Comment by laumars | Hacker News Reader

Comment by laumars | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate the need some people feel to make modern-looking web pages, but the format of this really is just a triumph of style of substance:

* I have no idea how far through the content I am

* The lack of verbosity means I'm constantly having to apply guesswork to their statements (ie an explained point will tell the readers why Haskell gave them better communication. A slide show like that with just headings mean I have to guess the reason Haskell had those benefits)

* It's scales terribly (at least on Opera, some of the content fell off screen - so I had to maximize the browser. But this might just have been an Opera bug. In either case, this wouldn't have been a problem with a more traditional blog layout).

* The navigation requires guesswork

* And most annoying of all, it doesn't actually save the reader any time by displaying the content like that than it would have done with blog post as the jarring navigation presented with slides require the reader to pause before each page to understand how to read the slide, and then pause after each page to apply the aforementioned guesswork. With a blog post, the information is presented in a more natural communicative way which makes it quicker to digest the information.

It's a great pity I'm having to pick post a negative comment about the presentation of the submission rather than comment about the point being raised - particularly as I've been very interested in Haskell lately. But I found even my interest in the subject wasn't enough for me to put up with this slide show layout and thus I ended up closing the browser tab before the end. :(

In terms of how far through the content - there seems to be a little marker (in yellow) that runs along the bottom of the screen. I suspect, depending on the browser, YMMV.

That may have been chopped of by Opera then. Thanks for the correction though :)

> modern-looking web pages

Well, herein lies the problem: It's not a web page, it's a slide deck.

But I do agree in general. The slides alone are often not very interesting or useful without the talk. Hopefully, it was recorded.

I assumed it was a deck but couldn't find a way to advance from the first slide.

The left and right cursor keys generally work.

Good presentations do not put every single thing in the slides. They are there to support the speaker. The better the presentation, the more worthless it is to click through on a web page, and therefore I generally avoid them in favor of something I can actually read.

It didn't work at all on my (admittedly old) version of Firefox.

I suspect the author made the slideshow to display on his/her own system, and generously shared it publically as an afterthought.

Interesting point. You might be right as someone else did hint that this was part of a talk.

> Interesting point. You might be right as someone else did hint that this was part of a talk.

He's used Reveal.js[1], a presentation/slideshow tool in JS. Can use node.js if you want to have speaker notes/etc too.

[1]: http://lab.hakim.se/reveal-js/

The url might have given you a hint. http://mth.io/talks/haskell-in-production/#/

I agree about the near-uselessness of this form of communication. But we should blame the submitter for that.

Doesn't work with my version of chrome (Version 26.0.1410.64 m) either.

Edit: Ooooh, found a button that actually does something. Apparently you have to use the scrollwheel, space or the arrow keys. Just clicking on things doesn't seem to work. Hooray for modern UX design.

* It came up completely blank when I opened it (presumably because of NoScript disabling Javascript, but I didn't check -- just closed it and left).

It also does not appear to be working on my nexus 7 as well. I find cases like this frustrating because I was very interested in the content, because I might start learning Haskell, but it is unlikely I will remember to check it later on my desktop.

Dear pg

I am beginning to see what you mean by the easy-negative-up-vote effect.

I hit that presentation and saw the first two pages - Mark Hibberd, and REST API documentation with Haskell. You could slideshow the phone directory at half speed and I would still be doing exactly what I did - go look up more info.

On the other hand, the responsiveness of that deck did feel like a phone book at half speed. So no downvoting from me.

> I am beginning to see what you mean by the easy-negative-up-vote effect.

I'm someone who normally hates such posts as well. However the reason I did leave such a comment this time round was out of disappointment rather than wanting to be negative for the sake of "internet points". The topic was one that I had a particular personal interest in and the content looked like it should have been really juicy. But sadly the item failed to offer any substance and that was entirely down to the choice of layout.

However it now seems like this presentation was designed to accompany a talk and likely wasn't expected to be viewed on it's own and without explanation. In which case my post was unfair and I genuinely wouldn't have left those points had I known. In fact the only reason I haven't deleted my post is because I think that would now do more harm than good due orphaning the replies.

So I do actually agree with your disappointment about seeing such a post - even in spite of being the author of it.

A man after my own confused mind :-)

(Or woman.)

You are having a better experience than me. To me, what I see is a blank page... A pity, I was really interested in the content. :-(

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