[HN Gopher] Notes apps are where ideas go to die, and that's good
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Notes apps are where ideas go to die, and that's good
Author : maguay
Score : 275 points
Date : 2022-02-15 09:04 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (reproof.app)
(TXT) w3m dump (reproof.app)
| em-bee wrote:
| i write stuff down so i can stop memorizing it. sometimes i get
| back to that, sometimes i don't. it doesn't matter. if it is
| important i will remember it, or remember that i wrote a note
| about it (and then hopefully find that note). if it is not
| important then it will stay there left ignored.
|
| the problem is i seem to treat browsertabs the same way. i open
| tabs intending to look at them later. then forget about them, and
| so they accumulate. i could close all the tabs, but some actually
| are important. and so i have to go through them, and clean them
| out once in a while.
| vidarh wrote:
| For open browser tabs, have a look at Onetab (browser
| extension). It'll close the tabs but keep them in a list
| however long you want. It lets you reopen things from the list
| with a click and optionally remove the ones you reopen from the
| list. In practice I find I very rarely go back to one of them,
| but for the rare occasions I do it matters, and knowing the
| urls are all preserved makes me much more likely to actually
| click that button now and again.
| prmph wrote:
| Moving tabs into history doesn't address why people are
| keeping tabs pen. The presence of the tab reminds you of
| something. If you move it into history, you have to go
| looking for it, which only works if you remember that you
| saved such a tab in the first place.
| Isthatablackgsd wrote:
| As a person with ADHD, this is exactly why I leave some
| tabs alone to remind me to look into it. I have a structure
| that helps to manage my process.
|
| 1. Tabs - Current 2. Tab Pins - For tabs that are living in
| my browser for more than a week or two. 3. Session Manager
| - I used it as a semi-archival bookmarking and used it for
| categorizing my tabs. This stage is where I decides that I
| need a new browser window, so I put all of my saved tabs in
| there and will review them in the future. After I review
| them, I moves the tab to the last stage. 4. Browser
| Bookmark - the final stage, I only use this for permanent
| archive. Bookmarks are regularly backup and sometimes
| merged from other browser bookmark through NirSoft tools.
| em-bee wrote:
| hmm, the tab management page of one tab is interesting, but
| it is only available if i move tabs into onetab. i'd like the
| ability to manage tabs like that, assign them to groups, move
| them to windows, etc while all the tabs are open. i remember
| the original firefox container feature had something like
| that.
| vidarh wrote:
| That does sound useful, yes. Chrome bookmarks at least can
| get you part-way there by letting you bookmarks all tabs in
| a window (right-click on the title bar) or letting you open
| an entire bookmarks folders contents as tabs, but it's not
| quite there.
| sk0g wrote:
| Not to sound obtuse, but that just sounds like browser
| history at that point. What sets it apart, aside from only
| storing the "fatal pages" - the pages that tabs were killed
| at?
| rhizome wrote:
| What browser do you use where history is at all usable for
| finding any specific thing? Combing through 150 or 500 by-
| domain YouTube entries with no other metadata? That thing
| that was a week or three ago on, uh, some domain with
| --ohhh look-- multiple subdomains? Hope you remember some
| words from the page title?
|
| Google and Mozilla have both completely shit on the entire
| idea of personal browsing continuity. Just close all your
| tabs at night, then go to the home page they provide and
| start from scratch every morning and nobody gets hurt.
| orlp wrote:
| The browser history has been destroyed in my experience. No
| one seems to care for its usability. One-page applications,
| pushState/replaceState, non-descript title pages and a
| horrible UI for it in the browsers, it goes on.
| alan-hn wrote:
| I actually use my browser history, but I forget _how
| much_ utility I actually get out of it until I clear it
| :S
| vidarh wrote:
| What sets it apart _is_ only storing the "fatal pages".
| That's the entire point.
|
| Those of us who keep accumulating tabs often do so as a "I
| think I care about this in the near future" halfway
| bookmark. I don't know about you, but my browser history
| for just this morning (it's noon here) is already so
| extensive that it's worthless for that purpose. When I do
| need to find something with Onetab, it's maybe 1% of the
| size of my browser history or less.
|
| EDIT: What's more is that when I reopen, it disappears from
| the list, whittling down what's left over until I can
| confidently press "delete all" for a given activation (it
| groups the tabs by which were open when you pressed it; but
| you can also drag and drop the "bookmarks" from one list to
| another)
| SloopJon wrote:
| This pretty much exactly describes my (ab)usage of tabs.
| I had a tab open with the HN submission for the death of
| Google Reader for two years, because there were so many
| interesting replacement suggestions. I finally admitted
| that Google had ruined RSS for me, and closed the tab.
|
| Thank you for the OneTab elevator pitch. I'll give it a
| try.
| senectus1 wrote:
| yup I whole heartedly agree with this extension. I use it all
| the time.
| klodolph wrote:
| I'm fascinated by browser tab hoarding...
|
| I recently started using a bookmarking app (one of the many, so
| many) because there were often one or two lingering tabs that I
| didn't want to close, and it was interfering with the way I
| normally clean up my screen. Normally, I close the entire
| browser and start fresh two or three times a day, during the
| workday. At night I turn the computer off, and start with a
| blank desktop the next morning.
| BeefWellington wrote:
| I have started using research link collection tools (in my case
| Zotero) specifically to address this same thing.
| 2wrist wrote:
| I used to do the same and that turned in to turning tabs in to
| bookmarks, then i ended up with soooo many bookmarks.. then I
| discovered pocket. But within a year I had so many unread
| items, they even informed I was in the top 3% of users... Fuck.
| deckard1 wrote:
| > then i ended up with soooo many bookmarks
|
| yep. I've been thinking about this problem for some time now.
| With Google, and especially Slack, what I've discovered is
| _resurfacing_ is more important than _organization_. You have
| some tiny thread of memory than you want to input into a
| system and have that system bring back the webpages and
| context. This is what Slack gets right.
|
| We have Slack, we have Google, but we do not have anything
| that is _personal_. A personal search engine. Something like
| macOS Spotlight, but more contextual. In Slack you can find
| individual messages which match a pattern, but you can also
| expand to see the entire context of that message with date
| and time. The bookmarks in Chrome do not even tell you the
| date /time you added them. That's such a basic thing that is
| missing. The ability to create a "view" of your bookmarks
| organized chronologically would be another useful tool. In
| addition: what other sites were you looking at around that
| time? What city were you in? What was the weather in that
| city at that time? Sounds silly, but this sort of info can
| jog your memory.
|
| The browser extends into the global but we have not yet
| discovered that the browser should extend the other way, into
| the personal. On one side we should have Chrome, on the other
| end should be Joplin or Obsidian.
| MasterScrat wrote:
| I do the same, but then I take an iPad with me for long
| plane/boat trips with all the articles saved for offline
| reading.
|
| Between the time spent in waiting rooms and actual travel
| time you can actually go through quite a lot of material (of
| course, pandemic didn't help with this strategy).
| malshe wrote:
| I am looking for an iPad app to read the articles offline
| as I'm traveling again now. Do you mind sharing what app
| you use for this?
| MasterScrat wrote:
| I use Pocket!
|
| https://help.getpocket.com/article/1136-using-pocket-
| offline
| malshe wrote:
| Thanks
| alan-hn wrote:
| Maybe Pocket should have a leaderboard
| BeefWellington wrote:
| And achievements.
|
| This could be a hilarious product idea: adding a
| leaderboard and achievements to any arbitrary site. I'm
| sure someone has already done it.
| post-it wrote:
| In a slightly better timeline, there's an "everything can
| have a leaderboard" craze instead of an "everything can
| be crypto" craze.
| MezzoDelCammin wrote:
| ideally with links to HN profiles ;-)
| 2wrist wrote:
| hahaha that would be scary...
| merely-unlikely wrote:
| I save articles that look interesting but aren't critical to
| Pocket. I have a daily script that clears anything more than
| 2 weeks old. Either stuff gets read or it gets forgotten.
|
| I do something similar with reminders - I schedule everything
| instead of keeping lists. That way I get reminded in a more
| digestible fashion and often by the time the reminder comes
| up, it's no longer relevant anyway. Makes clearing the list
| more organic and less cumbersome.
| em-bee wrote:
| that's why i don't just bookmark everything. it also takes
| more effort to open a bookmark than to switch to a tab.
| instead i try to use bookmarks for the really important
| things.
| planb wrote:
| I never understood how people can use browser tabs this way. If
| open tabs represent your backlog of stuff to come back to
| later, what represents your "current working set"? How can you
| concentrate on one task when there's so much other stuff open?
|
| If I don't need something right now, it is stored in a read it
| later service (blog post, news articles) or a bookmark service
| (software projects, company web pages, etc).
| rhizome wrote:
| I don't run my brain according to computer science
| principles, but generally the "current working set" for me
| are the tabs furthest to the right of a browser window's tab
| bar.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > computer science principles
|
| Hum... Try process engineering principles. They have no
| relation to computer science, but with the area of
| knowledge that focus on organizing work.
| vidarh wrote:
| My working set is a workspace. I send browser windows to
| separate workspaces if I context-switch apart from a few
| basics like e-mail etc. which has a workspace to itself.
|
| I may start adding things to my "scratch" workspace, and then
| if I realise this is something that's turning into more than
| just visiting a single page I'll tear of the tab and send it
| somewhere.
|
| Many of those workspaces can stay up for weeks or months.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| I use the Tree Style Tab add-on for Firefox. The working set
| can be one nested tree, like a directory in a file system. Or
| it can be a window, while I also have other windows with many
| tabs. I'm not well-organized though, just saying how it is.
| alan-hn wrote:
| For me its actually the browser window itself that represents
| a working set. I put all related tabs into their own windows
| and put the windows I'm not using on my supplemental monitor
| in the background so they're out of the way.
|
| Otherwise I start drowning in browser windows _and_ tabs
| Joeri wrote:
| Anything that really matters will pass by you multiple times in
| different ways. So, while some of those tabs that collect
| during the day no doubt have value, arguably none of them are
| worth keeping.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Chrome has a "bookmark all open tabs" feature, I do this to
| clear everything out once in a while, safe in the knowledge I'm
| still hoarding the data safely _somewhere_.
| jhatemyjob wrote:
| remember, browser history is a thing
| gexla wrote:
| These articles are as bad as the notes people they are bagging
| on.
|
| The trouble is that people try to fit the kitchen sink into the
| note app and that doesn't work. As a programmer, I have specific
| workflows for each note that I take.
|
| Example. I want to try stand-up one day. Each snippet that I
| think of as a joke, I write down in a note. All snippets go into
| the same space. Sometimes I think of a snippet which could extend
| an existing bit (a joke which is larger than a one liner.) Once
| this page got to a certain length, I didn't even have to think
| about new snippets anymore. All I would have to do is open this
| page and they would jump out at me.
|
| One approach is that if I feel like I got nothing, I can simply
| scan the list and find something which hits me. Like, I'll see a
| line and immediately think of something which could extend it. Or
| I'll see multiple lines which hit me and I can come up with
| something which mixes the two together. This may start a new
| branch of a joke.
|
| Apply this to every reason I might add a note. Yes, I have what's
| basically a trash bin where notes go to die. But anything else is
| sort of like these jokes, they go into a place where I have a
| specific way to use them. Within my notes app, I have a system of
| navigation and discovery, which is basically like a website where
| you follow links and use metadata to place things in certain
| spots (unless you're adding to an existing note.) I use a
| template which fills in most of what I need and then the
| remaining is a quick add. I can then query that metadata as if
| it's a real DB.
|
| I use Obsidian for this. I used Roam at one point, but it didn't
| have a way to hide things which weren't in my navigation path.
| Everything leaks, because, NETWORK! Nah, I look at it is like
| building spreadsheets. Each spreadsheet has a certain usage. I
| don't cram all the data into one spreadsheet. I use multiple
| spreadsheets. Then the app I use (Obsidian) has the above
| mentioned tools for nice navigation.
| Syntonicles wrote:
| I've been meaning to set up Roam since my org folder is getting
| unmanageable.
|
| Before Emacs I abused a Tomboy "wiki" style journal - even
| there I could set up several Notebooks as entry points. Every
| time I typed a word that happened to be a title it would link.
|
| Initially this was useful for discovering links between
| subjects but without a naming convention it became
| overwhelming.
|
| Is that what you mean by leaking? Can you briefly explain these
| issue and how Obsidian solves it?
| gexla wrote:
| By leaking, I mean how much of other content I see when I'm
| using the app for some purpose where that content isn't
| important.
|
| It has been a while since I used Roam, so maybe these points
| have significantly improved. But the first thing I would see
| when I logged into Roam was the most recent page. I don't
| care about these things, Obsidian with a plugin allows me to
| create a a home page from an MD file which then has links to
| whatever else I want.
|
| Roam also pushed things like a daily journal and backlinks in
| the sidebar. Most of the time, I don't want to see backlinks
| and I don't use the daily journal. I only want to see exactly
| what I have set the thing to show, anything else is a
| distraction. With Obsidian, all of this is so much more
| configurable, and easy to do so.
|
| I think a lot of the thinking overhead issues people have
| when they think "where do I put this" is from seeing too much
| stuff which isn't important to what they are working on.
| truetraveller wrote:
| Do you use multiple vaults in Obsidian? Or just one vault with
| many folders/pages?
| gexla wrote:
| I hate titles, hate naming files, hate moving files around in
| folders.
|
| Sure, much of these are abstract things which could end up
| with you doing the same stuff but a different way. But I find
| that changing a path in front-matter is less painful than
| moving a file. And I can put a thing in multiple paths.
|
| I use the Obsidian Zettel note to automatically name the file
| and I shove them all into the same directory. I then use the
| Dataview plugin to run queries for what I need.
|
| I have MD files strictly for navigation, as if they are part
| of a static site layer. These files contain the links to go
| further into the navigation. It's basically all index files.
|
| I keep everything together in the same vault, because so far
| I don't see a need to do any different. I just want to be
| able to navigate through the thing so that I'm not seeing a
| bunch of unrelated junk to distract me.
|
| I do use directories to separate very different types. Like
| PDF's and Epubs go into one directory. Images go into another
| directory. MD files go into another directory. I don't know
| that I even need to do this, but I haven't run into a
| problem.
| yumiris wrote:
| I'm exactly in the same boat as you regarding both the
| mentality and approach.
|
| Just a curious question about the index notes: don't you
| feel they're cluttering up the graph and result in
| superficial relationships between the notes?
|
| In my personal case: I used to create index notes to make
| navigation easier, but then I've found myself wondering
| "where should this note be indexed?" and also not getting
| much value out of the relationship graph.
|
| Once I've discarded the index notes, the relationships
| became much more organic and authentic. Surprisingly,
| finding notes hasn't become more difficult after
| eliminating the index notes -- queries and lists are a
| beautiful thing.
|
| What are your thoughts on this? Do you encounter any
| challenges with indexing?
| gexla wrote:
| This depends on which tool you're using. I use Obsidian,
| which has options for creating indexes without polluting
| the graph view. My indexes are produced from queries
| which don't create actual links which are picked up by
| the graph.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Thanks for sharing; I'm also an ex-Roam, daily Obsidian user,
| with similar (or at least overlapping) reasons for switching to
| obsdmd, and have a comparable workflow.
| gexla wrote:
| I love Roam, it would be on a short list of things to take
| with me to the after life. It's just that at the end of the
| day, all I really wanted was something to manage MD files and
| run queries on the key-value data in the front-matter.
| dragonelite wrote:
| I jumped on the emacs org-roam bandwagon so far so good.
| dv35z wrote:
| About to jump onto the wagon. Zero emacs experience. Hoping to
| achieve emacs -> org-mode, org-roam, automatically publish as a
| Hugo site as a knowledge base. Any essential, tips, advice or
| "I wish I had known earlier", lay it on me. This looks to be a
| trek.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Go through the emacs tutorial (built-in) to learn how to
| navigate buffers and the system correctly. Learn
| incrementally. When you start with org-mode, start by
| treating it as a fancy outliner. Pick one or two new features
| to integrate into your toolkit every couple of weeks (maybe
| more or more often, everyone's pace is different) to use.
| Abuse the hell out of them to make it muscle memory, and then
| scale back to a more reasonable use.
|
| Install and use helm (others may suggest something different,
| but I like it). With it set up, when you start typing M-x and
| typing out a name, it will show you all the current possible
| matches and their keyboard shortcuts. Makes discovery _much_
| easier than without. It can be hooked into other parts of the
| system as well, but that 's my #1 reason to recommend it to a
| new emacs user. Emacs discovery is pretty good, but this
| makes it even better.
|
| Use the "apropos" commands and the built-in help
| capabilities. C-h <various things> will tell you all about
| emacs, in general, and your current configuration. C-h b, for
| instance, tells you all the current key bindings (which can
| be different depending on the currently active modes).
|
| Use daemon mode and emacsclient. The key thing here, if you
| close all your open windows your emacs session doesn't
| terminate. You can reopen it and all your buffers will be
| accessible. You can force kill it (M-x server-force-delete)
| and restart the daemon later if you get into a weird state
| (possible early on when playing with your configuration).
|
| Read the manuals. The emacs manual and org-mode manual (I
| don't use org-roam so can't comment on it) are fantastic.
| Just browse through them, see if a table of contents item
| catches your attention, go to that section and read it. See
| if you can apply it, otherwise "forget" it and maybe later
| you'll think, "I want to do X, oh, wait, I think I saw that
| in the manual...".
|
| You learn it like any other thing in life. You probably
| didn't learn to use your OS of choice all in one go. You
| maybe started with a graphical interface or the shell.
| Learned a few key things, and only later learned more options
| that you were able to use to enhance your experience. "Oh,
| C-r lets me search backward through my shell history. That's
| cool, I'll use that a lot." But you probably didn't know it
| when you started learning (or forgot because you were
| inundated with information).
| dragonelite wrote:
| I followed the system crafters Emacs from scratch series to
| get some coding going, just to get a feel for emacs with
| evil(vim emulation). This weekend I started writing some
| notes in ORG and ORG-ROAM. But i was already used using links
| etc because i used obsidian note taking.
|
| Im not that comfortable yet to start customising my
| keybindings or rewrite my init/config file to really
| personalise emacs.
|
| System crafters playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?li
| st=PLEoMzSkcN8oPH1au7H6B7...
| gjvc wrote:
| Never underestimate the creative power of shredding your old
| notebooks. Makes space (both physically and mentally) for new
| ideas.
| playpause wrote:
| Interesting, can you expand on how this creates mental space
| for new ideas?
| barrenko wrote:
| Yup, love doing this, one of the best feelings in the world.
|
| Recommend actual fire.
| gjvc wrote:
| or compost
| polote wrote:
| What's funny with people like OP is that they forget that most
| people never take notes and are still able to achieve as much as
| people who take notes. It is like developers who use vim, they
| deliver as much as people who use VS code.
|
| But instead of saying 'yeah whatever' they try to prove that
| their way is the right way
| aprescott wrote:
| I'm struggling to tie your comment to what the author is
| getting at. The advice to write thoughts down so you can stop
| thinking about them isn't offered as a way to achieve more
| efficient performance, it's to let yourself stop worrying.
| ttiurani wrote:
| This is quite extreme: you absolutely can and will lose amazing
| ideas unless you can find them later written down. This comes up
| in interviews with great creative people all the time.
|
| Just listen to David Lynch:
|
| "I write [ideas] down so I don't commit suicide later having
| forgotten the idea. I've forgotten probably two or three major
| ideas, and it'll make you sick, just horrible. Write the idea
| down. You'll say: I'll never forget this idea. Ah-uh: you can
| forget them."
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHhf76z6BkM&t=197s
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Personally, when I am in idea mode I'm usually incapable of
| detailed problem solving, and when I'm in details mode I'm
| incapable of idea generation. It takes many minutes to change
| modes and on some days I simply can not change.
|
| So, if I don't write notes, I can't do anything complex. Some
| 20% of the ideas turn out to be useless, and _must_ be
| discarded, otherwise they add up, but most of them, buy a large
| margin are stuff that should be executed.
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| Sometimes I can come up with great ideas while I'm not
| working on anything and therefore I'm not equipped to
| properly store them or efficiently vet them. I've been
| spending my spare time on improving my note taking process
| and organization.
|
| Knowledge management feels like the western frontier of tech
| in some ways. Lots of wins can be had if you get it right and
| it's often up to the note taker. Tools alone can't solve the
| problem for most, at least not yet. Hasn't stopped many from
| trying though.
| technofiend wrote:
| Not that I can claim David-Lynch levels of ideas, but I've
| found more than a keyword or phrase is needed to restore the
| mental state I was in or chain of reasoning I had when the idea
| came to me. You really need to save context in addition to the
| idea itself.
| Retric wrote:
| Seeming like a good idea is easy, actually being a good idea is
| much harder.
| hannasanarion wrote:
| The first step to discovering whether an idea that seems good
| is actually good is to review it at another date, which
| necessitates writing it down.
| Retric wrote:
| I was writing them down for a while until I realized the
| ones I forgot about tended to have obvious flaws almost
| like my subconscious was filtering things.
| angusiasty wrote:
| It actually does :)
| throw10920 wrote:
| Most of my ideas that I've almost-forgot (passed from
| easy remembrance, only regained with much mental agony)
| and forgot-but-wrote-down don't have obvious flaws in
| them. Maybe you have a good mental filter, but for many
| of us we just have bad memory.
| Psyladine wrote:
| It doesn't need to be a good idea. It needs to be the next
| step in the branch; consider being in a conversation when
| some interruption happens. Interruption resolves, you say
| "and now back to...what was I saying?" In that moment, the
| value or proposition might have only been an argument or
| segue towards a broader point, or a sub-digression, but
| without that connective node, the entire pattern is lost.
|
| You could counter with "then it wasn't a good idea if you
| didn't remember it" but it's the structure of how we think
| rather than the quality of the outputs. Why do we retrace our
| steps when we misplace something? What does that have to do
| with anything? It's the scaffolding structure around which we
| build a mental model. It's so you don't run outside and start
| looking under rocks. If you believe you wouldn't do that, you
| have to consider then _why_ , and that is innately tied to
| the pattern-finding structure of our brain.
|
| Creatives may cling to a lost node as the Rosetta stone,
| perhaps assigning more weight than is qualified, but then you
| won't actually _know_ unless you find and explore that branch
| of thought. Its value lies in its unquantifiability.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Okay, but an idea can never make it from _seeming to be_ to
| _actually being_ a good idea unless you remember it for a
| sufficiently long duration.
| Fnoord wrote:
| Back in the 90s, that feeling when Netscape or Windows used to
| crash. First, a feeling of utter sadness, having lost whatever
| work was open (imagine writing a Word document for school and
| hours lost, that's when you learn to save regularly). Then the
| feeling of relief: ah, at least I gotta start over. But it
| keeps gnawing. What did I miss? Back then, there was no term
| for it (or it wasn't popularized), now there is: FOMO.
|
| With regards to your quote, writing down helps the brain
| memorizing. It turns out typing it out doesn't help as much. In
| that sense, a notes app isn't akin to writing a note, the
| former isn't handwriting and the latter isn't digitized with
| all the advantages (and disadvantages!) attached. Its why I
| bought a reMarkable 2 for my mother (before they went all
| _cloudy_ ). She writes down a lot. It became a mess of notes,
| pure chaos. A digital notebook is the best of both worlds.
| BeefWellington wrote:
| There was an old adventure game mantra that I find has served
| me well professionally: "Save Early, Save Often."
| Fnoord wrote:
| Sure, that was a lesson I learned from such (though some
| software did/does not allow to save). Even auto saved
| 'lagged' behind back then. Even 5 minutes can be a big
| difference if you made changes but can't memorize all of
| them. Nowadays, even fast software such as Sublime Text
| autosaves somewhere in homedir.
| klodolph wrote:
| Back in the 1990s, on old Macs, when Netscape crashed, it
| crashed with a "type 11" error which brought down the whole
| system. (I remember Word had autosave... I don't know when it
| first appeared, though.)
| analog31 wrote:
| Worse, a single mac could take down all the Macs on the
| network. At one point I reproducibly traced it to a font.
| post-it wrote:
| People nostalge over the the breath of fresh air that was
| Windows XP, but OS X was an equally incredible
| improvement.
| analog31 wrote:
| Indeed, I missed out on osx, but it was a much needed
| shot in the arm for Apple. System 7 was at the end of the
| road
| silon42 wrote:
| I have the same feeling now... Firefox doesn't crash anymore,
| even with 1000+ (unloaded) tabs... but I will often found
| that the page (or a youtube video) is now gone/removed after
| months or even years.
|
| I suspect it still loses data and maybe corrupts profile if
| there is a disk full.
| jolmg wrote:
| > I suspect it still loses data
|
| It deletes history entries once they're too old, and it
| also only keeps the last timestamp of when a URL was
| visited, so you can't know how often you visit a URL.
|
| https://superuser.com/questions/1054833/does-mozilla-
| firefox...
| twomoonsbysurf wrote:
| toss1 wrote:
| Yup.
|
| I'm often doing this with my wife when she cooks - trying to
| write it down so we can recreate it when something turns out
| great; and it often does and we haven't captured it. But I
| always remember the story I read about a guy whose side gig was
| inventing a colored solution for kids to use blowing huge
| bubbles (harder than you think - it's got to be colored enough
| to see, but become transparent and nonstaining or their moms
| will instantly kill the product). Several years in, he found a
| perfect solution - then discovered the next day he hadn't
| written it down and couldn't recreaate it. It took him several
| more years to find one that worked and successfully bring it to
| market.
|
| So, sure, maybe most of what goes in the notebooks is cruft,
| but the process is key. And the author DOES have an excellent
| point that the search & discovery capabilities of your system
| are key.
| j45 wrote:
| So true.
|
| The GTD methedology can work well to park ideas in a
| Someday/maybe pile.
|
| There are plenty of to-do/task managers which can accept tasks
| via email, and having a sudden idea can be as easy as sending
| that email address a quick note.
| post-it wrote:
| > I've forgotten probably two or three major ideas, and it'll
| make you sick, just horrible.
|
| I wish I could remember ideas well enough to even remember that
| I've forgotten them. When an idea of mine disappears, it's gone
| without a trace. I think I need to sleep better.
| [deleted]
| kiba wrote:
| A primary feature of my note app resurface 10 random notes I
| made. I don't write them to forget, and I often use it to revise
| and expand upon my original notes, or more often these days:
| Linking them up and creating my own internal wiki.
| quanticle wrote:
| _Flipping through your old notes suddenly "feels like sifting
| through stale garbage," as Dan Shipper found, disillusioned after
| building a galaxy of notes in Roam Research._
|
| I don't have that experience with my notes at all. I regularly
| refer to old notes. A sample of the queries my notebook (really a
| folder full of text files) has answered:
|
| - How did I sort those things in bash?
|
| - What were the setup steps for that software?
|
| - Where did I get this fact that I'm quoting?
|
| - I have a bad impression of this movie, why is that?
|
| - Why did I choose to architect this code this way; what pitfalls
| was I avoiding?
|
| - What was that brand of tea that I like?
|
| - What voltage RAM does that old laptop use?
|
| Sure, I can reconstruct all of this information with a
| combination of Google, experimentation, and physical examination
| of the relevant items. But it takes time. Having this information
| compiled in an easily grep-able format is like having information
| in RAM, versus having to fetch it from the hard drive.
| Cypher wrote:
| a note app is like a toy box
| genewitch wrote:
| Inb4 notebooks tambien
|
| It's okay to waste ideas.
| kpt wrote:
| Bookmarked this for reading again in 2 weeks, thank you for
| sharing this was very relatable.
| tartoran wrote:
| It will come back on HN again.
| hashtones wrote:
| Not to mention, it's not so much because we forget them, but by
| writing them down they can be later cued and synchronized to
| other ideas for fruitful promulgation.
| ridewinter wrote:
| It's the same mechanism as Morning Pages - write exactly 3 pages
| right when you wake up, whatever is on your mind. It's
| tremendously helpful to move you past whatever you're stuck on in
| life.
|
| You can write "I don't want to be writing this" over and over if
| you like. But it turns out that you usually have good things to
| say.
| jeffrogers wrote:
| Also worth noting that almost no effort has been made by the
| folks making note taking apps to help people make better use of
| their entries. Sure, they've implemented things like gallery
| views, filters, and tagging, but these are all passive and
| require the user to seek out the information. Why not active
| features like an API that makes code snippets available in my
| IDE, a feature that surfaces recipe recommendations from my
| collection, or how about automatically organizing my receipts by
| month and offering an expense summary report? There are a ton of
| features that could be made to help people better access and use
| the notes they make.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| > Then you try to relocate a note, only to find > that your
| favorite app's search doesn't seem > to be as good as you thought
| it was at first. > Now we don't feel safe forgetting anymore
|
| I guess I'm lucky that this rarely happens. Search works great,
| and is instant.
|
| I kept waiting for deeper insight, like a system of
| prioritzation, or culling tricks. But the article seemed to just
| repeat itself: writing things down frees our brain, and
| forgetting is ok. We feel value in doing so, ok.
| tmaly wrote:
| I have lost many good notes. Came across this book How to take
| smart notes last year.
|
| Now I am working on making a digital slip-box
| Jernik wrote:
| It looks like the poster is the author here, so hopefully he sees
| this feedback. Please, please, please pick a better contrast
| ratio for your text. Grey on slightly-lighter-grey is a terrible
| color combination for reading. I read the first paragraph and
| gave up on it because it wasn't worth the eye strain.
| jb1991 wrote:
| This author's ideas are hardly original, Stephen King has said
| for a long time that keeping notes is a great way for a bad idea
| to stick around.
|
| relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30098219
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| What human ideas are truly original?
| Litost wrote:
| Your comment and a comment below about "frequently
| reorganizing" notes is not an anti-pattern reminded me of
| this.
|
| "All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands
| of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them
| over again honestly, till they take root in our personal
| experience."
|
| - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
|
| Amusingly, also tying in with what someone above said about
| starting a compost heap, that quote has stuck with me after
| reading "Just Enough is Plenty" by Samuel Alexander [1] (an
| introduction to Henry Thoreau's economic ideas) whose first
| preface is entitled "Compost Capitalism".
|
| [1] Available as a post-consumerist 'pay what you want basis'
| here - https://simplicitycollective.com/just-enough-is-
| plenty-thore...
| parksy wrote:
| "What has been will be again, what has been done will be
| done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there
| anything of which one can say, 'Look! This is something
| new'? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our
| time."
|
| I mean ~2000+ years ago people understood this. Day to day
| relatable ideas generally come to anyone involved in the
| cutting edge of any era of humanity, and such ideas will
| generally resonate with one's contemporaries who are likely
| thinking similar things. Billions of us can't really claim
| to have found something new. We didn't invent countability,
| or factoring, or primes.
|
| But it's also a bit of a cynical lie that may comfort some
| of us, that being ordinary is okay, because ordinary is
| normal. Over the millennia we managed to turn philosophy
| into science, mathematics into machines, and miniaturise
| them into our hands, generate energy and resources
| unthinkable to our ancestors, and create networks of
| algorithms complex enough we offload a significant portion
| of day to day thinking and planning. These are new things.
|
| Is it true wisdom? Define true wisdom - my understanding is
| there is no objectivity in such matters. There is only the
| balance and friction between forces of imagination wrought
| out by human minds and hands, always building on knowledge
| that came before. Take away all knowledge, and the cycle
| will continue, it's just what people do. We think, we
| imagine, we create.
|
| I ramble but it probably feels day to day like nothing is
| ever new, and everything is always being recycled, but it's
| in this compost heap that new ideas ferment and take root,
| so that is an analogy I'll be adopting henceforth (not in
| the least as it makes me less disappointed in my own
| unpursued ideas).
| surrTurr wrote:
| For me, it's the process of taking notes that provides value. The
| notes are mere byproducts.
| screwgoth wrote:
| Love it. Write ideas to forget 'em. Reminded me of a blog I wrote
| a few years ago: https://medium.com/hackernoon/the-life-cycle-of-
| a-to-do-list...
| [deleted]
| Semiapies wrote:
| Just to get it out of the way: 300 weight #6b7280 on white.
| Someone hates eyes.
|
| As for the content...meh. The file(s) or book(s) you put your
| ideas in are like compost piles. You throw things in them, and
| every once in a while you get out the pitchfork and turn them
| over. You see if some half-baked concept has become fertilizer
| for your current thoughts. You admire how some old brainstorm has
| rotted down to goo after you've learned more on a subject. You
| fish out some weirdly undecayed thing and go, "Oh, I was
| _looking_ for that. "
| dsr_ wrote:
| Reader mode: don't use browsers without it.
| Semiapies wrote:
| Reader mode is no excuse for bad design.
| lycopodiopsida wrote:
| I think that author has a point - most of the time I also save
| pages just to have it saved, and never look at it. But, on the
| other side, if you need something again, you need it badly in my
| experience.
|
| DevonThink solved this problem for me years ago. I just pull in
| all the documents/pdf/web pages/text, let it auto-categorize them
| && forget. The only difference is that it has quit powerful and
| fast search, so that I can find them again in seconds. Bookmarks
| never worked for me and I don't have time and dedication for
| Zettelkasten-like systems.
| brnt wrote:
| Most notes I take I never read again. That's OK, that's what
| archives are for. Same with mail, bills, etc. It's still useful
| to collect them, and in case of notes write them.
|
| Sometimes I chuck out a whole bunch of Todos just to free my mind
| and it never turned into regret. I think that is why all these
| new note taking tools and ideas are not that important; the most
| important bit in note taking is taking the damn note.
| inferense wrote:
| some of them get to live another day if their context is
| executable and searchable. Works well in https://acreom.com
| kerrsclyde wrote:
| I've conditioned myself to think if something is worth saving
| then it is worth spending time to give it a meaningful title, tag
| it and put it in the right notebook. Without these added details
| I agree it is pointless.
| ds89 wrote:
| This is exactly what I love about Git. I don't have to worry
| about throwing away code and can go back in history whenever I
| want to (even though I rarely need to).
| cillian64 wrote:
| Yep, it's very freeing being able to just delete things even if
| you think you might need them later. I just recently
| resurrected a test which was deleted 6 months ago because it
| wasn't useful at the time but is now. Version control also
| saves a lot of commented-out code sitting around - delete it,
| and if something needs doing to it then make a ticket/task.
| thesaintlives wrote:
| Notes apps? Never found a good one that really worked for me.
| Rhodia notebooks - simple, effective and permanent. I write stuff
| down to remember, the ideas never die...
| civilized wrote:
| I just buy the $0.89 notebooks from the grocery store to be
| honest. And my kids have scribbled over half the pages.
| nickwarren wrote:
| I get what the author is saying, but I write down ideas to
| delegate to myself for later exploration. I find search is often
| good enough to get to what I'm looking for within a couple of
| queries, and a general read through of the collection makes for a
| great diving board when it comes to getting started on
| brainstorming
| vmoore wrote:
| Erm, no, I execute on all my bookmarks and put them to use.
| Because I said I would. I don't use an app for bookmarking, just
| a massive 10000+ list of URLs in a boring text file that I
| revisit constantly to GTD. As for exobrains, yeah I'm an
| externalist[0] through and through, and not ashamed of that. For
| journaling and note-taking I use Standard Notes.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externalism
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Notes are what let me carry transient thoughts from places where
| I can't execute them to places where I can. My memory isn't that
| good, so it's a sort of Sci-Fi augmentation!
| dodgerdan wrote:
| Joplin has changed my life. I now keep notes on everything and
| frequently reorganize and edit them.
|
| I've no idea what the author is suggesting as an alternative, not
| making notes?
| playpause wrote:
| If you actually get some value from re-reading and reorganising
| your old notes, that's great. It sounds like you don't have the
| problem the author is addressing. But many people write tons of
| notes and save them but almost never look at them again, and
| subsequently worry they're wasting time writing and saving all
| these notes. This author is saying this worrying is misplaced,
| it's not a waste of time. The act of writing a note is valuable
| for tidying up the ideas in your head, even if you never look
| at them again. And that while you don't really _need_ to save
| them (as you 've already had the value from writing them), it
| can be easier and quicker to just save all your random notes,
| as a general policy, because trying to determine which notes
| have potential future utility is fairly pointless and stressful
| activity. Notes don't really cost anything to store. This
| policy doesn't work so well for physical possessions.
| ReleaseCandidat wrote:
| > I've no idea what the author is suggesting as an alternative,
| not making notes?
|
| It doesn't matter where or how you write down your notes. It's
| just so you get the security of having that somewhere and not
| needing to think about it any more.
| diarrhea wrote:
| I regularly use Joplin and like it very much. But I guess note
| taking isn't for me. It's very far from having changed my life.
| Joplin is amazing for taking media-rich notes, combining PDFs
| attachments, images, bulleted lists, URLs, code snippets etc.
| into a single document. No other tool I know provides such
| richness. Whenever I need this unique combination, Joplin is a
| good bet. Regularly, I have files that fit nowhere, like a
| stray PDF that neither fits in my personal DMS (paperless-ng)
| nor into literature management software (Zotero); Joplin often
| is a good place for it. Allows to delete the file locally but
| still have confidence it's kept (with Joplin backed by
| Nextcloud, which is in turn backed up).
|
| On the other hand, I recently flattened (that is: deleted a
| bunch of superfluous, deep hierarchy) my Joplin notebooks. Flat
| is better than nested in this case, it was a good change to
| make.
|
| I wonder if "frequently reorganizing" notes is not an anti-
| pattern. Who _wants_ to do that? It 's a waste of time.
| fuadnafiz98 wrote:
| too long to read right now. Bookmarking this to read in the
| weekend
| pxtail wrote:
| Is this GPT-3 generated? This looks like affiliate links content
| farm designed specifically to nerdsnipe HN visitors: topic which
| are popular here:writing and organizing knowledge, plenty of
| affiliate links to most popular books frequently mentioned over
| here, some quotes sprinkled with truisms here and there, unknown
| author
| bowwoden wrote:
| interesting theory. gpt is good at writing about writing.
| Rygian wrote:
| Reminds me of one of the writing tips by Neil Gaiman [1]: "Start
| a compost heap"
|
| The act of entering information into a Notes app feeds the
| compost heap in a more or less indirect way, which then acts as
| subconscious nurture for later creativity. If you of the creative
| kind, that is.
|
| [1] https://writingcooperative.com/neil-gaimans-
| top-13-writing-t...
| ms4720 wrote:
| Zettelkasten comes to mind, look at logseq if interested
| michaelbarton wrote:
| This looks interesting. It sort of reminds me of an open
| source obsidian. I tried obsidian for a while but ended up
| switching to a dropbox directory full of markdown files. Felt
| likely slightly less friction to start a new page in vim, and
| also be able use ripgrep to find old ideas.
| pydry wrote:
| IME when the note is intended to be dropped off and picked up at
| a particular time it's useful (e.g. remember to pack insect
| repellent -> add to packing list -> wait 4 weeks -> check packing
| list).
|
| I'm increasingly convinced of the value of checklists for small
| items - especially repeated tasks.
|
| If it's a cool idea for, like, a new business or the start of
| essay without any predefined time to pick it up and work on it it
| ends up being kind of pointless and just creates a mess.
|
| For those things, if it's a good idea it'll pop up in your head
| again, probably in a better form.
|
| Note taking has to act like a pipeline to be useful.
| nikanj wrote:
| I have a checklist for "what to bring to the gym". It's saved
| my bacon numerous times. Same for "what to pack for a job-
| related day trip" etc
| KineticLensman wrote:
| Ditto for camping. After one trip, I inventoried everything I
| took out of the car and added items that I wished I'd had.
| And then typed it up and left copies in my gear bin.
| cillian64 wrote:
| I also do this! A bonus benefit is you can go back through
| the list when packing up to come home so you don't leave your
| charger/toothbrush/... in a hotel.
|
| I always feel a little obsessive or over-careful making lists
| for this sort of thing but it's amazing how much easier and
| less stressful it makes packing for me.
| sebastianconcpt wrote:
| _We need to forget, but we first must feel safe forgetting._
|
| Reminds me of some years ago when I finally burnt all sketches
| and notes, many actually quite pleasant to watch, of a startup
| I've shutdown in 2015.
|
| I think for me, that it was kind of a rite of passage of what it
| wasn't meant to be. And I certainly needed the feeling of moving
| on.
| Arainach wrote:
| Since it looks like the author posted this article: Please use
| better color selection. Slightly darker gray on light gray has
| almost no contrast and is impossible for many to read (and causes
| strain in those who can).
|
| You can automatically check against web accessibility with tools
| such as WAVE: https://wave.webaim.org/
|
| In your case, #6B7280 on #F2F2F2 is a contrast ratio of 4.31
| which is below all standards for normal sized text. Even for
| large fonts it would only be valid at lower compliance levels and
| not at AAA.
| fluder wrote:
| Even if one note out of a hundred turns out to be useful, this is
| already a victory. I use and recommend https://fsnot.es
| DonBarredora wrote:
| Offtopic: I can barely read this website, there's almost no
| contrast.
| alexpotato wrote:
| Couple stories I would share here:
|
| LOSING AN ENTIRE INBOX
|
| Once while doing a work rotation in Hong Kong, I was RDP'ing back
| into my NYC machine and I accidentally deleted ALL of the email
| in my inbox. At first, I was crushed and felt awful. I quickly
| moved past this thinking that if anyone really needed me for
| something, they would reach out again. If I lost anything
| crucial, I could probably go ask someone else.
|
| This was very freeing! Tim Ferriss has a similar exercise where
| he recommends acting as if you have $0 cash/credit card access
| etc every so often. This helps you a. move that state from
| "unknown" to "known" b. help you see that many situations seem
| bad only b/c you've never lived through them.
|
| IDEAS IN THE ROLODEX
|
| I was watching a documentary about the early days of Mad
| Magazine. They mentioned that one of the writers had a Rolodex of
| notecards with random ideas he had stored and organized. If they
| were stuck coming up with an idea, he would spin through the
| rolodex till he found one that worked.
|
| I've always liked this story as it's a form of decoupling
| (asynchronous?) idea inception from idea need. It requires more
| "caching" than trying to have ideas on demand with the trade off
| that you are not coming up with the ideas under pressure. While
| ideas sometimes get generated faster in the immediate need
| timeframe, I would imagine that also sometimes cuts the scope of
| those ideas. The decoupled model allows your idea generation
| boundaries to be much larger.
| dSebastien wrote:
| (Shameless plug)
|
| For those interested in essays about note-taking, thinking,
| writing & PKM, note that Matthew's article is also part of the
| PKM journal [1], an online publication that I've recently
| launched.
|
| [1]: https://pkmjournal.com/
| auggierose wrote:
| Since I started note-taking a few years ago, my productivity has
| increased dramatically. The biggest benefit is that you can stop
| working on an idea for a bit, then come back later and read it
| back from disk to main memory, often now seeing issues with what
| you have written down that are apparent now, but were not back
| then.
|
| Writing a paper about your idea is the ultimate form of this, but
| of course most of the time overkill. But it is good to bundle
| everything up in a paper once enough stuff has accumulated.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| While the stuff we write down is not valuable, the process of
| doing so is very valuable.
|
| Most people don't even take notes or use a shoebox/second brain
| to store these things. What most lifelong notetakers know is that
| the notes themselves aren't important, but rather the process of
| physically writing the notes, internalizing the information, and
| building new connections in your head is quite important.
|
| The remnants of this process are mostly throw away from the
| author's perspective, but may be novel to a random person. This
| reminds me of someone uncovering a journal of nonsensical
| information saying "What's this about?" to then the author says
| "That's how I figured it out".
|
| The beauty of it all is that it's meaningful to the author and
| not necessarily anyone else.
| gms7777 wrote:
| I agree -- I'm a lifelong chalk/whiteboard-er. Having a large
| space where I can write/draw/diagram is critical for me to work
| through ideas. Occasionally I take pictures or copy down my
| notes, but usually I just erase and feel like nothing is lost.
|
| I also find the physical component of whiteboarding to be very
| helpful -- standing up, walking around, pacing, etc vs. just
| sitting down and writing on a notepad.
| jakub_g wrote:
| I noticed "I think through writing". Whenever I need to
| implement a new feature I first explore status quo and write it
| down on confluence, jira etc. Then write down that I'm gonna
| do, alternatives etc. It takes time but makes it way clearer
| how to move forward on fuzzy things.
| petra wrote:
| It's not the stuff we write down is useless.
|
| let's assume that without a good note-taking app, we reuse 1%
| of our notes. And with a good note-taking app we reuse 2% of
| our notes.
|
| Our feeling will stay the same:those notes are a trash heap.
|
| But we doubled the number of the "ideas" we can access, which
| seems like a good ROI.
|
| And definetly, the process is useful.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| I have a high barrier of entry to my shoebox personally.
| Totally agreed that 99% of notes are throw-away, but the 1%
| are absolute gems.
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| Yeah, but why not reuse like... 99% of your notes? Why not
| just write things down only if you're going to need them
| again, and in a way that you will be able to find them when
| you need them? I'm more likely to reread a note many, many
| times than to take one I never reuse, because every time I
| need to use a cardinality aggregation or invert a
| conditional, I go back to the notes for that.
| egypturnash wrote:
| For a while Evernote was where my ideas went, _and_ where they
| got developed into full-blown scripts for comics by me and my
| creative partner. A lot of ideas went there to die, some went
| there to hibernate, some went there to be nurtured and grow.
|
| Then Evernote got rewritten as a bunch of sluggish Electron
| garbage that got in the way and now I never touch the fucking
| thing. I really wish I could find a replacement.
|
| (Criteria, before someone suggests their favorite: allows
| collaboration, works on Macs, iOS, Windows, and Android, with
| native apps.)
| ljm wrote:
| One of the reasons I have a nice notebook and pen to write with
| is because I can enjoy getting stuff out of my head and then,
| probably, never returning to it again.
|
| Just a simple thing so I enjoy the act of offloading in whatever
| way I feel like doing (scribbling, thoughtful stuff, drawing,
| whatever) and then I've freed up some space in my head so I can
| relax.
|
| I could try the same with a notekeeping app but I feel like I
| have to actually maintain them, or work with their system. Not to
| mention, it requires screen time that I might not want. A pen and
| some paper has no such system so it's liberating.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Article headlines are increasingly telling you how you should
| interpret the story before you even read it. And that's bad.
| alecbz wrote:
| I'm not a fan of this headline style but it's not really
| telling you how to interpret the story any more than "It's fine
| that ideas get forgotten in notes apps" or any other normative
| sentence would be.
|
| It's just kind of a cheesey way of making a surprising
| normative claim.
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