conaws

No hiring page yet, just dm @conaw on twitter for now

Good point. Will update.

Capability is there, but UX sucks for both sharing single pages and creating seperate workspaces.

Been working on both this week.

Might not be for you.

Most of benefit is in the new workflows you get via backlinks.

Blocks (paragraphs with subtrees) as first class objects with uids that can be pointed to.

Pages as filterable collections of backlinks from blocks.

A datalog engine for structured data via attributes.

Collaborative real time editing.

But you're mostly right - UX that comes from that is the thing that matters.

Dev here - open to suggestions

TiddlyWiki is great, was one of many tools I used before starting to work on Roam.

Lack of easy collaborative option and the speed of organizing sets of intersecting sets of notes were some of main reasons I needed something else.

Datalog :)

One of the devs here - totally true, our help docs and landing page don't really show half of what you can do. Help docs have a lot if you dig around though.

Heres a link

https://roamresearch.com/#/v8/help/page/1wnq-ZAAN

Really appreciate users like pps who do the work of figuring out how to make Roam work for them at this early stage.

Just as FYI - Roam is built in Clojure/Clojurescript and we're hiring

Play in the Sandbox on the help db for an hour and see if you still think this.

Shouldnt be true for JSON export.

Use nvalt till that ships then, import will be easier, and you'll start to taste power of very fast two-way links.

We store in cloud as it is a collaborative app, designed for building off your own and other's past work.

Lots of self hosted options that are much better than evernote or todoist. Org mode for one.

Worth learning emacs for that.

Or control-shift-O when cursor is hovering over a link to open page or referenced paragraph/subtree (block) in sidebar.

Problem w evernote is that file is bad unit of organization.

In a meeting with 4 people, discussing three big ideas, related to two projects, what file do you put the note in?

In Roam that's not even a question you have to ask, all info in each paragraph goes to all the right places

Co-founder here.

Best self hosted tools are Org-mode and nValt.

Neither have full feature set, or work collaboratively, but nvalt in particular gives a good 80/20.

We export to plaintext markdown that reads well in either, planning export to org mode with enough data for a good elisp hacker to build parity of main features -- will do sooner if we know there are takers for that.

Have seen cool analysis of JSON export in Wolfram Alpha.

Co-founder of Roam here. Also huge fan of treesheets, do recommend.

We export to markdown and JSON.

Also -- for folks asking about how we're different from Workflowy or Evernote or existing wiki tools

Key claim we have is that knowledge doesn't really fit into the tree structure of a file system (nearly 100% of knowledge management tools follow that structure)

In Roam, you can organize things hierarchically -- using indentation -- but when you link to another page, the paragraph or bullet point where you made that link appears in the "references" for that page.

Pages -- like a page for a person, or a concept -- end up getting a sort of implicit definition from all the other places where you talk about them.

So, a page for Alice or Bob for example has all the tasks that have been assigned to them, and all notes from meetings that involved them.

A page for a concept like [[Paul Graham recommends Clojure]] pulls in all the paragraphs or bullet points where you used the term -- and the bullet points nested below.

You can import any plain text or markdown file into Roam -- we take the indentation structure and parse it out.

Can also copy/paste in any html

Would build a special emacs importer if there was strong need -- but emacs export is so powerful you can also just export org-files into a format that Roam accepts already

Cofounder here -- just want to let people know that we STRONGLY believe that your data shouldn't be trapped in a SAAS application.

Roam does allow you to export all your data to an org-mode file (the emacs outliner), we're working on other import/export options, and want to get to the place where there is a close to plain text representation of your Roam workspace on your file system that syncs both ways.

We weren't expecting someone to post us to HN yet. This is a case of, if you're not embarrassed on launch, you launched too late. Just want to let y'all know we dont believe in SAAS lockin for a tool for thought, and data portability for the folks who aren't emacs users is coming.

The fact that folks in the comments are complaining here about Clojure's error messages here tells me that the implications of this post might not be obvious. Up to this point, it has been really really hard to give good error messages from macros, and a lot of the core functionality of Clojure (let, defn etc etc) are from macros. What Clojure.spec means (if I'm correct) is that in the future, not only will the Clojure language itself be able to have sane error messages, you'll be able to easily create sane error messages for yourself from your own code. This is a HUGE HUGE deal. It is quite possibly BETTER than any type system. http://clojure.org/about/spec Also, the idea that you'll be able to get generative testing FOR FREE, is just totally insane.

It means you may soon have amazing error messages when working with Clojure. You'll also be able to write your code in such a way that it gives you amazing error messages when some part of it breaks.

Solving that is what this post is about

lein figwheel new? lein devcards new?

Depending on your definition of experiment I think Clojure has a MUCH better story for getting to a good beginner setup with live reloading than webpack/react

"In my humble opinion clojure.spec is the most VPRI-worthy feature Rich Hickey has shipped since delivering fast persistent data structures." Love this quote

Wicked pumped for you guys. Very well deserved.

Closing a sale requires at least three things: you need to get yourself in front of the person with purchasing power, you need to build trust with that person and convince them they want what you've got (much easier if the product is good and you believe in it), and you need to give them enough of a feeling of urgency that they don't delay and talk themselves out of the sale.

The bad news, all three of these are easier to learn when you're an extrovert.

The good news, it's possible to learn all these skills and push yourself to become more extroverted.

A couple good books that help you become extroverted in the right way--How to Win Friends and Influence people (corny/scammy sounding title but a true classic, the tldr is--be genuinely interested in people if you want to be interesting, listen, smile, remember people's names, apologize when you're wrong really quickly)

Another great one is Never Eat Alone, by Keith Ferrazzi. Basically, take people out for casual lunches, but do it ALL THE TIME, try to help them even if they can't help you right now, introduce people to other people who can help them, etc.

Then the hard part, get used to talking to strangers. If you want to learn sales, you have to get over that fear. I'd say start, get used to saying hi to everyone you encounter throughout the day and trying to have a friendly conversation--hard for an introvert, but like going to the gym, it'll make you stronger and that subtle social confidence will pay off in a sales meeting. (Plus, you never know what random interaction will lead to a sales meeting).

Also, to be honest, there are a lot of similarities between closing a sale and dating. The difficulty is that in the second you're selling yourself, so rejection stings a lot more and the approaches can be a little scarier. That said, if you can strike up a conversation with a strange man or woman you find attractive and get them interested in you, you'll have no problem learning to sell any other reasonable product.