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Interesting concept, but 100 words is really quite a lot to get through... It's tiresome trudging through the easy words at the start, and I never got to see th
by sd9 4mo ago
Interesting concept, but 100 words is really quite a lot to get through... It's tiresome trudging through the easy words at the start, and I never got to see the interesting words before getting bored.
I've seen other systems like this calibrate far more quickly by assigning a sort of score and confidence behind the scenes. Confidence starts out low and increases over time - correct/incorrect answers rapidly adjust score at the beginning, then things settle down.
In practice this means you get a sequence of increasingly uncommon words initially, until you get one wrong, then you drop back to something easier until you start getting things right again, and eventually circle around words at your level.
Also - too many clicks per word. It's low stakes, just let me click the definition once and I'll live if I misclick (or add an undo button).
- datsci_est_2015 4mo ago> Also - too many clicks per word. It's low stakes, just let me click the definition once and I'll live if I misclick. This, and accept that people will have incorrect input and build it into the confidence. Even the smartest person in the world sometimes makes clerical errors, or has the wrong neuron fire at the wrong moment.
- thenthenthen 4mo agoMoly holy the clicking is too much 3 clicks that could be one :O
- conradludgate 4mo ago300* that could be 100*
- Karliss 4mo agoEven better if keyboard keys (1,2,3,4) were also supported.
- gpt5 4mo ago[dead]
- latexr 4mo ago> Also - too many clicks per word. They’re also too far away. I’m on a laptop and I have to keep moving the cursor up and down just to confirm. Give each option a letter or number and let me press it to choose the answer¹. ¹ There is (was?) some service for forms which does that and it works quite well. I think it was Typeform, but I just opened the website to check and—of course—it’s now just plastered with mentions of AI so I lost interest in verifying.
- analog8374 4mo agoit's intentional. therefore testing vocab isn't the point. I'm guessing it's testing our susceptibility to machine-generated compliments
- latexr 4mo ago> it's intentional. What is? > I'm guessing it's testing our susceptibility to machine-generated compliments I fail to see the point. For one, the compliments aren’t particularly good or interesting; for another, I didn’t even read them (I just went back to check after your comment), I simply clicked when seeing green.
- analog8374 4mo agotoo many clicks per word. and the distance between click points. that's intentional. well the point would be to see how susceptible you are to that. They're figuring out where your cost vs reward tipping point is.
- philipwhiuk 4mo agoThere's a small handful, mostly QI-inspired.
- latexr 4mo agoI think you’re reading too much into it. I think it’s just a common design pattern that was copied and is clearly optimised for mobile, where the distance doesn’t matter that much. Anyway, if they were running metrics on that they just became useless because I automated responding to it a bunch of times. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48598586#48600403 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48598586#48600403
- sandworm101 4mo ago100 is too many? Thats two or three minutes at most. I would suggest a bias in this test towards reading. More than a couple are words i know but rarely see in print. But maybe im too much a fan of british TV so i hear many of thier words without seeing them written down.
- sd9 4mo agoDid you actually do 100 words? It wasn't two or three minutes. With good UX, sure. But I wasn't getting through 1 word per second.
- sandworm101 4mo agoI did. Missed two. If you know a word there is no thinking time. Im on tablet so i was probably fast on the clicking, but not like korean gamer fast.
- sd9 4mo agoI guess you just have a higher tolerance for inconvenience than me
- ralferoo 4mo agoI don't know, I read each option for the first 20 or 30 in case there were any trick questions. There were a couple later where 1 option was very close to the meaning and 1 was much better. I actually got one wrong (can't remember what now, shame there's no summary at the end) where I chose one and it said another answer was correct, but I knew the meaning I chose was also valid.
- DC-3 4mo agoIt also doesn't get hard enough. Also way too many of the words are just words about long words, or the tendency to be verbose.
- thenthenthen 4mo agoLol. Yeah. Non native here but gave up at about 50 words. Too many words, too easy. And my English SUCKS
- haswell 4mo agoIf you gave up at 50, that means you skipped the difficult words.
- 2dvisio 4mo agoAgree. Complexity for me skyrocketed towards the end
- tengwar2 4mo agoYes - a very marked step rather than a gradual increase, I thought.
- thenthenthen 4mo agoTrue. I tried a few more times. There is just so much wrong with the design. First 90 words super easy and then super hard? Why not random? Why is the longest description the correct one? Why so many? Why 3 clicks?
- alentred 4mo ago> It also doesn't get hard enough Oh come on! Like you really knew what "Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia" is?
- iugtmkbdfil834 4mo ago:D I did better than expected, but I did miss that one. I learned some fun ones.
- sowbug 4mo agoPlus a scroll on mobile because the submit button is below the fold, though it seems to stay in the right place after the first scroll.
- dolebirchwood 4mo agoVibe coders don't know 'bout my dvh.
- cyanydeez 4mo agoyeah, it should just be click->next; I got tired after 8 words, looked at how many I'm suppose to know and gave up. It'd be improved with statistical analysis; just progressively get harder and try to guess. If you wanted to gameify, you could update the stats after each answer.
- dylanz 4mo ago+1 to all these points especially the first one. I dropped off after about 10 words and didn't have a clear path to move to the next level.
- jwpapi 4mo agoAlso the explanations are too broad. F.e. Frugal - Economical with money or goods I don’t think frugal means economical it means rather over the top … Yeah I don’t know how to define it properly but I don’t need to learn new words if they don’t even teach the right meaning Ai slop
- Per_Bothner 4mo ago"Frugal" most definitely does not mean "rather over the top" unless that is some new slang meaning I've never heard of.
- tom_ 4mo agoYou can look it up in a dictionary? See, e.g., https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=frugal https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=fruga...
- FLHerne 4mo agoThat seems a pretty good definition of 'frugal' to me. To be excessively frugal would be miserly, tight-fisted or whatever. There were a couple of definitions I did think were a bit off, e.g. 'zenith' and 'nihilism'. And one word where two answers seemed valid but I forget which. Sometimes it gives one of several possible meanings but that's a valid choice. In general I think it's a fun quiz - agreed with others though that the word selection brackets aren't ideal. It spends a lot of time on everyday vocabulary, then jumps straight into long words that someone made up one day as a joke. The words I find most interesting are those that convey some subtle nuance, or describe some very specific thing - tools for old crafts, uncommon but genuinely used adjectives and the like. Very few of those appear.
- LeonB 4mo agoThat definition hinges on their definition for “economical” - adding a qualifier like “excessively economical” would’ve been good I think.
- jwpapi 4mo agoSeems like I’m the idiot here. I had frugal stored as more than just economical. Thanks for your comments :/