allanderek's comments

allanderek | 9 years ago | on: Show HN: AutoComment

I have seen so many versions of this same script. The fact is that such header comments at the top of every file aren't that useful. I mean, what do you use them for? The information in them, is already stored from the fact that the file is under source code control. If someone moves the file from that then that will just increase the chance that the header comment is wrong.

Put another way, have you ever been reading a file and thought "Oh I wonder which project this belongs to and who wrote it? I'll check the top."

allanderek | 9 years ago | on: Show HN: DreamCoin: Anonymously Share Your Ideas and Profit

I'm afraid I have no real expertise in user-experience so I cannot really say. I definitely think you want, as you suggest, a "How it works" at the very top, centre of the landing page. Preferably in graphic form.

I also still think you want example dreams to be viewable by anyone. I believe that few people sign-up without a good idea of the kind of thing they are signing-up for.

allanderek | 9 years ago | on: Show HN: DreamCoin: Anonymously Share Your Ideas and Profit

That's a very noble approach, but I don't understand how it relates to not showing non-users current dreams? Is it that you have to pay to even view dreams? I didn't get that from the home page. I think at the very least you need to demonstrate to potential users what the product does, otherwise (I think) few people will sign-up for something they don't really understand.

allanderek | 9 years ago | on: Show HN: Python Module Update Checker (WebApp)

I like it. The blog site that hosts it has a slightly strange menu, when at 'home' there are three links 'Blog', 'Apps', and 'Contact', when at Apps, there appears to be only 'Blog' and 'Contact', when at 'Blog', there appears to only be 'Contact'.

But the actual app, is great. I like the output, but I would consider sorting them into those dependencies which are up to date and those which are not.

If you really want some extra user-friendlyness and learn a bit of the github API, that would be a cool way to accept input. Instead of copy&pasting the pip-freeze output, how about just your github repository link, you could then search for a requirements.txt (or similar), OR a first effort at this would be to allow users to link to a requirements.txt file, for example one hosted on github.

Finally, what about a spin-off pypi library to do this? I'd love to be able to do this from the command-line inside my project's directory.

allanderek | 10 years ago | on: Show HN: Writing Streak – write fiction every day

This looks great. There are a couple of minor bugs that I've come across so far.

    1. Occasionally at the 'Prompts' screen, pressing the reload icon causes a blank prompt, which means there is no reload icon. Hence the user has to refresh the entire page.
    2. In  the "prompt" screen the place which I think is for some title text from the user does not show what is typed. The user can see the cursor moving, but no text, they can select the text but it is not highlighted. You can select copy & paste the text elsewhere. Suggesting that the text colour is just the same as the background colour.
Other than that, you have small logos in the top right, but the logos are far from clear what they actually do. Home, Settings and (probably) logout are clear, but the other two are not so clear.

allanderek | 10 years ago | on: Show HN: A browser-based board game to kill time at work

It's nice. I like that you don't need to log-in, or create an account, or anything like that to play.

A bit more feedback on illegal moves would be a good addition. Even better would be feed-forward, such as dimming the places that the current chip cannot be placed. With a tool-tip explaining why, even better.

allanderek | 10 years ago | on: Show HN: GitHub Reviews – Reviews for Popular GitHub Repositories

So first off, I like this. I actually quite like the design as well. I absolutely agree that a "latest reviews" or something would be great. The first thing I want to do is at least see a single review, just to see what one looks like.

Probably a bit late for you to change since you have your domain name, but the name kind of suggests code reviews. But I don't think you're really aiming for code reviews correct? You're aiming for a kind of package reputation?

A related project shown here as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11481459

There I wrote a comment about how package reputation systems have the slight problem about what to do when a package is updated. A review may then be out-of-date, but you cannot just delete old reviews since they may still be quite appropriate. So it isn't an easily solved problem.

allanderek | 10 years ago | on: Stringbike – A Chain-less Bicycle

The bike itself looks quite neat but this kind of website grinds my gears.

Is it possible to buy one? I could not tell from the website. I'm no customer expert but I guess that many visitors want to know two things 1. is it possible to buy this now? and 2. how much does it/is it going to, cost?

I understand there are several models, but still someone just wants a rough costing. Does such a bike cost the roughly the same as a traditional bike of the same quality or is it currently much more expensive? So, can one such bike be had for somewhere between $500-1000 or is more like $5000?

The lack of any price makes me assume the latter, and I just get out of there before I find out any more information about the actual bike.

allanderek | 10 years ago | on: Show HN: Plino – An intelligent Spam filtering system built using python

Your website is very well designed, to me it looks very nice.

On my browser (Firefox-Linux) if I open the hamburger menu on the right, and click, say, API usage, the content is pushed off to the left and I can't even scroll it back. The only thing I can do is close the hamburger menu to properly see the content.

I was going to give a couple of comments assuming that you were hoping to turn some visitors into paying customers, but this seems to be an entirely free service.

I was going to say that "Python based" is a positive for some and a negative for others. I'm not sure it needs to be in the list of features and surely does not need to be the first feature. What should be first? "Unlimited Users", though not the use of the word "currently" may well put some people off. It suggests that this will not be free in the future, which perhaps it won't be. I don't know.

Secondly, a REST-API is great, focus more on it being something that can be integrated into a developer's application. The others, Python based, Machine Learning, Crafted With Love, Minimum Downtime are not really features at all. Python based and Machine Learning are just implementation details, the first is not really important and Machine Learning is kind of the assumed method of spam filtering. So overall your list of features scream you claiming "This is really good honest", rather than demonstrating that.

The Python API example is good, this is what a Python programmer cares about, they might dig a little deeper and be pleasantly surprised to find the whole thing is developed in Python.

In general, it's hard to see any unique selling point here. Why would a developer use this spam filter over a self-hosted one, or other existing one? I'm not saying there isn't a unique selling point, just that your website does not make this abundantly clear.

allanderek | 10 years ago | on: Show HN: Awesome Python – the go-to Python toolbox

I like it. On python-ideas the idea of a curated list of pypi packages comes up from time-to-time. The most recent incarnation was started just last month and you can read it here: https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2016-March/03...

Such discussions usually die out after some people give their opinions on what such a package curation/voting system should be like, whilst others state why we should not have such a system.

For my money, most of the objections are really just people pointing out that it is a very difficult to design problem. Rather than objecting to the actual idea.

So anyway, it's really nice to see some actual working code.

A few of comments:

1. You describe this as the "go-to Python Toolbox", but I'm not sure that really describes what it is well. It's really a summary of github statistics. Even forgetting how the packages are rated, you have a package rating system rather than a single toolbox. I think what you have is more interesting than a single python toolbox.

2. You have not quite solved the major complaint that usually comes up in discussions of such package voting systems. That is, that a package is not generally just "good" or "bad", but appropriate or not appropriate for given uses. Furthermore, I think the 'Popularity' metric is not quite obvious from a first look at, say, a package category. In other words, it's not quite obvious that this is a measure of how the github repository is starred. At least then the user can decide themselves whether or not this is a useful metric.

3. Github stars is not a bad measure. A better one would include the ability to downvote.

4. Pretty much all repulation/voting systems have the problem that for any "votes", or even full-blown reviews, it's not clear which version of the library they are about. This is really difficult to solve. Since you only have positive votes the problem is not so pronounced as it is in other systems (or proposed systems). But the basic problem is that a bunch of users downvote a library because it is difficult to use, or doesn't have tests, or they cannot install it etc. The developer takes that into consideration and produces a new version of the library, what should the reputation system do? It's really not a trivial question. You still have that issue in that a bunch of users may have decided not to star a library because of an earlier version. They may even star a library which later becomes less useful, for example because it is superceded by a better library, or because the code degrades. I understand users can unstar a repository, or flock to a new one, but still, the general problem is not entirely solved. That said, using GitHub stars probably suffers from this problem less than other measures.

5. I really like the look of it. I think the colour scheme for Python is the best of the three so far.

allanderek | 10 years ago | on: Show HN: Branch Logic and Short URLs

I guess I'm struggling quite to see the use case here. For web-site providers themselves they would much rather do the conditional logic themselves because then that would apply to all visitors not just those that come via your shorturl service.

I can perhaps imagine someone tweeting something like: "I've just published a new book, get it here", where 'here' is a link, which might send the user to the correct Amazon page based on their location (eg. amazon.com for US users and amazon.co.uk for UK based users).

allanderek | 10 years ago | on: Show HN: Create beautiful themes for most popular IDE's/Editors

Looks quite nice. For the lazy it is currently IntelliJ, Textmate, Atom, Emacs and Vim. I'm going to guess that adding a new IDE is relatively straightforward depending on how that IDE stores its themes.

I suppose it's a question of how many people switch IDEs etc. If you only use one, then you may as well use the theme-editor that comes with that, even if that is just editing the preferences and then checking. But if you switch IDEs a lot then I guess configuring/storing a theme once is quite useful.

Personally I don't switch much and when I do I'm happy to use different themes for different IDEs. But I'm sure there are others who would appreciate this.

allanderek | 10 years ago | on: Show HN: Trendr

Sounds great. The landing page, which is nice and light with no visual burden on the user. However, it's not quite clear what exactly a user should put in the single input box? The placeholder 'Trendr' does not really help at all. I understand that if the user waits a moment the placeholder changes but even still it's unclear what I should put in there. (Also there is probably some survey somewhere that demonstrates some really high percentage of users wait less than some really short space of time and hence will never see your placeholder text change).

allanderek | 10 years ago | on: Show HN: Material Management

If I'm honest, this is a great example of a home page in which I've browsed it and have no real clue what it does or what problem it attempts to solve.
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