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Ask HN: How did you build up your personal knowledge base?

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Re: Ask HN: How did you build up your personal knowledge base?

#31

Post by jmiskovic »

reinhardt1053 wrote: post #23
eirannejad wrote: post #17

I'm using Notion.so It's not a self-hosted platform and not personal in that sense but it has export to markdown capability so I feel safe storing my knowledgebase there knowing that I can download the data, files, images and everything else I have uploaded in a non-propriatry format

Here we go again. Hackernews users are not so stupid to fall for this marketing bullshit. Go back to reddit to shill your startup. You have been reposting the same thing in the last week, several times. It's annoying. It should be flagged.

This is too aggressive accusation without any proof given. I am so stupid to believe GP is recommending product in good faith.

Re: Ask HN: How did you build up your personal knowledge base?

#33

Post by metalliqaz »

This is an area that I'm keenly interested in. I desperately want to capture more information about my life both for posterity but also as a power-assist tool for my normal work/life.

I have noticed that many of the solutions here do not really translate well into cell phone use. Most of my life is not spent in front of my own computer. Even though I spend a lot of time at a work computer, it is heavily restricted (defense industry) and thus can't be used for personal projects. Anything I use has to work with my cellphone as a 1st class capture interface.

In my case, I recently decided that I since I am a heavy user of wikipedia, I should just use mediawiki. I'm used to it and it is well supported. The syntax isn't great but it has great API support. They have a decent cell phone interface, though I find that it isn't fast enough for taking notes. So I take quick notes in Evernote and move them into the wiki when I'm at my home PC.

It's working okay so far. I need to put more effort into my workflow. I want to have an automated infrastructure for capturing my various data from social networks, email, calendars, things like that.

Side note: I can't believe we are coasting into the year 2020 and copy/paste is still so friggin bad on my cell phone. Android has had copy/paste from text entry fields for a long time, but I still can't copy text out of most apps. WHY??? Case in point: YouTube descriptions and comments.

Re: Ask HN: How did you build up your personal knowledge base?

#35

Post by DoreenMichele »

metalliqaz wrote: post #34
reinhardt1053 wrote: post #12

You should stop reposting the same thing just to shill your startup. It should be flagged.

Based on user's post history, I think you are wrong.

Accusations of shillage are also a violation of the HN guidelines.

Re: Ask HN: How did you build up your personal knowledge base?

#36

Post by h0p3 »

nikivi wrote: post #11

I probably have the biggest personal public wiki at this point. Over 720 files and 13,000+ lines across all the files. All files: https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge/blob/master/SUMM... The way I did it was by treating the wiki as extension of my brain and having a perfect workflow for editing it at a speed of thought. In my case it's Sublime Text + Alfred + some macros. https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/other/…

Hey Nikita! It's been a little more than a year since we last spoke: https://philosopher.life/#2018.10.09%20-%20Nikita%3A%20Penpa....

I like the way you've got yours set up. I think we have similar mindsets to reasoning about personal wikis. In case you are interested in hunting around, I've run across some personal wikis larger than yours, but not many. Even my own wiki-epeen is about three times the size of yours in ~11k files (wrapped into one) and ~470k lines.

Drafting what will eventually be static content from within the 'in progress' nature of the wiki is hard to beat. Including, this post, I draft many of my communications openly in the wiki, and that has been extremely useful. Lots of odd things come out of the practice.

Re: Ask HN: How did you build up your personal knowledge base?

#38

Post by shubhamharnal »

Building a PKM ( Personal Knowledge Management ) system is what https://www.buildingasecondbrain.com/ is all about.

I benefited immensely from taking the course. I have no personal benefit or stake in the program.

The author/program does use evernote primarily as the tool but the technique/process/workflow is independent of tool ( I think they do address notion and onenote as well if that's what works for you ).

A brief high-level summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjZSy8s2VEE

Re: Ask HN: How did you build up your personal knowledge base?

#39

Post by h0p3 »

bocklund wrote: post #29
h0p3 wrote: post #18

Tiddlywiki: https://philosopher.life/ About 3 years, and I use it every day. The experiences with the tool are documented in the tool.

I am also using TiddlyWiki, but I just use it locally with almost all the defaults and no fancy formatting. It's a little different than a traditional wiki in that each "page" (called a "tiddler") is not really designed as a "page" that you view, but rather a snippet, which can be of any length. You can link between them and whatnot as in any wiki. The killer features for me are support for * code syntax highlighting…

All of those are //excellent// points. You can tailor it to suit your needs. For me, the killer features are:

* It works in any standard browser.

* You own your data, and it's very hackable.

* Its learning curve is better than comparable tools (e.g. emacs).

* It lowers the friction between you and your machine, enabling you to upload a semblance of your mind into the machine with minimal effort.

* Search and organization are mind-bendingly powerful.

* It is amazing at allowing you to reuse and reconstruct your work. It's designed to evolve.

Re: Ask HN: How did you build up your personal knowledge base?

#40

Post by mockingbirdy »

I split it up into two phases:

1. I use Omni Notes (simple note-taking app) and Bear [1] to write down thoughts and longer texts. And a simple voice recording app [2] for bigger ideas that need more words.

2. After this, I evaluate them and add them to my personal wiki. I’m using BookStack [3] which is the best open-source wiki I’ve found. Every aspect of my life gets its own book with chapters and pages. It’s a pretty straight-forward structure.

I'm using this process for a year and it served me well (understanding life goals, writing down business ideas, structuring knowledge). Next step is bookmark management, I'll probably try out Shiori [4] (was once featured in a Show HN).

[1]: https://bear.app

[2]: https://github.com/dkim0419/SoundRecorder

[3]: https://www.bookstackapp.com

[4]: https://github.com/go-shiori/shiori

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