Livven

The publisher's IT dept really only cares that the ads still show up in enough places, not about giving us a useful tool to work with.

That's really unfortunate, because your technical content is among the, if not the very best in the business. But clearly there hasn't been much investment into the presentation side over the last years.

There's this German hardware review site [1] that has an almost embarrassingly good system for graphs like this, I'm sure you are aware of it. Would be really amazing if we could somehow get that level of presentation for your content!

[1] https://www.computerbase.de/2020-09/samsung-980-pro-ssd-test...

To back up the other comment, recent studies find that students from worse secondary schools with worse grades end up outperforming students from more selective schools with better grades once in medical school.

So in order to get the best doctors you can't just be all "meritocratic" by looking only at the results, i.e. grades, but have to take other factors into account.

---

The relationship between school type and academic performance at medical school: a national, multi-cohort study https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5589012/

What is the effect of secondary (high) schooling on subsequent medical school performance? A national, UK-based, cohort study. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29792300

This is how traditional desktop operating systems work... some things require admin rights but most stuff is indeed fully accessible to any application.

To back up what the other comments are saying, recent studies find that students from worse secondary schools with worse grades end up outperforming students from more selective schools with better grades once in medical school.

So, if you want the cream to rise... take it from the bottom.

---

The relationship between school type and academic performance at medical school: a national, multi-cohort study https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5589012/

What is the effect of secondary (high) schooling on subsequent medical school performance? A national, UK-based, cohort study. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29792300

Note that this paper is from 2010 and thus, while quite influential for its time far from the current state-of-the-art. The stroke width transform method that it introduced is simply not as good as current deep learning-based methods.

If you want to get a (slightly out of date but what can you do, the field is moving very fast) overview see this survey from 2016:

Scene Text Detection and Recognition: Recent Advances and Future Trends http://mclab.eic.hust.edu.cn/UpLoadFiles/Papers/FCS_TextSurv...

If you're trying to handle text "in the wild" and not scanned documents, the keyword is "scene text". Most papers are focused on either detection/localization, i.e. finding the location of text, or recognition, i.e. recognizing the actual content given a cropped text image.

Here are some current state-of-the-art papers + code where available about detection:

Fused Text Segmentation Networks for Multi-oriented Scene Text Detection https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.03272

EAST: An Efficient and Accurate Scene Text Detector https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.03155 https://github.com/argman/EAST

Detecting Oriented Text in Natural Images by Linking Segments https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.06520 https://github.com/dengdan/seglink

Arbitrary-Oriented Scene Text Detection via Rotation Proposals https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.01086 https://github.com/mjq11302010044/RRPN

And for recognition:

An End-to-End Trainable Neural Network for Image-based Sequence Recognition and Its Application to Scene Text Recognition https://arxiv.org/abs/1507.05717 https://github.com/bgshih/crnn

Robust Scene Text Recognition with Automatic Rectification https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.03915

Current state-of-the-art approaches in this field are significantly better than existing commercial solutions at recognizing text in the wild (i.e. scene text).

As an example, see the ICDAR 2015 results [1], where the Google Vision API is at 59.60% (Hmean) while the best ones are over 80%. Note that this test is about localization, i.e. finding the text location without recognizing the actual content, though on a more challenging dataset.

As for recognition, see the table on page 6 of this paper [2]. The "IIIT5K None" column should be pretty close to what was done in the OP, using the same dataset, with recognition accuracies of around 80% while the Google Vision API is at 322/500=64.4%. Note here that since this paper is only about recognition, there is no localization step before which would otherwise act as a filter and decrease the accuracy a bit by failing to localize some text that the recognition step would be able to recognize.

[1] http://rrc.cvc.uab.es/?ch=4&com=evaluation&task=1

[2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.03915.pdf

Some (if not most) GUI Git tools should do this, e.g. I personally use Git Extensions[1] which shows history and diff side-by-side.

For what it's worth, features like that (along with, say, line-by-line staging) are the reason why I usually use a GUI client and only drop down to the command line when necessary.

[1] https://github.com/gitextensions/gitextensions

Shameless plug, check out my HN app for WP8.1 called Hacky News. It's very fast and has collapsible comments.

Link: https://www.microsoft.com/en-US/store/Apps/Hacky-News/9NBLGG...

You make the problem sound more obscure than it actually is, which to be fair is very understandable (and I guess common) if you're from an English-speaking country.

Many people outside of those know English well enough that they'd rather have a feature in English than not at all.

Also, many if not most applications and services that aren't billion-dollar businesses or otherwise have had insane amounts of resources poured into them have terrible localization. And even if the localization is good, it can be beneficial to use the English version.

English is the international language, it is taught to children all over the world, it is used in business, academia and so on, all over the world. You know that, everyone knows that, but sadly, to all-English dev teams, it is all too often an afterthought.

And that doesn't even take expats, travelers etc. into account, who might want to use their native language system-wide but need certain applications to use the local language, or vice versa.

2. The problem is that different opacities of the same color aren't as easily distinguishable. Nonetheless I tried some different variants here http://imgur.com/a/inGAD. (1) simply replaces the different colors with different opacities and leaves everything else the same, I think it looks too random. (2) does not fade out the additional bars to the left, slightly more differentiated but too cluttered. (3) keeps all the additional bars at the same opacity, looks best IMO. What do you think?

3. The reading mode button in IE does not have a label either, so that only leaves the open-in-IE button. Hopefully with the IE icon that one should be obvious as well.

4. Oh yeah the tilt effect, it doesn't really make much sense for those buttons beneath the browser anyway so I removed it there.

5. If you don't mind, I'll email you using the address in your profile once the beta is out. Might take a few more weeks.

6. I was worried about that screen not being very discoverable. The navigation is indeed a bit Android-like, so I tried to compromise by using another icon that makes sense (switch) instead of the hamburger icon. However it seems many people don't realize what the switch button does, and miss out on the settings menu because of it. I'll probably have to replace the app icon with the hamburger icon. Also, you can always use the back button to go back, is that not obvious (honest question, even if it sounds weird)?

7. (1) "Water you doing" is just a silly pun, I'm surprised you pointed out the extraneous space but ignored the "water" part :p (2) That is a margin/spacing issue, did you increase the system font size? The settings screen is kind of thrown together with very little customization, the toggle switch does not wrap its label by default but still there should usually be enough space for the full text. (3) Thanks, the hyphen seems to be more appropriate when it's used as an adjective so I added it.

8. Generally agree, but only if it's absolutely required to understand how to use the app. That's not the case here.

And finally, I really appreciate your feedback, it's useful to me whether you like the app or not :)

Yes I had issues too and looking at the new comments page [1], it seems there was an outage of sorts from around 16:00 to 16:40 UTC. Would be interesting to hear what happened, if any mod/admin wants to share.

EDIT: Seems like all the comments that were submitted during that timeframe are showing up now.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments

Thanks, that's some very interesting and useful feedback!

1. I assume "the ability to content" means voting/commenting? ;)

2. The advantage of those colored bars is that they are very easy to visually parse, while also requiring very little indentation. In fact, it would take 40 levels of comment nesting before half the screen width of a regular size (non-phablet) device is used up. However, I see your point, and will probably add an alternate comment threading style later on.

3. The address bar for the browser is actually very similar to the standard WP browser, which also doesn't have the usual icon labels. Back, forward, refresh, stop, more, and share should be self-explanatory, so I guess you were having issues with the mobilize and open-in-IE icons? I might change those out for the reading mode icon that IE uses [1], and the IE icon, respectively, which should hopefully make them more obvious. The reason I did not use them in the first place is because I have not been able to find vector/font versions of those icons. Also, I agree with you on the WP app bar, it's really well designed, however since it's an OS component it can't really be customized which is why I'm not using it.

4. The rotation angle is already bound to the horizontal scroll offset. As for the rotation direction, I tried both ways and this one felt better to me. I'm not sure why scrolling the bar in one direction should cause the rotation to feel wrong to you though, maybe try scrolling the bar by dragging instead of using the button and see if it still feels weird?

5. That's a very good point that I never thought of. Fixed, and should be available along with some other minor design changes next week.

BTW, would you be interested in beta testing a Reddit client I'm currently working on? Your feedback has been the best I've gotten so far, much appreciated :)

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2014/03/04/introducing-re...

Thanks for your feedback!

Voting and commenting is definitely planned, however I'm waiting on the API to add support for authentication first. The app actually does not use the API since it's somewhat lacking right now [1] so it scrapes the markup instead, but I'm not quite comfortable with implementing login/voting/commenting by scraping.

You can collapse comments by tapping anywhere outside the text area, i.e. on the author/time header or on the margins to the left and right. I'm sorry that's not obvious, I'll probably add a message explaining it in the next update.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8423025

I released this app a couple weeks ago, but the initial submission [1] did not get any traction here so I thought I'd resubmit it. Hope that's okay.

All the various sections and categories on HN are supported – the front page, new, show, shownew, ask, best, active, jobs. There's an integrated browser with mobilizer support, and you can instantly switch between the browser and comments with a simple swipe. Comment threads are color-coded and collapsible.

This is my first non-trivial project that I actually finished and released, so I'd appreciate any feedback.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8663913

Glad you like it and thanks for the suggestion! FWIW, I know a lot of apps have that feature but I personally never found it very useful, which is why I did not include it, but I'll definitely add it in a future update.

Sure, just need your Microsoft account email so I can add you to the beta list.

Would you be willing to beta test my application? It's pretty much finished already and doesn't have any of the issues you listed (in addition to having a, in my opinion, much nicer design), I'd just be looking for some general feedback regarding the discoverability of some features. I could submit a beta today or tomorrow.

I use your app, it's awesome! Also agree with your request, as I said elsewhere in this thread...

By the way, animations (the slide between list and comments) have been jerky since a recent update. I'm using the Android app on an HTC One M7 with the latest stock ROM (4.4.3 and Sense 6.0). A few other people have mentioned this in Play Store reviews. Is this a known issue?

I've tried your app, it's functional but obviously I wasn't satisfied with any of the existing options which is why I wrote my own ;) It should be coming out this week, just a few finishing touches now...

Thanks for the tip, I actually just figured that out myself a few minutes ago. Should be good enough until a proper SDK arrives.

With access to a Firebase SDK the only major additions the API needs to become a viable replacement for existing read-only client apps would be support for all the other lists apart from top stories (new, show, show new, ask, jobs, best, active) and more than 100 items for each. For apps that need write access I'd suggest keeping the current website on a separate subdomain until that is implemented into the API.

Well unfortunately there's no Firebase SDK for Windows Phone/C#/WinRT, and the WebSocket API is undocumented.

EDIT: After having played with the JS SDK a bit I'd like to add that it is indeed incredibly awesome.

Are you referring to the WebSocket API that the Firebase SDKs use internally? It doesn't seem to be documented anywhere so I guess it's only slightly better than scraping HTML ;)

I second that request. Having a subdomain point to the current layout for a little longer is definitely going to help the transition, especially for write access and platforms without Firebase SDKs.

I've been working on a Hacker News client for Windows Phone over the past several weeks and am very close to an initial release, so I feel somewhat ambivalent about this.

On the one hand, of course it's great that HN is finally getting a proper API and also modernizing its markup (which is a mess even if you ignore all the tables – for example, the first paragraph in a comment usually isn't wrapped in <p> tags), but on the other hand this current v0 version is very lacking and impractical for a regular client application.

Since the top stories (limited to 100) and child comments are only available as a list of IDs a client app would have to make a separate HTTP request for every single item, which is obviously not something you'd want to do especially in a mobile environment. Other lists apart from the top stories (new, show, ask, best, active etc.) don't seem to be available at all right now.

Of course this is just the first version, and the documentation promises improvements over time – which I don't doubt at all – but there's no clear indication that the API will be at feature-parity with the current website, even excluding anything that requires authentication, by October 28. So this means that I – and other developers of client apps or unofficial APIs – will probably have to write new scraping code once the new rendering engine (which I assume refers to the website) arrives instead of being able to switch to the new API immediately.

Now I guess I might just be needlessly worried, especially since the blog post explicitly says that the new API "should hopefully making switching your apps fairly painless", but then why not wait until it's actually ready for that before making the announcement? Putting a half-baked API out there a few days/weeks (?) in advance before it's fully fleshed out doesn't seem all that helpful, at least to me.

Agree, I don't understand how every major browser came to adopt that popup thing instead of just putting the link preview into the address bar. I use this addon which does exactly that https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/link-location...

That's why the new hamburger menu is so awesome. You can put all the addon buttons that you don't want taking up space on the main toolbar in there.

You can put the link preview directly into the address bar with this addon https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/link-location... Status-4-Evar can actually do the same but it's a bit of a hassle to configure if you don't need its other features.

Apparently lots of people (still) don't know about it but there have been free browser versions of Word/Excel/PowerPoint/OneNote since 2010. They were recently rebranded from Office Web Apps to Office Online, along with easier access directly from office.com. Here's the relevant HN thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7302221

If you publish/upload the document to OneDrive (7 GB is free) you can send the link to anyone and then they can view and edit the document for free in the browser, just like with Google Docs.

Indeed, I checked before posting my previous comment to verify that autocomplete for "Nudel" was still broken but it's fixed now, at least on the English version. If you go to google.com/?hl=de to force the German version then it's still broken.

Another autocomplete curiosity I found: "Mädchen", German for "girl", is blocked on the German version of Google while it autocompletes on the English version (not sure if this was just changed along with "Nudel" or not) even though the English equivalent is blocked on neither Google language version.