The Future of Polar Cloud Sync We're going to be changing some features in the 'local' mode version of Polar and some new cloud features won't be available in this mode. I've tried to keep Polar's local mode as full featured as possible but I've decided that this just isn't possible moving forward…

Polar Outage- Sept 18 2019 We had an outage last night for Polar cloud sync and our web application which was related to an issue in Google cloud. Users would have been unable to use the web application and cloud sync wouldn't work properly. At 2 AM PST Google downgraded all of our accounts due to…

Minimizing Defection Might be the Solution to the Tragedy of the Commons. Being that my background is in CompSci I tend to think about thinks in terms of probabilities, statistics, game theory, and distributed systems. I've recently made what I think may be a unique observation about a number of…

Polar 1.19.8 Released - Better Payments and Fixes Changes in 1.19.8 Include:

GPT-2, the Destruction of the Web and Artificially Intelligent Textbooks GPT-2 is a deep-learning language model released by OpenAI a few months ago which is causing a bit of controversy in the deep learning community. Due to our concerns about malicious applications of the technology, we are not…

13 Lucky Tips for using Anki and Spaced Repetition in 2019 For the past few years I've been using Anki to capture anything I want to remember long term. If I'm reading an important Wikipedia page I save it to Polar, annotate it directly, then create flashcards from the annotations. I do this to my…

Portable Web Documents - An Alternative to PDF based on HTML5 and Web Standards Portable Web Documents are a technology similar to PDFs (Portable Document Format) implemented in Polar which support offline caching of full HTML documents, and with (in the future) improved support for video, charts…

Polar 1.19 Released With Area Highlights and Updated Annotations View Polar 1.19 has been a lot of work but it's finally out the door. If you haven't updated Polar in a while make sure you're on the latest version by going to Help | About or Help | Check for Updates. There are a few we want to…

Polar 1.18.0 Released This release mostly focused on improving stability and implementing a few key UI features. This upgrades us to Electron 5.x which as needed for some users who were experiencing severe latency using Polar on Linux. We also resolve a key issue with non-atomic writes. This…

Overview I'm Kevin Burton, the creator of Polar and I need your help. For the past six months I've been working on a project to address the problems with the current Internet. Polar is a new type of app which helps you build a personal knowledge repository and keeps all your reading in one place…