4 ms·

(I'm the guy he refers to in that post.) If anyone reading this builds software like this, and releases it publicly, whether free or for sale, please let me kn

by sivers 5y ago

(I'm the guy he refers to in that post.) If anyone reading this builds software like this, and releases it publicly, whether free or for sale, please let me know. I'd be happy to send people your way. Because of https://sive.rs/dbt https://sive.rs/dbt I get a few emails a week from strangers, asking if my software is public yet, or if not, what else I would recommend. (And I might never make my software public. It's too tied-in to my now-complex PostgreSQL system of everything.) I'm definitely going to send people to Jakob's post here now. But if interested in this subject, please email me here: https://sive.rs/contact https://sive.rs/contact

runjake 5y ago
Glad to see you back -- at least for a couple comments, Derek!
- sivers 5y ago
  Thanks Jake! I read HN every day, but almost never log in to post.
christiangenco 5y ago
Hi Derek! My implementation of your system is just a bunch of markdown files. The title of the file is a friend's name, the frontmatter at the top keeps info about them that doesn't change too often (ex: birthday, address, kids names), and each time I chat with them I add a section with an H1 title that's the date we chatted (ex: "# 2022-02-14\n"). My notes about the chat go under that heading. Based off of that structure I can do a bunch of cool things with simple scripts: - print out a list of upcoming birthdays, half birthdays, birthdays on Jupiter, etc. of all my friends - print out a list of friends I haven't contacted within my desired `frequency` (the subject of this post) - create or open the friend file containing a particular name from the command line (ex: `,people Sarah` prints out all the Sarah files I have and asks me which I'd like to open) I think plain text is the way to go with something as personal as a system for keeping track of your friends. I was inspired to go this route by your post on journaling[1]: > If digital, use only plain text. It’s a standard format not owned by any company. It will be readable in 50 years on devices we haven’t even imagined yet. Don’t use formats that can only be read by one program, because that program won’t be around in 50 years. Don’t use the cloud, unless you’re also going to download it weekly and back it up in plain text outside that cloud. (Companies shut down. Clouds disappear. Think long-term.) I've been chewing on how to make this system something that might be used by other people who don't know how to use the command line. Something like the way Obsidian[2] works might make sense. 1. https://sive.rs/dj https://sive.rs/dj 2. https://obsidian.md/ https://obsidian.md/
- samatman 5y ago
  Not at all to bikeshed your tool, which I'm sure works just fine, but this is the sort of application where GNU Recutils really shines. https://www.gnu.org/software/recutils/ https://www.gnu.org/software/recutils/ I mention it because it doesn't get the attention that it deserves, as a format midway between relational data in database and plain-old-text.
  - sundarurfriend 5y ago
    The tooling (or lack thereof) is the only problem I have with recfiles. It quickly gets unpleasant entering the (repetitive) metadata every time (and the CLI entry isn't much better). I get the impression from the recfiles page that the Emacs plugin is the main supported one, and maybe that one has a good UI flow that makes it usable, but I don't use Emacs. I thought/hoped visidata would solve the problem. It has decent support for recfiles display - just being able to get a tabular view of the data is very useful - but the editing support is pretty unintuitive and full of footguns.
    - samatman 5y ago
      I'm glad you mentioned it because it's the format I would like to see get more attention, and I agree that tooling around it is holding it back. The repetition is genuinely useful if editing or adding one or two entries by hand, but tools for ingesting data into recfiles format, working with it in bulk and so on, I agree with you, they're primitive. My daydream is a tool like jq for recfiles, with something in front of it like pandoc for structured data, so that I can put my choice of JSON/TOML/YAML/TSV/CSV through the filter and work with it in recfile format. The real prize would be a solid library for importing and exporting SQLite data in recfiles form. The mapping is obvious and the metadata would allow for preservation of more of the underlying schema than the standard outputs, which are CSV and a collection of literal SQLite commands which you can execute to insert the data. I think pairing SQLite with a standard recfiles protocol would be exceptionally powerful, a workflow where SQLite reads a collection of recfiles into an in-memory database, slices and dices at leisure, and exports the changeset as patches over the recfiles? Yes please.
jtolmar 5y ago
I've been working on one of these on and off for a while now! It'll eventually be up on gosayhito.com. I'll try to remind you when it's done, but you can also probably put the website in as a monthly thing to check on.
ssivark 5y ago
You might find Perkeep interesting: https://perkeep.org/ https://perkeep.org/

by sivers 5y ago

runjake 5y ago

Glad to see you back -- at least for a couple comments, Derek!

sivers 5y ago
Thanks Jake! I read HN every day, but almost never log in to post.

christiangenco 5y ago

Hi Derek! My implementation of your system is just a bunch of markdown files. The title of the file is a friend's name, the frontmatter at the top keeps info about them that doesn't change too often (ex: birthday, address, kids names), and each time I chat with them I add a section with an H1 title that's the date we chatted (ex: "# 2022-02-14\n"). My notes about the chat go under that heading. Based off of that structure I can do a bunch of cool things with simple scripts: - print out a list of upcoming birthdays, half birthdays, birthdays on Jupiter, etc. of all my friends - print out a list of friends I haven't contacted within my desired `frequency` (the subject of this post) - create or open the friend file containing a particular name from the command line (ex: `,people Sarah` prints out all the Sarah files I have and asks me which I'd like to open) I think plain text is the way to go with something as personal as a system for keeping track of your friends. I was inspired to go this route by your post on journaling[1]: > If digital, use only plain text. It’s a standard format not owned by any company. It will be readable in 50 years on devices we haven’t even imagined yet. Don’t use formats that can only be read by one program, because that program won’t be around in 50 years. Don’t use the cloud, unless you’re also going to download it weekly and back it up in plain text outside that cloud. (Companies shut down. Clouds disappear. Think long-term.) I've been chewing on how to make this system something that might be used by other people who don't know how to use the command line. Something like the way Obsidian[2] works might make sense. 1. https://sive.rs/dj https://sive.rs/dj 2. https://obsidian.md/ https://obsidian.md/

samatman 5y ago
Not at all to bikeshed your tool, which I'm sure works just fine, but this is the sort of application where GNU Recutils really shines. https://www.gnu.org/software/recutils/ https://www.gnu.org/software/recutils/ I mention it because it doesn't get the attention that it deserves, as a format midway between relational data in database and plain-old-text.
- sundarurfriend 5y ago
  The tooling (or lack thereof) is the only problem I have with recfiles. It quickly gets unpleasant entering the (repetitive) metadata every time (and the CLI entry isn't much better). I get the impression from the recfiles page that the Emacs plugin is the main supported one, and maybe that one has a good UI flow that makes it usable, but I don't use Emacs. I thought/hoped visidata would solve the problem. It has decent support for recfiles display - just being able to get a tabular view of the data is very useful - but the editing support is pretty unintuitive and full of footguns.
  - samatman 5y ago
    I'm glad you mentioned it because it's the format I would like to see get more attention, and I agree that tooling around it is holding it back. The repetition is genuinely useful if editing or adding one or two entries by hand, but tools for ingesting data into recfiles format, working with it in bulk and so on, I agree with you, they're primitive. My daydream is a tool like jq for recfiles, with something in front of it like pandoc for structured data, so that I can put my choice of JSON/TOML/YAML/TSV/CSV through the filter and work with it in recfile format. The real prize would be a solid library for importing and exporting SQLite data in recfiles form. The mapping is obvious and the metadata would allow for preservation of more of the underlying schema than the standard outputs, which are CSV and a collection of literal SQLite commands which you can execute to insert the data. I think pairing SQLite with a standard recfiles protocol would be exceptionally powerful, a workflow where SQLite reads a collection of recfiles into an in-memory database, slices and dices at leisure, and exports the changeset as patches over the recfiles? Yes please.

jtolmar 5y ago

I've been working on one of these on and off for a while now! It'll eventually be up on gosayhito.com. I'll try to remind you when it's done, but you can also probably put the website in as a monthly thing to check on.

ssivark 5y ago

You might find Perkeep interesting: https://perkeep.org/ https://perkeep.org/