{
  "id": 19776872,
  "title": "I Counted 34,500 Flashcard Answers. 22% of Them Start With the Same Two Words.",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/11/13/i-counted-34-500-flashcard-answers-22-of-them-start-with-the-same-two",
  "topic": "tech",
  "section": "Tech",
  "published": "2026-11-13T08:08:51.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Dev.to",
    "slug": "dev-to",
    "url": "https://dev.to/mediadownloaderguides/i-counted-34500-flashcard-answers-22-of-them-start-with-the-same-two-words-2akf"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "I analyzed 34,500 flashcard answers on my site. Over 22% of them, 5,642 answers, began with the words \"The author\" or \"The chapter.\" This was determined by parsing my database, and the analysis was straightforward. I had shipped 156 decks without thoroughly reviewing them, which was a surprising discovery. Each deck page was structured with all its cards in a single array, making data extraction easy. Using a simple regex, I pulled 157 site map URLs and loaded the card arrays into my system. There were no malformed payloads or exact duplicate answers found in the data, which comprised 34,500 cards in total. The answers varied in length, with 88% falling between 50 and 75 words. Only 7,297 chapters had exactly four cards, while the rest had one card or more. The uniformity in the flashcards was not due to duplication, as I initially suspected. Instead, it was due to uniform openers and chapter lengths. Openers like \"The author\" and \"The chapter\" accounted for a quarter of the answers, while chapter lengths followed a standard deviation of 8.29 from a mean of 60.58 words. The ref field, which pointed back to the book, was consistently \"Chapter 7\". Despite the uniformity, I did not read the 156 source books to verify the answers, as the focus was on the formatting and consistency of the data.",
  "summary": "Two words: \"The author\". They open 5,642 of the answers on my flashcard site. Add \"The chapter\" and you are at 22.5% of 34,500. I found that by parsing my own database, which sounds more impressive than it was. The hard part was admitting I had shipped 156 decks without ever reading them end to end. The parse Each deck page ships its whole card array inline as window.BC_CARDS — the viewer needs…",
  "key_points": [
    "34,500 flashcard answers analyzed",
    "22% of answers start with The author or The chapter",
    "Uniformity due to openers and chapter lengths"
  ],
  "editors_take": "The prevalence of repetitive openers reveals a lack of manual oversight during the rapid deployment of over one hundred flashcard decks across the platform.",
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}