Launch HN: Athens Research (YC W21) – Open-Source Roam Research • Hacker News Board

Re: Launch HN: Athens Research (YC W21) – Open-Source Roam Research

#21

Post by solarkraft » Tue, Mar 02, 2021, 5:24 PM UTC

This is amazing. Until very recently the only tree structure "outliners" I found somewhat viable were Workflowy, Dynalist, Roam and Transno, all of which are proprietary.

Logseq eventually added an open source option, but that it fails to keep sub trees collapsed pretty much kills it.

My current favorite note applications are Dynalist and Workflowy, but during my use I have always had a bad stomach feeling about privacy, inability to use it for work related stuff and always thought "this needs some features breaking out of the tree structure".

I'm not entirely sure Athens is trying to be exactly what I'm thinking of here, but getting competition in the space is great.

Re: Launch HN: Athens Research (YC W21) – Open-Source Roam Research

#22

Post by fabiospampinato » Tue, Mar 02, 2021, 5:27 PM UTC

> Something else that's interesting about the most powerful networked tools like Roam and Athens is that you can't really make these apps with JavaScript

How come? There's no single feature that you can implement in any other programming language that you can't also implement with JavaScript, right?

Re: Launch HN: Athens Research (YC W21) – Open-Source Roam Research

#23

Post by FlashBlaze » Tue, Mar 02, 2021, 5:30 PM UTC

tangjeff0 wrote: post #5

nsriv wrote: post #2

Athens has been incredible for me over the past week, as someone that has bounced around using Workflowy, Dynalist, and Obsidian. The great outliner features of the first two, and the backlinking and graphing of Obsidian. My only real reservation is that files are not in Markdown. Is there a plan to address that, or is a DB central to the architecture? Currently using LogSeq because of this but eager to switch.

Yes! Good import/export functionality is important. Ultimately, it would be awesome if there was direct serialization between our database and markdown. This would allow seamless "import", the same way Obsidian/Foam/Zettlr are directly interchangeable.

Did not expect Zettlr to be mentioned here. Currently my go to note taking app.

Re: Launch HN: Athens Research (YC W21) – Open-Source Roam Research

#24

Post by gw » Tue, Mar 02, 2021, 5:36 PM UTC

Y'all both are making great tools but consider giving a read-only view of the page when javascript is disabled. After disabling JS this gives me a blank white screen: https://athensresearch.github.io/athens/ Same thing when i tried it with roam.

Re: Launch HN: Athens Research (YC W21) – Open-Source Roam Research

#25

Post by raun1 » Tue, Mar 02, 2021, 5:38 PM UTC

rronalddas wrote: post #4

Is it something like Obsidian ( https://obsidian.md/ ) but with more than just markdown files?

It's closer to Roam Research, the project that inspired and catalyzed Obsidian.md

There are a few major differences, but otherwise, the functionality is mostly similar.

Re: Launch HN: Athens Research (YC W21) – Open-Source Roam Research

#26

Post by pps » Tue, Mar 02, 2021, 5:38 PM UTC

tangjeff0 wrote: post #17

mattnewport wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you see as the advantages vs. Zettlr? I haven't got to a point where perf seems to be an issue that would require a real graph database and having your knowledgebase just be a collection of markdown files is the ultimate in local first no lock-in portability.

The current major difference between markdown-based and db-based apps is block references. Over time, the difference will become significant as knowledge bases grow in size. CSV -> Excel -> SQL -> Distributed Cloud DBs Furthermore, our database supports data types, including numbers, dates, etc. I don't think any networked notetaking app has executed well on tables and non-string types. UX for tables is generally not…

> The current major difference between markdown-based and db-based apps is block references. Over time, the difference will become significant as knowledge bases grow in size.

That should be true, but so far it is Roam with the biggest problems with performance, from 30+ seconds of loading each time you load/refresh tab to constant lags in normal usage for some users :)

I personally like the most this mixed approach of Logseq - app internally uses DataScript, but data is ultimately stored in plain files.

Re: Launch HN: Athens Research (YC W21) – Open-Source Roam Research

#27

Post by Dyac » Tue, Mar 02, 2021, 5:49 PM UTC

How do you feel about Workflowy (another YC company) suddenly starting to add new features like bidirectional linking, transclusion and file embedding functionality?

Re: Launch HN: Athens Research (YC W21) – Open-Source Roam Research

#28

Post by jolux » Tue, Mar 02, 2021, 6:05 PM UTC

> For maximum power, you want a true graph database.

Do you have empirical validation of this claim? Anecdotally, Postgres has a pretty rich set of graph modeling features these days, and keeps getting more of them, and SQL databases are often operationally simpler than graph databases. Maybe this matters less in a client side app?

Re: Launch HN: Athens Research (YC W21) – Open-Source Roam Research

#29

Post by vemv » Tue, Mar 02, 2021, 6:06 PM UTC

I wonder if the quite extremely early/intense competition that Roam faced as soon as it was shared publicly will result in none of the competitors succeeding (at the very least as a viable for-profit company).

It's possible that sometimes we have to let early ideas fully succeed to see how the market actually performs. Else one can end up in an arms-race situation that ultimately only leads to a tiny user base for each company.

Re: Launch HN: Athens Research (YC W21) – Open-Source Roam Research

#30

Post by sandGorgon » Tue, Mar 02, 2021, 6:23 PM UTC

This is pretty cool! I do urge you to take your domain name versus https://athensresearch.github.io/athens/

Could you talk about the clojure part of it? how instrumental was it to build Athens Research. could you have built it on Electron + Typescript for example