Earlier quoted context omitted.
Moly holy the clicking is too much 3 clicks that could be one :O
300* that could be 100*
Even better if keyboard keys (1,2,3,4) were also supported.
How many of the 170k English words do you know?
331–340 of 575 posts
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#332A couple
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#333They got the second word wrong, I got it right, but still scored against me. Haha.
Impartial does not mean "treating all parties equally". It means "uninterested in the results". Fair would be "treating all equally". That's why there's a phrase "fair and impartial". "Partial" of course, doesn't mean "unfair", so negating it can't turn it into "fair". Partial means to favor one side or the other.
This is why when people tell me I'm wrong, so often I feel smarter than they are. HN quizzes are conditioning me for some antisocial attitudes, I think.
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
It 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.
Level 5 grandmaster was hardcore!
I got zeitgeist, panacea and obfuscate on Level 5... wut?
Some at Level 4 was definitely a lot more obscure than those.
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#335In addition to everything everyone else has said: their math is off by half (or 100%, depending on how you count), due to a structural error. (context: native English speaker, big reader, huge nerd, perfect SAT score) I got all 100 correct on the first try without looking anything up! Confusingly, that only resulted in a "SCIENTIFIC ESTIMATE" that I know 85,000/~170,000 words? Their "How is this calculated" page that…
What background you all have that contributed you think to scoring 100
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#336An alternative algorithm which would probably converge faster than 100 questions would be something like Elo or Glicko 2.
A word's "difficulty" would be some function of how rare it is. Once you have a reasonable estimate of the user's "skill" you can infer that a user won't know more difficult words. The benefit of this is you're not spending time asking the user about words they probably know.
Of course it's possible at an individual level, difficulty does not monotonically increase as a function of how rare the word is. A person might be very familiar with a domain-specific subset of English. But the "stratified sampling" approach will also have this problem.
There is a similar problem in chess, where players have ratings which really only change on one dimension. So there can theoretically be a mismatch when puzzles are also scored on a single axis, since a "harder" puzzle that contains a motif a player is familiar with will actually be easier for the player.
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#337As others have pointed out, too many clicks per word. I am a sucker for a 'how many words do you know' quiz so I finished anyway. Overall I'm skeptical of the classifications. In broad strokes, the early words are easier and the latter words are more challenging, but the middle is pretty muddied. Some of the words chosen are rather absurd/inappropriate: breviary (which I got wrong but felt like a vaguely religious wo…
Yeh, it had 'kerfuffle' as one of the last words but that's very common.
Yet it had Zenzizenzizenzic (which I'd never heard of but I think I guessed it right)
It really could do with a summary showing the answers you made and corrections for what you got wrong.
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#338Pick the longest answer, you’re right 97% of the time. This is true of any LLM-generated quiz.
And it'll be one of the two choices that directly contradict each other.
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#339It should be possible to respond "I don't know". When you really-really don't know, it's unfair to get a 1/4 chance at right anyway, or even better if you use routine multiple-choice tactics. I got credit for a few that I would have happily just missed.
Agreed I did the full 100. It's not even 1/4, with the harder ones when one description is significantly longer than others, it's the correct one. Even outside that 2 choices are usually some object - which I think is never the correct answer I'd also say the toughness should be mixed up a little. The last 30 or so became a slog Cool idea though!
Also a lot of questions had "right answer" / "opposite of right answer" pairs. Just by identifying those you get to 50% probability.
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#340100%!