Notion for everyone - <AUTHOR> https://www.notion.so/personal <comment><USER3> I love using Notion, but I think the general discussion about it does not talk enough about how it's flexibility is also a problem many times.

1\. Flexibility of blocks is a cognitive overhead for most folks in my team. They would rather prefer more constrained and opinionated approaches like Trello

2\. Notion is currently a jack of all trades and master of none. We have tried to use it as a wiki, project tracker, issue tracker, CRM & spreadsheet. Though it's good to have one tool that can do many things, we quickly reach limits of what is possible automatically and have to spend a lot of time to manually maintain it

3\. Convention over configuration creates problems for other team members to follow because conventions are not documented properly.

But I see a lot of potential of it becoming a platform. If they can incentivize 3rd parties to build over their platform and build trust, I think it's gonna be the next big thing. "One platform for all my data" with specialized tools to deal with different kinds of data. I can imagine tools like Tello, Jira, Hubspot, Google spreadsheets & draw.io running over it.

<comment><USER4> I've had a similar experience with Notion. "Jack of all trades and master of none" resonates strongly with me.

This lead me to my latest startup [https://froosthq.com/](https://froosthq.com/) which is Notion inspired and aimed solely at software teams.

<comment><USER5> Funnily enough originaly the saying was "A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one." Seems like it got pretty skewed over time.

<comment><USER6> Specialization is for insects.

[https://wiki.c2.com/?SpecializationIsForInsects](https://wiki.c2.com/?SpecializationIsForInsects)

<comment><USER7> And also what allowed civilisation to exist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Notion is great, I used to want to build my knowledge base in it, but figured it's not future-proof enough for my needs.

And that's part of the reason we went on to build Obsidian ([https://obsidian.md/](https://obsidian.md/)), the local-first knowledge base app. Everything is in plain text Markdown.

Screenshot: [https://i.imgur.com/zof4zCj.png](https://i.imgur.com/zof4zCj.png)

Just released 0.6.0 and here's a video for anyone interested: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAkJMHg- dGw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAkJMHg-dGw)

The private beta community has built cool stuff already: [https://github.com/kmaasrud/awesome- obsidian](https://github.com/kmaasrud/awesome-obsidian)

In private beta right now, looking to launch soon.

<comment><USER9> I like the idea of Notion, but one of things keeping me is that it seems like it'd be a pain to export one's data if Notion ever went out of business.

But just keeping folders of Markdown notes is also inflexible, but on the opposite side of the scale.

Obsidian looks like a great balance! I've requested beta access as well.

Edit: Obsidian seems to make it easy to create a Zettelkasten, sort of like [https://github.com/alefore/weblog/blob/master/zettelkasten.m...](https://github.com/alefore/weblog/blob/master/zettelkasten.md) but with automation baked in.

<comment><USER10> I switched from OneNote to Notion a while a go, one major reason being the possibility to easily export notes in Markdown format. I think it's working pretty well, or am I overlooking something?

<comment><USER11> Notion's export used to dump it all in one opaque blob of files with no structure aside from some CSV files that roughly described where things went. Maybe they haven't used it since Notion changed it to use folders.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is kinda weird, because I was happily giving them $4/month after running out of space in their trial plan, and now I absolutely have no reason to keep giving them money.

Which, sure, I guess I'll take it. My $4/month isn't going to make or break their business and they probably barely give a shit about getting money for personal usage. Does remind me that my usage of their app doesn't align with their business model, which makes it feel rather... tenuous? Like at any time they might say "actually we're going to only support paid enterprise usage now" or "oh we're shutting down because companies just used Confluence and Airtable instead" (I have yet to sell any employer on using Notion because it's too unstructured for them to grok the benefits of :\\).

<comment><USER13> Are there any open source Notion alternatives? This is the main benefit of open source software, in my mind: no one can "take" it from you because it doesn't belong to "them" in the same way that a product does.

<comment><USER14> emacs + orgmode

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I mentioned this before. Notion is great, but the fact that they use fullstory (session recording) for a note taking app is a huge problem for me. We're talking about potentially sensitive data being available to notion and perhaps fullstory employees for the sake of improving UX. I especially dislike the fact that they don't disclose session recording upfront. I found out by inspecting their app webpage.

Sure there's a way to opt out of fullstory in general, but that's not very reliable.

I should mention that we use fullstory for our saas product and quite happy with it. However, our implementation makes it possible to opt out upfront during registration and or change your session recording settings from within our app. We don't rely on fullstory or bs workarounds, we simply don't load fullstory when you opt out.

<comment><USER16> Hi Yabood, we actually don't use Fullstory anymore due to privacy concerns. We removed it 6-9 months ago from all platforms. If you're still seeing this somewhere please let me know so we can address it.

<comment><USER17> Does Notion have access to the content of my notes if they're compelled to produce them?

Do employees have access to the content of my notes?

<comment><USER16> Notion employees are only allowed to access your workspace data with your written consent. We are also only allowed to do this in order to facilitate an improved user experience for you (e.g. debug problems you have asked support about, etc).

We are working on updating our T&C and Privacy Policy to make this more clear, but it is rigorously practiced internally already.

We do not yet have end-to-end encryption, or other encryption functionality that would make it technically impossible to access your data. We would love to do this at some point but it will be difficult because our permission model is quite complex!

<comment><USER17> Thanks for the reply, Jamie, much appreciated.

I would definitely pay for an E2E encrypted Notion.

<comment><USER18> I'm curious. Why the need for E2E?

<comment><USER17> I tend to use these platforms to organize my personal life and thoughts. Sharing that information in any way with a for-profit company is a non-starter for me. "Trust us, we care about your privacy" isn't good enough for me.

<comment><USER19> I would recommend looking at Standard Notes. It's paid only but it's so worth it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The one thing that bothers me about Notion (and Slack and other "everything in one place" tools), is the lack of encryption. I might have FAANGophobia, but whenever there is a free tier without a form of end-to-end encryption in place, it feels like a data puddle waiting to become a lake.

That being said, having clear-text data would allow features like an API on publicly shared pages/blocks, to use Notion as a CMS. I have seen some attempts [1] at reverse-engineering their internal API, but an official one on a paid plan could be a nice addition.

[1] [https://github.com/splitbee/notion-api- worker](https://github.com/splitbee/notion-api-worker)

<comment><USER21> this is the only thing that stops me from using Notion, too. just downloaded it and it looks like it would change my life... except i don't own the data.

right now i'm trying out Outline [1] which has an option for self hosting.

[1] [https://github.com/outline/outline](https://github.com/outline/outline)

<comment><USER22> I just checked out Outline. It seems strange that the landing page example is lifted straight from Stripe's docs[1] with "Stripe" replaced by "Acme".

[1] [https://stripe.com/docs/webhooks#what-are- webhooks](https://stripe.com/docs/webhooks#what-are-webhooks)

<comment><USER23> I can tell you that a large majority of in-production API docs use Stripe's docs as a template. I did it for my company, and I've seen a ton of other API services do it. Stripe leads in API docs, so it's easier to not reinvent the wheel and just do what works. I know this instance isn't even for a production product, but meh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm not sure what it is, but I feel like HN seems to pick apart everything that's posted in a negative light. Honestly I discovered Notion a few years back and used it for a while, but stopped using it when I couldn't sync it with my teams project management software. Fast forward a few years and my SO and I were at a restaurant sitting next to a guy who's one of the early engineers in the company, and that sparked my interest again. Since then, I've been using Notion to replace Google Docs and Trello, and it's been fantastic

<comment><USER25> Thanks. I'm going to give it a try. I currently use Trello to track my personal stuff. How does Notion compare?

<comment><USER24> I personally like the UX more, and it's just a smoother experience for me than trello. Also what's cool is we've divided up the Kanban boards so they're separated by team, but they merge into a master board so we can see how everyone is doing at a glance. I also use it for tech designs writing documentation so, I need more than trello by default

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Note-taking is very similar to blogging. Many people lose so much time while searching for the best app instead of taking notes. If you want to develop a proper note-taking habit, just start writing into somewhere. md files, evernote, notion, etc. after a while, you will know your needs and you will be able to pick one of them easily. I have been using [https://www.zoho.com/notebook/](https://www.zoho.com/notebook/) for a while and I am happy with it. Since my needs are extremely simple: bullets, tags, groups, mobile app, macOS apps.

</comment><comment><USER27> Notion is great. My one complaint is the fact that there's no "family plan". I currently have a free workspace that I share with my spouse, but we're about to hit the 1000 block limit. Notion CS's recommendation was for me to use a personal plan and invite them to each page we want to share, or to create a top-level page that all of the shared pages are nested under and invite them to the top-level page alone, but this is very annoying. But I don't want to pay $16/mo just for 2 members who don't need advanced team features.

<comment><USER28> (Notion here) We agree! The new personal plan enables you to have unlimited pages & blocks and share with up to 5 guests for free. [https://www.notion.so/pricing](https://www.notion.so/pricing)

<comment><USER27> Guests have to be invited to individual pages though, right? So this means I still need to either invite my spouse to every single shared page (which is problematic if my spouse wants to create a new top-level shared page in my workspace), or nest all the shared stuff under a single top-level page which is annoying (and hurts navigation on mobile).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I've tried so many note/todo/productivity apps throughout the years and I always find myself coming back to one simple solution:

\- keep your daily todo stuff on a sheet of paper in front of you, transfer the stuff from yesterday onto a fresh sheet before starting to work

\- keep project specific tasks close to the project. If the project is physical stick a note onto it, if it is git managed code open a issue or add a todo inline, or add a todo.md in the project folder. Only put a vague line on your daily todo sheet: "work on project x" all the detailed stuff should be in the project

\- if you have calls, meetings etc, just add them to your calendar with a reminder, no need to have them on the todo list

<comment><USER30> Same here. No productivity app will win me back the time I have spent looking for them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm sad that so many of the top comments here are Notion skeptical. I have loved Notion from the very beginning and used it as a personal repository for a long time.

More recently, we used Notion - where 'we' = a group of professional volunteers; professional in that everyone had skills to contribute and volunteer in that no one is being paid for those contributions - to create a Citizen-to-Citizen long term support platform for those impacted adversely by the COVID19 epidemic. In India in case you're wondering.

The challenges are many:

1\. Make it clear that we see ourselves not as a charity but as a citizen to citizen support network - today it could be that person, but tomorrow it could be you. We have to design around the dignity of the recipient and the donor.

2\. We need to identify potential beneficiaries whose needs are verifiable. Which means involving organizations that work with migrant laborers at scale (to take a key demographic) and can verify and on-board those potential beneficiaries.

3\. We need to pull together the back-end and front-end technology to make donations without intermediaries, i.e., there's no middleman receiving and storing the money - it's a direct transfer from one individuals account to another individual's account. No administrative fees and with any luck we could even see if the credit card fees can be waived.

4\. Compelling and easy to grasp design that inspires trust in potential donors and even more importantly, builds solidarity between the donor and the recipient. We are all in this together, aren't we?

5\. A communications strategy that brings in donors and creates a democratic narrative around donations.

Each one of these needs several individuals and sometimes several organizations to collaborate and agree upon a course of action. Notion helped us do that layer by layer, with the top level principles leading naturally to more technical decisions and an easy way to share content with non-technical but nevertheless insightful leaders in organizations that are providing essential services.

We first tried doing it with a combination of Google docs, Github repositories and other pieces of chewing gum and string, but once we shifted to Notion we never looked back. So much so that the next project this group is attempting is Notion native.

<comment><USER32> Hey i am originally from india and what you said resonated with me especially related to the issues faced by migrants. Any way I can contribute to your project?

Thanks.

<comment><USER31> Thank you for your generous offer of help. We don't need additional support at this time but I will keep you in mind if new needs come up. Thanks once again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This changes a lot for me. I like Notion's interface, as well as the functionality included. It _feels_ like a desktop app, which Google Docs simply can't compete with (they're also Google products, do with that what you will). The "blocks" limit always felt arbitrary on Free, so I never really got into it, but now that I can use this like I would normally use a note-taking app, I can see it being very valuable.

edit: apparently there's also a free upgrade to Personal Pro for EDU users, I wonder if that's been around for a while.

<comment><USER34> free for edu users since Sep 2019.

<comment><USER35> Accredited college or university only (e.g. no elementary or high schools). Also currently no discount for team plans.

<comment><USER36> If you ask, they'll give you access if you have a HS email... at least thats what I did sometime last year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I know it's a niche need but any note-taking app I use needs to support Latex and code highlighting. Unfortunately, once I throw this criteria in just about every app gets excluded, but at least VSC + sync is still very nice.

<comment><USER38> Supernotes[1] has been called "a smaller, faster notion" and supports LaTeX (both inline and block, notion only does block) and code highlighting.

Disclaimer: I built it.

1: [https://supernotes.app](https://supernotes.app)

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h ... You have a cookie pop-up that says, "Can we use cookies?" but the only option is a "Yes" button. If you're not giving people a choice, why even pretend?

<comment><USER38> Tracking scripts / cookies are only loaded if you click "Yes", otherwise they are not loaded at all.

<comment><USER39> But if you don't tap "yes" there is no way to dismiss it. Not a fan of this behaviour, and won't be looking any further.

<comment><USER40> This is top-tier HN material right here folks.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h If you use dark patterns on your front page, why would I ever trust your app?

<comment><USER38> How do you see this as a "dark pattern"? I see it as more of a reasonable compromise. If you visit my site, I think it's reasonable for me to understand how you're using it. If you don't want to participate in that, you are given a choice. That choice is between being tracked and having a mildly distracting banner at the bottom of a landing page. This doesn't seem like a betrayal of trust in any way. The implicit trust here is that you will not be tracked unless you agree to be tracked. This is in fact the case.

Of course, on the one hand we _do_ want you to opt in to tracking. This _is_ a marketing site, after all. If you're actually interested in the product, tracking helps us understand who is interested and why, which in turn allows us to improve the product and reach more potential users. If you're not interested in the product, you don't need to click yes and there is no problem – because presumably you won't be spending very much time on the landing page for a product you're not interested in.

I think a landing page like this one is slightly different from, say, a big cookie banner on a news website, as the intent is not really for you to be spending a lot of time reading content on this site.

<comment><USER41> It's a UX dark pattern because (besides deleting the html element) there's no way to dismiss a call to action, you can only ignore it.

<comment><USER42> Just because it's annoying doesn't mean it's a dark pattern in the typical sense of the word. Here's darkpatterns.org's definition:

> Dark Patterns are tricks used in websites and apps that make you do things > that you didn't mean to, like buying or signing up for something.

And here is the one used by the verge [0]:

> A dark pattern is a user interface carefully crafted to trick users into > doing things they might not otherwise do, such as buying insurance with > their purchase or signing up for recurring bills

Here there's no trickery and no chance that a user would unintentionally agree to cookies when they didn't mean to. It's just a little annoying thing that bugs you until you do what they want. It's not unethical, but if you don't like it you shouldn't use their site.

[0]: [https://www.theverge.com/2013/8/29/4640308/dark-patterns- ins...](https://www.theverge.com/2013/8/29/4640308/dark-patterns-inside-the- interfaces-designed-to-trick-you)

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h > Just because it's annoying doesn't mean it's a dark pattern in the typical > sense of the word.

I'm happy to include multiple forms of coercion; the pattern here is the ratchet: [https://jacquesmattheij.com/dark-patterns-the- ratchet/](https://jacquesmattheij.com/dark-patterns-the-ratchet/)

> It's just a little annoying thing that bugs you until you do what they want.

That's a nice summary of a class of dark patterns, yes.

> It's not unethical, but if you don't like it you shouldn't use their site.

It absolutely is unethical, and yes as I said above I will consider this a good reason to avoid the app.

<comment><USER38> What exactly is your definition of ethical? Because a little box at the bottom of a webpage that just sits there does not really cross the unethical line for me.

For me, this is only a dark pattern if the cookie banner makes the site unusable (as many sites do) until you click "Yes". Ours clearly does not.

Regardless, the initial accusation was:

> If you're not giving people a choice, why even pretend?

Which is clearly not true. There is a very real choice – we are not pretending. Your choice matters.

<comment><USER43> So why not allow disabling of the box?

<comment><USER38> Because we do actually want you to click "yes", so that we can understand how you're using the site. Annoying? Absolutely. Unethical? I don't think so.

However, since a lot of people are not a fan of our banner, we've decided to add an explicit "no" option. I still disagree that our original implementation is a "dark pattern", as we very explicitly[1] will not sell your data, and tracking for the sake of improving the product seems like a square deal to me. But I understand that people are finding it annoying, so it's been changed. Sorry about that.

[1] [https://supernotes.app/terms/](https://supernotes.app/terms/)

<comment><USER37> I trust people on HN to have the ethical relationship you envision, where someone uses your service, steps into a place you pay for, and can be generally expected to advance their own interests in a land of push and pull.

But for kids, older adults, and recent immigrants I feel this is borderline confusing (the right way to say no is to ignore?) and manipulative, and I would prefer more margin from the border.

The difficult conversation is to what degree do we expect rational agency from different kinds of folks, how do we think about formal or business relations with them, etc, but I don't think the answer is "you shouldn't let older moms or kids into the web".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I tried the Notion twice. It looks good, works fine and has a reasonable price. But. You cannot write notes in this application. Literally. You can build tables, resize images, align lists in different shapes, have a dashboard for all thousand cases you have with favourites photos as headers, filter views with a million conditions, manage to-dos and project with kanban, ..., but you cannot write simple notes. The interface will fight you, mouse/trackpad are required in many cases, Enter key will produce different unexpected results...

This is a good piece of software. But if you want to take simple linked notes, then you probably need something else.

<comment><USER45> Hey there, we've thought about that too and came up with a new user interface concept. Emvi [1] supports interlinked articles already and you can search through your notes easily. But we found the current user interface to inefficient for both, simple note taking and collaboration. You can read about our new concept here: [https://emvi.com/blog/a-new-experimental-user- interface-QMZg...](https://emvi.com/blog/a-new-experimental-user-interface- QMZgmZG1L5)

It will come out in about three weeks and we're always curious about feedback :)

[1] [https://emvi.com/](https://emvi.com/)

<comment><USER46> Is this a alternative frontend for notion? Or what do you mean?

From the look of it this seems like another poor implementation of the same old tricks and concepts which everyone already know and uses.

<comment><USER45> No it's a new frontend for Emvi which focuses on keyboard controls and better attention focus. What do you mean by the same old tricks? You'll find some images and gifs in our Twitter profile: [https://twitter.com/emvi](https://twitter.com/emvi)

<comment><USER46> It means there is nothing special about this, no innovation, nothing outstanding. Just playing the same old tune which so many others are already playing for a long long time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Notion consuming 10-15% CPU while on idle is a deal breaker to me. I wish they'd devote a bit more resources to fix this.

(On macOS, don't know if this is the case on other OSes)

<comment><USER48> On iPadOS it ignores pointer and external keyboard. Wish their apps were more native to the platforms.

<comment><USER49> This is the downside of webapps, they have to reimplement all the UX that native apps have builtin. In this case, Apple updated things like buttons and text inputs in their native components, so any app using those didn't have to do anything to make it work as expected.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I tried it around November 2019, really liked Notion and the UI/UX of the product for some note taking/personal knowledge base, however I had to contact their security team through their support because TLS 1.0 was still enabled at this time.

They say they are audited by NCC ( [https://www.notion.so/Security-6c56b4854b624b0d8f36711018647...](https://www.notion.so/Security-6c56b4854b624b0d8f36711018647f68#bd21b955eb45406ca6d1899cdf7538bb) ) but I don't know how NCC missed this. They disabled TLS 1.0 few days after my message.

My second concern is that their .so domain is the TLD of Somalia (with all the risks it brings in case of malicious takeover), and .so zone doesn't even support DNSSEC, once again this is a big issue for me, especially for an app that hosts "personal data" (I see they also make calls on a .com domain, but the .so main domain issue still stands). Support told me they would change the domain in the future but still didn't happened.

It's only my personal security stance/paranoia, but my 2 cents of what happened with them.

<comment><USER51> Virtually no mainstream platforms enable DNSSEC (what's the largest one you can find? It won't be in the Moz 500); it's not as if there's a major competitor to Notion you'll find that is DNSSEC-signed. DNSSEC is moribund.

What's ironic about this comment is that in our present WebPKI, Somalia's ownership of .so only tangentially impacts their security (Somalia could in theory seize the domain and DV-verify a new cert). But in a DNSSEC world, Somalia would have _de jure_ control over both the domain _and Notion 's TLS certificates_, which would chain through DANE from the same root.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I'm looking for something similar to Notion for my company's internal documentation (including operations), but it needs to be internationalized (and Notion isn't).

I've found out about Joplin[1] and thought it was the answer, but it seems that I cannot easily share the notes with my team in a collaborative manner. A pity! The quest continues.

[1][https://joplinapp.org/](https://joplinapp.org/)

<comment><USER45> What do you mean by internationalized? The user interface? I'm the co-founder of Emvi [1]. We support English and German on the user interface and you can add languages to your organization which allows your members to add translations for that languages. So an article can be present in multiple languages and use the one you chose as default as a fallback.

[1] [https://emvi.com/](https://emvi.com/)

<comment><USER52> Yes, user interface. I'll take a look at your app!

EDIT: Unfortunately, my company is heavily invested in Office 365 (Teams and friends) and we use our Azure AD logins for everything. Emvi seems to integrate Google credentials only. However, your product looks amazing! That's exactly what I'm looking for. I'll be sure to keep an eye on it for when it starts supporting Microsoft (i.e. Teams) logins or when (if) my company migrates to Google in the future :)

<comment><USER45> Ah good. Well what language do you need then? As I said we support English and German. The articles you write can be multilingual.

<comment><USER52> Portuguese Brazil, but my team would gladly translate it for you.

<comment><USER45> That would be incredible! It's actually not that much to translate I think. Read my comment above and I might come back to you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Anybody using Notion for personal knowledge management (lecture notes, literature notes, etc). Why do you find it oreferable to Roam, Obsidian or some of the other new Zettelkasten approaches?

<comment><USER45> Some people need structure, which is absolutely fine. But I always wanted to throw stuff into it and use the search to navigate. You can check out Emvi [1] if you like, I'm on of the founders.

[1] [https://emvi.com/](https://emvi.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Notion is just a fantastic piece of software and the team seems focused on making it better and cheaper at the same time. They should be unequivocally congratulated for this and I wish them more success.

Also if you ever change your mind on hiring outside of SF, call me :-)

</comment><comment><USER55> I had a really bad experience with Notion, used it for some time, hit some arbitrary 1000 block limit that no matter what I deleted I couldn't get rid of.

Now I rely on vimwiki and fzf. More robust and future-proof. Who knows how long Notion will be around?

<comment><USER56> I was using vimwiki for a while, but have since switched to notational-fzf- vim[1], which is basically Notational Velocity for Vim, powered by fzf and ripgrep. So far, it's exactly what I've been looking for.

Come to think of it, I don't see why you couldn't use both vimwiki and notational-fzf-vim. That might be pretty good actually.

[1]: [https://github.com/alok/notational-fzf- vim](https://github.com/alok/notational-fzf-vim)

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> If they only had a native Mac application.

I love Notion, but the Mac client feels so sluggish, I didn't investigative but looks like a web view or Electron or something similar.

<comment><USER35> Correct, it's Electron. And yes, I wish it were native, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> After Evernote started going downhill, I moved to plain markdown inside a Google Drive folder. I use the best, native app for each platform and have zero risk of being affected by a single company cancelling, closing,, increasing the price etc..

Notion does seem pretty interesting, but if they ever shut, stop innovating, or are outshined by a competitor, I don't fancy the idea of moving everything

<comment><USER59> Can you recommend a markdown native app for Windows? Currently switching to simple markdown notes myself but a bit annoyed always opening VS Code for a tiny note.

<comment><USER60> Notable is great and open source.

[https://notable.md/](https://notable.md/)

<comment><USER61> According to [https://github.com/notable/notable/blob/master/SOURCE_CODE.m...](https://github.com/notable/notable/blob/master/SOURCE_CODE.md) the current version is no longer open-source.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> I don't think Notion is for everyone. One of the limitations that I've seen with products like Notion is permissions. They don't offer granular permissions for viewing and editing down to the column, row or cell level. That is one of the reasons why I created cloudternal.com.

</comment><comment><USER63> I'm interested in Notion, but I can't get over the fact that they use a Somalia TLD for their app. I'm just not sure why they have to use this TLD for what I assume is vanity purposes, and I think there are security implications to using it.

</comment><comment><USER64> This is a perfect example of an app that you would want to self-host rather than give random people your personal data on a plate. The ability to self- host should be taught at schools so that everybody should be independent and actually own their own data.

</comment><comment><USER65> I paid for Notion for a little over a year. Ultimately, though, I migrated to using Zim backed by Dropbox. I just didn't need the powerful features of Notion. I only needed a wiki with a desktop interface and cloud storage.

</comment><comment><USER66> A couple of months ago, I published a blog post* about maintaining my personal knowledge base as a software engineer. Notion plays a significant role in this setup.

I do agree with others that Notion's flexibility can turn into a problem. Therefore, it is essential to clearly define use cases and conventions. Luckily, you don't have to argue about those with anyone else if you use it as a personal knowledge base ;)

* [https://tkainrad.dev/posts/managing-my-personal-knowledge-ba...](https://tkainrad.dev/posts/managing-my-personal-knowledge-base/)

</comment><comment><USER67> I'd be grateful if one of you product design folks could explain the rampant use of emoji. I notice that most things incorporate emoji extensively these days. Has that been shown to boost engagement or something?

</comment><comment> mr-karan I use Joplin and sync all my notes to Dropbox. It cannot be called a Notion alternative exactly, because Notion's flexibility to manage different things using "blocks" is unmatched for. However after using Notion, I felt that most of my time/energy goes into understanding how to create the template and no it's not a one time thing. Every time I add a to-do/task or an issue or use it as a bookmark manager, I am often presented with the question "Could it be done any better?". It's very important to get the tool out of your way if you follow any process like GTD.

My current workflow involves Taskwarrior + Joplin. I use TW for very very specific tasks and `task next` helps me plan my day. I use Joplin as my "Notebook" and have all my notes synced there. The default theme is a bit ugly, agreed, so I use "Artim Dark" with it. The biggest reason to choose Joplin was that it's actively maintained, the apps are not great but decent I'd say, it lets me use the APIs and CLI tools to backup my Joplin DB and upload to remote storage periodically (in addition to the built in Dropbox sync), in case the sync doesn't work some day. I also use Joplin Web Clipper Firefox extension to save bookmarks/screenshots from website to a notebook "Bookmarks". It can even store the whole webpage in your Notebook, which is beautifully rendered. It even has support for E2EE for notes, but I am yet to explore that. The search is based on SQLite FTS4 and it works _awesomely_ well. There is a support for wildcard queries, and it basically searches across all your notebooks and is quite fast that too. Also, I _love_ writing in Markdown, and unlike Notion, this is really quick to launch, open a notebook and start writing ASAP without dealing with the cognitive overhead that Notion presents with it's quirky "Template/Empty Page" options. Did I mention that I can write notes in any editor (I use VS Code) and Joplin will simply `watch` for changes on that file and save it in your notebook? :D

So basically I am in full control of my data, something any Notion user can never claim. I also love the fact that the code is OSS, the APIs are open and it allows me to build tools on top of Joplin to use it the way I like. And I don't have to worry for the day, the VC funding of Notion dries up and I am left with no option but to move to some other SASS product.

<comment><USER68> Another vote for Joplin here. All my notes are synced to Fastmail's WebDAV endpoint, I own all my data and can export it as plain markdown at any time.

The only feature it's lacking for me currently is a Drafts-like quick capture action on the iOS version.

Notion looks like one more super-hyped web-app, who will get insane amounts of VC money and start adding features no one needs or wants just to spend it all. Then it'll be a bloated mess that's not quick or easy to use.

What I would support is a note-taking solution, that is run like Basecamp. No VC money, no immense hype, just people dogfooding their own product and keeping it lean, functional and profitable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Side note: Basecamp is also free for personal use now: [https://basecamp.com/personal](https://basecamp.com/personal)

</comment><comment><USER70> Still clinging onto OneNote 2016, the last version that allows you to store your data locally.

There are some things - like personal notes - that really don't need to live in the cloud.

</comment><comment><USER71> API, please. Using a jack of all trades like Notion doesn't make any sense to me unless it comes with a decent way to integrate it with 3rd parties. Its features are surely impressive, but without a proper API Notion will be like a fancy metropolis without any connection with the outside world. People have been asking Notion to provide a usable API for a long time now: it's a shame that the company doesn't even bother to provide an ETA.

</comment><comment><USER72> I'm wondering how this impacts existing paying users. As far as I understand, by downgrading, we'd lose access to current 30-day revision history and access to an API that's still Coming Soon™.

I guess it makes sense to downgrade until API is actually released. "Coming soon" messaging seems promising, but yet again, it's been on their priority list for at least half a year now. Seems hardly justified to spend another $30 or so waiting for it.

</comment><comment><USER73> As a user of Apple Notes for personal and OneNote for work. What are the benefits of Notion - i have the app installed, but i always default to basic apple notes.

<comment><USER74> I love apple notes for its simplicity too but I think it lacks a good search engine and taking down technical notes with code

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Seems like people in this thread want an E2EE alternative. May I mention [https://standardnotes.org/](https://standardnotes.org/).

It's a very well built notes app, cross-platform. The dev team makes really solid decisions (they say no more than any other company to feature requests).

I'm in no way affiliated to them, just a happy paid customer who agrees with their mission and values.

</comment><comment><USER75> I use basecamp for my personal organization. calendar, to-dos and share with my spouse. Its perfect. It's intuitive and easy to use. why not basecamp ?

<comment><USER76> I use basecamp - but how do you do wiki, notes type of things in basecamp ?

<comment><USER75> I keep a vim open all the time and quickly note it down. End of the day, I transfer it to Basecamp for future tracking or convert that to action items and schedule it

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> I hope the founders of Notion will read this.

I really love Notion. It's filling the vacuum left by Evernote, once Evernote started spamming the hell out of its users.

I like how it's built with a "developer" mentality: there are things that you can do that require a little learning, but become very powerful productivity shortcuts.

What I really, really HATE about Notion is how they handle using it offline. At least for me, every few weeks it happens that I get logged out of Notion, and I couldn't have access to my files offline. It happened to me twice on a plane, and it was frustrating because I needed to access the information.

The other thing that I am not sure about is how they handle security. I've simply been lazy not to read enough about it, but perhaps Notion could make it more clear.

Overall, great job guys. (p.s. I live two blocks from your office, I'd love to come and say hello post-covid if you'd like. My email is my HN username @ gmail.)

</comment><comment><USER78> Does Notion work offline?I tried Notion way back when they launched, but at the time I was not willing to pay for it. I then switched to Coda, which was free, but had awful offline capabilities. I then gave up for a while and just went back to google documents which loaded offline without any issues.

<comment><USER79> Not yet but it's on their roadmap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> When are we going to get dependency graphs?

I want a ticket to be able to 'depend' on another ticket in a visually satisfying way like a dependency graph view.

Dependencies are such a huge part of ticketing systems but they don't seem to be treated with first class attention.

</comment><comment><USER81> I'm long Notion. I've been using it since the beginning, and it's hard to beat its flexibility. I had a brief stint using plain markdown, but at the end of the day, most of the notes I'm taking are meant to be shared.

Not sure if it's the rich formatting or customization, but I find myself coming back to notes and utilizing them much more frequently in Notion than I did with plain text.

The latest releases have resolved some of my larger issues like performance, search, and quick notes on mobile. I'm happy they're making their product more accessible, and I'm looking forward to the API.

</comment><comment><USER82> Last week, Notion leaked this pricing change accidentally on their dev instance. [0]

[0]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23186295](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23186295)

</comment><comment><USER83> I tried and failed at using Notion due to a lack of recurring tasks. Also a lot of what was said on here about being _too_ unstructured of an environment.

I found myself wasting time setting things up and then not using them. I found the community full of people bragging about the beautiful minimalism of their dashboards. I'm not sure if anyone is "getting things done," however.

I'd be willing to pay Notion for the ability to use recurring tasks, but they seem interested in solving every other problem with their platform before tackling recurring tasks.

</comment><comment><USER23> Notion's lack of 2FA, user roles, or the ability to enforce (only) Google OAuth makes it a non-starter for any real use cases in a tech company (ticket/task management, product planning, employee wiki, etc.). We wanted to use it, but their lax stance on security made us go elsewhere, even though the entire team loved the product as an all-in-one solution to product. I found an old conversation on Twitter dating back a couple years of Notion telling a customer that 2FA is on the roadmap, which was unfortunate.

</comment><comment><USER84> I love notion. I want to support them and I hope they and their product continue to grow and improve. But I can't help facepalming a little bit as I just bought 1 year of notion.

</comment><comment><USER85> Anyone mind giving me a TL;DR on the value proposition/use case of Notion? I have a friend that works at a small company who is absolutely _nuts_ about it (every single one of his tweets is about it), but I also have seen other people say it's a convoluted mess once you get above a certain size and they regret ever going down that path.

Also curious if anyone has comments on how it compares to similar apps like Dropbox Paper (which Notion seems like a direct clone of) or Quip.

<comment><USER86> It's a nice wiki with some interesting database features (a la airtable). Writing in it is pretty nice because it's basically markdown.

I'd stopped using it because it was too easy to outgrow the free plan. Now with unlimited pages I'll give it another shot but I'm still not sold on its benefits vs storing all my notes locally in plain markdown files.

<comment><USER87> I'd also recommend Gitbook. They've improved their search features recently and I'd say they're on a similar level to Notion.

We used it for our company wiki. Wanted to use Notion but for 500 users the Notion quote came out 15x more expensive so it was a no-brainer!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER88> Notion is a great workspace app. I am extremely impressed with the polish and flexibility that it provides. I'm surprised they're opening up to everyone, but I guess - growth - is the goal for everyone so it makes sense.

I've been working on a similar app ([https://usebustl.com](https://usebustl.com)) focusing on project management. However in doing so I've really come to appreciate how much of a quality product Notion is.

</comment><comment><USER89> Notion is absolutely amazing, I love the /code snippet, the seamless sharing a page with a url and the UX. I hope Apple doesn't buy them.

</comment><comment><USER90> This is much more sensible; their previous 10,000 block limit was rather fishy. I only gave it a shot for few minutes, when there was hype around it and those blocks filled up fast. I was like, "So I invest my time moving my notes to Notion, and by the time I've done all the work in setting up and am invested, they need payment. Where's the free tier?"

</comment><comment><USER91> I've been a user of Notion for two years now switching from Evernote. But the biggest reason was for the tree view which in Evernote is only done using tags. Are there other note apps that off a tree view?

Also Notion seems to store code blocks without formatting them, I found that in Evernote, the backtick and single quotes would get formatted even inside a code block.

</comment><comment><USER92> Why does Notion not have a GitHub integration? Kind of a dealbreaker for using it on any tech team unless you just want a wiki.

</comment><comment><USER93> I like Notion. Mostly using it for personal stuff with tables, like grocery list, expenses and domains archive.

Also recently build a resources hub on a custom domain using Notion and open- source toolkit Fruition.

Pretty happy with the result. [https://resources.remotejobs.center](https://resources.remotejobs.center)

</comment><comment><USER11> I switched to Joplin when I bumped up against Notion's limits. It's a little more setup than a cloud app, but it's completely seamless once it's running. The most complicated part is adding Joplin to system startup for the web clipper server. All it needs is a real rich editor and a preview on the clipper.

</comment><comment><USER94> If I've understood it right, looking at the homepage and the FAQ, Notion is tied to its own cloud service for storing information, and there's no way to use it as a standalone app storing data locally and sync information through an unrelated service on my own (using, say, Dropbox for example)? If yes, then this is not for me.

</comment><comment><USER95> I have to admit, SV has really cracked and disrupted the note taking industry. Evernote, OneNote, Asana, Trello, JIRA, ToDoist, and now Notion. I tried most of it and just gave up and started to capture my notes in Google docs and Todos in spreadsheet. Now that we have disrupted this space, we will soon move on to flying cars

</comment><comment><USER96> Its amazing that i had just posted a link of Notion in the twitter and Linkedin for a tool to use as daily driver and just in few hours it shows up here. To be honest, its a good tool to learn from and master but it needs to be open sourced to grow much better. Notion is just an idea coming live like once Linkedin or GitHub was. We need a platform to integrate all other tools in a single place and it will take a lot of efforts. There are 2 ways to achieve it. 1\. Private like Notion 2\. Public like ? I personally feel all big companies must release api's( if they don't already) and work in harmony to create an ultimate plug and use workspace system. Due to rapid growing of Tech stacks and tools every day. This is once of the biggest product i can see in futures to come. I read comments about security and how people wanted it real bad. To implement security in product like Notion, it might need a rework from scratch as they this was probably not a concern when they started it and as it grows it will be difficult to even integrate it again this is were an open source community comes into play and can be very helpful.

From views on Notion perspective is that this is the right time to go open source and let the world patch in. It's not a work that can be done in private as it's a huge pile of possibilities and requires an immense group of talented people to make it a success.

Why don't i do it then? Well i can definitely start a repo but my lack of experience, skills will easily out-number me by people who are better. I can be a good thinker and a decision maker and a leader but this thing needs support from amazing people and a repo is generally successful because of immence tech skills in initial phase of development in open source.

</comment><comment><USER97> I can't believe that no one has brought up a Lotus Notes comparison yet. The Notion sales pitch feels very similar to the Notes one; everything in one place.

Notes itself was actually not that bad but it was very complex and usually turned into something it shouldn't have been - like an email server.

</comment><comment><USER98> Can we talk about how slow it is? Literally the main reason I don't use this app (which seems so good for my use cases) is that it takes forever to start up on my phone. I can use it on my desktop but only because it's a fast machine - I could see a Macbook Air struggling to load it.

<comment><USER28> We just released some performance improvements across the board (improved mobile startup times from a ship a few days ago linked here: [https://twitter.com/NotionHQ/status/1261037710665322496](https://twitter.com/NotionHQ/status/1261037710665322496)). We'd love if you could try it again and we'll definitely continue to work on this.

<comment><USER99> Just tried and it is faster. It took several minutes before to load and now it's acceptable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER100> Good news. But I've been using Roam [1] for a couple months and I don't know if I can live without "biderectional links" and "unliked references" anymore.

[1] [https://roamresearch.com/](https://roamresearch.com/)

</comment><comment><USER101> I wish there was a way to disable all the CSS transitions. Makes the UI feel unnecessarily laggy

</comment><comment><USER102> Question to web-devs: I am using firefox with ublock. Notion, like a few other pages, load only as blank for me.

The only thing I have disabled are cookies and connections to trackers or ads. But cookies are not necessary to load a page. And adblocking is standard.

Does anyone know the reason?

<comment><USER103> Do you have Privacy Badger running in firefox? It blocks hCaptcha, which Notion uses (unfortunately).

</comment></comment><comment><USER104> I think Notion might actually work best in personal/small environments, and this seems like a smart move to encourage more of that kind of use. My exposure to it is at a large company, where it really does not work well.

</comment><comment><USER105> Worthwhile warning. While I'm not privy to all of the details, management was considering to make a complete move Notion but the whole plan for whipped due to privacy and data ownership / confidentiality concerns.

</comment><comment><USER106> Cool but please also add some basic API to the free personal version so I could export my notes and add items programmatically using a Python script (and also to let me author a GitHub Pages Markdown blog from Notion).

</comment><comment><USER107> Those cartoons remind me of the Persepolis animated film:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persepolis_(film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persepolis_\(film\))

</comment><comment><USER108> I've never used Notion before.

So I signed up and after looking around for a minute or two I still have no idea what Notion is. It seems to be a way to create lists of rich to do items with dates?

Can someone ELI5 Notion to me?

<comment><USER109> Hi! Initially I had the same impression and my team had a hard time convincing me to give it a try. Since then I really started enjoying Notion though.

So, what is notion? I'd call it a flexible on-line data organizer. Notion gives you a concept of pages (which then can have subpages) and blocks. A block can be a text, a table, a todo list, a calendar, an embedded Tweet etc.

I think a good way to see what you can do with it is to use the templates - they are example pages that allow you to see what are Notion's capabilities.

A few examples of what I've used Notion for:

* tracking my job applications when I was looking for a new position

* notes on resources I'm using for an online course I'm working on (I have a plan for lessons, each lesson has attached resources)

* planning my holidays trip - it was a combination of todo list, map with our stops, list of hotels I booked etc.

* todo list when moving to another country

I've also seen it used as a team handbook, here's a public example by Blendle: [https://www.notion.so/Blendle-s-Employee- Handbook-7692ffe24f...](https://www.notion.so/Blendle-s-Employee- Handbook-7692ffe24f07450785f093b94bbe1a09)

</comment></comment><comment><USER110> Am I going crazy or did this originally link to a blog post about using notion (rather than bookmarks etc) rather then to the notion site? Can't seem to find the link anywhere....

</comment><comment><USER111> As an non-user and since a quick glance at the website helps little - <USER2> exactly is notions USP and what makes it different than a standard note taking app synchronous across platforms?

</comment><comment><USER112> I tried it a few months ago on Android. Almost impossible to use (for me) as the phone's back button makes the app close instead of, you know, going back to the previous screen

</comment><comment><USER113> One way I have found Notion to be useful is writing book summaries, reviews and taking down notes. And I sometimes find myself crafting dashboards for project planning.

</comment><comment><USER114> Is there anything like Notion the only allows .txt files and folders? I would be very interested in that. I tried doing it with a git repo but I want the auto-syncing.

<comment><USER68> Joplin is markdown, with cloud sync (gdrive, dropbox, webdav etc): [https://joplinapp.org](https://joplinapp.org)

</comment></comment><comment><USER115> Microsoft's recent announced open-source Fluid framework sounds very similar to this - I wonder if that played into their decision to make this free.

</comment><comment><USER116> _TL;DR_ for the people already paying $4/month:

You can downgrade to the free plan for which the number of blocks is not limited anymore, or keep paying paying $4/month for a bunch of extra features.

From the FAQ:

        What if I'm already paying for the old Personal Plan?

        You've been automatically upgraded to our new Personal Pro Plan at no extra cost!

        In addition to all the features of the free Personal Plan, Personal Pro includes:

        - No limit on file uploads (5MB is the limit for free)

        - Unlimited guest collaborators (5 guests is the limit for free)

        - Version history up to 30 days

        - Priority customer support

        - API access (coming soon)

        You can switch back to the free Personal Plan at any time.

<comment><USER117> Thx. Very helpful TL;DR. I'm particularly excited about the "API access (coming soon)" part.

</comment></comment><comment><USER118> Currently use the Student plan, love Notion!

Do sometimes get lost and wonder if I'm doing things in the most optimal way though, it's so powerful.

</comment><comment><USER119> Notion would be a killer app for me if it used an open hypermedia protocol and the ability to run/link to my own endpoints.

</comment><comment><USER120> Is there any way to export or backup Notion data to your own personal servers? I'd happily pay for a nice way to do that.

<comment><USER72> In the settings, I see an option to export to HTML or Markdown + CSV, plus a PDF option (enterprise-only).

I've just tried the HTML and it looks pretty good. CSS is at the beginning of each HTML and looks pretty similar to their light mode interface, no JavaScript gets loaded.

</comment></comment><comment><USER121> There are just so many note-taking apps/services, it's really hard to tell what makes a given one stand out.

</comment><comment><USER122> I literally just bought 1 year of Personal Pro last week after running a little week long trial 2 weeks ago.

</comment><comment><USER46> Does Notion support APIs for automating data through external means? Or has it at least IFTTT-support?

</comment><comment><USER123> No one mentioned roamresearch.com?

</comment><comment><USER124> So this is basically an ad? Ugh.

</comment><comment><USER125> > Anabella is a software engineer with a love for visual design. Her resume is > a public page in Notion, making it viewable to the many hiring managers out > there browsing the web (and others who might share).

This is a weird testimonial. Any frontender should be making their own cool resume website, and not using a website generator!

</comment><comment><USER126> Where is the backing store for Notion? Does it save locally, in cloud, customizable?

</comment><comment><USER127> Holy shit. This might be the most beautiful piece of software I've ever used. The tutorial is perfect, the onboarding was super easy, and the Mac app is really responsive. And it's not owned by a huge corporation! I'm in love.

Does anyone have any deep-dive recommendations on how to get the most out of Notion?

<comment><USER128> Check out Marie Poulin's work on YouTube. She also has a 'Notion Mastery' offering: [https://mariepoulin.com/notion- mastery/](https://mariepoulin.com/notion-mastery/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER129> I can't believe the number of note taking apps I just learned about in this thread

</comment><comment><USER130> Such a great tool - so glad I gave it a shot, which made me fall in love with it.

</comment><comment><USER131> Notion is the embodiment of busy work --> false sense of being productive.

<comment><USER132> Notion's just a tool, like a pen and a pad. If you decide to use it for nothing but busy work, that's an option I suppose. But I get a lot of real work done using Notion.

<comment><USER131> The act of using Notion is in of itself busy work which distracts from productivity.

Not that you are _using_ it for busy work.

It's a strategy used by productivity "gurus" for 100+ years to keep the $$ trickling in.

Just a few years ago it was todist...before that it was Omni.

Once notion peaks we will all move on to the next one.

<comment><USER133> According to this description I believe you could also say writing tests or using git is just busy work. Nevertheless, a lot of people use tools like git and notepad (or notion) to organize their work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER134> Currrently I use vimwiki + a cron job to push my wiki to a Gitlab repo

</comment><comment><USER135> It actually deters me away that there is default content already there when I load the app. In my opinion, less is more and starting off with no content at all is a helpful cleaner alternative than having to delete all that default content.

<comment><USER45> True, but it sometimes helps to get you started. We wrote a simple "Get started" article for Emvi [1] which can be deleted quickly. But users send us mails asking for documentation, which we will add after beta. It's nice to have this documentation inside your workspace, but can get in your way too. I haven't decided what to prever.

[1] [https://emvi.com/](https://emvi.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER136> I wonder if this is a response to Microsoft's recent moves.

<comment><USER137> Regarding the timing I'd say it's rather the $50m USD they got as investment in April.

</comment></comment><comment><USER138> Is it only for me or the linked site is very slow? (Firefox)

<comment><USER139> Nope, also ff and molasses slow from 3 days ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER140> I wonder if this was decided because of pressure from Roam?

</comment><comment><USER141> Brilliant! My free credits plan was about to expire.

</comment><comment><USER142> Evernote Airtable Notion . ... .... .....

What is next?

</comment><comment><USER143> Nice idea, but for better or worse I equate Notion with work. So, I would rather not be reminded of work when organizing my personal life.

</comment><comment><USER144> How this replaces Google Drive the other time I can't upload a file larger than 4gb ?!

<comment><USER45> It's not a replacement for Drive as most note taking app are... well for note taking and not file storages. I would recommend to use Dropbox if you want both in one tool or separate those two use cases.

<comment><USER144> [https://www.notion.so/personal](https://www.notion.so/personal) If you scroll down in this page you'll see they are saying it replace Google Drive

<comment><USER45> Okay... well that's not the case I guess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER145> You're the product.

</comment><comment><USER146> Using Notion is awesome, but does require you to bring your own structure. Templates help, but much like any other process in your organization, it requires occasional review to keep the team on the same page to keep it tidy and useful. It helps to have a champion/steward for it.

</comment><comment><USER147> Google Docs on steroids. I approve of it.

</comment><comment><USER148> There are major disadvantages to using something like Notion for personal work - including non discoverability of work or thoughts. Most people are better of with pen and paper.

I've gone into further depth here: [https://usedone.today/blog/posts/davinci/](https://usedone.today/blog/posts/davinci/)</comment>


Twitter bans animated PNG files after attackers targeted users with epilepsy - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/23/21035855/twitter-bans-apngs-trolls-seizures-epilepsy-foundation-attack <comment><USER2> Effects that cause seizures in some are usually annoying to everyone else. Me included. But autoplay of video in general is still useful.

They should move towards making it a preference. Disable auto-play animation by default. Opt-in. This preserves freedom of expression while respecting freedom to not have a seizure / freedom from irritating auto-play videos. PNG format is handled by browser. Should be followed up with those guys as well to prevent / control autoplay.

The ability to flag videos as strobing might help as well. Let the crowd find and classify something for the rest of the crowd. Have a flag for "allow video flagged as containing strobing".

All that said, as I think about this and just _some_ of the potential mitigations, simply just banning it outright is a quick, straightforward and simple solution. I completely get why they'd just do that. Life is short.

</comment><comment><USER3> Animated PNG files causing problems with some users isn't a problem with Twitter, I should think (and it seems it is independent of the file format, so whether it is GIF, PNG, or MPEG, it would be the same problem, I should think); it is the browser. The user should configure the browser to disable animations by default if that is what is wanted. (If the browser does not implement that, then the browser writer should fix it so that it does.)

</comment><comment><USER4> It seems to me that some sort of lookahead function could be implemented to detect this sort of attack at the browser level.

Also, what is wrong with people?

<comment><USER5> Honestly, reading this article was the first time I saw a documented case of strobes causing seizures. It's possible (and this is purely speculation) that the attacker sent the strobe to give some comedic punch to the statement "you deserve a seizure" not expecting or hoping that it would actually cause a seizure.

<comment><USER6> >Honestly, reading this article was the first time I saw a documented case of strobes causing seizures

It's been common knowledge at least since the Porygon episode of Pokemon[0] in the late 90s.

>It's possible (and this is purely speculation) that the attacker sent the strobe to give some comedic punch to the statement "you deserve a seizure" not expecting or hoping that it would actually cause a seizure.

It's possible but knowing people and the internet, it's more likely they were hoping an actual seizure _would_ be the "comedic punch."

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denn%C5%8D_Senshi_Porygon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denn%C5%8D_Senshi_Porygon)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What's preventing Twitter from making APNGs work the same way as animated GIFs? (e.g. you have to explicitly click the play button)

<comment><USER7> Twitter automatically plays .gif now for new users.</comment></comment>


What is the problem accelerators are solving? - <AUTHOR> http://whoyoucallingajesse.com/past/2013/11/07/problem-accelerators-solving/

<comment><USER2> There is a fourth problem they solve: very early stage companies are willing to raise quick money on terrible terms as long as it doesn't actually set a valuation for their real seed round. Accelerators are positioned to do this because they can maintain a pretense that the shitty terms are made up for in mentoring and other services.

It would be much harder to raise a seed round on a 4M cap if you had just given an investor effectively a 1M cap 3 months before. But with accelerators that's not an issue!

<comment><USER3> I think that is a problem they create ;) The terms are insane.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> 9 out of 10 accelerators out there are bad copies of ycombinator made by greedy (and cheap) investors trying to ride the startup gravytrain like in the dotcom years and/or desperate politicians trying to get some of that sweet gentrification SF complains so much about.

I was unfortunate enough to land in a combination of BOTH: the accelerator was made by investors with literally ZERO experience with technology companies who were extremely cheap, and a local government that wasted taxpayer's money on it. I say waste because most of the money went to friends and family of the investors/organizers who didn't put a dime out of their collective pockets but went ahead and hired each other (and each other's acquaintances) to fill mentor roles within the accelerator.

What a joke that was, we got literally nothing out of the experience, we lost precious time having to deal with all the bullshit they made us go through. Contacts? they were nobodies, so no rolodex magic for us. Press? again, a bunch of nobodies, all press we got was BYO, in fact the accelerator mooched off our existing contacts with tech blogs and got some coverage for themselves.

Because the "investors" were cheapstakes along for the ride nobody got any investments from that network, only one team which secured a line of credit from a local no-name bank thanks to the local government (again more taxpayer money).

There should be a tripadvisor for accelerators, there was no way we could know what we were getting into.

<comment><USER5> Hey! are you on my Country?

Recently declared as "the most innovate-foster culture of Latin America" or something like that.

But is also WORSE. You need to spend 6 months, half-time attending talks, filling stuff and more or less wasting time... all for the _chance_ to _finally_ meet the investor.

Is a great business for the "accelerators" that are giving US20.000 for each startup (they "Value"), but only US 2.000 in cash, for the kind of thing THEY decide to buy (and no startup accelerator program here help in pay salaries, ie, the people you truly need. Is for buy business cards. Seriously).

The time I waste on that is one of the things I regret more. Saddly, you don't know the full terms UNTIL you have "win" in the top 100 of 1000, get pass the interview, fill stuff then get to the point of get that amazing benefits.

<comment><USER4> No never been to latam

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thought it was an article about _particle_ accelerators. Dissapointed. _yawn_

<comment><USER7> I like the idea of putting founders into a cyclotron, accelerating them to near the speed of light, and seeing what kind of energy they release when they collide with other founders.

<comment><USER7> But we should put them in inflatable sumo suits for cushioning. Maybe a helmet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Unlike college, it is extremely hard to know which programs are adding value and which ones are wasting everyone's time." Ha.

<comment><USER3> My thought there was there are rankings and historical data on employment success. Sure, it could be disguised as brand success.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The actual source URL: [http://whoyoucallingajesse.com/past/2013/11/07/problem- accel...](http://whoyoucallingajesse.com/past/2013/11/07/problem-accelerators- solving/)

<comment><USER3> That's me!</comment></comment>


Meet QVM, the new Tamarin VM contributed to Mozilla (written in Forth) - <AUTHOR> http://www.onflex.org/ted/2007/12/meet-qvm-new-tamarin-vm-contributed-to.php <comment><USER2> Reading the comments, it's not actually written in Forth.</comment>


Ask HN: Natural Language Processing in Objective C? - <AUTHOR>

I think I heard someone mentioning that OS X has some NLP capabilities built in (was that a CLI tool?), but I can't quite find the reference.
Basically I need some simple functions to do statistical analysis, etc on a given piece of text. I'd pick NLTK, but it has to be ObjC and I'd prefer system libs for that...
Thanks! <comment><USER2> Objective C is a superset of C. Why does it need to be ObjC?

<comment><AUTHOR> no, it doesn't need to be objC, C is perfectly fine, but it needs to be OS X friendly, i.e. no bizarre deps, etc. ideally, available as part of the standard sdk. if such thing exist, obviously.

i remember someone mentioning built-in cli tool, but i can't find the details... :(</comment></comment>


What Silicon Valley Can Learn from Seoul - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/what-silicon-valley-can-learn-from-seoul.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=mini-moth&region=top-stories-below&WT.nav=top-stories-below&_r=0 <comment><USER2> >In May, Google opened a campus in Seoul, its first in Asia.

Because Google Tokyo/Singapore aren't a thing...

<comment><USER3> Or India

<comment><USER4> Or, China, Hongkong, Japan, Malaysia, Taiwan, Thailand, Egypt, Israel, & Dubai.</comment></comment></comment>


Geeks should take lessons from Jazz musicians on how to flame properly. - <AUTHOR> http://www.jazzoasis.com/methenyonkennyg.htm

<comment><USER2> Perhaps ... but it also takes inspiration. Has anyone in the world of software and systems engaged in an analogous act of hacking "necrophilia" or defilement?

Also note that many acts of hacking defilement get their just punishment in due course, when the software doesn't work, the company fails, etc. Feedback of _that_ incisive a nature isn't as prevalent in the musical world.</comment>


Google API House Cleaning - <AUTHOR> http://blog.apievangelist.com/2011/05/27/google-api-house-cleaning/ <comment><USER2> Good job I spotted this as I had no idea the Translate API was being shut off in December. Just spent a looong time working this into something - gah. I assume the deprecation message must have been up some time (> 6 months)? Maybe I see what I want to see!

Funnily enough, the same project also uses the Feedburner API, which will be axed too.</comment>


I Hate 3D Printing - <AUTHOR> http://richardberwick.com/i-hate-3d-printing/ <comment><USER2> That was funny, an advertisement for a 3D printing service where the call to action is "this is going to suck so don't buy it." Well it wasn't really that exactly, the argument is the same though, and the conclusion is inescapable.

Our author doesn't really "hate" 3D printing, he is setting up his pitch, by "hating" on aspects of 3D printing that make it poorly suited to mass market adoption, except he doesn't actually _know_ why these things are hard, he writes as if someone gave him a laundry list of things that they didn't like about 3D printing and he's ready to pitch a "solution" which doesn't have those "bad things" associated with it.

Ok, so the problem with this pitch to a modestly sophisticated audience is that pretty much everyone who knows anything about 3D printing knows that the biggest problem facing 3D printing _is not_ that it doesn't have a vending machine business model. Further, if someone walked up and proposed a vending machine model, a reasonably astute person would say this:

It takes 3 - 6 hours to 'print' any reasonably complex shape. Lets say you had a web api to Thingiverse[1] and you could say "print this on the vending machine down stairs." you would then have to wait several hours before you could get your part. If someone else got their first it may be all day, worse it might be that your part is in the queue and won't get printed until a week from Tuesday. Even worse, the chance of a good outcome is not good, I would doubt if it were better than 66%. Probably a 1 in 3 chance something about the print will go wrong and you'll come by in a week and your part is crap. And even if you have a "this is crap do it again" button, does the machine stop what its doing and spend the next 3 hrs printing you another? Even if this shifts the completion of the other things in its queue?

Basically unattended 3D printing is _not possible_ at this stage. It will be at some point but for now it isn't. That means you have a shop somewhere and they have real people who start your print and make sure it comes out fine. They cost money, real money. If your scheme doesn't cover their salary then its not a scheme, its a dream.

3D printing is going to change the world, _in a decade_. That is how long it takes to change even a fraction of the pipeline of goods. Sure in various niche markets its changing them now, but printing kiosks? 10 maybe 20 years.

I understand the pain point though. If you look back you see all those people who wanted to use a computer for something in the 70's and they couldn't because they weren't engineers and didn't want to spend the time learning to program. It got a bit better (but very expensive) in the 80's and it wasn't until the 90's when people even considered owning two computers. These migrations are part time, part adaptation. It takes folks time for adapt the technology into their lifestyle. 3D printing is the same way. If you take the time to learn how to run one of these machines you can do your own 3D printing and it is hecka cool. You are donating your own time for 'free' into the cause with a bunch of other people who are interested. Custom printing labs, sort of like film labs of my youth, will no doubt spring up, do well during the pre- automation growth cycle, and then die out. 3D designers will become a sought after commodity, people who can use the tools to create excellent 3D shapes quickly that can be reliably printed. Hardware manufacturers will grow and evolve, standards will emerge, feature sets will be refined. New materials will be developed that are more suited to this style of construction. All of that is going to take time.

I wish our author luck but he's a bit early for this model.

[1] <http://www.thingiverse.com>

</comment><comment><USER3> Presenting the alternatives as much worse than they really are just so you can promote your own service is pretty patronising of your reader. It reminds me of infomercials and the over-acted non-problems they claim to solve. (<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08xQLGWTSag> to see what I mean).

Saying that, this seems like quite an interesting concept. If you could get the reliability and per-unit cost low enough then it could possibly gain traction. My only concern is that actually 3D printing is a fairly niche market - most of my friends and family have no desire to 3D print anything, and can't even conceive of wanting to. Given that the technology's not going to compete with mass production on cost any time in the next decade, the only people who I could see being interested in 3D printing are technical or artistic types - the kind of people who already like to make things. They're actually quite rare.

<comment><AUTHOR> I fully believe in what I wrote - the current options really are quite bad.

I can't imagine spending $80+ on a candy bar sized print, nor do I want to buy a machine and spend the time to learn to use it.

I don't believe that the vending machine is the end-all solution, but it does seem to be one of them.

What would you propose as another solution?

<comment><USER4> It's an emerging technology. It's got a long way to go, and fortunately people (yourself included) are moving the technology forward.

But your article makes it sound like the shortcomings of 3d printing exist because the people before you were idiots. That's clearly not the case.

If it's so bad, why don't you already have something better in production?

I assume the answer is that it's a hard problem, and you are still working on it. Just like everyone else. The difference is that they aren't writing posts about how terrible your current prototype (or whatever you have) is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Misleading title, post is an advertisement for 3d printing. Hates the state of 3d printing, building 3d printing vending machines a la red box.

That being said, it's a really cool idea. But post title is obnoxious IMHO.

<comment><AUTHOR> Obnoxious it is - thanks for the support for the idea, though!

<comment><USER5> For sure, I genuinely think it's a great idea and I hope you succeed.

As far as the writing goes though, I never understand why people try to generate interest through negativity and deceit. I think the post would be more inspiring if it went something like:

"I love 3d printing. I love 3D printing so much that I'm coming up with innovative ways to make it cheaper and more ubiquitous. Please join me on my quest to bring 3D printing to everyone..."

It's more genuine, less condescending, and isn't a lie. After all, you don't hate 3D printing in the least, not one bit. You're in love with it and are dedicating a portion of your life to making it better.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great ideas!

I've posted with titles/descriptions such as these on other forums, and have seen virtually no response, but it could be that I didn't write a decent article.

My next post will have a few of the technical details about what we're up to, and will definitely have a more positive/fitting title.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Clearly clickbait

Your service is interesting, but your method of advertising is disingenuous

</comment><comment><USER7> While reading this I got to thinking about the nature of those whom 3D Printing appeals too. <end-of-awkward-sentence/> I've a friend with a 3D printer (sorry don't remember which) and he and I have talked about it quite a bit. So putting those two input streams together with my own predilections, I conclude that the primary successful target is a hacker. I've not know any hacker who allowed the annoying bits between she or he and their goal to get in the way. Indeed in my own case those bits are just problems to be solved and I seem to be at least partially in it for the kick that comes from creating solutions. That said, I get to have access to my friends machine for free---in fact I don't even need to have hands on, he likes the idea of building things as both prototype and actual (read it works) product such that he just needs the specs or possibly a 3D file to input to the machine :) Long story short, this is just something new to hack on!

</comment><comment><USER8> Great job on using a hipsteresque title to get people to look at your stuff. It looked as valuable as most posts that start with 'n amount of things I wish I knew before xyz', 'new startup that lets you bla bla bla' so I didn't read it.

If you don't feel like adding value, please don't do anything at all and curl up somewhere, disconnected from all things internet.

</comment><comment><USER9> Honestly, I read the article because of the title, and you had seemingly valid points about why the current world of 3D printing sucks. So I see it as added value that you provide a solution at the end. And it's great that you're actually working on it.

It would be cool to see this "Vending Machine" be side-by-side with Bufferbox. A one-stop-shop for one day delivery/printing would be incredible, as long as it's easily accessible, and secure! Privacy might also be an issue; it might be good marketing to show the parts being printed, but customers might want their stuff printed privately.

</comment><comment><USER10> As somebody who is a member of Techshop and a student of 3D printing and metal CNC, I feel the blog post title and content were dead-on accurate.

Like one of my friends says, "3D printing is great ... for bathtub toys," where you don't need structural strength or fit and finish.

The more I learn about 3D printing with plastics, the less wonderful it is to me. I really don't understand what the above posts are griping about.

Mentally, I've made a note to only use 3D printing for molds at this point.

<comment><USER11> If you have the time, I've seen people finish objects using bondo or some other materials and you can end up with a nice looking object with a good finish. Strength on the other hand seems to be as much art as it is science, printing objects in the right direction and picking the right settings to get it to go the way you need it. I've not had a chance to make any real molds myself, how well does it end up working for the finish aspect also?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> So you know, your website redirects to the home page on mobile.

<comment><AUTHOR> Odd, doesn't do that for me - what mobile device are you on?

<comment><USER13> It's happening to me too on an iPhone 5.

<comment><AUTHOR> Got it! Old redirect, which has now been removed. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> change your pic</comment>


Ask HN: Free office space. Premature scaling? Too good to be true? - <AUTHOR>

Before I tell you the details of this free office space offer, I think it's I portent to let you know my current situation. I'm coming up on being in business for close to a year. In that year business has exploded (relatively speaking, of course).
I'm in the web design/development business (the amount of unqualified freelancers and "businesses out there doing this makes me embarrassed to admit that I'm in that industry here on HN but for the sake of discussion let's assume I'm great at what I do). The first client was free, number 2 was a $400 job and now it's not uncommon to ask for $4,000. That's 10 times the income. As it stands I work from home so my only overhead is my phone line, Internet connection, and any equipment and software I may need from time to time plus web hosting.
There's a guy in town offering "free rent for good ideas". I called and he's looking for viable businesses to take the space for free. The idea is that since this economy is so crappy he's willing to help people out by giving them the space free for as many months as he believes they need to turn enough profit to pay rent. After the free period, the rent would incrementally increase until it reaches a maximum of $1500/month.
After speaking with me he thinks I may be right to take the space but I'm wary. I can do fine without an office and don't think I absolutely need it but at the same time I feel that having a public store front increases credibility, visibility, professionalism, and that there's the possibility that having the office would boost my profits to a point where I can actually afford it when it's time to pay rent.
Is this magical thinking? Has anyone heard of others offering something similar? Do you think it makes sense to take the offer?
The guy also mentioned that we can partition the office in half and share it with a computer repair shop or cell phone retail store. <comment><USER2> What city are you in? That seems a bit high. The guy does seem a bit eager. I've found an outside office to be worth it, but just barely. It can be a huge time sink.

<comment><AUTHOR> Chicago suburbs. He's not totally eager, he is talking to at least 4 others and only wants to give it to _viable_ businesses by whatever his definition of viable is. I guess the deal has to do with how poorly businesses are doing around here. I've seen that business is starting to recover for the most part but there's still a long road ahead.

Why do you think it was beneficial and why has it been a time sink in your experience?</comment></comment>


Evolution of the precise code intel backend - <AUTHOR> https://about.sourcegraph.com/blog/evolution-of-the-precise-code-intel-backend <comment><USER2> Can't tell what this thing is. Hint?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm the author. Sorry for lack of context for people not familiar with Sourcegraph.

This blog post outlines changes to the backend services that enable precise code intelligence over the last year. Code intelligence in this context includes things like hover text, definitions, and references for a position in a source file, compiler/linting diagnostics for a file or directory, etc. To see it in action, try hovering over identifiers in this repository: [https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/-...](https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/-/blob/cmd/frontend/db/repos.go)

Sourcegraph has search-based code intelligence, which works with over 30 languages without configuration, but is heuristic and not always accurate (for example, jump-to-definition may jump to a definition with the same name, but not the correct one). We had support for running language servers to provide _precise_ code intelligence, but we moved away from that strategy due to speed and resource concerns. Since then we've moved to pre-indexing source code to provide precise code intelligence, which is where we're at today (and what the blog post is about). The original announcement of these features can be found at [https://about.sourcegraph.com/blog/code-intelligence-with- ls...](https://about.sourcegraph.com/blog/code-intelligence-with-lsif).

<comment><USER2> Anyway it helps to know that "intel" in context has nothing to do with the chip vendor.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Gojay – Performant JSON encoder/decoder for Golang - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/francoispqt/gojay <comment><USER2> The fastest Go JSON parser I know of is [https://github.com/buger/jsonparser](https://github.com/buger/jsonparser). I've used that one in production quite successfully.

I don't see that in the comparative benchmarks for Gojay.

<comment><USER3> > I don't see that in the comparative benchmarks for Gojay.

Look again, JasonParser is included in some, but not all, of the benchmarks. JasonParser [apparently] allocates no memory, which, to me, seems pretty compelling.

<comment><USER2> You are right. I totally missed it in the first few tables.

The lack of allocs for JsonParser was definitely a big win for my project. When processing at high rps (40k msg/sec), GC is near the top of all my performance profiles. Driving allocs down with Buger's parser was very helpful for getting the throughput up.

<comment><USER4> What's the project? Seems like a language with a GC is not a good choice, is it?

<comment><USER2> Essentially a gloried batcher / data transformer consuming from Kafka.

Even with the GC overhead, I will still able to hit my performance goal of 40k msg/sec per AWS c3.4xl.

In a vacuum I would have picked Rust over Go for this. But Go is widely used at my work, whereas I'm the only Rust guy.

<comment><USER5> How much of a difference you think rust would of made? Have you made something similar?

<comment><USER2> I've written some high req/sec projects in Rust, but nothing that would be apples-to-apples to that particular Go project.

The memory access patterns are straight-forward enough that the remaining GC could definitely go away. If I had to make a wild, from the hip, and unsubstantiated guess, maybe a 2x to 5x performance multiple. That would include a comparable amount of time spent optimizing and would depend greatly on the quality of the Kafka crates for Rust (which I've never used).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Performance is a real issue for Go's standard JSON, but this is a lot of extra boilerplate code to have to write (I'd probably codegen most of this if I had to), so I'd assume the reasonable strategy would be to implement with encoding/json, profile, and then just GoJay the hotspots.

<comment><USER7> It looks like this has a Marshal and Unmarshal function just like it's core library counterpart. So I'd guess you might be able to use this as a drop in replacement. However I'm yet to prove that theory.

<comment><USER6> encoding/json's Marshal and Unmarshall uses reflect and struct tags. This library doesn't: you have to define a function to make your struct satisfy an interface.

<comment><USER7> You don't have to use structs tags (nor even structs) to use encoding/json. In fact I often don't as a lot of my usage is with maps rather than structs.

I did some testing with gojay and it did work as a drop in replacement for most of my usage. However the performance improvements I saw in my benchmarks were not nearly as favourable as those published in the projects git repository. I'm sure I could get better results if I played around with their APIs a little more rather than just using the mashallers but frankly the utility I'm using it in favours the flexibility of encoding/json a little more anyway, even if that does cost me a little in performance (and to be clear, it really wasn't much as I needed to iterate the execution of my utility a thousand times just to get any meaningful differences between the two libraries. So we're not talking real world usages).

That said, if you're building high performance servers then I'm sure gojay would really stand out. On reflection (no pun intended), my requirements wasn't really the target use case for this package.

<comment><USER6> That's fine, but this library isn't a drop-in replacement for encoding/json; to be that, it has to work for people who expect tagged structs to round-trip through it, which won't happen with this library.

<comment><USER7> That's fine but I never stated "drop in for all use cases". A point I made very clear in my second post. But for some use cases it can be. As I had explained already.

The rest should be abundantly clear which use case would apply to anyone who's spent more than five minutes in Go (or any programming language that supports reflection) and had read the first like of the packages readme (ie that it doesn't use reflection).

It's definitely worth remembering that one doesn't have to use structs and tags to write nor read JSON in Go before people start bitching about boiler plate code and lack of macros.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have been using ffjson[1] in a couple of private projects, which generates code to encode/decode data, which supposedly is faster than the json library from Go's standard library.

Has somebody any first-hand expertise how this compares to the competition?

(I could, of course, do my own benchmarks, but so far I have not had any performance issues on this end, so it has not been a pressing need. The only problem I have run into with ffjson is that various linters will bark at the generated code, but again, that has not been a big problem.)

[1] [https://github.com/pquerna/ffjson](https://github.com/pquerna/ffjson)

<comment><USER9> (ffjson author here)

The main feature that ffjson has that most of the non-stdlib JSON libraries is stdlib compatibility. Eg, the same struct-tags and interfaces used in stdlib are used by ffjson. It's just trying move most of the reflection / allocations / etc to a `go generate` step vs runtime.

If you abandon trying to stay consistent with the stdlib JSON, and make new APIs/interfaces for propagating the encoder or decoder state, as Gojay has, it will undoubtedly be faster than ffjson or stdlib.

<comment><USER8> Thank you very much!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Would be handy if it included a utility to generate the (un)marshaling functions, so that can just be done as a build step.

So far we've used [https://github.com/mailru/easyjson](https://github.com/mailru/easyjson) for that, but the code generation step is unbelievably slow - multiple minutes for about 100 structs.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's actually the next milestone, a generator for structs, maps and slices. Until now the goal was to make it ready for some high traffic services in production. These traffic receive JSON with chinese, vietnamese character so we needed to make sure it works well first (boilerplate was not an issue).

<comment><USER11> Go is pretty good about Unicode, did you run into issues with Chinese and Vietnamese with standard encoding/json package or with other third-party Go JSON libraries?

<comment><USER12> Nope, it's quite easy to integrate unicode parsing :) just need to check for "\u1234" strings in JSON as it is valid, also need to check for utf16 surrogates. Standard package does it already just had to implement it in Gojay.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> To see how this fares against native code, I ported their benchmark to Rust's JSON library [https://serde.rs/](https://serde.rs/). Disclaimer: I am a maintainer of Serde.

Numbers and graphs: [https://github.com/serde-rs/json- benchmark/tree/gojay#serde](https://github.com/serde-rs/json- benchmark/tree/gojay#serde)

Rust source code: [https://github.com/serde-rs/json- benchmark/blob/gojay/src/li...](https://github.com/serde-rs/json- benchmark/blob/gojay/src/lib.rs)

TL;DR GoJay ranges from 20% slower to 2.7x slower depending on workload.

<comment><USER14> Go is "native code" but anyway nice work!

<comment><USER15> As always, it's a range.

Go has a runtime which you cannot control which schedules your code when it feels like it and a garbage collector. Rust has neither.

Sure, Go isn't parsing and interpreting its files at runtime. But neither does Python, so I'm not sure that's a meaningful line to draw.

<comment><USER16> > Sure, Go isn't parsing and interpreting its files at runtime

afaik, referring to something as "native code" just indicates it isn't compiled to/executing as bytecode. not anything to do with gc, runtime, etc.

<comment><USER15> Depends on who you ask. As demonstrated by literally every commenter in this thread so far.

Besides, define bytecode. Once it has run through a JIT and diverged from the on-disk representation, is it now native? How is it distinguishable from a binary that detects your CPU architecture and executes different branches of code? What about other forms of self-modifying code?

There are cases where an easy argument can be made (e.g. Java, which has a separately-supplied VM to run your bytecode... but then where's the line with DLLs?), but there isn't an unambiguous line in the sand here. At any line you can produce a new system that straddles it (e.g. a JAR which ships with its own VM. the VM is native code, is the binary now native or not?), and often there are already widely-used examples.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This looks perfect for a project I'm working on which is a UNIX / Linux $SHELL that makes heavy use of JSON pipelining.

<comment><USER17> structured shell, go on

<comment><USER18> [https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell](https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell)

<comment><USER7> Powershell is object oriented and, in my opinion at least, an absolute pig for doing quick one liners (overly verbose syntax, pipelines bork if types mismatch even when the data getting passed is still essentially just textual). I wanted something that was still in the same realm of typical UNIX shells (even with Bash comparability where sensible) but with an awareness of complex data formats.

However everyone has their own opinions and preferences. I wrote my shell to scratch my own personal itch and if others like / use it that is a bonus.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> How does it compare with encoding the same kind of data in a XML stream?

<comment><USER7> That would depend on the XML interface you used. I don't really rate the XML parser in the Go core library much. But I think as much if that is my own personal biased against XML.

<comment><USER20> Encoding XML to a structure makes little sense, as there is not a direct map between tags, attributes and struct fields. Something like a DOM makes lots more sense, but it is also much more verbose. This is the big reason to prefer JSON over XML.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, that was the point I was hinting at :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> How does this compare to [http://ugorji.net/blog/go- codecgen](http://ugorji.net/blog/go-codecgen) ?

<comment><USER12> It's faster :)</comment></comment>