Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files - <AUTHOR> https://obsidian.md/ <comment><AUTHOR> Maker here, excited to be on Hacker News. Obsidian is going into public beta today! (We're also on Product Hunt, come check us out!)

We made Obsidian to be your long-term second brain and personal knowledge base. As you put in more notes and make more connections, the knowledge base gets more valuable, so we think it's important that you can 100% own your data and not rely on any cloud services.

We believe you second brain should work similarly to your own brain and connections are crucial in thinking. Obsidian supports [[internal links]] between your notes out of the box, and provide a powerful graph view and backlink pane to help you understand your knowledge.

We also noticed how personal note-taking and knowledge management is, so we built Obsidian to be very extensible from the start, and let you put together your own workflow with plugins like daily notes and page preview as building blocks.

This leads to our three fundamental values of Obsidian:

1\. Local-first, Markdown plain text based; 2\. Link as first-citizen. 3\. As extensible as possible.

Obsidian is a powerful front-end for your knowledge, like an IDE for your notes.

Learn more about Obsidian's features: [https://obsidian.md/features](https://obsidian.md/features)

Read the story of the project and the team: [https://obsidian.md/about](https://obsidian.md/about)

<comment><USER3> Interesting stuff!

I currently use Andy Matuschak's [1] system, using his note-link-janitor script [2] to generate backlinks and Typora to edit. The only thing Obsidian adds is the graph view for me, but it seems that Obsidian generates backlinks using file name, not title. I prefer linking by title. Perhaps this can be an option? The editor also seems to be lacking a little... for instance I can't seem to render math. Hopefully some of my feedback will be useful to you.

Overall really cool idea, but probably not going to use for now. Will keep tabs, and wish you the best of luck!

[1] [https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes](https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes) [2] [https://github.com/andymatuschak/note-link- janitor](https://github.com/andymatuschak/note-link-janitor)

<comment><USER4> I discovered andy's notes in the past and has been trying to determined what he uses to publish those clean yet powerfull notes. The janitor is only one part. do you also publish your notes as HTML? How to you make use of the backlinks generated by janitor?

<comment><USER5> It's possible to get a similar system with TiddlyWiki and the Krystal theme plus a few plugins:

[https://twitter.com/Learn_Awesome/status/1265574525342793730...](https://twitter.com/Learn_Awesome/status/1265574525342793730?s=20)

<comment><USER3> Intriguing... thanks for sharing!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As several people have pointed out, both the "Personal" and "Catalyst" licenses are intended for personal use only, making this quite an expensive product should I want to use it for work as well. But in the full license text, there seems to be an even more problematic phrasing:

> The use of OBSIDIAN for the exercise of your own trade or profession (...) > does not qualify as personal use.

I would interpret this to mean that I as a developer can not use this to exercise the "trade" of software development. That would in turn mean that I can not use this to make notes of stuff I learn on my own time, if it is related to software development.

I would imagine most people not caring about this kind of license limitation, but it would be interesting if it was intended this way, or if this is just me being bad at licenses.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi there! Sorry it's our first time doing a license like this.

If I understand correctly, licenses are usually written more strictly for legal purposes, but in my opinion your use case sounds like it should belong to personal use.

If anyone has pointers for us to make the license text more clear, please let me know!

<comment><USER7> I would not write my own license. I'd really recommend you get a lawyer look over the text you have (that shouldn't be too expensive, it's a one time cost), or look at existing ones that are actually written by lawyers. For a public license (to restrict commercial use), I'd recommend both LicenseZero Prosperity ( [https://prosperitylicense.com/versions/3.0.0](https://prosperitylicense.com/versions/3.0.0) ) and the Polyform licenses ( [https://polyformproject.org/](https://polyformproject.org/) ).

For the private license, you could use/adapt the LicenseZero Private license ( [https://licensezero.com/licenses/private](https://licensezero.com/licenses/private) ).

Those are more geared towards developer tools, so I'm not sure whether they'd be a good fit for your product. But all of them are written in simple to understand language so you should be able to figure that out by youself, and at the very least get a few pointers. If not, that is considered a bug with the license, and both projects are very open to feedback.

<comment><USER8> Obsidian folks: please don't use any of the aforementioned licenses. The reality is that they're _not_ a good fit (although the author would probably love to get you as a client to handle your EULA and convince you to use one of the others for your eventually-open-source plans, and that would be an even worse idea).

<comment><USER7> Why are they not a good fit? From a shallow reading, I thought Prosperity and the Polyform licenses would be fairly similar in intent to the licenses they have on their page. I can't imagine the authors (not author) of Polyform/Prosperity would care either way, and since nobody ever claimed those are open source licenses I don't understand your other ill-made point either. Maybe you refer to the Parity license? That one would make no sense in this context at all, and I doubt anybody would suggest it here.

Also, since your post is fairly negative and unsubstantiated overall, would you care to suggest an alternative?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I will never again build any kind of workflow for my knowledge on top of anything that isn't open source. 5y is a long time and 10y is an eternity for these sorts of products but its just a fraction of my working life.

My own personal setup is a bunch of markdown files and it's great, so I like that approach, but I'm very cautious about investing time for something so important in a product i don't control.

<comment><AUTHOR> We'll likely make a formal guarantee to open source in the case of us shutting down. Didn't realize that was a possibility, thanks for the suggestion!

<comment><USER10> "Open source" is both a license and a development model. You're talking about a license, but someone interested in workflow longevity will probably not be satisfied with a source dump from a dead company. They're looking for a community which knows how to maintain it.

As JWZ once said: "You can't take a dying project, sprinkle it with the magic pixie dust of 'open source,' and have everything magically work out." Has there ever been a case where a company as its last act released their software as open-source, and a community formed and picked it up?

<comment><USER11> You do realize communities can die out as well?

<comment><USER10> By definition, that's what happens when its developer community dies off down to size n=0. A source dump without a community is essentially fast-forwarding a (potential) developer community to its death. It should be clear why this is strictly worse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've been using Obsidian for the past week. Here are my thoughts:

I love that this is basically just markdown with wiki links. I'm not too concerned about Obsidian going out of business and my notes not being useful anymore. Contrast that with Notion (which is great in many other ways), where I store my data on their cloud and even though I can export to markdown not everything is actually markdown (e.g. tables) so they just put a link to their site instead.

I also love that since this is locally stored, I have control of how I store my data. I have a private git repo, and just occasionally commit and push my changes.

I wish it were open source, that way I could feel better about the wiki links being useless if they go out of business. It's not a blocker for me though, since my notes are fairly straightforward and I mostly just use the links for table of contents files.

The downside of being locally stored is that it isn't cross-device capable. This limits me when I'm taking notes on my iPad. That said, I don't take many notes on my iPad so if I need to I can just manually transfer my notes when I get back to my computer. I can understand though that this would a be a show stopper for some people.

Overall, this solution works for me. I have high hopes that it will continue to improve and become even better than it is now. Thanks to the team for the hard work!

<comment><USER13> I store the notes in Dropbox and use iA on my mobile. Works well enough.

<comment><USER14> I can confirm that both iA writer and 1Writer work great as mobile solutions. 1Writer allows for following links. Both allow you to search through all your notes quickly, though there's probably a tiny bit less friction with iA than 1Writer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This looks great! Good timing too, since Roam has recently closed its doors to new signups. I've been looking for a new notetaking / PKM / Markdown app recently, but unfortunately all apps out there fall short in at least one of the following criteria:

* bidirectional [[wiki links]]

* support for both inline and display math

* customizable themes / CSS

* rich formatting beyond markdown (e.g. wrap content in <div> tags with custom formatting--useful for e.g. placing a box around text, etc.)

* WYSIWYG (crucial for documents with tons of math and rich formatting as above) including wysiwyg editing of tables

Tools I've tried that come close but aren't quite good enough:

* Jupyter Lab / Notebooks

* Typora

* Roam

* OneNote (just let me write $\LaTeX$ math!)

It's actually been quite frustrating. because some apps are __soooo close __to what I need, but they 're closed-source so I'm powerless to make the small improvements I need. My current workflow for notetaking uses a pretty suboptimal combination of Overleaf, Typora, and OneNote. I'd really like to be able to replace all three with a single tool. At the moment, the only thing that comes close is a Chrome tab with document.designMode="on".

To the Obsidian team: Please add inline math support and consider WYSWIG!

<comment><USER16> Since roam was lamented, obligatory boost for org-roam:

[https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam](https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam)

<comment><USER17> I love this, and used Deft and org-mode for a long while, but formatting and inline images aren't something that's non-hackily possible to do in Emacs. Would love to be wrong about this.

<comment><USER18> A quick search suggests it's doable [https://duckduckgo.com/html?q=org%20mode%20pictures](https://duckduckgo.com/html?q=org%20mode%20pictures)

<comment><USER17> Yep, I did use inline images in my days with org-mode, but I found it to be rather hacky. It's possible, I just found it unpleasant.

<comment><USER18> May I suggest contacting the emacs org-mode maintainers and chat. The emacs guys are very receptive I know, I imagine the org-mode guys will be just as good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Can somebody help me understand something about Markdown and Obsidian?

Why would I ever want an edit mode and a preview mode while taking notes? Don't I want to be able to _both_ see my note _and_ edit it at any time?

I mean, I guess I could just ignore preview mode if the edit mode actually allowed me to see all of the content of my note, but it doesn't. Images are only visible in preview mode. So all the talk about transclusion seems dumb to me. I can't see jack unless I decide to stop working and start viewing. I just don't get it. Is this really what people do? Switch back and forth between editing and viewing all the time?

Or perhaps they just decide to put all the content of the note on-screen twice? But why would I ever want to look at the same content twice? We're not talking about folding, so I can see two different places in the same note. We're talking viewing the exact same content twice, cutting my usable screen real estate in half for displaying the content of my note. So I have 50% of the context I could have... And don't even get me started about how synchronized scrolling is impossible in this view if you use images in your note.

I feel like I must be taking crazy pills, because everybody seems to love using markdown, and I _really_ want to like it, too. I know the benefits of plaintext. But I just don't get making that sort of usability sacrifice.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're working on WYSIWYG but it's not an easy problem. Eventually we want editing to feel comfortable to everyone! :)

<comment><USER19> That's good news for me, but apparently a lot of people don't feel the need for it. I'm still confused why. In general, are people switching modes or doing side-by-side or what?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think most people are used to seeing the source and can basically "imagine" what it looks like. So they really only switch for double checking before sending something out I would say.

Many people in our community said things about "staying in the editor" so I guess that's a common workflow.

<comment><USER19> I think I could get used to that in notes where I don't embed images.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I was about to spend $25 for a one-time/lifetime license, until I read your license. No commercial or professional use?

I'm not paying $50/yr for that sorry. A yearly fee for this is unrealistic and is way more expensive than other products like Quiver or SimpleMind which offers a lifetime product

<comment><USER21> It is quite an odd choice. It makes sense to tier based on features, but tiers based on how or when people use an app is bizarre. Am I supposed to monitor myself so I don't read a note in Obsidian while I'm doing commercial writing work?

(Also, their license page could do with some proofreading)

<comment><AUTHOR> The idea is that if you're creating value with Obsidian, your employer should expense that, ideally it shouldn't impact you financially. If you're working for a non-profit for example, it's all free.

> (Also, their license page could do with some proofreading)

Interested to hear more! We did a few rounds of proofreading, did you find any typos?

<comment><USER20> > your employer should expense that, ideally it shouldn't impact you > financially.

You're really limiting your userbase (customer pool) here by expecting only enterprise users. Many people here are freelance designers, students with part-time jobs, researchers writing for-profit books, or they work for themselves. Most employers don't allow expenses for note-taking apps. I would encourage you to adopt this pricing model: [https://simplemind.eu/features- pricing/](https://simplemind.eu/features-pricing/)

It looks cool, but I won't buy it until it's a lifetime license.

Edit: Sorry that this came out overly-negative. It's a beautiful product, congrats on launching it!

<comment><USER22> I confirm, I could be interested in such a tool for my professional activity, but I work in a large company and there's 0 chance they'd let me expense whatever software I want. I'd be paying from my own pocket.

<comment><USER7> For what it's worth: JetBrains has a model where they sell cheaper individual licenses that people can buy from their own money (company credit cards/expenses are not allowed), and those can be used for work. And more expensive per-seat licenses for companies/organizations. Also, that also includes a perpetual license for the version at the time of purchase (and discounts for people who upgrade). I think that is overall a fair deal, and keeps the incentives for both developers and customers as aligned as is possible under such circumstances, IMHO. Yearly licensing like this doesn't make much sense for such a product, I think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> For the people complaining it's not open source: Why does that matter ? It's not like your markdown disappears if they do. You would just have to write software or purchase another software with the same conventions.

<comment><USER24> Joplin is open source and basically the same application minus the linked graph. For people complaining, use that. I do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Can't comment on the merits of the product itself.

That in the first five minutes of this post being online, several users more or less claim that this has changed their lives in their first-ever comment on HN strikes me as a little odd however.

(Yes I'm aware that this is also my first-ever comment on HN.)

<comment><AUTHOR> We have been in private beta for a few months already, with 5000+ beta testers and a community. We did let them know that we're doing a "Show HN" today.

Hope that explains things!

<comment><USER25> Thanks for taking the time to reply! I guess it does explain things ...

Best of luck with the product, also +1 to the suggestion of an open source client from a sibling thread!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes! We really want people to be able to leave their knowledge bases as a legacy to their grandchildren, so we'll do everything it takes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It looks like this isn't open source. If this is supposed to be one's second brain, please at least consider using a time-bomb FOSS license. Something like: you're permitted to use Obsidian under Apache/MIT/GPL license either 7 years after a given release, or effective immediately in the event that Obsidian shuts down.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's an interesting idea and we'll look into it!

We plan to stay in business in the long run, but if things do go wrong and we shut down, we do intend to open source the app.

<comment> Whil- I guess we all have an incentive to make you go out of business then ;-)

On a more serious note: I see no issue with software being a service and costing money if it's built on a standard that leaves the data in the owners hands and in the owners own structures. I.e. Markdown files synced using infrastructure like OneDrive/Dropbox/whatever with some nice features on top of it and a nice UI can cost whatever and no one should complain. Because if that software goes away the data is in the owners hands and in a standardized format supported by many other tools.

That should be the preferred way we build software btw. And to take it to the next level we should create more general purpose (and standardized) database tools that are user friendly, treat them in similar fashion as files by syncing with user owned Infrastructure and we might just get to the point where more rigid data structures can be used in a similar manner as what I described above for files. That future would be great.

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally agree (except for the first sentence LOL!).

Come to think of it, IDEs are exactly that: a powerful front-end for your code files. That means us programmers are not locked into any one IDE.

> And to take it to the next level we should create more general purpose (and > standardized) database tools that are user friendly

Yep, but I wonder how we can get there. Hope someone figures it out! It's always hard to set standards.

<comment><USER26> I too see no problem in a closed-source application so long as the data files are open. I like the IDE analogy here -- you can edit source code with a bunch of different tools. Some open, some closed. But the important thing is that the source code is readable by all of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I actually get a lot of value from cloud hosted solutions, I bounce between 2-3 machines daily and multiple OS installations several times a week, and would like for my notes taken on one machine to just be there when I write notes on another machine.

Another thing I need to do often is type up design docs collaboratively, we use google docs for this currently but it sucks for our use cases.

And finally, I read and write a lot of GH wiki pages and various markdown notes in git repos for open source collaboration, which isn't really helpful for cross referencing information.

Is there any way to do this with obsidian? I'm all for owning my data but tbh, a lot of the powerful features you demonstrate only make sense for me if I can throw my data up on a server and make it accessible from anywhere with an internet connection.

<comment><USER28> Definitely can use across computers using a cloud sync provider (dropbox, etc).

You can also have multiple vaults, and if you want to collaborate, you can share that vault with someone.

Realtime collaboration may be a bit dangerous with syncing over a cloud provider. They are also planning a subscription with note hosting - <USER2> that will include some form of collaboration.

If you put all of your GH wiki pages into a single vault, that may be a solution (though I don't think it's possible to create a solution to your setup in the most general setting - you'd have to be able to link to any file on your OS).

But you can throw your data up on a server and make it accessible from anywhere with an internet connection

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I was using Obsidian in the beta and it's pretty great but I stopped using it when the licenses were released. I like the product and I'd like to support it but is quite the leap from $25 one time fee to $50 a year for commercial especially since I'll be using it for side projects alone. Getting a proper commercial license is a must for CYA reasons and I don't see myself paying $50 a year for it.

Also, the $25 catalyst license seems odd to me. It's called a license but you get a Discord badge and nothing else really changes from the personal license. I would reconsider how these are structured.

</comment><comment><USER30> It's not exactly Roam, but the thing looks promising still. I like that it is offline-first and Markdown based, really feels like the crew has got some ideas in what direction to lead this project to. The bi-directional links in themselves are quite a killer feature that makes many note-taking apps like Evernote feel obsolete.

<comment><USER31> Curious what it's missing that Roam has? I liked the Roam concept, but didn't use it for long before moving to Obsidian because of the privacy model, so I never really got a good feel for it. I still feel like I'm not getting the most out of the bi-directional link functionality everyone loves so much because I keep forgetting to create them.

<comment><USER30> I think Roam's graph is flawed, but it's much better that Obsidian's, which you can't even zoom out of. Also Conaw experiments with some neat things like to-do lists that double as backlinks, Kanban boards, Pomodoro timer (ok that's overkill but it was added recently anyway). Daily note-taking is also pretty streamlined in Roam with new notes created every day that can be referred to in a neat fashion, and perhaps also allow for SRS.

Idk, Roam feels too familiar to me as well, so I doubt that I'll drop it anytime soon (we'll see how will I handle the future $15 price tag).

<comment><AUTHOR> Interested in hearing more about the graph view!

As of the latest release our graph view can be zoomed in and out, and we've rewritten it to generate the graph with WebGL rather than SVG, so it's a lot more performant for 1,000+ notes.

<comment><USER32> Love it. Would also love to be able to search/filter in the graph view!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The comments here are so positive, I had to try this out. After reading through all the built-in notes and customizing some shortcuts, I have to say this is some very slick software.

I tried Roam before but didn't get into it, but the similarity between this and VSCode makes the barrier to entry very low. The formatting is very nice, the linking is fantastic. I am going to attempt to make this my daily driver for notes.

Great work Obsidian team!

</comment><comment><USER34> Obsidian is crazy good for how new it is. And the team is moving extremely fast. It seems like they really know what they want out of this product.

I've tried dozens of knowledge management tools and settled on TiddlyWiki a couple years ago. It took a lot of customization to get anywhere close as useable as Obsidian is out of the box.

Here's what I love about Obsidian:

\- Local files, syncs via iCloud/Dropbox/etc makes it future proof

\- Markdown with [[ ]]] bidirectional links and - [ ] checklists.

\- Automatically updates all old links if you rename a file(!)

\- Compatible with 1Writer on iOS

\- Really nice keyboard shortcuts

\- Runs as its own app (in a wrapper), but can be styled via custom CSS

\- Automatically parses external URLs (don't necessarily need to use the markdown format for simple .com URLs)

\- Great editing experience, e.g. auto indenting bullets

\- Autocomplete for everything (tags, linked pages)

\- Lots of extra nice touches like graph view and the pane system to open multiple files at once

<comment><USER35> Yup, I've got my Tiddlywiki in a place where the portability makes me not itch to try this (sort of the opposite of local-first; a raspberry pi in the sky holds my Markdown files) but this seems like it will be something like an IDE for markdown notes, which is very, very cool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Obsidian is a crazy project, and I would recommend you all to give it far more weight when deciding to use it or not. Before I switched to Notion earlier this year, I used to maintain my notes in a Github repository. A folder with a bunch of markdown and txt files. I then used some editor like Sublime Text to easily switch between pages and to write. And sometimes, I would render them using a combination of [Markserv]([https://www.npmjs.com/package/markserv](https://www.npmjs.com/package/markserv)) (to convert Markdown to static HTML files), and [Live Reload Addon]([https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/live- reload/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/live-reload/)) to pull those HTML files from disk every second. It was ugly, but it worked for me for years.

Obsidian fits this workflow __perfectly __. I use Notion now, but I believe it 's got too many bells and whistles, syntactic sugar, and non-native text editing experience, which makes me focus more on the interface than the content. I'm making the shift back to my previous way of managing notes/knowledge (going to take weeks), only because of this Application. I recommend you keep a close eye on it.

I am not in any way involved with the project.

</comment><comment><USER37> I wonder how this could be connected to some flash card system. I've been using anki for some months now to help me rememer things better (apps on linux, iOS and OSX and syncing via ankiweb). My notes are not linked so far as I have been looking for a solution that allows me keep all my notes in plain markdown files while linking them.

I'm syncing the md files across all my devices via a self-hosted rpi-nextcloud and I want to be able to add new notes through my mobile. So obsidian.md looks like a good fit for me, I will definitely give it a try. Thanks for putting this together, erica & shida!

However, I want to transfer as much of my second brain into my first brain, by actually memorizing linked notes. So the plugin 'open a random note' ([https://youtu.be/cFYaWC_86W0?t=547](https://youtu.be/cFYaWC_86W0?t=547)) goes a bit this way, but to optimize memorization it would need some system that makes use of spaced repetition and active recall like anki.

Anyone, ideas? Or do you actually have plans that go that direction, erica?

<comment><USER38> Although it's not markdown based, we're building [https://www.remnote.io/](https://www.remnote.io/) for this purpose; it lets you take hierarchical, nonlinear, linked notes and internalize them with spaced repetition.

<comment><USER39> +1 for remnote! I really love its research based spaced repetition functionality!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Isn't this basically a very slightly slicker version of Zim desktop wiki? Zim is based on plain text files, has links, to-dos, backlink pane etc. Oh, and it's Foss.

</comment><comment><USER41> Genuine question: what exactly are you taking notes of?

I have tried using tools like this before, but in all of my attempts I have found that I actually don't have much to take notes for; for example, I have never felt like "I wish I had taken notes of this", because I feel like any kind of search engine is doing this on a much larger scale, practically for combined notes of millions of people in a much efficient way than I probably could ever do.

I am genuinely asking this to learn more about and maybe adopt note-taking as a habit, any input is appreciated.

<comment><USER42> I'm making up for a terrible math education in Khan Academy and take notes in org-mode using org-roam. Here's an example file, in .md. If you click this link, a download dialog will launch, fair warning [http://calebjay.com/examplenotes.md](http://calebjay.com/examplenotes.md)

To answer your question re: search engine. I can't just google, like, every single elementary math concept up through calculus to magically know it. I need the learning/notetaking process to get Chunks of math knowledge in my brain and begin forming neurological patterns between those chunks. This is so I can later apply these chunks during my self-teaching of computer science (another thing I'm very elementary in despite my profession). The notes help me do things like create anki decks and etc as well.

I don't want to know _all_ math, just the very good curriculum that Khan Academy has set out.

Please don't make fun of how elementary my math level is lol. I'm trying.

<comment><USER43> That's pretty impressive, using org-mode and org-roam but lacking in math education, props. I myself have no music education, so I'm using it for that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I'm sure it's intended to look nice, but that website is so dark I can barely read it. I hope the application ships with a readable theme?

From what I can make out, it seems to draw some inspiration from zettelkasten tools, which looks promising at least.

<comment><USER45> It seems to support custom CSS and there are a few user-submitted themes you can choose from

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Sad to see that the only way to use it for work related note taking is a subscription. I know a lot of people will just ignore the license and happily use the personal or catalyst version, but I wish there was something in between the $0 one time fee and perpetual rent payment. I'll pass.

[https://obsidian.md/pricing](https://obsidian.md/pricing)

</comment><comment><USER47> What I'm looking for:

1st priority: macOS & iOS apps that always sync, open FAST, and look clean, to enter new notes with no friction. Like Bear (which I currently use) and Simplenote (which I used to use).

2nd priority: Bi-directional links. Like Roam and Obsidian. Transclusion. Like Roam (and Obsidian?)

I'm willing to pay up to $15/month. Like Roam.

Are there any solutions that give all of the above?

<comment><USER48> Ad 1: You'd have to try it yourself, but to me, Obsidian works flawlessly on Mac. As another commeter said, it has a certain VS Code feel to it. No iOS app yet, but I think it'll come sooner or later — you should keep an eye out.

2nd: Obsidian can transclude whole files or whole sections (afaik). No block- level transclusion, as there isn't any concept of blocks in Markdown, but that shouldn't matter much.

<comment><USER49> It matters enough for me to stay with Roam.

I like how Obsidian is doing PR better than Roam, yet I can't switch without block transclusion.

<comment><USER48> I'm curious what do you use block transclusion for? When I used Roam, I did occasionally have a need to link to only a small part of some note, but that happened so rarely that I happily traded that in for the Obsidian-specific features (md based, offline-first).

<comment><USER49> Most serious writing I do will consist of remixing the same ideas over and over again until it its practically unrecognisable. Roam is the perfect tool for making a collage of text while also keeping a reference to the primary sources.

A simple search on youtube will show you how people use block references btw.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I did a first look run-through of Obsidian on YouTube if anyone would find it helpful. It's a top-of-the-list recommendation for personal knowledge management software in my book. Kind, helpful community around the software too.

Video: [https://youtu.be/cFYaWC_86W0](https://youtu.be/cFYaWC_86W0)

</comment><comment><USER51> I want to like this application, and the little time I was able to spend in it certainly displayed a lot of promise. But it only worked for one day. Since then, it will not display any of the files. I know it is still connected since I can make new files and folders and see them appear in my directories, and before I tried to refresh the vault I could still see my tags. But Obsidian refuses to show anything in the file explorer, and unfortunately, that renders the product useless.

<comment><AUTHOR> Could you please reach out on our forum or Discord so we can help you debug?

Link to forum and Discord: [https://obsidian.md/community](https://obsidian.md/community)

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> A fork of visual studio to only work with .md files, with an NPM plugin to render markdown as a preview, and pull out links between the files as a D3 map.

:thinking-face: I'm not sure about this one. Maybe for others, but not the UI for me. Good luck to you all, in any case!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! For anyone who's curious, not a fork and we wrote most of the core code from scratch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Looks really cool. For those who are more comfortable taking notes in org-mode rather than md, check out org-roam [1].

[1] [https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam](https://github.com/org-roam/org- roam)

</comment><comment><USER54> How do I browse and edit my notes when I'm on mobile?

Desktop only is a non starter for actually going all-in on a notes solution.

<comment><USER55> A mobile version is planned in the long term. Your notes are in plain markdown files though, so you can use any markdown editor your phone supports. I have seen 1Writer (ios) and Markor (Android) recommended a lot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This app has changed the way I take notes - markdown, local files, wiki-style [[backlinking]], and Latex support has made it fun to build a personal knowledge base.

I never liked the hierarchical structure of most note taking systems, and backlinking just lets you write - you navigate the network structure later (you can also still use a hierarchy on top of the network structure if that's your thing).

Highly recommend checking it out!

<comment><USER56> I've had a lot of success with even less organization -- writing one giant append-only markdown file per project. Search for the thing you want and it usually comes up. Notes have a timestamp and they're in order, so it's not hard to determine whether they're still relevant.

<comment><USER8> Sounds like a blog. Maybe you should publish those notes. Most people won't find it useful. Some people might.

<comment><USER56> I wish I could! Proprietary work pays my bills at the moment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Not very impressed with this, because:

\- Rendering of files takes quite long (a couple of seconds) \- Interface looks dated \- Graph view is not very usable, it just shows a bunch of words. No idea how to get any meaning out of this. \- Backlinks did not update in my test

Typora [0], another markdown editor is light-years ahead with the basic features – being able to edit markdown files and search through them all at once.

I appreciate the competition, tho. Good to have another option.

The price is quite high for such an editor in my opinion. More polished note- taking apps like Bear [2] or Notion [3] [https://www.notion.so/](https://www.notion.so/) are even cheaper. They are proprietary, so not using markdown files directly, but I think it is fair to compare them anyways.

[0]: [https://typora.io/](https://typora.io/) [1]: [https://bear.app/](https://bear.app/) [2]: [https://notion.so](https://notion.so)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi there! It certainly doesn't sound normal for the app to take a few seconds to open files.

Would you join our community to give us a chance to debug the issue? [https://obsidian.md/community](https://obsidian.md/community)

We're still currently in beta so we'd really appreciate all the help we can get to polish any hiccups in the app.

As for the editing experience, we're only about 3 months in so there's a lot of catching up to do, and Typora-level editing experience is something we're shooting for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I've migrated from Roam to Obsidian and it's really awesome. I have ownership of my files, there are constant updates with newer features and bug fixes and the community is really nice :)

<comment><USER59> I haven't gotten my invite to Roam yet, but isn't an aspect of Roam that you can network with others to aid in collaboration and discovery?

Privacy is great, but for collaborative research, Obsidian's model seems to be at a disadvantage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> I have wanted an app like this for so long -- I love it just hooking into a local folder of markdown files, and making editing and navigating those files better. Little touches like, prepending the date in, sort order format, e.g. 2020-05-27 at the beginning of new files, for things like that, it's like you're reading my brain.

Basically, in order to win me over, you're competing with JetBrains. JetBrains is so good, so wired into my brain, they have good Markdown support, they just miss the little touches such as the easy linking and backlinking.

But primarily when I get into my giant collection of notes, I need to be able to find things very quickly -- this means navigating via keyboard shortcuts and having very rich file management, as well as close integration with the OS.

Things this doesn't have: * Really good keyboard navigation in the file pane, using the arrow keys. For example if I navigate down to a folder, then I want to be able to press the right key to open the folder and navigate into the folder. This doesn't work, so I have to open the folder using the mouse. * It's great that you have the [[quick links]] -- but why not work really hard to make the regular inter-linking work? E.g. if I have [my link](./my- file.md), that should work too, but it doesn't. * Say I find a file, and I want to open it up in the finder. JetBrains has a right-click action to "Open in enclosing folder" and it pops up the Finder. Something like that acknowledges that a tool is a part of an ecosystem & provides an "escape hatch" to interact with the files in another way.

Overall this is the best attempt I have found. I will spend more time with it trying to organize my notes using your excellent inter-linking features.

Git repo of markdown files is the best way I have found to keep notes. A game changing tool to to make that even more awesome will come along one day -- you are on the path. Thank you for your work.

<comment><USER24> I use Joplin which is similar to this, and it has a hotkey, Ctrl-E I think, which opens the external editor of your choice

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Probably worth mentioning that if you're looking for "all this and more", try out Tinderbox ([https://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/](https://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/)) too.

\- local storage

\- notes can be "namespaces" within documents

\- "zip links" that are the equivalent of the `[[...]]` style common to both Obsidian and Roam, showing Inbound, Outbound and "suggested" links, for each note

\- ad-hoc linking between notes on top of all this

\- switching between "plain notes" and a Map view, or an Outline view, or a Timeline view

\- viewing the resulting graph in different ways, auto-arranging it, etc.

\- Ad-hoc "decorators" (colors, labels, tags, icons) for notes

\- Ad-hoc "backgrounds" on all or portion of the graph view

\- Ad-hoc "note queries" (that allow you to collect notes matching certain metadata, having certain text etc)

\- ... and more that I haven't found time to use yet :-)

<comment><USER62> Ive been trying to get into tinderbox but there is no easy manual to follow. how do you get started with tinderbox?

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Self promotion:

I maintain an open source visual studio code plugin that organizes plaintext (md, tex, html you name it) files with a simple directive `@nested-tags: tag1, some/hierarchy/you/want`. I have been pretty lazy in regards to actively adding features to it though. I do have plans on adding a graph based visualization and to add more detailed views to simplify workflow. If you're interested in obsidian but don't want to be locked in, check it out.

[https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=vscode-n...](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=vscode- nested-tags.vscode-nested-tags)

</comment><comment><USER64> I tried out Obsidian in the closed beta and also Roam Research before ending up learning org-roam as part of org-mode in emacs.

I won't deny there is a heck of a learning curve with org-mode but once you make the jump I doubt you'll ever look back.

</comment><comment><USER65> OK, I love this already. I have a couple of feature requests though. 1. Allow scrolling past the bottom of the document - see the way Sublime Text and a lot of code editors do this. I find it _really_ uncomfortable writing with my current line anchored to the bottom of the screen. 2. Allow some (all?) of these markdown extensions [1] - our current knowledge base docs make heavy use of them, and a few are pretty critical for technical docs.

[1] [https://facelessuser.github.io/pymdown- extensions/](https://facelessuser.github.io/pymdown-extensions/)

</comment><comment><USER66> Obsidian is one of the best apps I discovered recently and almost immediately become a core part of my workflow despite its early stage.

It's a personal knowledge system built to last: proprietary formats provide advantages but end up locking you in it – especially when it's about a monthly subscription.

Obsidian is built on plain Markdown files that can be accessed by any app and are unlikely to become obsolete. The files are local, though you can put them in any cloud (in the future Obsidian will provide an additional paid sync option).

The devs are great and have been great at receiving feedback and adding the right features.

</comment><comment><USER67> Why is it that most of this apps are all following the same road feature-road? Some markup-language and a preview or a low richtext-mode and some simple filesystem-like organisation or even worse. The better ones have sometimes ability for internal linking or nowadays alternate views like graphs. More and more comes some basic plugin-support, mostly for editing or simple stuff, but hardly more.

How is it that none of them are offering advanced feature for automation? Or mature levels of organisations? Or some serious interface-ability?

<comment><USER68> Could you elaborate what you have in mind as automation?

Context: I'm working on a document editor that can resurface relevant information across different sources (docs, notes, emails,chats) while writing a document.

<comment><USER67> Notes in an application are just semi-structured databases. There is the structure of how they are saved, how they relate, but also the data they contain. Apps could offer ways to quer notes by certain constrains, like any other database, but also tools to parse the content into a generic data- structure and then have views to work on them manual or programatic. Keyword for this would be DOM and structured editing.

Usually a document has an internal structure to some degree, like header and body, different paragraphs, sentences and blocks, etc. For some welldefinend formats like there is the DOM (socument object model), but this is something limited to specific formats and purpose. Why not give people thenability ro parae data as they which and then have tools working on it manuel or programatic?

Personally I use some ancient outliner for notes which has a very open scripting-support. It's really nasty garbage and quite limited. But it gives me a tree which is kind of a database and the ability to run scripts over the whole tree and manipulate individual notes.

I use this to import documents or whole folders, break it into pieces, transform the tree by hand or with a script and then export the document again. This is very handy, especially the ability to explore the structure and change by hand when neccessary. For notes this is helpful because I can mass- change them, add properties, change content as I wish and so on.

Though, this is also quite limited because at the end its just an outline with a text-view, not more UI. And alls automation must be written by myself. A proper community could biold new tools, views, parsers, exporters and other automations. But for some reason, automation is hardly used in this space. Emacs org-mode is the only working in that area. But well, it's, emacs..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> My two biggest issues, skimming the website:

\- this does not seem to be open source or free-as-in-speech. That worries me - especially when it comes to longevity. It's the reason I wouldn't use this product if it was by Google.

\- i don't see an easy way to export my data in case I would like to migrate to a different service.

That being said I am definitely going to try it out and see what it does for me! There is definitely a gap in knowlege-mapping software in my life

<comment><USER28> You don't need to export your data. Your data is stored in plaintext markdown files on your machine. So if it does shut down, you still have all of your content in a format that can be readily read by many, many editors

<comment><USER70> I dont think many can read properly

<comment><USER71> it's just markdown and [[two way links]]

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> Seems like a more polished version of the Zettelkasten-based system "Neuron". [1]

I suppose there are benefits having a dedicated editor and viewer but I kind of like the simplicity of Neuron. Although I will admit that install it can be a pain since it depends on having the Nix package manager setup.

[1] [https://neuron.zettel.page/](https://neuron.zettel.page/)

</comment><comment><USER73> Nothing is forever.

Especially if it is not free.

Especially if it is not open source.

If personal use is free forever but not open source, how am I supposed to believe that it will be free forever?

Color me skeptical.

<comment><USER74> Healthy skepticism is great! But every post of yours is perfectly fitting the troll recipe. But just in case you're being genuine, here's my take.

The software is already nice and very usable, even at this early beta stage. There's going to be a million users within a couple years. One thing I've noticed about the PKM community, is that there are a lot of really smart and ambitious people here. You know what that means? Community capital. Guarantee or not, if Obsidian ceases to exist, you possess your data in an open format structure in an open standard, and the latest software you had downloaded will work until a handful of those million users create an open source equivalent.

There's nothing proprietary about backlinking. It's not rocket science. Obsidian is just leading the way with a very enjoyable UX for it.

And I hope they succeed. It seems like they are genuinely seeking a nice balance between creating value for themselves and the community.

<comment><USER73> I don't know what is it about every of my post that fits troll personality. Maybe because my first language is not English?

As for the rest of your post, fair point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> Some comments after testing it for the first time:

I am looking for alternatives of Typora since it is not open sourced. Obsidian is new and close to it (same feature to paste image from system clipboard) but still needs more work -

1\. Font size and equation font size are not easily configured. 2\. Inline Latex is not supported yet. 3\. Equation numbering are not supported yet

And it is not open sourced either. Good work and keep going!

<comment><USER76> have you looked at marktext? I think that's fairly close to typora, but i hasn't used typora much so I could be wrong

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> A few amazing things the site is not doing justice _yet_

\- Everything transclusion: just like you can show images in Github-MD, obsidian allows you to view PDF, Audio, or even other notes inside a note.

\- Header-level linking: You can link a note using [[note_name##sub_heading]]. Therefor, you can embedded a section of a note inside another.

\- CSS modding is AMAZING. The community is getting creative with modding obsidian to fit different workflows. From Andy Matuschak mode[1][2] to minimalist theme[3].

[1] [https://forum.obsidian.md/t/andy-matuschak- mode-v2/170](https://forum.obsidian.md/t/andy-matuschak-mode-v2/170)

[2] [https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes](https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes)

[3] [https://github.com/kmaasrud/clean-theme- obsidian](https://github.com/kmaasrud/clean-theme-obsidian)

</comment><comment> crooked-v Four bits of feedback:

1\. How do I select the font to use? The variable-width default font feels entirely out of place for me with Markdown.

2\. This could dearly use integration with Prettier ([https://prettier.io](https://prettier.io)) or a similar tool for those of us fussy with formatting details.

3\. The lack of Multimarkdown syntax like cross-references ([http://fletcher.github.io/MultiMarkdown-5/cross- references.h...](http://fletcher.github.io/MultiMarkdown-5/cross- references.html)) is painful for those of us with elaborate note-keeping. It's doubly painful that Obsidian apparently has its own invented syntax instead of using what's already been around for years and years with MMD.

4\. How in the world do I link between files? Nothing I do works, and there's no help document and not even a "copy as link" on the right click menu.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry for the confusion! Help docs are in Settings > Help.

<comment> crooked-v Also, I'm annoyed that this labels itself as supporting Markdown, but apparently can't actually handle actual proper Markdown links between files.

This is kind of a sticking point for me, because one app after another has gotten this wrong (see Ulysses' bizarro link editing, for example), and I'm just not going to use an app if it wants to make me convert all my files to a proprietary version of the syntax.

<comment><AUTHOR> Plain Markdown links should work just fine if you use relative paths to files within the vault folder selected.

Is it not working for you?

<comment><AUTHOR> I can't reply to your post further down, but it seems like space characters aren't allowed by Markdown spec. Apparently you have to convert it to "%20" :(

<comment> crooked-v For deeply nested posts, you have to click on the "X minutes ago" header to get the reply option to show up.

It looks like when I add the angle brackets that CommonMark allows to circumvent the spaces thing, some variations still don't work: [https://i.imgur.com/nqiQnl3.png](https://i.imgur.com/nqiQnl3.png)

For one more note, the obsidian.css thing for styling is deeply unintuitive, because you can't edit it from inside the app: if you make a note named "obsidian.css" at the root level, that gets ignored because it's actually obsidian.css.md, so you can only edit the styling with a separate app altogether to create/edit that file directly.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the tip!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> My first impression is very good. With one exception:

The .desktop file that is generated on Linux has the wrong StartupWMClass set. The correct one would be lowercase obsidian (VS Obsidian). Because of this, the application cannot be added to the favorites which is important for me to be able to start it via a super+NUM shortcut.

</comment><comment><USER78> This is sweet. I've been building and working in a markdown-based zettelkasten locally for a while, and this does provide the added killer benefits of the graph visualizer and pretty-preview functionality that I'm currently missing in the terminal. Nice job, looking forward to playing around with it!

</comment><comment><USER79> I'm considering using this but I'm having the same issue many others are with Obsidian itself being closed source. To any obsidian employers or stakeholders have you thought of an open core model for Obsidian?

Open core would help any cautious users and give your community the ability to help maintain your product.

</comment><comment><USER80> I don't understand your target audience:

> In our age when cloud services can shut down, get bought, or change privacy > policy any day, the last thing you want is proprietary formats and data > lock-in.

Concerned about proprietary lock-in when it comes to file format, but not when it comes to software.

Seems like you could make some technical gains without losing audience by getting consistent. You could ditch the "open standards based file storage that you manage yourself" idea and gain flexibility to do your own thing there. I bet people would expect you to handle sync in that case, but that's not so bad.

Alternatively you could go open source for functional parts of the app and build a development community to support you and your users.

</comment><comment><USER81> This is really the best, just what i wanted, already moved all my notes there,

I just miss one thing, working with images and making area screenshots, was easy in evernote, just use the hotkey and select the area and a new note with the image get created,

Now, i am using greenshot for trying to replicate this, i set my favorite save folder into Obsidian, Problem is , an image get created, if i want to write some stuff down , i have to create a note, insert the image.

Would be perfect, if we could set a 'special' folder, and all images coming inside get automatically a note created, (the real picture is in attachment folder)

Or we can right click or a picture and convert to MD note,

Resizing images in preview too, i think it is important.

Thank you for your work.

<comment><USER82> I like your ideas about images/new notes. Would help a lot moving to this from Evernote which currently has very good support for image editing / annotation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> Is it possible to do inline video, or is it possible to write a plugin that does it? I have a highly specific note taking application in mind, if you'd like to have a somewhat concrete use case for a specific market and you'd like to talk that over with me, feel free to contact me. (I'm using tiddlywiki now)

I think this is in general a problem with note taking apps - their market is too broad. Not many people want to 'take notes', they want to 'track the research for my book' or 'track references of the papers I write' or 'collect recipes'. It takes an engineer's mind to naturally abstract that into 'note taking'.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes! You can use the embed syntax ![[video.mp4]] to embed videos in Obsidian. The video should show up in preview mode.

I think you would really enjoy our active discord community where a lot of people share and discuss their use cases and specific workflows. [https://obsidian.md/community](https://obsidian.md/community)

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> I _was_ an user of their Windows app until recently, had to stop using when they added the license for business use. Sadly, the company I work for only allows in their computers software they bought with their money (I can request them to buy software for me, but it can't be software under 'pre-release', has to be an stable software.) because of the audits they get, so to avoid problems related with piracy they decided to block softwares with user-owned licenses.

And since I used to use both at work (mostly for personal notes) and on my personal time, I moved to completely to another solution. (My own thing, made in (get ready for it) Electron.)

</comment><comment><USER85> Great idea! I have to admit the UI reminded me of what I do presently -- VSCode + notes in a folder in Markdown. I'll take it for a test-drive and see how it compares to VSCode + git. If it speeds things up, I'll be a buyer!

Bear in mind that what it looks like you're competing directly against is an editor (VSCode) + versioning (Git) + sync (GoogleDrive/OneDrive). That's probably a harder sell to a techy individual since those are all free (or already subscribed to) but if you make the editing and management process better, seamless, hassle-free, I'd buy the editor (like pyCharm, goLand, Sublime or Linqpad).

</comment><comment><USER86> Counteroffer:

I use Kiwi to create a personal wiki on my phone. It sits in a Dropbox folder I always have open as a project in Sublime. It's also the folder that my NotePlan app uses - so my todo list, calendar, and wiki are all the same set of markdown files.

It's super portable (just a pile of markdown docs in a Dropbox folder), does knowledge base management, and ties my knowledge base directly into my todo/project management/time management. And it costs peanuts (kiwi is buy- once; I don't remember what I paid for NotePlan).

People remember wikis, right? "Interconnected markdown" isn't some new feature, and sure isn't worth a monthly subscription fee.

<comment><USER87> Can you link to the Kiwi you're talking about? I found [https://github.com/danielwertheim/Kiwi](https://github.com/danielwertheim/Kiwi) but it hasn't been updated in 7+ years, so I'm not sure if it's what you're talking about..

NotePlan looks interesting though. It's not free, but it's on my list of things to try now.

<comment><USER86> [https://github.com/landakram/kiwi](https://github.com/landakram/kiwi)

I don't know when it was last updated, but as far as I can tell, it's feature- complete for my needs (with zero lock-in).

I actually just tried out OP's Obsidian and ... it's nice. In my workflow it would replace Sublime, as the desktop wiki editor sitting on my existing folder of wiki files.

There isn't any of the lock-in I was getting concerned about from peoples posts here, and personal use is free. I'll continue to play with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER88> The graph view seems cool but I don't feel it is much useful in the long term.

It has a wow factor in the initial use but it is just a mingled web of links. It is like creating a graph of the www but I don't see how that could be useful.

<comment><USER59> If the links between node could be directed and annotated, then it'd become much more powerful, though. Similar to how TheBrain works [1]

I see that the public plugin interface is a long term goal at this point [2] but it'd be amazing if plugins could expose ways to mark up graph relationships!

[1] [https://www.thebrain.com](https://www.thebrain.com) [2] [https://trello.com/c/Z7qqKVXd/19-public-plugin- interface-v10](https://trello.com/c/Z7qqKVXd/19-public-plugin-interface-v10)

<comment><USER88> Still not sure if having a mind map would make it more usable. Do you feel having mind map like this would help you ?

<comment><USER59> Well, I don't really mean mind map; I don't think those are very useful at least not in the traditional sense.

But yes, I think directed graphs would help me. Take the use case of modeling social relationships: each node is a person or company with a short bio, links can include "funded-by", "worked-with". Suddenly you have a tool that you can use to traverse professional relationships to find a connection to an investor funding a certain type of company. You can sort of do this with LinkedIn and Crunchbase, and it's possible with TheBrain although its UX is very tedious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER89> I've been using The Archive ([https://zettelkasten.de/the- archive/](https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/)) to browse a knowledge graph of markdown files i.e. a Zettelkasten. It's one-time $19 and worth every penny.

I use it to browse my notes. There is a shortcut to open them in VIM. It's powerful and simple.

Shameless plug: I created a CLI tool to visualize a set of linked markdown files, print stats, and display orphans. See [https://github.com/BasilPH/vizel](https://github.com/BasilPH/vizel)

</comment><comment><USER90> This looks really cool, but:

Is there a reason this doesn't work with plain markdown links? I have a local working kbase already as a bunch of markdown files. If I use the obsidian markdown importer I guess it will destroy any links in that KB for any viewer or rendered that does NOT support GFM style [[links]]. Perhaps related to how Obsidian uses backlinks?

Ideally I could use Obsidian for structuring links / overview of a Knowledge base, and plain page editors for actually editing individual content pages. As it is though it can't be a combined/overlay usage, it has to be a cold turkey switch.

<comment><AUTHOR> Plain Markdown links should work just fine in Obsidian, but you might need to convert space characters to "%20" according to Markdown spec, since space is not allowed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> Shameless plug here after a failed HN post. For people interested in taking many quick notes using markdown please check [https://tdoapp.com](https://tdoapp.com). The app allows you to organize tasks into boards and lists and use keyboard to quickly navigate. Also, CSS and regular expressions are used to highlight tasks. The code is available on GitHub - [https://github.com/codaxy/tdo](https://github.com/codaxy/tdo)

</comment><comment><USER92> I've come to accept that Markdown is time-consuming and difficult for documents more complex than a README. I now truly appreciate Wikis with WYSIWYG interfaces and complex macros. Would love to see extensions to Markdown to give it more complete functions/macros, without any Jinja-esque "markdown programming".

If Markdown supported a modified HTML4.01 without all the unnecessary syntax fluff, that would do for most of my needs, and I could use a WYSIWYG to craft/organize the rest.

</comment><comment><USER93> Looks great. Would be amazing if I could use it as an alternative frontend for my vimwiki, which is also markdown.

Only thing missing is that links like these should work:

[anchor](path)

As that's the way vimwiki generates them :)

<comment><USER94> +1 for vimwiki! As a matter of fact, you can get almost all of these features with vimwiki, minus the fancy graph visualization. Plus, it's open source :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER95> For me the biggest benefit of Obsidian over several other PKM tools is that it uses local Markdown files rather than outlines/blocks. It still has bi- directional linking, and bubbles up unlinked resources like Roam. The pace and responsiveness of the developers is remarkable, and the community has been so friendly and helpful. No egos!

[editing to add that I'm using iCloud for my vaults which allows for very fast syncing and the ability to edit on iOS]

<comment><USER96> Can you expand on the "...allows...the ability to edit on iOS"?

<comment><USER95> You can create Obsidian vaults wherever you would like. I created my vaults in iCloud Drive on my Mac. As these are just Markdown files, you can use any Markdown capable iOS app (that has access to the Files chooser which includes iCloud Drive) and make any edits or modifications to those files. It doesn't automatically make link suggestions while editing it in an iOS app, but once you are back on your Mac you can easily update those links or just use the suggested unlinked references tool in the side panel. Does that make sense?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER97> Very interesting! I'm glad to see more development in the field of Personal Knowledge Management. There's a lot of cool features Obsidian has which are essential to me:

1\. Markdown 2\. Ability to create a Zettelkasten 3\. Backlinks

What it currently lacks for me is: 1\. native iOS app (one app for all note- taking. This is why I can't see myself using Roam Research right now, despite it being a pretty cool project)

Good job to the dev team and will keep a closed eye on this project :)

</comment><comment><USER98> How does this compare to Trilium? Looks similar.

[https://github.com/zadam/trilium](https://github.com/zadam/trilium)

<comment><USER99> Trilium is really cool, I especially like its note cloning feature. The thing that held me back was the back-end it uses.

<comment><USER82> Can you elaborate on this? What is the backend used and why is it problematic?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER100> I feel like I've seen a lot of similar apps like this posted to HN but as usual the main blocker for me is no mobile support.

A personal knowledge-base is a great idea but you need to be able to easily reference it wherever you are. If I had a second brain I wouldn't leave it at home ;).

I mostly use Notion and just as an example say you're at the mechanic and they say "hey you got the VIN for your car handy?"

I pop open notion and its right there.

<comment><USER35> I use Tiddlywiki 5's node server to host my wiki. I can use it on anything that can take my Yubikey :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER101> This is a great product if you want to take advantage of all the latest (and more) features in note taking + personal knowledge management software. Bi- directional linking, graph view, plugins, community themes. But the kicker is you own all your own note files in plain text (.md files) in a folder of your choosing on your computer (and can also sync your database with something like Dropbox, iCloud, etc.).

</comment><comment><USER102> I like what I see with Obsidian in my test drive but it's a proprietary tool with a license that only protects the company, no terms of service, no privacy policy or even a statement about data usage and collection.

I get that the md files are stored locally, but I have no way of knowing what information about my files is collected and stored.

I'd like to use it but I'll need a little more on the transparency side of things.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nothing is stored on our servers. The app does not upload anything at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER103> I'm glad the demand exists for this/it's a thing, I've made several of my own so that's cool other people make similar tools

</comment><comment><USER104> I've been using a Fandom Wiki [1] to hold my world-building notes, since I couldn't really find anything better. It's pretty annoying though, I might have to really think about using this instead. Although, getting my work _out_ of the Wiki might be annoying.

[1]: [http://ceremony-universe.fandom.com/](http://ceremony- universe.fandom.com/)

<comment><USER104> Downloaded Obsidian and moved my notes (and plot outline too, since it supports interactive task lists!!) over, and man this thing is wonderful. Good job!

</comment></comment><comment><USER105> Landing page looks like a cheap knock off of [https://linear.app/](https://linear.app/)

<comment><USER106> The inspiration does certainly seem quite strong.

Geez even the wireframe graphic thing is the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER107> Very interesting I'm going to try it out.

What's the app written in? It has a VSCode feel to it (which is great!)... Any chance it's built in typescript like VSCode too? I'd love to write a JavaScript extension or two to customise it in the future if that's the case. Can you share what it's built with and what the future extensions will need to be built with? Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it's TypeScript and we're loving it! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER108> I've never been involved in any software testing until I stumbled upon Obsidian a couple weeks ago, been testing it with a bunch of other PKM nerds and #Roamcult refugees ever since, it's been a quite exiting and rewarding experience. Really looking forward to the plugin ecosystem, no doubt it is going to become one of the most promising PKM solutions in the future.

</comment><comment><USER109> Local Markdown files are nice. Can it also use my local browser, instead of bloating my system with yet another Electron instance?

</comment><comment><USER71> I tried it today. I already had a directory full of .md and .adoc so it was nice to see those in a new editor. But of course the graph is just a bubble of unlinked dots. I did started to link some but I don't see the benefit.

Took a shower and my enthusiasm got cold: how can I know my data is safe aka not getting uploaded somewhere?

There is an AutoUpdate feature after-all. :(

<comment><AUTHOR> We'll add an option to disable auto-update soon!

If you don't trust us, technically you can also use firewall rules to block internet access (or monitor network and see what Obsidian is doing).

</comment></comment><comment><USER110> It's freaking me out that Obsidian is capitalized most places but in the MacOS client in the tool bar, it's:

Hide obsidian Quit obsidian

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops, will fix! Good catch!

</comment></comment><comment><USER111> If you don't need to render your notes as a graph, try VSNote out, or simply write markdown-based notes in your favorite editor and store them in your dropbox.

[https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=patrickl...](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=patricklee.vsnotes)

</comment><comment><USER112> I've been recently working on something similar (but much more primitive) [https://github.com/dpc/tagwiki](https://github.com/dpc/tagwiki) if anyone is interested. It's an async/await Rust project too, which might be interesting to some.

</comment><comment><USER113> This is amazing - I have a homebrew version of this - markdown only, with some scripts to wire-up the links, relying on unique file names.

This is miles better that what I have, and I look forward to using it.

A feature request - mermaid JS support please! This would allow me to import my ~3k existing markdown files without modification.

</comment><comment><USER114> Is there any reason why so many Electron apps (this one included) don't disable "Ctrl-Shift-I" to bring up the Chrome developer tools when they distribute their binary?

It's trivially done with `devTools: false` in the main window bootstrap code. It's kind of a pet peeve and just seems lazy.

<comment><AUTHOR> We don't want to prevent people from looking at the DOM to make custom CSS: [https://github.com/kmaasrud/awesome- obsidian](https://github.com/kmaasrud/awesome-obsidian)

It also makes it easy to debug issues with users since we're still in beta.

<comment><USER114> This is a fair point, congrats on your launch!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER115> The app looks promising!

If I understand the license correctly there's no way of trying it out for free in a commercial setting. The only use-case I would have for this is as a work tool, but since the license requires me to pay up front I'm not going to try it. A trial period or similar would be nice.

<comment><AUTHOR> Updated the pricing page to reflect the trial period, sorry about the oversight!

</comment></comment><comment><USER116> Timestamp-based ID is missing the point of Zettelkasten IMHO, here's an opinionated approach to a digital Zettelkasten: [https://www.tevinzhang.com/digital- zettelkasten/](https://www.tevinzhang.com/digital-zettelkasten/)

</comment><comment> yt-sdb Can anyone who uses cross-referencing speak to the benefits? I take notes using a simple web server-based Markdown editor and organize them with directories. I link between files occasionally using URLs. Does quick-linking between files or graph views really help? Any examples?

<comment><USER66> I think the Daily Note is the best example here, in both Obsidian and Roam. It makes it easy to jot down quick notes about the things you read/learned without thinking too much where to put it. You just highlight a few key words you find reasonable and then you'd be able to find that piece using any of them and then follow the graph around.

Now instead of just reading articles in Pocket I always take quick notes and save the most important parts for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER117> Am I the only one that has never before stumbled upon AppImage or Snap? I had to "google" to see that it's basically just chmod +x.

I suppose when the appimage doesn't work out of the box the user is knowledgeable enough to figure out what to do with it anyway.

</comment><comment> m-p-3 Jeez, 50$/user/year for commercial use?! That's almost as expensive as G Suite.

</comment><comment><USER118> This is a beautiful app, thank you for making it.

I can't find how to use a fixed-width font: are community themes the right way to accomplish that?

Markdown is a whitespace sensitive format, it might be that fixed pitch is a candidate to be a first class setting, even the default.

</comment><comment><USER119> I've been taking notes in Markdown for years. Your search and linking functionality to make it a great hybrid nodes-wiki system is fantastic. I'm gonna give this one the 'ol college try. It seems to hit my sweet spots.

</comment><comment><USER120> This is basically how I use notion now -- mostly "code blocks" full of Markdown. The split panes look really impressive. This is definitely worth keeping an eye on if I ever decide to bail on Notion (which just went free).

</comment><comment><USER121> It undoubtedly looks great, but it's hard not to be a bit put off by their landing page which seems, just slightly, inspired by [https://linear.app/](https://linear.app/)

</comment><comment><USER122> I want to say that I clicked on this without any intent to actually download this, but decided to solely due to the fact they understand the fear of cloud services shutting down, getting bought or changing their privacy policy.

</comment><comment><USER123> Minor gripe: The planned extras do the dark pattern of "per month, billed annually".

It's either $4 a month or $48 a year. If you're charging me $48, you're charging me $48. Obfuscating that is scummy.

</comment><comment><USER124> I use Standard Notes which doesn't charge extra for encryption or sync, and, most importantly, is open source/free software.

Closed source cryptography is dangerous, and should be avoided whenever possible.

</comment><comment><USER125> Hm.. I opened Obsidian. Double clicked the title bar to make it not full screen (on a Mac), now it's not visible anywhere. It's as if the window is 0 width somewhere on my screen..

<comment><AUTHOR> Is it possible for you to join our Discord so that we can help you?

</comment></comment><comment><USER126> Brilliant tool ! I started to put all my notes there. However I cannot figure out how to display a note at the bottom of the screen (below another one as in the featured page ?)

</comment><comment><USER127> @ericax, Thanks for this product. I have a lot of notes in Jupyter notebooks that contain chunks of markdown. Would be great if your product works with Jupyter notebooks.

</comment><comment><USER128> I use Ullysses+Delineato for a combination of notes+diagrams to organize my thoughts and now I am feeling like a dactylographer using a word processor for the first time.

</comment><comment><USER129> I was going to ask about possibility to extend the editor with a VIM emulator, but I see you guys already included that, neat!

I'm definitely going to give Obsidian a try.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes we do have a Vim mode. Thanks CodeMirror!

</comment></comment><comment><USER130> love this.

may I suggest you go open source and then charge a low monthly fee for your sync service?

open source really solidifies the "forever" tagline and I'd consider paying <5$ month (I'm Canadian & not paid nearly as well as many ppl on here...)

also I'm not stingy on the "open source" vs "source available" stuff. Im just a code hoarder.

i know your going against cloud integration but cloud + mobile has to be a consideration

</comment><comment><USER131> This seems pretty neat, however it looks like it freezes up when I open a vault inside of WSL. I can't make new files at all.

Worked fine on a regular Windows folder.

</comment><comment><USER132> I used to use Zim in the past, however recently I've switched to writing Markdown files and tracking the with Yadm. Works perfectly.

</comment><comment><USER133> Would be nice to see a live example, I can't tell from the website what this actually does or how it would be useful to me

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry but because it works on a local folder, online demo is unrealistic.

I would recommend installing, opening an _empty_ folder, and going to Settings - Help to grab our hel & demo folder to play around with it and get a feel.

<comment><USER133> You could have a video demoing it on your landing page. Most site visitors aren't going to take the time to install a random desktop application and toy with it just to see if it might be something they find useful. Maybe you're ok with that, just giving you my advice if you want to increase usership.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER134> What's the team sharing story here? Can I share a folder with other people and collaborate?

</comment><comment><USER135> It's nice that it's on my local machine. I can always make backups on github.

</comment><comment><USER136> This is awesome! great work! I'm in the process of switching from Roam.

</comment><comment><USER137> So how is this different from being another local/serverless wiki?

</comment><comment><USER138> Exactly what I've been looking for. Will there be extension support?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, once we get close to a stable v1.0 release we'll be opening up a plugin API!

</comment></comment><comment><USER139> Obsidian is awesome. I moved over from Roam and never looked back.

</comment><comment><USER140> does anyone know a simple app that allows hyperlinking between notes? I want to create a roam-style knowledge base, but this looks a bit too heavy for my purposes.

</comment><comment><USER141> This is very cool! Any plans on making it work in org files?

</comment><comment><USER142> Anyone know if this thing has a web-clipper plugin?

<comment><AUTHOR> You can use any web clipper extension that can turn HTML pages to Markdown files.

Our community made this: [https://github.com/deathau/markdown- clipper](https://github.com/deathau/markdown-clipper)

</comment></comment><comment><USER143> Would be great if this were a homebrew cask

</comment><comment><USER144> do you also plan to support asciidoc ?

</comment><comment><USER145> How well does it handle large repos?

<comment><USER82> Also would like to know this. Currently have over 10k notes in Evernote, looking to move elsewhere but Electron makes me worry about poor performance with such a large data set.

</comment></comment><comment><USER146> How does this compare to TiddlyWiki?

</comment><comment><USER147> I have a feeling I found a gem

</comment><comment><USER148> Been using this for months now and it's my full time PKM amazing product and amazing team, highly recommend!

<comment><USER149> I'm behind you and have only been using for a few weeks but I dig it. And it comes as an AppImage too!

</comment></comment><comment><USER150> This is a great idea.

</comment><comment><USER151> If you use org-mode, do you really need more than one file?</comment>


Ask HN: Examples of good code? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking for examples of well-written code (open-source projects), for study material.
If you have come across code, from which you learnt a lot by reading it, please share.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> Most recently for me, I saw Arthur's code which might not be what you're looking for. The origins of J[1], is publicly available C code, and even if it doesn't move you, consider spending some time on it anyway.

When I was younger, I learned a lot from reading djb's code[2] changed the way I think about application design and [3] changed my mind about system administration. Actually everything djb wrote is worth learning from.

Before that I recall specifically sicp[4] giving me a lot to think about.

There are also bigger things (like plan9[5] and emacs[6]) that I've found interesting.

[1]: [http://nsl.com/papers/origins.htm](http://nsl.com/papers/origins.htm)

[2]: [http://cr.yp.to/djbdns.html](http://cr.yp.to/djbdns.html)

[3]: [http://cr.yp.to/daemontools.html](http://cr.yp.to/daemontools.html)

[4]: [https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/](https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/)

[5]: [http://9p.io/plan9/index.html](http://9p.io/plan9/index.html)

[6]: [http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/](http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/)

<comment><USER3> I wouldn't invoke DJB's daemon as an example of good code. It's awful, its structure is terrible, file structure is terrible as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> SQLAlchemy[1] is a large project with a very solid codebase; it is very well documented and the API is exemplary.

1: [https://github.com/zzzeek/sqlalchemy/](https://github.com/zzzeek/sqlalchemy/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Physically Based Rendering by Pharr and Humphreys (a literate program) is exceptionally readable ndncdall of the source code. It won an Academy Award.</comment>


Ask HN: What is a better way of weighing up pros and cons? - <AUTHOR>

I frequently have the problem, almost exclusively on mailing lists or in e-mail, where the pros and cons of an argument are sidetracked or waylaid or lost.<p>What are some better ways for weighing up pros and cons. I'm leaning towards a customised wiki of some kind with a points system led by a moderator. Important is that the flow of ideas and points does not get lost. Thoughts? <comment><USER2> Lots of forum sites have polls, but over time factions skew the result. In any case, the most popular argument is not necessarily the best; I'd hazard a guess that as the size of an open voting population rises, the disparity increases.

Wave attempted to solve this problem, but the result was not very elegant on a UI level. It's hard to offer both depth and breadth at the same time.

<comment><AUTHOR> The problem with polls is that they are the end point of a discussion. All history is lost. The options are equal. There is no opportunity to weigh options differently using different scenarios. I'm looking for a way to summarise different answers and let people change their mind as they go. Something that enforces structure would do it.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Does Hair recognition exist? - <AUTHOR>

im doing an automated art experiment. My goal is to draw 1 set of vector points around the face and a 2nd set around just the hair. Is there anything out there that an do this with a 95% accuracy? <comment><USER2> Obligatory XKCD [1]

With quite a bit of work, a research team, a development team, and quite a few servers I was able to finish a project which did face recognition at just about the accuracy you are talking about [2]. With that we increased the accuracy of the hair and scalp recognition within the OpenCV project. However, this required quite a bit of algorithmic training [3]. Also, this did not include a set of vector points drawn around the subject, just a bounding box. This is a rather difficult problem set.

Now, if you have seen these fun little apps which show you what your hair would look like with a new style (or what you would look like with a set of glasses, or a new dress), this uses very little actual recognition. Basically they take a picture of you within a general "person shaped bounding box" or for hair a "head shaped bounding box" and then overlay the new style on top of the area where your hair, glasses, or clothes should be. This is relatively simple (especially in comparison to actual recognition). Might it solve some of your problem?

[1] [http://xkcd.com/1425/](http://xkcd.com/1425/)

[2] This accuracy was for the entire algorithmic set. It did not include a single datapoint set like "hair". It was also highly dependent on the image quality and how the subject was positioned within the image.

[3] Our test image set was 50,000. Our production training image set was 1,500,000 images.</comment>


Hacker fakes German minister's fingerprints using photos of her hands - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/dec/30/hacker-fakes-german-ministers-fingerprints-using-photos-of-her-hands <comment><USER2> Chaos Computer Club published a fingerprint of the German Minister of Internal Affairs 10 years ago. Taken from a glass.

"[Schäuble, the politician] was a keen proponent of mass gathering of biometric information by the state, and his widely circulated fingerprint lifted from a water glass served as an effective demonstration against the supposed infallibility of biometric information." [https://hackaday.com/2017/09/04/raspireader-an-open- source-f...](https://hackaday.com/2017/09/04/raspireader-an-open-source- fingerprint-reader/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Here is one of the pictures this person said they used. Seem credible to you? [https://www.dw.com/image/18154223_303.jpg](https://www.dw.com/image/18154223_303.jpg)

<comment><USER4> Are you...trying to debunk a well-known five year old method of obtaining fingerprints from photos?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> '2014'</comment>


Ask HN: What are you trying to automate? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Dozens of thousands of outbound tickets from excel files. Basically maps excel file columns into HTML fields for a ticketing system called Kayako.

[https://medium.com/archaic-revival/automating-boring- ticket-...](https://medium.com/archaic-revival/automating-boring-ticket- creation-3e9340796942)</comment>


Show HN: How Many Pages? – GitHub Repo-to-8.5"X11" count - <AUTHOR> https://howmanypages.herokuapp.com <comment><USER2> The estimates this thing gives me are insanely over-enthusiastic. I have a few teeny tiny repositories and only one of mine came out under 100 pages: [https://github.com/tomhodgins/quark](https://github.com/tomhodgins/quark)

If you printed each file to one page, allowing a couple files to span 2 pages, that adds up to 8. I can't imagine a way to print this repository that would need 10x the amount of pages!

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks a ton err4nt! had actually gone back and noticed an oversight to where I had left out a divisor!

Current formula is: LOC (Based on Linguist's default values) / 64 (which seemed to be about the num of lines that had shown up when opening a given file in print dialog)

With the change, your back at 1 for that repo ;).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You should add a few well known examples to make it more interesting at firs sight. Like a small competition, if that makes sense.

I also tried to use directly the repository address instead of the github user, but I got an error. I know the text says explicitly "search by username" but I like to ignore the documentation and search directly [https://github.com/torvalds/linux](https://github.com/torvalds/linux) (sorry if it's too big) (consider to add some caching)

Edit: 20.392.848 pages!

<comment><AUTHOR> hi gus_massa! thanks a ton for the feedback! great idea, can most def do.

and had most def had the thought of supported repo urls as well--thank you! and yes, could most def cache data for some of the more popular repos!

thanks a ton for your feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> 'Using a modified version of GitHub's Linguist and some good, old-fashioned guesstimation to estimate the number of 8.5"x11" pages it would take to print out a repo'</comment>


GraphQL in the age of REST APIs - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/chute-engineering/graphql-in-the-age-of-rest-apis-b10f2bf09bba

<comment><USER2> We've been tinkering with the same ideas recently, thanks for publishing a great article. I'm excited about the idea of creating a Node based "frontend server" that produces optimized view models for React, using our REST endpoints as building blocks. When Relay was announced, the idea of giving the client some control over those model shapes was really interesting to me as well. Excited to see where all this goes over the next several months.</comment>


DailyExtremes: CNN vs. Fox - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.twitter.com/DailyExtremes <comment><USER2> During the midterms we were watching the live vote tallying on CNN, and at one point one of the hosts accidentally said "we" when referring to the Democrats. It was at that point I stopped taking CNN seriously.

<comment><USER3> I assume you still watch Fox News?

<comment><USER2> I most certainly don't. I've just come to believe CNN is nearly as bad.

<comment><USER3> That's an interesting observations. "Nearly as bad".</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Beal's Conjecture: A Search for Counterexamples - <AUTHOR> http://norvig.com/beal.html <comment><USER2> Seems reasonable to do the sums in moderate modulo sizes, then for those that pass, give them to a larger modulo system, and only then check them "properly."

Also seems resonable to reduce the work by precomputing many, many results for small modulo values.

Hmm. Can easily speed up by a factor of 10 with some work, but that's not really interesting.

Besides, I actually believe the conjecture.</comment>


At Microsoft Build 2020, Microsoft is building platforms, not just products - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/20/21264363/microsoft-build-2020-top-news-annoucements-fluid-office-windows-reunion-edge <comment><AUTHOR> Original title was wordy and vague. It was:

The biggest announcements from Microsoft Build 2020</comment>


Microsoft Restores Deleted Technet and MSDN Blogs - <AUTHOR> https://borncity.com/win/2019/04/21/microsoft-restores-deleted-technet-and-msdn-blogs/ <comment><USER2> Now if they could just clean up the widespread "duplicate comments" issue so I won't get Deja Vu every time I read one of their blogs, that would be great.

Now if they could just clean up the widespread "duplicate comments" issue so I won't get Deja Vu every time I read one of their blogs, that would be great.

</comment><comment><USER3> 80% of the time something really gnarly is discussed on Stack Overflow, someone links a bug from Microsoft Connect. Alas, all of those links are now broken.

There should be a law against "We are rebranding the customer experience, and conveniently throwing away most user-generated content"

<comment><USER4> They took down Connect because they didn't want to spend the effort to make it GDPR compliant.

Proof from when I blogged about it, but they reworded it as soon as it started getting press: [https://www.brentozar.com/go/gdpr](https://www.brentozar.com/go/gdpr)

<comment><USER5> A wild Brent Ozar sighting ...!

<comment><USER4> > A wild Brent Ozar sighting ...!

That's what they call me, the Wild Brent Ozar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's really not cool to delete vast archives of knowledge, ahem... [http://web.archive.org/web/20171104080019/https://deis.com/](http://web.archive.org/web/20171104080019/https://deis.com/)

I wish that archive.org had captured more of deis.com/blog, there were 232 fantastic articles there, and while I still have them, it seems like it will have to take a great deal more effort to republish them all, than it would have taken to just leave them all online.

This is on-topic because it was some legal process in Microsoft corporation which decided to delete this, too. Not as popular though, so not restored. Check deis.com today, it just redirects to the (admittedly very nice) Azure Kubernetes cloud services home-page. It would have been great if even someone was given notice and permission to tell web.archive.org it was time to crawl this blog, first, so those articles could be referenced in historical context.

<comment><USER7> If you send them to me, I'll upload all the Deis blog material to archive.org. See my profile for my email address.

<comment><USER6> I appreciate that! Thank you.

It is a jekyll blog, and there are many authors, which is really what makes the copyright situation hard. I am working on contacting everyone to clarify their intention, as it was within MS rights to shut the site down, and it's within any author's rights to ask that their work not be republished, and to my knowledge nobody collected copyright releases at any point, so there is no person who can simply authorize it for everyone.

All of the few Deis team members that I've contacted so far, though, have been very receptive to having their work re-published and excited to hear about Team Hephy, which was created to continue some of the work that had to be left behind by Deis, so that they could better follow the demand.

I want to do it in a way that is thoughtful and fair. It's also hard to justify reposting everything when I don't have a plan to balance it with an equal amount of good quality, new content as well. Maybe I need to bite the bullet and take my SEO points, it will almost certainly drive more traffic to our site.

Do you have an "in" at Archive.org, or would you re-host them somewhere else? I'm more worried that when I repost them, they are still not going to be easy to find, and if they weren't in the history of deis.com, that sure won't make it any easier.

I realized I was definitely going to miss the content when I found this post[1] that was just what I was looking for, about the options for schedulers and what it means to have a monolithic scheduler, back when they were considering whether to rewrite Deis on Kubernetes (they did, it became known as Workflow). It came from the original Deis blog.

I don't know if it looks out of place on the new blog, or if it will make sense to grow this one post at a time, I think I don't like this blog, it was just thrown together one day when I said "we need a place to put a release announcement." I like the material style better than anything I myself could come up with alone, but honestly that's hardly a shining endorsement. Could be much better.

> I put my commas after closing quotation marks, because that's what > programmers do.

Your blog is really nice, I went through and found the webcam thing[2] and just wanted to call that out!

[1]: [https://blog.teamhephy.info/posts/schedulers-pt1-basic- monol...](https://blog.teamhephy.info/posts/schedulers-pt1-basic- monolithic.html)

[2]: [https://rahul.webcam/](https://rahul.webcam/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Things like this are why any mention of "cleaning" or "removing clutter" always gives me a hugely uneasy feeling. Storage is cheap and getting cheaper; and even if some content is only of historical value, that in itself is plenty enough reason to ensure its continued existence.

<comment><USER8> It's not necessarily just about storage. If old articles and comments are on a different content management system, that requires hosting and maintaining as well. They may even run on different languages or operating systems.

<comment><USER9> No it doesn't.

You make a static copy of all of the HTML, archive the systems that generated them as VM images, and then put a "this is archived static data" at the top of every page.

You also fire every executive who considers deleting documentation for technical products.

<comment><USER8> I suppose caching just the output is feasible. It's not zero maintenance, but it's easier than maintaining two separate systems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The first thought that came to my mind was if Raymond Chen's blogs on MSDN got deleted. Now , _that_ would have been a tragedy! The blog is still up fyi. Tons of technology trivia and snippets there.

Growing up, JoelOnSoftware[1] and Raymond Chen's blog[2] were two great companions for me while surfing the net. Knowing HN, I am pretty sure a lot of you would have grown up with these blogs :-)

[1][https://www.joelonsoftware.com/](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/)

[2][https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/)

Old MSDN link : [https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing)

<comment><USER11> I wish they could restore Raymond Chen's old CSS.

<comment><USER12> I did this ([https://userstyles.org/styles/121616/the-old-new-thing- class...](https://userstyles.org/styles/121616/the-old-new-thing-classic- style)) after the first blog redesign, but so far haven't found any time to see if something similar would still work with the current blog, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Holy smokes that's a huge amount of institutional memory to just trash, particularly without even allowing archiving.

<comment><USER14> I have no evidence for this but my gut is very, very confident it was done to get people off older versions of Windows.

<comment><USER15> Don't see how, only technical users would care about these blogs and they are too few to matter, even assuming these blogs somehow kept them stuck on older Windows versions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> dao- Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19454469](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19454469)</comment>