69 points jyhrow 1 hour ago 47 comments

lalith_c 59 minutes ago | parent

duh

oakmad 40 minutes ago | parent

That font will cure my addiction!

echelon 34 minutes ago | parent

I imagined bad. I couldn't imagine something that bad.

It looks gorgeous as an art piece, but it's impossible to read.

Form over function to the extreme.

jasonjmcghee 38 minutes ago | parent

Just a small note and I'm guessing this is an intentional aesthetic choice but the chromatic aberration makes the text very uncomfortable to read.

ranger_danger 36 minutes ago | parent

reader mode button works wonders for me

xattt 33 minutes ago | parent

Curb cuts for the win!

Insimwytim 25 minutes ago | parent

So does blocking css with uMatrix

NDlurker 35 minutes ago | parent

Literally hurt my eyes. Didn't make it past the first paragraph

dinobones 21 minutes ago | parent

As someone with keratoconus, I hardly noticed! This is what all text looks like for me.

someotherperson 15 minutes ago | parent

Get some hybrid mini-scleral lenses fitted and your life will improve significantly :)

jdw64 38 minutes ago | parent

I think I'm similar. But why didn't people talk about newspaper addiction back then? Sometimes I wonder—even before smartphones, people spent that time reading books, looking up information, and reading newspapers. That kind of addiction was seen as "positive." But in reality, it was probably disrupting daily life too, in its own way.

When I see things like this, it sometimes occurs to me that the people who create "addiction" are the ones in power. Come to think of it, it makes me wonder why there was never any such thing as newspaper addiction.

psyklic 34 minutes ago | parent

You can read a lot of the newspaper and still finish by the end of breakfast.

It isn't personalized, so many sections aren't of much interest.

jdw64 25 minutes ago | parent

But when I think about it, communities like HN don't exactly have only the taste I want either, do they?

That's always the case, really. There are people whose daily lives fall apart because they read too many books, but that usually isn't categorized as a form of addiction. So sometimes I wonder how addiction is actually defined.

kelvinjps10 25 minutes ago | parent

But newspapers end and then each one cost money.

neom 9 minutes ago | parent

Well... https://aeon.co/essays/contagion-poison-trigger-books-have-a...

and: https://archive.org/details/americannervousn00bearuoft/page/... - one note on this, Beard blamed nervous exhaustion on steam power, the periodical press, the telegraph, the sciences, and uh... the mental activity of women... This excerpt for a tl;dr: https://english.web.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/english/doc...

For how addiction is defined, google ICD-11. (I'm an alcoholic, 5 years sober)

Havoc 36 minutes ago | parent

Thank god for reader mode to unfuck that font

quasarj 28 minutes ago | parent

Damn you beat me to it, I was going to say exactly that. What a nightmare!

evolighting 31 minutes ago | parent

It's not information, it's emotion.

Danox 31 minutes ago | parent

HA.Ha.Ha. Interesting

i1856511 29 minutes ago | parent

This is another way to say you have ADHD. (I say this as someone with ADHD behaviors myself)

Tenemo 27 minutes ago | parent

I don't think I've seen a less accessible *font* in my life, including all the dark grey on black and yellow on white ones. Those are hard to read, but this one makes my eyes hurt, they actually started to hurt after I tried reading it despite discomfort. How come? Reading random text for 10 seconds can cause people physical pain? I wear glasses for near-sightedness and slight astigmatism, I wonder if it's related, and if people with 20/20 vision experience it differently.

arionhardison 20 minutes ago | parent

I thought it was me, I literally think there are things that should no longer be acceptable and this font is one of them. It serves no purpose and I would like to ask medical professionals if it is potentially harmful.

Edit: While fuzzy or blurry text itself is highly unlikely to trigger an epileptic seizure it is a major cause of optical strain, headaches, and reading barriers across various accessibility needs. Given the amount of screen time we all incur in our daily lives, I do not see why this should be a "thing".

panny 16 minutes ago | parent

You guys are saying this on a website which puts light grey text on light grey background.

tomrod 15 minutes ago | parent

My site shows black with yellow background and white text boxes. Highly visible. Maybe you're referring to dead comments? There are options to hide those.

panny 12 minutes ago | parent

I'm sorry, what is your username again? I can't read it, because it's tiny light grey text on a light grey background.

Controversy shouldn't give me cataracts either.

conorcleary 10 minutes ago | parent

and tiny buttons

Conan_Kudo 16 minutes ago | parent

It hurt for me too. I stopped reading it because it gave me a serious headache.

imwally 14 minutes ago | parent

I had to stop reading the first paragraph because of how bad it is.

nchmy 13 minutes ago | parent

this font is the stupidest thing ive seen in ages

cjkaminski 12 minutes ago | parent

I have 20/20 vision and this presentation hurt my eyes. I'm glad my browser has "reader mode" to normalize things like this. I'm not trying to yuck someone else's yum. I simply appreciate the technical ability to read someone else's post in a way that doesn't cause discomfort.

olooney 9 minutes ago | parent

Not a font. The VHS line striping is just a repeating gradient applied over the whole page:

    main::before { 
        background: 
            linear-gradient(rgba(18, 16, 16, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.25) 50%),
            linear-gradient( 90deg, rgba(255, 0, 0, 0.06), rgba(0, 255, 0, 0.02), rgba(0, 0, 255, 0.06) );
    }
The red glow is a red text shadow applied to every element on the page:

    :root { 
        --text-shadow: 2px 0px red, -2px 0px var(--glitch-color-2);
    }
Surprisingly, the glitchy logo is also done with CSS, with animations over two different versions of the text overlain atop one another:

        <span>explorator.dev</span>        
        <span>єӿƿłøгⱥʈøг.ᑻ</span>
I know this because the first thing I did when I got to the page was hit F12 to bring up the debugging tools and turn these styles off so I could read it. :)

BatchJob 26 minutes ago | parent

I doubt you are addicted to information. I highly suspect like many users of digital technology who are able to consume near infinite streams of said, that you are like a wasteful software program "polling" these data sources hoping that something really important will surface or that some underlying truth will be revealed through identifying patterns in the information.

I dont think you would need someone to publish that your hair was on fire on the web before you would believe it.

The wasteful part is that repeating the behavior (addiction or not) can become self-repeating even in the absence of the fix. Also one has to realize that at least in the case of news there is very little every day and most of what is distributed is rehash, or ancillary, or bloated and repeated to sell ads. You can go without watching or consuming news on the internet and not miss much for a pretty long time.

As far as tech goes, it moves very slow you can take a couple years off a software eng job and come back and not much has changed with very few exceptions. (Yes LLMs were one)

When you are done staring at your phone/computer at the end of the day reflect on whether or not you got anything really worthwhile out of it and put it in perspective. The signal vs noise ratio is not in your favor and getting less so every day.

I personally stare at my phone alot for the same reason as many people do. Im bored. But I dont do it at the expense of anything else Id rather do.

panny 14 minutes ago | parent

>like a wasteful software program "polling" these data sources hoping that something really important will surface

This is me on eBay :)

bluegatty 26 minutes ago | parent

People are complaining at that font should take another look.

I think there's something maybe special going on there.

Probably unintentional ... but I swear reading 'word at a time' the words are in a way clearer, like your mind is able to abstract them out of the background.

Wild!

And yes, information is 'the thing' but it depends on how it's presented obviously.

jareklupinski 15 minutes ago | parent

makes me think of https://accelareader.com/

domhudson 23 minutes ago | parent

If this is a marketing stunt to use such a bad font; honestly, I'm impressed.

Maxatar 22 minutes ago | parent

This is like saying, "I'm not addicted to smoking, I'm addicted to the happiness cigarettes give me." Addiction is a harmful dependency you pursue to achieve some desired outcome. The harmful dependency is the endless browsing, scrolling, and searching you engage in to obtain it, all the time wasted doing it and doing it in a way that consumes a significant amount of time that could be spent acquiring that same information in a more productive manner.

That's the addiction, not the information.

spacedoutman 19 minutes ago | parent

I thought the font was great.

bdangubic 18 minutes ago | parent

neither smartphone nor internet will help you get information these days. there is too much of it and anything there is too much of becomes worthless.

dxxvi 16 minutes ago | parent

    > I'm not addicted to the internet or my smartphone. I'm addicted to information
You're not the only one. Everybody is like that, I guess.

CompoundEyes 14 minutes ago | parent

My grandma always had the morning paper delivered. When I stayed with her during the summer I’d start in the top left corner of the first page and read all the way to the bottom right corner of the last and everything in between. What a 10 year old kid got out of the grain report? I’m not sure. But I was amped up on her homemade cinnamon rolls and multiple glasses of orange juice. It was wonderful. These days I’m more selective about what information I take in!

nonethewiser 12 minutes ago | parent

I remember reading the newspaper in the break room and at lunch. About 2013 or so. That's all their was. Well, for me, because I was a late smartphone adopter.

I kind of lump in "internet" (late 90s) with "internet in everyone's pockets at all times". But there was a fairly large gap there. Especially when you consider the limits of 3 and even 4g.

nasseri 14 minutes ago | parent

possibly the most unreadable website I've ever seen.

dang 12 minutes ago | parent

Hey all: "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, [etc...]. They're too common to be interesting."

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

hefner1456 5 minutes ago | parent

If you zoom in its actually 3 fonts. It looks line one of those Lain fan sites.

I actually like the font even though my eyes hate it. Its a short read so no biggie. Maybe remove the transparency for a sharper look and make the spacing of the 3 fonts slightly closer to each other.

karim79 31 seconds ago | parent

I feel you. I had to brave through the font that you're using but I feel you.

Maybe try to avoid making a statement using a font which literally hurts my eyes, and possibly the eyes of many others. That's messed up.

Also information addiction should be a human "feature" I suppose, shouldn't it?

Knowledge for the sake of knowledge and so forth.

The font is actually cool but it belongs in games like Alien Isolation (and possibly others) it's just not good for blogging methinks.