A modern alternative to the pizza delivery message would be to use uber to book a car near the location and upon the allocation of the driver, contact them and ask them to deliver the message.
and then drive around the block a few times for their trouble.
The 5's size was to maintain the 326ppi of the display and ensure a smooth transition for developers. A 3.5 and a 5 inch screen would have made app developers have to create 2 separate layouts, whereas this approach means that developers 2 similar layouts for 4-class phones (3:2) and 5-class phones (16:9), which should ideally mean less work for the developers
Sure, of course they want to minimize fragmentation. But developers have been making apps for the 3.5" (3:2) form factor since 2008. So continuing to make a 3.5" (3:2) phone alongside a 5" phone (either 3:2 or 16:9 or anything else) wouldn't make any more work for developers than they've already made.
The combination of the serif font, text-indent on paragraphs and lack of separation between them makes reading it a chore. One of the first times I have needed to use Safari's reader mode out of necessity.
I didn't even notice the serif font, because I have overridden the font-family in almost all places to the Ubuntu font-family (hooray for user style sheets!). I tried it as an experiment somewhere around a year ago. I strike the occasional website that doesn't look right and where it looks like the typeface used may have damaged it, but overall, it's marvellous. I noticed very quickly that the whole web was prettier and more readable. I tried going back, just out of curiosity, a month or two later. I went back to overriding the font-family less than a week later.
But as far as their layout is concerned, I do like the large typography, and don't see any problem with the paragraph spacing and layout. Overall, it's a nice, clean layout.
I've been doing this for a few years, along with a reasonable minimum font size. I find it really tough to go back to a smorgasbord of fonts and sizes, with some of them often unreadable. Controlling the fonts via Firefox is awesome.
The biggest downside to this is where sites (e.g. github) try using private-range unicode codepoints for graphical icons, not realizing that users often have other fonts set. I really discourage site authors for hacks and stick to using graphics for icons.
Though this doesn't totally solve your issue, the design is responsive, so if you're on your Mac, you could narrow your browser window to make the body text a little easier to scan. I mean, you shouldn't need to do that, but...
Interesting, totally opposite for me. The text-indent is what demarcates the paragraphs and I found that really readable. Also Safari's reader mode also uses a serif font, for me anyway.
The lack of hierarchy in navigation and contrast in their design makes it really hard to navigate the archives of the blog or really establish the differences between content, navigation, and comments.
As the blog post is about building a great product with the core competitive advantage being simplicity, this new blog design is a full 180 from the point of their post.
Seeing as an aside/light hearted post like this makes it onto the HN front page, I'd say its a reasonable deal for the advertiser in terms of eyeballs/brand awareness, even if the HN audience is not their intended audience.
I was always under the impression that the main point of salting a password before hashing (unique or not, stored in cleartext or otherwise) was to prevent the hash from being referenced against a rainbow table of precomputed hashes. Obviously this is in the case of using md5/sha1 for your hashing.
As an example, find the md5 of a dictionary word and google it, its original value is bound to be in the first or second result. Now find the md5 of that word and a random string (aka a salt)... google and there shouldn't be any results. and even if there was due to a collision, that password wouldn't work, because it would be resalted prior to the comparison happening.
and then drive around the block a few times for their trouble.