You probably don't need a knowledge garden | Hacker News Reader

You probably don't need a knowledge garden

bytebase.io

17 pointstheom18 comments

The form of this advertisement annoys me, it starts out sounding like an actual article and when you reach down a bit, the sentiment behind the argument becomes glaringly obvious "you probably don't need A because you can get B from us instead".

That said, I also disagree, both with the "you don't need" part and the "knowledge garden" idea in general.. A website, with some articles, is super useful because you're writing it for "someone who does not know what you do" and that person.. is future you = best notes ever.

Thinly disguised content marketing. Final paragraph is a CTA for their product.

We write things down, and most things are relevant only in the moment or for a short period of time. As time goes by, the usefulness of our notes usually decays rather quickly.

This is the key bit for me. Once I started prominently dating my notes it became much easier to see at a glance how things naturally become less relevant as time passes. Sorting by recency makes it much easier to find the relevant things than inevitably stale categorizations.

interesting piece. I think it captured well the experience of working in software where you have threads hanging all over the place that sometimes need to be managed. they don't have to all be managed at the same time, but when you do have to tug on one it is helpful to have some relevant context around. the workshop comparison really stood out for this reason

Love this. It's such a human weakness to think that "if I can just get ___ into perfect shape, my life will be perfect". Perfect is the enemy of good, and of getting stuff done. Embracing the mess feels like a better, more authentic strategy for a tooling company.

This is interesting... I really like that someone is building a note taking app specifically for developers. The way I take notes to assist in the process of writing software is quite different than taking notes for posterity sake. When just taking notes, what's produced are, well, notes. When using a scratchpad while developing for keeping track of little details, ideas, results, links to blog posts or docs, any kinds of breadcrumb, or anything along the way is sort of like scaffolding that is important _only while building_.

Yes, exactly! (I'm one of the creators)

We think of Bytebase as your "RAM" or working memory as you're doing your daily work (as opposed to your "Hard Drive").

In our user research, we've seen that over 90% of engineers use some super basic scratchpad (untitled text files, Apple Notes, etc) for their daily work. It's super messy and it seems to be overlooked because it's private.

That idea of having a list of umsorted ideas and of „bucketing“ them one by one with keyboard shortcuts speaks to me.

This is what I do when I prepare a legal brief. Lots of thought snippets and precedents collected. And then to put this all into a structure, the first step is to sort them into buckets. Which later will become the sections in the draft.

So far, I hadn‘t found a tool that does this well, or that makes this easy. Most tools require multiple clicks. Being able to go through the list of ideas and just pressing keyboard shortcuts would definitely be an improvement. I imagine pressing 1, 2, 3, etc. to assign it to the corresponding bucket.

Things I‘d wish for on top of that:

- Ability to create new buckets on the fly - Some balancing mechanism for the buckets - A learning algo that, over time, gets better and better at predicting which bucket a new piece of information belongs into (so I can just press Enter to accept)

Wow very interesting! I don't know too much about the legal brief use case but it sounds pretty similar to researching a coding task.

> I imagine pressing 1, 2, 3, etc. to assign it to the corresponding bucket. That's pretty much it. It's a compound command which allows you to do different things with the shortcut. E.g. 1g to go to 1. 1m to move notes to 1. 1q to create a new bucket in 1,

Re: Ability to create new buckets on the fly - We have that! (keyboard shortcut for it)

> Some balancing mechanism for the buckets - a learning algo Don't have that yet but could be pretty interesting.

Key thing is that your notes are reasonably organized without slowing you down.

Excited to try it out. I just signed up.

Love this take on “knowledge gardens”. I’ve spent way too much time trying to organize and re-organize notes. Embracing the mess with a capture and triage loop is so much more natural.

We forget that just 30 years ago the modern day equivalent of word processors edit features would make any typewriter or scratch pad jealous. Re-writing at breakneck speeds has saved countless trees and forests, as was the old environmental concerns with writing too much.

Want to edit a long form part of any paper written in 1985? Toss the paper in the wastebasket and start over. Most decent ideas can be fleshed out with enough editing and re-writing.

Paper had the advantage of being toss-able.. On a computer, what we write seems to be so unique and special... Books are common to have been written a couple times before they are in their 'final forms'.

Public internet knowledge before the social media moat was forums, wikis, various video sites, comment boards, Stackoverflow etc...

Embracing the mess of private knowledge in automotive repair space means recording any and all private repairs and posting them publicly whether someone gets value of it or not.

Embracing the mess of private knowledge in almost any other industry gives anyone the chance to see how messy most industries are with their knowledge moats.

Very interesting - the idea that with paper you accept that much of what you write is tossable and that for the select things you want to keep around, you're willing to re-transcribe. Your writing is understood to be a snapshot in time, not something that's supposed to stay up-to-date over time. There's something liberating about that.

I appreciate this take on note-taking in comparison to other apps, a lot of things are done messily and scrappily, whereas knowledge gardens feel like overkill sometimes.

Every time I've tried to build some elaborate "knowledge garden", it always devolves into post-it notes and random e-mails to myself. Very interested in using something that lets that become my starting point instead of my end result in defeat.

Thanks for the note! I'm one of the creators.

I've had this experience a number of times. I start out energized and wanting to be super organized. I over-organize. Then 1 or 2 months later, I can't keep up. I stop using my organized system and fall back to some basic untitled text file.

With Bytebase we're trying to embrace this messiness and do things a little differently...

I tend to use textedit on mac to jot ideas quickly and organize my todos. My brain dumps end up being brainstorm sessions later when I have time to all those scope ideas. I love that my workflow can be embraced as work in progress.

Cool stuff! We need flexible tools like this to capture notes quickly and triage them effectively.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com