Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading

Post by pkghost » Wed, Mar 12, 2014, 7:18 PM UTC

timtadh wrote: 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…

Post by sitkack » Wed, Mar 12, 2014, 7:24 PM UTC

lsb wrote: post #67

mallamanis wrote: post #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

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 mem…

Post by pkghost » Wed, Mar 12, 2014, 7:31 PM UTC

eik3_de wrote: post #50

timtadh wrote: 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…

Slow down on long words would be very helpful, I just tried it with some german news text[1] at 600wpm: Worked great except for words that occured like Kinderbetreuungsmöglichkeiten US-Geheimdienstausschusses Bundestags-Innenausschuss Bundeswirtschaftsminister Bundesarbeitsministeriums [1] http://www.deutschlandfunk.de/nachrichten.353.de.html

Post by andrewflnr » Wed, Mar 12, 2014, 7:36 PM UTC

nashequilibrium wrote: post #104

HN always likes the faster is better, I am a genius absorbing this much information quicker than you. Its been proven over and over that comprehension is way more important than speed of consumption. You guys fool yourselves into believing you can comprehend while reading at breakneck speeds, its way more fun & time saving to be able to imagine, driftaway in thought and understand what you are reading.

Post by benrhughes » Wed, Mar 12, 2014, 7:45 PM UTC

nilkn wrote: post #16

ghc wrote: 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…

> I wonder if people really read one word at a time They don't. I always thought the whole point of speed reading was to ingest multiple words simultaneously. These speed reading tools should be extended so that they can show multiple words at once rather than one word at a time. A really ambitious improvement would be to automatically recognize very common phrases and constructions and to make an effort to always sh…