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Comment by xg15 | Hacker News Reader

The language learning premise in this post is a bit ridiculous - if I started with the goal of learning a language and ended up worrying about the asymptotic complexity of my automated k-book recommendation algorithm for arbitrary values of k, then I think I should worry about a serious case of procrastination.

But the algorithms are interesting, so I think a better title would have been "why submodular NP hard problems are cool" or something similar.

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Agreed - it's a bit of a ridiculous premise. Honestly you'd be better served picking up some proper Graded Readers [1] in the foreign language.

[1] https://tadoku.org/japanese/en/graded-readers-en

The thing about language is that words have a weird distribution. The most common 100 words show up in every single sentence, but then tons of "common" words show up statistically almost never. Like, "octopus" is a common word that is only going to be useful if you're talking to a marine biologist, or a three year old that's obsessed with octopuses, otherwise you're hardly ever going to use that word. There's a lot of words like that. "Spine" of a book? It's probably not "spine" in your target language.

How would one go about dealing with that kind of procrastination? Or is it not handling distraction?

Well, I'm sure you could build an amazing anti-procrastination app that has pluggable anti-procrastination strategies and uses the multi-armed bandit algorithm, as well as an RL-trained RNN to discover your personal, optimal schedule of anti-procrastination interventions, while automatically prompting an LLM to devise new strategies as soon as the old ones begin to lose their effectiveness and also giving you an option to post your anti-procrastination progress online and watch the anti-procrastination achievements of your friends or invite them to go on a virtual anti-procrastination quest together...

https://hillaryrettigproductivity.com/the-seven-secrets-of-t...

"Procrastination, perfectionism and writer's block are not moral flaws; nor are they caused by laziness, lack of discipline or lack of commitment. They are habits rooted in fear and scarcity - and the great news is that once we start alleviating our fears and resourcing ourselves abundantly, our procrastination and related problems are often remarkably easily solved."

It's directed at writers, but it's really for all perfectionists.

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