Hacker News Reader

Comment by plankton_sb | Hacker News Reader

Hi all, I want to find a job as a RoR developer, but as I have ~10 years coding gap in my CV (I played poker, ran poker forum and did other poker related things) I decided to start some real life projects to build my GitHub portfolio.

LaptopHits.com is the first one. Idea came to me when two of my friends wanted to buy new laptops and asked me,'the computer guy', for some recommendations. I'm not laptop expert, so I usually ask for price range, display size, brand preferences and check some popular forums for laptop recommendations. To save some time doing this I wrote LaptopHits.com. It should collect all laptop mentions from all online discussions, but for now, as it's just MVP version, online discussion == Reddit comments and laptop mentions == Amazon links.

What do you think about it ?

View on HN

Congratulations on shipping. That's the hardest part.

Very clever on Amazon links in reddit being the source of truth. That will obviously leave a lot on the table, but gives you really reliable parsing.

Honestly, this is a great site. I'd keep it simple, but you could definitely expand on the styling a little bit.

Great work!

I like the styling. Clean, readable, works on hi-res screens and small screens like mobile. What would you want more? 3MB of CSS?

Styling the links, giving it a proper header, dividing it more properly into sections, and that will look infinitely better and still work equally well on all screens. The site is a good idea, making it looks like a real project by giving it at least craigslist level of design will take half a day and increase the appeal a lot. And visitors like won't have to check whether the css just did not load before writing a comment like this ;)

Op, if you'd like some help with that, shoot me a mail (in profile).

With all respect: I completely disagree. I think this looks great as is. Dividing it up, adding a bunch of extra CSS would make it less usable and readable for me. Of course, that tends to be subjective.

All it would really take IMO is picking a nice colour for the links to give the site some kind of recognisable brand/theme/personality. Perhaps move the other text away from pure black to decrease the contrast slightly.

How would you know that?

The site is already divided into three sections: header, controls to the left, laptop list to the right. To style that accordingly won't make it in any way less useable or readable. Making the header look like a header would not affect you negatively in any way, or properly styling the pagination, or giving it a color scheme (even one based on white as background).

Really, this is a Show HN. Let's at least try to give OP proper feedback without resorting to head-in-the-sand subjectivity like that. "I'd prefer to have it look like my site I created for geocities with Frontpage" is not what will help OP presenting this to a potential employer, or making it a viable source of income.

> How would you know that?

To be fair, I can't. I'm basing it on how I see your suggestions in my head. But the way I interpret the changes are how I've seen other sites do it, and it just sounds worse to me. I don't like extra styling, as it ends up cluttering the display. I personally find color-schemes annoying. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'd have to see how OP implements your suggestions before actually deciding.

> Really, this is a Show HN. Let's at least try to give OP proper feedback without resorting to head-in-the-sand subjectivity like that. "I'd prefer to have it look like my site I created for geocities with Frontpage" is not what will help OP presenting this to a potential employer, or making it a viable source of income.

I think you really need to take a breath here. I am giving OP proper feedback, which just happens to disagree with yours. Neither style is "right". They are both subjective preferences. I'm saying that I like the style he chose, and disagree with the "improvements" that you are suggesting. I fail to see how I'm sticking my head in the sand.

I would argue that keeping it simple is helping him. It makes the site more usable, less cluttered, faster to load, less maintenance and more easily navigable.

> I think you really need to take a breath here.

Maybe. You see, I hesitated after writing this, but then decided to stick with it. Just because I really am convinced that it is really bad advice. Based on my own sites (and pc-kombo.de is even in a related field), if you don't get the design at least near of being okay, people won't accept your site. Based on my studies, I know that usability does not get worse when giving it a proper design. And readability can simply (well, sometimes it's not that simple) be measured, but there is no reason at all it would get worse by doing the basics.

There is a small subset of people (socialized with another internet?) who really think the design of a site does not matter for them, or who disapprove of everything they think is modern design. Based on your comments, you are in that category. And some others commented in the same spirit here. Listening to those means making a site which 99% of internet users won't accept. At least as long as your site is not craigslist – but even current craigslist has more design than what I see on OPs site.

Not having a design is perfectly fine for a MVP. But not fine when going further. Stating otherwise actively hurts his chances of succeeding.

I'm not against modern design, I'm against over-design. IME sites work better and are more maintainable the simpler they are. If a design improves a site, then by all means, make it more usable. But to me, function > design, and I don't see how your suggestions would make the site better. I'm not saying you are objectively wrong, I'm just saying that I'd much rather use this site than pc-kombo.de or other overly-designed sites that take functionality away on the premise of "looking nice".

What are you talking about? Webdesign has never been about taking functionality away. I'm talking about separating page elements more properly, setting a link color, maybe setting a fitting background color, making sure elements stay big enough on a small screen, thinking about a logo for creating an identity, and having a look at the typography. How would any of this relate to negatively to the function of such a site?

That you think pc-kombo.de is overly designed I take as a compliment. Just saying, the design gave me the idea of adding the arrows at the side of the boxes, and gave a good place for the advanced menu, as well as the box control button for dismissing elements. It helped give users more functionality, more control over the site and their recommendations.

> Webdesign has never been about taking functionality away.

Now I feel like we're not even speaking the same language. Some of the current trends in webdev are no advanced options, no configuration settings, preventing urls from setting state, etc. I think most of these have great intentions, but they do reduce functionality.

I'm just saying that, in general, I don't like the colors, extra elements, logos, etc. That's all clutter IMO that doesn't make sites less functional, but adds unnecessary cruft to them. I think this site is fine as is and doesn't need that extra stuff. If you think it does, then great! I'm glad you suggested it. I just disagree with you.

It doesn't look great on an android phone, though. And (possibly because of the missing viewport setting) I get crazy "let me zoom that for you" behaviour when I try to click on things.

It could do with some responsive styling.

Weird. Seems to work fine with FF on my android phone

Really? You don't have a tiny, hard to read filter bar on the left side?

It's a little small and hard to read, but not terrible. Additionally I don't get any weird zooming behavior that was described

Now I have to assume you are trolling. On a mobile phone (tested on an android with FF), you need to zoom to read any text that is not a headline properly. And there is no way that pagination is clickable without zooming in directly on it. Google is saying the same: https://search.google.com/search-console/mobile-friendly?id=....

That is not working fine.

Why would I troll about that? It looks a little small but otherwise OK to me. I can click on the pagination just fine. There are a lot of variables, especially with android when it comes to screen size, font, etc, so I'm guessing it just comes down to that.

I'm really not trying to just be argumentative, but if you'd just look at the stylesheet you'd see it doesn't come down to that. There is no real attempt to give a good experience in a mobile context. And when it comes to basic responsive typography, there really aren't that many variables at all. Whether a screen is 320, 435, 515 wide, etc - a single query context could serve all those needs.

I'm not trying to be argumentative either, I'm just confused as to why I'm being told my experience is objectively wrong?

Maybe he's not trying to cater to a mobile context, I don't know his intentions. I am just expressing my opinion that I think the site is great and doesn't need any more styling. It works fine on my phone, yet somehow that means I'm trolling? Not sure what more you want me to say?

I certainly don't believe you are trolling at all (I wasn't the one to say that upstream, and if I came across as insinuating that I apologize).

And yes, you are certainly open to your opinions - I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree : )

Comparing Firefox to Chrome on Android (Galaxy S7 Edge), I find Chrome works better.

In Firefox, the results section is too wide, resulting in text that is either too small to read or that requires left-right scrolling. However, the filter section smart-zooms nicely and is easy to click.

In Chrome, the results section is wrapped and of legible size and is easy to skim through by scrolling vertically. However, there is a vertical strip of missing pixels at the left, such that the number 10 on the last result is missing its numeral 1 and part of its 0. The filter section smart-zooms nicely and is easy to click.

In both, it would be nice to lose the underscoring on the links (a pet peeve of mine, fixed with a user style sheet on my laptop).

With all respect: I completely disagree.

And that's fine. I'd be curious as to why though

Just setting

  a { text-decoration: none, color: [something else] }

would go along way. I think that's all thats needed.

Good styling is not necessarily equal to a huge stylesheet

Maybe normal people wouldn't trust this site as much as one with some "branding" or at least some other styles. Maybe it could increase conversion.

By normal I mean the general public. And yes I know about craigslist, but that one has decades (?) of background.

I'd like to be able to filter by comment about laptop used with linux. This feature would be great

Great idea, especially as I use linux on my laptop as well. Probably some other keywords like gaming, bussiness, study would be usefull as well.

There seems to be at least one major laptop brand missing and there's certainly not a to lack of discussions about their new Pro models.

Perhaps it's because most people buy said laptop at apple.com and not amazon.com

Bingo. No affiliate income. This site is biased not to mention inaccurate. More mentions does not equal better.

>More mentions does not equal better.

Nailed it.

I took amazon links because: 1. They are most popular links to products on /r/SuggestALaptop and 80%+ mentions of laptops in Reddit comments come from this subreddit (second popular site is Newegg). 2. There is an easy access to product details via Amazon Products API

I wanted to ship it fast, so these are the reasons. Affiliate program is a nice addition to it, but even without it I'd still collect laptop mentions this way, as it's the simplest way for me to implement such a tool.

>More mentions does not equal better.

I totally agree with it, it's only one step in laptop research, but if you don't have time or knowledge to do some more research I think it's quiete safe guess.

I believe there's a ton of uncovered value in parsing Reddit threads, especially those centered around buying or discovering things. Subreddits like r/BuyItForLife, r/malefashionadvice, r/rawdenim, and any city subreddit have great suggestions.

In fact when I need a new laptop, I'll use Google to search Reddit and change the filter settings to show only recent reviews i.e.

```windows laptop site:reddit.com/r/suggestalaptop```

It's not really uncovered, it's actively used and exploited. There are thousands of companies doing trend & sentiment analysis that use Reddit as one of the input. I've been paid to do it a couple of times.

> I believe there's a ton of uncovered value in parsing Reddit threads, especially those centered around buying or discovering things

I'm very interested in doing something like this for an app idea. Can you (or OP or someone else) tell me what the "path of least friction" is, to parse sub-reddits programatically? Is it using their API? Are there PaaS (Parsers as service) available? After that, what would I do? Apply some sort of NLP or AI?

Good idea, but needs more Apple. I can't imagine they haven't come up at all.

I fixed it, there were only 2 Apple "mentions" in my db, so I put them in Other.

It looks a bit weird that there is not more Apple products. These devices seems to be very popular, why is there so few talks about them?

Because "mentions" just means Amazon links right now. Most people don't buy them on Amazon, and even if you do, you don't need to link to it. You can just say "MacBook Pro" and everyone knows what you're talking about.

It's also only links from Reddit to Amazon so probably not the best source of good information

I would say you did an impressive first step towards your goal of filling up a coding gap. This is spot on regarding utility! Congrats on shipping and implementing such a useful tool :)

Thank you :)

I hate to bring up styling when it's been covered so much, but I think it is critical you make this mobile friendly.

There are a few big reasons for this:

- Since it's computer shopping, you'll probably have a fair amount of users accessing this site from a mobile device.

- Mobile users are more likely to leave your site if it looks even a little frustrating to use. Google offers several mobile friendly sites that recommend laptops.

- Google will not rank your site as high if it does not deem it to be mobile friendly.

- You said you are looking for a job as a Rails developer. It's a fair bet that any potential employer will expect mobile-compatible sites. Perhaps you don't really intend to do much front end work, but knowing more about it will benefit you regardless.

I understand that what your site offers is very special, and probably much better than hand picked recommendations. Many mobile users simply don't care. They don't want to zoom and pan to select options. Why should they stick around on your site, when they can just hit "back" and choose another result from google?

All that said, I really like what your site has going on. It seems quite functional, and the minimal design is a breath of fresh air.

There are two other things I would change, but these are just personal preference. Feel free to ignore them:

1. I would like the option to view more items per page.

2. The default, bright blue link color hurts my eyes. Something a little darker would be great.

Keep up the good work!

Thank you very much for this suggestions. I know it doesn't look good on mobile, will try to fix it.

Great site. Did you finally crap out at poker or are you just bored with it? I have a theory that most poker "pros" aren't actually beating the game, but rather are making money from sponsorships and selling pieces of themselves at a premium. There are also probably a few that just happen to run lucky for a statistically unlikely period of time - enough to make them think they are "good".

I had a similar story to OP, only over just 2 years. I likely was in that run-lucky group, but don't have the volume to know for sure. In my experience, there were clearly, provably good players in the top 1-2%, then a bunch of professional grinders (next 5-20%) with the majority of their winnings coming from rakeback (cash back from the house's cut).

OP, congrats on shipping. I'd recommend reading a bit about UX and throwing a CSS framework around your work to make it more palatable to general public. :)

It's both actually. I've never been a big winner in poker, just made enough to have a good living as a single and with time it was getting more and more difficult to win. Besides that I didn't like the lifestyle anymore and couldn't see myself playing poker in my 50s-60s. It was time to change something. I didn't play single hand since I decided to quit :).

You missed an opportunity to use amazon referral links.

No, I didn't :)

How do you know if a comment/link on reddit is positive or negative?

You can't. But looking more into laptop mentions I see that comments with links are usually recommendations. Submissions are a little different, they can be negative, positive, neutral. And usually are just questions 'I narrowed it down to 3 laptops: LINKS. What do you think about them?'. So I thought links in comments are positive opinions is fair enough guess.

I get those type of questions all the time too, and I also feel at a loss sometimes if it's been a while since the last time I went on the hunt. Another place to scrap/pull from might be Slickdeals.com because my friends are looking to get a good deal not just drop a lot of money on a laptop so after finding out what the best model is I end up creating a bunch of filters to notify when that model shows up there.

Great idea, and I'm also looking at laptops at the moment so I'm finding this useful. My only feedback would be to add a bit more UI / UX improvements - but I do think the default visited link color is helpful as a user. The ability to search by certain keywords (e.g. Linux, developer) would also be nice.

Maybe add some HN mentions as well ;)

Thank you for suggestions :)

I think it's a decent site but you should have separate categories for Lenovo ThinkPad and non-ThinkPads because they are very different in terms of quality, the ThinkPads (up to a certain semi-recent point, at least) being very good and the non-ThinkPads not being on the same level.

would like to see a sortable matrix with specs, along the lines of how wikipedia does it, eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ultrabook_models

I really like its simplicity. I'm thinking of buying the first laptop on the list, so you can consider me your first conversion.

Are you using Amazon affiliate links? I'd hate for you to miss out on potential revenue, as you're offering a decent service.

Yes. All the links have OP's affiliate tag => ?tag=laptophits-20

> I played poker, ran poker forum and did other poker related things)

How did that work out? Like seriously (not trolling). Did you make a lot of money? Always wondered about dabbling in Gambling / online games / casinos.

Why do you want back in on software development?

> Why do you want back in on software development?

Why play Poker when you can write some AI to do it for you? ;)

No, that is against online sites terms, but I do wonder how often it happens. It's certainly not the kind of thing the sites would want to own up to.

I had ups and downs, nothing spectacular but I had nice living. With time it got more difficult to win good money for me, and I stop loving it as much as on the beginning.

I want to go back to software development because I want regular pay with no variance :), and as I have a lot of ideas for side projects like this I'd love to work with advanced coders to learn more about web development, good practices, tips and tricks :).

This is great. Useful. Simple. Sharing it. Thanks!

[edit: personally I love the fact there's 0 images of the laptops, etc. Just data...]

[edit 2: regarding mobile friendly, I had no problem browsing this on mobile. If you do so, try to do it with CSS only and layout, IMO]

Yeah, at the beginning it was looking little strange with no images, but I couldn't see any value for user to put them, so I decided to leave just a text links.

Just curious, have you already made money off of this? Would you mind sharing some stats?

$8.60 :), but I hope it's going to change :)

I think the UI and design is absolutely superb.

A little off topic, but why did you leave poker?

Love the clean readable style, great job!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com