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Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository

getpolarized.io

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Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository

#71

Post by burtonator »

tylerflick wrote: post #35
gallerdude wrote: post #4

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.

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.

Polar doesn't mutate the PDF - by design. The PDF stays in tact. The annotations are layered on top.

Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository

#72

Post by pps »

burtonator wrote: post #57
pps wrote: post #14

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 man…

> 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 progre…

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.

Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository

#73

Post by sjy »

llamaz wrote: post #42
sixtram wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I started out with polarized, but then I moved onto just putting all my pdfs in a folder and highlighting them in adobe reader.

Dang. That’s what I’m doing too and I’m somewhat happy with it. But it does bother me that it only works with PDFs, and there’s no easy way to decouple the annotations from the content, so I was hoping that Polar might be significantly better.

Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository

#74

Post by sjy »

ausjke wrote: post #21
prepend wrote: post #19

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…

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

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.

Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository

#75

Post by bordercases »

burtonator wrote: post #49
gallerdude wrote: post #4

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.

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...

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.

Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository

#76

Post by bordercases »

_lbaq wrote: post #12

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.

Look at org-noter if you want something as a substitute for polar with rough edges.

Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository

#77

Post by dare2deviate »

burtonator wrote: post #67

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…

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.

Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository

#79

Post by 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 .

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.

Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository

#80

Post by eslaught »

burtonator wrote: post #69
eslaught wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

I just went to your website and saw this screenshot:

https://getpolarized.io/assets/screenshots/document-reposito...

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.

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