achamess
I'm Alex, the author of the blog post. I'm so honored that my post made it here to HN. :) Obviously the itch I'm trying to scratch is one that a lot people are.
The suggestions here are very helpful. I think all of us have learned to cobble together a suite of tools to do what we want, but it seems that few are totally satisfied. I don't think what I've proposed, or what other have proposed is insurmountable - we do far more complex things with computers. But given the idiosyncrasies of our individual workflows, maybe it's unrealistic to think we'll find a solution that everyone likes.
I'm going to compile a lot of the suggestions from this thread and around the web in a follow up post on the blog.
I want to quickly address some of the comments on Anki. I've been using Anki for a few years now, mostly to handle the massive amount of knowledge in medical school. I've written about it here. Anki has caught on in med school significantly.
http://drwillbe.blogspot.com/2011/08/anki-guide-for-medical-...
There is no much interest in Anki for knowledge management (and retention), that I'm working on an eBook for med students about it - http://www.learningmedicinebook.com/
I used to think that everything I came across should live in my brain. And so, I went a little crazy with Anki in the beginning, capturing EVERYTHING I read. That quickly wore me down, and I had to become more discriminating. A lot of novice Anki users fall into a similar trap. I realized that not everything is worth occupying my headspace. I've been trying to come up with criteria for what should and shouldn't live in my head, but regardless, I've come to point where I want to offload most of the heavy lifting to my PKB. The really high yield bits from my PKB, however, will become Anki cards, so that the most important things I remember, and serve as 'crumbs' back to the details in my PKB. I'm going to flesh this out further in future posts. I love the enthusiasm here for spaced repetition. It's very powerful.
Last thing, regarding the comments on a better collaborative environment for Anki decks. I completely agree! I love Anki as much as the next guy, but there are some serious deficiencies. Collaboration being one of the them. I still think Anki is the best in class right now, but there is a new tool on the horizon that I'm excited about, and I think it will overtake Anki eventually.
It's called Memorang: https://www.memorangapp.com/. I'm enthusiastic about this app, and while it doesn't have everything I need yet (I think the scheduling could be better), the collaborative environment is excellent. It's worth checking it out. Perhaps one day I can integrate with my PKB.
Anyway, thanks again for checking out my post. The discussion this post has spurred is very fruitful.