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Comment by sky2224 | Hacker News Reader

Some of the most intelligent people I've ever met in math, physics, and computer science don't even use a notebook. They use printer paper and pen. When they're done, they throw the paper away.

I have seldom found personal notes from far in the past to be useful. If there's something worth noting down, then it goes into documentation, so others can stumble upon whatever quirk I've come across in the future. If there's something I really want to remember, I create flashcards and do spaced repetition until I've learned the thing. But that's just me, and I imagine my way doesn't work for a lot of people.

I think people are taking this post a little too personally and literally. This is a writer's piece. The title is meant to share a philosophy that this developer subscribes to. Nothing about it is declaring that others must subscribe to it as well.

If a pen and notebook don't work for you, then don't use it.

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The sciencey side of this is that writing stuff down boosts memory, retention and learning, even if you immediately throw away what you wrote.

Here's one of the hundreds of articles about this, it's a very well documented phenomenon https://www.newscientist.com/article/2414241-writing-things-...

Writing by hand also has a greater effect than typing because it engages more of the senses and more of the brain, in particular the motor cortex.

I keep telling myself that this would all make a great excuse to get a Moleskine, but handwriting just isn't a part of my workflow. Typing copious amounts of stuff into text buffers and then transforming it is, especially now that we have LLMs. If my brain is totally non-functional I simply start typing barely intelligible phrases into a text editor until it wakes up, then I go back and edit/refactor/clean up, and frequently something comes out of this that looks like a vague outline of an email or piece of code I need to write that day. Or at least a todo list. Then we're off to the races doing actual work. Most of the initial doodling is destroyed.

Handwriting does aid retention though.

Unscientifically I always assumed that the pencil-and-paper was not really the important part, just the ritual of memorization that modern people have from however many years of schooling. I assumed the important part was the ritual.

I guess we have a large enough population of people who’ve always taken notes on their computers that a natural experiment could have occurred. But I wonder about the crosstabs—computers can be very distracting so I wonder if people who prefer them to notebooks will also just tend to be more distracted.

My handwriting was terrible all throughout school, and then I avoided it pretty much entirely for a decade or two. I'm not sure what's left can really be called handwriting. I guess maybe it still works to help recall, but it's barely useful as reference.

FWIW My handwriting (and the experience of writing) improved quite a bit when I switched to fountain pens. I always used to find writing a bit uncomfortable physically, and difficult mentally (due to ADHD) but fountain pens improved the experience somewhat.

You don’t need so much force to be applied to the pen compared to other writing instruments and the more comfortable writing experience helped my ADHD brain better tolerate it to.

For me it's critical that the note capture mechanism be unstructured and entirely free form. Typing notes on a keyboard just doesn't work when much of the things I need to keep note of are non-linear, non-verbal, relational, or spatial. Or just facts that I need to keep in temp memory.

I periodically review the notes and summarize anything worth keeping into the appropriate system of record (calendar, tickets, wiki, spaced repetition, doesn't matter). Like you, I find that very little is actually worth keeping. And that's fine; the paper notes are not a system of record but more of an extension of working memory.

>I have seldom found personal notes from far in the past to be useful

Same, but I still keep them (both notebooks and random pieces of paper). I find it extremely satisfying to just look into them after many years. It's like looking at random old photos, photos of my thinking process from the past.

This is how my brain works. I do have a notebook. My stream of thoughts for one day go one one page for that day. I turn the page the next day and I almost never look back. There may be some value in looking back. But, I have not been able to make myself do it.

Most of the contents of my notebook are never looked at again, just lists of thoughts, order of events, etc.

Occasionally i'll write something down that I know I'll forget for later reference and put a small post-it sticking out for easy access.

>>Some of the most intelligent people I've ever met in math, physics, and computer science don't even use a notebook. They use printer paper and pen. When they're done, they throw the paper away.

Donald Knuth works that way. In fact, most such people tend to do most of their thinking on paper, making small changes to the problem state, verifying if it sticks, and is going where they want it going. Rollback, make a different change to the same thing, or same change to different things. This goes on over hundreds of pages.

One of the advanced user level performers don't tend to view stationary(especially paper) as something that must be rationed or spent with limits.

I'm sure it's very personal :) Because everyone has their own reality, workflow and reading a piece either resonates or dissonates with you (personally).

I personally find paper&pen both comforting and unsettling at the same time. Soothing because writing really helps sort out thoughts etc. Mindflow is different from flow "on the computer/phone/tablet".

On the other hand, it's distracting because without an index system (I start each notebook with two blank pages trying to index the contents; every other page has a number) it's easy to get lost.

But today's kids, being digital natives, may take a different approach. Paper&pen may present anxiety for them. So it very much depends on the family we grew up in.

Don’t try to transform a paper notebook into a database. All those organizational tools are elaborate forms of procrastination.

What I do is write notes in the best format for paper: an append-only log with a date on top. Whether digitally or on paper, I rarely if at all need to consult notes from a long time ago, so the log is good enough for most use cases. In fact, as I mentioned elsewhere, writing by hand is not to store data, it’s a way to effectively digest information and incorporate it into your brain. You’ll get a lot of benefit of writing something and immediately throwing it away, so who cares about indexing it for later.

On the other hand, it's distracting because without an index system (I start each notebook with two blank pages trying to index the contents; every other page has a number) it's easy to get lost.

I use a smart pen that writes in a notebook, but also stores everything I write in memory. Every month or so I export the content of the pen to my computer via Bluetooth as OCRed PDFs. This is because my boss often asks me to account for time I spend doing different things, and I can quickly search the PDFs.

That sounds very intriguing, do you mind sharing the smart pen model?

Not the GP, but I got a Rocketbook from my most recent workplace when I joined. Not quite a smart pen, more like smart paper - each page is grid paper with a QR code at the bottom that you scan with their app to digitise.

how reliable are those smart pens actually? I've always been concerned that you'll end up losing out on crucial or really finely drawn stuff.

I use to just lose my notes. But I have been using tech to transcribe them and put the text into my Obsidian vault.

I am thinking about trying to do something with this like scanning for connections between notes or adding some tags to make ideas easier to find.

> I use to just lose my notes.

I used to do this very intentionally. In the past, I've found that taking notes is very valuable for me, but having notes seldom is.

When I was in school, I would write all my notes on a dry erase board and simply erase it when I had filled up the page. That was when I was studying things that were already known, though, so it was viable to, for reference material, just become skilled at referencing pre-existing reference material.

Now that I'm a professional and often working on something new or combining things in a new way, it's more often useful to me to generate new reference content for myself and especially for a different person who picks up the task on my day off.

I've used printer paper myself in different jobs in science. I personally don't like it but I have done it when it was the only paper available. Budgets in scientific organizations are often very tight, so often nothing else is provided, and many times you do not have the direct authority to order anything yourself.

My point is that I'd view this behavior more as a consequence of the circumstances many scientists find themselves in rather than a conscious choice, though I do admit that some people may like it more than I do.

What kind of paper do you prefer?

I don't have an exact preference on the kind and weight of the paper, but I do prefer notebooks with firmly bound and numbered pages like old-school laboratory notebooks [1]. My problem is that I often do long derivations or work that can span dozens of pages with diagrams, etc. If I use loose leaf paper like printer paper, I often lose track of pages or their order. I tend to label my pages extensively when I have to use printer paper. I also use binder clips instead of paper clips since they are much more secure. That system works for me but other people might not like it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38772707

Notebooks are cool, but I prefer printer paper for short term notes. I tend to staple them together if there's more than a few pages. If I need to remember something for longer than the few weeks before I lose the sheets, I take a picture with my phone.

> They use printer paper and pen. When they're done, they throw the paper away.

That's the most important takeaway from using pen(cil) and paper. If you can make it reusable for you great but the most important thing is physically writing it down.

I rarely, if ever, keep anything I have written down in the notebook. Eventually, I rip it out and shred it.

I used to use fancy watermarked paper just because it was fun, but then I got a job at a place with supply closets stocked with infinite printer paper, and, best of all - 11x17 printer paper! I got a 11x17 clipboard to go with it and been using that ever since.

Reminds me of the old joke: all you need to be a philosopher is pen and paper. All you need to be a mathematician is pen, paper, and a trash bin.

Reminds me of the sheer optimism which taking a picture of a whiteboard represents...I have not once, ever, needed or wanted to look back at one.

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