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Comment by beyonddream | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know why you got downvoted but you have a point. It looks as if OP doesn’t write for readership and his posts contents have similar characteristics of reckless abandon for conventional norms for a tech post. Too many cross references and link-backs to his own other articles that makes it really hard to follow the main thread of the essay.

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Dan Luu is a bit famous around HN.

I think he might subscribe to the philosophy of everyone should style websites however they like and not be prescribed by the author.

Nah, he's just trying to be different. It's vanity.

He's had a usable website in the past. This one is explicitly made to be shitty. "Look at me, I'm such a geek" energy.

His site has always looked like this, i'm sure of it. This is what sites look like if you just write them as text. Not everybody knows how to use sql or css or java or whatever thing it is that lets you pick the font.

I'm almost certain he used to have a reasonably styled website. I just tried to look it up but it looks like he's excluded the website from WayBackMachine.

> Not everybody knows how to use sql or css or java or whatever thing it is that lets you pick the font.

lol at the idea that Dan Luu can't add css to his website by copypasting some links into his html. He could make the site readable in about 3 mins and never have to worry about it again.

    <!-- Google Fonts -->
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Roboto:300,300italic,700,700italic">

    <!-- CSS Reset -->
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/normalize/8.0.1/normalize.css">

    <!-- Milligram CSS -->
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/milligram/1.4.1/milligram.css">

BTW this is just the first such library I found. There are lots of 'em, and all very well documented, requiring less knowledge to use than what it takes to publish a blog... which he's mastered.

Honestly I prefer the minimal style because I add my own to many pages as it is, or use the built-in reader or a reader extension. People have much different opinions on what's readable.

> People have much different opinions on what's readable.

Opinions are dime a dozen, but readability (and usability in general) is a well-studied field and having to move your head from side to side to read text that stretches the width of a screen is objectively bad for readability. That's just one example.

And making the website readable for the majority does not prevent one from using the built-in reader or an extension.

No it didn't. It used to be more readable and he changed it to look like this.

The downvotes may be related to community enforcing what's in the HN guidelines:

> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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