HN Explorer

How do you store and utilize knowledge?

5 points by Barazutti629 ↗ HN
Everyday I (and I assume most of us knowledge workers, devs, and creatives) read a bunch of articles, papers, code snippets, AI responses, newsletters...

Feel like there are so much information to consume and catchup with the world rn. But how do you actually store and make use of them? What do you use to consolidate, store and easily access them when necessary?

I’ve been trying to save all things I consider helpful into AI second brain apps and then ask AI to retrieve them when needed. I've tried tools like notion, mem, saner, but would love to hear your methods and recs

10 comments

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yocoda
I use .md files. I've tried everything, your words feel like a question I once had. Reframe the problem; setup a system. Then commit. Incremental improvements will happen automatically. Do more with less.
brettkromkamp
I built my own topic maps-based knowledge management system, Contextualise, a tool to organise projects and activities made up of unstructured information resources (think notes, URLs, images, files, locations, events, whatever…). All appropriately linked. I’ve been using it for years and it works very well for me. It does, however, require consistency, discipline, and effort.
ConradJarret
Is this something you can share? I'd love to try it out.
brettkromkamp
Sorry, didn’t see your reply. Sure, just go to https://contextualise.dev/ and sign up. You really do need to have a basic understanding of the topic maps model to really make the most of Contextualise, though. If you have any questions just let me know at info at contextualise dot dev.
scorpioxy
I use orgmode within emacs. Be careful that if you go down this rabbit hole, it can consume a lot of your time if you let it. I eventually stopped trying to optimize my productivity when I discovered it became another form of procrastination. I am OK with letting things go and not trying to be on top of all of the flood of information. These days I just iterate on my current system to help organize my life but not in a second brain way.
markus_zhang
Whatever the tool is, I figured that eventually, pushing scripts and markdown files to GitHub is the best idea. It's a bit difficult with the work laptop but those are usually small enough to re-type.
sandreas
I use flatnotes[1] on my homeserver with a cronjob, that automatically adds, commits and pushes the whole data directory into a private git repository.

It's not perfect, but dead simple and at least I can search, edit everywhere and easily migrate, if I'd find something better.

1: https://github.com/Dullage/flatnotes