Ness Labs

> Tiddlywiki Love Tiddlywiki. It's amazing the amount of functionality it has, even if you use it in "one html file" mode. Great for making a web garden [1]. [1]: https://nesslabs.com/digital-garden-tiddlywiki

Not mentioned, but obviously you don't need to read the whole book with same depth. Almost no book is must read from beginning to end. After skimming 3-5 hours, you can decide how much of it is important, or important to you and focus on those in deeper passes. Active vs. Passive Reading https://owl.excelsior.edu/orc/introduction/active-reading/ https://nesslabs.com/active-reading

I recommend checking out TiddlyWiki Desktop as a mechanism for managing lots of wikis. I save my files to iCloud and sync that way between devices. I us Quine2 on the iPhone to open the files there. Also worth checking out Anne-Laure Le Cunff's article on how to set up a digital garden using TiddlyWiki and some TW plugins. https://nesslabs.com/digital-garden-set-up

TiddlyWiki (https://tiddlywiki.com), which I think is amazing both in simplicity and flexibility, also offers export to static sites. There are two versions: either the wiki as a single html+js-file or on node.js, but export to static html exists in both. You can test it from the home page (https://tiddlywiki.com), just go to Tools in the sidebar -> Export all -> Static HTML. Amazingly simple. Not mine, but a (nice) demo: https://www.mentalnodes.com/ and more advanced guide: https://nesslabs.com/tiddlywiki-static-website-generator

I picked https://nesslabs.com/tiddlywiki-beginner-tutorial which uses https://noteself.org/. NoteSelf has autosync which is helpful. I would recommend reading How To Take Smart Notes and really internalizing the information there, I started off way too fast and ended up with too many tiny notes. It takes practice but its definitely worth it.

Thanks for sharing! I like the simple design. One piece of feedback I got when I wrote a blog post about mental models [1] was that mental models are easy to understand, but people struggle to figure out how to actually use them. In addition to the examples, it would be great to add concrete applications to each cards. [1] https://nesslabs.com/mental-models

The regular journalling with a notebook was really interesting, as it's a habit I've been trying to implement. I've been trying to do interstitial journaling [0] by writing down the time, noting energy levels, and listing out tasks to complete for the next 90 minutes [1]. It's far less reflective than Highsmith's notebook usage, and with a different intent, though it was inspiring to see the pages of notebooks one can fill out across their life, if one chooses to (from the article: "The 56 journals (18 diaries, 38 notebooks) add up to eight thousand pages in total."). I wonder why she journaled less regularly later in life. Privacy looks like a reason; from the article: "[...] that would also be the last diary entry for seven years. When her lover Ellen starts sneaking peeks at the diaries, Highsmith switches only to notebook entries, which are less personal (and less interesting)." Similarly, I've censored myself a bit with handwritten entries, as it's possible that I might lose the book, or a person might find and read the journal without permission. [0] https://nesslabs.com/interstitial-journaling [1] Inspired by Channing Allen's 'Plan, do, learn' loops posted on HN recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29841136

What constitutes "a heated discussion"? In what way was the discussion here "heated"? How do you measure it? It quickly becomes subjective, doesn't it? If you know what constitute heated, it's not hard to make it heated as a third party, I'd say. Or if you have access to the back end, you just make it heated and claim it is. It's all concealed after all. Why even demote a heated discussion? What good does that do? "Ah people disagree, quick, let's remove it." Lots of room for play. Maybe you are right. Maybe I am. >Be careful about jumping to some kind of conspiracy theory for explanations. It's not healthy. You don't have to worry about my paranoia, I'm well aware of how it functions, why it does what it does and how to prevent it from going wrong. I'm comfortable with that. The opposite is just as true, by the way. You on the other hand are claiming to know what is or isn't worth knowing for others, you have no problem calling the careful thoughts of others "conspiracy theories" and try to warn people about health issues, without any inquiry or verification if that applies or not. And when you're corrected or disagreed with you just decide to ignore it and go after another thing you think is wrong with someone else. What is it you want? Growth of others? Or growth of yourself? Or both? Because from where I'm standing you're trying to give to me what I already have, but you don't take for yourself. I know what my self deception looks like. Do you in which ways you…

In 2004 I lost my job because I was a specific MBTI type usually associated with "entrepreneurial skill", "thinking outside boxes", "natural LeAderShIPP", and "causing trouble", and because there were already 2 others with that MBTI in the team it was used as the justification to not extend my contract. The test was conducted by an external HR consultancy that pictured itself as an expert in MBTI and all things psychology. (they should have just told me they don't like my personality which would have been less of an insult and more honest) So no doubt with a bit of marketing this nonsense can be sold into HR departments. The Karen's and Kyle's of this world will no doubt think it's brilliant, buy it and feed their own biased decision making process. MBTI's are astrology for people who think they're too smart for astrology. Both are total nonsense and dangerous in the hands of the wanna-be psychologist Karen's usually in charge of HR. [0][1][3] It's all fun and games until people lose their jobs. Unlikely you will lose your job because you got the wrong MBTI, but when a company is downsizing and wants to pretend they're using scIeNtiFfic measures to make that decision in the name of performance it's likely they use garbage software like this to dress up their "cultural fit" bias. I urge OP to put a big fat warning label on their product and market it as a way to educate people why MBTI's are dangerous garbage and guide those that use it onto a path that helps them…

> In no world can you be working 5 hours a day and be giving a shit. "Four hours of creative work a day is about the limit for a mathematician." ~~ Henri Poincaré. https://nesslabs.com/how-much-work-is-enough-work

Previously discussed (June 2020; 63 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23468175 See these blog posts also: - https://tomcritchlow.com/2020/06/09/quotebacks/ - https://nesslabs.com/quotebacks

I use org-mode with the journal plugin, but I'm soon going to switch to zk[0]. My technique is called interstitional journaling[1], and I keep track of my location (I travel a lot) and the date in the header of the file, which gets generated by org. You can set up an interstitional journal in anything though, Logseq[2] supports it out of the box. [0] (https://github.com/mickael-menu/zk) [1] (https://nesslabs.com/interstitial-journaling) [2] (https://logseq.com/)

There is this concept of antilibrary https://nesslabs.com/antilibrary

Totally agree that mind maps are hard to scale out, either across time or people. This is why Dendron focuses on helping folks create consistent structures (we call them schemas) to help map out their knowledge base. Think of it as a type system for organizing your notes. More details on that here (https://nesslabs.com/dendron-featured-tool) if curious

I found the linked article on interstitial journaling quite interesting. I may try adopting the practice. https://nesslabs.com/interstitial-journaling

Reading outdoors may help. https://scitechdaily.com/scientific-research-uncovers-benefits-of-read… Reading aloud perhaps? https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/320377 Perhaps even one of these methods. https://nesslabs.com/improve-memory

I like the idea of daily notes even better when you combine them with your todo lists at the same time. That concept is called interstitial notes [0], and it's used in several software tools like Roam Research [1]. I use Drift [2] which has a interstitial notes plugin which has proven to work very well for me. [0] https://nesslabs.com/interstitial-journaling [1] https://roamresearch.com/ [2] https://akhater.github.io/drift/

Here's another article on Roam Research (I did appreciate the history in that link) that more clearly explains what it is they're up to. https://nesslabs.com/roam-research Also noted, Roam wants a request for access to their site: https://roamresearch.com/

I have found these links discussing Roam: - https://nesslabs.com/roam-research - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22104366 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22085837 Personalny I just use git repo with markdown files and Bash script miss.sh to quickly send/get new content to central repo

Anne-Laure Le Cunff just published a blog post that appears to be a summary of the book, which you might find interesting. https://nesslabs.com/how-to-read-a-book

I enjoyed this version of the article, found it to be easier to read and filled with actionable advice you can apply in your life https://nesslabs.com/parkinson-law (This article was published 1 day before the BBC article)

The nice thing about mental models is you have so many to choose from[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]. [1] https://medium.com/@yegg/mental-models-i-find-repeatedly-useful-936f1c… [2] http://www.defmacro.org/2016/12/22/models.html [3] https://fs.blog/mental-models/ [4] https://nesslabs.com/mental-models [5] https://amzn.to/2KiKQEg (Don't recommend) [6] https://amzn.to/2GOHoz4 (written by DuckDuckGo founder Gabe Weinberg) [7] https://amzn.to/31lfK4Q (A classic) [8] https://amzn.to/31tX17l (Haven't read but recommended by others)

I can add a use-case for that. I'm trying to read Joe Dispenza "Breaking a Habit of Being Yourself". The book starts with Joe Dispenza views on a quantum nature of our world, and I see that the author knows about quantum even less then me. Moreover he tries to make me to believe in something similar to Philip K. Dick, except everything unexplainable is explained not by references to Holy Spirit, but by slipping a word "quantum" somewhere in a sentence. He kinda believe in a magic world where you can change the world by thinking hard about the desired change, but instead of "magic" he says "quantum". Sometimes he uses word "quantum" twice in one sentence. It was bad enough so I was fighting my desire to stop reading the book and to never try it again. I persisted because his bullshit was far outside of his supposed area of expertise and I thought he could become better when he gets to a point. But then Dispenza refers to a study showing that you can change past with a prayer: if you pray for a random sample of patients from a decade ago, then this random sample does better than a general population[1]. Then he refers to a study showing that people can unwound DNA by a force of mind[2]. Dispenza starts his book by asking a reader to keep an open mind, but there are limits of mind openness, and if you go beyond the limits then what is the point of having a mind? Am I ready to break a habit of being myself and start believing in bullshit? After I'd found [1] and [2] with a…

Yes: https://nesslabs.com/roam-to-logseq

Fist, the 10,000 hour rule is false common knowledge [1,2]. Second, splitting a general role ("backend engineering") in arbitrary atomic skills doesn't make sense because there's no end to it. Backend engineering -> OS fundamentals -> Driver programming -> Hardware design -> Boolean logic -> Set theory -> and so on... Third, all engineering roles have cross-cutting concerns. You do need some network knowledge to be a "backend guy"... but also to be a sysadmin, devops, etc.. It's not like all these roles exist in a vacuum and you're starting from 0 if you switch between them. Finally, most people that think of themselves as experts in some role, language or framework end up in the "1 year of experience repeated 10 times" trap. True experts are also somewhat generalists too, because you can't built a tall knowledge without growing the base too (pun intended). [1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20121114-gladwells-10000-hour-rule-… [2] https://nesslabs.com/10000-hour-rule

Antilibrary men... https://nesslabs.com/antilibrary

Could it be Drift / TiddlyWiki? https://ramirosalas.com/#: (edit: note the colon in the url, then you get "a content area with multiple cards on the right, dark mode, list of tags/filters on the left") If not, then I think TiddlyWiki [1] will be perfect for the usecase you mention. You can choose between a single-file version or a node.js version. The former will be a HTML+js file which is self-contained. The latter will save all your cards (called tiddlers) in separate files which can easily be versioned. Both supports markdown by plugin [2]. Since it uses HTML and js, it will continue working as long as web browsers don't make major changes - and if that happens, you will still have all your data available in either the source code or text files. A tiddler has fields such as title, text and tags. But you can add other fields such as author or source or whatever. The field values can then be accessed as { {title!!fieldname}}. This demonstrates one of the real strengths of tiddlywiki: transclusion. Transclusion, combined with filters, opens a lot of possibilities. As tiddlywiki is quite customizable (see https://dynalist.io/d/zUP-nIWu2FFoXH-oM7L7d9DM), you may want to have a look at some variants for inspiration, such as RR-TW (https://rr-tw5.github.io/) or Stroll (https://giffmex.org/stroll/stroll.html) [1] https://tiddlywiki.com // https://nesslabs.com/tiddlywiki-beginner-tutorial [2] https://tiddlywiki.com/plugins/tiddlywiki/markdown/

It is interesting how this topic comes up every once in a while here ( https://hn.algolia.com/?q=antilibrary ), and there is a number of VERY similar blog posts around, even some short articles in larger magazines. But for years now, while it is an interesting and relevant topic, it seems like everyone is just copying the same article, using the same references to Umberto Eco and Nassim Taleb. Here are just some, from the first pages of hits on a search engine for "antilibary". All of them very similar: https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/24/umberto-eco-antilibrary/ https://nesslabs.com/antilibrary https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/columns/the-antilibrary-and-the-value… https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jun/26/umberto-eco-antil… https://medium.com/@suleymankoc/umberto-eco-on-unread-books-in-a-perso… Kevin Mims seems to have introduced/applied the Japanese term "Tsundoku" to this "antilibrary idea": https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/books/review/personal-libraries.htm… https://www.bbc.com/news/world-44981013 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsundoku

I use a Node-based static site generator called Hexo [1] for the blog I'm most active with. I actually wrote about my experience setting up Hexo on that blog. [2] I went with Hexo because of the availability of themes, plugins and documentation. My workflow goes like this: 1) Write blog post in markdown, making sure to include the YAML front-matter (JSON's also an option), 2) Generate the static pages from that blog post using `hexo generate` in my CLI, 3) Use `hexo server` in my CLI to preview my changes locally in my browser, 4) Upload my files to my remote server (I haven't automated this part yet) Alternatively, I've tried static site generation & deployment with Node, TiddlyWiki [3] and GitHub Pages. Although TiddlyWiki's not meant to be a static site by default (nor a blog), there's a lot of helpful documentation out there [4] that explains how it can be used in that way. I got a static representation of my TiddlyWiki digital garden [5] up and running in an afternoon, whereas Hexo took me a few days to figure out. [1]: https://hexo.io/ [2]: http://practicing.design/2020/05/02/my-review-of-hexo-a-node-powered-s… [3]: https://tiddlywiki.com/ [4]: https://nesslabs.com/tiddlywiki-static-website-generator [5]: http://meet-me-in.space/