“Devil Girl from Mars”: Why I Write Science Fiction (1998) | Hacker News Reader

“Devil Girl from Mars”: Why I Write Science Fiction (1998)

web.mit.edu

92 pointsbenbreen10 comments

This page is surprisingly belligerent to modern reader apps even if you navigate past Frame issues. Pocket, Instapaper, Safari, Firefox reader view, none of them can parse this correctly.

If you look past it all and actually read it, you'll find this gem of a passage.

Beware! All too often, we say what we hear others say. We see what we are permitted to see. Much worse, we see what we're told that we see. Repetition and pride are the keys to this. To hear or to see even an obvious lie again and again and again, is to say it, almost by reflex, and then to defend it because we have said it, and to embrace what we've defended. Thus without thought or intent, we make mere echoes of ourselves and we say what we hear others say.

Your opening comment is an interesting viewpoint, and, in particular, you have made an interesting choice of adjective, as it is one that ascribes intent. If I am understanding the Wayback Machine correctly, this page has been essentially like this at least since February 2002, yet it would seem that its author was acting in a hostile manner by not anticipating the limitations of modern reader apps - or perhaps the site administrator is at fault, for leaving it out there as a trap for an unsuspecting modern app user?

looking past this, I see that the passage you quote is indeed insightful.

Hmmm re-reading my comment, it does seem to put blame on the page. However, I wouldn't expect relic of the past to be changed or maintained (cost obviously). It just came as a surprise that big wall of text couldn't be parsed by modern apps.

I expected modern parsers to be more clever. This article is a table like many webpages were in the first decade. Wondering how we can improve readability of such pages? May be the size of raw text ratio or something clever that considers how the page is rendered and extract key information.

Edit: Instapaper parsed it very well in the end!

I didn't have issues with it and by no means is it the most egregious of the 90s - it was just designed for more or less fixed CRT assumptions. It would be say 800x600 or so as a screen.

While smaller in resolution the screens were at least about a standard sheet of printer paper and almost square.

I have gotten into a masochistic retrogames on Linux with minimal support and you see a lot of things that need emulation because design assumptions that were no brainers didn't hold long term back when Moore's law also applied to clock speeds and multicore was really niche.

Outline.com also seems to do a reasonable job[1], though only directed at the inner frame, and the result is still fraught with borders.

I found both the article and this little tangent into its markup interesting, however!

[1]: http://outline.com/GxBzrY

It looks good on Firefox desktop for me. Once I select only that frame, it seems like its well formatted for reading.

It doesn't play well with Firefox's reader view, but because it's already decently formatted for reading [on desktop] I wouldn't have bothered to try reader view.

edit: or are those indented portions not quotes?? Okay, that is weird. Friggin' tables!

That page is wild mix and nesting of tables, paragraphs, and divs (in no particular order and sometimes more of the same tag in itself).

I don't think that page looked better in any of the old browsers. It's likely the site passed through some redesign or CMS migration and the poor text got mangled on the way.

Lots of interesting bits in here, and some parts very prescient. The more interesting thoughts to me were near the end: “throw-away workers”, and the last quote on “truth”.

As a developer who does not need to seek work, due to well known previous work, I am dismayed as my friends are unable to acquire staff positions and are all "disposable workers" - long term freelance with no benefits.

That last quote on Truth is quite damning.

It was kind of chilling to see the author’s depiction of “throw-away workers” twenty years ago in a modern context. The aside of “maybe he’s about due for his pension” might have seemed so heartless then, and yet today, someone in the same position as that 50-year-old has, at best, a fickle 401(k), and at worst, simply nothing, as a participant in the gig economy.

Maybe that 50-year-old is trying to make ends meet delivering for Caviar, and a short series of slip-ups and consequent low ratings causes his “position” to be automatically terminated by an algorithm. Throw-away workers indeed.

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