
Show HN: Refinator, online lecture notes and PDFs with prerequisite lists - mrkgnao
https://refinator.herokuapp.com/
======
mrkgnao
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13245427)

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

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

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

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kichuku
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?

~~~
mrkgnao
> Also, is your tool is geared especially towards programmers only?

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

------
mrkgnao
I'd love comments!

