Comment by tinktank | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tinktank | Hacker News Reader

Not sure about startup but -- I'm unable to retain minutia in my brain for long (weeks, months, years) periods but the industry I work in requires it. Examples include:

How many queues does X have? How many are write-only queues? How many can be reconfigured to become wider queues? What are the protocols supported by Y? Which version of the protocols are supported?

I would like a tool, - accessible at my fingertips (through a keystroke), regardless of which Window on my Windows (or Linux) desktop has focus - Allows me to search/add/delete for "Facts" which are associated with "Values" - Will show me results in real-time (as I type, auto-suggest etc) - Easily dismissed by ESC once I've looked it up - Able to add/delete on the fly (through a keystroke); will take input as text and as CTRL+V from clipboard. Text, images, paths, etc supported - Scales to 500K+ items - Is able to bring up suggestions fast (<=100ms) - Able to export to common (CSV, XLS, etc) formats

Bonus points for: - Being able to extract this information automatically from PDFs, JPGs etc

If something like this exists, let me know!

I would change this up: does the industry you work in really require this level of detail? Is this an expectation you’ve set for yourself?

Maybe it does and if so I don't want to discount that, but a lot of me doubts it. I think you want to have an answer to these questions instantly available, but have you stopped to consider whether the people asking the questions expect that? And, if they do expect that, are they being reasonable?

A well-presented "I'll look this up and get back to you" type of answer is often acceptable. To me, the idea of this level of intensity is unsustainable.

I'm going to take a wild guess and assume you're in engineering. If so, I recommend you find some reading on what Sales Engineers do in situations where they're asked curveball questions.

My default thought is that anyone expecting you to know everything instantly is probably being unreasonable.

You could try my app, it’s free.

https://paperbirch.app/notes/notes.html

The main trick is to turn "facts" that exist in your head or possibly in a program's address space into something more concrete/searchable/discoverable, like a log line, source comment, manual entry, etc.

Otherwise, your database of 'facts' and 'values' will inevitably become out of date if you try to maintain it out of band.

We're in a golden age of note taking so I'd check out some of the stuff in the "second brain" space. Obsidian, in particular, is like an IDE for notes that you can customize (e.g. note templates, YAML front matter, plugins that will parse the frontmatter and generate tables dynamically, etc)

Emacs with org-roam? Bonus question left as an exercise for the reader...

Evernote, Obsidian, ...

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