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Comment by elashri | Hacker News Reader

That was nice to watch. I spent about 25 minutes going through that.

But it was horrifying for me. I realized that I wanted to see if the source code is available but then realized that I really don't remember those details. I remember random things for my childhood but I don't remember the date when I started elementary school. I know that I got my first computer when I was in third grade but don't remember the date. I don't even remember the date I started college and I probably wrote the wrong date couple of times during grad school application. While I started recording something less than a diary to record some of these but this was around covid.

Thanks OP and HN for this reality check.

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> I don't remember the date when I started elementary school

Ultimately the date is not important. It's a life event that came after an event (being born) and before another event (going to college/getting a job)

Recall isn't that simple. Some memories need to be jogged out with colors, smells, or sounds. You probably remember more than you first think, but it would be an involved activity to access.

Maybe a worthwhile one.

Don't look back, you've been there / Feel the mist as your breath hits the air. - Manfred Mann

> horrifying [...] don't remember

A similar exercise is lined paper, one year per line. Your life on a page or two. You can vertical-bracket ranges of time, and have multiple columns (even extending the sheet). One nice aspect, is constraint propagation helps a lot in figuring out when things happened. As the years fill in, you get "well, it has to be after X and before Y, and I've already penciled in that summer and that one, so it must have been this one". For greater-than-year precision you can mark a tick, or a blob, or a month letter, but you don't have to. Each time I've done this with someone, there's been something that surprised them.

I usually don't remember details like that but I practice the ways to get them - e.g. for elementary school you should know how old you were for the year, and then you can check at what date elementary school starts in your area (where I'm from it's always 15th of September) so you can pinpoint it.

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