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Comment by venning | Hacker News Reader

Data Warning: 100 MB.

Viewing the header illustration for more than a few seconds crashes my iPad Safari tab. Scrolling until it is off the viewport prevents this.

EDIT: Dev Tools reports 74.8 MB transferred with an ad blocker. The illustration is a single 69.2 MB gif.

EDIT: 101 MB in total when you scroll to the bottom. Three more gifs: 18.1 MB, 7.1 MB, 4.7 MB.

View on HN

Why are they gifs instead of mp4s? Yikes. Also, since they are screenshots without a lot of movement, they really should compress better than that even as gifs.

Maybe because they're using Medium, and Medium doesn't have that option.

Why the biggest newspaper in America can't run their own hosted blog is a bigger question.

I'm sure they could run a hosted blog, it's probably a deliberate decision by their tech team to seem cool and hip by posting on Medium, because that's the in thing right now for developer blogs.

(Note: I'm not dissing them, I know a very talented developer who works there and says he has a great team)

> because that's the in thing right now for developer blogs.

Which is bizarre. The comments section of tech blogs are a great place to discuss and ask questions, and the support for comments on Medium is abismal, looks like they deliberately made it suck.

I think Hacker News does a better job of this, and so here we are.

On some cases, agreed. But most content posted on Medium doesn't end up here.

Or it is but never gets upvoted enough for most people to see it.

Maybe it was a decision to not have to run and maintain unnecessary shit when they have enough to deal with with their primary products when third parties have already invented that wheel.

And then they end up with a 70 mb GIF because the platform has deliberately poor features.

>While it may seem strange for us, a publisher, to post on Medium rather than our own platform, we are here for a simple reason: the community. Medium is where so many of our people are, so much of the product, design and development community, so we wanted to be here too.

https://open.nytimes.com/introducing-the-new-open-blog-23eba...

Organizations use Medium instead of their own platforms to try to create a sort of social signalling--like, "this is not the usual old-school BS you'd expect from us--this is cool design or tech content."

Whether that actually works is up for debate...

Medium has already turned around to just be uncool and pushing stupid bars and buttons in front of the text. So they are late to the party.

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/03/06/dickbar

I've had this vague sense all year that someone gave it a term and wrote a post on it and I read it, but it never reached the level of consciousness where I'd actually look it up. Thanks for pointing the way.

On iOS, the app Unobstruct is a lifesaver for these.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/unobstruct/id1255281426?mt=8

> Maybe because they're using Medium, and Medium doesn't have that option.

> Why the biggest newspaper in America can't run their own hosted blog is a bigger question.

Kind of ironic given that the post is about building their custom web-based text editor... I wonder if they use it to draft their posts for Medium too.

69 MB gif - isn't that called a video? I thought we had different formats for that.

What I find amazing is that it's that large despite only being two bits of color depth, and it's extremely short and low framerate. Where the hell did all that filesize come from?

Screen-grabber?

Crypto currency mining!

/joke

Looks like they cut the size down some. I am seeing 10.7 MB for the GIF.

There are several reasons for why the GIF is so large that all contribute to the size. The GIF's resolution is quite large for a GIF, at 1004px by 788px, this is larger then they display it on the page. And the GIF is pretty long at 336 frames.

Since GIFs on like just about every video format except MJPEG has no interframe compression. So each frame only has to average 32 KB to make up that 10 MB (336 * 32.6KB = 10.7 MB).

This is an example of how extremely good our modern video codecs are.

[0] - https://ezgif.com/split/ezgif-4-240b758f26.gif

That's kind of outrageous. Esp since the nytimes webdev team has generally done such a bang-up job w/ compelling UX.

There's something wrong with your iPad or safari itself. My 2 year old phone has no problems keeping up. It is incredibly stupid to have a 69 MB gif though.

Instapaper Text view reduces it to a slightly more reasonable 41 MB.

https://www.instapaper.com/text?u=https%3A%2F%2Fopen.nytimes...

(This may require a free Instapaper account to view.)

UBlock brings it down to 204KB because the images are on a CDN. Being on a CDN is probably why the author is oblivious to the file sizes.

Unbelievable

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