blackbrokkoli

I already lived in Cairo for quite a while, so not quite your target group — but out of interest, how much did you sell? Did the monetization work?

Interesting! Sadly I don't have an apple device for testing, but here is one question anyways: This is a standalone app, right? Have you thought how to break the existing "mindless scrolling" pattern that your users already have established, which probably involves opening other apps?

thanks for the feedback, will work on this :)

It's on the "maybe" issue list :)

interesting idea, will put it on the long-term todo list :)

Trick is you don't have to pan or zoom — but yeah, successfully communicating this has been the main UX challenge so far...

interesting perspective, as well.

that's really the core struggle with learning games: not being too boring, not being too repetitive, not introducing stuff too fast, enabling user choice but also making sure learning is achieved...

will take both your point and parent poster's point into account :)

Good idea, will implement soon, thanks

Thanks everyone for the feedback. I used a pretty random svg library and was happy that it worked for now, will look into this.

Interesting idea :)

from the perspective of a dev who does occasional webscraping, I think you need more on your landing page that convinces me why I should use your thing over good old Selenium, which feels pretty "easy" to me — especially if ask an LLM too write me a script. Yes, setting up Selenium can be like 7 lines of python, but that won't make me learn a new tool.

I hope that helps, and good luck

Don't know about auto-rejecting, but as a recruiter I'd run an AI checker if the text feels suspicious. Wouldn't risk it unless you're on a very tight deadline; why not spend the 15 minutes of writing the filler yourself?

That's probably true. I reckon I'll add both rather soon.

An interesting problem for sure (for example, should idioms be translated literally?)...

On youtube, you have the opposite problem: Stuff like "ooh uhm" or garbled names makes it into the subtitles and confuse my translation engine...

Thanks! Not yet, but there is no technical hurdle to add basically any language. What would you be interested in? :)

Yes, solid ideas, I was thinking along similar lines.

There are two possible meta approaches for this:

a) hard-code the whole progression, which is tedious and not very adaptive to the learner's level

b) use algorithmic exercise/question selection. Then, suddenly, degrees of freedom explode: You had 5 exercises in a row with 6 images, maybe you'd want something easier. It was a long time since we practiced anything with "apple". But "cutting" was just practiced, it would be boring to bring it up again. So here is a set with all possible "apple" questions in the database. Some include words not yet practiced. Which one do we pick? And so on. It's a fascinating problem, far more complex than I anticipated. And if you use simple shortcuts, you quickly end in very boring loops :)

Thanks! Any ideas for puzzles you'd enjoy solving? Love the idea, but it can't think of many actual puzzles that make sense in this context...

Thanks for the feedback. I definitely agree, difficulty progression needs work :)

Genuine question:

If you write only for yourself, what motivates you to actually finish, and more importantly, polish a post?

I write for myself all the time, in private: I have a journal, a paper notebook, thousands of notes in Obsidian. Yet doing a blog post feels like a massive undertaking every single time, especially the later writing and editing: explaining stuff that is obvious to me and no one else, replacing idiosyncratic abbreviations, fixing formatting issues, fixing blogging engine or hosting stuff. I think I struggle with these parts because doing those tasks doesn't benefit me very much.

So how do you do these things within the framework of writing for oneself? Any takes on this?

Thank you for the answer.

If you want some inspiration for the toggle: have you ever seen the Firefox uBlock Origin plugin UI? They basically have a giant on/off button, which I think is a rather good solution.

Interesting approach for the difficulty evaluation, and rather pragmatic. If you happen to have some write-up for the grammar heuristics or more detailed sources, I'd be interested :)

Definitely didn't realize I had to set difficulty manually (but maybe I'm just blind). Would be interesting to see if there's any smart way of auto-evaluating progress...maybe something like occasionally asking how difficult a sentence that the user hovers was or even just passive signals such as whether sentences are hovered. Just because if difficulty would be evaluated by the software, you'd both have a non-subjective measurement of your progress and you truly just could have this on in the background, never thinking about it, and still always learn.

Just some random thoughts; in any case good luck with this!

Very neat, thanks for making this. Tested it with Italian and it's very good :)

One minor feedback: I would like a larger, much more prominent toggle to turn the translation on and off — not that the setting is hard to find, but I found myself wanting to quickly toggle the add-on (e.g. off for serious work) and the small checkbox feels a bit fiddly.

More technical question since I'm interested in language learning software: How do you implement sentence difficulty, and how do you track user progress, aka when do you show harder sentences?

Strange article.

It's basically a list of nice things going for PHP, but you can write that for literally any tech in any context — like, I could argue that you should build web sites with the Unity game engine or raw Python by listing out-of-context stats all day long.

Whenever the author actually compares, it breaks down:

- Ok, so Lavarel is from 2011 — React is from 2013, Django is from 2005...so what

- Sure, there may be a new js framework everyday, but not a new version of js...and anyway, an active and innovative community is automatically bad why?

- PHP has "2 strong framework players" — ok, so has Python, js has two to four...

- "lack of advanced technology" — what does this even mean?

  Location: Berlin, Germany
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Web (HTML, CSS, JS, Vue, ...), Python, Unity and Godot
  Résumé/CV: koljapluemer.com
  Email: contact [at] koljapluemer.com

Interested in working in edtech, digital learning or any kind of software enabling people to become better at something.

Your comment made me laugh, but to actually answer:

It matters from a Chesterton's Fence perspective: We know that the hippos were not brought for any good reason, inevitability, etc.

Fan favorite of the HN crowd I know, but hardly the correct line to draw.

Here is one of the hundreds of papers analyzing mislabeling in genetics (notice how affected papers are usually not withdrawn): https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00204-015-1632-4

(Unless you consider biology soft)

There is a funny kind of bias here: Fields and subfields who actually retract papers are more likely to win the this negative award of "most heavily citing retracted studies" — contrast that psychology, where things are almost never retracted, and there is no way of knowing whether a paper has been replicated consistently except reading hundreds of other papers: no chance of such criticism being leveled.

Can you expand how that would help with this problem? In my understanding the tools used to write a paper are completely hidden and non-consequential once a paper is published, no?

I blame rent-seeking academic "publishers" for the lack of these features. There are multiple high-impact features to be built in this regard, many of which would take an experienced dev around an afternoon to build, if a proper data source existed.

Instead, the only way to access many papers is as an idiosyncratic PDF, often only including a post-hoc OCR layer, and of course locked behind a 49.99$ 24-hour-access paywall that can also not be automatically accessed, even if you had the required millions laying around.

That's a good point. I know no site where it takes less clicks to access the current in-group drama.

Thinking about it, know I want a "Current Drama" button where the "I'm feeling lucky" button used to be on gSearch :)

It kind of does, though?

The point of such indicators is to make predictions about the real world. "If you're 5'6'', this mattress is a good fit" or "People taller than 6ft will be 2.4 times more likely to develop back problems".

Now imagine you try do anything intelligence-related, like hiring the best person for a job. If the variation between person A taking your intelligence test in week 1 and week 2 is higher than between person A and person B, you cannot use this metric to decide who is more intelligent — unless you're prepared to run the test dozens of times, and are fine with the "intelligence" of the person you're hiring regularly dipping below and above the "intelligence" of the other person you could've also hired. At that point you can very much go by firmness of handshake instead.

Can't find the one I actually had in mind right now, but here is one where they run various cognitive tests on high-IQ-value individuals, with performance regularly dipping below population average: 10.1007/s12207-021-09417-x