Posted by Jach 23 hours ago
Here in hackernews we have a bubble of people who are very smart so they process information at high speed in general, and have lots of experience with computers, so they process computer-related information with extra speed. We're like race drivers, squeezing every single bit of performance from the car, while majority of use cases for a car is being stuck in traffic on your way to work. Those people simply don't care about performance above 150km/h because they'll never reach such speeds so putting expensive, high-performance engines is a waste of resources.
The point I'm trying to make is that if software is fast enough for average user, and most users are fucking slow, there's no business need to further optimize it. You might keep arguing "but but but back in my days apps were instant and now they suck" but users simply do not care. This is why companies put shitty, time-wasting animations even if nothing is being done in the background.
Otherwise, I would have left immediately.
I'm all for speedy, simple, plaintext websites, but it is a negligible amount of work in 2026 to throw some barebones CSS in and make it approachable.
But reading small white text on black background that's 100% width is nearly impossible to read.
Also, perhaps you should learn how to make use of the user stylesheet feature of your browser, or ask an AI to tell you how...
I think he might subscribe to the philosophy of everyone should style websites however they like and not be prescribed by the author.
He's had a usable website in the past. This one is explicitly made to be shitty. "Look at me, I'm such a geek" energy.
> Not everybody knows how to use sql or css or java or whatever thing it is that lets you pick the font.
lol at the idea that Dan Luu can't add css to his website by copypasting some links into his html. He could make the site readable in about 3 mins and never have to worry about it again.
<!-- Google Fonts -->
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Roboto:300,300italic,700,700italic">
<!-- CSS Reset -->
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/normalize/8.0.1/normalize.css">
<!-- Milligram CSS -->
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/milligram/1.4.1/milligram.css">
Opinions are dime a dozen, but readability (and usability in general) is a well-studied field and having to move your head from side to side to read text that stretches the width of a screen is objectively bad for readability. That's just one example.
And making the website readable for the majority does not prevent one from using the built-in reader or an extension.
> 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.