Collection of "Today I Learned" notes | Hacker News Reader

Collection of "Today I Learned" notes

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170 pointskklisura33 comments

Hey, I'm Josh, the creator of this TIL repo. I've started it back in 2015 and still contribute to it a couple times a week. I reference TILs all the time to remember how to do something. It has been a great practice and I'd recommend to anyone to maintain their own TIL repo.

AMA!

Originally posted as Show HN a whooping 7.5 years ago with 150 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11068902

Fun fact: I discovered the original thread had a comment from the folks at hashrocket that they made an app for themselves. They are not only still running the app, it’s still being actively added to (I think by just 1 person though?). Pretty neat.

In all that time no one has learned anything about PHP. I’m not complaining, one of my favorite things about PHP is that it’s unpopular so it’s not used for resume driven development which usually pollutes a language’s eco system.

I think this is all the OP, in the original thread they said they wrote their own TILs down for the day or for the week. And I guess they simply don’t use PHP, just like they don’t use C# ;)

I do something similar, but I have one file technotes.md open all the time and just append snippets/commands/URL's/TIL's to the bottom with a date stamp and a hopefully findable comment.

Some notes are referenced constantly, and some I've probably never looked at again. The interesting thing is it's hard to predict when adding which one it will be...

I'm curious if yours is public as well like the posting as I'd love to check it out

Translate to fortune format and surprise yourself daily!

That is a brilliant idea for a low-noise spaced repetition solution. Thanks, I'll make good use of this!

I've done the same, initially in a dokuwiki page, now in an org document.

Do you find yourself using the date of entries much? It never occurred to me that I should be timestamping my snippets, and I'm curious if I'm missing out. I do tag them with an entry from a very simple taxonomy (shell, aws, macos, git, docker, etc etc)

As I'm using org-mode, I should really just customize org-journal-new-entry to include a timestamp. Or maybe something similar with org-roam. Argh! The temptation of yak-shaving is too great sometimes.

Just a few days ago added a "notes" page to my personal website on the same vein

https://marcospereira.me/notes/

I like how this is hosted on GitHub and is largely free to host and decentralised via Git. I recommend just using README.md for your notes as a low tech solution.

I also host my "Learning in Public" on GitHub, my blog, my notes my journal as README.md files, my code is all on GitHub . I've been doing it since 2013.

I like it being on GitHub because when I'm on a desktop computer, I can clone the git repository and edit locally, when I'm on a nondevelopment machine or Android phone I can edit on the GitHub website through the web editor.

I always sort of liked markdown, but I recently installed marksman, an markdown language server (I'm using it in helix but other editors are supported), and now I love markdown.

The ability to navigate between notes via the same "go to references" and "go to definition" hotkeys that I use while coding... It's pretty nice.

Hosting these on GitHub is such a good idea:

- GitHub have world class backups - commit something there and it gets replicated to data centers on three continents (I believe) - and a free public repo there won't vanish if you forget to update an expired credit card

- Related: GitHub is free. I care about this not because of not wanting to pay now, but because I don't want my content to be at risk if I forget to pay in the future (or can't pay for whatever reason)

- GitHub has several great web UIs for editing content, in addition to being able to edit in any other tool that supports the git protocol

- GitHub Actions makes it possible to add all sorts of automations on top of your notes, again for free. I use that to deploy my custom https://til.simonwillison.net site (mainly to give myself search)

- GitHub's own search is pretty good though!

- You can also use GitHub Pages if you just want a custom static site version of your notes.

- If someone spots a typo in your notes they can submit a PR to fix it!

From the author's own share just a few years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25781851), some of the motivation and thinking behind this repo:

https://dev.to/jbranchaud/how-i-built-a-learning-machine-45k...

This is awesome. I want to do something in a much smaller scale -- “Life Lessons Learned” (Taking Notes Now).

Linked from the article in the post to his inspiration, let me to learnt today that I can batch-rename files in macOS natively - https://www.techjunkie.com/batch-rename-files-os-x-yosemite/

Neat. From that list I learned that CTRL-Down on a Mac shows all windows of the current app. And I tried CTRL-F3 and that works too, and it's easier for me to remember.

If you're using a Mac, I really recommend alt-tab https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/.

I love cmd+tab on a mac to switch between applications, but I was missing a feature to switch between windows of the same application. Alt+tab solves that in the same manner Windows does.

Interesting, the Mac behavior of having different key combinations to switch between applications and windows of the same application is superior to me

I've been using CMD-` and CMD-SHIFT-` to switch between Chrome windows.

command backtick is alt-tab for the same app.

I got inspired by Josh and Khoa Pham (@onmyway133) and create a similar TIL notes vault a while ago. [1]

I love the idea of using GitHub Issues to create and share notes that I found each every morning, I hope that people find it useful.

[1] https://github.com/vinhnx/notes

I want to use Github to collect information like this, except about kitten issues, causes, and solutions. My focus is creating the tools to improve the state of kitten care and rescue, systematically and systemically. GitHub has many powerful features for an interactive project like mine.

However, I've never used GitHub before. Help?

Hi,

(I don't know how familiar you are with the following topics).

As long as your documentation is just plain text files, it can be versioned easily. In fact, many people have used github to create whole books about many different subjects. It ties nicely into the "issue tracker" functionality, cause you can use it as a starting point for discussions that later turn into new functionality or fixes.

You can also use the builtin wiki functionality, just got to "Wiki" on a new repo and click "new page". This has the added benefit that you don't really need to understand the git tool itself and you can start creating content right away.

Either way, I recomend looking up "markdown syntax", as it is very convenient when you're writing a book and its also used for the wiki functionality.

Hope it helps!

Thank you! My current idea is to upload the project as an obsidian vault to GitHub. That would contain markdown files that can be used as-is, and vault configuration files. Obsidian has a variety of plugins for manipulating files and their data.

I am a non-technical technical person in that I understand a lot of random technical concepts, but not necessarily how they work in practice.

I'm not too worried about creating content right away. I am more concerned with designing the system correctly and then working on converting my project to that system.

Then i think it comes down to who is the end user and how you plan to integrate into their current workflows. For example, are you after the good-samaritans or the smaller vet clinics? Are there any differences between how the two would use this information? What is more important? Ease of use or maintenance of knowledge? Etc

Thank you for these focusing questions.

The first phase of the project is identifying, collecting, and documenting kitten issues and solutions. The goal is to create a central repository for academic purposes, because kitten information is fragmented among nonprofits and cat breeders.

The repository is a first step in answering the question "What can I do to help kittens?" for any skill level). It's the technical information that the rest of the project is based on.

I think maintenance is more important for this first phase. Being human- and machine-readable is important. Ease of use is more important in later stages.

This inspired simonw's (among other things, the creator of the `llm` CLI tool) TIL, so I'd wager we'll be seeing him in this thread soon. Until then, here the link: https://til.simonwillison.net/

For a little while back 10 or 20 years ago, there was a tiny effort to start using the phrase "commonplace book" again for digital notes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace_book

This reminds me of one, but with an obvious IT overtone.

I dont want to criticize someone else's personal notes, but I wouldn't call it "SSH into a docker container" other than as a metaphor; but it's too close to the process for the metaphor to stand. SSH has nothing to do with it.

When I make notes they are very self-centered (bespoke). So it’s amazing that this is generally useful enough to have this many GH stars.

Wow, didn't expect there to be so many notes.

this is something nice. thanks for sharing.

What a great idea!

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