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679 points domenicd | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.434s | source
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bearjaws ◴[] No.44020922[source]
Spaced repetition has been all the rage for 20 years now.

Dozens of apps, thousands of lectures, and it turns out its not really a silver bullet.

There's nothing really wrong with it, it's just that people tend to fall off the same way they do on any other education pattern.

A couple years ago I was thinking "If Google and Apple really cared about kids they would make a spaced repetition unlock system", where by you have to make note cards every week and then have to answer correctly to get into your phone. (obviously requires some bypass system, other rules, etc)

You could probably jury rig it with a popup that comes up after you unlock, but people would never install it anyway.

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BeetleB ◴[] No.44022192[source]
> Dozens of apps, thousands of lectures, and it turns out its not really a silver bullet.

Easy statement to make when you're not defining the silver bullet. Kind of like saying dieting turns out not to be a silver bullet.

I've used spaced repairing for over 6 years. It's been transformative for me.

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1. 0xDEAFBEAD ◴[] No.44022672[source]
What info did you memorize?
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2. BeetleB ◴[] No.44025350[source]
Basic undergrad statistics. This doesn't make me better at doing statistics, but now I can understand things I read. Whereas prior to SR, I had learned the material three separate times - always forgot because of lack of use. SR made it stick.

Algorithms and data structures.

Basics of HTML/CSS/JS. I'm not a frontend developer, but this was enough for me to (mostly) understand colleagues' JS code. And often I would inform him of one of the newer JS features he didn't know of (e.g. null coalescing operator). Does it make me a JS developer? No. But it ensures I'm not useless at it.

Python 3.x new features. Simple things like "Stop using os.walk and use scandir instead".

A whole lot of Emacs keybindings. I was a heavy Emacs user before SR, but this really helped take it to the next level (I now mostly rely on hydras, so I no longer memorize keystrokes, cut I can't deny its effectiveness).

Some amount of elisp.

Probably a whole lot more random miscellany I can't recall right now.

Basically, what it does is let you retain information without usage. Prior to this, I would mostly retain only things I use (or had used) often.

I was in university for over a decade. Took lots of notes. But they're useless if you don't review them. Some years after leaving university I stopped trying to learn anything technical unless I was putting it to immediate use. Why bother if you're going to forget?

SR is what let me get back to studying for fun.