

Our startup analyzed the debate last week. What do you think? - boorad
http://heartbyte.com/blog/fl-debate/

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jsaxton86
After last week's debate I looked for an app where I could get objective,
near-real time analysis pertaining to the accuracy of a candidate's claim,
since Wolf Blitzer obviously wasn't interested in doing his job. To my
surprise, I couldn't find an app that did what I wanted. I considered writing
one, but it's been almost a week and I haven't done anything yet, so I'll
share the idea and maybe someone else will build it.

The basic idea would be that you press a button whenever a candidate says
something you think is controversial. This will bring up a list of recent
controversial statements made by the candidates, and you have the option to
select one. Meanwhile, someone on the server side is using his best google-fu
to immediately find primary sources that are relevant to each controversial
statement. When a primary source is found, it is immediately pushed out to the
user.

~~~
jerf
A lot of debate points really aren't "true" or "false" but only "true from a
certain point of view". There's exceptions in both directions, certainly, but
I don't think this is amenable to real-time analysis by anyone; you're mostly
going to get fed the biases of the person on the other end of the wire, not
"truth".

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steve8918
Interesting technology. But my biggest complaint is the font. I absolutely
hated the font of the blog post, and it made it almost unreadable for me.
Maybe I'm too old school, but the weird T's and the too-small-and-narrow fonts
made my head hurt. I forced myself to read the entire blog post so that I
could have legitimacy in writing this comment, but otherwise I would have just
closed my window.

~~~
gaelian
Really don't see why steve8918's comment was downvoted.

On a Win 7 machine, running Chrome 16.0.912.75, the font would appear to be a
legitimate problem. Were this a page that I had put together, I'd want to know
about it.

~~~
boorad
uncle. fixed.

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paulbaumgart
Feature suggestion: spectral analysis of the debaters' voices:
[http://www.www.asanet.org/images/members/docs/pdf/featured/0...](http://www.www.asanet.org/images/members/docs/pdf/featured/06gregory.pdf)

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andrewcooke
nice. is there any more info about your company? <http://heartbyte.com> is
kinda minimal (even with the comments) and <http://heartbyte.com/blog> gives
an error.

if not, can you outline what technology you're using (i see you've commented
on couchdb, some time ago...)? how quickly can you provide results? what does
the user interface look like from either side? (i'm a technical guy, but i bet
others here would also like to know how you're funded etc...)

~~~
boorad
We have some rough edges on our web presence to be sure. This may help a bit
on the UI front: <http://heartbyte.com/s/hn>

As for the tech, given the requests we need to handle from our distributed
queue, we do clustered stream processing in near realtime. Our broadcast
customers want a line on their screen within a second or two.

And for now we are bootstrapped.

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thatdudeguy
Just curious, but your age ranges are 8 years, 17 years, 14 years, and
Unknown. How did you come by those buckets? I can't figure out the intended
distinction between each group.

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jvc26
Just an FYI, all your results are in percentages, where the total is never
given throughout the article. 'about 30' participants is a throwaway gesture -
if one wants to actually gauge the quality of the stats, you need an accurate
total, and surely 'about 30' could be replaced with the single figure?

Otherwise, looks neat!

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sakopov
Nice to see that someone is actually applying technology to solve real
problems! Great work.

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samreaves
Excellent work, guys. This is going to be AWESOME for the upcoming debates!

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uncoder0
Interesting choice of color on the age graph. It almost looks like it implies
those older than 41 are not somehow as important those younger. They almost
blend into the background.

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pork
Minor nit: the distribution of Republican, Democrat, and Independent in the
population at large isn't 1/3rd each, so your sample is a bit off from
representative.

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bane
Cool stuff. I can see this being a fun interactive way to participate in tons
of reality shows...e.g. Project Runway.

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Raphael
Don't use pie charts.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_chart#Use.2C_effectiveness_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_chart#Use.2C_effectiveness_and_visual_perception)

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zeroonetwothree
Seems like it has potential, but using an example culled from 30 non-random
data points isn't particular interesting.

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wslh
feed subscription is broken.

