Comment by karmacondon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by karmacondon | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I've been working with own "PK" for about a year now. It's been an interesting experiment so far. My concept is based around random re-exposure to information. For whatever reason, the thought of "Let me look through my old bookmarks" never occurred to me and wasn't part of my daily workflow. So one aspect of my system is that it randomly selects bookmarks from different categories every day and shows them to me. It also has spaced repetition for facts and miscellany, or things I'm trying to learn about (like the US Presidents or Shakespeares plays), vocabulary, etc.

There were a few interesting things I've noticed by randomly viewing old bookmarks. The first is that linkrot is a very real thing and the web is decaying at a measurable rate. Second, it's amazing how limited my memory is. Half the time I don't remember something I bookmarked from years or even months ago at all. It's new to me, all over again. I'm going to bookmark this discussion and then completely forget it existed within a few months at most. Regularly reviewing old web pages and notes makes me feel like my mind is a sieve, as well as highlighting how my interest and thought processes have changed over the years.

I'm really interested in this topic, feel free to contact me to discuss.

A friend showed me http://gethibou.com/ yesterday. Basically the idea seems to be that you bookmark a page, highlight what you want to remember and they use spaced-repetition to help you remember it. It might go along well with the PK that you created yourself.

As a Workflowy user, I needed a way to do this and found it in the Colt[1] add-on for firefox. I use the following custom formats to insert tabs and newlines and it produces pretty slick bookmarks in Workflowy's bullet style for me.

Standard bookmark with optional quote via highlighting:

    %T %N %B %U %N %L %N %?[S{"%S"}]

Long form quote:

    via %U%N%L%N%N%?[S{"%S"}]

Long form quote with annotations:

    #note via %U%N%L%N%N%?[S{"%S"}]%N----%N

If I highlight your post and use the first template, it displays as:

    The Sad State of Personal Knowledgebases | Hacker News
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10739227
        12/18/2015, 10:04:11 AM
        "A friend showed me http://gethibou.com/ yesterday. Basically the idea seems to be that you bookmark a page, highlight what you want to remember and they use spaced-repetition to help you remember it. It might go along well with the PK that you created yourself."

[1]http://www.borngeek.com/firefox/colt

Sounds like what I have been doing with Evernote.

I described the system in a previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10301205

What you say about review resonates with me. Several years ago I got excited about Spaced repetition software (like Anki, discussed recently on HN) and tried writing an Evernote app that would periodically show me interesting things. Their API didn't work very well for this, so I stuck to doing this manually, and it's some of my most creative and intellectually productive time.

I am contemplating moving to Emacs org-mode for future things, with some sort of conversion process for the accumulated things. That should make a more intelligent system possible.

That's an interesting concept. Is the selection of random bookmarks completely random, or does it use a more complex algorithm to choose what to display?

There are simple rules, like "Don't show the same bookmark again within X months", where X becomes progressively longer the more times the bookmark has been shown. I can also flag the best stuff so it shows up more often.

I did my best to group the text of the urls, using first kmeans in php (which is a very stupid idea) and finally settling on LDA. I'd like to use hierarchical LDA to automatically discover topics within my bookmarks, but that's "Future Work" for now.

Are you planning on releasing/revealing the code at all?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com