Show HN: Everything I Know Wiki

https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz

by nikivi • 7 years ago

434 119 7 years ago

wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz

The more things you try and do, participate in, and understand, the shallower your knowledge will be of any one of those things.

akadeb• 7 years ago

is that a good thing or a bad thing?

reificator• 7 years ago

Note that a wider knowledge base can lead to a deeper understanding simply by having more possible connections between ideas. Our brains love connecting the dots.

knight17• 7 years ago

Generally this is true, but I think you are being dismissive by throwing this truism at his note taking attempt. The point of keeping a personal wiki, is tonote the things that has come to his attention and not to forget it and to come back to it later. Writing things down gives it a concrete form. Sometime I even force myself to write down things that I read and that is a reasonable cure for my binge reading procrastination. Even if you think it as just a glorified bookmark manager, it is more useful than your browser's bookmark manager . Many people who do not maintain a wiki may not realise that knowledge is incrementally gained and by having a wiki (or any place really) to note these things makes the process transparent and recallable.

camillomiller• 7 years ago

A vast superficial knowledge, along with a good memory, the ability of making meaningful connections between far away domains is a scarcely distributed skillset and a quite valuable one in today's Western world.

dTal4• 7 years ago

I'd like to believe this were true. Personally I've found it very difficult to find paid work that allows me to exercise even a fraction of my general knowledge. My best results so far have been with underfunded startups who are trying to do too much with too little - they need people who can tackle a different challenge every week, because they can't afford to hire specialists. But it's not a spectacular way to build a career.

Of course there are other kinds of value than monetary.

austhrow743• 7 years ago

However wordly wisdom can help you gain better models to process reality through.

https://old.ycombinator.com/munger.html

PurpleRamen• 7 years ago

Yes, but on the other side there is a chance to gain knowledge on a higher level, because of comparing different things and finding the common patterns. But this only really works well when those things are similar enough to have common patterns.

And from experience I think it's true that at some point one should move from being a jack of all trades to become a master of some things. But as big as the world has become today, the road to this has become even longer. I think today it's not so unusual anymore to search some years or longer for your calling to master.

kryptiskt• 7 years ago

Knowing a little about a lot of things allows you to generalize over them and learn new things faster.

For example, if you have dabbled in C++, Java and Python you are better placed to learn a new language than if you have exclusively used one of them. Even if your knowledge of that goes way deeper.

quickthrower2• 7 years ago

Not true. So if you are a JS developer who knows React and Vue you could learn Angular (same kind of thing) or learn Haskell (different) or Systems programming (different), and I assert the latter two things would deepen your knowledge of JS more than learning the library because they allow you to see JS through another lens.

codemati• 7 years ago

I really like this idea. I may steal it.

Thanks for sharing.

robertpelloni• 7 years ago

https://nathanwailes.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/MTOVT/overvie...

This is my friend's wiki which also deserves some attention I think.

black-tea• 7 years ago

I hope he has that information backed up locally. It scares me when people invest so much time and effort into contributing to a closed platform.

kjksf• 7 years ago

I do a similar thing at https://blog.kowalczyk.info/ (under "My external brain"), e.g. section on programming: https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/d61b4f94b10d4d808d3d238a...

I build a custom toolchain to generate it.

All the content is stored in Notion (which is the fastest way I found to write and edit content).

I wrote a Go program (https://github.com/kjk/blog) to convert that to html and deploy as a static site to Netlify, on their generous free plan.

I also generate the rest of the website (mostly blog) from content in Notion.

Since the code is open source, others can adopt it.

cpach• 7 years ago

Interesting! What is Notion?

tomonocle• 7 years ago

https://www.notion.so/

greyskull• 7 years ago

Looks like it's this: https://www.notion.so/

It wasn't clear to me how the data was exported, but it seems the author built his own library: https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/88aee8f43620471aa9dbcad2...

5_minutes• 7 years ago

Just hate another subscription service.

namanyayg• 7 years ago

I've had great luck using notion to start developing a personal wiki, seems like we're going to see more of Notion -> JAMStack work in the near future.

nikivi9• 7 years ago

This is really cool. One of the reasons I don’t use Notion is I love how portable raw markdown is as a format and that I can use Sublime Text with Vim mode to edit everything (which is super fast unlike Notion).

I also built a few workflows to retrieve information to both edit and consume my wiki easier.

https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/other/wiki-workflow

NicoJuicy• 7 years ago

Almost everything I know/find interesting is on http://handlr.sapico.me

HTML is possible through a tag, but adding Links is just faster then writing it down. Managing it through hierarchical/multiple tags makes it even more easier.

There's a bookmarklet for the browser and I can share it on Android through Tasker and autoshare

galfarragem• 7 years ago

I simply use a github repository but instead of being "everything I know" is kind of "everything I'm (actively) learning and can't find (minimalistic compiled) elsewhere". I have less will to document stuff that I already know or stuff that is easy to find in a palatable form.

https://github.com/archimodels/learning-notes

poisonborz• 7 years ago

Its interesting to see how people reinvent this conept continually. This is cool and certainly useful for slices of knowledge, but I think sadly technology is still not at a point where this would be universally feasible.

Links and text is lightweight and searchable but rather fragile (because of external dependencies) and incomplete. I use a filesystem for this purpose, but that would be still cubersome to effectively share - I wish we'de be at a point where hundreds of gigabytes/mixed form of media are easier and faster to sync and manage.

nikivi9• 7 years ago

Some more interesting discussion on personal wikis and workflows:

https://lobste.rs/s/ord0rg/does_anyone_else_keep_their_own_k...

hk__2• 7 years ago

Why are those called wikis? “personal wiki” sounds like “collaborative website but with only one user”.

detaro• 7 years ago

Probably because the term "wiki" is now also used for any website being made using a wiki engine.

mark_l_watson• 7 years ago

Beautiful project.

If I understand the author’s motivations, they are likely to have written and maintain this largely for their own use. I also keep a lot of notes about things I know and information I may want to refer back to, but, I don’t have my notes in a form that would be of much use to other people.

bibyte• 7 years ago

I got really inspired by it a few months ago and created my own repository. Thank you for the idea OP.

based2• 7 years ago

linked to https://github.com/learn-anything/learn-anything#readme

aj_g• 7 years ago

Really cool project. How do you differentiate between things that have been too internalized/are too obvious and things that are worth writing down? i.e. you don't have a section for basic algebra, because I can only assume you know that pretty well.

nikivi9• 7 years ago

In similar vein to this tweet (https://mobile.twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/10272457592326...) I mostly try to organize files by topic. Some topics I didn’t come across so have no notes/links to share. Other topics may be included inside other files.

Before starting this wiki, I already got some experience in organizing and visualizing knowledge in some way with the Learn Anything project.

aboutruby• 7 years ago

move files around until it feels right

Which I find true too, modulo obvious conventions like bin/ doc/ public/ etc.

Paul_S2• 7 years ago

When they design a human like robot they should give it this wiki to learn how to be more human. Or is it the other way round?

dannyw• 7 years ago

Curious: what do you do for a living?

Paul_S2• 7 years ago

And where do you live where rent is 450 euros a month?

nikivi9• 7 years ago

Den Bosch in Netherlands

nikivi9• 7 years ago

I am a software engineer. But I am trying to branch to other areas too where I can create value like music or art.

azappella• 7 years ago

I created a github repository[1] for my personal knowledge base. There are other people doing this too[2]

[1] https://github.com/azappella/knowledge

[2] https://github.com/RichardLitt/meta-knowledge

decasteve• 7 years ago

Very cool. My thoughts went to the series Buckminster Fuller did called “Everything I Know”. [1]

What inspired you to do this?

[1] https://www.bfi.org/about-fuller/resources/everything-i-know

nikivi9• 7 years ago

I wrote about my inspiration of starting both Learn Anything and this wiki in 2017 as a journal entry in the wiki itself.

https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/looking-back/2017

mjklin• 7 years ago

Also: Jerry’s Brain [1]. As far as linking ideas, TheBrain software is unmatched IMO. Cross-platform and well maintained too.

[1] https://www.jerrysbrain.com

indogooner• 7 years ago

This is pretty comprehensive. How do you manage to capture learning across devices? For instance when I find some interesting link on my mobile, I read and save it to Pocket but I don't like typing on mobile so I don't capture the gist of it like I do on desktop. And now my Pocket items are so bloated that I have no idea how to organize.

nikivi9• 7 years ago

I try to process everything on my macbook as I am much faster on it. So usually I send myself stuff to Telegram’s saved messages and process it later on mac.

I also use Ulysses on the phone in cases I need to make quick edits. More details here:

https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/other/wiki-workflow

rmkrmk• 7 years ago

If you're on iOS, I can't recommend working copy highly enough: https://workingcopyapp.com

It's an awesome git client (event git-lfs) with an editor + preview engine built in, it also provides everything iOS can offer regarding 3rd party app/scripting integrations.

polymath_potato• 7 years ago

This is very cool. I am working on a similar project since past 2 weeks but also plan on providing the resources(at least those which I think worked very well for me) to readers. It is kind of a no-nonsense guide to learning anything. Very inspired by this. Thanks

Quequau• 7 years ago

Back when I was getting my degree and was reading & writing a lot I got really enamored with the idea having an extensive repository of everything I had read or learned or simply come across and found interesting.

There are all sorts of software packages designed to facilitate this, I used DevonThink for a fairly long time. However, it never turned out to be nearly as useful or fulfilling as I had imagined going in and truth be told I just couldn't maintain the self discipline that the curation requires.

So now I have this ginormous unused data store that I don't want to mess with but nevertheless still can't bring myself to delete.

MarcysVonEylau• 7 years ago

On the other side of the spectrum we got "Things I don't know as of 2018" [1]. I really appreciate when people share what they do and don't know.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18780065

alexpetralia• 7 years ago

Using a system of personal knowledge management (PKM) has been a huge boon for me. Just the act of jotting down all my ideas whenever I have them (Google Keep), then dedicating time to structuring/curating them into an organized format (Microsoft OneNote), and then being able to quickly access them in the future has helped my retention and creativity immensely. I just see patterns I never would have recorded or remembered otherwise. Sometimes it's a pain to dedicate a few hours every weekend to structuring all this information but I've found the long term benefit to far outweigh that cost.

fartcannon• 7 years ago

Aren't you worried that google or Microsoft will deprecate your personal library? Google isn't exactly good at keeping non-gmail programs in good shape and my original MS One note files simply do not open anymore. Do you at least keep a plain text file somewhere?

It just seems like such a delicate choice of software to use for something like your personal knowledge. Certainly a wiki of some kind would be better?

opan• 7 years ago

I had a similar thought to this. I was shocked that he was willingly and publicly making proprietary software such a part of his life, and I thought of emacs org-mode, but maybe he doesn't like that sort of workflow. I've only barely used org myself, but I've seen a lot of thoughtbot talks and such that make me feel like bringing it up in case someone goes farther with it than I did.

patrickk• 7 years ago

Interesting. After reading Siver's writing on this topic[1], and your comment, this is really something to get into.

Every once and awhile I'll re-read something that I "should" have retained and internalised (by my own standards) but that hadn't sunk into my long term memory.

[1] https://sivers.org/dj

j7k62• 7 years ago

Great work! I did something with a similar approach, although it's just kind of a knowledge base for myself build with Jekyll and a little search function, called "My Sysadmin Cheatsheet": https://docs.j7k6.org

Did it mainly for myself, because I was tired of having to google for the same problem more than once, but decided to make it public to kind of share my knowledge with others.

bloopernova2• 7 years ago

This is fantastic! I love the live search results feature.

I don't suppose you have your source available with a free license?

EDIT: wait, I see it: https://github.com/j7k6/docs.j7k6.org

j7k62• 7 years ago

Thanks! I'm actually thinking about releasing it as a standalone Jekyll theme some time.

chdaniel• 7 years ago

Niki's wiki, right?

foxhop• 7 years ago

About 10 years ago I wrote wiki software called Pylowiki (Pylons/Python) which I still use occasionally to write notes that don't really fit in my personal blog.

Demo of it here: https://www.foxhop.net

fretflip• 7 years ago

Another digital commonplace book. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace_book

Waterluvian• 7 years ago

What's the best way to get up and running with something like this that's really easy to maintain?

maliker2• 7 years ago

I just throw everything in to text files, .pngs or .pdfs in a synced folder and find stuff by searching. One day I will try to organize.

albertshin• 7 years ago

This is what I do but that "one day" never seems to come...

aizatto• 7 years ago

He actually uses Gitbook https://www.gitbook.com/

I’ve been doing the same too https://www.aizatto.com/why-gitbook

chiefalchemist2• 7 years ago

Thanks for sharing both, but especially the second link.

There you said: "Organizing a lot of pages is difficult, even if nested..."

Any chance you've done, or know of an article titled something like: "GitBook - If I Knew Then What I Know Now"?

The idea is ultra-intriguing. But before getting started it would certainly help to not make the same mistakes others have already made.

tia

tnolet3• 7 years ago

Am I the only one here that thinks this is all a bit creepy? The technical bits I get, but the parts on general life advice, especially the chapter on “seduction” give me a very bleak image of the OP’s actual life.

I might be wrong, the OP might be the happiest person ever: I’m just picking up a lot of different signals from this project and the writing in it.

s_y_n_t_a_x• 7 years ago

Consider this a diary + blog. You'd get creeped out reading anyone's diary.

I don't think OP is creepy at all, everything in here is normal and very honest.

mbrock• 7 years ago

Maybe the seduction page would seem more relatable if it actually were diaristic, talking about some real life experiences rather than “theory.”

leftyted2• 7 years ago

"Creepy" seems judgmental.

Many (most? all?) single, heterosexual men are somewhat preoccupied with how to be attractive to women (the reverse is also true). Is this news to you?

I also have a negative reaction to you speculating about how "bleak" his life is. I see this project as an attempt at absolute honesty. And if we're being honest, doesn't everyone's life contain a fair amount of bleakness? We all have insecurities. We all suffer tragedies. We're all wrong about various things. Your comment seems basically uncharitable.

I wouldn't attempt to be honest about "everything I know" publicly, on the internet. But I think a little charity is in order towards those who do make that attempt.

haukilup• 7 years ago

I really connected with your comment, and it mirrors my personal attitude. Particularly this part:

I see this project as an attempt at absolute honesty. And if we're being honest, doesn't everyone's life contain a fair amount of bleakness? We all have insecurities. We all suffer tragedies. We're all wrong about various things.

It is difficult to be genuine in this world, at least for me. I am afraid of people's judgements, whether real or imagined. It takes a lot of courage on the part of the OP to put out this sort of work, opening themselves and their beliefs to the scrutiny of anyone who chooses to read it.

tnolet3• 7 years ago

Yes, it's judgemental. This is a discussion forum and this is my view on it, this is how I "judge" it. But honestly, I'm all for weird & quirky.

However, my response to reading this post and the blog/wiki was very different than some of the more positive responses here. Ergo, the counter argument. I didn't get the positive weird/quirky feeling, rather the opposite.

quakenul2• 7 years ago

This sentiment really, really bothers me. Yes, in reality humans are all sorts of weird, creepy, flawed, not super happy or good looking.

If this is what you risk when sharing on the internet, then maybe highly curated social media and the anxiety that it brings had it right all along.

We need more of this. More weirdness, more real human beings. If you don't like something, move along. Also, you never are the only one.

tnolet3• 7 years ago

Well, this is a discussion forum. The OP posted this wiki a couple of times to HN. You get positive comments, you get other, less positive or more critical ones.

The "if you don't like it, move along" argument is fine in general and I support it 100%, but in this case a bit strange as posting something to HN is mostly to get responses / views / arguments, not just gushing adoration.

codingdave• 7 years ago

Anyone who attempts to blog every single thing in their life is opening themselves up to showing off the less-than-perfect aspects of themselves. And that is what this site amounts to - call it a wiki, call it a blog, call it whatever you like, it is someone who spends a decent amount of their life self-documenting it.

I'd be far more likely to call them out on their Minimalism topic, as they clearly are far to the extreme on how much time they focus on documenting their life, which is not a minimalist pursuit.

Still, it is a personal site for a fellow human being, and I've always maintained that if someone if self-aware enough to make specific decisions on who they want to be, and how they want to live, they deserve respect for that.

krelian• 7 years ago

This is great and extremely interesting. I imagine me and you (and many others here on HN) fall in the spectrum were many of our interests converge so reading some of the things you wrote is in many ways a different take on my own interests and chances of finding something new of interest are quite high!

Invictus0• 7 years ago

I like this a lot and I wonder if it could work for me too. Currently, I use the iOS Notes app as my thought archive but it's obviously not very organized. One thing I notice about this project is that there are a ton of categories. Having so many categories seems to be poor organization because you're likely to have thoughts that overlap categories. Perhaps tagging would be a better method of organization?

pastastickers• 7 years ago

I also started making YouTube videos as I find the video format is often superior to just text and words.

No. A thousand times no.

robobro• 7 years ago

This reminds me of the project ran by scholar Avery Morrow, "Everything Shii Knows."[0] He was an early Wikipedia administrator and one of the founders of 4chan. It was really interesting.

Great work OP, personal wikis are very cool! I wish there were more of them :(

[0] http://shii.bibanon.org/shii.org/knows/Everything_Shii_Knows...

bcaa7f3a8bbc2• 7 years ago

It reminds me of Shii's wiki, too. Shii's wiki is not only a personal knowledge base, but also a piece of important documentation of Internet cultural history.

Unlike the pre-2000 Usenet era, Internet culture today (e.g. those on 4chan) is no longer systematic documented, and for better or worse, it has a significant influence to the "cyberspace" as a whole. But when people started to realize the existence of something, it's already too late to understand it, original records have been all lost... And people started shouting, "what the hell is going on?"

Written documentation like Shii's wiki is the rare treasure of a time capsule, a snapshot of the time. At Shii's wiki, 2006 never ends.

I'm particularly interested in the history of online culture of obscure political movements (including those crazy conspicary theorists and nationalists). It'n not that I'm morally approving their actions, but to me, they seem to be a new type of social organization in the information age. From Shii's wiki, written by a intelligent person who's observing and thinking about these topics, you can see many indications in 2006 about the status of things and how it's connected to the present day.

For example...

* How the Web was Lost

http://shii.bibanon.org/shii.org/knows/How_the_Web_was_Lost....

This 2006 article describes the upcoming demise of Internet utopianism. The massive commercialization was transforming the Internet to just another TV, telephone, or a shopping mall. It also mentioned how giving everyone access to information can have the side-effect of disintegrating information authority and good writing, and causes the polarization of extremes in politics.

Will we ever have another Thomas Paine standing in the street, telling us common sense that changes our lives? Those are rhetorical questions. The answer is no. There will be no more shots heard round the world, no more revelations shocking the whole nation at once. The Web is a difficult freight train to turn around, and it will likely destroy those lines of communication.

These topics/issues are NOT identified and explored by the Internet personalities/analysis/mass media until recently.

For example, this article Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19038327) was only posted on HN, two months ago. And What the Hell Is Going On? Effects of Information Abundance. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19413852) was only posted on HN, 7 days ago.

Another example about politics.

* Project for the New American Century (http://shii.bibanon.org/shii.org/knows/Project_for_the_New_A...), Ron Paul (http://shii.bibanon.org/shii.org/knows/Ron_Paul.html), and NAFTA (http://shii.bibanon.org/shii.org/knows/NAFTA.html).

Before Donald Trump gets popular in 2016 on the Internet, this trend can be traced back to (1) free trade and globalization, (2) September 11th, (3) hatred of neoconservatism online, which caused (4) many to support Pon Paul, (5) whose supporters were later disillusioned. Then the (6) Great Recession and (7) Obama occurred. It was a very complicated chain of events, which were all partially documented in Shii's wiki.

The bottom-line is, I think Shii must have gained some deep insights about everything by reading through the endless shitposts on 4chan. I wonder if Donald Trump never ran for the president, it may take another 10 years for the common people to realize these issues.

If you are involved in some online community, please consider to create your personal knowledge base. 20 years later, it may become the only historical records of something.

petra• 7 years ago

Fascinating.

How does on go on to finding the next shii , telling us what will happen next with such accuracy and insight ?

mpoteat• 7 years ago

I don't see transparency as necessarily a virtue to optimize over everything else, or even a terminal good in itself.

Consider: Would it be wise for a CIA agent to run an "Everything I know" site? No, because they could be targeted through the information they blindly broadcast. I know you're not in such a high-risk role yourself, but do you never want to be important in the future, e.g. a CEO, founder, or a high-ranking software engineer?

Knowledge is power, and sharing unnecessary information to strangers will allow them to abuse it and you.

nikivi9• 7 years ago

I don’t share what I perceive to me truly sensitive data (passwords, contacts, notes on people, my Focus board with goals, todos etc

I only share information that I find there is no harm in sharing. If someone finds it of use, that’s awesome.

I wrote an article about this mindset shift at some point:

https://link.medium.com/DYIiO5RtiV

brazzledazzle• 7 years ago

It’s important to strike a balance though. We all know engineers and sysadmins who think that their value lies in the exclusive information/knowledge they have or data sources they control. Working with hoarders like that is toxic.

nikivi9• 7 years ago

Agree with this 100%! The one thing I always try to optimize for in life is ability to solve problems efficiently.

And in my mind this means empowering everyone else around me so they can build even more awesome tools and ideas.

cmauniada• 7 years ago

I personally struggle at times to grasp some concepts being a first generation immigrant does have some effects but it’s also the lack of a deeper level of communication. Seeing something like this spelled out in front of me with every single little point about a person’s life choices is actually a really interesting way of peeking into someone else’s mindset. So thanks for sharing.

andreygrehov• 7 years ago

This looks very cool. I would like to see a combination of Learn Anything and this wiki, but driven by a timeline, so that nodes align with the date they were created at. And then in addition, it would be amazing to have an option to explore other people's knowledge graphs. Is there anything like that?

johnnymonster• 7 years ago

first, just want to say this is pretty amazing!

xtracerx• 7 years ago

This is a great project. I've been attempting to achieve a similar goal but just by writing articles on topics I'm interested in. Even if its a synthesis of other things I'm reading or studying. Essentially trying to boil a subject down and re-explain it in a compelling way to help cement the knowledge.

Inu• 7 years ago

I detect traces of Jordan Peterson. ;)

goombastic• 7 years ago

Anyone else use a paper notebook and writing long form? I somehow feel that it helps with recall/refresh better than a lot of the wikis Ive tried out? A lot of the times, one look at the page brings backs a photographic memory of the context under which those notes were made. Type/electronic note taking doesn't seem to cut it for me.

GaryNumanVevo• 7 years ago

I'm a huge fan of writing in a paper journal, for more important stuff, i.e. blog posts, video scripts, I'll use my Surface Pro + some OCR to get a rough draft converted.

Something about the physical action of writing makes me retain information better.

caffo• 7 years ago

I do something similar at http://www.rodrigofranco.com/ — all using Orgmode exports.

theicfire• 7 years ago

I love this! I'm a big knowledge hoarder myself. My brain is mostly written down in workflowy. I hope the day I die I'll be able to give friends/family members this one bug massive doc for them to peruse.

joelx• 7 years ago

I also did this on joelx.com. See my philosophy links at top.

Show HN: Everything I Know Wiki

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