alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Rebrain.gg – Doom learn, don't doom scroll
Hi HN,
I built https://rebrain.gg. It's a website which is intended to help you learn new things.
I built it for two reasons:
1. To play around with different ways of interacting with a LLM. Instead of a standard chat conversation, the LLM returns question forms the user can directly interact with (and use to continue the conversation with the LLM).
2. Because I thought it would be cool to have a site dedicated to interactive educational content instead of purely consuming content (which I do too much).
An example of a (useful-for-me) interactive conversation is: https://rebrain.gg/conversations/6. In it I'm learning how to use the `find` bash command. (Who ever knew to exclude a directory from a look-up you need to do `find . -path <path> -exclude -o <what you want to look for>`, where `-o` stands for "otherwise"!)
Still very early on, so interested in and open to any feedback.
Thanks!
Comments
An interesting approach, Good luck with it! A nit to pick: find is not a bash command. You can run it for example from a Windows DOS command line as:
wsl find ...
You can run all Linux commands this way. Also, pretty sure that find's "-o" is the Boolean "or", not "otherwise". (Yet another example of why learning from LLMs is dangerous, I suppose).
Great idea. It sadly doesn’t work for me, I went to pick a topic and some of the answers were pre-submitted, some of the questions did nothing after clicking “check”, then it just ended. Maybe it’s the HN hug of death?
The example you gave is just so buggy; why do you think that this is worth sharing with the world yet?
The very first question is full of obvious bugs.
You have 'find . -name "notes.txt"' selected, it then says 'You submitted: ls -R | grep notes.txt: find . -name "notes.txt"', then it responds:
'Thanks — your answer looks like it was partially entered.
'You picked find . -name "notes.txt" (good choice). The submission shows an escaped/unfinished string: find . -name \. The correct full command is find . -name "notes.txt", which searches recursively from the current directory for files or directories named exactly notes.txt.'
There seems to be some weird kind of quoting issue going on there. I would fix obvious issues like that before sharing this with the world.
My feedback reiterates what you're hearing about the cogintive load being unruly. If you want to "beat" doom scrolling, you need your mechanics to be as simple -- quick swipes and taps.
One potential direction, simple cards that are True/False.
I thought this would teach you random facts in one-screen-sized tiles. This doesn't look like doom scrolling. But I like the idea of the user picking a subject, maybe combine both: pick a subject, it gives you facts about it, maybe a tile to ask for which path to take once in a while (swipe left to keep learning about find, swipe right to learn about xargs).
Doom scrolling is when you just have to flip up. Maybe swipe if it's an advanced app.
This is something else entirely and requires far too much thinking for the label.
Upon clicking ‘continue’ or ‘submit’, make it transition to a different color which will give a good user experience
I think you should use nano-banana to auto matically create a "youtube short" that might make this more addictive like doomscrolling
The color scheme is painfully low-contrast. I can barely read it. Dear god increase the contrast.
I am not a big fan of AI-generated educational content, mostly because it's a great way to confidently learn falsehoods and misconceptions. I would prefer to learn from a reliable and reputable source.
I am also not a big fan of trying to beat doomscrolling. One of the defining properties of doomscrolling is that it is mindless and addicting. The moment you try to create a mindful, healthy alternative, you've already lost. No product will ever beat doomscrolling, only individuals dedicated to their own mental health are capable of clearing this hurdle.
Great tool How is this internally implemented? Would you be writing an engineering blog post?