<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: blackbrokkoli</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=blackbrokkoli</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Fri, 02 Oct 2026 15:55:34 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=blackbrokkoli" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by blackbrokkoli in "Show HN: Socratix – an AI tutor for proving mastery, not memorizing"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>haha no worries, setting up email is always a pain :)<p>I'd be up for a meet, do you have a preferred email or messaging app?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 15 Sep 2026 11:31:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49710939</link><dc:creator>blackbrokkoli</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49710939</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49710939</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by blackbrokkoli in "Ask HN: What do you miss in language learning apps?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>When you say "grammar focused", what exactly are you imagining? Research shows that it's very rare that teaching grammar transfers to any kind of actual language proficiency, so curious how you intend to solve that</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 15 Sep 2026 10:38:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49710388</link><dc:creator>blackbrokkoli</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49710388</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49710388</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by blackbrokkoli in "Show HN: Socratix – an AI tutor for proving mastery, not memorizing"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>cool concept! I sent some feedback via the support email on the site but sadly it bounced :(</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 14 Sep 2026 07:30:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49693181</link><dc:creator>blackbrokkoli</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49693181</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49693181</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by blackbrokkoli in "Show HN: Codenaturally.net, a website for building manual programming fluency"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Good idea, I like that it's minimalist and straight-to-the point (as opposed to e.g. exercism with its million features).<p>Nit: I think that when an exercise was just attempted, it should not come up immediately again (soon, yes, but w/ some enforced delay, maybe) — otherwise it feels a bit tedious (even though it's probably decent for internalizing it)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 13 Sep 2026 16:11:37 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49685579</link><dc:creator>blackbrokkoli</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49685579</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49685579</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by blackbrokkoli in "Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>here is a random example to showcase how this can make sense (I'm not too familiar with the actual stacks in questions):<p>- stack A needs lots of tedious, not-quite boilerplate not-quite-copy-paste work whenever you implement something, but reduces cross-OS bugs, UX and accessibility issues down the line. Lots of dev frustration, slows down iteration (when humans actually have to <i>do</i> this).<p>- stack B has awesome DX and affords smooth operation of the design/UX/dev teams, very fast. More issues down the line, though. May be worth it if unaided humans need to work on it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 11 Sep 2026 16:19:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49660979</link><dc:creator>blackbrokkoli</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49660979</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49660979</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by blackbrokkoli in "Show HN: VocReel – A sentence-by-sentence feed for English listening practice"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Cool tool :)<p>If you're looking for feedback: It's easy to get started (pleasant that you are not forcing a login), but not so easy to understand what to actually do — what's the main flow? Which buttons am I supposed to press to do what? Some onboarding may help.<p>Since I'm not really in the market to learn English: Are you planning to offer this for other language pairs?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 11 Sep 2026 14:16:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49658839</link><dc:creator>blackbrokkoli</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49658839</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49658839</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Show HN: Practice where countries are in the world]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>TLDR: Practice where countries are on the world map <a href="https://www.samlearns.org/world-map" rel="nofollow">https://www.samlearns.org/world-map</a><p>Hello HN,<p>...I keep making little web apps to practice geography, and since some people here enjoyed the previous version, I thought this one too.
It's a simple game loop where you have to either tab or name countries, w/ some varying conditions like zoom levels.<p>Following feedback from last time, I reconsidered almost all of the game systems, fixing quite a few issues (too hard, too easy, too many boring islands, countries recurring often, confusing UX, ...).
The stack is ts/vue and geojson, with some python for data crunching; learning algo built on top of FSRS.<p>It's all free, no-ads, no-signup and open source, in case you were wondering.<p>Feedback and ideas welcome!<p>Hope you get something out of this, cheers :)</p>
<hr>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49495618">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49495618</a></p>
<p>Points: 3</p>
<p># Comments: 0</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 30 Aug 2026 04:10:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49495618</link><dc:creator>blackbrokkoli</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49495618</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49495618</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by blackbrokkoli in "Ask HN: Anyone using AI agents for active learning sprints? Here's my setup"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Pretty interesting<p>yeah if it's no effort, please share, otherwise I reckon I'll rebuild it myself some time soon :)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 01 May 2026 06:23:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47971785</link><dc:creator>blackbrokkoli</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47971785</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47971785</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by blackbrokkoli in "Show HN: I built a Chinese learning app that teaches through sentence patterns"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Interesting! I've been thinking about how you'd best teach sentence patterns for a long time, happy someone is making progress on it.<p>I'm a bit too beginner to effectively use the app, sadly, but it's quite an interesting flow.<p>As an aside, a while ago, I sort of prototyped the reverse: Learn vocab to understand a natural language sentence, translate the sentence (<a href="https://infi.koljasam.com" rel="nofollow">https://infi.koljasam.com</a>)<p>Happy to talk and exchange notes, if you want :)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 30 Apr 2026 08:06:13 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47959622</link><dc:creator>blackbrokkoli</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47959622</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47959622</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by blackbrokkoli in "Ask HN: Anyone using AI agents for active learning sprints? Here's my setup"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>what is your hook into such a sprint; how do you get started? Do you just prompt "so uh teach me something about linux admin" and go from there?<p>I think this has been my biggest hurdle with LLM-based learning, even though I think the concept may be quite powerful...<p>Happy to hear more about your approach :)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 30 Apr 2026 08:01:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47959588</link><dc:creator>blackbrokkoli</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47959588</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47959588</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Show HN: I'm building an open platform to submit, rate and discover lectures]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>TLDR: I'm building an experimental open source/open data thing to collect good lecture recordings<p>website: <a href="https://lectures.koljasam.com/" rel="nofollow">https://lectures.koljasam.com/</a><p>repo: github.com/koljapluemer/awesome-lectures<p>Hi everyone,<p>this submission is my attempt to contribute something to the question of how we will find, share and evaluate information in the future, in the face of the many problems that I think HN is well-aware of (slob, search engines returning SEO garbage or corporate stuff, spam, trust problems, big companies eating everything,...).<p>I was specifically inspired by recent threads here on HN like <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47625952">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47625952</a> , so I hope some of what I'm saying here resonates, even if it's very much not comprehensive (nor that coherent).<p>To get specific, I decided to build a little platform (if you want to call it that) to submit, rate and find long-form recordings of talks/lectures; both because this a personal itch of mine, but also because I consider it a good low-stakes environment to test some (possibly larger) ideas, such as:<p>- having a community-information-curation platform where both code and data are managed via an open git repo, but where non-technical people can also contribute, without interacting with GitHub or code<p>- allowing submissions and contribution without any gatekeeping (=no sign-up), keeping in mind that spam exists<p>- running such a platform on close-to-zero-budget<p>- allowing to (at least eventually) democratize the platform completely, so that it doesn't die with its maintainer's motivation<p>The current tech stack is as follows:<p>- <i>data source of truth:</i> JSON files in an open repo<p>- <i>main interaction point</i>: Classic HTML-based static site, works without js if you want to, generated with a custom SSG<p>- <i>rating; submitting lectures; proposing changes</i>: JS-based features on the static site, talking to a Flask backend via an API, writing change proposals temporarily to a DB<p>- <i>Flask backend</i>: Allows moderators (currently just me because no one else knows about this project yet) to accept or deny submissions (=spam prevention). Accepted data is written to the JSON-source-of-truth (using Bayesian updates for ratings and some semi-fancy merge algos)<p>Crucial idea here:<p>1) The data source+the viewing modality can be replicated, modified and viewed very easily, even if I get hit by a bus or get bored of the project<p>2) When the backend gets spammed (likely with no-auth submission affordances), hammered, hacked or neglected, (view) access to the data is not affected<p>So while I think that it in fact would be great if there was a great community-driven list of lectures, I also think this concept may as a (dis)prove or concept for far more important platforms, e.g. for discussing scientific findings, finding truth, storing community knowledge or stuff like that.<p>Just in case this wasn't clear yet, everything is still very experimental and work-in-progress (but feel free to give brutal feedback anyways)<p>Anyways, truly any kind of feedback or contribution is really welcome, be it in the form of lecture submissions, ratings, technical help, philosophy, or whatever else :)<p>Thanks and let's try to keep some kind of human internet alive.<p><i>post edit: formatting</i></p>
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<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47720295">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47720295</a></p>
<p>Points: 5</p>
<p># Comments: 0</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 10 Apr 2026 16:13:18 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47720295</link><dc:creator>blackbrokkoli</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47720295</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47720295</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by blackbrokkoli in "Show HN: I built a frontpage for personal blogs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>What does this achieve over, say, git? This is hardly a zero-trust situation, is it?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 05 Apr 2026 07:21:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47646997</link><dc:creator>blackbrokkoli</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47646997</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47646997</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by blackbrokkoli in "Show HN: I built a frontpage for personal blogs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Instead of having that one god-author who has to keep maintaining everything, I think a better option may be to have the whole comprehensively community-maintained. Which opens up the question: How do you open source structured data and maintenance?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 03 Apr 2026 16:49:30 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47629031</link><dc:creator>blackbrokkoli</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47629031</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47629031</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by blackbrokkoli in "Show HN: I built a frontpage for personal blogs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Do you have any idea what killed webrings?<p>It seems to be simply a great idea...like...should we bring it back? Could we?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 03 Apr 2026 16:46:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47628996</link><dc:creator>blackbrokkoli</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47628996</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47628996</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Show HN: A minimal SVG polygon shape creator in the web]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Article URL: <a href="https://svg.koljasam.com/">https://svg.koljasam.com/</a></p>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47466588">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47466588</a></p>
<p>Points: 3</p>
<p># Comments: 0</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 21 Mar 2026 12:54:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://svg.koljasam.com/</link><dc:creator>blackbrokkoli</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47466588</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47466588</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[How I Do Personal Experiments (2020)]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Article URL: <a href="https://commoncog.com/doing-personal-experiments/">https://commoncog.com/doing-personal-experiments/</a></p>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47451372">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47451372</a></p>
<p>Points: 1</p>
<p># Comments: 0</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 20 Mar 2026 07:01:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://commoncog.com/doing-personal-experiments/</link><dc:creator>blackbrokkoli</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47451372</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47451372</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by blackbrokkoli in "Everyone is focusing on AI, we're focusing on humans"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Can you elaborate what right now is in the app that goes beyond Zoom? Always some effort to get started with a new communication app, and even more so to convince others to do so.
From the landing page, this seems very much...zoom.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 15 Mar 2026 17:26:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47389580</link><dc:creator>blackbrokkoli</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47389580</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47389580</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by blackbrokkoli in "Show HN: Language Life – Learn a language by living a simulated life"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Very neat! Nothing to add right now, except thanks for making this :)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 15 Mar 2026 17:24:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47389564</link><dc:creator>blackbrokkoli</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47389564</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47389564</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by blackbrokkoli in "Take One Small Step"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Variations of this are a common talking point in the self-help world, and while it's a powerful antidote against "I'm sure some day this giant thing will suddenly be easy and I'll just do it", it's not a silver bullet. Here are some counter-considerations:<p>- Doing anything usually involves prep work. Want to take a step? First put on your shoes (literally or figuratively, depending). If your attempted habit is 70% prep, your brain will somewhat rightfully conclude "this is stupid" fairly quickly.<p>- "Just do X every day for [long time period]" has an inherent falsification problem: You aren't "allowed" to argue against it until you tried it. Stopped after 2 years because you saw no change (and 5 was recommended)? You are still not allowed to argue against the strategy!<p>- You <i>can</i> actually make steps so small that they're useless. I once set out to have (at least) one github commit online per day (going for that green tile!). This led to my brain finding hacks like rephrasing one sentence of an old blog post. Doing that for 20 days is <i>way</i> less effective than one single coding session, at 20 times the emotional cost.<p>- Doing something daily for a long time is extremely hard to achieve, especially if it's not the main thing you're doing. It's <i>rare</i> in the wild. You will find piano virtuosos who play piano daily, but not piano virtuosos who also go to the gym daily.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 04 Jan 2026 13:46:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46487896</link><dc:creator>blackbrokkoli</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46487896</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46487896</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by blackbrokkoli in "Clair Obscur having its Indie Game Game Of The Year award stripped due to AI use"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's a double standard because it's apples and oranges.<p>Code is an abstract way of soldering cables in the correct way so the machine does a thing.<p>Art eludes definition while asking questions about what it means to be human.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 21 Dec 2025 08:57:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46343306</link><dc:creator>blackbrokkoli</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46343306</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46343306</guid></item></channel></rss>