

Share your insights: aha.betterexplained.com (beta) - zyfo
http://betterexplained.com/articles/share-your-insights-aha-betterexplained-com-beta/

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kalid
Thanks for sharing this -- it's a MVP designed to

    
    
      - get nascent ideas public (personal use case)
      - find the best analogies/examples used to explain topics
      - apply these techniques to other topics
    

It needs some iteration to narrow the focus, but my dream of dreams is to
visit any topic (Fourier Transform, let's say) and see the best insights that
_actually helped_ people understand the idea. Any feedback from HN'ers is more
than welcome!

Tech details: Running Rails3 [3.0 :)] on Heroku. I prototyped early versions
entirely in javascript using jsfiddle.net.

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Terry_B
Had this one on my ideas list for a long while now :) Good luck!

Perhaps there are some lessons to be learned from what worked and didn't work
on rulesofthumb.org?

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kalid
Thanks! I hadn't seen that site, appreciate the pointer.

One challenge I'm seeing is making it easy enough to contribute yet organized
enough to be meaningful. At the bare, bare mimimum I'm finding it useful to
collect my own thoughts so I've enjoyed that aspect thus far :).

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stuntgoat
Nice work! I am interested in collective intelligence. This is a cool starting
point for quickly sharing an idea.

It seems like the reverse of a Question/Answer site; it is almost a
Answer/Question site, where someone posts a solution ( or a solution to a
question they were asking themselves ) and others ask them about more about
what they found- great!

Concerning functionality: 1)How about being able to up-vote comments? Some
insights and comments are more valuable to your core community; and it would
be convenient for them to be able to see that reflected, as well as allowing
them to encourage it.

2)How about being able to merge similar or duplicate posts; so instead of
duplicated posts in a subject you would see all the duplicated posts under the
most popular/valuable post, as chosen by the users' up-votes.

It is a general-knowledge based site right now. I wonder if you could port it
to existing, active sites so that you could get feedback from the wild. Have
you considered enabling it as a web service?

It might be cool if there was an API such that I could link the # of "aha"'s
that users had attached to my website- similar to the Face Book 'like' and
Google '+1' button. Though this would be more valuable, since I don't really
want to see all the people that liked a page who I am 'friends' with; rather,
I really want to read valuable insight ( hopefully :) ) from strangers!

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kalid
Wow, awesome feedback, you must be in my head :).

Yes, the idea was to focus on answers (what worked?) and then perhaps draw out
the common questions (what is a good analogy for xyz?). For example, colorized
equations seem to be an awesome response to the unasked "Help me get a plain
English description of this equation."

1) Upvoting commets should definitely be added, thanks

2) Duplicate posts should be linked and combined. From initial usage,
duplicates emerged. Someone wrote an analogy for understanding why negative
times negative is positive and I made a new insight with my own thoughts.
Ideally all such insights are grouped and the top ones bubble up.

I think integration with existing sites is the next big step :). I have some
articles which are fairly popular and want to add an aha widget to them
(similar to disqus) where people can share and vote on the insights that
helped. Currently this is scattered in the comments on the article and
difficult to parse. Once I stabilize this I'd love to open it up.

I really appreciate the thoughtful feedback here! My mind is buzzing thinking
of possibilities :).

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a3_nm
Given some of the teachers I've had, I could probably contribute a lot to the
exact opposite of such a site...

huh.badlyexplained.com -- Let's share the deep huhs? that prevented us from
understanding an idea: convoluted diagrams, false analogies, cooked-up
examples.

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kalid
Funny you mention that, one of my taglines in progress was "turning huh into
aha!". But seeing why a bad example is false can be useful too.

