Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by test6554 2566 days ago
I worked on a markdown flash card app briefly because so many accounting terms referenced other terms in their definitions. By linking flash cards together I could quickly jump between flashcards to review unfamiliar terms.

Rather than wikipedia where everything about a subject is recorded, flash cards were meant to be a distilled set of facts for a single term from a single course or textbook you were studying.

I overhauled my models when I realized that the same field or subject (which I organized into Decks) used the same term in two different contexts to mean different things. That also meant I could not reference cards simply by name in the markdown. So I updated all links to reference by id rather than name. So I had to build some UI to select cards by name and generate links.

Then I hit a wall when I realized I would need a good way to encode and render math formulas and that's when my hobby project died.

Also, in the end, I found that having such quick linked access to knowledge I was studying made me less likely to remember the material, not more. I relied too heavily on the cards and the ability to just click on a term I didn't remember.