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Ask HN: How do you keep track of all the content you encounter?
67 points by vvoruganti on Dec 23, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 72 comments
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.




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.


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"


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.


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?


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.


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.


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


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.


I didn't know about the Wikipedia Current Events page. This is genius. Thank you.


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)


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.


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.


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.


I use something I built, which is running at https://mitta.us/. It uses Solr and GPT3 to control your browser, crawl websites, run ML pipelines on the documents, and provide search for whatever is saved. It's sorta like a souped up version of goosh.org.

The whole idea is based on a "shell" UI, which runs JavaScript commands that translate into something like what DDG does:

  > !google something (this takes you to Google after running google.js)
You can crawl things and then talk about them:

  nickel-scorpion*> Showing 1 of 1 results.
  url  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34102057
  title ChatGPT Caused 'Code Red' at Google, Report Says | Hacker News
  description None
  spool bulky-pastoral-perch view
  source_type web
  id 17VyZq5hw8xeLySWN discuss|tag|delete
  updated 2022-12-24T16:33:04Z ⊂ +alltime
  image 
  pastel-mature-herring~> !discuss what's this article about?
  nickel-scorpion*> The article is about how Google is worried that they could be replaced by a search engine based on the ChatGPT like technology.
  pastel-mature-herring~> !discuss is it a valid concern?
  nickel-scorpion*> Yes, it is a valid concern.
  pastel-mature-herring~> !model ~17VyZq5hw8xeLySWN |description_from_fulltext
  nickel-scorpion*> Standby...
  nickel-scorpion*> Document updated: ID 17VyZq5hw8xeLySWN.
  description The page contains excerpts from a discussion about the ChatGPT search engine. People are generally impressed with its accuracy, but caution that it is not always correct. The engine is still in development, and its costs are currently high.
It's been a long haul working on it and I'm still struggling with "getting done" enough to release it.


I save into several text files (20 files) ... one big one ( >100k lines) for anything software related organized using labels like

curl tricks _____________

      something here about curl
then most anything else goes into a second big file mostly grab bag ... then I have other specific files for : travel, nyc, todo, videos, etc

then from a terminal I can grep into each using say :

grep -B20 -A20 someSearchString workfile

in above the parms A and B return the surrounding lines from the matching line of txt file ... then to further filter output I sometime pipe output of above grep into another grep

using this process I find I can retrieve anything I have stored I just need to save each item into a meaningful label using above xxxx tricks ... this process works just fine ... have been using this for past decade or more

naturally all of these files are auto backed up to the cloud ... currently using mega.io yet previously was using dropbox

PS. I use a ubuntu linux laptop/desktop


I don't :) Or to be more precise: I gradually downgraded from storing everything to storing nothing.

I put an incredible amount of effort in forcing myself not to keep track of content I encounter. I keep some bookmarks: interfaces I must interact with on a daily or weekly basis at most, and a folder in which I put links to pages on which I have written a comment (like this one after I post my comment). The folder is quite up-to-date.

And I may save some pics, usually those shared by friends/family, typically pictures that I cannot find in a search engine.

Otherwise...I can't think of other content that I save.


I don't do anything, because I just realized that the overwhelming majority of everything I read or comment on isn't unique or doesn't matter, and it's just a momentary indulgence. The rest I can just search for, check the threads I've commented on, or it's in pocket, but I truly don't care about most of it. I can't think of a time I've actually thought to click on a bookmark, and I've maybe re-looked at a pocket article maybe once in the decade I've been using read it later services.

I find that also I'm much happier with this relationship to the crap I look at. It's neat for the moment, maybe impactful, maybe provides residual utility, but if there's something I need to know it likely won't come to me randomly while browsing on HN.

Once you read a critical mass of posts about anything you deem interesting, you'll almost certainly start seeing the same idea pop up again as other people have the same revelation, but by then there's a good chance I've moved on anyway.

Really important things demand deliberate attention to either learn about the existence of or learn the subject matter, and a lot of the time it's not really something I'd accept as a valid use of my attention, unless it's a hobby I'm steeped in. Not even more than video games. Not because it's not a valid use of anyone's time, but to really get value out of anything, it needs dedication, not a cursory perusal, so I accept that most stuff im casually perusing just isn't very important.


After trying and failing for various years to find the perfect system, I've since landed on the most dead-simple system possible: aggressively organizing my browser's bookmarks. As one might assume, it's a few general categories progressively broken down into more and more specific folders. For instance: tech/programming/command line/editors/neovim/plugins.

The one "magic" thing I've figured out is to put "_to check out" folders in various places. So, in the above example .../plugins/_to check out is for neovim plugins to...well, check out, but then .../editors_to check out is for new command line editors. Not that there are many of those, but you get the idea.

The other "magic" thing to make this actually work is to, rather than immediately going to HN or Reddit or whatever, instead I pick whatever category tickles my fancy at the moment and then find something in the _to check out folder.

I recently had the idea to write a little app that grabs a few random bookmarks from the various _to check out folders and serve them to me in the morning. I think that'll tie the whole together nicely.


If you are on a chromium based browser, I found these extensions to help dealing with large collections/hierarchies :

- Adding Faster to a specific folder with keyboard -> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/faster-bookmark-ad...

- Tagging simply by adding #tag to the title. -> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bookmark-tags/edpe...

- Sorting/Searching using more powerful filters -> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bookmark-manager-p...

So instead of using a series of "_" folders, What I do is I append #tocheck to title, then I can also sort/filter them by date, folder, url...(and add other tags like #5stars, #ProjectC...)


Tagging and all that is great, but that’s helpful if you’re more into searching and less into manually maintaining. I actually prefer my system over tags precisely because it requires that I traverse the folder hierarchy and don’t simply search. This way, I constantly run into stuff I can let go, see better ways of organizing things, etc.

Likewise, I’ve eschewed automatic money trackers in favor of paper receipts, a meticulously organized spreadsheet, and weekly financial check-ins with myself. There are times when automation IMO actively works against the intended purpose, and these are two of them for me. And this is coming from someone who’s (like many on HN) obsessed with automation.


I wanted something that I could organize "my way" and thought the html format was interesting since I could connect pieces of information together. Also something I could edit and update quickly - I settled on the combination of desktop+wiki+html...

So about 5 odd years ago I started using zim https://zim-wiki.org/index.html (there are other tools too, I have just gotten used to it) - everytime I searched for something, read something interesting or learned something new, I would add it to my zim install.

Over time, this has become the first place I search or refer to for anything - frequently I find more useful and contextual information here as compared to a search engine. This is becoming my backup brain.


This might be the comment that helps me get back on my zim install. I abandoned it for "life stuff" and I was meaning to "find something similar, or pick zim back" for some months.


I don't. Some things I remember, some I do not. I feel like that's the way it has to be for me.


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.


Why pocket doesn't work for you? I think its search feature is useful to find things. Plus it has tags, but I'm too lazy to use them.

There are two things I use: the first is taking notes of my thoughts so that I can remember better for later elaboration. Replace "thoughts" with "project" or whatever. Let's say you find a cool library: do a quickstart project even if silly, it's kind of like a note that helps remembering. The second is randomness: if I forget or can't find something, maybe its a disadvantage, but maybe it's also an advantage, making me focus on new things.

Another thing I do seldom is reviewing my saved items in pocket (that's the only one I use). If something it's no more interesting to me, I delete it.

About taking notes (real notes): I make quick and dirty ones with standard notes, then use obsidian to write more structured things starting from the quick notes.

I can't say to you I've solved the problem. But for how I view information, it is simply too chaotic to try and control and optimise its flow, it has to be managed in some way accepting its random nature.


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).


> 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.


Track / archive it? I don't. There's too much shit out there. If it's something really interesting chances are I'm going to email it to someone, and the sent copy gets saved in my archive folder (I archive mail over 90 days) and can be searched later. I've also made notes on my phone of urls that dav syncs with my email notes folder.

This is my hot take ... it's 2022, and any "serious" or worthwhile site still has an RSS feed (HN, NPR, ESPN, Department of Energy, NOAA, etc.). That's how I scan / get the majority of my news / info. I have tabs on my reader for work, hobbies, weather, etc. Hell, even the small cow town I live in has an rss feed for city council stuff or the city softball league sign up.


i started using Grist recently as a place where i could save almost everything, movies/tv shows to watch, books to read, audiobooks, podcasts, bits of software/services to try out etc etc

being able to have a notes column is handy. i have so many things ive bookmarked but then years can't remember why!

its also let's you embed an image and a youtube video which can be useful for jogging your memory.

im only experimenting with it at the moment but i think some type of web clipper is what i need to start using this more, otherwise there's just a lot of manual work each time you want to save something

https://www.getgrist.com


I Love grist. The good news is it supports incremental imports (=Merge). So personally, for daily use, I bookmark with the excellent Raindrop.io web clipper (you can add notes). From time to time, I would export everything as CSV (option included) to grist.

Another similar option I like is Notion. Its databases are less powerful than grist, but more than enough for cataloguing/bookmarking. And good web clippers exist for it like this one https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/save-to-notion/ldm...


i was using raindrop for a while as well actually, just for bookmarking regular stuff, but doing incremental imports using that is an option i suppose

i just did a bit more research on web clippers and found this one that supports of few different services so it might be trivial enough to add support for grist. not that i have the ability to do that at the moment but it might be a fun challenge at some point!

https://github.com/webclipper/web-clipper


I built my own solution for this that I've discussed and shared on HN before[1].

For me, keeping track of this sort of stuff was important enough that I decided to build something that was catered specifically to my wants and needs.

[1]: Previous discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33978500

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33627603

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33556765


This is an interesting approach, thanks


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.


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.


You put the info in a notes app or you keep searching again.

The better solution would be to make an AI like ChatGPT for home use and throw everything personal at it. Such an AI would be able to fetch whatever you request with abilities to transform that data. It would just not be knowledge base but provider of information to the user that's most relevant to him.

Any other approach does not seem scalable after some time. This AI should obviously be self hosted but since that is not possible atm we will have to bear with our dumb notes, journal apps for now.


Currently I'm dumping everything to Chrome-bookmarks and Notion in broadly categorised pages(like income, physics, fitness, etc).

I move the most interesting ones to my Google-Keep, which I use as my short-term daily checklist.

I'm planning to eventually migrate all of this to Obsidian for a unified lightweight solution and setup live-sync across my devices.


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.


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".


Former raindrop user here, I’d take a look at DevonThink if you want the automagic surfacing of similar things you’ve saved.


Issue with Raindrop is that it doesn’t have keyboard support for basic things like search which is really strange


I use Pocket for almost everything.

It is very difficult for me to get time to read throughout the day, so I skim the Hacker News section of Skimfeed and my multireddits on Reddit and share any links that look interesting to Pocket using the Share feature along the way. I then spend way longer than I want catching up.

I often dream of having a day or three of doing nothing but eating/drinking, walking, working out, coding and reading everything in my feeds without time limitations. Until then, Pocket to the rescue.


I do a lot of browsing on an iPad, and after finding the “freeform” app that showed up recently, I’m wondering if it might be a solid tool for keeping track of relevant links in the same thought thread.

It won’t help with your specific use case, “I didn’t know I was interested in finding X again until Y reminded me of it,” but once you’ve seeded a topic, using spatial memory to get back to particular links could be helpful.

Scrivener is more for writers, but has some good (and more proven) ways to organize references.


I can't tell if it works well yet, since I haven't been doing it for long, but I'm using public bookmarks for things that I want to save and point my instance of YaCy indexer at it. (Follow the links to +2 degree)

From basic testing it seems to work fine, but did not need to find anything critical yet. I'm tempted to add my whole browsing history to it automatically at some point, but not sure how yet. Maybe Firefox sync will help.


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.


For the majority of your time only look at content that fills gaps in your knowledge tree that is beneficial for you. You will retain this information naturally since it will be supported by previous knowledge and reinforced with future content

For fun (like 10% of your time) go on HN and other aggregators. Try to retroactively fit that knowledge into your knowledge tree, otherwise expect that content to be lost


Currently put it all into markdown files here: https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge

Building a tool to make this easier: https://github.com/learn-anything/learn-anything


Pocket is good for saving URLs: https://getpocket.com/


I find the history tab in the browser to be useful.


I don't. Why would I? I can probably find it again. And if I can't, no biggie, there's always something else to deal with. And in the end it's online, offline is always more important.


I don’t. There’s more new content of a high quality every day that I just enjoy the flow of the river.


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.


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.


I copy links in several (desktop, laptop, cellphone) text files, so I can grep them. For fuzzy search there is tre-agrep, or Whoosh for Python.


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?


I want to but don't yet. Maybe a personal knowledge system approach? Currently it all goes into mostly unsorted bookmarks or Safari tab groups.

One day I'll get to it...


Save the shit out of all of it. Only available on Apple Silicon. https://www.rewind.ai/


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.


I was super hyped about this till I saw the price. 50 bucks per month.


Looks like $20/mo


I simply don’t and stopped caring about the deluge.

Give “4000 weeks” a read.


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.


Browser bookmarks

Ctrl-d

Short tag like a b c d, depending on how important it is

I would prefer something more social, but haven't found anything stable


I post the links on my personal blog.


I need a Firefox or Chrome extension that scrapes all text on every page and stores it for me somewhere.


I'm using Pocket to keep track of things I'd like to read/watch later.


https://tinygem.org


I don't do this, but you could use archivebox to save interesting things.


Store it where you find it. As favorites or stars or whatever…


I don’t.


I don't


are.na




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