Hacker News Reader

It's a personal peeve, but I find the footnote style of putting in links, rather than inline like the web was intended, to be not only hard to read, but quite pretentious.

These are comments on some web resource, not research papers.

View on HN

I don't see how it can be pretentious. Usually, I do it to avoid disturbing the flow of text reading.

To each their own I guess. But from another thread today, I'd much rather read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29955514 than https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29955106

I guess there's no accounting for taste.

(Or, perhaps meta:

I'd much rather read [1] than [2]. Too much bouncing around; I'm not even sure if it's worse when the text is large compared to the research paper citations, or small.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29955514

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29955106 )

For my part I much prefer your second variant here, especially when the URL has a long path or query string.

HN doesn't allow inline links like the web intended. So you either get footnote style or the raw link text (possibly with non-human-interpretable query parameters), and either way is hard to read and interrupts the flow of the text.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com