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Ask HN: How do you organize your knowledge?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you organize your knowledge?

#31

Post by samstave »

drenvuk wrote: post #26

I used to use trillium notes (which is really good) for GTD and idea mapping for a few months but stopped. I just use a big three ring binder with some five star hard to rip paper now with some plastic sticky tabs for categories and write down things that are important. The barrier to taking down and recalling info is both low and high enough in just the right way that I remember things I want to remember and can rec…

Plus it is known that when you write things down with ink and paper, your recall tends to be higher. That doesnt mean its perfect for everyone, but a larger than just an average amount of people.

I like your idea - what ever happened to that e-ink note pad one could write on and it saves a digital copy?

Re: Ask HN: How do you organize your knowledge?

#32

Post by hkt »

Nextcloud Notes.

It syncs my notes to a cloud UI, my phone, laptops etc. Also provides for good search, and the notes are in markdown format so very portable. There are some limitations (no real way to link between notes) but I don't notice them or do the kind of writing which requires such things really.

Re: Ask HN: How do you organize your knowledge?

#33

Post by great_reversal »

For overall memory, I generally just remember things instead of using all these fancy apps. Sometimes I'll make some notes in Typora (clean .md editor), but more often than not, I'll never revisit the file.

I'm a visual learner, so its really easy for me to recall past snapshots (static, not like a video) from my life, or how certain things looked at a point in time. It's not quite an identical memory, but it's not too far off either. Maps are a breeze, and even complex tunnel systems like the PATH in Toronto are easy to navigate.

For learning, it helps if you just throw yourself into it. Take 5 minutes and try to work at the concept. Usually this will turn into 30-60 minutes. I learned Kubernetes and AWS EKS this way.

For problem solving, I'll make some notes for brainstorming, todo lists, and any questions I have. Then when I go for my daily walk (~15km/2hrs), I reflect on the abstractions again (from memory) and try to refactor what doesn't seem perfect.

I do have a mind palace set up, but I don't really use it.

Re: Ask HN: How do you organize your knowledge?

#34

Post by samstave »

lolive wrote: post #21

Obsidian was the mind opener for me. Simple to use. Backuped on Dropbox on my various machines, it is my ubiquitous personal knowledge base. The fact that you can copy/paste HTML from web pages into it makes me rebuild knowledge I get from the internet into my own version. Really really a fundamental tool for me. The Vi of knowledge. PS: I don't know the other tools (notion, roam,...) PPS: a big downside in Obsidian,…

What about that post just earlier today for HTML-izing .md files in addition to turning them into presentation slides

Re: Ask HN: How do you organize your knowledge?

#36

Post by moasda »

jll29 wrote: post #19

After trying out various ways, online and offline (including studying Luhmann's famous "Zettelkasten" http://ds.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/viewer/image/ZL1A1001/1/#topDo... ), and the one that I stuck with is using plain text files. One's knowledge is too valuable and important to entrust it to a particular binary format that can soon no longer be read. Plain text is durable, portable, easy to process using UNIX command lin…

Very interesting, I also tried several approaches and came finally to text files. For me the most important feature are full text search and some kind of formatting, including basic support for images.

As I couldn`t find a good tool I wrote my own Wiki server - 13 years ago and still using it every day: https://moasdawiki.net/

Re: Ask HN: How do you organize your knowledge?

#38

Post by symkat »

samstave wrote: post #31
drenvuk wrote: post #26

I used to use trillium notes (which is really good) for GTD and idea mapping for a few months but stopped. I just use a big three ring binder with some five star hard to rip paper now with some plastic sticky tabs for categories and write down things that are important. The barrier to taking down and recalling info is both low and high enough in just the right way that I remember things I want to remember and can rec…

Plus it is known that when you write things down with ink and paper, your recall tends to be higher. That doesnt mean its perfect for everyone, but a larger than just an average amount of people. I like your idea - what ever happened to that e-ink note pad one could write on and it saves a digital copy?

>> I like your idea - what ever happened to that e-ink note pad one could write on and it saves a digital copy?

Probably https://remarkable.com/

Re: Ask HN: How do you organize your knowledge?

#40

Post by gofreddygo »

Plain text. I keep metadata embedded in the content of each file. I keep only one k:v pair per line. e.g

    "topic: D3",   
    "subject: scales",
    "context: Side Project"
Use grep and awk to slice, group, dice and join as and how I want.

Incredibly flexible, a bash-like shell is my only dependency. Works with any search engine that i've tried. Easily replacable parts. Check into git regularly.

Some scripts I use

  ## group by topic. search for lines that start with "topic". print topic and the file name
  grep -i "^topic" *.txt | awk -F ":" '{printf "%-25s%s\n",$3,$1}' | sort

  ## find all files containing the "topic" tag 
  grep -i "^topic" *.txt | awk -F ":" '{printf "%-25s%s\n",$3,$1}' | sort 


  ## find all files NOT containing "topic". useful for cleaning up 
  grep -iL "^topic" *.txt

  ## find first 10 files not containing "topic" and open each in vi sequentially
  for f in $(grep -ilL "^topic" *.txt | head); do vi $f; done
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