[HN Gopher] My bad habit of hoarding information ___________________________________________________________________ My bad habit of hoarding information Author : techn00 Score : 471 points Date : 2023-01-06 09:45 UTC (13 hours ago) (HTM) web link (andreisurugiu.com) (TXT) w3m dump (andreisurugiu.com) | williamcotton wrote: | I email links to myself for topics that I am actively working on | or researching (or planning on researching). Most languish unread | in my inbox but every once in awhile I search for that article I | saw a couple of month ago about, eg, building your own C | compiler... | | I wouldn't mind if DDG/Google/et al. showed search results from | my curated list of articles I've archived in this manner! | lo_zamoyski wrote: | FOMO is a sign of the vice of curiosity[0] and pride[1]. The | rosier side of what you're doing is that you seem to have a means | of at least managing the impulse. Still unfocused, still not | perfect, but better than pointless chasing after information. | | Perhaps a way to break the habit is a kind of fasting and | interruption: when you come across the temptation to indulge a | distraction or archive that link, cut yourself off and remind | yourself that all you're doing is dissipating your energies and | working against your own good and understanding. Instead of | nourishing your mind through sustained commitment, you are | choosing to wallow in the shallows of the shoreline. To enter the | depths, you must let go the shore. That's the decision you face | here, and decisions are always a sacrificial act. You give up one | thing for another. | | [0] Curiosity here refers to a kind of "information | gluttony/lust", a kind of wandering eye. It's the same impulse | that afflicts busybodies and gossips in that the desire to know | has been unhinged from reason. You don't need to know most of | that stuff and most of it is of little value to you. | | [1] Pride because there's now way you can know everything, not in | this life. | keybored wrote: | Nice diagnosis. For the cure I would look anywhere but | Catholicism. | themodelplumber wrote: | That's a pretty limited model for teaching purposes. | | You can also model FOMO as a beginner move, unskilled outcome, | etc. | | For a lot of techies this is relevant since they get more | traction from learning new skills than they do from moralizing, | for example. | | One's views on morality may also be (harmfully) hyperbolic due | to a similar lack of nuanced application / experience. | abnry wrote: | This comment pulled me in and I've reread it several times. | Tere is a lot of truth here. I appreciate how information | hoarding can be a sign of status seeking. More knowledge, more | skill, more times being the person who just knows the answer. | Fear (of missing out) is a classic symptom of status seeking. | | The problem is that some degree of information hoarding has | paid off for me. It sometimes really does improve your skill | and impress your peers. Aside from fasting type interventions, | what I think is needed in addition to this is some form of | wisdom relating to knowing what is valuable to hoard, read, or | study. It's like drinking alcohol. If you are getting drunk all | the time it is probably a good idea to stop completely. But | there are real benefits of social drinking. | | This makes me convinced I need more skill in establishing and | recognizing priorities when it comes to information gathering. | bgilroy26 wrote: | A significant resource for the concept of curiositas is the | virtues section of the Summa Theologica | | https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3167.htm | | For those new to the Summa, generally speaking, it is good to | read an article starting with the On the Contrary and the I | Answer That, and then proceed on to the Objections and | Replies | elevation wrote: | Another point to ponder: | | Whether you fill hard drives or book shelves, your collection | will perish with you unless you transfer it to someone | younger _and teach them to value it_ before you pass. | | Several of my aging friends have thousands of books they've | read and shelved up. In a few years their children will think | nothing of depositing them all in the landfill because the | books lack both market value and sentimental value. The books | simply aren't worth the hassle of sorting through. Old hard | drives filled with niche data won't fare any better. | | Unless the ongoing existence of your collection benefits you | or a protege directly, you yourself are already effectively | disposing of it. | giraffe_lady wrote: | Is a paraphrase from a john chrysostom sermon? It sounds so | familiar but from a completely different context and I can't | quite place it. It definitely stuck with me the first time I | heard it too, and grappling with the negative side of curiosity | has been valuable for me. | sockaddr wrote: | > write a hacker news post about information hoarding in the | style of john chrysostom | giraffe_lady wrote: | lmao | Mezzie wrote: | > Curiosity here refers to a kind of "information | gluttony/lust", a kind of wandering eye. It's the same impulse | that afflicts busybodies and gossips in that the desire to know | has been unhinged from reason. You don't need to know most of | that stuff and most of it is of little value to you. | | Ow. I'm in this picture and don't like it. But that is a | wonderful phrase, thank you for introducing it to me. | dmreedy wrote: | I think there's a whole lot of truth in this, but I'd also like | to try to provide a complementary position, for the balance. | | There is a kind of depth can come from focus, but this is a | narrow kind of depth, one that can't question its own premises. | It's directly analogous to the depth of a depth-first search, | and has the same upsides and downsides. It's really handy when | you know your target, and when you think your heuristics for | having chosen that target are pretty good. | | Meanwhile, I think you can look at this kind of broad-spectrum | curiosity as a kind of breadth-first search, again, with the | same strengths and weaknesses. It definitely takes longer, and | it definitely can end up amounting to not much more than | wallowing. But it can also serve very well when you're not sure | what the target is, or if there even is one. | | Furthermore, it can give access to more _possible_ models, more | analogies, more metaphor, more understanding-by-comparison, | which in turn grants a depth of its own kind, especially in | conjunction with true narrow depth of exploration. Since all | models are wrong, and each model explores different facets of | an idea, having more models gives you a broader set of tools | for taking a given concept and applying it to specific areas. | They may not be useful in the given moment, but they may lead | to unpredictable and insightful connections later on. | | But of course, to your point, that all comes at the risk of | never getting far enough along to apply anything in the first | place. But I do believe there is a place for each. Feynman | spinning plates in the cafeteria and all that. | pazurduy wrote: | In the book "non-things" by "Byung-Chul Han" the author talks | about this feeling, the never ending information bombing (a | society problem in his opinion) | | Han suggests that this overload of information has led to a kind | of "information fatigue," where people are unable to process or | make sense of all the data and information that they are exposed | to on a daily basis. This can lead to a feeling of disconnection | and alienation, as people struggle to navigate the constant | influx of information and find meaning in their lives. | | the author suggest this also has personal/society consequences, | tho I don't agree on that 100%, but his argument is that this | information bombing is making us forget about other "important | things on life". first chapter of the book I think will help you | understand your feelings better and maybe understand that this is | a more modern problem, the old philosophers didn't manage to | describe the "phone-sapiens" . | naavis wrote: | I have this same problem with YouTube videos. I have a Watch | Later list of 1800 videos, and it keeps growing. | cainxinth wrote: | Me too. I organize them by length. I have a folder for under 30 | minutes, 30 minutes to an hour, and over an hour. Lots of good | stuff in there that I always plan to get to, but generally I | add new ones faster than I watch old ones. | naavis wrote: | I once went on an organizing spree and categorized the videos | by topic, but never did that again, so the 1800 videos are | now the uncategorized videos that are not in one of those | more specific folders which I never visit either. | | I am rarely in a mood to watch YouTube videos longer than | 5-10 minutes for some reason. Shorter ones I often watch | right away, but all the others get filed away for a rainy | day. | cainxinth wrote: | For me, 90% of them are 'second screen' content that I | leave on while doing something else. | imhoguy wrote: | Good you don't download them, that would grow the data hoarder | HDD rack pretty quickly. | jacknews wrote: | bookmarked | NotPavlovsDog wrote: | I've blocked most news websites, in the last decades the only | "Big World" news that I really needed were communicated to me by | others almost immediately (9/11, oncoming catastrophic storm, | lock-downs). | | When my current endeavor needs tune-in to a particular news | cycle, I've set up simple scraping of top headlines only. These | are usually demarked via keywords, headers or other metadata. | Sure, there are some services and RSS readers that facilitate the | functionality and ease of use. Except I need less user- | friendliness, not more. | | Having to spend a minute more per news source, as opposed to some | copy-pastes or clicks, keeps the need to over-subscribe down. The | interests of the media in representing information do not match | my own. I have not been able to find analyst materials that do | not suffer from politically and emotionally manipulative agendas. | | Not letting noise in from the start is the best policy for me. | ergonaught wrote: | I do something similar, and in my case it is apparently a result | of ADHD/ASD, but that's not why I'm here. I installed the OneTab | browser plugin fairly recently because I tended to keep open "too | many" tabs across multiple devices for various reasons. And I'd | use it, and all my tabs are "closed and bookmarked and filed | away", and then a short while later I've got dozens of tabs open | again. In most cases, I've actually read these and I'm expecting | to continue using the content in some manner. | | So, anyway, counting what's open right now and what I've filed | away, I'm at nearly 700 tabs. Some of them will be reused but the | vast majority of essentially junk food for the brain. | | That doesn't include the untracked but presumably insane number | of things I actually did read but didn't keep open in a tab or | file for later (just as it ignores the several hundred unread | books on my Kindle while not counting the vast number of digital | and physical books I do read). | | I could handwave and spout unfounded theories about dopamine or | "conditions" or anything you like, but ultimately, after decades | of this, in my case it's what happens when my focus is on | consuming rather than producing (ex: when I'm not engaged in | something like a zettelkasten process), while allowing my | insatiable curiosity and love of learning to remain undirected. | | In short, you've got to manage that stuff. Or, at least, I do, | jwmoz wrote: | Delete all the tabs now and watch the world continue. | arcticfox wrote: | In case anyone else is looking into browser options, I can't | recommend https://arc.net/ more highly. I never thought I'd | move away from Chrome, but then again, I never considered that | they'd gather so much users that they can't make fundamental UX | improvements any more without massive friction. | | Arc is just better for me in terms of staying organized. | Everyone seems to have their own favorite feature, but "Spaces" | are the killer feature for me. | bollos wrote: | Arc definitely has some features that I really like. Wish | they would've released it on other platforms too as I'm not | always using my Mac for everything that I do day-to-day. | codethief wrote: | Am I seeing this correctly that arc.net doesn't provide any | information about this supposed super browser _at all_ and | instead just links to a sign-up form where I need to provide | my email address? Yeah, no, not doing that. | grugagag wrote: | I got over tab hoarding by adding a shortcut to onetab to | archive the current tab. Now I freely archive the tabs knowing | it's recoverable, problem solved for me. | stavros_ wrote: | Fellow ADHDr here, also living the many tabs life. | | I highly recommend the Sidebery addon (Firefox). Not just tree | style tabs, but tree style tabs with customizable panels so you | can sort everything out quite tidily. I'm able to manage | hundreds of tabs without mess, and prune through them on a | weekly basis seeing what needs to be bookmarked or can be | safely forgotten. | INeedMoreRam wrote: | [dead] | pessimizer wrote: | I don't know if you use firefox and tree-style tabs (unlikely, | but far more likely here than anywhere else.) If you do, | there's an extension for tree-style tabs (an extension for the | extension) called "Fade Old Tabs." It allows you to color tabs | based on how long it's been since they were accessed. You do | this by setting a age range for tabs to be painted gray. Tabs | not accessed since the beginning of that range are panted | _dark_ gray, and tabs accessed after the range are not colored | at all. | | So if you have 700 tabs and 600 of them you haven't opened in a | month, you'll _see_ them and it might make a difference in your | habits. It also makes it easier to surf your open tabs when you | 're bored, rather than surfing randomly and adding new tabs. | krackpot wrote: | Thank you for sharing "Fade Old Tabs". I have the same | problem with OP and have 1200+ tabs open across 4 firefox | windows. That is after a big purge I did earlier this year | where it was 2000+. Tree Style Tabs crashed a lot before but | it has been quite good in recent memory. | | I have a hard time closing out what is essentially my thought | process to finding a solution or doing research. Along the | way I close out dead branches. What remains is either a | solution or where I have left off. I think my mental barrier | is what it represents: my time capital sunk. The issue is | working around this many tabs and managing it; a time sink in | itself to fix. | | Started documenting completed solutions in Obsidian and I've | found that if I can't get over my lazy barrier to even enter | it in, it's probably not important. Just have to keep working | on improving and refining the way I think and approach this. | deafpolygon wrote: | > have 1200+ tabs open across 4 firefox windows | | does research get you to have so many open? How do you | manage it all? I've only just started using Sidebery but I | try to keep my tabs at a reasonable 100-200 open. | Arrath wrote: | If OP is anything like me, they 'manage' the old tabs by | thinking "Oh that's neat I'll leave it open so I can come | back to it' and...never do that. | goarchive wrote: | I fall into this trap as well. My solution to mitigate my | tab hoarding has been to set up a blank GitHub repo and | use the discussions/issues to just continually post | links, descriptions, and notes in a thread format. | | Then I can just keep commenting to myself. It seems to | help break up topic binges that I go on. Plus I like with | GitHub it's all markdown-based so I can throw images, | files and whatever else I need in a session in there to | keep it all encompassing. | Pavlova8 wrote: | So you'd use git in a similar way you'd use obsidian, | just with the ability to sync online and share | easily/collaborate. | pessimizer wrote: | Ever thought of productizing that idea? Sort of a | personal threaded wiki that you can send bookmarks to? | 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: | My solution is to shutdown my PCs every day. | weaksauce wrote: | I wrote a little webext to help me find tabs in a visual | way grouped by window. middle click closes the tab and | left click brings the tab you click on to the forefront. | It's simple but something I use many times every day. | | feel free to try it out: | | https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/ | | https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjgg | iog... | | https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist | namaria wrote: | People have hundreds of tabs open at the same time?? I get | anxiety if it goes above 12 or 15... The times when I just | close them all and start opening firefox with no previous | tabs are so relieving to me. | numbasys wrote: | This is a valuable reply because it describes my own experience | so well. Thank you. | SpencerOMG wrote: | lol a OneTab newbie, eh? | | I've used OneTab (and then switched to BetterOneTab). Been | using it for about 5 years or so. I have dozens of exported | "backup" files, because after a certain amount of saved tabs, | the extension stops working. You can't save any new ones. I've | lost maybe 100 tabs so far by adding them to OneTab only to | discover I was at my limit and nothing got saved. It then stops | allowing deletions (they come back after refreshing the | extension page). So I have to export my hundreds or even | thousands of tabs, uninstall the extension, and then reinstall | it. And then I keep hoarding. | | I have a real bad case of digital tsundoku. Even as I type | this, I have roughly 80 links from HN opened, two dozen or so | Twitter tabs, probably 30 YouTube tabs, and then a healthy heap | of other miscellaneous sites. I know I will never get through | this infinite backlog. Even if I were to squirrel myself away | and do nothing but open each tab, digest its contents, and move | on to the next, it would probably take me years. And I would be | so burnt out I wouldn't be digesting well enough. Plus, most of | that information is probably, at least slightly, outdated. | | ...Oh well, time to open up another dozen 3-hour long YouTube | "mini" docs about niche subjects I have no engagement in. | lannisterstark wrote: | I have over 24000 frickign tabs on OneTab saved lol | | https://tabula.civitat.es/images/2023/01/06/8krQ.png | | I may have a problem. | johnchristopher wrote: | Re... restore all ! | jovi909 wrote: | Isn't that 24000 bookmarks and not "tabs" - a tab (to me) | means an open tab in the browser. | user_7832 wrote: | Please export the tabs, before one tab crashes on you. I'm | amazed you made it till 24k without it crashing, low-k tabs | are enough on my laptop to crash it. (Though my laptop is | from 2015 so that might also factor in.) | yawboakye wrote: | i'd be interested in how many are dead links now. i'm nowhere | near (hovering around 500 at the moment) and when i | frequently do a healthcheck i see that most are already dead. | are you archiving (using archive's wayback machine or | something?) to ensure they're alive when you need them? for | some definition of need lol | vidarh wrote: | OneTab for me is a solution to my problem: | | What ends up there is what I know isn't important enough to | bookmark, but I kinda feel like I should read. Having OneTab | makes me feel like it's ok to close the tabs, knowing full | well I'll never, ever look for most of them again... | | It's an comfort blanket. | | I know I'm fooling myself, and I'm perfectly happy with that. | phkahler wrote: | Those of you trying to curate large amounts of link should get | together and create a public index of all that content. You | could call the site yoohoo or something ;-) | brainzap wrote: | didn't there exist a browser toolbar called stumble upon that | allowed people to share interesting links | ryandrake wrote: | We've re-invented dmoz[1]. Now someone just has to slap AI | and blockchain on the idea, and they could raise for a | "modern" dmoz. | | 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ | sanderjd wrote: | I unironically think social bookmarking is a missing product. | Not because it doesn't exist, but because nothing has gained | enough mindshare and momentum to be dominant and widely used. | manuelmoreale wrote: | I know it's not exactly what you're describing but a | somewhat comparable option is https://www.are.na | coliveira wrote: | The problem is not to be dominant, it is that there was no | money to be made in this type of website. These sites come | and go, it is very difficult to monetize them. | nextaccountic wrote: | so they need a different model for funding | sodimel wrote: | I think it's great that there's no giant making money on | top of this concept. It lets people do whatever they want | to store and share links :) | sanderjd wrote: | Yes but it means there is no one thing that all the | people I want to follow all use. Everyone ends up in | their own sandbox. Network effects are really useful and | positive sum, I think. | | And there are very few things like Wikipedia that both | have the benefit of being dominant and not monetized. Are | there any other examples at all? | 0x445442 wrote: | I'm very close to having an old Delicious style site | ready. Do you think people would pay $1 a month? | sanderjd wrote: | Not at first, at least, in my opinion, if crowdsourcing | is what makes it useful. If the network effects are what | makes a product useful, a subscription fee pushes against | the growth of that network. | 0x445442 wrote: | Yeah, what I'm foreseeing is public and private links, | tagging and the ability to search for links by page | description, tags and user. The subscription fee would | mainly be for hosting costs and an eventual commensurate | salary. Even if the site were to gain traction I wouldn't | be interested in selling ads based on user base size. | | I'm willing to incur some hosting costs for a beta period | but I won't fund the service for long without revenue if | the hosting costs are prohibitive as I'm not really | interested in selling it later for someone else to | monetize with ads. | johnchristopher wrote: | Depends what you get beside storing links I suppose | (cached version of content, super smart search function | not limited to og: and metadata tags, super privacy, | bridges to-do app maybe ?, android app + ff ext. + chr. | ext. + apple thingies for ubiquitous access to links, | etc.). I could see myself dropping ~10bucks a year like | for bitwarden. | jodrellblank wrote: | They pay pinboard enough for idlewords (HN user) to live | off it, and buy Delicious when they went broke. | | Delicious once sold to yahoo! For 15 million, bought for | 35k. | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14463102 | | Delicious spending twice as much as pinboard in running | costs in 2017. | | There are some detailed blog posts from the time about | running costs somewhere. | fitzroy wrote: | How is it different from https://pinboard.in (besides $1/ | mo)? | 0x445442 wrote: | Beyond some differing features and interface, there | wouldn't be much difference. | sanderjd wrote: | Agreed entirely. I guess I saw the two things as linked - | if you get enough network effects, there must be some way | to make money - but perhaps Twitter has shown us that | this is not the case. | incanus77 wrote: | Del.icio.us was a big deal ~15 years ago. I made a Mac | client for it (Pukka) that sold pretty well and the service | was much talked-about in tech circles, not just for | researchers. This was in the early era of social networking | as a whole ("Web 2.0") as well as this idea of "wisdom of | crowds" for emergent context to bubble up from public | tagging. | aprdm wrote: | Isn't that Reddit ? | Moissanite wrote: | StumbleUpon used to be a kind of answer to this. I'd love | to have it back, particularly if the contents could be | curated (eg "show me a random link which has been featured | on the front page of HN or lobste.rs in the last month") | sanderjd wrote: | Yes, I loved that era of the web! | worldsayshi wrote: | If somebody can figure out a note/link app that becomes | as easy to manage when you're adding your first note as | when you're adding your thousandth note then such | services will stop dying out. | krazydad wrote: | delicio.us was pretty great in it's day | sanderjd wrote: | Yes! One of the other comments got to the crux of this: | nobody ever figured out a sustainable business model for | this. I think it's a shame. | ghaff wrote: | Folksonomies was one of the terms used back in the day when | delicio.us was one of the current hotnesses. I still use | pinboard and it's handy. But, like RSS, this sort of thing | mostly appeals to researchers/analysts/journalists/etc. The | average person mostly doesn't care about saving and even | loosely organizing a lot of information. | kcb wrote: | Pinterest? | strangattractor wrote: | Hoarding data does not have to be a negative thing | necessarily. Might I suggest checking out | https://archive.org/about/. Create an account and install the | browser extension. | | https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wayback- | machine/fp... | | WARNING: archiving can be habit forming. | sogen wrote: | Or Google! | donkeyd wrote: | Friend of mine is always surprised when we discuss something | and 20 seconds later I send him an article I once read about | it. He has asked multiple times what I use to store all these | links. It's Google. I just use Google to find the article | again based on what I remember from it. | | This doesn't always work though and can lead to a frustrating | half hour of searching that ends in disappointment. | frereubu wrote: | Even more frustrating when you can't quite remember the | content of the article you can't find, although you're sure | you found it fascinating when you read it at the time... | [deleted] | Jeff_Brown wrote: | If I had a dollar for every topic I've read about and | found fascinating and can hardly describe with any more | detail than that ... | mnsh wrote: | I hate it when that happens, more often that not i | remember the visuals of the site, then i try to find it | in my browser history like a sucker. | | I have yet to find a solution for this. | | One solution is I screenshot all the sites i visit, | extract their colors, and create a searchable index. Nice | side project idea I guess. | klibertp wrote: | > This doesn't always work | | The problem is with when it doesn't work: when it's the | least convenient and the most irritating. For popular | content it doesn't matter if you forget a precise word used | there, you'll get to it soon enough. But for specific, | niche content - which is the most valuable to me most of | the time - even if you get all the keywords right you might | not find what you're looking for on Google. The reasons | range from the keywords being too generic to the site being | no longer online and it's really frustrating when it | happens. | | OneTab and bookmarks are not an answer because they don't | save the content. I tried Joplin + Web Clipper which does, | but it works on a single-tab basis, and when I have 200 | tabs open sending them all to Joplin manually takes ages... | and then Joplin slows down to a crawl when you're done. | therealdrag0 wrote: | I have experienced that for sure. | | Reminds me though I have also experienced "I swear there is | a word that sounds like "bla" that means xyz" and spend 30+ | min trying to find it in dictionaries and it just doesn't | exist. Funny how the mind works. | kmote00 wrote: | I've used this website for years, for just that purpose. | Can't believe it's still up, actually. | | https://chir.ag/projects/tip-of-my-tongue/ | Ghoyome wrote: | Windows > Tabs every single time. What helped me most was a | good window manager: | | * A single floating window acting as an opener* | | * windows are always arranged in the case of tiling wms. | | * In the case of Firefox user.css can help u remove the tab bar | entirely. And opening in windows rather than tabs can be | configured. | | * I built my own window fuzzy searcher for finding windows. | | The effect is compulsory need to close windows asap but keep a | couple of windows forever that are actually for doing work. In | my case : | | * newsboat > firefox. * Cmus > firefox. * Aerc > firefox. * | Irssi > firefox. | | The list goes on and on. | | The benefit is this: every job has it's own window. | | Note that still it is 100% the case that when not in | "production/building" mode the default is consuming. This setup | merely helps heighten awareness to the fact. | | Hope it helps! | | * lf, ranger, nnn are all good choices. | Havelock wrote: | I do the same, but right now I just keep tabmanager.io on my | right screen to show a grid of all my windows. Some which I | save for later, e.g. switching between projects. | conceptualspace wrote: | to help manage this i created a "speed dial" extension and use | it basically as a visual bookmark manager. the advantage to | tabs in a list is that they are easy to reference visually, and | like any bookmark can be sorted and arranged into folders. for | example i have one for technical references, various research | topics, etc that i plan to come back to. and its easy to pop | one off the list to maintain them. check it out if youre | curious, its open source! | | https://github.com/conceptualspace/yet-another-speed-dial | soulofmischief wrote: | 700 open tabs... Try 7000.... I have tabs all the way back from | 2014 open right now on one of my firefox instances (probably | have ~15 Firefox windows open across devices rn) which I have | migrated between multiple machines along with my user profile, | and I'm telling you I'm gonna get to them any day now. | switchbak wrote: | I think the zero inbox folks would have a heart attack. | Impressive you can maintain the tab state that long! | | I usually have max 100 open, but I reboot all the time (for | power mgmt reasons) and use OneTab so that seems to solve my | hoarding tendencies. That and keeping searchable local notes | / using history / bookmarking the really good ones that I'll | also never read. | pbhjpbhj wrote: | I keep zero inbox at work as much as I can and have a | couple of hundred tabs open on various desktops (91 tabs on | this mobile alone; far more on desktop). | | To me they're just different organisational methods that | work well in different contexts. | alx__ wrote: | > and I'm telling you I'm gonna get to them any day now | | I feel this deeply | | The compromise I found was just to dump them into my | bookmarking service. If I really _really_ need to find that | thing again, it 's saved somewhere. 99% of the time it's just | digital ephemera and I try to let it go and close the tab. | comboy wrote: | Very impressive. | | I think it could be solved better browsers history. One idea | - star pages - not adding to favorites, just marking them so | that you could browse history of those separately. It could | also show list of the latest stars in the new tab window for | example. | | Currently bookmarks, in firefox at least, as far as I can | tell, cannot be even browsed by date. | Luc wrote: | I have 272x tabs open, 170x in my main window. I have been | using Tab Session Manager to save and then close windows. Try | it, you can always restore the window later. | | (the x in the numbers is because the display overflows haha) | aborsy wrote: | How much ram does that take? I find Firefox problematic | after around 10 tabs. | kevin_thibedeau wrote: | Firefox doesn't load inactive tabs after a restart. | They're just low overhead database entries. | Luc wrote: | Don't know, not enough to cause trouble on my 16GB Mac | Mini m1, with 10 other apps open as well. | jrm4 wrote: | FWIW. You'll likely never _stop_ doing this, so the best thing is | to think about modifying your process and goals. Things I 've | discovered about this that work for me. | | - Broadly, try to enjoy deleting things; take some pride and | pleasure in the fact that you're "cleaning," and have faith that | if it's important, it'll stick around or come back. | | - Folders/Hierarchies mostly suck. Tags are also overrated. Lists | and links are mostly the way to go. The hyperlink is probably the | most underrated advancement in our lifetime. | | - If you _must_ do folders, go by form, NOT topic or area, you | 'll get bogged down in "which bucket does this go in." | | - Consider the end goal, which is something easy and elegant and | enjoyable to peruse again. One way to look at it might be, if I | got bonked on the head, or if a stranger looked at this, would | they find it useful? | jbms wrote: | Writing things down to remember them, you feel like you've dealt | with it. Which can be a great help since you can empty your brain | of distractions that pop up and do so in a way you feel you've | not just forgotten something. And reread later you'll realise how | little was really important outside the moment it came up. | | But if you place an artificial burden on yourself to follow up on | everything that might be interesting, then that's probably | overwhelming and shows a lack of prioritisation. That might be | due to a lack of a system to prioritise, or it might be a lack of | goals. Asking why you do it might feel you work backwards towards | the goal - is it an ambiguous sense of professional development, | or is it simply an enjoyment of pursuing novelty that means you | keep turning up things that you feel you should come back to, but | because novelty is the goal you never do. These might miss the | mark with you, but they explain for me a lot about why I do the | same things. | conceptualspace wrote: | to offer an opposing view: libraries are cool. i frequently | reference and revisit links i have saved, and on a rainy day a | quick browse of them often inspires a new project or advances | some existing work. i don't know what i would gain by blowing | that all away. naturally links that are infrequently used settle | to the bottom of the list and die anyway. | | i do manage my bookmarks visually, which i have found | tremendously helpful since i first saw this functionality in | opera years ago. its sort of like having album art. | | so here is a shameless plug for my open source and cross browser | implementation, yet another speed dial: | | https://github.com/conceptualspace/yet-another-speed-dial | dynamic_sausage wrote: | Another approach that does not show up in comments here is to use | a reference manager, such as _Zotero_. It integrates nicely with | browsers, so that saving webpages or pdfs is only one click away. | Data is stored locally, so if a resource goes offline, you will | still have access to it. And it has full-text indexing and | search, so you can lookup terms from pages that you previously | stored, even if you don 't remember the metadata. | tenebrisalietum wrote: | If I like something online, or potentially might like it, I will | tend towards saving it if possible, because it might disappear. | It's that simple for me. | Simran-B wrote: | I don't know about you, but my mobile browser hasn't display the | number of open tabs in years because it displays :D (a smiley) if | you exceed 99 tabs. | | Half of these tabs are work-related, often to-do items, and the | other half is things I have yet to read or that I don't want to | forget about but was too lazy to create a bookmark. (FWIW, there | is no way to store all tabs as bookmarks, unlike in the desktop | version of the browser.) | | One time, after a crash or accidentally closing all tabs and then | restoring them, a toast message showed the tab count and it was | around 750 back then. That was 2-3 years ago and I have left more | tabs open since then than closed. I'm definitely a hoarder. | lostlogin wrote: | This makes me anxious. Aren't you afraid of data loss? | | It sounds like you don't have many problems. I put this in the | same mental category as a pc without a clipboard history | manager. | Simran-B wrote: | I sometimes check and close dozens of the old tabs because it | turns out that my interests have shifted or that they lost | their relevance otherwise. So it wouldn't be much of a loss. | Most of the information I could still find again, given that | I remember the right keywords. | | I grew up with an OS clipboard that can hold exactly one item | and can perfectly live without a clipboard manager. I guess | it's mostly habits? | coffeeblack wrote: | Wouldn't call it hoarding though. It's more like leaving | mountains of documents and papers on your desk. | Simran-B wrote: | I do have such mountains, too, plus a random collection of | items that keep growing on my desk. Maybe I'm an | "unorganizer"? | reil_convnet wrote: | Same with me. I even go ahead and save articles as PDF and come | back to about 1% of these PDFs when I read later. The other 99% | are never touched. | | Pretty sure this is related to ADHD. Its as if collecting | information creates the big picture view the mind finds it hard | to develop reading just one source. | | I actually plan to take a week off and do nothing but quick read | PDFs related to each relevant topic every year. That's my | resolution for 2023. | khaledh wrote: | We're in the age of what I call "information obesity". We have | devices in our hands that gives us access to all sorts of | information, and we have little will power to moderate ourselves. | It's like taking the fridge with you everywhere and opening it | every few moments to eat whatever is inside, except this fridge | is small enough to put in your pocket, and there's a constant | supply of food in it. The natural result is information obesity. | | I don't have a solution for this problem. When it's that easy to | consume, will power alone is not sufficient. And unlike physical | obesity, information obesity is not visible; it's in the brain. | So it's hard to detect, let alone fix. | dbodin11 wrote: | I'm the same! I had long work commutes on public transit, so I | used my passive time to read and learn everyday to try and grow | 1% each day. | | I used GMail drafts body to save links and the subject as | searchable tags. I saved thousands of entries this way before I | noticed two things: 1.) I'm actually interested in only a few | parts of each link and want an easy way to return to them in the | future, and 2.) I wish I could see the parts of links other | dedicated readers found useful which would both help discover | quality resources and save time with highlights acting as a | preview or summary. So I actually built a social annotation web | overlay that saves to a web app that's both an aggregator and | social network: https://www.kontxt.io/. | | I publicly share most of what I read and highlight on my profile | https://www.kontxt.io/profiles/d. | | Hacker News is one of my seed sites I visit multiple times a day, | so I created a group for myself and other HN readers to see | people's highlights of links on HN: | https://www.kontxt.io/groups/23423/documents. Feel free to join | and share your highlights, or just quickly view all the best | parts of the links on HN highlighted by others. | | It would bring me no greater joy than to see the hundreds of | thousands of lines of code I've developed over six years be used | to unite avid readers on HN and fellow information addicts to | learn and grow together as a community. Stay curious--and keep | reading! | seydor wrote: | I dont call it FOMO or ADHD. Have you tried sitting in a quiet | room? It's very unsettling, the need for information is | universal, and probably 'settling'. That s why (social) media are | so addictive. | | I believe most people are not hoarding information however, but | they are looking into the information for the next thing to do. | | AI will change that, it will tell us directly what to do. I can't | wait | pperusse wrote: | I hoard the information I have actually read (sometimes even | stuff I did not read thoroughly) into my own, personal, | searchable version of the internet, so that I can easily refer | back to it, retrieve an old article and share it. | | To do that I use a paying account of pinboard.in | anotheraccount9 wrote: | I hoard data. I've been using the Johnny Decimal system with the | Dewey Decimal classes for the most part (100'000+ books and | documents selectively saved on all subjects). I also have a more | dynamic sections with articles, medias, and projects. These don't | include libgen or similar collections. I use Recoll to index and | search (https://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/pages/index- | recoll.htm...). | | A few things I've noticed over the years: 1. I obviously don't | read all of that stuff, but it's very satisfying to find useful | information from an obscure book when looking for something. | | 2. I cannot find anymore online some of the documents and videos | I've saved. So I think that's a win to have them locally, as long | as what I'm keeping is potentially useful. | | 3. To find info, nothing works perfectly. That's why I'm making | an effort to use descriptive and structured folders, good | filenames (often followed by the original filename), and | sometimes an additional text file as meta for context. Still, my | bookmarks are a mess. | s-video wrote: | I think you if you have a particular goal with using the computer | it gets easier to avoid hoarding. I'm trying to get better at | writing code that's easy to read and change, which is admittedly | too vague but it can still help me be real with myself and close | tabs that don't have anything to do with it. | | For example, here's two tabs I opened recently: | | A Neat XOR Trick: https://www.mattkeeter.com/blog/2022-12-10-xor/ | | Code Only Says What it Does: | https://brooker.co.za/blog/2020/06/23/code | | So that first one is about solving an advent of code problem | cleverly. That second one makes some nice points about how code | doesn't necessarily capture your intent or the reasons you wrote | what you did. So if I had both of those open in my browser or in | some queue for unread links, and I wanted to cut down, I'd delete | the first one. | | I also find it helpful to ask if a link has any information that | isn't already covered by some other resource in more depth. So if | my goal was to learn more about compilers I might be tempted to | save the blog post OP links to about writing a brainfuck compiler | in Go with LLVM but there's already resources like Crafting | Interpreters out there, so I'd probably only give that blog post | a skim and not bother saving the link. (But if it was my goal to | specifically write a brainfuck compiler, or write a compiler in | Go, or write a compiler that uses LLVM, or some combination, I'd | be more likely to save that particular post.) | masklinn wrote: | > So that first one is about solving an advent of code problem | cleverly. | | Ah but it's not just about that, it's also about figuring out | what problems can be fit into bit twiddling, knowledge about | bitwise operation (especially that xor is self-reversing so it | handles set/unset as well as pairs), and the ability to reduce | effective complexity. | | I agree it's not useful if you're currently on a quest | | > to get better at writing code that's easy to read and change | | but thinking of it as "solving an advent of code problem | cleverly" misses most of the information. | JustSomeNobody wrote: | I do similar to this when I am learning something new. Case in | point, I'm learning Go. Instead of writing ugly code and learning | from that, I read and read and read trying to absorb how to write | "idiomatic" Go. | | Eventually, I stop. So, with Go, I'll eventually stop, write bad, | non-idiomatic code while I'm learning, then I'll eventually write | better code. | | Not sure why I do this, nobody is going to see the crappy learner | projects. I don't put that on github or anything. | aaronbieber wrote: | There is a ton of _practical_ stuff written in this general area | if you search for "mind mapping" or "zettelkasten" (links | below). | | The biggest thing I've taken away from all of my reading and | experimentation in this (and being a bit of an information | hoarder myself) is that the link itself, or the article itself, | is not information, it's "data." | | There is value to the data, and if you want to record it that's | fine. I use tags (hashtags in Logseq) to classify data so at | least it's in some type of taxonomy, but Logseq full-text search | is also pretty good so as long as you have words around the URLs | that you'd be likely to search for you're good. | | _Information_ is what you derive from the data. It 's your | summary, or paraphrasing of the core point(s), or connections you | make between a thing and some other thing you previously | recorded. | | Tools like Logseq and Obsidian exist to allow you to easily | create those connections, and that's very much based on the | zettelkasten method, though amplified by what the technology now | allows, which is more complex and nuanced. | | Don't hoard URLs and headlines. Hoard your thoughts about them, | what you think is important about them, what you saw that related | to another thing you saw. _That_ is information. | | https://zettelkasten.de/introduction/ | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten | | https://logseq.com/ | | https://obsidian.md/ | safety1st wrote: | Came to say this as a light user of Obsidian. I don't think | "hoarding" information is a bad habit. These are potentially | bad habits: | | A) Allowing yourself to be distracted by useless information | | B) Under-organizing (or over-organizing) the information you | collect | | The OP may over-collect pieces of information that aren't | important (URLs of random things that are novel) and may not | spend enough time adding context to what he collects (e.g. via | notes in a tool like Obsidian). | | I find the ideas behind zettelkasten very useful. Our brains | are not able to remember everything of value, therefore it is | worthwhile to invest a little energy in an external or "second | brain" where information is stored with some degree of | organization for future retrieval. | | I have a cache of notes on all manner of subjects going back | about a decade. I only recently discovered Obsidian and have | been gradually linking those notes together, adding context | etc. This has had a real impact on my understanding of certain | topics because I've re-discovered insights and knowledge of | many things I had simply forgotten. | kixxauth wrote: | > There is a ton of practical stuff written in this general | area if you search for "mind mapping" or "zettelkasten" (links | below). | | I think sometimes we can overweight the impact of tools and | systems for retaining knowledge. These tools can be useful (I'm | working on my own home grown versions of them) and I am getting | better with the systems as I get more practice. But, still, | this is a race you can never win. As you digest more | information, you consume more. | | Eventually you've got to get out there and be a maker. | PebblesRox wrote: | I like this distinction between raw data and processed | understanding; thanks for sharing your insight! | iLoveOncall wrote: | You didn't read the article did you? | | He's just saying that he has too many links to go through and | your answer is "what if you wrote a massive note about each of | those links?"... | pprotas wrote: | That's different from how I understood his comment! | | There is no point in hoarding links; this is just | "information." Information by itself is not useful; we need | "data" instead. | | To turn this information into data, you could use something | like Zettelkasten. Instead of hoarding links to articles, | hoard notes about these articles and link them together. | | Basically, stop hoarding links due to your FOMO. Actually | read articles that interest you and learn from them by | writing your thoughts. | captaincaveman wrote: | normally you go : data -> information -> knowledge. | | Although the definitions are some what murky, this is the | generally accepted model. | | I think what you are talking about is personal knowledge | management. | pprotas wrote: | You are right, I mixed the terms "data" and "information" | up | iLoveOncall wrote: | > I like seeing what people are working on, but there's too | much information and I have a small problem with that.. | While it's manageable to read through a smaller batch of | 30-40 links, it's time-consuming and overwhelming when the | number grows to 80+ in a single week. | | The author writes his problem very clearly: he doesn't have | time to go through the links. | | Suggesting that he not only goes through the links but also | writes a Zettelkasten note about it is simply ridiculous. | | I'm not saying that the original comment is wrong, just | that it's completely off topic and presents something as a | solution when it's actually just a bigger problem. | pprotas wrote: | The autor mentions that they are spending a huge amount | of time on hoarding links. This is a waste of time. They | should stop doing this, instead spend that time on | reading a few articles and writing notes. | wahnfrieden wrote: | Why should they start spending time on writing notes on | links, even if it requires looking at less links to make | the time for it? It's really not obvious that writing | notes habitually is good advice or a healthier use of | time | guntherhermann wrote: | Yo, be kinder. Don't accuse people of x, y or z. It's | unnecessary. Chill out, and if you're in a bad mood, don't | post inflammatory comments on the internet. Peace. | kixxauth wrote: | I've been collecting nerdy tech information on and off for 30 | years. I say "on and off" because it seems to come in waves. It | happens between spans of time when I'm building something | important or profitable (not necessarily related). | | Examples: | | In 2004 I built my own web crawler and RSS feed reader in PHP in | an attempt to build my way out of the information problem. I | learned that tools do not help with this problem, but it did lead | to a good software development job where I was able to put what I | learned to use. | | In 2006 - 2007 I went down a deep rabbit hole with the | possibility of server side JavaScript. That led to participating | in the development of the Node.js runtime, CommonJS and Promise | specifications, and a career doing some pretty cool stuff with | JavaScript. | | In 2014 - 2016 I went down a rabbit hole on video streaming which | led me through a startup (which failed) and then a job at a major | consumer streaming platform (which has been wildly successful). I | got to build some state of the art technology because I had | remembered and acted on some of that information I was hoarding. | | Now I feel like I've missed out on information hoarding while | I've been building cool stuff in my dream job. I don't regret my | time away from the information hurricane, but I am having fun | getting back into it to see what comes up next (it is NOT AI or | Web3 ;-) ) | | For everything, there is a season. | ZhangSWEFAANG wrote: | Instead of "major consumer streaming platform", you can just | say Disney. You're not that important or successful. There's no | need to humblebrag. | nop_slide wrote: | Instead of naming yourself ZhangSWEFAANG why aren't you just | Zhangdev? Being at FAANG doesn't make you more important or | successful. | paganel wrote: | > In 2004 I built my own web crawler and RSS feed reader in PHP | in an attempt to build my way out of the information problem. | | I've built and actively maintained a Django- and Solr-based | personal project to store all my info about the DVDs that I was | hording around 2007-2010, it also involved crawling IMDB. Did | the same with the anime shows I was also hording, in this | instance I was crawling animenewsnetwork.com. | | After a very long hiatus I feel that I should do the same with | the physical books hording that has gotten over me since the | pandemic started (this time using Elasticsearch instead of | Solr), after all categorising books is from where facet-search | libraries like Solr first got their hints. | kixxauth wrote: | Looking through the comments on this post, it's no surprise | that many HN readers are doing the same. A self selected | audience, I guess ;-) | | Still, it has been fun, and rewarding. I don't feel like | building these things is a waste of time, seriously. | ctvo wrote: | Being curious isn't a bad thing. The more important question is | why do you think it's a negative? Who cares if you skimmed it, | nodded along, and moved on? It's OK to never revisit them. | Getting exposure to what's possible and what others are doing is | in itself helpful. No need for any other value extraction. | yanyanhack wrote: | A software can be made, and a group of people can share the | screening results. | jiggawatts wrote: | I do the same kind of thing, and apparently, many others here do | too! | | Frankly, I'm not surprised. This is not an _illness_ , it's a | common trait of polymaths and intelligent people to be curious | about _everything_ , even things that appear to be irrelevant to | their daily life. | | There's a great story about how Bill Gates asked his secretary to | buy random magazines and journals, and he'd flip through one | every day. Print-era Reddit, as it were. He read one about | _sowing machines_ and realised the software for the newfangled | computer-controlled ones was terrible, and for many years | basically all sowing machines ended up with Windows as their OS! | | Another similar story is how Apple devices have nice typography | because Steve Jobs randomly took a calligraphy class. | | I shock people at work semi regularly by pulling random little | things out of the back of my brain where I filed them away "just | in case". Sometimes, the "in case" turns up! | | Something I've noticed about IT these days is that it's becoming | less about having some sort of raw talent, and more about simply | knowing what tools, SDKs, and APIs are out there, written by | other people with talent. In the past, you had to be wizard, now | you just have to _know about_ wizards. | jonwinstanley wrote: | So basically knowing that those "awesome" lists on github exist | tomjakubowski wrote: | yes, and a good filter to detect the stuff that's not any | good. something which experience is good for | roxymusic1973 wrote: | > for many years basically all sowing machines ended up with | Windows as their OS | | Presumably this also helped Microsoft pivot into reaping | machines. | pnutjam wrote: | of course, you reap what you sew. | boilerupnc wrote: | ^^^THIS. I've always felt that my greatest superpower was the | gift to search/find information fast. This allows me to both | discover a wide range of info and also go hunting for targetted | info when the situation dictates a more narrow scope. Pre-fetch | provides the quickest time-to-value. With a near infinite cache | to fill, it only makes sense to continually feed a steady diet | of information to satisfy relentless curiosity. Bookmarking, | re-reading/re-visiting past info, writing and sharing info | tidbits of random info, etc ... all help to lock-in what I'm | aware of and also provide confidence to go hunting and | rediscover a known nugget when a particular | situation/conversation could benefit. | | TL;DR: Awareness comes in two forms: quick immediate recall and | fuzzy vague confidence of related material. To expand breadth | and depth of both forms, it's beneficial to hunt information | efficiently. | shenbomo wrote: | https://zettelkasten.de/posts/collectors-fallacy/ | hdaz0017 wrote: | I had not looked at total URLs before but these the figures - | started around July 2006 on this process but there were others | before this. | | Indexed Articles - 24,613 | | Line Count - 9,594,745 | | Total URLs - 260,306 | | lol your not alone :) | karol wrote: | Set time aside when you are allowed to do it. In other times | block the offending sites completely. | | Ask yourself a question - is what I am doing right not | benefitting me in a way a walk/exercise/spending time with | family/doing practical coding/starting a business/insert your | favourite would? If now, stop and move on. | | Why it's not easy? Because it's a habit which has its own trigger | (sitting at a computer). Unfortunately as a developer you cannot | get rid of the trigger. From own perspective - rearranging the | work space or changing helps for a while and then slowly you fall | back to old habits, so I wouldn't say it's a permanent solution. | jasmeet217 wrote: | Bookmarking this thread to read later! | 99failures wrote: | I used to collect links and abstracts of things that were of | interest to me on a customized WordPress install, visible to the | public. | | And I did such a good job that my "site" was very rich. The | problem was not storage, so to speak, the problem was, and still | is, recollection. | | I had no need or I didn't remember >95% of the things I stored, | and for that 5% that I needed or remember, I could just as easily | find them using google. | | So I abandoned the practice and now google is my new bookmark | site. | diego898 wrote: | In-line with this discussion, over 80% of my open tabs are HN | links. | | I'd like to be able to easily: 1. Archive the link the HN post is | pointing to 2. Archive the HN comments | | Does anyone know of an easy automated way to archive both the HN | post (comments) and target link (arbitrary link)? | | I have a dream of then running textual analysis on this to make | it all easily searchable by topic like "machine learning" | goplayoutside wrote: | raindrop.io has some features that may help with that. | didgetmaster wrote: | My desk (and monitor) are covered with post-it notes and notepads | where I jot down things I mean to go back to (sometimes I do, | sometimes I don't). I also have tabs and files where I cut and | paste links into for future reference. | | If only there were more hours in each day... | Moissanite wrote: | This resonates. I've managed to control this behaviour a bit (or | at least lessen the impact on my life) by just reconciling that | there are link dumps for each specific purpose: | | - Link to an interesting software project? Star it on GitHub then | delete the link. If I am so inclined in the future, I can just | trawl through my starred repos. | | - Low-value article which is too long to read right now? Add to | Pocket, then periodically read-and-purge. The hard part is giving | myself permission to delete articles which seem "timeless", but I | don't stress over it - it's not like Pocket is going anywhere | (and if it does, problem solved!) | | - Genuinely useful information? Add to Obsidian - either with | links to other key information I already have in there, or as the | root of a new bundle of nodes. | | The main blocker to keeping on top of these organization schemes | is the fact that I often discover the links while on my phone. | The only solution I've found is a weekly purge of Firefox tabs | onto a laptop, where the links can be sorted properly. | orobinson wrote: | Goodreads and its "Want to read" shelf is good for this | approach with books. I just add any book I see someone | recommending to that list then when I need a new book to read I | can pick from there. The ratings on there are handy for sanity | checking if a book is worth your time. I've found anything with | a score of 4.0 or above is usually worth a read. | ciupicri wrote: | Why star a project on GitHub when you can just bookmark it | including with some tags? What if the project is hosted | somewhere else, say GitLab? | CITIZENDOT wrote: | Except the obsidian part, I do the same. | [deleted] | marze wrote: | Of course the first step is admitting you have a problem. A | problem many other people share these days... | | Ideas: perhaps keep a daily written log and make a written | summary of what you have learned at the end of each day. And, | make written goals regarding the process, to guide it. I like | exporting interesting web pages as a .pdf into a single unsorted | directory, for possible use and organization at some future time, | for things that aren't directly related to primary tasks. | | Best idea is probably to solicit ideas and try out the most | promising until you find a good solution, but in an organized | way, with periodic evaluation and written reports. | xtiansimon wrote: | > "I spend a huge amount of time collecting a never-ending stream | of links, notes, and thoughts, only to never actually go back and | read them again." | | Curious. Why is this a 'bad thing'? People waste hours on video | games. People plant things in the ground in spring only to dig | them up in fall. What else would you be doing with _your free | time_ that's a better use? | lacoolj wrote: | i have over 500 tabs open in my two browsers (700 if i open my | other profile) | | bookmarks just dont cut it these days | guntherhermann wrote: | Reddit and Twitter are mostly for tech-focused nerds? Hahahaha, | ah. Thanks for the laugh. Reddit and Twitter are outrage | machines. I'm sure there are some good subreddits out there but | all of the ones I used to be a part of got taken over by mods who | care far too much about the Current Thing To Get Upset About | (take your pick). If there are any recommendations for good subs | I'm all ears. Can't convince me about Twitter though, it's an | absolute cesspit and it has been for a long time. | | For information hoarding I use logseq | (https://github.com/logseq/logseq) + syncthing | (https://syncthing.net/). I've been doing it for a few months now | and it's quite a nice workflow. | TheFragenTaken wrote: | I think your take on Reddit is maybe misplaced. "Outrage | machines" stem from algorithmic feeds that push that. Reddit | pushes your own subreddits, and the popular ones are quite | heavily moderated. Though I would agree that constant memes | aren't terribly useful. | | On the other hand, Twitter push tweets for users I don't | follow, never engaged with, and tweet content I am not remotely | interested in. Generally I find Twitter promotes personal | attacks in a whole different way from Reddit, because you | follow people, not topics. | guntherhermann wrote: | > I'm sure there are some good subreddits out there but all | of the ones I used to be a part of got taken over by mods who | care far too much about the Current Thing To Get Upset About | (take your pick). If there are any recommendations for good | subs I'm all ears. | | It's not misplaced, it's my personal experience. It might | differ from your own, but it doesn't make it wrong. | | Got any recommendations? /r/$language isn't as good as the | $language IRC channels. The rest of the popular "tech" ones | (space, futurism, tech) have exactly the issue I outlined | above (calling those subreddits 'outrage machines' is a | reach, but they _are_ shit, and not really for 'tech' people. | Probably because they're popular, maybe because I'm too | elitest?). | Sakos wrote: | I'm dealing with the same issue actively. My latest attempt | involves the article https://zettelkasten.de/posts/knowledge- | cycle-efficiently-or... | | I have a gazillion tabs open, and I try to work through my tabs | once a day to see what I can delete without losing information I | want to keep and what I think is valuable enough to add to my | notes in some way. | | I'll look for a note that already covers the idea and add the URL | and a quick summary. If a note doesn't exist, I'll add the core | idea that interested me about it as a new note with the idea(s) | summarized in my own words (maybe 1-3 sentences), then a | reference in that note to the URL. I also try to summarize the | link from memory instead of reading through it again. I'll only | check the link's contents if I'm having trouble writing anything. | If I'm feeling particularly productive, I might add any quotes or | particular passages I remember as well (paraphrased, of course, I | don't have an eidetic memory). | | I've made a huge dent in my open tabs so far and I'm fairly happy | with my progress in the past week. | | edit: I briefly saw another comment about using OneTab (sorry, I | haven't had the time to read any of the other comments yet) and | my current attempt is partly based on how unhappy I am with | OneTab. The addon itself is brilliant, but I've realized that | I'll just save all the open tabs and then ... well, that's it. | They're basically bookmarks again and it's like an information | blackhole for me. | | edit2: I'm currently using Obsidian.md. Not bothering with | directories at the moment, because I haven't yet decided how to | organize my notes. | fluential wrote: | For deep linking knowledge and notes I love to use Remnote | (found here on HN) | ranger47 wrote: | Obsidian is great. I tend to use it for TTRPG stuff since it's | prettt portable. | | For actual notes, or detailed lists, I like Featherwiki. | | https://feather.wiki/ | justin_oaks wrote: | Thanks for linking Featherwiki. I've used Tiddlywiki, and | it's good to see other entries in this space (wikis as a | single HTML file). | | Featherwiki's 55KB size is quite small compared to | Tiddlywiki's 2MB. That said, the size difference alone may | not be sufficient reason to switch away from Tiddlywiki. | mclightning wrote: | If you enjoy it, keep doing it. | | If you don't enjoy it, seek solutions. I wrote this as a | secondary alternative because your article is not seeking any | solution but rather stating a fact and asking the resolution on | why you may be doing this. Then it goes circular. | | I have developed some solutions, personal traits to deal with | this in my own personal life. | | Learn to ignore useless facts, information and opinion pieces. | | Learn to ignore other people's pet peeves. Let them handle it. | | Learn to prioritise the information you can act upon. | | Learn to stop it all and put the information to action. | Bondi_Blue wrote: | I have the same problem. I think it helps to slot in a dedicated | amount of time, on a weekly basis or something, to catch up and | aggregate. On the other 6 days of the week, I'm trying to use | that same time slot to actually read and consume what I've set | aside. | hamsterbase wrote: | To solve this problem, I have developed a local-first read-it- | later software specifically for this purpose. | | I used the singlefile plugin to save thousands of articles in my | bookmarks as offline html and then imported them into | hamsterbase. Now I only have Twitter, HN, GitHub and other | popular sites in my bookmarks. | | Because the data is all local, I will have the feeling that I | really own them. I don't think I'll have time to read them in the | future, so maybe I can get chatgpt to do it for me. | | The software is currently completely free and all data is local, | so if you are interested, give it a try. | | https://hamsterbase.com | | I have saved all the articles I am interested in so that I can | search for them in full when I need them. I don't have to worry | about losing the site because the data is local. | | Here's how I use it | | 1. when I come across an article of interest, I take a quick look | at it and save it as mhtml in cmd + s. hamsterbase will | automatically import and index it. | | 2. I've designed the unread list to only show articles added | within 14 days, so I don't have to worry about piling up | thousands of unread articles, I'll read through them when I can | and highlight them as I read them. | | 3. I can quickly find the previously saved pages because of the | support by domain, date added, whether they have comments or not, | and whether they are liked or not. | | 4. I've deployed a copy on my Synology and am running the desktop | side on my mac and pc (not released yet, still eating enough food | for myself). Peer-to-peer sync between the three devices | | 5. Since I don't have the energy to develop the mobile side at | the moment (this is a side project), I have developed an RSS | interface to output the saved pages as rss so that I can read | them on my iPhone with my favourite rss reader. | behnamoh wrote: | * Windows only | hamsterbase wrote: | Thanks for the tip, I realised I had written the wrong thing | on the front page. Currently supports linux,mac,windows | | Currently officially released | | linux : https://hamsterbase.com/docs/install/install-with- | docker.htm... macos: | https://hamsterbase.com/docs/install/macos.html windows: | https://hamsterbase.com/docs/install/windows.html | | Not yet officially released but available | | windows desktop : https://github.com/hamsterbase/hamsterbase/ | releases/tag/0.6.... macos arm desktop : https://github.com/h | amsterbase/hamsterbase/releases/tag/0.6.... macos intel | desktop :https://github.com/hamsterbase/hamsterbase/releases/ | tag/0.6.... : https://hamsterbase.com/docs/install/install- | with-docker.htm... macos: | https://hamsterbase.com/docs/install/macos.html windows: | https://hamsterbase.com/docs/install/windows.html | | Not yet officially released but available | | Download from https://github.com/hamsterbase/hamsterbase/rele | ases/tag/0.6.... | | windows desktop ,macos arm desktop , macos intel desktop | pwillia7 wrote: | ooh this is a cool idea | amelius wrote: | Nice. But I guess it needs some AI to figure out what you want | to read next. | hamsterbase wrote: | hamsterbase offers an api with an open source sdk that could | perhaps be combined with openai. | | https://hamsterbase.com/developer/ | abnry wrote: | I am quite interested in this. I take a similar approach using | SingleFile and then a watchdog script to watch for SingleFile | downloads. But mine doesn't look as mature as yours. | | If I have a large collection of SingleFile bookmarks can I | upload them to hamsterbase? | | Another goal of mine is to make conversions to epub easy so I | can read on my Kindle. | vageli wrote: | I would be interested when you deploy the desktop app. I wonder | if something like a browser extension would be a good fit here | to offload the manual file download step. | hamsterbase wrote: | The desktop version is available, it's just not officially | released yet (for the app store), you can download it from | github. | | https://github.com/hamsterbase/hamsterbase/releases/tag/0.6.. | .. | | hamsterbase supports singlefile. You can save web pages | directly with singlefile. You can see the documentation below | | https://hamsterbase.com/docs/integrations/singlefile.html | Jayakumark wrote: | You are not alone, Currently have 250,000 bookmarks in Pinboard, | might probably be their largest hoarder :-). When i see an | interesting in tech, my hand automatically will press Ctrl+D. I | know, A lifetime wont be enough to go through them all. But i | cant stop it , newer AI/ML Summarizer is getting so much better | where my only hope is someday i can summarize them all order them | all by some sort of ranking and glance it. | javajosh wrote: | It's not a bad habit, you just haven't discovered a way to | integrate the information in a way that produces good output for | you. E.g. something like a Zettlekasten. | | Also, its not ADHD, its preparedness. There is a fundamental | tension between discovery and requirement. You're going through | your garage and you find a cool or unusual thing. You feel | inspired, excited you own this treasure, and dreaming of things | to do with it. That is discovery. Requirement is when you want to | build something specific, and now you need to gather tools and | supplies to fit the need. This is a _significantly_ less | enjoyable process for most people, especially since for most | projects it 's usually the first (and last) time you'll execute a | project like that (its a power law thing). It's not all bad - its | because 'requirement' is so much less exciting that people pay | good money to entice people to do that work for them. | | One way to cope with this asymmetry, have your cake and eat it | too, is to constantly discover things (which is its own reward), | but you can squirrel the discoveries away so that when | _requirement_ comes you 'll be ready for it. By its nature, this | strategy means you'll never use 95% of your information, but | you'll never know which 95%. | | So, don't be so hard on yourself and horde away, I say! | majkinetor wrote: | Not sure why you got downvoted, this comment is amazing way to | frame this and its almost 100% how I think about it and why I | personally hord bunch of stuff. | | However, there are other forms of hording that don't fit this - | why do I hord and organize full flac albums (adding each in the | musicbrainz), ebooks (calibre), resources (audio/video | samples). | | And also, why do I hord this stuff: all hardware I buy, all | medical diagnostics and lab results, personal metrics (bp, | weight, etc.)... | | Maybe its all preperedness, in fact, for future potential | situation. This sounds a lot like FOMO. But what is the | difference between FOMO and preperedness? | | I am quite certain that I dont have ADHD, maybe a bit of OCD. | javajosh wrote: | _> Not sure why you got downvoted_ | | Me neither! Discovery vs requirement is a really cool idea | (if I do say so myself) which deserves a longer treatment. | Glad you like it. | willjp wrote: | Not alone! I do this too. I have a mediawiki instance I use to | keep notes on things I learn. I try to keep a rough heirarchy | (ex. Editors), and I use it's "what links here" to navigate from | a related page (ex. Vim) to get back to that list of related | pages. | | It's consistent enough that if I want to start learning | something, I'll usually try to create that page only to find it | exists, and then I can start with the links (or purge them if | they were not useful after all). | pwillia7 wrote: | If you're unaware, try Chrome Reading List for an easy solution | (but you still have to not save 10000 links) | https://www.groovypost.com/howto/use-the-google-chrome-readi... | ranger47 wrote: | This article hits close to home, but there is one crucial | component missing; free time. For the most part, I'm at my laptop | or mobile about half of my primary work day, and take regular | breaks from actual work to check out HN or any other gathering of | techheads I follow. Here's where the data collection happens, | mostly, as another commenter mentioned, projects I was to try or | have been inspired by, skills to brush up on, etc. | | There's this odd notion of "saving for someday" that kindles hope | of some rainy weekend where I suddenly have 48 hours all to | myself, and to focus on making again. That's what drives the data | collection. | HuwFulcher wrote: | Yes, I resonate with this a lot. It's one thing to have time to | capture information but a whole other thing to have the time to | extract the essence out of it. I still haven't figured out an | answer yet though. | larve wrote: | TL;DR: it doesn't matter how many tabs you have or how you close | them, the value I get out of them comes down to intellectually | engaging with them fully, which is exhausting and rewarding. The | most valuable practice I found is "generating" out of tabs, and | for that, sometimes just the tab title is enough. No tool is | going to save you. | | I have a few modes of "consuming" these tab piles. | | 1. doing in-depth studying | | This is like taking 1 day to go through 1 page of a math book. | It's sitting down with a tutorial and actually going through it | and doing all the side exercises and then reflecting upon it. | It's slow af, but it's very rewarding, and of course I learn | things. Over the long term, the value of that learning | diminishes, sometimes very rapidly, depending on what I focused | on. I learned awk and R repeatedly, at times over months, and | it's all gone. What stays are some deeper insights that were | uncovered just through sheer focus. This is the "it takes a full | day to close a single tab" mode. | | Of course, a tab could be a textbook that actually would take 3 | semesters to work through, so there's a wide range in what "in- | depth" itself means. | | 2. reading and annotating | | This is where I sit down with an article (for example using | Reader) and read it with the intent of really engaging with it. I | don't just highlight interesting passages, I put myself in the | mindset of having a conversation with the author, of putting my | own ideas against theirs. This is pretty high-intensity too, and | when I do this over the weekend, I would put it in the "it takes | an hour to close a single tab" mode. | | This is what I actually find has the most "return on time | reading". I have a fairly productive Zettelkasten thing going on, | and filing thoughts that come out of articles, along with notes, | is very productive, often leads to blog posts, and I have found | how to make highlights and quotes and crosslinking work for me. | | The downside is that usually, for every tab closed, 80 more get | opened. I can reasonably process about 5-6 tabs this way during a | work week, maybe 10 if I'm pushing it. On holidays I would | average 5-6 per day, just because you get more efficient as you | go. | | 3. just reading | | This would be just reading a tab for fun. Personally, this | happens if I just opened a tab. I rarely go back to an old tab | and then just read it for fun, usually it's just more dopamine- | rewarding to go open a fresh tab on HN :) This is fairly fast, | and usually pretty transient in terms of "return on investment". | Sure maybe over years you get something out of it, but I consider | it entertainment (which is great!). | | 4. filing links | | This is something I need to get better at. I think there is a lot | of value of just looking at the title of a tab, quickly scrolling | through it, and then discarding it, or keeping a reference to it | along with a small paragraph. I never file a link without a small | paragraph about why I think it is important to keep it, which in | a way is a quick way to generate a thought, like in 2. Just the | fact of writing that paragraph means I probably get more "value" | (as in, it will help me generate my own knowledge in the future) | than actually reading it like in 3, because I actually "created" | something myself. | | If that little paragraph is stored in a relevant location, it | means that the next time I want to study that topic or look | something up, I will find it, along with its link, and | immediately get context. That is actually _extremely_ valuable. | This filing of links is something I am not very good at, and | definitely want to work on more. | | A concrete example: I stumble across the [the Fennel programming | language](https://fennel-lang.org). Incredibly interesting to me, | but also something I feel would deserve a few months if not a | year of attention to "really" get it. I can file it away under | Lisp / Lua / Programming Languages and my daily log in my | obsidian vault, maybe skim the website and make a little bullet | point list of points I find interesting, link a HN discussion. | This takes about 2-5 minutes per tab. It is also exhausting work, | if I do this for two hours, I'll be ready to just plop down in | front of Netflix. | | So, is any of these better? I like all of them, and I definitely | had to build workflows for 1, 2, 4. I am content now knowing that | there is no solution, and feeling like you can process 800 links | a day is impossible. Instead I focus on time-boxing "quality | time", and just close all the tabs once I'm done, there'll be | plenty of high-value quality time the next day. | larve wrote: | Just for fun, I created the entry for Fennel Lisp by | "processing" the index page, to show what that is like: | https://publish.obsidian.md/manuel/Wiki/Programming/Fennel+L... | | I also found that I mentioned Fennel Lisp back in june, so I | linked that in too. If you step through the vault, you can see | how I slowly moved from: | | - pile of links | | to | | - pile of links with a single sentence per link | | to | | - full paragraph with a lot more thinking of how I relate to | the link. | | The latter is really where it's at. Write down why you think | the link is interesting, how you found it, what made you decide | to write something about it, other links it evokes in you. The | context in which you found the link interesting is what you | want to capture, and what will help you get value out of it in | the future. The information itself is transient. | codemac wrote: | Two big lessons of GTD (and majorly influencing many many other | systems like basb, ztd, etc): | | - DO NOT read/peruse/etc on first inspection! Just add it to a | list. | | - Collecting these items is not processing them which is not | organization! | | Stop beating yourself up, and start running a system. You must | set aside the time for the following: | | - Collect everything into some list. Links on the web you'd like | to read is great for this - just get the title and the link. | | - Process that list into what it means to you! Is it a project? A | task? A piece of reference material? Just fun stuff to read later | that you don't want to commit to? etc | | - Organize those now processed items to where things belong. | Projects/tasks, into your task manager. Reference material, into | your reference filings. Fun stuff to read later? Just throw it on | a "hey, read this when you're bored later" list using something | like Instapaper, or evernote, or even a text file of links. | | Now you're cooking with gas. You get to peruse all these links | that make you feel up to date, but you're spending maybe 5 mins | just collecting them into a list to read whenever you have time | later. "Do it tomorrow" is my mantra, and I can only be honest | about that if I keep lists. | | My list is excessively long, and normally I try to comment/read | comment threads the day after the post is made. However I had to | comment that the emotions around these desires can be inspected, | introspected, dissected, etc... or you can change the basic | behavior into what you'd like - and skip some of the emotions all | together. | | One of the most powerful things I learned with meditation: going | through the "noticing and labeling" process, eventually leading | to just noticing and labeling everything as "desires", and | watching them float through the sky. Notice, label, and it'll | slowly go away. | f0e4c2f7 wrote: | I wonder if you could feed the contents of your bookmarks into | chatgpt or another AI system and then interogate it about what | might be interesting, duplicates, or even have it suggest random | articles (perhaps related to browsing? Done as a browser | extension maybe?) | rcdwealth wrote: | [dead] | ZephyrBlu wrote: | I like to read a lot of links, tweets, articles, product | documentation, etc and tend to build up a backlog as well. | | The way I solve this is twofold: | | 1) Leaving shit and forgetting about it. If I can't make time to | read it, I don't care enough about it. Very effective. | | 2) Aggressively pruning tabs. If I want to clear out my backlog, | I ask myself "how much do I actually want to read about this?" | and close the tab unless I really want to read it. | | In the rare case I want to keep things around for a while and | haven't forgotten about them, I generally put them into a new | window then minimize it. | etrautmann wrote: | I like using the pocket app for this and then never feeling bad | about closing tabs. | alkonaut wrote: | I absolutely love reading articles and I spend hours clicking HN | links or reading things shared by people I follow on Twitter. But | I have zero FOMO. I don't download and organize music and video | out of fear they will disappear from a steaming video. I don't | collect "read later" bookmarks (in fact I don't use bookmarks for | anything, ever). I don't have a system for writing down notes or | thoughts. | | So if I have an idea I either act on it now, or remember later, | or forget. And that's _fine_. | | To miss a great article, fail to realize a great idea, forget | that great song that disappeared forever on Spotify is _fine_. | | And I'm so thankful for feeling this. I think it's basically | another side of my laziness/ tendency for procrastination that | helps me. But I like it. I'll never be a person with an org mode | full of random thoughts, a list of ideas for projects or blog | posts, or a library of videos for watching later (or even more | pathologically, or things I already watched). | stewbrew wrote: | Just subscribe to a good weekly magazine like e.g. the economist | and let other do the hard work. | vicnicius wrote: | I'm finishing https://sendmyreads.com to help me tackle just | that. I figured if I get all the information I gather pulled at | me at a convenient time I'd be more likely to actually consume | it. It's been working well, but I'm afraid I'm now biased towards | reading it (because I built the thing) so I want to give it more | time to see how it goes. | | If OP or anyone else is interested let me know and I'll let you | know once it's ready. | surfsvammel wrote: | This is interesting. I don't do this anymore, but maybe I should. | | Usually I just trust that when I need something I'll be able to | find it. But nowadays Google (and searching in general) is so bad | that maybe I should not trust that I'll be able to find it again | when I need it. Maybe today it's more worth while to build a | library of interesting stuff, than it was a couple of years ago. | danparsonson wrote: | Ah this is a big part of my hoarding problem - I find something | useful today, tomorrow I need it and it's gone. Of course this | happens to 0.01% of things I find... but I don't know which | 0.01% it will be. | kvetching wrote: | This is the result of the prescription amphetamines. When people | stop taking amphetamines, perspective returns and you realize | there's a lot of noise that you don't actually care about. When | you're overloading your dopamine receptors with amphetamine, you | see potential in everything. | waynesonfire wrote: | For me, it's that my ambition far exceed my talent. | | How do I deal with this? I try to stop and anchor myself in | proven technologies that align with _ME_ not _YOU_ or what _YOU_ | blogged about or find interesting. This takes courage as | sometimes you'll find yourself off the beaten path. I see entry | level folks switching text editors, programming languages, tech | stacks, etc. They're enduring through the same thing. It's not | your IDE, it's not your color theme, or your background image. | It's not an article that you have FOMO over, or some library that | you haven't yet discovered. None of these will solve your | problems. You have to do real work. You have to anchor yourself | in the technology that you want to conquer and stop relying on | folks to hold your hand through it. | | Stop hoarding information and start building. You may find | yourself off the beaten path and you may too discover that your | ambition far exceed your talent. | lowleveldesign wrote: | Information hoarding was my big problem as well. To fight it, a | few years ago, I stopped using any bookmark services, and I | started to keep a list of links in a markdown text file with a | limited number of tags. I split the links by month and often add | a short description and a tag to a saved link. All IT tags are | textual, but I use emojis for other link categories, such as | music or books. Example content: | | ### 2022/12 | | - {musical note emoji} [Mendelssohn - Complete Piano | Works](https://www.amazon.pl/Complete-Piano-Works- | Prosseda/dp/B084D...) | | - [Checked C](https://github.com/microsoft/checkedc) - extensions | to make C safer #cpp | | - [SQLite Internals: How The World's Most Used Database | Works](https://www.compileralchemy.com/books/sqlite-internals/) | | - {book emoji} [Ask HN: Best books read in | 2022?](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33849267) - some | interesting pieces here | | ### 2022/11 | | - [The Linux Kernel Module Programming | Guide](https://sysprog21.github.io/lkmpg/), | [repo](https://github.com/sysprog21/lkmpg) #linux | | ... | | And so on. I know it's simplistic, but it helped me a lot to keep | the number of links under a reasonable limit, and it is | effortless to search through. | mahogany wrote: | This is funny, I went the other way. I used to keep text files | of links quite similar to this, but then after several years I | realized I rarely (perhaps a handful of times over years) went | back to them. So I started using bookmarks with tags because it | was much faster. I still rarely go back to bookmarks, but when | I do, I find there is much less friction compared to scanning a | text file. | mauiuku wrote: | I've gotten past this by using this app the records your screen | (and audio) and indexes all the words that show up. Data is | stored locally. Check it out: https://www.rewind.ai/ | tunnuz wrote: | You're not alone, there is at least another one like you. | adaisadais wrote: | I too have the same problem. | | I've always wondered "what if I simply just read them and took a | note / maybe linked them to a word or Google doc or something?" | | I had a friend who did a similar activity with books. Read a | book, took notes on the 'highest learnings' and saved each book | he finished. | | He went back and found an old book with all of his 'wisdom' and | realized he had totally change since he wrote those things. He | didn't really care about them like he thought his future self | might. | | Knowledge / link hoarding is vanity. | pessimizer wrote: | This depends on the books that you're getting the 'highest | learnings' from. If you're reading a bunch of biographies and | self-help, you'll end up with notes that are simultaneously | less interesting and more grandiose than if you do the same | thing while reading math, science or real (non-biography/non- | inspirational) history and anthropology books. | | i.e. don't record "wisdom," record information. | adaisadais wrote: | Haha your name is great. | | The danger I find in information is a) there's too much and | b) it's already out of date. | | Wisdom transcends time but is much harder to come by. | | "I'm not a pessimist, I'm an optometrist" -Ricky | sodimel wrote: | That's funny, I just saved this link on my website that's serving | the unique purpose to store (and maybe share? that makes it two | purposes?) links I find interesting: | https://links.l3m.in/en/link/2840/ | | I developed this thing myself after I grew too tired of my 800+ | bookmarks, and also after I grew too tired of my Shaarli instance | too. It's still in development & it's open source, you can find a | link on the footer. | | One feature of this thing I use daily is that I've set the "new | page" url of my browser to the random url you can find in the | menu of the website. That way I am greeted by a cool | article/product/thing every time I open my browser :) | gmuslera wrote: | From time to time (months to years) I go back to those links | (usually saved in my rss reader), or at least some of the newest, | and try to turn some of those links into knowledge. Some may not | work anymore, the remaining I try to put in categories/bookmarks, | or give me time to read and then decide what to do with them. | Sometimes that read implies more work, like taking notes, | learning more about some discussed topics, link them somewhat | with other pieces of saved content. | | The awesome lists ( https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome and | related ) helped me to take off some of the burden. It is not | that I need to have those links, but having them somewhat | available when I need them, at least for a lot of | places/software/etc. | | In the end, is in part some sort of external memory. Knowing how | to recover something interesting you found about a particular | topic make it useful. It implies work, not just storing but | refreshing/(re)organizing and putting them into your present | context. But either on time or volume you must put some | restrictions. | imjonse wrote: | The fact that the info is tech or science related thus relatively | serious, is less important than the fact that it feeds into the | same type of cycle as reading tabloids, collecting skins and gems | in mobile games or following a sports team. It may be useful in | the future, or being remembered and used at some point, but the | main purpose is producing a rush and it too is a form of escapism | (maybe from doing actual projects). | [deleted] | allochthon wrote: | I have the same habit and wrote a web app to catalog the links I | come across: | | https://digraph.app/ | warinukraine wrote: | It's not "perfectionism". It's called entertainment. Some people | like watching desperate housewives, some people like reading | about compilers. | MagicMoonlight wrote: | I run an instance of yacy on my desktop and pump all the | interesting sites into that. | | That way, 2 years from now I can remember that there was a | website about undulating crystal sheep enhancers and search it up | in my archive. It's really handy. | igtztorrero wrote: | Maybe I do it too. | | I watch HN every morning ( 15 to 60 minutes) | | I only upvote interesting articles for me. | | If it's really good for me, I use Getpocket to save a list of | interested articles, tagged ( GoLang Vue Css SysAdmin DB Health | etc ) | | When I need to something I always look on Getpocket ( it's my | hard drive memory for all information HN ) | | Saludos | digitalsanctum wrote: | You're not alone. I have a daily routine of hitting several | websites with news and RSS feeds. Saved to bookmarks stored in | browsers, saved to Pocket, downloaded and printed to read later, | etc. I literally have hundreds, probably thousands of new | "information" coming in and while I never expect to read it all, | it comes in handy. As a distraction, a nurturer of endless | curiosity, a trick to cope with the fact that I know a very very | small fraction about anything. | maherbeg wrote: | I've been using the PARA system from Building a Second Brain by | Tiago Forte for all of my new notes and interest hoarding. After | I've read a link, I'll quickly file it away into an inbox with | some useful snippets on the page. When I'm bored, or have | additional free time, I'll summarize the highlighted points and | then move it into either a Project, Area, or Resource. | | Sometimes I just read stuff and don't bother with the notes. As | long as I have an inkling of what the thing was, I'll be able to | find it later. | iamben wrote: | This hit home! | | I recently cleared through thousands of bookmarks. Many of the | sites weren't there anymore, many of them were things I thought | 'would be a good read at some point' or things I thought 'were a | good read'. A couple of them I read during the cleanse, most were | impractically out of date or just not worth it/interesting | anymore (life changes!). From that point I made a note to only | bookmark sites I'm likely to actually need/use again, and they go | into category folders (which makes me think twice about | bookmarking as opposed to just pressing the star blindly). | | Anything else I want to read I'll open in a new tab and suspend | if I'm not reading straight away. I go through the tabs fairly | regularly in a relatively brutal "am I actually going to read | this" way and close them if not. | | I've tried many, many ways of 'storing' things for recall ("those | 10 rules for life were fantastic!") but the reality of it is I | never revisit 99% of those things and for the 1% I can usually | google it (or find a more up to date substitute). Code snippets | are ever so slightly different (but not much!). There's probably | something much better to store visual things (like screenshots of | great websites etc.) - I'm just not sure I want to _start_ doing | this. | | Long and short I'm trying to take the same approach to | information as I do to my wardrobe - if I'm not wearing it, why's | it in there? | robofanatic wrote: | > I recently cleared through thousands of bookmarks | | Wow that's some dedication. For me bookmarking doesn't work, | still I do it. My bad habit I guess ;-) I never revisit that | stuff, because there is always so much new and more exciting | stuff coming in all the time that the old stuff seems almost | irrelevant. | iamben wrote: | Yeah, that was me exactly! I just couldn't face that massive | long list anymore - it had been ported from computer to | computer for years and was the digital equivalent of clearing | out the garage (and it felt great afterwards)! It was amazing | how useless half of them now were. | jodrellblank wrote: | Task for a future-tech AI; feed the AI all the | articles/books/bookmarks/ideas you would like to have read or | 'should' read, and then see what kind of a person it becomes | after ingesting them. | natn wrote: | This thread is like group therapy. On my current device I'd | estimate ~100 chrome tabs open over 10 desktops. I try to keep | them organized at least. | danparsonson wrote: | Hehe amateur - last time I cleared out the tabs on just my | phone, I had over 140 | dspillett wrote: | _> I spend a huge amount of time collecting a never-ending stream | of links, notes, and thoughts, only to never actually go back and | read them again._ | | Same here. I have a huge and every expanding list of lists of | things I want to play with, and little projects (that might turn | into larger projects) which I have yet to really start, and | (because this has been going on so long) a list of skills I need | to bring up-to-date because they have atrophied significantly | while I've been _reading_ and not _doing_ (this is part of the | procrastination on starting many of those projects). | greenbit wrote: | Bookmarks, open tabs, screen shots. I hear you. For me, I think | it's that I insanely overestimate my free time, always thinking | "there's something I'd like to get back to". And about once a | month I have to close over 100 tabs that will never find the time | to get back to. | | There's a never ending stream of Other Stuff that consumes my | time instead. Dishes, laundry, yard work, work-work, walking the | dog, you name it. I envy the dog; she at least has the sense not | to bookmark things she's never going to look at again. | eternalban wrote: | OP's condition is likely very common among hn readership. Looked | at positively, it is indicative of a desire to remain abreast of | the very fast moving technology curve on various fronts. The | issue is, in part, our bandwidth limitation. | | Tools may help to some extent and the heavy lifting bits are | already done by others (e.g. https://typeset.io/). A simple | browser extension could use such services and provide a more | compact information package to consume. And a bit later down the | line, we'll likely can train AI to learn our informational | preferences (and/or goals) and further package and curate 'what | you need to read', etc. | | - | | a p.s. | | After playing with GPT-3, diving a bit into the LLMs (to | understand the magic), the thought occurred that if a primitive | information processing network -- primitive compared to the one | we have in our cranium -- can do this, and this magic is mainly | and principally due to massive data consumption, then 'read | everything you can get your hands on' is a sensible imperative. | captaincaveman wrote: | I also have this problem and has been something I've been | thinking about for some time, and have started building. | | All the comments here have been great validation, that there is | others with a need, which is encouraging. | | I've mostly been working on the data aspects, so not much to see | as yet, but if a new approach to this is of interest to you, | please signup. | | https://ont.fyi | | I think the other solutions out there focus too much on note | taking, and manually organising stuff, hopefully I can create | something more compelling for the rest of us! | crispyambulance wrote: | Not disagreeing with the OP but "Hoarding information" is more | commonly used to describe a much more insidious problem than just | collecting so much information that it's a problem to keep track | of it. | | "Information hoarding" is a problem when the hoarder keeps the | information from other people. It happens a lot in dysfunctional | work environments where "information is power" and where hoarders | just keep important details to themselves, leaving others out of | the loop to fend for themselves. | kleer001 wrote: | In business talk that's sometimes called "Silo-ing" as opposed | to "Building bridges". | Aromasin wrote: | I do the same, but set aside 2 hours every weekend to go back and | review all the links I saved that week. Important ones, I do a | write up summary of the content and it goes in my notes for | future reference. Non-important ones get archived. For archived, | links I'll go back once a month and read again. By the third time | I've read something, I can normally remember it. It's in long | term memory, and I can refer to it. | | I've been using Obsidian lately to track my notes after migrating | all my old Markdown notes to there, and it's fantastic. I can | search by tags (I tag my notes meticulously) and come up with | heaps of information on one subject or another. It's a second | brain at this point - both a hobby, and a tool for when it comes | to writing or building. | samsquire wrote: | This is why I journal computer ideas out in the open on GitHub. | There is plenty of inspiration in blog posts and Quora and Hacker | News and Reddit. It is useful to aggregate thinking and | extrapolate thinking by writing. Writing is thinking. | | Every interesting idea or thought or inspiration goes in my | journal. | | Someone is writing about a problem or difficulty, I think and | write how I would fix it. | | I have over 700 entries in my journal from 2013. If you want more | things to read, check out my profile. Start with "ideas" or | "ideas4" | daneel_w wrote: | Genuine question: do you also prep for disaster? "This might come | in handy some day" etc. | ZhangSWEFAANG wrote: | There's an easy solution to this - it's called the | information:action ratio. Actions include reading deeply, | writing, coding, etc. For every piece of information you consume, | you in general, want to produce twice that. | | Source: My 150 IQ | snapcaster wrote: | Citing your IQ is cringe but I like the idea of | information:action ratio. I think I would benefit from keeping | that in mind | carapace wrote: | I do this too (although I think of it as a "backlog" rather than | "hoarding" but it's not important.) | | Two things seem to help: | | 1) Filter by "actionable"-ness: I ask myself, "Am I ever going to | do something with this piece of information?" | | 2) Jotting down a sentence or two per item that captures _why_ I | find it interesting. Even that much work can change a list of | tabs /URLs into something more like a useful directory of | information. | | Hope that helps. :) | hiAndrewQuinn wrote: | I had this when I was a kid. I broke out of it as a teen thanks | to taking spaced repetition systems seriously. | | For one unfortunate semester in college almost a decade ago I | tried to put _everything_ I found interesting into SuperMemo. I | got good with all of its advanced features - adding web pages | directly, incremental reading, the works. After a few weeks I was | spending more time reading my SM queue than actually adding new | things to it. After about 2 months I dropped out because I was | spending too much time and mental energy using SuperMemo to do, | you know, _work_. | | I have never, ever given myself a hard time for being forgetful | since. 99.999% of the information that flows through my eyes and | into my brain vanishes into pleasant unintelligible neural noise | and I would add more 9s to that if I could. Because the 0.001% of | genuinely insightful, evergreen, _resonant_ ideas that stick | around and elaborate my worldview is beautiful beyond to me. | erlich wrote: | Considering how many hoarders are out here, I would think it | wouldn't be too hard to manually tag and summarize every single | article that is posted on HN. | BasDirks wrote: | Sounds like you are maintaining and extending your own frame of | reference. I feel like a note that is never read again is not | necessarily a wasted effort. | visarga wrote: | > Whatever the cause, the end result is the same: I spend a huge | amount of time collecting a never-ending stream of links, notes, | and thoughts, only to never actually go back and read them again. | | The solution is to save everything unorganised and retrieve with | a search engine, preferably hacked into your main search UI, so | you always get them on top. Don't make a separate search UI, you | won't use it. It has to be hacked into the main UI, probably | Google. | | I'm wondering why Google, who is a search company and also a | browser maker doesn't implement full text search on the browsing | history. | robofanatic wrote: | > I'm wondering why Google, who is a search company and also a | browser maker doesn't implement full text search on the | browsing history. | | They do. The search history shows up in the address bar as you | type. But sometimes it's annoying and maybe a privacy issue | especially when you are screen sharing with someone. | Cunya wrote: | I wrote a ruby script that kills all chrome processes that take | more than x amount of memory, so my browser tabs and windows | become placeholders for the links without taking huge amounts of | memory.. | s3000 wrote: | >Why do I find myself in this situation? Is it FOMO driving me to | want to keep track of everything? Perhaps it's some form of | perfectionism or even an addiction. | | My preferred explanation is Repetition compulsion [1]. | | >Whatever the cause, the end result is the same: I spend a huge | amount of time collecting a never-ending stream of links, notes, | and thoughts, only to never actually go back and read them again. | | Do those notes have to be read again by the one who creates them? | Connecting information and publishing that on social media allows | others to do the next steps. | | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repetition_compulsion | mo_42 wrote: | I like the idea of repetition compulsion. Most probably keeps | people going once they started this way. But why do people | start in the first place? | | I think it's some kind of uneasiness with actual work. Actual | work is hard, not exciting and the reward may come in a distant | future. | | Maybe I should avoid HN much more because it gives me a | dopamine kick without having accomplished anything. | s3000 wrote: | The opposite of information hoarding is not unexciting, mind- | numbing work. The opposite of information hoarding is doing | what you want to do. | | If somebody can do something nice, and still does information | hoarding, things become interesting. | | That's why it's more than a habit: | | >Repetition compulsion is the unconscious tendency of a | person to repeat a traumatic event or its circumstances | | Information hoarding is the perfect repeatable event. There | is an almost infinite supply of rewarding ideas and there is | no physical obstacle building up that triggers invention from | somebody else. | | With those conditions, any traumatic event, any drama, can be | projected onto these situations until the lesson is learned. | | The cruel paradox of the information hoarder community is | that they haven't managed to create a list of information | that helps to resolves their unfortunate condition. | batmansmk wrote: | I tend to associate the information I hoard with knowledge, which | I equate to fuel to develop my efficiency. It's actually the | opposite. I rarely lack the extra bit of information and more | often loose track of what really matters. I resonate with this | article. | rus64 wrote: | Saving this to read later | breischl wrote: | I think I do something similar, though on reflection I read | things almost as a distraction. Like, I should be working on | something useful, and instead I'm reading about the internals of | a change to a language I don't even use. It's _interesting_, but | usually not _useful_. It's just information porn - to me anyway, | it's probably very useful to some other people. | | I partially alleviated this by requiring myself to summarize the | useful bits from any article I read into a note. The point being | that if there's not enough value in the article to make that | worthwhile, then there's no point even reading it and I'm just | wasting time. And if there is value in it, then forcing myself to | summarize that is going to make it more likely that I'll remember | it. | | I'm not 100% consistent on doing this, but it does help break me | out of "information grazing". | cadbox1 wrote: | I built a notes app specifically for capturing my HN links. It | organises them both by date and topic so I can browse them by | topic but also find "that one link from last week". | | https://kapanotes.com/cadbox1 | ss48 wrote: | I ended up using an extension called Tabs Aside | (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabs-aside/) and | watch later for this. Then have an extension to open a random | bookmark or shuffle through the watch later playlist. | | It's not so much about hoarding as much as it is about a broader | range of content. The internet can only be focused on discussing | so many things in a day. I find that not saving news articles and | current events really helps in this regards to maintain a useful | list of things to read through that might be worth learning about | more or exploring. | dlahoda wrote: | learning math helps, discrete math and logic. | | using taggers helps. reading abstract and having tag | #have_read_abstract for example. so you should not read whole. | close. | | there are taggers for time and files too. | | do more p2p and crowd hoarding, dozens of p2p softwares for | haording. it helps in some way. | | sure mentioned, anki, and foam. so learn hotkeys and multiline | editing. | | there are other ways, so not sure if these easy to use right | away. measuring economic valuation of opening any link or reading | works. check some authority, credibility and quality. retreats | and no tech for a while help to reset measuring gadgets in brain. | | many things are zombies, dead in arrival, lack structure. do not | spend on these. | | my recent example, thousand yoga people there. and few which give | you structure. example, yoga plus anatomy course. | mzzter wrote: | I also hoard information. Keeping a stream of links where I go | back to a small percentage. But I find that it is a good habit | for me. The links are a slice of the pages that I actually care | about. | | Though, I wish for a way to index and search specifically within | my stream of links. So that I can better recall content that I | have glanced at in the past. | jhoelzel wrote: | I found a pretty good way around this: | | I use exchange and email myself the articles, usually over iphone | share. | | That means i can go to my folder that i have dedicated "from me | to me" and in there i can use full text search to satisfy the | "damn, where have i read that again?" | | It's incomplete because stuff goes down all the time, but usually | ill read the headline and be on my way to the original vendor | docs anyway =) | dfraser992 wrote: | I have been collecting bookmarks for some time now as well - all | unsorted... Doing it manually would be a nightmare so I have been | thinking about making a SaaS - webcrawler + AI (NLP + clustering) | | It would at least accomplish a preliminary sort/grouping; manual | cleanup or fine tuning would always be needed, I think, but at | least the bulk of the work could be done in an automated fashion | to give the user a head start. | | Would anyone else want such a SaaS? I thought about how to charge | for it, but ideally it is a one-time operation, so charging | anything more than $1 to $5 doesn't seem reasonable. And the | privacy issues ... bunch of practical problems, so I may just | write some OSS. | satvikchoudhary wrote: | It can easily be just a habit. I had the same habit as OP before, | at some point I used to collect tabs stopped at 500 or so. Then I | began collecting links and info in markdown. Many people go even | further, they set up automation on top of notion, twitter bots | and what not. | | Now I just browse, collect only as much tabs I can read in 1-2 | days. Hoarding hasn't done me any good. So I just don't do it | anymore. | | But why do I browse so much of twitter, HN. I think it is FOMO, | but also a bit of a lack of purpose which I think I have atleast | partially solved for now. | | Or maybe its just curious minds can't stop when there is more | information out there as said by one of the comments. | tpoacher wrote: | put them on anki | | make special options for the deck that effectively remind you to | read a random article everynow and then (or, one a day/week) | | read articles get pushed further down the queue as per anki's | algorithm | | enjoy your incremental reading of links you liked | gchokov wrote: | I resonate with the article as well. There seems to be too many | interesting things for the curious minds. Perhaps, it has always | been like this. Nothing bad with curiosity - I think it's quite | the opposite, it's a great thing. I found that for me though, it | needs to be balanced, and I learned to not feel bad if I can't | check or read everything I want. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-01-06 23:00 UTC)