How to Make a Memex | Hacker News Reader

How to Make a Memex

srconstantin.posthaven.com

103 pointsmapleoin41 comments

I just recently learned about using two square brackets in OneNote to make arbitrary links to existing pages or instantly create a new page on demand. It is quite similar to the linking in [[roam]] but the later offers up a drop-down of pages with similar names to click from, while the former just does an exact string match.

I'm not sure which I prefer, but it has helped me in my OneNote uses recently.

Having starte my personal memex journey with onenote 2010 and blending in the likes of mempad, notewiki, and dokuwiki for specific use cases, I'm feeling like I am close but not quite arrived at a program I can trust to feed more than the work notes of the day.

The ideal app is a combination of Onenote, dokuwiki, and mempad, and seeing as I've not discovered the app that has all the following features yet, I may end up writing it for myself.

1. Rich text support without required markup (but can convert markdown to RTF on the fly would be a nice bonus). Links need to be drop-dead simple to create, even two square backets feels like it could be simplified. Maybe I go for NoteWiki stye camelCase or PascalCase words?

Winner: Onenote

Losers: Notewiki, dokuwiki

2. Offline first saving of files to a single encryptable file. I'm thinking if I end up writing something, it would be an scrypt encrypted sqlite database with a different file extension. Using the sqlite format enables later mobile apps to have a common save format.

Winner: mempad

Loser: OneNote, Dokuwiki

3. True image / audio / table support. This program doesn't have to necessarily support the creation of these assets out the gate, but I should be able to copy/paste them into it and have them saved and retrieved safely. A file picker dialog box should be something I CAN use but never should have to.

Winner: Onenote

Loser: Mempad, Dokuwiki

4. Full export to HTML with files placed in relative directories. A Microsoft Binder-like solution could be a bonus.

Winner: Dokuwiki?

Loser: ?

5. Entire sqlitedb search for a given term

Winner: Onenote, Dokuwiki, Mempad

Thanks for skimming the wishlist. I've heard of notion (too online), CherryTree (no mobile app), NoteWiki (no images), and a couple more, but if you think you have a program that addresses most of these, I'd love to hear it.

So uhm, how does Roam differ from regular wikis, beyond supposedly-better keyboard interaction...?

The problem with any wiki-like app, in my usage, is search capabilities and the need for constant maintenance. Stuffing stuff in is usually pretty easy; it’s getting value out in the long term, that is the issue.

If conventional wikis are a framing hammer, roam is a nail gun. It's not just about the outcome, but about the ergonomics of creating the outcome. Lowering the friction of wiki creation leads to more and better wikis, even if you change nothing else (although they do).

Roam has easy bracket syntax for turning a word into a tag, which creates a sort of intermediate index page for that concept, linking out and showing snippets of its usage across all other documents, and allowing you to maintain that content in a single place. The two-way/retroactive nature of this is really helpful compared to e.g. notion where if I reference page A on page B, I have to manually create a link on page B to page A, creating a fragile web of unmaintainable connections. Roam does this out of the box.

I find the graph stuff visually interesting but mostly uninteresting for now, but the potential is huge. Once the graph has weighting and filtering, I think it's going to be wildly useful.

Roam looks fun, having played around with it briefly. There doesn't seem to be a way of getting it offline though (data export is possible) which is a bit of a killer for a note taking app, at least for me. I don't mind so much about privacy issues, but having to be online especially to review things would be a big problem e.g. during travel.

Roam very much reminds me of Natrificial’s “Brain”, which I first installed in mid-1999 and used extensively during my early university days.

It seems that the product is still up and running at www.thebrain.com (or at the very least, something very similar to it)

Here is the original announcement of Natrificial’s product way back in January 1998: https://www.wired.com/1998/11/when-your-computer-gets-a-brai...

Basically it was a kind of brainstorming/network software, but it could store documents, notes, and URLs at nodes. This was fairly innovative (for the time) and useful.

Crucially, it offered standalone .brn files for storage and exchange.

I installed a Memex-inspired extension on my browser, but I don't use it. Most of the time I forget it's there. https://getmemex.com/ https://github.com/WorldBrain/Memex

FWIW, what I really want is a timeline that shows my browsing history.

Not a bad idea, grouping browsing history by time and topic would be helpful. Seems like a solvable thing.

I attempted to bundle firefox history to memacs, and remember it used to work ok-ish, but of course, you have to be using the whole emacs,org-mode suite.

I can't guarantee how well it works nowadays cause I forgot to add the cron job last time I reinstalled my system. It seems there's always something you have to remember (and I forget).

- https://github.com/novoid/Memacs/blob/master/docs/memacs_fir...

I loved the concept of "automatic bi-directional tagging" so much that I created a sorta-clone of Roam here: https://github.com/neutralinsomniac/exocortex

It's still WIP, but I use it every day for my personal notes.

maybe someone is interested in a not so well known predecessor to Bush's Memex, Goldbergs 'Statistical Machine' http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~buckland/statistical.htm...

"Bush seems to have said little in his published work about the antecedents of his Memex or of his microfilm rapid selector" - Buckland wrote a nice article summing it up: http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~buckland/goldbush.html

Shameless plug: Goldberg's life story and his search/pattern detection machine was the main inspiration to create Revealer - https://revealer.cc

The top navigation isn't shown on mobile (Firefox Preview), so I was left wondering "ok ... so what is it actually?" for a while.

Roam looks pretty nice, but TFA argues pretty effectively for a private memex.

How does the author reconcile that with putting their intimate thoughts into Roam aka someone else's computer?

I love the references to the Memex in Stross's Laundry Files series.

“you mean he actually built one?!”

“unlike you, mr. howard, i’m concerned about Van Eck interference”

I love that interaction. Angleton is a prick, but also an excellent teacher.

I believe the series has been optioned for film/TV so we might get to see a Memex being used on screen by Angleton. Mind you - that does the raise the alarming question of what Teapot would look like....

Didn't know that but I'm very excited about it!

If you like the Laundry Files there is another series of books with a similar premise and setup but slightly more towards the dark humour side of things called Oddjobs.

If you have a kindle prime sub they are included.

I will absolutely look at that. Thank you!

They are great, same authors also did the Clovenhoof series.

Premise of that one is Satan gets sacked so they toss him out and he ends up living in a flat in a converted house in Birmingham getting up to all sorts of mischief.

Beautifully written and very very funny.

Somewhere between Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett style humour.

I use TiddlyWiki on a webdav server. With syncthing I sync with android, mac, windows and my VR headset with Firefox Reality. It also supports mindmaps.

Someone has made a TiddyWiki extension to give it the sort of bidirectional linking of Roam: https://giffmex.org/gifts/tiddlyblink.html

Best way to use an old TW file with modern FF? I want a FF addon, but the node.js thing seems unfortunately the best path.

Can't believe no one has mentioned org-mode yet.

Org-mode is a mode for marked-up plain text files in emacs that gives you note taking, outlining, to-do lists, scheduling, project management, time tracking, and journaling. It's really a good candidate for a private Memex, and you can store it however you want, not just on someone else's computer. There are mobile apps for it as well, and somewhat less-capable compatibility modes for vim and VSCode.

The only shortcoming I see for it as a personal Memex is the weak support for binary content (images, audio, word processing documents). It does support binary attachments, but they're not presented very well.

This site sometimes feels like the Truman show, where each user has to pretend they're not just recycling the same three scripts.

I've been collecting the most frequently used tropes on hn. It includes such fan favorites

- website caused mobile phone to implode

- this math book has too much math

- this math doesn't have enough math

- cockroach db offends me in my soul

- org-mode does my dishes and tucks me in every night

- functional programming is the messiah

- functional programming is the devil

- software interviews are like being on a cattle car in Poland in the late 1930s

- people that can't pass software interviews shouldn't be allowed to reproduce

- ...

Once I get enough I'll build a bot that can simulate hn for me and then I'll never come here again

One I'm guilty of: JavaScript desktop applications are not desktop applications.

Will add to the list! Thanks!

I'll throw one I am DEFINITELY guilty of.

No offline? No onboard

No one ever mentions what I actually love org-mode for, which is being a super-easy brainless markup language that can compile to reasonable LaTeX documents, freeing me from LaTeX boilerplate.

not to mention https://github.com/jethrokuan/org-roam

I have long loved org-mode and repeatedly tried to get into org-brain. Roam, to me, feels like what org-brain should have been—and I spend less time fiddling with it and more time using it.

"The only shortcoming I see for it as a personal Memex is the weak support for binary content (images, "

That's not an "only". It's huge. Also, afaik, org-mode only accepts no space tags. Ie I should tag a place as "GeorgesTownLakeAvenue32" instead of "[George's Town] [Lake avenue] [address number: 32]"

Very cool, just started playing around with roam because of this.

There seems to be a lot of overlap with Project Xanadu and the related ideas. I've been playing with this idea for a while and there's been a handful of partial implementations [0]. A personal memex-style device has been a dream of mine for a few years now allowing for composition of pages and collection of various snippets with links back to the original sources.

The main issue with transclusion (inlining portions of versioned docs) of documents is that the documents need to be versioned and permanently accessible (otherwise linkrot and broken documents happen). It would be nice to apply this to the web in general, but it goes against it's nature (and is fundamentally incompatible with styling).

Markdown + Gitfs is the obvious choice here as it's simple, well supported and extensible. Most importantly it's decoupled from the interface/viewer itself. That and you get access to anything in a git repo out of the box. I've done some basic work on this [1][2] but life got busy.

[0] http://lain.gboards.ca/cgi-bin/view.cgi?url=../docs/demos/do...

[1] https://github.com/germ/XanaDown

[2] https://github.com/germ/germ.xan

There’s an explosion in “markdown-plus” formats.

I’ve been toying with the idea of tags and internal links in my Huge Text File but I don’t give nearly enough mind to a consistent syntax even after toying with custom syntax coloring etc. I’m not even sure what goes in the text file — it’s getting cluttered with longform essays when it once was basically a phone number list before smartphones.

It's interesting that nobody has mentioned TiddlyWiki; what does its saving story look like in the world of the modern featurectomy-ridden browser landscape?

I'm running https://github.com/djmaze/tiddlywiki-docker on a Digital Ocean instance. You can mount a volume where it will maintain all of your tiddlers as separate files - no downloading required (and since your config options are saved as tiddlers, those are persisted as well). For backups, I run a daily cron job to git add/commit/push from that volume to a private repo.

Since everyone is recommending note apps, I'll throw a plug in for Bear, if you have a MBP and an iPhone. Syncs via iCloud, and it's just simple, Markdown oriented notes with a simple tagging system. Good enough search. Haven't really needed anything else and it actually exports pretty nicely to various formats (Word, pdf, html, etc.).

What is the user interface flow like in Roam for factoring part of a page out into a new page, or otherwise creating a new page linked to the current one? If a Roam screencast already exists I'm not finding it.

Or, you could build an actual Memex. https://trevor.smith.name/memex/

Tried Roam for a bit but an online-only option when most of my notes are work related isn't something I can do.

I did just get an email from them about "Beautiful creations of the RoamCult"

RoamCult? Come on. Calling your users a "cult" isn't cool or edgy or endearing in any way. It's weird. Stop.

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