Live data from Hacker News

Digital Tools I Wish Existed

jborichevskiy.com

51–60 of 73 posts

Re: Digital Tools I Wish Existed

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The details of what I record (in another comment[1]) might be idiosyncratic and uninteresting to you. Those details aren't important. The important point is that so much information belongs in multiple places. A single statement, let alone article or book, might regard all of economics, justice, common sense and beauty. It might be about parsing, Haskell, and keeping data types flexible. I'd like to be able to search…

How often do you look stuff up that's older than say a week? Personally, I'm kind of glad to soak up information as I go and being able to just forget everything else. As opposed to constantly feeling the need to tag, sort, archive, reference, cross-reference, keep track of information, that future self will to 99.9% never actually need. Yet, I wonder whether use cases start to materialize, once you start using it...

Projects and how-to notes, pretty regularly. Abstract concepts like comedy, maybe yearly. It's definitely an art, knowing what to bother ingesting into the system. I have erred on both sides.

Federation could reduce the hurdle -- both reducing the need to ingest, and the difficulty of doing so. Borichevskiy (author of article that generated this thread) nods at the idea of using someone else's index of books. Such labor-sharing could be much more general.

I don't want to suggest, though, that ingesting something is a waste of time if you don't review it. That's true of boilerplate metadata like ISBN numbers. But for original ideas, or for paraphrased insights gleaned from reading online, I find that sticking it into the graph produces value at the moment it's done. The rigor of compressing an idea to a few words, and determining which adjacent concepts it bears on, and how, has helped me understand things.

(Teachers often ask their students to state things in their own words. It's like that, but faster and harder. Like punk rock for essays.)

Re: Digital Tools I Wish Existed

#52

Hode[1] (the Higher Order Data Editor), which is free, solves some of these problems. (I wrote it. It's still evolving but it works already.) > metadata is hard Hode lets you encode and search any kind of information -- entities, relationships bewteen entities, relationships between relationships, relationships of any arity (number of members). Hash, the language in which one adds and searches for data in Hode, is ve…

This looks interesting. If I may ask a naive question, why did you decide to build this as a text editor rather than tooling on top of an existing text editor (the parallel that occurs to me being Emacs and org-mode)?

Re: Digital Tools I Wish Existed

#53

Hode[1] (the Higher Order Data Editor), which is free, solves some of these problems. (I wrote it. It's still evolving but it works already.) > metadata is hard Hode lets you encode and search any kind of information -- entities, relationships bewteen entities, relationships between relationships, relationships of any arity (number of members). Hash, the language in which one adds and searches for data in Hode, is ve…

This looks interesting. If I may ask a naive question, why did you decide to build this as a text editor rather than tooling on top of an existing text editor (the parallel that occurs to me being Emacs and org-mode)?

Not naive at all! Making it a console app was easier just easier. I'd love it if Hode plugged into Emacs.

Re: Digital Tools I Wish Existed

#54

The "Queue Management for Inbound Content" section is exactly what I really want as well, so much that I've just started building it instead of waiting and hoping. For me, this is the lynchpin: > "all content I think my future self would appreciate me consuming." (emphasis mine) Current content feeds are optimized for engagement (ie. advertisement load) and thus won't conceive of a "future self", only what your curre…

> I think that content feeds need to incorporate goal-orientation and move away from right-here-right-now orientation I think part of the issue with the current inbound content queues (e.g. Instapaper, Pocket) is that they treat all content the same. There is a difference between content I need immediately from content my future self will find interesting in the future. there should be a way to rank/aggregate content…

Agreed. These queues also seem like a natural place for a "show me this content again in x months/years" pipeline/priority/feature.

Re: Digital Tools I Wish Existed

#55

The "Queue Management for Inbound Content" section is exactly what I really want as well, so much that I've just started building it instead of waiting and hoping. For me, this is the lynchpin: > "all content I think my future self would appreciate me consuming." (emphasis mine) Current content feeds are optimized for engagement (ie. advertisement load) and thus won't conceive of a "future self", only what your curre…

> The "Queue Management for Inbound Content" section is exactly what I really want as well, so much that I've just started building it instead of waiting and hoping.

Personally I just use mails for that.

More specifically, I have a VPS with a dovecot mail server, and I wrote a set of tools to write almost anything to any of my maildir folder (shameless self advertising: https://github.com/sloonz/ua). Most of it is RSS feeds, but I also receive a daily summary of operations in my bank accounts (with boobank from weboob), new posts from a forum I’m subscribed to (with boobmsg's tapatalk plugin from weboob), and new posts from reddit

Re: Digital Tools I Wish Existed

#56
post #28

I can't help thinking that resurrection of Google Reader (and RSS readers in general) and del.icio.us might help.

How popular was Google Reader really? I don’t think many people I know irl ever used it. There’s a handful of known or referenced RSS readers now. Combined they just aren’t that popular. I have a hard time buying that Google Reader was super popular.

There’s a few bookmarking services now. Some startups like linked in the article. And Pinboard has been around for a long time. Delicious isn’t needed anymore. I use Larder.io and Pinboard.in myself

Re: Digital Tools I Wish Existed

#57
From 2014 to around 2018 I was part of a team that was heavily invested into bringing these concepts to reality. What we accomplished was amazing and I still use some of them tools day-to-day, unfortunately we had to stop.

What I wanted to share is that it was extremely hard (and ultimately impossible for us) to accrue a critical mass of people that is willing to use these things AND pay for them. We reached a few hundred paying customers; but we were 6 guys working on this full-time, so that means salaries and overall we were losing money like nothing else.

That aside, I would do it again if I could, particularly now that the "standard tools" of the internet have become useless with time. Example, Google never gives me what I want anymore and they're removing the URLs now from the results (why?).

If someone reads this and want to kickstart some kind of "internet renaissance" with me, you can reach me here: alex@.com

Re: Digital Tools I Wish Existed

#58
post #14

This is taking your digital life very seriously. I feel like saying he should have less screen time and live in the real world cause such details don’t matter at all. But what a hypocrite that would make me.

It can also be a case of wanting the means to that end. Some have certain minimal needs either professionally or simply personally and the more efficient that process, the more time there is for everything else.

Re: Digital Tools I Wish Existed

#60
post #47

The "Queue Management for Inbound Content" section is exactly what I really want as well, so much that I've just started building it instead of waiting and hoping. For me, this is the lynchpin: > "all content I think my future self would appreciate me consuming." (emphasis mine) Current content feeds are optimized for engagement (ie. advertisement load) and thus won't conceive of a "future self", only what your curre…

I have been emailing links to myself tagged with a one word keyword for the last decade. They focus on things that I or my (unconceived, unborn) son or daughter would like to read, learn or understand “later”. I have about 10k sitting in my inbox (including this one) that I plan to convert into a critical path and consumption order once I take a sabbatical. Sometimes the best systems are the simplest.

What kind of algorithm/system do you think you'd use to convert them into a consumption order?
Post reply on HN