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Comment by caf | Hacker News Reader

The value of writing comments intended for your future self was confirmed in a strange way for me: I once found myself googling some faintly obscure question of systems programming, and soon found an article that answered my question perfectly. At that point I noticed with considerable surprise that I was reading a web archive of a Usenet posting I had made myself, some 10 years prior - of all the people to randomly run into on the Internet, your past self is one of the strangest.

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This goes to show how useful it is to share your knowledge. You never know when you might need it back. :)

That's happened to me, but unfortunately I've mostly found my old questions, not my old answers!

I've had this happen to me a few times, but usually it's "I've answered this before for someone else, and now I have the same question. What was my answer again?"

Heh, I was helping a colleague with some question, and I wasn't really sure about the answer, so we Googled and checked out the top hit on StackOverflow. Wound up being a question that I had answered a couple of years earlier, and forgotten the answer in the meantime.

I've actually done the next stage: researched a problem, found a really helpful Stackoverflow answer, which it turns out I had written, which was a reply to a question which it turned out I had also written.

The only disappointing thing being that due to causality constraints, I was unable to upvote past me's answer or further past me's question, which was a shame as they were both really useful.

Yes, and it is weirdly unsettling too... seeing how you used to phrase things differently.

I've gone back and referred to this (Emacs code browsing tips) http://www.kirubakaran.com/articles/efficiently-browsing-tex... many times. Definitely helps to take some time and write. Even if you aren't helping anyone else, you're definitely helping yourself. https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/you-should-write-b...

In my case this is complicated by the fact that there's someone else with the same name who has both significant professional overlap and a similar writing style. There are a couple of times I've been half way through an archived mailing list post wondering how I managed to forget an answer so completely before scrolling down far enough to see his .sig at the end.

That's been occurring to me for a while with SO questions. I get about halfway through and begin to recognize the writing style. :)

I have this with stackoverflow sometimes :p

Same here. Also my old blog posts.

My weirdest one was when I was searching for an answer to a progamming question and ended up finding (and then contacting) my "long lost" cousin (the name was fairly unusual).

Turns out he became a programmer too.

This has happened to me more times than I would like heh. Makes me realise the fallibility of memory.

Ha, this actually happened to me just yesterday believe it or not. :D I looked up something and turns out it's 21 years old me who asked it in Stackoverflow four years ago.

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