself would make them unable to display the characters. Just makes their note all the more strange.

[1]: https://www.sfgate.com/sports/article/alcantara-gets-another...

Iceland has the Þingvellir valley, which is an above-sea continuation of the rift valley down the middle of the Mid-Atlantic ridge. It includes the Silfra, which is underwater (fresh water) at the lowest part of the valley. The Great Crack in Hawai'i is of course not such a major rift, but it is the same idea: upwelling magma raises the ground, creating a crack like in a loaf of raising bread.

The Great Rift in Idaho is another volcanic rift valley, which (IIUC) passes through Craters of the Moon National Monument (where the Apollo astronauts trained).

This is so double standards. He used the AllTrails despite walking through private roads and yet wanted to remove it so that no one else could use it because of trespassing concerns. If that was the case, why does he brazenly show photos of what he did? This is the case of the kid in class who cheats but doesn’t let others do the same.

It wasn't the author who wanted it removed, it was AllTrails.

GMaps link: https://maps.app.goo.gl/HUA5m4KPJmbeqJEF6

The author needs to pack a small drone next time they head out. They're light, easy to use, and take pretty OK pictures.

It's funny how these big geo features are all hidden. I mean, it's a big crack in the Earth. Maybe this is where the lizard people come from, so anyone that talks about "the crack" disappears?

It’s a National Park, the use of drones is substantially restricted.

It was nice knowing you, mannyv.

It is not permitted to fly drones on National Park land without permission - which to my knowledge they rarely give.

And yet it's so remote that who is going to stop you?

You suggested the journalist use drone footage as part of their piece. They may have been aware of the restriction. Either way they would likely end up with at least a fine if and when the NPS caught wind of it.

“Who is going to stop you?” is such a great exercise in entitlement. One of the worst and most visible bits of American culture in my opinion (Who knows if you are American, I am. And the National Parks are a beloved and shared resource). Toxic individualism.

I found the photos uninspiring, perhaps a drone could have helped. There wasn't much to give me a sense of the scale of the "crack", I think a skilled photographer could have done a better job here.

Oregon has https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crack_in_the_Ground and it's much easier to get to.

If we are doing a survey on great cracks, I vote the one in Utah as the most unsettling.

https://www.outono.net/elentir/2025/07/10/the-huge-crevasse-...

My understanding it was a layer of asphalt that got turned sideways(vertical) and as such that was how it was mined. Leaving a very eerie hole.

Interesting story, but if you go there it’s going to be hard to follow up on yourself:

>>> When I contacted AllTrails with questions about the route, the company removed it from the app.

I used to own a large ranch in Puna district that had this very crack run through the middle of it. I once crashed a bulldozer into it and got it stuck sideways about 50 ft from the surface.

After dropping a rock below my feet and couting to 10 before I heard the splash I discovered that the crack went all the way to ground water about 1100 ft down. That rock could have been me!

It's honestly very difficult for me to see the depth or scale in any of these photos. I can't really tell where the crack is supposed to be or how it reaches a 66-foot depth at any point.

It sounds similar to the Grand Canyon. Intellectually, we know it is big and deep and wide. Being there and seeing it for the first time is more of an emotional understanding of how big and deep and wide it is as if you didn't already know it intellectually. As they say, it never fails to impress. The sheer size is impossible to recreate emotionally. Maybe if they had put a human for scale it might help.

Yeah, but I can't even really get to the intellectual conclusion from the photos, is the thing. Like, I want to at least see a sign of it that doesn't look like just a small cave. It's very difficult to see the scale of rocky landscapes from a photo, I guess maybe a person for scale wouldn't hurt. I don't need to see the full entire depth, but I just see so little in general. Maybe there's more in the photo, but I'm not interpreting the rough rock faces well enough. Can't really get any information from the shadows either.

I’m curious if the size of 8 miles is related to the curvature of the earth. That’s about the distance that big things disappear over the horizon

From a 6 foot above ground level of eye, an object only needs to be 17 ft tall to disappear below the horizon at 8 miles.

Amazing the math you remember from a celestial nav course more than a decade ago.

"A Brief History of Kīlauea’s Southwest Rift Zone"

After Dark in the Park Program in Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park

The Hawaiian Volcano Education and Resilience Institute

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HF8gHPhF6MQ

It's referred to as The Great Crack.

There's a brief description of it in the Park Expansion subsection of the Description section of this wiki article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawai%CA%BBi_Volcanoes_Nationa...

I totally expected this to be another case of the Mystery Flesh Pit https://www.mysteryfleshpitnationalpark.com/ Pleasant surprise it was not.

A great site for a CoC scenario per the article.

It's the southwest rift of Kilauea, we know exactly why it's there, the island is pulling itself apart as it slumps into the ocean and that gashis where the direction of pull changes along the rift. What amazing journalism /s.

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