
Ask HN: What are your thoughts on spaced repetition?  Have you heard of it? - burtonator
I&#x27;m curious if the HN community has heard of spaced repetition?<p>Essentially, it&#x27;s a way to remember massive amounts of information by timing the study and review by the material you&#x27;re learning.<p>Simple things that you mostly already know don&#x27;t need to be reviewed often but more complicated things need to be reviewed more frequently or you will end up forgetting them.<p>I ended up building a document reader system for spaced repetition named Polar:<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getpolarized.io&#x2F;<p>It sync&#x27;s with another system named Anki.<p>Anki manages the flashcards and Polar manages your reading.<p>What I like about this is that you never have to worry about forgetting an important fact again.  You can just spend 15-30 minutes studying and you&#x27;re re-tested right before it&#x27;s forgotten.<p>Anyway.  If you haven&#x27;t heard about it I&#x27;d recommend diving into it... really fascinating topic and it&#x27;s dramatically changed how I view my long-term education.
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ColinWright
It's been discussed here on HN many, many times[0]. Personally, I'm a huge,
_huge_ fan. I've written my own version and use it extensively.

I've memorised the periodic table of elements, the poem "Ozymandias", the
regnal dates of the English throne, the poem "Clancy of the Overflow", Formula
One drivers and teams, the poem "Cargoes", the competitors and partners in the
2018 UK series of Strictly Come Dancing, and more.

Spaced repetition is phenomenally effective when used properly. I have
somewhere an academic paper that explains the underlying model, and could
probably dig it out if someone really wants it. But it's available on
t'internet if you look.

[0]
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=spaced+repetition&sort=byDate&...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=spaced+repetition&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story)

~~~
burtonator
Do you remember the title or the author?

I usually try to read anything like this that's referenced.

~~~
ColinWright
[https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.07032](https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.07032)

    
    
        Unbounded Human Learning:
        Optimal Scheduling for
        Spaced Repetition
    
        Siddharth Reddy,
        Igor Labutov,
        Siddhartha Banerjee,
        Thorsten Joachims

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datastreamer
Also would love to discuss the tools you use.

[https://getpolarized.io/](https://getpolarized.io/)

is the app I wrote.

here's the link to Anki, the app we sync with:

[https://ankiweb.net/about](https://ankiweb.net/about)

there are other apps like:

[https://www.duolingo.com/](https://www.duolingo.com/)

which sort of have their own flashcards and for language learning are amazing.

Duolingo was my first introduction to SR systems.

