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Comment by OJFord | Hacker News Reader

Weird, I was actually thinking of a related AskHN, that comments here are obviously now the place for.

Is there anything similar people use for sort of general 'knowledge base' type things - like people use one big text file, or Obsidian, or Logseq, or Notion, or whatever - but with some kind of Anki-like reminder/retrieval rather than just deliberate searching to look something up?

Or do people successfully use Anki itself in that way? (Maybe I'm wrong to associate it with focussed studying/cramming on a specific topic for an exam say?)

The closest I could think of was a Zettlekasten system, where though you wouldn't have the automated reminder prompts, you would (if you'd done a good job linking things) have a rabbit hole to fall down once you opened something.

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There's an Obsidian plugin for Anki -- https://github.com/reuseman/flashcards-obsidian

It connects with your Anki desktop app. You create notes in Obsidian in a specific format, and they get converted to Anki flashcards. This way your flashcard creation process becomes much easier if you already use Obsidian for note-taking.

Unfortunately, while super useful, that plugin is quite out-of-date. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't depending on what Obsidian/Anki version combination you use. If one of them updates, it breaks. I think I had to pin Obsidian to some older version to keep it working.

Actually Logseq comes with built-in flash cards. That's why I love it.

https://unofficial-logseq-docs.gitbook.io/unofficial-logseq-...

Interesting, maybe I should try it out again. I wanted to like it, but I just kept hitting bugs even just for basic things as I was getting started. I think the big showstopper one for me was something like link a page and then rename it, and the link's broken; I found an issue for it and the response was like unfortunately due to implementation detail this is really hard and probably won't-fix. At which point I just thought ok nope that's table stakes as far as I'm concerned.

Edit: found it: github.com/logseq/logseq#7519 (maybe there's another way of a basic page link that isn't a query so it's not quite as bad as I described above, but still)

I think a related, but often overlooked question is: is there really a need for remembering things off the top of one's head?

Since there was no need to look it up, perhaps it's not relevant to whatever one is doing at the moment.

When learning a language, yes!

There are things I used to understand while studying that I no longer do, but wish I did. I can look them up and understand if I want to intentionally use them, but they're not sort of available in my mind for me to draw on; information that might apply to something without me knowing in order to look it up, if that makes sense?

And also as a sibling comment says, language. In particular vocabulary - I've learnt a decent amount of Hindi grammar by self-study, in fact I think totally sufficient for casual or even professional conversation, but my vocabulary's really lacking, and it holds me back from speaking, which means even when I do have the opportunity to practice speaking with others, I can only say stupid basic things, I lack the vocabulary to say what I want most of the time. (And casual Hindi's way more forgiving than most languages, because 'Hinglish' is so common. But I don't get any better by just using Hindi connectives and ancillary words in an otherwise English sentence!)

I'm studying data structures and algorithms, out of interest, and to pass technical interviews. I can't fire up ChatGPT during interviews.

Anki has definitely helped me. It's surprising how well it works if you do it daily.

I also add new cards when I come across a word I don't know. If I keep this up for years or decades, my vocabulary should be extraordinary.

RemNote seems like a close match to what you're describing: https://www.remnote.com

What is rem note?

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