[HN Gopher] My bad habit of hoarding information
___________________________________________________________________
My bad habit of hoarding information
Author : techn00
Score : 471 points
Date : 2023-01-06 09:45 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (andreisurugiu.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (andreisurugiu.com)
| williamcotton wrote:
| I email links to myself for topics that I am actively working on
| or researching (or planning on researching). Most languish unread
| in my inbox but every once in awhile I search for that article I
| saw a couple of month ago about, eg, building your own C
| compiler...
|
| I wouldn't mind if DDG/Google/et al. showed search results from
| my curated list of articles I've archived in this manner!
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| FOMO is a sign of the vice of curiosity[0] and pride[1]. The
| rosier side of what you're doing is that you seem to have a means
| of at least managing the impulse. Still unfocused, still not
| perfect, but better than pointless chasing after information.
|
| Perhaps a way to break the habit is a kind of fasting and
| interruption: when you come across the temptation to indulge a
| distraction or archive that link, cut yourself off and remind
| yourself that all you're doing is dissipating your energies and
| working against your own good and understanding. Instead of
| nourishing your mind through sustained commitment, you are
| choosing to wallow in the shallows of the shoreline. To enter the
| depths, you must let go the shore. That's the decision you face
| here, and decisions are always a sacrificial act. You give up one
| thing for another.
|
| [0] Curiosity here refers to a kind of "information
| gluttony/lust", a kind of wandering eye. It's the same impulse
| that afflicts busybodies and gossips in that the desire to know
| has been unhinged from reason. You don't need to know most of
| that stuff and most of it is of little value to you.
|
| [1] Pride because there's now way you can know everything, not in
| this life.
| keybored wrote:
| Nice diagnosis. For the cure I would look anywhere but
| Catholicism.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| That's a pretty limited model for teaching purposes.
|
| You can also model FOMO as a beginner move, unskilled outcome,
| etc.
|
| For a lot of techies this is relevant since they get more
| traction from learning new skills than they do from moralizing,
| for example.
|
| One's views on morality may also be (harmfully) hyperbolic due
| to a similar lack of nuanced application / experience.
| abnry wrote:
| This comment pulled me in and I've reread it several times.
| Tere is a lot of truth here. I appreciate how information
| hoarding can be a sign of status seeking. More knowledge, more
| skill, more times being the person who just knows the answer.
| Fear (of missing out) is a classic symptom of status seeking.
|
| The problem is that some degree of information hoarding has
| paid off for me. It sometimes really does improve your skill
| and impress your peers. Aside from fasting type interventions,
| what I think is needed in addition to this is some form of
| wisdom relating to knowing what is valuable to hoard, read, or
| study. It's like drinking alcohol. If you are getting drunk all
| the time it is probably a good idea to stop completely. But
| there are real benefits of social drinking.
|
| This makes me convinced I need more skill in establishing and
| recognizing priorities when it comes to information gathering.
| bgilroy26 wrote:
| A significant resource for the concept of curiositas is the
| virtues section of the Summa Theologica
|
| https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3167.htm
|
| For those new to the Summa, generally speaking, it is good to
| read an article starting with the On the Contrary and the I
| Answer That, and then proceed on to the Objections and
| Replies
| elevation wrote:
| Another point to ponder:
|
| Whether you fill hard drives or book shelves, your collection
| will perish with you unless you transfer it to someone
| younger _and teach them to value it_ before you pass.
|
| Several of my aging friends have thousands of books they've
| read and shelved up. In a few years their children will think
| nothing of depositing them all in the landfill because the
| books lack both market value and sentimental value. The books
| simply aren't worth the hassle of sorting through. Old hard
| drives filled with niche data won't fare any better.
|
| Unless the ongoing existence of your collection benefits you
| or a protege directly, you yourself are already effectively
| disposing of it.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Is a paraphrase from a john chrysostom sermon? It sounds so
| familiar but from a completely different context and I can't
| quite place it. It definitely stuck with me the first time I
| heard it too, and grappling with the negative side of curiosity
| has been valuable for me.
| sockaddr wrote:
| > write a hacker news post about information hoarding in the
| style of john chrysostom
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| lmao
| Mezzie wrote:
| > Curiosity here refers to a kind of "information
| gluttony/lust", a kind of wandering eye. It's the same impulse
| that afflicts busybodies and gossips in that the desire to know
| has been unhinged from reason. You don't need to know most of
| that stuff and most of it is of little value to you.
|
| Ow. I'm in this picture and don't like it. But that is a
| wonderful phrase, thank you for introducing it to me.
| dmreedy wrote:
| I think there's a whole lot of truth in this, but I'd also like
| to try to provide a complementary position, for the balance.
|
| There is a kind of depth can come from focus, but this is a
| narrow kind of depth, one that can't question its own premises.
| It's directly analogous to the depth of a depth-first search,
| and has the same upsides and downsides. It's really handy when
| you know your target, and when you think your heuristics for
| having chosen that target are pretty good.
|
| Meanwhile, I think you can look at this kind of broad-spectrum
| curiosity as a kind of breadth-first search, again, with the
| same strengths and weaknesses. It definitely takes longer, and
| it definitely can end up amounting to not much more than
| wallowing. But it can also serve very well when you're not sure
| what the target is, or if there even is one.
|
| Furthermore, it can give access to more _possible_ models, more
| analogies, more metaphor, more understanding-by-comparison,
| which in turn grants a depth of its own kind, especially in
| conjunction with true narrow depth of exploration. Since all
| models are wrong, and each model explores different facets of
| an idea, having more models gives you a broader set of tools
| for taking a given concept and applying it to specific areas.
| They may not be useful in the given moment, but they may lead
| to unpredictable and insightful connections later on.
|
| But of course, to your point, that all comes at the risk of
| never getting far enough along to apply anything in the first
| place. But I do believe there is a place for each. Feynman
| spinning plates in the cafeteria and all that.
| pazurduy wrote:
| In the book "non-things" by "Byung-Chul Han" the author talks
| about this feeling, the never ending information bombing (a
| society problem in his opinion)
|
| Han suggests that this overload of information has led to a kind
| of "information fatigue," where people are unable to process or
| make sense of all the data and information that they are exposed
| to on a daily basis. This can lead to a feeling of disconnection
| and alienation, as people struggle to navigate the constant
| influx of information and find meaning in their lives.
|
| the author suggest this also has personal/society consequences,
| tho I don't agree on that 100%, but his argument is that this
| information bombing is making us forget about other "important
| things on life". first chapter of the book I think will help you
| understand your feelings better and maybe understand that this is
| a more modern problem, the old philosophers didn't manage to
| describe the "phone-sapiens" .
| naavis wrote:
| I have this same problem with YouTube videos. I have a Watch
| Later list of 1800 videos, and it keeps growing.
| cainxinth wrote:
| Me too. I organize them by length. I have a folder for under 30
| minutes, 30 minutes to an hour, and over an hour. Lots of good
| stuff in there that I always plan to get to, but generally I
| add new ones faster than I watch old ones.
| naavis wrote:
| I once went on an organizing spree and categorized the videos
| by topic, but never did that again, so the 1800 videos are
| now the uncategorized videos that are not in one of those
| more specific folders which I never visit either.
|
| I am rarely in a mood to watch YouTube videos longer than
| 5-10 minutes for some reason. Shorter ones I often watch
| right away, but all the others get filed away for a rainy
| day.
| cainxinth wrote:
| For me, 90% of them are 'second screen' content that I
| leave on while doing something else.
| imhoguy wrote:
| Good you don't download them, that would grow the data hoarder
| HDD rack pretty quickly.
| jacknews wrote:
| bookmarked
| NotPavlovsDog wrote:
| I've blocked most news websites, in the last decades the only
| "Big World" news that I really needed were communicated to me by
| others almost immediately (9/11, oncoming catastrophic storm,
| lock-downs).
|
| When my current endeavor needs tune-in to a particular news
| cycle, I've set up simple scraping of top headlines only. These
| are usually demarked via keywords, headers or other metadata.
| Sure, there are some services and RSS readers that facilitate the
| functionality and ease of use. Except I need less user-
| friendliness, not more.
|
| Having to spend a minute more per news source, as opposed to some
| copy-pastes or clicks, keeps the need to over-subscribe down. The
| interests of the media in representing information do not match
| my own. I have not been able to find analyst materials that do
| not suffer from politically and emotionally manipulative agendas.
|
| Not letting noise in from the start is the best policy for me.
| ergonaught wrote:
| I do something similar, and in my case it is apparently a result
| of ADHD/ASD, but that's not why I'm here. I installed the OneTab
| browser plugin fairly recently because I tended to keep open "too
| many" tabs across multiple devices for various reasons. And I'd
| use it, and all my tabs are "closed and bookmarked and filed
| away", and then a short while later I've got dozens of tabs open
| again. In most cases, I've actually read these and I'm expecting
| to continue using the content in some manner.
|
| So, anyway, counting what's open right now and what I've filed
| away, I'm at nearly 700 tabs. Some of them will be reused but the
| vast majority of essentially junk food for the brain.
|
| That doesn't include the untracked but presumably insane number
| of things I actually did read but didn't keep open in a tab or
| file for later (just as it ignores the several hundred unread
| books on my Kindle while not counting the vast number of digital
| and physical books I do read).
|
| I could handwave and spout unfounded theories about dopamine or
| "conditions" or anything you like, but ultimately, after decades
| of this, in my case it's what happens when my focus is on
| consuming rather than producing (ex: when I'm not engaged in
| something like a zettelkasten process), while allowing my
| insatiable curiosity and love of learning to remain undirected.
|
| In short, you've got to manage that stuff. Or, at least, I do,
| jwmoz wrote:
| Delete all the tabs now and watch the world continue.
| arcticfox wrote:
| In case anyone else is looking into browser options, I can't
| recommend https://arc.net/ more highly. I never thought I'd
| move away from Chrome, but then again, I never considered that
| they'd gather so much users that they can't make fundamental UX
| improvements any more without massive friction.
|
| Arc is just better for me in terms of staying organized.
| Everyone seems to have their own favorite feature, but "Spaces"
| are the killer feature for me.
| bollos wrote:
| Arc definitely has some features that I really like. Wish
| they would've released it on other platforms too as I'm not
| always using my Mac for everything that I do day-to-day.
| codethief wrote:
| Am I seeing this correctly that arc.net doesn't provide any
| information about this supposed super browser _at all_ and
| instead just links to a sign-up form where I need to provide
| my email address? Yeah, no, not doing that.
| grugagag wrote:
| I got over tab hoarding by adding a shortcut to onetab to
| archive the current tab. Now I freely archive the tabs knowing
| it's recoverable, problem solved for me.
| stavros_ wrote:
| Fellow ADHDr here, also living the many tabs life.
|
| I highly recommend the Sidebery addon (Firefox). Not just tree
| style tabs, but tree style tabs with customizable panels so you
| can sort everything out quite tidily. I'm able to manage
| hundreds of tabs without mess, and prune through them on a
| weekly basis seeing what needs to be bookmarked or can be
| safely forgotten.
| INeedMoreRam wrote:
| [dead]
| pessimizer wrote:
| I don't know if you use firefox and tree-style tabs (unlikely,
| but far more likely here than anywhere else.) If you do,
| there's an extension for tree-style tabs (an extension for the
| extension) called "Fade Old Tabs." It allows you to color tabs
| based on how long it's been since they were accessed. You do
| this by setting a age range for tabs to be painted gray. Tabs
| not accessed since the beginning of that range are panted
| _dark_ gray, and tabs accessed after the range are not colored
| at all.
|
| So if you have 700 tabs and 600 of them you haven't opened in a
| month, you'll _see_ them and it might make a difference in your
| habits. It also makes it easier to surf your open tabs when you
| 're bored, rather than surfing randomly and adding new tabs.
| krackpot wrote:
| Thank you for sharing "Fade Old Tabs". I have the same
| problem with OP and have 1200+ tabs open across 4 firefox
| windows. That is after a big purge I did earlier this year
| where it was 2000+. Tree Style Tabs crashed a lot before but
| it has been quite good in recent memory.
|
| I have a hard time closing out what is essentially my thought
| process to finding a solution or doing research. Along the
| way I close out dead branches. What remains is either a
| solution or where I have left off. I think my mental barrier
| is what it represents: my time capital sunk. The issue is
| working around this many tabs and managing it; a time sink in
| itself to fix.
|
| Started documenting completed solutions in Obsidian and I've
| found that if I can't get over my lazy barrier to even enter
| it in, it's probably not important. Just have to keep working
| on improving and refining the way I think and approach this.
| deafpolygon wrote:
| > have 1200+ tabs open across 4 firefox windows
|
| does research get you to have so many open? How do you
| manage it all? I've only just started using Sidebery but I
| try to keep my tabs at a reasonable 100-200 open.
| Arrath wrote:
| If OP is anything like me, they 'manage' the old tabs by
| thinking "Oh that's neat I'll leave it open so I can come
| back to it' and...never do that.
| goarchive wrote:
| I fall into this trap as well. My solution to mitigate my
| tab hoarding has been to set up a blank GitHub repo and
| use the discussions/issues to just continually post
| links, descriptions, and notes in a thread format.
|
| Then I can just keep commenting to myself. It seems to
| help break up topic binges that I go on. Plus I like with
| GitHub it's all markdown-based so I can throw images,
| files and whatever else I need in a session in there to
| keep it all encompassing.
| Pavlova8 wrote:
| So you'd use git in a similar way you'd use obsidian,
| just with the ability to sync online and share
| easily/collaborate.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Ever thought of productizing that idea? Sort of a
| personal threaded wiki that you can send bookmarks to?
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| My solution is to shutdown my PCs every day.
| weaksauce wrote:
| I wrote a little webext to help me find tabs in a visual
| way grouped by window. middle click closes the tab and
| left click brings the tab you click on to the forefront.
| It's simple but something I use many times every day.
|
| feel free to try it out:
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/
|
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjgg
| iog...
|
| https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist
| namaria wrote:
| People have hundreds of tabs open at the same time?? I get
| anxiety if it goes above 12 or 15... The times when I just
| close them all and start opening firefox with no previous
| tabs are so relieving to me.
| numbasys wrote:
| This is a valuable reply because it describes my own experience
| so well. Thank you.
| SpencerOMG wrote:
| lol a OneTab newbie, eh?
|
| I've used OneTab (and then switched to BetterOneTab). Been
| using it for about 5 years or so. I have dozens of exported
| "backup" files, because after a certain amount of saved tabs,
| the extension stops working. You can't save any new ones. I've
| lost maybe 100 tabs so far by adding them to OneTab only to
| discover I was at my limit and nothing got saved. It then stops
| allowing deletions (they come back after refreshing the
| extension page). So I have to export my hundreds or even
| thousands of tabs, uninstall the extension, and then reinstall
| it. And then I keep hoarding.
|
| I have a real bad case of digital tsundoku. Even as I type
| this, I have roughly 80 links from HN opened, two dozen or so
| Twitter tabs, probably 30 YouTube tabs, and then a healthy heap
| of other miscellaneous sites. I know I will never get through
| this infinite backlog. Even if I were to squirrel myself away
| and do nothing but open each tab, digest its contents, and move
| on to the next, it would probably take me years. And I would be
| so burnt out I wouldn't be digesting well enough. Plus, most of
| that information is probably, at least slightly, outdated.
|
| ...Oh well, time to open up another dozen 3-hour long YouTube
| "mini" docs about niche subjects I have no engagement in.
| lannisterstark wrote:
| I have over 24000 frickign tabs on OneTab saved lol
|
| https://tabula.civitat.es/images/2023/01/06/8krQ.png
|
| I may have a problem.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| Re... restore all !
| jovi909 wrote:
| Isn't that 24000 bookmarks and not "tabs" - a tab (to me)
| means an open tab in the browser.
| user_7832 wrote:
| Please export the tabs, before one tab crashes on you. I'm
| amazed you made it till 24k without it crashing, low-k tabs
| are enough on my laptop to crash it. (Though my laptop is
| from 2015 so that might also factor in.)
| yawboakye wrote:
| i'd be interested in how many are dead links now. i'm nowhere
| near (hovering around 500 at the moment) and when i
| frequently do a healthcheck i see that most are already dead.
| are you archiving (using archive's wayback machine or
| something?) to ensure they're alive when you need them? for
| some definition of need lol
| vidarh wrote:
| OneTab for me is a solution to my problem:
|
| What ends up there is what I know isn't important enough to
| bookmark, but I kinda feel like I should read. Having OneTab
| makes me feel like it's ok to close the tabs, knowing full
| well I'll never, ever look for most of them again...
|
| It's an comfort blanket.
|
| I know I'm fooling myself, and I'm perfectly happy with that.
| phkahler wrote:
| Those of you trying to curate large amounts of link should get
| together and create a public index of all that content. You
| could call the site yoohoo or something ;-)
| brainzap wrote:
| didn't there exist a browser toolbar called stumble upon that
| allowed people to share interesting links
| ryandrake wrote:
| We've re-invented dmoz[1]. Now someone just has to slap AI
| and blockchain on the idea, and they could raise for a
| "modern" dmoz.
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ
| sanderjd wrote:
| I unironically think social bookmarking is a missing product.
| Not because it doesn't exist, but because nothing has gained
| enough mindshare and momentum to be dominant and widely used.
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| I know it's not exactly what you're describing but a
| somewhat comparable option is https://www.are.na
| coliveira wrote:
| The problem is not to be dominant, it is that there was no
| money to be made in this type of website. These sites come
| and go, it is very difficult to monetize them.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| so they need a different model for funding
| sodimel wrote:
| I think it's great that there's no giant making money on
| top of this concept. It lets people do whatever they want
| to store and share links :)
| sanderjd wrote:
| Yes but it means there is no one thing that all the
| people I want to follow all use. Everyone ends up in
| their own sandbox. Network effects are really useful and
| positive sum, I think.
|
| And there are very few things like Wikipedia that both
| have the benefit of being dominant and not monetized. Are
| there any other examples at all?
| 0x445442 wrote:
| I'm very close to having an old Delicious style site
| ready. Do you think people would pay $1 a month?
| sanderjd wrote:
| Not at first, at least, in my opinion, if crowdsourcing
| is what makes it useful. If the network effects are what
| makes a product useful, a subscription fee pushes against
| the growth of that network.
| 0x445442 wrote:
| Yeah, what I'm foreseeing is public and private links,
| tagging and the ability to search for links by page
| description, tags and user. The subscription fee would
| mainly be for hosting costs and an eventual commensurate
| salary. Even if the site were to gain traction I wouldn't
| be interested in selling ads based on user base size.
|
| I'm willing to incur some hosting costs for a beta period
| but I won't fund the service for long without revenue if
| the hosting costs are prohibitive as I'm not really
| interested in selling it later for someone else to
| monetize with ads.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| Depends what you get beside storing links I suppose
| (cached version of content, super smart search function
| not limited to og: and metadata tags, super privacy,
| bridges to-do app maybe ?, android app + ff ext. + chr.
| ext. + apple thingies for ubiquitous access to links,
| etc.). I could see myself dropping ~10bucks a year like
| for bitwarden.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| They pay pinboard enough for idlewords (HN user) to live
| off it, and buy Delicious when they went broke.
|
| Delicious once sold to yahoo! For 15 million, bought for
| 35k.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14463102
|
| Delicious spending twice as much as pinboard in running
| costs in 2017.
|
| There are some detailed blog posts from the time about
| running costs somewhere.
| fitzroy wrote:
| How is it different from https://pinboard.in (besides $1/
| mo)?
| 0x445442 wrote:
| Beyond some differing features and interface, there
| wouldn't be much difference.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Agreed entirely. I guess I saw the two things as linked -
| if you get enough network effects, there must be some way
| to make money - but perhaps Twitter has shown us that
| this is not the case.
| incanus77 wrote:
| Del.icio.us was a big deal ~15 years ago. I made a Mac
| client for it (Pukka) that sold pretty well and the service
| was much talked-about in tech circles, not just for
| researchers. This was in the early era of social networking
| as a whole ("Web 2.0") as well as this idea of "wisdom of
| crowds" for emergent context to bubble up from public
| tagging.
| aprdm wrote:
| Isn't that Reddit ?
| Moissanite wrote:
| StumbleUpon used to be a kind of answer to this. I'd love
| to have it back, particularly if the contents could be
| curated (eg "show me a random link which has been featured
| on the front page of HN or lobste.rs in the last month")
| sanderjd wrote:
| Yes, I loved that era of the web!
| worldsayshi wrote:
| If somebody can figure out a note/link app that becomes
| as easy to manage when you're adding your first note as
| when you're adding your thousandth note then such
| services will stop dying out.
| krazydad wrote:
| delicio.us was pretty great in it's day
| sanderjd wrote:
| Yes! One of the other comments got to the crux of this:
| nobody ever figured out a sustainable business model for
| this. I think it's a shame.
| ghaff wrote:
| Folksonomies was one of the terms used back in the day when
| delicio.us was one of the current hotnesses. I still use
| pinboard and it's handy. But, like RSS, this sort of thing
| mostly appeals to researchers/analysts/journalists/etc. The
| average person mostly doesn't care about saving and even
| loosely organizing a lot of information.
| kcb wrote:
| Pinterest?
| strangattractor wrote:
| Hoarding data does not have to be a negative thing
| necessarily. Might I suggest checking out
| https://archive.org/about/. Create an account and install the
| browser extension.
|
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wayback-
| machine/fp...
|
| WARNING: archiving can be habit forming.
| sogen wrote:
| Or Google!
| donkeyd wrote:
| Friend of mine is always surprised when we discuss something
| and 20 seconds later I send him an article I once read about
| it. He has asked multiple times what I use to store all these
| links. It's Google. I just use Google to find the article
| again based on what I remember from it.
|
| This doesn't always work though and can lead to a frustrating
| half hour of searching that ends in disappointment.
| frereubu wrote:
| Even more frustrating when you can't quite remember the
| content of the article you can't find, although you're sure
| you found it fascinating when you read it at the time...
| [deleted]
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| If I had a dollar for every topic I've read about and
| found fascinating and can hardly describe with any more
| detail than that ...
| mnsh wrote:
| I hate it when that happens, more often that not i
| remember the visuals of the site, then i try to find it
| in my browser history like a sucker.
|
| I have yet to find a solution for this.
|
| One solution is I screenshot all the sites i visit,
| extract their colors, and create a searchable index. Nice
| side project idea I guess.
| klibertp wrote:
| > This doesn't always work
|
| The problem is with when it doesn't work: when it's the
| least convenient and the most irritating. For popular
| content it doesn't matter if you forget a precise word used
| there, you'll get to it soon enough. But for specific,
| niche content - which is the most valuable to me most of
| the time - even if you get all the keywords right you might
| not find what you're looking for on Google. The reasons
| range from the keywords being too generic to the site being
| no longer online and it's really frustrating when it
| happens.
|
| OneTab and bookmarks are not an answer because they don't
| save the content. I tried Joplin + Web Clipper which does,
| but it works on a single-tab basis, and when I have 200
| tabs open sending them all to Joplin manually takes ages...
| and then Joplin slows down to a crawl when you're done.
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| I have experienced that for sure.
|
| Reminds me though I have also experienced "I swear there is
| a word that sounds like "bla" that means xyz" and spend 30+
| min trying to find it in dictionaries and it just doesn't
| exist. Funny how the mind works.
| kmote00 wrote:
| I've used this website for years, for just that purpose.
| Can't believe it's still up, actually.
|
| https://chir.ag/projects/tip-of-my-tongue/
| Ghoyome wrote:
| Windows > Tabs every single time. What helped me most was a
| good window manager:
|
| * A single floating window acting as an opener*
|
| * windows are always arranged in the case of tiling wms.
|
| * In the case of Firefox user.css can help u remove the tab bar
| entirely. And opening in windows rather than tabs can be
| configured.
|
| * I built my own window fuzzy searcher for finding windows.
|
| The effect is compulsory need to close windows asap but keep a
| couple of windows forever that are actually for doing work. In
| my case :
|
| * newsboat > firefox. * Cmus > firefox. * Aerc > firefox. *
| Irssi > firefox.
|
| The list goes on and on.
|
| The benefit is this: every job has it's own window.
|
| Note that still it is 100% the case that when not in
| "production/building" mode the default is consuming. This setup
| merely helps heighten awareness to the fact.
|
| Hope it helps!
|
| * lf, ranger, nnn are all good choices.
| Havelock wrote:
| I do the same, but right now I just keep tabmanager.io on my
| right screen to show a grid of all my windows. Some which I
| save for later, e.g. switching between projects.
| conceptualspace wrote:
| to help manage this i created a "speed dial" extension and use
| it basically as a visual bookmark manager. the advantage to
| tabs in a list is that they are easy to reference visually, and
| like any bookmark can be sorted and arranged into folders. for
| example i have one for technical references, various research
| topics, etc that i plan to come back to. and its easy to pop
| one off the list to maintain them. check it out if youre
| curious, its open source!
|
| https://github.com/conceptualspace/yet-another-speed-dial
| soulofmischief wrote:
| 700 open tabs... Try 7000.... I have tabs all the way back from
| 2014 open right now on one of my firefox instances (probably
| have ~15 Firefox windows open across devices rn) which I have
| migrated between multiple machines along with my user profile,
| and I'm telling you I'm gonna get to them any day now.
| switchbak wrote:
| I think the zero inbox folks would have a heart attack.
| Impressive you can maintain the tab state that long!
|
| I usually have max 100 open, but I reboot all the time (for
| power mgmt reasons) and use OneTab so that seems to solve my
| hoarding tendencies. That and keeping searchable local notes
| / using history / bookmarking the really good ones that I'll
| also never read.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| I keep zero inbox at work as much as I can and have a
| couple of hundred tabs open on various desktops (91 tabs on
| this mobile alone; far more on desktop).
|
| To me they're just different organisational methods that
| work well in different contexts.
| alx__ wrote:
| > and I'm telling you I'm gonna get to them any day now
|
| I feel this deeply
|
| The compromise I found was just to dump them into my
| bookmarking service. If I really _really_ need to find that
| thing again, it 's saved somewhere. 99% of the time it's just
| digital ephemera and I try to let it go and close the tab.
| comboy wrote:
| Very impressive.
|
| I think it could be solved better browsers history. One idea
| - star pages - not adding to favorites, just marking them so
| that you could browse history of those separately. It could
| also show list of the latest stars in the new tab window for
| example.
|
| Currently bookmarks, in firefox at least, as far as I can
| tell, cannot be even browsed by date.
| Luc wrote:
| I have 272x tabs open, 170x in my main window. I have been
| using Tab Session Manager to save and then close windows. Try
| it, you can always restore the window later.
|
| (the x in the numbers is because the display overflows haha)
| aborsy wrote:
| How much ram does that take? I find Firefox problematic
| after around 10 tabs.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Firefox doesn't load inactive tabs after a restart.
| They're just low overhead database entries.
| Luc wrote:
| Don't know, not enough to cause trouble on my 16GB Mac
| Mini m1, with 10 other apps open as well.
| jrm4 wrote:
| FWIW. You'll likely never _stop_ doing this, so the best thing is
| to think about modifying your process and goals. Things I 've
| discovered about this that work for me.
|
| - Broadly, try to enjoy deleting things; take some pride and
| pleasure in the fact that you're "cleaning," and have faith that
| if it's important, it'll stick around or come back.
|
| - Folders/Hierarchies mostly suck. Tags are also overrated. Lists
| and links are mostly the way to go. The hyperlink is probably the
| most underrated advancement in our lifetime.
|
| - If you _must_ do folders, go by form, NOT topic or area, you
| 'll get bogged down in "which bucket does this go in."
|
| - Consider the end goal, which is something easy and elegant and
| enjoyable to peruse again. One way to look at it might be, if I
| got bonked on the head, or if a stranger looked at this, would
| they find it useful?
| jbms wrote:
| Writing things down to remember them, you feel like you've dealt
| with it. Which can be a great help since you can empty your brain
| of distractions that pop up and do so in a way you feel you've
| not just forgotten something. And reread later you'll realise how
| little was really important outside the moment it came up.
|
| But if you place an artificial burden on yourself to follow up on
| everything that might be interesting, then that's probably
| overwhelming and shows a lack of prioritisation. That might be
| due to a lack of a system to prioritise, or it might be a lack of
| goals. Asking why you do it might feel you work backwards towards
| the goal - is it an ambiguous sense of professional development,
| or is it simply an enjoyment of pursuing novelty that means you
| keep turning up things that you feel you should come back to, but
| because novelty is the goal you never do. These might miss the
| mark with you, but they explain for me a lot about why I do the
| same things.
| conceptualspace wrote:
| to offer an opposing view: libraries are cool. i frequently
| reference and revisit links i have saved, and on a rainy day a
| quick browse of them often inspires a new project or advances
| some existing work. i don't know what i would gain by blowing
| that all away. naturally links that are infrequently used settle
| to the bottom of the list and die anyway.
|
| i do manage my bookmarks visually, which i have found
| tremendously helpful since i first saw this functionality in
| opera years ago. its sort of like having album art.
|
| so here is a shameless plug for my open source and cross browser
| implementation, yet another speed dial:
|
| https://github.com/conceptualspace/yet-another-speed-dial
| dynamic_sausage wrote:
| Another approach that does not show up in comments here is to use
| a reference manager, such as _Zotero_. It integrates nicely with
| browsers, so that saving webpages or pdfs is only one click away.
| Data is stored locally, so if a resource goes offline, you will
| still have access to it. And it has full-text indexing and
| search, so you can lookup terms from pages that you previously
| stored, even if you don 't remember the metadata.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| If I like something online, or potentially might like it, I will
| tend towards saving it if possible, because it might disappear.
| It's that simple for me.
| Simran-B wrote:
| I don't know about you, but my mobile browser hasn't display the
| number of open tabs in years because it displays :D (a smiley) if
| you exceed 99 tabs.
|
| Half of these tabs are work-related, often to-do items, and the
| other half is things I have yet to read or that I don't want to
| forget about but was too lazy to create a bookmark. (FWIW, there
| is no way to store all tabs as bookmarks, unlike in the desktop
| version of the browser.)
|
| One time, after a crash or accidentally closing all tabs and then
| restoring them, a toast message showed the tab count and it was
| around 750 back then. That was 2-3 years ago and I have left more
| tabs open since then than closed. I'm definitely a hoarder.
| lostlogin wrote:
| This makes me anxious. Aren't you afraid of data loss?
|
| It sounds like you don't have many problems. I put this in the
| same mental category as a pc without a clipboard history
| manager.
| Simran-B wrote:
| I sometimes check and close dozens of the old tabs because it
| turns out that my interests have shifted or that they lost
| their relevance otherwise. So it wouldn't be much of a loss.
| Most of the information I could still find again, given that
| I remember the right keywords.
|
| I grew up with an OS clipboard that can hold exactly one item
| and can perfectly live without a clipboard manager. I guess
| it's mostly habits?
| coffeeblack wrote:
| Wouldn't call it hoarding though. It's more like leaving
| mountains of documents and papers on your desk.
| Simran-B wrote:
| I do have such mountains, too, plus a random collection of
| items that keep growing on my desk. Maybe I'm an
| "unorganizer"?
| reil_convnet wrote:
| Same with me. I even go ahead and save articles as PDF and come
| back to about 1% of these PDFs when I read later. The other 99%
| are never touched.
|
| Pretty sure this is related to ADHD. Its as if collecting
| information creates the big picture view the mind finds it hard
| to develop reading just one source.
|
| I actually plan to take a week off and do nothing but quick read
| PDFs related to each relevant topic every year. That's my
| resolution for 2023.
| khaledh wrote:
| We're in the age of what I call "information obesity". We have
| devices in our hands that gives us access to all sorts of
| information, and we have little will power to moderate ourselves.
| It's like taking the fridge with you everywhere and opening it
| every few moments to eat whatever is inside, except this fridge
| is small enough to put in your pocket, and there's a constant
| supply of food in it. The natural result is information obesity.
|
| I don't have a solution for this problem. When it's that easy to
| consume, will power alone is not sufficient. And unlike physical
| obesity, information obesity is not visible; it's in the brain.
| So it's hard to detect, let alone fix.
| dbodin11 wrote:
| I'm the same! I had long work commutes on public transit, so I
| used my passive time to read and learn everyday to try and grow
| 1% each day.
|
| I used GMail drafts body to save links and the subject as
| searchable tags. I saved thousands of entries this way before I
| noticed two things: 1.) I'm actually interested in only a few
| parts of each link and want an easy way to return to them in the
| future, and 2.) I wish I could see the parts of links other
| dedicated readers found useful which would both help discover
| quality resources and save time with highlights acting as a
| preview or summary. So I actually built a social annotation web
| overlay that saves to a web app that's both an aggregator and
| social network: https://www.kontxt.io/.
|
| I publicly share most of what I read and highlight on my profile
| https://www.kontxt.io/profiles/d.
|
| Hacker News is one of my seed sites I visit multiple times a day,
| so I created a group for myself and other HN readers to see
| people's highlights of links on HN:
| https://www.kontxt.io/groups/23423/documents. Feel free to join
| and share your highlights, or just quickly view all the best
| parts of the links on HN highlighted by others.
|
| It would bring me no greater joy than to see the hundreds of
| thousands of lines of code I've developed over six years be used
| to unite avid readers on HN and fellow information addicts to
| learn and grow together as a community. Stay curious--and keep
| reading!
| seydor wrote:
| I dont call it FOMO or ADHD. Have you tried sitting in a quiet
| room? It's very unsettling, the need for information is
| universal, and probably 'settling'. That s why (social) media are
| so addictive.
|
| I believe most people are not hoarding information however, but
| they are looking into the information for the next thing to do.
|
| AI will change that, it will tell us directly what to do. I can't
| wait
| pperusse wrote:
| I hoard the information I have actually read (sometimes even
| stuff I did not read thoroughly) into my own, personal,
| searchable version of the internet, so that I can easily refer
| back to it, retrieve an old article and share it.
|
| To do that I use a paying account of pinboard.in
| anotheraccount9 wrote:
| I hoard data. I've been using the Johnny Decimal system with the
| Dewey Decimal classes for the most part (100'000+ books and
| documents selectively saved on all subjects). I also have a more
| dynamic sections with articles, medias, and projects. These don't
| include libgen or similar collections. I use Recoll to index and
| search (https://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/pages/index-
| recoll.htm...).
|
| A few things I've noticed over the years: 1. I obviously don't
| read all of that stuff, but it's very satisfying to find useful
| information from an obscure book when looking for something.
|
| 2. I cannot find anymore online some of the documents and videos
| I've saved. So I think that's a win to have them locally, as long
| as what I'm keeping is potentially useful.
|
| 3. To find info, nothing works perfectly. That's why I'm making
| an effort to use descriptive and structured folders, good
| filenames (often followed by the original filename), and
| sometimes an additional text file as meta for context. Still, my
| bookmarks are a mess.
| s-video wrote:
| I think you if you have a particular goal with using the computer
| it gets easier to avoid hoarding. I'm trying to get better at
| writing code that's easy to read and change, which is admittedly
| too vague but it can still help me be real with myself and close
| tabs that don't have anything to do with it.
|
| For example, here's two tabs I opened recently:
|
| A Neat XOR Trick: https://www.mattkeeter.com/blog/2022-12-10-xor/
|
| Code Only Says What it Does:
| https://brooker.co.za/blog/2020/06/23/code
|
| So that first one is about solving an advent of code problem
| cleverly. That second one makes some nice points about how code
| doesn't necessarily capture your intent or the reasons you wrote
| what you did. So if I had both of those open in my browser or in
| some queue for unread links, and I wanted to cut down, I'd delete
| the first one.
|
| I also find it helpful to ask if a link has any information that
| isn't already covered by some other resource in more depth. So if
| my goal was to learn more about compilers I might be tempted to
| save the blog post OP links to about writing a brainfuck compiler
| in Go with LLVM but there's already resources like Crafting
| Interpreters out there, so I'd probably only give that blog post
| a skim and not bother saving the link. (But if it was my goal to
| specifically write a brainfuck compiler, or write a compiler in
| Go, or write a compiler that uses LLVM, or some combination, I'd
| be more likely to save that particular post.)
| masklinn wrote:
| > So that first one is about solving an advent of code problem
| cleverly.
|
| Ah but it's not just about that, it's also about figuring out
| what problems can be fit into bit twiddling, knowledge about
| bitwise operation (especially that xor is self-reversing so it
| handles set/unset as well as pairs), and the ability to reduce
| effective complexity.
|
| I agree it's not useful if you're currently on a quest
|
| > to get better at writing code that's easy to read and change
|
| but thinking of it as "solving an advent of code problem
| cleverly" misses most of the information.
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| I do similar to this when I am learning something new. Case in
| point, I'm learning Go. Instead of writing ugly code and learning
| from that, I read and read and read trying to absorb how to write
| "idiomatic" Go.
|
| Eventually, I stop. So, with Go, I'll eventually stop, write bad,
| non-idiomatic code while I'm learning, then I'll eventually write
| better code.
|
| Not sure why I do this, nobody is going to see the crappy learner
| projects. I don't put that on github or anything.
| aaronbieber wrote:
| There is a ton of _practical_ stuff written in this general area
| if you search for "mind mapping" or "zettelkasten" (links
| below).
|
| The biggest thing I've taken away from all of my reading and
| experimentation in this (and being a bit of an information
| hoarder myself) is that the link itself, or the article itself,
| is not information, it's "data."
|
| There is value to the data, and if you want to record it that's
| fine. I use tags (hashtags in Logseq) to classify data so at
| least it's in some type of taxonomy, but Logseq full-text search
| is also pretty good so as long as you have words around the URLs
| that you'd be likely to search for you're good.
|
| _Information_ is what you derive from the data. It 's your
| summary, or paraphrasing of the core point(s), or connections you
| make between a thing and some other thing you previously
| recorded.
|
| Tools like Logseq and Obsidian exist to allow you to easily
| create those connections, and that's very much based on the
| zettelkasten method, though amplified by what the technology now
| allows, which is more complex and nuanced.
|
| Don't hoard URLs and headlines. Hoard your thoughts about them,
| what you think is important about them, what you saw that related
| to another thing you saw. _That_ is information.
|
| https://zettelkasten.de/introduction/
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten
|
| https://logseq.com/
|
| https://obsidian.md/
| safety1st wrote:
| Came to say this as a light user of Obsidian. I don't think
| "hoarding" information is a bad habit. These are potentially
| bad habits:
|
| A) Allowing yourself to be distracted by useless information
|
| B) Under-organizing (or over-organizing) the information you
| collect
|
| The OP may over-collect pieces of information that aren't
| important (URLs of random things that are novel) and may not
| spend enough time adding context to what he collects (e.g. via
| notes in a tool like Obsidian).
|
| I find the ideas behind zettelkasten very useful. Our brains
| are not able to remember everything of value, therefore it is
| worthwhile to invest a little energy in an external or "second
| brain" where information is stored with some degree of
| organization for future retrieval.
|
| I have a cache of notes on all manner of subjects going back
| about a decade. I only recently discovered Obsidian and have
| been gradually linking those notes together, adding context
| etc. This has had a real impact on my understanding of certain
| topics because I've re-discovered insights and knowledge of
| many things I had simply forgotten.
| kixxauth wrote:
| > There is a ton of practical stuff written in this general
| area if you search for "mind mapping" or "zettelkasten" (links
| below).
|
| I think sometimes we can overweight the impact of tools and
| systems for retaining knowledge. These tools can be useful (I'm
| working on my own home grown versions of them) and I am getting
| better with the systems as I get more practice. But, still,
| this is a race you can never win. As you digest more
| information, you consume more.
|
| Eventually you've got to get out there and be a maker.
| PebblesRox wrote:
| I like this distinction between raw data and processed
| understanding; thanks for sharing your insight!
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| You didn't read the article did you?
|
| He's just saying that he has too many links to go through and
| your answer is "what if you wrote a massive note about each of
| those links?"...
| pprotas wrote:
| That's different from how I understood his comment!
|
| There is no point in hoarding links; this is just
| "information." Information by itself is not useful; we need
| "data" instead.
|
| To turn this information into data, you could use something
| like Zettelkasten. Instead of hoarding links to articles,
| hoard notes about these articles and link them together.
|
| Basically, stop hoarding links due to your FOMO. Actually
| read articles that interest you and learn from them by
| writing your thoughts.
| captaincaveman wrote:
| normally you go : data -> information -> knowledge.
|
| Although the definitions are some what murky, this is the
| generally accepted model.
|
| I think what you are talking about is personal knowledge
| management.
| pprotas wrote:
| You are right, I mixed the terms "data" and "information"
| up
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| > I like seeing what people are working on, but there's too
| much information and I have a small problem with that..
| While it's manageable to read through a smaller batch of
| 30-40 links, it's time-consuming and overwhelming when the
| number grows to 80+ in a single week.
|
| The author writes his problem very clearly: he doesn't have
| time to go through the links.
|
| Suggesting that he not only goes through the links but also
| writes a Zettelkasten note about it is simply ridiculous.
|
| I'm not saying that the original comment is wrong, just
| that it's completely off topic and presents something as a
| solution when it's actually just a bigger problem.
| pprotas wrote:
| The autor mentions that they are spending a huge amount
| of time on hoarding links. This is a waste of time. They
| should stop doing this, instead spend that time on
| reading a few articles and writing notes.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Why should they start spending time on writing notes on
| links, even if it requires looking at less links to make
| the time for it? It's really not obvious that writing
| notes habitually is good advice or a healthier use of
| time
| guntherhermann wrote:
| Yo, be kinder. Don't accuse people of x, y or z. It's
| unnecessary. Chill out, and if you're in a bad mood, don't
| post inflammatory comments on the internet. Peace.
| kixxauth wrote:
| I've been collecting nerdy tech information on and off for 30
| years. I say "on and off" because it seems to come in waves. It
| happens between spans of time when I'm building something
| important or profitable (not necessarily related).
|
| Examples:
|
| In 2004 I built my own web crawler and RSS feed reader in PHP in
| an attempt to build my way out of the information problem. I
| learned that tools do not help with this problem, but it did lead
| to a good software development job where I was able to put what I
| learned to use.
|
| In 2006 - 2007 I went down a deep rabbit hole with the
| possibility of server side JavaScript. That led to participating
| in the development of the Node.js runtime, CommonJS and Promise
| specifications, and a career doing some pretty cool stuff with
| JavaScript.
|
| In 2014 - 2016 I went down a rabbit hole on video streaming which
| led me through a startup (which failed) and then a job at a major
| consumer streaming platform (which has been wildly successful). I
| got to build some state of the art technology because I had
| remembered and acted on some of that information I was hoarding.
|
| Now I feel like I've missed out on information hoarding while
| I've been building cool stuff in my dream job. I don't regret my
| time away from the information hurricane, but I am having fun
| getting back into it to see what comes up next (it is NOT AI or
| Web3 ;-) )
|
| For everything, there is a season.
| ZhangSWEFAANG wrote:
| Instead of "major consumer streaming platform", you can just
| say Disney. You're not that important or successful. There's no
| need to humblebrag.
| nop_slide wrote:
| Instead of naming yourself ZhangSWEFAANG why aren't you just
| Zhangdev? Being at FAANG doesn't make you more important or
| successful.
| paganel wrote:
| > In 2004 I built my own web crawler and RSS feed reader in PHP
| in an attempt to build my way out of the information problem.
|
| I've built and actively maintained a Django- and Solr-based
| personal project to store all my info about the DVDs that I was
| hording around 2007-2010, it also involved crawling IMDB. Did
| the same with the anime shows I was also hording, in this
| instance I was crawling animenewsnetwork.com.
|
| After a very long hiatus I feel that I should do the same with
| the physical books hording that has gotten over me since the
| pandemic started (this time using Elasticsearch instead of
| Solr), after all categorising books is from where facet-search
| libraries like Solr first got their hints.
| kixxauth wrote:
| Looking through the comments on this post, it's no surprise
| that many HN readers are doing the same. A self selected
| audience, I guess ;-)
|
| Still, it has been fun, and rewarding. I don't feel like
| building these things is a waste of time, seriously.
| ctvo wrote:
| Being curious isn't a bad thing. The more important question is
| why do you think it's a negative? Who cares if you skimmed it,
| nodded along, and moved on? It's OK to never revisit them.
| Getting exposure to what's possible and what others are doing is
| in itself helpful. No need for any other value extraction.
| yanyanhack wrote:
| A software can be made, and a group of people can share the
| screening results.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| I do the same kind of thing, and apparently, many others here do
| too!
|
| Frankly, I'm not surprised. This is not an _illness_ , it's a
| common trait of polymaths and intelligent people to be curious
| about _everything_ , even things that appear to be irrelevant to
| their daily life.
|
| There's a great story about how Bill Gates asked his secretary to
| buy random magazines and journals, and he'd flip through one
| every day. Print-era Reddit, as it were. He read one about
| _sowing machines_ and realised the software for the newfangled
| computer-controlled ones was terrible, and for many years
| basically all sowing machines ended up with Windows as their OS!
|
| Another similar story is how Apple devices have nice typography
| because Steve Jobs randomly took a calligraphy class.
|
| I shock people at work semi regularly by pulling random little
| things out of the back of my brain where I filed them away "just
| in case". Sometimes, the "in case" turns up!
|
| Something I've noticed about IT these days is that it's becoming
| less about having some sort of raw talent, and more about simply
| knowing what tools, SDKs, and APIs are out there, written by
| other people with talent. In the past, you had to be wizard, now
| you just have to _know about_ wizards.
| jonwinstanley wrote:
| So basically knowing that those "awesome" lists on github exist
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| yes, and a good filter to detect the stuff that's not any
| good. something which experience is good for
| roxymusic1973 wrote:
| > for many years basically all sowing machines ended up with
| Windows as their OS
|
| Presumably this also helped Microsoft pivot into reaping
| machines.
| pnutjam wrote:
| of course, you reap what you sew.
| boilerupnc wrote:
| ^^^THIS. I've always felt that my greatest superpower was the
| gift to search/find information fast. This allows me to both
| discover a wide range of info and also go hunting for targetted
| info when the situation dictates a more narrow scope. Pre-fetch
| provides the quickest time-to-value. With a near infinite cache
| to fill, it only makes sense to continually feed a steady diet
| of information to satisfy relentless curiosity. Bookmarking,
| re-reading/re-visiting past info, writing and sharing info
| tidbits of random info, etc ... all help to lock-in what I'm
| aware of and also provide confidence to go hunting and
| rediscover a known nugget when a particular
| situation/conversation could benefit.
|
| TL;DR: Awareness comes in two forms: quick immediate recall and
| fuzzy vague confidence of related material. To expand breadth
| and depth of both forms, it's beneficial to hunt information
| efficiently.
| shenbomo wrote:
| https://zettelkasten.de/posts/collectors-fallacy/
| hdaz0017 wrote:
| I had not looked at total URLs before but these the figures -
| started around July 2006 on this process but there were others
| before this.
|
| Indexed Articles - 24,613
|
| Line Count - 9,594,745
|
| Total URLs - 260,306
|
| lol your not alone :)
| karol wrote:
| Set time aside when you are allowed to do it. In other times
| block the offending sites completely.
|
| Ask yourself a question - is what I am doing right not
| benefitting me in a way a walk/exercise/spending time with
| family/doing practical coding/starting a business/insert your
| favourite would? If now, stop and move on.
|
| Why it's not easy? Because it's a habit which has its own trigger
| (sitting at a computer). Unfortunately as a developer you cannot
| get rid of the trigger. From own perspective - rearranging the
| work space or changing helps for a while and then slowly you fall
| back to old habits, so I wouldn't say it's a permanent solution.
| jasmeet217 wrote:
| Bookmarking this thread to read later!
| 99failures wrote:
| I used to collect links and abstracts of things that were of
| interest to me on a customized WordPress install, visible to the
| public.
|
| And I did such a good job that my "site" was very rich. The
| problem was not storage, so to speak, the problem was, and still
| is, recollection.
|
| I had no need or I didn't remember >95% of the things I stored,
| and for that 5% that I needed or remember, I could just as easily
| find them using google.
|
| So I abandoned the practice and now google is my new bookmark
| site.
| diego898 wrote:
| In-line with this discussion, over 80% of my open tabs are HN
| links.
|
| I'd like to be able to easily: 1. Archive the link the HN post is
| pointing to 2. Archive the HN comments
|
| Does anyone know of an easy automated way to archive both the HN
| post (comments) and target link (arbitrary link)?
|
| I have a dream of then running textual analysis on this to make
| it all easily searchable by topic like "machine learning"
| goplayoutside wrote:
| raindrop.io has some features that may help with that.
| didgetmaster wrote:
| My desk (and monitor) are covered with post-it notes and notepads
| where I jot down things I mean to go back to (sometimes I do,
| sometimes I don't). I also have tabs and files where I cut and
| paste links into for future reference.
|
| If only there were more hours in each day...
| Moissanite wrote:
| This resonates. I've managed to control this behaviour a bit (or
| at least lessen the impact on my life) by just reconciling that
| there are link dumps for each specific purpose:
|
| - Link to an interesting software project? Star it on GitHub then
| delete the link. If I am so inclined in the future, I can just
| trawl through my starred repos.
|
| - Low-value article which is too long to read right now? Add to
| Pocket, then periodically read-and-purge. The hard part is giving
| myself permission to delete articles which seem "timeless", but I
| don't stress over it - it's not like Pocket is going anywhere
| (and if it does, problem solved!)
|
| - Genuinely useful information? Add to Obsidian - either with
| links to other key information I already have in there, or as the
| root of a new bundle of nodes.
|
| The main blocker to keeping on top of these organization schemes
| is the fact that I often discover the links while on my phone.
| The only solution I've found is a weekly purge of Firefox tabs
| onto a laptop, where the links can be sorted properly.
| orobinson wrote:
| Goodreads and its "Want to read" shelf is good for this
| approach with books. I just add any book I see someone
| recommending to that list then when I need a new book to read I
| can pick from there. The ratings on there are handy for sanity
| checking if a book is worth your time. I've found anything with
| a score of 4.0 or above is usually worth a read.
| ciupicri wrote:
| Why star a project on GitHub when you can just bookmark it
| including with some tags? What if the project is hosted
| somewhere else, say GitLab?
| CITIZENDOT wrote:
| Except the obsidian part, I do the same.
| [deleted]
| marze wrote:
| Of course the first step is admitting you have a problem. A
| problem many other people share these days...
|
| Ideas: perhaps keep a daily written log and make a written
| summary of what you have learned at the end of each day. And,
| make written goals regarding the process, to guide it. I like
| exporting interesting web pages as a .pdf into a single unsorted
| directory, for possible use and organization at some future time,
| for things that aren't directly related to primary tasks.
|
| Best idea is probably to solicit ideas and try out the most
| promising until you find a good solution, but in an organized
| way, with periodic evaluation and written reports.
| xtiansimon wrote:
| > "I spend a huge amount of time collecting a never-ending stream
| of links, notes, and thoughts, only to never actually go back and
| read them again."
|
| Curious. Why is this a 'bad thing'? People waste hours on video
| games. People plant things in the ground in spring only to dig
| them up in fall. What else would you be doing with _your free
| time_ that's a better use?
| lacoolj wrote:
| i have over 500 tabs open in my two browsers (700 if i open my
| other profile)
|
| bookmarks just dont cut it these days
| guntherhermann wrote:
| Reddit and Twitter are mostly for tech-focused nerds? Hahahaha,
| ah. Thanks for the laugh. Reddit and Twitter are outrage
| machines. I'm sure there are some good subreddits out there but
| all of the ones I used to be a part of got taken over by mods who
| care far too much about the Current Thing To Get Upset About
| (take your pick). If there are any recommendations for good subs
| I'm all ears. Can't convince me about Twitter though, it's an
| absolute cesspit and it has been for a long time.
|
| For information hoarding I use logseq
| (https://github.com/logseq/logseq) + syncthing
| (https://syncthing.net/). I've been doing it for a few months now
| and it's quite a nice workflow.
| TheFragenTaken wrote:
| I think your take on Reddit is maybe misplaced. "Outrage
| machines" stem from algorithmic feeds that push that. Reddit
| pushes your own subreddits, and the popular ones are quite
| heavily moderated. Though I would agree that constant memes
| aren't terribly useful.
|
| On the other hand, Twitter push tweets for users I don't
| follow, never engaged with, and tweet content I am not remotely
| interested in. Generally I find Twitter promotes personal
| attacks in a whole different way from Reddit, because you
| follow people, not topics.
| guntherhermann wrote:
| > I'm sure there are some good subreddits out there but all
| of the ones I used to be a part of got taken over by mods who
| care far too much about the Current Thing To Get Upset About
| (take your pick). If there are any recommendations for good
| subs I'm all ears.
|
| It's not misplaced, it's my personal experience. It might
| differ from your own, but it doesn't make it wrong.
|
| Got any recommendations? /r/$language isn't as good as the
| $language IRC channels. The rest of the popular "tech" ones
| (space, futurism, tech) have exactly the issue I outlined
| above (calling those subreddits 'outrage machines' is a
| reach, but they _are_ shit, and not really for 'tech' people.
| Probably because they're popular, maybe because I'm too
| elitest?).
| Sakos wrote:
| I'm dealing with the same issue actively. My latest attempt
| involves the article https://zettelkasten.de/posts/knowledge-
| cycle-efficiently-or...
|
| I have a gazillion tabs open, and I try to work through my tabs
| once a day to see what I can delete without losing information I
| want to keep and what I think is valuable enough to add to my
| notes in some way.
|
| I'll look for a note that already covers the idea and add the URL
| and a quick summary. If a note doesn't exist, I'll add the core
| idea that interested me about it as a new note with the idea(s)
| summarized in my own words (maybe 1-3 sentences), then a
| reference in that note to the URL. I also try to summarize the
| link from memory instead of reading through it again. I'll only
| check the link's contents if I'm having trouble writing anything.
| If I'm feeling particularly productive, I might add any quotes or
| particular passages I remember as well (paraphrased, of course, I
| don't have an eidetic memory).
|
| I've made a huge dent in my open tabs so far and I'm fairly happy
| with my progress in the past week.
|
| edit: I briefly saw another comment about using OneTab (sorry, I
| haven't had the time to read any of the other comments yet) and
| my current attempt is partly based on how unhappy I am with
| OneTab. The addon itself is brilliant, but I've realized that
| I'll just save all the open tabs and then ... well, that's it.
| They're basically bookmarks again and it's like an information
| blackhole for me.
|
| edit2: I'm currently using Obsidian.md. Not bothering with
| directories at the moment, because I haven't yet decided how to
| organize my notes.
| fluential wrote:
| For deep linking knowledge and notes I love to use Remnote
| (found here on HN)
| ranger47 wrote:
| Obsidian is great. I tend to use it for TTRPG stuff since it's
| prettt portable.
|
| For actual notes, or detailed lists, I like Featherwiki.
|
| https://feather.wiki/
| justin_oaks wrote:
| Thanks for linking Featherwiki. I've used Tiddlywiki, and
| it's good to see other entries in this space (wikis as a
| single HTML file).
|
| Featherwiki's 55KB size is quite small compared to
| Tiddlywiki's 2MB. That said, the size difference alone may
| not be sufficient reason to switch away from Tiddlywiki.
| mclightning wrote:
| If you enjoy it, keep doing it.
|
| If you don't enjoy it, seek solutions. I wrote this as a
| secondary alternative because your article is not seeking any
| solution but rather stating a fact and asking the resolution on
| why you may be doing this. Then it goes circular.
|
| I have developed some solutions, personal traits to deal with
| this in my own personal life.
|
| Learn to ignore useless facts, information and opinion pieces.
|
| Learn to ignore other people's pet peeves. Let them handle it.
|
| Learn to prioritise the information you can act upon.
|
| Learn to stop it all and put the information to action.
| Bondi_Blue wrote:
| I have the same problem. I think it helps to slot in a dedicated
| amount of time, on a weekly basis or something, to catch up and
| aggregate. On the other 6 days of the week, I'm trying to use
| that same time slot to actually read and consume what I've set
| aside.
| hamsterbase wrote:
| To solve this problem, I have developed a local-first read-it-
| later software specifically for this purpose.
|
| I used the singlefile plugin to save thousands of articles in my
| bookmarks as offline html and then imported them into
| hamsterbase. Now I only have Twitter, HN, GitHub and other
| popular sites in my bookmarks.
|
| Because the data is all local, I will have the feeling that I
| really own them. I don't think I'll have time to read them in the
| future, so maybe I can get chatgpt to do it for me.
|
| The software is currently completely free and all data is local,
| so if you are interested, give it a try.
|
| https://hamsterbase.com
|
| I have saved all the articles I am interested in so that I can
| search for them in full when I need them. I don't have to worry
| about losing the site because the data is local.
|
| Here's how I use it
|
| 1. when I come across an article of interest, I take a quick look
| at it and save it as mhtml in cmd + s. hamsterbase will
| automatically import and index it.
|
| 2. I've designed the unread list to only show articles added
| within 14 days, so I don't have to worry about piling up
| thousands of unread articles, I'll read through them when I can
| and highlight them as I read them.
|
| 3. I can quickly find the previously saved pages because of the
| support by domain, date added, whether they have comments or not,
| and whether they are liked or not.
|
| 4. I've deployed a copy on my Synology and am running the desktop
| side on my mac and pc (not released yet, still eating enough food
| for myself). Peer-to-peer sync between the three devices
|
| 5. Since I don't have the energy to develop the mobile side at
| the moment (this is a side project), I have developed an RSS
| interface to output the saved pages as rss so that I can read
| them on my iPhone with my favourite rss reader.
| behnamoh wrote:
| * Windows only
| hamsterbase wrote:
| Thanks for the tip, I realised I had written the wrong thing
| on the front page. Currently supports linux,mac,windows
|
| Currently officially released
|
| linux : https://hamsterbase.com/docs/install/install-with-
| docker.htm... macos:
| https://hamsterbase.com/docs/install/macos.html windows:
| https://hamsterbase.com/docs/install/windows.html
|
| Not yet officially released but available
|
| windows desktop : https://github.com/hamsterbase/hamsterbase/
| releases/tag/0.6.... macos arm desktop : https://github.com/h
| amsterbase/hamsterbase/releases/tag/0.6.... macos intel
| desktop :https://github.com/hamsterbase/hamsterbase/releases/
| tag/0.6.... : https://hamsterbase.com/docs/install/install-
| with-docker.htm... macos:
| https://hamsterbase.com/docs/install/macos.html windows:
| https://hamsterbase.com/docs/install/windows.html
|
| Not yet officially released but available
|
| Download from https://github.com/hamsterbase/hamsterbase/rele
| ases/tag/0.6....
|
| windows desktop ,macos arm desktop , macos intel desktop
| pwillia7 wrote:
| ooh this is a cool idea
| amelius wrote:
| Nice. But I guess it needs some AI to figure out what you want
| to read next.
| hamsterbase wrote:
| hamsterbase offers an api with an open source sdk that could
| perhaps be combined with openai.
|
| https://hamsterbase.com/developer/
| abnry wrote:
| I am quite interested in this. I take a similar approach using
| SingleFile and then a watchdog script to watch for SingleFile
| downloads. But mine doesn't look as mature as yours.
|
| If I have a large collection of SingleFile bookmarks can I
| upload them to hamsterbase?
|
| Another goal of mine is to make conversions to epub easy so I
| can read on my Kindle.
| vageli wrote:
| I would be interested when you deploy the desktop app. I wonder
| if something like a browser extension would be a good fit here
| to offload the manual file download step.
| hamsterbase wrote:
| The desktop version is available, it's just not officially
| released yet (for the app store), you can download it from
| github.
|
| https://github.com/hamsterbase/hamsterbase/releases/tag/0.6..
| ..
|
| hamsterbase supports singlefile. You can save web pages
| directly with singlefile. You can see the documentation below
|
| https://hamsterbase.com/docs/integrations/singlefile.html
| Jayakumark wrote:
| You are not alone, Currently have 250,000 bookmarks in Pinboard,
| might probably be their largest hoarder :-). When i see an
| interesting in tech, my hand automatically will press Ctrl+D. I
| know, A lifetime wont be enough to go through them all. But i
| cant stop it , newer AI/ML Summarizer is getting so much better
| where my only hope is someday i can summarize them all order them
| all by some sort of ranking and glance it.
| javajosh wrote:
| It's not a bad habit, you just haven't discovered a way to
| integrate the information in a way that produces good output for
| you. E.g. something like a Zettlekasten.
|
| Also, its not ADHD, its preparedness. There is a fundamental
| tension between discovery and requirement. You're going through
| your garage and you find a cool or unusual thing. You feel
| inspired, excited you own this treasure, and dreaming of things
| to do with it. That is discovery. Requirement is when you want to
| build something specific, and now you need to gather tools and
| supplies to fit the need. This is a _significantly_ less
| enjoyable process for most people, especially since for most
| projects it 's usually the first (and last) time you'll execute a
| project like that (its a power law thing). It's not all bad - its
| because 'requirement' is so much less exciting that people pay
| good money to entice people to do that work for them.
|
| One way to cope with this asymmetry, have your cake and eat it
| too, is to constantly discover things (which is its own reward),
| but you can squirrel the discoveries away so that when
| _requirement_ comes you 'll be ready for it. By its nature, this
| strategy means you'll never use 95% of your information, but
| you'll never know which 95%.
|
| So, don't be so hard on yourself and horde away, I say!
| majkinetor wrote:
| Not sure why you got downvoted, this comment is amazing way to
| frame this and its almost 100% how I think about it and why I
| personally hord bunch of stuff.
|
| However, there are other forms of hording that don't fit this -
| why do I hord and organize full flac albums (adding each in the
| musicbrainz), ebooks (calibre), resources (audio/video
| samples).
|
| And also, why do I hord this stuff: all hardware I buy, all
| medical diagnostics and lab results, personal metrics (bp,
| weight, etc.)...
|
| Maybe its all preperedness, in fact, for future potential
| situation. This sounds a lot like FOMO. But what is the
| difference between FOMO and preperedness?
|
| I am quite certain that I dont have ADHD, maybe a bit of OCD.
| javajosh wrote:
| _> Not sure why you got downvoted_
|
| Me neither! Discovery vs requirement is a really cool idea
| (if I do say so myself) which deserves a longer treatment.
| Glad you like it.
| willjp wrote:
| Not alone! I do this too. I have a mediawiki instance I use to
| keep notes on things I learn. I try to keep a rough heirarchy
| (ex. Editors), and I use it's "what links here" to navigate from
| a related page (ex. Vim) to get back to that list of related
| pages.
|
| It's consistent enough that if I want to start learning
| something, I'll usually try to create that page only to find it
| exists, and then I can start with the links (or purge them if
| they were not useful after all).
| pwillia7 wrote:
| If you're unaware, try Chrome Reading List for an easy solution
| (but you still have to not save 10000 links)
| https://www.groovypost.com/howto/use-the-google-chrome-readi...
| ranger47 wrote:
| This article hits close to home, but there is one crucial
| component missing; free time. For the most part, I'm at my laptop
| or mobile about half of my primary work day, and take regular
| breaks from actual work to check out HN or any other gathering of
| techheads I follow. Here's where the data collection happens,
| mostly, as another commenter mentioned, projects I was to try or
| have been inspired by, skills to brush up on, etc.
|
| There's this odd notion of "saving for someday" that kindles hope
| of some rainy weekend where I suddenly have 48 hours all to
| myself, and to focus on making again. That's what drives the data
| collection.
| HuwFulcher wrote:
| Yes, I resonate with this a lot. It's one thing to have time to
| capture information but a whole other thing to have the time to
| extract the essence out of it. I still haven't figured out an
| answer yet though.
| larve wrote:
| TL;DR: it doesn't matter how many tabs you have or how you close
| them, the value I get out of them comes down to intellectually
| engaging with them fully, which is exhausting and rewarding. The
| most valuable practice I found is "generating" out of tabs, and
| for that, sometimes just the tab title is enough. No tool is
| going to save you.
|
| I have a few modes of "consuming" these tab piles.
|
| 1. doing in-depth studying
|
| This is like taking 1 day to go through 1 page of a math book.
| It's sitting down with a tutorial and actually going through it
| and doing all the side exercises and then reflecting upon it.
| It's slow af, but it's very rewarding, and of course I learn
| things. Over the long term, the value of that learning
| diminishes, sometimes very rapidly, depending on what I focused
| on. I learned awk and R repeatedly, at times over months, and
| it's all gone. What stays are some deeper insights that were
| uncovered just through sheer focus. This is the "it takes a full
| day to close a single tab" mode.
|
| Of course, a tab could be a textbook that actually would take 3
| semesters to work through, so there's a wide range in what "in-
| depth" itself means.
|
| 2. reading and annotating
|
| This is where I sit down with an article (for example using
| Reader) and read it with the intent of really engaging with it. I
| don't just highlight interesting passages, I put myself in the
| mindset of having a conversation with the author, of putting my
| own ideas against theirs. This is pretty high-intensity too, and
| when I do this over the weekend, I would put it in the "it takes
| an hour to close a single tab" mode.
|
| This is what I actually find has the most "return on time
| reading". I have a fairly productive Zettelkasten thing going on,
| and filing thoughts that come out of articles, along with notes,
| is very productive, often leads to blog posts, and I have found
| how to make highlights and quotes and crosslinking work for me.
|
| The downside is that usually, for every tab closed, 80 more get
| opened. I can reasonably process about 5-6 tabs this way during a
| work week, maybe 10 if I'm pushing it. On holidays I would
| average 5-6 per day, just because you get more efficient as you
| go.
|
| 3. just reading
|
| This would be just reading a tab for fun. Personally, this
| happens if I just opened a tab. I rarely go back to an old tab
| and then just read it for fun, usually it's just more dopamine-
| rewarding to go open a fresh tab on HN :) This is fairly fast,
| and usually pretty transient in terms of "return on investment".
| Sure maybe over years you get something out of it, but I consider
| it entertainment (which is great!).
|
| 4. filing links
|
| This is something I need to get better at. I think there is a lot
| of value of just looking at the title of a tab, quickly scrolling
| through it, and then discarding it, or keeping a reference to it
| along with a small paragraph. I never file a link without a small
| paragraph about why I think it is important to keep it, which in
| a way is a quick way to generate a thought, like in 2. Just the
| fact of writing that paragraph means I probably get more "value"
| (as in, it will help me generate my own knowledge in the future)
| than actually reading it like in 3, because I actually "created"
| something myself.
|
| If that little paragraph is stored in a relevant location, it
| means that the next time I want to study that topic or look
| something up, I will find it, along with its link, and
| immediately get context. That is actually _extremely_ valuable.
| This filing of links is something I am not very good at, and
| definitely want to work on more.
|
| A concrete example: I stumble across the [the Fennel programming
| language](https://fennel-lang.org). Incredibly interesting to me,
| but also something I feel would deserve a few months if not a
| year of attention to "really" get it. I can file it away under
| Lisp / Lua / Programming Languages and my daily log in my
| obsidian vault, maybe skim the website and make a little bullet
| point list of points I find interesting, link a HN discussion.
| This takes about 2-5 minutes per tab. It is also exhausting work,
| if I do this for two hours, I'll be ready to just plop down in
| front of Netflix.
|
| So, is any of these better? I like all of them, and I definitely
| had to build workflows for 1, 2, 4. I am content now knowing that
| there is no solution, and feeling like you can process 800 links
| a day is impossible. Instead I focus on time-boxing "quality
| time", and just close all the tabs once I'm done, there'll be
| plenty of high-value quality time the next day.
| larve wrote:
| Just for fun, I created the entry for Fennel Lisp by
| "processing" the index page, to show what that is like:
| https://publish.obsidian.md/manuel/Wiki/Programming/Fennel+L...
|
| I also found that I mentioned Fennel Lisp back in june, so I
| linked that in too. If you step through the vault, you can see
| how I slowly moved from:
|
| - pile of links
|
| to
|
| - pile of links with a single sentence per link
|
| to
|
| - full paragraph with a lot more thinking of how I relate to
| the link.
|
| The latter is really where it's at. Write down why you think
| the link is interesting, how you found it, what made you decide
| to write something about it, other links it evokes in you. The
| context in which you found the link interesting is what you
| want to capture, and what will help you get value out of it in
| the future. The information itself is transient.
| codemac wrote:
| Two big lessons of GTD (and majorly influencing many many other
| systems like basb, ztd, etc):
|
| - DO NOT read/peruse/etc on first inspection! Just add it to a
| list.
|
| - Collecting these items is not processing them which is not
| organization!
|
| Stop beating yourself up, and start running a system. You must
| set aside the time for the following:
|
| - Collect everything into some list. Links on the web you'd like
| to read is great for this - just get the title and the link.
|
| - Process that list into what it means to you! Is it a project? A
| task? A piece of reference material? Just fun stuff to read later
| that you don't want to commit to? etc
|
| - Organize those now processed items to where things belong.
| Projects/tasks, into your task manager. Reference material, into
| your reference filings. Fun stuff to read later? Just throw it on
| a "hey, read this when you're bored later" list using something
| like Instapaper, or evernote, or even a text file of links.
|
| Now you're cooking with gas. You get to peruse all these links
| that make you feel up to date, but you're spending maybe 5 mins
| just collecting them into a list to read whenever you have time
| later. "Do it tomorrow" is my mantra, and I can only be honest
| about that if I keep lists.
|
| My list is excessively long, and normally I try to comment/read
| comment threads the day after the post is made. However I had to
| comment that the emotions around these desires can be inspected,
| introspected, dissected, etc... or you can change the basic
| behavior into what you'd like - and skip some of the emotions all
| together.
|
| One of the most powerful things I learned with meditation: going
| through the "noticing and labeling" process, eventually leading
| to just noticing and labeling everything as "desires", and
| watching them float through the sky. Notice, label, and it'll
| slowly go away.
| f0e4c2f7 wrote:
| I wonder if you could feed the contents of your bookmarks into
| chatgpt or another AI system and then interogate it about what
| might be interesting, duplicates, or even have it suggest random
| articles (perhaps related to browsing? Done as a browser
| extension maybe?)
| rcdwealth wrote:
| [dead]
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| I like to read a lot of links, tweets, articles, product
| documentation, etc and tend to build up a backlog as well.
|
| The way I solve this is twofold:
|
| 1) Leaving shit and forgetting about it. If I can't make time to
| read it, I don't care enough about it. Very effective.
|
| 2) Aggressively pruning tabs. If I want to clear out my backlog,
| I ask myself "how much do I actually want to read about this?"
| and close the tab unless I really want to read it.
|
| In the rare case I want to keep things around for a while and
| haven't forgotten about them, I generally put them into a new
| window then minimize it.
| etrautmann wrote:
| I like using the pocket app for this and then never feeling bad
| about closing tabs.
| alkonaut wrote:
| I absolutely love reading articles and I spend hours clicking HN
| links or reading things shared by people I follow on Twitter. But
| I have zero FOMO. I don't download and organize music and video
| out of fear they will disappear from a steaming video. I don't
| collect "read later" bookmarks (in fact I don't use bookmarks for
| anything, ever). I don't have a system for writing down notes or
| thoughts.
|
| So if I have an idea I either act on it now, or remember later,
| or forget. And that's _fine_.
|
| To miss a great article, fail to realize a great idea, forget
| that great song that disappeared forever on Spotify is _fine_.
|
| And I'm so thankful for feeling this. I think it's basically
| another side of my laziness/ tendency for procrastination that
| helps me. But I like it. I'll never be a person with an org mode
| full of random thoughts, a list of ideas for projects or blog
| posts, or a library of videos for watching later (or even more
| pathologically, or things I already watched).
| stewbrew wrote:
| Just subscribe to a good weekly magazine like e.g. the economist
| and let other do the hard work.
| vicnicius wrote:
| I'm finishing https://sendmyreads.com to help me tackle just
| that. I figured if I get all the information I gather pulled at
| me at a convenient time I'd be more likely to actually consume
| it. It's been working well, but I'm afraid I'm now biased towards
| reading it (because I built the thing) so I want to give it more
| time to see how it goes.
|
| If OP or anyone else is interested let me know and I'll let you
| know once it's ready.
| surfsvammel wrote:
| This is interesting. I don't do this anymore, but maybe I should.
|
| Usually I just trust that when I need something I'll be able to
| find it. But nowadays Google (and searching in general) is so bad
| that maybe I should not trust that I'll be able to find it again
| when I need it. Maybe today it's more worth while to build a
| library of interesting stuff, than it was a couple of years ago.
| danparsonson wrote:
| Ah this is a big part of my hoarding problem - I find something
| useful today, tomorrow I need it and it's gone. Of course this
| happens to 0.01% of things I find... but I don't know which
| 0.01% it will be.
| kvetching wrote:
| This is the result of the prescription amphetamines. When people
| stop taking amphetamines, perspective returns and you realize
| there's a lot of noise that you don't actually care about. When
| you're overloading your dopamine receptors with amphetamine, you
| see potential in everything.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| For me, it's that my ambition far exceed my talent.
|
| How do I deal with this? I try to stop and anchor myself in
| proven technologies that align with _ME_ not _YOU_ or what _YOU_
| blogged about or find interesting. This takes courage as
| sometimes you'll find yourself off the beaten path. I see entry
| level folks switching text editors, programming languages, tech
| stacks, etc. They're enduring through the same thing. It's not
| your IDE, it's not your color theme, or your background image.
| It's not an article that you have FOMO over, or some library that
| you haven't yet discovered. None of these will solve your
| problems. You have to do real work. You have to anchor yourself
| in the technology that you want to conquer and stop relying on
| folks to hold your hand through it.
|
| Stop hoarding information and start building. You may find
| yourself off the beaten path and you may too discover that your
| ambition far exceed your talent.
| lowleveldesign wrote:
| Information hoarding was my big problem as well. To fight it, a
| few years ago, I stopped using any bookmark services, and I
| started to keep a list of links in a markdown text file with a
| limited number of tags. I split the links by month and often add
| a short description and a tag to a saved link. All IT tags are
| textual, but I use emojis for other link categories, such as
| music or books. Example content:
|
| ### 2022/12
|
| - {musical note emoji} [Mendelssohn - Complete Piano
| Works](https://www.amazon.pl/Complete-Piano-Works-
| Prosseda/dp/B084D...)
|
| - [Checked C](https://github.com/microsoft/checkedc) - extensions
| to make C safer #cpp
|
| - [SQLite Internals: How The World's Most Used Database
| Works](https://www.compileralchemy.com/books/sqlite-internals/)
|
| - {book emoji} [Ask HN: Best books read in
| 2022?](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33849267) - some
| interesting pieces here
|
| ### 2022/11
|
| - [The Linux Kernel Module Programming
| Guide](https://sysprog21.github.io/lkmpg/),
| [repo](https://github.com/sysprog21/lkmpg) #linux
|
| ...
|
| And so on. I know it's simplistic, but it helped me a lot to keep
| the number of links under a reasonable limit, and it is
| effortless to search through.
| mahogany wrote:
| This is funny, I went the other way. I used to keep text files
| of links quite similar to this, but then after several years I
| realized I rarely (perhaps a handful of times over years) went
| back to them. So I started using bookmarks with tags because it
| was much faster. I still rarely go back to bookmarks, but when
| I do, I find there is much less friction compared to scanning a
| text file.
| mauiuku wrote:
| I've gotten past this by using this app the records your screen
| (and audio) and indexes all the words that show up. Data is
| stored locally. Check it out: https://www.rewind.ai/
| tunnuz wrote:
| You're not alone, there is at least another one like you.
| adaisadais wrote:
| I too have the same problem.
|
| I've always wondered "what if I simply just read them and took a
| note / maybe linked them to a word or Google doc or something?"
|
| I had a friend who did a similar activity with books. Read a
| book, took notes on the 'highest learnings' and saved each book
| he finished.
|
| He went back and found an old book with all of his 'wisdom' and
| realized he had totally change since he wrote those things. He
| didn't really care about them like he thought his future self
| might.
|
| Knowledge / link hoarding is vanity.
| pessimizer wrote:
| This depends on the books that you're getting the 'highest
| learnings' from. If you're reading a bunch of biographies and
| self-help, you'll end up with notes that are simultaneously
| less interesting and more grandiose than if you do the same
| thing while reading math, science or real (non-biography/non-
| inspirational) history and anthropology books.
|
| i.e. don't record "wisdom," record information.
| adaisadais wrote:
| Haha your name is great.
|
| The danger I find in information is a) there's too much and
| b) it's already out of date.
|
| Wisdom transcends time but is much harder to come by.
|
| "I'm not a pessimist, I'm an optometrist" -Ricky
| sodimel wrote:
| That's funny, I just saved this link on my website that's serving
| the unique purpose to store (and maybe share? that makes it two
| purposes?) links I find interesting:
| https://links.l3m.in/en/link/2840/
|
| I developed this thing myself after I grew too tired of my 800+
| bookmarks, and also after I grew too tired of my Shaarli instance
| too. It's still in development & it's open source, you can find a
| link on the footer.
|
| One feature of this thing I use daily is that I've set the "new
| page" url of my browser to the random url you can find in the
| menu of the website. That way I am greeted by a cool
| article/product/thing every time I open my browser :)
| gmuslera wrote:
| From time to time (months to years) I go back to those links
| (usually saved in my rss reader), or at least some of the newest,
| and try to turn some of those links into knowledge. Some may not
| work anymore, the remaining I try to put in categories/bookmarks,
| or give me time to read and then decide what to do with them.
| Sometimes that read implies more work, like taking notes,
| learning more about some discussed topics, link them somewhat
| with other pieces of saved content.
|
| The awesome lists ( https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome and
| related ) helped me to take off some of the burden. It is not
| that I need to have those links, but having them somewhat
| available when I need them, at least for a lot of
| places/software/etc.
|
| In the end, is in part some sort of external memory. Knowing how
| to recover something interesting you found about a particular
| topic make it useful. It implies work, not just storing but
| refreshing/(re)organizing and putting them into your present
| context. But either on time or volume you must put some
| restrictions.
| imjonse wrote:
| The fact that the info is tech or science related thus relatively
| serious, is less important than the fact that it feeds into the
| same type of cycle as reading tabloids, collecting skins and gems
| in mobile games or following a sports team. It may be useful in
| the future, or being remembered and used at some point, but the
| main purpose is producing a rush and it too is a form of escapism
| (maybe from doing actual projects).
| [deleted]
| allochthon wrote:
| I have the same habit and wrote a web app to catalog the links I
| come across:
|
| https://digraph.app/
| warinukraine wrote:
| It's not "perfectionism". It's called entertainment. Some people
| like watching desperate housewives, some people like reading
| about compilers.
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| I run an instance of yacy on my desktop and pump all the
| interesting sites into that.
|
| That way, 2 years from now I can remember that there was a
| website about undulating crystal sheep enhancers and search it up
| in my archive. It's really handy.
| igtztorrero wrote:
| Maybe I do it too.
|
| I watch HN every morning ( 15 to 60 minutes)
|
| I only upvote interesting articles for me.
|
| If it's really good for me, I use Getpocket to save a list of
| interested articles, tagged ( GoLang Vue Css SysAdmin DB Health
| etc )
|
| When I need to something I always look on Getpocket ( it's my
| hard drive memory for all information HN )
|
| Saludos
| digitalsanctum wrote:
| You're not alone. I have a daily routine of hitting several
| websites with news and RSS feeds. Saved to bookmarks stored in
| browsers, saved to Pocket, downloaded and printed to read later,
| etc. I literally have hundreds, probably thousands of new
| "information" coming in and while I never expect to read it all,
| it comes in handy. As a distraction, a nurturer of endless
| curiosity, a trick to cope with the fact that I know a very very
| small fraction about anything.
| maherbeg wrote:
| I've been using the PARA system from Building a Second Brain by
| Tiago Forte for all of my new notes and interest hoarding. After
| I've read a link, I'll quickly file it away into an inbox with
| some useful snippets on the page. When I'm bored, or have
| additional free time, I'll summarize the highlighted points and
| then move it into either a Project, Area, or Resource.
|
| Sometimes I just read stuff and don't bother with the notes. As
| long as I have an inkling of what the thing was, I'll be able to
| find it later.
| iamben wrote:
| This hit home!
|
| I recently cleared through thousands of bookmarks. Many of the
| sites weren't there anymore, many of them were things I thought
| 'would be a good read at some point' or things I thought 'were a
| good read'. A couple of them I read during the cleanse, most were
| impractically out of date or just not worth it/interesting
| anymore (life changes!). From that point I made a note to only
| bookmark sites I'm likely to actually need/use again, and they go
| into category folders (which makes me think twice about
| bookmarking as opposed to just pressing the star blindly).
|
| Anything else I want to read I'll open in a new tab and suspend
| if I'm not reading straight away. I go through the tabs fairly
| regularly in a relatively brutal "am I actually going to read
| this" way and close them if not.
|
| I've tried many, many ways of 'storing' things for recall ("those
| 10 rules for life were fantastic!") but the reality of it is I
| never revisit 99% of those things and for the 1% I can usually
| google it (or find a more up to date substitute). Code snippets
| are ever so slightly different (but not much!). There's probably
| something much better to store visual things (like screenshots of
| great websites etc.) - I'm just not sure I want to _start_ doing
| this.
|
| Long and short I'm trying to take the same approach to
| information as I do to my wardrobe - if I'm not wearing it, why's
| it in there?
| robofanatic wrote:
| > I recently cleared through thousands of bookmarks
|
| Wow that's some dedication. For me bookmarking doesn't work,
| still I do it. My bad habit I guess ;-) I never revisit that
| stuff, because there is always so much new and more exciting
| stuff coming in all the time that the old stuff seems almost
| irrelevant.
| iamben wrote:
| Yeah, that was me exactly! I just couldn't face that massive
| long list anymore - it had been ported from computer to
| computer for years and was the digital equivalent of clearing
| out the garage (and it felt great afterwards)! It was amazing
| how useless half of them now were.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Task for a future-tech AI; feed the AI all the
| articles/books/bookmarks/ideas you would like to have read or
| 'should' read, and then see what kind of a person it becomes
| after ingesting them.
| natn wrote:
| This thread is like group therapy. On my current device I'd
| estimate ~100 chrome tabs open over 10 desktops. I try to keep
| them organized at least.
| danparsonson wrote:
| Hehe amateur - last time I cleared out the tabs on just my
| phone, I had over 140
| dspillett wrote:
| _> I spend a huge amount of time collecting a never-ending stream
| of links, notes, and thoughts, only to never actually go back and
| read them again._
|
| Same here. I have a huge and every expanding list of lists of
| things I want to play with, and little projects (that might turn
| into larger projects) which I have yet to really start, and
| (because this has been going on so long) a list of skills I need
| to bring up-to-date because they have atrophied significantly
| while I've been _reading_ and not _doing_ (this is part of the
| procrastination on starting many of those projects).
| greenbit wrote:
| Bookmarks, open tabs, screen shots. I hear you. For me, I think
| it's that I insanely overestimate my free time, always thinking
| "there's something I'd like to get back to". And about once a
| month I have to close over 100 tabs that will never find the time
| to get back to.
|
| There's a never ending stream of Other Stuff that consumes my
| time instead. Dishes, laundry, yard work, work-work, walking the
| dog, you name it. I envy the dog; she at least has the sense not
| to bookmark things she's never going to look at again.
| eternalban wrote:
| OP's condition is likely very common among hn readership. Looked
| at positively, it is indicative of a desire to remain abreast of
| the very fast moving technology curve on various fronts. The
| issue is, in part, our bandwidth limitation.
|
| Tools may help to some extent and the heavy lifting bits are
| already done by others (e.g. https://typeset.io/). A simple
| browser extension could use such services and provide a more
| compact information package to consume. And a bit later down the
| line, we'll likely can train AI to learn our informational
| preferences (and/or goals) and further package and curate 'what
| you need to read', etc.
|
| -
|
| a p.s.
|
| After playing with GPT-3, diving a bit into the LLMs (to
| understand the magic), the thought occurred that if a primitive
| information processing network -- primitive compared to the one
| we have in our cranium -- can do this, and this magic is mainly
| and principally due to massive data consumption, then 'read
| everything you can get your hands on' is a sensible imperative.
| captaincaveman wrote:
| I also have this problem and has been something I've been
| thinking about for some time, and have started building.
|
| All the comments here have been great validation, that there is
| others with a need, which is encouraging.
|
| I've mostly been working on the data aspects, so not much to see
| as yet, but if a new approach to this is of interest to you,
| please signup.
|
| https://ont.fyi
|
| I think the other solutions out there focus too much on note
| taking, and manually organising stuff, hopefully I can create
| something more compelling for the rest of us!
| crispyambulance wrote:
| Not disagreeing with the OP but "Hoarding information" is more
| commonly used to describe a much more insidious problem than just
| collecting so much information that it's a problem to keep track
| of it.
|
| "Information hoarding" is a problem when the hoarder keeps the
| information from other people. It happens a lot in dysfunctional
| work environments where "information is power" and where hoarders
| just keep important details to themselves, leaving others out of
| the loop to fend for themselves.
| kleer001 wrote:
| In business talk that's sometimes called "Silo-ing" as opposed
| to "Building bridges".
| Aromasin wrote:
| I do the same, but set aside 2 hours every weekend to go back and
| review all the links I saved that week. Important ones, I do a
| write up summary of the content and it goes in my notes for
| future reference. Non-important ones get archived. For archived,
| links I'll go back once a month and read again. By the third time
| I've read something, I can normally remember it. It's in long
| term memory, and I can refer to it.
|
| I've been using Obsidian lately to track my notes after migrating
| all my old Markdown notes to there, and it's fantastic. I can
| search by tags (I tag my notes meticulously) and come up with
| heaps of information on one subject or another. It's a second
| brain at this point - both a hobby, and a tool for when it comes
| to writing or building.
| samsquire wrote:
| This is why I journal computer ideas out in the open on GitHub.
| There is plenty of inspiration in blog posts and Quora and Hacker
| News and Reddit. It is useful to aggregate thinking and
| extrapolate thinking by writing. Writing is thinking.
|
| Every interesting idea or thought or inspiration goes in my
| journal.
|
| Someone is writing about a problem or difficulty, I think and
| write how I would fix it.
|
| I have over 700 entries in my journal from 2013. If you want more
| things to read, check out my profile. Start with "ideas" or
| "ideas4"
| daneel_w wrote:
| Genuine question: do you also prep for disaster? "This might come
| in handy some day" etc.
| ZhangSWEFAANG wrote:
| There's an easy solution to this - it's called the
| information:action ratio. Actions include reading deeply,
| writing, coding, etc. For every piece of information you consume,
| you in general, want to produce twice that.
|
| Source: My 150 IQ
| snapcaster wrote:
| Citing your IQ is cringe but I like the idea of
| information:action ratio. I think I would benefit from keeping
| that in mind
| carapace wrote:
| I do this too (although I think of it as a "backlog" rather than
| "hoarding" but it's not important.)
|
| Two things seem to help:
|
| 1) Filter by "actionable"-ness: I ask myself, "Am I ever going to
| do something with this piece of information?"
|
| 2) Jotting down a sentence or two per item that captures _why_ I
| find it interesting. Even that much work can change a list of
| tabs /URLs into something more like a useful directory of
| information.
|
| Hope that helps. :)
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| I had this when I was a kid. I broke out of it as a teen thanks
| to taking spaced repetition systems seriously.
|
| For one unfortunate semester in college almost a decade ago I
| tried to put _everything_ I found interesting into SuperMemo. I
| got good with all of its advanced features - adding web pages
| directly, incremental reading, the works. After a few weeks I was
| spending more time reading my SM queue than actually adding new
| things to it. After about 2 months I dropped out because I was
| spending too much time and mental energy using SuperMemo to do,
| you know, _work_.
|
| I have never, ever given myself a hard time for being forgetful
| since. 99.999% of the information that flows through my eyes and
| into my brain vanishes into pleasant unintelligible neural noise
| and I would add more 9s to that if I could. Because the 0.001% of
| genuinely insightful, evergreen, _resonant_ ideas that stick
| around and elaborate my worldview is beautiful beyond to me.
| erlich wrote:
| Considering how many hoarders are out here, I would think it
| wouldn't be too hard to manually tag and summarize every single
| article that is posted on HN.
| BasDirks wrote:
| Sounds like you are maintaining and extending your own frame of
| reference. I feel like a note that is never read again is not
| necessarily a wasted effort.
| visarga wrote:
| > Whatever the cause, the end result is the same: I spend a huge
| amount of time collecting a never-ending stream of links, notes,
| and thoughts, only to never actually go back and read them again.
|
| The solution is to save everything unorganised and retrieve with
| a search engine, preferably hacked into your main search UI, so
| you always get them on top. Don't make a separate search UI, you
| won't use it. It has to be hacked into the main UI, probably
| Google.
|
| I'm wondering why Google, who is a search company and also a
| browser maker doesn't implement full text search on the browsing
| history.
| robofanatic wrote:
| > I'm wondering why Google, who is a search company and also a
| browser maker doesn't implement full text search on the
| browsing history.
|
| They do. The search history shows up in the address bar as you
| type. But sometimes it's annoying and maybe a privacy issue
| especially when you are screen sharing with someone.
| Cunya wrote:
| I wrote a ruby script that kills all chrome processes that take
| more than x amount of memory, so my browser tabs and windows
| become placeholders for the links without taking huge amounts of
| memory..
| s3000 wrote:
| >Why do I find myself in this situation? Is it FOMO driving me to
| want to keep track of everything? Perhaps it's some form of
| perfectionism or even an addiction.
|
| My preferred explanation is Repetition compulsion [1].
|
| >Whatever the cause, the end result is the same: I spend a huge
| amount of time collecting a never-ending stream of links, notes,
| and thoughts, only to never actually go back and read them again.
|
| Do those notes have to be read again by the one who creates them?
| Connecting information and publishing that on social media allows
| others to do the next steps.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repetition_compulsion
| mo_42 wrote:
| I like the idea of repetition compulsion. Most probably keeps
| people going once they started this way. But why do people
| start in the first place?
|
| I think it's some kind of uneasiness with actual work. Actual
| work is hard, not exciting and the reward may come in a distant
| future.
|
| Maybe I should avoid HN much more because it gives me a
| dopamine kick without having accomplished anything.
| s3000 wrote:
| The opposite of information hoarding is not unexciting, mind-
| numbing work. The opposite of information hoarding is doing
| what you want to do.
|
| If somebody can do something nice, and still does information
| hoarding, things become interesting.
|
| That's why it's more than a habit:
|
| >Repetition compulsion is the unconscious tendency of a
| person to repeat a traumatic event or its circumstances
|
| Information hoarding is the perfect repeatable event. There
| is an almost infinite supply of rewarding ideas and there is
| no physical obstacle building up that triggers invention from
| somebody else.
|
| With those conditions, any traumatic event, any drama, can be
| projected onto these situations until the lesson is learned.
|
| The cruel paradox of the information hoarder community is
| that they haven't managed to create a list of information
| that helps to resolves their unfortunate condition.
| batmansmk wrote:
| I tend to associate the information I hoard with knowledge, which
| I equate to fuel to develop my efficiency. It's actually the
| opposite. I rarely lack the extra bit of information and more
| often loose track of what really matters. I resonate with this
| article.
| rus64 wrote:
| Saving this to read later
| breischl wrote:
| I think I do something similar, though on reflection I read
| things almost as a distraction. Like, I should be working on
| something useful, and instead I'm reading about the internals of
| a change to a language I don't even use. It's _interesting_, but
| usually not _useful_. It's just information porn - to me anyway,
| it's probably very useful to some other people.
|
| I partially alleviated this by requiring myself to summarize the
| useful bits from any article I read into a note. The point being
| that if there's not enough value in the article to make that
| worthwhile, then there's no point even reading it and I'm just
| wasting time. And if there is value in it, then forcing myself to
| summarize that is going to make it more likely that I'll remember
| it.
|
| I'm not 100% consistent on doing this, but it does help break me
| out of "information grazing".
| cadbox1 wrote:
| I built a notes app specifically for capturing my HN links. It
| organises them both by date and topic so I can browse them by
| topic but also find "that one link from last week".
|
| https://kapanotes.com/cadbox1
| ss48 wrote:
| I ended up using an extension called Tabs Aside
| (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabs-aside/) and
| watch later for this. Then have an extension to open a random
| bookmark or shuffle through the watch later playlist.
|
| It's not so much about hoarding as much as it is about a broader
| range of content. The internet can only be focused on discussing
| so many things in a day. I find that not saving news articles and
| current events really helps in this regards to maintain a useful
| list of things to read through that might be worth learning about
| more or exploring.
| dlahoda wrote:
| learning math helps, discrete math and logic.
|
| using taggers helps. reading abstract and having tag
| #have_read_abstract for example. so you should not read whole.
| close.
|
| there are taggers for time and files too.
|
| do more p2p and crowd hoarding, dozens of p2p softwares for
| haording. it helps in some way.
|
| sure mentioned, anki, and foam. so learn hotkeys and multiline
| editing.
|
| there are other ways, so not sure if these easy to use right
| away. measuring economic valuation of opening any link or reading
| works. check some authority, credibility and quality. retreats
| and no tech for a while help to reset measuring gadgets in brain.
|
| many things are zombies, dead in arrival, lack structure. do not
| spend on these.
|
| my recent example, thousand yoga people there. and few which give
| you structure. example, yoga plus anatomy course.
| mzzter wrote:
| I also hoard information. Keeping a stream of links where I go
| back to a small percentage. But I find that it is a good habit
| for me. The links are a slice of the pages that I actually care
| about.
|
| Though, I wish for a way to index and search specifically within
| my stream of links. So that I can better recall content that I
| have glanced at in the past.
| jhoelzel wrote:
| I found a pretty good way around this:
|
| I use exchange and email myself the articles, usually over iphone
| share.
|
| That means i can go to my folder that i have dedicated "from me
| to me" and in there i can use full text search to satisfy the
| "damn, where have i read that again?"
|
| It's incomplete because stuff goes down all the time, but usually
| ill read the headline and be on my way to the original vendor
| docs anyway =)
| dfraser992 wrote:
| I have been collecting bookmarks for some time now as well - all
| unsorted... Doing it manually would be a nightmare so I have been
| thinking about making a SaaS - webcrawler + AI (NLP + clustering)
|
| It would at least accomplish a preliminary sort/grouping; manual
| cleanup or fine tuning would always be needed, I think, but at
| least the bulk of the work could be done in an automated fashion
| to give the user a head start.
|
| Would anyone else want such a SaaS? I thought about how to charge
| for it, but ideally it is a one-time operation, so charging
| anything more than $1 to $5 doesn't seem reasonable. And the
| privacy issues ... bunch of practical problems, so I may just
| write some OSS.
| satvikchoudhary wrote:
| It can easily be just a habit. I had the same habit as OP before,
| at some point I used to collect tabs stopped at 500 or so. Then I
| began collecting links and info in markdown. Many people go even
| further, they set up automation on top of notion, twitter bots
| and what not.
|
| Now I just browse, collect only as much tabs I can read in 1-2
| days. Hoarding hasn't done me any good. So I just don't do it
| anymore.
|
| But why do I browse so much of twitter, HN. I think it is FOMO,
| but also a bit of a lack of purpose which I think I have atleast
| partially solved for now.
|
| Or maybe its just curious minds can't stop when there is more
| information out there as said by one of the comments.
| tpoacher wrote:
| put them on anki
|
| make special options for the deck that effectively remind you to
| read a random article everynow and then (or, one a day/week)
|
| read articles get pushed further down the queue as per anki's
| algorithm
|
| enjoy your incremental reading of links you liked
| gchokov wrote:
| I resonate with the article as well. There seems to be too many
| interesting things for the curious minds. Perhaps, it has always
| been like this. Nothing bad with curiosity - I think it's quite
| the opposite, it's a great thing. I found that for me though, it
| needs to be balanced, and I learned to not feel bad if I can't
| check or read everything I want.
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