If I would have known just one thing... | Hacker News Reader

If I would have known just one thing...

ifiwouldhaveknownjustonething.com

66 pointsrailsjedi47 comments

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It should be "If I had known just one thing." http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/grammar_subjunctive.html

Too bad to see so much attention paid to design and so little to grammar ...

At least it's not "If I would of known just one thing".

that domain was taken ;-)

Sent you an email with some grammatically correct alternatives.

Slide deck is open source and also up on github: http://github.com/railsjedi/know1thing

I reused the HTML5 Rocks demo from Google for the UI.

Good job. Hope you can keep it updated! Also, try and get few influential people to contribute.

Doesn't work too well on iPhone.

Horizontal - the top and bottom are truncated Vertical - too small to read

Yeah, sorry about that. I'll try to fix. Also.. patches accepted! ;-)

What's up with all the spammy comments from fake users?

I hate to jump to conclusions without any proof, but it looks a lot like someone trying to "bump" up their own article by upping it and posting fake comments.

We sent out some tweets with links to this hacker news posts. So we are introducing some people to hacker news for the first time.

Notice the names on some of these "fake users" match authors on the slideshow :-). Why is it bad to comment on and be excited about something they've contributed to?

It's not, but when the comments read like they're from impressed third parties, it smells a bit. Imagine if coauthors of a book posted reviews on Amazon along the lines of "Wow! This book is amazing and has a great design" without disclosing their authorship, it looks weird. Instead, they should have gone with something more natural like "Just wanted to say I was involved with one of the slides in this project and I think it's turned out great!" I doubt such comments would have been voted down to oblivion.

Yeah. The comments like that deserve to be voted down for sure. I agree they don't really add anything.

But I do think they are genuine. Since these are all people who just replied to an email that we then compiled into a site, they sorta (kinda) qualify as "impressed 3rd parties".

If you haven't been around here, you may not have noticed that there aren't a whole lot of "Me too" or "First post!" type of comments.

Some of the comments on HN could pass for short essays with subsequent panel discussions. That's why we read it.

Crashes the iPad web browser.... I'll have to live without knowing that one thing. ;)

If they had known just one thing, it'd be that Typekit's iPad support only works when one weight of each typeface is used, otherwise it crashes MobileSafari.

Haha. I wish I had known that one thing!

The tagline is "30 leaders..." but I've never heard of any of them.

Should I have?

Most of them are Social Media Strategists. Draw your own conclusions...

Sure, a few of them are. But what exactly are they selling? Shane sent out a call for content, got lots of responses, and picked the slides with the best advice. I helped put it together for fun, and because I think there's a lot of great advice and thoughts here that I'm not usually exposed to as a techie.

Just company owners and people from all walks giving simple thoughts. Define leader? :)

I use Firefox on a Windows box.

Page 1: Looks interesting. Download or Start Reading? I'll Read. Click.

Page 2: Stop. Do something unexpected. Cool. Okay, how do I go to the next page? Any arrows to click? None. Click somewhere randomly? Nothing happens.

Guess this is it? Cool message, short and to the point. Can't shake the nagging feeling that there's more, though.

It was not immediately obvious that I could use the arrow keys to move forward. I found out only after I opened the PDF to confirm that there's more pages.

Yeah, probably related to the screen size issue. Forgot to test it on small monitors. There's a big "next slide" button on the bottom, but it gets cut off for smaller monitors.

The UI fails on a maximised Safari, with tab bar, bookmarks bar, and tool bar, and a visible dock, on a 13" MacBook Pro, which is 1280 by 800.

This isn't exactly a niche set-up I'm using. Having a fixed height is pretty much useless for anything you want people to use in a meaningful way.

If it's an art piece, then I guess it doesn't matter. I can't tell, because it's not usable.

You can sort of work around it by minimizing it using ctrl+-. But, yeah. I sorta screwed up by not getting it to work on smaller screens and mobile. Sincere apologies!

I'm a bit confused by the interface. You suggest in a comment that it's built on something called "Slide Deck" but I've never encountered that.

I seem to have the main slide I'm reading with previous and next buttons. My mouse wheel (I discovered accidentially.) seems to scroll things back and forth. There's the adjacent slides with their own next and previous buttons. Why aren't these UI buttons hidden on slides you can only see the edges of? the "next" and "previous" buttons on the adjacent slides end up sort of broken: I click "previous" on the slide to the right of the one I'm viewing and it sends me to the slide that's to the left of the one I'm looking at. I can see why it's doing this because I can guess what under the button. The whole thing serves only to confuse me (and likely others?) I spent my whole time on the site screwing with the UI, not reading.

The slideshow drives me up the wall. I'm not able to follow along as I read.

Sorry about that :-). We also have a more readable PDF download for the people who don't like the html5 craziness.

http://ifiwouldhaveknownjustonething.com/If-I-would-have-kno...

That the process can and should be as awesome as the goal.

I like that this ebook redefines thought leaders.

We're hearing from people that are touchable. They're real. They're available to you and I. And that makes more sense to me. And it makes their "one thing" that much more real, meaningful, and applicable to me.

Thanks, Shane, for a book that actually connects.

Kind of sad that the pdf looks so terrible compared to the site. Also had to fullscreen chrome on my laptop.

Other than that it is rather interesting that so many new accounts are being created to "praise" the slideshow, I hope it isn't the author/curator who is doing that.

I'm the author and no, not opening any. My developer who built the site posted to Hacker News so yes, I am completely new here.

Looks very nice on the iPad (I viewed it in landscape mode)

Good thing I know how to ctrl -, otherwise that would have been unreadable (tiny screen here!)

nice design, kinda breaks on my 13" macbook + FF though :( cant see the entirety of each slide, the top and the bottoms get chopped off.

Use ctrl (cmd) -

yeah, i figured that. but a 1280x800 display is hardly uncommon, seems a bit of a fail that it doesn't fit.

Yeah, my bad. Could have used more testing

the UI flow is creative but I didn't like using it. random feedback, take with grain of salt.

What an awesome site. I especially enjoyed the first slide, doing something unexpected for a friend or a stranger.

Awesomeness.

Strong messages!

This shit is rockin.

Sweet site design - its fresh!

Great stuff, very cool design too!

Love the design and awesome slideshow. Great stories as well!

Lots of great advice on things that count from entrepreneurs and a killer design. Thanks for sharing!!

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