HPI VS concise-encoding

If this is interesting to you, you should check out the interesting work that karlicoss and others have done with "Human Programming Interface" [0] / [1].

I've been kicking this idea around for quite a few years and have gone through multiple iterations before finding HPI and tossing out all my work in favor of building off theirs.

HPI is a great platform to build your own stuff off and benefit from all the work that has already been done because imo building a good foundation is the hardest part. Sean Breckenridge's HPI-API is super interesting and useful, could likely be worked into this search engine concept, quite sure Sean actually has both newsboat and Firefox modules already made.

I wrote modules of my own and made an authentication wrapped HPI-API and a GraphQL instance but currently in the middle of an infra move so nothing super cool to show off.

Lots of interesting stuff in collecting and leveraging your data. If any of this stuff catches your eye, I highly encourage browsing karlicoss' exobrain [2] because there are some interesting things in there.

[0]: https://github.com/karlicoss/HPI

[1]: my own stuff, not trying to step on Karli, just wanted a 3 letter org for my stuff: https://github.com/hpi

[2]: https://beepb00p.xyz/myinfra.html

My version of this: Human Programming Interface https://github.com/karlicoss/HPI

It's a bit heavier on the automatic data aggregation side, but has some manual inputs as data sources too.

This is my approach!

I'm using HPI [0] as a sort of universal API for almost all of my data (manual notes, bookmarks, instant messages, internet comments, etc)

Then I use it in tools like Orger [1] and Promnesia [2] which function as my second brain

[0] https://github.com/karlicoss/HPI

[1] https://github.com/karlicoss/orger

[2] https://beepb00p.xyz/promnesia.html

I suppose HPI[0] kind of is that? ;)

A community repository would be super nice for those. Something along the lines of DefinitelyTyped[1], all managed through git, easily integrates with other stuff (like shown on npmjs.org when the @types package exists), allows maintainers to "own" the adapters they contribute. It's really the N adapters * T time per adapter that really makes it hard for one person to do. That plus monitoring API changes/flakiness of each adapter to make sure the data is still solid.

[0] https://github.com/karlicoss/HPI

[1] https://github.com/DefinitelyTyped/DefinitelyTyped

I'm working on tools/projects to unify, access, interact and use my personal data for quantified self, knowledge management, etc.

A couple of examples:

- https://github.com/karlicoss/HPI#readme

- https://github.com/karlicoss/promnesia#readme

Would very much love to discuss it with other people, collaborate etc.

Emacs is born as a human-computer interface, not specifically a PIM/PKM systems (Personal Information Management systems, Personal Knowledge Management systems), those are born at Xerox Parc and they never really took off, unfortunately. You can find a small intro like https://doi.org/10.1145/1480506.1480524 you can find many research articles and thesis on the ACM and other places, try https://karl-voit.at/tagstore/downloads/Voit2011.pdf by /u/publicvoit today in Emacs the most popular of such systems in org-roam, a wrapper/accessing tool for org-mode, witch is probably one of the most powerful, Memacs is another classic one that do something more and something less, Dimitri Gerasimov have it's own public HPI https://beepb00p.xyz/hpi.html with Grasp and Promnesia extensions for Emacs and probably many others do exists but they are used/developed by a small community and while in the "old" wiki book before, "personal note/evernote boom", now "zettelkasten boom" interest keep being there documentation especially at newcomer level is nearly zero... There are research papers, few whole books, tons of articles, but nothing like a complete and simple learning path...

Their author have developed a more complex script collection (HPI, https://beepb00p.xyz/hpi.html) witch is a bit confuse, but seems alive and for certain aspects do extra things then memacs (https://github.com/novoid/Memacs).

Side note: His Promnesia and HPI projects are just mind blowing!

Some of my favourites:

- "5. Life engine" and "92. Personal Data API"

   I'm working on this in "Human Programming Interface" :) https://github.com/karlicoss/HPI#readme It's far from solving these in general, but it works for me very well.

"Local time" is time zone metadata. I've written a fair bit about timekeeping, because the context of what you're capturing becomes very important: https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ce...

This is basically why I ended up rolling my own text date format for Concise Encoding: https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ct...

ISO 8601 and RFC 3339 are fine for dates in the past, but they're not great as a general time format.

This looks similar to https://concise-encoding.org/

Dogma was developed as a consequence of trying to describe Concise Binary Encoding. The CBE spec used to look like the preserves binary spec, full of hex values, tables and various ad-hoc illustrations: https://preserves.dev/preserves-binary.html

Now the CBE formal description looks like this: https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/cb...

And the regular documentation looks like this: https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/cb...

Dogma also does text formats (Concise Encoding has a text and binary format, so I needed a metalanguage that could do both in order to make it less jarring for a reader):

https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ct...

https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ct...

Hey thanks for taking the time to critique!

I actually do have an ANTLR file that is about 90% of the way there ( https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/tree/master/an... ), so I could use those as a basis...

One thing I'm not sure about is how to define a BNF rule that says for example: "An identifier is a series of characters from unicode categories Cf, L, M, N, and these specific symbol characters". BNF feels very ASCII-centric...

It's still in the prerelease stage, but v1 will be released later this year. I'm mostly getting hits from China since they tend to be a lot more worried about security. I expect the rest of the world to catch on to the gaping security holes of JSON and friends in the next few years as the more sophisticated actors start taking advantage of them. For example https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ce...

There are still a few things to do:

- Update enctool (https://github.com/kstenerud/enctool) to integrate https://cuelang.org so that there's at least a command line schema validator for CE.

- Update the grammar file (https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/tree/master/an...) because it's a bit out of date.

- Revamp the compliance tests to be themselves written in Concise Encoding (for example https://github.com/kstenerud/go-concise-encoding/blob/master... but I'll be simplifying the format some more). That way, we can run the same tests on all CE implementations instead of everyone coming up with their own. I'll move the test definitions to their own repo when they're done and then you can just submodule it.

I'm thinking that they should look more like:

    c1

Ugh Unicode has been the bane of my existence trying to write a text format spec. I started by trying to forbid certain characters to keep files editable and avoid Unicode rendering exploits (like hiding text, or making structured text behave differently than it looks), but in the end it became so much like herding cats that I had to just settle on https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ct...

Basically allow everything except some separators, most control chars, and some lookalike characters (which have to be updated as more characters are added to Unicode). It's not as clean as I'd like, but it's at least manageable this way.

You might get a kick out of Concise Encoding then (shameless plug). It focuses on security and consistency of behavior.

https://concise-encoding.org/

In particular:

* How to deal with unrepresentable values: https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ce...

* Mandatory limits and security considerations: https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ce...

* Consistent error classification and processing: https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ce...

In the above example, `&a:` means mark the next object and give it symbolic identifier "a". `$a` means look up the reference to symbolic identifier "a". So this is a map whose "recusive link" key is a pointer to the map itself. How this data is represented internally by the receiver of such a document (a table, a struct, etc) is up to the implementation.

> - Time zones: ASN.1 supports ISO 8601 time types, including specification of local or UTC time.

Yes, this is the major failing of ISO 8601: They don't have true time zones. It only uses UTC offsets, which are a bad idea for so many reasons. https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ce...

> - Bin + txt: Again, I'm unclear on what you mean here, but ASN.1 has both binary and text-based encodings

Ah cool, didn't know about those.

> - Versioned: Also a little unclear to me

The intent is to specify the exact document formatting that the decoder can expect. For example we could in theory decide make CBE version 2 a bit-oriented format instead of byte-oriented in order to save space at the cost of processing time. It would be completely unreadable to a CBE 1 decoder, but since the document starts with 0x83 0x02 instead of 0x83 0x01, a CBE 1 decoder would say "I can't decode this" and a CBE 2 decoder would say "I can decode this".

With documents versioned to the spec, we can change even the fundamental structure of the format to deal with ANYTHING that might come up in future. Maybe a new security flaw in CBE 1 is discovered. Maybe a new data type becomes so popular that it would be crazy not to include it, etc. This avoids polluting the simpler encodings with deprecated types and bloating the format.