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Comment by PeterisP | Hacker News Reader

Horrible presentation - the enforced pauses (even hiding the continue button during them!) cause frustration after every single sentence.

Why can't I read at a normal pace instead of being interrupted all the time and having to wait while the next sentence is shown?

[edit] This behavior would be very suitable if I was making a presentation to an audience with this content - but it's quite contrary to what's needed for the audience to view the content themselves at their own pacing.

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Well, I like it - a lot.

It would be even nicer if the "Continue" button had a permanent position (and if I could use enter/space/pagedown/... instead of mouse), but I didn't notice that it was hidden between animations. I guess I am slower than you are. :)

I am not sure if the concept is valid (some other comments have issue with that), but it was well presented. Good job, OP - keep it up!

You can use the arrow keys to navigate, which is a lot better than clicking "Continue" each time.

Arrow keys don't help much on a tablet or a phone.

Author here. Thanks for the feedback.

The presentation originally moved forward on its own but as you get into later sections there's a lot going on visually so it's easy to miss key points in the explanation. There's also an issue that the presentation is attached to the wall clock in later sections so you need the visual in a certain state before moving forward on the explanation.

In hindsight, I agree that there are better ways to present this information. Part of this project is to help me learn how to best communicate complicated topics like distributed consensus in the most effective way. Most existing resources are 20 page PhD dissertations which are not very accessible to beginners so I'm just figuring this out as I go.

I'm changing the format in future presentations. I'm working on infrastructure now to allow D3.js visualizations to be embedded into Medium blog posts. That'll give the best of both worlds -- read at your own pace and interact with mini visualizations as you go along.

I'm always looking for CS topics to visualize and help explain better. If you (or anyone) has any suggestions, please let me know. I'm @benbjohnson on Twitter.

+1 It's infuriatingly slow. This is almost worse than presenting text content as videos.

I thought it was great. The concepts are not simple and, for me at least, took time to process.

I disagree. This presentation was fantastic. I was going to post how much I loved it, so instead I'll come to its defense.

I liked it very much. This works well for individuals whose reading speed exceeds their speed of comprehension. For example, I tend to read way to fast for my own good and need something to pace me (only for technical texts, not fiction). This works very well. It allows me to focus on one thing at a time.

Its insulting. Especially the first few spoonfed sentences. Why not at the very least have the continue button come up instantly.

It's intended as a gentler introduction to Raft[1]. I thought it was great for someone with no real knowledge of distributed systems like myself.

[1] According to http://raftconsensus.github.io.

I only managed to click continue two or three times before I gave up in frustration.

You guys have a serious patience problem. Sure, it was a bit frustrating, but come on.

Much of this feedback misses the point -- the presentation is meant to supplement other forms of study. Read the paper a couple of times, and then come back to this. You'll appreciate its dynamic nature then.

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