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Comment by jordigh | Hacker News Reader

Gah, call me lazy, but this article really is tl;dr. I feel like the web is the wrong medium for this. If I were offline with a printed copy of the NYT, and no internet access, I may more gladly spend like 15-30 minutes to read through the whole thing, but during my morning HN round-up, I really don't feel like it.

If someone wants to summarise for me, I would be grateful.

edit: Dear downvoters: you think I should just shut up and spend the 15-30 minutes to read the whole article instead of kindly requesting a summary, right?

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That's fine if you don't want to read long articles. But don't insist that every article be short. I read this thing start to finish in 30 minutes no problem. Because of it's length, it went into a greater level of detail than your average blog post. That detail made the story totally engrossing for me.

I feel ya on the issue of paper though. It'd be nicer to read on paper, because you could move around with it. Maybe I should be reading on a tablet and not a desktop. Not sure.

I find it sad how people are so lazy when it comes to long form content. I understand we all might not have time at the moment for the long form content, but there is time somewhere in the day. Somewhere.

I guess if lazyness == not giving a fuck to read the whole thing because I'm busying doing cool shit (to me) -ness

To add to this point: nobody can read all the long-form journalism out there. I love long pieces, read at least a couple each day, but I spent 20 seconds reading the intro to this piece and decided it wasn't worth my time. That's not to say it shouldn't be written that way, just that I'd personally read something else than this. So instead I just glanced at the HN comments to see if I was missing out.

Yeah, when I'm offline, with no distractions, and with a printed copy of the NYT. The morning commute in public transit may be a good situation, but I can't easily get a printed copy of the NYT here every morning.

It's not always laziness; since nobody can read everything, people need help deciding which stuff to read.

I need a TL;DR and other's people's feedback on the piece to help me decide which one it's going to be.

Furthermore, for the ones I don't read, it's nice to have a TL;DR so I'm at least aware of the major points.

I personally think there's a difference between substantial long-form content and the standardized "elongated-form" content that all starts out with something like "It was a cold December morning and the sparse streaks of light crept softly through...". That's purely for entertainment value over informational value, and I can see why the parent commenter could grow tired of it. As soon as I saw the first line of this article, I knew it was going to be a haystack I didn't feel like perusing for needles of information.

Yes, these storytale leads make me think, "get to the blasted point already!"

Isn't that the point of services like Instapaper or Pocket though?

Is either of them gonna snail mail me a printed copy of articles each morning so that I can read them without the distraction of the internet?

instapaper can send the articles you've saved to instapaper to your kindle every day or every week.

That's a fairly good approximation of what you're asking for.

Kindles are not offline. I haven't found an ereader that (1) works with e-ink (2) does not require non-free software and (3) has no internet access at all.

I know I'm picky, but these requirements are all met by a printed paper, so I know it's possible to have this.

Browsing the web on the kindle is too inconvenient to be a distraction at all.

My reasons are complicated and probably sound loony to you, but I'm sure I would find ways to get distracted by the web on the kindle (hey, look at me, I'm responding to you 10 minutes after you posted on a dead thread). Moreover, I want hardware that just can't possibly fall prey to practices like having books removed from it by Amazon or having my reading habits reported to Amazon. The only way to ensure that thing is with free software and/or no internet hardware.

I've been looking for a long time for an e-reader that I like. My ideal music player has been a Sansa Clip+ with Rockbox installed on it. Cheap, featureful, runs a free OS. I have a large collection of mathematical pdfs I'd like to read, but I have not found the device to read them on.

For what I want, printed copies are still hard to beat.

Everything that everyone said about Mayer and Yahoo two years ago was pretty much true.

What did they say two years ago?

Yahoo's board was being too hasty and that Mayer was going to try and Googlify Yahoo.

Yahoo, even today, has some very incredible assets that aren't being leveraged. Instead they're trying to compete on search. Which is retarded.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. Google search doesn't have the sterling reputation of effectiveness it did 5 years ago. And Yahoo's new deal with Firefox could very well pay dividends.

May be popular words for 2015: Googlify and Applify :)

What assets?

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