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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?

#91

Post by fchu »

bengotow wrote: post #66

I realize this may not be the place for this comment, but a few of these comments got me thinking. Human memory is squishy, and that's great. You retain facts + feelings that help you make future decisions and everything else is integrated into smaller and smaller summaries until it fades away entirely. I spent years clinging to every experience wanting not to forget anything, and being horrified when I couldn't reme…

> The real power-up isn't keeping it all, it's being able to change and grow, with just enough focus on the past to make good choices.

Love how you framed it!

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

#92

Post by riazrizvi »

bengotow wrote: post #66

I realize this may not be the place for this comment, but a few of these comments got me thinking. Human memory is squishy, and that's great. You retain facts + feelings that help you make future decisions and everything else is integrated into smaller and smaller summaries until it fades away entirely. I spent years clinging to every experience wanting not to forget anything, and being horrified when I couldn't reme…

Yes I think the Knowledge Is Power aphorism leads mistakenly to a Knowledge-Value-Function K(x) > 0 for any item of knowledge x.

But knowledge value is only positive if it helps you achieve your goal, when recalled. Otherwise the time taken to recall and discard knowledge is a negative. So really optimal knowledge is where you only know what you need to achieve your goals.

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

#93

Post by gorkemcetin »

jkmcf wrote: post #28
gitgud wrote: post #13

Wasn't this just asked yesterday? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21310030

Timing is everything. I read yesterday's and today's comments and discovered different things.

I didn’t even expect this appear on a the main page, after reading all comments yesterday. Ask this every week and then, and you will see different answers from different people.

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

#95

Post by 8bitsrule »

By way of warning: I was burned several times by relying on proprietary 'solutions' that disappeared (Hypercard, for one). It was clear that I needed a customizable, long-lasting 'free' solution.

For my needs text files were that solution. Indexed entries, with or without HTML, that I can custom-search and display in a web browser. Adding links to great online resources takes little time. Adding 'features' is the other dangerous fun.

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

#96

Post by marttt »

bengotow wrote: post #66

I realize this may not be the place for this comment, but a few of these comments got me thinking. Human memory is squishy, and that's great. You retain facts + feelings that help you make future decisions and everything else is integrated into smaller and smaller summaries until it fades away entirely. I spent years clinging to every experience wanting not to forget anything, and being horrified when I couldn't reme…

+1, I think this links well with Alan Kay's thoughts on book reading. Some of his insights from a (maybe famous) HN thread:

"Mind palace", forgetting, "relax!": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11809676

"Oxbridge method": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11805264

Not taking notes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11853258

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

#97

Post by mackrevinack »

metalliqaz wrote: post #33

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 (d…

have you ever tried using an outliner such as Dynalist? im not familiar with mediawiki but i used Evernote for a long while. once I found out about dynslist i moved everything over in the space of a few days, even though it didn't have support for in-line images which I used a lot. the speed at which you can jot down notes made me not care about other missing features.

the other benefit of an outliner is that you don't have to worry about things getting unorganised. everything is a bullet point but you can also nest points under each other and then collapse the list or zoom in to focus on a certain point.

with a single page like in Evernote there is only so much you can write before things gets messy. if you want to reorder something it means you can to cut and paste whereas with dynalist you just drag and drop the bulletpoint

heres the full feature list https://dynalist.io/features/full or check out the showcase section in the forum to see what other people are using it for

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

#98

Post by mackrevinack »

djhworld wrote: post #56

I've jumped around all over the place, I can never settle on a tool and it's really frustrating I've been through * evernote - slow and buggy UX, properietary format * emacs org mode - good but you need buy in to org format, user experience across devices e.g. mobile not so good) * quiver - pretty good, markdown format, but lacking android support * git + markdown files - ok, but a bit finicky, again annoying across…

I think Dynalist would tick all the boxes for you apart from in-line images.

you can add images but at the moment you need to hover over the link to view them unfortunately. (although I think somebody made a browser extension that makes the images load in view, but then that won't work on the mobile app version. their web app is fairly useable in a mobile browser though)

I just wrote a spiel about Dynalist in another comment if you want to word search for that

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

#99

Post by desipenguin »

davchana wrote: post #74
djhworld wrote: post #56

I've jumped around all over the place, I can never settle on a tool and it's really frustrating I've been through * evernote - slow and buggy UX, properietary format * emacs org mode - good but you need buy in to org format, user experience across devices e.g. mobile not so good) * quiver - pretty good, markdown format, but lacking android support * git + markdown files - ok, but a bit finicky, again annoying across…

My issue with TiddlyWiki was that it always get saved as new file when you save it.

"was" - so I assume it is now resolved ?

I use it myself, and file is "overwritten" when saved. (as expected)

I have local file that I open in firefox, and edit. Every so often I commit it to git.

If you open from non-local URL - it can not be "saved" - which is what you may have encountered ?

https://wiki.desipenguin.com/#2019.10.11

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

#100

Post by grumpy-cowboy »

All my personal knowledge/information/research are structured using the File System Infobase Manager method as described by Douglas Barone : http://dougist.com/2009/08/file-system-infobase-manager/

It's future proof and require no special tool. Another philosophy that drive this way of managing my data : The Lo-Fi Manifesto http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/20.2/inventio/stolley/

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