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Comment by Stratoscope | Hacker News Reader

Like a human being could ever read that text.

If you're having as much trouble reading it as I was, open the developer tools and on the body style, remove "DINPro" from the font-family, turn off the font-weight: 300 or change it to 400, and increase the font-size to 16px or whatever size you like.

If the AIs ever do take over, my one request is that they use plenty of sarcasm when they talk about designers who think unreadable text with substandard font-weight is a good thing.

Of course, being AIs, maybe they could care less.

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The funny thing is that I think it's in part motivated by the desire for minimalism. But instead of minimising the form they have minimised the function!

The harder it is to read, the longer you'll spend reading it. And time spent on page is a really common vanity metric.

Or.. the harder it is to read, the more unlikely I am to read it. And will instead leave the page and find another source for the information if I care that much.

It actually looks quite nice in Firefox, it is hard to read in Chrome though. Maybe they have the one last web design team that primarily tests in FF? :D

I'm curious which OS you're using. On Windows, it looks pretty much equally bad to my eyes in Chrome, Firefox, and Edge.

It looks good for me in Firefox on Xubuntu 16.04.

It's legible in my computer. Debian 8, with Firefox, no-script, and ublocker, with 24" screen and a forced minimum font size of something that I don't even remember.

Anything of those could be making it legible. I'd rather trust the opinion of somebody with a more standard system, and I doubt the GP is that somebody either.

It's the no-script. Allowing scripts loads a crappy font. Hurray for NoScript!

Looks good in Firefox on Windows. I'm not on a high DPI monitor, which can certainly mess things up.

Taking a screenshot and zooming in with a pixel grid, the 'i' on comedian is antialiased to 3 pixels in total wide, though the 2 on the side are very light. Firefox is 2 pixels wide, but both columns are dark. Chrome is also 2 pixels wide, but the columns are rather lightly colored.

(Windows' native font antialiasing is amazing, I'm sad all apps don't use it...)

awful on mobile safari. and then if you zoom in to read it, a line no longer fits on the screen

Sarcastic CSS is the current fashion.

Cascading Snarky Sarky.

I find reader mode to be easier than modifying CSS, and it's built in to all major browsers (except desktop Chrome, funnily enough...)

So that's what the Luxo lamp in my Chrome toolbar is for! (I have the Evernote extension installed in Chrome, and it includes Clearly as well.)

It's funny, I've hardly ever used that thing. Like a dummy I forget it's there, and instead I go in and hack the CSS (mostly removing styles) and then post sarcastic comments about it.

But you're right, I just clicked the Luxo lamp and the whole page became perfectly readable.

And then I dragged the Luxo lamp over to the left where my most-used extensions are, so I'll remember it next time.

Thanks for the tip!

You even left a comment on the site writing that. Don't be an asshole.

Fair enough, I edited the comment I posted there to take out the sarcasm and just kept the note on how to make the page readable. OK now?

Put it back in. We love sarcasm!

OK, chief! I even stepped it up and called it "scrawny text" for good measure.

I am like a politician waffling and flip-flopping as the polling winds blow to and fro.

Hmm... Chicken and waffles sounds pretty good right now!

Will look into changing that font up, many thanks for the feedback!

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