Hacker News Reader

rajlegoon Using Anki to remember what you read

There is also SuperMemo 18 (https://super-memo.com/supermemo18.html) which is from the same people as supermemo.com except it's a desktop app with way more features but also a much higher learning curve.

If you use SM and you use anki both for a significant amount of time it's not hard to see that SM leaves you with way less reps. Anki is based on the very first version of the SuperMemo algorithm (from ~1990 or so which was the first SRS algorithm ever) known as SM2. Current version of SM uses SM18.

rajlegoon I Learned French in 12 Months

I really like this site [1] because it shows you just how big the gap between native and non-native speakers is. Non-native speakers generally know around 10,000 words while adult native speakers tend to know upwards of 20,000 words. I think the reason that getting to real native level fluency is extremely hard is that they have thousands more hours of input than you do and it's very hard to make up for that in real situations other than reading/watching lots and lots of Spanish content.

[1] http://testyourvocab.com/

rajlegoon I Learned French in 12 Months

Have you heard of Stephen Krashen's Input Hypothesis? [1] There are a couple of parts to it but it essentially says that linguistic competence (a fancy way to say your innate knowledge of a language) only increases when you take in input. If you talk all day that doesn't really make you any better (since you don't learn anything new) unless you use a process like deliberate feedback to be corrected. Personally I think it's much more useful to thus focus on reading/listening to start and then later move on to speaking/writing. I learned Spanish through normal school and while I can speak fast the fact that I haven't had much real input really shows since I'm generally just translating English -> spanish and I don't know if I'm using grammar right since I haven't heard it enough.

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

rajlegoon Smart homes will turn dumb overnight as Charter kills security service

Wow, that's pretty cool. What level of iOS device do you need to run it? I try to avoid using my phone too much so I'm wondering if I could control it all with a really old iPad or a cheap old iTouch. Any recommendations on the IR blaster? I've been wanting to have some sort of non-remote control but I don't trust alexa/google home so this looks like a good option that would let me use my existing devices.

rajlegoon Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

Are you familiar with Piotr Wozniak's writings on sleep? I think you might find them interesting https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Science_of_sleep. DSPS is pretty common and fairly natural considering how we've diverged in habits from our ancestors.

rajlegoon Ask HN: With ADHD, how did you become an effective software developer?

https://www.amazon.com/3M-Peltor-Over-Earmuffs-X5A/dp/B00CPC...

I use these exact ones and can attest to them working, keep in mind though that the size does really make them look funny. You can get smaller sizes but I’m not 100% sure how well earbuds will fit with them. If earbuds do fit main trade off would be that for silence you’d need somewhat higher wind noise but I’m sure they’re not too bad either.

rajlegoon Ask HN: With ADHD, how did you become an effective software developer?

A lot of people here have been talking about headphones/blocking out noise. To that end I HIGHLY suggest buying some good earmuffs (I use the X5A) and inside those using earbuds. It’ll look ridiculous (though there are smaller sizes) but for 30$ for earmuffs and 20$ earbuds you’ll have extremely effective noise cancelling if the earbuds are on low (the earmuffs don’t block well certain types of sounds but low noise from earbuds takes care of that).

rajlegoon Ask HN: With ADHD, how did you become an effective software developer?

I’ve found brain.fm works well for me though I also find earmuffs (I have the Peltor X5A) plus earbuds with very low wind noise to be extremely effective.

rajlegoon Digital Tools I Wish Existed

What kind of algorithm/system do you think you'd use to convert them into a consumption order?

rajlegoon Digital Tools I Wish Existed

For programming, you might find this video interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mgrdg1uwDeA Larry Sanger (co-founder of wikipedia) found SuperMemo/SRS sort of clunky for use with program so he made a program which lets you review more by doing rather than just recalling.

I think rest of what you're after are in large part SuperMemo which I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread. It basically allows the same goal orientation feature through its priority/scheduling system though it lacks managing requisites (aside from just scheduling something to show up later than something else).

I'm not a huge fan of books for 2 reasons: -they're not information dense (you can get way more information-per-paragraph from a wikipedia article rather than a book) -they're not very context independent, as in, if I want to understand some specific part of a book I'll likely have to read the entire thing while with internet articles I can read one part and ignore the rest. The main reason this is important is that I can read the parts I find valuable and ignore less valued things. Reading an entire book for one concept that takes 15 chapters to get to isn't great.

With SuperMemo, if there's a book I find interesting I'll generally try to find any alternative wikipedia article first or otherwise some other web article on the same idea. It's just takes so much more time to read and retain a book than to retain a smaller, denser article.

rajlegoon Digital Tools I Wish Existed

I love that article, it changed a lot of my thinking regarding people's potential for success. Woz has a lot of other articles you might also find interesting here: https://supermemo.guru/wiki/SuperMemo_Guru. I've especially read through a lot of his articles on sleep and memory and found them invaluable.

SuperMemo's interface was not designed with the beginner in mind. When I first started trying it even basic operations frustrated me to no end. But now that I use it as a high(er) level user, it feels very very intuitive and you start to understand why it was designed in a way that looks so unappealing at first. If you do decide to try it again, I would highly recommend joining the SM discord server (https://discordapp.com/invite/pB7jcSK). There are a lot of very helpful people there.

rajlegoon Digital Tools I Wish Existed

I think even if you have a content feed incorporating goal-orientation you'll still struggle with the learning part. I think this article is very valuable in explaining why: https://andymatuschak.org/books/.

rajlegoon Digital Tools I Wish Existed

I would check out the IR feature of SuperMemo (https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Incremental_reading). There is a very steep learning curve and when you are a beginner you'll think it looks antiquated but if you ever up becoming proficient in it it will all just quick.

rajlegoon Digital Tools I Wish Existed

I haven't read the entire article thoroughly but I think "Queue management for inbound digital content" is something implemented in an SRS app called SuperMemo. The way it's intended to work is that you have content and over time break it down and through the scheduling system you eventually end up with extracts small enough to be made into SRS cards (though it's more complicated than that in actual use). It has a lot of weaknesses, mainly because a lot of it is based on features from IE (thus poor PDF support) but I still find it extremely useful. If I find any article that looks interesting I just throw it there and eventually I'll import it, go through it with incremental reading (https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Incremental_reading) and eventually dismiss it.

Edit: I also ought to mention, it has a very good priority/interval system for scheduling when I see things. Essentially things I give lower priority are less likely to show up and when I'm going through my material/doing my reps I'm more likely to see high priority material. There's a general issue that you find the thing you see soonest most shiny and thus a strong likelihood of overprioritizing new material but SuperMemo helps intersperse everything to prevent that.

It sort of can do the central search thing too to an extent, I can search through my collection of imported articles/cards and find stuff that's generally relevant to my interests. Though how useful it is depends largely on how long you've used the app. I am also reminded of the brain (https://www.thebrain.com/) but I'm not super familiar with it.

Have you heard of Ted Nelson's Xanadu? I've only looked into it a little but I was reminded of it when you talked about better reading.

rajlegoon Failing 15% of the time is the best way to learn, say scientists

I haven’t used either Anki not wanikani (I use SuperMemo) but from what I’ve heard wanikani has no leech management meaning you end up stuck repeating the kanji you keep failing, making the experience miserable. Leech management is really important for any decent SRS

rajlegoon We, the peoples of the Amazon, are full of fear. Soon you will be too

Not eating meat is reasonable for people in most first world countries. It would be harder to boycott Brazilian products though.

rajlegoon How Men’s Bodies Change When They Become Fathers

I think there are much worse diets to have that your kids would learn from than soylent.

rajlegoon A Programmer’s Regret: Neglecting Math at University

Likely unwanted commentary but how do you do leech handling/minimum information principle with your math cards? I'm a SuperMemo user and I think one of the biggest failures I see with Anki, in general, is that it doesn't handle leeches well (leeches are cards you repeatedly fail that end up taking most of your time) and failure to adhere to minimum information principle (only 1 thing to recall per card). I think with math this would become even more difficult if you make minute long cards to go over some proof you will definitely be setting yourself up to suffer.

rajlegoon The Case Against Octopus Farming

As mentioned by zerofries, the only way this would happen is by consumer pressure. Otherwise there’s no way it would ever make sense to raise chickens in the way you’ve said. There’s not enough ROI on ensuring really happy chickens for anything other than boycotting normal chicken meat to make it probably. At least in the near future (next 100 years) I would say not existing is far preferable to the hell theyre put through in factory farming.

rajlegoon The Case Against Octopus Farming

I’ve always found the intelligence criteria for eating for not eating animals stupid (because I never thought of intelligence having relevance to ability to suffer) but the social metric is an interesting way of looking at it. I don’t think you can call socialness of a species something so related to the intelligence though, there are highly solitary species that are still very intelligent. Being kept in captivity would still be suffering for them, just for different reasons. I think the suffering of all animals matters but if I had to say between animals which one’s matters more I’m not sure I would differentiate by more than lifespan.

rajlegoon Glymphatic system clears toxins in the brain during sleep (2013)

Something that really bothers me about coffee culture is that coffee is seen as a solution to being tired when really all it is is just an alertness booster. The main neurological cause of sleepiness is the brain’s desire to do memory optimization which can only happen by sleeping at the right time. Correct timing is really important and it seems to me like you have DSPS (delayed sleep phase syndrome). Most people’s circadian rhythms are a bit longer than 24 hours (usually between 24.5-25.5 hours) though external signals like exercise or bright light in the morning reset it to being closer to 24. If you have DSPS, yours isn’t reset well (you can try the aformtentioned morning bright light and exercise to change this) and you have a tendency to wake up later and later each day. The problem is that if you have to wake up at 7 every day and you think you need 9 hours of sleep you’ll try to sleep at 10 to get enough which backfires. The reason it can backfire is that for good sleep you need both strong homeostatic sleep signals (tiredness from thinking a lot or doing a lot of effort in the day) and circadian (sleepiness goes and comes cyclically). If you sleep at 10 and have DSPS, even if your homeostatic signals sleep, it is likely that your circadian isn’t which means you end up tossing and turning throughout the night. If you slept maybe an hour later you’d get full circadian and homeostatic sleepiness giving you good quality sleep but if you have to wake up at 7 you have to cut short sleep with an alarm clock which isn’t great since your brain can’t complete all the memory optimization it wants. I would say though that sleeping later more restfully for shorter will do you better than sleeping earlier restlessly. (Sorry for the essay, sleep is something I care about a lot. I hope this was a little helpful.)

rajlegoon Nutrient deficiencies in rice grown under higher carbon dioxide

I would say that enough land is spent on livestock feed that if we switched to meatless diets we would likely be able to feed everyone. There are regions only suited to food for livestock but most of the world imports food making it not an issue. The regions that don’t import food that tend to eat more meat from necessity are also likely to be the places that don’t contribute to overuse of land for livestock food.

rajlegoon Death Note: L, Anonymity and Eluding Entropy (2017)

I’m not an accountant but I’ve heard that accountants often use number frequencies to look for fraud. IIRC, amounts of money starting with 9 are less likely. Looking at those kinds of distributions in the world can maybe show influence of non normal factors.

rajlegoon Japan's Women Opt Out of Marriage

I'm a foreigner living in Tokyo, it's just supply and demand. Lots of people want to live in the city so inevitably a decent-sized apartment gets pricey.

rajlegoon How to Accomplish Big Things, Even When You Feel Small

I feel like the gun to the head thing is a good way to get started on things, which is what people struggle with the most. If you put a gun to your head trying to learn or study something and you’re hating it you won’t get great results, if you overcome your initial inertia against starting and find you enjoy then I think depending on the enjoyment is likely better.

rajlegoon A Programmer’s Regret: Neglecting Math at University

I think the biggest problem of math education is that it’s not taught in a way that maximizes long-term memory. There’s a lot of research on it but I think there’s lots of methodology in teaching on how to make students remember better that’s underutilized. An example: interleaving old problems in tests and homework. Doesn’t take much work but from what I remember there are studies that show significant improvement in final tests scores and likely in overall recall. Depending on students to review older material on their own isn’t a good bet.

rajlegoon A Programmer’s Regret: Neglecting Math at University

Interesting point, reminds me of this article: https://www.supermemo.com/en/archives1990-2015/articles/geni.... One of the points it makes is basically that abstract thinking is more valuable than specific facts, and that math is basically the king of this. I hadn’t really thought about comparatively weak something like programming can be since a strong focus of it is syntax (if programming and computer science are somewhat seperated).

rajlegoon A Programmer’s Regret: Neglecting Math at University

I don’t think learning something and forgetting it should really be justified, it’s just not an efficient use of time.

If you wanted the benefit of knowing tools that help with linear algebra, memorize that, there’s not point cramming the entire thing just for a class.

I think a good remedy to this issue is spaced repetition software like Anki/SuperMemo. It’s a bit messy to use with math, especially with something like a proof, and they’re meant for cards that shouldn’t take you longer than say 10 seconds to solve. It is doable though if you can break things down into atomic components. And it can be worth more than you realize to have usable access to those memories for say decades rather than till the month after your class

I think it’s difficult though to make classes focus on such long-term memories because tests create such poor short-term incentive structures which aren’t easily replaceable. I think the only way to get around this is to just focus on learning what you want and if you’re missing something that seems useful to acquire it on your own rather than being required to study something and just forgetting it as soon as the test passes.