Awesome, I've looking for something like this for ages!
Needs a bit of tuning, though.
Fails when reading this article on Chrome 33 for Linux:
http://aphyr.com/posts/311-clojure-from-the-ground-up-logist...
Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading
151–160 of 213 posts
Re: Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading
#152Awesome idea, thanks for making & sharing!
I tried it on http://blog.eventjoy.com/post/79387694078/how-we-restarted-o... but it choked/stopped once it came across the first linked.
Re: Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading
#153Similar to what I did with the chrome extension Spree [1]. Though I find your pauses on periods to be a bit much. Code for Spree available on github [2]. The IIFE in spree.js can also function as a bookmarklet. Also, Spree doesn't walk to an element's parent, which usually keeps it from getting into JS and ads, while still reading all of, say, a news article. On another tack, quite a lovely site. 1. https://chrome.go…
I really like the way this works - much less disruptive to jump in and out.
Any reason you cap WPM at 666, and always default to 400wpm? I want to go fasterrrr :)
edit: I made my branch do this, are you interested in contributions?
Re: Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading
#154I tried using it on a github wiki page, and it broke because github wouldn't load the external javascript. So I copied the text and made a local html file. That didn't work because of these errors: Failed to load resource: net::ERR_FILE_NOT_FOUND file://www.squirt.io/bm/font-awesome.css Failed to load resource: net::ERR_FILE_NOT_FOUND file://www.squirt.io/bm/squirt.css 62 Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'sty…
Yeah, it's hosted on github pages right now, and they don't do SSL. It's one many, many, many things I'd like to fix about Squirt.
Re: Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading
#155Aw, I made a chrome extension, but this is better :(
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/grokfaster/ncjhald...
Re: Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading
#156Using a "let me google that for you" link on the problem with software patents seems unnecessary. Why imply your users are lazy? At first I thought the contrast between "whose patents are pending" and that link was a great bit of commentary, but that link was an unexpected slap. I was expecting an EFF link.
Oops—did not wake up wanting to slap you :) My thought was more along the lines of "if you're not aware that this is a problem, here's a list of big/obvious headlines to pick from, or just walk away with the sense that there is an active conversation about the issue"
Re: Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I've been using n-grams heavily in my PhD. I like a lot what you are describing. Also a simple extension is to use "cache" n-gram models, that can naively simulate longer-term "memory". What's fascinating is that in the entropy/information-theoretic sense, instead of using wpm, one could aim for "constant" information rate of reading (as in bits/token). That's really cool as a concept. I don't know if it would work,…
You're welcome to fork it! http://www.github.com/cameron/squirt. Would love to see such an implementation
Re: Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading
#158Does anyone know of a speed-reading API another than Spritz?
OP here. I'm using readability's old code (arc90) to extract text, and you can use squirt on any page you like--just embed a link with the same JS as the bookmarklet. If you want a real API, add a github issue (http://www.github.com/cameron/squirt) to remind me--it's on my project bucket list :)
Re: Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading
#159What 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…
Hey timtadh! Spritz Inc's blog ( http://www.spritzinc.com/blog/ ) has some interesting things to say about word recognition, primarily that it's related to a word's unique shape more than length. Words that are less than 4 characters long are actually harder to recognize due to their having more visual analogues than longer words, and words over 7 characters are start looking "long" more than any other shape characte…
That may be true for familiar words, but a long, uncommon word is unavoidably going to take more processing. Flashing "unforgettable" is probably fine, but I'd want a split second pause on "periodontia" or "imbroglie".
Re: Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading
#160HN 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.
OP here. Totally agree. I would not use this to read a novel, but rather in the way that we already read articles on the web--skimming them.
I think there is a huge value to giving the reader a tradeoff between speed and comprehension, so long as the reader is conscious that they're making a choice and does so appropriately.