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Comment by michaelcampbell | Hacker News Reader

> spaced repetition is for memorization; I'm not trying to memorize

Only if you use it as such. SRS is a scheduler to help you optimize your time, to not spend time on things you probably don't need to refresh. The actual memory/learning part is orthogonal.

I use SRS to plan different practices of things (in my case programming languages or concepts). If I consider that I did one of them well, I mark it as such and won't see it for a longer time, if not, I mark it badly and I'll see it again sooner.

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This is accurate and interesting. I initially thought this was incorrect from strong association with it as a flashcard system, though your technique is consistent with the definition provided on this wiki created by community members [0].

I’m curious. If you would be willing to share, could you demonstrate an example of a prompt? My learning items have almost always been questions and answers, and occasionally image occlusion (‘label this part of the diagram’) and cloze deletion (‘fill in the blank’).

[0] https://www.supermemo.wiki/en/learning/spaced-repetition

You can just put it a whole math practice problem and solve it (with pen and paper, outside of the app), then mark it in the app.

I have several non-memorization type things. Some personal "get better" things, like... "I tell stories badly. I should avoid them." where I rate it a "2" for a "yeah, I did ok this week" or "1" if I transgressed. I put that into a deck that has a maximum review time of a week. I have other decks with similar things that expire in no more than a month, or a quarter.

For the tech things, the prompts are things like:

"Do an exercism.io exercise in <language>" where language is one of the programming languages I'm studying or want to keep "fresh"

"Write the basic 'counter' in React. With class compoments" or "... with functional components".

Things of that nature. Stuff I can get done in a half hour or less.

>Some personal "get better" things, like... "I tell stories badly. I should avoid them." where I rate it a "2" for a "yeah, I did ok this week" or "1" if I transgressed

I thought I was the only one that did this.

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