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
I only briefly glanced at your project, but it doesn’t 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 purposes…
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)
(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; there’s so much Obsidian can do especially with plugins that Notion isn’t able to address. If we can make the two work together even if it’s 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 I’d build it myself, but it needs some fairly complex machinery for change tracking & merging which would require ongoing support so it’s not something I can tackle responsibly as a weekend project.
At the least we could offer YAML frontmatter as an option for Notion’s markdown export feature. Maybe I can get to that today I have a few spare hours.
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.
> 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.
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 (https://quesma.com/blog/ 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.
I don’t 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 Ferraris…
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.
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.
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.
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
My obsidian is slow to start on my phone (~30s, latest iPhone) and even on my computer it’s ~10s. I probably have 1000 notes, no back links, and I’m using the Vim extension and the default theme. It uses iCloud backup.
I can’t figure out why it’s so damn slow. But also, how is it any better than Notion at that point?
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".
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.
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!
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.
I've had a pretty good experience offering bounties on my own projects:
- https://github.com/orgs/com-lihaoyi/discussions/6
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
I only briefly glanced at your project, but it doesn’t 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 purposes…
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)
(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; there’s so much Obsidian can do especially with plugins that Notion isn’t able to address. If we can make the two work together even if it’s 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 I’d build it myself, but it needs some fairly complex machinery for change tracking & merging which would require ongoing support so it’s not something I can tackle responsibly as a weekend project.
At the least we could offer YAML frontmatter as an option for Notion’s markdown export feature. Maybe I can get to that today I have a few spare hours.
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.
> 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.
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 (https://quesma.com/blog/ 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.
I don’t 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 Ferraris…
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.
Someone's given it a shot: https://github.com/obsidianmd/obsidian-importer/pull/424
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.
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.
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.
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
This seems very exploitative of their user base. In a way that’s becoming more and more common.
Although Obsidian isn’t 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.
How is it exploitative?
There are also open bounties by comma.ai, is it becoming more common? https://github.com/orgs/commaai/projects/26/views/1
Comma.ai, since its founding, and Tinygrad now, both started by George Hotz, only hire candidates who solve their bounties first.
https://tinygrad.org/#worktiny
What’s the easiest way to convert all dataviews in an existing Obsidian vault to Bases?
Last I looked DataView is way more powerful than Bases. So, "convert all dataviews" is likely impossible.
There's this community-made Dataview to Bases script:
https://github.com/Quorafind/Bases-Toolbox
My obsidian is slow to start on my phone (~30s, latest iPhone) and even on my computer it’s ~10s. I probably have 1000 notes, no back links, and I’m using the Vim extension and the default theme. It uses iCloud backup.
I can’t figure out why it’s so damn slow. But also, how is it any better than Notion at that point?
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".
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.
> 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
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!
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.