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Comment by _tsz4 | Hacker News Reader

Passive learning. Whenever I come across something cool or interesting, I put it into a chrome extension I made called "Harvest". It sends me email reminders of what I've added on a spaced repetition schedule (1, 7, 17, 35 days into the future) for optimal retention

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/harvest-grow-your-...

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Man, this is awesome. Now that Firefox has become so vastly better than Chrome (who would have expected that a year ago?) you should port it to Firefox too.

interesting. ive heard this a lot. will port it

interested in this as well. is there any way I can be notified if you do so?

yes, i will be sure to ping you guys here

me too, thanks

me 3

Would you please alert me as well?

We should automate this somehow…

lol good idea. can you guys add your emails to: https://aetolabs.com/harvest/

i won't spam you, promise. will notify everyone there about updates like the firefox port

You might still want to reply to everyone in this thread manually. I wouldn't know about the mailing list if I didn't stumble upon this page in my Pocket.

Firefox port done: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/harvest-grow-...

Added. Thank you.

How much better? Any reference to a comparison?

I just gave it a spin again, after using Chrome for years.

The new Firefox is actually faster than Chrome, on my PCs. Plus of course the mobile version actually supports adblockers. I'm switching back to Firefox, personally.

Thanks for sharing. I tried it out and it looks great. I had a couple issues. Firstly it has me sign into my Google account on a browser window with no address bar. The only way I could actually verify that it wasn't a fishing site was to use the dev tools. After that it signed me out after a few hours. Hope this helps.

How do you pop the dev tools up on that window?

I tried but can't (same thoughts as you, without verifying it myself, not gonna sign in...)

Hitting F12 or Ctrl+Shift+C on the popup page do nothing.

EDIT: chrome on linux Version 59.0.3071.86 (Official Build) (64-bit)

Using Mac Chrome I was given the option to "inspect" on the right click menu.

understand completely about the google signin. will look into how to display the URL as well to give people peace of mind. one day soon will add a dedicated authentication service.. this was just the easiest way to get up and running.

getting signed out happens for a variety of reasons, probably unrelated to the extension itself. ill keep an eye out though to see if there is a systematic reason

thks for the feedback mate!

This is AMAZING. I am going to use this for its intended purpose because I love passive learning. I also intend on using it as a tool to keep me in check with nags with things that don't end up on my immediate schedule: "Have you written the unit tests for that open source project yet?". Having that show up a few times in random days or months would be great.

Sucks extensions don't work on phones (Chrome) I was doing a similar thing just grabbing topics when you go down a rabbit hole to remember random stuff you learn.

mobile app in the plan

Just downloaded your extension, it looks great! What does the stack look like for this product? I'd love to hear how you went about building this extension.

google extensions are basically all javascript :p and the styling is from https://semantic-ui.com/ backend is node planning to make a simple mobile app so i can save stuff from my phone too. i can do a more detailed writeup later on!

Cool idea. I will probably highlight way too many unimportant-but-seemed-neat-at-the-time facts from Wikipedia, but I'm going to try it out.

hah i do this all the time. added a "delete" button to get rid of the useless-in-hindsight stuff

https://www.memomize.com/ is a similar extension.

thks for the link. i think main difference is that harvest uses spaced repetition for passive learning, i dont want to see every thing every time i open a new tab. i like looking at my momentum backgrounds :)

This is really interesting. What are some of the things you have used this for? One of the examples is a quotation, which makes lots of sense. What else could it be useful for? Formulas, maybe?

I'm trying to expand my Chinese vocab, so I usually do something like "<characters> translation"

eg. 拓展 expand

For that I use Anki with the Chinese Support plugin, which is honestly pretty great. It does not only have characters and translation, but also pronunciation both as Pinyin (I think other romanizations can be configured) and audio (which plays on review, great for training your ear and checking your pronunciation), as well as measure words and characters in the opposite set (simplified vs traditional). And it can fill all of those automatically. Then there's stuff built-in to Anki, like statistics that let me know I've learned precisely 2521 unique characters in total, which is great for motivation. (The numbers must go up!)

I guess you will want to keep using your homegrown program, but maybe this can give you some inspiration for features to implement.

ive actually never tried anki before, but will check it out now. thks for the details!

Skritter is also really good for this.

For formulas, I find Anki to be pretty effective, because it forces me to recall the formula. I also try to put proofs and proof-techniques into Anki so I can maintain knowledge of an area without using it frequently.

That's awesome!

Really cool idea, thanks for sharing!

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