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Orbit: an experimental platform for small tasks repeated over time
- yewenjie 5y agoThe homepage does not load if you use an adblocker that blocks Sentry. Edit: Has been fixed in the latest commit.
- anotha1 5y agoI read the readme, now can someone explain what this is like I'm stupid?
- degenerate 5y agoThis page explains it a bit more, and gives a demo: https://docs.withorbit.com/ 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.
- whimsicalism 5y agoAre you familiar with Anki?
- spelunker 5y agoI 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/ 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 5y agoThe 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 5y agoYes, 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 5y agoAs 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.
- StavrosK 5y agoIt's a thing for learning stuff that fits on cards.
- waynesonfire 5y agodecentralized, right in the readme. what more do you need to know?
- caslon 5y agoI 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 5y agoI'm really stupid and/or lack the attention for this, but thank you for trying!
- redrobein 5y ago> 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.
- jkhdigital 5y agoI don’t think it’s the tool itself, rather the technique. I used SRS to learn kanji and it was nothing short of miraculous. I also used it to study extremely efficiently for well-defined examinations (e.g. proficiency exams for some basic college courses). However, I’ve also tried SRS on other subjects with less success. One challenge is that in many knowledge domains, it’s not entirely clear what is worth remembering. Sure, you can purge cards that turn out to be unimportant, but the process of creating the cards in the first place can be awfully time-consuming so it starts to feel less efficient.
- asoneth 5y agoOrbit 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/ https://ncase.me/remember/
- Raed667 5y agoI have lost count of how many projects called Orbit I have seen so far.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Igelau 5y agoThis is the one that would have helped you remember the others.
- twobitshifter 5y agoJust 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/ 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.
- andymatuschak 5y ago(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 https://quantum.country for an example)
- jkhdigital 5y agoAre you familiar with Niklas Luhmann’s “zettelkasten” methods? Seems like there might be some fertile ground at the intersection of these two ideas...
- nextos 5y agoIndeed. For example, org-mode can easily implement both a Zettelkasten and SRS. There are ready-made packages for both.
- gmccreight2 5y agoAndy (the Orbit author) has his own very interesting Zettelkasten-like set of public notes. In this page, for example, he compares/contrasts his "Evergreen note" approach to a Zettles in a Zettlekasten: https://notes.andymatuschak.org/z4AX7pHAu5uUfmrq4K4zig9x8jmmF62XgaMXm https://notes.andymatuschak.org/z4AX7pHAu5uUfmrq4K4zig9x8jmm... Additionally, his system does have spaced repetition built-in, too: "I’ve embedded a Spaced repetition memory system into my notes: The mnemonic medium can be extended to one’s personal notes. This has substantially changed the medium, but in ways I don’t yet understand very well." I do not believe he has open-sourced his note taking system, but it is fun to browse around in; he presents a lot of interesting ideas, particularly if you're into this space.
- edwintorok 5y agoSo 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 https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes
- judofyr 5y agoSome context: The author created https://quantum.country 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.
- rolisz 5y agoI 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.
- judofyr 5y ago> 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.
- bruhhh 5y agogenuine question: why should we care?
- kickscondor 5y agoI'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 https://quotebacks.net
- andymatuschak 5y agoHi, 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 https://quantum.country for an example or https://numinous.productions/ttft https://numinous.productions/ttft for detailed background and discussion.
- pugio 5y agoHi 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.
- Ataraxy 5y agoI saw the name and was hoping he was open sourcing his notes platform hehe. This is interesting, but definitely above my head.
- da39a3ee 5y agoI'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.
- odyslam 5y agoThis is awesome man. Thanks for sharing!
- vinceguidry 5y agoI 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.
- dang 5y agoSince 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&query=orbit%20comments%3E0&sort=byDate&type=story 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 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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21152542 - Oct 2019 (74 comments)
- mdoms 5y ago> 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 5y agoNuke them... from Orbit!
- hughes 5y agoReading this made me so incredibly nostalgic for the 2006-2007 era.
- stephenhandley 5y agoHadn't heard of SuperMemo / spaced learning before and has been awesome reading about it tonight, especially relating to personal note-taking. That said, one thing about QCVC I'm not wild about (so far) is the amount of meta content / sales pitching it leads with. Like, I get it, you wanna convince people of the value of this approach, but I'd prefer a version that just did the thing (teach the basics of QC) instead of spending so much time talking about teaching you the thing. Its like if I was reading a textbook and it spent half of the time talking about why I should do / engage with the exercises... ideally the method / process should be self-justifying and not need to make a case for itself. I get that QCVC was geared towards proving the concept, so I guess just hoping if this starts getting used by other authors, they implement just the process rather than spend an inordinate amount of time talking about it.