A Meta-Layer for Notes | Hacker News Reader

A Meta-Layer for Notes

julian.digital

The author is correct that notes function best when they aren’t soloed, but that’s true of applications in general.

Why do mail programs maintain their own database of messages? It used to be quite handy to organize your projects by directory or tree, with mail files, presentations, code etc all kept together, greppable and with some choice of which program to run. Now if I am working on a couple of projects I have to search around (was that a slack note? An iMessage? Mail? Or perhaps it was a comment in a document?

That's an interesting observation. An e-mail client that would allow you to route e-mails to different folders on your system (not folders within its own filesystem or database) would be very powerful, especially for developers. Do you know of such a program?

It was quite standard in the “old days” — I just read my mail in Emacs from around ‘78 to around ‘98 and filed my mail in directories all over my system. Mutt, elm, mm etc all worked this way iirc. I blame the arrival of the PC for the silo approach to apps in general.

As for simply delivering them to other directories: that’s pretty easy depending on what very agent you use (Postfix, qmail, sendmail etc). They are all designed to support that. It’s the clients that struggle.

On a similar vein, how easy is it to programmatically process emails? I receive a report every day as an email attachment that I would like to process automatically. Right now, I’m doing part where I open the email and download it manually.

You could retrieve it from your mail server via IMAP (say with tiny program like fetchmail) and pope them through whatever program you like.

I run my own server so info stuff like this automatically as the mail comes in.

The people saying “use smtp” don’t know what they are talking about: SMTP is the protocol for delivering mail to a host. You want to process the message as or after it arrives.

I was able to process my Gmail with a simple python script that accessed email via SMTP (using smtplib, I think it was) a long time ago, it can't be too hard.

At the time I was only experimenting with it for an idea I never fully realized, creating a system for video games to automatically play games asynchronously using email instead of a server (also you could see it was your turn again just by email notifications), thus being able to survive in perpetuity as long as SMTP remained a thing, but I could see using it to do what you're suggesting as well.

The doesn't sound very difficult if you can get the email via SMTP. I'm sure there's dozens of APIs that can do it, and in the realm I'm most familiar with, I think you could use Rails' Action Mailbox to take incoming email and process it. It's overengineered for a simple task, of course.

You could use Mailgun for this: https://www.mailgun.com/email-parsing-software

The proposed functionality of attaching a note to a semantic context (eg. a note attached to a person, popping up in email, LinkedIn, chat, etc.) is well taken, but the spatial aspect hasn't been thought through enough.

Attaching a reminder to a door only captures part of the intended context, it very much matters whether you are reminded upon leaving, arriving (or both). In meatspace, we can capture that additional context by placing the note on the inside or outside surface of the door (placing it outside also has the effect of making the note public, but we can ignore that aspect initially).

I think that in order to show up in most of (and mostly just in) the relevant contexts, true digital sticky notes would have to be both pretty smart and shoulder-surf your activity, which could be quite invasive.

Relatively benign example: should you be reminded of the 5-year-old note you posted for a hotel if you're booking a flight to the city the hotel is in? Does it matter if the note's sentiment was positive or negative? How about your note related to a person who lives in that city? After booking the flight? While making a hotel reservation in that city? How about while reading a Wikipedia article related to the history of that same city? What if the hotel is a historical landmark? What if the person is a historian?

All too easily, you could end up wading through a flurry of your own notes, reducing the odds you will notice the one you would want to see, but a false negative ends up negating the utility of the note entirely.

You can categorize notes and show or hide whole categories as "layers" over whatever you are doing, but now you are mostly back to having to interact with a silo to deal with that.

You can achieve this with Amna! (disclaimer: I built it). The described sticky notes approach can actually fall flat on two levels. One is that notes lack order. We learned this from our user interviews. Users lose track of post it notes all the time. Things just “slip”. The other side effect is that it can be overwhelming to have a bunch of notes everywhere. You’re back at square 1 if notes exist in the apps. Rather, the app must exist in the note (idk if that makes sense, I can clarify)

With Amna, you start with a task, and for each task start pulling information. Email is just one of many sources of action. Everything from a GitHub PR to Slack Message is an action waiting to be taken and notes to write. A todo app that connects everything better can be really powerful. It becomes the point of entry to get running. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23780781)

I love that this problem space is getting more attention! I totally agree information is way more useful in context and in a common place. A meta layer would be very interesting, but I struggle to see how it would be technically possible to implement (outside of the browser) -- maybe for anyone except for Apple. We've been approaching a similar problem to what hey is tackling from a different angle, at https://www.twobird.com

We built a sub-100ms OCR system for Mac and built an accompanying app that sort of did this, but eventually pivoted away. It’s on my GitHub though, two different versions of it.

This looks very ingesting. I’ll be giving it a go

The obvious answer to the title* "er, sticky notes" would miss the more interesting observations of the article, particularly wrt spatial and event based note taking.

Mentioning this, as the title might be off-putting in the seeming banality of its question; it's not necessarily about Stickies or similar products..

*EDIT: original title here was "What’s the digital equivalent of sticky notes?"

Reading this reminded me of part of Bret Victor's 2006 "Magic Inc" [1]. The utopia Victor envisions is somewhat related to this post, but taken further and extended to all kinds of data - not just notes.

The idea is fairly fundamental - ultimately, each application should know about whatever is relevant in their context, especially if other applications already know it (Victor goes into applications making smart guesses through ML methods or sensor data as well, but a big part of it is having access to data from other apps).

Of course, if you actually want to get all your apps to talk to eachother without causing a babylonian mess and/or compromising privacy completely, things get extremely tricky. But I do feel like OSes could develop further in this regard, at least for fairly standard data like events, notes, etc.

1. http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/

I just submitted this for the related (but oft-forgotten) project - Lifestreams:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24391846

another gem: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aura/

On target.

Would be a killer Chrome extension if such an extension can work across domains in this manner. Take my money.

This looks like what you want.

A couple of weeks ago, the extension Promnesia was on the first page of HN (Haven't used it, but looks interesting)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23668507

Its github goes more to the point of what it can do https://github.com/karlicoss/promnesia#readme

Working on something similar for a while now. Soon!

I'd be grateful if you could notify me when you release what you're working on. Email is in profile. Thank you :)

The best I have found is ... not like sticky notes, but rather to form a habit of using lists, a few alarms, and a calendar (and anki or the like), using whatever tools (such as my http://onemodel.org , but there are many choices). This way I make a "self program" so I am reminded of the right things at the right times and not distracted by them otherwise. Some people also appreciate the whole GDT thing.

Edit: I also treat email like a to-do list, but it defers to my knowledge management system (linked in my parent comment) which tries to be complete like the OP suggests, but is AGPL, and has a similar but broader vision (not all features present yet, but hoping, and I use it every day). In it, every bit of knowledge is treated like the real-life "thing" that it is, and linked with everything else desired.

I've hard the first part for years with boomerang (there are other similar things, and google baked in most of the functionality) to get emails back when you're ready for them.

Also, I would send myself an email within the email thread.

Things that have been possible for quite some time.

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