My bad habit of hoarding information

So, anyway, counting what's open right now and what I've filed away, I'm at nearly 700 tabs. Some of them will be reused but the vast majority of essentially junk food for the brain.

That doesn't include the untracked but presumably insane number of things I actually did read but didn't keep open in a tab or file for later (just as it ignores the several hundred unread books on my Kindle while not counting the vast number of digital and physical books I do read).

I could handwave and spout unfounded theories about dopamine or "conditions" or anything you like, but ultimately, after decades of this, in my case it's what happens when my focus is on consuming rather than producing (ex: when I'm not engaged in something like a zettelkasten process), while allowing my insatiable curiosity and love of learning to remain undirected.

In short, you've got to manage that stuff. Or, at least, I do,

Perhaps a way to break the habit is a kind of fasting and interruption: when you come across the temptation to indulge a distraction or archive that link, cut yourself off and remind yourself that all you're doing is dissipating your energies and working against your own good and understanding. Instead of nourishing your mind through sustained commitment, you are choosing to wallow in the shallows of the shoreline. To enter the depths, you must let go the shore. That's the decision you face here, and decisions are always a sacrificial act. You give up one thing for another.

[0] Curiosity here refers to a kind of "information gluttony/lust", a kind of wandering eye. It's the same impulse that afflicts busybodies and gossips in that the desire to know has been unhinged from reason. You don't need to know most of that stuff and most of it is of little value to you.

[1] Pride because there's now way you can know everything, not in this life.

The biggest thing I've taken away from all of my reading and experimentation in this (and being a bit of an information hoarder myself) is that the link itself, or the article itself, is not information, it's "data."

There is value to the data, and if you want to record it that's fine. I use tags (hashtags in Logseq) to classify data so at least it's in some type of taxonomy, but Logseq full-text search is also pretty good so as long as you have words around the URLs that you'd be likely to search for you're good.

Information is what you derive from the data. It's your summary, or paraphrasing of the core point(s), or connections you make between a thing and some other thing you previously recorded.

Tools like Logseq and Obsidian exist to allow you to easily create those connections, and that's very much based on the zettelkasten method, though amplified by what the technology now allows, which is more complex and nuanced.

Don't hoard URLs and headlines. Hoard your thoughts about them, what you think is important about them, what you saw that related to another thing you saw. That is information.

https://zettelkasten.de/introduction/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten

https://logseq.com/

https://obsidian.md/

Frankly, I'm not surprised. This is not an illness, it's a common trait of polymaths and intelligent people to be curious about everything, even things that appear to be irrelevant to their daily life.

There's a great story about how Bill Gates asked his secretary to buy random magazines and journals, and he'd flip through one every day. Print-era Reddit, as it were. He read one about sowing machines and realised the software for the newfangled computer-controlled ones was terrible, and for many years basically all sowing machines ended up with Windows as their OS!

Another similar story is how Apple devices have nice typography because Steve Jobs randomly took a calligraphy class.

I shock people at work semi regularly by pulling random little things out of the back of my brain where I filed them away "just in case". Sometimes, the "in case" turns up!

Something I've noticed about IT these days is that it's becoming less about having some sort of raw talent, and more about simply knowing what tools, SDKs, and APIs are out there, written by other people with talent. In the past, you had to be wizard, now you just have to know about wizards.

- Broadly, try to enjoy deleting things; take some pride and pleasure in the fact that you're "cleaning," and have faith that if it's important, it'll stick around or come back.

- Folders/Hierarchies mostly suck. Tags are also overrated. Lists and links are mostly the way to go. The hyperlink is probably the most underrated advancement in our lifetime.

- If you must do folders, go by form, NOT topic or area, you'll get bogged down in "which bucket does this go in."

- Consider the end goal, which is something easy and elegant and enjoyable to peruse again. One way to look at it might be, if I got bonked on the head, or if a stranger looked at this, would they find it useful?

I have a gazillion tabs open, and I try to work through my tabs once a day to see what I can delete without losing information I want to keep and what I think is valuable enough to add to my notes in some way.

I'll look for a note that already covers the idea and add the URL and a quick summary. If a note doesn't exist, I'll add the core idea that interested me about it as a new note with the idea(s) summarized in my own words (maybe 1-3 sentences), then a reference in that note to the URL. I also try to summarize the link from memory instead of reading through it again. I'll only check the link's contents if I'm having trouble writing anything. If I'm feeling particularly productive, I might add any quotes or particular passages I remember as well (paraphrased, of course, I don't have an eidetic memory).

I've made a huge dent in my open tabs so far and I'm fairly happy with my progress in the past week.

edit: I briefly saw another comment about using OneTab (sorry, I haven't had the time to read any of the other comments yet) and my current attempt is partly based on how unhappy I am with OneTab. The addon itself is brilliant, but I've realized that I'll just save all the open tabs and then ... well, that's it. They're basically bookmarks again and it's like an information blackhole for me.

edit2: I'm currently using Obsidian.md. Not bothering with directories at the moment, because I haven't yet decided how to organize my notes.

I used the singlefile plugin to save thousands of articles in my bookmarks as offline html and then imported them into hamsterbase. Now I only have Twitter, HN, GitHub and other popular sites in my bookmarks.

Because the data is all local, I will have the feeling that I really own them. I don't think I'll have time to read them in the future, so maybe I can get chatgpt to do it for me.

The software is currently completely free and all data is local, so if you are interested, give it a try.

https://hamsterbase.com

I have saved all the articles I am interested in so that I can search for them in full when I need them. I don't have to worry about losing the site because the data is local.

Here's how I use it

1. when I come across an article of interest, I take a quick look at it and save it as mhtml in cmd + s. hamsterbase will automatically import and index it.

2. I've designed the unread list to only show articles added within 14 days, so I don't have to worry about piling up thousands of unread articles, I'll read through them when I can and highlight them as I read them.

3. I can quickly find the previously saved pages because of the support by domain, date added, whether they have comments or not, and whether they are liked or not.

4. I've deployed a copy on my Synology and am running the desktop side on my mac and pc (not released yet, still eating enough food for myself). Peer-to-peer sync between the three devices

5. Since I don't have the energy to develop the mobile side at the moment (this is a side project), I have developed an RSS interface to output the saved pages as rss so that I can read them on my iPhone with my favourite rss reader.

Examples:

In 2004 I built my own web crawler and RSS feed reader in PHP in an attempt to build my way out of the information problem. I learned that tools do not help with this problem, but it did lead to a good software development job where I was able to put what I learned to use.

In 2006 - 2007 I went down a deep rabbit hole with the possibility of server side JavaScript. That led to participating in the development of the Node.js runtime, CommonJS and Promise specifications, and a career doing some pretty cool stuff with JavaScript.

In 2014 - 2016 I went down a rabbit hole on video streaming which led me through a startup (which failed) and then a job at a major consumer streaming platform (which has been wildly successful). I got to build some state of the art technology because I had remembered and acted on some of that information I was hoarding.

Now I feel like I've missed out on information hoarding while I've been building cool stuff in my dream job. I don't regret my time away from the information hurricane, but I am having fun getting back into it to see what comes up next (it is NOT AI or Web3 ;-) )

For everything, there is a season.

For information hoarding I use logseq (https://github.com/logseq/logseq) + syncthing (https://syncthing.net/). I've been doing it for a few months now and it's quite a nice workflow.

There's this odd notion of "saving for someday" that kindles hope of some rainy weekend where I suddenly have 48 hours all to myself, and to focus on making again. That's what drives the data collection.

I don't have a solution for this problem. When it's that easy to consume, will power alone is not sufficient. And unlike physical obesity, information obesity is not visible; it's in the brain. So it's hard to detect, let alone fix.

A few things I've noticed over the years: 1. I obviously don't read all of that stuff, but it's very satisfying to find useful information from an obscure book when looking for something.

2. I cannot find anymore online some of the documents and videos I've saved. So I think that's a win to have them locally, as long as what I'm keeping is potentially useful.

3. To find info, nothing works perfectly. That's why I'm making an effort to use descriptive and structured folders, good filenames (often followed by the original filename), and sometimes an additional text file as meta for context. Still, my bookmarks are a mess.

- Link to an interesting software project? Star it on GitHub then delete the link. If I am so inclined in the future, I can just trawl through my starred repos.

- Low-value article which is too long to read right now? Add to Pocket, then periodically read-and-purge. The hard part is giving myself permission to delete articles which seem "timeless", but I don't stress over it - it's not like Pocket is going anywhere (and if it does, problem solved!)

- Genuinely useful information? Add to Obsidian - either with links to other key information I already have in there, or as the root of a new bundle of nodes.

The main blocker to keeping on top of these organization schemes is the fact that I often discover the links while on my phone. The only solution I've found is a weekly purge of Firefox tabs onto a laptop, where the links can be sorted properly.

But if you place an artificial burden on yourself to follow up on everything that might be interesting, then that's probably overwhelming and shows a lack of prioritisation. That might be due to a lack of a system to prioritise, or it might be a lack of goals. Asking why you do it might feel you work backwards towards the goal - is it an ambiguous sense of professional development, or is it simply an enjoyment of pursuing novelty that means you keep turning up things that you feel you should come back to, but because novelty is the goal you never do. These might miss the mark with you, but they explain for me a lot about why I do the same things.

If you don't enjoy it, seek solutions. I wrote this as a secondary alternative because your article is not seeking any solution but rather stating a fact and asking the resolution on why you may be doing this. Then it goes circular.

I have developed some solutions, personal traits to deal with this in my own personal life.

Learn to ignore useless facts, information and opinion pieces.

Learn to ignore other people's pet peeves. Let them handle it.

Learn to prioritise the information you can act upon.

Learn to stop it all and put the information to action.

For one unfortunate semester in college almost a decade ago I tried to put _everything_ I found interesting into SuperMemo. I got good with all of its advanced features - adding web pages directly, incremental reading, the works. After a few weeks I was spending more time reading my SM queue than actually adding new things to it. After about 2 months I dropped out because I was spending too much time and mental energy using SuperMemo to do, you know, _work_.

I have never, ever given myself a hard time for being forgetful since. 99.999% of the information that flows through my eyes and into my brain vanishes into pleasant unintelligible neural noise and I would add more 9s to that if I could. Because the 0.001% of genuinely insightful, evergreen, _resonant_ ideas that stick around and elaborate my worldview is beautiful beyond to me.

- DO NOT read/peruse/etc on first inspection! Just add it to a list.

- Collecting these items is not processing them which is not organization!

Stop beating yourself up, and start running a system. You must set aside the time for the following:

- Collect everything into some list. Links on the web you'd like to read is great for this - just get the title and the link.

- Process that list into what it means to you! Is it a project? A task? A piece of reference material? Just fun stuff to read later that you don't want to commit to? etc

- Organize those now processed items to where things belong. Projects/tasks, into your task manager. Reference material, into your reference filings. Fun stuff to read later? Just throw it on a "hey, read this when you're bored later" list using something like Instapaper, or evernote, or even a text file of links.

Now you're cooking with gas. You get to peruse all these links that make you feel up to date, but you're spending maybe 5 mins just collecting them into a list to read whenever you have time later. "Do it tomorrow" is my mantra, and I can only be honest about that if I keep lists.

My list is excessively long, and normally I try to comment/read comment threads the day after the post is made. However I had to comment that the emotions around these desires can be inspected, introspected, dissected, etc... or you can change the basic behavior into what you'd like - and skip some of the emotions all together.

One of the most powerful things I learned with meditation: going through the "noticing and labeling" process, eventually leading to just noticing and labeling everything as "desires", and watching them float through the sky. Notice, label, and it'll slowly go away.

Also, its not ADHD, its preparedness. There is a fundamental tension between discovery and requirement. You're going through your garage and you find a cool or unusual thing. You feel inspired, excited you own this treasure, and dreaming of things to do with it. That is discovery. Requirement is when you want to build something specific, and now you need to gather tools and supplies to fit the need. This is a significantly less enjoyable process for most people, especially since for most projects it's usually the first (and last) time you'll execute a project like that (its a power law thing). It's not all bad - its because 'requirement' is so much less exciting that people pay good money to entice people to do that work for them.

One way to cope with this asymmetry, have your cake and eat it too, is to constantly discover things (which is its own reward), but you can squirrel the discoveries away so that when requirement comes you'll be ready for it. By its nature, this strategy means you'll never use 95% of your information, but you'll never know which 95%.

So, don't be so hard on yourself and horde away, I say!

I’d like to be able to easily: 1. Archive the link the HN post is pointing to 2. Archive the HN comments

Does anyone know of an easy automated way to archive both the HN post (comments) and target link (arbitrary link)?

I have a dream of then running textual analysis on this to make it all easily searchable by topic like “machine learning”

Sometimes I think somebody should set up an IHA (Information Hoarders Anonymous)

I have a large 'archive' hard drive on my computer which is 'write once, keep forever'. Periodically, as that hard drive gets filled, I replace it with one at least twice as large.

I have music on there that I have never listened to. I have browser-bookmark lists that contain links that are probably non-existent in today's World Wide Web that I never visit.

I have program files that I wrote 40-odd years ago. I have program files from my first computer that I assembled back in 1978 from a huge box of components and which were written by a 'Home Computer' manufacturer that has disappeared 40-odd years ago from the face of the Earth.

I have books that have hung around on my bookshelves for decades before computers were a glint in my eye.

I have audio files which were transcribed from analog audio cassettes, LPs and 45s. Ditto for thousands of photos.

And that hard drive gets redundantly backed-up every day, "just in case".

Why do we do this? I have no explanation, apart from the standard FOMO that I will no longer be able to listen to, read, see, or run something which might no longer exist in my world.

How do you clean up?

Step 1: Stop adding to the list. 1200 tabs open? Stop adding the 1201th one. This is something you can do NOW. Without the overhead of the rest of the 1200 tabs. Do this.

Step 2: Plan up. What do you want? What do you want to discard? Think this through.

Step 3: Start cleaning up from one end. Lil by little. We will have the urge to do a single sit clean up. Stop that. Do 5 mins of it. I cleaned up ~10-15k emails across 3 email accounts over the period of 3 months. Thorough sweep of deleting emails by reading em. Then deleting accounts to all those old websites you were using a decade ago. It was not overwhelming because I was doing it lil by lil. Ofcourse, persistence is necessary.

This helps. This works. Productivity apps doesn't make us disciplined. It assist us when we have our stuff together.

### 2022/12

- {musical note emoji} [Mendelssohn - Complete Piano Works](https://www.amazon.pl/Complete-Piano-Works-Prosseda/dp/B084D...)

- [Checked C](https://github.com/microsoft/checkedc) - extensions to make C safer #cpp

- [SQLite Internals: How The World's Most Used Database Works](https://www.compileralchemy.com/books/sqlite-internals/)

- {book emoji} [Ask HN: Best books read in 2022?](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33849267) - some interesting pieces here

### 2022/11

- [The Linux Kernel Module Programming Guide](https://sysprog21.github.io/lkmpg/), [repo](https://github.com/sysprog21/lkmpg) #linux

...

And so on. I know it's simplistic, but it helped me a lot to keep the number of links under a reasonable limit, and it is effortless to search through.

When my current endeavor needs tune-in to a particular news cycle, I've set up simple scraping of top headlines only. These are usually demarked via keywords, headers or other metadata. Sure, there are some services and RSS readers that facilitate the functionality and ease of use. Except I need less user-friendliness, not more.

Having to spend a minute more per news source, as opposed to some copy-pastes or clicks, keeps the need to over-subscribe down. The interests of the media in representing information do not match my own. I have not been able to find analyst materials that do not suffer from politically and emotionally manipulative agendas.

Not letting noise in from the start is the best policy for me.

I partially alleviated this by requiring myself to summarize the useful bits from any article I read into a note. The point being that if there's not enough value in the article to make that worthwhile, then there's no point even reading it and I'm just wasting time. And if there is value in it, then forcing myself to summarize that is going to make it more likely that I'll remember it.

I'm not 100% consistent on doing this, but it does help break me out of "information grazing".

Curious. Why is this a ‘bad thing’? People waste hours on video games. People plant things in the ground in spring only to dig them up in fall. What else would you be doing with _your free time_ that's a better use?

I recently cleared through thousands of bookmarks. Many of the sites weren't there anymore, many of them were things I thought 'would be a good read at some point' or things I thought 'were a good read'. A couple of them I read during the cleanse, most were impractically out of date or just not worth it/interesting anymore (life changes!). From that point I made a note to only bookmark sites I'm likely to actually need/use again, and they go into category folders (which makes me think twice about bookmarking as opposed to just pressing the star blindly).

Anything else I want to read I'll open in a new tab and suspend if I'm not reading straight away. I go through the tabs fairly regularly in a relatively brutal "am I actually going to read this" way and close them if not.

I've tried many, many ways of 'storing' things for recall ("those 10 rules for life were fantastic!") but the reality of it is I never revisit 99% of those things and for the 1% I can usually google it (or find a more up to date substitute). Code snippets are ever so slightly different (but not much!). There's probably something much better to store visual things (like screenshots of great websites etc.) - I'm just not sure I want to start doing this.

Long and short I'm trying to take the same approach to information as I do to my wardrobe - if I'm not wearing it, why's it in there?

"Information hoarding" is a problem when the hoarder keeps the information from other people. It happens a lot in dysfunctional work environments where "information is power" and where hoarders just keep important details to themselves, leaving others out of the loop to fend for themselves.

Every interesting idea or thought or inspiration goes in my journal.

Someone is writing about a problem or difficulty, I think and write how I would fix it.

I have over 700 entries in my journal from 2013. If you want more things to read, check out my profile. Start with "ideas" or "ideas4"

I used GMail drafts body to save links and the subject as searchable tags. I saved thousands of entries this way before I noticed two things: 1.) I'm actually interested in only a few parts of each link and want an easy way to return to them in the future, and 2.) I wish I could see the parts of links other dedicated readers found useful which would both help discover quality resources and save time with highlights acting as a preview or summary. So I actually built a social annotation web overlay that saves to a web app that's both an aggregator and social network: https://www.kontxt.io/.

I publicly share most of what I read and highlight on my profile https://www.kontxt.io/profiles/d.

Hacker News is one of my seed sites I visit multiple times a day, so I created a group for myself and other HN readers to see people's highlights of links on HN: https://www.kontxt.io/groups/23423/documents. Feel free to join and share your highlights, or just quickly view all the best parts of the links on HN highlighted by others.

It would bring me no greater joy than to see the hundreds of thousands of lines of code I've developed over six years be used to unite avid readers on HN and fellow information addicts to learn and grow together as a community. Stay curious--and keep reading!

So if I have an idea I either act on it now, or remember later, or forget. And that’s fine.

To miss a great article, fail to realize a great idea, forget that great song that disappeared forever on Spotify is fine.

And I’m so thankful for feeling this. I think it’s basically another side of my laziness/ tendency for procrastination that helps me. But I like it. I’ll never be a person with an org mode full of random thoughts, a list of ideas for projects or blog posts, or a library of videos for watching later (or even more pathologically, or things I already watched).

The past two years I've started toying with that lens of "Just in Case" vs "Just in" Time". Found it to be super helpful to manage some sanity and a balance of doing intellectual masturbation - impactful output. Thought out loud here [1]

Info (or technically: data) hoarding is me trying to seek control and reduce uncertainty, I devour and gather just in case I need it. It's just a security blanket. I'm just armoring up and ammo-ing up. While I can actually afford to be more JIT in the state of the internet and all the infocomm technology now. As long as I know what is possible and a rough sense of where to find it, I'll be fine. But of course this goes against the way human is wired.

Now I try to train myself to do a quick mental check for random pieces of information I come across: Do I need this now? When do I need this? Why am I interested in knowing this? Do I not know it already?

I try to recognise when something is already giving me a diminishing returns. I think a good heuristic is: when you can give a 10 minute talk about a topic to a uninitiated person, then you’ll be fine not reading this article.

My current layperson’s take is that JIC largely plays in the acquisition of Explicit Knowledge: data and information. While JIT is the process where we (are forced to) transform these into Tacit Knowledge by applying the Explicit Knowledge we have acquired.

It led me to obsess over this question: how can we enable more tools and affordances to understand our contexts to surface the right information at the right time and free our cognition from having to carry and store less relevant details?

[1] https://medium.com/getting-things-in-out-and-across-heads/ju...

It's not so much about hoarding as much as it is about a broader range of content. The internet can only be focused on discussing so many things in a day. I find that not saving news articles and current events really helps in this regards to maintain a useful list of things to read through that might be worth learning about more or exploring.

Half of these tabs are work-related, often to-do items, and the other half is things I have yet to read or that I don't want to forget about but was too lazy to create a bookmark. (FWIW, there is no way to store all tabs as bookmarks, unlike in the desktop version of the browser.)

One time, after a crash or accidentally closing all tabs and then restoring them, a toast message showed the tab count and it was around 750 back then. That was 2-3 years ago and I have left more tabs open since then than closed. I'm definitely a hoarder.

Ask yourself a question - is what I am doing right not benefitting me in a way a walk/exercise/spending time with family/doing practical coding/starting a business/insert your favourite would? If now, stop and move on.

Why it's not easy? Because it's a habit which has its own trigger (sitting at a computer). Unfortunately as a developer you cannot get rid of the trigger. From own perspective - rearranging the work space or changing helps for a while and then slowly you fall back to old habits, so I wouldn't say it's a permanent solution.

Ideas: perhaps keep a daily written log and make a written summary of what you have learned at the end of each day. And, make written goals regarding the process, to guide it. I like exporting interesting web pages as a .pdf into a single unsorted directory, for possible use and organization at some future time, for things that aren't directly related to primary tasks.

Best idea is probably to solicit ideas and try out the most promising until you find a good solution, but in an organized way, with periodic evaluation and written reports.

Same here. I have a huge and every expanding list of lists of things I want to play with, and little projects (that might turn into larger projects) which I have yet to really start, and (because this has been going on so long) a list of skills I need to bring up-to-date because they have atrophied significantly while I've been reading and not doing (this is part of the procrastination on starting many of those projects).

There's a never ending stream of Other Stuff that consumes my time instead. Dishes, laundry, yard work, work-work, walking the dog, you name it. I envy the dog; she at least has the sense not to bookmark things she's never going to look at again.

I’ve always wondered “what if I simply just read them and took a note / maybe linked them to a word or Google doc or something?”

I had a friend who did a similar activity with books. Read a book, took notes on the ‘highest learnings’ and saved each book he finished.

He went back and found an old book with all of his ‘wisdom’ and realized he had totally change since he wrote those things. He didn’t really care about them like he thought his future self might.

Knowledge / link hoarding is vanity.

For example, here's two tabs I opened recently:

A Neat XOR Trick: https://www.mattkeeter.com/blog/2022-12-10-xor/

Code Only Says What it Does: https://brooker.co.za/blog/2020/06/23/code

So that first one is about solving an advent of code problem cleverly. That second one makes some nice points about how code doesn't necessarily capture your intent or the reasons you wrote what you did. So if I had both of those open in my browser or in some queue for unread links, and I wanted to cut down, I'd delete the first one.

I also find it helpful to ask if a link has any information that isn't already covered by some other resource in more depth. So if my goal was to learn more about compilers I might be tempted to save the blog post OP links to about writing a brainfuck compiler in Go with LLVM but there's already resources like Crafting Interpreters out there, so I'd probably only give that blog post a skim and not bother saving the link. (But if it was my goal to specifically write a brainfuck compiler, or write a compiler in Go, or write a compiler that uses LLVM, or some combination, I'd be more likely to save that particular post.)

The awesome lists ( https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome and related ) helped me to take off some of the burden. It is not that I need to have those links, but having them somewhat available when I need them, at least for a lot of places/software/etc.

In the end, is in part some sort of external memory. Knowing how to recover something interesting you found about a particular topic make it useful. It implies work, not just storing but refreshing/(re)organizing and putting them into your present context. But either on time or volume you must put some restrictions.

- If it's interesting I upvote.

- If it's really really interesting I bookmark on the browser. This still means 2 or 3 links daily.

- Once a week I copy/paste browser bookmarks to my markdown file[0]

- At least once a month I tree shake them. Time passes and some stuff are not so relevant/interesting anymore. Eventually some move to my notebook[1] or to my news aggregator[2]. All my github projects are somehow a tool to deal with digital obesity.

[0] https://github.com/slowernews/hamster-system

[1] https://github.com/slowernews/notebook

[2] https://github.com/slowernews/slowernews

Tools may help to some extent and the heavy lifting bits are already done by others (e.g. https://typeset.io/). A simple browser extension could use such services and provide a more compact information package to consume. And a bit later down the line, we'll likely can train AI to learn our informational preferences (and/or goals) and further package and curate 'what you need to read', etc.

-

a p.s.

After playing with GPT-3, diving a bit into the LLMs (to understand the magic), the thought occurred that if a primitive information processing network -- primitive compared to the one we have in our cranium -- can do this, and this magic is mainly and principally due to massive data consumption, then 'read everything you can get your hands on' is a sensible imperative.

I use exchange and email myself the articles, usually over iphone share.

That means i can go to my folder that i have dedicated "from me to me" and in there i can use full text search to satisfy the "damn, where have i read that again?"

It's incomplete because stuff goes down all the time, but usually ill read the headline and be on my way to the original vendor docs anyway =)

Usually I just trust that when I need something I’ll be able to find it. But nowadays Google (and searching in general) is so bad that maybe I should not trust that I’ll be able to find it again when I need it. Maybe today it’s more worth while to build a library of interesting stuff, than it was a couple of years ago.

Han suggests that this overload of information has led to a kind of "information fatigue," where people are unable to process or make sense of all the data and information that they are exposed to on a daily basis. This can lead to a feeling of disconnection and alienation, as people struggle to navigate the constant influx of information and find meaning in their lives.

the author suggest this also has personal/society consequences, tho I don't agree on that 100%, but his argument is that this information bombing is making us forget about other "important things on life". first chapter of the book I think will help you understand your feelings better and maybe understand that this is a more modern problem, the old philosophers didn't manage to describe the "phone-sapiens" .

How do I deal with this? I try to stop and anchor myself in proven technologies that align with _ME_ not _YOU_ or what _YOU_ blogged about or find interesting. This takes courage as sometimes you'll find yourself off the beaten path. I see entry level folks switching text editors, programming languages, tech stacks, etc. They're enduring through the same thing. It's not your IDE, it's not your color theme, or your background image. It's not an article that you have FOMO over, or some library that you haven't yet discovered. None of these will solve your problems. You have to do real work. You have to anchor yourself in the technology that you want to conquer and stop relying on folks to hold your hand through it.

Stop hoarding information and start building. You may find yourself off the beaten path and you may too discover that your ambition far exceed your talent.

I developed this thing myself after I grew too tired of my 800+ bookmarks, and also after I grew too tired of my Shaarli instance too. It's still in development & it's open source, you can find a link on the footer.

One feature of this thing I use daily is that I've set the "new page" url of my browser to the random url you can find in the menu of the website. That way I am greeted by a cool article/product/thing every time I open my browser :)

I've been using Obsidian lately to track my notes after migrating all my old Markdown notes to there, and it's fantastic. I can search by tags (I tag my notes meticulously) and come up with heaps of information on one subject or another. It's a second brain at this point - both a hobby, and a tool for when it comes to writing or building.

i do manage my bookmarks visually, which i have found tremendously helpful since i first saw this functionality in opera years ago. its sort of like having album art.

so here is a shameless plug for my open source and cross browser implementation, yet another speed dial:

https://github.com/conceptualspace/yet-another-speed-dial

Have you ever had someone join your team and immediately start lecturing you about this best practice and that design pattern and how the current codebase falls so far short of them? I don’t want to be that guy.

But that makes me hesitant to talk about whatever cool new thing(TM) I’ve just stumbled upon. If I mention pyo3 offhandedly (I.e. “I thought this was cool what do you think?”) will people think that _I think_ that we should rewrite everything in rust (and then port it back to Python…)? That’s a sort of paranoid thought pattern but - unfortunately- it is one that I observe myself falling into.

If you take a gem and do something with it, that's now more valuable than all the gems you would have found and stashed away. The gems are only valuable when you use them. Not when you drop them halfway through to snag another gem.

Just find a good gem, and run with it. Make something out of it. It'll become more valuable as you go, and eventually that gem will become more valuable than you'll ever need.

My preferred explanation is Repetition compulsion [1].

>Whatever the cause, the end result is the same: I spend a huge amount of time collecting a never-ending stream of links, notes, and thoughts, only to never actually go back and read them again.

Do those notes have to be read again by the one who creates them? Connecting information and publishing that on social media allows others to do the next steps.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repetition_compulsion

In the future I want to write a small service which mails me random links from these sources, especially those which I’ve saved/opened several times but not very recently. So I’m not missing out on URLs I do not recall directly.

It would at least accomplish a preliminary sort/grouping; manual cleanup or fine tuning would always be needed, I think, but at least the bulk of the work could be done in an automated fashion to give the user a head start.

Would anyone else want such a SaaS? I thought about how to charge for it, but ideally it is a one-time operation, so charging anything more than $1 to $5 doesn't seem reasonable. And the privacy issues ... bunch of practical problems, so I may just write some OSS.

Now I just browse, collect only as much tabs I can read in 1-2 days. Hoarding hasn't done me any good. So I just don't do it anymore.

But why do I browse so much of twitter, HN. I think it is FOMO, but also a bit of a lack of purpose which I think I have atleast partially solved for now.

Or maybe its just curious minds can't stop when there is more information out there as said by one of the comments.

The solution is to save everything unorganised and retrieve with a search engine, preferably hacked into your main search UI, so you always get them on top. Don't make a separate search UI, you won't use it. It has to be hacked into the main UI, probably Google.

I'm wondering why Google, who is a search company and also a browser maker doesn't implement full text search on the browsing history.

All the comments here have been great validation, that there is others with a need, which is encouraging.

I've mostly been working on the data aspects, so not much to see as yet, but if a new approach to this is of interest to you, please signup.

https://ont.fyi

I think the other solutions out there focus too much on note taking, and manually organising stuff, hopefully I can create something more compelling for the rest of us!

The way I solve this is twofold:

1) Leaving shit and forgetting about it. If I can't make time to read it, I don't care enough about it. Very effective.

2) Aggressively pruning tabs. If I want to clear out my backlog, I ask myself "how much do I actually want to read about this?" and close the tab unless I really want to read it.

In the rare case I want to keep things around for a while and haven't forgotten about them, I generally put them into a new window then minimize it.

Sometimes I just read stuff and don't bother with the notes. As long as I have an inkling of what the thing was, I'll be able to find it later.

If OP or anyone else is interested let me know and I’ll let you know once it’s ready.

Eventually, I stop. So, with Go, I'll eventually stop, write bad, non-idiomatic code while I'm learning, then I'll eventually write better code.

Not sure why I do this, nobody is going to see the crappy learner projects. I don't put that on github or anything.

And I did such a good job that my "site" was very rich. The problem was not storage, so to speak, the problem was, and still is, recollection.

I had no need or I didn't remember >95% of the things I stored, and for that 5% that I needed or remember, I could just as easily find them using google.

So I abandoned the practice and now google is my new bookmark site.

It’s consistent enough that if I want to start learning something, I’ll usually try to create that page only to find it exists, and then I can start with the links (or purge them if they were not useful after all).

Two things seem to help:

1) Filter by "actionable"-ness: I ask myself, "Am I ever going to do something with this piece of information?"

2) Jotting down a sentence or two per item that captures why I find it interesting. Even that much work can change a list of tabs/URLs into something more like a useful directory of information.

Hope that helps. :)

Pretty sure this is related to ADHD. Its as if collecting information creates the big picture view the mind finds it hard to develop reading just one source.

I actually plan to take a week off and do nothing but quick read PDFs related to each relevant topic every year. That's my resolution for 2023.

I wouldn’t mind if DDG/Google/et al. showed search results from my curated list of articles I’ve archived in this manner!

Though, I wish for a way to index and search specifically within my stream of links. So that I can better recall content that I have glanced at in the past.

https://kapanotes.com/cadbox1

I watch HN every morning ( 15 to 60 minutes)

I only upvote interesting articles for me.

If it's really good for me, I use Getpocket to save a list of interested articles, tagged ( GoLang Vue Css SysAdmin DB Health etc )

When I need to something I always look on Getpocket ( it's my hard drive memory for all information HN )

Saludos

There's a personal mode to differentiate between what's automated ( eg. RSS) and what i added myselve...

https://handlr.sapico.me

To do that I use a paying account of pinboard.in

If only there were more hours in each day...

using taggers helps. reading abstract and having tag #have_read_abstract for example. so you should not read whole. close.

there are taggers for time and files too.

do more p2p and crowd hoarding, dozens of p2p softwares for haording. it helps in some way.

sure mentioned, anki, and foam. so learn hotkeys and multiline editing.

there are other ways, so not sure if these easy to use right away. measuring economic valuation of opening any link or reading works. check some authority, credibility and quality. retreats and no tech for a while help to reset measuring gadgets in brain.

many things are zombies, dead in arrival, lack structure. do not spend on these.

my recent example, thousand yoga people there. and few which give you structure. example, yoga plus anatomy course.

That way, 2 years from now I can remember that there was a website about undulating crystal sheep enhancers and search it up in my archive. It’s really handy.

make special options for the deck that effectively remind you to read a random article everynow and then (or, one a day/week)

read articles get pushed further down the queue as per anki's algorithm

enjoy your incremental reading of links you liked

Indexed Articles - 24,613

Line Count - 9,594,745

Total URLs - 260,306

lol your not alone :)

https://digraph.app/

I believe most people are not hoarding information however, but they are looking into the information for the next thing to do.

AI will change that, it will tell us directly what to do. I can't wait

bookmarks just dont cut it these days

I have a few modes of "consuming" these tab piles.

1. doing in-depth studying

This is like taking 1 day to go through 1 page of a math book. It's sitting down with a tutorial and actually going through it and doing all the side exercises and then reflecting upon it. It's slow af, but it's very rewarding, and of course I learn things. Over the long term, the value of that learning diminishes, sometimes very rapidly, depending on what I focused on. I learned awk and R repeatedly, at times over months, and it's all gone. What stays are some deeper insights that were uncovered just through sheer focus. This is the "it takes a full day to close a single tab" mode.

Of course, a tab could be a textbook that actually would take 3 semesters to work through, so there's a wide range in what "in-depth" itself means.

2. reading and annotating

This is where I sit down with an article (for example using Reader) and read it with the intent of really engaging with it. I don't just highlight interesting passages, I put myself in the mindset of having a conversation with the author, of putting my own ideas against theirs. This is pretty high-intensity too, and when I do this over the weekend, I would put it in the "it takes an hour to close a single tab" mode.

This is what I actually find has the most "return on time reading". I have a fairly productive Zettelkasten thing going on, and filing thoughts that come out of articles, along with notes, is very productive, often leads to blog posts, and I have found how to make highlights and quotes and crosslinking work for me.

The downside is that usually, for every tab closed, 80 more get opened. I can reasonably process about 5-6 tabs this way during a work week, maybe 10 if I'm pushing it. On holidays I would average 5-6 per day, just because you get more efficient as you go.

3. just reading

This would be just reading a tab for fun. Personally, this happens if I just opened a tab. I rarely go back to an old tab and then just read it for fun, usually it's just more dopamine-rewarding to go open a fresh tab on HN :) This is fairly fast, and usually pretty transient in terms of "return on investment". Sure maybe over years you get something out of it, but I consider it entertainment (which is great!).

4. filing links

This is something I need to get better at. I think there is a lot of value of just looking at the title of a tab, quickly scrolling through it, and then discarding it, or keeping a reference to it along with a small paragraph. I never file a link without a small paragraph about why I think it is important to keep it, which in a way is a quick way to generate a thought, like in 2. Just the fact of writing that paragraph means I probably get more "value" (as in, it will help me generate my own knowledge in the future) than actually reading it like in 3, because I actually "created" something myself.

If that little paragraph is stored in a relevant location, it means that the next time I want to study that topic or look something up, I will find it, along with its link, and immediately get context. That is actually extremely valuable. This filing of links is something I am not very good at, and definitely want to work on more.

A concrete example: I stumble across the [the Fennel programming language](https://fennel-lang.org). Incredibly interesting to me, but also something I feel would deserve a few months if not a year of attention to "really" get it. I can file it away under Lisp / Lua / Programming Languages and my daily log in my obsidian vault, maybe skim the website and make a little bullet point list of points I find interesting, link a HN discussion. This takes about 2-5 minutes per tab. It is also exhausting work, if I do this for two hours, I'll be ready to just plop down in front of Netflix.

So, is any of these better? I like all of them, and I definitely had to build workflows for 1, 2, 4. I am content now knowing that there is no solution, and feeling like you can process 800 links a day is impossible. Instead I focus on time-boxing "quality time", and just close all the tabs once I'm done, there'll be plenty of high-value quality time the next day.

Source: My 150 IQ