
Show HN: A little knowledge portal I've been building - tuvalie
https://tuvalie.com/fae/?q=Albert%20Einstein
======
eric001
Regarding the UI, personally, I would shrink things down a notch. It feels a
bit "in your face" right now, if that makes sense. Besides that - love it!

Edit: even just changing font-size from 14pt to 11pt is much better imho.

~~~
tuvalie
Hi, eric. Thanks for the feedback. If you don't mind me asking, do you think
it feels that way because of the color choices, spacing, order of content, or
something else? The colors are tied to specific themes, which can be changed
by registered users -- but I can still tweak the default theme if it would
improve things.

~~~
s_kilk
(not eric, but had the same thought)

Everything just feels way oversized, in a Fisher-Price kind of way. The font,
the colors and "chunky"-ness of the UI.

The full-width content-area doesn't help either. The whole page gets right up
in your face and shouts the content at you.

Concrete suggestions:

\- dial down the font size

\- put some blank space in the left-right marigns of the page (responsive if
possible).

\- maybe choose a more passive shade of blue for the background.

EDIT: here's an example comparing your page with wikipedia
[http://recordit.co/Za7NuT8Hy7](http://recordit.co/Za7NuT8Hy7)

~~~
tuvalie
Thank you! I'm going to work through those suggestions later. Do you mind if I
ask for your feedback afterwards?

~~~
s_kilk
Sure, go for it :)

~~~
tuvalie
I made a couple of small tweaks. If you have a moment and are willing to take
a look, I'd love to hear your thoughts! (You may need to perform a hard reload
in your browser.)

------
tuvalie
Hey folks, I just wanted to apologize. I got an influx of several thousand
views because of this post and exceeded some API usage limits, so the web and
some of the image results were down for a bit. They're back up now, but if
they exceed the limits again, they'll have to remain down for a bit (financial
limitations :S).

------
xjay
I don't have a comment on the work itself, but like most sites, it has no
awareness of line length, and it's therefore painful to parse the information
without resizing the window.

Both HN, and the linked website, could benefit greatly in readability by
simply limiting line-length to ~32em for textual information. It's strange
that a browser, designed for human use, has no notion of humans in that
regard.

~~~
tuvalie
Hi, xjay. Thank you for bringing that to my attention. I'll experiment with it
later on today. If you don't mind me asking, do you have a reference site I
can look at that you think really shines in terms of readability?

~~~
xjay
Sure! Matthew Butterick opened my eyes on the world of typography. He has a
site with tips:
[http://practicaltypography.com/](http://practicaltypography.com/)

He also has a very good talk called "Typography for Docs":
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8J6HuvosP0s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8J6HuvosP0s)

~~~
tuvalie
Those are perfect, thanks! After I'm doing fiddling with things later, do you
mind if I solicit your feedback?

------
gkya
Nice work, compliments. I also like the UI, no clutter or heavy JS. But I
suggest you add a little noscript message saying this only functions with it
enabled.

~~~
tuvalie
That's a great idea, thank you. A little ashamed I overlooked it, actually :/
It'll be thrown in with my other to-do's for the day.

~~~
gkya
No problem, even the no-js users overlook it, including myself...

~~~
tuvalie
Hi, gkya. The noscript element has been added. Based on some other feedback
I've received here, I also reduced the font size and line width for
encyclopedic information display. (It may require a hard reload to notice the
difference.) Since you had a positive impression of the original design, it'd
be good to hear that it hasn't changed with the update. And thanks again!

~~~
gkya
Checked it, yes, I see the noscript message. I rather like a more plain style
for web pages that is based on text rather than icons, but it is personal
preference. The font size is better, and it zooms in and out nicely (I zoom
out on it for easier reading). If I would change one thing, that'd be to use a
serif for some longer text. You're welcome, and kudos again.

------
mark_l_watson
Nicely done! I especially like the timeline. Most of the data for the search
results I tried are available via DBPedia and other sources and you did a
great job tying it all together.

BTW, re: UI: I found it easy to use, and it looked nice, on the iPad Pro I am
using right now. It is kind of people here to offer suggestions for improving
the UI, but my suggestion is to leave the UI as is and keep working on the
back end stuff

~~~
tuvalie
Thanks for the kind words! You might have seen the UI after I just pushed a
small improvement through (it was right around the time of your comment), so
it may have been less offensive for your particular viewing! (If it doesn't
change when you do a hard reload, you saw the updated version.) Hopefully that
addresses some of the issues, but I agree that focusing on the core service is
more important in the long run.

------
solveforall
Great work! The UI is a bit old school -- reminds me of Windows 3.1 crossed
with some wireframe creation program, but it is not hard to use. But I
especially like the timeline and encyclopedic information. Since I run a
search engine myself (solveforall.com), I would like to ask you the sources of
the encylopedic information, timeline, and quotes. The result that doesn't
seem to add much value is the NELL project one, which lists the type
hierarchy. Maybe that could just be summarized to "Albert Einstien is a male
scientist" ...

Of course autocomplete would be nice as well as more tolerant input
acceptance.

I don't get the finder ... do you plan that people will register, then you can
find other users that way? This is not a general search for someone by email,
right? That would be cool...

I am looking forward to using your API as well! Do the endpoints on
[https://tuvalie.com/?do=developers](https://tuvalie.com/?do=developers) work?

Anyway, cool stuff. If you want to discuss further with me, contact me at
jctsay AT aim.com.

~~~
tuvalie
Thanks for the feedback! What's being demonstrated here is one part of one
feature of a larger project I've been working on over the last several years.
I've built a lot of custom parsers that continuously mine/merge facts from
various sources. (I think it's sitting at around 215 million atomic facts,
right now, outside of what it can dynamically calculate.) The APIs work
(theoretically), but they're very rough. Showing this project off is very new
to me!

~~~
solveforall
215 million facts, that's impressive! Anyway, congratulations on shipping. If
you ever want to collaborate on search, please let me know.

~~~
tuvalie
I'd love to find ways to collaborate with anyone who's interested :) I also
forgot to mention that you can download an export of (most) of the timeline
events from [http://endlessorigins.com/](http://endlessorigins.com/) \-- I
update it from time to time with new events, too. To my knowledge, it's the
largest freely available structured data set of historic human events. Could
that be useful to you?

~~~
solveforall
That looks great, I am going to look into this at some point. Thanks a lot for
the link and all your hard work.

------
mmanfrin
Man, this is almost exactly a project I had envisioned years ago. I was going
over a list of terms I needed to know for a midterm in school, and thought it
would be neat if I could just plunk in a list of comma-separated terms and
have it fetch definitions, wiki blurbs, images, and whatever else it could
find in to cards for each term.

~~~
tuvalie
Funny you should mention that! For registered users, comparisons across
concepts are an actual feature. The service tries to summarize on a per
attribute, cross-entity basis what makes each item different or similar. It's
pretty computationally-expensive, though, so I didn't want to slow down this
demo by showing that off. I can post a couple of screenshots of it in action
if there's any interest?

------
jrumbut
This is so cool, it shows you're a real developer's developer, if you get what
I mean!

One thing that confused me a little at first, UI wise, is the scroll bars on
the page Web Results and Image Results panels. I was just scanning pages and
thought the page was hanging for some reason while using my mouse wheel.

~~~
tuvalie
Thank you! I can honestly say that comment put a smile on my face. As far as
the scroll bars go, I just didn't want to take up too much screen real estate
for those individual sections. (So that people who want to spend time with
them can, but those who don't can skip over them a bit quicker.) Do you think
there's a better way to handle that? I'm very open to suggestions for just
about anything!

~~~
jrumbut
Sorry this is a little bit delayed! It's hard to see when you get replies here
:)

My feeling is to either make liberal use of "Click to expand" or to just let
users scroll the whole page vertically. I think we've become used to long,
vertical content elements.

------
tuvalie
Thanks for anyone who checks this out. I'd like to release a free API soon
with most of the data the portal contains. That's one of my big objectives
since hearing about Freebase shutting down. At any rate, all thoughts and
feedback are greatly appreciated!

~~~
tokenizerrr
What would be really awesome (and probably insanely difficult to make) is an
API which does something similar to what Google does when you define: stuff.
It usually comes from a dictionary, but sometimes it has more interesting
sources. I'd love to put something like that in an IRC bot.

~~~
tuvalie
This is even more experimental than the main service, itself, but does
something like this meet your needs (genuinely curious)?
[https://tuvalie.com/fae/?q=Albert%20Einstein&api](https://tuvalie.com/fae/?q=Albert%20Einstein&api)

~~~
tokenizerrr
While that is useful, it wouldn't meet these particular needs. What I'd want
is a single piece of text, with maybe a link, giving a best-effort
description/explanation of the subject.

So when specifying "Albert Einstein" Google gives:

> Albert Einstein. BrE. (1879-1955) a physicist, born in Germany, who was
> possibly the greatest scientist of the 20th century. In 1905 he published
> his theory of relativity. This led to the equation giving the relationship
> between mass and energy, E=mc2, which is the basis of atomic energy.

But when specifying "hubbub" Google gives:

> a chaotic din caused by a crowd of people. "a hubbub of laughter and
> shouting"

Stuff like that, where it (somehow) automatically determines which piece of
information is most relevant. Again, I don't think this is really doable
without having as much search data as Google does.

------
karmacondon
Completely subjective, but I'm very drawn to the timeline. I would be
interested in a site that was organized entirely around that, with the videos
and pictures displayed chronologically and by importance.

~~~
tuvalie
I'm a big fan of the timeline, myself! I actually regularly export some of the
timeline data to a TSV file for others to be able to use in their own
projects. [http://endlessorigins.com/](http://endlessorigins.com/) \-- I'd
love to know what kind of uses you can find for it!

------
techaddict009
Information looks good. Design looks a bit old doesnt affect anyway but I
would recommend updating it. SEO of the site is worse.

What is the plan for revenue? contextual advertisement? Donation? Or something
else?

I would love to collaborate and help in UI/UX and SEO. Ping me if you wish to
connect: vivek@eyuva.com

Recent work: oizom.com, metavideos.com

~~~
tuvalie
Hi. Thanks for the feedback. If I can help it, I don't want any advertising to
touch the knowledge functions of the site. It's part of a larger project that
offers subscription services and sponsorships for interest communities, so all
of this is just one piece to that puzzle. Donations would be wonderful, but I
don't really see getting a lot of them. If nothing else, I still love building
this stuff. I've been at it for several years and my interest level hasn't
diminished at all, so I have that going for me!

------
DrScump
Registration rejects email addresses with certain characters ("+" at least)

Also, I think it's a bad idea to offer common financial codes as recovery
codes for your site (SSN, mother's maiden name, etc.)

~~~
tuvalie
Thank you, DrScump. Both of these have been fixed. Users will be warned to
change their security question if they're using an old, insecure question
type, and no one will be able to select those questions beginning immediately.
I was using a standard list of security questions, but I absolutely see the
value of avoiding such info.

------
uptownhr
Invitation code? Not liking my email address for some reason.

~~~
tuvalie
Hey, if you're willing, could you shoot me an e-mail from the address it
doesn't like? You can reach me at hello @ the domain of the site. That's the
first I've heard of the issue, and I'd like to make sure it gets fixed. (And
thanks!)

------
uptownhr
Invitation code?

