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by sd9 4 hours ago
Interesting concept, but 100 words is really quite a lot to get through... It's tiresome trudging through the easy words at the start, and I never got to see the interesting words before getting bored.

I've seen other systems like this calibrate far more quickly by assigning a sort of score and confidence behind the scenes. Confidence starts out low and increases over time - correct/incorrect answers rapidly adjust score at the beginning, then things settle down.

In practice this means you get a sequence of increasingly uncommon words initially, until you get one wrong, then you drop back to something easier until you start getting things right again, and eventually circle around words at your level.

Also - too many clicks per word. It's low stakes, just let me click the definition once and I'll live if I misclick (or add an undo button).

6 comments

> Also - too many clicks per word. It's low stakes, just let me click the definition once and I'll live if I misclick.

This, and accept that people will have incorrect input and build it into the confidence. Even the smartest person in the world sometimes makes clerical errors, or has the wrong neuron fire at the wrong moment.

Moly holy the clicking is too much 3 clicks that could be one :O
300* that could be 100*
It also doesn't get hard enough. Also way too many of the words are just words about long words, or the tendency to be verbose.
It does get hard enough but only in the very last fraction.

Zenzizenzizenzic for example.

> It also doesn't get hard enough

Oh come on! Like you really knew what "Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia" is?

:D I did better than expected, but I did miss that one. I learned some fun ones.
Based on only missing that one, it figured out. I knew 83,000 words. That seems unsupportable
Lol. Yeah. Non native here but gave up at about 50 words. Too many words, too easy. And my English SUCKS
Plus a scroll on mobile because the submit button is below the fold, though it seems to stay in the right place after the first scroll.
> Also - too many clicks per word.

They’re also too far away. I’m on a laptop and I have to keep moving the cursor up and down just to confirm. Give each option a letter or number and let me press it to choose the answer¹.

¹ There is (was?) some service for forms which does that and it works quite well. I think it was Typeform, but I just opened the website to check and—of course—it’s now just plastered with mentions of AI so I lost interest in verifying.

it's intentional. therefore testing vocab isn't the point.

I'm guessing it's testing our susceptibility to machine-generated compliments

> it's intentional.

What is?

> I'm guessing it's testing our susceptibility to machine-generated compliments

I fail to see the point. For one, the compliments aren’t particularly good or interesting; for another, I didn’t even read them (I just went back to check after your comment), I simply clicked when seeing green.

too many clicks per word. and the distance between click points. that's intentional.

well the point would be to see how susceptible you are to that. They're figuring out where your cost vs reward tipping point is.

I think you’re reading too much into it. I think it’s just a common design pattern that was copied and is clearly optimised for mobile, where the distance doesn’t matter that much.

Anyway, if they were running metrics on that they just became useless because I automated responding to it a bunch of times.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48598586#48600403

There's a small handful, mostly QI-inspired.
yeah, it should just be click->next;

I got tired after 8 words, looked at how many I'm suppose to know and gave up.

It'd be improved with statistical analysis; just progressively get harder and try to guess. If you wanted to gameify, you could update the stats after each answer.

100 is too many? Thats two or three minutes at most.

I would suggest a bias in this test towards reading. More than a couple are words i know but rarely see in print. But maybe im too much a fan of british TV so i hear many of thier words without seeing them written down.

Did you actually do 100 words? It wasn't two or three minutes. With good UX, sure. But I wasn't getting through 1 word per second.
I did. Missed two. If you know a word there is no thinking time. Im on tablet so i was probably fast on the clicking, but not like korean gamer fast.
I guess you just have a higher tolerance for inconvenience than me