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Comment by bkishan | Hacker News Reader

Is it normal for individuals to index their (handwritten) notes? Atleast I've never seen anyone do that.

For many decades I've done this with my work notes.

I use a cross-indexing scheme, using square brackets to mean "this uses information in item X" and angle brackets for "this is used by item Y". The latter is really important, because if I find an error in an early note, I can trace it's effect easily through later work.

My reference scheme is simple: X and Y are of the form B.P, where B is book number and P is page number in that book. I write these X and Y items in the margin, where they are easily visible, and later I copy them to the first page of the entry.

In addition to the above, I use keywords, and these go in the table of contents along with titles.

Every once in a while, I transcribe the table of contents and the cross-indexing information into a computer file, so that I can do logical operations on the data and find things I need.

None of this takes much effort, and it comes in handy when you're doing quite a lot of work at once.

I had schoolteachers that insisted on it. There’s also a popular note taking methodology called “bullet journaling” or “bujo” that took off sometime before Tumblr committed sudoku (so it spread around a bit there) that’s built entirely around distinguishable bullet points and indexing your notes–some more artistically than others.

Seppuku? Otherwise what is the alternate meaning of sudoku?

You have the meanings right. It’s an intentional internet-native joke. A meme.

It's a humorous intentional mistake that is popular in some parts of the internet.

Interestingly, It's becoming much more common for young people to use obscured phrases for advertiser-unfriendly but non-profane terms. For example, using un-aliving instead of commit suicide. It's not an ironic usage, but an actual usage to avoid getting agorithim'd on social media websites, but it leaks out into domains where advertiser unfriendliness isn't actually a problem (like HN for example) and gets used in the same way. It's a real time example of the intersection of marketing and technology shaping language and it's kind of fascinating.

I have personally heard "unalived" spoken aloud by teenagers on multiple occasions. One of the many positive effects tiktok has had on the United States.

Reminds me of a now-old Doctor Who story (Paradise Towers) where the girl k^Hgangs used "unalive" the same way (although usually they were murder victims)

Why would young people care if their tweet/tik is advertiser friendly? It seems like it would be the platforms, not the users, that encourage this behaviour?

They care because your content gets scrubbed without warning by the algorithm, and there is no way to appeal.

The problem is particularly acute on YouTube.

> The problem is particularly acute on YouTube.

And tiktok.

And Twitch which is also trigger happy with the TOS violations.

So the users don't care, but are forced to care by their platforms arbitrary rules?

If it were actual rules, it would be a lot simpler even if it were arbitrary. But usually it's AI blackbox decisions with very few humans you can ever talk to afterwards, even if the person in question makes a living from their account.

From what I gathered on HN, there are known but undocumented cases of FAANG employees extracting sexual or other favors for account unlocks or arbitrarily seizing accounts with noteworthy usernames.

Kids invented slang since long before Internet.

Being humorous about someone's suicide is kind of fucked up IMO

Edit am illiterate, finna an heroize

Welcome to the Internet.

As someone who barely survived attempted suicide 10 years ago, I completely disagree.

Your past doesn't qualify you more than other people to talk about suicide. We can play the "who's had more experience" game to prove my point but I'm just going to leave it at if someone made fun of my brother's suicide with "he committed sudoku (laughing crying emoji)" then I would be pretty sad. And that I misread OP anyway

I had no intention to portray myself as more qualified to talk about it. I should have made myself more clear, I'm sorry about that. I was offering my point of view on it. It's of course completely subjective, so your perspective is no less valid than mine. I should have been more explicit about that.

And the example you cited wouldn't be okay with me at all. I was thinking more about suicide related humour in general, I guess.

To me personally it's always been important to be open about it and to have some irony to get past the shame I had to work through.

I get why you feel that way, having lost your brother. Just last month my brother died at 39 from complication after a long life of drug addiction. If someone tried to joke about him I would probably lose it and just start shouting at them.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=commit%20sud...

https://www.slanglang.net/slang/commit-sudoku/

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/commit-sudoku

Also since I’m here, let me share one of my favorite tips since I don’t get to often: if you are on a Macintosh or iPhone you can highlight any word or multi-word phrase and do a “Look Up” action. Originally just for Dictionary words, this was updated at some point to do web searches too and is fantastic when you encounter unusual or new-to-you phrases.

It never occurred to me to check urban dictionary!

There's a lengthy oral history, a series of interviews with him, on the American Institute of Physics website [1]. They're constantly talking about his notebooks and how he can go back to look things up in them.

[1] https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral... (link to fifth session)

That's how we were taught how to do it in school. We used to keep first 4-5 pages of every notebook blank to accommodate this. The first thing the teacher used to check was if the index was up to date. I guess it helped them too as assignments were easy to find. But then again latest home work was on the last page anyways .

Eventually some companies started producing notebooks with a printed index form. Those were more expensive and thus became status signals.

I've tried it but can never keep up with it. The trouble is it requires particular notebooks to be on hand when you need them, or later "clean up" efforts to incorporate slapdash notes into your system.

However—I do it with digital notes! Thanks to the magic of full-text search, this amounts to just making sure to add enough relevant terms when creating a note that you'll be sure to find it later when you search for it. I find anything more involved too high-friction—I will end up neglecting it until it's useless. Even folders or categories or whatever are too much and will end up a mess. Search is the only thing that works for me.

I expect that if I worked off paper all the time, as most folks used to, it'd be easier to keep up with a paper indexing/TOC system. As it is, I almost never forget my phone, but have constantly forgotten various notebooks I've tried to keep. So, digital it is.

Whenever I start a new notebook I enthusiastically start on a new table of contents on the first page, and then forget about it...

It's certainly 'normal' in academic and some professional circles. To the extent that the writing is the work, the indexing and other organizing methods suggested by a variety of note-taking "methodologies" is part of the work.

It also occurs to me that working before the age of ubiquitous computing devices readily at hand, the handwritten notes where the notes, not an adjunct to a notes app, online storage, and other assists for automatic indexing.

However, for the sort of person who still makes handwritten notes in their primary information-gathering step, going back and indexing them, even when the notes, or some abstracted form of them, will be entered into a computer.

It depends of why you are taking them. It's useless if you just want them to write minutes later or take them to help you stay focused like most people. But if you actually need them later like most researchers do, you will quickly pin for a way to sort through them easily and an index is pretty much as good as it gets.

I never did. My notes were not in chronological order anyway. I would just scribble on a random free page and my notes would be almost illegible even to me.

It didn't matter, it's the process of writing down itself that establishes them in the mind. At least it is for me.

I did for a very long time. Learned it from a biologist. In my experience bench scientists tend to have better notebook discipline than people in other professions.

I think it is quite normal to add post-its to stick out of your notes for easy access. That is essentially an index.

What? Many notebooks have page numbers and a blank index for the owner to fill out as they go.

We now have <1s access to much larger indexes. Perhaps it's not as useful anymore?

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