Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#141

Post by kasperset » Sat, Sep 01, 2018, 11:58 PM UTC

nickelbob wrote: post #139

kasperset wrote: post #111

This can be difficult. I was looking for a system to organize all the personal knowledge beginning of the year. I tried Evernote and several of the alternatives such as OneNote, but none of them stuck with me well. My main issue was storing code along with the notes. Evernote does provide code formatting but not very friendly with the syntax highlighting. I also tried Quiver for storing code, but it is specialized to…

> I also tried Quiver for storing code, but it is specialized towards code storage. Can you expand on this? Was quiver not good enough at basic text?

Yes, it was but I wanted to access information with a web browser as well. I might give it a try again.

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#142

Post by JesseAldridge » Sun, Sep 02, 2018, 12:02 AM UTC

I've been using the offline version of Draw.io for this. You can save diagrams as individual xml files. Unfortunately the data is base64 encoded by default so you have to manually convert them to a searchable format. I wrote a script to do that: https://github.com/JesseAldridge/draw.io-convert

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#143

Post by inawarminister » Sun, Sep 02, 2018, 12:17 AM UTC

I_complete_me wrote: post #124

se7entime wrote: post #56

Personally i can recommend http://zim-wiki.org/ you can organize the "media" think in "attachment" and tag them or create page about them, and you can still find the attachment in your file manager "Zim is a graphical text editor used to maintain a collection of wiki pages. Each page can contain links to other pages, simple formatting and images. Pages are stored in a folder structure, like in an outliner, and can ha…

zim-wiki for me, absolutely. Text-based, offline, decent plugins, cross-platform, easy. What I love is that if zim is not available I can use Sublime Text to view and navigate as a near replacement as long as the SidebarEnhancements plugin is installed. I stand by the supremacy of zim-wiki although it does lack "pretty".

Do any of you sync your Zim/open it from mobile, specifically Android? I've been using Zim for a few days now and it works well, but would be much better if I can access the database while on the go...

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#144

Post by delbel » Sun, Sep 02, 2018, 12:25 AM UTC

I use qownnotes and Nextcloud on a NAS and back it up on external storage, as well as every desktop/laptop also has a local copy. It uses Mark Down. So far it seems to be working fine. Nextcloud is very flaky but better than owncloud.

I keep a lab paper notebook for everything I do and I write the date, time, and whatever I need. Then I type it in.

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#145

Post by mark_l_watson » Sun, Sep 02, 2018, 12:26 AM UTC

I wrote my own Evernote style system and used it for a while. Then I changed to my current system: Emacs and org-mode for notes, todos, tasks, etc. I also use Notes in Fastmail (and they show up in Apple Notes automatically). For PDFs of purchased books, Communication of the ACM, good articles converted to PDFs, etc. I use Google Drive because it is searchable.

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#146

Post by sridca » Sun, Sep 02, 2018, 12:30 AM UTC

mark_l_watson wrote: post #145

I wrote my own Evernote style system and used it for a while. Then I changed to my current system: Emacs and org-mode for notes, todos, tasks, etc. I also use Notes in Fastmail (and they show up in Apple Notes automatically). For PDFs of purchased books, Communication of the ACM, good articles converted to PDFs, etc. I use Google Drive because it is searchable.

By searchable you mean Google Drive can search _inside_ of documents like PDFs and images?

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#147

Post by mark_l_watson » Sun, Sep 02, 2018, 12:36 AM UTC

sridca wrote: post #146

mark_l_watson wrote: post #145

I wrote my own Evernote style system and used it for a while. Then I changed to my current system: Emacs and org-mode for notes, todos, tasks, etc. I also use Notes in Fastmail (and they show up in Apple Notes automatically). For PDFs of purchased books, Communication of the ACM, good articles converted to PDFs, etc. I use Google Drive because it is searchable.

By searchable you mean Google Drive can search _inside_ of documents like PDFs and images?

I don't think search works inside images but works well for PDFs. Just this morning I was trying to find a particular paper on LSTMs and NLP and I found what I needed very quickly.

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#148

Post by juliend2 » Sun, Sep 02, 2018, 12:54 AM UTC

markpapadakis wrote: post #38

I use Dropbox to store everything. There are no files that I care fore that are not managed by Dropbox (or iCloud, for my photos/videos). I use iA Writer to create lists and documents for everything in Dropbox folders. I also have a folder for PDFs/papers (also on Dropbox). There are also folders for my study nodes ( I study codebases ), notes on personal stuff, notes on Programming, on pretty much everything. I use…

This, and I have, in the root-level folder, a folder for every spheres of my life. For example:

- Personal (health, finance, hobbies, spirituality, etc)

- Work (things for my company, invoices, PDFs for learning tech stuff, etc)

- Church (I volunteer for a couple of churches, so that's very misc)

The exact same structure exist for my Google Calendars (separated by spheres that encompass several projects/concerns).

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#149

Post by stockkid » Sun, Sep 02, 2018, 12:59 AM UTC

My tip is to break down your knowledge into very small chunks and store them somewhere easily accessible and searchable. I have been looking for a solution for this, and that led me to build a system for myself and open source it [0].

In short, I find that writing them down every day in bite-sized chunks is most helpful. This method probably will not help you store non-texts such as movies, pictures, but for other mediums, it is great.

After about two years, the main benefits I find are:

* Bite-sized notes are easier to index and search for later

* We can easily share those notes with others when in a technical discussion etc, saving a lot of time

* We can do spaced-repetition on those notes easily because they are concise. (I wrote a short Go program to do this for me)

[0] - https://github.com/dnote/cli

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#150

Post by SomewhatLikely » Sun, Sep 02, 2018, 1:01 AM UTC

I'm surprised to not see any YAGNI voices in the comments. I set up Evernote with lots of collected papers I had read. However, I found I would rarely go back, and finding things within a collection of two hundred items was already not easier than just googling it. Perhaps with improved semantic search the situation may improve. I just think summarizing down to a small set of core ideas and storing them in a single small text file or document is better than keeping extensive originals or even per item notes.