nwinter

21 ms·

121.
by nwinter 17y ago
We just had to do this, but shied away from the variable data printing, which was pretty expensive compared to getting a huge batch of identical cards (10x cheaper). We added the codes with transparent sticker labels. We had to affix them o
122.
by nwinter 17y ago
Those are good ideas. I guess we have been targeting focused learners. I'm not sure how much we could offer for free, though, without diluting it for paying users. What do you think? An iPhone app will be awesome, but we're pretty bottlenec
123.
by nwinter 17y ago
No, we can't even start it until next semester. I did do a smaller study last year that showed average writing retention rates of 38%, and it'll be easy to destroy that. Maybe if SLA research is too tight to penetrate, we can still go the t
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by nwinter 17y ago
Ours did too. Well, it's probably more fair to say that it was us and not the idea. We didn't have a lot going for us on paper.
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by nwinter 17y ago
Someone changed the password, I guess. I changed it back.
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by nwinter 17y ago
We allow any stroke order for 女 because a lot of people write it non-standardly in order to make it look better. Skritter's deal is to make spaced repetition easy (premade textbook lists, no need to grade yourself) and efficient (taking adv
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by nwinter 17y ago
The Wacom definitely preserves the rhythm. I dread the thought of what it would take to do cursive instructionally. Thanks for the writing ideas. I think there's a lot more we can do with it.
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by nwinter 17y ago
Thanks, Devin! (Want to get on our front page for saying that?)
129.
by nwinter 17y ago
Yes, I'm probably the fastest on paper because I avoid some of the quirks with the time tracking system. Our top normal user hit 2000 characters essentially from writing scratch (had some reading knowledge) in 100 hours, but now he's at 220
130.
by nwinter 17y ago
Thanks for the positioning advice! I guess I just fell again for the builder's blindness and forgot all I learned from HN about marketing as telling stories to people. We actually do have some users who put together a kung cu list for us...
131.
by nwinter 17y ago
Control group vs. Skritter group, track the time they spend spend studying characters specifically, give them a huge quiz at the end of the semester--not enough? You're right that we can't get a large sample, but we can get a large effect
132.
by nwinter 17y ago
Ah, yes, you're right. Perhaps I'll also say that there aren't a lot of effective competitors, especially for Chinese writing. We are making our own set of language data, which is a lot of work but which does help differentiate because stud
133.
by nwinter 17y ago
Thanks, swombat. I guess printable drill sheets will go on the feature list, but they sound pretty low priority. You're right that writing in the screen only isn't going to do anyone's handwriting any prettiness, but so far it looks like kn
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by nwinter 17y ago
Ah. I think we'll improve the post-signup flow to land you on the vocab lists page.
135.
by nwinter 17y ago
Ah. You've probably just added the entire list at once, where what you want is the "Add starting from..." checkbox. You should delete those (using Select List) or you'll get overwhelmed. We'll work on that UI. Yeah, App Engine doesn't do SQ
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by nwinter 17y ago
A lot, I think. Some of the libraries we called had switched to Mango because Rosetta Stone had become too expensive.
137.
by nwinter 17y ago
Really? I'd guess that it's the advanced learners who can abstract characters better and don't need as accurate a writing style. We're thinking of not repositioning strokes, or maybe not even recognizing them, until each component is comple
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by nwinter 17y ago
We don't have a lot of stats yet, but I'm at 1700 characters after 60 hours of practice, and I probably could only write 600 when I started.
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by nwinter 17y ago
I think we're in a good place for charging for it: it's something that will save users a lot of time and helps with something they're probably already paying a lot more for (learning Chinese). We also have no competition with writing practi
140.
by nwinter 17y ago
Character decompositions while practicing are planned, so when you write each radical or component it'll identify it and give you info on how the character is constructed. That'll take a while, though. We have a radical vocab list, but it's
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by nwinter 18y ago
How difficult would it be to write a virus that fixed common system vulnerabilities? Could one write something that would run Windows Update, download Spybot and some other free antivirus programs to do a sweep, update Java and Flash, etc.?
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by nwinter 18y ago
Meta-discussion blending with topical discussion here, I'd be interested to know what the moderation burden on HN is. HN has maintained quality up to this scale and may be able to prevent additional growth, but what's the cost?
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by nwinter 18y ago
I use the default font size, but rotated my screen, so I get 111 lines. I would hate to go back.
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by nwinter 18y ago
From http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/you-dont-have-a-fo... “Do you know what it means to sinter something? I didn’t; but the kanji are so clear: 焼結 “burn + join”.” I could believe that because specialized vocabulary is transpare
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by nwinter 18y ago
"... but they don't call it telescope science." - unknown
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Modeling Hacker News Upvoting as Poisson Processes(olug.cs.oberlin.edu)
3 points by nwinter 18y ago|0 comments
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by nwinter 18y ago
By daily manual polling, I can track when submissions occurred and how many points they received, but I can't so easily track when they received those points. I could write a program to poll more frequently, to look for changes in each su
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Ask YC: Site usage data for math modeling exercise?
1 points by nwinter 18y ago|2 comments
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by nwinter 19y ago
Interestingly enough, as far as I know, Python ints and floats each take up a cumulative 20 bytes.