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Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository

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Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository

#61

Post by burtonator »

solarkraft wrote: post #41
kissgyorgy wrote: post #8

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?

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 comp…

> 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.

Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository

#62

Post by burtonator »

franl wrote: post #7

@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.

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.

Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository

#64

Post by burtonator »

ausjke wrote: post #23

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.

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.

Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository

#65

Post by DecayingOrganic »

burtonator wrote: post #50
7e wrote: post #34

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.

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.

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.

Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository

#66

Post by burtonator »

ausjke wrote: post #20

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…

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.

Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository

#67

Post by 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

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 ... we've received essentially zero Open Source contributions from the community and very little funding.

Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository

#68

Post by eslaught »

burtonator wrote: post #56
bachmeier wrote: post #15

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 thin…

> 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…

> 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.

Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository

#69

Post by burtonator »

eslaught wrote: post #68
burtonator wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository

#70

Post by burtonator »

avivo wrote: post #63

Are you building on the web annotation standard? Or otherwise connected to the prior work here? 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...

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.

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