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Evolving my note-taking processes
- frozencell 4y agoWho is using knowledge graphs to sort notes?
- pillefitz 4y agoI'm a happy user of Obsidian, but always considered the graph visualization gimmicky. Still I make heavy use of note linking, so in that sense I'm using a knowledge graph to sort notes.
- samsquire 4y agoI journal computer and software ideas as markdown files out in the open on GitHub. When I get to 100-300 entries I move onto a new repository. https://GitHub.com/samsquire/ideas https://GitHub.com/samsquire/ideas https://GitHub.com/samsquire/ideas2 https://GitHub.com/samsquire/ideas2 https://GitHub.com/samsquire/ideas3 https://GitHub.com/samsquire/ideas3 https://GitHub.com/samsquire/ideas4 https://GitHub.com/samsquire/ideas4 https://GitHub.com/samsquire/startups https://GitHub.com/samsquire/startups I create a new markdown heading for each entry and write. It's searchable and the data is easy to synchronize, backup and use and the solution shall last for multiple decades maybe even longer. It's also indexed by Google. I'm still tweaking my first journal that I created in 2013. At one point I tried to love Emacs and I am yet to use org mode. I actually use the GitHub interface mostly to update my journal. And before that vim and lately IntelliJ which includes preview features. I would recommend if you want to write notes or create an external mind to improve your thinking just write. The tool you use doesn't really matter. It's the quality and reward from writing and rereading what you wrote.
- interroboink 4y ago> I would recommend if you want to write notes or create an external mind to improve your thinking just write. Agreed. Personally, I still use paper + pencil for a lot of things. Even if I never rustle through my stacks of notes to find it again, I already got a big chunk of the value from just writing it. Aside: I find rustling through my notes to be useful in itself, even though it's inefficient on the surface. Electronic systems are so good at finding exactly what you want as quickly as possible that the "browse around and see what you bump into" experience can get lost. Sometimes I'll just happen to see diagram X next to diagram Y and come up with a new insight, where if I only ever saw what I was specifically looking for, I'd lose that. Though I do waste a lot of time, too (:
- samsquire 4y agoI reread my journal to try come up with new ideas. I think explaining your problem can reveal solutions. Rubber ducking. My stack of paper drawings and diagrams and notes was thrown away by accident. So I only have my digital notes left. As it was for Richard Feynman, writing is thinking itself.
- bachmeier 4y agoI started by putting stuff on my professional website. Too much overhead and styling kept me from writing: https://lancebachmeier.com/other.html https://lancebachmeier.com/other.html Then I moved to GH pages and a simple theme, so that I could type directly in the browser on any device: https://bachmeil.github.io/online-writing/ https://bachmeil.github.io/online-writing/ There was still too much styling on that page for my taste. The full CSS for my new site is body { max-width: 950px; margin: auto; padding: 8px;} pre { border: 1px solid gray; border-radius: 6px; padding: 8px; } That feels more natural to me. Site here: https://bachmeil.github.io/the-blog/ https://bachmeil.github.io/the-blog/
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- apetresc 4y agoWhat is the benefit of moving on to a new repository? It's not like Git would have a performance problem with thousands of small text files, and it's just as easy to organize (actually much easier) within a single root than within multiple roots.
- samsquire 4y agoI am adding to my journal every day. If someone checks my journal on Monday, unless they scroll to the bottom to check for new journal entries on Tuesday, they shall miss the journal entries I added Tuesday. (Unless they come back but I feel I have one chance to gain a regular reader) I submit to HN when I reach a new batch of 100-300 entries. I don't want people to not see the new entries. I only tweak or add to older journal repositories, I don't add new entries to the bottom of those repositories.
- abrax3141 4y agoHunh??? (Also, why would anyone want to read anyone else’s personal journal, I mean, I guess if you were Donald Trump it might be “interesting”. But if there were more than, like, three of these that I followed, I’d be reading personal journals more than doing anything else. I barely have time to follow podcasts that drop once a month, much less the random musings of random hackers.)
- samsquire 4y agoI see my journal of ideas as a blog. I just happen to use GitHub and it is formatted as a journal. I am always looking for high quality things to read. So I'm interested in other people's blogs such as Joel on Software or Jeff Atwood or Joe Duffy. If you don't find it interesting then you are not the intended audience.
- abrax3141 4y agoOh. I see. Yes, framing this as using GitHub as a (micro)blogging platform makes it make much more sense (at least to me).
- ILMostro7 4y agoDo you get paid every time the word "idea" appears on the page? Interesting process, though. thanks
- alexalx666 4y agoIs there a clone of Standard Notes which includes basic plugins for free? I almost think it was a mistake to go with SN for self-hosted notes
- Daedren 4y agoYou can also self-host the Standard Notes extensions though.
- alexalx666 4y agoso their extensions are free if self-hosted?
- gnuj3 4y agonotesnook.com
- gigel82 4y agoNotesnook is not open source (you cannot self-host it, you must pay them). FWIW, Standard Notes is also very difficult to self host, though if you dig deep enough you can actually find the server and some outdated documentation. FWIW, I settled on https://github.com/zadam/trilium https://github.com/zadam/trilium which is very bare-bones but fully open source and self-hostable.
- alexalx666 4y agoyes SN was the hardest installation for me :D, Trilium looks good, will deff try it out, thanks!
- gnuj3 4y agoOn the Notesnook front page: > Open source zero knowledge private note taking
- gigel82 4y ago
- sureglymop 4y agoWhat I want in a personal note taking system is something where I can link anything. Anything is just a generic object that can be linked to and worked with. Like a mix between Logseq and Nextcloud, where I can still use CalDav and CardDav but I can link to tasks and calendar events and contacts from my notes. And i can link to a certain pdf page right from my notes.. or even a certain page of a word document. Anything needs to be treated as a generic object of content that is linkable.
- vavooom 4y agoSounds like you are looking for a Zettelkasten [1], which is a way of organizing notes around a loose linked structure. I use Obsidian[2] for mine! [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten#:~:text=A%20Zettelkasten%20(German%3A%20%22slip,such%20as%20numbers%20and%20tags https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten#:~:text=A%20Zet.... [2] https://obsidian.md/ https://obsidian.md/
- xypage 4y ago+1 for obsidian, I love it. I've tried for years to make Zettelkasten work for me and have struggled to fully commit with atomic notes but in attempting I stumbled upon obsidian and even if you aren't going full Zettelkasten with it it's a 10/10 markdown editor
- albatrosstrophy 4y agoI came across this recently, not sure if it's something that might help. https://www.scrintal.com/ https://www.scrintal.com/
- eointierney 4y agoEmacs :)
- ILMostro7 4y agoLol was just thinking, IIRC that's how org-mode came to exist
- parthianshotgun 4y agoITT someone who hasn't heard of Obsidian
- bronxpockfabz 4y ago
- reactspa 4y agoMarkdown question: I want to take create a chronological journal where I track tutorials I've done (and how well, etc), but I want to add some sort of a tag wherever I feel like so that with a click I can find all my entries related to (say) React, or R (statistics), and so on. If you're reading this, and have had luck with such a tagging mechanism, please share your solution. FOSS only, of course.
- adamdusty 4y agoSounds doable with logseq. Everything is pages rather than tags, but a similar concept. Any block/note can be a part of any number of pages/tags via hashtags or page links.
- not_skynet 4y agoI use [Dendron](https://www.dendron.so https://www.dendron.so) for this. You can add tags or links to any entry, and the targets of those links will have backlinks. There's a nice "daily note" mechanism as well. [Foam](https://github.com/foambubble/foam https://github.com/foambubble/foam) seems very similar but I haven't personally tried it.
- bachmeier 4y agoHere's a session with someone that not only uses Logseq for notes, but even to run R code for statistical analysis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN6tjeQfxRc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN6tjeQfxRc
- galoisscobi 4y agoI have a vi oriented solution. I use neovim+vimwiki(in markdown mode)+telescope[0] and that setup has been working well for me. I don’t do tags per se but telescope should be able to search those. [0] https://github.com/nvim-telescope/telescope.nvim https://github.com/nvim-telescope/telescope.nvim
- cloverr20 4y agoVimwiki does supports tags, and allows multiple tags too. I added a request around 2 years ago to add support for custom delimiters for tags which too was added in the dev branch. I have been a happy user of vimwiki for the last 3-4 years and it works great. Use pandoc for conversion to html, has mathjax support for mathematical expressions along with support for mermaid-js too. For searching the notes i have been using leader-f with fzf, fd and rg.
- ithrow 4y agoSince this is an Emacs article I recommend checking out https://protesilaos.com/emacs/denote https://protesilaos.com/emacs/denote
- leetrout 4y agoIf you enjoy sharing info around knowledge management I made a discord community "Awesome Knowledge Management"[1] and there is also Brett's awesome list for knowledge management[2] for more resources! [1] https://discord.gg/VsqazDhsES https://discord.gg/VsqazDhsES [2] https://github.com/brettkromkamp/awesome-knowledge-management https://github.com/brettkromkamp/awesome-knowledge-managemen...
- mttyng 4y agoOh that’s great! Thank you.
- cpbotha 4y agoThere is also Sébastien Dubois's Personal Knowledge Management slack [1] and the PKMs reddit [2]. [1] https://dsebastien.net/pkm-community https://dsebastien.net/pkm-community [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/PKMS/ https://www.reddit.com/r/PKMS/
- leetrout 4y agoThanks! Joined both
- pen2l 4y agoI came to appreciate and realize the importance of note-taking, finally this year, with org-mode. Folding and easy-labeling features jive well with me (and for when sharing my notes and thoughts with others), babel and linking is pretty cool too. I use orgmode for to-do lists too, but it's a little weak there. I think an effective to-do list management implementation is tightly coupled with calendars... It was such a welcome surprise to me that when I got the M2 Macbook air, Apple calendar synced to my google calendar so easily... now my to-do list/calendar schedule is never too far away from me. The apple watch makes a vibration ding for events in my calendar... as does the iphone, and I can CRUD calendar entries on any of these interfaces. I would have _loved_ to be able to have org-mode as one other place where my calendar/todo list is staring at me in the face, as I now use emacs for everything, but sadly that's iffy. Yes, solutions purportedly exist (e.g. https://github.com/kidd/org-gcal.el9 https://github.com/kidd/org-gcal.el9 ) but none work reliably and require too much finagling. Linked solution doesn't work as Google deprecated the ability to retrieve OAuth 2.0 tokens.
- Joeri 4y agoI think an effective to-do list management implementation is tightly coupled with calendars... That is a fascinating take, because I am of the opposite opinion. I don’t think a todo system that involves scheduling tasks can work well, because it is impossible to figure out ahead of time whether too many or too few tasks are scheduled on a day, and because it is hard to reprioritize scheduled tasks. Instead, imho, the only role dates play in an effective todo system is to label tasks with their due date, but never to schedule a task on its due date (as that is too late) but only to inform the setting of priorities. Instead in my view the critical aspect of an effective todo system is a clear priority of tasks, easily reprioritized, so that working time involves only tackling the flat list of tasks in order of priority until the completion of the working day. For me integration with email instead of calendar is super convenient though, because that is where tasks often stream into my todo list. But I never use unread or flagged status to mark mails as a todo, because email does not afford reprioritizing. I see email as a way station between other people and my todo list.
- abrax3141 4y agoI find all online note taking to be useless because you can’t efficiently and effectively draw on any existing platform with anything like the convenience of p&p. Also, why aren’t you all just using gDocs, like everyone else? Self hosting your personal notes seems like you’re putting your precious brain dumps one drive failure away from disaster.
- dvzk 4y agoGoogle Docs isn’t a backup service. If ransomware or a child (or Google) deletes your synchronized documents, and you don’t have an offline or remote append-only copy, then you didn’t do enough disaster mitigation.
- triyambakam 4y ago> putting your precious brain dumps one drive failure away from disaster. The likelihood of Google locking you out of your account seems higher than your own drive failing.
- abrax3141 4y agoReally? Why would google lock you out of your account unless you’re not who you claim to be? I mean, maybe temporarily, but that’s just more evidence of them being super secure.
- triyambakam 4y agoThere are stories posted here a few times a year about Google disabling someone's account for reasons that Google feels it doesn't need to make clear.
- jrm4 4y agoSyncthing or some other backup system. Using Google for this strikes me as much riskier, as well as just creepier.
- corobo 4y agoMy notes are text files. Markdown to be precise. Theoretically I could add an images folder no problem, though I've not needed to yet. I store them in a git repo and they're also a part of my normal backup process. I'd need my PC and 3 NAS drives (all different vendors/batches) to fail AND Backblaze and GitHub would need to both break before I worry about losing my notes. I doubt I'd be able to lose them if I tried honestly. There'll be a copy on my laptop too now I'm thinking about it. As for why? Because I can build my own systems no bother. I also like to have many ways of adding to my notes such as via phone, via command line, via the share menu in iOS, via web browser (github.dev), via Siri if I really wanted to. Wrapping all this up into a nice working system took the better part of a few hours and I don't have to worry about anything being discontinued. Text files will probably still be usable 100 years from now, which is plenty for what I need. E: Oh yeah there's another copy of the repo on both my phone and my iPad haha. Both autosync using iOS Shortcuts whenever I write a note on that device.
- Test0129 4y agoI prefer pen and paper for most things. For that I'd recommend the supernote [1] with the utmost confidence. It has single-handedly changed my life. My biggest issue was I wanted to go digital (because paper sucks to handle) but my experience with the usual suspects in the tablet market left a lot to be desired. I didn't really need all the bells and whistles. Just a paper replacement. I didn't want to use org mode or anything because after trying these things the retention I got out of it wasn't great. I've been using it for months for basically everything from project ideas to journaling and I've been impressed. [1] https://supernote.com/ https://supernote.com/
- nicbou 4y agoI considered those for a long time and ended up with the latest iPad Mini. Procreate and Notability are so ridiculously compared to the homebrew solutions eink tablets come with. I cam draw stuff and them colour it and Airdrop it to my laptop. My iPad is still confined to paper replacement duty, and it excels.
- Test0129 4y agoYeah I think it comes down to preference. I have an iPad as well and a windows tablet. Both were more than sufficient for note-taking but often times I would forget to plug them in or something and suddenly I had a dead notebook. Plus I almost never used the features that made these worth 1200+ dollars. Seemed like money I just lit on fire for a note taking tablet to be honest. The android tablets were also considered but I degoogled years ago and won't go back. eInk leaves a lot to be desired still but the input latency on the supernote seems comparable to the iPad. I think the tactile experience is superior and for me that sacrifice was worth it. I can go a few weeks without charging my supernote and my iPad requires a charge at least once every couple days. The supernote also seems better set up for bullet Journaling and what not. It definitely is exactly as offered - a notebook replacement. Nothing more and nothing less. I find that charming.
- avg_dev 4y agoI’ve been typing for a long time, but I like taking notes by hand in a notebook. Just works well for me.
- nicbou 4y agoI settled for notability on an iPad Mini. I like having different pens, and an undo function.
- russellbeattie 4y agoI take great notes. I've got hundreds of pages of detailed thoughts and miscellaneous bits of important info in Joplin, synced to all my devices. Then I never look at them again. Same with to-do lists. I often wonder who I'm writing them for, as apparently it's not me.
- oxff 4y ago> 0 mentions for Zotero Question for anyone that consumes a lot of PDFs as I do: what do you use instead? Manual data insertion is an absolute no. So that leaves the Zotero alternatives, but quick search shows 0 mentions for any of them too.
- liketochill 4y agoI’m still using qiqqa instead of zotero or mendeley for searching my pdf library but never got heavily in to the annotations feature - I would copy or screenshot to one note and then add my thoughts
- longrod 4y agoBeen using (and following) Notesnook [0] for over a year now. Truly phenomenal what the devs have done in such a short time. But I don't think any one note taking style or software would apply to 2 people. Everyone's thought process is so different. I tried doing the Zettlekasten but it didn't work out (for me). The worst problem with taking notes is finding them (and God knows all these tools don't make it easier). It's tragic to see that search is often last on the list. What I wish for is search like Google (when it was better than it is now) for my own notes - intelligent, fast, and predictable. [0] https://notesnook.com https://notesnook.com
- rrgok 4y agoI don't take notes at all, I just use Notepad++ as temporary clipboard for big copy/pastes or edit before paste. I'm really curious to see what the notes looks like for these heavy note taker with hundred of pages/notes. I'm also curios to know if it depends on the career, maybe a ML Engineer need more note taking than an electrician who wire cables all day. I'm a software engineer. My thinking process gets better as I develop and implement things. I cannot write notes and then implement. There were times when I wished I took notes/planned before implementing, but nothing to make me regret. It is just more refactor and time consuming to rewrite things. I feel like note taking is overrated and trendy like AI/ML (like DALL-E or Stable Diffusion). I wish someone can mentor me to takes notes and make understand the value of it. And I read a lot of blog post about it.
- type0 4y agoMy philosophy that one should make note taking system as effortless as possibly, once you over-engineer it becomes a chore
- wainstead 4y ago> I'm also curios to know if it depends on the career, maybe a ML Engineer need more note taking than an electrician who wire cables I started keeping a “log” back in 1999 just for work (I too am a software engineer). I note what I worked on and/or what problems I was trying to solve and/or what solutions I found. And some personal stuff too. My inspiration is the idea of the scientist’s lab book where “if you didn’t write it down it didn’t happen.” Countless times — even this past week - it has proven invaluable when I wanted to look up how I solved something before (“how do we generate those CSP headers on the fly?” “How did I mount that Docker container?”) or when no one knows why something was built a certain way (and I noted the date and time a manager made that decision). After a few years I wind up with a few novels worth of entries (by volume) so it’s amazing how writing a little each day adds up. As to format, it started as a .txt file in Emacs but has evolved into a moderately simple org-mode file.
- FinnKuhn 4y agoIf I understand this correctly you could almost describe your note taking as writing a personal documentation
- infinitezest 4y agoFor anyone that likes to use markdown and neovim I've developed this plugin: https://gitlab.com/atomdmac/notes.vim https://gitlab.com/atomdmac/notes.vim
- keeptrying 4y agoI find writing and journaling in a real book much more therapeutic. If you buy an executive notebook and a really nice flowing pen like the G2, it’s a pleasurable practice. Once I have it written down I feel much less stressed. I’ve never felt hat way about online notetsking