HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

nsavage

1,654 karma · joined February 20, 2010

Building Zettelgarden, an intelligent zettelkasten where AI agents help you capture, process, and recall knowledge seamlessly

Socials: - nick@nicksavage.ca - github.com/NickSavage - linkedin.com/in/nicholasbsavage

---

submissionscomments
nsavage··on The Mafia may be keeping fentanyl out of Italy
I'll be honest, this was helpful for me even as someone who lives about 2km from the Quebec border. I was uncertain as you don't often see it in the Hacker News context.
nsavage··on [dead]
For everyone else clicking, the one with the actual discussion is this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49447057
nsavage··on Deus Ex creator Warren Spector is retiring from game development
The other factor that might be in play is that the people who made great games got lucky and didn't really know exactly what made their games so good and aren't able to recapture the magic.
nsavage··on Rome Fell and Nobody Noticed
This is a really interesting idea. I'd never put this together myself, but its really compelling. It really shows the value of the phrase "history doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme".
nsavage··on World Capitals Voronoi
The bad news is that we lose Windsor in this trade. The good news is that we pick up Seattle and Minneapolis.
nsavage··on SimCity 3k in 4k (2025)
According to Denis Leary, he would be an "asshole". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrgpZ0fUixs
nsavage··on North American English Dialects
I'm from Ontario and its very simplified in my experience as well. Maybe the problem is the sample audio clips they have are all 'posh', its not how most people speak. Two large examples I can think of that even have their own wikipedia pages are the Ottawa Valley Twang (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottawa_Valley_English) and the 'Torontomans' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_slang). I grew up in Toronto, and the latter isn't just something funny you see on tiktok, people actually talk that way.
nsavage··on Willingness to look stupid
Reminds me of the Dan Luu article from a few years ago: https://danluu.com/look-stupid/
nsavage··on AIs can't stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations
If anything, this probably shows their reddit heritage.
nsavage··on Medieval Monks Wrote over Ancient Star Catalog – Particle Accel Reveals Original
People are already correcting you, but I find it hard to read this much into the case of this particular text. We'd need to know the full context to what exactly happened, but they might have chosen to sacrifice the catalog for many reasons, not just because of an anti-scientific bend. Maybe it was one of many copies that they held, yet the other ones didn't survive.

We also need to consider that these sorts of texts did survive because of monks. They kept the embers alive. Without them, we would have nothing, not living among the stars.

nsavage··on Alarm overload is undermining safety at sea as crews face thousands of alerts
My Volkswagen has assistance features which routinely fail on snowy days and can’t seem to be disabled. The best you can do is disable them for a minute (!) at which point they start blaring again. Its ironic because the time you need the most focus is the time the car lets you focus the least.
nsavage··on Invader: Where to Spot the 8-Bit Street Art in London
I don't live in London, but was there a few weeks ago and walked right by one of the buildings featured and didn't notice. Goes to show that you should always be looking up.
nsavage··on Beej's Guide to Learning Computer Science
Since I had to find the link: https://beej.us/guide/bgnet/
nsavage··on My favorite cult sci-fi and fantasy books you may not have heard of before
Bookstores like to make things easy for themselves by defining categories (a la Seeing Like A State), especially due to the perceived overlap between the readership of the two categories as the weird books the nerdy guys read.

While that may have been true historically, fantasy has a new, blossoming, largely female readership, although you could consider this to be overloading the term 'fantasy' as these new BookTok books seem to have little in common with the old school sword and sorcery.

nsavage··on Baseball durations after the pitch clock
I hate the removal of the shift. I thought it was such an interesting innovation to the game, and the fact that baseball allowed for such things part of its magic.
nsavage··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2025)
I'm working on Zettelgarden: https://zettelgarden.com.

It's a personal knowledge system. It's a zettelkasten with an LLM substrate. It uses LLMs to build a model of the theses, arguments and facts used in cards, and uses these to both summarize the information on the card and to automatically link cards together based on shared concepts.

nsavage··on Models of European metro stations
Given the title, I was surprised to find Canadian metro stations on the list, even my native Ottawa!
nsavage··on Building my childhood dream PC
This is a pretty common behaviour. My dad has been buying both his dream Amigas and his dream car, a Triumph TR6. I bought my dream childhood console, a Gameboy Advance SP (I only had a regular Gameboy Advance).
nsavage··on PKM apps need to get better at resurfacing information
Agreed, this is a big problem. I tried a paper zettelkasten to get around the taking notes and losing them problem, but my collection grew too big to maintain on paper. Because of that, I've been building Zettelgarden (https://github.com/Zettelgarden/Zettelgarden) to help and try to solve this problem for myself.

Among other things, it breaks your notes apart into facts and entities, then stores those along with embeddings. This helps surface things you've seen before since it makes and surfaces links based on individual things, instead of the text as a whole.

In case anyone is interested, I wrote a bit about the process here: https://nsavage.substack.com/p/facts-arguments-theses-buildi...

nsavage··on ReMarkable Paper Pro Move
I bought a Remarkable and ended up returning it. It was a cool device, but you're exactly right, I had a hard time justifying the cost over a $10 notebook.
nsavage··on Facts, Arguments, Theses: Building AI Knowledge Retrieval on Meaning, Not Slices
I see what you’re saying, this works a little differently in that its asking the LLM what it thinks the writing is trying to say and what the writing uses to support it. Agreed that hallucinations are an issue though.
nsavage··on With waters at 32C, Mediterranean tropicalization shifts into high gear
These are great examples, I have some more ancedotal evidence in Canada, such as the creeping north of the wine industry. Used to be just Point Pelee, then Niagara, and now even the Ottawa Valley has wineries.
nsavage··on Vanishing home field advantage in English football
In case anyone is interested, baseball has a similar variety in stadiums. Fenway Park comes to mind as a field with particular unique circumstances, like the Green Monster (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Monster).

It also feels relevant to note that air pressure plays a role, and that players have an easier time hitting home runs in high altitude places like Colorado, so the game isn't the same everywhere.

nsavage··on A Typology of Canadianisms
This is excellent stuff, I am going to be spending a lot of time on this.

My absolute favourite Canadianism is how, on wikipedia, the 401 (major highway that goes through Toronto) is "colloquially referred to as the four-oh-one" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_Highway_401).

nsavage··on A Typology of Canadianisms
I travel to the UK a lot and am usually pretty careful with my Canadianisms, but during my last trip I accidentally asked a server for both a pop and a serviette at the same time, leading to a blank stare.
nsavage··on Trans-Taiga Road (2004)
I think you're right, but I don't think 'colonization' ever really stopped in Ontario - it just moved elsewhere. While Quebec was incentivized to develop its regions, there were more valuable places for Ontario capital to flow to, such as Alberta.

The difference between the two is language really and the urge to develop Quebec as a sovereign country, that drive has never been there for Ontario because Ontario is Canada, at least in the eyes of Ontarians. You don't see people in Ontario proud of being Ontarian as you do in Quebec, the Maritimes, Alberta, etc, instead they're proud of being Canadian.

nsavage··on Trans-Taiga Road (2004)
As bad as it sounds, I'm guessing this policy is because of the indigenous peoples who live in the area and not wanting to create a pattern.
nsavage··on Sailing the fjords like the Vikings yields unexpected insights
I can't help but be remembered of the discovery of the HMS Terror, one of John Franklin's missing ships. It was announced that it was discovered conveniently located in what was already called Terror Bay, and that the ship's masts were even sticking out of the water. The local Inuit of course knew it was there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_Bay

nsavage··on India launches attack on 9 sites in Pakistan and Pakistani Jammu and Kashmir
That's not really comparable to Poland and Germany. More comparable would be: Man A is pushing man B repeatedly and yelling at him as a bar dispute escalates. Man A pulls out a gun and shoots man B once Man B retaliates.
nsavage··on Airline demand between Canada and United States collapses, down 70%+
Yes, no doubt. We would occasionally go anyways for unique snacks or Trader Joes, but not anymore.
Page 1 of 2Next →