[HN Gopher] Orbit: an experimental platform for small tasks repe...
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Orbit: an experimental platform for small tasks repeated over time
Author : goerz
Score : 267 points
Date : 2021-05-05 15:50 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| edwintorok wrote:
| So this is the system described in [0], which I've been curious
| about for a while, but wasn't readily available. It'll be
| interesting to see how this compares or complements tools like
| Dendron. The style also reminds me of the fedwiki.
|
| [0] https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes
| yewenjie wrote:
| The homepage does not load if you use an adblocker that blocks
| Sentry.
|
| Edit: Has been fixed in the latest commit.
| cobrabyte wrote:
| Can confirm.
| caslon wrote:
| (Unless you're using an adblocker worth its salt, like uBO on
| Firefox, in which case it works perfectly.)
| Ataraxy wrote:
| I saw the name and was hoping he was open sourcing his notes
| platform hehe.
|
| This is interesting, but definitely above my head.
| kickscondor wrote:
| I'm excited by all of the neat hypertext developments we're
| seeing out there! Like Quotebacks[0] - snippets that are designed
| to be for all-purpose use rather than dev use.
|
| To me, this is a possible sign that there is momentum back toward
| general Web blogging and home pages. While native apps have a lot
| of great tooling these days (like TikTok's "duets" or Snapchat
| filters), the Web excels at markup and embedding - and it's great
| to see tools that play to that strength.
|
| [0] https://quotebacks.net
| odyslam wrote:
| This is awesome man. Thanks for sharing!
| vinceguidry wrote:
| I really wish people would stop dual-licensing with permissive
| licenses. This particular case seems pretty bad, and completely
| negates the whole point of releasing it under the AGPL in the
| first place, by having the BSL convert to Apache License in three
| years. Three years is no time at all, and after that it's like
| the AGPL never existed.
|
| I don't agree with releasing libraries under a permissive
| license, but that's of course the prerogative of the author.
| Businesses don't need to have their GPL fears coddled, they can
| and need to learn how to work with copylefted software.
| da39a3ee wrote:
| I'm afraid I felt that the spaced repetition questions on quantum
| country were a complete waste of time. There I was struggling (a
| lot!) with trying to work out how on Earth to think about C^2
| (the space of 2-tuples of complex numbers, which you might semi-
| naively think of as 4-dimensional but that's probably a terrible
| mistake, but anyway that's not really germane to the point here)
| and the spaced repetition questions were asking me totally
| superficial questions, of the sort you might expect to be given
| to a 13 year old.
|
| I couldn't help feeling that this was likely to be a
| manifestation of the common desire nowadays to make things
| "inclusive". I would love for things to be inclusive, but we
| mustn't let inclusiveness be correlated with dumbing down; that
| will in the end turn out to be a toxic correlation. And there is
| a limit to how inclusive you can be about complex vector spaces
| and their use in modeling information in such a way as to
| facilitate non-classical computing.
| anotha1 wrote:
| I read the readme, now can someone explain what this is like I'm
| stupid?
| caslon wrote:
| I haven't used it/had no idea about it until reading this post,
| but here's my attempt.
|
| You aren't stupid, it's just that the genre of projects
| (spaced-repetition systems) Orbit is in is pretty niche.
|
| It mentions that it more or less wants to be a more generalized
| version of Anki. Anki is basically an application that goes,
| "Hey. Here are some flashcards you haven't seen in a while. Do
| you still know the answers?" The specific timing of these
| depends on how many times you've gotten them right in the past,
| with the aim of getting the information into your long-term
| memory.
|
| Anki is _incredibly_ useful for memorization. However, because
| of how limited it is, it 's only really gained popularity in
| the medical student space and the language-learning community.
| It's not really extensible beyond what you'd expect from
| flashcards that you can embed video in.
|
| What Orbit seems to claim to do is have a _very_ extensible
| system for spaced-repetition, so that the underlying principles
| can be used for a wider array of things. However, it doesn 't
| appear to be aiming for mass uptake; rather, it's mostly a
| research vessel to gain an understanding of the problem domain.
| anotha1 wrote:
| I'm really stupid and/or lack the attention for this, but
| thank you for trying!
| redrobein wrote:
| > because of how limited it is...
|
| What is so limiting about Anki? Anki cards are also fully
| javascript capable, and anything you can't achieve with just
| js you can do with their python addon api. From what I've
| seen the only use case Orbit serves that Anki doesn't is the
| ability to embed cards on your own pages.
| asoneth wrote:
| Orbit looks like a way to publish content with accompanying
| spaced repetition. Spaced repetition is a technique to
| efficiently improve long-term recall.
|
| The most accessible primer on spaced repetition I've seen is
| Nicky Case's interactive exploration at
| https://ncase.me/remember/
| degenerate wrote:
| This page explains it a bit more, and gives a demo:
|
| https://docs.withorbit.com/
|
| It looks like a flash card widget that you can embed in your
| blog. Honestly I have no idea what the context is for needing
| this, perhaps the authors could point to a real-world use case?
| I don't understand what the "Forgotten" and "Remembered"
| buttons do, or why a new question pops up when I click one. It
| seems to loop forever through different cards in a random
| pattern. This page doesn't do a great job of explaining the
| project from a 50-foot level, and the homepage is even worse at
| that.
| spelunker wrote:
| I found the docs as well. The docs jump right in and use
| words like "prompts", "prose", and talking about writing a
| bunch. I guess maybe this is intended for authors? The
| inspiration listed is a digital book
| (https://quantum.country/). Some context sure would be nice.
|
| Agreed, none of the documentation does a good "elevator
| pitch" or summary of what the product is, or the intended
| audience.
|
| neat font though.
| rolisz wrote:
| The digital book is made by the same guy, Andy M. and
| Michael Nielsen. Orbit seems to be a platform to enable
| anyone to build similar content, with mnemonic content
| (flash cards basically) built in.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| Yes, they really try hard to make it as obscure as possible.
| Here is my take. Imagine you publish an article on some
| complex subject matter - the kind that requires a pause and
| reflection after each sentence. Imagine that after a
| paragraph or two there is a widget where you can test your
| understanding of the above paragraph. It seems useful to me,
| but of course it depends on the actual implementation.
| mcguire wrote:
| As whimsicalism says, it's like Anki.
|
| You get the question and then the answer; if you remember the
| answer, the question won't be re-asked for a longer time, if
| you don't, the question will be re-asked sooner.
|
| It appears (?) to be a sort of global tool---you embed your
| flashcards into the text you are writing and the reader gets
| asked your questions in addition to questions from the math
| book they read last week or last month.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Are you familiar with Anki?
| StavrosK wrote:
| It's a thing for learning stuff that fits on cards.
| anotha1 wrote:
| Perfect, thanks!
| StavrosK wrote:
| Haha, you're welcome!
| waynesonfire wrote:
| decentralized, right in the readme. what more do you need to
| know?
| andymatuschak wrote:
| Hi, all. Author of the project here. Sorry to have caused some
| confusion: this is part of a research project, and it's not yet
| meant to be terribly legible to a public audience.
|
| In the near-term, this project is about augmenting written texts
| so that readers can easily remember the key details. See
| https://quantum.country for an example or
| https://numinous.productions/ttft for detailed background and
| discussion.
| pugio wrote:
| Hi Andy, thank you for doing this. I've been checking your
| Twitter feed daily to see when this is released. I love the
| direction of your research and am really excited to see how
| Orbit develops.
|
| I've been experimenting with integrating Orbit (before this
| release) into some _Intro to Data Science_ Jupyter notebooks I
| use to teach a class (code, text, Orbit questions). I 'm hoping
| to publish the course on the web later this year, and, if I can
| get a good integration, experimenting to see if adding SRS
| elements helps student performance.
|
| I haven't looked at the code base yet, but I'm curious to see
| if I can integrate the questions with our code execution
| environment, and have spaced review of executable code inline
| in the question/answer prompt card.
| Raed667 wrote:
| I have lost count of how many projects called Orbit I have seen
| so far.
| Igelau wrote:
| This is the one that would have helped you remember the others.
| [deleted]
| judofyr wrote:
| Some context: The author created https://quantum.country which is
| a text book augmented with spaced-repetition. It seems that Orbit
| is a toolkit for creating these types of flashcard/spaced-
| repetition learning webpages for anyone (with the user data being
| stored at Orbit's server).
|
| I'll have to say that I'm still not 100% sure how useful this
| approach is. Most of the times when you're learning something
| you're not merely _reading_ , but you're also actively _using_
| the knowledge in some way. If I 'm learning about B-trees then
| the major part of that learning process is implementing them. If
| I'm learning some complicated math I will solve a bunch of
| exercises. Where does flashcards in a text book fit into this?
|
| It was also my impression (from the Anki community) that spaced-
| repetition is far more effective when you create the cards
| yourself. A common "beginner mistake" is to download a pre-made
| deck and start memorizing from scratch.
| lrei wrote:
| Research shows that doing the recall is the important part. The
| effect is by now well accepted. Off course if you do the cards
| yourself you can guarantee both their quality and their
| relevance to you. Ive heard of research pointing that learning
| things that are relevant to you helps. (If you are learning
| Spanish to speak with a relative or friend a flash card with an
| obscure literary word is probably more annoying than helpful).
| early episodes of Learning Scientists podcast talk about using
| vs creating flash cards if you want to know more.
| wccrawford wrote:
| I made a SRS deck for PHP stuff when I was going to take the
| certification.
|
| What I found was that studying the deck didn't help me _at
| all_. What did help was _making_ the deck.
|
| IMO, if something makes the deck for you, it's going to
| drastically reduce the usefulness of the deck. Making the deck
| means a lot, and possibly much more than studying the deck
| could do for you.
|
| It does help that this is making it from something you're
| trying to read... But I think removing that effort is actually
| harmful to the experience.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| > It was also my impression (from the Anki community) that
| spaced-repetition is far more effective when you create the
| cards yourself. A common "beginner mistake" is to download a
| pre-made deck and start memorizing from scratch.
|
| Varies between people and subject matter I think.
|
| All of my Anki usage thus far has been for language learning,
| and for this use case pre-made decks have been better than
| self-made for the simple reason that these decks are higher
| quality than I have patience to build myself. I do still plan
| to build my own decks for vocab beyond core 2-3k but for
| getting off to a running start I think premade is just fine.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| "Where does flashcards in a text book fit into this?"
|
| Answering a question doesn't have to rely only on rote
| memorization. For example, a book might explain how to do
| addition, and then ask "What is 110+257?". You might need to
| use a piece of paper to work out the answer. And, if that same
| question is asked again a couple of weeks later, it's unlikely
| you'll remember the answer. You'll need to work it out again,
| reinforcing your understanding of the technique.
|
| "spaced-repetition is far more effective when you create the
| cards yourself"
|
| Yes, but part of the reason is that there's little point in
| having a card for something you've not encountered in another
| context. But Quantum Country doesn't present questions to you
| until after you've encountered the concept in the text.
| rolisz wrote:
| I think the "beginner mistake" is that you can download a pre-
| made deck of 1000 German words, many of which you have never
| heard before, so it will be very hard to make them stick in
| your memory.
|
| With Orbit, I think the idea is that the prompts are very well
| crafted (Andy has some research on making good prompts) and
| also that you are encountering the questions right in the
| context where you are learning about them, so you have
| something to attach them to.
|
| I think this is a complementary thing for implementing B-trees
| or solving exercises. That is needed as well, but will you
| still remember the finer details of splitting nodes in a B-Tree
| a month later? Or six months later? Which might or might not be
| necessary.
| hobofan wrote:
| Fully agreed! I think the existing options for pre-made decks
| often resemble your "1000 German words" example, and the
| space of providing good pre-made decks is explored far too
| little and dismissed too quickly in the Anki community.
|
| I can see something like Orbit very likely existing in the
| set of my future learning tools. Most texts that I read
| (doesn't matter with how much concentration), flow right
| through me and nothing sticks. The only way to make them
| stick is by exercising with spaced repetition flashcards, but
| creating them often takes so much time that I only bother to
| do it for the most important subjects.
|
| A possible future evolution of the concept where cards
| unlocked on two independent websites can unlock further cards
| like "how does concept A (from website A) relate to concept B
| (from website B)" would be amazing, and seems very much in
| the realm of possiblity.
| judofyr wrote:
| > I think this is a complementary thing for implementing
| B-trees or solving exercises. That is needed as well, but
| will you still remember the finer details of splitting nodes
| in a B-Tree a month later? Or six months later? Which might
| or might not be necessary.
|
| This is a very good point. This is the type of knowledge
| which I don't care about retaining. I'm pretty confident that
| I can re-learn it in a few days when I need it later. It's
| also not critical to have this knowledge at the top of my
| head as I'm rarely going to be in a situation where I need to
| recall this immediately.
|
| This is quite different from vocabulary where it _is_
| critical that you can find (or understand) the word in
| seconds otherwise you 'll fail at communicating.
| mduncs wrote:
| You make a great point that using knowledge is important in
| actually learning the study material. Personally, those moments
| of learning happen when I stumble across a problem where I'm
| applying my knowledge in the wild.
|
| What I've found is that spaced-repetition software lets me keep
| in touch with information long enough to be able to have those
| moments more consistently, otherwise I read something
| interesting, take notes, and two weeks later its pretty much
| out of memory. By extending the amount of time info is living
| in my head, I get more chances to use the knowledge and take it
| to heart!
|
| This doesn't lend itself to everything perfectly well though,
| I've had luck learning how to do household tasks like
| gardening, cooking where I'm semi-regularly getting chances to
| use what I'm learning
| bruhhh wrote:
| genuine question: why should we care?
| mdoms wrote:
| > Orbit is an experimental platform for publishing and engaging
| with small tasks repeatedly over time. In the short term, it's
| focused on supporting the "mnemonic medium", a way of augmenting
| texts so that readers can easily remember all the key details.
| For an example, see Quantum Country, a textbook on quantum
| computation. More abstractly, Orbit aspires to offer a more
| general form of spaced repetition systems like Anki, as part of a
| connected cloud service. Learn more on the home page.
|
| Huh?
| airhead969 wrote:
| Nuke them... from Orbit!
| twobitshifter wrote:
| Just recently I was reading about supermemo, a tool that's about
| 30 years old but has been updated and focuses on improving
| retained memory. It was developed by Piotr Wozniak who based on
| this 2008 article has taken the system as far as humanly possible
| by surrending his life to the algorithm.
|
| https://www.wired.com/2008/04/ff-wozniak/
|
| The supermemo algorithm has been published and you'll find all
| sorts of implementations including the Ruby gem forgetful.
|
| I read the mnemonic memory article and I didn't see what differs
| between orbit and supermemo, but that doesn't mean the approaches
| are the same.
| cyphar wrote:
| The schematics for the older versions of the SuperMemo
| algorithm (SM-2 and SM-5) have been published but they're quite
| old and any good reimplementation is actually a fork that fixes
| glaring deficiencies in the old algorithms.
|
| The newest versions (SM-19) are proprietary and rely on a bunch
| of training data (they use some kind of ML) gathered from
| SuperMemo users (there is a way to get access to SuperMemo
| algorithm but you have to negotiate a license from memory).
| There is some rough outline of the algorithms on the SuperMemo
| wiki, but you couldn't reimplement it any more than you could
| reimplement Google Search given the Wikipedia description of
| PageRank.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > there is a way to get access to SuperMemo algorithm but you
| have to negotiate a license from memory
|
| Well, SuperMemo may be of some help to the memory portion :-)
| andymatuschak wrote:
| (Orbit author here) Wozniak is the pioneer, and like all in
| this space, we're heavily inspired by his work. Orbit is a
| vehicle for exploring some different ideas in this space. For
| instance, we're looking at how spaced repetition might be woven
| into a written form, like a book, so that authors can
| facilitate readers internalizing ideas deeply with relatively
| little extra effort. (see https://quantum.country for an
| example)
| jkhdigital wrote:
| Are you familiar with Niklas Luhmann's "zettelkasten"
| methods? Seems like there might be some fertile ground at the
| intersection of these two ideas...
| dang wrote:
| Since it doesn't look like this project has been discussed on HN
| before (though it was a bit hard to search for:
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...),
| I've changed the title from "Orbit is now open source" to one
| that describes the project.
|
| Edit: ah, but the author's related essay has been discussed a
| couple times:
|
| _Develop Transformative Tools for Thought_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26078115 - Feb 2021 (1
| comment)
|
| _How can we develop transformative tools for thought?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22147212 - Jan 2020 (44
| comments)
|
| _How can we develop transformative tools for thought?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21152542 - Oct 2019 (74
| comments)
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