A transparent portion of the #comments div is covering the body text and sidebar. If you change #comments position from relative to initial, things work as expected. I think the problem is that the sidebar is floated and the float isn't cleared. Setting a clear: both on #comments prevents the div from overlapping the body and sidebar.

How does one go about editing the display parameters?

I am a complete neophyte at this, but tried pressing F12 to access various debugging tools. I could not find any reference to the comments.

Also interested how you discovered this in the first place?

In chrome, I right clicked on the body text and hit "inspect element". That brings up element inspector with the relevant element highlighted. The highlighted div had the id "comments". Hovering over that element in the inspector pane shows you the dimensions of the div in blue and the padding in green in the main windows. This makes it pretty easy to see that the comments div is covering everything else.

The css for #comments in the inspector pane doesn't specify dimensions for the div, so it should be the size of its child elements. None of the child elements overlap the body text or sidebar, so something else is causing the parent div to cover those elements.

The div directly before #comments is the sidebar, and clicking on it in the inspector pane shows the css floating it.

I then just added a clear: both to #comments using the inspector and it fixed the problem in the main window. You can add css to an element in the inspector in chrome by hitting the "+" in the right-hand pane (there are other ways, but that's probably the easiest).

The easiest way (in Chrome, but other browsers will have something similar) is to right click pretty much anywhere on the text and click "Inspect Element". The developer tools will come up with that element in the DOM highlighted (it is a div element with id "comments"). The easiest thing to do is then to right-click on that element and select "Delete Node".

By the way, when the "what can we do now that we couldn't do in the 90s" debate comes up it always occurs to me that the majority of the applications I use are far more malleable due to being web applications built on its fundamentally open (if admittedly complex and fragile) tool set. So instead of thinking "well, this UI sucks", I can actually fix it myself if I care enough to.

You see that the text is not highlightable. In Chrome, for example, you might right click that text and select "Inspect element". You can see that while you clicked on a paragraph of copy, the element that gets inspected is the #comments div, which should live below content of the article. Under the "Styles" tab of the right pane of the developer tools, you can modify existing css rules or enter new ones under element.style or #comments if you like. Adding a "clear: both" rule fixes the issue.

(In Chrome) If you right-click anywhere on the text and select "inspect element" it will select the #comments div because it covers the whole page. Then on the right-hand side of the dev tools you can add to "element.style". Adding clear:both; to this fixes the issue.

"display: none" works very nicely as well.

Yeah, actually, I don't read articles anymore that do shit like that. Also: If I end up on a website that has some sort of popup (like us on FB, sign up here), I instant-close it. I don't care how good the content is. If they annoy me, I won't read it.

I do the same thing. Last one I remember I believe was washingtonpost. Oh well, their problem. Not mine.

If enough people do it, reading time will go down and bounce rate will go up. If that happens, someone might notice and decide to change something. I think there's no other way than that to tell them that their approach sucks.

Just a layout bug caused by improper float clearing, causing the #comments div to obscure the content and the sidebar. OP, if you're reading this: Just add your "clear" class to that div, and you're golden.

EDIT: Interesting that I've seen problems like this pop up more than a couple times in recent months. For instance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7382206

I'm guessing it's some sort of layout thing gone horribly wrong. Not really the new web to blame here -- just poor testing.

Change div id="content" to anything you want, then site layout becomes much better and you can select anything as well.

stop with these annoying content protection people!

Site works fine without JS, and I can do all of those things too.

Although all those extra parameters in the URL are a little odd.

For what its worth, the page works fine without all the parameters. Why they are in the submitted link, I don't know.

The utm_* parameters tend to be used for source tracking; the important ones here being "content" and "campaign".

Of course, this particular link doesn't refer to HN in its campaign code, so their statistics are going to get a little confused.

I had this problem also but I was logged in to wordpress.com (or .org, I don't even know, but it had the black bar at the top from WordPress) and when I signed out, that problem went away immediately.

Perhaps more importantly to the author, I noticed this when I tried to share via twitter. display:none; on the comments div worked fine.

I noticed the same thing.

Easiest thing for me was "view source code" and copy from there.

select all still works (ctrl a), but yeah, horrid that they are doing it with css instead of at least having the decency to do it with javascript so I can easily disable that.

Site has been fixed now. Good to see the quick response.