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Show HN: Lurnby, a tool for better learning, is now open source

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Re: Show HN: Lurnby, a tool for better learning, is now open source

#11

Post by riidom »

roznoshchik wrote: post #6
daitangio wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also a short "Quick start guide" on the README would be nice...IU was unable to find out an INSTALL.md either.

Hey, by quickstart do you mean for installing it locally? Or for using it on the website?

I was about to ask the same thing, didn't realize until your answer, that it is web-based? A local offline application would be great!

(also maybe.. is making an account necessary?)

And one more question, can it also pull multi-page documentation, or just single URL's? I assume it downloads websites and makes them offline available, or is that a wrong assumption.

Re: Show HN: Lurnby, a tool for better learning, is now open source

#12

Post by roznoshchik »

riidom wrote: post #11
roznoshchik wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, by quickstart do you mean for installing it locally? Or for using it on the website?

I was about to ask the same thing, didn't realize until your answer, that it is web-based? A local offline application would be great! (also maybe.. is making an account necessary?) And one more question, can it also pull multi-page documentation, or just single URL's? I assume it downloads websites and makes them offline available, or is that a wrong assumption.

It is web based. That way you can read on the computer and continue reading on the phone or any other device.

A version that runs just locally on the computer would also work, but that wasn't the main focus of this particular iteration.

I haven't built a robust offline functionality yet. That's something I'm thinking of doing in the near future. Was thinking of having your X most recent articles cached.

It parses the content of articles and stores the text in a db. Then as you highlight and add notes, the text gets updated with the annotations.

It doesn't pull multipage documentation. Each url should be added manually.

At least for now.

Re: Show HN: Lurnby, a tool for better learning, is now open source

#13

Post by riidom »

roznoshchik wrote: post #12
riidom wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was about to ask the same thing, didn't realize until your answer, that it is web-based? A local offline application would be great! (also maybe.. is making an account necessary?) And one more question, can it also pull multi-page documentation, or just single URL's? I assume it downloads websites and makes them offline available, or is that a wrong assumption.

It is web based. That way you can read on the computer and continue reading on the phone or any other device. A version that runs just locally on the computer would also work, but that wasn't the main focus of this particular iteration. I haven't built a robust offline functionality yet. That's something I'm thinking of doing in the near future. Was thinking of having your X most recent articles cached. It parses the…

Thanks for the detailed answer, starred anyway! :)

Re: Show HN: Lurnby, a tool for better learning, is now open source

#14

Post by alan-hn »

roznoshchik wrote: post #10
network2592 wrote: post #9

What is the neuroscience research upon which the techniques are based? Do you have any paper or book references? It could be insightful for a visitor to the site to be given more context.

Hey, I don't have any specific papers. And I think neuroscience makes it sound fancier than it maybe is in reality. But the primary concepts are spaced-repetition, elaborative encoding, and active recall. And the main focus is really on reducing friction with putting these practices into play.

I think the reality of neuroscience and behavioral research at this point in time is that it's just really difficult to translate neuro -> behavior and thought processes. There are some decently well researched learning methods, such as spaced repetition and enhancing depth of knowledge but we don't have a totally clear picture on why these things work well.

There are suspicions of course, such as how deeper knowledge of a subject is able to integrate the information into more parts of the network, but afaik the actual biochemical mechanisms and how those translate into network dynamics and recall for a lot of memory and learning functions are still fairly unknown.

If anyone knows of some solid studies (preferably using humans) I would be more than happy to read them, learning and memory is a fascinating area of neuroscience.

Re: Show HN: Lurnby, a tool for better learning, is now open source

#15

Post by dflock »

Add any issues you know about - or todo's you have to the projects Issues in github. Add "help wanted" and "good first issue" labels to these issue, as appropriate. Add a "Contributing" section to the README to help new contributors get started, pointing to https://github.com/Roznoshchik/Lurnby/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%...

What's your plan with lurnby.com?

Re: Show HN: Lurnby, a tool for better learning, is now open source

#16

Post by roznoshchik »

daitangio wrote: post #3
wand3r wrote: post #2

This sounds cool. I would suggest putting a UI screenshot on the github page. At least for me personally, as someone who would use something like this, I don’t really have a great concept for the tool without seeing it. For Notes & Tools like this the UI is very important as a differentiator because a lot of similar things exist. To get buy in, people want to know exactly what they are getting. Thats just my $0.02

Also a short "Quick start guide" on the README would be nice...IU was unable to find out an INSTALL.md either.

I added an install.md now for setting it up locally. Does that work for you?

Re: Show HN: Lurnby, a tool for better learning, is now open source

#17

Post by zozbot234 »

> add add epubs, pdfs, and web articles to the app => highlight and add comments => tag and organize highlights => review them with a spaced repetition system

This would make way more sense if it was an add-on to existing information/knowledge management software like Zotero. The base software would take care of the "add documents to the app" workflow, and the "highlight excerpts and use them to build cloze-testing SRS cards" thing could be an added feature. Having everything be a single "app" can be too limiting at times.

Re: Show HN: Lurnby, a tool for better learning, is now open source

#18

Post by roznoshchik »

dflock wrote: post #15

Add any issues you know about - or todo's you have to the projects Issues in github. Add "help wanted" and "good first issue" labels to these issue, as appropriate. Add a "Contributing" section to the README to help new contributors get started, pointing to https://github.com/Roznoshchik/Lurnby/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%... What's your plan with lurnby.com?

Thanks! I actually haven't contributed to any open source projects myself. So this would be my first time figuring out what's involved.

This helps give some structure for what I should do to make it easier for ppl to engage. Although I have to get organized enough to outline all of those things first. :D

Plan for Lurnby.com is to keep it up, assuming the hosting costs don't spiral out of control.

Re: Show HN: Lurnby, a tool for better learning, is now open source

#19

Post by daitangio »

roznoshchik wrote: post #16
daitangio wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also a short "Quick start guide" on the README would be nice...IU was unable to find out an INSTALL.md either.

I added an install.md now for setting it up locally. Does that work for you?

Nice. Tip: format it as a shell code block on markdown

Also eval adding a Dockerfile for super-rapid deploy

Re: Show HN: Lurnby, a tool for better learning, is now open source

#20

Post by roznoshchik »

zozbot234 wrote: post #17

> add add epubs, pdfs, and web articles to the app => highlight and add comments => tag and organize highlights => review them with a spaced repetition system This would make way more sense if it was an add-on to existing information/knowledge management software like Zotero. The base software would take care of the "add documents to the app" workflow, and the "highlight excerpts and use them to build cloze-testing S…

Thanks!

I agree with you. My goal isn't to actually make it a closed system like this. I ultimately want to make it as easy as possible for you ppl to get content in and out of the tool.

Lurnby doesn't have the NICEST reading experience possible. It's better in some aspects, but struggles in others. The plan was always to figure out how to allow people to read wherever they are comfortable and still make use of the tool to facilitate memory and retention.

First step is to decouple highlights from in-app articles, and allow them to be linked to external sources instead.

Then it's just a matter of importing them into Lurnby. I actually set the foundation for that already with another script I wrote recently. https://github.com/Roznoshchik/spreadsheet-importer

This would also allow the web extensions to be more useful and allow sending just highlights instead of articles.

My goal is to make it flexible to integrate with any existing workflow, but also be self sufficient for people who don't use any existing tools.

But it's a long road to get there.

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