Ask HN: How to remember technical topics which you don’t use/refer everyday?

Notes.app is absolutely invaluable to me now, and has well over a thousands entries. It has photos, links and many are shared. I wish I could remember it all.

I’ve been planning to migrate to bear.app for a long time, but have never made the leap.

I’ve been meaning to try bear.app for this reason. Have never got past notes.app though.

Teach it.

I don't know why nobody else has suggested this.

If you want to learn, really learn something. Self educate, then teach it to someone else. You'll have to really educate yourself on the subject, but once you do.. Blog post, Twitter, Youtube, Linked-In, or whatever platform you want to use. You'll get corrections if you're wrong about something, and hopefully a load of questions that will make you dig further into the topic. The process of teaching it will reinforce it into your memory as you present it in the way you understand, and the feedback you get will also strengthen your understanding even further. You'll become much less likely to forget it over time.

But what if you're like me, and you don't have a social media presence or following to get any kind of feedback? Surely you have friends with similar interests, or know one of those people who likes soaking up knowledge like a sponge. You could use HN here to post something, or post to Reddit's "Today I Learned".

Inevitably, teaching something is the best way to learn more about that thing, and learning more about it is what will make it stick better.

I have had the same problem and I worked on it with a workflow of reading something today, making a note of it in a notebook (handwritten works best for me) and revising it the day after. The hand writing part makes me bio-mechanically engage with the material and finally reviewing my notes the next day forces spaced repetition. A nice side-effect is that after a few months when I am just flipping through my notebook I remember something that I had forgotten.

I use this for technical webpages that I read, business concepts (e.g. I am reading about `Yule’s Law of Complementarity` or new technical concepts (e.g. NestJS).

This works for me and I stumbled upon this workflow for myself after trying out a lot of other things that did not work for me.

Hey! As many have already mentioned in this thread, you might want to look into spaced repetition if you haven’t already. To summarize, it’s a simple algorithm that forces you to recall something at an increasing interval until it is committed to long term memory.

Anki is a popular app that uses spaced repetition. I personally wasn’t quite satisfied with any of the options out there so I decided to build a new app to solve this problem. Feel free to check it out: https://activerecall.com/ It allows you to create flashcards using a rich text editor with support for things such as code and latex blocks. I’m using it daily both to learn new software development concepts and for general knowledge.

Even with a spaced repetition-tool however there is a lot of nuance that goes into the process of acquiring new knowledge. A couple of pointers here:

1. It’s important to distinguish the learning step and the act of remembering what you’ve learned. Learning for example means using a new programming concept to the point where you understand it. Now that you have that context, you can encode it in the form of question and answer in a spaced repetition based system to ensure that you will remember what you’ve learned.

2. Some things that you want to remember are purely factual, while some require deeper understanding. In the latter case, you’ll want to structure your flashcards in a way that you’re solving a problem when answering it rather than just stating facts. This ensures that you’re actually remembering how to solve something rather than simply stating what the solution is.

3. Some things that seem like they are worth remembering when you first put them into your system will later turn out to be time sinks. Don’t be afraid to just get rid of them or keep them for reference (in my app you can “suspend” cards so that you can still search for them etc, essentially turning them into notes).

If you end up trying Active Recall out please feel free to reach out with any questions or if you just want to chat more about learning!