Ask HN: What are your thoughts on spaced repetition? Have you heard of it?

Essentially, it's a way to remember massive amounts of information by timing the study and review by the material you're learning.

Simple things that you mostly already know don't need to be reviewed often but more complicated things need to be reviewed more frequently or you will end up forgetting them.

I ended up building a document reader system for spaced repetition named Polar:

https://getpolarized.io/

It sync's with another system named Anki.

Anki manages the flashcards and Polar manages your reading.

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're re-tested right before it's forgotten.

Anyway. If you haven't heard about it I'd recommend diving into it... really fascinating topic and it's dramatically changed how I view my long-term education.

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&...

    Unbounded Human Learning:
    Optimal Scheduling for
    Spaced Repetition

    Siddharth Reddy,
    Igor Labutov,
    Siddhartha Banerjee,
    Thorsten Joachims