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Ask HN: How do you keep track of all the content you encounter?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of all the content you encounter?

#51

Post by fedeb95 »

grnrnm wrote: post #26
alunchbox wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the catch though, stay out of media and then you're ignorant of things happening, as tiring as it is. Stay with social news apps like reddit and yeah they're a huge time waster but quick aggregation of news and can get you a good understanding of what's happening.

I just look at the Wikipedia Current Events page [0]. It's possibly the most straight-to-the-point and least biased way I've found to just know what's going on. If you have any specific interests, there are similar sites. I've found Blue's News [1] to be great for a quick catch up on gaming. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events [1]: https://www.bluesnews.com

My approach is different, don't know if better or worse: important news will eventually reach me, the rest is probably not important. This is excluding things I need to react quickly about, which are pretty much constrained to my job.

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of all the content you encounter?

#52

Post by fedeb95 »

bsnnkv wrote: post #32

I built my own solution for this that I've discussed and shared on HN before[1]. For me, keeping track of this sort of stuff was important enough that I decided to build something that was catered specifically to my wants and needs. [1]: Previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33978500 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33627603 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33556765

This is an interesting approach, thanks

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of all the content you encounter?

#53

Post by quaintdev »

whynotmaybe wrote: post #41
pnf wrote: post #14

Save it to a "read it later" app. Forget all about it. Move on with life. When you need something, search for it. By that time, there will be a hundred other hits saying or doing the same thing. If you really want to remember something, write it down in a giant text file with a date stamp. You'll still forget it, but you'll more likely remember it exists later if you need it. Next step is to stop spending "a lot of t…

Being too often on HN is clearly destructive for me. Seeing a post about some advanced stuff where I don't understand anything in the article and seeing dozen of different people commenting on it gives me such an imposter syndrome. My mind goes into the "HN is for people like you, you should know this stuff"

I saw the Social Dilemma 5-6 days back and since then I have been little vary of touching my phone. Since yesterday morning I had been putting my phone deliberately in other room and I certainly feel spiked in terms of energy. I guess I will do same thing for HN and Reddit.

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of all the content you encounter?

#54

Post by quaintdev »

You put the info in a notes app or you keep searching again.

The better solution would be to make an AI like ChatGPT for home use and throw everything personal at it. Such an AI would be able to fetch whatever you request with abilities to transform that data. It would just not be knowledge base but provider of information to the user that's most relevant to him.

Any other approach does not seem scalable after some time. This AI should obviously be self hosted but since that is not possible atm we will have to bear with our dumb notes, journal apps for now.

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of all the content you encounter?

#55

Post by LunarAurora »

rewgs wrote: post #40

After trying and failing for various years to find the perfect system, I've since landed on the most dead-simple system possible: aggressively organizing my browser's bookmarks. As one might assume, it's a few general categories progressively broken down into more and more specific folders. For instance: tech/programming/command line/editors/neovim/plugins. The one "magic" thing I've figured out is to put "_to check…

If you are on a chromium based browser, I found these extensions to help dealing with large collections/hierarchies :

- Adding Faster to a specific folder with keyboard -> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/faster-bookmark-ad...

- Tagging simply by adding #tag to the title. -> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bookmark-tags/edpe...

- Sorting/Searching using more powerful filters -> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bookmark-manager-p...

So instead of using a series of "_" folders, What I do is I append #tocheck to title, then I can also sort/filter them by date, folder, url...(and add other tags like #5stars, #ProjectC...)

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of all the content you encounter?

#56

Post by happyjack »

Track / archive it? I don't. There's too much shit out there. If it's something really interesting chances are I'm going to email it to someone, and the sent copy gets saved in my archive folder (I archive mail over 90 days) and can be searched later. I've also made notes on my phone of urls that dav syncs with my email notes folder.

This is my hot take ... it's 2022, and any "serious" or worthwhile site still has an RSS feed (HN, NPR, ESPN, Department of Energy, NOAA, etc.). That's how I scan / get the majority of my news / info. I have tabs on my reader for work, hobbies, weather, etc. Hell, even the small cow town I live in has an rss feed for city council stuff or the city softball league sign up.

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of all the content you encounter?

#58

Post by rewgs »

LunarAurora wrote: post #55
rewgs wrote: post #40

After trying and failing for various years to find the perfect system, I've since landed on the most dead-simple system possible: aggressively organizing my browser's bookmarks. As one might assume, it's a few general categories progressively broken down into more and more specific folders. For instance: tech/programming/command line/editors/neovim/plugins. The one "magic" thing I've figured out is to put "_to check…

If you are on a chromium based browser, I found these extensions to help dealing with large collections/hierarchies : - Adding Faster to a specific folder with keyboard -> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/faster-bookmark-ad... - Tagging simply by adding #tag to the title. -> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bookmark-tags/edpe... - Sorting/Searching using more powerful filters -> https://chrome.googl…

Tagging and all that is great, but that’s helpful if you’re more into searching and less into manually maintaining. I actually prefer my system over tags precisely because it requires that I traverse the folder hierarchy and don’t simply search. This way, I constantly run into stuff I can let go, see better ways of organizing things, etc.

Likewise, I’ve eschewed automatic money trackers in favor of paper receipts, a meticulously organized spreadsheet, and weekly financial check-ins with myself. There are times when automation IMO actively works against the intended purpose, and these are two of them for me. And this is coming from someone who’s (like many on HN) obsessed with automation.

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of all the content you encounter?

#60

Post by AtomicOrbital »

I save into several text files (20 files) ... one big one ( >100k lines) for anything software related organized using labels like

curl tricks _____________

      something here about curl
then most anything else goes into a second big file mostly grab bag ... then I have other specific files for : travel, nyc, todo, videos, etc

then from a terminal I can grep into each using say :

grep -B20 -A20 someSearchString workfile

in above the parms A and B return the surrounding lines from the matching line of txt file ... then to further filter output I sometime pipe output of above grep into another grep

using this process I find I can retrieve anything I have stored I just need to save each item into a meaningful label using above xxxx tricks ... this process works just fine ... have been using this for past decade or more

naturally all of these files are auto backed up to the cloud ... currently using mega.io yet previously was using dropbox

PS. I use a ubuntu linux laptop/desktop

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