7 ms·

The Difference Between Funny and LOL

173 points by thejana 13y ago

Slackwise 13y ago
Slightly off topic, but the font used in the slides is Vollkorn: http://friedrichalthausen.de/vollkorn/ http://friedrichalthausen.de/vollkorn/ http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Vollkorn http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Vollkorn I figure there are some designers or people interested in typography that might appreciate this information. It was rather easy to eyeball due its strong and distinct serifs at large point sizes, although the stylesheets verify it as well. Even more off topic: you'll also find that Vollkorn is one of the fonts available for use in the Google Play Books app on Android. If you use Google Play Books, I recommend trying it out. It's a fantastically readable font, especially white-on-black, for late night readers like myself.
- thejana 13y ago
  It is a great "workhorse" font. Awesome for noticing it. When Tapestry first launched it was the only font offered because of it's readability in most cases. An artist made this Tapestry story breaking it down: https://readtapestry.com/s/C9M36zhFA/ https://readtapestry.com/s/C9M36zhFA/
  - Slackwise 13y ago
    That was a great, and very accurate, description of Vollkorn. The more I use it, the more I fall in love with it. So happy to see it go around. Thanks!
rcfox 13y ago
That was actually a really cool presentation. Are there any papers out there for someone who is interested in segmenting data like that? Also, on the topic of "LOL", and the related acronyms, I think this little cartoon explains it well: http://www.27bslash6.com/lol.jpg http://www.27bslash6.com/lol.jpg
daurnimator 13y ago
Took me a while to figure out it was more than a gif.... on hacker news. Eventually I clicked and figured out it was a slideshow. Is it possible to go back a slide?
- saurik 13y ago
  I installed the app, and part of the welcome tutorial was that they seemed excited about how you couldn't go backwards "so take your time". They advocate using it for "storytelling": it seems like an irritating medium for a semi-scientific slide deck.
  - Zecc 13y ago
    It's in their About page (https://readtapestry.com/about# https://readtapestry.com/about#) too: >> It's simple: tap to move forward in a story. There’s no going back, so take your time—that’s the whole point! Not allowing the viewer to know how many slides there are and navigate between them is a terrible, terrible idea. I think Mike Bostok's Stack is worth a mention: http://mbostock.github.io/stack/#0 http://mbostock.github.io/stack/#0
  - BetaCygni 13y ago
    Yeah, the most annoying thing ever. Didn't they ever attend a real presentation where people actually asked questions about things that were shown on past slides?
    - mynameisme 13y ago
      Or, accidentally click too many times, skipping a slide?
- mhartl 13y ago
  I couldn't figure out a way to go back a slide—very frustrating.
- zalew 13y ago
  and there is no way of telling if the presentation is 17 or 159 slides. this site sucks.
drivers99 13y ago
I remember back in the days of HTML 1.0 or 2.0, they suggested not using the words "click here" in a link since some day you might be able to indicate other ways of following a link besides clicking (or you could already through non-graphical browsers). I think this is the first time I've seen "tap here" when I had to click. It was kind of a weird feeling, like I was pretending to tap by clicking. But my point is "tap here" and "keep tapping" is just as incorrect as "click here." And as Donald Norman would point out, you shouldn't have to put instructions on your interface telling people how to use it (e.g. "push" and "pull" on doors). It seems that everyone who uses this site to create a presentation is going to have to put "tap here" and "keep tapping" on the first two slides to get anyone to understand what's going on. It looks like I wasn't the only one confused by the user interface. Losing the ability to go back and forward is also kind of annoying (tried right click).
- Dru89 13y ago
  It took me five minutes to figure out how to navigate past that first page. I thought it was some sort of joke that I just wasn't getting. On that note, I was only able to get the "right arrow" key to allow me to move forward. Mouse clicking, space bar, and several others didn't work. Am I missing something fundamental?
- aprescott 13y ago
  I actually think "push" and "pull" make sense on a door since it can go both ways (although you can solve that one by using a handle on the pull side, and a flat rectangle on the push side). The real thing you shouldn't need to put on a door, though, is how to use it: "Use as an entrance."
  - andrewflnr 13y ago
    Norman's point is probably precisely that you should put the flat plate/handle on as appropriate.
    - drivers99 13y ago
      It was. He also had some other more elaborate examples, but I couldn't think of any. I believe he is coming out with a new edition of The Design of Everyday Things which is mostly rewritten. Looks like it's coming out November 5th.
adamio 13y ago
What software was used to make those graphs? Or did I tap through it
- the_cat_kittles 13y ago
  I am also curious- the partitioning algorithms, the visualization. Does anyone know what tools he used are, or tools to achieve similar results?
- myoung 13y ago
  I'm pretty sure he used Gephi - gephi.org. You can ask him though :-) @gilgul on twitter
  - James_Duval 13y ago
    There is also a course involving network analysis on Coursera, https://www.coursera.org/course/sna https://www.coursera.org/course/sna EDIT: The relevance being that it involves the use of Gephi.
alexkus 13y ago
Funny means funny. LOL is just unnecessary punctuation.
barbs 13y ago
Bit annoying that they took the name of a startup I used to work at: http://www.tapestry.net/ http://www.tapestry.net/
shortstuffsushi 13y ago
Le sigh. All of the comments are on the UX of the site, and not the content of the article. Come on guys. This article was really interesting to me (though obviously he doesn't get terribly into depth). I find data vis like this, whether it be super meaningful or not to be really cool. I'd like to see more analysis like this done with it.
- hamburglar 13y ago
  This is what happens when your UX is so bad it's a distraction. It's like complaining that nobody is listening to your lecture on particle physics just because you are delivering it in full bondage gear. I personally was too dumb to figure out that the OP isn't just a link to a gif, and came to the comments here to see what the deal was. Given all the distraction and lack of attention to whatever the subject actually is, I'd hope the author might reconsider the delivery method.
  - shortstuffsushi 13y ago
    In this case specifically, since multiple comments addressed people being "unable to find" the content, you might have a point. I don't feel like that's typically the case on HN, though. It more commonly seems like "this wasn't immediately obvious or in a format I'm already comfortable with, shame on you." That, to me, seems like (UX) innovation killing potential. I'm sure that's an entirely different discussion, but I don't think experimenting with new things like this is a bad thing.
- Mizza 13y ago
  That's because this is "linkbait". The poster is a founder of Tapestry, the site actually hosting this content. To be honest, I'm fine with this kind of submission, I think it's a better way to see a product in context than a "Show HN", however, some people may see it as being underhanded as it defies the convention around here.
  - shortstuffsushi 13y ago
    To an extent, I see what you're saying. However, I didn't take this particular linked "tapestry" as a "join this site" mechanic. Well, I think the last slide said join or something, but I don't get the correlation at all between the content of that slide set and desiring to join the site. Is Tapestry intended to show data visualizations like this or something? I didn't get that vibe from it. If people had concerns like these, then maybe I'd agree with you. If all people can focus on is the UX of a site, as they tend to with ANY post, be it Show HN or otherwise, I stick with me original statement.
alanctgardner2 13y ago
I worked on a project with a guy who did network analysis like this. It was pretty cool... the first three times. After that it seemed like every problem had to involve a whizbang graphic - then I realized he didn't actually know how to program at all. His whole job was 'analysis', which was using Tableau and a graph partitioning program to produce visualizations (pretty much using the defaults), and then try to explain what they meant. I was kind of in awe that this was a whole job by itself - I've never really seen an analysis of one of these graph diagrams that wasn't really superficial, like the examples in this presentation. It kind of makes me wonder if the "complexity" of the graph visualizations doesn't cow the viewer a bit, and make them more impressed by subsequent, not-super-interesting insights. I'd be interested in a comparison with and without the graphics.
- PebblesRox 13y ago
  Yeah, I'm always skeptical about how much information those kinds of visualizations really reveal. How much of the pattern is truly present in the data vs. a result of making it pretty? Is it possible to gain insight that wouldn't already be just as easy to see by looking at the data in a simpler way?
ced 13y ago
Is the Japanese Python community really that big? What do they use it for?
- philangist 13y ago
  The japanese Twitter community as a whole is actually really big. I believe Twitter has most of its users in Japan.
Mizza 13y ago
It's like http://zeega.com http://zeega.com but without the music.
photorized 13y ago
Talk about over analyzing something to death.
sytelus 13y ago
From Wikipedia: Modularity is one measure of the structure of networks or graphs. It was designed to measure the strength of division of a network into modules (also called groups, clusters or communities). Networks with high modularity have dense connections between the nodes within modules but sparse connections between nodes in different modules. Modularity is often used in optimization methods for detecting community structure in networks. However, it has been shown that modularity suffers a resolution limit and, therefore, it is unable to detect small communities. Biological networks, including animal brains, exhibit a high degree of modularity. A 2013 paper shows that modularity in biological networks may have evolved due to selection pressures to reduce connection costs. Paper on Modularity Maximization algo to identify communities in graph is at http://www-scf.usc.edu/~gaurava/modularity.pdf http://www-scf.usc.edu/~gaurava/modularity.pdf There are many other ways to cluster the graph.
tomphoolery 13y ago
That was pretty cool. Also, Tapestry is insanely cool!
dantiberian 13y ago
An on-topic question: what software was used to create the network visualisations in this presentation?
- myoung 13y ago
  I think Gilad used Gephi for the networks visualizations: gephi.org
rurounijones 13y ago
The presentation is actually quite interesting and very badly named in terms of describing what it does. Do not be put off by link title.
jrockway 13y ago
Welp, I admit it. I'm finally too old to use the Internet. I tried clicking the "tap here", but that didn't do anything. I have a touch-enabled tablet, and I tried tapping there. That didn't do anything either. Then I gave up. Why does my VCR blink 12:00 all the time, anyway?
- Dru89 13y ago
  You, sir, have easily made my evening. Also, I've found that "right arrow" seems to go forward, but it's impossible to go back. As for your VCR, you may have just found yourself in an endless time loop.
- acheron 13y ago
  Abstruse UI doesn't reflect on you. (Though I laughed at the VCR thing. Now I'm wondering how many HN readers have ever set a VCR time though.) Remember the days of Flash sites? "Did you click on the squid?" http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1999/03/03 http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1999/03/03
malkia 13y ago
Nooooooooooooooooooooooo!
jpswade 13y ago
It's ironic that "funny" is people laughing out loud and "lol" is "funny" (read: odd) things.
roarktoohey 13y ago
"Interesting" visualizations. Could someone without an understanding of lol and funny create this? Visualizations, in this context, show what you already knew to be true. How well can it be used to find something new, instead of novel?
hammock 13y ago
Anyone have a link of how to do this kind of analysis yourself?
NAFV_P 13y ago
This might seem like a childish query: would anyone know where to find that flying horse gif? I think I cracked a rib laughing.

173 points by thejana 13y ago

Slightly off topic, but the font used in the slides is Vollkorn: http://friedrichalthausen.de/vollkorn/ http://friedrichalthausen.de/vollkorn/ http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Vollkorn http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Vollkorn I figure there are some designers or people interested in typography that might appreciate this information. It was rather easy to eyeball due its strong and distinct serifs at large point sizes, although the stylesheets verify it as well. Even more off topic: you'll also find that Vollkorn is one of the fonts available for use in the Google Play Books app on Android. If you use Google Play Books, I recommend trying it out. It's a fantastically readable font, especially white-on-black, for late night readers like myself.

thejana 13y ago
It is a great "workhorse" font. Awesome for noticing it. When Tapestry first launched it was the only font offered because of it's readability in most cases. An artist made this Tapestry story breaking it down: https://readtapestry.com/s/C9M36zhFA/ https://readtapestry.com/s/C9M36zhFA/
- Slackwise 13y ago
  That was a great, and very accurate, description of Vollkorn. The more I use it, the more I fall in love with it. So happy to see it go around. Thanks!

rcfox 13y ago

That was actually a really cool presentation. Are there any papers out there for someone who is interested in segmenting data like that? Also, on the topic of "LOL", and the related acronyms, I think this little cartoon explains it well: http://www.27bslash6.com/lol.jpg http://www.27bslash6.com/lol.jpg

daurnimator 13y ago

Took me a while to figure out it was more than a gif.... on hacker news. Eventually I clicked and figured out it was a slideshow. Is it possible to go back a slide?

saurik 13y ago
I installed the app, and part of the welcome tutorial was that they seemed excited about how you couldn't go backwards "so take your time". They advocate using it for "storytelling": it seems like an irritating medium for a semi-scientific slide deck.
- Zecc 13y ago
  It's in their About page (https://readtapestry.com/about# https://readtapestry.com/about#) too: >> It's simple: tap to move forward in a story. There’s no going back, so take your time—that’s the whole point! Not allowing the viewer to know how many slides there are and navigate between them is a terrible, terrible idea. I think Mike Bostok's Stack is worth a mention: http://mbostock.github.io/stack/#0 http://mbostock.github.io/stack/#0
- BetaCygni 13y ago
  Yeah, the most annoying thing ever. Didn't they ever attend a real presentation where people actually asked questions about things that were shown on past slides?
  - mynameisme 13y ago
    Or, accidentally click too many times, skipping a slide?
mhartl 13y ago
I couldn't figure out a way to go back a slide—very frustrating.
zalew 13y ago
and there is no way of telling if the presentation is 17 or 159 slides. this site sucks.

drivers99 13y ago

I remember back in the days of HTML 1.0 or 2.0, they suggested not using the words "click here" in a link since some day you might be able to indicate other ways of following a link besides clicking (or you could already through non-graphical browsers). I think this is the first time I've seen "tap here" when I had to click. It was kind of a weird feeling, like I was pretending to tap by clicking. But my point is "tap here" and "keep tapping" is just as incorrect as "click here." And as Donald Norman would point out, you shouldn't have to put instructions on your interface telling people how to use it (e.g. "push" and "pull" on doors). It seems that everyone who uses this site to create a presentation is going to have to put "tap here" and "keep tapping" on the first two slides to get anyone to understand what's going on. It looks like I wasn't the only one confused by the user interface. Losing the ability to go back and forward is also kind of annoying (tried right click).

Dru89 13y ago
It took me five minutes to figure out how to navigate past that first page. I thought it was some sort of joke that I just wasn't getting. On that note, I was only able to get the "right arrow" key to allow me to move forward. Mouse clicking, space bar, and several others didn't work. Am I missing something fundamental?
aprescott 13y ago
I actually think "push" and "pull" make sense on a door since it can go both ways (although you can solve that one by using a handle on the pull side, and a flat rectangle on the push side). The real thing you shouldn't need to put on a door, though, is how to use it: "Use as an entrance."
- andrewflnr 13y ago
  Norman's point is probably precisely that you should put the flat plate/handle on as appropriate.
  - drivers99 13y ago
    It was. He also had some other more elaborate examples, but I couldn't think of any. I believe he is coming out with a new edition of The Design of Everyday Things which is mostly rewritten. Looks like it's coming out November 5th.

adamio 13y ago

What software was used to make those graphs? Or did I tap through it

the_cat_kittles 13y ago
I am also curious- the partitioning algorithms, the visualization. Does anyone know what tools he used are, or tools to achieve similar results?
myoung 13y ago
I'm pretty sure he used Gephi - gephi.org. You can ask him though :-) @gilgul on twitter
- James_Duval 13y ago
  There is also a course involving network analysis on Coursera, https://www.coursera.org/course/sna https://www.coursera.org/course/sna EDIT: The relevance being that it involves the use of Gephi.

alexkus 13y ago

Funny means funny. LOL is just unnecessary punctuation.

barbs 13y ago

Bit annoying that they took the name of a startup I used to work at: http://www.tapestry.net/ http://www.tapestry.net/

shortstuffsushi 13y ago

Le sigh. All of the comments are on the UX of the site, and not the content of the article. Come on guys. This article was really interesting to me (though obviously he doesn't get terribly into depth). I find data vis like this, whether it be super meaningful or not to be really cool. I'd like to see more analysis like this done with it.

hamburglar 13y ago
This is what happens when your UX is so bad it's a distraction. It's like complaining that nobody is listening to your lecture on particle physics just because you are delivering it in full bondage gear. I personally was too dumb to figure out that the OP isn't just a link to a gif, and came to the comments here to see what the deal was. Given all the distraction and lack of attention to whatever the subject actually is, I'd hope the author might reconsider the delivery method.
- shortstuffsushi 13y ago
  In this case specifically, since multiple comments addressed people being "unable to find" the content, you might have a point. I don't feel like that's typically the case on HN, though. It more commonly seems like "this wasn't immediately obvious or in a format I'm already comfortable with, shame on you." That, to me, seems like (UX) innovation killing potential. I'm sure that's an entirely different discussion, but I don't think experimenting with new things like this is a bad thing.
Mizza 13y ago
That's because this is "linkbait". The poster is a founder of Tapestry, the site actually hosting this content. To be honest, I'm fine with this kind of submission, I think it's a better way to see a product in context than a "Show HN", however, some people may see it as being underhanded as it defies the convention around here.
- shortstuffsushi 13y ago
  To an extent, I see what you're saying. However, I didn't take this particular linked "tapestry" as a "join this site" mechanic. Well, I think the last slide said join or something, but I don't get the correlation at all between the content of that slide set and desiring to join the site. Is Tapestry intended to show data visualizations like this or something? I didn't get that vibe from it. If people had concerns like these, then maybe I'd agree with you. If all people can focus on is the UX of a site, as they tend to with ANY post, be it Show HN or otherwise, I stick with me original statement.

alanctgardner2 13y ago

I worked on a project with a guy who did network analysis like this. It was pretty cool... the first three times. After that it seemed like every problem had to involve a whizbang graphic - then I realized he didn't actually know how to program at all. His whole job was 'analysis', which was using Tableau and a graph partitioning program to produce visualizations (pretty much using the defaults), and then try to explain what they meant. I was kind of in awe that this was a whole job by itself - I've never really seen an analysis of one of these graph diagrams that wasn't really superficial, like the examples in this presentation. It kind of makes me wonder if the "complexity" of the graph visualizations doesn't cow the viewer a bit, and make them more impressed by subsequent, not-super-interesting insights. I'd be interested in a comparison with and without the graphics.

PebblesRox 13y ago
Yeah, I'm always skeptical about how much information those kinds of visualizations really reveal. How much of the pattern is truly present in the data vs. a result of making it pretty? Is it possible to gain insight that wouldn't already be just as easy to see by looking at the data in a simpler way?

ced 13y ago

Is the Japanese Python community really that big? What do they use it for?

philangist 13y ago
The japanese Twitter community as a whole is actually really big. I believe Twitter has most of its users in Japan.

Mizza 13y ago

It's like http://zeega.com http://zeega.com but without the music.

photorized 13y ago

Talk about over analyzing something to death.

sytelus 13y ago

From Wikipedia: Modularity is one measure of the structure of networks or graphs. It was designed to measure the strength of division of a network into modules (also called groups, clusters or communities). Networks with high modularity have dense connections between the nodes within modules but sparse connections between nodes in different modules. Modularity is often used in optimization methods for detecting community structure in networks. However, it has been shown that modularity suffers a resolution limit and, therefore, it is unable to detect small communities. Biological networks, including animal brains, exhibit a high degree of modularity. A 2013 paper shows that modularity in biological networks may have evolved due to selection pressures to reduce connection costs. Paper on Modularity Maximization algo to identify communities in graph is at http://www-scf.usc.edu/~gaurava/modularity.pdf http://www-scf.usc.edu/~gaurava/modularity.pdf There are many other ways to cluster the graph.

tomphoolery 13y ago

That was pretty cool. Also, Tapestry is insanely cool!

dantiberian 13y ago

An on-topic question: what software was used to create the network visualisations in this presentation?

myoung 13y ago
I think Gilad used Gephi for the networks visualizations: gephi.org

rurounijones 13y ago

The presentation is actually quite interesting and very badly named in terms of describing what it does. Do not be put off by link title.

jrockway 13y ago

Welp, I admit it. I'm finally too old to use the Internet. I tried clicking the "tap here", but that didn't do anything. I have a touch-enabled tablet, and I tried tapping there. That didn't do anything either. Then I gave up. Why does my VCR blink 12:00 all the time, anyway?

Dru89 13y ago
You, sir, have easily made my evening. Also, I've found that "right arrow" seems to go forward, but it's impossible to go back. As for your VCR, you may have just found yourself in an endless time loop.
acheron 13y ago
Abstruse UI doesn't reflect on you. (Though I laughed at the VCR thing. Now I'm wondering how many HN readers have ever set a VCR time though.) Remember the days of Flash sites? "Did you click on the squid?" http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1999/03/03 http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1999/03/03

malkia 13y ago

Nooooooooooooooooooooooo!

jpswade 13y ago

It's ironic that "funny" is people laughing out loud and "lol" is "funny" (read: odd) things.

roarktoohey 13y ago

"Interesting" visualizations. Could someone without an understanding of lol and funny create this? Visualizations, in this context, show what you already knew to be true. How well can it be used to find something new, instead of novel?

hammock 13y ago

Anyone have a link of how to do this kind of analysis yourself?

NAFV_P 13y ago

This might seem like a childish query: would anyone know where to find that flying horse gif? I think I cracked a rib laughing.