with so much knowledge, you need an index. And a large index is a knowledge base. Why not?
Ask HN: Why have a knowledge base when anything is easily googleable?
21–26 of 26 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why have a knowledge base when anything is easily googleable?
#22>Why have a knowledge base when anything is easily googleable? Because it isn't. It's not even close to "anything". Only superficial things are googlable, and even then google's NN algorithms sometimes manage to mess thing up, providing some useless links instead of a single correct one. That's why I tend to use google for quick search, but then I back it up with my own notes and articles/books/webpage archive. Of co…
I'll give you an example to make my point clearer. For the past month I have been reading Sylvia Plath's biography and works. I decided to document what I had learnt about her. I created a sort-of wiki page of her in my personal notes app. But then I went to the actual page and found the same information there. This made me think that I needed to change my approach and I came here to ask this.
I do similar things (and have came upon similar notes elsewhere) but my personal notes are still valuable because a) they are structured how I think, and b) I remember it better/it finds its way into my consciousness better by writing it.
Re: Ask HN: Why have a knowledge base when anything is easily googleable?
#23If you can find a way to make KB organized then for sure it's better than simple Googling. Plus in many occurences I have to pull contents from quite a few webpages and put them under the same problem.
Do you actually go back to your KB to look something up? I feel like having a KB is merely a way of reinforcing retention of new information.
Yeah I do, for example I constantly look up how to do percentiles in Vertica. Man I can never memorize these, so I have a KB of queries and imported most of them into Datagrip using live templates starting with '_' followed by name of database. Some of them are technical stuffs and some of them are business stuffs (like how to get this piece of info from the tables).
I have other KBs but yeah I agreed that I do not go back very often, maybe just in training sessions.
Re: Ask HN: Why have a knowledge base when anything is easily googleable?
#24One more reason: There are so many sites writing on so many subjects but most of them are skewed for the Google algorithm.
Finding meaningful content that adds value is very rare. There is no guarantee you will get the same page next time you search, unless you can recollect a significant unique string from the page.
Hence, a knowledge base.
Re: Ask HN: Why have a knowledge base when anything is easily googleable?
#25I maintain a set of text files some of which I refer to many times hourly to either read or write to
here are the more frequently used text files
- work specific - software specific - general todo with daily entries - general purpose knowledge - vacation related with top tips per country - nyc specific
within some of these files are top level categories with subentries
I have search tooling to probe the files ... sometime as simple as
cat file | egrep --color=auto -B20 -A20 'some string'
which will color highlight matches and show surrounding lines from the file
I find note keeping a critical skill everyone should adopt to varying extents ... my main software note file contains over 90,000 lines of text so is the keystone to my approach ( yes that's over 1600 pages ) ... as the complexity of my note keeping expanded so did my ability to organically do local searches so I am not in want of any outside tools ... all I use is vi and various flavors of grep
additionally I have a few directories with subdirs which are either project or topic or tool specific
having organizational skills when working on complex research projects which span months or years pays back in spades and note keeping is just one aspect
Re: Ask HN: Why have a knowledge base when anything is easily googleable?
#26>Why have a knowledge base when anything is easily googleable? Because it isn't. It's not even close to "anything". Only superficial things are googlable, and even then google's NN algorithms sometimes manage to mess thing up, providing some useless links instead of a single correct one. That's why I tend to use google for quick search, but then I back it up with my own notes and articles/books/webpage archive. Of co…
I'll give you an example to make my point clearer. For the past month I have been reading Sylvia Plath's biography and works. I decided to document what I had learnt about her. I created a sort-of wiki page of her in my personal notes app. But then I went to the actual page and found the same information there. This made me think that I needed to change my approach and I came here to ask this.
>I created a sort-of wiki page of her in my personal notes app. But then I went to the actual page and found the same information there
Usually when I read wiki written by more than one man and need something more complex than "born xxxx, died xxxx", I feel like the page was written by schizophrenic with OCD i.e. the information is not consistent and writer is obsessed by formal correctness at the expense of clarity. Thus I cannot understand shit unless I'm already well familiar with the topic - but then what's the reason for me to read this article?