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Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading

squirt.io

61–70 of 213 posts

Re: Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading

#61

I am not sure that I get the point of this. When I read a long piece, I try to enjoy it. Imagine the same approach being used to "fix" food or sex in the name of efficiency.

Just because you are reading quicker does not mean you are not still enjoying what you are reading..

Re: Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading

#63

Why does each user need to be given an ID? How private is this?

It uses keen.io for analytics, and it might even store the URL you're visiting. You'd better not use this if you're concerned about your privacy: https://github.com/cameron/squirt/blob/gh-pages/js/io.js#L65...

Re: Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading

#65
I'd really like to see this model with an adaptive speed. Same speed for all the words isn't always the best.

Maybe using an n-gram model to predict how probable the next word is, could pass high probability phrases at a faster rate, while slowing down for "harder" words

Re: Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading

#66
post #58
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think german words like this would benefit from automatic syllable colorization -- slightly changing the shade of grey to make the syllable boundaries more obvious?

Not sure. E.g. 'Kinderbetreuungsmöglichkeiten' means 'child care possibilities', that's three words in one. I suppose the brain just needs more time to parse that. But just counting characters to determine delay won't cut it, since 'Mississippi' is quite quick to parse.

Then maybe colorize nouns in a compound noun word instead of syllables ?

Re: Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading

#67

I'd really like to see this model with an adaptive speed. Same speed for all the words isn't always the best. Maybe using an n-gram model to predict how probable the next word is, could pass high probability phrases at a faster rate, while slowing down for "harder" words

There's a good Google Books dataset for doing exactly that, and you can doing something in Hive to get you the lowest-entropy n-grams (with something like https://github.com/lsb/text-entropy/blob/master/passphrase-s... ), and then you can the low-entropy n-grams into a Bloom filter (like http://www.leebutterman.com/passphrase-safety/how-it-works.h... ) and your enormous corpus gets fitted into a few dozen megs of memory.

(That sounds like a cool idea, hit me up if you're game for hacking on something like that)

Re: Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading

#68
post #46
post #12

I've never thought much about my reading speed before, but after trying this and finding the deafault setting a bit slow, I decided to compare my natural reading speed. I was able to read the article I chose in about 85% of the time of the default 400WPM of the bookmarklet (I read the article first with a timer, and then reread with the bookmarklet), which would put me at 470WPM. With Squirt, I was only able to get u…

Word by word is feels unnatural, phrase by phrase may be better - I don't know. However, I have dyslexia and I often struggle to follow the line, sometimes I drop out and I have to read a sentence or two again to get in flow state. I found this method to really improve my reading speed but I am still not sure if want it as my default reading method.

When I was playing around with something like this before (Can't remember what, it was linked on HN recently), I found the optimium was 2 words at a time.

Re: Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading

#70
post #45

What I noticed using this to read a couple Ars Technica articles was it worked really well for short words. But, if a longer complicated word appeared, at say 600 wpm, I would miss it. It seems like an adaptive algorithm based on word length would improve the speed even more allowing it to go faster on short common words and slow down on longer unusual words. Also, there is bug that sometimes causes two words to appe…

Agreed. They need to slow down the speed for longer words. Otherwise, it would be perfect.
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