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Show HN: I built a math website the internet loved, I'm back with more features
A few months back, I published my website, teachyourselfmath, which shows you a list of math problems parsed automatically from PDFs around the world. It received a tremendous amount of feedback and interest. And I was honestly overwhelmed by the response and then life happened.
Over the past few weeks, I have been actively working on this project, trying to incorporate all the feedback and I’d love to share it with the world again. New features:
1. Filter problems by difficulty and category
2. Bookmark your favorite problems
3. Editor in the comment section supports markdown formatting
4. ...and some UI improvements throughout the website
I am also starting a small telegram community of math nerds who would like to discuss all things math, as well as talk about upcoming features and feedback for the website. Here is the link - (https://t.me/teachyourselfmath https://t.me/teachyourselfmath)
If you’d like to support my work through small donations, you can do it here - (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/viveknathani https://www.buymeacoffee.com/viveknathani). Right now, teachyourselfmath runs for free. Later, I’d love to make features that people would love to pay for but fundamentally, the goal is to make math accessible through technology. There’s a lot of peer learning involved in the comments section of these math problems. All of this gives me more reason to keep working on this.
Happy hacking!
- mrkramer 2y agoI like the HN like design. Great web app.
- viveknathani_ 2y agohi, glad you liked it! thank you!
- lajisam 2y agoThis is awesome!
- viveknathani_ 2y agothank you :)
- mgd 2y agoAs someone who has struggled with learning maths, this looks really great. I've set up an account and look forward to giving it a try And yes, the Hacker News minimal style of the website is very much appreciated! well done
- viveknathani_ 2y agoglad you liked it! you can also check out the telegram community i am building - https://t.me/teachyourselfmath https://t.me/teachyourselfmath
- who-shot-jr 2y agoThis looks fantastic, getting better at maths is something I have always wanted to do. Also, some of the commenters have posted python code but it is not formatted/styled.
- viveknathani_ 2y agohi! glad you like the site. i have introduced a markdown editor in this release. that should fix the code formatting issues going forward. thanks!
- franciscop 2y agoAre you interested in using https://vector-graph.com/ https://vector-graph.com/ to add math diagrams? I created it exactly for this kind of websites and I'd be happy to waiver the fee for your site!
- viveknathani_ 2y agowow! this seems amazing. let me chalk out the roadmap for this site and reach out to you accordingly. thank you for your interest!
- namanyayg 2y agoso beautiful :) how much time did it take to build?
- franciscop 2y agoThanks! I made it 2-3 years ago and IIRC it took me few months of weekend work; the things is that it was "easy" in the beginning, but for each combination of "feature" + "drawing type" things got a lot more complex, specially later on. e.g. when adding the option to shift the grid, or scale it, then I needed to change all of the drawing methods; or when I add a new drawing method, then it needs to work with all the other configs. So a lot of the code is basically dealings with these cases. It also has a lot of logic trying to position things so that they look nice, specially around the axis arrows/numbers (since any overflow off the SVG would be cut off).
- internetter 2y agoHow many licenses have you sold?
- franciscop 2y agoUnfortunately none. Once I finished the library I realized I was barking at the wrong tree, meaning this would probably be better for high-value high integration business (B2B) rather than to sell to small blogs that have maths in them at B2C prices. But then I also got a job and so while the library works just fine, I haven't put the energy into selling it.
- namanyayg 2y agocongrats on launching Vivek! Followed you on Twitter
- viveknathani_ 2y agothank you naman!
- n4r9 2y agoNice work. Out of curiosity, how is the difficulty determined? I notice that some of the "hard" questions (inverting a 2x2 matrices or differentiating common functions) are much easier than others (proving that no natural number has Euler totient equal to 14).
- viveknathani_ 2y agohi! right now, it is manually assigned after parsing the problems. i am figuring out a relative system for assigning difficulty automatically.
- n4r9 2y agoI don't envy you the task! You've probably thought about it a lot more than me, but I was wondering if you could add a "very hard" or "advanced" category. Or perhaps users could submit difficulty ratings as a percentage and you take the average.
- viveknathani_ 2y agoyou are right, user-submitted content can help too. but that would imply a difficulty setting based on all users who have participated instead of a globally agreeable difficulty value. if the smart ones find a hard problem to be easy and they are the only ones to attempt that problem, that problem would be marked as easy. on the "very hard"/"advanced" bit, feedback taken. thank you for writing your thoughts!
- ajkjk 2y agoI feel like the obvious answer is to let people vote on it, like an upvotes/downvotes system.
- ktallett 2y agoIMO, I think in the grand scheme of things proofs are always tricky so it generally would be in a higher difficulty no matter the problem. However in the category of number theory, that would be say an easier proof than some others.
- antinone 2y agocool. highly recommend to implement the review exercise style of https://www.executeprogram.com/ https://www.executeprogram.com/!, both the UI, albeit with better theming (https://monkeytype.com/ https://monkeytype.com/), and the spaced repition feature, all while keeping the hn styled comment section, although i'd let none-related comments run horizontally to click through different approaches/explanation(-styles). you got a startup there. keep it affordable. 5 bucks a month after u get a propper UI and spaced repetition with different numbers integrated. great, simple, idea! let the copycat-wars begin :D
- viveknathani_ 2y agohahaha thanks! it is easy to put up a paywall but like you rightly pointed out, i'd love to make something worth paying for. until then, i don't know what direction this project will be taking. i'll keep iterating. thanks for writing in!
- DeathArrow 2y agoMaybe you can mention it on r/learnmath? A lot of people would be interested.
- viveknathani_ 2y agoi posted here previously - https://www.reddit.com/r/learnmath/comments/19e8awk/i_wished_for_a_website_with_an_evergrowing_list/ https://www.reddit.com/r/learnmath/comments/19e8awk/i_wished...
- Ciantic 2y agoLooks good, one quick thing: Maybe hide the comments behind a button? Now they are giving away the answer, as some have already posted it there in the first comments.
- viveknathani_ 2y agovalid feedback. thanks, will add this!
- robbiejs 2y agoHey OP, Love the headline. Very confident ;-)
- shoaki 2y agoTo stay in touch with math, the annually publicized math problems from the German Abitur[0] are great! The problems are already separated into three difficulties, making it suitable to include in your website (although they might need translating). [0] https://www.iqb.hu-berlin.de/abitur/pools2023/mathematik/erhoeht/ https://www.iqb.hu-berlin.de/abitur/pools2023/mathematik/erh...
- viveknathani_ 2y agothis seems very interesting! thanks, i will check it out!
- internetter 2y agoPreviously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39113879 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39113879 (92 Comments)
- Brosper 2y agoHmm what about the UX/UI. I don't feel it
- king_magic 2y agoI love this. Great job. Bought you some coffee.
- viveknathani_ 2y agohi, thank you so much, means a lot to me :))))
- mattl 2y agoThe font size is a little small on mobile and the layout breaks if you increase it.
- npilk 2y agoCool website! But I hope titles like these don't become common on HN - I really appreciate the 'no clickbait' policy here.
- ilikegreen 2y agoI remember when you first posted this and it is a project I think upon very frequently! It's nice to see you have made further progress — and that there are comments with attempts at solving! Great job. I still find some problems with the navigation of the problems, but I am not even sure where to go to fix that. It has to do with the difficulty of each problem, but also with how large each topic is: algebra encompasses both linear algebra and linear equation solving, which is a very wide bracket. But you're making progress. That's great! Congratulations on that, and I'll be sure to keep visiting the website.
- viveknathani_ 2y agothis comment has my heart, thank you! i understand that the difficulty metric right now does not do justice to the problem's representation - i will come up with a better solution for this. on the point of topic granularity - i understand that it feels vague right now but i also wonder what the depth should be. i will do some research on how to solve this better. lastly, if you are interested, there's also a small community i am making around this - https://t.me/teachyourselfmath https://t.me/teachyourselfmath thank you for all the feedback!
- mojomark 2y agoCool, but all I see are comments and attempts at solutions. Are the actual correct solutions available somewhere in the app that I'm not seeing?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- eappleby 2y agoI love it! I also built a math focused website. Schools can use it to host Math-A-Thons, which is a type of fundraiser where students answer math problems online and solicit donations to support their school. I made all the math problems available to play for free outside of the platform, as well as guides that help the students answer the problems: https://www.forourschool.org/math-games https://www.forourschool.org/math-games https://www.forourschool.org/math-guides https://www.forourschool.org/math-guides Yay Math!!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- koshergweilo 2y agoSmall nitpick, instead of having a "back to home" button on the left, maybe just make the logo in the navbar a link to the homepage.