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Comment by sudahtigabulan | Hacker News Reader

> too many links in the README

In other documents too. And very repetitive.

I don't need a link to Wikipedia every time "PoC" is used. Or to an online man page every time strace(1) is mentioned.

I get it that a documentation can have more than one "entry point", and hyperlinking all occurrences solves that.

But I think assuming certain audience leads to a document that is more effective. You don't explain addition in university-level textbooks, to make it easier to children from primary school.

This product is simply not for people who hear of strace for the first time.

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Some Wikipedia articles themselves do this, linking every common word in the article, which makes trying to simply highlight a section of text a fun adventure. I ended up at one point making a userscript to strip all internally-pointing links just to make an article more readable (as an addition to an existing script that stripped all the "[citation needed]" and other noise).

Wikipedia needs some notion of "suggested links" that don't become links unless the text is selected or they're toggled globally or some other explicit action. With those, authors could go and link every last word if they like.

> which makes trying to simply highlight a section of text a fun adventure

Tip: in Firefox, you can hold Alt to drag and select text without triggering links.

TIL. I wish I knew years ago, I've never been happier to have switched.

Still using Chrome for work stuff, since profile management in FF is still pure hate.

what's wrong with `firefox -ProfileManager` and the like or alternatively containers?

I always seem to end up with duplicate profiles, or `about:profiles` refuses to open ("Another copy of Firefox has made changes to profiles.") and on and on with various hiccups and speedbumps. Small annoyances, but profiles on Chrome always Just Work, and the half-dozen times I tried it on FF was always death by a thousand cuts.

It's been a few years, so I'll give profiles another try I guess. Containers likely won't do it since multiple profiles all use the same domain (console.aws.amazon.com being the obvious one).

Containers don't need to auto-open domains. You can simply use them to "color" tabs manually. That should cover your needs!

I thought Wikipedia recommended against overlinking, and on looking it up, they do:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Link...

Eh. Personally I find it refreshing to see a page err on the side of too many links instead of too few. No need to explain addition in any book if you can just link to the best explanation available.

The bigger issue IMO is that the links seem to be automatically-generated, and the generation is a bit sloppy; for example, the "Syd" links should probably link to the sandboxing technology instead of Pink Floyd's original frontman.

> the links seem to be automatically-generated, and the generation is a bit sloppy; for example, the "Syd" links

I dare you, check the git history! (if you care anyway)

It's all manually crafted, with love. From the Shine On You Crazy Diamond badge at the top down to the very last link.

Fair enough lol

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