Comment by nefitty | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nefitty | Hacker News Reader

Wow, this site has a lot of self-study resources. I've been sort of chicken pecking at books about learning to try to extract ideas, like stuff by Barbara Oakley, etc.

Even the Wikipedia page on "evidence-based learning" only discusses three things: spaced repetition (Anki), n-back training and some weird ambiguous behavioral thing called errorless learning.

I've also continually scoured HN and Reddit for tips.

Does anyone have any hidden knowledge to share? My current experiment is a tweak of memory palaces. I take a route in my city that I know well, that I can picture myself traversing. I then mark monuments on the path. I then mentally attach items to the path. Finally, I take a screenshot of the path and manually label each milestone with the associated piece of information.

So far I've managed to memorize 19 items related to Javascript proxies this way, after a single session.

I have experimented with memory systems some and used SRSs extensively to learn foreign languages. I also use SRSs for more obscure programming stuff. The hardest thing is knowing what you need to remember. I have not had any success with memory palace techniques with programming as they are for memorizing lists in order and programming requires understanding concepts more at random.

Yeah, same here. I've been able to learn new tools quickly with SRS, for example GraphQL. My usual method is to wrestle with the tool until I get stuck. SRS for GraphQL gave me a much better framework for what to ask when I got stuck.

I'm going to try memory palaces for programming ideas. I'm thinking of sequential book-style information. For example, what I think I will do is hook each paragraph or section to a landmark by concocting a question about the section. That might help with the "synthesis" portion of comprehension.

I imagine that this will result in either shit rote-knowledge, or an abundance of new ideas and connections.

Btw, I successfully impressed my wife by memorizing a 15-digit number of her making in a span of less than 5 minutes. If anything, this is going to be a cool party trick lol

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