HN Explorer

Ask HN: How do you keep track of all the content you encounter?

67 points by vvoruganti ↗ HN
I spend a lot of my time looking at HN, reddit, and a lot of other aggregation sites to find new cool projects or ideas. I have hundreds of browser bookmarks, my pocket saves are unwieldy, and a ton of different github stars.

How do people keep track of everything they're encountering? Like sometimes I'll see something and it will remind me of a post or project I saw months ago, but it's almost up to chance if I'm able to find it again or link the two concepts together.

75 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 152 ms ] thread
rahimnathwani
I don't do this, but you could use archivebox to save interesting things.
PaulHoule
I find the history tab in the browser to be useful.
gammalost
I don't. Some things I remember, some I do not. I feel like that's the way it has to be for me.
ozim
Same. I think it would be cool but really most of the stuff is not that useful.

Just like physical stuff I have - happened once or twice in my life when some small thing would be useful if I would keep it.

LRU - last recently used is sorting algorithm for my life.

rPlayer6554
I throw it in Joplin or signal self chat or just something I can search. I then accept that I will most likely never look at that thing again. If I do need it, whatever i stored it in has search.
CharlesW
I use Tabs Outliner (Chrome extension) as my short(er)-term memory, and Raindrop.io as my long-term memory. Occasionally, I'll create "awesome list" notes (using Apple Notes) on a theme.

> Like sometimes I'll see something and it will remind me of a post or project I saw months ago, but it's almost up to chance if I'm able to find it again or link the two concepts together.

I have this problem as well. It'd be neat if Raindrop.io would automagically surface "Things Like This I've Saved".

pratikch1253
Issue with Raindrop is that it doesn’t have keyboard support for basic things like search which is really strange
rcarr
Former raindrop user here, I’d take a look at DevonThink if you want the automagic surfacing of similar things you’ve saved.
f0e4c2f7
I keep notes in a cloud app and unsynced bookmarks across various devices.

When it's a slow news day I look through them like my own currated hacker news or reddit.

From time to time I change browsers or something and declare bookmark bankruptcy.

shyn3
I need a Firefox or Chrome extension that scrapes all text on every page and stores it for me somewhere.
robswc
I have a "reading list" but realistically, I never actually get to it.

I have UpNotes which is pretty nice. That I used all the time.

If something gives me an idea or I remember something, I write something down under an "ideas" or "project" catalog.

pnf
Save it to a "read it later" app. Forget all about it. Move on with life. When you need something, search for it. By that time, there will be a hundred other hits saying or doing the same thing. If you really want to remember something, write it down in a giant text file with a date stamp. You'll still forget it, but you'll more likely remember it exists later if you need it.

Next step is to stop spending "a lot of time" looking at HN, Reddit, etc... These are life wasting activities that sap energy and lead to mild, undiagnosed psychosis in most people.

alunchbox
That's the catch though, stay out of media and then you're ignorant of things happening, as tiring as it is. Stay with social news apps like reddit and yeah they're a huge time waster but quick aggregation of news and can get you a good understanding of what's happening.
marginalia_nu
That's mostly just FOMO. Most of "what's happening" isn't really happening. Instead, the absolute majority of news is gossip and speculation. When something of consequence happens, it will reach you.
pnf
Most of the "news" is propaganda or advertorial marketing campaigns. If you want to make sure you don't get caught with your pants down if something affecting you happens then let someone else live on that content treadmill. Find a few newsletter digests by people you trust and read those daily or weekly. The only people who need to keep up with the news cycle are the ones creating it and using it to psyop their enemies and marks. Everything else is better when it's had time to mellow. Skip the hot takes. Wait for the cream to rise. Focus your life on things within your control. You'll be happier.
grnrnm
I just look at the Wikipedia Current Events page [0]. It's possibly the most straight-to-the-point and least biased way I've found to just know what's going on. If you have any specific interests, there are similar sites. I've found Blue's News [1] to be great for a quick catch up on gaming.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

[1]: https://www.bluesnews.com

fedeb95
My approach is different, don't know if better or worse: important news will eventually reach me, the rest is probably not important. This is excluding things I need to react quickly about, which are pretty much constrained to my job.
Pr0ject217
I didn't know about the Wikipedia Current Events page. This is genius. Thank you.
mesarvagya
What's wrong with being ignorant? People lived being ignorant way before social media was even invented. In a way, ignorance is bliss. I would rather stay out of social media than consuming all bullshit news, that has no direct impact in my life.
timoteostewart
Makes me think of this quote from Richard Hamming, to the extent that having an ear tuned into the news is like having your office door open:

    "Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame."

    (from "You and Your Research," 1986)
whynotmaybe
Being too often on HN is clearly destructive for me.

Seeing a post about some advanced stuff where I don't understand anything in the article and seeing dozen of different people commenting on it gives me such an imposter syndrome.

My mind goes into the "HN is for people like you, you should know this stuff"

quaintdev
I saw the Social Dilemma 5-6 days back and since then I have been little vary of touching my phone. Since yesterday morning I had been putting my phone deliberately in other room and I certainly feel spiked in terms of energy. I guess I will do same thing for HN and Reddit.
taskforcegemini
I spend too much time on hn, but don't think I share your approach. Either I learn something, enjoy reading it (or both), or skip the issue alltogether. Is everything where you think "you should know this stuff" actually relevant to you, or just interesting?
whynotmaybe
That's the issue with my mind, the filter between "I should know it" and "you'll learn it if you need it" is sometimes not working.

Like the post about Numba, the Python compiler. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34148455

I've never used Python, and probably won't ever use it, but some deep part of me "needs" to read the article.

It's harder for me to fight this insatiable desire to learn something unuseful, than to stop reading HN.

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
Waterluvian
I don’t. There’s more new content of a high quality every day that I just enjoy the flow of the river.
LunarAurora
A small tip I use -> I ask myself : can I find it later using a keyword ? if yes, I pass. I may sometimes append these keywords (and related ones) to my notes (if they are specific/new)

See, the problem is the keywords : the way we search for it later will sometimes not lead (directly anyway) to the original keywords/results. So, The day we will have good enough NLP search for history/bookmarks/notes, this problem will be mostly solved.

This is already on the way -> https://get.mem.ai/mem-x | https://heyday.xyz/

That being said, if it is important, it should be better categorized/tagged. Otherwise, It is often best to just let it go (as many pointed out).

viraptor
> can I find it later using a keyword ? if yes, I pass.

I got disappointed by this a few times unfortunately. There are articles that I want to search for. Sometimes I even remember part of the title. Yet, the search spam comes up higher anyway and I get stupid listicles instead.

The situation was better a few years ago, but I don't believe in "I'll be able to find it by keywords" anymore.

eternityforest
By wistfully imagining a better bookmarks/content manager and then not actually building it, of course.

I actually might put it a few hours this week though.

fragmede
Save the shit out of all of it. Only available on Apple Silicon. https://www.rewind.ai/
anibalin
I was super hyped about this till I saw the price. 50 bucks per month.
skinnymuch
It uses a lot of cpu usage and I can’t find stuff I’m looking for for past 3 searches. I have to use my own system I already have of screenshotting 4x/min to go back to finding stuff.
rcarr
DevonThink. Literally the perfect application for this if you’re in the Apple ecosystem. I went into detail here about my workflow:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33757241

It has now evolved so that I group articles in folders by year and month e.g 2022 -> 12 -> article. I think for the coming year I may even group them by week and then at the end of each week do a review where I identify my favourite articles which I could then use for part of a newsletter. And then having a “favourite articles of the year” come next December.

humanistbot
Zotero (https://zotero.org) -- an open source reference manager built by academics, but it works for all kinds of web-based content. Register an account and get the browser extension, then all you have to do is click a button and it'll do its best to scrape the metadata and archive a copy of the page. They also have a desktop app where you can add notes.
m-p-3
I bookmark it and add relevant tags to it. I usually can find it later without too much trouble.

If I am unsure the page will survive, I send a save request to the Wayback Machine, and I will also convert the page to Markdown and store a copy in Joplin.

2OEH8eoCRo0
Lots of bookmarks. If it's really good stuff that I'd like to commit to memory I'll write a summary in Dendron with links.

If it's not worth a few minutes to read and summarize is it really that important?

[deleted]
(comment deleted)