Hacker News Reader

Comment by uptownfunk | Hacker News Reader

Capturing notes in a decent UI seems to be a solved problem and there are a lot of tools out there for the job. Searching through a lot of notes also seems to be a solved problem.

However, the structured organization of a large collection of notes (think thousands to tens of thousands of notecards in boxes..) as well as the finding connections between seemingly unrelated notes doesn't seem to be a solved problem. Does anyone know of any solutions in this space? Zettelkasten (per my understanding) seems to make this manual on part of the note-taker, but (1) this is super time consuming and (2) very hard to keep track of all the note cards as the collection grows over time.

View on HN

I'm trying to do that with a new project that uses Natural Language Processing. (see gif at https://twitter.com/uzpg_/status/1483140905943146502)

Basically it generates an automated graph of relations between your notes and tries to find which "ideas" group them.

I'll probably post the Show HN soon once I make it public!

Cool! I really think this could be huge. Finding connections between ideas is basically the genesis of innovation. Would be very interested to see/learn about your approach.

I'm looking forward to it!

I think part of the point of Zettelkasten is that by manually making the links yourself, you are forming the associations in your brain, which is part of the learning, thinking, and remembering process.

I am just now learning about it from the book How to Take Smart Notes, so I could be off, but that's part of the idea. With that said, I think what you suggest could possibly be a cool supplement or replacement.

I maintain an offensively big knowledge graph, and I feel like you're both right -- building those connections manually is both mind-expanding and somewhat labor intensive.

If I have a conversation with X and discover they're an expert about Y, learning fact Z, I like to record Z as a file, and link it to both X and Y. That forces me to keep X and Y as entities in the graph. Which, if I care about them, is worth doing.

The real beauty of making those connections is the act of classifying something can cause you to explicitly recognize what concepts it is related to, and formulate precisely what the connection is.

The real pain point is knowing what your future self will wish your past self kept a file on. Some ideas (generally more social science-related ones, but also something like a bug involving the interaction of a lot of disparate technologies) are so cross-cutting that I'd need to make five parent concepts to file them "completely", and often then I'd like to file those parent concepts further. I generally don't.

I used to use Semantic Synchrony, for which the creation and linking processes are much faster. Every little keypress counts. My SmSn graph is as a result much more connected than my org-roam graph. I still refer to it, but try not to build it out much, because the Git review process is so time consuming. For me org-roam's killer feature is that version control is so easy.

You could fall back to a publicly available knowledge graph like Wikidata for your general-purpose "meta" concepts. Then Wikidata itself takes care of linkages at the "meta" level, while your own private information can of course still be managed locally.

It's an interesting idea. Maybe I should try. I suspect, though, that I want control over every node, no matter how general. The thing about my notes is they contain only information I think I might need. I have, for instance, an "emotions" node. I'm sure the Wikidata node for emotions is interesting, but I want my own node too.

I tried to square this circle once by writing Hode[1], which permits encoding certain data as relevant to me, and then filter my view accordingly when I wanted. But the encoding process (i.e. the user experience when adding data to one's knowledge base) was so hard that I gave up.

[1] https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/hode

Zettlekasten is more about making connections between ideas and keeping your ideas organized. The primary use is for generating ideas and writing, not for information retrieval.

The flow is: 1. Read something and take notes 2. Review and distill your notes into key ideas 3. Create cards in your zettelkasten linking these ideas with other ideas already in your zettelkasten

When you are writing and get stuck, refer to the topic in your zettelkasten and follow the flow of ideas.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com