I've been taking notes too. I can't publish most of them because I use note-taking as a way of heavily criticising articles, which contain mostly fluff or wrong conclusions. It helps me think thoughts which, if I shared with others, would almost definitely offend them.
It's hard to criticise people's work seriously without hurting their egos.
I take notes, but mainly from the books I read. I did see a site that gave a condensed version of business books, but I can't seem to find it off-hand. What I think would be useful would be a site like Read Later, but where you could annotate and others could find your notes prior to reading the full article. Personally I never read a HN article before I read the notes to see whether its worth reading!
I used to read HN comments before reading articles, but I don't do that much any more because I find the top comments on HN often miss the point of the article. The top comments are almost always criticising the article, which is OK because "good post" comments are mostly boring. But the criticism is often due to misunderstanding the author.
Most articles are not worth reading because they don't have much substance; so there's not much point reading comments about them. For the very little original and interesting writing out there, I prefer to read it before reading any comments.
I had hoped that people would do things like that (summaries, discussions) on SqueezedBooks.com but now I've sold it (although I retain some interest in it) and am not sure where it's going to go right now.
Yeah, it gets a reasonable amount of traffic, and ranks fairly well on Google for summaries of some of the books. I was never able to do a good job of translating that into active participants, advertising dollars, or Amazon referral fees either. Part of the reason I sold it and retained some interest in it is to see if someone else could do a better job.
Brilliant post there. Jotting down what you have learnt is not only important for others, but also for you. Writing stuff down means putting your thoughts to order, means better view on your product or company.
Taking notes definitely helps. The problem is I always forget to revisit them. That's exactly why me and some friends built thoughtback.com. It's a micro-journaling tool with mac and web apps that automatically re-exposes you to your thoughts.
PS - I'm really not sure if it's appropriate to post a link to a service that's relevant to the article in the comments if I made it. Should I not do this again?
He does describe an important problem, but, gee, I thought that everyone on Hacker News long since had a good solution if only as a special case of how they keep track of information more generally! :)!
But, not for the first time, apparently I was wrong!
So, here's my solution to the problem described in the blog, my 'Personal Information Management 101 for Dummies'. I describe my solution in four parts below:
(1) Text
I like text, in English.
There is a fundamental reason: So far there is essentially only one way to communicate information, and that is text, e.g., English, hopefully in complete sentences in well organized paragraphs. Sorry, guys, seriously, in English, that's the only way that works. Math? Actually it is not an exception (I omit details on just why). Mathematical physics? Engineering? Computer science? The same.
So, text is necessary.
Nicely enough, simple text is also sufficient (unless are writing math in which case it's also very nice to have Knuth's TeX).
So, text is necessary and sufficient for communicating all information except for math where also need, say, TeX.
Graphs? Tables? Pictures? Those are often helpful, nearly always not crucial to the information, and can never replace text. Computer language code? Similar. And, yes, computer people, code can never replace text in complete English sentences.
So, fantastic news: Now one of the things current computing is the very best at is handling simple text. FANTASTIC. So, I exploit that fantastic news.
So, while I have a long list of three letter file extensions on my computer's hard disk, I make sure, usually with minimal effort, that nearly all the 'information' is in just simple text.
By analogy, simple text solves the Tower of Bable problem of many different sources of information; even if keep a copy of the original, just convert it all to simple text.
(2) Text Editor
Okay, in a kitchen, two of the very best tools are a quite sharp French chef's knife and a maple cutting board.
Well, in close analogy, in handling text, the best tool is a good text editor. I use KEdit on Windows XP, and before converting to Windows used KEdit also on OS/2 and MS/DOS. Before that I used the very similar XEDIT on VM/CMS. KEdit is a good text editor.
KEdit is by a wide margin my most heavily used tool in computing.
While KEdit is a good (excellent?) text editor, in part its glory is its macro language, basically M. Cowlishaw's elegant Rexx. So, in a cooking analogy, I can have a macro for slicing carrots -- given a bunch of carrots, type the name of the carrot macro, and, presto, washed, peeled, sliced carrots.
For spell checking, I use Aspell that comes with at least one TeX distribution. Aspell is terrific. Since, really, I want just one personal 'addendum' dictionary, I use Aspell for as much as possible of my spelling corrections.
Related is that I use ObjectRexx as a text window scripting language, and, yes, it can drive KEdit.
So, I use KEdit for as much as possible of my typing, for forum posts such as this one, e-mail I send, software for KEdit macros, scripts, Visual Basic .NET, C, Fortran, T-SQL, HTML via ASP.MET, input to Knuth's TeX, own notes of wide variety, etc.
One of the best single ways to get work organized, lacking anything else, is just time and date. So I have little macros that insert time and date lines wherever useful. In a programming language, the line is inserted as a comment in that language.
In a text file, if a line has a tree name or a URL, then one keystroke tells KEdit to 'do the right thing', usually 'open' that file. So, my programming source code is awash in such 'links'.
Yes, just a few lines of the KEdit macro language can use old serial port COM1 to send to my FAX modem card an old AT code with a phone number. Since my land line desk phone goes through that FAX modem card, one keystroke in KEdit dials the phone number. Darned useful.
Once I wrote some simple POP3 e-mail software and used it for years. Then, if I was editing a file in KEdit an...
19 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 42.7 ms ] threadIt's hard to criticise people's work seriously without hurting their egos.
So, I hope to turn it into a comic one day.
Most articles are not worth reading because they don't have much substance; so there's not much point reading comments about them. For the very little original and interesting writing out there, I prefer to read it before reading any comments.
http://7bks.com
http://www.hn-books.com/
http://anynewbooks.com/
http://bookflavor.com
Maybe you could partner up with one of them?
PS - I'm really not sure if it's appropriate to post a link to a service that's relevant to the article in the comments if I made it. Should I not do this again?
But, not for the first time, apparently I was wrong!
So, here's my solution to the problem described in the blog, my 'Personal Information Management 101 for Dummies'. I describe my solution in four parts below:
(1) Text
I like text, in English.
There is a fundamental reason: So far there is essentially only one way to communicate information, and that is text, e.g., English, hopefully in complete sentences in well organized paragraphs. Sorry, guys, seriously, in English, that's the only way that works. Math? Actually it is not an exception (I omit details on just why). Mathematical physics? Engineering? Computer science? The same.
So, text is necessary.
Nicely enough, simple text is also sufficient (unless are writing math in which case it's also very nice to have Knuth's TeX).
So, text is necessary and sufficient for communicating all information except for math where also need, say, TeX.
Graphs? Tables? Pictures? Those are often helpful, nearly always not crucial to the information, and can never replace text. Computer language code? Similar. And, yes, computer people, code can never replace text in complete English sentences.
So, fantastic news: Now one of the things current computing is the very best at is handling simple text. FANTASTIC. So, I exploit that fantastic news.
So, while I have a long list of three letter file extensions on my computer's hard disk, I make sure, usually with minimal effort, that nearly all the 'information' is in just simple text.
By analogy, simple text solves the Tower of Bable problem of many different sources of information; even if keep a copy of the original, just convert it all to simple text.
(2) Text Editor
Okay, in a kitchen, two of the very best tools are a quite sharp French chef's knife and a maple cutting board.
Well, in close analogy, in handling text, the best tool is a good text editor. I use KEdit on Windows XP, and before converting to Windows used KEdit also on OS/2 and MS/DOS. Before that I used the very similar XEDIT on VM/CMS. KEdit is a good text editor.
KEdit is by a wide margin my most heavily used tool in computing.
While KEdit is a good (excellent?) text editor, in part its glory is its macro language, basically M. Cowlishaw's elegant Rexx. So, in a cooking analogy, I can have a macro for slicing carrots -- given a bunch of carrots, type the name of the carrot macro, and, presto, washed, peeled, sliced carrots.
For spell checking, I use Aspell that comes with at least one TeX distribution. Aspell is terrific. Since, really, I want just one personal 'addendum' dictionary, I use Aspell for as much as possible of my spelling corrections.
Related is that I use ObjectRexx as a text window scripting language, and, yes, it can drive KEdit.
So, I use KEdit for as much as possible of my typing, for forum posts such as this one, e-mail I send, software for KEdit macros, scripts, Visual Basic .NET, C, Fortran, T-SQL, HTML via ASP.MET, input to Knuth's TeX, own notes of wide variety, etc.
One of the best single ways to get work organized, lacking anything else, is just time and date. So I have little macros that insert time and date lines wherever useful. In a programming language, the line is inserted as a comment in that language.
In a text file, if a line has a tree name or a URL, then one keystroke tells KEdit to 'do the right thing', usually 'open' that file. So, my programming source code is awash in such 'links'.
Yes, just a few lines of the KEdit macro language can use old serial port COM1 to send to my FAX modem card an old AT code with a phone number. Since my land line desk phone goes through that FAX modem card, one keystroke in KEdit dials the phone number. Darned useful.
Once I wrote some simple POP3 e-mail software and used it for years. Then, if I was editing a file in KEdit an...