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Comment by jashkenas | Hacker News Reader

Working at a still-feels-new-to-me job as Graphics Director for Opinion at The New York Times. Our small team publishes arguments and guest essays supported by visual evidence, like these:

- https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/10/29/opinion/scien...

- https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/08/opinion/urban...

- https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/07/20/opinion/ancie...

But I'm a believer in asking for help in order to cast a wider net. If you happen to stumble across an obscure-yet-newsworthy dataset, or have a strong feeling about a particular guest essayist that we should be approaching, or can't stop thinking about an argument that's itching you — pitches and tips are always welcome: [my hn username]@nytimes.com

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This kind of interactive, bespoke content is one of the main reasons I subscribe to the Times. It feels like NYT truly embraced the concept of being able to tell stories and convey information in a completely novel and exciting format, and I find myself really immersed in these pieces all the damn time. It feels very much like you guys are _leading_ rather than following, which is damn impressive for such an old institution.

Hell, I remember last year's Christmas Cookies piece, which was just this lovely immersive slideshow of tight high resolution videos of different stages of the cookie making process and just thinking "this is just _good_ content."

But this stuff is also powerful because of its ability to inform people in a way visually that more traditional text and even older illustrative modalities would've fallen short with. This deep-dive, guided tour, expando-driven approach is just... awesome. Keep up the great work!

Don't have any pitches or anything. I just wanted to say that your team does awesome work. I hope you folks all know how much it's appreciated.

This is great work. I'm impressed.

Just in case you happen to know the answer: How does taking tree samples (as in your third link) not harm the tree? It seems inevitable that it would do so, at least intuitively.

I had the same question!

My understanding — relayed through one degree of separation from Daniel Griffin, the dendrochronologist who wrote the piece — is that the core samples are very long and thin, and care is taken not to injure the tree and to allow it to heal rapidly.

Here's a write-up from Carleton with more info about how the tree core sampling process works: https://serc.carleton.edu/trex/students/labs/lab2_2.html

Not having read the much more authoritative response above (or any such), I'll foolishly offer the one fact about trees I recall from boy scouts or outdoor school:

The core of a tree is much less alive than the bark—so much less, in fact, that if you walk in a circle around a tree scraping off a thin strip of bark and make sure to stop where you started, the tree will die.

Having googled this just to be sure, I also learned that trees can only lose up to about a quarter of a circumference of bark (in the fashion describe above) before facing mortal peril.

Cork trees are an exception to this, and are harvested all the way round without harming the tree.

If you could dive into this: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

and how Alan Greenspan went from writing 'Gold and Economic Freedom'[0] to pushing low interest rates that would be rad.

I'm not actually a gold-standard supporter, but given the huge shift what average people can expect economically it would be nice to have this addressed by someone other than the conspiracy crowd.

[0]https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...

I work in tech for public media and am it's almost disheartening to know what kind of resources other publications have. We have people spread across everything at once. Do you work for the technology department or for the editorial department?

For the Opinion section. (Editorial)

I've been following the NYTimes tech development from a distance for almost 20 years. A couple of things I've picked up:

1) it helps to be the biggest

2) it helps to have rabid boosters with reputational stakes themselves, like Edward Tufte.

3) the tech group maintains the framework, but each section owns their own section layouts.

4) the tech group made a big splash ... eh, sometime between 2005 and 2009 if I recall, with a very early progressive framework. I wish I could recall the details, but it was spicy when it first landed, like "Wow, that's genius, and it looks so good."

Makes me think of Mike Bostock who created d3 for New York Times. Amazing stuff and definitely made me smarter to work my way through how it works.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Bostock

And Rich Harris who developed Svelte while working there (and used by The New York times)

Thank you for making JavaScript a somewhat palatable language. Countless millions of us have to write JavaScript to accomplish the daily drudgery and it's in part to your contributions and impeccable sense of style that it's at least somewhat enjoyable.

People probably think my praise is overblown, but if it wasn't for you I'd probably be using wasm to escape JS and the fight against flash would have been for naught.

Just a feather in your cap for the new year!

It's really disillusioning to see the top comment in a front-page HN-thread require payment to even be read completely.

I can see that this isn't your personal design decision, but there is a literal paywall preventing you from communicating with me. This is absurd.

Sorry about that! I didn't think to put in gift links, and of course I should have. Here are (what should be) unpaywalled versions:

- https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/10/29/opinion/scien...

- https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/08/opinion/urban...

- https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/07/20/opinion/ancie...

On the first link scrolling is extremely slow on Firefox -- but curiously the problem doesn't appear on the other two.

(Also -- completely OT, sorry -- but science doesn't have a "photoshopping" problem as much as a fraud problem, as the author herself makes clear in the body of the text:

> With a sense of unease about how much bad science might be in journals, I quit my full-time job in 2019 so that I could devote myself to finding and reporting more cases of scientific fraud.)

Do you know what the rationale is for such long unlock codes in the URL?

FWIW, this extension has worked great for me, but it seems that the developer's support is dwindling for it: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome/

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