Comment by gcr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gcr | Hacker News Reader

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I LOVE anki!! I’m a heavy user.

Everything goes in my morning flash cards. Knots, geography, language, tar commandline flags, papers, statistics homework. Fill them with things you like, is my advice - it’s fun to say hello to hobbies on the verge of your memory in the morning.

Bird calls! I’m learning sounds of bird calls since I can’t see very well so I can’t learn by sight. I listed eBird’s set of common birds near me and downloaded their calls as mp3s from the Macaulay Library and batch-imported them into my flash cards (for my personal use). It’s always rewarding to hear a bird outside and go “hey I think I know what that is!” Pairs well with Merlin Sound ID.

Another great use is as a mnemonic Rolodex: I frequently forget to reach out and catch up with friends in my life, so I have a deck with just names of people to say hi to. Every time somebody comes up, I say hello, and then answer the card for whichever interval feels appropriate. This way, the SRS itself will make sure that I never forget someone for too long.

Wait a moment. "tar commandline flags"? When I was still learning how to program, the general advice was to avoid memorizing things you can easily look up, like language syntax, framework functionality or commandline flags, and just let it happen. In fact, I recently caught myself skimming Nest.js docs to make cards to learn how to use Nest.js BEFORE I even start working on my project, and almost felt like I'm procrastinating instead of being productive.

I don't disagree with how Anki is effective at memorization, because that would be like disagreeing with the effectiveness of space repetition as a principle. I'm just wondering if it's worth putting stuff like "vim keybinds" in - John Carmack reportedly did that to check what's the fuss about Vim.

At least for me this often means, that I just keep on lookin up the stuff over and over again. Takes some deliberate effort to actually store some obscure things in my memory.

When I was still active with Anki, I was mostly picking up some random things I knew I would need fairly often and included those in my deck.

But that means you're doing tar flag flashcards more often than you're using those tar flags? Because otherwise, and for me, the CLI usage is the flashcard? Using them is what teaches me and keeps fresh the commands and flags that I most often use.

Not necessarily. Hypothetical example, but let's say I use some obscure tar command twice a month. That's too far apart for me to remember it, but often enough that it would annoy me to look it up every time. Chuck it into anki and I have a short time where I repeat it often enough so that it sticks and after that the time between repetitions quickly becomes far longer than the 14 day interval where I actually use the command.

And now I never have to look it up again :)

I think that's the original claim: That you're memorizing something that you use 12-20 times per year. Why not turn that into a script, or make it a memorable alias?

Because I perceive the cost of memorizing it to be almost zero.

There's of course a need for nuance here. I do write scripts to automate stuff and I do have aliases configured for certain commands, directories, etc. I don't try to remember all the things, just so that I never have to look something up again.

If I wasn't a heavy anki user already, then I certainly wouldn't set it up just to remember some commandline stuff. But that's not the situation I'm in. I use it for lots of things already and I have an established habit to review the cards every day. Adding a card to remember specific flags has incredibly low overhead for me.

A different, but similar example is using Anki for learning library/framework syntax. I made heavy use of it when I first learned Pytorch. There are so many different commands to wrangle your data into the shape you need it to be. I frequently mixed them up and got frustrated because it doesn't necessarily result in runtime errors and then it's hard to debug (because I didn't know what I was doing). So everyday I chucked a couple of the new commands I encountered into Anki and by the end of the week I was comfortable doing all kinds transformations. Would I have learned to do that without Anki? Probably. Did it give me an additional opportunity to consolidate that knowledge for very little cost? Also yes.

This is the issue I've found with SRS style memorization in general. It's basically the definition of overfitting.

He should have used Vim instead of memorizing it's keybindings. That makes no sense at all.

I managed to finally switch to using Vim after years of attempts, once I used Anki to help me memorize the common commands. I was less frustrated when using it day to day.

Well, he absolutely should have been using Vim, he instead spent the week learning vi.

I've done both. It was very effective.

As someone who has a had some false starts with SRS, this seems like an interesting approach. Do you add all these disparate topics into one huge deck? What does adding a new topic domain look like?

I think a bit of the problem (for me) when I tried anki before was friction from the overhead of 1.) deciding how to split time among decks and 2.) having to assign a 1-5 value for 'how well I remembered the info'. That second point is huge, I find that kind of task to be incredibly exhausting. Do you have any tips for getting over that?

Where did you find a decent flash cards about knots?

Bird calls is a great idea! I never thought of it, but it really does align with the medium.

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