Ask HN: What is a sustainable methodology for taking notes of your learning? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What is a sustainable methodology for taking notes of your learning?

#41

Post by robcohen » Sun, Jul 24, 2022, 2:11 PM UTC

alexpetralia wrote: post #28

> As I've mentioned elsewhere, I have a fairly straightforward "personal knowledge management" (PKM) methodology. 1. Capture: every interesting idea that I think up or read is immediately stored in Google Keep (on mobile or laptop). It can be very rough at this point, the goal is simply to not forget. 2. Transcribe & Organize: every weekend, I go through the notes I accumulated during the week. It tends to be between…

The first two steps look like the GTD methodology, which I also follow. The point is to remove the cognitive load by putting all todos into an inbox for sorting later.

Re: Ask HN: What is a sustainable methodology for taking notes of your learning?

#42

Post by tonyarkles » Sun, Jul 24, 2022, 2:14 PM UTC

PaulKeeble wrote: post #31

Most formats aren't going to stand the test of time and unless you want to spend a lot of time converting from one format to another its usually best to stick as close to just text as possible. Initially I used simple ascii text documents in a folder structure which I maintained backups of and then gradually I have used more markdown and use Dokuwiki currently for the software to display and edit. It still works from…

Yeah, my notes from online courses and things all go into org-mode documents. Still plaintext, but with the convenience of inline LaTeX math and executable code snippets. 20 years from now the in-line Python or R might not still run, but the output gets saved into the file at least.

Re: Ask HN: What is a sustainable methodology for taking notes of your learning?

#43

Post by stinos » Sun, Jul 24, 2022, 2:34 PM UTC

stuckinhell wrote: post #39

I find everything fails eventually anki, Zettelkasten, markdown, text files, obsidian, one note, wiki, notion etc. You need to very clearly define what you want and you should know how your brain works. Some people want loose links to job memories, some people think slower but more deeply. Some people get math better than biology, and so on and so on. You should have a good idea how you learn and what you are good/ba…

Very good point. Just like I only learned how to properly study in the last 2-3 years of university (which was quite a 'perfomance' increase, i.e. time spent studying decreased quite a lot yet grades went up; partially driven by the topics being more interesting, but still..) I tried a bunch of things. Only to figure out that the exact tool used doesn't matter a lot, it just needs to be easy enough to work with and preferrably plain text - I settled with Obsidian in the end because it's simply pretty good at what it does, and FF Simple Tab Groups for links used often.

What did matter is that I needed to use the tool consistently and not be like 'oh let's quickly add a text file with a note on my desktop' or 'oh here's a shiny new tool let's take some notes in it and paste some bookmarks in it'. That, and figuring out categories: not too much, not too little.

Re: Ask HN: What is a sustainable methodology for taking notes of your learning?

#44

Post by photochemsyn » Sun, Jul 24, 2022, 2:55 PM UTC

No tool is as versatile as pen and notebook. The limitation is that you don't have access to data / images / tools. Indexing the notebook to a filesystem where each subject in the notebook has an affiliated folder, and the filesystem gets backed up to storage regularly, with occassional archival storage (basically freeze a picture of the filesystem to a USB drive once a year and store it somewhere safe) is a decent approach.

Re: Ask HN: What is a sustainable methodology for taking notes of your learning?

#45

Post by taccicardia » Sun, Jul 24, 2022, 3:11 PM UTC

I use a text editor (usually notepad++) for my notes. Just simple bullet lists. If I need to convey a flow, I’ll use combinations of various brackets and arrows and stuff. Then at some point I go through these notes and format them to a markdown file in Joplin, which gets backed up to the cloud. I haven’t found a simpler way to take notes than this and I feel like folks trying hard to minmax this process are losing the plot.

Re: Ask HN: What is a sustainable methodology for taking notes of your learning?

#46

Post by knlb2022 » Sun, Jul 24, 2022, 3:17 PM UTC

I use logseq to take study notes in org mode, which are then published to my public slipbox by post-processing with emacs in a github action. The consistent part of this has been plain text notes -- the slipbox has stuck for the past year, and hopefully will continue.

https://explog.in/slipbox/

Re: Ask HN: What is a sustainable methodology for taking notes of your learning?

#47

Post by greymalik » Sun, Jul 24, 2022, 3:18 PM UTC

srvmshr wrote: post #34

I usually keep a project open in Overleaf where I keep jotting down everything that I like. Then on a second pass on my own - I expand or cull the information usually and double checking the information as well. Here is an example of what I did for Stanford CS 230 notes: https://github.com/fagan2888/CS230_notes/blob/main/section1/... I used to write things down. But I am very OCD about the page yellowing or creasing.…

What did you use for the diagrams? I know you could do some of that in tikz but that seems tedious.

Re: Ask HN: What is a sustainable methodology for taking notes of your learning?

#48

Post by srvmshr » Sun, Jul 24, 2022, 3:24 PM UTC

greymalik wrote: post #47

srvmshr wrote: post #34

I usually keep a project open in Overleaf where I keep jotting down everything that I like. Then on a second pass on my own - I expand or cull the information usually and double checking the information as well. Here is an example of what I did for Stanford CS 230 notes: https://github.com/fagan2888/CS230_notes/blob/main/section1/... I used to write things down. But I am very OCD about the page yellowing or creasing.…

What did you use for the diagrams? I know you could do some of that in tikz but that seems tedious.

The graphs are from Jupyter notebooks/Pytorch + Matplotlib. Neural networks schemes are made in Latex Tikz. Several others (flowchart & generic) just Google slides. I have latex macros to build the template & sections quickly - and then just focus on writing

Re: Ask HN: What is a sustainable methodology for taking notes of your learning?

#49

Post by clircle » Sun, Jul 24, 2022, 3:26 PM UTC

I used a paper and pencil or pen. It works well in school and at work. I use org-mode (org-capture) for tasks though.

Re: Ask HN: What is a sustainable methodology for taking notes of your learning?

#50

Post by oldjavacoder » Sun, Jul 24, 2022, 3:37 PM UTC

A text editor is what I use, the pattern is a comment line beginning with a # sign followed by the thing or things I'm noting, interspersed with comment lines if needed, followed by one or more blank lines to separate the concept.