Comment by andrey_utkin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrey_utkin | Hacker News Reader

The concept of viewing activities as DAG is going to be huge and ubiquitous, I think.

This applies to any activities of humans, organizations and computer systems, and hybrids of those three. One of the most fascinating epiphanies I've had recently is exactly that the purposeful behavior of these three kinds of actors can be decomposed as DAG with a relationship meaning "contributes to fulfillment of a need".

So congrats on the launch to the author, and expect a lot of competition, including me :)

I am working on a FOSS tool storing TODO actions and activities in an SQL table, and enabling DAG relations between entries. https://github.com/andrey-utkin/taskdb/wiki

I have actually built my DAG (or, as I like to call it, a semilattice) going all the way up to fundamental categories of needs as described by Maslow.

Sorry that I have no live demo container or juicy screenshots yet, that will be in place in a week or two, please email me at (my HN username) at fastmail.com if you want an update when I publish the containerized demo system.

> The concept of viewing activities as DAG is going to be huge and ubiquitous, I think.

What do you mean "is going to be"? Activities as a DAG is how it's already done. This is how Work Breakdown Structures are generally constructed. Tools like MS Project can display them as Gantt charts or network diagrams or as an outline (where you can set the dependencies used to create the Gantt and network charts).

Very few human tools utilizing this concept are common to any degree.

Github Issues doesn't have issue dependencies at all.

Salesforce "Action Plan" view is a plain list, no deps at all, as far as I have seen.

Todoist doesn't do dependencies.

Bugzilla does dependency graph, wow: https://bugs.gentoo.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=706426&hid...

I guess JIRA supports deps, but I don't think it's the tool which people here would want to use to be able to decompose their big undertakings, especially personal ones.

TaskWarrior supports deps, but it's not a mainstream tool and deps were fairly hard to use in it AFAIR.

It may not be common in the tools people here use, but it's common in the tools used by major engineering organizations.

My point isn't that it's a bad idea, it's that it's not a novel idea. PERT is another way of graphically representing activity. If you aren't concerned with the time, it's your DAG.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_evaluation_and_review_...

Haha looking forward to the competition ;). TaskDB sounds good, I'll keep an eye on it. Your approach to keeping the entire history of the graph is a good one, I'm using Datomic in Intention mainly for this reason.

I do hope DAGs become more commonplace, I think a lot of areas (e.g. project management) could benefit from using them.

True, I don't see why Intention and taskdb couldn't grow into enterprise, or groupware project management systems. Sometimes I'm even thinking about peer to peer exchange protocols for this kind of data (e.g. if your spouse or collaborator uses it too).

why acyclic though?

like, if i want to "feel better" and "lose weight", then "run a marathon" might contribute to both of those.

> why acyclic though?

What extra usefulness you'd get from using cyclic graphs? I don't see the point yet.

> like, if i want to "feel better"

I don't see "feel better" in the example graphs anywhere.

> and "lose weight", then "run a marathon" might contribute to both of those.

This is up to a person setting the goals. And the goals themselves are just the means for satisfaction of fundamental needs (which I found very helpful to outline explicitly in my personal DAG).

For one person, it might be of high importance to lose weight, it will be their long-term concern and they will try different approaches, including running marathons.

For another person, weight might be fine for their life and needs, but running a marathon may be important for them, say, it was their New Year resolution. They may have identified that if they could lose just a few kilograms, their marathon performance and experience would be much better, so they want to do it. In this case weight loss is an activity contributing to the higher level goal.

A third person may indeed be after feeling good about their body, and both weight loss and running marathons would be activities of the same rank, contributing to the satisfaction of their desire to feel good about their body.

A fourth person may absolutely see no point in one, or both of running marathons or losing weight, because they already do tennis or swimming or whatever and/or they are slim enough for their needs.

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