How do you keep track of all the content you encounter?

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.

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.

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.

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

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).

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 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

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".

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/

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