Hacker News Reader

Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

I don't use Rap Genius often, so I almost missed sama's responses.

Be sure to click on the annotations to see them.

I use Genius almost exclusively for its rap annotations, so reading news on this platform felt strange to me. While I can definitely see its merits for lyrics/poetry, I'm not sure how much I like it in this context. I think that expository/news articles should be written well-enough that annotations (other than hyperlinks, I guess) are unnecessary.

I'm of the opposite opinion. I loved it! The concept seems similar to Hypertext [0] (or what it was supposed to be). Would love to see how they handle first-hand commentary from multiple conflicting voices!

[0] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext

The point of this annotation was for someone who disagrees with the author to offer a point by point take down in the context of the original article.

You could understand the article (at least the view the author wants to promote) just fine without the annotation--the annotation provides a counterpoint that systematically undermines the premise of the article. [edit spelling]

Ah, that's the first use of the annotations for this that I've seen. The only other "news" I've seen on Genius before was statements from Genius or a16z, and the annotations only provided more in-depth explanations of the text.

Agree! I was going to reply to some of Sam's comments, but stopped because this is not at all what Genius was designed for and my reply to his comments wouldn't fit the UX.

Did you notice the comments button?

I actually found the UI excellent when reading this. You get to see counterpoints and clarifications inline, and you can see exactly what phrase or sentence is being addressed.

The only improvement I could see is if it was more prominent who is giving the verified annotations. It's listed twice at the top but they're easy to miss. Might be nice to have each person's avatars and names take up the side next to the first few paragraphs.

if I were a VC, I’d worry much more about Angel List than YC when it comes to A rounds

-- SamA

Completely agreed. Which pretty much kills the entire point of the article.

why not do A rounds? I agree regarding the signaling issue ( if you do A round for 3 companies, you are sending bad signal for the remaining ones ) - but what if you address/ mitigate the signaling issue?

I'm not sure how one is even supposed to know that Sam was the one writing the annotations. Is there even a way to see who wrote them?

Click on the annotation and then click "Authors" under the text.

https://twitter.com/sama/status/509133306278211584

Thanks for pointing this out. @sama's pitch perfect on his notes here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com