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

There are a ton of topics I learn/read on a daily basis. Some are out of my personal interest, some out of need (when interviewing).

I notice that after a while, without enough usage, these topics simply evaporate from my memory. I know the simple answer is to keep practicing.

I’m interested in knowing how different people do this. Looking for any tips, hacks, etc.

I print them out on paper, then add them to my library. Brain just does the rest.

I don’t. If I’m not actively using something then it just gets evicted from cache.

I generally remember the difficult/weird parts that made initial learning slow, everything else I just re-learn as needed from the same sources that I used initially.

Sorry for the non-answer answer I'm about to give, but I don't really think you should have to keep these things in memory. At some point it becomes a waste of memory space (at least that's how I experience it).

There ARE some topics I want to remember, and those I try to put in writing. Both because it helps them stick in my mind for longer and because then I have a reference to go back to if I need a refresher. I use my own blog quite a bit to remember ways to do things that I may have figured out earlier and then forgotten.

But in terms of keeping things completely in memory: I have grown to think that, for a healthy mind, the things worth remembering are the things we remember. It's _good_ to remember things you're regularly using. If you're not regularly using them, you may as well forget the details and refresh your memory later if needed. Of course the major caveat being that this is within reasonable limits and not a symptom of an illness or actual serious memory loss.

It is a balance, and losing my memory in general is one of my worst fears. I guess it is a matter of deciding if these topics are beginning to evaporate sooner than you're comfortable with. Do they disappear after a day? A week? A year? If I start forgetting knowledge too quickly for my standards, that's when I'll get worried. It's just a matter of deciding what "too quickly" is for us.

Learn the basics of how human memory works, and techniques for making knowledge stick in long-term memory. Here's a few resources that teach this at an approachable level:

[1] A Mind for Numbers (book): https://barbaraoakley.com/books/a-mind-for-numbers/

[2] Learning How To Learn (Coursera course): https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn

[3] Make It Stick (book): https://www.retrievalpractice.org/make-it-stick

[4] Augmenting Long-Term Memory (blog post): http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html

[5] SuperMemo Guru (website): https://supermemo.guru/wiki/SuperMemo_Guru

[6] Nelson Dellis (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnINhoHWuVjUDXp7dav5e3A

I second the use of Anki--it's a great tool. Other (non-free) options include SuperMemo and IDoRecall.