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Show HN: Anytype – local-first, P2P knowledge management

anytype.io

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Re: Show HN: Anytype – local-first, P2P knowledge management

#71

Post by rubymamis »

josephg wrote: post #68
rubymamis wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi! If you click on the "More details" button, you'll see the following table[1]. Here's the methodology (also available on the website): 1. Loading time: Fully loads the entire text and ready to scroll. 2. Memory use after load: Memory used by the app after loading the text. 3. Scroll jump: How fast the app scrolls when dragging the scrollbar to a far position. 4. Resize: How fast the app resizes after scrolling to…

Huh - it was surprising how poorly Bear fares in that benchmark given I use it regularly and find it snappy and responsive. But then I looked closer and saw you were loading War and Peace into it. I'll let you in on a dirty secret: Most of my documents aren't as long as war and peace. I care a lot more about "normal" document sizes and real world typing latency. Is Anytype actually slow in this case?

My benchmark is largely based on the "Moby Dick Workout"[1] of Jesse Grosjean. I agree with him that ANY text editor should pass these tests. And block editors are first and foremost text editors. I just decided to take it up a notch and do my tests on War and Peace.

Another very crucial point, a good deal of software today is written with no oversight on performance at all, so you end up needing to buy the latest hardware to run apps smoothly. Why would anyone need a M3 Macbook to run a text editor fast??

This is why I used a 2017 Macbook Air in my tests and not the M1 Pro next to it. Efficient software matters for the longevity of hardware.

[1] https://www.hogbaysoftware.com/posts/moby-dick-workout/

Re: Show HN: Anytype – local-first, P2P knowledge management

#73

Post by jitl »

junipertea wrote: post #45
orthecreedence wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No note application does this Yes, the app Turtl ( https://turtlapp.com ) does do this and it's not slow at all really. It only decrypts data upon viewing, and immediately re-encrypts when saving data. So this is actually entirely reasonable and entirely doable. The benefits are that malicious applications can't read data just sitting on the hard drive, which removes an entire class of attacks. An encrypted hd does…

How would you search through thousands of notes? Decrypt them all in memory, search and encrypt them again? How does this scale with attachments?

Seems fine to encrypt a SQLite database with all the contents

Re: Show HN: Anytype – local-first, P2P knowledge management

#74

Post by manyty »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #72

Is this like a local-first Notion? Might be worth describing it like that, as it took me some time to figure out what it is (I needed the HN description here to figure it out).

Local first as well as peer to peer with benefits for speed and security.

Re: Show HN: Anytype – local-first, P2P knowledge management

#75

Post by josephg »

rubymamis wrote: post #71
josephg wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh - it was surprising how poorly Bear fares in that benchmark given I use it regularly and find it snappy and responsive. But then I looked closer and saw you were loading War and Peace into it. I'll let you in on a dirty secret: Most of my documents aren't as long as war and peace. I care a lot more about "normal" document sizes and real world typing latency. Is Anytype actually slow in this case?

My benchmark is largely based on the "Moby Dick Workout"[1] of Jesse Grosjean. I agree with him that ANY text editor should pass these tests. And block editors are first and foremost text editors. I just decided to take it up a notch and do my tests on War and Peace. Another very crucial point, a good deal of software today is written with no oversight on performance at all, so you end up needing to buy the latest ha…

Yeah thats fair. I have a friend building a personal thought management system, like roam research. Her goal is to store everything she thinks in her life.

In the 8 years or so she's been working on it she's recorded about 100k thoughts. So, 1 million thoughts is probably enough to store everything you think in an entire lifetime. Thats a bit of a grim thought, but its probably about the right performance target for something like that. There's something very calming about knowing that if it performs well with 1M thoughts, its fit for purpose.

Its nice to have benchmarks like that.

For what its worth, I'd recommend explaining all of that with the benchmark explanation. "Measured on a 2017 macbook air with the text of War and Peace". Seeing Bear crash doesn't really tell me enough about whats going on.

Re: Show HN: Anytype – local-first, P2P knowledge management

#76

Post by rubymamis »

josephg wrote: post #75
rubymamis wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My benchmark is largely based on the "Moby Dick Workout"[1] of Jesse Grosjean. I agree with him that ANY text editor should pass these tests. And block editors are first and foremost text editors. I just decided to take it up a notch and do my tests on War and Peace. Another very crucial point, a good deal of software today is written with no oversight on performance at all, so you end up needing to buy the latest ha…

Yeah thats fair. I have a friend building a personal thought management system, like roam research. Her goal is to store everything she thinks in her life. In the 8 years or so she's been working on it she's recorded about 100k thoughts. So, 1 million thoughts is probably enough to store everything you think in an entire lifetime. Thats a bit of a grim thought, but its probably about the right performance target for…

> There's something very calming about knowing that if it performs well with 1M thoughts, its fit for purpose.

Exactly. I've been using my note-taking app (of which Plume is built on) since 2014, so I have 4850 notes in total, and it's still rock solid and fast.

Another plus of efficient software is that my 2017 Macbook Air actually loads text ~2x faster than the best competitor (Bike) on a 2021 M1 Pro (with much more performance)

2017 MacBook Air:

Plume: 0.8 seconds

Bike: 3.46 seconds

MacBook M1 Pro:

Plume: 0.3 seconds

Bike: 1.5 seconds

That alone says a lot.

> For what its worth, I'd recommend explaining all of that with the benchmark explanation. "Measured on a 2017 macbook air with the text of War and Peace". Seeing Bear crash doesn't really tell me enough about whats going on.

Thanks for letting me know. Do you have a suggestion for how to convey it better?

Re: Show HN: Anytype – local-first, P2P knowledge management

#77

Post by maelito »

I've just been recently through a long reflection about the tools I use.

I need two things : - infinitely nested task lists (also called infinite outliners) : dynalist, workflowy - markdown notes : notesnook, obsidian, notion, etc.

After drowning myself in all these tools and their respective small drawbacks, and also trying anytype which lacks basic things like share a document online, I finally went for local markdown files synced with git, using vim as my editor, and an extremely small deno server to publish my markdown notes (some listed, some not). On mobile, I decided to use gitjournal.

For my non-developer friends, and also those that don't care about using non-open source software than might get bought by microsoft in 1 year, I can understand the appeal of notion.

If anytype can provide an open-source local-first alternative to notion, it would be beautiful.

Re: Show HN: Anytype – local-first, P2P knowledge management

#78

Post by mrtesthah »

pronkin wrote: post #8
bosky101 wrote: post #2

1) is it accessible via a browser. Your screenshots and download section indicates 3 os installers. 2) I did find docs, wiki on the website. Was that created by the same tool?

1) We don’t offer a browser version. Instead, we have an Electron-based cross-platform app that works on Windows, Linux, and macOS. We also have two native mobile apps for iOS and Android. Creating a browser version is challenging for us because our business logic and local database rely on a middleware library written in Go. Currently, the only feasible approach is running it in WebAssembly (Wasm). We hope to make a…

If you already have an iOS app, it’s straightforward to build a macOS port that runs on Apple Silicon, and would provide a substantially better user experience than Electron. And then on the other side, there’s Windows Subsystem for Android.

OTOH, if these mobile apps would be worse than running a bundled browser, then I’d have to question their overall utility.

Re: Show HN: Anytype – local-first, P2P knowledge management

#79

Post by mehh »

orthecreedence wrote: post #30
hruzgar wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

im not the dev but what you're wanting is completely unreasonable. No note application does this and this would slow down the application without having any additional benefits

> No note application does this Yes, the app Turtl ( https://turtlapp.com ) does do this and it's not slow at all really. It only decrypts data upon viewing, and immediately re-encrypts when saving data. So this is actually entirely reasonable and entirely doable. The benefits are that malicious applications can't read data just sitting on the hard drive, which removes an entire class of attacks. An encrypted hd does…

Are your notes really that interesting? I’ve written software that does this sort of thing commercially, if your materials are that sensitive you’d be using one of those packages.

I suspect this is just a dev with a fetish for obsessing over security. Like putting an expensive lock on a cheap bike!

Re: Show HN: Anytype – local-first, P2P knowledge management

#80

Post by hammyhavoc »

dang wrote: post #42

Related: Anytype Desktop 0.37.0 Released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38772317 - Dec 2023 (1 comment) Anytype – local-first, P2P Notion alternative - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36799548 - July 2023 (273 comments) Anytype. FOSS Notion Alternative - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34167322 - Dec 2022 (7 comments) Anytype: A local, privacy-first Notion alternative - https://news.ycombinator.com/…

Is it not source-available rather than open-source?
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