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Comment by biesnecker | Hacker News Reader

I’m very wary of putting my flashcards (about 25k in a bunch of decks stretching back nearly 20 years now) in something that either 1) I own fully (I’ve bought the software and it will work even if your company doesn’t); or 2) at least provide full-fidelity exports of not just the content but also the repetition history.

It looks like a very well-done app and I agree that Anki can be clunky but I don’t worry about it disappearing and taking years of work with it. I really do wish you luck but for me at least it’s a high bar to cross.

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Your 25k cards interest me. I've long hoped to merge the concepts of knowledge base and retention. I love knowledge bases, but i want them to aid and augment my natural retention.

Can you speak about how you use the 25k cards? Do you feel you retain them all?

At first glance i suspect you're using your 25k cards the way i envision my ideal knowledge base setup. A store of information which exceeds my brains capacity, but which i can choose a slice at which i want to transfer to my brain. Ie choose a deck of cards and working on that to transfer (learn) the material again.

I'm not the original poster, but I have 19,324 cards in my computer science deck and 3,632 in my Spanish deck... so our numbers are similar.

I use my decks to keep topics in mind for years until I choose to forget them. But these cards are things I always have memorized -- they're not something that I restudy when I need them.

25k cards hardly exceed your brain's capacity! That's about the same amount of information as 12,000 words in a second language -- plenty of people are bilingual.

Do I retain them all? Errrr... not really. My retention of cards I haven't seen for a while is about 85%. Further, 1,354 of the cards are "suspended" -- that is, I've gotten them wrong enough times that Anki won't show them to me again unless I un-suspend them.

The most important questions to ask any one who's using a flashcard system are:

- What do you get out of it? - What are your costs?

For me, I get years' worth of material I no longer need to look up and a good foundation in Spanish, even though I only travel every few years. But my costs are an hour a day, every day, trying to remember things that are just about to be forgotten.

Good luck!

A pointer I've learned when dealing with suspended cards that I want to keep is to take the time to come up with a mnemonic and add it to the answer, even if it's a little hokey. It took me a little practice to get the hang of coming up with creative mnemonics, but even the poor ones have proven effective for me.

I have ~10,000 cards in a Chinese deck (learning characters in college ~20 years ago is how I started with spaced repetition) that I built throughout the 2000s when I in college and then living in Shanghai. I don't add much to it anymore, but it keeps my reading pretty sharp, even though I don't use it much day-to-day anymore.

Another ~10,000 cards are work-related (computer science). I add to this frequently, mostly consuming research papers and turning them into cards.

The last ~5000 cards are an assortment of topics I've been interested in over the years.

I don't think that I use it the way you're describing--I more or less know all of the things that come up in my reviews each day, though I certainly miss things from time to time, and sometimes I go through and purge a bunch of cards related to topics that I don't have any interest in. It's much less than my total capacity (I know plenty of things that I haven't encoded as flashcards). More than anything it's a way to artificially engage pathways I'm not actively using, in the hope that when I need them they'll be there. It feels much less costly to maintain knowledge than to forget and relearn it, though there's always the danger that you are wasting cycles maintaining things you'll never need again.

I agree fully that export is a must for app like this. On the other note, your collection of flashcard sounds impressive, perhaps you could consider publishing those flashcards publicly on github or somewhere, and kill 2 birds with 1 stone: backup the flashcard and also share the knowledge?

I'm not the original poster, but I have more than 23k cards in Anki.

I would emphatically not want to publish my flashcards publicly. Many of them are internal to where I work, and simply aren't interesting outside my workspace.

(Does any one outside my company want to memorize the class names for the eight steps my company uses to do on-the-fly scoring of open opportunities? I didn't think so...)

+1 I would not publish mine, both because of a lot of work-related things, but also a lot of weird / inside-joke / funny but probably only to me references in them.

I also believe firmly that the act of creating flashcards is part of what encodes them in your brain. I've never had any luck with prepared decks.

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