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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?

#41

Post by dewey »

h0p3 wrote: post #36
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…

The font on your blog is extremely hard to read on macOS + a decent Dell 1080p screen.

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

#42

Post by chrisbro »

I've been kicking around an idea of creating a site dedicated to in-depth writeups of the workflows that professionals use these days to stay organized - I've always had the problem of having too big of a toolbox (note-taking app, todo app, documentation app) but no cohesive way to combine all of them into something resembling organization. Would love to hear the details of how others do it.

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

#43

Post by nickjj »

I have been using plain text documents since 2001.

I just make a new file with a YYYY-MM format and dump everything in there, and on the next month I start a new file. I keep them all in 1 folder.

It's really simple to use and very searchable with grep. I like it because it's all offline and doesn't get in the way.

It becomes a brain dump of interesting links, notes about certain things I'm doing or whatever else I feel is worth jotting down at the time.

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

#44

Post by h0p3 »

dewey wrote: post #41
h0p3 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The font on your blog is extremely hard to read on macOS + a decent Dell 1080p screen.

Yes, thank you for telling me. I agree the wiki doesn't look good on every screen or suit most people. Sorry. It works well for me, and I'm the one who uses my personal knowledge base the most (by far).

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

#45

Post by cr0sh »

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/…

For those of us without macs or ios - what would you recommend (if anything) for replacement of Alfred for Windows or Linux?

Or is there another kind of application you'd like to be able to use (that may or may not exist yet) in place of Alfred?

Would any search system work for that matter? Could a command line system be used (ie - some form of grep perhaps)? What about something like a "google appliance" style search system (a couple of these exist - both open source and otherwise)?

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

#46

Post by hundchenkatze »

h0p3 wrote: post #44
dewey wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The font on your blog is extremely hard to read on macOS + a decent Dell 1080p screen.

Yes, thank you for telling me. I agree the wiki doesn't look good on every screen or suit most people. Sorry. It works well for me, and I'm the one who uses my personal knowledge base the most (by far).

For what it's worth I really enjoy the design (and content) of your wiki. :) I'm also on macOS, using a decent 1440p Dell monitor.

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

#47

Post by cr0sh »

Most of the stuff I learn, I try to keep it in my mind. Not perfect, but it has worked for people for a very long time, it's fairly portable, has low power usage, but retention isn't great, and i/o bandwidth is poor to say the least...

Ok - well, other than that it's a hodgepodge of text files on my phone and main workstation, some of which get moved to my small home NAS.

And a few notebooks. And some stickies. And scraps of paper.

Not a great system - well, let's face it, it stinks.

At one time I had a website/blog I had built, but my vhosting provider updated PHP and it broke my stuff; not so much I couldn't fix it, but I got lazy and never fixed it, and now I've been mulling over for a while how to do everything as a github supported static page website instead, since I am pretty tired of my crufty PHP junk.

I'm going to eagerly read everyone's thoughts here, though, as I think maybe they could help me become more organized in what I am doing and such.

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

#49

Post by msluyter »

I've used Anki for a while, but never very consistently or effectively until recently. Over the past year, I've started doing the following:

1. Stopped trying to categorize cards and just create them all in a single deck (with tags in lieu of separate decks).

2. Whenever I find myself googling something or looking it up on StackOverflow (that's not wildly specific or related to domains I don't really care about), I add a new card for it.

3. Review cards for a few minutes in the morning.

The above has worked rather well. I mostly focus on topics I'm interested in diving deeper into (python, for example) and has helped fill various lacunae in my knowledge.

For broader sorts of knowledge acquisition, I use Boostnote to keep track of interesting notes/articles, but I have to confess I'm not that great at keeping it updated/relevant.

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

#50

Post by least »

cr0sh wrote: post #45
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/…

For those of us without macs or ios - what would you recommend (if anything) for replacement of Alfred for Windows or Linux? Or is there another kind of application you'd like to be able to use (that may or may not exist yet) in place of Alfred? Would any search system work for that matter? Could a command line system be used (ie - some form of grep perhaps)? What about something like a "google appliance" style searc…

A more direct alternative to Alfred on linux is Albert [1]. There's also Rofi [2], Ulauncher[3], and probably many more launchers available.

On Windows Keypirinha[4] is pretty good. There's also Wox[5].

I don't think any of the alternatives are as well fleshed out as Alfred is but there are a lot of 'good enough' if you're using a different OS. Any launcher is better than the default search on windows 10, for example.

[1] https://github.com/albertlauncher/albert [2] https://github.com/DaveDavenport/rofi [3] https://ulauncher.io

[4] http://keypirinha.com [5] http://www.wox.one

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