Comment by neurocroc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by neurocroc | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Author of the project here.

I do agree with you that mind maps have their flaws and limitations. But I found most curated list and most content in general to be quite rigid in structure. These mind maps should let the users explore and be guided through arrows.

And the big problem that I find is that google and other search engines are a black box. You have to know what you want to ask for to get an answer. The poses a big problem because many don't know what to ask.

Wikipedia is great too but I found it to lack in the visualisation aspect. Everything is connected but many people don't know exactly how and where and with what it is connected. These kinds of visualisations are very popular on the internet (https://github.com/kamranahmedse/developer-roadmap is one example) because they do bring clarity as to what it is the person doesn't know. However this repository although great, it just shows an image.

With these mind maps I can replicate the same but make it interactive. Now users can not only see what they don't know, but if they do want to learn it, they don't have to waste time online finding resources, they just click on a link and see what the best way of learning the topic is. If any questions arise when they are learning the content, then the search engine of their choice will answer these questions.

I also try to solve the problem of dependencies of knowledge. For example if user wants to learn 'machine learning'. I show that machine learning requires knowledge of statistics and linear algebra (http://i.imgur.com/A75JMNt.png) and then give links to the mind maps of both of these topics so user can learn them. There should be no wandering around and wasting time finding resources and being lost.

I find the most valuable point is the last: whereas, sure, you can go on wikipedia and find dependencies of an area of knowledge, that three of prerequisites makes more sense to be presented as a flow converging on a point, rather than having to dig deeper until you find a node you already understand.

A suggestion for your product: build these dependency graphs automatically, and let users mark subjects as already satisfied. That way you can omit digging into dependencies that are satisfied. If you really want to be righteous, recursively mark the dependencies of the satisfied dependency as also satisfied. That way a user can pick a topic and find everything that still remains to learn to get to that point.

And you can have the best of both worlds. Generating a linear progression of things to learn becomes a simple matter of printing the dependency tree in postorder.

You can also think of this project as an index of links similar to what Google has. Only instead, the index is human curated and it is an open canvas that all can explore.

Have you explored taking links from Wikipedia and adding them into your visualization? It might be interesting considering most articles have resources at the bottom.

I do link to wikipedia articles on nearly all nodes. I just expand it with more learning resources after. I think wikipedia is always a great starting point for learning about any subject. Or you meant something else?

I meant crawling wikipedia to add nodes automatically

Oh I see. I think something like this has been done before and the results are usually messy. Although I do want to use algorithms and curate things in a more 'smart' way that I do now. A bonus point of doing it by hand is that I take in the time to understand the topic for myself and actually understand why that node goes there and not in some other place.

You've created a significance map of your own conception of these subjects. It is, afterall, a mind map.

On a side note, I would subdivide Philosophy into Epistemology, Ethics, Naturalism, and Phenomenology and reclassify/reassociate accordingly.

Checkout Moonwalking with Einstein And Anki

Reply on news.ycombinator.com