Ask HN: How do you take notes?

Nothing beats pen and paper for speed, efficiency, portability , usability, economy, and ease of use.

Having said that my backup tool for more complex information, that is shareable, backed-up, and potentially contributable by others is my own personal wiki hosted on my own domain. Dokuwiki I recommend for ease of installation and use.

I use mindmapping each time a subject needs a bit of attention (ie: preparing a phone call, keeping the history and overview on a project, etc).

> This doesn't necessarily make sense. Memorization is a first step to learning, nothing more. I don't believe you can learn the higher level concepts of any subject without memorizing the details of its primitives at some stage of your study.

I vehemently disagree, maybe because I understood the original statement differently.

In classes, I've watched students diligently write down everything on the blackboard and yet find themselves incapable of answering the simplest question on something just explained (but not written down). They spend all of their mental capacity putting ideas down on paper in front of them, rather than putting those ideas in their brain and playing with them, as they should. They can regurgitate what was just said, sure, but give them new data and ask them to apply a concept just explained with different data, and they're lost. That's the difference between memorization and learning. Memorization is something you can do at home with a textbook. In fact, textbooks have already "memorized" facts for you, why are you doing it at all? When you come to class, you shouldn't be worried about that.

Personally, I'd much rather be in a position to explain (for example) a formula I can't write down exactly, and say what it does and means, and why, than have a thousand formulas memorized which I don't understand.

> I think note-taking still has its place. For me its ultimately production. When I need to get my thinking clear on a given subject or problem, I fire up a terminal, write down what I know, what the problem is, and what I need to know to solve it.

Heh, I do the same thing. cat > /dev/null seems to be my brain's swap space.

Most of my notes are in an big OmniOutliner (http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnioutliner/) document called Notes.oo3. I find the outline format best for me when taking notes, because if I come to the computer and I want to write multiple things down, I can just write the first bullet for each of them so I don't forget the main ideas and then write the sub-bullets afterwards. Sadly, OO only lets you search the whole document, not just the top-level bullets, so it's a bit hard to find old stuff, but the convenience of bullets outweighs that annoyance. The notes in that file are in two sections: Permanent, for notes I want to keep long-term or which will always exist, like a list of the programming projects I am currently working on, and Temporary, which is like a to-do list.

I also use Notational Velocity (http://notational.net/) for a few things that don't need to be outlines and can just be a list, because it is easy to search. My ideal note-taking program would be Notational Velocity, with all text in an outline format instead of free text. (I know you can simulate outlines with the tab key, but the indentation on multi-line bullets is wrong, and you can't drag bullets around like you can in OmniOutliner.)

With programming, it might be best to pause for a minute and "convince" yourself by writing your own examples.

If the text book says "array elements are stored in contiguous memory", pause for a second and write a snippet that iterates over an array and prints out their memory addresses. Now, was that a static or dynamic array? if it was static, how do the pointer addresses change if you created the array in the body of a function vs as a global variable? how do the pointers change if you change the array type from int to long to character?

This is the same "convince yourself" techniques that one uses to teach themselves mathematics. Math books are usually terse and require a lot of active participation in one's mind.