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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

Yes. You need notes that you can search through, and useful information that you've collected.

Otherwise you're limited by what you can hold in your head - and as you get older and take on more ambitious work you'll find that's a pretty big restriction.

My version of that is spread out across way too many places now - it's mainly https://til.simonwillison.net/ and https://simonwillison.net/ for published notes, 700+ public GitHub repositories for code and issue notes, 100+ private repositories for private code and private issue notes, a Pocket account with 8700 items in it, plus the contents of my 15+ year old Dropbox folder structure, an old Evernote dump and a continually growing S3 bucket of larger things.

I tried to tie it all together with a unified search engine, but that needs some more work: https://simonwillison.net/2020/Nov/14/personal-data-warehous...

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You certainly don’t need - I know and have worked with many successful people who don’t have any sort of meaningful (beyond grocery list type) notes or externally-stored knowledge of any kind.

This feels like a comment without substance and in a way, it is. But I think it’s important to push back on this idea that if you aren’t managing a Second Brain while you’re GTD’ing a side project and Tools for Thought-ing your way through the western canon you’re wasting your life.

I eventually settled on a hardback A4 notebook.

I don't usually need to scan back more than a few days, but one book lasts several months. You can use it standing up, e.g. in a SCRUM. It's resistant to having a mug of coffee spilled over it. It never crashes, and it doesn't need RAID or backups. You can attach post-its to the pages. You can use a stack of 4-5 of them as a monitor stand.

Downsides: you can't paste screencaps into it. And there's no search function.

Yes, it's a glorified grocery list. But it works better for me than any electronic solution.

I met plenty of productive people who do so with hardback notebooks and a pencil, you are good. Other thing I saw is once they are done with it they glue a paper on the cover and notedown some things and throw the notebook in a big plastic box for archival. Recently finished notebooks tend to find some time living in their desks before going into the box.

i'm with you as long as -- by design -- it consists of the plainest of plain text, and will migrate with me along my life.

otherwise all the shine and chrome in the world won't make it superior to a filing cabinet and some free time.

that's the difficulty point for all of these personal PIM type tools, they all have their own biased view on things like file format and 'touchability' of stored data in the (unannounced) hopes of trapping a captive audience; no good.

Open standards, open formats, and a revenue stream that isn't user-hostile -- then i'm in.

The only revenue stream that isn’t user-hostile is subscriptions. And people generally hate that: imo, the web ended up ad-supported because users did not want to pay every website they used directly and it remains ad-supported because users continue to reject the viable alternatives (subscriptions, services like Blendle, some micropayment scheme).

Yeah, subscriptions is tough for this because it needs to be a solution which lasts a lifetime - it's hard to confidently subscribe to something that I may end up paying for decades, especially if it may turn out not to be the right solution in the long-run.

I think some combination of a subscription and source escrow would be ideal here: if the service goes under, some third-party releases the source to subscribed customers.

Why only plain text? Images have a lot of value

I'm not the op but posted about my own text system. In short, I never used images in my notes even when adding them was easy, so I saved myself the trouble of having to deal with rich document formats. With the goal of portability and tool agnosticism in mind, I believe a plain text file is better for me. Everything can break or be replaced, yet I'll be able to continue my work habits using nothing more than notepad or even EDIT.EXE. I'm reasonably confident markdown or html will be readable for a long time, but I value ultra simplicity here. I think ultimately it's a matter of personal taste.

When I produce images, it's nearly always in the context of a project, which has a wiki or other system. But that's outside of what I'd personally call "notes".

Markdown and html can display local images. The only tricky thing is if you want to place images in separate folders and how you maintain that structure over time.

I believe that charts and diagrams convey a lot of information that cannot be easily reproduced with raw text. I guess it ultimately depends on the topic you are reviewing.

Agree with the plainest-of-plain-text approach. For me, the more structured the note system, the less it is used. I have a simple script called `n` that operates on a `notes.txt` on my NAS. If given arguments, it appends a timestamp and the arguments (verbatim) to the notes file. This serves as a super quick way to jot something down or log an action (`n determined Krylon adheres best for project X`, `n timestamp placeholder for server X reboot`). Alternatively, calling it with no arguments appends a timestamp and opens vim in insert mode at the bottom of the file. Finally, I have an alias `nt` to open `less` at the bottom of the notes file, for quick review (`alias nt=less +G ~/share/notes.txt`).

The main script is:

  ~$ cat share/bin/n
  #! /usr/bin/env bash
  cd $HOME/share # or wherever you want to put your notes
  echo >> notes.txt
  echo -n '# ' >> notes.txt
  date '+%a %d %b %Y %T %Z' | tr -d "\n" >> notes.txt
  echo ' #' >> notes.txt
  if [[ $# -ne 0 ]]; then
    echo $@ >> notes.txt
    tail notes.txt
  else
    vim "+normal Go" +startinsert notes.txt # or nano: nano -R +-1 notes.txt
  fi

This script is accessible from all my personal machines as well as appropriate work machines. It works well enough. I've devised a small system of tags and keywords, but that part is not particularly interesting. I just put the keywords at the beginning of a line and search for them with /^thekeyword/.

More structured notes go into dokuwiki or just a LibreOffice file in the project folder.

All this is almost guaranteed to be readable in 20 years. The LibreOffice files may be at more risk, but at least there is more than one tool available to read them.

Do you look back over these notes and find them useful? Perhaps it's my ADD or the nature of the software products I create, but for the past 20 years of my career, I've never kept significant notes and never found myself missing them. I'm wondering if there's something I don't know that I don't know here.

Quickly check the last note to remember what I was doing? Often. Search through? Rarely, maybe once a month. The times I do though it's really helpful. I realized I was forgetting lots of semi important things that had no default place to write down.

This frequency informed the design, in fact. Easy to write, easy to read the last couple entries, moderate difficulty in finding older entries (in exchange for lower cost of making individual notes).

I think for me this is why it's so important for the system to be almost zero effort, else I'll just kinda stop using it. Just having an ubiquitous default place to dump something out of my brain helps.

Of note. A very slightly modified version of this runs on an ancient Thinkpad in my bedroom for diary/mental health reasons. I find the separation helpful. Those I almost never ever read, but I think that's the point of those.

Edit: at work I didn't really use this system, it's mostly for my own life. At work I used the ticket tracker, wikis, and calendar. I found that taking personal notes at work was best substituted by making actual documents that my team could find and use. There were much fewer uncategorized tasks at work.

I refer to mine constantly. Just one example: I wrote this one a few days ago and I've already referred back to it for four separate projects in the past 48 hours: https://til.simonwillison.net/python/pyproject

I use them for cooking. I refer to this one every time I want to make a Pisco Sour cocktail, for example: https://til.simonwillison.net/cocktails/pisco-sour

I see notes as a way of accumulating micro-skills - things I know how to do, but not well enough to remember off the top of my head.

This is cool. I do something similar but with an IRC server that I run and expose over wireguard.

I have a channel where my various IOT devices tell me stuff, a channel where my algorithmic trading bot notifies me, and a reminders channel that basically serves as an append-only, always-synched memopad.

Hmm that's interesting. My notifications niche is filled by my home assistant setup, but that's lacking persistence.

I’d love to hear a bit about how often you actually search, and some examples you’ve found valuable.

I have ambitions to do this occasionally, and I tracked things and took notes a lot for a while, but I never found myself using it.

Looking through your notes, I noticed that this link was already purple:

https://til.simonwillison.net/linux/allow-sudo-without-passw...

Yup, I read that just a few weeks ago. Thank you!

As the island of your knowledge grows larger, the shores of your ignorance grow even faster.

I just use OneNote.

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