Ask HN: What are some good examples of Anki card decks?

18 points by ParallelThread 3 years ago | 5 comments

I am interested in learning Anki for spaced repetition. Looking for good examples especially about system design and programming.

tra3 3 years ago |

Creating your own deck is the way to go. Other people's decks never quite clicked for me the same way a self made deck does. A huge part of it is going through the material and identifying the pieces of knowledge that you actually want/need to retain.

Andy Matushchak's prompt guide [0] linked below is amazing. Supermemo's 20 rules for formulating knowledge [1] is great too, Wozniak is the one that invented SRS.

[0] https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/

[1] https://www.supermemo.com/en/blog/twenty-rules-of-formulatin...

leobg 3 years ago | |

Isn’t it interesting how that “cloze deletion” technique described here in 1997 is what they use today to train powerful large language models?

(Obviously it’s been described even earlier, for instance back in the 1960s by BF Skinner, for “programmed instruction“.)

Leftium 3 years ago |

Fluent Forever teaches how to make effective SRS flashcards, based on science and personal experience. I think many of the methods taught by Fluent Forever would work for other domains outside learning foreign languages.

Here are some of the more important points:

- Make your own flashcards (don't just use unmodified decks made by other people). Just the act of making the flashcards exercises your brain so you will be more likely to recall in the future, even if you never use the deck.

- Make personal connections between the facts and yourself. Like if the fact is about `await`, use the first time that keyword helped make your code more readable. What function were you awaiting?

- Connect the facts to visceral feelings/emotions. Perhaps some things are categorized by inconsistent/illogical categories (like German genders). Attach that category to feelings/emotions like hot, cold, explosive, sexy, sad.

- Use images because the brain is better at recalling images than abstract facts.

https://lifeclub.org/books/fluent-forever-gabriel-wyner-revi...

https://www.grahammann.net/book-notes/fluent-forever-gabriel...

minhmeoke 3 years ago |

I've used this amazing deck for learning Chinese: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChineseLanguage/comments/7mjmjc/bes...

This looks like a nice Anki deck for reviewing system design concepts: https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primer

You might also be interested in Alex Xu's System Design Interview Book.

jazzabeanie 3 years ago |

There was an comment yesterday (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35209775) that linked to https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/