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

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#21

Post by tmoravec » Sat, Sep 01, 2018, 5:53 PM UTC

I use OneNote currently. Dump (almost) everything in there. The UX leaves something to be desired - Evernote is so much better. Shame that Evernote kept losing my data.

And Google Drive for the "larger” and better organized stuff like photos, e-books, or invoices.

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#22

Post by jeanlucas » Sat, Sep 01, 2018, 5:54 PM UTC

kqr wrote: post #15

This is a crossover between bookmarks and content curation. Also looking for a good solution.

I was thinking of building my own hacker news: own links, curation of content, tags, and even ranking.

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#23

Post by miles » Sat, Sep 01, 2018, 5:54 PM UTC

I still use Together 2.6.8[0] for collecting and organizing just about everything. Multiple libraries, built-in previewing, editing, and Spotlight search, no proprietary database (uses Finder under the hood), etc.

There were some changes in version 3 and the subsequent rebranded Keep It[1] which kept me from upgrading, but it might fit your needs.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20130315081858/http://reinvented...

[1] https://reinventedsoftware.com/keepit/

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#24

Post by nathcd » Sat, Sep 01, 2018, 5:54 PM UTC

I really think what we need for this is a new sort of file manager, and it should look more like iTunes or Kodi than Thunar or Dolphin.

I always enjoy reading this post about tag-based file organization, which feels like it would be a great foundation for this: https://www.nayuki.io/page/designing-better-file-organizatio...

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#25

Post by toomuchtodo » Sat, Sep 01, 2018, 5:55 PM UTC

I try whenever possible to push as much personal knowledge into Wikipedia and Stackoverflow, and then use bookmarks to keep track of that info in my browser. This ensures that others can take advantage of that info, forever.

EDIT: I'm still trying to find a good machine readable way to represent the metadata for all that information. Alas, there are only so many hours in a day. Will probably end up with tags and Pinboard.

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#26

Post by stevenleeg » Sat, Sep 01, 2018, 5:56 PM UTC

Personally I use vimwiki. It stores everything in plaintext files that I can search, keep track of in git, and also comes with quite a few useful features for building articles.

The main downside, as someone else has mentioned here with org-mode, is the lack of a good mobile editor. This is something I’ve wanted to find time to fix for years but still haven’t had a chance.

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#27

Post by wrbishop » Sat, Sep 01, 2018, 5:58 PM UTC

I build mindmaps using freemind/freeplane to keep track of my research; I literally have hundreds of mindmaps from 3Dprinting to ZFS. I also link mindmaps to other mindmaps (crude "topic mapping").

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#28

Post by ronaldvalente » Sat, Sep 01, 2018, 5:59 PM UTC

DEVONthink - great for all things bookmarks, data, searchable PDFs etc - can also use it for org-mode files and open in your fav editor. Many sync options. Mobile too.

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#29

Post by shbhrsaha » Sat, Sep 01, 2018, 6:00 PM UTC

For personal notes, check out Nvalt [0]. The search is blazing fast. I linked it with SimpleNote [1] so changes sync instantly between my laptop and phone. It also plays well with the Typora [2] markdown editor

[0] http://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/

[1] https://simplenote.com/

[2] https://typora.io/

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#30

Post by dba7dba » Sat, Sep 01, 2018, 6:00 PM UTC

I use personally hosted Confluence ($10 a year) to keep snips of notes and personal project related stuff. And also Google docs.

Yes I'd be interested in having a tool to keep videos organized.