Show HN: A tool for your learning, like Anki and Notion in one
notegarden.web.app
notegarden.web.app
Creating a new web account loads the tutorial page, but it's a little confusing at first how to add a node. Also, there are quite a few spelling and grammar errors on that page which will make an unfair negative impression. If you clean those up you will get more conversions.
Examples:
It's my job to keep your complicated brain neat and tidy and remember **things** for a long time!
Here's how you can **create** a neat Note Garden.
2. Structure what you have learned and put **it** in order.
I even take care of your knowledge so that you won't forget **it** for the rest of your life!
(The road to being a great gardener** was **not easy, but we did it!)
On the landing page 'Write Smartly' is correct English, but people rarely use the word this way - although it is technically correct it feels weird, and you don't want to create that feeling on a landing page. 'Write Smart' would be better.
Also, you wrote 'Law students - People who study for a long time that should not be forgotten'. I suggest 'Law students - People who need to study and retain knowledge for a long time.'
These are small language errors, but they would be very quickly noticed by your target audience.
Finally, the desktop sign-in with Google seems not to work - it opens a blank window and then closes again. Maybe it is just from server load right now.
Anyway I like it a lot and will consider using it regularly. I am more of a pencil-and-paper note person but this is one of the nicest digital notebooks I've found.
As for the part where desktop google sign-in does not work, regarding your description, it seems that the part that executes the app protocol using a browser does not seem to work.... I'm sorry. Let me see why not.
"What's 'Smart' and why do I need to learn it?"
Apart from that, your comment was a fairly objective criticism. When criticising, you should write down all the things you want to criticise, then (without removing any) re-write it so it's as kind as you can to the thing you're criticising. Especially if you're comparing it to something of your own.
Mochi is a great help there, since it provides a lot of small conveniences especially for language learning. The ability to automatically add a translation and spoken pronunciations is super nice and built in a way that it seamlessly integrates into the keyboard-centric markdown flow of the app.
IIRC Mochi is written in ClojureScript and it shows, it's a really simple, yet composable and powerful tool.
The author also keeps polishing it continuously, which I found to really streamline everything.
It's my absolutely most favourite tool for learning languages, because it does its job beautifully, efficiently, and doesn't get in my way, and that's a property that's hard to come by in software these days.
And if you're a Linux user, Mochi has you covered too!
The main concepts of this app are
1. Take notes in a tree structure.
2. Test immediately without wasting time and effort to create flashcards separately.
3. Review with the optimal learning cycle calculated by the SR algorithm.
This is probably the question you are most curious about. “What is the difference with other competitors?”
The long and nerdy answer: https://learnobit.postach.io/post/to-everyone-who-showed-a-p...
My most immediate questions are:
1. Where is the source code?
2. What is the license?
Question - what is SR algorithm are you using?
1) it doesn't scale. You'll be overwhelmed with repetitions once you're in the high hundreds, and you will be if using Q/A style questions. And what's your daily strategy once it hits thousands?
2) I've converted all my notes from libreoffice writer to anki using python and various formatting tricks, and while the import outcome was perfect, most of the notes are useless - too ambigious/too broad/WIP - you'll never remember those well.
3) premade cards are mostly useless for long term - say you want to remember linux stuffs - you can find cards with thousands of items, but to what point - there's only so much time in a day and you want to learn something different than the author did - you def won't spend a year reviewing them.
I myself am confident this problem can be solved with supermemo and creating tailored q/a from my notes and thinking hard what I actually want to remember long term.
Would you please try the app out...?
Agree that most notes from other documents don’t make good cards. Making your own cards is worth the time spent, for the most part, although there are plenty of standard decks you might as well clone (Greek letters, as a simple example.)
Anyway, Anki scale in the sense that you don't have to do thousand cards if you don't want to. But the UI was designed to help combat psychological problems of tackling an intimidating amount of cards.
If you plan on sustaining dozens of new cards per day indefinitely, you’ll bury yourself in reviews, but spaced repetition does ensure that if your recall rate is high, review count degrades over time, and eventually becomes negligible. I go through periods of daily new cards when I’m focused on learning something, and periods of review and consolidation. If my daily reviews get over 200, it’s time to let the new cards rest for a while.
There are definitely many things that Anki is _not_ good for. But for the things where it's good, there's nothing else like it. The UI might be stale, but this is outweighed by the add-on ecosystem.
But a year into my professorship, I just didn't have time to do all of them daily and this compounded to disencentivize me as the number of cards to review piled up into the thousands. I still have Anki installed but I haven't used it much since 2016.
One of the best things about Anki is it is free. I wouldn't want to subscribe with a recurring payments, and I like having a non-web app to ensure I could use it indefinitely even if the product dies.
As far I remember there was a feature to address this in SuperMemo.
Out of curiosity, have you found yourself getting rusty on the information that had seemed long-term locked-in when you were a regular user?
However, there are a lot of things I don't use regularly.
2. Regarding the issue of when the product dies, we are also considering making it open source to minimize the harm to learners when the Note Garden can no longer be maintained. And we have already been developing Note Garden for over 3 years. It won't die right away
I solved this problem by having two separate decks. One that is purely quick recall, where if you know the answer you'll flip through the card in seconds. The other deck is the high cognitive load one, where it may take, say, a minute or longer for some cards.
I review the "quick" deck daily - it takes perhaps 5 minutes. It's hard to convince yourself you can't spare 5 minutes.
The other deck I do less frequently - perhaps target once a week, and block out time on your calendar for it?
1. The feature set on paper is impressive, but there should be a way of trying out the limited features in offline mode, without requiring a mandatory sign-up. So consider adding a demo mode both in the downloaded and web version.
2. Is there a way to host data locally?
3. The Privacy policy & Terms of service take forever to load. The loading times need some serious tweaking.
2. It can't be. But you can use the app offline or by exporting & importing local data.
3. I'm sorry. I have nothing else to say but to reload. It's fine on our side.
Having some demo content would help me quickly decide if this could be a good tool for me.
Here's why in case you care. Different is an adjective, which describes a noun. Differently is an adverb, which describes a verb. The sentence "study different" has an implicit subject "you", so it could be written "you study different". This makes it more obvious that "different" is trying to describe the verb "study", not the noun "you".
(And maybe output? I didn't realise at first, but now seems more likely GP is referring to e-paper devices being easier on the eyes.)
[0] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.0181... / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24714990
> We conclude that because of the benefits of sensory-motor integration due to the larger involvement of the senses as well as fine and precisely controlled hand movements when writing by hand and when drawing, it is vital to maintain both activities in a learning environment to facilitate and optimize learning.
There is nothing about structuring content.
Which does not mean your statement is necessarily wrong; it’s just a speculation presented as a fact with no supporting evidence in the name of promoting your product.
Also I’d be interested to know a little more about the translation from notes to testing. To me it seems when I’ve used Anki that it takes great care and time to make a well formed question. A poorly formed question has a massive detriment in knowledge recall. Just wondering how you’ve managed to bridge that dilemma to automate the process.
Very interested in contributing, I’m a programmer, clinical educator and love spaced repetition.
In fact, some companies can do it with no time delay, like https://plausible.io – but, of course, it depends on your business model and your field.
I feel very uncomfortable contributing huge amounts of content to a product that I have no control over. With no Linux version I can only submit all my data to the cloud. It does appear you can export to JSON or Anki deck though so you could always do regular exports to ensure you have a copy of your data.
I was wondering how the author managed to get the "web.app" domain, but it turns out it's owned by Google (Firebase). Because of course it is.
It sounds promising in theory and I agree that linking the Q/A cards to more detailed notes and tree structure is useful but in implementation it felt very clunky and I did not gel with the UI at all. The most immediate issue was that identifying how to actually markdown the notes into a usable question and answer format wasn't clear from the brief description in the intro document. The tool REALLY needs a tutorial. After I worked that out though the "learn" tab just felt like any other SR flashcard app and it didn't present the notes in any useful way to make it better than a well curated Anki deck.
I've never really tried anything except Anki, Memrise and now this app but it's just hard to recommend this over Anki, as a widely accepted and open source standard. I found this frustrating to use.
Still very rough, but I'm accepting feature requests and suggestions! Email in bio.
I am strongly opposed to this for ethical reasons. Distracting drivers will kill people. This functionality would also increase the risk of death for non-users of the software.
My country, Spain, has reached just 29 deaths per million inhabitants and year due to road accidents by focusing on the big risk factors, such as dui, speeding, lack of seatbelt use, overall disregard for traffic rules, texting and handling phones, bad infrastructure status, etc. and I don’t think talking while driving is a big part of the remaining risk factors that contribute to deaths.
That last part is just my opinion though; I’m just saying the problem is serious but imo lies elsewhere.
HTH!
I love anki because it's free and every time I've used a new software, which was better, to learn new things, I had to pay eventually.
There is no Add a New File button. I only see the Let’s start page. There’s no way to create a new file and no menu other than the sidebar.
The only way to create a page is by not following the instructions and through some jiggery-pokery with the mouse on the help page.
Am I missing something or just the application malfunctioning?
Out of curiosity, what spaced repetition algorithm is the app using? Did you create your own or did you use a pre-existing one?
> And if you've always been interested in SR programs, you'd probably want to ask what algorithm Note Garden uses, which is embarrassing to say, but it's an improved version of the old SM2 algorithm.
Source: https://learnobit.postach.io/post/to-everyone-who-showed-a-p...
To recap, I'm currently using the traditional SM2. But there are ambitious plans to appoint new and innovative algorithms.
Call me stupid, but I can't find the '+Add a New File' button. Where is it? If I click "Files" on the sidebar, I only see a 'Let's Start!' card. I signed up as a guest.
Maybe consider looking at the Accept-Language header for a default in this case
There is an old, tried-and-tested learning algorithm called SR (Spaced Repetition)
(The algorithm used to determine when to show cards in flashcard programs)
The problem is that SR is a tool that only fits 1:1 structures,
and this structure does not match the structure of knowledge
What fits this structure is as simple as country–capital pairs or word–meaning pairs,
but not general subjects
Now, LearnObit has a solution for that!
The first step is to make a good note-taking tool
that mimics the tree structure for the purpose of organizing knowledge
The second step is to connect that note-taking tool with SR
Then SR can be easily used for learning information that has tree structures as well as 1:1 pairs
And since the tree structure is the structure of general subjects,
SR can be used for general subjects unlike in the past
Now SR is the normal way, not just for a few enthusiasts on the fringes
One thing stood out to me in your explanation — you say “tree structure” is a natural way to organize knowledge.
Why is that the case? I generally use one of the modern “tools of thought” (first Roam and now mem.ai) and in these tools, you just dump notes and add tags and and links among notes, so you have a general graph structure (from the links) overlayed with tags.