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

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

#121

Post by helloguillecl »

dageshi wrote: post #119
helloguillecl wrote: post #16

This is amazing. I like Roam Research but I refuse to give full control of something so important to any third party. At this point we have all experienced what it is like to give the control over your digital life to FAANG-like entities with priorities other than their own users well-being. We can and should ask for better. If it will be my second brain (please note how important this sounds), what I want is to be a…

You can export everything from roam in json or markup... does that basically not suffice?

That's as useful as exporting your excel sheets into CSV or exporting your Google takeout backup. Yes you have your data, but can you do anything useful and continue working with it without a big deal of effort? I'd also like to continue working in the same learned workflow/method after I take my data.

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

#123

Post by randomchars »

helloguillecl wrote: post #121
dageshi wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can export everything from roam in json or markup... does that basically not suffice?

That's as useful as exporting your excel sheets into CSV or exporting your Google takeout backup. Yes you have your data, but can you do anything useful and continue working with it without a big deal of effort? I'd also like to continue working in the same learned workflow/method after I take my data.

One more point: the exported data in markdown (and maybe in json too) is lossy. It's not just that the you can't use it out of the box, but that significant parts of it are missing as well.

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

#124

Post by desmap »

tincholio wrote: post #118
desmap wrote: post #116

So, after diving a bit deeper into this field I still do not understand why the underlying tech is important for bidirectional linking? I understand that a graph database like neo4j can be amazing once you need more than just binary relationships (any kind of relationship in any level can be expressed) and once you start to query the database. Latter is so powerful and crucial from a data scientist perspective. But w…

You can have both, actually. Having a datalog engine allows things like this, which is pretty cool: https://www.loom.com/share/d007932e94db4b4981cca606bebdb54a

Thanks for the video. Still I am not sure why you need a graph database here, everything can be done with hyper-linked md-files, optionally enriched with metadata (front matter). I am aware that a graph database is more elegant but again, does it justify its costs?

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

#125

Post by Grustaf »

randomchars wrote: post #120
dageshi wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can export everything from roam in json or markup... does that basically not suffice?

Have you actually looked at what's exported? You need to do a lot of parsing, and modifying before that content is usable...

Someone could write a viewer, or converter for this format? Should be simpler than writing a new creation app.

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

#127

Post by altgans »

Off wrote: post #14

Hi Jeff! Great to see a Roam alternative backed by YC! Congrats on the launch! What are you thoughts on the other Roam alternative, Logseq[1]? It seems to be doing really well and has a lot of features, from github sync and encrypted data to custom themes and publishing, it looks like privacy is their main goal, while being local-first and opensource, do you think that such features will be implemented in the near fu…

E: I somehow replied to the wrong post. Sorry about that.

From all the Note-taking tools, I liked TW best, as the "story river" is a genious visualization, but I found the text editor very cumbersome and annoying. It just did not feel good to write my notes.

The "tag-interface" always popped up and could only be closed with the mouse, there were some issues with tab, ...

---

I then moved to Dendron and finally to org-roam. I think markdown notes are superior to org-files*, but I also wanted VIM keys, as being able to write without hassle is the single most important thing when taking notes. VSC of course has a VIM extension, but it is very much a second-class citizen. There is also the option to emulate and use nvim, but then I would have to set-up and customize nvim. Why not move directly to Emacs, where Evil reigns superior?

*org-files are very parasitic. I only consider them plain-text in the sense that they can be opened and edited with any text editor, similar to SVG, JSON and XML. But they are not exactly plain, and pretty much unusable outside of emacs/org-mode.

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

#128

Post by pizza_pleb »

Nice! I’m also developing a clone at https://github.com/cofinley/free-roam.

Done mainly to learn latest React/Redux. It’s coming along nicely. Also hosted on GitHub pages as a type of progressive web app (https://cofinley.github.io/free-roam). I love the idea of offline apps where you bring your own data. Kind of like the Beaker Browser.

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

#129

Post by jurassic »

etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #69

Me and some friends have played around with Roam a bit and we are baffled by the app. It just does not work well. It is a badly-designed, lower performance, glitchy note-taking app. You end up staring at its gaudy giant astrolabe loading spinner more often than not. We look at it and end up baffled why anyone would pay a monthly subscription for it!

This has not been my experience. I use it daily and after the initial load screen my graph is very responsive. They’ve fixed a lot of bugs since last year as well.

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

#130

Post by drcode »

etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #69

Me and some friends have played around with Roam a bit and we are baffled by the app. It just does not work well. It is a badly-designed, lower performance, glitchy note-taking app. You end up staring at its gaudy giant astrolabe loading spinner more often than not. We look at it and end up baffled why anyone would pay a monthly subscription for it!

I agree- A notetaking app has to be speedy and 100% glitch free, this is way way more important than "bidirectional links" or any other such niceties.

Like everyone else, I'm building my own clone just to address this fact (mine is fully unix cli to maximize performance and reliability)

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