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I'm really confused. This looks like someone's private notes on various tech subjects. Kind of like the notes I might keep in my notebook. Very little context,

by iyulaev 13y ago

I'm really confused. This looks like someone's private notes on various tech subjects. Kind of like the notes I might keep in my notebook. Very little context, and hard for me to make anything out of this. Am I approaching this wrong?

stiff 13y ago
I would love to hear something from the author of the wiki about how he uses those notes, because I have mostly the same feelings, it looks like a CS tumblr, a hodgepodge of random concepts from random areas. I took some similar notes in the past (but nowhere near the volume) and I benefited little from them. Today I think I would just go for large sheets of paper and basically prepare cheatsheets for myself from the areas I do some work in at least from time to time. You really have to put in the effort to organize it clearly and have some focus or learning-related note-taking becomes a waste of time in my experience. I do use Emacs with Org mode for notetaking daily though, for throwing together todo lists, organizing links, keep track of learning sessions etc.
- xyzzyrz 13y ago
  I basically use these notes as a reference from time to time, esp. when revisiting an area I haven't worked in for a while - stuff like seeing a summary of what insights/tricks were used for successful collaborative filtering models or reviewing worked-out examples of different concurrency memory models or recalling my comparisons of different Linux monitoring systems. The act of writing stuff down helps me organize thoughts and juxtapose related things as I'm learning them. There's definitely some content I haven't looked up again after that, but I surprise myself with how easily and thoroughly I forget something I once mastered, and how frequently I want to look up things exactly as I wrote them. I rely primarily on search for subsequent lookup. (Similarly, I'm also surprised at how frequently I Google for a question only to find that I had posted it years ago to a mailing list or StackOverflow - makes me feel very glad that I asked!) I guess it depends on what you do, but as a generalist software engineer, I feel there's just too much crap to know, and I could never keep it all in my head.
  - milkmiruku 13y ago
    I love your wiki! I do the same on https://wiki.thingsandstuff.org https://wiki.thingsandstuff.org . Same reasons here, note taking and knowledge outlines. Mainly for Linux, making websites and other tech, but various misc. things I'm also interested in. Fairly organic and often incomplete, but hey, that's a wiki for you. It ties in with a bit of constructivist learning theory also, helping frame things, though I know I need to refactor more to smooth out how much each article covers.
xyzzyrz 13y ago
Hello, author here. It's just a set of reference notes I mainly keep for myself, but it's not really private - I share it as-is in case others can extract value from it (I'm surprised that this made HN front page). I do think it would be neat to make what's there more accessible/useful to a broader set of folks. If you have any ideas on how to improve the content, drop me a pull request! https://github.com/yang/notes https://github.com/yang/notes
- hga 13y ago
  The couple of pages I looked at looked useful, and I can state one thing immediately: Look at the Compilers page, and all the real estate at the top devoted to parsing. Then look at Lisp ^_^. (You did do SICP under Brian Harvey, right?) More seriously, at the very least I expect some of those pages to help me not overlook something important in the future in a project or two I'm thinking about. Those are of course fields where I have a grounding; if someone else looks at a page and feels completely lost, that's probably a signal to learn the foundations, which the notes can help in, as topics to search on, for judging books and other guides for their coverage (again touching on the completeness idea), etc.
  - xyzzyrz 13y ago
    Hah, surprised the Lisp section even exists! Yeah I took SICP with Harvey (though long before starting these notes). This is probably an artifact of me filling in notes opportunistically/as I come across things. But thanks for the comment, glad these are (potentially) helpful!
- keithpeter 13y ago
  Lyx notes failing to compile to PDF under Lyx on Ubuntu 13.04, numerous warnings. But I can read them within Lyx
  - xyzzyrz 13y ago
    Thanks for the heads-up. Just pushed a fix for a pair of double-superscript errors. I can then build under Ubuntu 12.04. Hope this works for you.

by iyulaev 13y ago

stiff 13y ago

I would love to hear something from the author of the wiki about how he uses those notes, because I have mostly the same feelings, it looks like a CS tumblr, a hodgepodge of random concepts from random areas. I took some similar notes in the past (but nowhere near the volume) and I benefited little from them. Today I think I would just go for large sheets of paper and basically prepare cheatsheets for myself from the areas I do some work in at least from time to time. You really have to put in the effort to organize it clearly and have some focus or learning-related note-taking becomes a waste of time in my experience. I do use Emacs with Org mode for notetaking daily though, for throwing together todo lists, organizing links, keep track of learning sessions etc.

xyzzyrz 13y ago
I basically use these notes as a reference from time to time, esp. when revisiting an area I haven't worked in for a while - stuff like seeing a summary of what insights/tricks were used for successful collaborative filtering models or reviewing worked-out examples of different concurrency memory models or recalling my comparisons of different Linux monitoring systems. The act of writing stuff down helps me organize thoughts and juxtapose related things as I'm learning them. There's definitely some content I haven't looked up again after that, but I surprise myself with how easily and thoroughly I forget something I once mastered, and how frequently I want to look up things exactly as I wrote them. I rely primarily on search for subsequent lookup. (Similarly, I'm also surprised at how frequently I Google for a question only to find that I had posted it years ago to a mailing list or StackOverflow - makes me feel very glad that I asked!) I guess it depends on what you do, but as a generalist software engineer, I feel there's just too much crap to know, and I could never keep it all in my head.
- milkmiruku 13y ago
  I love your wiki! I do the same on https://wiki.thingsandstuff.org https://wiki.thingsandstuff.org . Same reasons here, note taking and knowledge outlines. Mainly for Linux, making websites and other tech, but various misc. things I'm also interested in. Fairly organic and often incomplete, but hey, that's a wiki for you. It ties in with a bit of constructivist learning theory also, helping frame things, though I know I need to refactor more to smooth out how much each article covers.

xyzzyrz 13y ago

Hello, author here. It's just a set of reference notes I mainly keep for myself, but it's not really private - I share it as-is in case others can extract value from it (I'm surprised that this made HN front page). I do think it would be neat to make what's there more accessible/useful to a broader set of folks. If you have any ideas on how to improve the content, drop me a pull request! https://github.com/yang/notes https://github.com/yang/notes

hga 13y ago
The couple of pages I looked at looked useful, and I can state one thing immediately: Look at the Compilers page, and all the real estate at the top devoted to parsing. Then look at Lisp ^_^. (You did do SICP under Brian Harvey, right?) More seriously, at the very least I expect some of those pages to help me not overlook something important in the future in a project or two I'm thinking about. Those are of course fields where I have a grounding; if someone else looks at a page and feels completely lost, that's probably a signal to learn the foundations, which the notes can help in, as topics to search on, for judging books and other guides for their coverage (again touching on the completeness idea), etc.
- xyzzyrz 13y ago
  Hah, surprised the Lisp section even exists! Yeah I took SICP with Harvey (though long before starting these notes). This is probably an artifact of me filling in notes opportunistically/as I come across things. But thanks for the comment, glad these are (potentially) helpful!
keithpeter 13y ago
Lyx notes failing to compile to PDF under Lyx on Ubuntu 13.04, numerous warnings. But I can read them within Lyx
- xyzzyrz 13y ago
  Thanks for the heads-up. Just pushed a fix for a pair of double-superscript errors. I can then build under Ubuntu 12.04. Hope this works for you.