I learned how to weld (MIG) and built a giant mushroom to house a mannequin I dubbed "the mushroom man" over about 100 hours in the last 4 weeks. I covered the outside with thick foam panels cut to size, cementing them in place with copious amounts of spray foam. I shaved the outside to a nice shape with a sawzall and the inside I covered in chicken-fenced, then attached a painters tarp to that (so it could be painted on).
To fit on a trailer (the mushroom's cap is 11.5ft wide) the cap comes off the stem and the edges of the cap are two half-moons which have fixed mounting points where threaded rod sticks through some welded washers, and a nut is put on in place. I was too last minute to install the 200 WS2811 pixels and have them run some cool patterns, before the music festival I brought it to came time, but even just a lantern on top (another painters tarp covered the cap's metal-frame, and everything was spray painted) looked great.
Super fun project. Expensive, but I learned a lot, got to be creative, and I'm happy to try out new things and make the best of my before-children time. Also, it was such a joy seeing people croud around the mushroom (and site beside the mushroom man inside) at night during the festival.
MIG is really just a glue gun for metal. For things where structural integrity isn’t critical you MIG stuff together by watching a couple YouTube videos and then going at it.
I was using my dad's shop and MIG welder, so he was able to give me an intro. A buddy of mine is a millwright and came over and kindly taught me some tricks which brought me welds up to an acceptable quality.
After learning, I'd have to agree with one of the other responses, learning by Youtube is probably feasible. It's safer than I expected (less concern about touching metal in the ground path) though I'd strongly recommend investing in quality gloves, a quality helmet, and good thick pants, and a long-sleeved shirt / overcoat.
I thought about taking a course but I found this way of learning a lot more fun and engaging (if you're fortunate, as I am, to have experienced people in your life).
I spent a week building a website that is a repository of timeless content. It generally consists of old magazine articles (though not exclusively) that you can pick up at any time and will bring value to your life. I notice most of what we consume on daily basis is ephemeral and not all that valuable outside of the moment, whereas ever-present content is always valuable.
The unique angle here is that each article includes a hand-written summary explaining why the article was meaningful to the curator. This gives you a quick window into the piece without being overwhelming.
Since this is a free website mostly to be shared with friends and family, I implemented user login via "phone number" to save and submit articles, but without a one-time token. So it's "password-less" for now; a trust-based system.
It's basically 'done' - but I'm not sure that I want to share it publicly for the aforementioned reasons. I've been using it on my subway rides to read more interesting stuff. So far so good.
From that I’m guessing you don’t want to open it to random HN folk, but if you ever do, it sounds a great resource and something I’d love to participate in.
I got so upset with Docusign being too expensive and unfair, that I quit my last startup to build a new one.
I built a complete platform over the past 3 years, that doesn't require a subscription and you only pay for what you send. Give it a go if you need to send a document that needs to be signed.
I'm using safari all the time.
Gah yes - appreciate the screenshots. I'll get that sorted tonight, I've recently rolled those two section out and missed checking it for mobile. Doh...
The joys of solo development.
Really good job! Just a note your pricing comparison table looks a bit shady. I think you should give either your per year cost compared to the others, or put the document cost on the others. But the way you've done it makes it look like you are tricking people into thinking yours is cheaper. That's just the vibe I'm getting from it. I think that's what you want the takeaway to be there, so I'd suggest updating that slightly.
The others don't do a document cost, so it does make it much harder to compare.
The others just have a document limit, eg Docusign has a 100 document limit per user.
Docusign has a really high cost per user (I don't charge for users, only for sends).
So it is harder to compare apples with apples – at the end of the day GoodSign is just that simple. $1.50 per send, unlimited users : )
I choose 6 – because that's about the typical team size I see with GoodSign. So that feels like a good comparison.
Thanks for pointing the pricing out - it really is that terrible! Hence why I built a product I would buy and I could understand. : )
I have been looking for something like this, but the pricing is too high for my use case. It needs to be comparable to just printing the document and signing with pens, or it's not generally worth it to me. It seems wild to me that something that in principal could be basically free costs so much.
This is nice, but I think it would be even better if you had some sort of unlimited plan or volume price (I see the $1k offer but that still is pretty high). A person conducting a survey with NDAs with 150 would find this useful, but if i am regularly conducting surveys with at least 1k people who have to sign NDAs, your pricing model becomes unfavorable.
Appreciate the feedback - you probably could do something much simpler for NDA. I don't really think you need a signature, a check box would be good enough in your survey saying they've agreed to your NDA.
GoodSign works really well for multiple signers, employment contracts and small to medium startups that are want a better signing tool and document management - but don't feel like the high prices of other tools is justified.
The folks from Agree.com just started up to do the same thing... what do you think of them? Sounds like one of those times when folks think the same thing at the same time?
my wife and I have a new side project: we're opening a bookshop! the last local store is closing due to retirement and we figure the community demand is still there. we're negotiating the lease, sorting out how to order a lot of bookshelves, and source the initial inventory. i'm currently figuring out how to connect our point of sale system to our accounting software. good times. :)
I hope you succeed. This would be a dream of mine, have a cozy bookshop, with maybe a cafe, or something like that. The world deserves more bookstores, they are beautiful and each one is unique. Honestly, I wish you the best and, as someone who would love to live it through but possibly won't, I'd love if you start a weekly newsletter telling what you are doing/learning in the process!
yeah, it was the same for us. really one day we woke up, talked about it, and agreed, why not. worst case, i'll work a few more years than i had originally planned or whatever. best cast, we have delivered a valuable service to the community and can work on it for many years. my wife will be full time and it's very much her dream too. i hadn't thought of the newsletter but that's such a good idea...stay tuned, i might dm you.
I'm pretty sure that the owners of Belmont Books in Belmont, MA also opened their store out of a love of bookstores & the community surrounding it. Best of luck to you!
https://www.belmontbooks.com/ (no affiliation)
Even if you can’t have a full service cafe, having a commercial coffee brewer (do they make tea ones?) could add that extra oomph. I like nothing more than sitting at a table and perusing my new book while sipping on some hot coffee or tea.
What accounting is it and what POS?
Cuz for $15/m I have one that connects with Quickbooks online and xero natively.
Would be more than enough for a bookstore / coffee.
It’s well know and used all over the world.
I've heard that IKEA "Billy" bookshelves are very popular, including among people who heavily customize them into creations that look nothing like the original.
That's lovely. I'm still in university, but one thing I've wanted to do since I was a kid is to have a small bookshop or library later in life. Thanks for showing me it can be done!
Ah, my wife and I have always wanted to do the same. We would like to make it a bookshop for dog charity. Hope we get there some day as well. Keep up the good work!
we have a really great local library system where i live so what we're working on is definitely more a local store. we'll have a mix of titles based on our knowledge of community preferences (my wife is also a writer and knows much more than me about the local scene), seasonal titles (e.g. featuring new and old horror titles in october), plus events like author readings and educational seminars.
at full retail price, you're often looking at 40-50% for books...but then everything goes on sale at some point. sideline merch (think the stuffed animals in the kids section) can get 60%+. but after rent, expenses, etc. we're just hoping to break even in year 1. the math suggests its possible but we're about to find out empirically. in the end, most evidence also suggests there are a lot easier ways to make $30k net a year. but it's a community project as a much as a business.
Building algorithmic trading models. So far results continue to be good with every model outperforming the market on both absolute and risk-adjusted basis since going live.
This is an unleveraged, apples to apples comparison. These are not high frequency trading models. Most of them only change signal once every 2-4 weeks on average. During long signals, the models are simply long the S&P 500 and during short signals, they go to cash.
One of the pros of this macro swing-trading/hedging style is high tax efficiency, by holding a core ETF long position that never gets sold and then selling S&P 500 futures (ES or MES) of equal value to the ETFs against the long position. This way your account will accumulate unrealized capital gains indefinitely and you'll only pay tax on the net result of successful hedging. The cherry on top is that the S&P 500 futures are section 1256 contracts that are taxed at 60% long term / 40% short term capital gains rates regardless of the duration they are held.
The models use a variety of indicators, many of them custom built. Most important are various VIX metrics (absolute level, VIX futures curve shape/slope, divergences against S&P 500 price, etc), trend-following TA metrics (MACD, EMV, etc), mean-reversion TA metrics (Bollinger Bands, CMO, etc), macroeconomic (unemployment, housing starts, leading composite), and monetary policy (yield curve inversion, equity risk premium, dot plot, etc). They've been backtested very cautiously to avoid overfitting to the best of my ability.
I've been curious about doing algotrading for both the data engineering aspect and the quant. Do you have suggestions about books or others sources to get inspiration from ?
Is this a one man venture or do you have a group discussing edges ?
For inspiration, I highly recommend "The Man Who Solved the Market" about James Simons and Renaissance Technologies. Some of Ernie Chan's books are great for learning about the basics, but ultimately finding an edge is the most difficult part. Books can teach you some of the best practices for researching edges, how to avoid common pitfalls in backtesting, etc, but no book will ever lay out the details of any strategy that contains alpha of course.
Grizzly Bulls is currently a one man (and wife) venture :)
I've looked before for good online communities but never found one, I'd be interested if anyone has a source. The best people work for hedge funds so wont disclose anything and the individuals out there mostly are clueless or lucky, I suspect its too hard to find an edge without the resources of a large firm.
I expect the long term CAGR for the top models to be in the 20-40% annual range. That's certainly high enough to get wealthy over a couple decades, or sooner if you are already starting with 8 figures, but it's not overnight Roaring Kitty style fast money. Grizzly Bulls' growing revenue helps even out my overall income, and I could definitely see it growing to $10M+ ARR over the long term, very significant even with a 9 figure net worth.
The models are not HFT. Swing-trading the most liquid instrument in the world (ES futures) has extremely high strategy capacity, well into the billions or perhaps 10s of billions, so selling signals does not (currently) in any way negatively impact my own returns.
The alternative would be to start a hedge fund, but that's an expensive and highly regulated endeavor that appeals to a different audience.
How would I even go about starting investing using this? Let's say I have a trading212 account or similar? Where do you even start? Do you have a "how to get started page" assuming someone knows little about investing.
https://grizzlybulls.com/how-it-works is the best page I have explaining the basics, but I probably need to be more accommodating to complete beginners. Grizzly Bulls is intended to be a great complement to the buy and hold passive indexing strategy that most people use.
The easiest way to use Grizzly Bulls is to hold VOO in any brokerage account, sell it when the model generates a sell signal, and then rebuy it when the model generates the next buy signal. A slightly more advanced but more tax efficient approach would be to open a margin account with futures trading permissions and sell S&P 500 Futures (ES or MES) of equal value to your VOO during sell signals, then repurchase the contracts you sold during the next buy signal. With this method, I've found you can usually reduce your overall tax burden to less than 15% and you'll only owe taxes on the net result of your futures trading.
I use Interactive Brokers for automated trade execution and as data source for real-time ES and VIX data. Data for the other indicators comes from a wide variety of sources. One of my favorites is https://fred.stlouisfed.org/.
Not yet, but I plan to write a revised edition incorporating some of the feedback I've gotten in the near future. I'll include a digital version with it.
Yes, in fact non-bull regimes are where they earn most of their relative outperformance. During buy signals, it's impossible for the models to outperform as they are long the S&P 500. During sell signals, they are in cash with the hopes of rebuying lower (doesn't always work out as they are of course imperfect). When the market is rising with low volatility, there aren't as many opportunities for outperformance.
Yes, but that's why the preferred method of implementation is using the S&P 500 futures (ES and MES) as the hedging tool during sell signals. With this method, you hold your preferred ETFs/stocks of choice forever and continue to accumulate unrealized gains indefinitely. Then on sell signals, you sell ES and MES of equivalent value to your long holdings to effectively go market neutral.
At the end of each year, you'll only owe taxes on the net result of your hedging with futures, and futures are section 1256 contracts so they are taxed as 60% long term gains / 40% short term gains regardless of holding period. In practice, I've found that this usually works out to an effective capital gains tax of less than 15% of annual profits. If a strategy returns a gross 30%, then the after-tax return would be about 25.5%.
Also, if you implement in a retirement account which many of our members do, capital gains are irrelevant.
You have a point, but it still makes sense to report before tax performance. Before tax performance depends on model only, but after tax performance depends on model and the user. this website couldn't report that even if it wanted.
It's essentially a simpler, read-only, AWS dashboard where everything is a filterable, searchable, exportable-to-CSV table, with some extra features like multi-region mode, saved notes, and a debugger for access denied errors.
It uses the AWS SDK for JavaScript, so everything is run client-side from your browser. I'm not 100% sure what direction I'm taking it yet, but it's been fun to hack on!
Thankfully programmatic. It’s a common UI table widget, essentially, and I’ve written some custom code to handle multi-region support, updating the AWS credential handler, pagination, and response processing. From there, it’s a matter of plugging in some common options for each AWS service: the service name, SDK method to call, pagination property (annoyingly, AWS API has numerous ways of paginating responses), etc. Takes about five minutes to add a new service.
I'm using ag-grid for my project too. I did a bunch of work to make configuring it more declarative... so you can have pinned rows that read from a different data source for summary stats, so you can specify custom renderers for each column. how have you found ag-grid to use?
I'm working on https://nuenki.app/, a language learning tool. It teaches you a language while you procrastinate by inserting translations of appropriate-difficulty sentences into webpages as you browse HN etc.
Currently trying to reduce costs by switching from using DeepL (high quality, low latency, high cost) everywhere to a hybrid that also uses Claude (high quality, high latency, low cost) for text that is far from the user. Also experimenting with Gemma 2 9B via Groq to go in between them, but it's bad at following instructions and I don't quite trust the quality numbers I'm seeing for it (they're benchmarked with gpt-4o as a judge).
I'm also trying to work out marketing. I'm not good at it, and I dislike it, but I need to get good at it. Currently considering Reddit ads for awareness, some content marketing going over the technical details (there's some fun language processing and performance optimisations), and... I feel that's not enough, but I'm not sure what to add to that.
I'm running on very little budget (I just left school and I'd rather not go into my limited savings over this), so I can't afford to just throw money at ads.
Toucan has a similar concept, but it works on individual words rather than sentences. Beyond a smaller scope, it's also quite difficult to accurately translate single words without context - Nuenki has it disabled by default.
The tradeoff is that Toucan is free, and translation is quite expensive.
Would be really useful to have some way to hear the translated sentences so that you can also learn how it's supposed to be said - would be very useful for learning Japanese.
Some feedback: I was about to try now (paying) but currently I can only install it in my desktop (no iOS support), and I am very worried about the idea of giving full access to a close-source unpopular extension with not-very-clear ownership.
I think it would go a long way to create some trust to show who are you in the webpage and maybe open source the extension too (the backend is not as importa nt).
I'm considering open sourcing the extension. I don't want people to be able to copy it wholesale, but realistically that's unlikely and I'm going to write some blog posts on the technical details anyway.
awesome! i am also exploring “low effort language learning” space and making an app. would be interested in bouncing some ideas, got a social handle to share?
looks cool,it would be useful to have transliterations for non latin alphabet languages,or at least pinyin for Chinese, since learning characters is somewhat orthogonal to the words.
Building a web app that lets me do math and chemistry problems on an infinite canvas with a drawing tablet. After finishing the problem, I can open up an integrated text editor (with vim bindings) that lets me create Anki flashcards about the problem, letting me copy different portions of the handwritten/hand-drawn stuff onto the flashcard.
I developed a very simple compiler to specify flashcard content. Anything inside brackets is considered the "back" of the flashcard (cloze) in Anki. The @n references the nth group in the canvas, and copies those svg paths into the flashcard.
Example card:
How do you solve for x in this problem?
@0 // handwritten text of 2x = 4
[
Divide both sides by 2, them simplify
]
This project was a response to the lack of systematic review in my college's STEM classes. I would practice a lot, but forget how to approach certain problems on exams. The hope is to have a digital space where I can be reasonably productive in solving practice problems, but also lets me easily integrate with SRS tools.
I wish educators and educational institutions would make an attempt to incorporate SRS into classes. I think it would help a lot of students, especially for cumulative final exams.
Nice. SRS integration is my ultimate yak-shave when learning something new.
> I wish educators and educational institutions would make an attempt to incorporate SRS into classes. I think it would help a lot of students, especially for cumulative final exams.
Some of us try to. But when teaching middle-high school aged children the problem is almost always one of motivation and engagement rather than tooling and methodology.
You can take a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. Worst case scenario you try to enforce SRS activities and some students develop an aversion to an incredibly powerful tool.
My sweet spot was something like "here is an app called Anki, here is a deck of content we will cover in this class (tagged by week), try it out and see if its useful for you". Even then I was slightly conflicted because I've always wondered how much of the utility I've gotten from SRS came from sitting down and making the decks myself...
Readit News
To fit on a trailer (the mushroom's cap is 11.5ft wide) the cap comes off the stem and the edges of the cap are two half-moons which have fixed mounting points where threaded rod sticks through some welded washers, and a nut is put on in place. I was too last minute to install the 200 WS2811 pixels and have them run some cool patterns, before the music festival I brought it to came time, but even just a lantern on top (another painters tarp covered the cap's metal-frame, and everything was spray painted) looked great.
Super fun project. Expensive, but I learned a lot, got to be creative, and I'm happy to try out new things and make the best of my before-children time. Also, it was such a joy seeing people croud around the mushroom (and site beside the mushroom man inside) at night during the festival.
I learned to weld awhile back, but haven't pulled the trigger on purchasing all the stuff I need.
After learning, I'd have to agree with one of the other responses, learning by Youtube is probably feasible. It's safer than I expected (less concern about touching metal in the ground path) though I'd strongly recommend investing in quality gloves, a quality helmet, and good thick pants, and a long-sleeved shirt / overcoat.
I thought about taking a course but I found this way of learning a lot more fun and engaging (if you're fortunate, as I am, to have experienced people in your life).
something like this works well.
https://a.co/d/8XMYx7j
for thin steel or aluminum you really do need shielding gas.
https://youtu.be/X4WkDDnvS7g
Deleted Comment
The unique angle here is that each article includes a hand-written summary explaining why the article was meaningful to the curator. This gives you a quick window into the piece without being overwhelming.
Since this is a free website mostly to be shared with friends and family, I implemented user login via "phone number" to save and submit articles, but without a one-time token. So it's "password-less" for now; a trust-based system.
It's basically 'done' - but I'm not sure that I want to share it publicly for the aforementioned reasons. I've been using it on my subway rides to read more interesting stuff. So far so good.
screenshot - https://i.imgur.com/8kIrgBt.png
I built a complete platform over the past 3 years, that doesn't require a subscription and you only pay for what you send. Give it a go if you need to send a document that needs to be signed.
https://goodsign.io
https://up2store.de/file/4RpE3Q2fuK8Dj4S4/kjcZbp9k8srjpcx8/I...
https://up2store.de/file/4RpE3Q2fuK8Dj4S4/o71komFm2AoTGjvU/I...
The others just have a document limit, eg Docusign has a 100 document limit per user. Docusign has a really high cost per user (I don't charge for users, only for sends).
So it is harder to compare apples with apples – at the end of the day GoodSign is just that simple. $1.50 per send, unlimited users : )
I choose 6 – because that's about the typical team size I see with GoodSign. So that feels like a good comparison.
Thanks for pointing the pricing out - it really is that terrible! Hence why I built a product I would buy and I could understand. : )
> It needs to be comparable to just printing the document and signing with pens
When you factor in the price of buying a printer, and move the printed doc around for multiple persons to sign, it is comparable if not cheaper.
[0] https://goodsign.io
What do web apps like DocuSign offer that Preview doesn’t?
Great job all the same, this is nice.
GoodSign works really well for multiple signers, employment contracts and small to medium startups that are want a better signing tool and document management - but don't feel like the high prices of other tools is justified.
I've heard that IKEA "Billy" bookshelves are very popular, including among people who heavily customize them into creations that look nothing like the original.
What kind of margins do book stores typically have?
Since launching https://grizzlybulls.com in January 2022:
Model | Return | Max drawdown
-------------------
S&P 500 (benchmark) | 21.51% | -27.56%
VIX TA Macro MP Extreme | 64.21% | -16.48%
VIX TA Macro Advanced| 59.13% | -19.12%
VIX TA Advanced | 35.20% | -22.96%
VIX Advanced | 33.39% | -23.93%
VIX Basic | 24.29% | -24.23%
TA - Mean Reversion | 22.30% | -19.92%
TA - Trend | 27.07% | -24.98%
This is an unleveraged, apples to apples comparison. These are not high frequency trading models. Most of them only change signal once every 2-4 weeks on average. During long signals, the models are simply long the S&P 500 and during short signals, they go to cash.
One of the pros of this macro swing-trading/hedging style is high tax efficiency, by holding a core ETF long position that never gets sold and then selling S&P 500 futures (ES or MES) of equal value to the ETFs against the long position. This way your account will accumulate unrealized capital gains indefinitely and you'll only pay tax on the net result of successful hedging. The cherry on top is that the S&P 500 futures are section 1256 contracts that are taxed at 60% long term / 40% short term capital gains rates regardless of the duration they are held.
The models use a variety of indicators, many of them custom built. Most important are various VIX metrics (absolute level, VIX futures curve shape/slope, divergences against S&P 500 price, etc), trend-following TA metrics (MACD, EMV, etc), mean-reversion TA metrics (Bollinger Bands, CMO, etc), macroeconomic (unemployment, housing starts, leading composite), and monetary policy (yield curve inversion, equity risk premium, dot plot, etc). They've been backtested very cautiously to avoid overfitting to the best of my ability.
Is this a one man venture or do you have a group discussing edges ?
Grizzly Bulls is currently a one man (and wife) venture :)
The models are not HFT. Swing-trading the most liquid instrument in the world (ES futures) has extremely high strategy capacity, well into the billions or perhaps 10s of billions, so selling signals does not (currently) in any way negatively impact my own returns.
The alternative would be to start a hedge fund, but that's an expensive and highly regulated endeavor that appeals to a different audience.
The easiest way to use Grizzly Bulls is to hold VOO in any brokerage account, sell it when the model generates a sell signal, and then rebuy it when the model generates the next buy signal. A slightly more advanced but more tax efficient approach would be to open a margin account with futures trading permissions and sell S&P 500 Futures (ES or MES) of equal value to your VOO during sell signals, then repurchase the contracts you sold during the next buy signal. With this method, I've found you can usually reduce your overall tax burden to less than 15% and you'll only owe taxes on the net result of your futures trading.
Do you run it with good volumes or are these returns “as if”?
This trades the S&P 500. The SPY ETF along trades 21 billion dollars a day of volume. He'd probably need to trade a billion dollars to impact it.
Deleted Comment
great start, and good luck.
At the end of each year, you'll only owe taxes on the net result of your hedging with futures, and futures are section 1256 contracts so they are taxed as 60% long term gains / 40% short term gains regardless of holding period. In practice, I've found that this usually works out to an effective capital gains tax of less than 15% of annual profits. If a strategy returns a gross 30%, then the after-tax return would be about 25.5%.
Also, if you implement in a retirement account which many of our members do, capital gains are irrelevant.
It's essentially a simpler, read-only, AWS dashboard where everything is a filterable, searchable, exportable-to-CSV table, with some extra features like multi-region mode, saved notes, and a debugger for access denied errors.
It uses the AWS SDK for JavaScript, so everything is run client-side from your browser. I'm not 100% sure what direction I'm taking it yet, but it's been fun to hack on!
There's a live demo here: https://wut.dev/?service=ec2&type=instances&demo=true if you want to try it out.
https://buckaroo-data.readthedocs.io/en/latest/examples/inde... I need to clean up those examples.
Currently trying to reduce costs by switching from using DeepL (high quality, low latency, high cost) everywhere to a hybrid that also uses Claude (high quality, high latency, low cost) for text that is far from the user. Also experimenting with Gemma 2 9B via Groq to go in between them, but it's bad at following instructions and I don't quite trust the quality numbers I'm seeing for it (they're benchmarked with gpt-4o as a judge).
I'm also trying to work out marketing. I'm not good at it, and I dislike it, but I need to get good at it. Currently considering Reddit ads for awareness, some content marketing going over the technical details (there's some fun language processing and performance optimisations), and... I feel that's not enough, but I'm not sure what to add to that.
I'm running on very little budget (I just left school and I'd rather not go into my limited savings over this), so I can't afford to just throw money at ads.
Toucan [1] does something similar (but I think only at a word level, not sentences), so might be worth looking at what they do in terms of marketing.
Also, have you considered throwing in a spaced repetition component to the process? Really helpful when building an active voc.
[1] https://jointoucan.com/
Looking forward to being able to save specific words/phrases for future review + audio functionality + pinyin for Chinese please :)
The tradeoff is that Toucan is free, and translation is quite expensive.
I think it would go a long way to create some trust to show who are you in the webpage and maybe open source the extension too (the backend is not as importa nt).
Here's my github: https://github.com/Alex-Programs
I'm considering open sourcing the extension. I don't want people to be able to copy it wholesale, but realistically that's unlikely and I'm going to write some blog posts on the technical details anyway.
Not good for anything serious, but fun.
Would you typically have the pinyin above the Chinese characters (like Furigana) or show it separately?
I'm not sure what the quality is like though.
If you'd like I can contact you when I've added support for it. What's your email/discord?
Mine is alex@nuenki.app / alexc.j on Discord.
I developed a very simple compiler to specify flashcard content. Anything inside brackets is considered the "back" of the flashcard (cloze) in Anki. The @n references the nth group in the canvas, and copies those svg paths into the flashcard.
Example card:
This project was a response to the lack of systematic review in my college's STEM classes. I would practice a lot, but forget how to approach certain problems on exams. The hope is to have a digital space where I can be reasonably productive in solving practice problems, but also lets me easily integrate with SRS tools.I wish educators and educational institutions would make an attempt to incorporate SRS into classes. I think it would help a lot of students, especially for cumulative final exams.
Edit: Here's a screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/Yaq7vBx
> I wish educators and educational institutions would make an attempt to incorporate SRS into classes. I think it would help a lot of students, especially for cumulative final exams.
Some of us try to. But when teaching middle-high school aged children the problem is almost always one of motivation and engagement rather than tooling and methodology.
You can take a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. Worst case scenario you try to enforce SRS activities and some students develop an aversion to an incredibly powerful tool.
My sweet spot was something like "here is an app called Anki, here is a deck of content we will cover in this class (tagged by week), try it out and see if its useful for you". Even then I was slightly conflicted because I've always wondered how much of the utility I've gotten from SRS came from sitting down and making the decks myself...