12 ms·

Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository

238 points by burtonator 8y ago

sj4nz 8y ago
Sounds very zettelkasten-esque.
- cedex12 8y ago
  even after visiting the website, I don't really understand what zettelkasten is really. Is it a software or a standard of sorts?
  - pps 8y ago
    Polar has absolutely nothing in common with Zettelkasten. Zettelkasten is a method of creating and storing notes, optimised for creating connections between topics and for creative thinking. The creator of this method done that on indexed cards. It's hard to explain this in few words, this book is doing this better than anything I saw online https://takesmartnotes.com/ https://takesmartnotes.com/ . You can also try this article if you don't want to pay http://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/luhmanns-zettelkasten.html http://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/luhmanns-zettelkas...
    - cedex12 8y ago
      Ah, sorry, I actually meant zettelkasten's website, as linked by a sibling comment. Thanks for the links!
- miguelrochefort 8y ago
  Context: https://zettelkasten.de/ https://zettelkasten.de/
  - kawera 8y ago
    Similar but OSS: https://fsnot.es/ https://fsnot.es/ Happily using it for a few months now.
- hprotagonist 8y ago
  which itself sounds rather like org-mode without emacs.
gallerdude 8y ago
I like the idea of the Personal Knowledge Repository, but I don't like having a 3rd party app for it. 3rd Party Apps are good for creating and editing content, because there's a lot of different ways things can be made. Yet there's no great reason to use one to store content, storing content is basically the same, and OS's do it well.
- apostacy 8y ago
  I feel exactly the same way. But a few years ago I basically found a solution the works for me. I have a pile of interlink Markdown files in a git repo (you can use Dropbox also), and I can use various tools to access it. If you are willing to use the zettelkasten method, then you can use one based on Sublime Text[1], or one that is a standalone program[2]. You can use a more free-form wiki, with a simple plugin for Sublime[3] These Markdown files will work a slew of different wiki servers, including Gollum, the wiki used for Github, Gitlab, and BitBucket, and are only one step away from vim-wiki. But, since they are simple text, you could even access them on most other platforms. [1]: https://github.com/renerocksai/sublime_zk https://github.com/renerocksai/sublime_zk [2]: https://github.com/renerocksai/sublimeless_zk https://github.com/renerocksai/sublimeless_zk [3]: https://github.com/unqueued/sublime-notelink https://github.com/unqueued/sublime-notelink
- DelightOne 8y ago
  > Yet there's no great reason to use one to store content, Depends upon internally-created data or external. If you talk about exposing internal data there‘s /Interoperability Problems/. You don‘t have to think about other apps creating invalid files. State stored won’t vanish because another app decided it‘s not needed and ignores it during editing+resaving. And all the other interoperability problems you may encounter. If its external files I may agree.
- tylerflick 8y ago
  I'm not sure if it's an issue of 3rd party apps, but more 3rd party proprietary data stores. PDF is an open standard, and as long as POLAR isn't creating entries that are out of spec, your notes should transfer across all PDF viewers/editors.
dangoor 8y ago
I recently started using Evernote again after a couple of years living in other tools (e.g. DEVONthink). Since I last used it, Evernote has gotten better at saving "simplified" formats of articles to my notebooks. The ability to do so on desktop _and_ mobile devices is pretty key for me. Evernote lets me both capture and view on all of my devices. Any plans for a mobile app for Polarized? Evernote doesn't support annotations usefully, and the incremental reading feature of Polarized also sounds cool.
- Numberwang 8y ago
  Any darkmode for Evernote yet? It is useless without it.
franl 8y ago
@burtonator: Are in-app flashcards coming anytime soon? Love the idea of a PKR. Tried Anki for that purpose, but it just didn’t work well enough.
- burtonator 8y ago
  We could possibly have in-app flashcards but I want to wait until Polar 2.0 which will support web+mobile+table so that I can do cross device sync easier. For me having flashcards means having them on my phone.
kissgyorgy 8y ago
I use Wallabag on a daily basis for months now and never been happier. Polar seems more advanced at the first glance, anyone using it? What are the experiences with it?
- solarkraft 8y ago
  Downloaded it. Rather large app bundle. The experience I remember is wanting to archive a page, so: - Copying its link - Switching over to the app - Hunting for a way to add a page to the archive - A browser like window opening, pasting the link into the address bar, clicking an accept button - It rendering out the page, asking whether it looks okay - it did, so accepting - Opening the resulting PDF and it being completely fucked up. I gave up. I like the idea of Wallabag much more, but can't get the FF extension to work. Edit: Polar does offer a Chrome extension, but research about a FF version (the API is THE SAME) is hindered by me not being able to find any reference to the Chrome extension anywhere outside of the app. Idk, to me it just seemed fishy. I don't hate burtonator, I've just been frustrated. Why would I save my web pages as PDF anyway? That's an even more obscure, hard to process format. I tend to like the WARC format. Does Wallabag support a full-text search?
  - burtonator 8y ago
    > Polar does offer a Chrome extension, but research about a FF version (the API is THE SAME) is hindered by me not being able to find any reference to the Chrome extension anywhere outside of the app. Idk, to me it just seemed fishy. Wait. What seems fishy? I don't follow. I'm planning on revamping this entirely with more of this functionality done within the chrome/FF extension itself where we just capture what's already rendered without any of the above complexity. It's waiting for Polar 2.0 which is about 1-2 months away. > Why would I save my web pages as PDF anyway? That's an even more obscure, hard to process format. I tend to like the WARC format. Big misconception. It's not saved as PDF.. It's saved as a captured HTML format. We might do something like WARC in the future though.
jabberthemutt 8y ago
Can I easily use this to replace zotero, jabref, mendeley etc for citation management?
- burtonator 8y ago
  Still working on that part. I think I'm going to allow association of a DOI then lookup the full metadata and then allow you to copy the metadata in a citation format to the clipboard. Would that give you 80% of what you want? I did some analysis and 40-60% of PDFs have the DOIs embedded.
stuartbman 8y ago
I've tried a few document management solutions, but I can't get past the fact that annotating documents by hand is so much more satisfying, I can't angrily scribble or circle text when they're digital!
- walterbell 8y ago
  On iPad (and probably Surface) you can!
walkingolof 8y ago
I started use evernote for this, but it dawned of me after a while that if evernote went down, all my data, diaries, notes etc etc was to be locked in and I have to start over. Therefore I'm using org-mode, its just a UTF8 encoded file, even if org-mode disappeared over night, I can still read the data.
- dunham 8y ago
  Evernote isn't too bad - all the data is cached locally in xml files with attachments - one directory per document. It is almost xhtml - the top level content wrapped in an en-note tag and the images are en-media tags. I agree that it's important to be sure you can get your data back out of whatever you're using. And another benefit of something like org mode that uses text files as a backing store is that you can edit/consume them with whatever tools you want.
- nugator 8y ago
  AFAIK the Evernote client caches your notes locally in a readable file format. I back up that folder in case Evernote goes down.
- burtonator 8y ago
  This is why Polar is OSS ... you won't have this issue with Polar just like you wouldn't with org-mode. I like Emacs too and have written literall hundreds of thousands of lines of elisp (seriously)... I'm trying to make Polar usable for everyone not just Emacs users.
- bordercases 8y ago
  Look at org-noter if you want something as a substitute for polar with rough edges.
- dangoor 8y ago
  Evernote has an export format and a bunch of other tools can import Evernote exports, given how popular Evernote is. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good.
pps 8y ago
I like the idea and was using this for months, but finally gave up, document viewer (or however this pdf.js thing is called in english) lags every time I scroll and it's too annoying. Also overlays for selecting progress are messing with highlighting and re-reading. It could be showed instead simply as rectangle with borders, without this blue background, if that's possible and if not there should be other way to manage progress.
- burtonator 8y ago
  > the document viewer ... lags every time I scroll and it's too annoying. Also Even if you scroll down like 5px or if you scrolled multiple pages at once? How long was the lag? > overlays for selecting progress are messing with highlighting and re-reading. It could be showed instead simply as rectangle with borders, without this blue background, if that's possible and if not there should be other way to manage progress. Yes.. I'm planning on evolving this a bit. I didn't realize that people would be so annoyed by this and it isn't part of my normal usage. I read forward and the pagemarks lag behind my reading and highlights. I think I can implement a feature to poke through the pagemark to be able to annotate through it.
  - pps 8y ago
    By lag I mean it's not smooth, not sure if lag is a good word, I don't need to wait seconds for refresh, just milliseconds probably, but it's clearly visible when I compare it to built-in Preview app (I'm using Mac) or Chrome internal pdf viewer. The smallest scroll I can make is sometimes ok, sometimes not, but normal scrolling when I'm just reading stuff is always like that, like something is blocking rendering for a moment. It was completely smooth when I started using it (~7 months ago) but I don't remember when it changed to current state. I thought that it might be some problem with Retina screen resolution and changed it to open in low resolution mode, but it didn't help.
bachmeier 8y ago
AFAICT, this is for PDF files on your computer and websites converted to PDF. There's no option to add, say, markdown files or locally stored email files. Don't get me wrong, I've tried it out and it's awesome. I'm just not seeing how it's going to take off as a knowledge repository with its limitations. The last thing I want is yet another place I have to look for my files, and I sure don't want to have to keep things in sync with a repo that holds the rest of my files. I'm also concerned with the ability of this thing to scale. There doesn't appear to be any system for grouping items other than tagging. Maybe tagging works for others, but it's not something I trust (if I have hundreds of items and missed a tag, the item is lost). Definitely don't want this to be a negative comment. It's more "you're 95% of the way to an outstanding product, but I think the last 5% might be an obstacle to adoption."
- zild3d 8y ago
  Agreed, "Personal knowledge" needs to also include personal knowledge like self-generated notes, journals, and such
- sixtram 8y ago
  I've also downloaded this software and my impression is that it is far far from 95% to be an outstanding product. At least I bumped into small ui bugs the author should catched himself before a release. At the same time I agree with his idea that a knowledge base + spaced repetition is a good combination, however outputting spaced repetition into a 3rd party app is not a good idea. I see that burtonator is trying to push this product here every time a relevant discussion pops up, I don't have an issue with that. But I do think that this product is a long way from being useful for me in a daily setting. Right now it's nothing more than an electron wrapper around pdf.js and knowing how far I read a pdf.
  - llamaz 8y ago
    I started out with polarized, but then I moved onto just putting all my pdfs in a folder and highlighting them in adobe reader.
    - 8y ago
lcuff 8y ago
I started keeping favorite quotes in Hypercard back in 1987. I didn't pay attention when Hypercard went extinct 15 years later, and failed to do the work to extract the data. Now I keep info in text files and grep is my friend. No spaced repetition, but tags go in as grep-able raw text too. Will Polar, or Evernote, or any other system, be around in 30 years?
- mherrmann 8y ago
  What do you do about more structured data, such as Excel files?
  - lcuff 8y ago
    Great question: If it were just columnized data you could keep it in csv format, but Excel supports way more than that.
  - prepend 8y ago
    Excel is a zip of xml now, so you can do basic text searches within them.
- apostacy 8y ago
  It's not hard to extract the data from your hypercard stack, though.
- elviejo 8y ago
  "Will... any other system be around in 30 years?" Yes, Emacs. "The editor of a lifetime" https://youtu.be/VADudzQGvU8 https://youtu.be/VADudzQGvU8
- burtonator 8y ago
  > Will Polar, or Evernote, or any other system, be around in 30 years? Yes.. that's literally why I called it Polar. It's designed to be a permanent vault for your data. This is why it's Open Source.
prepend 8y ago
This would be neater as a self hosted system. I have a haphazard way of managing notes and docs that has too much overhead. I would like a squirrel program to store and retrieve more easily and will eventually just write one. I think we need more tools that rely on self-hosting cheap nodes for data where the owner has complete control. Knowledge management systems are really personal and if third parties go away then that is critically bad. I intend to keep this info for 50-100 years so need something that does a good job of just storing to git or whatever and then rely on different front-ends and things that can be run without any third party access to data. The iOS model is closest to this in terms of data and apps, but is not OSS and I spend so much time in front of a full computer so phone access only is too limited.
- ausjke 8y ago
  I'm using gitea to self-host, works well for markdowns and code, but bad for anything that is binary(pdf,media files,etc), because of git, which really does not fit for binaries, and git-lfs is a PITA to use still
  - prepend 8y ago
    I have something similar (private github, but will move to self host soon). The binary thing is a challenge for me as well as part of my filing includes always making copies of web sites and office and pdf to check for versioning and edits. I frequently try to remember or check if web sites changed info or released a new version so I need a link and a frozen copy. Git does not like this and gets real big, real fast.
  - rmkrmk 8y ago
    I do the same. I have a gitea instance and all my text saved in markdown in there. I also enabled full-text search so I can find it again. On mobile (iOS) I use working copy as a git client, which handles all files just fine (and also supports git-lfs). Most of the time I want to attach binary files to notes, so I thought about using a sync solution like NextCloud or FileRun (with syncthing) and just link to my files.
  - sjy 8y ago
ausjke 8y ago
very interesting, however: "We use cookies to track your usage. We use cookies to track your usage and to determine which features are used to improve the quality of Polar. Additionally, we track application errors which helps us find bugs and to prioritize which issues to fix. This data is sent to 3rd parties which provide the infrastructure necessary to provide the analytics services needed to analyze and store the data. We avoid sending personally identifiable information at all times." https://getpolarized.io/cookie-policy.html https://getpolarized.io/cookie-policy.html I am forced to click on "Accept" actually, which I don't like. Overall it looks like calibre to me, however Calibre does not do highlighting
- ausjke 8y ago
  the entire platform is based on Electron (Node + Chromium)
- burtonator 8y ago
  Polar Premium will allow you to disable tracking but you should enable it. you can audit the code but we only track what features you use and so forth. I can't build Polar without the analytics data as I don't know what's breaking and have no ability to optimize it and improve usability.
  - Aeolun 8y ago
    Maybe we should have an open source error tracking engine that can be self hosted. Too often I see this being the reason people freak out about using a product (only on hackernews though).
thinkersilver 8y ago
I liked the idea but couldn't quite get the anki workflow running smoothly. To be fair I tried this because of the anki integration but I don't think that's what it's meant for
- sa1 8y ago
  Indeed, it's painful to get notes into Anki currently. I would prefer if I could get any text selected into a new Anki note with minimum number of keypresses, rather than creating flashcards in Polar and then syncing them, which seems rather inefficient.
  - burtonator 8y ago
    I would like to make it more efficient for sure. Part of the problem is actually Anki. It's kind of janky and then there is the issue of firewalls that some people are running into which isn't fun. I'm trying to smooth out the UI a bit more but it's an iterative process.
ausjke 8y ago
A personal knowledge management app that can: 1. deal with various file formats(pdf,markdown,code,flashcards,etc) 2. easy to annotate, tag, highlight 3. works across web and smartphone 4. can be self-hosted and portable will be very valuable, I'm willing to pay for it if it exists, though an OSS version is optimal. No I don't want to store all my personal notes on any cloud storage so self-host is a must.
- burtonator 8y ago
  You will absolutely want cloud storage when I'm done with this and have the social functionality implemented. Read the linked article. I talk about this at the bottom. IMO 80% of the VALUE of this data is that you're collaboratively building your knowledge with others. My core hypothesis is that building knowledge is social.
docode 8y ago
Okok. The features are neat. But what we really need is Polar for EVERYTHING! PDF, docx, jpg, MD, ... All of them, like a new modern Filesystem. But with Metadata and auto OCR... That would revolutionary!
7e 8y ago
Why would I want spaced repetition for knowledge I don't use? And if I do use it, don't I get spaced repetition for free in the course of using it? It seems there are better uses for my time.
- Tharkun 8y ago
  I'm not sure what you're trying to say. You don't have to create flash cards. Polar just makes it easy to turn notes into flash cards, that's all.
- burtonator 8y ago
  The issue is exponential backoff off what your trying to learn. Spaced repetition handles the scheduling. You've learned something important yesterday and you might not forget it tomorrow or the day after but you might in six months. This is what spaced repetition gives you.
  - DecayingOrganic 8y ago
    A natural way to think about forgetting is that our minds simply run out of space. The key idea behind Anderson’s new account of human memory is that the problem might be not one of storage, but of organization. According to his theory, the mind has essentially infinite capacity for memories, but we have only a finite amount of time in which to search for them. The key to a good human memory then becomes the same as the key to a good computer cache: predicting which items are most likely to be wanted in the future. That it’s a perfect tuning of the brain to the world, making available precisely the things most likely to be needed. In putting the emphasis on time, caching shows us that memory involves unavoidable tradeoffs, and a certain zero-sumness. You can’t have every library book at your desk, every product on display at the front of the store, every headline above the fold, every paper at the top of the pile. And in the same way, you can’t have every fact or face or name at the front of your mind. “Many people hold the bias that human memory is anything but optimal,” wrote Anderson and Schooler. “They point to the many frustrating failures of memory. However, these criticisms fail to appreciate the task before human memory, which is to try to manage a huge stockpile of memories. In any system responsible for managing a vast data base there must be failures of retrieval. It is just too expensive to maintain access to an unbounded number of items.” From the book: Algorithms to Live By.
alexcnwy 8y ago
I've tried everything and I really like Dynalist (or any other outliner) as a personal knowledge repo / place to store notes and ideas. I find ideas do tend to be quite hierarchical and you can link between nodes if need be.
throway88989898 8y ago
You can already reopen PDFs where you left them in Adobe Reader : Edit > Accessibility > Setup Assistant > Set all accessibility options > Next > Next > Next > Next > Reopen documents to the last viewed page or Edit > Preferences > Documents > Restore last view settings when reopening documents
avivo 8y ago
Are you building on the web annotation standard? Or otherwise connected to the prior work here? https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-model/ https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-model/ It applies to PDF's also. More context: https://web.hypothes.is/blog/annotation-is-now-a-web-standard/ https://web.hypothes.is/blog/annotation-is-now-a-web-standar...
- burtonator 8y ago
  No.. I looked at it and I'm still considering it but I wanted to first get a Polar MVP launched and prove that people will actively use it. To be clear I was one of the inventors of RSS and Atom so it's not like I'm naive in this area... I just find that implementing standards can slow down a proof of concept that may or not be successful. Plus I need to review the spec to see if it's compatible with our model and I plan on iterating rapidly on our model and it might not match up with the standard.
burtonator 8y ago
Also, wanted to thanks all you guys for reviewing Polar and there's a lot of good feedback here. In a nutshell: 1. I'm working on more document formats including Markdown and ePub. 2. I'm working on some preliminary support for reference management so we can lookup the full reference info via DOI and have reference formatters for you to use for your research. Some of the DOI storage is already done. 3. I'm working on a webapp and mobile support. Probably a month away. 4. The captured web content isn't actually converted to PDF - it's actually a cached web archive. Full HTML is kept in your repo. 5. Polar 2.0 will be more web aware. You can annotate anything without actually having to store the full thing in Polar. We will just store a URL. 6. Pagemarks will be improved her shortly so you can toggle them on and off and possibly even highlight through them directly. 7. There are definitely small bugs and fit and finish issue we're working on. If you have an issue please report it: https://github.com/burtonator/polar-bookshelf/issues https://github.com/burtonator/polar-bookshelf/issues 8. Yes. Polar isn't fully self hosted but that defeats the point. My cure hypothesis is that knowledge benefits from being social which is the main thing I'm trying to test. By the time I'm done I think 95% of you would agree that keeping it private is insane as you don't benefit from the community. 9. If you like Polar please consider donating. https://opencollective.com/polar-bookshelf https://opencollective.com/polar-bookshelf ... we've received essentially zero Open Source contributions from the community and very little funding.
- dare2deviate 8y ago
  This is cool! I am working on something similar but a slight variation on intelligence augmentation and memory recall. Would love to chat with you, if interested.
  - burtonator 8y ago
    Sure.. jump on the discord: https://discordapp.com/invite/GT8MhA6 https://discordapp.com/invite/GT8MhA6
- dangoor 8y ago
  I asked about mobile in a sibling comment. > 3. I'm working on a webapp and mobile support. Probably a month away. Okay, that would likely be fine. I'd suggest at least creating a iOS Shortcut to save to your webapp because not being able to save via the normal share sheet would be a drag.
visarga 8y ago
It's slow on my mac. I suspect it's the pdf.js rendering engine.
- burtonator 8y ago
  would you mind taking a video? Some people are saying it's slow and I wonder if it's slow because of another issue that I haven't seen yet.
sigi45 8y ago
Like it and will check it out. Had similar thoughts and I named it knowledge graph. The center is you, than you tag books, lectures, wikipages and have a visual representation of all of your knowledge. I also imagined having your whole education in it and because it's a graph, you could import a path which you can follow. 1+1 needs to be done before you can do 1*1 etc. I thought about it while learning for a university course and a lot of time was spent on finding good material which explained a topic. And after the exam I started to forget stuff again. It felt really stupid. I wanna be in control on what I know, what I want to know and what I no longer need to know. And all tools out there are not that good. Anki is doing its job but nothing else. Memrise does it more playful but also misses stuff. Duolingo (most of online learning has this problem) feels more like 101 <topic>. How is it possible that 1000thands of universities record videos of lectures every year and are often paid by all of us (Germany for example) but all those videos have one or all of the following issues: - bad audio - bad video - horrible handwriting - no slides Should it not be possible to sit together and create small topics and build one ONE comprehensive learning page? ... Edit: and such a platform could not only benefit a lot of people it would also be financially a good deal. From 1-6 grade it could support parents and teachers, than teachers and pupils and later profs and students. Lots of knowledge doesn't change every year.
orpheline 8y ago
I've tried a number of approaches to a personal data repo: plain text files, custom database tools, dropping everything in a file folder... My current approach - which I really like - is vimwiki saving to markdown instead of the default .wiki. it's on a self-hosted NextCloud instance, giving me access across all my computers as well as my phone. It's not perfect - I'm extending it with some standardized project templates and other things - but everything's ultimately text; it's self-hosted, so not dependent on a third-party service that might disappear; and I can easily extend it to meet my requirements.
tptacek 8y ago
I would pay decent money for the version of this thing that automatically found all the PDFs in my Pinboard account and loaded them in.
- burtonator 8y ago
  I'm working on a better sync framework to easily drop in systems like this to discovery notes, documents, URLs, etc.
mvyo 8y ago
> maintaining all your documents in one place, annotating them with highlights, comments, managing your documents with tags, and maintaining key extracted knowledge via spaced repetition > I believe this is a new class of application I haven't used SuperMemo (the app that inspired Anki development), but looks like it has all these features plus tons of other stuff (https://help.supermemo.org/wiki/Incremental_learning https://help.supermemo.org/wiki/Incremental_learning). It has some flaws (not cross platform, doesn't support PDF directly, complex UI, and of course closed source), but I think it's unfair to claim "a new class of application".
- getpolarized 8y ago
  Everything new is inspired by something in the past. Literally nothing comes from whole cloth. I think the point I was trying to make is that we're going to see more of these types of apps.
ggm 8y ago
It is a problem about "me" but my problem in personal knowledge is not having it (ok: it is, but thats unavoidable) it's my lack of clarity about which of half-a-hundred models of classification to apply at any given time. I think this is why google free-text search is so powerful: you don't have to have an organizing principle, you just have to know a few key words, or a semantic construct which can be extracted from (meta) data. OTOH the chaos implicit in my desk (I use volcano filing) probably perpetuates online in this model.
- Aeolun 8y ago
  Since I couldn’t find anything about this. Is the volcano filing model where things simply get stacked up until they erupt?
  - ggm 8y ago
    Yes. the model is you stack things, and they form (cinder) cones, and the boring things are either buried, or slip off and fall to the floor, and what is left is relevant or interesting. It's very effective (at forming piles, at least)
slaymaker1907 8y ago
My favorite tools for this sort of thing have been TiddlyWiki as well as Scribble (Racket language). An essential feature present in both is that they both are incredibly hackable and customizeable since most products don't support enough organization for me. However, my main complaint with these tools is that while they are customizeable, it is sometimes nice to have a WYSIWIG since some notes I take will only every be looked at as I am writing them so having instant feedback is nice, even if the resulting document is imperfect.
- apostacy 8y ago
  I used TiddlyWiki for awhile, and it will always have a place in my heart. But it just wasn't portable enough for me.
qwerty456127 8y ago
I failed to find how to create notes (it should be able to create and interlink all kinds of them if it's meant to be a knowledge repository: notes attached do a particular document, attached to a particular place in a document and not attached to anything, all notes should be taggable). Lack of support for any formats other than PDF (it should at least support EPUB, all other formats if possible: AZW, DJVU, FB2, Markdown, single-file HTML) limits its usage for studying e-books. And it's annoyingly slow (but I'd consider this tolerable if it was really helpful). I just hope this is just the beginning and Polar is actually going to improve.
jively 8y ago
This is extremely cool, I've been wondering about how I can create subject matter repositories of various media types and then enhance that data with my own findings. What would be cool here would be the ability to reference between documents and notes, like you would with hypertext. Imagine you write an essay or blog post, and you want to instantly browse the citations and quotes you use. That document could live inside polar, maybe as a simple MarkDown editor. Either way I've downloaded and installed. I wonder if I can get some fancy PDF scanning gear so I can get book segments into it. /ramble
allochthon 8y ago
I am tackling a related challenge with Digraph, an app I'm working on [0]. My project is focused less on providing an infrastructure for learning and retention, and more on simply organizing the vast amount of information that each of us reads every day, month and year into a collection that is coherent and growing and that builds upon itself. The long-term vision is a crowd-sourced alternative to search engines like Google and Bing. But the short-term focus is on something targeted and immediately useful. > If the company that runs your PKR goes out of business you’re entire education might be in jeopardy. I'm dealing with this problem in part by making the Digraph source available under the MIT license. [0] https://digraph.app/ https://digraph.app/, https://digraph.app/about https://digraph.app/about
shdh 8y ago
I use standardnotes.org self hosted
equalunique 8y ago
Today I first discovered that Pocket, which is the integrated service associated with that odd icon in FireFox that I had never clicked on before. It's like Instapaper, which is also something I have never used. Both of those seem to be online services, like Polar, with APIs to support browser extensions, Android integration, and other stuff like that. I was pretty disappointed that FireFox integrated a service that was proprietary and not even one that was GDPR-compliant. I have been looking for a hackable alternative to Google Keep. In the past, Pinboard.io had served me well, but now I am looking for something more. I want not just to store bookmarks, not just to archive web pages, but really to have all these at my fingertips for analysis. I want to shift the balance I have between consuming new information and munging on the information that's already come my way. Polar seems to be a great alternative because it's a computer application that's 100% self-hosted. I would like something that could be run in a federated way, like Mastodon, but this is still _very_ nice. Since I own the data, I'm not worried about any limitations. I especially like that various forms of cloud sync are supported (looking at you, Syncthing). I see Electron bashed on HN from time to time. I have no opinion about it personally. Even if there were some noticeable overhead, the capabilities this offers are probably worth it. Super exciting. I'll give it a go.

238 points by burtonator 8y ago

sj4nz 8y ago

Sounds very zettelkasten-esque.

cedex12 8y ago
even after visiting the website, I don't really understand what zettelkasten is really. Is it a software or a standard of sorts?
- pps 8y ago
  Polar has absolutely nothing in common with Zettelkasten. Zettelkasten is a method of creating and storing notes, optimised for creating connections between topics and for creative thinking. The creator of this method done that on indexed cards. It's hard to explain this in few words, this book is doing this better than anything I saw online https://takesmartnotes.com/ https://takesmartnotes.com/ . You can also try this article if you don't want to pay http://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/luhmanns-zettelkasten.html http://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/luhmanns-zettelkas...
  - cedex12 8y ago
    Ah, sorry, I actually meant zettelkasten's website, as linked by a sibling comment. Thanks for the links!
miguelrochefort 8y ago
Context: https://zettelkasten.de/ https://zettelkasten.de/
- kawera 8y ago
  Similar but OSS: https://fsnot.es/ https://fsnot.es/ Happily using it for a few months now.
hprotagonist 8y ago
which itself sounds rather like org-mode without emacs.

gallerdude 8y ago

I like the idea of the Personal Knowledge Repository, but I don't like having a 3rd party app for it. 3rd Party Apps are good for creating and editing content, because there's a lot of different ways things can be made. Yet there's no great reason to use one to store content, storing content is basically the same, and OS's do it well.

apostacy 8y ago
I feel exactly the same way. But a few years ago I basically found a solution the works for me. I have a pile of interlink Markdown files in a git repo (you can use Dropbox also), and I can use various tools to access it. If you are willing to use the zettelkasten method, then you can use one based on Sublime Text[1], or one that is a standalone program[2]. You can use a more free-form wiki, with a simple plugin for Sublime[3] These Markdown files will work a slew of different wiki servers, including Gollum, the wiki used for Github, Gitlab, and BitBucket, and are only one step away from vim-wiki. But, since they are simple text, you could even access them on most other platforms. [1]: https://github.com/renerocksai/sublime_zk https://github.com/renerocksai/sublime_zk [2]: https://github.com/renerocksai/sublimeless_zk https://github.com/renerocksai/sublimeless_zk [3]: https://github.com/unqueued/sublime-notelink https://github.com/unqueued/sublime-notelink
DelightOne 8y ago
> Yet there's no great reason to use one to store content, Depends upon internally-created data or external. If you talk about exposing internal data there‘s /Interoperability Problems/. You don‘t have to think about other apps creating invalid files. State stored won’t vanish because another app decided it‘s not needed and ignores it during editing+resaving. And all the other interoperability problems you may encounter. If its external files I may agree.
tylerflick 8y ago
I'm not sure if it's an issue of 3rd party apps, but more 3rd party proprietary data stores. PDF is an open standard, and as long as POLAR isn't creating entries that are out of spec, your notes should transfer across all PDF viewers/editors.

dangoor 8y ago

I recently started using Evernote again after a couple of years living in other tools (e.g. DEVONthink). Since I last used it, Evernote has gotten better at saving "simplified" formats of articles to my notebooks. The ability to do so on desktop _and_ mobile devices is pretty key for me. Evernote lets me both capture and view on all of my devices. Any plans for a mobile app for Polarized? Evernote doesn't support annotations usefully, and the incremental reading feature of Polarized also sounds cool.

Numberwang 8y ago
Any darkmode for Evernote yet? It is useless without it.

franl 8y ago

@burtonator: Are in-app flashcards coming anytime soon? Love the idea of a PKR. Tried Anki for that purpose, but it just didn’t work well enough.

burtonator 8y ago
We could possibly have in-app flashcards but I want to wait until Polar 2.0 which will support web+mobile+table so that I can do cross device sync easier. For me having flashcards means having them on my phone.

kissgyorgy 8y ago

I use Wallabag on a daily basis for months now and never been happier. Polar seems more advanced at the first glance, anyone using it? What are the experiences with it?

solarkraft 8y ago
Downloaded it. Rather large app bundle. The experience I remember is wanting to archive a page, so: - Copying its link - Switching over to the app - Hunting for a way to add a page to the archive - A browser like window opening, pasting the link into the address bar, clicking an accept button - It rendering out the page, asking whether it looks okay - it did, so accepting - Opening the resulting PDF and it being completely fucked up. I gave up. I like the idea of Wallabag much more, but can't get the FF extension to work. Edit: Polar does offer a Chrome extension, but research about a FF version (the API is THE SAME) is hindered by me not being able to find any reference to the Chrome extension anywhere outside of the app. Idk, to me it just seemed fishy. I don't hate burtonator, I've just been frustrated. Why would I save my web pages as PDF anyway? That's an even more obscure, hard to process format. I tend to like the WARC format. Does Wallabag support a full-text search?
- burtonator 8y ago
  > Polar does offer a Chrome extension, but research about a FF version (the API is THE SAME) is hindered by me not being able to find any reference to the Chrome extension anywhere outside of the app. Idk, to me it just seemed fishy. Wait. What seems fishy? I don't follow. I'm planning on revamping this entirely with more of this functionality done within the chrome/FF extension itself where we just capture what's already rendered without any of the above complexity. It's waiting for Polar 2.0 which is about 1-2 months away. > Why would I save my web pages as PDF anyway? That's an even more obscure, hard to process format. I tend to like the WARC format. Big misconception. It's not saved as PDF.. It's saved as a captured HTML format. We might do something like WARC in the future though.

jabberthemutt 8y ago

Can I easily use this to replace zotero, jabref, mendeley etc for citation management?

burtonator 8y ago
Still working on that part. I think I'm going to allow association of a DOI then lookup the full metadata and then allow you to copy the metadata in a citation format to the clipboard. Would that give you 80% of what you want? I did some analysis and 40-60% of PDFs have the DOIs embedded.

stuartbman 8y ago

I've tried a few document management solutions, but I can't get past the fact that annotating documents by hand is so much more satisfying, I can't angrily scribble or circle text when they're digital!

walterbell 8y ago
On iPad (and probably Surface) you can!

walkingolof 8y ago

I started use evernote for this, but it dawned of me after a while that if evernote went down, all my data, diaries, notes etc etc was to be locked in and I have to start over. Therefore I'm using org-mode, its just a UTF8 encoded file, even if org-mode disappeared over night, I can still read the data.

dunham 8y ago
Evernote isn't too bad - all the data is cached locally in xml files with attachments - one directory per document. It is almost xhtml - the top level content wrapped in an en-note tag and the images are en-media tags. I agree that it's important to be sure you can get your data back out of whatever you're using. And another benefit of something like org mode that uses text files as a backing store is that you can edit/consume them with whatever tools you want.
nugator 8y ago
AFAIK the Evernote client caches your notes locally in a readable file format. I back up that folder in case Evernote goes down.
burtonator 8y ago
This is why Polar is OSS ... you won't have this issue with Polar just like you wouldn't with org-mode. I like Emacs too and have written literall hundreds of thousands of lines of elisp (seriously)... I'm trying to make Polar usable for everyone not just Emacs users.
bordercases 8y ago
Look at org-noter if you want something as a substitute for polar with rough edges.
dangoor 8y ago
Evernote has an export format and a bunch of other tools can import Evernote exports, given how popular Evernote is. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good.

pps 8y ago

I like the idea and was using this for months, but finally gave up, document viewer (or however this pdf.js thing is called in english) lags every time I scroll and it's too annoying. Also overlays for selecting progress are messing with highlighting and re-reading. It could be showed instead simply as rectangle with borders, without this blue background, if that's possible and if not there should be other way to manage progress.

burtonator 8y ago
> the document viewer ... lags every time I scroll and it's too annoying. Also Even if you scroll down like 5px or if you scrolled multiple pages at once? How long was the lag? > overlays for selecting progress are messing with highlighting and re-reading. It could be showed instead simply as rectangle with borders, without this blue background, if that's possible and if not there should be other way to manage progress. Yes.. I'm planning on evolving this a bit. I didn't realize that people would be so annoyed by this and it isn't part of my normal usage. I read forward and the pagemarks lag behind my reading and highlights. I think I can implement a feature to poke through the pagemark to be able to annotate through it.
- pps 8y ago
  By lag I mean it's not smooth, not sure if lag is a good word, I don't need to wait seconds for refresh, just milliseconds probably, but it's clearly visible when I compare it to built-in Preview app (I'm using Mac) or Chrome internal pdf viewer. The smallest scroll I can make is sometimes ok, sometimes not, but normal scrolling when I'm just reading stuff is always like that, like something is blocking rendering for a moment. It was completely smooth when I started using it (~7 months ago) but I don't remember when it changed to current state. I thought that it might be some problem with Retina screen resolution and changed it to open in low resolution mode, but it didn't help.

bachmeier 8y ago

AFAICT, this is for PDF files on your computer and websites converted to PDF. There's no option to add, say, markdown files or locally stored email files. Don't get me wrong, I've tried it out and it's awesome. I'm just not seeing how it's going to take off as a knowledge repository with its limitations. The last thing I want is yet another place I have to look for my files, and I sure don't want to have to keep things in sync with a repo that holds the rest of my files. I'm also concerned with the ability of this thing to scale. There doesn't appear to be any system for grouping items other than tagging. Maybe tagging works for others, but it's not something I trust (if I have hundreds of items and missed a tag, the item is lost). Definitely don't want this to be a negative comment. It's more "you're 95% of the way to an outstanding product, but I think the last 5% might be an obstacle to adoption."

zild3d 8y ago
Agreed, "Personal knowledge" needs to also include personal knowledge like self-generated notes, journals, and such
sixtram 8y ago
I've also downloaded this software and my impression is that it is far far from 95% to be an outstanding product. At least I bumped into small ui bugs the author should catched himself before a release. At the same time I agree with his idea that a knowledge base + spaced repetition is a good combination, however outputting spaced repetition into a 3rd party app is not a good idea. I see that burtonator is trying to push this product here every time a relevant discussion pops up, I don't have an issue with that. But I do think that this product is a long way from being useful for me in a daily setting. Right now it's nothing more than an electron wrapper around pdf.js and knowing how far I read a pdf.
- llamaz 8y ago
  I started out with polarized, but then I moved onto just putting all my pdfs in a folder and highlighting them in adobe reader.
  - 8y ago

lcuff 8y ago

I started keeping favorite quotes in Hypercard back in 1987. I didn't pay attention when Hypercard went extinct 15 years later, and failed to do the work to extract the data. Now I keep info in text files and grep is my friend. No spaced repetition, but tags go in as grep-able raw text too. Will Polar, or Evernote, or any other system, be around in 30 years?

mherrmann 8y ago
What do you do about more structured data, such as Excel files?
- lcuff 8y ago
  Great question: If it were just columnized data you could keep it in csv format, but Excel supports way more than that.
- prepend 8y ago
  Excel is a zip of xml now, so you can do basic text searches within them.
apostacy 8y ago
It's not hard to extract the data from your hypercard stack, though.
elviejo 8y ago
"Will... any other system be around in 30 years?" Yes, Emacs. "The editor of a lifetime" https://youtu.be/VADudzQGvU8 https://youtu.be/VADudzQGvU8
burtonator 8y ago
> Will Polar, or Evernote, or any other system, be around in 30 years? Yes.. that's literally why I called it Polar. It's designed to be a permanent vault for your data. This is why it's Open Source.

prepend 8y ago

This would be neater as a self hosted system. I have a haphazard way of managing notes and docs that has too much overhead. I would like a squirrel program to store and retrieve more easily and will eventually just write one. I think we need more tools that rely on self-hosting cheap nodes for data where the owner has complete control. Knowledge management systems are really personal and if third parties go away then that is critically bad. I intend to keep this info for 50-100 years so need something that does a good job of just storing to git or whatever and then rely on different front-ends and things that can be run without any third party access to data. The iOS model is closest to this in terms of data and apps, but is not OSS and I spend so much time in front of a full computer so phone access only is too limited.

ausjke 8y ago
I'm using gitea to self-host, works well for markdowns and code, but bad for anything that is binary(pdf,media files,etc), because of git, which really does not fit for binaries, and git-lfs is a PITA to use still
- prepend 8y ago
  I have something similar (private github, but will move to self host soon). The binary thing is a challenge for me as well as part of my filing includes always making copies of web sites and office and pdf to check for versioning and edits. I frequently try to remember or check if web sites changed info or released a new version so I need a link and a frozen copy. Git does not like this and gets real big, real fast.
- rmkrmk 8y ago
  I do the same. I have a gitea instance and all my text saved in markdown in there. I also enabled full-text search so I can find it again. On mobile (iOS) I use working copy as a git client, which handles all files just fine (and also supports git-lfs). Most of the time I want to attach binary files to notes, so I thought about using a sync solution like NextCloud or FileRun (with syncthing) and just link to my files.
- sjy 8y ago

ausjke 8y ago

very interesting, however: "We use cookies to track your usage. We use cookies to track your usage and to determine which features are used to improve the quality of Polar. Additionally, we track application errors which helps us find bugs and to prioritize which issues to fix. This data is sent to 3rd parties which provide the infrastructure necessary to provide the analytics services needed to analyze and store the data. We avoid sending personally identifiable information at all times." https://getpolarized.io/cookie-policy.html https://getpolarized.io/cookie-policy.html I am forced to click on "Accept" actually, which I don't like. Overall it looks like calibre to me, however Calibre does not do highlighting

ausjke 8y ago
the entire platform is based on Electron (Node + Chromium)
burtonator 8y ago
Polar Premium will allow you to disable tracking but you should enable it. you can audit the code but we only track what features you use and so forth. I can't build Polar without the analytics data as I don't know what's breaking and have no ability to optimize it and improve usability.
- Aeolun 8y ago
  Maybe we should have an open source error tracking engine that can be self hosted. Too often I see this being the reason people freak out about using a product (only on hackernews though).

thinkersilver 8y ago

I liked the idea but couldn't quite get the anki workflow running smoothly. To be fair I tried this because of the anki integration but I don't think that's what it's meant for

sa1 8y ago
Indeed, it's painful to get notes into Anki currently. I would prefer if I could get any text selected into a new Anki note with minimum number of keypresses, rather than creating flashcards in Polar and then syncing them, which seems rather inefficient.
- burtonator 8y ago
  I would like to make it more efficient for sure. Part of the problem is actually Anki. It's kind of janky and then there is the issue of firewalls that some people are running into which isn't fun. I'm trying to smooth out the UI a bit more but it's an iterative process.

ausjke 8y ago

A personal knowledge management app that can: 1. deal with various file formats(pdf,markdown,code,flashcards,etc) 2. easy to annotate, tag, highlight 3. works across web and smartphone 4. can be self-hosted and portable will be very valuable, I'm willing to pay for it if it exists, though an OSS version is optimal. No I don't want to store all my personal notes on any cloud storage so self-host is a must.

burtonator 8y ago
You will absolutely want cloud storage when I'm done with this and have the social functionality implemented. Read the linked article. I talk about this at the bottom. IMO 80% of the VALUE of this data is that you're collaboratively building your knowledge with others. My core hypothesis is that building knowledge is social.

docode 8y ago

Okok. The features are neat. But what we really need is Polar for EVERYTHING! PDF, docx, jpg, MD, ... All of them, like a new modern Filesystem. But with Metadata and auto OCR... That would revolutionary!

7e 8y ago

Why would I want spaced repetition for knowledge I don't use? And if I do use it, don't I get spaced repetition for free in the course of using it? It seems there are better uses for my time.

Tharkun 8y ago
I'm not sure what you're trying to say. You don't have to create flash cards. Polar just makes it easy to turn notes into flash cards, that's all.
burtonator 8y ago
The issue is exponential backoff off what your trying to learn. Spaced repetition handles the scheduling. You've learned something important yesterday and you might not forget it tomorrow or the day after but you might in six months. This is what spaced repetition gives you.
- DecayingOrganic 8y ago
  A natural way to think about forgetting is that our minds simply run out of space. The key idea behind Anderson’s new account of human memory is that the problem might be not one of storage, but of organization. According to his theory, the mind has essentially infinite capacity for memories, but we have only a finite amount of time in which to search for them. The key to a good human memory then becomes the same as the key to a good computer cache: predicting which items are most likely to be wanted in the future. That it’s a perfect tuning of the brain to the world, making available precisely the things most likely to be needed. In putting the emphasis on time, caching shows us that memory involves unavoidable tradeoffs, and a certain zero-sumness. You can’t have every library book at your desk, every product on display at the front of the store, every headline above the fold, every paper at the top of the pile. And in the same way, you can’t have every fact or face or name at the front of your mind. “Many people hold the bias that human memory is anything but optimal,” wrote Anderson and Schooler. “They point to the many frustrating failures of memory. However, these criticisms fail to appreciate the task before human memory, which is to try to manage a huge stockpile of memories. In any system responsible for managing a vast data base there must be failures of retrieval. It is just too expensive to maintain access to an unbounded number of items.” From the book: Algorithms to Live By.

alexcnwy 8y ago

I've tried everything and I really like Dynalist (or any other outliner) as a personal knowledge repo / place to store notes and ideas. I find ideas do tend to be quite hierarchical and you can link between nodes if need be.

throway88989898 8y ago

You can already reopen PDFs where you left them in Adobe Reader : Edit > Accessibility > Setup Assistant > Set all accessibility options > Next > Next > Next > Next > Reopen documents to the last viewed page or Edit > Preferences > Documents > Restore last view settings when reopening documents

avivo 8y ago

Are you building on the web annotation standard? Or otherwise connected to the prior work here? https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-model/ https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-model/ It applies to PDF's also. More context: https://web.hypothes.is/blog/annotation-is-now-a-web-standard/ https://web.hypothes.is/blog/annotation-is-now-a-web-standar...

burtonator 8y ago
No.. I looked at it and I'm still considering it but I wanted to first get a Polar MVP launched and prove that people will actively use it. To be clear I was one of the inventors of RSS and Atom so it's not like I'm naive in this area... I just find that implementing standards can slow down a proof of concept that may or not be successful. Plus I need to review the spec to see if it's compatible with our model and I plan on iterating rapidly on our model and it might not match up with the standard.

burtonator 8y ago

Also, wanted to thanks all you guys for reviewing Polar and there's a lot of good feedback here. In a nutshell: 1. I'm working on more document formats including Markdown and ePub. 2. I'm working on some preliminary support for reference management so we can lookup the full reference info via DOI and have reference formatters for you to use for your research. Some of the DOI storage is already done. 3. I'm working on a webapp and mobile support. Probably a month away. 4. The captured web content isn't actually converted to PDF - it's actually a cached web archive. Full HTML is kept in your repo. 5. Polar 2.0 will be more web aware. You can annotate anything without actually having to store the full thing in Polar. We will just store a URL. 6. Pagemarks will be improved her shortly so you can toggle them on and off and possibly even highlight through them directly. 7. There are definitely small bugs and fit and finish issue we're working on. If you have an issue please report it: https://github.com/burtonator/polar-bookshelf/issues https://github.com/burtonator/polar-bookshelf/issues 8. Yes. Polar isn't fully self hosted but that defeats the point. My cure hypothesis is that knowledge benefits from being social which is the main thing I'm trying to test. By the time I'm done I think 95% of you would agree that keeping it private is insane as you don't benefit from the community. 9. If you like Polar please consider donating. https://opencollective.com/polar-bookshelf https://opencollective.com/polar-bookshelf ... we've received essentially zero Open Source contributions from the community and very little funding.

dare2deviate 8y ago
This is cool! I am working on something similar but a slight variation on intelligence augmentation and memory recall. Would love to chat with you, if interested.
- burtonator 8y ago
  Sure.. jump on the discord: https://discordapp.com/invite/GT8MhA6 https://discordapp.com/invite/GT8MhA6
dangoor 8y ago
I asked about mobile in a sibling comment. > 3. I'm working on a webapp and mobile support. Probably a month away. Okay, that would likely be fine. I'd suggest at least creating a iOS Shortcut to save to your webapp because not being able to save via the normal share sheet would be a drag.

visarga 8y ago

It's slow on my mac. I suspect it's the pdf.js rendering engine.

burtonator 8y ago
would you mind taking a video? Some people are saying it's slow and I wonder if it's slow because of another issue that I haven't seen yet.

sigi45 8y ago

Like it and will check it out. Had similar thoughts and I named it knowledge graph. The center is you, than you tag books, lectures, wikipages and have a visual representation of all of your knowledge. I also imagined having your whole education in it and because it's a graph, you could import a path which you can follow. 1+1 needs to be done before you can do 1*1 etc. I thought about it while learning for a university course and a lot of time was spent on finding good material which explained a topic. And after the exam I started to forget stuff again. It felt really stupid. I wanna be in control on what I know, what I want to know and what I no longer need to know. And all tools out there are not that good. Anki is doing its job but nothing else. Memrise does it more playful but also misses stuff. Duolingo (most of online learning has this problem) feels more like 101 <topic>. How is it possible that 1000thands of universities record videos of lectures every year and are often paid by all of us (Germany for example) but all those videos have one or all of the following issues: - bad audio - bad video - horrible handwriting - no slides Should it not be possible to sit together and create small topics and build one ONE comprehensive learning page? ... Edit: and such a platform could not only benefit a lot of people it would also be financially a good deal. From 1-6 grade it could support parents and teachers, than teachers and pupils and later profs and students. Lots of knowledge doesn't change every year.

orpheline 8y ago

I've tried a number of approaches to a personal data repo: plain text files, custom database tools, dropping everything in a file folder... My current approach - which I really like - is vimwiki saving to markdown instead of the default .wiki. it's on a self-hosted NextCloud instance, giving me access across all my computers as well as my phone. It's not perfect - I'm extending it with some standardized project templates and other things - but everything's ultimately text; it's self-hosted, so not dependent on a third-party service that might disappear; and I can easily extend it to meet my requirements.

tptacek 8y ago

I would pay decent money for the version of this thing that automatically found all the PDFs in my Pinboard account and loaded them in.

burtonator 8y ago
I'm working on a better sync framework to easily drop in systems like this to discovery notes, documents, URLs, etc.

mvyo 8y ago

> maintaining all your documents in one place, annotating them with highlights, comments, managing your documents with tags, and maintaining key extracted knowledge via spaced repetition > I believe this is a new class of application I haven't used SuperMemo (the app that inspired Anki development), but looks like it has all these features plus tons of other stuff (https://help.supermemo.org/wiki/Incremental_learning https://help.supermemo.org/wiki/Incremental_learning). It has some flaws (not cross platform, doesn't support PDF directly, complex UI, and of course closed source), but I think it's unfair to claim "a new class of application".

getpolarized 8y ago
Everything new is inspired by something in the past. Literally nothing comes from whole cloth. I think the point I was trying to make is that we're going to see more of these types of apps.

ggm 8y ago

It is a problem about "me" but my problem in personal knowledge is not having it (ok: it is, but thats unavoidable) it's my lack of clarity about which of half-a-hundred models of classification to apply at any given time. I think this is why google free-text search is so powerful: you don't have to have an organizing principle, you just have to know a few key words, or a semantic construct which can be extracted from (meta) data. OTOH the chaos implicit in my desk (I use volcano filing) probably perpetuates online in this model.

Aeolun 8y ago
Since I couldn’t find anything about this. Is the volcano filing model where things simply get stacked up until they erupt?
- ggm 8y ago
  Yes. the model is you stack things, and they form (cinder) cones, and the boring things are either buried, or slip off and fall to the floor, and what is left is relevant or interesting. It's very effective (at forming piles, at least)

slaymaker1907 8y ago

My favorite tools for this sort of thing have been TiddlyWiki as well as Scribble (Racket language). An essential feature present in both is that they both are incredibly hackable and customizeable since most products don't support enough organization for me. However, my main complaint with these tools is that while they are customizeable, it is sometimes nice to have a WYSIWIG since some notes I take will only every be looked at as I am writing them so having instant feedback is nice, even if the resulting document is imperfect.

apostacy 8y ago
I used TiddlyWiki for awhile, and it will always have a place in my heart. But it just wasn't portable enough for me.

qwerty456127 8y ago

I failed to find how to create notes (it should be able to create and interlink all kinds of them if it's meant to be a knowledge repository: notes attached do a particular document, attached to a particular place in a document and not attached to anything, all notes should be taggable). Lack of support for any formats other than PDF (it should at least support EPUB, all other formats if possible: AZW, DJVU, FB2, Markdown, single-file HTML) limits its usage for studying e-books. And it's annoyingly slow (but I'd consider this tolerable if it was really helpful). I just hope this is just the beginning and Polar is actually going to improve.

jively 8y ago

This is extremely cool, I've been wondering about how I can create subject matter repositories of various media types and then enhance that data with my own findings. What would be cool here would be the ability to reference between documents and notes, like you would with hypertext. Imagine you write an essay or blog post, and you want to instantly browse the citations and quotes you use. That document could live inside polar, maybe as a simple MarkDown editor. Either way I've downloaded and installed. I wonder if I can get some fancy PDF scanning gear so I can get book segments into it. /ramble

allochthon 8y ago

I am tackling a related challenge with Digraph, an app I'm working on [0]. My project is focused less on providing an infrastructure for learning and retention, and more on simply organizing the vast amount of information that each of us reads every day, month and year into a collection that is coherent and growing and that builds upon itself. The long-term vision is a crowd-sourced alternative to search engines like Google and Bing. But the short-term focus is on something targeted and immediately useful. > If the company that runs your PKR goes out of business you’re entire education might be in jeopardy. I'm dealing with this problem in part by making the Digraph source available under the MIT license. [0] https://digraph.app/ https://digraph.app/, https://digraph.app/about https://digraph.app/about

shdh 8y ago

I use standardnotes.org self hosted

equalunique 8y ago

Today I first discovered that Pocket, which is the integrated service associated with that odd icon in FireFox that I had never clicked on before. It's like Instapaper, which is also something I have never used. Both of those seem to be online services, like Polar, with APIs to support browser extensions, Android integration, and other stuff like that. I was pretty disappointed that FireFox integrated a service that was proprietary and not even one that was GDPR-compliant. I have been looking for a hackable alternative to Google Keep. In the past, Pinboard.io had served me well, but now I am looking for something more. I want not just to store bookmarks, not just to archive web pages, but really to have all these at my fingertips for analysis. I want to shift the balance I have between consuming new information and munging on the information that's already come my way. Polar seems to be a great alternative because it's a computer application that's 100% self-hosted. I would like something that could be run in a federated way, like Mastodon, but this is still _very_ nice. Since I own the data, I'm not worried about any limitations. I especially like that various forms of cloud sync are supported (looking at you, Syncthing). I see Electron bashed on HN from time to time. I have no opinion about it personally. Even if there were some noticeable overhead, the capabilities this offers are probably worth it. Super exciting. I'll give it a go.