Ask HN: Tips for students before starting their first job

Are there examples/blogs of how to use Spaced repetition for math/sciences/computer science/programming?

For discrete math currently, I solve problems, and either I come across 1 complex problem for each topic which I might have struggled with, or a problem which has concepts of multiple topics interleaved. I add that to my deck and I solve them regularly.

I agree. The advice is good for some environments, but too cynical for someone starting his career. Six out of those seven are about guarding against bad actors. I'm sure the author is trying to spare the person asking the question from some of the experiences that they went through, but default mistrust is not a good way to start a career (or any relationship for that matter).

Set up a financial plan before you accept your first dollar, if you wish to be most efficient.

Use percentages, such as saving 10% for long term wealth, and 5% for a fun account so you don't sabotage your financial plan.

Learn enough of the tax code in the country you live in so that when you make financial (and employment/business) decisions you are doing so while obtaining the best treatment in taxes, one of our biggest expenses.

Once this is all rote, you can focus on doing what you want, following dreams, exploring new realms, acquiring new valuable skills, etc. knowing that you have your financial base set up to grow solidly.

Nielsen has http://cognitivemedium.com/srs-mathematics, for example.

I would strongly recommend not having entire problems as a single card; it's absolutely crucial that answering any particular card is a single mental motion. (You can get by with a very small workload if your cards are more complex than that, but it doesn't scale even in the medium term.) I wouldn't go any more complex than "what is 75 * 43".

As an example, the definition of a red-black tree for me is six cards:

* What, imprecisely, are the colouring rules on a red-black tree? ["global; local; base-case"]

* What are the leaves of a red-black tree? ["null"]

* What is the base-case colouring rule of a red-black tree? ["leaves are black"]

* What is the local colouring rule of a red-black tree? ["red node => black children"]

* What is the global colouring rule of a red-black tree? ["black depth is well defined"]

* What is the black depth of a node in a red-black tree? ["the number of black nodes encountered on a path from that node down to a leaf"]

One might naively have created a single card that is "what is a red-black tree?", but in my experience such a card is too big. The difficulty of learning a card grows at least quadratically with the number of mental motions it takes to answer that card, and small/simple/easily-learned cards are incredibly cheap in that Anki very quickly learns not to show them to you if they're genuinely easy.

Maths-wise, my cards usually look like:

* "Does path-connectedness imply connectedness?" [yes]

* "Does connectedness imply path-connectedness?" [no]

* "Counterexample to connectedness-implies-path-connectedness" [topologist's sine curve]

* "Definition of the topologist's sine curve" [union of the y-axis and a squashed sine]

* "Definition of the squashing of the sine component of the topologist's sine curve" [whatever]

* "Main idea of the proof that path-connectedness implies connectedness" [use "all locally constant functions into [0, 1] are constant"]