Comment by xkfm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xkfm | Hacker News Reader

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This is by far my favorite piece of software I've ever purchased (and one that's keeping me on Windows). It's very obtuse to use and not really user friendly at all unless you're just making flashcards with it. I get the impression that it's somewhat dogfooding taken to the extreme, and it's almost as if they're selling it as a side project.

There are so many random features like the sleep tracker (https://www.supermemo.com/help/sleep.htm) that don't really make much sense to have but are there anyway.

There's also a web version if you just want flashcards that's mainly focused on language learning. They sell some courses and you can add your own cards too.

The biggest selling point for me is the incremental reading (https://www.supermemo.com/help/read.htm) feature. It's the only way I can manage to keep track of so many articles that I find interesting, and is vastly superior to leaving hundreds of tabs open or a bunch of bookmarks I'll never look at. It's superior to instapaper,readitlater etc because I don't have to decide what to read when I open the app, and I don't have to worry about forgetting about the article if I stop in the middle of it.

If I see anything remotely interesting, I just chuck it in Supermemo, and I'll see it eventually. If it's really important, I'll set its priority higher so I see the article sooner.

If I'm doing research on something and have 15 tabs open, all 15 tabs go into Supermemo, and will eventually get whittled down into flashcards. Start with an article -> extracts -> smaller extracts -> cloze deleted flashcard.

Long comment chains on Hacker News? Supermemo. Youtube videos? Supermemo. Email? Supermemo. Images? Supermemo.

I check my RSS feeds once or twice a week, grab all the interesting articles, import into supermemo, and I'm done.

Supermemo for me replaces: Evernote/OneNote, most bookmarks, Anki, and various todo list apps.

If I just wanted to make flashcards from set material, I'd honestly use Anki, because of the mobile apps. It's really easy to do a few repetitions when you have downtime through the day.

Every person I've shown this app too doesn't really care about it, and I don't really know why. If I had to guess, it's probably because the UI is horrific. I can effortlessly keep up with so much information, and it takes an hour or two out of my day.

> Incremental reading is a learning technique that makes it possible to read thousands of articles at the same time without getting lost.

Man, does't really work that way? When I learn something, like ML, I need the knowledge to sink in, but most of all I need to experiment, to test, to see how it works in practice. I guess the incremental reading may work for something like learning anatomy etc., but I doubt it would help me with more complex abstract concepts.

So for memorizing "stuff" - does this provide anything over Anki? It looks like Anki does the same thing.

No not really, the algo might be slightly "better". But if you only want flashcards, go with Anki. I'd also recommend you make them yourself.

Thanks for sharing your workflow.

When importing articles, does SuperMemo store the original URL? How about the layout of the original article, e.g. photos or diagrams in addition to the text? Is it IE-only or can it work with Firefox to import multiple tabs?

It's IE-only unfortunately. Importing I typically just copy and paste by hand instead of using the importer. The importer doesn't work that well in my opinion unless it's mostly plain text. With all the new front-end stuff and ads, it's gotten especially bad on some sites.

But in general, I get all the photos and diagrams too. URLs are stored, and you can mark up the article further as well for easier searching later. An example: https://www.supermemo.com/help/images/f/f5/Incremental_readi...

Supermemo seems to be heavily integrated with gecko/IE, probably due to age.

Thank for the info & screenshot. Other apps have clipping / knowledge management functions, but not the spaced repetition traversal through a reading queue. You would think that Pocket/Instapaper could add this functionality.

http://www.connectedtext.com (Windows)

https://www.devontechnologies.com/products/devonthink/overvi... (iOS & Mac)

I've heard fantastic things about SuperMemo but don't have a Windows machine - and don't plan on buying one. It's extremely unfortunate there's no Mac version.

VirtualBox? It’s free. Windows isn’t, obviously, but you can run the eval version for however long.

The only difference in the eval version (i.e. not yet registered) is you can’t change the wallpaper, ... which is free enough for me

Do you have a writeup expanding this further? Or maybe contact information. I like learning interesting workflows like this. My contact is in my username

Nothing so far really. I've been trying to figure out how to describe it for years. The program is an extremely hard sell outside flashcards, which you get from Anki.

I realize that supermemo has terrible UI but I'm really curious to see how you use it for incremental reading,research, youtube, and watch it later things. I've never used supermemo before

I'll make a small video, but it's going to take a few days before I can get it done. I'll let you know when I'm finished.

Okay let me know I would love to see it :)

Just emailed you the video, it's a little raw, mostly due to the length limit.

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