Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading • Hacker News Board

Re: Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading

#171

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 4:31 AM UTC

EC1 wrote: post #120

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.

Honestly I don't have time to read, so I'm going to use this heavily. Long as I get the gist. If I miss a few things, I'll go back and quickly scan those few things I missed. I can finish like 10 articles on my commute no problem with this, versus just a few.

[deleted]

Re: Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading

#172

Post by bduerst » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 5:31 AM UTC

olalonde wrote: post #122

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.

There isn't that much substance in most blog posts / articles I read online. Of course, I wouldn't use this to read "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach".

Agreed. The signal density in many news articles is lower than what you would expect in a journal article or even a novel. This could be a very useful tool there.

Re: Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading

#173

Post by xerophtye » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 6:16 AM UTC

X4 wrote: post #137

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.

meh, I think you generalize a lot here. There are people who are very comfortably reading at 1000wpm and beyond and keep all of the story in the mind. Some people can even accurately repeat the sped read texts. There are more people who can do that, than you may think. Personally I would NOT YET read a real book this way, for one reason: I cannot keep a person's name in memory well enough and would mix up roles and w…

Also, in novels there is metadata in positioning of the text (eg scene change, speaker change etc) which i believe would be lost in such readers. So it's not a good way to read a novel, but pretty cool for reading blog posts and articles

Re: Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading

#174

Post by pkghost » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 7:37 AM UTC

sirclueless wrote: post #159

pkghost wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

This is a great observation. After reading Spritz' blog post, I've been thinking about using word shape uniqueness as the main signal for how long to pause--i.e., "soliloquy" would be quite unique thanks to its ascenders and descenders, whereas "excessive" is less unique, owing to its relatively featureless outline. Combining shape with word frequency (across language) seems even more promising.

Re: Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading

#175

Post by pkghost » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 7:39 AM UTC

gohrt wrote: post #52

eik3_de wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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?

Syllable recognition is still an unsolved problem, no? Is anybody familiar with the state of the art?

Re: Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading

#176

Post by pkghost » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 7:46 AM UTC

nedwin wrote: post #166

pkghost wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

I clicked the first link and wasn't convinced. Surely you would want to find the most convincing article that you could find and link to that?

I would. Do you have one top of mind?

Re: Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading

#177

Post by pkghost » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 7:48 AM UTC

philfreo wrote: post #152

Awesome 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.

Thanks for the bug report! Will look into it :)

Re: Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading

#178

Post by pkghost » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 7:52 AM UTC

zealon wrote: post #151

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...

Thank you--added to the "problem URL" list.

Re: Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading

#179

Post by pkghost » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 7:54 AM UTC

Touche wrote: post #24

Really like it. The only downside is that you have no idea how far along in the article you are. Would be nice if there was a % complete shown somewhere.

You're not the only one ;) In the works!

Re: Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading

#180

Post by pkghost » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 7:54 AM UTC

jfccohen wrote: post #17

I installed this on my browser bar and hasn't worked for cnn.com, highlighting specific text on cnn.com, medium.com. It worked on techcrunch...what about the HTML of the previous sites renders Squirt unusable?

Good question! I'll be investigating that shortly...