Hacker News Reader

Comment by Viktoire | Hacker News Reader

When I save things, I try to make sure that it'll be immediately useful to me once I find it again.

I'll highlight, summarise and take notes of what I save. Or some combination of those. If I don't find anything new or directly applicable to my life, I'll let it pass by.

This approach isn't good for archival purposes, but I hesitate to save a lot of things that I'll never read again.

View on HN

I'm going through my file cabinets right now. I'll keep a few things that catch my eye but I'll likely throw out most of it. The odd 25 year old computer magazine is probably interesting but not all of them collectively for the most part. And I'm certainly not going to index them in a way that they'd be useful to me.

You can probably sell or donate those old magazines to a collector, or a kid interested in that stuff. At the very least drop them off at a thirft store instead of just dumping them.

Thrift stores don't want a ton of old paper. There are a lot of things that someone somewhere would probably like but I'm not going to track them down or get them there. Mostly it's not magazines anywway. It's a bunch of articles I ripped out over the years.

The one thing I have in my garage I know someone would want is a big pile of laserdiscs. But, again, a thrift shop (or my library) wouldn't want them and I live pretty far out from a major city. Probably will try Craigslist post-winter though as I'm trying to declutter.

Laserdiscs appear and gradually disappear at my local thrift, so someone must be buying them. Now in the vinyl records pile, there are copies of Mantovani, Jim Nabors, and Herb Alpert which have been there for years, but anything classic rock or newer sells the same day.

In the spring I'll probably do take it or leave it for the whole collection on Craigslist for the whole pile at a nominal price and, if that doesn't work, just take it up to the local thrift and I'll at least have tried.

I was just thinking yesterday, wanting some Christmas music to get into the spirit while wrapping presents, remembering being a kid, when my mom would put on Jim Nabors' Christmas album.

Luckily there are (currently) multiple playlists of it on Youtube.

But they might not be there next year.

Absolutely nothing beats Vince Guaraldi’s “A Charlie Brown Christmas” for me.

I went through mine and cut out the stuff that was still relevant, threw out the rest of the magazine.

Ended up with a single folder of clippings about x86 assembly etc

That's more or less what I did over time. No harm in a few folders of clippings for old times sake but not really boxes and boxes of magazines that will probably never be looked at.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com