Comment by tdekken | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tdekken | Hacker News Reader

I am a former principal software engineer at a MAMAA company turned independent educational researcher. My primary interest is in deliberate practice and how to use spaced repetition (i.e., Anki) to develop expertise.

I have three primary areas that I am working on and would love to find serious collaborators:

1) I am building high-quality content for math, English language arts, chess, etc. (see [0] for a good explanation of what this looks like). This is primarily for my 2nd grade child, but I have also written hundreds of cards for high school level math, undergraduate level math, and programming languages.

For example, I used this approach to build an Anki deck that decomposed the NNAT test (i.e., a gifted program test) into atomic chunks and then demonstrated how sample NNAT questions were composed of those primitives.

2) I am eventually looking to leverage this content and knowledge to build turn-key resources for others. This is surprisingly challenging for reasons I won’t touch on, but it could profoundly improve learning outcomes for many people.

3). I am pondering how to enable richer sharing and collaboration between people. I have a number of patents in this space and can envision a few business opportunities.

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[0] https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/

> MAMAA

took me a second, but I guess it's Microsoft Apple Meta Amazon Alphabet now

yep, exactly. When Facebook changed their name to Meta, people were looking for a good acronym for the biggest tech companies.

Interesting that out of five corporations, only two letters are represented. Ok, "A" is ranked third in frequency in the English language, but the other one I avoided in these sentences? Not even in the top twelve.

Freqency at the begining of words is likely to be different to frequency anywhere in the word. Regardless, "a" has the highest frequency in the company names, when spelled out in full (occurring 6 times, in 3 of the 5 corporations)

Could be M2A3, like the tank.

It's kind of weird to use Alphabet in this context because people at Google seem to mostly still refer to it as Google, and the comp and hiring standards vary widely between the "other bets".

I mean, I imagine Facebook employees still call it facebook too?

I like it, I hope it catches on. Right now I think it's just odd looking because it's unfamiliar.

GAMMA?

NAAAM, a tour in NAAAM

I need to get back on Blind to make my memes propagate

I kinda would rather just keep calling it Facebook; Meta feels like a bad joke that we shouldn't repeat.

It reeks of “that’s so fetch!”

Welp. My brain interpreted "fetch" in the context of "replacement for JavaScript XHR", as though Vietnam war flashbacks had collectively been replaced with modern web development.

Why don't we all just say Big Tech at this point? Literally could be any of those companies, and it doesn't matter beyond that.

I'm partial to MANGA (for the former FAANG) and GAMMA when you replace Netflix with MS.

At Quizlet, we are working on problems in this space.

https://quizlet.com/features/how-quizlet-works

I'm an engineer on the step-by-step Explanations team - if interested in learning more, shoot me an email (scott @ quizlet.com) and we can chat! Maybe this violates the objective of the OP - but it sounds like we'd have fun collaborating. We'd just be getting paid by the same company to do so.

I'm trying to build GitHub for flashcards: https://github.com/dharmaturtle/cardoverflow

Emailing you!

Have you already written about the challenges alluded to in item 2 of your post somewhere? I would love for these resources to exist and I'm curious about the obstacles you're facing.

No, not yet. In brief, some of the key challenges seem to be:

1) Each person's internal representation of knowledge differs (see [0]). Therefore it is difficult to take someone else's questions and answers and expect them to make much sense, be at the appropriate difficulty, or even be relevant.

2) The current unit of collaboration is an entire deck. This is far too coarse grained and impedes finding and adapting relevant material. In addition, it is a pain to later sync if there are updates.

3) The current unit of work is a single card. This has some advantages, but also makes it harder to make changes, see the forest for the trees, and think holistically about knowledge.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunking_(psychology)

I talk about this a little in an old reddit thread:

> With StackOverflow/Wikipedia there's only one article/question/answer. With flashcards, people want to individualize their cards. As an example, for you as a foreign language learner, perhaps you want to include short clips from movies/youtube of someone saying a phrase like "Where is the library?", while someone else wants to use a clip of the same phrase from a podcast. The semantic content is the same, but the reification into a flashcard is not. You could possibly link to related cards like StackOverflow does in a sidebar... but I'm designing something that's more like concept learning. Each card is an Example of a Concept. The author can then move their Card/Example into what Concept they think it best fits - or create a new Concept if they can't find anything they like. Basically I'm building in the ability to group cards that have very similar content. By looking at all the various Examples/Cards, a person can choose what best suits their style - or make one for themselves by forking an existing card.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Anki/comments/nalar8/open_source_we...

Hello! Would like to reach out but don't know Microsoft products well enough to guess what their fiery email domain is. Do you mean outlook?

Hotmail!

LOL, I suppose "fiery email domain" could mean outlook/exchange if we think in terms of reliability. I updated it to "Microsoft's not cold email domain acquired in 1997".

Emailed you

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