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Comment by rahimnathwani | Hacker News Reader

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rahimnathwani

This is an interesting approach. Congrats on shipping!

I worry that it won't be effective. Systems like Supermemo and Anki work because of:

1) Spaced repetition (showing you the thing at the right time).

2) Retrieval practice (having your brain practice retrieving the thing you're about to forget).

3) Feedback and automation (using your self-rating to schedule the next review).

You are doing #1 and #3.

But you totally skip #2, because you show all the info in the email. So, unlike Anki, Supermemo or Quantum Country (which someone mentioned in another comment), there's no front/back or cloze deletion, and no retrieval practice happening.

Perhaps putting the question in the email subject and the answer in the email body would work?

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Thanks for the feedback!

I agree, and this is something I thought about a lot during the design process. In my experience, just looking at the note (#1 in your example) helps a lot more than no repetitions (which is obvious of course), but it's still a huge improvement compared to my previous flow.

As for repetition, I was thinking of replying to the email with what you think is the answer and letting an LLM decide if you remember correctly. Is that something that sounds effective to you?

Just create a “show answer” link.

The link can literally encode the answer in the URL, which you can just hide the raw url it in the emails’s HTML. (Fox examples, put it as base64 chars in query parameters)

Then you can host a (static) webpage that renders the text. This lets you host any users text w/o an interactive site. No live database, no ops burden, etc.

If you wanted to get fancy (which users of such a product probably would probably want) throw in “success/failure” links so your users can report the results and get changed frequency of spaced repetitions based on their success rate.

For Pete sake, don’t use an LLM.

Just use CSS to hide/show the answers, or a little bit of JavaScript for just that. Or scrolling, if it is text only. Or links to the answer an http server.

  I was thinking of replying to the email with what you think is the answer and letting an LLM decide if you remember correctly. Is that something that sounds effective to you?

The nice thing about your tool is the simplicity and low-friction due to using email. For retrieval, replies might work, but I wonder whether the people who are willing to do that work are the same people who would just install Anki instead.

Email seems like a no-go here. It would feel like spam. If you wanted a something more conversational, I'd consider doing this over text messages.

You can practice retrieving something without entering and checking it.

More information on #2 (colloquially known as 'active recall'): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testing_effect

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