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dSebastienon You Need a Fourth Place: A Space to Think

In this article, I discuss the 3 classic places: home, work, and communities. Then, I share ideas about what the Fourth place actually is.

Yes, Home, Work and Communities can be combined to form cool new places for people to live, work, and grow. But everyone needs a space to think. And few people seem to actually consider that "place" as important. IMHO, they're missing out, and would really benefit from properly designing and taking care of their Fourth place.

TL;DR: The Fourth place is everywhere you think, and it can become much more valuable/powerful with a Personal Knowledge Management system.

dSebastienon My journey with Obsidian

I've created a beginner's guide that covers most of what there is to know about Obsidian: https://www.dsebastien.net/free-beginners-guide-to-mastering...

In short, it's a free note-taking app using the Markdown syntax, storing files locally and with wiki-like linking, tagging, a plugin system and tons of community plugins. Using it, you can organize knowledge, ideas, references, keep a journal, and more.

dSebastienon My journey with Obsidian

Plus as a developer, I can extend it in any way I want I recently created a plugin to let me quickly publish posts on social media platforms: https://github.com/dsebastien/obsidian-typefully

dSebastienon My journey with Obsidian

Obsidian is my command center. So many advantages compared to almost everything out there: https://notes.dsebastien.net/30+Areas/33+Permanent+notes/33....

dSebastienon Ask HN: Share Your YoutTube Channel

https://youtube.com/@dsebastien

dSebastienon Ask HN: How to transcribe 1000s of handwritten notes

You made my day. It's obviously an awesome approach!

Documented here: https://notes.dsebastien.net/30+Areas/33+Permanent+notes/33....

dSebastienon Show HN: I built an Obsidian plugin to create notes from BibTeX

Do it. TS is fun ;-) There's a lot yet to be done around Obsidian and LLMs, like extracting text from images, selecting text and generating images, etc

dSebastienon Storing knowledge in a single long plain text file

One big text file (OBTF) for the win? I'm curious about the pros and cons people think of.

https://notes.dsebastien.net/30+Areas/33+Permanent+notes/33....

dSebastienon Learn things that don't change

I wrote about this a while ago: https://www.dsebastien.net/focus-on-things-that-dont-change/

dSebastienon How and why to make a /now page on your site

I have one and rely on a recurring event on my calendar to update it every couple of months

https://www.dsebastien.net/now/

dSebastienon How to choose your sources and inputs

Some thoughts on how to make better choices when it comes to information consumption.

dSebastienon Closing Open Loops: The Key to a Calmer, More Productive Mind

I often think about open loops, things that clutter my mind and take my attention away. I've spent quite some time creating systems to remove those from my life, enabling me to "forget" as much as possible, and get things done. Thought I could share some ideas on the topic.

dSebastienon Show HN: macOS Reminder Sync for Obsidian Tasks

I have published a free guide: https://www.dsebastien.net/the-ultimate-beginners-guide-to-o...

I also have a course: https://developassion.gumroad.com/l/obsidian-starter-course

And a starting point with a preconfigured vault and a user guide: https://developassion.gumroad.com/l/obsidian-starter-kit

dSebastienon Show HN: Sapling is a business-ready TypeScript, Express.js, React boilerplate

More suffering for the world

dSebastienon The adult consequences of being bullied in childhood

I was bullied between 6 and 16. I got hit, mocked, ignored, etc. I felt like I did not exist apart in my head.

My father was also very violent and I was scared shitless when he was angry. And he was always angry at something or someone. He tried to strangle my mom multiple times, hit me, broke windows, yelled like a madman...

It turned me into a ghost, trying to be invisible while I hated not being "seen".

I was crazy shy, couldn't look at people for long, felt bad whenever I saw they saw me. My safe place was the Web. It saved my life, and helped me find (or created??) my passion.

It took me a good 20-25 years to evolve and start daring to live more the way I wanted. Now I'm 40, it's all far behind, but I still get sad from time to time, thinking about all that crap. Yet, I'm thankful, because it turned me into someone with a lot of inner calm, patience, empathy, and willingness to make people around me happier. I have very few deep relationships, but I value those a lot, and I don't need any more.

Empathy, calm and patience are powerful and valuable skills to have in many life situations.

dSebastienon The Value of Atomic Notes

Short notes that focus on a single idea are generally much more valuable to grow a valuable Personal Knowledge Management system than long and deep notes can be.

dSebastienon In Defense of Using Fewer Tools

Good point. I didn't mention familiarity and proficiency with the tools, but it's indeed another angle to think about it. More familiar often implies more productivity, even though you might miss out on the "latest and greatest".

Considering programming, it's mostly the same, indeed. There are endless debates about what's the best library, framework or language out there, while in reality, working with what you know often yields better/more tangible results for end users. I like the fact that some successful indie hackers out there stick to old-school HTML+CSS+PHP and still get to make tons of cash.

Tools are not the main thing.

dSebastienon Oslo acquires ChatGPT for 110k students and teachers

Hope they know that it sucks at math

dSebastienon The Art of Note Naming: Keys to Effective Knowledge Management

Thank you for sharing. These are awesome conventions, as long as they work for you. The challenge if we try to generalize is to remain consistent with that many naming conventions. I personally still rely on (few) folders, metadata, templates and automation to organize everything automagically.

dSebastienon Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

I've built a template for Obsidian accompanied by a user guide and video course, all based on my personal system.

It's solid and scales well. I've sold 700+ copies and most customers are happy with it.

https://ObsidianStarterKit.com

dSebastienon Meta-Learning Is All You Need (2020)

I wrote an article about the importance of meta-learning for humans: https://www.dsebastien.net/meta-learning-the-missing-link-in...

dSebastienon I Will Fucking Haymaker You If You Mention Agile Again

Each and every time I hear the world "Agile" at work, I get depressed.

It's everything but agile. It's always Scrum. It's always implemented as a way to pressure people to deliver faster, without ever reducing the scope.

The worst I've seen recently is business entities adopting "agile" and thinking that they're making progress. They get trained by certified Scrum "Masters" and embark on a painful journey, without even realizing that they're just brainwashed to use a super rigid approach...

dSebastienon Show HN: I built a dataset of 25k+ Gumroad products to spot market opportunities

Do you have an affiliate program? I'd be interested:)

dSebastienon Note-taking apps are designed for storage, not insight – can AI change that?

+1. I found that most of the content about Zettelkasten made it look more complex than it needs to be.

I wrote a piece about it: https://www.dsebastien.net/2022-05-01-zettelkasten-method/

dSebastienon Ask HN: Tell us about your project that's not done yet but you want feedback on

The UI will be structured, free form text will be limited to summaries one can attach to a shared resource.

Focus will be on people and their contributions.

dSebastienon Ask HN: Tell us about your project that's not done yet but you want feedback on

I'm working on Knowii [0], an Open Source (AGPL) Knowledge Management platform for communities. In the first version, communities will be able to curate/capture/share collections of useful/interesting resources. A browser extension will make it easy to capture information/links.

Later on, we'll add job boards, ways to share summaries/notes, news, vote, tag, explore through user profiles, etc.

[0] https://github.com/knowii-oss/knowii

dSebastienon TypeScript please give us reflection/runtime types

Runtime type checking is an explicit non-goal of TS: https://www.dsebastien.net/2020-04-25-typescript-non-goals/

dSebastienon Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?

https://dSebastien.net

I write about Personal Knowledge Management, note-taking, note-making, entrepreneurship and more. I also have a weekly newsletter.

I started writing on that domain ten or so years ago. Some of the older content is long gone :p

dSebastienon Against Alcohol (2022)

It's an awesome source of information. I've shared a summary here: https://www.dsebastien.net/summary-of-what-alcohol-does-to-y...

dSebastienon Ask HN: Should I build a new community app platform?

I am currently giving it a try with Knowii, under the AGPL: https://github.com/knowii-oss

I haven't written all that much about it so far, but my idea is to focus on community knowledge management.

IMHO, communities have enough places to hold their discussions. I think communities need a platform where they can build/store/organize their knowledge, share ideas, useful resources, etc. More focus on knowledge and people, and less on conversations.