Show HN: Refinator, online lecture notes and PDFs with prerequisite lists

https://refinator.herokuapp.com/

by mrkgnao • 10 years ago

35 4 10 years ago

refinator.herokuapp.com

mrkgnao3• 10 years ago

I haven't worked on this in a few months, so I figured I'd just show off the current state of the project since I'm unlikely to be able to work on it in the next couple of months (since I'm in my last few months of high school, and I'll have a lot of exams and such things to deal with). I posted this yesterday[-1], but it didn't get much attention so I figured I'd try one more time.

This is a really simple proof-of-concept for something I've often wished to be able to use myself. Among other things, I've often felt that prerequisite and "read alongside" lists (ideally based on (topic, sophistication) pairs instead of being specific books as it currently is) would be great to have when you're reading something technical. The about page[0] goes into more detail on this.

Please consider adding any documents you frequently refer to to the list: I've seen searches for, among other things, neural networks, modular forms, type theory, von Neumann algebras, and probability in my logs!

Contributions to the code[1] are welcome too! :)

This has also been posted[2] to /r/math on reddit.

[-1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13245427

[0] https://refinator.herokuapp.com/about

[1] https://github.com/mrkgnao/refinator

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/5jx53e/refinator_lets...

mrkgnao3• 10 years ago

I'd love comments!

kichuku• 10 years ago

I am really liking this idea.

I am not a programmer. I am a network engineer. In my daily work I have to research a lot on network engineering. In fact, atleast one hour in my job each day involves researching about the topics in network engineering that I am working on.

And I see myself using a similar tool when it is available.

One major factor I would like you to consider is that the web is very much transient. The URL that we see now may not exist one month from now, due to various reasons.

One clumsy workaround that I have been using so far is to use archive.org 's wayback machine tool to archive those pages and add those URLs too. Maybe you can implement something similar. It cannot be something you host because I guess you yourself wouldn't know how long you would be interested/able to support this tool.

I know Evernote intends to solve this in a lot of ways. But I hate Evernote due to lots of reasons. I am more of of a OneNote guy.

Also, is your tool is geared especially towards programmers only? There is nothing wrong in that if you would like to keep it that way. But can you also consider adapting it so that people from other technical fields can use it?

mrkgnao3• 10 years ago

Also, is your tool is geared especially towards programmers only?

No! I myself am a math enthusiast, as you can see :)

Show HN: Refinator, online lecture notes and PDFs with prerequisite lists

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