Show HN: ReadKinetic – a free, local-first speed reader for your own books
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Re: Show HN: ReadKinetic – a free, local-first speed reader for your own books
#2[deleted]
Re: Show HN: ReadKinetic – a free, local-first speed reader for your own books
#3I like how it pauses near where I would normally pause while reading. How did you choose the cadence?
Re: Show HN: ReadKinetic – a free, local-first speed reader for your own books
#4I like how it pauses near where I would normally pause while reading. How did you choose the cadence?
Thanks, that's the detail I was most hoping someone would pick up on.
It started as a flat interval and felt terrible. Every word got the same slot, so sentences never landed and it read like a stock ticker.
Now there's a base duration from the WPM setting, with per word multipliers on top: 3x on sentence-ending punctuation, 2x on commas and semicolons, and an extra 0.7x if the word is 8 characters or longer.
The punctuation weights came from reading passages out loud and noticing where I actually stopped. Those are the breath points, so giving them proportionally more time puts the sentence structure back in. The long word bump is closer to the eye tracking literature, where fixation duration scales with word length. It felt wrong for a 12 letter word to get the same slot as "the".
The actual numbers were tuned by ear over a lot of real reading. I tried syllable estimates and word frequency weighting too, but neither was noticeably better than punctuation plus length, and they made the rhythm less predictable, which turned out to matter more than being clever.
Re: Show HN: ReadKinetic – a free, local-first speed reader for your own books
#5Wow that was a fascinating experience - honestly the biggest revelation for me is how much I skim content without realizing it. Reading and remembering every single word, one at a time, and comprehending what was being said was more effort than I expected! I also took away how much I need the inter-word formatting to keep track of what's being said
Re: Show HN: ReadKinetic – a free, local-first speed reader for your own books
#6Wow that was a fascinating experience - honestly the biggest revelation for me is how much I skim content without realizing it. Reading and remembering every single word, one at a time, and comprehending what was being said was more effort than I expected! I also took away how much I need the inter-word formatting to keep track of what's being said
[deleted]
Re: Show HN: ReadKinetic – a free, local-first speed reader for your own books
#7i have tried variations of this many time, it personally doesn't work for me. the word flashes into my brain, and i can keep up with "reading" at high wpm's, but the whole sentence doesn't register. i am not seeing the forest because of all the trees.
Re: Show HN: ReadKinetic – a free, local-first speed reader for your own books
#8I like it. Feels solid and cool. I read a lot of books with some images and graphs how they get processed?
Re: Show HN: ReadKinetic – a free, local-first speed reader for your own books
#9Wow that was a fascinating experience - honestly the biggest revelation for me is how much I skim content without realizing it. Reading and remembering every single word, one at a time, and comprehending what was being said was more effort than I expected! I also took away how much I need the inter-word formatting to keep track of what's being said
Yeah, the skimming thing surprised me too when I started looking into it. In regular reading, people skip about a quarter to a third of the words, mainly small ones like "the" and "of." Your eyes grab the next word or two out of the corner of your eye before you actually see them.
With RSVP, you save the eye movement, but you also lose the skipping. You have to look at every word, no matter if it’s important or not. Those two factors might balance each other out, which I think is a big reason the actual speed gain is much less than what most speed reading products promise.
The formatting issue you brought up is something I haven’t figured out. You miss line breaks, the shape of paragraphs, punctuation that sits in your peripheral vision, and even just keeping track of where you are on the page. I add longer pauses at punctuation to restore some of the sentence rhythm, but the structure of paragraphs and dialogue is still missing. That’s why it doesn’t work for me with fiction that has a lot of dialogue.
Re: Show HN: ReadKinetic – a free, local-first speed reader for your own books
#10i have tried variations of this many time, it personally doesn't work for me. the word flashes into my brain, and i can keep up with "reading" at high wpm's, but the whole sentence doesn't register. i am not seeing the forest because of all the trees.
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