Hacker News Reader

Comment by gego | Hacker News Reader

It is not that the semantic community was not warned - philosophers, linguists, archivists, librarians, historians, we talked and talked to our IT counterparts but could not get through - too much love for technology, not enough study of humans... So it is interesting to read as someone who is interested in archival sciences and history...

the woes of the archive, the problems of wrongly categorized stuff, perhaps even due to political reasons (famously Diderot's encyclopedia in the 18th century linked from "eucharistie" to cannibal, showing how political linking can be) are as old as people trying to sort, use and abuse archives - would be great, if some dialogue might have created a middle ground between dumb full text vs semantic search... with some magic AI put over it ;)

View on HN

interesting comment until "magic AI" !! there is no Magic AI, thank you! and in the same breathe as "not enough study of humans" ..

augmented human intelligence ++

authority blankets with massive data backing -1000

I know, I know :) it was more as a reference on how the pendulum swings in this field as well...

But even there: Luhmann's "Zettelkasten" externalises the main data processing effort back to the users conscious and unconscious references of recorded information, giving back associations not conciously realised before - all with paper cards... would have been another good path not really followed...

The Zettelkasten in particular requires an incredible degree of conscientiousness.

I've found that having a whiteboard in my office helps me jot down quick mathematical ideas as soon as they come (but note how simpler this is due to the home office wave), but that doesn't work well for fleeting thoughts of a more philosophical or conceptual nature.

There's a lot of innovation going on for conscientious people to have a better UI to keep notes, but really all innovation can happen post hoc if you have a text editor and devise a quick text language for linking and metadata (maybe based off something like yaml to cut down on parser writing). The open problem is how to stop losing the fleeting thoughts of smart distracted people.

It's a big schlep, cue in Paul Graham essay.

> that doesn't work well for fleeting thoughts of a more philosophical or conceptual nature

I don't understand. If you're at a keyboard then just type, and if not, just write. Don't include much (if any) refinement, as you can do that at a later stage. Just get down as many associations as you can.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com