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

Funny how often the word recollect has come up here, without mentioning the fantastic tool recoll, updated frequently and available for many operating systems. I use it on macOS for an immense library of scientific and other documents. I think there's a standalone installer, and it's also available via macports. It may be found at

https://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/pages/index-recoll.htm...

It allows me to index and find words and phrases in files of many types AND view their contents independently of external readers, or using system readers, including text, PDF, or word processing files of common sorts.

I use Obsidian with several thousand notes for everything "writing" (structured - studying, definitions, thinking things through, and unstructured - memorable moments, stories, people, random streams of thought). "Actionable" things (todo lists and tasks) have their own place. My motivation is quite similar - I feel like I just forget things. And it's been wonderful! It's so nice to write about a nice moment, and be reminded that it happened - small things you'd otherwise forget.

I've found ideas from Andy Matuschak extremely useful - https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes?stackedNot...

On a practical level the crucial features of what's been working for me for a few years now (inspired by Obsidian community and Andy):

* Notes have to be very clearly "bounded" - break things into smallest logical "statement" units, and interconnect notes instead of having behemoth notes with everything in one place

* Note titles have to be an explicit "statement or sentence summary of the contents, with relevant context" - which really helps with search / discoverability. E.g. "Browsers are the most common and visually advanced applications that make use of the internet, but there are also many others" instead of "Web browsers" or "Applications that use the internet". Or "The day I embarassed myself at football". An alternative of this is to have explicitly clear headings.

* The idea of putting notes into a "reverse spaced repetition" algorithm where instead of spacing things you've learnt further and further into the future, you are spacing things that are "fruitful" nearer and nearer in the future (and when you have less to add, further into the future, when eventually a note becomes "evergreen"). You then have a "queue" (mine is always packed) of notes that are due, and you pick them up as you like. This can be achieved with https://github.com/st3v3nmw/obsidian-spaced-repetition and is described better by Andy: https://notes.andymatuschak.org/zJrfPCbY7GcpV9asEc8NTVzXTAV4...

With the above things combined, I usually sit down just to write and unload things from my mind and enter notes into the (basic) "attention algorithm". That way I never stress about polishing notes, and there's always a time in the future when I come back to a note written a long time ago, make some edits, maybe split it into a couple of notes, clarify the title, maybe merge a duplicate (if something has come to mind twice, it's clearly important to me!!). With explicit titles I almost immediately know what the note is about, trigger new connections (between the time I've written the note and now, some other relevant thing may have surfaced which changed what I think or know, or I've come up with a clearer way to describe the same thing).

I am using GPT to write the commit message for me of my changes.

Since this is purely text, it summarises the changes / corrections.

I had a similar issue. I had read How to Take Smart Notes. This discussed the slip box method. I was recording ideas in Obsidian. But I was not reviewing them.

Fast forward another year, I saw a mention of a book called Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte. I bought it and read it in 3 sittings.

The concept was that you are only capturing what resonates with you. Stuff that is actionable for your projects.

The structure of your folders helps with this. So current projects are easy to locate. You can keep working on them.

He suggests in a bonus chapter on tagging to just use the search mechanism of your app. He gives some other useful ways tags can be used.

Fast forward to today, I am actively reviewing my notes and improving them each time I touch them to make them more useful.

I run a mediawiki instance at home (a few containers managed with docker compose) and it's been great for the last 3+ years.

There are a number of feature for organizing content (the main ones being Categories and Namespaces) and it has APIs (so i can write simple python scripts to perform actions -- like updating some index pages with a custom format).

The VisualEditor is very nice and it's fairly easy to embed images, videos or even pdf documents.

It's not exposed publicly but I can access it (both for viewing and editing) from anywhere using my own vpn connection.

I update the main software once in like 6-8 months so it's fairly low maintenance (this boils down to essentially changing the version tag in docker compose file, restarting and checking everything's working alright -- with the occasional fixes).

Since it's running at home (on a small computer that i would keep on anyway and that it's also doing other stuff) it's essentially free and i don't have to worry about space or any other metric.