10 ms·

Gains I'm seeing from my second brain tool

156 points by codazoda 5y ago

donclark 5y ago
This makes me wonder if someone could create a service to gather our conversations, writings, emails - in the hopes of: -help us manage our relationships -guide us to bring us closer together as human beings -bringing more understanding and options for resolutions (edit) formatting
itg 5y ago
Anyone try Nolific? What advantages does it have over Notepad/Textedit?
- codazoda 5y ago
  Hey, post author and Nolific creator here. Nolific is very, very new, so I don’t think there will be a lot of other users, yet. For me there are a couple advantages. The main one is that it’s in the browser, where I spend a lot of my day, which makes it friction free. I mention a couple more in the post. I’m also super excited to add “actions” to Nolific. When I do, it will pass any text you’re working on to any API end-point. I’ll use it for things like, “Post to my blog”.
  - 58x14 5y ago
    This is a killer feature that I've been wanting to create myself. When my thinking is divergent, I benefit from a single dialogue that allows me to write without distraction, but my outputs belong to many different contexts. When my thinking is convergent, I have difficulty recovering my collection of useful material. My experience with a 'second brain' has mirrored yours. Nice post! Good luck!
shane_b 5y ago
I do this with two notion pages. One is Idea Inbox for any ideas worth exploring later. Then a second page called Journal which is a running list of entries for each day. I pretty much work out of this page and use Idea Inbox to remember what to write about that day. I’ve surprisingly seen health improvements as well.
- CapnKillbot 5y ago
  Can you describe some of the health benefits? My "second brain" attempts have pretty much been a mess, but I like your system for its simplicity.
  - shane_b 5y ago
    For sure. I’m not exactly sure why but I make more consistent progress towards working out. Maybe I’m more aware. For instance, one day I’ll write my neck hurts today. When I see that again, I think about why. Then start thinking about posture. I start doing a simple yoga routine. Find one area is super tight. Write it down. I learn my hip flexors need work. Now I’m on that simple yoga routine with some martial arts kick drills and I feel phenomenal! Mental clarity is greatly improved as well. The biggest benefit to me is not redundantly thinking about things. When I do, it’s obvious because I see it in writing and can take action. I tried a bunch of complicated frameworks for organizing. I ended up with as simple as possible.
drooby 5y ago
I’d like to see these kind of second brain tools mergable with a global anonymized database. Where my notes merge with the collective, and I can traverse ideas that spawn from my database into the collective whole.
- akvadrako 5y ago
  I agree this is something we should have and it's what I will be working on for the next year or so. One aspect I would like to get out of it is something like Wikipedia but with no notability criteria or censorship, since each author can choose which edits to include.
  - 58x14 5y ago
    How can I follow along?
    - akvadrako 5y ago
      I'm not a fan of the "release early" montra, but if I build something interesting I'll let you know.
  - ffhhj 5y ago
    Nice idea, but how will you deal with spam without spending all your resources into moderation?
    - akvadrako 5y ago
      Each editor can choose how they want to moderate incoming edits. So I expect most editors would delegate most pages a service who aggregates other editors, and focus on just their core interests.
- cxr 5y ago
  This is, in theory, what graph.global is supposed to be (by Mek from OpenLibrary / Internet Archive). <https://github.com/w2g/w2g https://github.com/w2g/w2g>
T3RMINATED 5y ago
oxff 5y ago
I just use wikilinks and markdown, edit it in VSC; it is helpful if you schedule yourself like a hour of study time for some topic which forces you to revisit the stuff you wrote previously, regularly. I'm going over some math / stat / probability at evenings for 1-3 hours and the wikilinking is definitely helping to learn the stuff. But on topics where I am not doing revisits regularly even if to just to light a bulb in my head ("Oh that topic, yeah I remember it"), I don't see much benefit accumulating.
ALittleLight 5y ago
I use Obsidian to take notes. I like it. I keep a daily journal there and connect it out to notes I open on different projects I work on or books I read. When I started using it I thought about it like a "Second brain" in the sense of it would somehow make me effectively smarter. I imagined referring back to stuff I'd written, building connections, and the notes letting me discover or recall insights I may have missed. Instead, like the author of this piece, I find that most of the benefits seem to come from inspiration and overcoming inertia and I almost never refer back to things I've written in the past. The inspiration is usually simple stuff, like if someone told you a problem you might immediately react with a solution or question. Same kind of thing happens when you write out problems. For example, recently my wife was annoyed at me because I haven't done a chore I said I would. As I'm just jotting this down into my daily journal I have the obvious "Why don't you take out the boxes now?" question. I answer that now I don't want to do it because she scolded me and I don't want to reinforce her scolding me. As soon as I see those words, I realize that's childish and I go take out the boxes. It's a realization I might not have confronted had I just existed in a non-reflective state. By typing out what's going I gave myself the chance to make conscious questions and observations which I can then react to. Sometimes they are useful. Journaling also helps overcome inertia. Left to my own devices I might spend all day on hackernews, Twitter, YouTube, and taking care of kids. When I journal though I document my frustrations with living that way and that helps push me to work on my side projects more. Further, just the act of writing things out helps me get started. If I have this nebulous idea that I want to work on "an idea" it's hard to actually start doing it. Decomposing a big idea into discrete chunks is inherently productive - it's drafting a plan and thinking through the system end to end. When I've written out a plan I have something specific and actionable to work on and my mind is already in the "Work on X" state. Note taking has also helped with ideation. Last night I wrote that I wondered whether Spotify would ban Joe Rogan and challenged myself to predict whether or not they would. While I was writing a brief argumentative essay to myself making my case (low confidence they do ban this year) I came to hold an opinion on Spotify the company (long straddle). I was then able to queue up a buy order - which I wouldn't have done had I not been note taking. (Although, whether or not this idea was good for me remains to be seen)
- reidjs 5y ago
tunnuz 5y ago
Can recommend Standard Notes.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
wware 5y ago
I'm running on a Macbook that is not at all set up for PHP, so no "users.ini" file. I did this ugly hack. <?php class BasicAuth { public function __construct($passwordFile) { } public function auth() { return true; } public function hash($password) { return "hello"; } } I can create notes and search them, only possible name is "Untitled", found no controls for formatting (h1/h2/h3, italic, bold, code block, lists, etc). Nice start, could benefit from a better UE and more features.
- codazoda 5y ago
  EDIT: I've fixed this. Yeah, sorry about all that, this thing is very early in it's life... The users.ini file is a simple ini with my list of users. I put that file in place. I put it outside of the root so that you can't read it. I thought I had explained this somewhere, but clearly I haven't. I need to fix this. My plan with the name is to pull the first line of the text file, remove pounds and things, and use that as the "dynamic" name. I haven't needed to implement that for myself just yet, so it's on the todo list.
endisneigh 5y ago
I wish there were a tool that could just record everything - text, web history, clicked links, video chat, messages, etc. and just index it. fundamentally I believe "taking notes" is the wrong way to think about it. if you "know" everything, then notes serve no purpose.
- 9dev 5y ago
  Wouldn't that essentially be a system that tracked the entirety of your digital life in a sort of timeline, with metadata attached, making it easily accessible and searchable? I have thought a lot about this and curiously, it's also what many science fiction depictions of computer systems seem to aim for - a single, integrated, computing experience, across all devices and tools.
  - shepherdjerred 5y ago
    This is something I think about often when it comes to tools. The idea that Google had all of my location history for the past 8 years means I can see everywhere I've ever gone. I can lookup any email I've ever sent/received. I can look through my browser history for any particular day. With Spotify + Last.fm I can see stats about my listening history, and with Tract.tv I can see my TV/movie watching habits. Strava tracks exercise, and YNAB tracks budgeting/spending. There's an incredible amount of health data from my iPhone + Apple Watch. It's really cool to think that all of this data exists, but I'm not really sure that it's useful. Occasionally I've gone back through my old search history for that one old post that I wanted to re-read, or go through my Spotify listening history to find a song I really enjoyed but forgot the name of, but 99% of that data goes to waste. Quantified Self [0] is an interesting project to me since it seems to make use of data from all of these disparate sources, but I'm still not sure what the outcome of tracking all of this data is. It seems cool but not useful. [0]: https://quantifiedself.com/ https://quantifiedself.com/
    - Jeff_Brown 5y ago
      It's exciting that the data exists, but Google's (and every similar organization's) business model is not compatible with full data transparency. They want you locked into their platform, using their tools.
jedberg 5y ago
I read the page and the docs but I still have one main question: What problem is getting solved with this? I feel like I'm missing something.
- capableweb 5y ago
  First off, not everything is about "This is the problem and here is the solution", sometimes it's just about wanting to make incremental improvements in something. That said, here are the incremental improvements listed from the post in the submission: - I’m writing more - I understand my productivity better - I’m thinking more - I’m managing my health better - I’m managing my subscriptions better - My spelling is better - I’m tracking decisions If it helps you, you could frame each section as "The problem is that I'm writing too little, so my second brain helps me to write more", "The problem is that I'm thinking too little, so my second brain helps me to think more" etc etc.
  - jedberg 5y ago
    Fair enough, but how? How does this tool enable those things that Notepad doesn't?
    - codazoda 5y ago
      Author here... I had originally written something like, "I wrote my own tool but you might see these gains using any note tool". For whatever reason, I edited that out. Probably a mistake, given your confusion.
      - jedberg 5y ago
        Ah yeah that clears it up. I thought this was a post about why your tool was better than others. Thanks!
    - capableweb 5y ago
      Ah, I didn't even realize this was a post/ad about a specific tool that the author was launching, I thought it was a general post about any "second brain tool". Sorry for that.
9dev 5y ago
> Naming software experiments is a barrier to entry for me. Typically, I need to come up with a name before I can even create a project. Using numbers removes that burden and lets me start with a readme or a bit of code. This is the first of those numbered experiments. (From the project readme on GitHub) I have the exact same issue, not only for projects, but also servers, structures or variables. If the name doesn't clearly communicate the purpose, I can't go ahead. What helps me is settling for an unrelated naming scheme like greek gods or NASA missions (servers), going with concepts, like batch-importer or note-app (projects), or choosing the first generic name that occurs to me, eg. EncodingManager (code structures). The only important thing is a simple path to renaming stuff later on as its purpose becomes clear :)
matrixcubed 5y ago
Joplin user here. I’ve installed it on every device I own, and sync my notes with my NextCloud code instance. A few synchronizing snags aside, I’m extremely happy with it.
notepalf 5y ago
For a simple note taking app I recommend https://simplenote.com/ https://simplenote.com/
newbie789 5y ago
- junipertea 5y ago
  Second brain is a pretty common term for curating your knowledge in a structured way. While a text editor is a main component of it, it tends to allow us to: 1) connect notes/ideas using tags or links 2) automatically generate graphs/views (some even do sql) 3) make it easy to look up past information. Some people can do it using a single txt file in notepad.exe and ctrl+f, some people add tags/headers/titles to make it easier, and some people go full graph DB with roam research. You might not enjoy that (and based on the comments, we enjoy dumping stuff to it more than using it), but no need to dismiss this.
  - newbie789 5y ago
brentjanderson 5y ago
I tried a few different options for note taking, including Foam[1], Roam[2], and now Dendron[3]. Dendron has been the best fit for me because it's built on VS Code (I already know my way around and can be more productive in it), and has a great team & community supporting it. Markdown in a git repo is so much better than anything else I've tried. [1] https://foambubble.github.io/foam/ https://foambubble.github.io/foam/ [2] https://roamresearch.com/ https://roamresearch.com/ [3] https://dendron.so/ https://dendron.so/
- jerrygoyal 5y ago
  obsidian.md is another great tool (supports local md folder, backlinks, graph view)
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    While we're shilling for Obsidian, I'd like to plug "Obsidian-Admonition"[0], which has been a gamechanger in the way I take notes. It's a simple extension of Markdown protocols with an enormous amount of flexibility for adding block-styled content. If you've ever wanted to glitz up your notes with some documentation-styled content blocks, this is for you! [0] https://github.com/valentine195/obsidian-admonition https://github.com/valentine195/obsidian-admonition
- bobbylarrybobby 5y ago
  LogSeq is another interesting tool in this space. Its primary differentiator seems to be letting you attach arbitrary key-value attributes to pages and blocks and then query things in your workspace to create ad-hoc tables. https://docs.logseq.com/#/page/advanced%20queries https://docs.logseq.com/#/page/advanced%20queries
  - bathtub365 5y ago
    What I really like about LogSeq is the Journal feature that you can specify a template for, and the ability to query TODOs across all of your notes. I take meeting notes and add in action items and they all get collected up and organized using my queries that filter and order by due date. The way they’re presented also lets you easily jump back to the context where the TODO was created. It’s a prolog based query language so it took a bit of time to learn but now it helps me stay organized and on top of all the stuff I need to do.
l0c0b0x 5y ago
Am I in a minority that has been looking for a tool like this ("2nd brain"), but just never knew the concept is called that way? This is what my current, best second brain, looks like :\ https://i.imgur.com/B1dT9M8.png https://i.imgur.com/B1dT9M8.png I'm excited to try these new tools and see improvements.
- RankingMember 5y ago
  Ha, this is what mine looks like too, but all in one tab and split up via line breaks. Sometimes I come back to it and realize I've completely lost the plot and clear it and start over. It's like having too many tabs open in a web browser.
- toastercat 5y ago
  Haha I kinda do what you do (text editor + files). It works fine for me, and I keep it synced with Syncthing. I just repurposed my old installation of Sublime Text 3 and keep stuff separated by [topic].md. screenshot: https://i.vgy.me/1Ol8BZ.png https://i.vgy.me/1Ol8BZ.png
- Jeff_Brown 5y ago
  "Notes", "personal knowledge base" and "(personal) knowledge graph" are terms I'd call both more informative and more popular than "second brain", but they all have history.
ouid 5y ago
What I would like, as a productivity tool, is a coarse to do list + contexts. Contexts here means, essentially, snapshots of virtual machines with all of the tools open that I was using, along with some structure for shared ddata, probably managed by git. You might recognize this as more or less the definition of an operating system, so I suppose I could just say that I want an OS which treats me as the CPU.
- youngNed 5y ago
  > so I suppose I could just say that I want an OS which treats me as the CPU <obligatory emacs response here>
- Jeff_Brown 5y ago
  Tmux and Emacs scripts can (either on it's own) get you pretty far in that direction.
  - ouid 5y ago
    I would love to know more about it, I know about as little as it's possible to know about emacs while having also used it. If you have anything more guided than me just doing a google search, please share!
    - Jeff_Brown 5y ago
      Here is the page about Tmux from the public portion of my knowledge graph: https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/notes-in-org-format-on-tech/blob/master/tmux_software.org https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/notes-in-org-format-... See in particular the passage "send text to a tmux session|window|pane". In Emacs, `M-x desktop-save` and `M-x desktop-change-dir` will let you save your session state and restore from a saved state. Also handy is the command `process-send-string`. I use it in the below (from my .emacs config[1]) to mark one buffer as the "receiving GHCI buffer" and then send text from another buffer to be evaluated in that one. ;; https://emacs.stackexchange.com/a/37889 (defun mark-receiving-ghci-buffer () (interactive) (setq receiving-ghci-buffer (buffer-name))) (defun send-highlighted-region-to-receiving-ghci-buffer (beg end) (interactive "r") (process-send-string receiving-ghci-buffer ":{\n") (process-send-region receiving-ghci-buffer beg end) (process-send-string receiving-ghci-buffer "\n:}\n")) (global-set-key ( kbd "C-c s") ( lambda () (interactive) (send-highlighted-region-to-receiving-ghci-buffer) ) ) [1] https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/play/blob/master/dot-emacs.el https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/play/blob/master/dot...
nivethan 5y ago
This is exactly what I found as well! Writing things down forces me to consume content and makes me want to produce more as a result. I made my own application as well at https://leftwrite.io https://leftwrite.io though the focus is more on making notes on websites I visit than plain notes. I'm still working on it but you can see how to use at https://nivethan.dev/devlog/how-to-use-leftwrite.html https://nivethan.dev/devlog/how-to-use-leftwrite.html. It's still very much still in progress for documentation but the core features I consider complete and so there won't be any functional changes.
kenta_nagamine 5y ago
sdze 5y ago
I love minimalistic tools! Thank you for that.
vernie 5y ago
I'm just a moderately productive programmer so I guess this isn't for me.
onaworkcomputer 5y ago
I realize it's not hip, but I use OneNote. I used to keep notes + a work diary in markdown in a git repo, but it was difficult to integrate screenshots, and converting a note to a task was always a manual process of copying text into a separate system. OneNote's native integration with Outlook tasks was the killer feature for me.
_virtu 5y ago
Am I missing something or should v0.0.2 really be v0.1.0 considering that there are more than bug fixes in the release?
- codazoda 5y ago
  Yeah, that's true, I'm not properly following semver here. I'll try to improve that for the next release.
rosstex 5y ago
For this I recommend Notes.app or TextEdit.exe
_virtu 5y ago
Love that you're putting this out there, but what's the difference between this and VisualStudio code or another editor du jour?
- codazoda 5y ago
  Thanks. For me, it's important that it runs in the browser and is still minimal (just text). I spend much of my time in the browser. I spend a lot of time in VS Code too, but I found it awkward for notes for some reason. It may be that I've got a few VS Code projects opened and so I was confusing code with notes, I'm not really sure. There are lots of note tools out there and I'm sure our preferences will each be different. I hacked this one together to work for my particular needs, which I'm not sure I even completely understand. But, the minimalist web based nature of it is making the work-flow work really well for me.
dang 5y ago
Recent and related: Show HN: I built my own second brain software tool - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29640765 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29640765 - Dec 2021 (20 comments)
bachmeier 5y ago
Is there a way to query your notes, or is it intended as a way to capture and maybe review the most recent few notes?
- codazoda 5y ago
  I have added a simple search feature recently. Calling it a tool for "most recent" notes is an accurate indication of how I'm using it. In fact, it defaults to your most recent note and then you can flip back and forth through recent stuff. The search feature does come in handy when I'm looking for something specific that I know I wrote in the past.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
AlwaysRock 5y ago
This is cool. Have you considered making it a chrome extension?
throw10920 5y ago
I'm building my own PIM. The only points that the author brings up that I can relate to are "I'm writing more" and "I'm thinking more". The interesting part is that my PIM is incomplete - I can put things into it very easily, I just can't get things out. That didn't stop my random note-taking from rising significantly (from 1 note once every few days to 1-3/day on slow days and 30-50 on fast days) after I implemented the note capture bit. Although, even though I can't (easily) get things out of it again, my brain seems to think that I'll eventually find the stuff I write down again - perhaps that's what unlocked the flood of ideas?
smusamashah 5y ago
I suggest all to pick up "Mircosoft OneNote" once again. Pick the older version, not the new Windows Apps version, its BS like every other metro style app. After trying a bunch of tools, i found OneNote to be the least resistant. You can write and put anything anywhere on a page including text, images, files and even draw something. Every page is freeform like an infinite canvas and its all searchable.

156 points by codazoda 5y ago

This makes me wonder if someone could create a service to gather our conversations, writings, emails - in the hopes of: -help us manage our relationships -guide us to bring us closer together as human beings -bringing more understanding and options for resolutions (edit) formatting

itg 5y ago

Anyone try Nolific? What advantages does it have over Notepad/Textedit?

codazoda 5y ago
Hey, post author and Nolific creator here. Nolific is very, very new, so I don’t think there will be a lot of other users, yet. For me there are a couple advantages. The main one is that it’s in the browser, where I spend a lot of my day, which makes it friction free. I mention a couple more in the post. I’m also super excited to add “actions” to Nolific. When I do, it will pass any text you’re working on to any API end-point. I’ll use it for things like, “Post to my blog”.
- 58x14 5y ago
  This is a killer feature that I've been wanting to create myself. When my thinking is divergent, I benefit from a single dialogue that allows me to write without distraction, but my outputs belong to many different contexts. When my thinking is convergent, I have difficulty recovering my collection of useful material. My experience with a 'second brain' has mirrored yours. Nice post! Good luck!

shane_b 5y ago

I do this with two notion pages. One is Idea Inbox for any ideas worth exploring later. Then a second page called Journal which is a running list of entries for each day. I pretty much work out of this page and use Idea Inbox to remember what to write about that day. I’ve surprisingly seen health improvements as well.

CapnKillbot 5y ago
Can you describe some of the health benefits? My "second brain" attempts have pretty much been a mess, but I like your system for its simplicity.
- shane_b 5y ago
  For sure. I’m not exactly sure why but I make more consistent progress towards working out. Maybe I’m more aware. For instance, one day I’ll write my neck hurts today. When I see that again, I think about why. Then start thinking about posture. I start doing a simple yoga routine. Find one area is super tight. Write it down. I learn my hip flexors need work. Now I’m on that simple yoga routine with some martial arts kick drills and I feel phenomenal! Mental clarity is greatly improved as well. The biggest benefit to me is not redundantly thinking about things. When I do, it’s obvious because I see it in writing and can take action. I tried a bunch of complicated frameworks for organizing. I ended up with as simple as possible.

drooby 5y ago

I’d like to see these kind of second brain tools mergable with a global anonymized database. Where my notes merge with the collective, and I can traverse ideas that spawn from my database into the collective whole.

akvadrako 5y ago
I agree this is something we should have and it's what I will be working on for the next year or so. One aspect I would like to get out of it is something like Wikipedia but with no notability criteria or censorship, since each author can choose which edits to include.
- 58x14 5y ago
  How can I follow along?
  - akvadrako 5y ago
    I'm not a fan of the "release early" montra, but if I build something interesting I'll let you know.
- ffhhj 5y ago
  Nice idea, but how will you deal with spam without spending all your resources into moderation?
  - akvadrako 5y ago
    Each editor can choose how they want to moderate incoming edits. So I expect most editors would delegate most pages a service who aggregates other editors, and focus on just their core interests.
cxr 5y ago
This is, in theory, what graph.global is supposed to be (by Mek from OpenLibrary / Internet Archive). <https://github.com/w2g/w2g https://github.com/w2g/w2g>

T3RMINATED 5y ago

oxff 5y ago

I just use wikilinks and markdown, edit it in VSC; it is helpful if you schedule yourself like a hour of study time for some topic which forces you to revisit the stuff you wrote previously, regularly. I'm going over some math / stat / probability at evenings for 1-3 hours and the wikilinking is definitely helping to learn the stuff. But on topics where I am not doing revisits regularly even if to just to light a bulb in my head ("Oh that topic, yeah I remember it"), I don't see much benefit accumulating.

ALittleLight 5y ago

I use Obsidian to take notes. I like it. I keep a daily journal there and connect it out to notes I open on different projects I work on or books I read. When I started using it I thought about it like a "Second brain" in the sense of it would somehow make me effectively smarter. I imagined referring back to stuff I'd written, building connections, and the notes letting me discover or recall insights I may have missed. Instead, like the author of this piece, I find that most of the benefits seem to come from inspiration and overcoming inertia and I almost never refer back to things I've written in the past. The inspiration is usually simple stuff, like if someone told you a problem you might immediately react with a solution or question. Same kind of thing happens when you write out problems. For example, recently my wife was annoyed at me because I haven't done a chore I said I would. As I'm just jotting this down into my daily journal I have the obvious "Why don't you take out the boxes now?" question. I answer that now I don't want to do it because she scolded me and I don't want to reinforce her scolding me. As soon as I see those words, I realize that's childish and I go take out the boxes. It's a realization I might not have confronted had I just existed in a non-reflective state. By typing out what's going I gave myself the chance to make conscious questions and observations which I can then react to. Sometimes they are useful. Journaling also helps overcome inertia. Left to my own devices I might spend all day on hackernews, Twitter, YouTube, and taking care of kids. When I journal though I document my frustrations with living that way and that helps push me to work on my side projects more. Further, just the act of writing things out helps me get started. If I have this nebulous idea that I want to work on "an idea" it's hard to actually start doing it. Decomposing a big idea into discrete chunks is inherently productive - it's drafting a plan and thinking through the system end to end. When I've written out a plan I have something specific and actionable to work on and my mind is already in the "Work on X" state. Note taking has also helped with ideation. Last night I wrote that I wondered whether Spotify would ban Joe Rogan and challenged myself to predict whether or not they would. While I was writing a brief argumentative essay to myself making my case (low confidence they do ban this year) I came to hold an opinion on Spotify the company (long straddle). I was then able to queue up a buy order - which I wouldn't have done had I not been note taking. (Although, whether or not this idea was good for me remains to be seen)

reidjs 5y ago

tunnuz 5y ago

Can recommend Standard Notes.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

wware 5y ago

I'm running on a Macbook that is not at all set up for PHP, so no "users.ini" file. I did this ugly hack. <?php class BasicAuth { public function __construct($passwordFile) { } public function auth() { return true; } public function hash($password) { return "hello"; } } I can create notes and search them, only possible name is "Untitled", found no controls for formatting (h1/h2/h3, italic, bold, code block, lists, etc). Nice start, could benefit from a better UE and more features.

codazoda 5y ago
EDIT: I've fixed this. Yeah, sorry about all that, this thing is very early in it's life... The users.ini file is a simple ini with my list of users. I put that file in place. I put it outside of the root so that you can't read it. I thought I had explained this somewhere, but clearly I haven't. I need to fix this. My plan with the name is to pull the first line of the text file, remove pounds and things, and use that as the "dynamic" name. I haven't needed to implement that for myself just yet, so it's on the todo list.

endisneigh 5y ago

I wish there were a tool that could just record everything - text, web history, clicked links, video chat, messages, etc. and just index it. fundamentally I believe "taking notes" is the wrong way to think about it. if you "know" everything, then notes serve no purpose.

9dev 5y ago
Wouldn't that essentially be a system that tracked the entirety of your digital life in a sort of timeline, with metadata attached, making it easily accessible and searchable? I have thought a lot about this and curiously, it's also what many science fiction depictions of computer systems seem to aim for - a single, integrated, computing experience, across all devices and tools.
- shepherdjerred 5y ago
  This is something I think about often when it comes to tools. The idea that Google had all of my location history for the past 8 years means I can see everywhere I've ever gone. I can lookup any email I've ever sent/received. I can look through my browser history for any particular day. With Spotify + Last.fm I can see stats about my listening history, and with Tract.tv I can see my TV/movie watching habits. Strava tracks exercise, and YNAB tracks budgeting/spending. There's an incredible amount of health data from my iPhone + Apple Watch. It's really cool to think that all of this data exists, but I'm not really sure that it's useful. Occasionally I've gone back through my old search history for that one old post that I wanted to re-read, or go through my Spotify listening history to find a song I really enjoyed but forgot the name of, but 99% of that data goes to waste. Quantified Self [0] is an interesting project to me since it seems to make use of data from all of these disparate sources, but I'm still not sure what the outcome of tracking all of this data is. It seems cool but not useful. [0]: https://quantifiedself.com/ https://quantifiedself.com/
  - Jeff_Brown 5y ago
    It's exciting that the data exists, but Google's (and every similar organization's) business model is not compatible with full data transparency. They want you locked into their platform, using their tools.

jedberg 5y ago

I read the page and the docs but I still have one main question: What problem is getting solved with this? I feel like I'm missing something.

capableweb 5y ago
First off, not everything is about "This is the problem and here is the solution", sometimes it's just about wanting to make incremental improvements in something. That said, here are the incremental improvements listed from the post in the submission: - I’m writing more - I understand my productivity better - I’m thinking more - I’m managing my health better - I’m managing my subscriptions better - My spelling is better - I’m tracking decisions If it helps you, you could frame each section as "The problem is that I'm writing too little, so my second brain helps me to write more", "The problem is that I'm thinking too little, so my second brain helps me to think more" etc etc.
- jedberg 5y ago
  Fair enough, but how? How does this tool enable those things that Notepad doesn't?
  - codazoda 5y ago
    Author here... I had originally written something like, "I wrote my own tool but you might see these gains using any note tool". For whatever reason, I edited that out. Probably a mistake, given your confusion.
    - jedberg 5y ago
      Ah yeah that clears it up. I thought this was a post about why your tool was better than others. Thanks!
  - capableweb 5y ago
    Ah, I didn't even realize this was a post/ad about a specific tool that the author was launching, I thought it was a general post about any "second brain tool". Sorry for that.

9dev 5y ago

> Naming software experiments is a barrier to entry for me. Typically, I need to come up with a name before I can even create a project. Using numbers removes that burden and lets me start with a readme or a bit of code. This is the first of those numbered experiments. (From the project readme on GitHub) I have the exact same issue, not only for projects, but also servers, structures or variables. If the name doesn't clearly communicate the purpose, I can't go ahead. What helps me is settling for an unrelated naming scheme like greek gods or NASA missions (servers), going with concepts, like batch-importer or note-app (projects), or choosing the first generic name that occurs to me, eg. EncodingManager (code structures). The only important thing is a simple path to renaming stuff later on as its purpose becomes clear :)

matrixcubed 5y ago

Joplin user here. I’ve installed it on every device I own, and sync my notes with my NextCloud code instance. A few synchronizing snags aside, I’m extremely happy with it.

notepalf 5y ago

For a simple note taking app I recommend https://simplenote.com/ https://simplenote.com/

newbie789 5y ago

junipertea 5y ago
Second brain is a pretty common term for curating your knowledge in a structured way. While a text editor is a main component of it, it tends to allow us to: 1) connect notes/ideas using tags or links 2) automatically generate graphs/views (some even do sql) 3) make it easy to look up past information. Some people can do it using a single txt file in notepad.exe and ctrl+f, some people add tags/headers/titles to make it easier, and some people go full graph DB with roam research. You might not enjoy that (and based on the comments, we enjoy dumping stuff to it more than using it), but no need to dismiss this.
- newbie789 5y ago

brentjanderson 5y ago

I tried a few different options for note taking, including Foam[1], Roam[2], and now Dendron[3]. Dendron has been the best fit for me because it's built on VS Code (I already know my way around and can be more productive in it), and has a great team & community supporting it. Markdown in a git repo is so much better than anything else I've tried. [1] https://foambubble.github.io/foam/ https://foambubble.github.io/foam/ [2] https://roamresearch.com/ https://roamresearch.com/ [3] https://dendron.so/ https://dendron.so/

jerrygoyal 5y ago
obsidian.md is another great tool (supports local md folder, backlinks, graph view)
- smoldesu 5y ago
  While we're shilling for Obsidian, I'd like to plug "Obsidian-Admonition"[0], which has been a gamechanger in the way I take notes. It's a simple extension of Markdown protocols with an enormous amount of flexibility for adding block-styled content. If you've ever wanted to glitz up your notes with some documentation-styled content blocks, this is for you! [0] https://github.com/valentine195/obsidian-admonition https://github.com/valentine195/obsidian-admonition
bobbylarrybobby 5y ago
LogSeq is another interesting tool in this space. Its primary differentiator seems to be letting you attach arbitrary key-value attributes to pages and blocks and then query things in your workspace to create ad-hoc tables. https://docs.logseq.com/#/page/advanced%20queries https://docs.logseq.com/#/page/advanced%20queries
- bathtub365 5y ago
  What I really like about LogSeq is the Journal feature that you can specify a template for, and the ability to query TODOs across all of your notes. I take meeting notes and add in action items and they all get collected up and organized using my queries that filter and order by due date. The way they’re presented also lets you easily jump back to the context where the TODO was created. It’s a prolog based query language so it took a bit of time to learn but now it helps me stay organized and on top of all the stuff I need to do.

l0c0b0x 5y ago

Am I in a minority that has been looking for a tool like this ("2nd brain"), but just never knew the concept is called that way? This is what my current, best second brain, looks like :\ https://i.imgur.com/B1dT9M8.png https://i.imgur.com/B1dT9M8.png I'm excited to try these new tools and see improvements.

RankingMember 5y ago
Ha, this is what mine looks like too, but all in one tab and split up via line breaks. Sometimes I come back to it and realize I've completely lost the plot and clear it and start over. It's like having too many tabs open in a web browser.
toastercat 5y ago
Haha I kinda do what you do (text editor + files). It works fine for me, and I keep it synced with Syncthing. I just repurposed my old installation of Sublime Text 3 and keep stuff separated by [topic].md. screenshot: https://i.vgy.me/1Ol8BZ.png https://i.vgy.me/1Ol8BZ.png
Jeff_Brown 5y ago
"Notes", "personal knowledge base" and "(personal) knowledge graph" are terms I'd call both more informative and more popular than "second brain", but they all have history.

ouid 5y ago

What I would like, as a productivity tool, is a coarse to do list + contexts. Contexts here means, essentially, snapshots of virtual machines with all of the tools open that I was using, along with some structure for shared ddata, probably managed by git. You might recognize this as more or less the definition of an operating system, so I suppose I could just say that I want an OS which treats me as the CPU.

youngNed 5y ago
> so I suppose I could just say that I want an OS which treats me as the CPU <obligatory emacs response here>
Jeff_Brown 5y ago
Tmux and Emacs scripts can (either on it's own) get you pretty far in that direction.
- ouid 5y ago
  I would love to know more about it, I know about as little as it's possible to know about emacs while having also used it. If you have anything more guided than me just doing a google search, please share!
  - Jeff_Brown 5y ago
    Here is the page about Tmux from the public portion of my knowledge graph: https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/notes-in-org-format-on-tech/blob/master/tmux_software.org https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/notes-in-org-format-... See in particular the passage "send text to a tmux session|window|pane". In Emacs, `M-x desktop-save` and `M-x desktop-change-dir` will let you save your session state and restore from a saved state. Also handy is the command `process-send-string`. I use it in the below (from my .emacs config[1]) to mark one buffer as the "receiving GHCI buffer" and then send text from another buffer to be evaluated in that one. ;; https://emacs.stackexchange.com/a/37889 (defun mark-receiving-ghci-buffer () (interactive) (setq receiving-ghci-buffer (buffer-name))) (defun send-highlighted-region-to-receiving-ghci-buffer (beg end) (interactive "r") (process-send-string receiving-ghci-buffer ":{\n") (process-send-region receiving-ghci-buffer beg end) (process-send-string receiving-ghci-buffer "\n:}\n")) (global-set-key ( kbd "C-c s") ( lambda () (interactive) (send-highlighted-region-to-receiving-ghci-buffer) ) ) [1] https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/play/blob/master/dot-emacs.el https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/play/blob/master/dot...

nivethan 5y ago

This is exactly what I found as well! Writing things down forces me to consume content and makes me want to produce more as a result. I made my own application as well at https://leftwrite.io https://leftwrite.io though the focus is more on making notes on websites I visit than plain notes. I'm still working on it but you can see how to use at https://nivethan.dev/devlog/how-to-use-leftwrite.html https://nivethan.dev/devlog/how-to-use-leftwrite.html. It's still very much still in progress for documentation but the core features I consider complete and so there won't be any functional changes.

kenta_nagamine 5y ago

sdze 5y ago

I love minimalistic tools! Thank you for that.

vernie 5y ago

I'm just a moderately productive programmer so I guess this isn't for me.

onaworkcomputer 5y ago

I realize it's not hip, but I use OneNote. I used to keep notes + a work diary in markdown in a git repo, but it was difficult to integrate screenshots, and converting a note to a task was always a manual process of copying text into a separate system. OneNote's native integration with Outlook tasks was the killer feature for me.

_virtu 5y ago

Am I missing something or should v0.0.2 really be v0.1.0 considering that there are more than bug fixes in the release?

codazoda 5y ago
Yeah, that's true, I'm not properly following semver here. I'll try to improve that for the next release.

rosstex 5y ago

For this I recommend Notes.app or TextEdit.exe

_virtu 5y ago

Love that you're putting this out there, but what's the difference between this and VisualStudio code or another editor du jour?

codazoda 5y ago
Thanks. For me, it's important that it runs in the browser and is still minimal (just text). I spend much of my time in the browser. I spend a lot of time in VS Code too, but I found it awkward for notes for some reason. It may be that I've got a few VS Code projects opened and so I was confusing code with notes, I'm not really sure. There are lots of note tools out there and I'm sure our preferences will each be different. I hacked this one together to work for my particular needs, which I'm not sure I even completely understand. But, the minimalist web based nature of it is making the work-flow work really well for me.

dang 5y ago

Recent and related: Show HN: I built my own second brain software tool - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29640765 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29640765 - Dec 2021 (20 comments)

bachmeier 5y ago

Is there a way to query your notes, or is it intended as a way to capture and maybe review the most recent few notes?

codazoda 5y ago
I have added a simple search feature recently. Calling it a tool for "most recent" notes is an accurate indication of how I'm using it. In fact, it defaults to your most recent note and then you can flip back and forth through recent stuff. The search feature does come in handy when I'm looking for something specific that I know I wrote in the past.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

AlwaysRock 5y ago

This is cool. Have you considered making it a chrome extension?

throw10920 5y ago

I'm building my own PIM. The only points that the author brings up that I can relate to are "I'm writing more" and "I'm thinking more". The interesting part is that my PIM is incomplete - I can put things into it very easily, I just can't get things out. That didn't stop my random note-taking from rising significantly (from 1 note once every few days to 1-3/day on slow days and 30-50 on fast days) after I implemented the note capture bit. Although, even though I can't (easily) get things out of it again, my brain seems to think that I'll eventually find the stuff I write down again - perhaps that's what unlocked the flood of ideas?

smusamashah 5y ago

I suggest all to pick up "Mircosoft OneNote" once again. Pick the older version, not the new Windows Apps version, its BS like every other metro style app. After trying a bunch of tools, i found OneNote to be the least resistant. You can write and put anything anywhere on a page including text, images, files and even draw something. Every page is freeform like an infinite canvas and its all searchable.