
Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository - burtonator
https://getpolarized.io/2019/03/01/polar-personal-knowledge-repository.html
======
bachmeier
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."

~~~
burtonator
> 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.

Key point of order.

We don't actually convert the websites to PDF. We cache the pages offline so
you have the original in your archive.

This is massively cool and I need to do a better job of making it clear that
this isn't just conversion to PDF.

> 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.

You mean specific limitations to Polar?

> 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).

Some users want to have more of a hierarchical folder view and we might
implement that.

But I don't get your point about a missing tag.

> 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."

Well one thing is that I think the Hacker News crowd is very very very picky
in terms of features and functionality vs the normal user base.

The features I've seen from HN just aren't going to be necessary for all
users. I'm fine adding them if they fit into the roadmap but some just won't
be implemented.

One issue is the ability to use other cloud providers which has been brought
up a number of times (which is why I wrote this post).

That's a massively complex feature and while that would be cool in some sense
it would just be far far far too expensive to implement.

I think the remaining 5% is doable but we will see..

One valid criticism is that PDF is the only format. We're working on markdown
and ePub too...

~~~
eslaught
> But I don't get your point about a missing tag.

At least in my experience, interfaces that use tags (Gmail, Google Docs prior
to the Drive upgrade) end up being a massive global heap that make it
impossible to find anything. Tags help but only marginally, and only when I'm
very selective about applying them. When a tag becomes too big it, it's just
the soup problem all over again. In my experience with Gmail/Docs I usually
find things via search, or not at all (and unfortunately more often than not
the latter).

You could argue the same problem occurs in hierarchical folders. But I think
one major takeaway I've had is that defaults matter: hierarchical folders
normalize a usage where you categorize _everything_. Therefore, I can find
utility bills for an apartment I moved out of some years ago, with about four
clicks through my folder tree. As another example, a while back I was asked
for my daughter's birth certificate when checking in for a flight. No problem,
five clicks and I've got it on my phone. In my experience this is hopeless in
a tagging system unless search is very good or the tags are hierarchical and
very granular, and at least so far I've never been able to develop the
discipline to do this.

~~~
burtonator
I mean a document with no tags is just like sticking something in /

Plus, with tags you can have multiple categories.

Also, Polar suggest tags for you based on your history. So it gets smarter
over time.

We will probably add some sort of hierarchy viewer but I'm torn over whether
it should be compiled based on the tags or built manually.

~~~
eslaught
I just went to your website and saw this screenshot:

[https://getpolarized.io/assets/screenshots/document-
reposito...](https://getpolarized.io/assets/screenshots/document-
repository.png)

This is exactly what I'm talking about. Tags may be supported but it's not a
tag-first interface, per se.

When I open finder/explorer/nautilus on my computer, what shows up is the top
level of my file hierarchy. This would be like an interface where you showed
_only_ top-level tags and then you have to click through one of those to get
to any actual documents. You can say this increases friction, but the tradeoff
is that it promotes a system of organization that becomes faster overall when
I have large numbers of documents.

Or again, the issue of uncategorized files: you say it's like saving a
document in /, but when I save a file on my local machine it doesn't put it in
/ first and then as a second step I have to manually put it somewhere else.
But that's how most tagging systems work: documents go into the soup of the
untagged list by default, I have to manually tag it if that's what I care
about. Again, it's normalizing an approach where you dump things in and
organize them later except the second step usually doesn't happen.

Like I said before, it's not that I don't think tagging could be used with
discipline to maintain organization, it's that systems that rely on tagging
tend to design their interfaces in a way where tagging is at most an
afterthought and often isn't done at all. Whereas on my desktop I literally
can't save a file without putting it _somewhere_ in the file hierarchy, and
the UI is designed to put that hierarchy front and center.

~~~
burtonator
Ah! That screenshot is out of date.

[https://i.imgur.com/hXizVHG.png](https://i.imgur.com/hXizVHG.png)

Tags are now front and center and on by default in the UI.

You can easily filter by tag too:

[https://i.imgur.com/9N5ZMi6.png](https://i.imgur.com/9N5ZMi6.png)

Polar 2.0 will be web based ... there have been thousands of people checking
out the website but not many people downloading the app. Had it been web based
I don't think that would have been an issue.

I think they would have started using it.

> it doesn't put it in / first and then as a second step I have to manually
> put it somewhere else.

no.. but it will pick either the users home or their Documents or their
Downloads. That's not much better.

------
burtonator
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
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
Sure.. jump on the discord:

[https://discordapp.com/invite/GT8MhA6](https://discordapp.com/invite/GT8MhA6)

------
gallerdude
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.

~~~
burtonator
I think you're missing the forest for the trees here. There's a lot more
functionality than just storing files here.

The OS doesn't provide annotations, highlights, flashcards, doesn't have a tag
index, doesn't support offline capture, etc.

Install Polar and take the tour...

~~~
bordercases
What are you going to do with that data you're collecting through hosting? Not
forest for trees, more like, hidden monetization strategy with an otherwise
more convenient package in the front as "opt-in". It's only missing something
if you're thinking several steps ahead.

------
prepend
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
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

~~~
sjy
Have you tried git-annex? I found it to be a simpler, more git-like solution
to the large binaries problem than LFS, which seemed like a centralised system
that would be painful to set up.

~~~
apostacy
Git-annex is amazing. It has changed the way I manage my data.

------
pps
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
> 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
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.

------
walkingolof
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
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.

------
sigi45
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.

------
ausjke
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
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.

------
7e
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.

~~~
burtonator
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
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.

------
ausjke
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

~~~
burtonator
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
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).

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

~~~
burtonator
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.

------
slaymaker1907
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
I used TiddlyWiki for awhile, and it will always have a place in my heart. But
it just wasn't portable enough for me.

------
avivo
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-
standar...](https://web.hypothes.is/blog/annotation-is-now-a-web-standard/)

~~~
burtonator
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.

------
lcuff
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
What do you do about more structured data, such as Excel files?

~~~
lcuff
Great question: If it were just columnized data you could keep it in csv
format, but Excel supports way more than that.

------
allochthon
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)

------
sj4nz
Sounds very zettelkasten-esque.

~~~
miguelrochefort
Context: [https://zettelkasten.de/](https://zettelkasten.de/)

~~~
kawera
Similar but OSS: [https://fsnot.es/](https://fsnot.es/) Happily using it for a
few months now.

------
throway88989898
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

------
mvyo
> 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
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.

------
qwerty456127
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.

------
orpheline
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.

------
alexcnwy
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.

------
jively
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

------
ggm
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
Since I couldn’t find anything about this. Is the volcano filing model where
things simply get stacked up until they erupt?

~~~
ggm
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)

------
dangoor
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
Any darkmode for Evernote yet? It is useless without it.

------
stuartbman
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
On iPad (and probably Surface) you can!

------
thinkersilver
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
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
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.

------
kissgyorgy
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
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
> 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.

------
docode
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!

------
franl
@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
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.

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

------
equalunique
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.

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

~~~
burtonator
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.

------
shdh
I use standardnotes.org self hosted

