Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: I wished for a site with a growing list of math problems, I built it

teachyourselfmath.app

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 95 posts

Re: Show HN: I wished for a site with a growing list of math problems, I built it

#21

Post by dotancohen »

ethanwillis wrote: post #11

Why don't you actually put effort into actually writing out the problems? I'm not going to do your work for you and I'm not going to pat you on the back for scraping good content in a sloppy way. So here's a really good example of the problem with what you're doing. https://teachyourselfmath.app/problem?id=18 I really hope to see this improve because the idea is good. The execution is not

  > I really hope to see this improve because the idea is good. The execution is not.
The scraping and storage is simply a search engine. This site would be very valuable if it just presented the information as a search engine - with links to the original documents.

Re: Show HN: I wished for a site with a growing list of math problems, I built it

#23

Post by nilsherzig »

viveknathani_ wrote: post #3
fragmede wrote: post #2

This is great but those are some really hard questions! Some links to math textbooks to help figure out answers would be great.

I am working on exposing the difficulty for every problem. With a larger problem set and an ability to filter by difficulty, this problem can be solved I think. One of the ideas that came up in feedback is that I could have an AI driven experience to walk a user through the question's topic and give enough pointers to eventually arrive at a solution. I am still thinking about the best way to approach this problem in…

I tried to teach myself my current math course at university like this. Turns out gpt4 really isn't capable of doing that yet.

When asked to solve and explain something it produced a right answer to a problem with a solid explanation I could easily follow. (Or ask more in depth questions about it).

When asked to push me to the right solution by asking me things / walking me through the steps, it got "confused" and more often than not produced a wrong answer.

Re: Show HN: I wished for a site with a growing list of math problems, I built it

#25

Post by viveknathani_ »

grenoire wrote: post #17
ethanwillis wrote: post #11

Why don't you actually put effort into actually writing out the problems? I'm not going to do your work for you and I'm not going to pat you on the back for scraping good content in a sloppy way. So here's a really good example of the problem with what you're doing. https://teachyourselfmath.app/problem?id=18 I really hope to see this improve because the idea is good. The execution is not

I see that he's getting downvoted, but there are minor errors indeed. Problem 31 ( https://teachyourselfmath.app/problem?id=31 ) doesn't list the problem inputs, for example.

hey! thanks for pointing this out, checking this.

Re: Show HN: I wished for a site with a growing list of math problems, I built it

#26

Post by viveknathani_ »

dotancohen wrote: post #21
ethanwillis wrote: post #11

Why don't you actually put effort into actually writing out the problems? I'm not going to do your work for you and I'm not going to pat you on the back for scraping good content in a sloppy way. So here's a really good example of the problem with what you're doing. https://teachyourselfmath.app/problem?id=18 I really hope to see this improve because the idea is good. The execution is not

> I really hope to see this improve because the idea is good. The execution is not. The scraping and storage is simply a search engine. This site would be very valuable if it just presented the information as a search engine - with links to the original documents.

that is a very cool tangential idea imo! thanks, i will consider this.

Re: Show HN: I wished for a site with a growing list of math problems, I built it

#27

Post by viveknathani_ »

ethanwillis wrote: post #20
viveknathani_ wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hey, each problem in itself is intended to be a complete entity. while picking up from the PDF, it is extracting all the text written for that problem. if this is not happening for every problem already, that is something to be fixed I believe. i would rather spend my time in making this better instead of curating every problem manually. i could also spend time in picking up better sources that have more complete pro…

A thought. If you're set on automation it could be that you could try automating the opposite of this approach as well. Detecting incomplete problem definitions when they happen. In either case, you're welcome. I don't mean to be rude :) As I said I think it's a good idea. I just know that poor execution on this will limit the potential a lot.

yep - a cleanup job running at a set frequency seems like a good idea! and no worries, i am taking all the feedback positively. thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts!

Re: Show HN: I wished for a site with a growing list of math problems, I built it

#29

Post by viveknathani_ »

TrAnn3l wrote: post #22

What about Project Euler? https://projecteuler.net/

i love project euler but most of the problems listed here require you to do some sort of programming which is great but i want to expand beyond just doing that in math. also, project euler is curated by its authors while teachyourselfmath just picks problems from whatever PDFs are available.
Post reply on HN