Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Learn Exponentially

saveall.ai

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 154 posts

Re: Learn Exponentially

#121

Post by hazz99 »

teddyh wrote: post #103
motohagiography wrote: post #32

Spaced repetition turns reading into a physical activity with feedback. If you had an activity that required the knowledge you were hoping to acquire, you would learn at the same rate or faster by practice. Most lessons are encoded really poorly. I think spaced repetition is great, but practice at something is better. A hacker is just someone who has practiced learning independently and has become exceptionally good…

“ One will weave the canvas; another will fell a tree by the light of his ax. Yet another will forge nails, and there will be others who observe the stars to learn how to navigate. And yet all will be as one. Building a boat isn’t about weaving canvas, forging nails, or reading the sky. It’s about giving a shared taste for the sea, by the light of which you will see nothing contradictory but rather a community of lov…

What translation is this? I love the writing!

Re: Learn Exponentially

#122

Post by themenomen »

pkilgore wrote: post #42

Anyone else feel like they just read a bunch of assumptions with no support followed by a chart "proving" an exponential equation grows faster than a linear one? What the heck am I supposed to take away from this? This is a half ass theory, not evidence. Where's a shred of evidence, on the time scales here, these "units of information" are retained (under either method). Are they even relevant compared to a _skill_ l…

Well, for me, this article and the previous one that was on HN some weeks ago were just propaganda to push the service they promote for eventual monetization. Something wrong with it? I don't know, well may be just lack of transparency I guess.

Re: Learn Exponentially

#124

Post by teeray »

gratitoad wrote: post #104
motohagiography wrote: post #32

Spaced repetition turns reading into a physical activity with feedback. If you had an activity that required the knowledge you were hoping to acquire, you would learn at the same rate or faster by practice. Most lessons are encoded really poorly. I think spaced repetition is great, but practice at something is better. A hacker is just someone who has practiced learning independently and has become exceptionally good…

Reading this comment had me cheering “yes, a thousand times yes” but then it occurred to me how often I turn to an O’Reilly book instead of a concrete project and I wondered why. I think I subconsciously avoid new projects to learn something programming-related because of how often they end up unbounded in time due to one of the fundamental attributes of writing software: unknown unknowns. The kinds of sticking point…

Limit the degrees of freedom. If the goal is to learn a new programming language, pick an interesting problem that you’ve already solved (e.g. todo list manager, pomodoro timer, etc.). If you want to learn a new domain (e.g. networking), pick a familiar language. Choose boring tech for everything else—-things like deployment, monitoring, etc. If your goal is not learning k8s, just SCP stuff to a VPS. It can be crappy. Crappy is how you learn.

Re: Learn Exponentially

#125

Post by an_aparallel »

anon2020dot00 wrote: post #6

My idea is that there is a market for community-curated spaced repetition decks. Many people want to learn the same things such as a foreign language or a programming language. The difficult part is creating a deck and crafting the answers and questions. Because usually this is a time-consuming process. So if it was a community-effort then it would be a win-win. This is probably not an original idea and if anyone kno…

the point of spaced repetition - like Anki is to be involved with the creation process of the deck. Simply downloading it ready is not as effective.

Re: Learn Exponentially

#126

Post by teeray »

redelbee wrote: post #18

I think a better title might be “Memorize Exponentially” because that seems to be the true gist of the article. There are undoubtedly many areas in which memorization is useful. I tend to use memorization as a second-order tool, in the sense that it is only useful to memorize once I’ve learned that memorization would be necessary. I memorize combinations to locks I unlock frequently. I memorize names of items I sell…

Memorization helps in the murky world of haven’t-quite-learned-it-yet. By knowing certain things to be true because you’ve memorized them, you can start to make connections to other things and investigate why those things are true. I most recently experienced this memorizing a bunch of stuff on intermodulation in RF (amateur radio). It had me questioning “why is this so?”, so I found a related domain: audio. Turns out IMD is an issue with mastering using saturation plugins (which add harmonics). Since I have some music background, this made the whole thing far more sensible to me. It’s really a process of presenting yourself with some disconnected facts, and filling in the gaps over time.

Re: Learn Exponentially

#127

Post by throwamon »

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #40

I don't see how "reading" is anyone anyone on HN needs advice to do, all people do nowadays is reading if reading is defined as getting information from text on a screen. Using a computer is basically entirely reading. Edit: to the article's point spaced repetition to memorize domain specific facts is useful but it's not exponential like reading is.

> Using a computer is basically entirely reading

I gather you've never met a zoomer in your life

Re: Learn Exponentially

#128

Post by p-christ »

woojoo666 wrote: post #99

Title is misleading. This isn't learning exponentially. Anybody who has used a spaced repetition app (like Anki) knows that you generally learn around the same number of words every day. You're not going to be learning 10 words in a day and then one week later, learn 1000 words in a day. This article talks about how the reps needed to learn one piece of information, reduces exponentially over time. You might need 1 r…

Think about it in terms of how many days of knowledge each rep gets you.

The first rep gets you 1 extra day of knowledge. The next rep gets you 2 extra days. The next one gets you 5 extra days.

So each rep is getting you more and more knowledge even though the time required to execute the rep remains the same. This is exponential growth.

If you only have 1 card then for most days you won't have any reviews to do so it doesn't work. But if you add cards regularly then over the long-run every day you'll be getting more and more "extra days of knowledge" by doing the same amount of reviews each day.

Re: Learn Exponentially

#129

Post by p-christ »

atahanacar wrote: post #117
p-christ wrote: post #2

We wrote this at Save All ( https://saveall.ai/ ) and want to know what you think - tell us why it's wrong / right

Why should I, as the user, spend time and create cards on a piece of non-free software which I have no control over? What if you stop the service? I tried it for a few minutes, but couldn't find a "export" feature apart from the "email us to get your cards as csv" part. An "export cards and progress" feature would be nice. I tried adding a few cards, which seems to work fine even in the worst case scenario. It seems…

Thanks for the feedback, we are going to add an export feature sometime soon

Re: Learn Exponentially

#130

Post by p-christ »

SnowHill9902 wrote: post #81

I apologize in advance to the author but this is pretty dumb. Learning is not remembering all the words in a dictionary or all entries in an encyclopedia. You learn exponentially by layering concepts and ideas, one more complex than the previous one, on top of each other. You advance by understanding more deeply what you read and actually think for yourself. Wise men recommend to learn for 1/3 of the time, think for…

You misunderstand how important memory is for learning. Ofsted, the UK school inspection board, actually defines learning itself as a "change in long-term memory". You can't learn anything without a change to your memory, they aren't separate things.

So, sure, you should try to apply your knowledge and layer concepts on top of each other. But if you do that AND also remember a lot more of such experiences you'll learn a lot faster.

Post reply on HN