Ask HN: How do you use the knowledge gained in a day?

[mdoliwa]

I'm paraphrasing yesterday's Ask HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43976045

Every time I see posts like this, I feel like I should take more notes. I do write some down, but I rarely use them afterward.

I'm curious, what do you actually do with your notes? How do they help you in real life?

[jjice]

It's all minor stuff. I don't bother storing things that I can web search. I store things that are relevant to my life, or would at least be a pain to find online. For example, I have the door code to my mom's house written down. I visit like twice a year and if I didn't have it written down, I'd lock myself out every time (ask me how I know...).

Other things include planning and documenting projects like travel planning. If I write it down now and have it in one place, I'll look at it at the planned time I'll use it (during the trip).

Another example is info I had to watch a YouTube video for that can be paraphrased. Cleaning and descaling my espresso machine is a good example. It's a few textual lines and I know I do it once every few months, so having it essentially cached in my notes comes in handy.

If I can't Google it (at least in a reasonable amount of time) and I suspect it may come up again, I'll jot it down. If I can't see any way I'd care about it in the future, I don't bother jotting it down.

[Phlebsy]

> If I can't Google it (at least in a reasonable amount of time) and I suspect it may come up again, I'll jot it down.

With how much google at least has become incentivized to push results further down for their other features I've been glad that I've had a habit of storing the links for useful/non trivially found results with the queries originally used for a while now.

That said, maybe having AI summarize the curated results to store along with them wouldn't be a bad idea as well with things seeming to fall off the internet with dead links or migrated URLs more and more.

[HenryBemis]

> (ask me how I know...)

How _do_ you know?

[ferguess_k]

I figured 99.99% of the knowledge I gained from Internet is useless so I didn't bother to take notes at all. If it's really useful then I better start using it in real life. All those books, bookmarks, useless. I'll never do whatever I really love to do professionally and work is mostly a chore. Whatever.

[jack_peplinski]

Your concern reminds me of this line:

> The self is no longer rooted to the experience of the body. It lives in various digitally mediated manifestations and iterations. As such it is variously coded and indexed. We can search not only the text but the archives of the self. [Source](https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/a-world-ordered-o...)

You could check out Distill or Pile.

https://un.ms/pile https://distill.id/