Ask HN: How Do You Utilize Your Personal Knowledge Base?

Use of this type of thing has been absolutely essential to my work as a research scientist, as the modern equivalent of a 'commonplace book' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace_book). Search is the primary advantage over paper notebooks and so search is arguably the most important feature of any of these 'knowledge bases'. Tagging or other forms of organizing being subsets of search, and in my opinion essential features.

So, how do I employ it? One is to search on a subject I'm interested in or working on, ie to find notes, previous readings and writings, then add to these or go from there. Another is to keep various kinds of lists, (eg lists of ideas, things to read, etc). Otherwise the way your able to link things together with tags and other forms of linking is also pretty great - these are all features I will insist on when I move to something new, since I use tiddlywiki, which is a mostly dead project.

Anything with these features works like an external brain, allowing for recall, with just enough inefficient that you have to engage with the material, and possible mix some notes and facts together to hopefully inspire some new ideas.

I use chatblade, Obsidian, and git. I generate a diff, send it to GPT-4 which gives me a short description of what I changed and then I push to github. This makes maintenance easier.

You can do it automatigally, but that can get expensive rather quickly.

I use it as the means to understand things. I write as if I am explaining things to somebody else, that else is the future me, but in the process you can quickly understand what is not clear in your head, break it down to first principles, and build it back up again.

N=1, but writing has had an enormous impact on my growth.

I started using Foam[0] a few years ago, but the more I used it, the more I dropped all the tedious bits, and it became nothing more than a big, evolving markdown repo.

I switched from vscode (back) to vim, and it has worked as well or better than it did before. I follow my own rules. I like the Zettelkasten idea of one idea per card, but if I put more related things in the same .md file, that's OK. I didn't like the flat directory structure, and so I have dirs organized by category. My /bar directory is inside my /cooking directory, and for whatever reason, that makes sense to me. Ripgrep doesn't care, and I always find what I'm looking for.

This markdown hierarchy, that still lives in a repo called "foam", has become indispensable to me.

[0] https://github.com/foambubble/foam

I use Obsidian to manage personal knowledge about apps, OS features, and workflows. Some of it has to do with personal configurations; some of it has to do with undocumented behaviour I found out myself, issues, or coalescing fragmented information from around the web. I'm pretty careful to not simply rewrite what the web already documents well or is easily found in a single search. So it is a mix of official documentation links, written knowledge, and personal experiences like the search query paths I used.

The approach is basically "I write what I've used if I still have around what caused me to need it. I associate what I use with where I access the context of the cause". Because issues are context dependant you organize by the context that it came from. If you name a file as the app name you can have the document come up when you search for the app name. Because the content is based on situations and issues, returning to it is predictably probable. I find this is a pretty low mental burden to writing, maintaining, discovering, and navigating. You don't really have to make decisions about where to place something, how to name it, or how to find it because it follows from naturally arising circumstances and contexts.

I don't think I technically need to use a PKMS as I use the special features lightly but it is nice to have them there when you really want them and to have an interface dedicated and designed to deal with servicing the whole workflow. I also like to write down my stream of thoughts too but I keep them separate and use a separate system for interfacing and managing them.

Lol...

    $ wc `fdfind -t f -e org`
    1839279 16220106 107034844

(lines words chars)

Yes, it's structured.