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Comment by adamsmith143 | Hacker News Reader

Who is this for? I never understood the idea of using notecards in subjects that are math heavy. Sure you can memorize some definitions or equations but the second you have to calculate yourself you will be hopelessly lost. I saw this time and time again teaching undergrad Physics. They study the textbook like its a History book, underlining and highlighting things and then can't do a single calculation come exam time. It just doesn't work to study certain subjects this way.

It's like trying to learn how to ride a bike by reading about it.

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> I never understood the idea of using notecards in subjects that are math heavy.

I would suggest that people should use notecards for subjects that are math heavy. Even if you don't fully learn by using notecards. Even then.

When you use notecards, and stick to a spaced repeatation algorithm, if nothing else happens, you at least get to familiarise your brain to notations, jargon, graphs, diagrams and so on. This especially helps if you are learning alone. When none of your classmates or colleagues or mentees is learning what you are learning, i.e. you are not in a classroom or training program.

It's a book (well, a digital book), not just a set of flashcards. The SRS parts are to reinforce what's been read and studied from the prior sections.

Ok I read the book "How to ride a bike" and used it's flashcard. I should be able to ride one on the street now right?

Don't know if this true, but George Boole taught himself to swim just by reading a book, i.e. he successfully swam the very first time he got into water.

You can memorize problem solving techniques or approaches and add them to your toolbox of tricks. I used spaced repetition to memorize 100+ difficult leetcode problems and learn math. I've found it consistently will get you between 0.5-1 standard deviation better performance, as measured by comparing myself to the university course websites I'm using to learn. The trick is just to put problems rather than definitions, etc. as the card to be memorized.

Can you give an example? I found only memorizing key ideas is the way to go, as opposed to trying to solve whole problem in your head, which gets tedious

You don't solve the problem in your head, you actually take the time to solve it either on Leetcode or on a piece of paper. I've found that in the long run you don't end up memorizing the problem itself but the technique to solve the problem.

For example, I was learning Manacher's algorithm and I directly put the link to the corresponding Leetcode problem into Anki. Set your minimum interval to 1 day and just follow whatever Anki tells you to study. You don't need many cards to memorize the problem solving techniques, my entire probability deck has under 150 cards and half of that is concepts. It turns out the human brain is pretty good at generalizing from a few problems.

Make sure you don't put every problem you encounter because the review workload will get very heavy very fast if you do that. Only put the challenging ones or the ones you get wrong.

Sure you can memorize some definitions or equations but the second you have to calculate yourself you will be hopelessly lost.

At least two mathematicians used spaced repetition to further understand mathematics and make new insight.

Conceptual understanding is a good memorization techque.

Underlining and highlighting however, are an ineffective method of studying for any subject, even history.

Who are such historic examples?

What would be a better approach to grok quantum computing in your opinion? Asking because genuinely interested in learning more about quantum computing.

That's why I asked who this is for. If you really want to have a good understanding then you need to calculate, a lot. If you just care about concepts then I'm sure this is sufficient.

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