Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Riding the New Silk Road

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 161 posts

Re: Riding the New Silk Road

#41

Post by dclowd9901 »

cocoflunchy wrote: post #15

It's great to try new formats, but the experience is completely broken on my now-slightly-aging Windows laptop. I wish web developer/designers would test their pages on regular hardware instead of 27" iMacs or rMPB... The scrolling is horribly lagging, and the gifs/videos are all black: http://prntscr.com/1gq4he http://prntscr.com/1gq5b6

It'd be nice if there was a machineable way to test UI in varying browsers. Litmus.com gets close, but it's only for emails, and "all" it does is render the emails in like 40 different clients (which is actually amazing).

But it'd be nice to be able to say, "Yes, this version in chrome is what I want it to look like," and you get back scores that determine how "close" the other versions are to the version you selected as your reference (0-100%?).

Seems like one could achieve this with some sort of pixel diff algorithm.

Re: Riding the New Silk Road

#42

Post by ansimionescu »

Ellipsis753 wrote: post #24

I actually disliked this page design. The image and text always faded to black before it went off the top of the screen. I am in the habit of moving text to the top of the screen to read it. It kept vanishing as I did so meaning I'd have to move the text I wanted to read down to the middle of the screen. Did this not happen to anyone else?

I hate being forced into consuming content in a specific way, but this page was very well done.

Re: Riding the New Silk Road

#44

Post by RockyMcNuts »

dclusin wrote: post #16

It seems to me like we're finally witnessing the birth of a 21st century news paper. The New York times has always been well regarded for it's journalism. Now we're starting to see what can be accomplished when a credible journalism outfit is complemented by equally credible digital designers.

The actually appointed a 'Snowfaller in Chief'

http://www.bizjournals.com/newyork/news/2013/07/12/new-york-...

Re: Riding the New Silk Road

#45

Post by mynameisvlad »

crgt wrote: post #40
mynameisvlad wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By your own source, news and media is only 5% (/4% as part of the table below it) of mobile use. This would fall into that category. Furthermore, I get the impression that their definition of "mostly or only" means more than 50%, which is not the most helpful. It'd be more helpful to do a category-based breakdown for that, which will probably see desktop usage being higher than mobile for news/media.

Right - so, the stats say that there are a lot of people using mobile devices to surf the web, many of whom are using mobile almost exclusively. A fraction of the time those users spend on the web is spent on news sites. Does the fact that those mobile web users split their time across different destinations really lead you to believe it's not worth optimizing for them?

First of all, the stats don't say that many of them are using mobile almost exclusively. As I previously said, the way it is written leads me to believe that "mostly" to them is "more than 50%". Almost exclusively implies a much higher percentage of use.

And in any case, if people are only going to spend 5% on news in general while on mobile, then I would most definitely not optimize my site for them unless it were incredibly simple to do so. The 5% is then further split across many venues, and, as the source says, it includes in-app usage. That even further fractions the amount of time spent. With that much fractioning of the time, the chance that a user will even see this piece is pretty low.

Re: Riding the New Silk Road

#46

Post by modfodder »

chime wrote: post #18
cm2012 wrote: post #14

Wow, I really wanted that to continue the path all the way to Europe. Really just a treat to use. The smoothness of the "gif-like" images just smashes typical video in my mind.

They're called http://www.reddit.com/r/cinemagraphs

Actually, they're just really nice high quality animated gifs (someone below analyzing the source states that they are actually video, which is possible). A cinemagraph is a still photo that has one (or few) moving parts of the image, typically in a near seamless loop. A cinemagraph is a bit more involved to create than a gif, requiring at least some basic compositing.

Re: Riding the New Silk Road

#47

Post by hippich »

I see mentions of security, but from pictures it is just few men without any (visible) weapon most of the time. Even given these men, i believe on a so long distance, there are many desert places, where nobody is present.

Question - how such a valuable shipments protected against someone, who will try to disconnect few cars, crack open 'em and steal all these laptops on trucks?

Re: Riding the New Silk Road

#48

Post by marcusramberg »

easy_rider wrote: post #20
kiba wrote: post #12

Did anybody thought of the black market site "silk road" rather than the actual Silk Road before clicking on the link?

I'd like to think I knew what the "real" Silk Road is, but I'm afraid that I would not answer this question correctly in quiz setting.

Who is Marco Polo?

Re: Riding the New Silk Road

#49

Post by davidw »

btilly wrote: post #34

Time to trot out trivia. As the article points out, the Silk Road faded in importance in the 1400s. But it doesn't say why. There were three major reasons why it faded. The first was the final fall of Constantinople in 1453, ending the last remnant of the original Roman Empire. This made trade with Europe harder. The second was the development, initially by the Portuguese but followed by others, of direct sea routes…

> long-term economic and military decline of areas like the Middle East

It put in motion the long-term decline of the Venetian Republic, as well, which made most of its money trading with the middle east. Interestingly enough, this also led the Venetians to focus a bit more on their land conquests in northern Italy, so there are some areas that received more attention at that point: swamps drained, villas built, and so on, which made sense, with trade drying up. My wife comes from a town that really came into being in the 1600's, which, for Italy, is fairly late, all things considered. Prior to that the area was a malarial swamp that was not of much interest to people.

Re: Riding the New Silk Road

#50

Post by socillion »

cocoflunchy wrote: post #15

It's great to try new formats, but the experience is completely broken on my now-slightly-aging Windows laptop. I wish web developer/designers would test their pages on regular hardware instead of 27" iMacs or rMPB... The scrolling is horribly lagging, and the gifs/videos are all black: http://prntscr.com/1gq4he http://prntscr.com/1gq5b6

This isn't your problem, but HTTPS-Everywhere reproducibly breaks the page for me on Firefox with the default ruleset containing nytimes.com. Once disabled, the images load fine.
Post reply on HN