nor's blog

By nor, 23 months ago, In English
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23 months ago, # |
Rev. 2   Vote: I like it +76 Vote: I do not like it

I think additionally, we should have the ability to collapse the folders, and open only one directory at a time. Currently it looks like we only have the option between collapsing all and expanding all.

Additionally, I think there should be a top level split between different levels of difficulty. I think a neat classification would be,

  • Beginner oriented

  • Competitor oriented

  • Advanced knowledge oriented

And if we can collapse and expand one folder at a time, a bit of redundancy might not be the worst thing.

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    23 months ago, # ^ |
      Vote: I like it +50 Vote: I do not like it

    Thanks for mentioning the difficulty-wise split. Somehow slipped my mind while I was writing the blog, but I think it's a very important feature to have.

    In my opinion, the redundancy issue is not just limited to viewing the catalog. When someone adds a blog to a category, they implicitly assume that there is meant to be a single category per blog (and moving previously added blogs to multiple categories takes a lot of operations). I think an explicit mention of the possibility of multiple tags will make it much better.

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    23 months ago, # ^ |
      Vote: I like it +26 Vote: I do not like it

    I would not put the difficulty as a top level distinction; rather, I would add a 3-star or 5-star difficulty rating to every problem and agree to generally order blogs within a category by the difficulty.

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23 months ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +8 Vote: I do not like it

I kind of disagree with putting many tags or categories to a blog in most cases, i.e. I think a blog should not be in every category it kinda sorta relates to. A blog should be in a category if it really is about that thing the category talks about.

Compare this to problem tags: problems have multiple tags and some tags are kind of useless because somehow, people find a way to justify putting "dp", "binary search" and "constructive algorithms" on just about everything.

For example I would not put your blog under strings, graphs, number theory or data structures even though it does have some relation to those things.

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    23 months ago, # ^ |
    Rev. 2   Vote: I like it +45 Vote: I do not like it

    In that specific case, me neither. It really just talks about permutations, and it should have a single tag that signifies that. My main concern in this specific case was the fact that if there is still no consensus on such simple blogs, maybe there is something wrong with the categorization as it is now. Hence the part that says "I wonder how to categorize blogs that take a topic and try to collect some ideas around that topic. General idea based blogs are currently categorized under a general section under algorithms, and they suffer from the same issue, but to a lesser extent because they are kind of global."

    In the remaining cases, I think the concern is genuine, and the blogs really talk about more than one thing. For example, the blog on segment tree talks about how to do certain kinds of optimizations in C++ (not limited to segment trees), and including it in the section on segment tree only is a bit weird. Similarly, the Mobius inversion blog is more of a general idea in algebraic combinatorics, than just a generalization of something you see in NT (maybe it would make sense to remove it from NT and add it into some other specific category). And it is surprising that the blog on visualizing geometry is not in tools.

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20 months ago, # |
Rev. 2   Vote: I like it +22 Vote: I do not like it

Bumping this, since the catalog seems to have had no activity for a couple of months, but there have been quite a few high quality blogs in this duration that could have been added. I think implementing the second suggestion would definitely help in this scenario.

In the meantime, one can go searching for educational blogs here.

Maybe it's just what I think, but adding features requested by the community should be given priority over features no one asked for.