Read Something Wonderful | Hacker News Reader

Read Something Wonderful

readsomethingwonderful.com

189 pointssnorbleck34 comments

I am amazed at this page's CSS. The body text is small so I hit command-+ to make it bigger... and it gets smaller instead. Reset and hit command--... and it also gets smaller. And reader mode's broken.

It's because the "body text" is actually a screenshot of text, for some bizarre reason.

hahaha wtf

Heh, and as the real text in the left and right sidebars scales, the article preview shrinks. Needs some constraints on the centre column.

Pinch-to-zoom works on mobile (Android) for this site, since each post/article is just an image with a heading.

Swiping up to see the next post/article also retains the zoom, but the fonts & sizes in the posts/articles are not consistent, so we may need to zoom again to make the content fit better on the screen or to make it more legible.

The site reminds me of one of the glorious tools of the old Web - StumbleUpon (integrated as a browser toolbar) - which allowed to jump to random sites upvoted/liked by users. During its heydays, it even allowed users to host their own webpages, and interact in community forum, so like-minded strangers could discuss their fave topics and share nice new finds (websites, tools, etc.).

Yeah, really bad UX. Unreadable.

I zoomed on Firefox on MacOS and the two finger scroll stops working. The scrollbar appears momentarily so I grabbed it but it jumps to the next article and scrolls left, which pushes the next article off the page to the right.

i got a blank page

> I hit command-+ to make it bigger... and it gets smaller instead. Reset and hit command--... and it also gets smaller.

Fun fact, this also occurs on HN on android/chrome when going from 100% to 110% :)

And yes it's infuriating when you're just trying to enlarge text.

If this collection of articles would get updated in the future, I hope there is a rss feed for it. But it seems that the site is just a promotion for this Matter app...

Beautiful UI.

What's the criteria for pieces promoted?

At a quick glance, the main criteria seems for it to be libertarian and anti-socialism.

not quite. it's random selections every visit to the site.

Same here. I'm really curious about this too. What do they mean by "wonderful"? I suppose some of the pieces here might not be very well-known or popular, but they are inspiring, or maybe they are a good resource for learning something. All I can see is they are maybe associated with a read-later app?

Wondering about that too. What are the "wonderfullness" criteria?

For example, the first article I clicked on: https://juliagalef.com/2017/08/23/unpopular-ideas-about-soci...

has some pretty vile stuff:

> Non-offending pedophiles should be more widely accepted by society. It’s unfair to ostracize someone for a desire they were born with, and integrating them into society makes them less likely to cause harm.

Whats vile about that?

The truth

Amorality.

There's no evidence that anyone is born with particular sexual deviations. It attempts to simultaneously absolve and normalize attitudes that ideate rape of children, so long as they don't act on it. That's a pretty thin and permeable line to draw.

were you born with an attraction to women or is there no evidence to support it?

This needs a subscribe or RSS feed

I recognize many of these, because I've found them through hacker news before. There's probably a lot more treasures on that list.

Links to some articles are broken, eg. https://www.mikkelaaland.com/sweat-bathing-and-the-body.html gives a cert error on iOS

I have been following that website a while. The curation is great, but the UI is annoying. I can’t easily right click or long press to share with Instapaper. I can’t scroll past the ones I have already seen. A list of links would be much better.

I thought so too, I made a simpler version of this at readsomethingwonderfulmoreeasily.netlify.app

Feyman at his finest:

https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.pdf

Sorry but two of the top 3 articles were “Friday Night Meatballs: How to Change Tour Life with Pasta”, “The Real Heroes are Dead” and “Wealth: The Toxic Byproduct”.

None of those are wonderful to me.

what am I looking at?

Cards of text that I have to click to further read?

Apparently, yes. Apparently, they present a curated set of texts.

It's not a bad concept. Seeing the first paragraphs of an article helps me decide quickly if I want to invest time on it or not. I would like to do that with books, if there was a reliable way to get the first page of a large number of them.

A curated list of links, yes. These have been around since the Internet was created.

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