CS undergrad looking to combine travel and supporting NGOs this summer | Hacker News Reader

CS undergrad looking to combine travel and supporting NGOs this summer

charity-hack.org

15 pointsrguldener8 comments

Sorry, I don't like to gripe but I have to whine about the site design. I scroll while reading. As a habit I typically keep my focus toward the top of the page. With your page the stuff I'm about to read disappears just before I want to read it. It's incredibly frustrating.

Then when I scroll back up to try to make the text reappear it doesn't unless I either wait for the fade transition to finish before scrolling up or scroll up an additional segment. Except when this happened on the first segment I couldn't scroll up an additional segment so I needed to refresh the page.

You can probably fix this by adding a bunch of whitespace between scroll transitions, or by fixing the animation step to the scroll event rather than using a timeout event (I didn't look at your source, but I assume at some level that's what's happening).

Either way the nontraditional design is superfluous, frustrating, and distracting from your goal. I assume you want people focused on your content and ultimately your goal rather than your design. You might have better luck with a traditional blog layout.

[Edit: I'm on Chrome on a 13" Retina Macbook Pro.]

Nice idea! Liked the design until the green & yellow background colours... They're much too bright and contrast with the text makes it very hard to read. Otherwise, good luck!

Yes the yellow nearly blinded me. I really like the page though. It has a good flow.

Admire the effort, but even if you work from dawn to dusk there's not much you can do in a day.

That was my first thought as well -- noble intentions, but NGOs are generally not run with the "You will ship code on your first day" mantra in mind. One day could easily be eaten up by

  * introductions
  * paperwork
  * formulation of problem / explanation of constraints
  * assessing the current situation to figure out what
    solution might be sustainable in the long term (i.e.
    what happens after he leaves)
  * making a rough draft and discovering that there were
    additional constraints that didn't come up at first

Some of the articles that resonate best on HN are those which reiterate the value of doing good work consistently instead of trying to be amazing for a single moment. Unless this guy has a better plan than his pitch makes apparent, I'm not sure it's really a worthwhile proposition.

Perhaps if you're referring to understanding their existing products and contributing you may be correct.

On the other hand, if the NGO needed something built from scratch, He could create a simple web app/site/mobile app. That's very doable. Essentially a hackathon per day.

Try this: http://afritech.com/item?id=2689 (Maybe you could just whip up some python in a day)

My eyes hurt after looking at your website.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com