Suppose you have a diverse interest in CS, Philosophy, Physics. The purpose can be improving your knowledge in building systems etc.
Ask HN: What is a sustainable methodology for taking notes of your learning?
1–10 of 90 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is a sustainable methodology for taking notes of your learning?
#2Re: Ask HN: What is a sustainable methodology for taking notes of your learning?
#3Emacs org-mode
Kitchen sink is yet to be implemented[1], but for everything else you are covered:
- Executable blocks
- Footnotes
- Inline charts/images
- TODOs tracking
- Multi-device support (there are mobile apps)
It's not going away any time soon, and you can always add-on stuff yourself if you familiarize yourself with emacs-lisp.
Re: Ask HN: What is a sustainable methodology for taking notes of your learning?
#4Either don’t take notes and read more, in clusters by topic, or write about what you read. You’ll still forget a lot but at least you’ll be able to find out what you thought about something at the time. Or you could use Anki or another spaced repetition system.
This can only be an individual question. Try things.
Re: Ask HN: What is a sustainable methodology for taking notes of your learning?
#5Relatively simple, but effective at least for me. I've a notes folder, and every day I'll save a text file called YYYYMMDD.txt, and in it I'll write lots of one liners like,
Note: Do something Read later: some url and description Bug: whatever
Then I'll just grep on a particular term and keyword and rank by filename to get the most recent.
Re: Ask HN: What is a sustainable methodology for taking notes of your learning?
#6Either don’t take notes and read more, in clusters by topic, or write about what you read. You’ll still forget a lot but at least you’ll be able to find out what you thought about something at the time. Or you could use Anki or another spaced repetition system. This can only be an individual question. Try things.
On the topic of flash cards, the Leitner system is pretty awesome.
Re: Ask HN: What is a sustainable methodology for taking notes of your learning?
#7Relatively simple, but effective at least for me. I've a notes folder, and every day I'll save a text file called YYYYMMDD.txt, and in it I'll write lots of one liners like, Note: Do something Read later: some url and description Bug: whatever Then I'll just grep on a particular term and keyword and rank by filename to get the most recent.
I follow the same approach, I use obsidian to create the daily note with a button. When I study I take notes there and then if I have to, I move them to different files
Re: Ask HN: What is a sustainable methodology for taking notes of your learning?
#8Commonmark with a few essential pandoc extensions like attributes and pipe tables.
Unfortunately, Commonmark and Markdown have a widespread ecosystem and are recognized everywhere. There are commonmark preview tools available even for the terminal (glow, mdcat). Its ecosystem makes Commonmark a necessary evil, at least for me. You can also find literate programming tools for Commonmark. You can edit Commonmark in lots of different editors and many static site generators work primarily on Commonmark (Mkdocs Material, Hugo, Zola).
The only other viable alternative I know of is Emacs Org Mode. However, OrgMode is tied to Emacs and you'll have to be comfortable with Emacs to use OrgMode. There are some addons for editors like Neovim but they're not at feature parity and probably never will be because of the inherent limitations of a terminal (showing multiple different monospace fonts, for example). Emacs can generate HTML using Org documents. There's ox-hugo for the Hugo static site generator.
Re: Ask HN: What is a sustainable methodology for taking notes of your learning?
#9Notion is not bad: the killer feature is you can export so not locked in.
Re: Ask HN: What is a sustainable methodology for taking notes of your learning?
#10In recent years, many tools have been created in the note-taking space. They often market themselves as something like "personal knowledge management tools", "Zettelkasten" or "second brain".
There are just so many solutions now (and it seems like every week someone develops a new one). I keep a list where I note down solutions I see mentioned. In case you are still in search of a tool, here is a short extract containing some of the more popular tools from my note:
Obsidian, logseq, roam, foam, org mode, notion, remnote, evernote, dendron, zettlr, tiddlywiki, joplin, devonthink, thebrain, heptabase, scrintal, ...
My advice would be:
1. pick something that works outside the browser
2. pick something that you can sync, and that has a mobile solution for quick notes on-the-go
3. pick something that works on a "future-proof" plain-text format, e.g. .txt files or .md
4. some tools offer spaced repetition integration, either as core functionality, as plugin, or by syncing to a dedicated SRS app like Anki. If you find a way to frictionlessly create SR cards in your notes, that can be a nice way of keeping some knowledge "cached"
5. keep it simple in general, don't rely too much on specific tools or workflows. they will all cease to work/go out of business at some point.
6. If you are going with any solution that operates on a local folder of .md/.txt/.org files, a nice goodie is that you can actually version your notes with git.