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on Gopher (inofficial)
URI Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI Notion API importer, with Databases to Bases conversion bounty
NalNezumi wrote 6 hours 39 min ago:
Several years ago I made a bare metal notion to obsidian conversion
scripts. At the time there wasn't any Bases available so databases was
just turned in to csv table. It was relatively simple, no dependency
python script and just export your notion notes as a zips of markdowns
and then check every file to fix linking and the weird naming (with
some caveat that not all links are properly exported to markdown links
by notion)
Today I learned that obsidian have an API towards it. Still I wonder
why it's not just easier to use notions "download your pages as
markdown". Notion would very dislike an API that allows users to
migrate away from it and probably actively would sabotage it. "download
notes as markdown" is however a user service, which they probably don't
want to break. (maybe now that they added an offline mode too late, I
don't know)
jitl wrote 5 hours 57 min ago:
(I work at Notion and built the html exporter during my hiring
process work trial in 2019, opinion is my own)
I would love to two-way sync Notion <-> Obsidian vault. Notion is
focused on online collaboration, Obsidian is focused on file-over-app
personal software customization; thereâs so much Obsidian can do
especially with plugins that Notion isnât able to address. If we
can make the two work together even if itâs not perfectly seamless,
it would extend usefulness of both tools by uniting their strengths
and avoiding the tradeoff of their weaknesses.
If only I had an extra 24h per day Iâd build it myself, but it
needs some fairly complex machinery for change tracking & merging
which would require ongoing support so itâs not something I can
tackle responsibly as a weekend project.
At the least we could offer YAML frontmatter as an option for
Notionâs markdown export feature. Maybe I can get to that today I
have a few spare hours.
dtkav wrote 4 hours 25 min ago:
In the age of Claude Code having real-time collaboration +
local-first markdown + easy to write custom plugins is the future.
It makes no sense to lock up your documents in a saas product that
gatekeeps your access to using AI on your own documents.
That's why I've been working Relay [0] - a privacy-preserving
local-first collaboration plugin for Obsidian.
Our customers really like being able to self-host Relay Servers for
complete document privacy while using our global identity system to
do cross-org collaboration with anyone in the world.
[0]
URI [1]: https://relay.md
jitl wrote 2 hours 53 min ago:
We offer Notion MCP since most users prefer the ease of GUI, but
agree that Claude code CLI + markdown files is handy. If we had
the Obsidian md style sync we could sync to an obsidian vault in
a Git repo just as well. We have lots of docs in Notion as you
might imagine and having them synced into the git repo could
improve their hit rate w Claude and all the other menagerie of
code agents without needing to hook them all up w MCP and waste
time on remote tool calls.
dfee wrote 7 hours 40 min ago:
My obsidian is slow to start on my phone (~30s, latest iPhone) and even
on my computer itâs ~10s. I probably have 1000 notes, no back links,
and Iâm using the Vim extension and the default theme. It uses iCloud
backup.
I canât figure out why itâs so damn slow. But also, how is it any
better than Notion at that point?
kepano wrote 7 hours 10 min ago:
It sounds like iCloud's automatic offloading "feature" which deletes
your local files and re-downloads them as needed. Go to the iCloud
folder for Obsidian and set it to "Keep downloaded".
dfee wrote 3 hours 9 min ago:
Wow. I think this is the answer! Thanks!
threetonesun wrote 7 hours 19 min ago:
The mobile app had a notice about iCloud for a long time (I forget if
it's gone now or not), but usually you're running into Obsidian
trying to sync all of the files and rebuild it's internal cache when
it opens instead of being able to do any background sync.
As for why is it better than Notion at that point, well, if you
wanted to you could use a "faster" app like iA Writer on your phone,
or anything that can open Markdown. That remains its biggest benefit,
you're never locked in to files that are only on someone else's
server.
AbstractH24 wrote 8 hours 25 min ago:
This seems very exploitative of their user base. In a way thatâs
becoming more and more common.
Although Obsidian isnât open source, the community has a very similar
vibe. Very anti-big-corporate-overlord.
But maybe not, maybe the world of bounties is just one im not in the
loop on and this is common.
mpalmer wrote 8 hours 19 min ago:
How is it exploitative?
wraptile wrote 10 hours 31 min ago:
As someone who wrote a fair share of notion API code - the 5,000$
bounty is not enough and I'm only half-joking here.
That being said, yay open source bounties! People should do more of
those.
ayewo wrote 3 hours 32 min ago:
There are a few more bounties like this out there.
1. Tenstorrent [1] $200 - $3,000 bounties
2. microG [2] $10,000 bounty
3. Li Haoyi [3] multiple bounties (already mentioned upthread)
4. Algora also hosts bounties for COSS (Commercial OSS)
URI [1]: https://github.com/tenstorrent/tt-metal/issues?q=is%3Aissue%...
URI [2]: https://github.com/microg/GmsCore/issues/2994
URI [3]: https://github.com/orgs/com-lihaoyi/discussions/6
URI [4]: https://algora.io/bounties
eamag wrote 11 hours 2 min ago:
There are also open bounties by comma.ai, is it becoming more common?
URI [1]: https://github.com/orgs/commaai/projects/26/views/1
TheBlapse wrote 10 hours 46 min ago:
Comma.ai, since its founding, and Tinygrad now, both started by
George Hotz, only hire candidates who solve their bounties first.
URI [1]: https://tinygrad.org/#worktiny
nivertech wrote 11 hours 56 min ago:
Whatâs the easiest way to convert all dataviews in an existing
Obsidian vault to Bases?
yencabulator wrote 6 hours 33 min ago:
Last I looked DataView is way more powerful than Bases. So, "convert
all dataviews" is likely impossible.
kepano wrote 7 hours 6 min ago:
There's this community-made Dataview to Bases script:
URI [1]: https://github.com/Quorafind/Bases-Toolbox
lihaoyi wrote 12 hours 19 min ago:
I've had a pretty good experience offering bounties on my own projects:
- [1] If you look at that thread, you'll see I've paid out quite a lot
in bounties, somewhere around 50-60kUSD (the amount is not quite
precise, because some bounties I completed myself without paying, and
others I paid extra when the work turned out to be more than expected).
In exchange, I did manage to get quite a lot of work done for that cost
You do get some trash, it does take significant work to review, and not
everything is amenable to bounties. But for projects that already have
interested users and potential collaborators, sometimes 500-1000USD in
cash is enough motivation for someone to go from curious to engaged.
And if I can pay someone 500-1000USD to save me a week of work (and
associated context switching) it can definitely be worth the cost.
The bounties are certainly not a living wage for people, especially
compared to my peers making 1mUSD/yr at some big tech FAANG. It's just
a token of appreciation that somehow feels qualitatively different from
the money that comes in your twice-monthly paycheck
URI [1]: https://github.com/orgs/com-lihaoyi/discussions/6
rtkwe wrote 3 hours 34 min ago:
Is this the standard way to do bounties, where you take applications
and then choose someone to attempt the bounty? I always thought you'd
just state the requirements and the bounty and then screen the
submissions and chose a winner.
Granted this does feel a bit less like asking for spec work so I can
see why they might have chosen to go this way instead of generically
accepting bounties.
ayewo wrote 3 hours 27 min ago:
It's not a standard way to do it. Different projects adopt
different approaches.
I posted a list of projects offering bounties elsewhere [1] in the
thread.
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45278787
chatmasta wrote 8 hours 13 min ago:
I only briefly glanced at your project, but it doesnât look like a
commercial offering or a component of one⦠what is your motivation
for paying people to do this work? I would think bounties would be
used more often by companies who need some open source feature for
interoperability or integration purposesâ¦
count wrote 6 hours 58 min ago:
Having more money than free time but still wanting a thing to get
done.
Lots of folks pay good money for hobbies (video games, golf fees,
bicycle purchases, etc.).
srid wrote 5 hours 29 min ago:
Can you deduct these expenditures fully in income tax?
chatmasta wrote 2 hours 9 min ago:
You could deduct them if you have a corporation with some
reasonable claim to the IP behind the projects, or a clear
business reason for needing the features. Thereâs probably no
clear settled tax law on the specific topic, but Iâm sure it
would pass an audit as long as there isnât some egregiously
obvious non-business related work being bountied.
jumploops wrote 14 hours 11 min ago:
Everyone is looking down on LLM-assisted dev here, but I think it's a
great fit.
I also don't believe it can be one-shotted (there's too many deltas
between Notion's API and Obsidian).
With that said, LLMs are great for enumerating edge-cases, and this
feels like the perfect task for Codex/Claude Code.
I'd implore the obsidian team/maintainers to take a stab at building
this with LLMs. Based on personal experience, the cost is likely within
the same magnitude ($100-$1k in API cost + dev time), but the
additional context (tests, docs, etc.) will be invaluable to future
changes to either API surface.
slightwinder wrote 10 hours 12 min ago:
> Everyone is looking down on LLM-assisted dev here, but I think it's
a great fit.
From my own experience, I don't think that's the case. I've wrote a
similar sync-script obsidian<->notion-databases myself some months
ago, and I also used AI in the beginning; but I learned really fast
what an annoying mess Notions API is, and how fast LLMs are hanging
up on edge-cases. AI is good to get a start into the API, but at the
end you still have to fix it up yourself.
danielscrubs wrote 10 hours 44 min ago:
I donât get the llm shilling. If you think you can earn 50k with
some prompts, then earn it. Why _instead_ shill for llms? Feels like
stock traders having courses for how YOU could earn big bucks. They
themselves have photos taken with one day rented Ferrarisâ¦
We all lean on LLMs in one way or another, but HN is becoming
infested with wishful prompt engineers. Show, dont tell. Compete on
the market instead of yet another PoC.
jumploops wrote 5 hours 50 min ago:
Uh, sorry?
The bounty here is just $5k, and if you read my comment, Iâm
suggesting that the maintainer(s), even with LLMs, will likely
spend a similar amount in inference + cost of their own time,
however theyâll likely produce a solution more robust than what
the bounty alone will produce.
To be clear: Iâm not advocating that someone simply vibe-codes
this up.
Thatâs already happening (2 PRs when this hit HN), both with
negative feedback.
Iâm suggesting that the maintainers should give LLM-assisted dev
a try here, as they already have context on the Obsidian-side API.
NewsaHackO wrote 9 hours 33 min ago:
>Feels like stock traders having courses for how YOU could earn big
bucks. They themselves have photos taken with one day rented
Ferrarisâ¦
Do you think the person you are replying to is Sam Altman?
stared wrote 12 hours 17 min ago:
LLMs are wonderful for migration. Also, are good at exploring APIs.
A month ago I migrated company's website and blog from Framer to
Astro ( [1] is you would like to see the end result).
This weekend I created a summary of Grafana dashboard data. LLMs are
tireless at checking hypothesis, running grunt code, seeing results,
and iterating on that.
What takes more than a single is to check if the result is correct
(nothing missed, nothing confabulated, no default fallbacks) and to
maintain code quality (I refactor early and often, here is a place in
Claude Code that there is no other way than using Opus 4.1). Most of
my time spend talking with Claude Code ais in refactoring - and it
requires most knowledge of tooling, abstraction, etc.
URI [1]: https://quesma.com/blog/
Banditoz wrote 13 hours 37 min ago:
Someone's given it a shot:
URI [1]: https://github.com/obsidianmd/obsidian-importer/pull/424
sndixnnx wrote 6 hours 49 min ago:
Itâs funny reading these threads. A gif of a few clicks is
evidence âit worksâ for the author. Itâs like citing lines of
code as a measure of your productivity. Appears impressive on first
glance, but any expert will call you out as a snake oil salesman.
My guess is this is close to the level of testing they put forth
for ensuring the AI generated code works (based off my experience
with other AI heavy devs). They didnât take any time to
thoroughly review nor understand the code. A large file doesnât
necessarily mean shoddy work, but it certainly indicates itâs
likely that.
sarreph wrote 12 hours 49 min ago:
Can't help but think if the author of that PR had been less
defeatist and snarky they would have had a chance at decent
discussion about it being a viable option (with AI).
jychang wrote 12 hours 18 min ago:
It's 1100 lines of code in a single file that nobody understands.
That's instant spaghetti right there, not a valid PR.
At least have it be split into some files and structured in some
way.
artursapek wrote 10 hours 51 min ago:
how is a single 1100 line file that handles Notionâs API
format âspaghettiâ?
spaghetti code is code that snakes through the code base in a
hard-to-follow way
hazzamanic wrote 14 hours 24 min ago:
Having once used the Notion API to build an OPEN API doc generator, I
pity whoever takes this on. The API was painful to integrate with, full
of limitations and nowhere near feature parity with the Notion UI
itself
thombles wrote 14 hours 35 min ago:
In addition to what's already in the thread, I assume by now somebody
has vibecoded an agent to scan GitHub for bounties and then
automatically vibe up a corresponding solution. Will be a fun source of
spam for anyone who wants to do the right thing and pay people for good
work.
BoorishBears wrote 13 hours 55 min ago:
I recently got my first AI generated PR for a project I maintain and
it was honestly a little stressful.
My first clue was that PR description was absurdly detailed and well
structured... yet the actual changes were really scattershot. A human
with the experience and attention to detail to produce that detailed
description would likely also have broken it down into seperate PRs.
And the code seemed alright until I noticed a small one-line change:
a UI component had been replaced with a comment that stated
"Insantiating component now requires X"
Except the new insantiation wasn't anywhere. Their coding agent had
commented out insantiating the component instead of figuring out
dependency injection.
That component was the container for all of the app's settings.
-
It's interesting because the PR wasn't entirely useless: individual
parts of it were good enough that even if I took over the PR I'd be
fine keeping them.
But whatever coded it couldn't understand architecture well enough. I
suspect whoever was piloting it probably tested the core
functionality and assumed their small UI changes wouldn't break
anything.
I hope we normalize just admitting when most of a piece of code is AI
generated. I'm not a luddite about these tools, but it also changes
how I'll approach a piece of code.
Things that are easy for humans get very hard for AI, and vice versa.
jillesvangurp wrote 10 hours 39 min ago:
> I hope we normalize just admitting when most of a piece of code
is AI generated.
People using AI tools in their work is becoming normal. In the end,
it doesn't matter how the code is created if the code works and is
otherwise high quality. The person contributing is responsible for
checking the quality of their contributions. Generally, a pull
request that changes half the system for no good reason without
good motivation is clearly not acceptable in most OSS systems.
Likewise, a pull request that ignores existing design and
conventions is also not acceptable. If you do such a pull request
manually, it will probably also get rejected and get told off by
repository maintainers.
The beauty of the pull request system is that it puts the
responsibility on the PR creator to make sure their pull request is
good enough. Creating huge pull requests is generally not
appreciated and creates a lot of review overhead. It's also good
practice to work via the issue tracker and discuss your plans
before you start the work. Especially with bigger changes. The
problem here is not necessary AI but but people using AI to create
low quality pull requests and people not communicating properly.
I've not yet received any obvious AI generated pull requests on any
of my projects. But I've used codex on my own projects for a few
pull requests. I'd probably disclose that fact if I was going to
contribute something to somebody else's code base and would also
take the time to properly clean up the pull request and make sure
it delivers as promised.
artursapek wrote 10 hours 48 min ago:
I canât stand people who open a pull request and ask for review
without first reviewing their own diff. They should have caught
that themselves.
zwnow wrote 13 hours 27 min ago:
Not only admitting, it should be law to mark anything AI generated
as AI generated. Even if AI contributed just a tiny bit. I dont
want to use AI slop, and I should be allowed to make informed
decisions based on that preference.
scrollaway wrote 12 hours 56 min ago:
Did you by any chance type this comment on a device that has
autocorrect enabled?
jangxx wrote 12 hours 36 min ago:
Autocorrect is not generative AI in the way that anyone is
using that word. Also autocorrect doesn't even need to use any
sort of ML model.
scrollaway wrote 12 hours 20 min ago:
Ah yes the duality of anti-AI crowds on HN. âGenAI is just
fancy autocorrectâ, and âautocorrect isnât actually
GenAIâ.
The thing is, if youâre talking about making laws (as GP
is), your âsurely people understand this differenceâ
strategy doesnât matter squat and the impact will be larger
than you think.
jangxx wrote 11 hours 20 min ago:
You don't seem to understand what people mean when they say
"AI is just fancy autocorrect". People talk about the
little word suggestions over the keyboard, not about
correcting spelling. And yes, of course those suggestions
are going to be provided by some sort of ML model, and yes
if you actually write a whole article just using them, it
should be marked as AI generated, but literally no one is
doing that. Maybe because it's not fancy enough
autocorrect. Either way, this is not the gotcha you think.
NewsaHackO wrote 9 hours 28 min ago:
But the original poster said:
>Even if AI contributed just a tiny bit.
Which would imply autocorrect should be reported as AI
use.
jangxx wrote 8 hours 55 min ago:
A law like this would obviously need some sort of
sensible definition of what "AI" means in this context.
Online translation tools also use ML models and even
systems to unlock your device with your face do, so
classifying all of that as "AI contributions" would
make the definition completely useless.
I assume the OP was talking about things like LLMs and
diffusion models which one could definitely single out
for regulatory purposes. At the end of the day I don't
think it would ever be realistically possible to have a
law like this anyway, at least not one that wouldn't
come with a bunch of ambiguity that would need to be
resolved in court.
scrollaway wrote 7 hours 36 min ago:
OK, so define it for us, please. Because, once again,
this thread is talking about introducing laws about
"AI". OP was talking about LLMs you say - So SLMs
then are fine? If not, then where is the boundary? If
they're fine then congratulations you have created a
new industry of people pushing the boundaries of what
SLMs can do, as well as how they are defined.
Laws are built on definitions and this hand-wavy BS
is how we got nonsense like the current version of
the AI act.
jangxx wrote 7 hours 20 min ago:
Why are you so mad at me, I'm not even the OP you
should ask these questions. I'm also not convinced
we need regulation like this in the first place, so
I can't tell you where this boundary should be, but
a boundary could certainly be found and it would be
beyond simple spellchecking autocorrect.
I also don't understand why you think this would be
so impossible to define. There are regulations for
all kinds of areas where specific things are
targeted like chemicals or drugs and just because
some of these have incentivized people to slightly
change a regulated thing into an unregulated thing
does not mean we don't regulate these areas at all.
So how are AI systems so different that you think
it'd be impossible to find an adequate definition?
zwnow wrote 14 hours 37 min ago:
> Please only apply if you have taken time to explore the Importer
codebase, as well as the Notion API.
Suddenly 5k$ does not sound as good
Kichererbsen wrote 12 hours 24 min ago:
Unless you've already done projects in both. Then, it might seem
trivial? Idk. I haven't looked at either. But if there is such a
person out there, with the spare time to look into it, they might be
ideally suited!
cybrox wrote 14 hours 19 min ago:
Why? It doesn't say you need to have extensive experience with them.
I would assume this is mostly to dissuade applicants that are not
aware of the potential challenges ahead.
zwnow wrote 13 hours 43 min ago:
This "exploring" can take tremendous amounts of time, depending on
the complexity of these APIs. My time is worth a lot to myself. I
am not going to spend many hours for a chance of winning 5k$. If
this takes a week off of my free time its not worth 5k to me.
theshrike79 wrote 10 hours 56 min ago:
If you get paid more than $5k a week, this isn't for you clearly.
zwnow wrote 9 hours 13 min ago:
If you think this is what I wrote, you should go to reading
comprehension courses.
sindriava wrote 8 hours 5 min ago:
While I understand you wrote "free time", this isn't Reddit.
Keep the snarkiness to a minimum.
zwnow wrote 4 hours 34 min ago:
This website is worse than reddit. Pretentious AI bros
everywhere. It even has the reddit color.
DIR <- back to front page