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

If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

p.migdal.pl

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 282 posts

Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

#11

Post by maxbond »

aosaigh wrote: post #2

I'm not surprised this post opens with a link to /r/DataHoarder. Hot take ... I understand the sentiment that you can't trust content on the web to be there forever, but there is also the other side of the argument which is: compulsively saving data is a waste of time and it introduces a cognitive overhead that you'd be better off without.

An archivist saves everything, because it's impossible to anticipate what future historians will need or want; they are working from a context you cannot access. You can winnow down a large dataset to it's relevant subset, but you can't study what wasn't preserved.

Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

#12

Post by polytely »

aosaigh wrote: post #2

I'm not surprised this post opens with a link to /r/DataHoarder. Hot take ... I understand the sentiment that you can't trust content on the web to be there forever, but there is also the other side of the argument which is: compulsively saving data is a waste of time and it introduces a cognitive overhead that you'd be better off without.

If I read something and then remember it 5 years later because it becomes relevant, I want to be able to find it. It's not even that I will look at it, I just want to have the option if I want to.

Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

#14

Post by weikju »

theshackleford wrote: post #6
aosaigh wrote: post #2

I'm not surprised this post opens with a link to /r/DataHoarder. Hot take ... I understand the sentiment that you can't trust content on the web to be there forever, but there is also the other side of the argument which is: compulsively saving data is a waste of time and it introduces a cognitive overhead that you'd be better off without.

> I understand the sentiment that you can't trust content on the web to be there forever The thing is, people say this, and I am sure for some amount of content it's true. However I eventually realised I have never had a single issue if required, in retrieving literally any piece of software or digital content after the fact from somewhere on the internet. It's pretty much why I care so little about what happens to m…

That’s only possible because some people are hoarders who save this data or software and put it out there..

Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

#15

Post by ambivalence »

I wholeheartedly agree with this post. I also keep my notes in Markdown, I also have plenty of Python scripting around them, including automatic publishing of my website.

I use FSNotes today on macOS and iOS. Both apps are open source, both use well-structured .textbundle directories that separate Markdown content from JSON metadata and binary attachments. Synchronization happens through Git. It's a very powerful combination.

Ironically, I wrote a blog post some 8 years ago about this very subject. That blog post is now offline.

Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

#16

Post by grimui »

normalaccess wrote: post #13

I love markdown and use it for all my notes, however it really needs a native way to underline. I have been converting some older books and lectures to markdown and underline is used all the time. If anyone has a good solution I'm all ears.

Not the best solution but you could use the HTML underline tag

Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

#17

Post by Evidlo »

Just a note that the most common Markdown flavor (Commonmark) doesn't actually support frontmatter. The author is using presumably Obisidian-flavored Markdown (which is a mixture of Commonmark, GH-flavored Markdown, and Latex).

For file-tagging, I would consider TMSU [0] instead of writing bespoke tools. (ideally we would just use xattrs, but the world isn't ready for that)

[0]: https://tmsu.org/

Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

#18

Post by ambivalence »

normalaccess wrote: post #13

I love markdown and use it for all my notes, however it really needs a native way to underline. I have been converting some older books and lectures to markdown and underline is used all the time. If anyone has a good solution I'm all ears.

Markdown is plaintext so you decide what it means. I personally write *italic* and **bold**, so I can use _underline_. Most Markdown to HTML converters would make the last example into italic, but you can customize many of them.

Commonmark doesn't even mention "bold", "italic", and "underline". It just says "emphasis" and "strong emphasis". You can style it however you want.

Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

#19

Post by downut »

The underlying purpose of org-mode is to manage this issue (the text part). It doesn't solve it, instead it is a tool for managing the steadily increasing archive organizational complexity within an ever evolving timeline. You reconfigure your archive's implicit schema well now you're in a world of heavy editing. That's life. If you don't have a solid backup strategy, you are going to lose stuff. That's also life. Big binary blobs are a different, equally important problem.

Sure, keep your archive text in markdown (which one? a dumb person asks). But I'd recommend managing it with org-mode, it doesn't really care what format your text is in.

(Yeah I saw the footnote mentioning org-mode but that reads to me that org-mode's reference there is entirely about the markup flavor.)

Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

#20

Post by Tagbert »

normalaccess wrote: post #13

I love markdown and use it for all my notes, however it really needs a native way to underline. I have been converting some older books and lectures to markdown and underline is used all the time. If anyone has a good solution I'm all ears.

it might depend on what you want to do with the underline. Does it just indicate some kind of emphasis?

Could you use the convention in your documents that "_" is the underline delimiter? I know that the default is to render it as italic/emphasis but that is just a decision at rendering time. The semantics of emphasize/underline could easily overlap.

Of course if you want 3 levels of emphasis with bold, italic, and underline, then yes you need to look elsewhere.

Markdown isn't really a formatting tool. it is a way to structure text in the minimal way that a person would interpret it and a machine could render it.

Post reply on HN