Show HN: A friendship-centric journal
github.com
github.com
The human-readable (Markdown) database format is clever. The friend identification algorithm is simple and elegant and sounds pretty effective. And the natural language input format.
Every one of these decisions is "bad" in the sense that they aren't perfect or could cause problems down the line, but it seems like they all work just fine for the intended purpose. So let me suggest that more designers and developers consider the scope/scale of their problems and try to choose simpler options (even "hacks") when they make sense.
And re: the post title, thanks for the tip—it seems "journal" has even more meanings than I thought! I wanted to avoid "diary," which in my experience often has childish connotations. Perhaps the awkward-sounding "friendship log" is the best descriptor...
These days it should be integrated with an address book or customer relationship management software.
Thanks for making me rethink how I interact with the world.
Are there annoyances with having an update command like this?
1) People who regularly use one or a couple of package managers who can update all packages with a few commands.
2) People who regularly use packages from a variety of many different package managers, for whom running `update` for each one would be more cumbersome than just running updates on the packages themselves.
I don't know which way I lean, but I don't see the harm in having a self-update in the package so long as you can also update via gem, but maybe I'm way off-base.
I'm not totally sure what you mean by "profiles," but you can see all of the activities you've done with a friend like this: `friends list activities --with 'Grace Hopper'` and you can see a graph of your relationship over time with: `friends graph 'Grace Hopper'`
I suspect by "profile" you really mean what the second question is getting at around storing more information. I haven't committed to anything in particular in that vein and I like how this program is currently very lightweight UX-wise. (I want it to encourage users/me to be social and maintain relationships offline.) That being said, I've been thinking a lot about lightweight ways to intelligently incorporate location data as well, so that (for example) if I'm visiting a city for a weekend I could query for friends in that city to do things with.
Do you have other ideas? I'm very very open to suggestions!
> friends will automatically figure out which "Grace" and "George" you're referring to, even if you're friends with lots of different Graces and Georges.
How does this work? For example, if I have two equally good friends named "Grace", how can "friends" guess which one I'm talking about?
Currently, it looks at all of the past activities and in particular how often groups of friends appear together. For instance, if my activity is:
"Grabbed burgers and fries with Grace and George."
It will pick the "Grace" and "George" that appear most often together. In the case of a tie, or when there is only one name to match, it picks the ones who are closer friends (which for our purposes means they've been in more activities).
This works even for large groups, and it will brute-force every combination of all of the names with multiple friend matches to find the set with the highest score (based on pairs of friends, so a group of 10 friends will be matched correctly even if no activity has yet had exactly those 10 friends together). The brute force algorithm hasn't been slow enough to warrant any sort of constraint satisfaction optimization.
I've found this algorithm to work almost every time, because I find I usually refer to people (verbally and mentally) in groups ("Mark, Jane, and Stacy from work," "Jack and Jill's wedding," etc.), or use last names when I have more than one friend with a given first name and the one I'm referring to isn't the one I'm closest with (e.g. "Grace" would refer to my close friend Grace Hopper, while I might say "Grace Kelly" to refer to my acquaintance to clarify that it's not Grace Hopper).
I'm interested in ways to make this smarter still though, and/or better UX to allow the user to correct mistakes. Very interested in suggestions here if you have any!
Mostly posting these stats because it was interesting for me to count them and see for myself. :)
It was :-)
Thank you for the number.
Simular to your own thinking, the "suggest" feature is why I built this in the first place, but sadly it has gotten the least amount of love because I had to first build the foundation so it would have friends to suggest in the first place.
If you have any suggestions (heh) for how to improve/expand upon this feature, I'm all ears!
I've been dealing with a lot of recruiters over the past year. I even wrote my own Rails app: https://github.com/klenwell/recruiters-on-rails.
I have found it pretty useful in tracking the ones I deal with more substantively but one use case I have had trouble dealing with is in initial encounters and deciding whether it is even worth the effort of adding a new recruiter to my app. I get enough recruiter spam that the cost of simply filling in the form on my app to add each recruiter could be prohibitive. Nevertheless, I'd like to keep a record with any recruiter I deal with, even if it is just spam or template email.
I currently have a de-facto solution that involves the autocomplete feature in Gmail search and Mailchimp mailing lists. But I can see this solving this problem much more neatly and coherently. And as a Ruby gem, I could imagine even integrating it with my Rails app.
Great work!
In particular I'd love to hear how this works as a standalone Ruby library (the `Introvert` class should help you more directly than the shell commands), since I tried to separate the internals from the command-line interface (which is in bin/friends) but I think that separation is somewhat blurred at the moment.
After two weeks, she was disappointed because i failed to reach the goal. I was able to get intense communication to only three of my friends. But i got my problem right: All of these empty feeling was because i didn't have enough interaction with other.
I didn't have adequate evidence that i was that lonely. By writing a journal, i knew that i barely made sufficient interaction with other; far below the threshold.
(Disclaimer: i am an ambivert)
# how to deal with couples
$ friends add "John and Martha Smith"
$ friends add Sister
$ friends add Brother-in-Law
Location sensitive friends - Don't remind me of friends in New York when I live in LA. Similarly, if I am visiting my mom in Toronto, remind me of friends living in Toronto. I know facebook and similar services attempt to do something like this.
Locations is one of the next big areas I'd like this to incorporate, but many of my ideas are fuzzy so any thoughts are (as always) appreciated!
Consider that the complex network which is considered the ego network (a la the sociologists) is really considered a complex network, just like the overall global social network: radical inequality in the degree structure, clustering and triangle formation, radical inequality in eigenvalues of adjacency matrix, critical percolation to a giant component, durability to random insult but not attack, synchronizability.
Therefore, it will seem in low-friendship times that a radical prioritization is needed and that the durability to random insult should be used to deal with deep friends only. However, the global structure of the ego net must be maintained also by weak friendships, and weak relations are of the utmost importance in doing anything (see Granovetter's work).
As for the operation of getting the friends, fifteen or twenty readings of K. Johnstone's Impro should suffice.
I'd also be interested in hearing more about how your system works if you're willing to share!