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Hashcards: A plain-text spaced repetition system

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Re: Hashcards: A plain-text spaced repetition system

#151

Post by pvdebbe »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #148
pvdebbe wrote: post #144

Perfect timing. I just started to teach my wife Finnish so that she'll have easier time with real language lessons when she gets her paperwork sorted out to move here. And I've feverishly been looking for a self-hosted SRS system where I can feed new content to the "decks" and she can consume it on her schedule. Making micro decks that she'd import in Anki wouldn't be very convenient. This would seem perfect to me. I…

Loistavaa, what a perfectly tailored comment for me, I have like 80% the thing for you at https://finnish.andrew-quinn.me/ . Unfortunately I'm all in on Anki but maybe these will sway you nonetheless. Every 6 months I create around 5000 Anki cards out of the last 6 months for reading practice of the YLE Selkouutiset news, on a sentence by sentence basis: https://github.com/Selkouutiset-Archive/selkokortti For raw iso…

Fantastic tools you've collected here! My rationale for building own decks for my wife is that I'm intending to start slow and easy, and I'll build new cards that are closely tied to days' lessons I'm giving her. I'm hopeful that after a while she gains confidence to start going through premade decks. With anki and similar tools it's important not to just memorize words without having some handle on how to build sentences etc. I spent a lot of time learning Japanese that way, only to find that I maybe memorized words but to build sentences with them...

Re: Hashcards: A plain-text spaced repetition system

#152

Post by danielscrubs »

eps wrote: post #85

> Cards are content-addressed, that is, identified by the hash of their text. Wouldn't this invalidate card's review history if I am to fix a typo in the card's text?

I did something similar in markdown as the author, but my solution was to generate an unique anchor with a unicode symbol after each answer.

Kind of wish I had an SSH frontend though.

Re: Hashcards: A plain-text spaced repetition system

#153

Post by WhyNotHugo »

yellow_lead wrote: post #19

I'm happy to see others in the space, but I wish Anki competitors would implement a decent 'import from Anki' feature. Otherwise, I think most existing users of SRS are unlikely to switch (because we use Anki and have thousands of cards there already). The data format of Anki is a bit complicated but at least it's SQLite. I've seen a ton of shared decks and resources on ankiweb, but it's true you can't easily put the…

I’ve been writing my own flashcards (purely text-based, no SQLite like in this case) primarily because Anki never worked out for me (too hard to use, too hard to sync, everything too complicated). I have zero time or motivation to research how to import data from it.

This needs to be contributed by folks coming from Anki. By folks who actually have interest in the feature.

Re: Hashcards: A plain-text spaced repetition system

#154

Post by WhyNotHugo »

jwrallie wrote: post #100

I think the overall idea is good. If the cards are identified in the database as their hashes, wouldn’t editing the content reset all repetition data so far? Anyone here has been using FSRS long enough to have comments about its effectiveness? I think it’s general consensus that moving from SM-2 to FSRS will show great improvement. I’m using SuperMemo 9 though, so it’s much harder to understand whether there will be…

I’ve been storing cards as markdown with a horizontal ruler separating the prompt from the response and another ruler separating historical data.

That is: the historical data in on the same file as the card. This makes cards trivial to sync.

Re: Hashcards: A plain-text spaced repetition system

#155

Post by huhtenberg »

noahlt wrote: post #111

> The thing that makes hashcards unique: it doesn’t use a database. […] Your performance and review history is stored in an SQLite database in the same directory as the cards. Man I was really looking forward to seeing how they stored review history in plain text.

The OP says that he doesn't want _cards_ be stored in opaque format, because they are valuable. The review history he doesn't care about.

But, yeah, phrasing could've been a bit more precise.

Re: Hashcards: A plain-text spaced repetition system

#156

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

noahlt wrote: post #111

> The thing that makes hashcards unique: it doesn’t use a database. […] Your performance and review history is stored in an SQLite database in the same directory as the cards. Man I was really looking forward to seeing how they stored review history in plain text.

Absolutely the same here. It seems weird to have 'no database' as the selling option for the main system, but then use SQLite for that slice of it.

Re: Hashcards: A plain-text spaced repetition system

#157

Post by tvshtr »

pityJuke wrote: post #140
tvshtr wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that many devs missed the fact that Anki went through major rewrite and all of its business logic/its brain/api are now contained in few rust crates. They're a pleasure to work with and it's very easy to write alternative frontends (just finished one). You don't have to import anything because you can just use the same db, and cards as Anki.

This feels as if it deserves a write up, did not know that they migrated from Python to a primarily Rust backend. Would love to know the why/what from the team. (Anecdotally, Anki has seen a huge quality increase in the past couple of years.)

Most def. It's ALL Rust underneath, the PyQT gui (on desktop) is basically a legacy compat layer, mostly because they need to support vast amount of add-ons, and the editor is quite complicated piece of UI.

Re: Hashcards: A plain-text spaced repetition system

#159

Post by skydowx »

btilly wrote: post #128
seizethecheese wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if you meant to reply to this comment. If you did, I'd love to know what you mean :)

Fibonacci works well, and I'm sure that they'll remember me a week later. So schedule a call for a week after the cruise. Then 2 weeks after that. Then 3 weeks after that. Then 5, 8, 13, 21, and so on. Each call will bring back for both of us what it was like on that cruise, bring back that connection, and make both of us feel that any other call (say to meet on another cruise) would be welcome. At least that's the t…

Sounds fun. I would love to know more about how the system that you developed for your memories works.

Re: Hashcards: A plain-text spaced repetition system

#160

Post by scotty79 »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #44
btilly wrote: post #40

I think that the real power of spaced repetition is not in flashcard applications like this. It is in behavior modification. Let's take a real example to show how this works. August 19, 2025. My wife called me in to help her decide what to do about a dentist that she thought was ripping her off. A couple of quick suggestions later, and she went to being mad at me about not having heard the problem through before tryi…

I love this example because the correct, wise approach is so alien to my mind that I do not know how to respond to such situations. I am a professional problem solver, you described a problem, yet you do not want it solved? Just talk about it being annoying, like an immutable facet of the universe? Should I retort about my grievances with gravity making roof repairs a bear?

> I am a professional problem solver

The question is, do you want to be anything more than that?

Even as a problem solver you might ask yourself, what should I do in any given interaction to not become the additional secondary problem myself.

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