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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?

#91

Post by grep_name »

rmhsilva wrote: post #75
aristofun wrote: post #70

This general “knowledge management” question is like a “time management” one — usually meaningless and sometimes a form of escapism. When you don’t have any particular emotionally charged goal(s) in mind — no time/knowledge management technique would really make a difference. But some of them might give you a good illusion of something important going on. And as soon as you have specific important goal in mind (like…

I've had a different experience. In the times where an emotionally charged goal isn't driving me forward, adhering to disciplined regimes for time and knowledge management has helped me to prepare and therefore perform better in times there IS a highly motivating goal. There don't have to be two extremes of X-management (one fuelled by emotion and one dragged down by apathy). Like anything, building a discipline in t…

I've found similarly that there's a lot of value in cultivating your knowledge base in between emotionally charged goals or spurts of inspiration, but highly disciplined / regimented approaches never worked for me at all for some reason.

For me, the key was switching to a totally non-linear but robustly inter-connectable note system, which turned out to be tiddlywiki in my case. Regimented approaches I found created friction for creating a new submission, and switching to just creating a 'tiddler' when something was on my mind (and then being able to choose to reference that content within larger ones later or not) has been one of the most liberating changes I've made in years.

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

#92

Post by breck »

wuschel wrote: post #90
breck wrote: post #41

I use spreadsheets and custom 2D dsls. I get the best of tabular and tree structures. The latest iterations aren’t live yet, but there’s a lot of stuff on treenotation.org which is the foundation of what I use. I consider it like a tool for clear thinking. There’s no punctuation or noise, pure signal. I build DSLs and then spreadsheets in those DSLs. Both the data and grammars are in 2D Lang’s. There’s no quotes, bra…

Hi, I had a look at treenotation.org and some of your other resources - could you perhaps post a practical example on how you use your custom 2D DSLs, and why it would be preferential to other tools?

Here's a 2 minute video explaining one example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0l2QWH-iV3k

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

#95

Post by jamie_ca »

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,…

Yeah, it can tie in really nicely with a static site generator.

I use Notable rather than Obsidian, but it works the same (folder of .md files). My blog builds with Bridgetown, and I wrote a little bit of extra code to handle the wikilink formatting and build up an incoming link list, but it runs pretty cleanly. https://blog.tracefunc.com/notes/

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

#96

Post by lcall »

I heavily use the desktop program at http://onemodel.org (AGPL, I'm the author). I hope in the future to make it easier to install, and move it from scala to rust (edit: and hopefully from postgres to sqlite). Feedback welcome.

Edits: It is my "self-program" for life as I learn, make plans, tasks, calendar, study topics, work on habits, map out details of things, track contacts, etc, etc. Progress has slowed due to health limitations, but I still have many plans. It is text- and keyboard-oriented, feels today like "endless lists of fast recursively nested lists", very physically efficient, can export to html or numbered or indented text outlines, import (somewhat) from text files, show an activity log by date (~"journal"), can store files (not slick, but works), etc.

It is, today, a .jar and you have to install a JRE and postgresql and follow documented config steps. For me at least, the best thing for this that i have found. Code in github.

Another future feature is like sharing, so it becomes like a (selectively) public wiki+gopher server, with updates selectively synchronizable across instances. Down the road, hopefully. And embedded code associated with entry types.

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

#98

Post by eddof13 »

gofreddygo wrote: post #72

TLDR version of what's in the comments : Anki Bear Bulletproof Workspace Commonplace Dokuwiki Emacs (org-mode) Evernote Everything Folder structure with files GTD GitJournal Github Google Docs Google Keep Joplin Markdeep Markdown Mental Pivot Mr. Dewey and his decimal numbering NeuraCache Notepad++ Notion Obsidian OneNote Pen & Paper plain text (awk, sort, grep) Roam Research Spaceli Sublime SyncThing Synology Trello…

Also DevonThink

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

#99

Post by wuschel »

breck wrote: post #92
wuschel wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, I had a look at treenotation.org and some of your other resources - could you perhaps post a practical example on how you use your custom 2D DSLs, and why it would be preferential to other tools?

Here's a 2 minute video explaining one example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0l2QWH-iV3k

Thank you for the video URI, and for taking the time to get to back to me!

I am still trying to identify what makes your technical solution unique and better that, say, a Jupyter/Dataframe based system.

1) It seems to me that most of the commands that have to be done in a UI with Google Docs/Excel can now be written down and immidiately resolved in your hybrid solution. That probably opens a path towards diffing/version control. Type checking is very nice, though.

2) The spreadsheet like UI probably makes it easier to edit data, although that is something I would like to play arounnd with.

Also, I am trying to understand the key conceptional differentiators. What do you mean by 2D language?

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