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Comment by zetalyrae | Hacker News Reader

I wrote this. Ask me anything!

1. Have you read Andy Matuschak's guide to prompt writing? Your post reminded me of it. https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/

2. Do you have any sort of guide or principles for note-taking? I'm always debating whether or not it's worth taking notes, and when I do take notes I'm debating what the best way to do it is. (Hierarchal/bulleted information like in your post, or summarizing things in paragraphs, or what) A lot of times it's unclear to me what information is worth writing and it frustrates me.

Great article? I'm curious what your Anki settings are, if you've changed anything. I'm pretty new to the app, but when I hit things like "you'll need see this card in 5 years" I had to dive into settings and start tweaking stuff. I'm more concerned about definitely remembering it in say 12 months than having too high of a load. But there are many adjustments to achieve this, so any thoughts?

I use Mochi with all settings out of the box. Mochi doesn't even implement the SM-2 algorithm, it just applies a multiplier to the review interval on getting it right/forgetting.

Triggered.

I spent so much time and effort comparing the various spaced repetition software before finally, grudgingly, choosing Anki over Mochi.

My rationale was that, while Mochi's UX is amazing, the algorithm matters. SuperMemo seems to justify this - SM18+ is a highly refined algorithm and 'seems' to provide much, much better performance than SM2/Anki.

So Mochi's incredibly basic 'engine' seems, by this logic, to be a pretty significant downside.

In the end what I care most about is memorization, and it seems like the best 'engine' for that is (Supermemo if you're on Windows, otherwise...) Anki + FSRS.

I'd appreciate being convinced I'm wrong - Using Mochi was a vastly more pleasant experience than using Anki.

I'm with you. The fact that Anki is FOSS, is still actively developed, and has a SQLite database that is easily queryable are also important considerations for me when selecting tools that will be used over such long periods of time. I've just been burned too often by online services that shut down or change significantly from what I originally wanted to use them for.

Thanks for the write up.

Could you share with us how you’re applying this knowledge in your work?

I mostly use SR so I can study intensely whatever strikes me as interesting, then turn to the next thing, while still retaining the knowledge and being able to make progress.

Like a few months back I had the sudden inexplicable autistic urge to learn geology. So, I picked up a textbook and went through it like a novel and just wrote the flashcards as I read.

I think of it as checkpointing for learning: https://borretti.me/article/spaced-repetition-checkpointing-...

Currently going through Jaynes' Probability Theory: The Logic of Science.

Nice write-up! Haven't tried SRS yes, I definitely see how it can work well for learning facts like you show. For fuzzier subjects like history or psychology, I've had some success with writing questions for myself that require more of an understanding of the subject than mere facts. (Never got to the repetition part, though.) I found that writing non-trivial questions also helped me understand the subject matter better. How would you work with such subjects?

How would you reccomend I learn history with spaced repetition? I'm studying a detailed subject independently (I.e. not for an exam with a set curriculum) and I'm finding it hard to atomise the cards down bevond dates and names. I suppose I should start there first and then build more complex cards, but I'm not sure what the best approach for those is. Thanks for the detailed article!

I'm currently doing this and personally I believe the dates and names approach is best (depending on your goals). The theory is that if you have a solid grasp of the coarse details like births/deaths/major battles then when you are reading about the more subtle ideas (like what factors caused the fall of the Roman empire) you will be able to couch those ideas in the concrete framework you've already built. Then those ideas will be able to stick better.

I've only been doing it for a year and change so we'll see how it goes, but I think it's a good approach.

I've thought about this a lot and I don't have an answer. History is very prose-like and unstructured and that makes it hard.

My tentative thought (and I haven't validated this entirely) is to try to structure it. Make a spreadsheet with tables for people, events, etc. Look at Wikipedia infoboxes for inspiration into the types of things that should go as columns in the tables.

You can also try hierarchical periodization. Like if you were making flashcards about the life of Peter the Great you'd divide his life into:

    1. Early life
    2. Grand Embassy
        2.1. Austria
        2.2. The Netherlands
        2.3. England
    3. Great Northern War
        3.1 Start
        3.2 Founding of St. Petersburg

And put information under each of the leaf nodes.

I'd check out Cal Newport's work on efficient study habits and apply Anki where it makes sense.

For example, read this and follow the links: https://calnewport.com/case-study-how-i-plan-to-study-for-my...

Obviously ignore the stuff that's less relevant for an autodidact, though seriously consider the effect any particular thing could have on your learning. For example, perhaps you'd get a high ROI paying a history graduate student to assign and grade a research paper or exam.

Ali Abdaal also has great suggestions that should be useful: https://aliabdaal.com/the-essay-memorisation-framework/

Thanks for the great article, you've inspired me to take another shot at making a habit of learning through spaced repetition!

I had a question: how much time do you typically spend on this activity in a day? Do you have tips for how to adjust based on the time you have available?

It depends, after a big burst of adding flashcards I'll have a big hump to get through for like 2 or 3 weeks. That might be hundreds of flashcards a day, that can take 15-20 minutes.

Right now I haven't added many cards in a while so it's more like 30-50 cards a day. Usually not even 5 minutes.

I wouldn't recommend doing hundreds of cards a day, especially if you're just getting into it. I'm just nuts.

Thanks for this. What topics have you learned/memorized with this technique?

I find writing cards / decks the challenge. IIRC the ones you download from Ankiweb are all such low quality!

Could you link to some good quality decks for inspiration please?

I write essentially all of my cards. I find that it helps a bit with recall.

Also, people differ in the "density" of cards they need around a given topic. I might need a lot of cards to cover a particular area of a topic in many different ways, while someone who already knows that area needs fewer.

I agree that public decks tend to be terrible. So I don't really know any good ones. For the examples in the post, I tried to keep the wording as close as possible to the flashcards in my own Mochi decks, without adding extraneous detail.

Thanks for the article! I noticed a small issue: the “Powers of two” subsection didn’t render properly, probably due to a Markdown syntax error.

Thanks! Fixed this.

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