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Show HN: I'm 17 and made a tool to help students study smarter

lira.study

21–24 of 24 posts

Re: Show HN: I'm 17 and made a tool to help students study smarter

#21
> Works Undetected

> LIRA works in the background on any webpage.

This is false. If you mutate the DOM on the page, you're trivially detectable. Unless this is meant as a honeypot you should at least warn your users that you're only undetectable as long as the edtech sites don't care to try.

Courtesy of ChatGPT 4o mini:

  const onPopupDetected = (node) => {
    console.log(' element detected:', node);
  };

  const observer = new MutationObserver((mutationsList, observer) => {
    for (const mutation of mutationsList) {
      if (mutation.type === 'childList') {
        mutation.addedNodes.forEach((node) => {
          if (node.nodeName.toLowerCase() === 'lira-popup') {
            onPopupDetected(node);
          }
        });
      }
    }
  });

  observer.observe(document.body, {
    childList: true,
    subtree: true,
  });

Re: Show HN: I'm 17 and made a tool to help students study smarter

#22
post #5

So: - The first example is a multiple choice question being answered by AI. - “The hero text below says: “LIRA lets you quickly save notes, summarize, and answer questions on any webpage, undetected .” (emphasis in original) This sounds more like a cheating engine than a “study tool”.

Good educational systems don't use multiple choice questions and surely important exams are done without access to the net.

Cheating is easy to defeat, at least in the hard sciences, you just can't do it on the cheap.

Re: Show HN: I'm 17 and made a tool to help students study smarter

#23
post #12

I'm skeptical about this product, and while my age might introduce (17 year old as well , though no cool project other than some ai made bogus , just learning / looking at cool stuff) with some bias, I have a lot of criticisms. The project seems like an underwhelming alternative to Anki (which I use), enhanced dim wittedly with AI. More importantly, the marketing approach feels misguided. My primary issue is that Pro…

As a previously precocious young teen, I would have agreed with your point but as someone who is now a boring adult I disagree. Projects are often and will continue to be judged by their marketing. There are many such cases of "I'm X years old and I made Y" posts on Hacker News reaching the front page. As a founder, you should use whatever you can to get eyeballs on your product. As a hacker, you should try to make s…

> As a founder, you should use whatever you can to get eyeballs on your product.

I am not a founder so maybe my side of reasoning is flawed as a customer but I come in the belief that there is good advertising and bad advertising.

Some people consider both advertising to be good but I don't think so.

For example , the discussion we are having right now could be considered as an example of bad advertising I mean , think about it , why are we discussing about the age of the product's creator in the first place aside from the fact that he tried to catch our precious attention by such advertising.

I also don't think that the current apple intelligence ads are good advertising. They are in the news / It was my first time watching an apple ads intentionally (I have ad blocker) , and I cringed half way through. I felt even righter that as an android user , I am right (maybe it was a self serving bias that because I am an android user , I watched iphone ad to improve my ego)

Maybe its my open source mentality but I am way way more impressed not by marketing fuzzbuzz but rather the merit of the tool , I don't care if its a zero star repo on github , (eg: https://github.com/heroslender/lg-remote) I am his only star on his repo and I love his work that he has done on this project

My line of thinking is simple if the tool has merit (for ideological reasons , I prefer open source) , I am going to use it. But if you think that you can use catchy terms to catch my attention , well sure you got my attention , but in the long term I am going to remember how you got my attention in first place (whether on the basis of merit or marketing fizzbuzz) I really hate the latter

Re: Show HN: I'm 17 and made a tool to help students study smarter

#24

This product claims to unlock "smarter" studying. How does it make studying smarter? I'm assuming this uses some LLM to generate answers. How can you guarantee that they are accurate, as you claim? I'm skeptical of this product simply because I don't believe studying is hard because we don't have enough tools. It's hard because the process to build knowledge is inherently long. It takes patience and revisiting topics…

This is going to be controversial, but I think there are instances where cheating is acceptable. Primarily when studying something that one has lesser interest in, and doesn't impact how they'd function in the real world. If the time saved by cheating is invested in another skill that one is more inclined towards, then I don't personally see the harm. Of course, if cheating is entirely relied upon and abused, then it…

Cheating being acceptable ultimately comes down to a moral judgement. My issue with this product is that I don't think it's effective. Also, its marketed as a "smarter way to study", which, unless is a gross euphemism, doesn't seem to have "cheating" as its goal.
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