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

Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management

unattributed.cc

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 101 posts

Re: Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management

#91

Post by kepano »

swiftcoder wrote: post #88
kepano wrote: post #26

Asking "what have note-taking apps accomplished?" is like asking "what have spreadsheets accomplished?" or "what have cameras accomplished?". A tool doesn't accomplish anything on its own. A tool is a means to an end. A few days ago, someone jokingly asked if Henry Ford had a personal knowledge base in Obsidian... Well, sort of! He had something he called "jot books", where he journaled, kept notes, grocery lists, et…

> Asking "what have note-taking apps accomplished?" is like asking "what have spreadsheets accomplished?" or "what have cameras accomplished?" I think you have to be somewhat careful with this line of reasoning - the camera put the portrait artist out of business pretty much permanently, and the spreadsheet had similarly cataclysmic effects on the accounting and engineering professions. Just because these things are…

That is exactly the point I am making (echoing the author of the linked piece). Those tools did change the world. But I do not know how you go about measuring the net effect of it all. I can certainly share many anecdotes but what is the sum of things that happened and did not happen due to photography or spreadsheets or notes?

Re: Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management

#92

Post by kashunstva »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #10
udbhavs wrote: post #2

I've realized that most of my tendencies to set up elaborate note-taking systems and frameworks have been an attempt to address my anxiety around learning and productivity. I'm constantly in the mode of "learning defensively" - questioning what I'm absorbing into my mental toolkit, how much I retain, and how much I'd be able to conjure if I needed to solve a problem in that domain. In this context, noting down whatev…

Well if you write down a snippet of code, and later upi reliaze you need that code a gain but don't remember it but do remember that you must have written a note about it, then writing down the note was useful. The issue I'm still working on is how do I find such notes when I don't exactly remeber what they were about.

> how do I find such notes when I don't exactly remeber what they were about

I can't claim to have solved that; but I do have a personal rule about notes. I don't create a note unless (1) I'm willing to endow it with at least some metadata, and (2) I'm willing to manually link it to another note so that I've at least dropped one breadcrumb.

Re: Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management

#93

Post by udbhavs »

wolvoleo wrote: post #44
udbhavs wrote: post #2

I've realized that most of my tendencies to set up elaborate note-taking systems and frameworks have been an attempt to address my anxiety around learning and productivity. I'm constantly in the mode of "learning defensively" - questioning what I'm absorbing into my mental toolkit, how much I retain, and how much I'd be able to conjure if I needed to solve a problem in that domain. In this context, noting down whatev…

Wow you take learning methodology so seriously. When it comes to learning (or in fact pretty much anything) I really hate structure. I thrive in chaos. When I want to learn something I just start and fill in knowledge gaps where I need, and just roll with it, and if I fall and make mistakes it's ok. If I don't retain something I don't care, it must not have been important and I can always pick it up again. For this r…

It is funny, I like reading about standards and certifications! I'm definitely more on the anxious side which leads to information hoarding tendencies and trying to think as much as I can before I act. I would love to get pulled a bit in your direction and be a bit more trigger-happy with making decisions and putting out things.

Re: Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management

#94

Post by swiftcoder »

kepano wrote: post #91
swiftcoder wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Asking "what have note-taking apps accomplished?" is like asking "what have spreadsheets accomplished?" or "what have cameras accomplished?" I think you have to be somewhat careful with this line of reasoning - the camera put the portrait artist out of business pretty much permanently, and the spreadsheet had similarly cataclysmic effects on the accounting and engineering professions. Just because these things are…

That is exactly the point I am making (echoing the author of the linked piece). Those tools did change the world. But I do not know how you go about measuring the net effect of it all. I can certainly share many anecdotes but what is the sum of things that happened and did not happen due to photography or spreadsheets or notes?

> what is the sum of things that happened and did not happen due to photography or spreadsheets or notes

In someways the problem here is the inverse one might expect. Without photography, the entire modern world does not exist - it's the base technology required to develop optical lithography, without which we never achieve silicon chips. Without the spreadsheet (VisiCalc), the IBM PC likely fails to find product-market fit, and the entire tech and financial worlds are a decade or more behind where they are today. These are technologies with downstream tech trees so deep we can't reasonably put an upper bound on their value.

I don't personally believe that note-taking represents a paradigm change in the same sense - obsidian and friends are really just reifying existing text-based (and even paper-based) note taking workflows, with some hypertext niceties layered in...

Re: Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management

#95

Post by kepano »

swiftcoder wrote: post #94
kepano wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is exactly the point I am making (echoing the author of the linked piece). Those tools did change the world. But I do not know how you go about measuring the net effect of it all. I can certainly share many anecdotes but what is the sum of things that happened and did not happen due to photography or spreadsheets or notes?

> what is the sum of things that happened and did not happen due to photography or spreadsheets or notes In someways the problem here is the inverse one might expect. Without photography, the entire modern world does not exist - it's the base technology required to develop optical lithography, without which we never achieve silicon chips. Without the spreadsheet (VisiCalc), the IBM PC likely fails to find product-mar…

We're in agreement. And it's not only the technological advances that came after, it's all the small life moments and personal accomplishments too. That's why I connected this to the Henry Ford example. How can we determine which of his accomplishments would or wouldn't have happened without his notetaking practice? He probably would not be able to answer that question himself.

Re: Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management

#96

Post by freshchilled »

disposedtrolley wrote: post #16
freshchilled wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also much prefer handwritten notes. The act of writing something down helps it to stay in my memory more than typing it up. The main for me downside is there's no Cmd+F for my handwritten notes. I read a post recently about using a local LLM to OCR handwritten notes that I intend to trial soon: https://andrewdoering.org/blog/2026/remarkable-local-handwri...

The premise of that article is neat, but it looks to be entirely LLM-generated (in addition to the header image) that it’s almost impossible to read.

I did notice that, and the other article I have saved about setting up Ollama on a Macbook Air is even more clearly AI. But I'm assuming/hoping the author had an LLM generate it from their notes/Github project.

Re: Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management

#97

Post by sfn42 »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #62
sfn42 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I always recommend an education over self learning programming. I can absolutely see the argument in places like the US where it costs an arm and a leg, but in Europe and other places with free education it's pretty much a no-brainer to me. Not only does it help you learn in a structured way with predetermined goals etc, but you end up with fairly solid evidence of what you've learned. I think the self le…

>Another common one is "I didn't learn anything in university" and all I can say about that is if you spent 3 years where your job was learning, and you didn't learn anything, then that's on you. I don't think that's what people mean when they say that. They followed the curriculum and then when they started working they found they needed little of what they had studied and had a lot of gaps in their knowledge that n…

That will always be the case though. No education is perfect, it will lag behind infustry standard because it takes time for the curriculum to catch up and industry standard still evolves rapidly.

I also think this view severely underestimates how much you actually end up using. For example you (are supposed to) learn at least one and more likely 2-3+ programming languages. We learned DSA which I very frequently see mentioned as "useless" which just tells me they never understood the topic to begin with. We learned about databases which I'd say most developers end up using. We learned about web development which sure if you go on to work on embedded systems or something you might not use it but it's a stretch to say it's useless.

I think the DSA example encapsulates a lot of this. Most people aren't top students who actually understand the topics, most people are mediocre and lazy. They learn barely enough to pass then they forget 90% of it and then they complain that it was a waste of time. Well duh. Of course it's a waste of time when you didn't actually learn it.

They go to uni just for the piece of paper and then complain that all they got was the piece of paper.

Re: Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management

#98

Post by kashunstva »

The author’s critique of the thesis that PKM tools lack evidence of impact in global knowledge is certainly interesting. But there is a fundamental problem that I state plainly as: what responsibility do I or any user have to this nebulous corpus of total circulating knowledge, anyway? I use Obsidian to organize knowledge around things that are personally interesting to me. That’s the “personal” part of PKM. I feel zero obligation to contribute that to some larger public corpus. I may do so at my discretion, of course. But holding PKM systems to such a high (and impossible to assess) standard is a mistake. I routinely play with my dogs; but what evidence is there that it makes the world a better place by some objective measure?

Re: Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management

#99

Post by wolvoleo »

udbhavs wrote: post #93
wolvoleo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow you take learning methodology so seriously. When it comes to learning (or in fact pretty much anything) I really hate structure. I thrive in chaos. When I want to learn something I just start and fill in knowledge gaps where I need, and just roll with it, and if I fall and make mistakes it's ok. If I don't retain something I don't care, it must not have been important and I can always pick it up again. For this r…

It is funny, I like reading about standards and certifications! I'm definitely more on the anxious side which leads to information hoarding tendencies and trying to think as much as I can before I act. I would love to get pulled a bit in your direction and be a bit more trigger-happy with making decisions and putting out things.

Be careful what you wish for :) It did give me the reputation of being a cowboy. It has to match your personality otherwise I'm sure it will make you feel uncomfortable and out of control.

However it also seems to tie me to projects that nobody else wants because the path forward is not clear or they are deemed unsafe bets, which means I have a lot more agency as most of the management and oversight also doesn't want to link their names to it too closely :) Which is exactly what I want. I noticed a lot of people get more conservative in their approach as they move up in their career. Probably because they have more to lose. For me having challenging and interesting work is more important than my career path.

And I am pretty successful with my approach meaning results. I always feel like if there is a way to do something I will find it and that generally does end up being the case. At work it's becoming a harder and harder fit though as governance processes ramp up.

In personal projects I'm even more like this and I do end up not finishing many of them. It is what it is. I do find that brainstorming with a good AI model can help the momentum going though. I know several projects I have hardly progressed with until I started doing that.

Re: Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management

#100

Post by udbhavs »

RugnirViking wrote: post #83
monk_grilla wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...typing notes into a dumb markdown file with the textbooks name is good enough What sorts of things are you writing into your markdown file? After 3.5 years of uni I still don't know how or why to take proper notes to enhance my learning.

> I still don't know how or why to take proper notes I find that there is some element of ritual to "proper" notes. Its personal, and everyone differs. Any given system may sound logcal and sensible, but its most important that you write something, anything. Everything else doesnt really matter. I like to use real paper and pen, and start with a wide ruler drawn margin on the left (of course, you can buy paper with t…

> It supports my learning only in the sense that it makes me feel like im doing things right

I think my downfall might have been questioning the efficacy of my method beyond it just "feeling right" and trying to find ways to show myself that I am learning.. maybe the correct approach is to just do whatever and hope for the best

Post reply on HN