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Comment by cryptozeus | Hacker News Reader

As side note: gif with nytimes article headlines are totally useless on phone, not readable at all

Ironically those graphics are the whole point of the article. It is supposed to simulate what the year 1968 might have looked like if there had been a Twitter feed back then. There is very little original content in the article text itself.

Edit: On further inspection, I am coming to the conclusion that the article is really a thinly veiled advertisement for TimesMachine, a subscription newspaper archive.

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com

You had to say “a side note” because it’s technically not the semantics of the page, but thanks for making the comment. We need to call out functionally crappy design, especially when it interferes with good content

Not just that, but for me they also cause the actual article text to jump around, making reading the article quite frustrating.

What gif? I only found a couple and they were at the bottom of the page in the related article stuff.

There are graphics simulating push notifications of 1968 news every few paragraphs, captioned "Photo: Associated Press". They animate only once, so try reloading?

I agree that it animates a tad too quickly, and that the animation really isn't needed.

I think figgis may be responding in a sarcastic way and trying to point out that those are not animated gifs, but are actual HTML page elements, animated with CSS. If you view on desktop and use a browser DOM inspector (like Chrome Dev Tools) you can verify that this is the case.

To be honest I'm quite impressed that NYTimes went this length to create these technical widgets. Do they have software engineers or web developers working in conjunction with journalists on articles like these? Seems like a relatively high cost of production.

Although I'm not a fan, I have to say in this case it does do its job quite well, which is to demonstrate how having twitter news would feel like back in the 1968s~ time.

>> To be honest I'm quite impressed that NYTimes went this length to create these technical widgets ... Seems like a relatively high cost of production.

That's because the article is really just an advertisement for TimesMachine, a subscription newspaper archive. I didn't notice it at first, either.

Yes, they have newsroom developers and newsroom web designers. That’s how they managed to create well integrated pieces like the 2013 Oscar trailers article [1] or the many d3js interactive dataviz. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/02/19/movies/awardss...

> I think figgis may be responding in a sarcastic way

Was not intended, just curious. But that would be why I couldn't find it.

The speed is part of the effect - big news happening fast and before you have had time to digest the previous event. At least, that was my take.

Side note to the side note: I remember reading here that someone had a scriptlet that removes nytimes stories from hackernews. If someone has such a thing, would you mind sharing it?

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