rdwallis

Your comment highlights exactly why comment scores should not be shown.

If you use comment scores as a proxy for agree/disagree you are much more likely to downvote comments you don't agree with even if they add to the discussion.

Your submission history suggests that you are involved in the development of at least 2 of the 7 extensions. (buffer and tldr.io)

Are any of the other extensions your work?

It's disingenuous to pretend to impartially recommend products that you work on.

Reach out to your most active users and ask them if they want to help moderate for you.

Give them premium content or even just cool badges that other users can see in exchange.

Make it personal. Email them and ask for their advice. Listen to it even if you don't implement it all. People love to help and they love to be heard. If you do it right they'll like your game even more.

Sadly, when people are offered money to steal babies they steal babies.[1] The moral outrage is important because it increases the cost of the action but removing the incentive is generally a more effective way to change behavior.

[1] http://www.economist.com/news/china/21570762-curb-widespread...

There are tons and tons of use cases for sharing code between server and client. Why would you want to write things twice? The only reason it is not more common is that programming is generally done in different languages on the server and client.

I built an ebook reader that can process ebooks in javascript. Because IE does not support the File API the server needs to pick up the slack when users are on that browser. Sharing code means I don't need to program two versions and I only have to patch bugs once.

It's also common to share validation code. This allows you to check data client-side and then again once it reaches the server using the same code.

I don't find the argument that famine relief does more harm than good compelling.

Can you list some examples of this type of harm? Are they outliers or is it normal for this kind of aid to hurt its recipients?

Cool stuff.

You should adapt the scrolling speed to the number of characters in each comment if you're able. It's hard to do but it'll improve things tremendously.

Full disclosure, I'm waging a war against your bookmarklet's scrolling effect. See: http://www.magicscroll.net/ScrollTheWeb.html

You can try the autoscroll feature at the bottom right on that page to see how much of difference matching the scroll speed to character count makes.

My solution doesn't work well with tree structured documents like comment threads though. Perhaps I need to adapt it.

Emphasizing that you're a way to manage bash aliases rather than just aliases might go a long way to clear things up. I thought for a few minutes that you might be a way of managing my facebook, twitter or hn profiles.

In the first paragraph of your post you should mention what alias does.

Or at least make your value more clear on the rest of the page. I don't immediately understand what your product does from the small hard to find "manage your aliases in the cloud" phrase.

In fact the first thing I'm aware of when visiting your page is that it is very easy to register for your service. But it's very hard to find out what that service might be.

Thanks can you email me at support@magicscroll.net. I can't reproduce the error so I'll need help testing the fix.

I don't know about courses but I read The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman more than 10 years ago and it profoundly changed my life.

Obviously it doesn't only deal with UI design but I really recommend it if you're looking for a place to jump off from.

Be warned, once you read it you'll find yourself becoming extraordinarily annoyed by certain types of doors.

http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/d...

Should be fixed now.

Actually this doesn't really work. Mainly the problem is when the top page hasn't scrolled at all, for example if you're just using pagination, it creates a meaningless shadow.

Not requiring signup makes development massively harder but I think it's worth it.

All of the websites competing in my space require a signup except mine. Their products may be way better but I don't bother to check and neither do my users.

In fact I think you can make a viable business just by taking popular websites and working out how to implement them without user accounts.

Are you on a netbook or otherwise slow computer?

I'll see what I can do to add some breaks to the page rendering loop. I get the impression that the Firefox version needs a bit of work.

Agree but the new interface is jaring enough. I wanted to use bog standard colors.

For the ebook reader on the main page at magicscroll.net you can set it to use Ethan Schoonover's solarized colors: http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized which I prefer to the black on white.

That looks great. I'll see if I can update it tomorrow.

I tried this. It doesn't work as well. Same with making the line thicker or putting a margin above and below it.

The code's open source if you want to fiddle with it: https://github.com/rdwallis/MagicScrollWebReader

Is this on the page itself? Or is it when using the bookmarklet?

Any chance you can send a screenshot of the truncated text to support@magicscroll.net?

This is a lot easier to learn than dvorak.

pdf is not reflowable. So I don't think it's possible while still adhering to the pdf standard.

The scrolling changes based on whether you're using a Magic Mouse or not. With the Magic Mouse it won't snap to the line.

If you use the extension or the main site ebook reader you can set it to scroll at a specific word per minute speed.

It works really well over long texts and often your screensaver will come on before you need to adjust anything.

It's normally best to set the speed to just slower than your natural speed, so that you don't feel that you're racing the line.

Thanks, the arrows are a relic from the ebook reader on the main site. With that I specifically wanted users to discover the scrolling only by accident after they were already familiar with the pagination.

I tried it without allowing the scroll back on the first page (i.e. stop the white page from appearing behind.) but it made the ui feel stuck.

Just anecdotal but magicscroll.net is a pretty popular ebook reader. Though that might be inspite of the scrolling rather than because of it.

For everyone who doesn't like it immediately please try it for a few days if you're able. I'm working against decades of learnt behavior so I don't think you can judge it on immediate impressions.

It doesn't scroll on touch devices. You do get the pagination though.

Yes, this is hard to keep track of even after window resizes which changes how many words appear on each page. To do it I'd need to store info about page position in local storage. which is possible with the extension but might be a bit too much effort. I can't think of a way to do it with the bookmarklet at the moment.

I found some stickyness on Firefox 18. I've deployed a fix but I put a 24 hour cache in front of the page before posting it to hn so it'll probably only update for you this time tomorrow.

Thanks. Can I ask what OS are you using and what mouse?