4 ms·

Notion API importer, with Databases to Bases conversion bounty

189 points by twapi 1y ago

zwnow 1y ago
> Please only apply if you have taken time to explore the Importer codebase, as well as the Notion API. Suddenly 5k$ does not sound as good
- cybrox 1y ago
  Why? It doesn't say you need to have extensive experience with them. I would assume this is mostly to dissuade applicants that are not aware of the potential challenges ahead.
  - zwnow 1y ago
    This "exploring" can take tremendous amounts of time, depending on the complexity of these APIs. My time is worth a lot to myself. I am not going to spend many hours for a chance of winning 5k$. If this takes a week off of my free time its not worth 5k to me.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - theshrike79 1y ago
      If you get paid more than $5k a week, this isn't for you clearly.
      - zwnow 1y ago
        If you think this is what I wrote, you should go to reading comprehension courses.
        sindriava 1y ago
        While I understand you wrote "free time", this isn't Reddit. Keep the snarkiness to a minimum.
        zwnow 1y ago
        This website is worse than reddit. Pretentious AI bros everywhere. It even has the reddit color.
- Kichererbsen 1y ago
  Unless you've already done projects in both. Then, it might seem trivial? Idk. I haven't looked at either. But if there is such a person out there, with the spare time to look into it, they might be ideally suited!
thombles 1y ago
In addition to what's already in the thread, I assume by now somebody has vibecoded an agent to scan GitHub for bounties and then automatically vibe up a corresponding solution. Will be a fun source of spam for anyone who wants to do the right thing and pay people for good work.
- BoorishBears 1y ago
  I recently got my first AI generated PR for a project I maintain and it was honestly a little stressful. My first clue was that PR description was absurdly detailed and well structured... yet the actual changes were really scattershot. A human with the experience and attention to detail to produce that detailed description would likely also have broken it down into seperate PRs. And the code seemed alright until I noticed a small one-line change: a UI component had been replaced with a comment that stated "Insantiating component now requires X" Except the new insantiation wasn't anywhere. Their coding agent had commented out insantiating the component instead of figuring out dependency injection. That component was the container for all of the app's settings. - It's interesting because the PR wasn't entirely useless: individual parts of it were good enough that even if I took over the PR I'd be fine keeping them. But whatever coded it couldn't understand architecture well enough. I suspect whoever was piloting it probably tested the core functionality and assumed their small UI changes wouldn't break anything. I hope we normalize just admitting when most of a piece of code is AI generated. I'm not a luddite about these tools, but it also changes how I'll approach a piece of code. Things that are easy for humans get very hard for AI, and vice versa.
  - zwnow 1y ago
    Not only admitting, it should be law to mark anything AI generated as AI generated. Even if AI contributed just a tiny bit. I dont want to use AI slop, and I should be allowed to make informed decisions based on that preference.
    - scrollaway 1y ago
      Did you by any chance type this comment on a device that has autocorrect enabled?
hazzamanic 1y ago
Having once used the Notion API to build an OPEN API doc generator, I pity whoever takes this on. The API was painful to integrate with, full of limitations and nowhere near feature parity with the Notion UI itself
- ath3nd 1y ago
  [dead]
jumploops 1y ago
Everyone is looking down on LLM-assisted dev here, but I think it's a great fit. I also don't believe it can be one-shotted (there's too many deltas between Notion's API and Obsidian). With that said, LLMs are great for enumerating edge-cases, and this feels like the perfect task for Codex/Claude Code. I'd implore the obsidian team/maintainers to take a stab at building this with LLMs. Based on personal experience, the cost is likely within the same magnitude ($100-$1k in API cost + dev time), but the additional context (tests, docs, etc.) will be invaluable to future changes to either API surface.
- Banditoz 1y ago
  Someone's given it a shot: https://github.com/obsidianmd/obsidian-importer/pull/424 https://github.com/obsidianmd/obsidian-importer/pull/424
  - sarreph 1y ago
    Can't help but think if the author of that PR had been less defeatist and snarky they would have had a chance at decent discussion about it being a viable option (with AI).
    - jychang 1y ago
      It's 1100 lines of code in a single file that nobody understands. That's instant spaghetti right there, not a valid PR. At least have it be split into some files and structured in some way.
      - artursapek 1y ago
        how is a single 1100 line file that handles Notion’s API format “spaghetti”? spaghetti code is code that snakes through the code base in a hard-to-follow way
        ath3nd 1y ago
        [dead]
lihaoyi 1y ago
I've had a pretty good experience offering bounties on my own projects: - https://github.com/orgs/com-lihaoyi/discussions/6 https://github.com/orgs/com-lihaoyi/discussions/6 If you look at that thread, you'll see I've paid out quite a lot in bounties, somewhere around 50-60kUSD (the amount is not quite precise, because some bounties I completed myself without paying, and others I paid extra when the work turned out to be more than expected). In exchange, I did manage to get quite a lot of work done for that cost You do get some trash, it does take significant work to review, and not everything is amenable to bounties. But for projects that already have interested users and potential collaborators, sometimes 500-1000USD in cash is enough motivation for someone to go from curious to engaged. And if I can pay someone 500-1000USD to save me a week of work (and associated context switching) it can definitely be worth the cost. The bounties are certainly not a living wage for people, especially compared to my peers making 1mUSD/yr at some big tech FAANG. It's just a token of appreciation that somehow feels qualitatively different from the money that comes in your twice-monthly paycheck
- chatmasta 1y ago
  I only briefly glanced at your project, but it doesn’t look like a commercial offering or a component of one… what is your motivation for paying people to do this work? I would think bounties would be used more often by companies who need some open source feature for interoperability or integration purposes…
  - count 1y ago
    Having more money than free time but still wanting a thing to get done. Lots of folks pay good money for hobbies (video games, golf fees, bicycle purchases, etc.).
    - srid 1y ago
      Can you deduct these expenditures fully in income tax?
      - 1y ago
nivertech 1y ago
What’s the easiest way to convert all dataviews in an existing Obsidian vault to Bases?
- kepano 1y ago
  There's this community-made Dataview to Bases script: https://github.com/Quorafind/Bases-Toolbox https://github.com/Quorafind/Bases-Toolbox
- yencabulator 1y ago
  Last I looked DataView is way more powerful than Bases. So, "convert all dataviews" is likely impossible.
eamag 1y ago
There are also open bounties by comma.ai, is it becoming more common? https://github.com/orgs/commaai/projects/26/views/1 https://github.com/orgs/commaai/projects/26/views/1
- TheBlapse 1y ago
  Comma.ai, since its founding, and Tinygrad now, both started by George Hotz, only hire candidates who solve their bounties first. https://tinygrad.org/#worktiny https://tinygrad.org/#worktiny
wraptile 1y ago
As someone who wrote a fair share of notion API code - the 5,000$ bounty is not enough and I'm only half-joking here. That being said, yay open source bounties! People should do more of those.
- ayewo 1y ago
  There are a few more bounties like this out there. 1. Tenstorrent https://github.com/tenstorrent/tt-metal/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20state%3Aopen%20label%3Abounty https://github.com/tenstorrent/tt-metal/issues?q=is%3Aissue%... $200 - $3,000 bounties 2. microG https://github.com/microg/GmsCore/issues/2994 https://github.com/microg/GmsCore/issues/2994 $10,000 bounty 3. Li Haoyi https://github.com/orgs/com-lihaoyi/discussions/6 https://github.com/orgs/com-lihaoyi/discussions/6 multiple bounties (already mentioned upthread) 4. Algora also hosts bounties for COSS (Commercial OSS) https://algora.io/bounties https://algora.io/bounties
AbstractH24 1y ago
This seems very exploitative of their user base. In a way that’s becoming more and more common. Although Obsidian isn’t open source, the community has a very similar vibe. Very anti-big-corporate-overlord. But maybe not, maybe the world of bounties is just one im not in the loop on and this is common.
- mpalmer 1y ago
  How is it exploitative?
dfee 1y ago
My obsidian is slow to start on my phone (~30s, latest iPhone) and even on my computer it’s ~10s. I probably have 1000 notes, no back links, and I’m using the Vim extension and the default theme. It uses iCloud backup. I can’t figure out why it’s so damn slow. But also, how is it any better than Notion at that point?
- threetonesun 1y ago
  The mobile app had a notice about iCloud for a long time (I forget if it's gone now or not), but usually you're running into Obsidian trying to sync all of the files and rebuild it's internal cache when it opens instead of being able to do any background sync. As for why is it better than Notion at that point, well, if you wanted to you could use a "faster" app like iA Writer on your phone, or anything that can open Markdown. That remains its biggest benefit, you're never locked in to files that are only on someone else's server.
- kepano 1y ago
  It sounds like iCloud's automatic offloading "feature" which deletes your local files and re-downloads them as needed. Go to the iCloud folder for Obsidian and set it to "Keep downloaded".
  - dfee 1y ago
    Wow. I think this is the answer! Thanks!
NalNezumi 1y ago
Several years ago I made a bare metal notion to obsidian conversion scripts. At the time there wasn't any Bases available so databases was just turned in to csv table. It was relatively simple, no dependency python script and just export your notion notes as a zips of markdowns and then check every file to fix linking and the weird naming (with some caveat that not all links are properly exported to markdown links by notion) Today I learned that obsidian have an API towards it. Still I wonder why it's not just easier to use notions "download your pages as markdown". Notion would very dislike an API that allows users to migrate away from it and probably actively would sabotage it. "download notes as markdown" is however a user service, which they probably don't want to break. (maybe now that they added an offline mode too late, I don't know)
- jitl 1y ago
  (I work at Notion and built the html exporter during my hiring process work trial in 2019, opinion is my own) I would love to two-way sync Notion <-> Obsidian vault. Notion is focused on online collaboration, Obsidian is focused on file-over-app personal software customization; there’s so much Obsidian can do especially with plugins that Notion isn’t able to address. If we can make the two work together even if it’s not perfectly seamless, it would extend usefulness of both tools by uniting their strengths and avoiding the tradeoff of their weaknesses. If only I had an extra 24h per day I’d build it myself, but it needs some fairly complex machinery for change tracking & merging which would require ongoing support so it’s not something I can tackle responsibly as a weekend project. At the least we could offer YAML frontmatter as an option for Notion’s markdown export feature. Maybe I can get to that today I have a few spare hours.
  - dtkav 1y ago
    In the age of Claude Code having real-time collaboration + local-first markdown + easy to write custom plugins is the future. It makes no sense to lock up your documents in a saas product that gatekeeps your access to using AI on your own documents. That's why I've been working Relay [0] - a privacy-preserving local-first collaboration plugin for Obsidian. Our customers really like being able to self-host Relay Servers for complete document privacy while using our global identity system to do cross-org collaboration with anyone in the world. [0] https://relay.md https://relay.md
salamanderr 1y ago
[dead]

189 points by twapi 1y ago

> Please only apply if you have taken time to explore the Importer codebase, as well as the Notion API. Suddenly 5k$ does not sound as good

cybrox 1y ago
Why? It doesn't say you need to have extensive experience with them. I would assume this is mostly to dissuade applicants that are not aware of the potential challenges ahead.
- zwnow 1y ago
  This "exploring" can take tremendous amounts of time, depending on the complexity of these APIs. My time is worth a lot to myself. I am not going to spend many hours for a chance of winning 5k$. If this takes a week off of my free time its not worth 5k to me.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - theshrike79 1y ago
    If you get paid more than $5k a week, this isn't for you clearly.
    - zwnow 1y ago
      If you think this is what I wrote, you should go to reading comprehension courses.
      - sindriava 1y ago
        While I understand you wrote "free time", this isn't Reddit. Keep the snarkiness to a minimum.
        zwnow 1y ago
        This website is worse than reddit. Pretentious AI bros everywhere. It even has the reddit color.
Kichererbsen 1y ago
Unless you've already done projects in both. Then, it might seem trivial? Idk. I haven't looked at either. But if there is such a person out there, with the spare time to look into it, they might be ideally suited!

thombles 1y ago

In addition to what's already in the thread, I assume by now somebody has vibecoded an agent to scan GitHub for bounties and then automatically vibe up a corresponding solution. Will be a fun source of spam for anyone who wants to do the right thing and pay people for good work.

BoorishBears 1y ago
I recently got my first AI generated PR for a project I maintain and it was honestly a little stressful. My first clue was that PR description was absurdly detailed and well structured... yet the actual changes were really scattershot. A human with the experience and attention to detail to produce that detailed description would likely also have broken it down into seperate PRs. And the code seemed alright until I noticed a small one-line change: a UI component had been replaced with a comment that stated "Insantiating component now requires X" Except the new insantiation wasn't anywhere. Their coding agent had commented out insantiating the component instead of figuring out dependency injection. That component was the container for all of the app's settings. - It's interesting because the PR wasn't entirely useless: individual parts of it were good enough that even if I took over the PR I'd be fine keeping them. But whatever coded it couldn't understand architecture well enough. I suspect whoever was piloting it probably tested the core functionality and assumed their small UI changes wouldn't break anything. I hope we normalize just admitting when most of a piece of code is AI generated. I'm not a luddite about these tools, but it also changes how I'll approach a piece of code. Things that are easy for humans get very hard for AI, and vice versa.
- zwnow 1y ago
  Not only admitting, it should be law to mark anything AI generated as AI generated. Even if AI contributed just a tiny bit. I dont want to use AI slop, and I should be allowed to make informed decisions based on that preference.
  - scrollaway 1y ago
    Did you by any chance type this comment on a device that has autocorrect enabled?

hazzamanic 1y ago

Having once used the Notion API to build an OPEN API doc generator, I pity whoever takes this on. The API was painful to integrate with, full of limitations and nowhere near feature parity with the Notion UI itself

ath3nd 1y ago
[dead]

jumploops 1y ago

Everyone is looking down on LLM-assisted dev here, but I think it's a great fit. I also don't believe it can be one-shotted (there's too many deltas between Notion's API and Obsidian). With that said, LLMs are great for enumerating edge-cases, and this feels like the perfect task for Codex/Claude Code. I'd implore the obsidian team/maintainers to take a stab at building this with LLMs. Based on personal experience, the cost is likely within the same magnitude ($100-$1k in API cost + dev time), but the additional context (tests, docs, etc.) will be invaluable to future changes to either API surface.

Banditoz 1y ago
Someone's given it a shot: https://github.com/obsidianmd/obsidian-importer/pull/424 https://github.com/obsidianmd/obsidian-importer/pull/424
- sarreph 1y ago
  Can't help but think if the author of that PR had been less defeatist and snarky they would have had a chance at decent discussion about it being a viable option (with AI).
  - jychang 1y ago
    It's 1100 lines of code in a single file that nobody understands. That's instant spaghetti right there, not a valid PR. At least have it be split into some files and structured in some way.
    - artursapek 1y ago
      how is a single 1100 line file that handles Notion’s API format “spaghetti”? spaghetti code is code that snakes through the code base in a hard-to-follow way
      - ath3nd 1y ago
        [dead]

lihaoyi 1y ago

I've had a pretty good experience offering bounties on my own projects: - https://github.com/orgs/com-lihaoyi/discussions/6 https://github.com/orgs/com-lihaoyi/discussions/6 If you look at that thread, you'll see I've paid out quite a lot in bounties, somewhere around 50-60kUSD (the amount is not quite precise, because some bounties I completed myself without paying, and others I paid extra when the work turned out to be more than expected). In exchange, I did manage to get quite a lot of work done for that cost You do get some trash, it does take significant work to review, and not everything is amenable to bounties. But for projects that already have interested users and potential collaborators, sometimes 500-1000USD in cash is enough motivation for someone to go from curious to engaged. And if I can pay someone 500-1000USD to save me a week of work (and associated context switching) it can definitely be worth the cost. The bounties are certainly not a living wage for people, especially compared to my peers making 1mUSD/yr at some big tech FAANG. It's just a token of appreciation that somehow feels qualitatively different from the money that comes in your twice-monthly paycheck

chatmasta 1y ago
I only briefly glanced at your project, but it doesn’t look like a commercial offering or a component of one… what is your motivation for paying people to do this work? I would think bounties would be used more often by companies who need some open source feature for interoperability or integration purposes…
- count 1y ago
  Having more money than free time but still wanting a thing to get done. Lots of folks pay good money for hobbies (video games, golf fees, bicycle purchases, etc.).
  - srid 1y ago
    Can you deduct these expenditures fully in income tax?
    - 1y ago

nivertech 1y ago

What’s the easiest way to convert all dataviews in an existing Obsidian vault to Bases?

kepano 1y ago
There's this community-made Dataview to Bases script: https://github.com/Quorafind/Bases-Toolbox https://github.com/Quorafind/Bases-Toolbox
yencabulator 1y ago
Last I looked DataView is way more powerful than Bases. So, "convert all dataviews" is likely impossible.

eamag 1y ago

There are also open bounties by comma.ai, is it becoming more common? https://github.com/orgs/commaai/projects/26/views/1 https://github.com/orgs/commaai/projects/26/views/1

TheBlapse 1y ago
Comma.ai, since its founding, and Tinygrad now, both started by George Hotz, only hire candidates who solve their bounties first. https://tinygrad.org/#worktiny https://tinygrad.org/#worktiny

wraptile 1y ago

As someone who wrote a fair share of notion API code - the 5,000$ bounty is not enough and I'm only half-joking here. That being said, yay open source bounties! People should do more of those.

ayewo 1y ago
There are a few more bounties like this out there. 1. Tenstorrent https://github.com/tenstorrent/tt-metal/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20state%3Aopen%20label%3Abounty https://github.com/tenstorrent/tt-metal/issues?q=is%3Aissue%... $200 - $3,000 bounties 2. microG https://github.com/microg/GmsCore/issues/2994 https://github.com/microg/GmsCore/issues/2994 $10,000 bounty 3. Li Haoyi https://github.com/orgs/com-lihaoyi/discussions/6 https://github.com/orgs/com-lihaoyi/discussions/6 multiple bounties (already mentioned upthread) 4. Algora also hosts bounties for COSS (Commercial OSS) https://algora.io/bounties https://algora.io/bounties

AbstractH24 1y ago

This seems very exploitative of their user base. In a way that’s becoming more and more common. Although Obsidian isn’t open source, the community has a very similar vibe. Very anti-big-corporate-overlord. But maybe not, maybe the world of bounties is just one im not in the loop on and this is common.

mpalmer 1y ago
How is it exploitative?

dfee 1y ago

My obsidian is slow to start on my phone (~30s, latest iPhone) and even on my computer it’s ~10s. I probably have 1000 notes, no back links, and I’m using the Vim extension and the default theme. It uses iCloud backup. I can’t figure out why it’s so damn slow. But also, how is it any better than Notion at that point?

threetonesun 1y ago
The mobile app had a notice about iCloud for a long time (I forget if it's gone now or not), but usually you're running into Obsidian trying to sync all of the files and rebuild it's internal cache when it opens instead of being able to do any background sync. As for why is it better than Notion at that point, well, if you wanted to you could use a "faster" app like iA Writer on your phone, or anything that can open Markdown. That remains its biggest benefit, you're never locked in to files that are only on someone else's server.
kepano 1y ago
It sounds like iCloud's automatic offloading "feature" which deletes your local files and re-downloads them as needed. Go to the iCloud folder for Obsidian and set it to "Keep downloaded".
- dfee 1y ago
  Wow. I think this is the answer! Thanks!

NalNezumi 1y ago

Several years ago I made a bare metal notion to obsidian conversion scripts. At the time there wasn't any Bases available so databases was just turned in to csv table. It was relatively simple, no dependency python script and just export your notion notes as a zips of markdowns and then check every file to fix linking and the weird naming (with some caveat that not all links are properly exported to markdown links by notion) Today I learned that obsidian have an API towards it. Still I wonder why it's not just easier to use notions "download your pages as markdown". Notion would very dislike an API that allows users to migrate away from it and probably actively would sabotage it. "download notes as markdown" is however a user service, which they probably don't want to break. (maybe now that they added an offline mode too late, I don't know)

jitl 1y ago
(I work at Notion and built the html exporter during my hiring process work trial in 2019, opinion is my own) I would love to two-way sync Notion <-> Obsidian vault. Notion is focused on online collaboration, Obsidian is focused on file-over-app personal software customization; there’s so much Obsidian can do especially with plugins that Notion isn’t able to address. If we can make the two work together even if it’s not perfectly seamless, it would extend usefulness of both tools by uniting their strengths and avoiding the tradeoff of their weaknesses. If only I had an extra 24h per day I’d build it myself, but it needs some fairly complex machinery for change tracking & merging which would require ongoing support so it’s not something I can tackle responsibly as a weekend project. At the least we could offer YAML frontmatter as an option for Notion’s markdown export feature. Maybe I can get to that today I have a few spare hours.
- dtkav 1y ago
  In the age of Claude Code having real-time collaboration + local-first markdown + easy to write custom plugins is the future. It makes no sense to lock up your documents in a saas product that gatekeeps your access to using AI on your own documents. That's why I've been working Relay [0] - a privacy-preserving local-first collaboration plugin for Obsidian. Our customers really like being able to self-host Relay Servers for complete document privacy while using our global identity system to do cross-org collaboration with anyone in the world. [0] https://relay.md https://relay.md

salamanderr 1y ago

[dead]