Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 228 posts

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#62

Post by dcx »

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…

I do exactly the same thing. Nothing beats text files, a deep folder structure and full text search (and ubiquitous access via Dropbox). I get a ton of value out of my system.

The thing that I find really makes things click is to figure out/set up good keyboard shortcuts and then practice them, so that you are able to save files to anywhere in your organiser hierarchy very very quickly. Say an average of five seconds per file. They say a 10x quantitative change is a qualitative change; once I had this down, I started using it a ton more and treating it kind of like an extension of my memory.

For Mac users some useful starting points for this technique are Default Folder X and ClipMenu.

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#65

Post by samuraixp »

I use http://papersapp.com/ for handling PDF papers from arxiv.org etc.

It seems they have merged with readcube who want a yearly subscription however I was still able to buy a life time license to papers app a few months ago. I guess support will slowly disappear but for now its working great, with PDF sync via dropbox onto my iPad or iPhone, the ability to draw and take notes and search as well as download new papers. For your own PDFs I guess this would still work pretty well since you can search and annotate, create smart groups etc.

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#67

Post by haney »

I use Evernote for ebooks, papers, articles and personal notes. Probably wouldn't work well for movies or large photo albums (I iCloud for stuff like that). I use their chrome extension, desktop app and mobile app and it works really well. It's really nice to be able to search everything I've ever written in notes or clipped on the web. It also has some support for OCR for paper notes, and does a decent job of indexing text in PDFs. I searched for an open source or self hosted solution for a long time, but ultimately broke down and chose a well supported commercial solution.

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#68

Post by petra »

haney wrote: post #67

I use Evernote for ebooks, papers, articles and personal notes. Probably wouldn't work well for movies or large photo albums (I iCloud for stuff like that). I use their chrome extension, desktop app and mobile app and it works really well. It's really nice to be able to search everything I've ever written in notes or clipped on the web. It also has some support for OCR for paper notes, and does a decent job of indexi…

Evernote's search sucks(at least for a free user). can't(sometimes) even handle synonyms well. Sadly, there's no better alternative.

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#70

Post by childintime »

This isn't a task you should be doing. Simply put, an OS should keep record of where you got things from, and where it was sent/copied to. That info should stay with you when moving between computers. It should try to tag the files accordingly.

Disk indexing isn't enough to answer "where is that file", when you moved it for example to cold-storage.

Note that by this definition Windows is not an OS :) Linux came closest with the failed Nepomuk.

Post reply on HN