There is no "Subscribe" link anywhere in the text of this article or on the web page that hosts it (http://lwn.net/Articles/696017/).
I was able to find the link from the front page, but it's kind of hidden -- https://lwn.net/subscribe/Info which says "Get started! The first step is to log into LWN. If you do not yet have an account, please create one now; otherwise, please log in to continue:". Which seems like a lot of steps to pay them money.
There's nothing wrong with informing people that you can subscribe! A small Call To Action at the end of every post (Do you like this post? Help support us and get future content directly to your inbox by subscribing) would already do wonders! And having "Subscribe" in the sidebar. (If anyone from LWN is reading: use those words verbatim if you wish)
There's no shame in this being a paid publication. Considering the anti-advertising demographic, many would be glad to help support an ad-free system.
I'm a subscriber but I don't look at it as a subscription to a weekly magazine but an investment. Enabling knowledgeable people to write in-depth analysis of various patch sets or subsystems of Linux kernel—which rarely change dramatically—ensures that, later on, there'll always be an article in Google search results that'll explain the reason behind certain behaviours in a more approachable manner than reading the source code or doc.txts—they're invaluable but a bit intimidating.
As an occasional writer for LWN, thank you for supporting them and helping make it possible for LWN to pay for articles. (I don't write about the kernel, though.)
I felt the same way and subscribed for years, but lately most of the content seems to be links out to external sites, and many of those seem to be reposts from HN or proggit....just not worth it anymore to me
So I see a lot of confusion about what LWN is on here.
While it provides a detailed write up of recent kernel development for sure, it is far from the only thing they do. LWN is first and foremost a great way to stay on top of the most important developments in the free/open-source community, without having to browse tens of mailing list discussions on a weekly basis.
I see it as giving me a way to keep a tap on the pulse of the community and thus be ready when changes come.
They have reports from every FOSS conference or hackaton and condense the main points into a very readable summary that saves me time, while still keeping me informed.
Apart from kernel development, it did excellent technical reporting on systemd, prior to it being widely adopted and it does a great job of keeping you in the know of how things like wayland are actually progressing.
As for the parts that are genuinely over my head, I've been surprised how many times I've read about something on LWN and not really understanding what I was reading about at the time, but connecting the dots later.
You know when you read something and have no use for it, so you delete it from your front-end memory, but it resurfaces just when you actually need it?
Just to give an example, I remember reading a series on LWN some time ago about how virtual memory is managed in the kernel and now that I am writing a toy OS in Rust, I regularly have flashbacks to that series and it makes the concepts that I am learning about now genuinely easier to grasp, because I can make an instant, be it clouded connection that I did in fact hear about this and this already, even if it didn't make a lot of sense at the time.
There's also been times when the kernel has been misbehaving on me and I remembered that there was an article on LWN talking about this very issue and how adding a certain kernel boot parameter may resolve it, and it usually does.
For me, LWN is well worth the $7 a month they ask for it just on these points alone, it is one of a very few internet publications that in fact I am willing to pay for and consider it money well spent.
I also like how they have a variety of price points. I've been subscribed for a few years (paying annually) and vary my payment up and down depending on my budget.
Most people here are commenting about the look and feel of LWN, I really don't have any complaints about the UI/UX so far, I don't expect to read LWN on my mobile phone.
I think the main reason of the drop in readership is firstly kernel development is very involved and detailed, LWN mostly reflects the kernel mailing list and associated events and tech talks.
I guess what I find most difficult as an outsider of the kernel community, is trying to keep up. Jonathan Corbet is doing and extraordinary job summarizing the activities of the kernel community in LWN. But the kernel doesn't maintain any main "Epics" that we have in software traditional development, so take for example fair scheduling. AFAIK, the kernel community does not decide to tackle fair scheduling on the next release of kernel, ie 4.7. Then say power management in 4.8 etc...
LWN ends up with a smattering of various articles under common themes like "Kernel", "Security" etc...
LWN has in the past explained long running topics like scheduling when key updates are happening and I commend them for that.
None of the above is a negative reflection on the kernel community or LWN in how they operate but it feels kinda hard to keep up and stay vested.
Anyways just a few thoughts, will renew membership now.
Not all software uses epics. I've actually found epics personally to be a bit of an antipattern, but that's a conversation for another time.
If the kernel has anything like an epic, there is multiple concurrent epics because the Linux is not a monolithic project. Nor are epics related to any kernel version.
For example, each major GPU driver (radeon, novaeu, intel) manages their own development, and push things upstream. DRM (the kernel part of DRI) interacts with those guys, and DRM pushes things upstream.
Network drivers and the network core are managed by small teams, push things to each other (such as adding support for major intrusive features like, say, when they added segment offload support, or recently genericfied the interface for that to support more protocols; or alternatively, when they started making more complex DMA patterns like scatter-gather and other zero-copy methodologies happen). The network guys push things to each other, and push things upstream.
The storage guys also do that, storage drivers and storage core push things to each other, and push things upstream.
Every possible major section of the kernel is a project in of itself, and have project leaders, and have parts that are ran by different people.
Generally, you don't push a patch to lkml by itself, and then you're done; this almost never happens. What happens more often is you go to one of the people who manage that part of the kernel, or has significant experience with that part of the kernel, and discuss your patch with them, and then they will try to help you make a patch that can be merged upstream.
More patches are rejected than committed because of how this works. Linus, or any other kernel maintainer, does not want your patch if it hasn't been ok'ed by the people who maintain those other parts of the kernel unless it is a small patch that does something obviously useful.
And what about the companies that just push drivers? Companies employ kernel hackers that know how to write drivers. For example, Intel employs the Intel GPU driver guys, Radeon employs the Radeon GPU guys, and all those guys are already major authors in the X/DRI/Gallium/DRM/whatever community; the infrastructure to make that all work is shaped by the hardware, the hardware is not shaped by the infrastructure.
As a kernel developer, I really, really appreciate the work of Jon Corbet and the rest of the LWN team. LWN serves a vital function for the kernel community and churns out some very useful kernel articles, as well as being a decent source of news for many other open source happenings. I hope they find some extra revenue from somewhere!
The thing is, the Glory Days when kernel development was a scary, exciting wild west are lone gone.
By necessity, the Linux kernel is now a part of the tech firmament and development is necessarily not as sexy as it used to be. So it's gonna be tough to get people to pay to read about it.
I don't think kernel development is any less scary now than it used to be. It's just as scary, people just don't care to know the gory details anymore. Such systems-level knowledge is seen as much less valuable now in the age of javascript frameworks that don't last longer than a month and silver bullets that everyone talks about but few are actually using for "production" scenarios worthy of that name.
It just mirrors internet culture as a whole. Easy to consume information, show off and fashion.
To be fair, LWN is more than just about Linux kernel development. I find it a useful aggregator of information of note from the F/OSS world.
For example, as of right now, most of the articles on the front page aren't about kernel development: distro security updates, LibreOffice, Firefox, GnuPG, ...
I think kernel development is a lot slower and more incremental than it used to be, which is probably a good thing. However, back in the "wild west" days we had some very good books that explained in detail how the kernel works. Now, if someone wants to get started in kernel development, I wouldn't even know what book to recommend; all the good ones I know of haven't been updated in a decade.
I think this is perhaps an overlooked aspect of Linux's success; at a critical time, they had LWN and good documentation that made it easy for new developers to understand what's going on and start contributing. I don't know any other open source project that is as accessible to new developers as the kernel was in the early 2000's.
I've never been a subscriber of this page and I don't think I am their real target audience. But I'm a professional programmer and I have been using Linux for around 15 years.
I must say that this website comes across as very unprofessional due to the total lack of any design elements which would make it more easy to consume the content (spacing, choice of font). Also it seems like they don't use CSS to enhance the site's UX at all. If you look at the mobile site, they have some sort of dropdown to show the menu, which is then also way too small to properly click on. Issues like this are allover the site: Tables without any proper spacing / borders, mixing centered and left-aligned content with no reason, etc.
For me it just feels clunky and even though the information they aggregate seems to have some value for others, the presentation is just way off.
> I must say that this website comes across as very unprofessional due to the total lack of any design elements which would make it more easy to consume the content (spacing, choice of font).
Say what? On the contrary, I think that it's splendidly simple to read LWN, because there's no distraction. It's a good, clean site; it respects the styling I instruct my browser to apply to it; it displays just fine in links, lynx, elinks, ewww, emacs-w3m, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer, Edge — if that's not professional, then what is?
The HTML is very clean and readable. They do use CSS.
Granted, it doesn't look trendy. Indeed, it looks like something from the 90s/00s. But once one updates to a20`6 style, one then has to spend money in 2017, 2018, spring 2019, summer 2019, fall 2019, winter 2019, January 2020, February 2020 — one will be paying designers and artists until the end of time.
Would I appreciate a somewhat more current look? Sure. Would I trade good HTML and universal readability for a more current look? Hell no.
> I must say that this website comes across as very unprofessional due to the total lack of any design elements which would make it more easy to consume the content
And you're commenting this on Hacker News. A site built up on tables, inline style-definitions, and where it for half a decade refused to add a simple...
I'm not saying it's not a factor, but clearly this seems to be an issue you're able to overcome, given the right circumstances and content.
Also, I'd like to think of LWNs look and feel as a "solid" and clean web-page, the way they used to look and work back in the days when HTML was simple. Nothing excessive, and no overdone CSS/JS madness, which increasingly seems to be the norm.
You just point your browser at the page, the browser retrieves the HTML, the HTML contains the content, and the overall wastefulness of network bandwidth is way below 10%. It's the way I wished the web still worked.
> this website comes across as very unprofessional due to the total lack of any design elements
Really? I've always viewed plain HTML sites in the complete opposite way. They tend to have really good, well thought-out content. There's no filler or clickbait with them.
For the person downvoting me: Let's look at the article's comments. It is so hard to actually follow the conversation between the users. The article's title is repeated multiple times and has a red background.
Underneath each comment's title is a full-height line with a font stating the UTC timestamp, and in the next line we can finally read the actual comment.
I can't be the first person to criticise those issues, and from the fact that they haven't changed it already I think they actually don't care about these kind of things.
> design elements which would make it more easy to consume the content
For me, "design elements" tend to make content harder to consume.
> it just feels clunky
Pages that load megabytes of JavaScript to display kilobytes of text feel clunky. The modern trend toward large icons, large fonts, wide margins, and slow response times because everything has to go through JS/XHR makes websites that keep with today's design fads feel like toys, while websites that present information without a ton of JS and CSS baggage feel like tools.
I feel like design fads are partly a clever marketing ploy to keep web designers in business -- "it doesn't look modern" shouldn't be a justification to plop down the big bucks to redesign a perfectly functioning website every 3-5 years, but it is.
"unprofessional"? really? I have been reading lwn since 2000 and it is the single most important site when it comes to general Free Software news and in depth information. Jon is a kernel developer and not a web programmer, still the site works on every browser I have tried in a consistent way. While the look and feel can "improve", the current or past forms have never been anywhere close to unprofessional.
LWN gets me what I want. It is the most important resource for a linux kernel or in general Free Software enthusiast. Average HN crowd perhaps does not fit into that stereotype.
[X] site loads instantly
[X] doesn't download dozens of frameworks or ads
[X] puts focus on content rather than appearance
You're right the LWN site is utter trash. It's 2016, why aren't they embarrassed of their own incompetence? What comes next? Are they going to tell me to read a book?
In fairness, I see your point, and it's not a bad one. I do appreciate the fact that LWN works in any browser, and doesn't require JavaScript to function.
I wouldn't say that it comes across as unprofessional, though — rather the opposite. To me, LWN appears to be professional: no-frills, focused on substance over form.
Interesting backlash on this comment considering the issue in the post of subscriber drops. Not saying this is the case but younger readers who may be extremely interested in the sites content visit or are linked to the page and quickly leave because it looks like it hasn't been touched since 2000 (outside the content). I don't personally view any annoying layout issues but I believe this is a valid (if small) point.
>I must say that this website comes across as very unprofessional due to the total lack of any design elements which would make it more easy to consume the content (spacing, choice of font)
> Nathan Willis, who has been an LWN contributor for many years and an employee since 2012, will be stepping down at the end of September to pursue an unmissable opportunity to study one of his non-journalistic passions: fonts and type design.
If you are a designer, maybe consider making some CSS changes or additions with Stylebot or another similar browser plugin? You could then share more "trendy themes" with others who are looking for a different design.
I really like LWN and I subscribe - although the Kernel Development part is usually way above my head and my interest level.
If you perhaps not enjoy LWN enough to subscribe - at least consider if you have any friends that might be interested or persuade them to subscribe - if they're already readers.
It is important to have good quality and well researched articles. LWN provides this for free software (so not just the kernel). As long as LWN continues their reporting in this way (high quality), I'll continue my subscription (more like a donation; don't need to get anything back for myself).
Well researched information is an important way to avoid incorrect assumptions to spread. Thereby hopefully avoiding bad decisions to be taken, as well as actions on problematic things (e.g. gmane).
Okay, let's fix this, here are some suggestions they could think about:
- Improve the design a bit. Carefully, you do not want to piss of old subscribers.
- Improve the conversion rate. There is a middle ground between newsletter modals and burying the method to subscribe.
- Introduce a few new products. As far as I can see, at the moment it is just "in depth news for OSS, especially kernel hackers". Maybe they could package some parts of this up for different audiences (security notices, content partnerships etc.).
- Some marketing tactics. "Invite a new subscriber to get this badge." SEO could be improved, too.
I cannot read the kernel source code as easily as the great articles on LWN that lovingly explicate the details. Sometimes even the articles are challenging for me but I learn something new every time I visit it.
If HN and the now nearly defunct Slashdot are popcorn, LWN is fine organically grown fruit and vegetables.
I am off to subscribe to LWN and urge you to do so if you find the kernel interesting
They also cover lots of non kernel topics. There was a fine article on the software modifications usef by VW to cheat the pollution testing, for instance.
I'm somewhat a new reader in the past couple years to LWN and actually was thinking about subscribing just a couple weeks ago. In honesty, I didn't even realize LWN had subscriptions until recently.
Either way, I've gone ahead and paid for the year up front, please keep going, I thoroughly enjoy the articles!
I have been a subscriber for a while now and I consider it some of the best money I have spent ever. Just look at the wealth of information available at
I've never been inclined to subscribe to LWN, even though I read about an article a month when it's posted to HN. Looking through the frontpage, I see:
* 6 x LWN.net Weekly Edition for $DATE
* A few weekly security advisories
* "Some news from LWN"
* Statistics from the 4.7 development cycle
* New software releases
None of these interest me. Here's what does:
* Klitzke: Why Uber Engineering Switched from Postgres to MySQL
* Python's os.urandom() in the absence of entropy
* One-time passwords and GnuPG with Nitrokey
There are a few articles I like there. But they aren't discoverable and I can't find what I want without working to filter the noise.
Contrast this with hackaday.com, where every article is a really interesting feature, there's no news on bugfix releases or kernel changelogs, and they mix feature news, cool stuff in the store, and community projects.
You didn't click into the Weekly Editions? That's where the real good stuff is. And it is separated into categories so you can skip the kernel news page if you like.
I have been a subscriber for years but stopped the subscription last year, it's just that I'm doing less kernel related development these days.
lwn could do better though, make the website visually better, have a mobile app, do some beginner friendly kernel corner and such, also add a save-my-favorite-articles function under my account(last time I checked there is no such thing), adding tag support,etc. In fact just moving to wordpress will probably solve many of its website "issues" so it can focus on the content as it has been for a long time. You need the landing page stay up to date to attract new and young subscribers.
I know that Jonathan Corbet is having cancer but he still keep working on and supporting this site. Not mentioning this is the best place for kernel developers, hackers to keep up with latest kernel news. God bless Jon.
One minor idea. If you're an organization defined by a mystery three letter acronym, do people a favor and define it somewhere. Since it's not in this post or on the lwn.net homepage, here's the LWN faq:
Notice that it's seven printed pages full of questions that somebody familiar with the thing might want to know. But nowhere does it tell you what "LWN" stands for.
If you want people to subscribe to your thing, step one should be to tell us what it is.
"What does LWN stand for, anyway?
LWN, initially, was "Linux Weekly News." That name has been deemphasized over time as we have moved beyond just the weekly coverage, and as we have looked at the free software community as a whole. We have yet to come up with a better meaning for LWN, however."
>The acronym "LWN" originally stood for Linux Weekly News; that name is no longer used because the site no longer covers exclusively Linux-related topics, and it has daily as well as weekly content.
I've been supporting LWN for years, because I love the Kernel page. I've learned so much from reading it over the years. I don't know of anything else like it. Their other articles are often great, but kernel nerdery is what keeps me.
I'm happy to keep supporting them.
(Since others have commented on the design/redesign I'll say one thing: The way the sidebar works now means I can't zoom text in on my iPad because it gets covered by the sidebar. It's a serious functionality dent which I wish would be fixed. That's it.)
This policy of having the strict title on the page is a bit much. The original title provided context as to what this link was about; the current title, the title on the page, is meaningless. It also makes the current top comment, mherdeg's "There is no "Subscribe" link anywhere in the text of this article.." make little sense
LWN produce some of the highest quality articles around - well worth a subscription. Something I think may harm their subscription rate is how quickly they release articles to non-subscribers (1 week after publication?). This makes it easy for non-subscribers to justify not going for the subscription because "some weeks I don't get time to read LWN until a week late anyway". I think it could easily be stretched to a couple of weeks IMHO. Especially as the "subscriber link" mechanism is in place for articles readers would like to share.
[+] [-] mherdeg|9 years ago|reply
I was able to find the link from the front page, but it's kind of hidden -- https://lwn.net/subscribe/Info which says "Get started! The first step is to log into LWN. If you do not yet have an account, please create one now; otherwise, please log in to continue:". Which seems like a lot of steps to pay them money.
[+] [-] rtpg|9 years ago|reply
There's nothing wrong with informing people that you can subscribe! A small Call To Action at the end of every post (Do you like this post? Help support us and get future content directly to your inbox by subscribing) would already do wonders! And having "Subscribe" in the sidebar. (If anyone from LWN is reading: use those words verbatim if you wish)
There's no shame in this being a paid publication. Considering the anti-advertising demographic, many would be glad to help support an ad-free system.
[+] [-] gluegadget|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leephillips|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] karma_vaccum123|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AsyncAwait|9 years ago|reply
Apart from kernel development, it did excellent technical reporting on systemd, prior to it being widely adopted and it does a great job of keeping you in the know of how things like wayland are actually progressing.
As for the parts that are genuinely over my head, I've been surprised how many times I've read about something on LWN and not really understanding what I was reading about at the time, but connecting the dots later.
You know when you read something and have no use for it, so you delete it from your front-end memory, but it resurfaces just when you actually need it?
Just to give an example, I remember reading a series on LWN some time ago about how virtual memory is managed in the kernel and now that I am writing a toy OS in Rust, I regularly have flashbacks to that series and it makes the concepts that I am learning about now genuinely easier to grasp, because I can make an instant, be it clouded connection that I did in fact hear about this and this already, even if it didn't make a lot of sense at the time.
There's also been times when the kernel has been misbehaving on me and I remembered that there was an article on LWN talking about this very issue and how adding a certain kernel boot parameter may resolve it, and it usually does.
For me, LWN is well worth the $7 a month they ask for it just on these points alone, it is one of a very few internet publications that in fact I am willing to pay for and consider it money well spent.
[+] [-] davidgerard|9 years ago|reply
"LWN: A site you want to read the comments on."
[+] [-] spoonie|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] filereaper|9 years ago|reply
I think the main reason of the drop in readership is firstly kernel development is very involved and detailed, LWN mostly reflects the kernel mailing list and associated events and tech talks.
I guess what I find most difficult as an outsider of the kernel community, is trying to keep up. Jonathan Corbet is doing and extraordinary job summarizing the activities of the kernel community in LWN. But the kernel doesn't maintain any main "Epics" that we have in software traditional development, so take for example fair scheduling. AFAIK, the kernel community does not decide to tackle fair scheduling on the next release of kernel, ie 4.7. Then say power management in 4.8 etc...
LWN ends up with a smattering of various articles under common themes like "Kernel", "Security" etc...
LWN has in the past explained long running topics like scheduling when key updates are happening and I commend them for that.
None of the above is a negative reflection on the kernel community or LWN in how they operate but it feels kinda hard to keep up and stay vested.
Anyways just a few thoughts, will renew membership now.
[+] [-] DiabloD3|9 years ago|reply
If the kernel has anything like an epic, there is multiple concurrent epics because the Linux is not a monolithic project. Nor are epics related to any kernel version.
For example, each major GPU driver (radeon, novaeu, intel) manages their own development, and push things upstream. DRM (the kernel part of DRI) interacts with those guys, and DRM pushes things upstream.
Network drivers and the network core are managed by small teams, push things to each other (such as adding support for major intrusive features like, say, when they added segment offload support, or recently genericfied the interface for that to support more protocols; or alternatively, when they started making more complex DMA patterns like scatter-gather and other zero-copy methodologies happen). The network guys push things to each other, and push things upstream.
The storage guys also do that, storage drivers and storage core push things to each other, and push things upstream.
Every possible major section of the kernel is a project in of itself, and have project leaders, and have parts that are ran by different people.
Generally, you don't push a patch to lkml by itself, and then you're done; this almost never happens. What happens more often is you go to one of the people who manage that part of the kernel, or has significant experience with that part of the kernel, and discuss your patch with them, and then they will try to help you make a patch that can be merged upstream.
More patches are rejected than committed because of how this works. Linus, or any other kernel maintainer, does not want your patch if it hasn't been ok'ed by the people who maintain those other parts of the kernel unless it is a small patch that does something obviously useful.
And what about the companies that just push drivers? Companies employ kernel hackers that know how to write drivers. For example, Intel employs the Intel GPU driver guys, Radeon employs the Radeon GPU guys, and all those guys are already major authors in the X/DRI/Gallium/DRM/whatever community; the infrastructure to make that all work is shaped by the hardware, the hardware is not shaped by the infrastructure.
[+] [-] cbsmith|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajdlinux|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grabcocque|9 years ago|reply
The thing is, the Glory Days when kernel development was a scary, exciting wild west are lone gone.
By necessity, the Linux kernel is now a part of the tech firmament and development is necessarily not as sexy as it used to be. So it's gonna be tough to get people to pay to read about it.
[+] [-] CrLf|9 years ago|reply
It just mirrors internet culture as a whole. Easy to consume information, show off and fashion.
[+] [-] ckastner|9 years ago|reply
For example, as of right now, most of the articles on the front page aren't about kernel development: distro security updates, LibreOffice, Firefox, GnuPG, ...
[+] [-] elihu|9 years ago|reply
I think this is perhaps an overlooked aspect of Linux's success; at a critical time, they had LWN and good documentation that made it easy for new developers to understand what's going on and start contributing. I don't know any other open source project that is as accessible to new developers as the kernel was in the early 2000's.
[+] [-] bflesch|9 years ago|reply
I must say that this website comes across as very unprofessional due to the total lack of any design elements which would make it more easy to consume the content (spacing, choice of font). Also it seems like they don't use CSS to enhance the site's UX at all. If you look at the mobile site, they have some sort of dropdown to show the menu, which is then also way too small to properly click on. Issues like this are allover the site: Tables without any proper spacing / borders, mixing centered and left-aligned content with no reason, etc.
For me it just feels clunky and even though the information they aggregate seems to have some value for others, the presentation is just way off.
[+] [-] wtbob|9 years ago|reply
Say what? On the contrary, I think that it's splendidly simple to read LWN, because there's no distraction. It's a good, clean site; it respects the styling I instruct my browser to apply to it; it displays just fine in links, lynx, elinks, ewww, emacs-w3m, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer, Edge — if that's not professional, then what is?
The HTML is very clean and readable. They do use CSS.
Granted, it doesn't look trendy. Indeed, it looks like something from the 90s/00s. But once one updates to a20`6 style, one then has to spend money in 2017, 2018, spring 2019, summer 2019, fall 2019, winter 2019, January 2020, February 2020 — one will be paying designers and artists until the end of time.
Would I appreciate a somewhat more current look? Sure. Would I trade good HTML and universal readability for a more current look? Hell no.
[+] [-] josteink|9 years ago|reply
And you're commenting this on Hacker News. A site built up on tables, inline style-definitions, and where it for half a decade refused to add a simple...
...HTML header which made it usable on a mobile.I'm not saying it's not a factor, but clearly this seems to be an issue you're able to overcome, given the right circumstances and content.
Also, I'd like to think of LWNs look and feel as a "solid" and clean web-page, the way they used to look and work back in the days when HTML was simple. Nothing excessive, and no overdone CSS/JS madness, which increasingly seems to be the norm.
You just point your browser at the page, the browser retrieves the HTML, the HTML contains the content, and the overall wastefulness of network bandwidth is way below 10%. It's the way I wished the web still worked.
[+] [-] pubby|9 years ago|reply
Really? I've always viewed plain HTML sites in the complete opposite way. They tend to have really good, well thought-out content. There's no filler or clickbait with them.
[+] [-] bflesch|9 years ago|reply
Underneath each comment's title is a full-height line with a font stating the UTC timestamp, and in the next line we can finally read the actual comment.
I can't be the first person to criticise those issues, and from the fact that they haven't changed it already I think they actually don't care about these kind of things.
[+] [-] csense|9 years ago|reply
For me, "design elements" tend to make content harder to consume.
> it just feels clunky
Pages that load megabytes of JavaScript to display kilobytes of text feel clunky. The modern trend toward large icons, large fonts, wide margins, and slow response times because everything has to go through JS/XHR makes websites that keep with today's design fads feel like toys, while websites that present information without a ton of JS and CSS baggage feel like tools.
I feel like design fads are partly a clever marketing ploy to keep web designers in business -- "it doesn't look modern" shouldn't be a justification to plop down the big bucks to redesign a perfectly functioning website every 3-5 years, but it is.
[+] [-] paganel|9 years ago|reply
For me that's a feature, not a bug. I'm interested about the content itself, not about with what color or what font that content is presented as.
[+] [-] lil1729|9 years ago|reply
LWN gets me what I want. It is the most important resource for a linux kernel or in general Free Software enthusiast. Average HN crowd perhaps does not fit into that stereotype.
[+] [-] bloatisgood|9 years ago|reply
You're right the LWN site is utter trash. It's 2016, why aren't they embarrassed of their own incompetence? What comes next? Are they going to tell me to read a book?
[+] [-] zeveb|9 years ago|reply
I wouldn't say that it comes across as unprofessional, though — rather the opposite. To me, LWN appears to be professional: no-frills, focused on substance over form.
[+] [-] eumoria|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grokys|9 years ago|reply
> Nathan Willis, who has been an LWN contributor for many years and an employee since 2012, will be stepping down at the end of September to pursue an unmissable opportunity to study one of his non-journalistic passions: fonts and type design.
Related?
[+] [-] pnathan|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keyboardhitter|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GFK_of_xmaspast|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ersii|9 years ago|reply
If you perhaps not enjoy LWN enough to subscribe - at least consider if you have any friends that might be interested or persuade them to subscribe - if they're already readers.
[+] [-] bkor|9 years ago|reply
Well researched information is an important way to avoid incorrect assumptions to spread. Thereby hopefully avoiding bad decisions to be taken, as well as actions on problematic things (e.g. gmane).
[+] [-] allendoerfer|9 years ago|reply
- Improve the design a bit. Carefully, you do not want to piss of old subscribers.
- Improve the conversion rate. There is a middle ground between newsletter modals and burying the method to subscribe.
- Introduce a few new products. As far as I can see, at the moment it is just "in depth news for OSS, especially kernel hackers". Maybe they could package some parts of this up for different audiences (security notices, content partnerships etc.).
- Some marketing tactics. "Invite a new subscriber to get this badge." SEO could be improved, too.
[+] [-] seesomesense|9 years ago|reply
I cannot read the kernel source code as easily as the great articles on LWN that lovingly explicate the details. Sometimes even the articles are challenging for me but I learn something new every time I visit it.
If HN and the now nearly defunct Slashdot are popcorn, LWN is fine organically grown fruit and vegetables.
I am off to subscribe to LWN and urge you to do so if you find the kernel interesting
They also cover lots of non kernel topics. There was a fine article on the software modifications usef by VW to cheat the pollution testing, for instance.
[+] [-] mihok|9 years ago|reply
Either way, I've gone ahead and paid for the year up front, please keep going, I thoroughly enjoy the articles!
[+] [-] Shugyousha|9 years ago|reply
http://lwn.net/Kernel/Index/
that is being enabled by your subscription!
[+] [-] mplewis|9 years ago|reply
* 6 x LWN.net Weekly Edition for $DATE
* A few weekly security advisories
* "Some news from LWN"
* Statistics from the 4.7 development cycle
* New software releases
None of these interest me. Here's what does:
* Klitzke: Why Uber Engineering Switched from Postgres to MySQL
* Python's os.urandom() in the absence of entropy
* One-time passwords and GnuPG with Nitrokey
There are a few articles I like there. But they aren't discoverable and I can't find what I want without working to filter the noise.
Contrast this with hackaday.com, where every article is a really interesting feature, there's no news on bugfix releases or kernel changelogs, and they mix feature news, cool stuff in the store, and community projects.
[+] [-] zlynx|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ausjke|9 years ago|reply
lwn could do better though, make the website visually better, have a mobile app, do some beginner friendly kernel corner and such, also add a save-my-favorite-articles function under my account(last time I checked there is no such thing), adding tag support,etc. In fact just moving to wordpress will probably solve many of its website "issues" so it can focus on the content as it has been for a long time. You need the landing page stay up to date to attract new and young subscribers.
[+] [-] xorcist|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anders098|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasonkester|9 years ago|reply
http://lwn.net/op/FAQ.lwn
Notice that it's seven printed pages full of questions that somebody familiar with the thing might want to know. But nowhere does it tell you what "LWN" stands for.
If you want people to subscribe to your thing, step one should be to tell us what it is.
[+] [-] cdesai|9 years ago|reply
"What does LWN stand for, anyway? LWN, initially, was "Linux Weekly News." That name has been deemphasized over time as we have moved beyond just the weekly coverage, and as we have looked at the free software community as a whole. We have yet to come up with a better meaning for LWN, however."
[+] [-] iokanuon|9 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LWN.net
[+] [-] c22|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BigDaddyD|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MBCook|9 years ago|reply
I'm happy to keep supporting them.
(Since others have commented on the design/redesign I'll say one thing: The way the sidebar works now means I can't zoom text in on my iPad because it gets covered by the sidebar. It's a serious functionality dent which I wish would be fixed. That's it.)
Keep up the great work.
[+] [-] jimktrains2|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ris|9 years ago|reply