Zettelkasten – Luhmann Style | Hacker News Reader

Zettelkasten – Luhmann Style

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48 pointsvpt8 comments

I love how there are two separate Zettelkasten posts on the front page rn. I've been adding to mine for almost six months now. My Zettelkasten[1] has made me smarter, able to see connections where I wouldn't before, has improved my working memory and writing, and has given me a way to create a world from my mind that others can experience.

Every mind NEEDS a Zettelkasten!

[1] - https://www.bramadams.dev/slip-box

I can only understand things through examples, so: what was the most important connection you were able to see through Zettelkasten which you didnt otherwise?

I did a deep dive analysis on the article 'On Having Enough Socks' (https://www.gwern.net/Socks) which on the surface is a great tale anyway and a recommended read but when I broke it apart and re-wrote and put it into three different systems (Obsidian, Roam and ZettelKasten) linked out to just about everything I had via the keywords. This one article sparked several rabbit hole gazing and yak shaving parties for me but ultimately led me back to doing root cause analysis of several issues in my life as well as connecting a thread to complex systems and wicked problems. On reflection the article did contain enough information for a deep thinker to work with, but with my distracted edge of attention overloaded brain it helped me to work it through logically using these tools even if it took me months longer for the aha connections to become useful.

I poked around in the repo, but couldn’t see anything that jumps out at me as a differentiator compared to Obsidian or Roam. Is there anyone familiar with this software and it’s strengths compared to other tools?

I've tried it. One crucial bit of this software is the ability to make chains of cards/items easily so as to link ideas together. They are called 'note sequences' in the app and they can be viewed in the Outliner. There is also less focus on all the other stuff that Obsidian and Roam do, like exposing similar content via automatic search, which can sometimes be confusing and overwhelming. This is much more stripped down and like using an electronic version of index cards.

Creating and using a Zettelkasten is not intuitive - it's not a fancy backlinked-wiki or knowledgebase. It's not "facts" but rather your thoughts and interpretations of those facts (with references to the source material).

I strongly recommend people read a book about Zettelkasten to better understand it:

https://smile.amazon.com/How-Take-Smart-Notes-Nonfiction-ebo...

A better and more modern implementation of a Luhmann-style Zettelkasten is Zettelstore developed by Prof. Detlef Stern:

https://github.com/zettelstore/zettelstore

There are some wonderful blog-posts (only in german) about the problem with other Zettelkasten-Implementations:

- https://t73f.de/blog/2020/zettelkasten/

Interesting how there isn’t a Java 9+ version for the Mac, despite v3.3.1 being out for 9 months now.

Due to development needs, my main rig needs the latest Zulu Java LTS, which is now Java 17. Not interested in confusing my system with multiple installed versions, that shit never ends well.

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