Evernote Blows Up the 'Fail Fast' Gospel - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/28/business/evernote-what-happened.html <comment><USER3> Most people don't know this, but evernote was created maybe 15 years ago, as a desktop app ([https://lifehacker.com/download-of-the-day- evernote-2-0-wind...](https://lifehacker.com/download-of-the-day- evernote-2-0-windows-253471)). I used evernote before their version 3, which is the one everyone knows today. Evernote 2 was a brilliant note taking app, the first and best of its kind, and it cost a few dozen bucks, which I gladly paid... Then they shifted to the online version called Evernote 3, abandoned their original client base, and started charging a monthly fee in place of the perpetual license (that people already paid...). All this, to say this wouldn't be the first time evernote disappoints loyal customers. I guess you do what you have to do to survive...

<comment><USER4> Evernote was a great application, and paying for features was not a problem (at least not for the reasonable ones among us). The problem was the the application kept growing and getting slower, more bloated and ugly. In my case, it got replaced by lower-friction apps which were better designed.

Natural selection at work, I'd say.

<comment><USER5> My problem with it was that I typed things and Evernote would just delete them on sync.

<comment><USER6> It's so weird I use Evernote precisely because it does not and has not ever lost any note I've ever written across dozens of devices over over 7 years

<comment><USER5> It's not that weird. Whatever the error rate, there will be a distribution of people who never encounter errors and some who get them often.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The main problem with Evernote seems to be that their total-available-market is way too small to justify their valuation and expenses. It's core success is as a note-taking app - how big is the market for that really? They are competing against free alternatives like Emacs-org-mode, Apple Notes, and Google Keep. Sure, they can carve out a niche for themselves as a premium multi-device cloud-based no-ads app. But a $1B valuation? I don't think so.

Evernote sounds like a company that tried too hard to be something it wasn't. _" Smart covers for your feet"_? Really?? The founders of Evernote could have built a very successful low-expenses high-margin lifestyle business that would have made them very rich. _" Unicorn or bust"_ isn't always a winning strategy. I hope the other startup featured in NYTimes today - Superhuman - learns from Evernote's failings

<comment><USER8> I use Google Keep because I had sync issues with Remember The Milk on Android and wasn't about to continue paying them, but Keep is trash. It's a typical side project from a Googler. It's exactly what it was like when they rolled it out. Maybe a tiny feature here or there was added (I haven't noticed any), but it's a static service that is barely usable.

<comment><USER9> I use Google Keep every day. These are my requirements from my note taking app:

\- simple plain text note-taking; \- available on android, iOS and web; \- available offline and syncs (more or less) reliably; \- full text search.

I do not want more features on my note-taking app. I do not want it to go on steroid. Google Keep is not trash. It is perfect for the intended audience. You are just not part of that audience.

<comment><USER10> Google Keep updated itself and deleted all my data, everywhere, just saying.

<comment><USER11> I find Google docs to be so clunky and slow.

<comment><USER12> My company uses Google docs.

Anything destined for for that pit of despair I write in vi and excel, and copy/paste or import. Docs is not quite awful, but nowhere close to nice to use.

And "just search" as an organizing principle for docs from lots of people who aren't information nerds ends up leading to a bucket of ass. Newhires end up doing broken things because they found an outdated doc, you have to pick through multiple versions of other people's crap that never goes away, etc.

I keep all my docs to myself and render-to-Google when something needs to be shared. Reminds me a bit of blogging, really, with crappier tools.

<comment><USER13> I love how Google fanboys downvoted you to oblivion.

Come on people, when is sharing an opinion worth a downvote?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It used to be fantastic. The killer app for me was that it was actually impressively good at searching text _in images_ which at the time felt like magic. Like you could take a picture of a whiteboard or your handwritten notes from a meeting or slide on a screen at a conference and then do a free text search of the keywords in it a few months later and find it.

It was also really good at clipping web pages and helping you find them later. I really really liked it for free form research, like when you spend a couple weeks looking into a business idea to write up a detailed report later and want to find the reference to that concept or statistic you remember.

Ten years ago that kind of thing was really hard to do reliably and they were good at it.

But then instead of building on that success the product got worse. Oh well.

<comment><USER15> _But then instead of building on that success the product got worse. Oh well._

Evernote seems to have some sort of "reality distortion field" which is somewhat like Apple's, but somewhat mis-calibrated. (Apple's own "reality distortion field" originated with Steve Jobs, and has been losing its calibration ever since he departed this world.) They have a tendency to start with things which feel "magic" then have them fade into "meh." I've tried Evernote a few times, but it just never stuck. It's in that category of, "It seems like it could be really cool, but for some reason, it isn't."

<comment><USER16> This is how I feel about Slack. I use it, it's everywhere but it's pretty ordinary.

FFS, they still haven't implemented a dark theme yet. . . isn't that something you can just do in CSS?

<comment><USER17> Here's the [black theme]([https://github.com/widget-/slack-black- theme);](https://github.com/widget-/slack-black-theme\);) and a [Solarized Dark]([https://github.com/widget-/slack-black- theme](https://github.com/widget-/slack-black-theme)) one for good measure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Failure, in this context could either mean product or company failure, and the "fail fast" adage is usually applied to product, not company. At least as this article presents the story (executive churn, etc), it sounds like company failure is the main part of it.

The issue with "unicorn" failures is that a product can be really successful in objective terms (users, revenue, profit..) but still an investment failure, _if it fails to live up to valuations._

So, if investors in 200X thought (and paid as if) the company had N potential... N becomes definition of success. They'll also, in all likelihood have already begun to spend accordingly to that N level. Failure of one kind leads to others

As I said, it sounds like there are fundamental company issues with Evernote, but it also could be that it's more of a failure to live up to expectations (we should have been slack!) than failure in objective terms.

..I know people who like Evernote.

<comment><USER19> I often think of the story of the guy who posted here about how his startup "failed" but in reality it just didn't bring in the massive cash flow that was hoped for.

IIRC he bought it from the investors for cheap (so they could get it off their books) and then just ran it as one guy (maybe a few more added part time later)... and it does just fine in that conext, and who knows what might happen from there.

Kinda makes me think that a lot of Unicorn style world domination or nothing, result in some business opportunities being lost if those are the only two options.

<comment><USER20> I'd like to read that; it sounds like a good story. Do you happen to have a link?

<comment><USER19> [https://medium.com/s/story/reflecting-on-my-failure-to- build...](https://medium.com/s/story/reflecting-on-my-failure-to-build-a- billion-dollar-company-b0c31d7db0e7)

Thanks to rutierut who remembered it better than I did ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The Evernote detractors camp has grown to epic proportions in the past year, which is warranted, but I strongly disagree with the contingent of detractors who claim that Evernote's downfall was having the audacity to raise their prices, or limit the scope of their free version. So many of the customer rants I read are focused on this aspect, and it misses the point. Good products are entitled to charge a price for their use.

The reason Evernote is dying is because it wasn't a good product. Nobody could fix the long-term tech debt they accumulated, which grew to become regular bugs in the product. And rampant feature bloat.

There are a slew of able replacements to Evernote now available. The landscape of note taking software in 2019 is a very different place than it had been when Evernote started. For them to beat back companies like Notion (and imho Amplenote) would have required heroics on par with what it took to build the company in the first place. Simply getting sync right is itself profoundly challenging for a company with their legacy [1]. It's years of infrastructure decisions, and a consistent dedication to an unpleasant development task. Newer competitors (incl free options like Google Docs/Keep) were ready and waiting to do better.

[1] I've spent the last couple years trying to build an Evernote replacement. Sync for us is very tough, but must be a pit of despair for companies liked Evernote who built their note content out of HTML

<comment><USER22> What confuses me about products like Evernote and other CRUD services is - it's just a notebook app. How is it truly worthy of the army of coders, or the millions or billions in valuation that similar CRUD acquires?

It feels like there is a tendency of projects like this to grow too far, too fast, until they fail - dollar signs in their eyes obscuring a reasonable vision of their scale and potential, which is far more modest than they realise.

But then again, the ones that remain reasonable don't get in the news I suppose.

<comment><USER23> Evernote had a lot of odd tech bits in it, it wasn't just a CRUD app. At one point you could take a picture of a beer bottle and it would OCR the label for you automatically. I'm sympathetic to your argument (since that's how Pinboard competitors have died) but Evernote was a universe of its own.

<comment><USER24> And consider this: performing OCR on product labels is _nothing_ like performing OCR on a neatly typed A4 paper that has been scanned. It is an enormously difficult feat that probably required at least a small team to accomplish.

<comment><USER25> Or a small army on mturk

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I used to love Evernote. The thing that killed my enthusiasm for them was the constant upselling, even for paid accounts.

I paid for a Plus monthly subscription (a lower tier) and there were constant advertisements within the app to upgrade to Premium. Upgrade buttons that would reappear even when I remove them, notices on the bottom of the note UI, etc.

I could understand the constant advertising for free accounts, but for paid accounts it was infuriating.

<comment> mkr-hn I see no ads/upsells on my free account. Maybe that was one of the things they got rid of after the CEO (new?) announced the new direction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The thing is - what made Evernote great at some point - take a picture of anything and forget it doesn't work anymore.

You can't trust Evernote to have searchable archive anymore. Instead it's a convoluted app with lot of useless features. They lost their focus.

<comment><USER19> I think a lot of the problem is the sort of hook that makes these apps great ... isn't often a sustainable thing or isn't enough to maintain user and/or investor expectations.

There's a lot of gee whiz out there.

<comment><USER28> > isn't enough to maintain user and/or investor expectations.

I think the latter part is key: VC funding means people are pressured to chase huge returns and over-compensating staff (especially at the executive level) as if they're a billion-dollar company. That frequently leads to neglecting the "little" things which would actually make it better for users — in the case of Evernote, I stopped using it because the sync was unreliable and the apps desperately needed a QA/UX team with veto authority. Tossing everything into Dropbox should not have — but almost always was — a better experience for me and I stopped using them around 2013.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The first order problem is that VCs are desperate and dumb, in a low interest rate economy everyone is looking for high yields and that desperation will lead you to believe that a note taking app is worth a billion dollars.

The second order effect is that the valley is still way too concentrated, there are billion dollar ideas out there that can really make a dent in the universe, and inspiring entrepreneurs across the globe -- but with such a myopic view, Sand Hill Road will never be able to reach out farther than suburban Redwood City.

</comment><comment><USER19> Maybe fail fast should also include ... fail cheap?

>Lots of once-hyped companies live on the "Remember this?" spectrum. On one end, there is a cluster of fast flameouts — the Yo-Ello-Peach-Meerkat-Stolen- Clinkle-Secret-Color coterie.

That makes me think someone should create (maybe has) a start-up graveyard for folks to peruse.

<comment><USER30> Properly executed an explosive startup that burns fast and fails hard can still net the founders substantial change just by setting their own salaries and running investor money through the ringer fast and furious.

I don't really think its in the self interest of someone trying to make a successful product in tech to take a landslide of outside capital to try to grow a functioning, healthy business. But its definitely in the self interest of the founders if the goal is to get big and blow up. Because getting big alone has many benefits - besides the aforementioned pay, you become connected and influential in the industry in ways that can absolve you of responsibility to outside money in your future ventures or interests.

<comment><USER19> Yeah there absolutely is a perverse incentive there.

Investors throw so much money at these guys and by doing so... can create incentives that straight leads to driving the investment into the ground and walking away with a bag of cash / future prospects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I stopped using Evernote after they started pushing their "sharing" features in the UI so hard that I struggled to use it to take notes. I just wanted a notepad that synced between devices and they wanted to be something else.

<comment><USER32> Me too.

I want Evernote Personal which would be just the core product and a web clipper. The only advanced feature I really would want included is OCR of text in images. Every time I search for something and it finds a snapshot of a whiteboard with that text on it, I get a little thrill.

FWIW, I am on the $35/year plan even though I only use it maybe 10 times per year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Lots of people here mentioned they are looking for Evernote replacements. Here is my experience with this:

Joplin[1] seems to be the best in my view. It's cross-platform, has decent sync capabilities, plus a web clipper. I've been using this for a while and have liked it a lot so far.

I used Quiver[2] for a while when I used to run macOS, but moved away from it because it was macOS specific. It also had some features lacking, namely no spell check (an issue that Joplin also has, although I believe this is being worked on). It also dosen't have a web clipper.

OneNote is ok, but I don't run Windows (I used it at work at one point). The killer feature it has is collaboration with other uses on the same domain, a la Google Docs. If that's not a use case you have, it's probably not worthwhile. Also no web clipper.

I briefly tried zim[3], but found that it lacked polish, and didn't have a mobile client or a web clipper, so I never fully moved on to it.

For a long time, I used Sphinx[4] plus several extensions and wrote everything in rst, with syncing accomplished via git. This turned out not to be very ergonomic to use, had no mobile client, and no web clipper.

Some other note taking apps that I've heard of but not tried personally:

* Turtl[5]

* TagSpaces[6] - tried the demo briefly, but didn't like the UI, also the iOS client was abandoned at that time

* Standard Notes[7]

* Inkdrop[8]

1 - [https://github.com/laurent22/joplin](https://github.com/laurent22/joplin)

2 - [http://happenapps.com/#quiver](http://happenapps.com/#quiver)

3 - [https://zim-wiki.org/](https://zim-wiki.org/)

4 - [http://www.sphinx- doc.org/en/master/usage/restructuredtext/b...](http://www.sphinx- doc.org/en/master/usage/restructuredtext/basics.html)

5 - [https://turtlapp.com/](https://turtlapp.com/)

6 - [https://www.tagspaces.org/](https://www.tagspaces.org/)

7 - [https://standardnotes.org/](https://standardnotes.org/)

8 - [https://inkdrop.app/](https://inkdrop.app/)

<comment><USER34> OneNote does have a web clipper:

[https://www.onenote.com/clipper](https://www.onenote.com/clipper)

<comment><USER35> It's nearly useless. It embeds a screenshot of the page into a note. I don't think anyone who works on OneNote has used a real web clipper before. Certainly not one as good as Evernote's is.

<comment><USER36> There's an actual "Article" mode which cleans up the text and puts text in onenote (and not screenshot).

Disclaimer: Ex-MSFT/onenote engineer.

<comment><USER35> Ah, you know I just noticed that a couple of weeks ago. Alas, I use it only for work, and it still doesn't work due to a OneDrive limit (can't fetch my list of notebooks).

It's still not as useful as the Evernote clipper, but it's not as awful as I said it was.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> [http://archive.is/yqb83](http://archive.is/yqb83)

(Archive link for those who prefer non-broken web experiences)

<comment><USER38> Thank you so much, the ny times seems to have my number whatever i do but this works.

<comment><USER39> $ curl [nytimes article link] > article.html

Then open it.

I wish this worked for the WSJ too, but it appears they're smart enough not to send the full article text in the initial request unless you're logged in

<comment><USER38> Thanks never heard of curl before today (!), I think it's something i need to install (i'm on windows)

<comment><USER40> IIRC curl works in PowerShell as an alias for Invoke-WebRequest

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> SaaS subscriptions are magical when they work; they provide much needed regularity to cash flow forecasting which assuages investor timidity.

However, creating a subscription model doesn't necessarily mean there is a service that warrants it.

<comment><USER42> Subscription is great for the company "selling", might be fine for other companies paying it, but I absolutely despise it as an end-user/private customer and will do everything I can to find an alternative (e.g. with a single-purchase license).

<comment> yoz-y Single purchase licenses are way better but a company with a cloud component can not be sustainable on that model. One option is to provide a way to offload the cloud storage to another company (such as Dropbox syncing).

<comment><USER43> Depends how much data users use. I have a feeling you could store and transfer a lot of data for a £40 fee.

A couple of alternatives:

1\. Decouple the cloud syncing component and sell that as subscription, with a sync-less version for a fee. PWAs mean you don't even need to give up the web platform to do this nowadays.

2\. (My personal favourite) is sell a perpetual license but charge for feature upgrades. Retro, I know.

3\. Sell a subscription licence which includes a perpetual license for the latest copy of the software. If you stop paying, you stop getting updates. JetBeains works like this with their products.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Evernote failed because their product was sub-par. Onenote always provided better organization, better pen input. There were just numerous places in which you could see that man-hours were being placed in the wrong places.

<comment><USER45> Mentioning OneNote sort of makes another point as well. I expect a lot of Office users have never heard of OneNote. The whole general category that lets people save notes of pieces of the Web for later use just turned out to be not that big a thing for most people.

I should be a target for this sort of software and used something else in the same general vein for a few years. But I don't really like everything tied up in a proprietary format even if I can export bits and pieces to some degree. And more generally just tend to go back to text editors, word processing docs, etc.

Put another way, it's software that sort of demands 1.) That you want to carefully save/curate what you read and write for later reuse and 2.) You go all in on a particular program.

<comment><USER44> I, like many others, use OneNote for science and engineering purposes. I use it to keep hand-written notes from seminars, calculations, discussions with collaborators, as well as keeping track of every every wafer I've fabricated on. I take my tablet into the cleanroom with me. When I'm repairing a piece of equipment, I take pictures and paste them in my notebook and draw on them where I think a failure has occurred. My daily experimental workflow involves making a new sheet per day, logging my changes to my experimental setup, and pasting matplotlib plots into it. My life as a scientist revolves around onenote. If you go to a conference, you'll see numerous people with their surface pro or surface laptop, surface pen, and a copy of onenote open. Evernote missed the opportunity to make a real tool. They kinda almost did. They sorta grazed by making a real tool. Enough so that I sunk more time than I wish I had into trying to make their software work for me before throwing my hands up and realizing they're completely unserious about what they're making.

<comment><USER45> The tool I used for a time was fairly explicitly aimed at researchers as I recall. Though TBF that's probably a pretty niche area. (See also Scrivener on the Mac which targets screenwriting and book writers. It's been around for ages so I assume it's making someone a bit of money but, I also assume, very much in the lifestyle business level of revenue.)

<comment><USER46> I wanna say Scrivener exists - or at least it did in the first place - <USER2> it was a "scratch your own itch" kind of project. New versions are pretty rare, it's twelve years old and only on version 3. Checking their 'about us' page ([https://www.literatureandlatte.com/about- us](https://www.literatureandlatte.com/about-us)) confirms that; the founder learn to program explicitly to make the

There's a total of twelve people listed on that about page, only three of whom are programmers. Most of them are also writers, including two of the programmers, and it sort of sounds like a lot of these jobs are part-time.

So yeah, definitely lifestyle business rather than unicorn.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Evernote stumbled and failed to execute so many times. The got hacked, had a clunky/yucky UI forever and lost people's notes. Plus, like a meal kit service or taxi app, they didn't have anything that was inherently defensible. That's why they failed.

</comment><comment><USER48> Instead of this 'long and winding road' wry style pr, the reality is EN spectacularly screwed up. They had the world at their feet but got in their own way. I still use it because incredibly there isn't anything better i'm aware of (I tried onenote but didn't like it) but for me EN is a case history of the incompetent side of valley hype

<comment><USER49> how did they spectacularly screw up? honestly asking.

<comment><USER48> Code quality of the service they were offering: It's improved a little recently but search is still bad, the shared document function was very buggy and made material disappear. General bugs and niggles in past.

<comment><USER50> > search is still bad

Search is hard. Google has the benefit of getting a lot of training data. Corporate intranet search, searching your documents, etc. has to actually figure out relevancy and can't infer it from having already served that query thousands of times in the last day.

<comment><USER48> This is the problem Slack solved, their search is pretty good

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> In have 12k notes (stuck) in Evernote. Every now and then I look for alternatives and come across products like Notion [0], Bear, Apple Notes, Emacs+Org, Notability, and many more.

All of these tools have their strengths and use-cases. But none of them has the power of Evernote (API that lets me access my notes via Python, boolean search, ocr search, saved searches, folders and tags that I can jump to, local copy of my notes on my Mac). But Evernote is old. I would love to use markdown in my notes (see BearApp!), more flexible and nested folders (see Bear or Notion). Also my gut feeling tells me that this company won't exist in a few years from now. So I need to move on someday.

There are a few companies that shouldn't have pitched VCs that expect billion dollar valuations. Evernote is one of those companies. Soundcloud is another.

[0] Notion: too slow, does not keep a local copy of my notes, search is not comparable to Evernote's search capabilities)

</comment><comment><USER6> Apple's "Notes" application is a well known unreliable piece of shit. Evernote's core functionality is extremely reliable and valuable to a lot of people, including myself. Maybe Apple should buy Evernote.

<comment><USER52> > Apple's "Notes" application is a well known unreliable piece of shit.

Since the big update a couple of versions ago Apple Notes is one of the better note apps. Syncing works great, and it has been far more reliable than any of my forays into Evernote.

<comment> java-man just curious, is it easy to export all the notes to a file, or migrate notes to a different machine without using iCloud?

<comment><USER53> Not without third party software it seems.

Search for "Notes Exporter"

<comment> java-man Thank you.

It appears to be a leitmotif with the apple ecosystem: they try to lure you in and then keep you in by limiting your choices of interoperability.

At some point, this should have a negative overall: the number of users gained vs. the number of users not joining due to fears of being locked in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> It is time to tell the Pegasus from the Unicorns. Unicorn is a magical creature horse with no wings. A Pegasus i a magical horse with wings. The macro economic policy that feeded Unicorns was ZIRP zero interest rate policy where magical unicorns pops up from central banks printing new money. Macro economic it could be that trade barriers read import taxes will feed inflation that will force central banks to raise interest rates.

Unicorn, has no wings. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicorn#/media/File:Domenichin...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicorn#/media/File:DomenichinounicornPalFarnese.jpg)

Pegasus has wings [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus#/media/File:The- Winged...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus#/media/File:The-Winged- Horse.jpg)

Unicorns Exist Only When Money Is Free [https://www.advisorperspectives.com/commentaries/2018/05/10/...](https://www.advisorperspectives.com/commentaries/2018/05/10/unicorns- exist-only-when-money-is-free)

<comment><USER55> Does it bother you that this mythical animal metaphor is being extended to yet another creature? But since we are here, I would consider Falkor the Luckdragon to be a better choice instead of a Pegasus.

<comment><USER56> When it comes to pony based economic plans, Vermin Supreme is clearly the best choice.

However, I will have to read up on Falkor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Evernote is a great case study in lack of (or very poor) product management. They even have "The five percent problem" attributed to them. Their product lost any semblance of focus. What they sell obviously has _some_ value, or they'd be gone. But by making their software not particularly good at anything, they made it really hard to love.

Evernote lost me almost ten years ago. They somehow managed to lose about half of my data. Devices would sync and have merge conflicts, even when none of those files had updated (leading to an explosion of notes that were just duplicates). Search never seemed to produce relevant results. Google Keep came out and solved at least my most immediate needs, and I never went back.

At the end, I remember having real trouble trying to find features that I knew existed. The UI would change and I'd be lost. They had an explosion of features (like Office pre-ribbon) and nobody knew enough to (or had authority to) put their foot down and fix it. It's a real shame, but underscores the need for a smart product org and talented designers.

</comment><comment><USER58> Tangentially, what I want in a note/todo app is that the first screen will be a list of categories, like "car" and "shower". Under "car" would be a note I made that says "bring new SD card for dash cam".

I'd look in "car" before heading out to the car, and see that note and remember to bring the SD card out to it. I'd habitually check all of these before doing anything, so I didn't keep forgetting things I needed to do like bringing an SD card with me when I head out instead of having to walk back into the house once I'm in the car and remember or bringing the new shampoo bottle into the shower before I get in it. Also useful would be repeatable checklists, for things like putting my xbox controller in my backback before heading out on a frequent long trip.

Is there anything like this?

<comment><USER59> OmniFocus

Or really, most any Note/ToDo that has first class support for GTD aka Getting Things Done which leverages the notion of @contexts.

<comment><USER60> I've been playing around with a similar concept for the last year or so, with contexts like "On the go", "Have / Do not have internet connection", "Access to work intranet", etc., and whether a phone could do a good enough job of determining whether you're in a collection of those contexts.

Thanks for pointing me at OmniFocus, it looks really cool. Unfortunately, I'm an Android/Windows guy, and I doubt the Web version is going to be good enough at contexts for it to be worth it for me... :(

EDIT: Might give this one a try: [https://appfluence.com/productivity/priority-matrix- omnifocu...](https://appfluence.com/productivity/priority-matrix-omnifocus- android/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Also let's not forget the founders of Skitch, who (in the absence of any better options at the time), accepted an all-stock acquisition deal by Evernote.

I mean, all's fair in love and war, but wow that really turned out to be a bad outcome for the developers of a product that, at its peak, made a pretty huge impact.

</comment><comment><USER62> Article missed the MOST important part of Evernote's collapse, IMHO: [https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/16/13979778/evernote- privac...](https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/16/13979778/evernote-privacy- policy-opt-out)

That's why I left Evernote. I can't imagine trying to tell their story without mentioning that.

<comment><USER63> Same reason I left after years of paying, they later backtracked but I'd moved on and don't really trust they won't do similar again.

<comment><USER64> > _they later backtracked_

Evernote never embraced privacy. On-device encrypted and analyzed notes would have made them a natural Apple acquisition, to boot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> I've been burned by half a dozen note-taking apps/services. They all lost my data or went out of business. (Not Evernote; never tried it because of all the stories about data loss.)

Now I have a subscription to Dropbox and everything goes there. I edit notes with Emacs on my laptop and the builtin text editor in Dropbox on my phone. It's not great, but Dropbox has never lost my data and I don't have time to try yet another program that almost certainly won't sweat the details of how sync should work.

</comment><comment><USER66> A bit of a nuts idea for Evernote: you pay a (decent $$$) monthly fee and you get your own boss. They help you manage your life and make sure you are doing all the things you plan to and enable you to calibrate your time management / ability to do things when you say you will.

<comment><USER67> There's already another company offering this.

[https://bossasaservice.life/](https://bossasaservice.life/)

<comment><USER68> When it did its show HN I asked their support team a question; they acknowledged the question, said they would get back to me, and today I'm still waiting.

I have left bosses that don't deliver on promises, I'm not going to hire one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> I'd like to leave Evernote (I moved to Linux, which they don't support, and their web app is insufficient). But for me the killer feature is doing OCR on PDFs and images you post and including it in search. I haven't found that elsewhere. Does anyone else do that?

<comment><USER70> OneNote has this: "OneNote can search typed text, handwritten notes, and words that appear in inserted images." [https://support.office.com/en- us/article/Search-for-Notes-in...](https://support.office.com/en- us/article/Search-for-Notes-in-OneNote-for- Windows-10-01F1DA59-8B41-4DC7-B060-9A220AD2EC57)

But it won't help your Linux support issue :(

<comment><USER71> Unfortunately search in images never works for me in OneNote. I have quite a few PDF documents with scanned contracts as images and none of them are found by OneNote or OneDrive search.The content in the images of the PDF files are immediately available in search results on my Google Drive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> Who is the target user for Evernote these days? I started looking for a replacement after it perma-deleted a hundred or so active notes because I emptied my recycle bin, and once I realized that OneNote was, for my needs, superior in basically every way, I never went back.

</comment><comment><USER73> I'm an Evernote user and have been worried recently about the direction things were going. Features moving from free to paid and such. I take many notes on the app and have years of jottings - I would hate to get trapped in a corner.

This new CEO sounds reassuring ([https://evernote.com/blog/looking-ahead- evernotes-priorities...](https://evernote.com/blog/looking-ahead-evernotes- priorities-2019/)). Like he's got his head screwed on, and wants to build a great productivity app and a profitable, sustainable company - not be "the Nike of your mind" (sheesh).

</comment><comment><USER38> I've seen a couple of the series of videos that Evernote have been releasing recently explaing the company's plans etc to users. Ian Small comes across as a decent, down-to-earth guy, the sort you'd like to see succeed.

</comment><comment><USER74> Evernote's failure really motivated me to work on an Open Source alternative:

[https://getpolarized.io/](https://getpolarized.io/)

It's slightly different than Evernote and more focused on reading + spaced repetition integration.

The next version I'm working on add support for folders and better three level notes preview.

The one thing I need to add, to enable a full Evernote alternative is the ability to take standalone notes.

Right now they have to be attached to books / PDFs which is a bit limiting.

</comment><comment><USER75> I've been a subscription paying Evernote customer since 2011 and use the service literally everyday. I hope they make it and the service can continue. The features I love the most are the ability to clip websites of interest as research and tag them the way I like for search. I also find that some websites I clip disappear over time. So my clipped copy be ones my own personal "way back machine" copy.

</comment><comment><USER76> I don't use Evernote any longer for several reasons (lack of Linux support, privacy, etc), but I haven't been able to find anything to replace it for my use case. Evernote has a great web clipper and handles handwritten notes and scanned PDF documents really well. That, combined with its reasonably good search and organization features (tags, notebooks) made it really useful for me.

<comment><USER77> I've found their web clipper has really gone downhill. Best I can tell is that it's getting conflicts with ad-blocking plugins over cookies - as in I need to log in all the time and sometimes it maybe works at all.

In the bigger picture, it seems from a customer side that the vast majority of what they've been focused on developing over the past few years has zero value to me (i.e. work chat). They ought to be very concerned about their future if that's how their product is being perceived as evolving.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> Funny that Evernote had an impact on me wanting to do a Freemium business model back in the day, but maybe I shouldn't have valued their public advice as much as I did. Their CEO gave a talk that I can't find right now with some nice graphs that showed freemium working for Evernote at the time. Anyone able to find that talk?

</comment><comment><USER79> My wife and I tried using Evernote for keeping a running shopping list. Our options were: You can copy the shared note, but only that most recent version. Or, you can keep it as is but always have to navigate to the "work chat" and click on the note there (no way to add a shared note to your notes without copying it).

<comment><USER80> not trying to spam, but i created a shared action item tracking list myself, free to use, my particular use case was to track everything in our family from buying things to other tasks. i could also use this for work, only iphone.

[https://getsdone.xyz](https://getsdone.xyz)

regarding evernote, i use this religiously, but mainly for personal note taking with sync across devices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> One of the biggest ways I was hoping that evernote could win at was surfacing Notes after I created them. They had some browser extension that showed relevant notes next to your Google searches, but this didn't work that well. This is something none of the major note taking applications have gotten right yet.

</comment><comment><USER82> They are just not good enough. It came early, dominate the market, then so what? Google Keep is more light weight, One Note basically provide the same feature, and better. Even Apple note is getting more value recently. And Evernote is not free, why using it then?

</comment><comment><USER83> Someone gave me one of the Evernote Moleskines once. It turned out that all the fancy features only worked on the iOS version of the Evernote app. That was not obvious to the kind person who bought it for me.

Left a little bit of a sour taste in my mouth as far as Evernote is concerned.

</comment><comment><USER84> I've been using the free version forever, and I've never felt compelled to subscribe. I can't be alone in this.

If I suddenly had the need to use it across more than 2 devices I'd have to pay but that hasn't come up yet.

</comment><comment><USER85> I use Evernote to store mostly bookmarks, tag them, sometimes I take a note with it. I'm mostly reliant on the search by tag feature. I use Evernote on multiple devices that sync.

What would HN crowd recommend as an Evernote replacement?

<comment><USER86> I've heard great things about Notion.

Nothing beats emacs/org-mode + beorg on iOS for me though. beorg even has scheme-based scripting, although I haven't tried it out yet.

<comment><USER87> The orgmode hype I still don't get. I code full time in emacs and still don't get it. Maybe because all the use case blog posts I've found can be reduced to "you must discover a user flow for yourself."

I can't even tell whether I should have more than one .org file.

<comment><USER88> Do you take a lot of notes? If so, what do you use to take notes? Some people don't take a lot of notes, and Org mode might not be useful to them.

My personal wiki includes several thousand .org files that are interlinked using hierarchical tagging. No other note-taking tool I've evaluated has all of the features and efficiency of Emacs and Org mode.

For example, Evernote doesn't allow users to enter tabular data and make calculations on that data, which Org mode supports. The suggested solution for Evernote is to attach a spreadsheet file. That's what I did with the various note-taking solutions I used back in the 90s. Now all of my small sets of tabular data are included in the same files as my notes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER89> I feel like Journal <[https://usejournal.com/>](https://usejournal.com/>) is sort of the platonic ideal--what Evernote should have been. Search-first.

</comment><comment><USER90> I once heard a podcast and some guy who worked there said that the problem is that they took investor money and they had to grow and ended up fucking up a great small app.

They said at one point they were selling t-shirts.

</comment><comment><USER91> Wishing them luck! I really like their app. They do have so many things to sort out in terms of feature request/bugs. Wish their perseverance should pay off eventually.

</comment><comment><USER92> Scannable was and still is one of the best "take a picture and scan a document" apps out there. But Evernote, which has 15 years of my life stored in it, sucks.

</comment><comment><USER93> I still use Evernote. It holds PDF scans of all my receipts, articles I read, scans of my snail-mail etc. I am not sure what I would replace it with:(

</comment><comment><USER94> What are the tax implications of Evernote failing? Do the founders have to pay taxes on the investment that has been written down to zero?

<comment><USER95> No. That's not the way investments work.

<comment><USER87> Oh. How do investments work?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER96> I never had a use for Evernote, but I was always bitter towards them after they bought and gutted Skitch. Skitch was amazing

</comment><comment><USER97> Regardless of traction, is a note taking app (with nothing defensible tech wise) worthy of unicorn valuation?

</comment><comment><USER98> I remember when someone first showed me evernote with a bunch of hype. And I was like "This is pointless, I can't believe it's a company."

I think we can refer to that as the age of 'cloud madness' where anything and everything cloud-related was the new hotness. I think we've forgotten just how strong the buzz-wordiness was around cloud, it was prolific.

<comment><USER38> I get you but if you go on to the discussion forums for evernote either on their site or reddit you'll find people who have their entire lives at their fingertips thanks to this app and for whom it's vital to their work. They use its IFTTT functionality to an insane degree such that every document they get it's one click on the phone and it's filed.

<comment><USER98> I'm sure there's a subsection of hard-core users that find it really great. The people I interacted with it were just treating it as a document cloud. For me, I carry my work laptop everywhere when I'm working.... so I don't really need to do much on the phone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER99> That is all fine, but there fundamental question still remains as to why _anyone_ would think, or thought, that a _note taking app_ would be worth billions in valuation.

<comment><USER100> Yeah. I remember thinking the same thing about microblogging and photo sharing. :-(

<comment><USER101> And chat, e.g. whatsapp and alack

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER102> Love Evernote. A key feature is still missing.. find a way to reach out. I have a side project I've been working on for years.. maybe they can start believing again

</comment><comment><USER103> What alternatives would you recommend?

<comment><USER104> Depending on what the use case is, (for me it's note taking, bit of math/equations, code snippets)

\- Joplin Editor is nice (due to KaTeX), "cloud" syncing can be made to work, iCloud not supported though

\- Quiver [https://happenapps.com/](https://happenapps.com/) , is paid, but math/equations are supported via MathJax, iCloud is supported

Currently, Joplin works for me but Quiver is overall better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER105> Notion.so

</comment><comment><USER106> I used it for a bit, but OneNote is the 800lb gorilla that really is a great app.

</comment><comment><USER107> paywall

<comment><USER108> Delete NYT cookie, refresh page. In Chrome and Firefox this is available in just a few clicks by clicking the area immediately to the left of the URL.

<comment><USER109> Firefox's "Containers On The Go" addon lets you spin up disposable tab containers (see "Multi-Account Containers") with a single click. This works wonders for sites with limited free reads; it's increasingly the only way Medium is browsable for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER110> Basing a business on a notepad app seems unwise...

<comment><USER19> It did fill a serious need though. Other people followed including Microsoft making their own product as well.

<comment><USER111> Microsoft OneNote was released in 2003, while Evernote was founded in 2007. There were changes Microsoft made to allow OneNote to better compete with Evernote, but they did not make the product itself in response to Evernote.

<comment><USER38> I moved from evernote to onenote earlier this year. It was easy to move all my stuff (i was never a heavy user) using the tool onenote provides for the purpose. I have no complaints. I moved because I felt guilty/insecure being a free user of evernote. Onenote doesn't give you the guilt trip and it's got that Microsoft permanence about it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Who would be up for a co-founder meeting in San Francisco? - <AUTHOR> Hi, there's no real solutions out there to meet a co-founder so what do you guys think about old fashion style meetups? We all get together in one place and chat.
How many people are looking for a co-founder here? A lot I bet. Having a network is great, but it's not enough since you have to convince your friends to quite their jobs and work for free with no guarantee... there's the network of friends and a network of wannabe entrepreneurs.
You're looking for a co-founder? I do. He or she does too. Then let's meetup in our respective cities.
Who wants to meet in SF? <comment><USER2> Columbus, OH.

<comment><USER2> "Then let's meetup in our respective cities."

I just posted my city like it mentions in the original post...thanks for the downvote!!!</comment></comment>


A Touchpad Embedded Keyboard - sahin-boydas https://www.mokibo.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> BlackBerry has been doing this with the keyboards on their phones for some time now

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yn6DRcUFj8Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yn6DRcUFj8Y)

<comment><USER2> Came here to say the same thing. I used the KeyOne and now the Key2 and I can't imagine going back to software keyboards.

<comment><USER3> Did you notice any improvement on this in the Key2?

I have the KeyOne and while I love the feature and it works somewhere between OK and excellent, I have trouble correctly using the typing-oriented gestures (auto complete, delete word). I end up avoiding them because I just can't make them work with near 100% accuracy (accuracy being one of the main points of a physical keyboard to me).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Built a keyboard like this 10 years ago. Always wondered when it would be launched as a product. :) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltNSCOzxbvY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltNSCOzxbvY)

<comment><USER5> In case the soon-to-be-product Tactual keyboard[1] doesn't work out, I wonder...

Imagine you already have optical tracking available for XY finger position. So all you want from the keyboard is sensitive "is the finger near xy _really_ touching?" bits. Without compromising the expert typing experience (eg FlickBoard). Any thoughts on nice ways to approach this?

Spray every keycap with 4 conductive pads, and run 400+ wires... :/

[1] [https://vimeo.com/258421095](https://vimeo.com/258421095)

<comment><USER4> What touch pads use and also we did is capacitive sensors, but they don't really measure if something touches normally, they just give a high response if you are very close. Touchpads are covered by a insulating film. But, if you already know the x,y position then one option could potentially be to make the keys of a conductive plastic and measure the change in capacitance when they get touched. You just need "one" wire that goes to every key. Treat all keys as one sensor.

<comment><USER5> With optical tracking, one can, for example, have all fingers resting on home row, with one finger tapping. But it's hard to distinguish actually touching from merely being near the surface, so one exaggerates the taps to rise above tracking noise. Which is sort of ok for taps, but is a pretty bad user experience for say finger-stroking scrolling.

So the objective is to have per-finger high-quality is-it-touching-or-not- quite touch determination, on a good keyboard. Perhaps made easier by having high-quality XY position available from the optical tracking.

A keyboard where every keycap was a multitouch touchpad would work... but seems problematic.

Monotouch pads are more feasible, but imagine home row fingers now shifted half a key to the left, so finger tips touch multiple keys, and keys are touched by multiple fingers. Now detect tapping, when the tapped key remains continuously touched, and the tapping finger may be in contact with other adjacent fingers.

One _could_ wire together all keys, if say you have finger-tip electrodes. And wired fingers have the bonus of providing good touch determination for finger- finger contact, instead of just finger-key. But the pragmatics of electrodes on skin are messy, and gloves badly sacrifice typing experience.

Ah well. Thanks. Perhaps the Tactual PRISM keyboard will work out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Looks this would be perfect as a "sofa keyboard" for controlling a home media center or similar. I guess that the main difficulty would be not pressing the keys while using it as a touchpad, but I imagine it would be possible to get used to that.

<comment><USER7> Not sure how it's any better than the Logitech K400 or the Microsoft All in One keyboard, especially since those don't need any special software support so can work with your Android TV, Apple TV, HTPC and essentially any other device that supports USB HID, and those cost only like $20-30 I don't see this thing being sold for less than $150-200.

<comment><USER8> I have only owned the Logitech K400 before and its touchpad is rubbish. I threw it out because it was so frustrating to use. Lots of accidental taps when just trying to move the mouse pointer and issues like that.

Is the Microsoft All In One any better?

<comment><USER9> I'm using the Logitech K830. I don't have many issues with the trackpad on that model. It's not great, like your average Windows laptop's trackpad, but I nowhere near throwing it out cause it's so bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't get it. The "keep your fingers on the keyboard and use the mouse" thing has been solved ages ago with the trackpoint [1]. It's the number one reason for me not to buy a MacBook.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_stick](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_stick)

<comment><USER11> Figuring out how to disable that damn thing was my top priority when I had a thinkpad. Maybe I should have stuck with it, but it was just an annoying thing that was impossible to control and easily knocked to where I didn't want it to be (a problem when input focus is mouse based rather than foreground app based).

So this looks interesting to me... but possibly suffers from the same problem of inadvertent activation.

<comment><USER10> It is the other way around for me, I always disable the track pad, as I else will randomly move the cursor while typing, which is really annoying.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, I have tweaked the settings on them before; they generally have a sort of palm detection that prevents them from misfiring which works pretty well for me - only in one case have I ever had to adjust a laptop for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A while ago when I was doing a lot of VR I wanted something like this so I could see where my hands were touching the keyboard while wearing a VR headset. Hand trackers aren't precise enough for that, and video passthrough also isn't great for various reasons. Add a Vive tracker to this and you could potentially use it fairly naturally in VR.

<comment><USER13> Sounds like touch typing is for you. It's even called "blind typing" in some languages.

<comment><USER12> I am a touch typist. But not for every key on the keyboard. But more importantly, touch typing doesn't help you position your hands when moving them from something else to the keyboard.

<comment><USER14> > touch typing doesn't help you position your hands when moving them from > something else to the keyboard.

I thought that's what the bumps on the f and j keys were for.

<comment><USER12> They are rather small and take a bit of work to find when you are blind.

<comment><USER13> I have this problem on 'j' but not on 'f'―the comparison lead me to the thought that I really should glue a grain of plastic on the 'j'. We here are supposed to be hackers and to do-it-ourselves, after all.

The same can be done to other keys, I think―if you have the unfortunate configuration of an unsplit F-row, for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> They are not sure whether there are 80 or 90 sensors in the keyboard. The video says 90, the descriptive text says 80 :')

Other than that, it looks like a nice keyboard. I wonder if mouse activity and keyboard activity conflict with each other, that your mouse starts moving while you only wanted to type or something...

<comment><USER16> I want one for my HTPC, if it turns out to be a good one. :-)

I have two mice on my workstation. At least in Windows it just accumulates the movement. E.g. move left left, right right about the same amount and you'll have the cursor just moving around a little bit but staying mostly in place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Sounds a lot like fingerworks who had a similar product on the market I think about 14years ago or so. As I remember it they got snatched up by Apple and ditched the product. I always wished they'd release a slightly better touchpad tech version of it, at a more reasonable price point.

<comment><USER18> I believe apple got them just for the multitouch: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FingerWorks](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FingerWorks)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Does anybody here use keynav?

I have been a ThinkPad user all my life but the trackpoint hurt my fingers (like another commented here)

Mouse and trackpad need a switch.

I like keynav but its slow and I'm wondering if with prqctise I will actually get somewhere or will forever remain slow?

<comment><USER20> I love the TrackPoint, but finally I too am noticing a strain in my index finger.

I am hoping to take things to the next level.

Currently am looking at wiring a game controller-style thumb joystick to a Contra keyboard.

<comment><USER5> Configuring your acceleration profile can be the difference between awful and wonderful. On linux, the default experience can be poor. And some older TrackPoint hardware is now less well supported than it once was.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I used to have a keyboard back in 2005 that was made by a company called FingerWorks. The keyboard came in two halves and used virtual keys and gestures. You could get it with either Qwerty or Dvorak layouts printed on the smooth surface. They also made a replacement keyboard that you could install in MacBook Pros. Apple acquired the company in 2005 and used the technology in its products.

I really liked my FingerWorks keyboard, but it kind of died out for me once FingerWorks stopped producing firmware updates for it. I don't know how well this keyboard works, but I'd be happy with it if it worked at least as well as my FingerWorks keyboard did.

</comment><comment><USER22> Flat keycaps means it's not really suitable for any prolonged used. The newish mac keyboards solve the key homing problem with large gaps between keys, but it's still not great experience.

</comment><comment><USER23> Lenovo have similar:

[https://www.lenovo.com/gb/en/accessories-and- monitors/keyboa...](https://www.lenovo.com/gb/en/accessories-and- monitors/keyboards-and-mice/keyboards/KB-MICE-BO-L500-controller/p/GX30N73442)

</comment><comment><USER24> Anyone else notice the copyright on the web site is 2012? Presumably just a bad copy-and-paste, but weird nonetheless.

<comment><USER5> > copyright on the web site is 2012?

Given the many abandoned companies in HID space, I checked... Wayback Machine has the web site as new in 2019.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Didn't TouchStream buy up all this IP in multiple ways then get bought by Apple?

I still have a functional touchstream and it's a fantastic device. The drivers even still sort work on Linux.

<comment><USER26> I thought FingerWorks did their own R&D.

<comment><USER25> I thought they did their own patents ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For proximity and 3D, there's also the not-yet-released Tactual PRISM keyboard[1] with depth sensing.

And optical tracking.[2] Though that last millimeter of "is it actually touching or not quite" is hard to do without hardware support from the keyboard.

[1] [https://vimeo.com/258421095](https://vimeo.com/258421095) [http://www.tactuallabs.com/](http://www.tactuallabs.com/) [2] [https://frl.nyu.edu/multi-touch-with-realsense- camera/](https://frl.nyu.edu/multi-touch-with-realsense-camera/)

</comment><comment><USER27> That would drive me absolutely and completely insane.

</comment><comment><USER28> I didn't see a price anywhere. Did I miss it? How much do they plan to sell these for?

</comment><comment><USER29> why is signup for preorder so detailed about the user? it even requires phone number. Most of the questions were so sketchy I gave up and didnt sign up. Would not be surprised if all that data ends up in wrong hands and will be used for phishing.

<comment><USER30> Because it's a Korean company.

It's far less common to use email to contact a customer in Korea. As you can see email is not even a required field in the sign-up page. The customers prefer to receive notifications via SMS (or Kakaotalk nowadays) then email. Actually email is almost meaningless in Korea for contacting method to consumers.

If the company send official release news to sing-up customers on email only, they might complain that the company contact them on email for such an important announcement.

Email is the least serious communication channel in Korea. Even in Business- to-Business situations email is usually used for sending files, not for communications.

<comment><USER20> Thanks for this interesting insight into Korean culture & customs.

<comment><USER30> No problem :) Because of these cultures Koreans often have worst email habits for the western standards. Most of them don't know what CC and BCC are.

The noticeable one is they often have worst email names such as email@example.com and they use it _in business_. So don't suprise if you get a wired email name from Koreans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I think it would bother me having the click buttons separate from the 'touchpad', but a cool concept none the less.

Can anyone see how you switch between keyboard and touchpad mode? Or does it guess based on gestures? I tried to find it in the user manual, but it appears to only be in Korean.

</comment><comment><USER32> As a side note, I am perplexed by the:

> Mokibo saves 60% of mode chnage between keyboard and touchpad which are > 50-100 hours in a year.

Does really that (or keyboard/mouse change) amount to 50-100 hours in a year?

</comment><comment><USER33> The challenge here is that what makes a great touchpad (unbroken surface) is the opposite of the keyboards I like (gaps between keys). I'm interested to try this to see if they've cracked that nut.

</comment><comment><USER34> I would probably try this if the price point is reasonable.

Years ago I had a machine aluminum frame that held a wireless mac desktop keyboard and associated mouse together as a single unit and allowed typing and touchpading on the desktop just like a laptop. I found this to be much better than a touchpad to either side of the keyboard and especially much better than a touchpad to the right of a 104-key sized keyboard. Would love to have that again.

</comment><comment><USER7> I was half expecting them send me a DNA sample collection kit with those intrusive questions, they ask for all but your astrological sign and favorite color....

</comment><comment><USER35> If all that's being sensed is touched(A) or touched(SPACEBAR) with no x,y reporting, I can't imagine the experience would be good enough to please a MacBook trackpad user. I can see the low-rez touch sensing being ok for gestures, but a poor substitute for real multitouch experience.

For example, the pinch-to-zoom demo looks janky compared to two-finger pinch on an actual MacBook trackpad.

<comment><USER36> Look at the video at the bottom of the page (say, at 27 seconds in) -- it is very clear that it has higher resolution than just which key you are touching.

It says there are 80 touch sensors, but presumably each sensor is like a mini track pad, not just an "on or off".

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> This reminds me of the Noahpad, one of the sillier ideas to come out of the Great Netbook Craze of the late 2000s. That thing looked like an ergonomic nightmare and RSI waiting to happen.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FovGyv96a30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FovGyv96a30)

</comment><comment><USER38> I'm not sure what to make of this. On the surface, it does sounds like a great idea! But I'm not sure if the touch bits would work in a satisfactory manner. The touch surface discontinuity bothers me. Regardless, I hope they produce a great product as I can see myself using it to control my home setup.

</comment><comment><USER39> I can see this working for me. And it would be highly efficient and ergonomic. Would definitely like to try it.

<comment><USER40> For touch typists, this is definitely not ergonomic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> If only it were multitouch, then it'd be ideal for the 10gui concept: [http://10gui.com/](http://10gui.com/)

But... I hate laptop-style keyboards and can't see myself moving back after switching to mechanical keyboards, if I can at all help it.

<comment><USER42> It is multitouch. They demonstrate two fingered scrolling and pinch to zoom.

<comment><USER41> I suppose I should have been more specific and said ten-finger multitouch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I normally use a Microsoft natural keyboard and I lay a magic TouchPad over the numpad/home/end button area.

This way it's ergonomic and productive, as I never move my hands. Seems like a better solution, to me, than passing your fingers through the bumpy keys "islands"...

</comment><comment><USER36> I'd like to try it. I could imagine getting used to it quickly.

People seem to be confused as to whether the resolution is one unit per key, or if there is a grid on each key. Clearly, based on the video, it is much higher than one unit of resolution per key.

<comment><USER44> Which could still be implemented as a single sensor per key + interpolation. I which case it really depends how good the software is in edge cases. Like two fingers close together in untypical location.

Noting enough machine learning cannot solve :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Reminds me of [1]

[1]: [https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-642-03658-...](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-642-03658-3_30)

</comment><comment><USER46> At least one manufacturer will use this to make a 21:9 notebook.

<comment><USER47> Kind of like the HP Jornada!

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> What's the point with using this thing?

</comment><comment><USER49> I wonder if this is Windows Precision Touchpad compatible? As far as I can tell, there are not many options for precision touchpads that are not in a laptop

</comment><comment><USER50> so when the switches fail you gotta plug in a mouse anyways. switches fail on an average of one every 5 years in my experience(shorter if you're using one of the chinese clones like kailh instead of cherry since they don't have as good QC in my experience)

These guys haven't mentioned switches so i guess they're using cheaper variants to cut down costs. something to be aware of...

</comment><comment><USER51> The arrow keys. Ugh. That set-up - left and right keys same size as normal keys - I could never get used to it on the new macbook keyboards

<comment><USER52> I dunno, I think I've used a MacBook that had that type of layout. Either that or it was another notebook. That layout is pretty common.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I don't get this. You must feel the "bumps" from key edges in touchpad mode, right?

If so, it's terrible as a trackpad.

</comment><comment><USER54> Tap to Click on this would be amazing

<comment><USER55> _Clicking_ is hands-down the hardest problem with this type of device. Their hardware mouse button placement is not ergonomic; the user in their video has to use a separate hand just to click!

• If you allow tap-to-click, users are likely to trigger false positives from resting on the keys

• If you allow press-to-click, users will be unable to click in many positions (e.g. the intersection of 3 keys)

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> For some occasions i think i'd prefer a keyboard embedded touchpad

</comment><comment><USER57> A bad keyboard and a bad touchpad

</comment><comment><USER58> They were so worried about whether they could they didn't stop to think whether they should.</comment>


Why Google Will Abandon Android - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/google-will-abandon-android-2012-4

<comment><USER2> This article goes out of its way to use semantics to say some things that are kind of stupid. Google isn't going to "abandon android". AT MOST they'll start wrapping android into a brand called "play". And honest, I'll be surprised if they even do that.</comment>


Ask HN: What are the most tedious tasks you face in your job? - <AUTHOR> I'm mainly looking for tasks that are:<p>- Frequent so you'd consider a service<p>- Could be done by a gig-worker or automated<p>Otherwise, catharsis is also welcome <comment><USER2> Some of the accounting tasks like filing invoices into dropbox folders. I thought about writing an incoming email filter of sorts but now our accounting company switched to a dropbox alternative that doesn't have an API. And paying some of them (same amount every month) which requires login to online banking, 2FA etc. When it comes to access to the company bank account gig-worker wouldn't work.

There are some services, especially for travel expenses with automation, multi-layer approval processes etc. Those are too complex for a 5 person or less company.

And [https://www.spendesk.com](https://www.spendesk.com) doesn't help because we already use credit cards and automated payments where ever possible.

<comment><AUTHOR> Monetization aside, do you think a web browser macro that runs locally and only prompts you for 2FA could help?

Not sure how this would fit in [https://xkcd.com/1205/](https://xkcd.com/1205/) though.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> At my last job, the 1 hr/week Time & Expense data entry task we had, I would've happily paid $10-15 per upload for someone else (or a bot) to take care of.</comment>


Ask HN: How to generate topics from a question(like what Quora doing)? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> This SO had helped me solve a similar problem in the past.

[https://datascience.stackexchange.com/a/7000](https://datascience.stackexchange.com/a/7000)

[https://www.kaggle.com/c/facebook-recruiting-iii-keyword- ext...](https://www.kaggle.com/c/facebook-recruiting-iii-keyword- extraction/forums/t/6650/share-your-approach)

</comment><comment><USER3> Here is a brief overview of what you need to do:

1\. Use nltk to get all the nouns etc. from the topic.

2\. You can use LDA/TF-IDF (gensim) for your questions to extract the most common topic.

3\. Use cosine similarity once you have the corpus built to tag a question to the right category.

Look into gensim for more details for the topic modeling.</comment>


Solar Scare Mosquito - <AUTHOR> http://www.gallactronics.com/2014/05/solar-scare-mosquito.html <comment><USER2> Assuming both that it works and that one wants to do a prodigious amount of enterprise sales, this is probably something which is actually easier to sell to comparatively rich countries rather than comparatively non-rich countries. Illinois and much of the Midwest has substantial annual expenditures on mosquito abatement, partially through habitat destruction and partly through periodically spraying after e.g. substantial rainfall or when residents get particularly bothered. A single truck roll to e.g. a park pond costs them several hundred dollars. They might repeat that several times in the season. 1,000 of these devices at $10 apiece and $25 per deployment (I know that sounds high, but government work, what can I say) costs "rounding error."

Potential problems: There is the perpetual issue with all government work, which is that one can't ever propose doing it _too_ efficiently, lest one discover that there exists a margin at which the government is happy to inflict more mosquito bites as long as it allows it to continue awarding easy, well-paying jobs to favored constituents.

Anyhow, I assume that after you start ordering these in lots of 100k you can get it closer to the pennies-per-household-protected figure that it has to reach to be achievable for the largest fraction of folks worrying about malaria.

<comment><USER3> I would buy one for my neighbours pond so I could once again sleep with the window open and I live in rural England.

<comment><USER4> $5 of screen or netting and you are good to go...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Critiquing this article's approximation of a field-biology study would be a great exercise for young science students. I envision a roomful of kids shouting "where is your control group"?

I know nothing of mosquitoes and I haven't had my coffee and yet I can reel off three alternative hypotheses that need to be checked, from the prosaic ("experimenter cannot reliably identify viable mosquito larvae", "water temperature was incorrect and mosquitoes died") to the less prosaic ("plastic box leaches chemicals into water which poisons mosquitoes"; "a tiny frog, perhaps attracted by the alluring sound of this buzzing box, visited the pond and took the opportunity to snack on mosquito larvae". Oops, that was four. I'll get my coffee now.

Also, citations. Just one, pretty please? Surely a thousand people have published on this problem before. What was wrong with the version of this approach that they probably tried back in 1953?

<comment><USER6> God forbid someone should sketch out a prototype and share about it before running a multi-million dollar RCT, right?

<comment><USER7> You're right we shouldn't shoot this down in flames, but I think most of us would consider evidence with a sample size of one as un-evidence.

Providing better evidence will not take a multi-million dollar RCT - all you'd need is ten ponds and a fortnight of checking them once a day.

If that went well, you would have the confidence to push this harder, and maybe get a local university biology department involved to carry out a better designed study. And if that produced good results, you'd be ready to knock on the Gates Foundation door.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This device will do great clearing out mosquitoes from your backyard but don't think for a second that this will save lives or help solve the global malaria problem.

This is a great device for eliminating mosquitoes from stagnant water but it is completely impractical that it would work in the areas where malaria hurst the most. [1]

Firstly, it would require that every single puddle be discovered immediately. Try doing that after monsoon season in India, or in rural West Africa where malaria is one of the main killers of children under the age of five and where the roads are so bad you can't even get a truck loaded with food in, let alone these devices.

If these did make it into some of these rural villages, every single one would be picked up off the ground immediately and be converted into something that really could improve the quality of life, into something that might power lights or charge cell phones or be sold to someone who could.

[1] [http://cms.travelstart.com/uploads/image/asset/92/malaria- ar...](http://cms.travelstart.com/uploads/image/asset/92/malaria-area-map.jpg)

<comment><USER9> I think he proposes leaving these in areas that are prone to forming puddles after storms. And they would turn on automatically when wet.

That way you don't have to immediately locate all puddles.

<comment><USER10> I doubt it, as the in-built alarm would sound for months while the device waits for the puddle to form.

Also, largish puddles are not the only (and probably not the main) problem with malaria. Many puddles will be too small for this device. That old tire in a corner, a coke can, a discarded piece of plastic all can and will contain stagnant water.

Finally, even if one could predict where puddles would form on roads, I doubt these would survive the dry season with cars driving over them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Having built my own pond and faced similar issues dealing with mosquitos I'm highly skeptical that this is as effective as claimed. I've purchased cheap aeration devices that were solar powered in the past and they were not very effective. It took a few months of getting the right combination of fish, plants and a more powerful aerator to solve the problem. Also it seems like deployment of these things in thousands of small standing pools of water which breed mosquitoes wouldn't be feasible.

</comment><comment><USER12> I find it amazing (and somewhat disappointing) that some comments are heralding this as the end of malaria. The lifecycle of mosquitoes is quite complex and mosquitoes are very adaptable creatures, unfortunately. I imagine this device would help, but only as part of a more comprehensive approach

I'm typing on my phone, but here are two informative articles on how mosquitoes breed and what can be done to reduce populations:

[http://www.vdh.virginia.gov/lhd/CentralShenandoah/EH/WNV/mos...](http://www.vdh.virginia.gov/lhd/CentralShenandoah/EH/WNV/mosquito_breeding_habitats.htm)

[http://www2.ca.uky.edu/entomology/entfacts/ef005.asp](http://www2.ca.uky.edu/entomology/entfacts/ef005.asp)

<comment><USER13> Technophants believe 1) technology solves all problems more or less instantly and 2) the only reason any problems exist are because one or more of bureaucracy, regulation, ignorance(luddism), lack of monitization scheme have prevented the technical solution from being applied.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This solar aerator is interesting but still a bit expensive and limited. I wonder what happens when buggies and fishies nibble at it and water inevitably leaks in.

There are some cheaper solutions. The mosquito dunk costs less than $1 per application and is pretty easy to use--just toss a little puck into a pond, and the bacteria specific to mosquito larvae destroys the pest without causing any known side effects.

There are also dragonflies. They, like mosquitoes, start life in the water and the nymphs are voracious eaters of mosquito larvae. Then, when they crawl out of the water and grow wings, they eat flying mosquitoes and other small insects in large quantities.

If you seed your area with dragonflies, of course they will end up becoming food for bats and other predators which also eat mosquitoes but will preferentially go after larger, meatier insects. But on balance, a larger number of these creatures will keep the mosquito population down naturally and efficiently.

It seems unlikely that introducing dragonflies to a specific area will unbalance the ecosystem. Dragonflies are ubiquitous in the world except for Antarctica. They are an ancient species and fossil records of giant dragonflies date back as far as 300 million years. The mystery to me is why we even still have mosquitoes, when we have such efficient and highly adapted killers of mosquitoes out there.

Spraying is perhaps the worst possible approach of all of these. I've seen spraying done in urban areas that actually resulted in more mosquitoes in some neighborhoods. It either pushes the mosquitoes into new areas, or it inadvertently kills predators of mosquitoes. The best thing is to use as natural means as possible.

That said... please, please find a way to wipe these critters out of existence. As discussed a few weeks ago ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7657251](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7657251)) there are plenty of non-biting mosquitoes out there; only 200 out of 3,000 species feed on human blood. Life would go on just fine if we could genetically target those blood-sucking varieties and zero them out.

<comment><USER15> >genetically target those blood-sucking varieties and zero them out

This is exactly what some scientists are doing. A recent Radiolab episode discussed a field deployment in Brazil.

[http://www.radiolab.org/story/kill-em- all/](http://www.radiolab.org/story/kill-em-all/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you're interested in this you may like to check out Radiolab's "Kill 'em all" \- [http://www.radiolab.org/story/kill-em- all/](http://www.radiolab.org/story/kill-em-all/). There is an organisation breeding a strain of mosquito that when released into wild populations causes all offspring to be infertile. This causes mosquito populations to be eradicated very quickly.

One of the presenters was asked if there are any benefits of having mosquitos around. After looking high and low, his conclusion was that they've stopped humans from coming in and destroying precious ecosystems, for instance in jungles, forests and swamplands.

</comment><comment><USER17> One issue seems to be that if the pond is of any decent size (say > 20 meters in diameter) and you put in a few of these devices at the end of the day they are all in the same corner of the pond due to the current/wind.

<comment><USER18> that would be simple solution of anchoring the device with a stone

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Put some Mosquitofish[1] into your pond. It should clean the pond up pretty quickly. It is also provide a pleasant environment as well, watching the fish rather than some box creating bubbles.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquitofish](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquitofish)

<comment><USER20> Wouldn't that disrupt the ecosystem?

<comment><USER21> Wouldn't removing the mosquitoes and changing the entire environment from fetid to oxygenated water disrupt the ecosystem?

<comment><USER22> The change in the water might, but it turns out that mosquitoes aren't a vital part of any ecosystem. Nothing preys on them exclusively or even primarily, and their animal victims seldom die, so they're not keeping anything's numbers in check.

<comment><USER23> Well, they do seem to keep human numbers in check to some degree.

<comment><USER24> I always understood that human numbers in less developed areas actually increase because other forces (disease, poverty, mosquitoes?) try to keep them in check.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Simpler solution: stick a tiny bit of soap in the water. Not much at all. Doesn't hurt aquatic life but breaks the surface tension which kills the mosquito rafts dead as they sink straight away.

Source: I live next to a sewage farm.

<comment><USER26> I thought the traditional simple solution (e.g., while building the panama canal) was to put a thin layer of oil over your stagnant water.

<comment><USER25> Yes - they put kerosene on it which suffocates them. Unfortunately it's quite toxic to anything which enters and exists the water plus there is some indication (after the whole BP Deepwater Horizon fuck up + Corexit that used deodorised kerosene) that it is toxic if absorbed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I suspect the problem with deploying this on a large scale to fight Malaria for example, is that mosquito breeding areas are often very large areas, and change in location due to environmental changes. This device is probably a good fit for stopping mosquitos breeding in the pond outside your house, but for stopping malaria you need to cover a very large area.

<comment><USER28> The other problem is that even tiny still water bodies are enough for mosquitoes to breed. So even if you control several ponds, if your neighbor keeps a bucket of still rainwater, you'll have mosquitoes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This isn't a bad idea but it's increasingly a side-show: tiger mosquitoes are spreading throughout the world courtesy of commercial shipping and global warming. In addition to being active throughout the day, they need far less water to reproduce – something like a bottle-cap or flower blossom is enough:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aedes_albopictus#Control_and_su...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aedes_albopictus#Control_and_suppression)

If you do a great job suppressing traditional threats, all you're doing is wiping out the competition…

What we really need is something like the photonic fence prototype from Intellectual Ventures:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito_laser](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito_laser)

Unfortunately, my understanding is that they decided this wasn't cost- effective as a malaria control mechanism but I suspect there'd be a big market in developed controls where the drawbacks of pesticides are an increasing concern.

</comment><comment><USER30> I don't see how this could kill mosquito larvae. Aerating the water will just make it better for the aquatic animals.

Ripples on the water surface might stop some mosquitoes from laying their eggs. But this would need to be tested. I doubt a small device could continuously create big enough ripples.

</comment><comment><USER31> simple arithmetic : 3.4B people in the risk areas, US retail price for mosquito DEET containing repellent is $0.1-0.3 per day (this is also about the same as mosquito repellent bracelets on Alibaba, though i never used one, and Amazon shows even cheaper ones - would be great if this stuff really works).

So, the higher estimate for everybody to have repellent every day is $400B dollars/year. In many areas you actually need it only part of the year. So napkin calculation comes to say $200B or 1K per clinical episode (or even less if not to use US retail prices).

[http://www.cdc.gov/malaria/malaria_worldwide/impact.html](http://www.cdc.gov/malaria/malaria_worldwide/impact.html)

To me it looks like something that we as a civilization could have done. And after few years the parasite would possibly be eradicated in many areas.

(note: i'd used DEET extensively in my time in Western Siberia ("stroyotryad" who knows/remembers :) , so i understand limitations of it, yet i also understand the difference it makes :)

</comment><comment><USER32> I've got a fountain in which the pool is NEVER still ... once the chlorination has bubbled out of the water, it still gets mosquitoes.

<comment><USER33> You want to throw one of these in every month: [http://www.amazon.com/Summit-111-5-20-Pack-Mosquito- Dunk/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Summit-111-5-20-Pack-Mosquito- Dunk/dp/B0002568YA/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> What an elegant solution to malaria problem. My only fear is that mosquitoes will adapt to this minor change.

<comment><USER34> I'm not sure if that would happen. It's a natural adaptation to only breed in still water. If mosquitos evolved from that, we would have _much_ bigger problems than just malaria.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> The air pump is probably superfluous, you could just have a cell phone vibrator style motor...

</comment><comment><USER36> Can it cause issues with other living organisms in water?

</comment><comment><USER37> oh god this is awesome. a lot of people will buy this if it is only $10.

</comment><comment><USER38> So simple, so smart

</comment><comment><USER39> Is a 2 meter radius enough? I don't think that this strategy scales because power dissipates as r^a.

<comment><USER3> If this technique is shown to be effective and becomes popular amongst owners of small ponds I could imagine similar techniques being encouraged, or mandated, for any large body of still water in and around high-populations.

<comment><USER39> But it literally can't scale. If you want your wave to do more than a 2 radius meters you need a ton more power.

<comment><USER40> Yes, but area also scales square of radius, so it will consume power proportional to the area covered.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


20+ Dating Sites For Geeks and Freaks - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2007/08/15/dating-sites/ Maybe could help out some of our struggling hackers out there ;-) <comment><USER2> cute facebook apps are the best way to impress girls if you are a geek, at least that's what happened to my friend who made a cute one involving kittens

<comment><USER3> May be easier than a whole facebook app:

<http://icanhascheezburger.com/2007/07/23/i-cans-be-bracelet/></comment></comment>


Security exploits by programming language. - <AUTHOR> http://samate.nist.gov/SRD/view.php?count=20&first=0&sort=asc

<comment><USER2> Title as submitted is _Security exploits by programming language._

Actual title of linked page is _Software Assurance reference Dataset :: View all test cases_ and contains a mix of C, C++, and Java. There is no way I can see to search by programming language (or even to search at all).</comment>


Show HN: A status dashboard for the NYC power grid - <AUTHOR> http://nycpowerstatus.com/

<comment><USER2> Hmm, I'm not sure I would say "At the moment 0% of Con Edison's Customers in Manhattan are Without Power". I currently have 4 people staying with me because their power is out in Battery Park, Chelsea, and Gramercy. It is definitely an improvement (I didn't have power or water until yesterday morning), but it's not over yet.

Looking at the ConEd official power outage map, they list roughly 10,000 people in Manhattan without power.

<comment><AUTHOR> The ConEd data is a nested set of areas where each Area the fields: total_customers, customers_out. It seems there's a discrepancy between the number of customers_out for Manhattan and the sum of customers_out for Manhattans's sub areas.

I've decided to trust the sum of the individual sub areas instead, working on a fix.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Interesting data. It looks like not much restoration work has been going on in Queens: 86449 offline to begin, and still 73599 offline. And they tell me my power is going to be out until the 9th...

Does the "coned" gem use some public API that ConEd has, or does it just scrape their web site?

Note: "burough" should be "borough".

<comment><USER4> _Does the "coned" gem use some public API that ConEd has, or does it just scrape their web site?_

<https://github.com/ckundo/coned/blob/master/lib/coned.rb#L12>

<comment><USER5> coned has some endpoints <https://twitter.com/ckundo/status/265610079783514112>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Perfect example of why to opensource your work; I never could have made this awesome design. Great work!

</comment><comment><USER7> Neat.

How did you get google to serve up a white tileset? Or did you generate your own?

<comment><USER8> [http://gmaps- samples-v3.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/styledmaps/...](http://gmaps- samples-v3.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/styledmaps/wizard/index.html)

Turn the saturation down. This was found with 10 seconds worth of searching by the way.

<comment><USER7> I don't know what search terms you used, but I got lost in a thicket of docs on generating and uploading entirely custom tilesets, which I was hoping not to have to do.

Thanks for the link, less so for the snark!

<comment><USER8> My search term was "greyscale google maps" and I'm sorry for the snark!

<comment><USER7> Civility on HN. Faith in humanity, restored!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why does clicking on the Lower East Side green bubble (why is the bubble green, as that seems to correspond to a 0 percent outage in the text) take me to the Greenwich Village page?

I guess the bigger criticism is...the map view could use some work and given the non-officialness of neighborhood boundaries, maybe a map view isn't the most useful?</comment>


Berners-Lee's next project: a platform that gives users control of their data - <AUTHOR> http://www.csail.mit.edu/solid_mastercard_gift <comment><AUTHOR> See the spec on github: [https://github.com/solid/solid- spec](https://github.com/solid/solid-spec)

Unrelated to the spec, I wonder how IPFS + cryptography could be used as a backend for such a data plateform.</comment>


Potion - a little fast OO language by _why - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/why/potion/tree/master <comment><USER2> Not to sidetrack things, but there is a bunch of cool stuff in the source for Lua. Whether or not it gets used directly, it is going to have a _huge_ influence on the implementation of new languages.

It has a bunch of novel ideas* (e.g. the register-based VM, the table optimizations) that have paid off big, it's very portable (due to being written in strict ANSI C), and it has a surprisingly small code base. It's pretty readable (<http://www.lua.org/source/5.1/>), full of examples of simple-but-efficient garbage collectors, string handling optimizations, etc. The designers have worked hard to keep it small and simple.

* See "The Implementation of Lua 5.0" (<http://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/~lhf/ftp/doc/jucs05.pdf>). It's 16 pages, and is a quick - but quite thought-provoking - read.

<comment><USER3> I agree that it has a bunch of novel ideas, but I wouldn't list the register- based VM and table optimizations among them; register-based VMs go back to the 1950s, depending on how you want to count, and using different representations for tables used as arrays and tables used as hashes (that's what you mean by "table optimizations", right?) is pretty unsurprising. I'm not saying it isn't a great engineering achievement; I never would have predicted that those things would have been worth the cost in Lua's context, and they were, brilliantly so.

I would instead list their one-pass-compiler implementation of flat closures and their approach to continuations, and especially integrating continuations with C code calling back into Lua.

I second the recommendation of the paper. I also think their paper on LPEG is worth reading for anyone who is considering using regular expressions or yacc or ANTLR for anything: <http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/docs/peg.pdf>

<comment><USER2> To my understanding, stack-based VMs are more common than register-based VMs, and the Lua VM is noteworthy for being both well-implemented and small enough to read. Then again, it looks like you're quite a bit ahead of me in reading about VMs. I just found this in your "blog thing" yesterday: [http://www.bentwookie.org/blog/kragen- tol/2007-September/000...](http://www.bentwookie.org/blog/kragen- tol/2007-September/000871.html) You've got a lot of good links. :)

By "table optimizations", I meant the way it behaves as both a dict and a table, depending on how it is used, and how much they get out of using those throughout the language. (I wrote the above in a hurry before catching the bus, and knew I had missed better examples, but it came to mind from the _Implementation_ paper.)

<comment><USER3> Yes, I agree that stack-based VMs are more common than register-based VMs, and it was an unusual decision on the part of the Lua folks to choose a register- based VM, particularly given their emphasis on implementation simplicity. And it appears to have paid off, which is pretty cool!

I'm glad you've enjoyed the various links.

 _I meant the way it behaves as both a dict and a table_

You mean, a dict and an array?

I'm not sure I agree with their decision to unify those structures, but it does seem not to have cost them much implementation complexity or performance.

<comment><USER2> Oops. Dict and an array, yes.

Also, Lua had a stack-based VM until Lua 5.0.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Man, _why knows how to just come out of nowhere and drop awesome stuff on us all. This is really slick.

<comment><USER5> Agreed, _why really makes me think of the days when hackers weren't doing things with the hopes of getting a paycheck in the end, but more because they had the know how, and they wanted to do it just to see if they could pull it off.

It's an infectious virus that works rather brilliantly with the presentation, and quality of work this guy puts together.

<comment><USER6> I wonder what he does for a living that he can pull all this stuff together in his free time?

<comment><USER7> It's been wondered before. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=371897>

<comment><USER8> My god, that was a great article. Thanks for the link.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wow, the technical and artistic output by him is amazing. I'd love it if he wrote a bit about how he operates, what his interests are and etc but I somehow feel that is outside his character.

</comment><comment><USER10> /me waits for web framework named: cauldron.

<comment><USER11> and the Rack-port: Crack!

<comment><USER12> Speaking of Rack ports... a JavaScript one I just started a couple days ago, called Jack of course: <http://github.com/tlrobinson/jack>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _Why is a very clever and subtle fellow. And to add insult to injury, he gets things done! Huzzah for _Why!

<comment><USER14> Done! (And gets things smart).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Who IS this guy and how is he so productive and awesome?

<comment><USER16> I'm pretty sure _why is really like twelve guys just messing with our heads.

<comment><USER17> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff> He's right there, dork. :P

<comment><USER16> I know who _why is. I was being facetious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What do you guys think of the language?

<comment><USER7> It's interesting that there are no classes, and that there are only Objects, where you just mix everything in.

As I understand it, javascript objects are like this, except you only add in methods one at a time, instead of mixing in and out modules.

It doesn't look like there are inheritance trees. I'm not sure what you'd do to prevent namespace clashes when mixing in different modules or if/how modules share and work on object attribute data, but so far in Ruby, that hasn't been too much of a problem.

<comment><USER19> I think you'll have a "well, duh" reaction if you implement an OO system in pure C. It is basically just a bunch of structs (data) with a bunch of functions which take a struct pointer as their first argument. Mixins just let you randomly add or remove these functions without any extra shenanigans, which you can also easily do in our pure C OO system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> ok, so _why did it again. from time to time, this guy comes from nowhere and drops a little something of awesomeness. _why makes me feel sad and be ashamed to even touch a computer keyboard :/ this guy rocks.

</comment><comment><USER21> When I grow up, I want to be like _why.

</comment><comment><USER22> Has anyone tried to run the ascii art piece from the README as a Potion program?

</comment><comment><USER23> Looks like a good experiment - is good to keep asm knowledge in circulation.

Also looks like it will do the fastest fib benchmark around !

</comment><comment><USER18> Should we come together as a community and give out hacker awards?

Would it be fun?

Someone like _why is a real inspiration to me personally.

<comment><USER24> Me too!

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> who is _why ?

<comment><USER26> <http://poignantguide.net/> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff>

A developer and Ruby advocate who's written one of the earlier and more popular guides.

...you don't know how much restraint it took to avoid the Abbot and Costello routine there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> They should just get it over with and give him a MacArthur Genius Award....</comment>