[HN Gopher] How to record and retrieve anything you've ever had ...
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How to record and retrieve anything you've ever had to look up
twice
Author : Curiositry
Score : 153 points
Date : 2026-03-02 04:15 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ellanew.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (ellanew.com)
| evanjrowley wrote:
| In my lists of Pros and Cons for sticking with the Google Pixel
| ecosystem, one of the Cons is the fact that Google definitely
| does not want you to have this valuable capability. If you stop
| looking things up, then you won't be looking at their search
| engine, their ads, and their recommendation algorithms. Every
| platform wants you to do that. It's why bookmarks in Google
| Chrome lack useful features like tagging. It's one of the reasons
| why so many vendors try to lock your data inside their walled
| gardens. Apple is well known for walled gardens, but for the most
| part, you can be sure they will let you change your default
| search engine without much hassle. They won't care so much if you
| want to use something like SearXNG to prioritize your
| knowledgebase first, however, the App Store, Apple Music, and
| Apple TV are the same story as Google - any attempts to influence
| the search results in your favor will be actively fought against.
| rootsudo wrote:
| Thank you for your insight and comment. I've witnessed this
| behavior but never thought to question it until now. It's
| amazing how simple and devious it can be.
| theturtletalks wrote:
| Extend that to marketplaces too, all their search UIs have dark
| patterns forcing you to see their "recommendations" instead of
| being able to manipulate the results like you want.
| Barbing wrote:
| >Apple is well known for walled gardens, but for the most part,
| you can be sure they will let you change your default search
| engine without much hassle.
|
| Respectfully, please, this below is an absolute joke--has it
| changed in a decade?
|
| https://imgz.org/i6oyQ3QG.jpg
|
| Image: Apple provides easy changing for Google, Yahoo, Bing,
| DuckDuckGo, and Ecosia. (That poor paid search engine that
| starts with a K has to mess around with extensions; I'm
| unaffiliated.)
|
| Plus, even though I have it set to DuckDuckGo, when I ask Siri
| to "search {query}", it searches Google. So even the default I
| have set is not actually truly the all-around default.
| Embarrassing to have locked this down as if I didn't drop a
| grand on the phone.
|
| -
|
| Fun fact: for years now, asking Siri to "search Google Images"
| results in whitelabeled Bing Images (thankfully, exceptionally
| easy to remedy with the excellent Shortcuts: "Picture-Search"
| for Google, quality difference night & day unfortunately...
| anyway go SearXNG!, it lets you keep your soul).
| evanjrowley wrote:
| This enlightening fact has burst my hubris bubble. Shows how
| much I know about iOS (e.g., the marketing). Well, I hope the
| EU comes up with a good alternative. I'm sure they'll have
| some law that requires all searches be age-verified and
| reported to the government, but at least we can bet the
| implementation will be "sovereign" and distanced from FAANG.
| autoexec wrote:
| > Google definitely does not want you to have this valuable
| capability. If you stop looking things up, then you won't be
| looking at their search engine, their ads, and their
| recommendation algorithms.
|
| Google is very interested in knowing about whatever you're
| interested in, and in knowing when, how often, and for how long
| you're interested in those things. In addition to looking at
| their search engine, their ads, and their recommendations,
| you're also feeding them more and more data about you.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| This is why I switched to Kagi. Even if it's just proxying
| Google, it doesn't tell Google who I am.
| autoexec wrote:
| My problem with Kagi is that it requires a login to be
| useful meaning that it always knows exactly who you are and
| can associate your searches to your identity. If you don't
| log into google they can only guess (although honestly
| they'll probably guess accurately given enough search
| data).
|
| I think I remember Kagi was working on a way to allow users
| to create an anonymous account and if so I'll have to take
| another look at them.
| freediver wrote:
| Kagi Privacy Pass
|
| https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass
| retsibsi wrote:
| This seems obvious in retrospect! I've often wondered why
| Chrome's bookmarks (and, to a lesser extent, history) system is
| so bad, even to the point of thinking it was a bit suspicious,
| but I didn't put 2 and 2 together and realise that a better
| version could directly hurt Google's search business.
| gab007 wrote:
| I am using a combination of Tomboy (desktop), Tomdroid and Markor
| (mobile) to record info i need later. Simple and effective.
| pwndByDeath wrote:
| I've used Zim for this over the last 20 years. Its a mess but
| with search I can find what I'm looking for if I was good enough.
| For especially tricky trouble shooting I'll put in each theory
| and strike it out so at least if I stop documenting I'll see what
| didn't work before I gave up or succeeded and quit documenting.
| vessenes wrote:
| I'm on the other side of this - I'd like it to happen passively
| and in an automated fashion. Right now I'm playing around with
| porting concepts from zettelkasten (card based handwritten
| knowledge systems) to openclaw memory.
|
| Rather than just coalescing to markdown files, the memory-zet
| plugin looks for actionable durable information and files it
| inside the existing zettelkasten system with embeddings - a quick
| no-LLM step (well 300m parameter query embed, it's fast) is run
| against incoming chats or as a tool - this returns cards
| (zettels).
|
| Zettels are somewhat unique in that the original methodology
| included a post-writing categorization and linking step - I have
| the system doing this as well. Result - cards can give you a
| (possibly cyclic) directed graph of connectivity. I built it for
| 'centaur' mode, so I can edit, link, unlink, move, etc through a
| nice little web interface.
|
| The auto links are not the same quality I would make. But they
| are genuinely useful; upshot is for anything incoming, the LLM
| can see information directly about the query (if we have it),
| stuff that relates whether or not it embeds similarly, and can
| follow up links if they look promising with a fast tool call.
|
| I made this memory system my daily driver yesterday; so far it is
| a significant improvement over the core memory extension (write
| to markdown files, don't worry about compaction bro, it will be
| fine)!
|
| It's already building out people and organizational card bases
| for things that come in via email and whatsapp - this is a dream,
| basically. I _think_ it will scale over time - but it's at least
| scaling nicely over a few days of work right now.
| zavec wrote:
| This sounds fascinating, if you ever write more about it I'd
| love to read it!
| vessenes wrote:
| Oh man, it's on the extensive backlog. :) I'm just about to
| put it up for people to play with, though, so you can clone
| it and use it or just ask claude to tell you about it.
|
| I think the essay will be something like: adding structure
| post-hoc lets you build intelligence into the datastore as an
| architectural matter, not just rely on connections being made
| during use-time inference, using an embedding with links like
| this is much different than bulk embedding search, and we
| need some sort of tests to understand if this helps in
| practice, although it a) feels pretty good and b) it's VERY
| nice to be able to refer to and modify the agents "mid term"
| memory directly in any event.
|
| Anyway you've triggered me enough to say I'll try and get the
| repo published today so people can look at it.
| BOOSTERHIDROGEN wrote:
| I'd love to see that too. thanks.
| megamorf wrote:
| I'd love to hear more about this; have you considered creating
| a blog post, gist or something similar about it?
| basch wrote:
| You're the first comment as I scrolled challenging the premise.
| But your solution amplifies what I see as a problem.
|
| I'd like to add, that by forcing myself to look up the answer
| every time I have happy accidents where I learn new ways to do
| things.
|
| It's a skill to be willing to unlearn and always presume
| yourself ignorant, even if you do know how to do it. It's like
| confirming "is my way still best practice."
| huijzer wrote:
| In most cases, I just add a blog post for such things.
|
| For example, Syncthing on Debian notes [1] or using Spleeter AI
| to remove background sound from a long audio track [2]. This is
| why I switched back from static site to a Wordpress-like site
| [3], so that I can quickly publish notes from my phone.
|
| [1]: https://huijzer.xyz/posts/149/setup-a-syncthing-service-
| on-d...
|
| [2]: https://huijzer.xyz/posts/146/installing-and-running-
| spleete...
|
| [3]: https://github.com/rikhuijzer/fx
| FearNotDaniel wrote:
| I find one possible answer to the question "How to make yourself
| actually do it" is to start by getting into the routine of
| keeping an engineering notebook - if you are already in the habit
| of jotting down stream-of-consciousness notes on whatever you are
| working on at a given time, then Obsidian's feature to "extract
| highlighted text into a new note" feature makes it blisteringly
| easy to file away things you are likely to want to repeat in the
| future.
| SanjayMehta wrote:
| I use a couple of slim A7 notebooks, one is like a diary, it gets
| stored when it's full. The other is a hard copy of my memory of
| how to do things like squishing PDFs. I rarely have to look at
| things twice as the act of writing it down gives me enough
| context to remember it. But it's invaluable when I need it.
|
| Tried Evernote and tagging and so on and it turns out cataloging
| stuff is hard, and the lazy recourse is to over-tag, and then I
| end up doing a brute force search.
| klondike_klive wrote:
| I do this too. A7 is the sweet spot for me because it fits in
| my back pocket and so it's always there when I need it. I write
| the date started on the front cover and the same when I finish
| them and file them away. The hard part about using physical
| notebooks is resurfacing old info, I really need to work on
| processing and triage.
| bryanhogan wrote:
| Also love using Obsidian for this! Small suggestion, use the
| `aliases` property for alternative titles, I usually use them for
| a title that means the same thing but uses different keywords.
| Makes it easier to search for a note.
|
| Although usually a bottom-up approach using automatically
| updating `Map of Content` notes (Bases) work well for me for
| finding content.
| arjie wrote:
| I just post these things on my blog and then use the built-in
| search engine. One thing I do with my email and Reddit comments
| is that I use the GDPR/CCPA data request forms and then run them
| through GPT Embedding and stick it in a sqlite/duckdb (there's no
| real difference for me between the two) and then put that on a
| recurring job where my claw can read from it via a skill. This
| has proven strangely useful.
|
| I haven't found a way to automate this import of my data, but
| most of the magic is in the history not in the present. It really
| is incredible. I'll ask the claw to find what I said about the
| SFPD cruiser I once saw in the TL and boom! It's there! A mild
| annoyance with using my Mediawiki-based blog (which I chose
| because it has good support for allowing users to edit it) is
| that authoring is still a lot of work and I keep forgetting Draft
| namespace articles.
| rpigab wrote:
| The letter "y" is off, it's bugging me.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| > Record an audio note describing what you did if you really
| don't have time to sit and write it down.
|
| Am I the only one who gets physically ill listening to themselves
| speak? =)
| Urahandystar wrote:
| No but its one of things you have to train out of yourself.
| voidUpdate wrote:
| I really hate it. I used to livestream, and have never been
| able to watch back the VODs because I hate the sound of my
| voice so much
| basch wrote:
| Interesting idea. Voice modulation software that converts your
| voice to how you sound in your own head.
|
| I imagine it sort of like an eye test. Play two samples, A/B
| test in rapid succession until you get a match.
| aa-jv wrote:
| I simply print to PDF, anything interesting I've read online. So
| now I've got 30+ years of my own private offline Internet
| experience.
|
| Some 80,000+ files in a directory represents an awesome database
| of knowledge. "$ ls _inux_ " to find anything Linux-related, etc.
|
| One of these days I'll get around to setting up some ML tool that
| will tell me all the things I didn't already osmose from the
| archive .. and maybe long after I'm gone, in some hole in a wall
| of some grimy back alley somewhere, there'll be a ML version of
| me embedded in a brick, ready to have the conversation well into
| the future ..
| dewey wrote:
| https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx might be a nice
| rabbit hole for you, drop the files in there and it'll be
| OCR'ed and searchable. There's also some AI projects you can
| give access to paperless to achieve your use case.
| brador wrote:
| Gold solution would be a searchable folder of synced text files
| with year sub folders, backed up automatically in 123 config.
|
| Anything else is a bandaid.
| an_am wrote:
| I have a ChatGPT project categorized by work, cooking, and
| repairing.
|
| Whenever I do something and realize I might need it in the
| future, I just store it on corresponding projects.
|
| Seems to be serving well to me for some time.
| sureglymop wrote:
| I've done this for years and it has saved me many times. I just
| make a new markdown file everyday and often search through them
| with ripgrep.
|
| One secret here is to have a good UX for adding metadata. For
| example, in obsidian a search window pops up when you write
| `#[[`. Or when you type `#` to create a tag, a window with all
| preexisting tags shows up.
|
| However, lately I've been working on a new side project in order
| to additionally automatically record/collect what I am doing on
| digital devices. Basically I am building a "personal"
| spyware/data collection software suite. Kind of in the same realm
| as ms recall but more focused on security/privacy with sensible
| cryptographic defaults where needed.
| cachius wrote:
| Checkout Timelinize and Perkeep!
|
| https://timelinize.com/
| https://github.com/timelinize/timelinize
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45504973
| https://perkeep.org/ https://github.com/perkeep/perkeep
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45896130
|
| Links are Website, Repo, HN discussion
| solarkraft wrote:
| I'm highly interested in this! Would love to see what you come
| up with!
| WillAdams wrote:
| Several times in my life, when I've needed to study/learn
| something, I just found or made a wiki on it, and categorized
| everything which I learned on it --- then when I had trouble
| recalling a fact, it was there in that structured site --- on the
| flip side, there almost certainly are folks who will aver that I
| ruined the Shapeoko CNC project wiki by using it as a personal
| notebook. Fortunately, @julien, a native French speaker from the
| Carbide 3D Community forums wanted to improve his English, so he
| made a gitbook:
|
| https://shapeokoenthusiasts.gitbook.io/shapeoko-cnc-a-to-z/
|
| which re-worked the essentials from that wiki, discarded the
| chaff, and has become a reference which a number of projects have
| re-purposed. I did resurrect the notes aspect on the /r/shapeoko
| wiki though.
|
| Similarly, when I wanted to set up the ultimate commuter/long-
| haul mountain bike, I put down all the gear I learned about at:
|
| http://old.reddit.com/r/bicyclegear/wiki
|
| (probably out-of-date now, but I found the notes useful)
|
| Unfortunately, I've lost access to the two e-mail archives from
| when I worked as a graphic designer/typographer --- really should
| have forwarded any notable e-mails (which I would have wanted to
| refer to later) to myself --- at least one of them wound up being
| printed out by a startup composition house and distributed to new
| employees.... maybe one of these days I'll finish the type
| composition book I was asked to write by an editor at a major
| publishing house.
|
| For now, I've been working on:
|
| https://willadams.gitbook.io/design-into-3d and
| https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview
| stavros wrote:
| I made something to help me with this exact process:
|
| https://www.stavros.io/posts/i-made-a-voice-note-taker/
|
| I usually forget what steps I've taken, but using the recorder
| above, I can dictate short clips of the steps. An LLM assistant
| I've built takes the clips and adds them to my Joplin, which then
| gets published:
|
| https://notes.stavros.io/
|
| It's been extremely helpful for keeping logs.
| alexpotato wrote:
| Shout out to Pinboard for making bookmarking pages and adding
| notes incredibly easy.
|
| They have a bookmarklet that sits on my bookmarks toolbar and if
| I like a page/tweet/video etc I just hit the "Add pin", enter
| some tags and hit enter.
|
| This works so well that I went through and bookmarked and tagged
| all of my LinkedIn connections as well (inspired by a post from
| Derek Sivers [1]).
|
| People are generally amazed at how quickly I can go from talking
| about a subject to "oh, I have this article you would love" to
| "here it is!"
|
| 0 - https://pinboard.in
|
| 1 - https://sive.rs/dbt
| NiallBunting wrote:
| Another thing I do for software projects is use the exact same
| make template [1].
|
| I also try to add any other commands to it as they come up. So
| much easier to run 'make install' whenever I pull a project than
| have to remember the commands.
|
| Even if I can't always add the process I will use a bunch of
| echo's to bring me through the steps.
|
| 1. https://niallbunting.com/commake/
| indigodaddy wrote:
| But how do we just make an AI do all of that from the article
| eudamoniac wrote:
| Why can't we put the full text of every page we've ever visited
| into a searchable local database?
| qznc wrote:
| I recently (mostly vibe-) coded myself a Firefox addon which
| indexes every page I visit locally:
| https://codeberg.org/copacetic/where_did_i_read
| basch wrote:
| Microsoft Recall wasn't popular because it was Microsoft, but
| it is actually what people want.
| mpalmer wrote:
| Hah, my prediction that this was going to be about Bloom filters
| was a bad one. Nice article!
| emptysands wrote:
| Long time ago (10+ years) I'd occasionally google something and
| find an older blog solution post on my own blog. It is hard to
| maintain both the revelance and the practice to maintain these
| over the course of life.
| jll29 wrote:
| The mmap() call is actually not ISO C, but part of the IEEE/IEC
| POSIX.1 (2024) Standard (since about 1996?).
|
| Check for yourself: mmap does not occur in the C standard
| document:
| https://www.dii.uchile.cl/~daespino/files/Iso_C_1999_definit...
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(page generated 2026-03-02 23:01 UTC)