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Comment by byebyetech | Hacker News Reader

I don't think Anki supposed to be used that way. Each card should be recallable under 10 seconds. So it should be only few lines of content. More content you put in one Anki card, it will take you more time and eventually you will stop looking at the card. A failure scenario.

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Yeah that might be the reason I have never seen this. But whatever works for oneself is fine and worth to share.

There are quite nice deck ideas:

  + Facts about friends
  + Standard Library of your programming language 
    (https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/3937203746)
  + Bird Voices
    (https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/2088996377)

More here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Anki/comments/5ka1ny/what_have_you_...

Yeah, I used Anki a ton in college, and doing things like this was always futile and frustrating. Flashcards are fantastic for learning short bouts of things, but not large structures like many lines of code.

Additionally I'd say even if you succeeded in memorizing it this way, it's not making you a better problem solver, which is what actually matters for that particular subject; you're just (temporarily) better at regurgitating some lines of code.

I agree in general, but it seems like there might be a particularly constrained situation where it makes sense. I can usually look at a medium-sized block of code and suss out its intent in a short amount of time, even if I don't know all of the details about its behavior or how it works. A deck of flashcards curated from examples like that might be useful for recognizing the higher-level patterns that drive that intuition.

I wouldn't really know for sure; I took the long way 'round (time and experience) for gaining that skill. But it at least seems plausible. Of course, the linked article isn't this.

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