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

Using an engineering notebook

ntietz.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 161 posts

Re: Using an engineering notebook

#131

Post by nunez »

psanford wrote: post #111

This "it has to be handwritten" stuff is nonsense. Do that if you enjoy it, but also you should acknowledge the downsides to it. I started keeping a work journal a few years ago and it has changed how I work for the better. It is just a text file. The main value of it is that I can search it! When I'm figuring something out for the first time, and I have a lot of trail and error, I write down what I did. And then I m…

It's not nonsense. At least it hasn't been for me. My memory retention shoots into the stratosphere when I write stuff (that I need to remember) down. Something about it being slower and actual effort needing to be expended to commit the information.

Handwriting is my primary notetaking route, but in situations where it isn't (typing is faster after all), I'll scribe what I typed into my reMarkable later. If the note I created was for work and I wrote a note by hand first, I'll type it into a Google Doc later and upload both versions (since they might differ slightly). I learned this as a study hack while I was in school 15+ years ago and it still works flawlessly for retention.

Handwriting everything has held me back sometimes, though. Ironically, insisting on handwriting everything is the reason why I didn't keep a daily journal for a long time. I started journaling in 2012 and stopped as work and life got busier. I picked it back up in 2021 with a mood tracking app to, well, track my mood and reactions to emotions and fairly quickly regretted not having just typed my journal entries.

Re: Using an engineering notebook

#132

Post by nunez »

I'm a simple man. I see a post about the reMarkable; I comment.

Buying this damn thing has been a life-changer.

I could never get on with physical notebooks, as I always lost them and searching for stuff was a chore.

It's an amazing companion for keeping track of everything I've written down, especially with the newest update that can _actually_ search handwritten content (instead of content that was typed, which previous versions were restricted to).

I especially appreciate the reMarkable team for sticking to their position of making the reMarkable a notetaking only device, even when it's inconvenient.

The reMarkable has been ESPECIALLY helpful for tracking my workouts. I've powerlifted for a long time and have experienced the rise and fall (or subscription-laden feature bloat and enshittification, more like) of The Apps™ (JEFIT, Strong, Hevy). More specifically, I like to leave my phone at home when I visit the gym, and none of these apps have provided a good experience on the Apple Watch.

Tracking my workouts on paper became increasingly attractive over the years; maintaining a small mountain of notebooks was not.

The reMarkable completely and elegantly solved this problem. I have a template I developed two years ago that works for my programs, and moving that data into a Google Sheet (whenever I get around to it) should be easy (though it's a lot of data, so it will take a long time).

Re: Using an engineering notebook

#133

Post by BeetleB »

psanford wrote: post #111

This "it has to be handwritten" stuff is nonsense. Do that if you enjoy it, but also you should acknowledge the downsides to it. I started keeping a work journal a few years ago and it has changed how I work for the better. It is just a text file. The main value of it is that I can search it! When I'm figuring something out for the first time, and I have a lot of trail and error, I write down what I did. And then I m…

> This "it has to be handwritten" stuff is nonsense. Do that if you enjoy it, but also you should acknowledge the downsides to it.

From the submission:

"Should you use one?

Maybe! I can't answer that for you. "

There is a middle ground. Write on paper on the spot. Transcribe to digital form later. I've been doing it for many years. Painful, but now I just get an LLM to OCR my handwriting.

And oh, definitely - for me the brain works differently while typing vs handwriting.

Re: Using an engineering notebook

#134

Post by BeetleB »

thyristan wrote: post #122
helterskelter wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing things by hand leads to better retention, but if you can't remember it...yeah you'll have a fun time finding it again if you have a nontrivial amount of notes and haven't spent a significant amount of time indexing them. I guess you could OCR them. Best of both worlds.

You can't OCR handwriting. There are some AIs that do claim handwriting recognition, but I've yet to find a single one that can read my notes.

I've only recently started using LLMs for OCR, and so far they've done a great job with my handwriting.

Re: Using an engineering notebook

#135

Post by contingencies »

Personally I use loose leaf A4 pages, colored pens (massively useful!) and a padfolio with magnetic clip. When a bunch of notes are done, I'll staple them together and file them. I date stuff exactly or approximately or thematically group it. Then they go in boxed document folders (my context is insane, I work on mechanical/electrical/software/patents/random projects at the same time). Periodically, like changing countries, I scan stuff, digitize it, shred and purge.

Closed notebooks barely work because unless you're working on something highly sequential you wind up with 100 notebooks each of which have 5-15 pages used and are mostly wasted.

Occasionally, dated notes can be critical in IP litigation.

Re: Using an engineering notebook

#138

Post by swah »

globular-toast wrote: post #75
eddyg wrote: post #72

Obsidian with the (core) Daily Notes⁽¹⁾ plugin plus Jump-To-Date⁽²⁾ and Daily Note Navbar⁽³⁾ is a powerful combo for me. Everything is still searchable (or can be fed into an LLM) since it’s all Markdown text files behind the scenes. (And I can type my thoughts much faster than I can write.) ⁽¹⁾ https://help.obsidian.md/plugins/daily-notes ⁽²⁾ https://github.com/TfTHacker/obsidian42-jump-to-date ⁽³⁾ https://github.co…

Curious to know what you actually do with the notes, though. I've tried to get in the habit of keeping daily journals but it ends up being very much write once, read never. Maybe having some kind of fuzzy, semantic search or LLM would unlock their usefulness, but so far I don't find myself ever really using the things I write down.

Same - they are too low quality for me to decode more than 8 hours afterwards.

Re: Using an engineering notebook

#139

Post by agentultra »

I use one too!

In fact, I use several. I have a series of journals for graphics programming. One for proof kernels. A series for projects... if I'm working on a program that takes me longer than a few hours to realize I keep notes, plans, etc.

Great practice!

Re: Using an engineering notebook

#140

Post by swah »

recvonline wrote: post #113
reeeeee wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you one-shot this using an AI coding agent? If this was really just now created after reading this article and the comments, it's incredibly impressive.

Let's say.... 10 shot with Claude Code :) Initial app, then hand refined, Claude Code again...back and forth. Spend my morning doing it and it was fun. Very simple so far, want to clean it up and add more meaningful features. EDIT: Also, turns out the in-browser Editor landscape got GOOD the last few years apparently. It's really just plug and play. I remember 5 years I tried to do this and it was painful.

Crazy. Is it a library or ... ?
Post reply on HN