Hickory (YC S15) predicts when you are going to forget something | Hacker News Reader

Hickory (YC S15) predicts when you are going to forget something

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41 pointsbt4117 comments

So this is just Anki[1] under an umbrella? E.g. flash cards are provided by someone higher up who can also look at the data?

[1] http://ankisrs.net/

They're both tools that use spaced repetition [1].

The OP made it sound like Hickory is automatically generating cards based on what a user reads. It also sounds like Hickory is doing more analytics. Of course, Anki is open-source, so it could be augmented to do these.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition

The analytics are definitely useful. I re-read it and it does seem like Hickory automatically divides any text into flash-cards. Not sure how effective that is in reality though.

Stay tuned. :-)

Hey Emerongi, CEO here and great question.

SRS systems are a good start, however they typically only utilize flashcards and treat all information the same. Where we are starting is looking at the type of knowledge that's trying to be retained and building a solution for each one.

Without giving to much away, a SRS flashcard is quite good at helping you remember a vocabulary word, or a single fact. These systems break down quickly if you have a multistep process (like closing a sale) or a tree of conditional steps. We have solutions for each of these and we're learning a lot of interesting things from our early customers.

The entire system is built around creating information that is highly memorable, so from first view to latest review we're optimizing the learning path.

This should have been in the article. From the title, I was expecting something completely else; reading the article I thought "nothing new" and eventually I was left with "there's some dude doing something".

As a daily Anki user, this seems interesting though.

I was a daily one for years, then completely moved on once I had Hickory (we use it for ourselves internally) and trained to get into YC with it.

Happy to talk more about this and talk go over what we're thinking. brian@hickorytraining.com

It seems, then, that you're a flashcard consultancy that works with customers to optimize learning using SRS + something like http://www.supermemo.com/articles/20rules.htm. Perhaps with more secret sauce.

Are there studies you use to inform your secret sauce? Are they recent?

I ask as someone who's been building a personal knowledge base of sorts of which one key component is Anki / SRS.

I wonder if they plan to tackle other educational settings in the future (e.g. schools, self-studying individuals, etc). Am also curious to know if the card design happens automatically or maybe the customer selects from different card types depending on content. The space of tech products that help improve learning seems more sparse than it should be.

Great questions! Thanks bluusteel.

We'll see regarding other educational settings, right now it's very targeted on these sales / customer service. What we learn here however can be applied anywhere.

Card types are a bit automagic and templatized based on the course type. I.e. if it's a sales pitch there are different templates & exercises than if it's about a product.

"The space of tech products that help improve learning seems more sparse than it should be." -- Completely agree.

I tried to figure out what this app is doing for a few minutes, my understanding after reading a title was that it reminds me about e.g. my keys or wallet before leaving the house :-) It would carry so much more information if you phrased it in a way that mentions learning.

Haha, yeah. I'm happy to text you everyday and tell you where your keys are. It will most likely be a guess however.

Anyplace and bite-sized learning, even before personalizing it to a commute or using other data, seems totally green field. Most corporate training is just videos. Pretty exciting.

After seeing early prototypes and having known the founder for years, this has the potential to be a truly great product and company - congrats!

<3 More to come.

This is 100% for me. I am the world's worst forgetful bear. And by my at least my subjective experience, the number of times I think back to the thing at spaced intervals determines in a large degree the likelihood that I am going to remember it longer.

Can you imagine any downside to remembering all the material you try to learn?

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