Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ideas that have been beaten to death

ruky.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 130 posts

Re: Ideas that have been beaten to death

#101

Post by csdvrx »

Gustomaximus wrote: post #56
GEBBL wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, I would say the process of note taking is an important part of my retention. I refer to my notes a lot. I worked with a guy who never took notes and was able to remember everything. I’m not that smart!

And it stops that one important thing being forgotten. E.g. You having a busy day with 12 fires to fight, you remember 11 but forget that 1 someone text chatted you and you said yes right before person 2 came to your desk and added another etc. Also I quite like writing a list at the end of the day for tomorrow. For me anyway get the day going well as its laid out there for you fresh, until the new fires arrive!

>And it stops that one important thing being forgotten. > E.g. You having a busy day with 12 fires to fight, you remember 11 but forget that 1 someone text chatted you and you said yes right before person 2 came to your desk and added another etc.

Funny, I believe in the exact opposite: if you forgot about the 12th, it wasn't as important as the first 11th. By not adding things to any list, I let my mind dynamically curate the priorities and expunge cached entries that I'd like to rationalize as "important"... but that aren't enough for me to bother remembering them.

Forgetfulness can be a wonderful tool, because there will always be more things you may want to do than time. So instead of trying to achieve the impossible, I use this wonderful tool that comes factory installed in all human beings!

Re: Ideas that have been beaten to death

#102

Post by krisoft »

zenkat wrote: post #84
hliyan wrote: post #77

My theory: the larger your bookmark collection grows, the more indistinguishable it becomes from Google. It basically becomes a curated search index. The closest I have come to using bookmarks is through Firefox address bar suggestions from my browsing history.

But Google indexes the whole web . I want a search that works just over the articles I've read. "What was that article I read a few months back that talked about why you should be able to explain why a fence exists before tearing it down?". It works be perfect for the discussion I'm having with my team right now, but I can't remember the name of the stupid law or where I came across it . Google is useless in these si…

> Google is useless in these situations.

Is it? I just googled the keywords from your sentence "fence before tear it down" and the first article is titled "Chesterton's Fence: A Lesson in Second Order Thinking"

Re: Ideas that have been beaten to death

#103

Post by csdvrx »

15charslong wrote: post #92

So basically I tried to solve the 'Bookmark Problem' by creating a simple user focused search engine, user builds a list of bookmarks, and the app, Mrkff, allows you to search your bookmarks as if it were google, but tailored to your own content. If you would allow me to plug my own personal bookmarking app - Mrkff [0] - pronounced `Mark off`. I went through YC in 2019 for it, and I launched it in 2020. I also built…

Have you considered B2B? A lot of small companies would love shared bookmarks to have some employees discover more easily things that were previously bookmarked by other employees.

Re: Ideas that have been beaten to death

#104

Post by TrailMixRaisin »

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #97
TrailMixRaisin wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you describe the real problem here. For me I just skip the bookmarking part. If I want to come back to something later, I just leave the tab open. This was a good solution because 2-3 years ago there came an inevitable browser crash and all the open tabs were lost. If you could not remember them, they most likely are not that important. Unfortunately these hard resets do not occur any more. So I have to close…

Hello, fellow 100+ tab club member. How do you keep your tabs organized? I used Tree Style Tab plus an extension to aggressively unload background tabs. I wish there were a browser where a vertical tree of tabs was the default tan interface instead of a hack around an inferior horizontal bar of tabs.

Actually I do not use vertical trees because it forces me to select and close tabs once the get to small to have and text displayed on them.

Re: Ideas that have been beaten to death

#105

Post by giorgioz »

causi wrote: post #63
giorgioz wrote: post #60

> Bookmarking is broken in all browsers The author suggests bookmarking is broken in all browsers. I'm personally pretty happy with the bookmarking on Chrome. I try to stick with only enough links to be visible in the Bookmarks bar. If I have to click on the >> arrows to expand I might just as well Google it. So yes my simpler guess is that browsers bookmarking is indeed good enough.

I'm personally pretty happy with the bookmarking on Chrome. I try to stick with only enough links to be visible in the Bookmarks bar. That's like saying "I'm pretty happy with the address bar. I try to only click links and avoid ever typing in a URL."

No it's not. It's a conscious minimalist choice. My booksmark bar in Chrome fits 18 links. There is more links than the websites I use daily or even monthly.

I think having more links than that it's HOARDING. You have the feeling of creating value by saving the links but in practice you won't use most of them and anyway you have history and search to help you out.

Chrome even remove the bookmark bar by default. You have to add it back. That is to say Bookmarks is for power users and the most powerful ones are probably just being collectionist rather than pragmatist.

Re: Ideas that have been beaten to death

#106

Post by yoyohello13 »

eloisius wrote: post #44
bee_rider wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note taking is a memorization ritual for some people. Notes taken but not reviewed have still done their job if it helps the person remember.

That’s true for me, but I’ve found that the easier and more streamlined my note-taking apparatus is, the less effective it is at helping my memory to congeal. I just keep a scrap of paper handy and jot stuff down occasionally. I’m trying out a Techo this year, so that’s a step more sophisticated. Handwriting seems to be the important bit for me.

I've found hand written notes to be important for me. I have dozens of filled notebooks in my office that I've never read again. The act of writing things down by hand helps to lock them in my brain. I've tried to take notes electronically, but I find I don't retain as much. Something about pen to paper helps me retain information.

Re: Ideas that have been beaten to death

#107

Post by yoyohello13 »

I feel like an outlier in that I find bookmarks extremely useful. When I start a new project, I create a bookmark folder related to that project. I bookmark any web references I looked at during the course of that project. Then later I can remember "Oh yeah I did something like this in X project." and go peruse those bookmarks. I actually find it pretty fun to go back to old project folders and checkout what kind of stuff I bookmarked in the past.

Re: Ideas that have been beaten to death

#108

Post by perrygeo »

Bookmarks projects fail to be interesting because simply recording a list of links (maybe with folders or tags or some other categorization method) is something anyone can do trivially in a text file. They add no value because they only focus on the easiest part - simply capturing the link. My bookmarks.txt file is just as easy to use and requires only a text editor. I can sync it multiple computers, organize and search it any way I want, back it up, add notes, etc. In many ways a text file is a vast improvement over the existing solutions.

If you really want to make a good bookmark app, you need to understand that the act of bookmarking, organizing bookmarks, and using bookmarks are three completely separate activities. When you create a bookmark, you want minimal interaction - click the star, maybe add a tag, and move on. When you're organizing bookmarks you want to review and restructure what you've already bookmarked into folders, a mindmap, etc. while taking into account the content behind each link. When you're using bookmarks, you want to leverage that existing organization scheme to find what you want quickly. Most bookmark features/plugins are decent at the first step of capturing the link, but are terrible at or completely ignore the rest.

I would love to see a bookmark app that was designed in the spirit of "Getting Things Done" - where ideas are captured quickly but then funneled into a system where they are later reviewed regularly and acted upon. Just capturing a list of bookmarks and regurgitating them to the user is not sufficient and can be easily replaced with a text file.

Re: Ideas that have been beaten to death

#109

Post by rchaud »

timoth3y wrote: post #65

Alternate Take: - Bookmarking is not broken. Bookmarking works just fine. What's broken is what we want to do with the bookmarks once we have them. The problem is we don't know exactly what that is. We tell ourselves that it's to "review it later", but that's not really it. It it were it would be simple to block out some time and do that, but we never actually do. We don't know why we really make those bookmarks. Boo…

Agreed 100%. My bookmarking behaviour has changed massively in this respect over the past 15 years. I used to have a giant bookmarks folder but at some point it became easier to Google for the site first, for a number of reasons:

1) Link rot. I have bookmarks from as late as 2016, that 404 because the site is no longer hosted.

2) With smartphones, my browsing is split across PC and mobile, and I don't sync bookmarks across them (personal preference). This leads to more Google-first behaviour.

3) More and more stuff is getting bookmarked inside of apps. Reddit 'saves', Pinterest 'pins' and Twitter 'bookmarks'.

Re: Ideas that have been beaten to death

#110

Post by rhn_mk1 »

zenkat wrote: post #84
hliyan wrote: post #77

My theory: the larger your bookmark collection grows, the more indistinguishable it becomes from Google. It basically becomes a curated search index. The closest I have come to using bookmarks is through Firefox address bar suggestions from my browsing history.

But Google indexes the whole web . I want a search that works just over the articles I've read. "What was that article I read a few months back that talked about why you should be able to explain why a fence exists before tearing it down?". It works be perfect for the discussion I'm having with my team right now, but I can't remember the name of the stupid law or where I came across it . Google is useless in these si…

I use SingleFileZ for saving the bookmark, and then run it through recoll-we to search them. The search is not perfect, but it has augmented my memory several times already.
Post reply on HN