Hacker News for Education | Hacker News Reader

Hacker News for Education

news.learnboost.com

47 pointsrafaelc32 comments

Just to reiterate: this is our soft launch. All of these comments and suggestions have been awesome and we're making some design/point fixes.

The official launch is Monday 4/19 and we're getting a few education bloggers to write about this. Let us know if you have suggestions for any other people to reach out to so that they can get the scoop on Hacker News for Education.

I'm not sure if he does any blogging, but HN user tokenadult jumps into my mind as the most informed person in this community with regards to the state of the education world. If I were you, I'd try to reach out to him.

Reached out to him, he emailed within minutes. Awesome.

I'm on it. Thanks.

Basically we're trying to recreate Hacker News but for educators. We were surprised to see there isn't something like this for the #education community, so with some help from Slinkset we've built this. Hopefully we'll save teachers a lot of time and help everyone find the best content, just like HN.

I've been pleasantly surprised with the number of education posts on HN. Good luck, I just sent this to my teacher friends :)

Cool, thanks for doing that! We're doing the official launch on Monday but wanted to release it to HN early to get the feedback (see some of the comments about theme, fonts, etc)

And please feel free to contribute edu links there, awesome.

how about reddit.com/r/education?

Maybe you're already planning this, but you should consider putting some explanatory 'what-is-this-site' text somewhere prominent. Much of your potential audience has never seen HN, Digg, or Reddit.

Funny how even the most simple things are overlooked. Thanks. We're going to add some text... let me know what you think in a bit.

The first two sentences are fine. I'd rethink the third sentence: Also, up voting and commenting is how you can help every reader uncover the best of the best by pushing those articles to the top of the list.

Problems: (1) Most people have no idea what 'up voting' means. (2) The syntax is needlessly tangled.

What about: "Vote for the articles you find most useful, and they'll rise to the top of the list."

Great point. Making that change now!

Reach out to Kirsten Winkler - http://www.kirstenwinkler.com/

She's like the techcrunch of online education (someone else said this once).

Awesome. I will reach out to Kirsten now... thanks!

Clicking on the left side of the header (not the Login/Register portion) doesn't bring me to the homepage. It wasn't immediately clear to me that the Popular link brings me there. This is important if folks arrive at your site via a link directly to an item.

I like the styling better than HN -- CSS is always better than nested tables IMHO.

Oh yeah, CSS is more fun too :)

Good catch on the header link going back to the homepage. Iterating, iterating, iterating...

This seems to have been blocked by my workplace firewall, not sure if there is a catchy term somewhere on the URL. I will wait until evening to check out the web-app, and maybe come up with some suggestions. Thanks for the initiative!

Awesome! Great work. I'll read it daily and link to it on our blog! Thank you!

Fantastic. And make sure you take the time to give yourself some credit and submit your posts too, so that people discover what you've written...

OpenID logins would be fantastic.

Soon... we've got to work on our core product for now

I don't like that I have to login to do anything

You don't have to login to gain the primary value, which is finding the best education content. You can click on the links as they're sorted by the community.

To join the community, you create a username and a password. That's it. Which is exactly what you had to do to create your account for Hacker News...

Theme and fonts are not good. This is important.

Suggestions?

Playing around in Firebug, I think it's a bit easier on the eyes without the bold title and the title size a bit smaller. Also, I love the arrow in HN - very simple and unobtrusive. Yours might be fine with a little bit more margin to the right.

Perhaps maybe a bit more white space as well. With those adjustments I think it looks great

Awesome suggestions. OK we're going to play around with some of this and tweak... one follow up though: do you think the white space is a suggestion that "the mainstream" will like or is that more for the HN community coming over to news.learnboost.com ?

My personal opinion is that while it may not be something that the "mainstream" notices, it's a bit more comforting on the eyes and appears less cluttered.

Keep in mind, it's just one person's opinion, and I work with a guy who's pretty hardcore about padding and white space so I've grown into his style a bit ;)

Made some design changes (upgrades?)

What do you think now?

How many lines of Lisp did it take?

hahaha... :)

Interesting thoughts!

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