Show HN: Make math automatic with Mathy

I chose Algebra II, which I'm currently re-visiting as an adult learner starting a new direction in college. It immediately thrust me into problems I've not seen before. I skipped multiple times and was never presented with something I recognized. I went into settings an turned on Algebra I, thinking that would start with more basics, but had the same issue. Gave up after 5-6 tries, feeling just as frustrated and dumb as I do in class.Programmer of 27 years, doing math by other names. I continue to be frustrated by how bad math-as-a-programming-language is. This tool did nothing to improve that feeling.

How did you come up with the curriculum? I tried the third grade curriculum and it’s hard to know if it’s calibrated.Have you compared the curriculum with Duolingo math, IXL, Kahn academy, etc?

This is very cool, thank you. I understand the choice of no account, but would have loved if my progress could be linked between devices, maybe icloud sync?

Expii did something similar but abandoned the AI judge that gave you more practice though I don't know why

Great work. Have you shared this with the Math Academy folks? I bet they'd love to copy your homework :)I did a little deep dive into this kind of stuff over the summer. I haven't written it up yet, but I'll share some highlights below.I realized Anki was optimized for the opposite of the problems I actually had. Anki's optimized to minimize study time. It does this by maximizing difficulty. For me, this means maximizing pain!I'm not low on time; I'm low on willpower. I need it to be fun and easy! Otherwise, I quit and memory goes to zero. Gwern implies I am typical in this regard; most people who try SRS don't stick with it, even if they want to. So "Minimize Pain" seems like a worthy endeavour here.So, by necessity, I made the reps easy. By making the reps easy, I realized I had accidentally become much more fluent. [0](The "automaticity" you mention, comes from practicing more frequently.) In other words, working hard (suffering more) was giving me worse results. Imagine! (I had a similar experience with complex motor skills, but that's a separate post!)At some point I realized I could replace my entire flashcard app with a lightly modded Anki: increase target retrievability (to increase frequency), and use latency as the score (easy with a tiny addon, and/or custom card type).As far as the math goes, I got stuck on generating the cards (past arithmetic). How did you do that? :)(Also, I'd love to see the knowledge graph! I've been trying to reverse engineer the old one from Khan Academy...)--[0] The ancients knew this principle well...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_teachingSpeaking of fluency, I think "overlearning" is a misnomer. Our standards are too low and we are chronically "underlearning". Similarly, our "Mastery Learning" is actually Temporary Basic Competence...

I did some geometry/trig.Too much fine print. Trig would be better if it showed the picture of a right triangle with all sides labelled. Giving only the essential information doesn’t help with issues like confusing sine and cosine, which a memorization drill should address.Basically: add more pictures.Consider that in applications the names of the variables are different. Not sure that I would change this in a memorization app, but there’s no sign the author is aware of it.

This is a great project to see. I'm also an early fan and customer of Math Academy and am glad to see something like this focused on micro skills. As much as memorization is dismissed, having automatic recall base skills lets you get much further, much faster in harder ones.

Dude, hell yeah! I was just shopping for this exact thing not that long ago [1]. I've never been great with math and wanted something I could practice with away from my laptop. Love that it works in the browser, too. Well done, this is really nice.[1] https://graybearding.bearblog.dev/how-im-teaching-myself-mat...

This is great, Gabe.One small piece of feedback: on my Pixel, the Android keyboard obscures the green button. So when I'm answering a numerical question, I use your number pad to enter the digits, and then use the enter key on my Android keyboard. This feels weird, but I guess with regular use it wouldn't.

A good project. It’s great that the tasks are generated deterministically, without using AI-generated answers