Re:Show HN: Tool Time - how well do you know your dev tools?
by Illniyar on Friday July 22, 2016 @07:53AM
(#12143002)
The title made me think this will be a quiz about rarely known commands or feature in some IDEs.
That would be nice.
Instead it's a quiz where there are 8 subjective barely descriptive words (such as good ui, has app, etc..) and 4 saas products that I barely heard of and never used.
So, nice idea of the aim was to get people to discover new SaaS products using a playful game.
Re:Show HN: Tool Time - how well do you know your dev tools?
by yonasb on Friday July 22, 2016 @11:10AM
(#12143997)
One of the creators here. Fair point regarding expectations. But I'm pretty sure if we had said "SaaS tools" people would have been thrown off since there's a fair amount of non-SaaS. And the subjective words are submitted by people who've used the products, so they're more feedback than anything- we probably should have made that clear in the UI.
Re:Show HN: Tool Time - how well do you know your dev tools?
by laumars on Friday July 22, 2016 @06:12AM
(#12142695)
> It seems biased on SaaS tools
Yeah, that bothered me a little. I was expecting something like interesting lesser-known features of popular standalone tools, from command line tools to plugins for text editors and IDEs. Instead it felt more like sponsored ads loosely presented as a quiz.
I probably wouldn't mind so much if the examples were then discussed. I might have missed it, but I couldn't even find a "read more" link about any of the products so if I hadn't heard of the examples then I've gained nothing from the exercise.
Re:Show HN: Tool Time - how well do you know your dev tools?
by laumars on Friday July 22, 2016 @07:30AM
(#12142921)
You're right, my apologies.
It still might have been nice to have a little information on the quiz answers though. It breaks the flow of the site if I constantly have to navigate away just to find a summary of the product. The questions are pretty vague a lot of the time and often full of marketing double talk, so you don't glean much new information from the quiz site itself. However I do understand and agree with having those links for contestants who wish to learn more than a summary about any specific product.
Re:Show HN: Tool Time - how well do you know your dev tools?
by yonasb on Friday July 22, 2016 @11:11AM
(#12144009)
Good idea! We originally had the descriptions there for the options but that gave away the answer. Showing the description once you answer would be helpful, we'll add that.
Re:Show HN: Tool Time - how well do you know your dev tools?
by OJFord on Friday July 22, 2016 @05:09AM
(#12142497)
It's also entertaining to get the keywords:
Great community support
Flexible, powerful, simple
Superb api
Easy to learn and powerful to work with
mmk. Just shows how fluffy and not _actually_ useful SaaS descriptions can be - the only real clue here is "api", since one of the options was nginx, that helps a tiny bit.
Re:Show HN: Tool Time - how well do you know your dev tools?
by ubertaco on Friday July 22, 2016 @07:54AM
(#12143006)
A lot of the ones I saw were a mix of way too vague to be guessable ("easy to use", "simple", "pleasant") or way too obvious because of the clues ("backed by Microsoft" -- the only Microsoft one in here is C#) ("If you know HTTP you know Sinatra" -- guess it's Sinatra then), with a couple that were just misleading (why is "Scala" given as a clue for a Git hosting platform?)
That being said, it's a fun little quiz, and I definitely understand that getting good clues is hard. Writing good clues for a quiz by hand is hard enough; using scraped/machine-collected clues makes it harder.
That would be nice.
Instead it's a quiz where there are 8 subjective barely descriptive words (such as good ui, has app, etc..) and 4 saas products that I barely heard of and never used.
So, nice idea of the aim was to get people to discover new SaaS products using a playful game.
Yeah, that bothered me a little. I was expecting something like interesting lesser-known features of popular standalone tools, from command line tools to plugins for text editors and IDEs. Instead it felt more like sponsored ads loosely presented as a quiz.
I probably wouldn't mind so much if the examples were then discussed. I might have missed it, but I couldn't even find a "read more" link about any of the products so if I hadn't heard of the examples then I've gained nothing from the exercise.
One to a StackShare profile and one to the website of the product.
It still might have been nice to have a little information on the quiz answers though. It breaks the flow of the site if I constantly have to navigate away just to find a summary of the product. The questions are pretty vague a lot of the time and often full of marketing double talk, so you don't glean much new information from the quiz site itself. However I do understand and agree with having those links for contestants who wish to learn more than a summary about any specific product.
It already crawls the tags from stackshare, so it could also crawl the description.
There's a lot of those, especially with AWS products, where all but the product name is mentioned in the descriptions.
It's fun to play though :). Also amazing how many things there are.
"Free plan, nice ui, easy to use"
And there's 4 SaaS apps that I've never heard of--not that I could distinguish if I had heard of them.
That being said, it's a fun little quiz, and I definitely understand that getting good clues is hard. Writing good clues for a quiz by hand is hard enough; using scraped/machine-collected clues makes it harder.
React? nope, PrestaShop
wut?
^ Describing AWS Lambda. May want to fix that one.