[HN Gopher] The append-and-review note
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The append-and-review note
Author : vinhnx
Score : 75 points
Date : 2025-07-23 13:01 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (karpathy.bearblog.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (karpathy.bearblog.dev)
| redhale wrote:
| I didn't have a name for it, but I evolved to this same exact
| system myself. I use HeyNote [0] for mine.
|
| [0] https://heynote.com/
| adamtaylor_13 wrote:
| This seems almost uselessly simple to me. The "cognitive
| overhead" of a list of notes feels trivial considering this is a
| person who managed to put their words online.
|
| The issue isn't cognitive overhead, it's not having rituals to
| review and refine your thoughts. Everyone has to jot down ideas
| from time to time, but if you never take time to stop, review,
| and organize your thoughts then sure it'll feel like a lot of
| cognitive overhead.
| meribold wrote:
| > person who managed to put their words online
|
| He also managed to do quite a lot of other things:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrej_Karpathy
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| The person is also quite good at specifically putting their
| words online in a way that others can benefit from them.
| (Enough so that it's a bit of a running joke[1] when he quits
| his job and has time to write some more words.) That skill is
| generally difficult to transmit, so if they're saying
| something in that direction it could be worth listening.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39365638
| getnormality wrote:
| > The issue isn't cognitive overhead, it's not having rituals
| to review and refine your thoughts.
|
| It is called the append and _review_ note, so I think the blog
| author engages with your point and agrees with it?
| meribold wrote:
| This system seems quite similar to sending messages to oneself on
| Signal/Telegram/whatever. What I like about using messenger apps
| is that every note gets a timestamp and that messenger apps are,
| in my experience, more polished than note-taking apps.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Then you're at the mercy of a third party service for access to
| your notes.
| meribold wrote:
| That depends on the messenger app. Telegram, for instance,
| supports backing up messages as HTML and/or JSON.
| camwest wrote:
| This feels similar to a GitHub issue.
|
| 1. Editable description 2. Comments
| getnormality wrote:
| Why does the perfect note-taking system seem to be such blogging
| catnip? And the post always basically says "here's my system",
| never "here's why taking notes is valuable" or "here's something
| objectively valuable that was enabled by my note-taking system".
|
| By the way, here's my note-taking system:
| https://renormalize.substack.com/p/my-markdown-project-manag...
|
| All joking aside, append-and-review does seem like a nice pattern
| for maintaining attention on a big heap of odds and ends, which
| is probably useful for a researcher like Andrej Karpathy.
| thejohnconway wrote:
| I find it pretty mysterious, and am starting to think it's
| distributed bike-shedding. I'd wager most notes, if they are
| ever taken, are write-only. Seems like a distraction to me.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| A funny thing happens where, if I don't write something down,
| I'm more likely to forget it than if I do. So I write things
| down!
|
| If I happen to indeed forget, I'm one grep away from finding
| what I wrote about the topic based on some vague keyword.
| getnormality wrote:
| I have been a huge note-taker for many years, but it's mostly
| about tracking projects and tasks at work and home that I
| need to be accountable for. Whereas a lot of the recent
| trendiness around note-taking seems to be more like, looking
| for a system that is going to capture every insight you have
| or interesting tidbit of information you encounter, and this
| is going to reveal things to you.
|
| But what people seem to find is, if a system requires a lot
| of work and doesn't show any benefits, they give it up pretty
| fast. Which is why a super simple system like TFA's is
| probably the only sustainable thing if you just want to
| remember "stuff" you hope will be useful later.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| Yes, about 90% of notes are write only. But it's usually
| worth it for the last 10% percent.
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| The problem is the appification of doing, data/structure
| should have apptributes, we should live in the structure not
| the function, I have a personal client that I've solved all
| my issues with, I've got a fair amount of polish before I can
| release it, but it's effectively my OS at this point.
|
| The nice side effect is that other than chatting with agents
| it solves the issue of getting sucked into feeds as
| everything external is a single feed curated by my cluster of
| ai agents.
|
| Its basically an OS for creators.
| dzink wrote:
| Because in a world where everything decays, including most
| physical objects and your health, your ideas preserved is the
| only thing that may remain of you in the end.
| convolvatron wrote:
| if that's your goal, I don't think you can count on future
| generations to try to deconstruct your notes unless you've
| made some other pretty historically significant
| contributions. you should be writing essays and academic
| papers.
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| In the future it will be easier to mine private notes for
| novelty.
|
| I've developed a pretty unqiue approach to naturalistic
| non-arbitrary universally binding morality that has fixed
| my Ai alignment issues (without being able to retrain their
| model off their weird utilitarianism), but I'm not highly
| motivated to share it, it'll get around eventually if
| humanity doesn't implode.
| pratikdeoghare wrote:
| I also use a single text file. I have developed my own notation
| to give it some structure [1]. I have a parser for the notation
| that creates tree of the document. Then I write various programs
| that walk the tree and do cool things. I have been happy(didn't
| feel like I needed anything else) with my system for some years
| now.
|
| Checkout the video: https://youtu.be/CpcsOiETgxA
|
| [1] https://github.com/PratikDeoghare/brashtag
|
| Apologies for low quality of video and code. :)
|
| -----------
|
| Example file: ``` [x*x for x in
| range(10)] ``` #out{}
|
| Now if notebook program is watching the file then it will send
| the code block to jupyter server and write results to `#out{}`
| "bag". And file will look like this. ```
| [x*x for x in range(10)] ``` #out{
| ````````````````````````````````````````````
| [0, 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64, 81]
| ````````````````````````````````````````````}
| cube2222 wrote:
| Most of my attempts at note taking usually end up devolving to
| this. Not to say it's a bad thing, I think it's effective enough.
|
| I may keep separate append-and-review topics per major area
| (work, personal, cooking) but that's about it.
|
| Usually in form of an outline / list, append in the front, and
| with deeply nested sub-points, as I "discuss with myself in
| writing".
| ltiger wrote:
| Same, except I append to the bottom of an Apple note.
|
| (I append, the author's really prepending. Anyway...)
|
| When the note gets too long, I cut and paste it to what I call
| the big note: a 127000-line, 4.9 MB text file I've been
| maintaining for 14 years.
|
| Trivially searchable, can get context from neighboring notes
| (What else was happening around this time?), and easily parsable
| when necessary.
| ltiger wrote:
| [Reviews current note...] Oh, I do both! - Prepend todos to the
| top, append notes at the bottom.
| linkage wrote:
| Ok but todos have a time cost. It takes time to watch a YouTube
| video or read a book or make a slide deck. Todos often have
| deadlines as well. You can't capture all of this in an
| unstructured text file unless you create your own grammar (like
| what Andrej showed). Even after that, you need to visualize
| what's in progress and what's blocked because of some other todo,
| and before you know it, you have reinvented a shittier version of
| Linear.
| another_twist wrote:
| Next up: everybody claims this the best way to do note taking.
| Single note on Apple notes is now all the rage and single-noting
| startups crop up in droves. Give this man a breather honestly.
| hkon wrote:
| I can already visualize the accompanying YouTube thumbnails.
| outlore wrote:
| I used to like Reflect Notes which had an "infinite " scrolling
| daily note. Are there any other similar apps to that? it's kind
| of nice to have everything laid out on one screen but i need a
| little more structure than Karpathy's single note which feels
| more brittle somehow
| mud_dauber wrote:
| I use RememberTheMilk for this work - especially the notes
| feature for appending thoughts. Giving items a due date ensures I
| need to review things.
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| An important part of this system would be, when do you ever
| review? Everyplace I do this, I never check it, because when do I
| ever have nothing to do?
| titanomachy wrote:
| > when do I ever have nothing to do
|
| my dude you're literally on Hacker News right now
| ravelantunes wrote:
| I do it similarly, but I still start another note every week, as
| it "feels cleaner". I find that the global search works pretty
| well on Apple Notes, and by splitting by week I get a sense of
| around when I might have taken that note, which is helpful
| sometimes.
| dzink wrote:
| After using Apple, and OneNote (which suddenly became unusable
| thanks to syncing becoming paid without warning) and others, I
| noticed in some cases the software was wiping the bottom of my
| large notes (or maybe not syncing them). Confirm indeed that the
| bottom of your increasingly large note is still there. Also need
| some method to backup or verify integrity of content added,
| because Microsoft wiping OneNote sync is one of many ways those
| services betray your memories and leave you empty handed.
| koinedad wrote:
| I just use it to store anything in small tiny notes and then use
| the excellent indexing and search to find what I'm looking for on
| my phone or laptop.
| ccorcos wrote:
| I do something very similar but I add to the bottom instead of
| the top. It keeps things chronological which is nice when
| referring back to things.
|
| It's also much more similar to how you would take notes on paper
| or in a notebook.
|
| I just wish some note taking app would have a setting that allows
| me to open a note at the bottom instead of the top!
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(page generated 2025-07-26 23:01 UTC)