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Comment by thrownaway954 | Hacker News Reader

maybe i'm just a jerk, but it bothers me when someone posts a project and doesn't link to an example of give a full description. i have no idea what anki cards are so i googled it and it's a pretty cool little open source flash card program. most people aren't going to do the research so it's best to have an explanation what all the components are. you don't have to be overly verbose, just a one liner explanation is fine most of the time.

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Technical writing is a skill. Little things like linking related topics requires foresight into the range of knowledge your audience could have. It is easy to assume everyone shares the same knowledge you do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge

This is absolutely true, but you can seldom go wrong assuming that proper nouns (like Anki) should be accompanied by links.

Thank you so much for adding that Wikipedia link. For years (no exaggeration), I've been trying to remember the term for the problem of forgetting what it was like to not know something. I was never able to come up with the right search query.

And now I'm going to add it to my queue for making Anki cards.

which is why i always follow the "assume nothing" rule. when writing something, assume you have to explain everything. again though, it doesn't have to be verbose, just a one liner is more than enough.

I had the same response, so i googled it. The home page that came up for the Anki application (https://apps.ankiweb.net) doesn't really explain what it is either (it has a lot of fluff about how its useful and where its useful, but no actual information on what it does and how it does it.) I had to go to the docs link and read a good way into the user manual to get a sense of what it actually does. Still I'm not 100% sure I know what it is and how it works. Ok, its a flash card app. There have been hundreds of those going back to at least the 80s. And before that people were writing on 3x5 cards for a very long time. How is this better or more useful that?

Anki specifically is a spaced repetition [0] [1] flashcards app, similar to supermemo.

When you review a card, you can mark it as "Again", "Hard", "Good", or "Easy". The new interval of a card will depend on the grade, so it might be like 1day -> 2days / 3days / 4days, and so on. "Again" resets the interval to 0, like a new card.

The documentation is "open source tier", because anki is open source. It should be better, I agree, but something something you get what you pay for. Anki is free on pc/mac and android, but not on ios.

As someone who has used it for the last 2.5 years, I can wholeheartedly recommend it. In fact, I've written at length about it [2]. However I think the manual is pretty good [3] (for anyone who's curious).

Feel free to ask if you have any specific questions.

[0]: https://s3.amazonaws.com/andrewzah.com/studies/Pashler.Rohre...

[1]: https://s3.amazonaws.com/andrewzah.com/studies/Bahrick-et-al...

[2]: https://andrewzah.com/tags/anki/

[3]: https://apps.ankiweb.net/docs/manual.html

It's not just a plain old flashcard app, the point is to implement a scheduled recall system to help you memorize the content effectively while minimizing effort.

Anecdotally, it's also a lot more engaging than your average flashcard app. Using Anki feels like playing a video game, except that you also get quite valuable results out of it.

thanks both of you for the clarity.

I figure the appeal of this tool is largest to those who already use author flashcards in Anki. There's been a number of posts related to Anki in the past year on HN, so there is some overlap.

I'll add the Introduction section to the Readme page soon. Thanks!

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