Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, and databases - <AUTHOR> https://www.notion.so <comment><USER2> Just in case someone might need it: I reverse engineered their API and wrote (an unofficial) client for accessing the data: [https://github.com/kjk/notionapi](https://github.com/kjk/notionapi)

It's for Go but one could easily port it to any other language. It's just HTTP requests and some light processing of JSON responses.

I use it so that I can have my blog content in Notion. In a daily cron job I download the data from Notion, convert it to HTML and publish on Netlify as a static website. This script is open source: [https://github.com/kjk/blog](https://github.com/kjk/blog)

Basically I use Notion as CMS.

I described my reverse-engineering process in [https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/88aee8f43620471aa9dbcad2...](https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/88aee8f43620471aa9dbcad28368174c/how- i-reverse-engineered-notion-api.html)

<comment><USER3> Yikes, they don't have an official API? Hardly interested in making a closed system my "central source of truth"

<comment><USER2> Official API is on their roadmap: [https://www.notion.so/What-s- New-157765353f2c4705bd45474e5ba...](https://www.notion.so/What-s- New-157765353f2c4705bd45474e5ba8b46c)

<comment><USER4> Also, it's easy to export your entire workspace as raw data. Markup files, images, etc.

<comment><USER5> Problem is that the export does not preserve node nesting, which is a problem for an outliner

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Used notion for about 6 months, but stopped for two main reasons:

1\. It's extremely slow on even a new iPhone - about 6-7 seconds until I can start typing a note. By then I forget what I wanted to write. It's basically a webview of a very heavy web app, so it's not snappy at all.

2\. No offline support whatsoever.

In addition it feels like they have abandoned development or are busy being acquired (~bi-weekly updates until about three months ago: [https://www.notion.so/What-s- New-157765353f2c4705bd45474e5ba...](https://www.notion.so/What-s- New-157765353f2c4705bd45474e5ba8b46c))

I migrated back to Bear ([https://bear.app/](https://bear.app/)) which was a pain - exporting from Notion is also not one of their best features.

<comment><USER7> I didn't know about Bear. Just had a look on their website and the application and user experience looks pretty stunning.

However, I am not quite sure it justifies paying for this service when Apple Notes has got a lot better in the past few years (I also feel confident in the privacy approach of Apple).

Out of curiosity, what features make you use Bear and not Notes? I take a lot of notes, and if something can make my life easier, I would seriously consider making the move.

<comment><USER8> Main difference to Notes is that Bear uses Markdown as the data format. It has a rare capability of converting webpages to Markdown when you save them as a note using a sharing extension on iOS. The conversion is decent.

But as mentioned above it also lacks important organisation features: no folders, no dated notes, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> louis-paul There is something about Notion that makes it feel very well-made and coherent. It's one of the few apps I use with this inherent feeling of quality (off the top of my head Sublime Text/Merge, Beyond Compare, Things fall into this category of intangible greatness). Every interaction is delightful, and the app scales really well from basic note-taking to decently complex databases with grouping, filters, relations, templates and permissions. It comes with really good real-time collaboration.

On the flip side the software a bit slow to start and uses a lot of resources—it's based on Electron, but I encourage everyone to try it (the demo on their website is cool!).

This is as close to "painting the back of the fence" as it gets.

<comment><USER9> Notion's founder here. Thank you for the kind words - we are honored :-)

To be honest, nothing we are doing is that new. Most of the ideas came from the 70s-80s (Alan Kay, Doug Engelbart, Ted Nelson...) We are just applying a fresh coat of paint.

Of course, there's still a lot more to be done to fully realize these pioneers' dreams of computing as a medium for everyone – not just programmers like us. If you are interested to learn more or work with us, feel free to message me directly at ivan at makenotion.com, or link below. We are happy to host you for lunch: [https://www.notion.so/notion/Join- Us-e7aeb157238a4603a2964b2...](https://www.notion.so/notion/Join- Us-e7aeb157238a4603a2964b28c646f07f)

Have a good one! Ivan

<comment><USER10> Give linux love. I was interested in trying it after reading comments, but as it is I can't touch it until there is a linux build.

<comment><USER11> Notion is a webapp. You can use it fine with a browser. I think everyone is missing the fact that the desktop apps are not necessary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hmm, I cannot seem to create an account without sharing my Google contacts; which I see no need to do and it's needless friction. I get into a loop of clicking checkbox "I don't want to share my Google contacts", then being rerouted back to login page and requested approval to share my contacts.

Pricing wise, I wish these types of apps didn't have such a steep escalation as soon as I want to share. $4 for individual, but $8/team member, which means wanting to share this with my wife is _four times as expensive_ as just using it myself, with limited to no appreciable improvement.

<comment><USER13> Same here — I cannot create an account with a password. If you try to go in and do an email signup, they will punish you for it by emailing you every time with a new password, until you suffered enough that you'll relent and give them access to your Google account.

Not a great first impression — especially not after their support tells me that this is for my own security.

<comment><USER14> I use Notion with a non google e-mail and don't mind the password being e-mailed to me. I have to re-auth maybe once a month, tops, and it's one less password to manage.

<comment><USER15> It is an extremely frustrating practice (emailing you the password). I find that I have to go through this every few days for whatever reason and I've had cases where the email from Notion took five minutes to arrive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I am uncomfortable to put all personal thoughts, diaries, etc into a non-self- hosting place.

Can they dockerize this and sell that so I can self-host the docker image instead?

for people that is not tech-savvy, what about they buy a docker-container- hosted-by-the-vendor-company but can encrypt the contents in a way that nobody else can peek into the content ever?

<comment><USER17> There's a reason nobody really does this: there's just no money in it. Nylas mail is a good example of this: it offered the ability to self-run it and pay them for the license, but nobody really did. I wonder what they would need to charge to make it feasible? $1000 a year? It makes me pretty sad, but it's just such a distraction for a company of Notion's size and stage.

<comment><USER18> Well, then we should create open-source analog of notion. I actually was itching wondering what could I create in OSS realm. Probably will have a look at this task :)

<comment><USER19> That seems to be pretty hard. I just finished a long search for an Open Source one-page markdown editor (no split windows for preview and editing): the closest I could find was an editor called MarkText but even that doesn't have half the functionality of Notion or Dropbox Paper. It's hard to compete with fully funded and devoted teams.

<comment><USER20> I've been looking for something too. GetCanvas (now defunct but released as open source) was wonderful, but seems abandoned.

stackedit.io has been the closest that I could find.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I love the product, but the login workflow is awful. Why innovate on logins? We've solved that problem.

Specifically, the login is a randomly-generated one-time code sent to your email address. Notion says this is more secure than them storing a username+password, but that's a dubious argument. They've also said this is two-factor auth (lolno). A side effect of this is that Notion is unusable on my mobile device since I have no email on it.

I really hope they implement a more traditional login system. Until then, I'm sticking with Evernote. :(

<comment><USER22> Thanks for telling me this. I will definitely avoid Notion now. I want a username/password combo at the very least, both different for every site I use, and preferably with TOTP as well. I never want my email to be used for security purposes as it is among the most hackable target out there.

<comment><USER23> Yeah dude someone might go through the trouble of hacking your email just so they can find your todo page with an unchecked checkbox for feeding your goldfish.

<comment><USER24> You have no idea what they want to put in their Notion account. And so what if they want to have high security for something you deem trivial? You gain nothing by being an asshole about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm a big Notion fan. Use it for everything in my life, both work and personal. Here's a screenshot of my Notion homepage: [https://twitter.com/benln/status/1034475232445181952](https://twitter.com/benln/status/1034475232445181952)

I also made this site for people to share their Notion pages: [http://notionpages.com](http://notionpages.com) You can use that to get a better sense of use cases for Notion.

<comment><USER26> I see that your site only includes screenshots of Notion pages. Have you considered asking people to share Markdown exports of their pages as well?

<comment><USER25> Some have templates. Hoping Notion releases clone feature soon. Didn't know you could export markdown, will look into that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> If you like Notion but are looking for something open source, similarly polished and more wiki-focused then this will be up your street - [http://getoutline.com](http://getoutline.com)

We've been building it for 2 years, happy to answer questions.

<comment><USER28> I previously tried to sign up via a Google account but it required a 'company Google account' \- I was slightly confused about the reasoning behind this.

<comment><USER27> It's designed for teams, Google auth is used to avoid having to manage invites etc. If you could sign in with any old Google account then it would introduce a class of problems with having to manage invites / user management / accidental duplicate teams.

Having said that, I do think it would be cool if signing in with your personal gmail account gave you a personal non-team wiki.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> For me, Notion replaced Evernote and I haven't looked back. Three features that have been particularly useful for personal productivity are

1) explicit support for Kanban board-ing tasks and similar to-do management

2) collapsible blocks

3) substantially smoother linking to, or embedding, notes within notes

Notion is just as sleek as Evernote for small independent notes, but these two features allow Notion to scale much better for projects that require an inter- related network of notes with substantial breadth and depth.

<comment><USER30> Evernote's killer feature for me is the automatic OCR on images, included in the search. Any way to rig that in Notion?

<comment><USER29> Not that I know of, and probably an area that Notion won't catch up in for a long time, if ever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Some good alternatives

\- Quip ([https://quip.com](https://quip.com))

\- Airtable ([https://airtable.com](https://airtable.com))

\- Taskade ([https://taskade.com](https://taskade.com))

<comment><USER32> \- Coda ([https://coda.io/](https://coda.io/))

<comment><USER33> Notion is now becoming a lot more like coda. I love how Coda exposes tabular data in a programmable way (but programmable as in easier than spreadsheets). It also even has API access: [https://coda.io/developers/apis/v1beta1](https://coda.io/developers/apis/v1beta1)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This isn't self-hosted? I'm interested in a self-hosted solution that uses local markdown files and directories to manage content.

<comment><USER35> This is one thing I've wanted. A local app that lets me store all my data with markdown syntax, syntax highlighting, in local files and directories, specifically for macOS although a cross platform app would be fine. One that doesn't require an account or the internet at all for it to work. I've wanted this kind of app for many years (and wouldn't be opposed to making it if no existing solution is all that great at it).

<comment><USER36> Emacs with org mode, helm, and projectile as a starting point would hit all of your asks (although org syntax has differences from markdown, it's still quite intuitive).

I use org mode for: my tasks (gtd style), food log (using org columns), notes (easy export to any other format), habits. Alongside beorg for iOS for quick capturing on the go, I cannot imagine I would be any happier elsewhere.

<comment> mickael-kerjean Same here, org-mode is going nowhere, it's one of those things that just works. From wikis, todos, document authoring, agendas, code notebook, ... On mobile, there's a few options, I made one, a web app called filestash: [https://demo.filestash.app/s/hn](https://demo.filestash.app/s/hn) . It has a lot of the org mode candies: agenda, todos, and the real org-mode exporters: HTML, PDF, Markdown, TXT, Latex, iCal, ODT and even beamer

<comment><USER37> And literate programming too with Babel!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> For those just discovering Notion, it's one of the most liberating tools I've ever used, because it offers just enough complexity to configure it however you want, while still remaining simple on the surface. I just love that I can mould it around how my brain works. I wrote this guide that might be useful for anyone else in understanding its power and what you can do with it: [https://medium.com/@ow/the-writers-ultimate-guide-to- notion-...](https://medium.com/@ow/the-writers-ultimate-guide-to- notion-6bf90d1cf45b)

</comment><comment><USER38> After trying many different things over the years, I wrote this: [http://onemodel.org](http://onemodel.org) (yes I plan to move to https sometime). You can think of it something like a personal wiki + emacs org- mode, very efficient, keyboard-oriented, using postgres, but with a much larger vision than today's features, including sharing (linking/copying securely) between instances, and computability of the info for things like anki-like features. Self-hosted now but open to hosting for others. The most current code is in github (AGPL). Comments/questions very welcome, preferably via the mailing list; be patient if my answers are slow. The lists are currently low-volume, and the announcements list should always be.

(It can store files, but isn't especially smooth about it yet. For personal notes of all kinds, it is _the_ most efficient, effective, flexible thing I know of. The FAQs link to a discussion comparing it with emacs org-mode and others. It has fulltext search, some finicky but very functional import/export, a nice numbered-outline export to text, and a journal/activity log.)

I have noted to look at Notion, and Trillium, to see how much they overlap and if we can collaborate. I have been quite slow lately though, hoping to get more done sometime relatively soon.

</comment><comment><USER28> I used Notion for a significant period but ended up switching to Nuclino [1] - which is identical in many respects, but without the various add-ons that are unnecessary if you're working with text/images.

I've found it to be more responsive, and to my tastes, it has a better UI. I'm not a big fan of the emoji/blank file image that is necessary with every Notion entry.

[1] - [https://www.nuclino.com/](https://www.nuclino.com/)

<comment><USER39> I love Nuclino too. Their editor uses the wonderful ProseMirror ([https://discuss.prosemirror.net/t/nuclino-a-lightweight- real...](https://discuss.prosemirror.net/t/nuclino-a-lightweight-real-time- wiki-built-on-top-of-prosemirror/146)) by Marijn Haverbeke ([https://marijnhaverbeke.nl/](https://marijnhaverbeke.nl/)) of CodeMirror and Tern fame.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Notion looks great, and I've been hoping to migrate it. There are two big problems.

One is the migration path from Evernote. If you look at all the current notetaking apps, none of them seem to have capitalized on the fact that there are lots of unhappy Evernote users out there who would kill for a smooth, painless migration path. Instead, these apps ask you to export your Evernote notes as HTML, something which Evernote only lets you do for a single notebook at a time. I have lots of individual notebooks, so this would take forever. Plus, you lose folders and images this way. Why not just write a small app that scrapes the whole Evernote database? Last I checked, it's an SQLite database!

The other is the lack of offline search. This isn't a dealbreaker, but it seems pretty suspect for an app like this. Losing cell service completely is one thing, but shouldn't it be "offline indexing first" anyway? Obviously it has all my notes synced at all times. I want the search to be lightning fast even if I'm on a slow connection.

It seems like "attachments" (files like PDFs, and also images) are not stored offline, either. In the iOS app, clicking on a file or image brings up an S3 URL inside an embedded web browser.

<comment><USER41> The database is evernotes internal structure, and can change. The HTML at least is their official export and somewhat stable. I bet when you search on github you will find some scripts converting the database into html. But for a company it might be to much hassle to maintain such a tool.

<comment><USER40> This should be the bread and butter of a company like this, no matter how much hassle the technical implementation details are. In today's world, getting people to bootstrap a completely new app with content is a very hard ask. Want customers? Have great onboarding.

<comment><USER41> A company has always thousands of imporant tasks which they should do. But ressources are limited, so most of them simply can't be done. This task here is nice on paper, but in reality just a minimal enhancement over the existing solution.

<comment><USER40> Not if you have dozens of notebooks and hundreds or even thousands of notes containing images and attachments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I'm happy to see more people are realizing Filemaker is a great product.

<comment><USER43> Yes unfortunately it is not being more widely used.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Notion is just awesome and I have been using it for 6 months now. It's the only app I have used so far that feels like a text editor and despite covering so many use-cases, excels at each of them and outdoes individual apps made for that specific purpose.

Tools I have replaced with Notion:

\- Todos & Planning: Evernote, Workflowy, Text Files.

\- Notes: Google Keep, Text Files.

\- Work Wiki: MediaWiki.

\- Collaboration/Project Management: Confluence, Trello, Asana.

I also use it for pros and cons lists, inspirations and moodboards for design and so on.

One thing that would be quite helpful in Notion is to have some sort of "marketplace" where users can share pre-made templates. I am not sure if they have an API for extensions yet, but that would be awesome.

<comment><USER45> What about the jittery performance?

<comment><USER44> I haven't really experienced that but if I had, that would make me quit on the product. I use it on my MacBook and Hackintosh Desktop, and perhaps there's lag on other platforms but I haven't used them.

<comment><USER45> In this case, you _don 't_ want to downgrade.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> It's great to see Notion get continued exposure. I feel it truly is a great step towards productivity online.

I made a list earlier (using Notion) of some next-get productivity platforms that caught my eye if anyone is interested:

[https://www.notion.so/Next-gen-Productivity-Platform- Researc...](https://www.notion.so/Next-gen-Productivity-Platform- Research-6ba8df8c007c4e2881957270c3a815b2)

It includes both these all-in-one type of tools along with nice project management and spreadsheet/db tools like airtable.

<comment><USER47> You might wanna add codeBeamer from [http://www.Intland.com](http://www.Intland.com) to your list. This one can be self hosted and probably has the largest capabilities of any of the mentioned tools. It's web based and has a good UI that you can get familiar with in 10 minutes while easy to configure and administrate. Think: Agile team planning + Project Management + Dashboard + Wiki + Documents Management + Requirements Engineering + Workflow Engine + Database

<comment><USER48> And you'll only need to spend five figures to use it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> +1 for having a native linux client. I'm not sure what the process would be, but being electron based I can't imagine it being extremely hard. Right now I'm using [https://github.com/sysdrum/notion- app](https://github.com/sysdrum/notion-app) to basically wrap a browser instance. But there's a very noticeable performance difference between this hacky solution and my friends native electron client on MacOS. Especially on my heavier pages with lots of photos. Notion has completely changed my life and workflow, but I feel like I'm starting to run up against the limits of what I can do on the operating system I'm on. I even considered reaching out to CodeWeavers the makers of Crossover to see what it would take to make a linux port, but it seems like I actually have to be the owner of the app being ported for that to be an option.

<comment><USER50> I'm curious, why don't you use a 'normal' browser? I use Notion quite heavily myself, and have never had any performance issues in Firefox (on Linux).

<comment><USER49> I haven't tried it in firefox, I'll definitely give it a look. Using it in chrome however, the performance feels the same as the hacky electron wrapped version. I notice it the most when switching between two heavy pages or trying to get to the bottom of a page I have 50+ pictures saved to. But it's useful for me to still have it register as a separate application in case I ever need to kill chrome for some reason. Or for organizing it across my different desktops.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> We use it to keep track of all Of our tasks and projects. Switched to it after getting annoyed with Asana and not wanting to use something like Jira. We love how freeform it is and allowed us to create a workflow that fit us.

There are some gripes I have with it, notifications are still hit or miss despite talking to support about it multiple times - they'll be delayed or missed altogether if you've recently opened the iOS app or have the desktop app open on another computer. Search still needs some love. It should probably weigh recently opened pages higher. And I'd love it if the Mac app was native instead of electron based.

Their team is pretty responsive when messaging them so that's a huge plus.

<comment><USER52> We use Asana at work. What annoyances did you have with Asana that are solved with Notion?

<comment><USER51> \- tasks getting lost easily (still somewhat of an issue with notion but custom database views sorted by due date solves)

\- not showing today on top like it used to, unwilling to change or add an option (same as above, database views are awesome)

\- forcing us into a flow that didn't really fit the way we worked (notion lets us have a completely custom flow)

\- no good way to have documentation stored in

\- limited ability to document tasks, like images inline with the description, code blocks, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> After downloading the mac app and signing up with google I got an email from google saying

Security Alert: New device signed in to email@example.com

This is a concern. How are they doing the signup that google is not recognising my computer? When signing up as there is no redirect to a google sign in page, for all I know they have just created a fake google sign in page and stolen my credentials.

</comment><comment><USER54> I'm concerned about the privacy of this service. Do company employees have (or are able to get) access to users' private data? Is there any data mining in use?

<comment><USER55> They use FullStory, which probably means all employees can see your data if they wanted to. There's no option to remove it, as far as I can tell.

<comment><USER56> You can use an ad blocker to block FS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> In case anyone is interested in a similar open source solution that can be self hosted I can recommend Trilium ([https://github.com/zadam/trilium](https://github.com/zadam/trilium)). It was also recently featured on HN. I since host it on my private server and it works like a charm.

</comment><comment><USER58> I've started using notion as a kind of personal wiki a few months ago, and I really like it for that. Breaking the distinction between files and folders is one of the ways it's way easier for me to navigate/structure than it is in google docs.

My only issue with Notion is that I feel it's hard to get stuff out of it, especially on mobile. I sometimes type draft documents with it that I really don't want to share as notion links, and I haven't figured out how to export them on a phone - I usually have to go to my computer and export the markdown/process it then share...

</comment><comment><USER59> I think Notion tries to do too much (a database? really?) and because of that it's not _great_ at any. Yes, at the end of it you can end up with pretty looking pages but the process is not fun. For example, you _can_ use Notion as Trello, but it always feels like fitting a square peg in a round hole. (a path which Slite and Quip also took)

Apps like Bear on the other hand, don't try be a smarter paper and end up being great at their limited use case.

Maybe, for enterprise customers it has some value, but as a personal user I didn't find much utility in it.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I am wondering if this is just the thing for our workplace - it is remarkable how spot on their value proposition is. It is not every feature from every service - but they seem to deliver very well on core functionality. And I must say that their landing page is one of the better I have seen for a SaaS.

I posted this in hopes of people posting stories and discussions about their experiences and thoughts about the product - which you very well delivered, thanks.

<comment><USER60> This was my impression of their landing page as well. One of the few that made me go 'I want this' right when reading it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Pro tip: copied text from Notion is pasted as Markdown in your text editor.

</comment><comment><USER62> This seems like a mash-up of Air Table and Quip. I'm curious to see how the functionality compares for day-to-day tasks.

<comment><USER63> And Coda.io

<comment><USER64> I just started using Coda.io now and I already think it's amazing. It's like Excel in Word (Or Javascript in HTML) with superpowers and it's very usable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I too am a big Notion fan. However, I have a ton of things I would improve, two of which I kinda solved already: drawing input [0] and inline math [1]. The success of these has led me to create a small slack group to discuss other such hacks, more info at [2].

[0]: [https://www.notion.so/evertheylen/Notation-e7a4f861a5ed4d14a...](https://www.notion.so/evertheylen/Notation-e7a4f861a5ed4d14a767326062f80e89) [1]: [https://www.notion.so/evertheylen/Notion-Inline- Math-9c5047a...](https://www.notion.so/evertheylen/Notion-Inline- Math-9c5047a4e7c84643848b3630db8d5a5e) [2]: [https://www.notion.so/notionhacks/Notion- Hacks-27b92f71afcd4...](https://www.notion.so/notionhacks/Notion- Hacks-27b92f71afcd4ae2ac9a4d14fef0ce47)

</comment><comment><USER65> Not gonna lie. That knowledge base with the collapsible menu looks like a very useful feature. Especially with integrated search. Will definitely give it a try. As far as self hosting goes. If there is a feature to export to text, csv or md. One could use the app to edit. Then archive and serve a read only copy locally.

</comment><comment><USER66> Nothing to say but it's a fantastic product - if the team behind notion is reading this.. keep up the great work!

</comment><comment><USER67> We're are developing an open source offering in this space: [https://budibase.com](https://budibase.com) . Planning to have an MVP in the summer - at which stage we will also make the source public.

We are more focussed around a tool for building SaaS products, fast. However, we are planning to build a Notion-like app using BudiBase, for management of the project & business.

Sign up for updates if you're interested!

Website is a bit vague on detail right now... a few features:

\- Design your own data model: create typed fields, data validation rules, object relationships, indexing & scaling options

\- HTTP Api for all CRUD operations, based on your data model

\- User Management & User Role definitions

\- Generated UI, with the ability to drop in your own UI wherever suits

\- Fully pluginable backend, for integrations

\- Output is a Single Page Web application, with an HTTP Api & data storage. Web app will be mobile ready (PWA).

<comment><USER68> Looks awesome. When will it be ready? Is it a LCDP?

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Having switched from Evernote about 6 months ago, here are some of the biggest positives and negatives to me -

Biggest positive: The variety of formats & integrations. I use "toggles" and tables a ton. This was the main reason I switched and it's enough of a differentiator to keep me around.

Biggest negative: Notion doesn't handle a large volume of notes well. There is no easily accessible metadata, no tagging, no way to see a table of notes sorted by create date as far as I can tell.

Other observations:

It's terrifyingly easy to delete a note and not realize it. Notes show up as a line item in their parent note; a simple press of the delete button and a note is gone with no warning

Sharing is also a little funny. Shared notes show up in a separate workspace and are easy to forget about.

Also, no offline support at all... if you aren't connected, you can't do anything on the desktop or iOS app.

</comment><comment><USER70> This seems like a great tool. What's the security model for this? I get that it's offline first with sync capabilities, but is notion hosting any of this content to facilitate syncing and if so is it encryped etc? Is there an easy way to export all of my content?

<comment><USER70> On that note, regardless of what the actual answer is here, insight is sorely missing on the brochureware. Conversely, quip.io has an in-depth whitepaper @ [https://quip-cdn.com/iR2bxQSxnJmpXi8KbaQ-XQ](https://quip- cdn.com/iR2bxQSxnJmpXi8KbaQ-XQ) which is linked to from their global page footer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> Like Notion a lot and we looked at a number of the modern wiki tools (cloud based).

vs Confluence it is much faster. We did end up with Confluence, but that wasn't my first choice.

vs Samepage it just felt a lot more modern. That might be harsh, but we only had a limited time to eval all the options.

vs Quip, well, it's Salesforce. The sales was spammy and you just know how hard the sale will be if you've ever used the core SF products.

Best OS with a combo of Bookstackapp and a ticket system that I forget the name of now. No integration between the two, and no support.

The reason it lost in the end was it was the only one that didn't have draw.io integrated and we do a lot of diagramming. But, as I say, really nice and I would have preferred it to Confluence.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, a draw.io integration would have been great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> I wish they had an API to integrate with.

<comment><USER73> They do! It's just in beta.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> I use Notion for my personal productivity, and I highly recommend it. It's one of the few personal tools I'm happy to pay for. It many ways it's a personal wiki, and it is incredibly easy to use.

Notion has made it much easier to keep track of and refer back to my old notes. For example, I used to draft emails in an unorganized OneNote notebook. If I needed to find an old draft, I'd have to use search and hope that I remembered the right keywords. With Notion, I make all of my email drafts a subpage of an email page, which makes them much easier to find.

</comment><comment><USER75> The amount of times note taking apps and products appear on the HN front page is quite amusing. Has anyone ever cracked this nut?

I've been using Joplin for about a year, it works. Could be better, but does the job

<comment><USER76> I think the problem is that it isn't a single nut to crack - everyone works slightly differently, some like a clean interface, others like all the info laid for them.

With Notes and tasks, it is quite personal, so any issues in the interface are seen as worse, eg we are more likely to accept a slightly shitty interface when paying a bill or logging on to a corporate system than a product we use daily.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> I made a Python API wrapper in case annoying would find it useful: [https://learningequality.org/r/notion-py-an-unofficial- pytho...](https://learningequality.org/r/notion-py-an-unofficial-python-api- wrapper-for-notion-so)

It has full read/write support for Notion data, with a local data store that live-updates async when data changes on Notion, including callbacks. And you can manipulate database entries using classes with columns mapped to slugified attributes.

</comment><comment><USER11> Glad to see this here, it's a very well-built product that finds the perfect balance between strict JIRA/PM tools and completely unstructured wikis/text files.

Everything is a "block" and blocks can be nested and attached together to create pages/subpages, tables, kanban boards, calendars, etc. It's a very nice way of working and everything loads fast. The sharing links are nice too.

Only feedback would be fixing some UI issues that can be a little too sensitive, with an errant keypress or misclick changing everything.

</comment><comment><USER78> I've tried Notion (I've tried most PIMs since 2003) but it didn't fit my brain / what I wanted to do with it. Not enough structure yet too constraining.

The closest I've found is Workflowy, but it's just that bit too basic.

I store all web clippings in Evernote and hope to find what I want one day.

I bookmark heavily into an online service, and wish my tag vocabulary was better constrained (but full text search helps).

And finally I mind map on paper; none of the digital ones have quite cut it.

One day there will be a PIM to rule them all. One day.

<comment><USER20> I'm in the same boat. I have a vision in mind for how a perfect PIM could look like: a mind-map like structure to organize everything. A pintrest-like UI to list all "cards"/"pages".

I'd love to create an ipad app with pencil support to just draw the mind-map and allow unlimited nested depth.

zenkit.com tries to combine a table/kanban/mind-map visualization, but it's not quite what I want.

It seems like we are all on a quest for a Holy Grail.

<comment><USER78> I'm a visual person, also dyslexic. I think in terms of relations between items. I also find nested lists helpful for something more 'ordered'.

The Kanban-style board a lot of people love does nothing for me unless using it for pure, strict Kanban. Sorting mixed stuff into 3-4 columns doesn't help, unless ensuring I am always progressing through those tasks. It loses the relationships between items which I see.

I plan to draw/write up my ideas this year. If you permit I'll keep in contact with you via email.

<comment><USER78> Thinking further, what I'd like is something like fractals. You can keep zooming in on your information down to the details - but also out to an overview.

Nope, no idea how that would work, other than when I'm mind mapping I would have it work like Workflowy, where you can focus on each node in turn -- so you can zoom down to a node, and have an entire mindmap off there. Zoom to one of its nodes and be in another mind map.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> As a product manager I have to say the UI is great. Simple, clean, easy to navigate. If only Enterprise apps could be made to look this good (yes its possible but usually politics get in the way).

On Android also works smoothly even on my low capacity line at home.

Security aspects raised by others is a concern - there is enough secure storage solutions out there it should be high on the roadmap to address that so there is encryption at rest (and at REST :-D ) . Data should only be accesible to team or public. Nobody else, ever.

My 2c.

</comment><comment><USER80> One more todo and notes app. Why does the world need so many such apps? I always find myself changing from one such app to another, porting all the existing notes. Currently I'm using onenote and am very content with it. But there's always this feeling that something's not quite right. I tried evernote, onenote, and several other notes apps. I don't understand why I try so many note taking apps. I think others too feel the same way. Any ideas why?

<comment><USER81> I had the same feeling for as long as I can remember: just when I thought I was content with some apps, I find a new one on Product Hunt or Hacker News that promise something that I don't know I want but after some thought think I need esp. for note taking/organization/productivity combo apps.

Still coping with it with a better clue as to how to deal with it.

The antidote for me is to figure out this (with the help of pen and paper): a list of what are the absolute basic needs I want out of productivity apps. For example, I tried to find the best tools for my personal knowledge management. My criteria (or deal breaker): cross device (iOS and MacOS); easy to export and share in common formats to others; no need for collaboration features; I can throw in any file without worrying that I need to import or convert format. Upon examining the list, I figured out that I want a tool that's more like a file management system with full text search ability.

A bigger and prior than "basic needs for productivity tools" question that took me some time to figure out last year between October and November is what my workflows are, what kind of communication I need between different apps. For example, I need a central tool to search all my files (preferably full text) in a project, yet I need editing features in specific apps (Photoshop, Mindnode, Numbers).

Last point is to be content. I was on a constant quest for finding the holy grail of all-in-one app to no avail (I experimented with Notion on and off for almost a year but ultimately decided that it's not for me). And when I look back, my real need disguised as "finding the perfect tool" is actually to master the knowledge that I picked up from life and work, and the best way is really just to routinely index, review and edit my knowledge scattered around in the files (adding and deleting) and write reviews of what I learned whenever possible.

P.S. I grow more skeptical of tools that need internet connection to function (i.e., beyond syncing) because: can't cope with my need to take down notes fast (therefore I went with Drafts for times like this); files cannot be loaded in places where internet connections are not great (surprisingly a lot of places when you're on the road a lot); you can't control which features they add or take down (for their own reasons).

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> Hello HN, first time long time here.

I use Notion.so personally and professionally and must say its totally changed my game. Notion.so feels like a personal digi Marie Kondo.

</comment><comment><USER83> What Slack did for chat and GitHub did for source control, Notion does for keeping information organised.

My prediction: In five years time, most of us will be using Notion.

</comment><comment><USER84> Is a Linux desktop app planned? It's only available on windows / Mac OS.

<comment><USER85> It seems like they're coming around to the idea: [https://twitter.com/NotionHQ/status/1080230116641300481](https://twitter.com/NotionHQ/status/1080230116641300481)

<comment><USER86> Is their web version limited in any way compared to desktop apps for MacOS / Windows?

<comment><USER85> You can't alt+tab to it and offline support isn't there. Not sure if there are any global keyboard shortcuts for quick/easy note capture, but if so, those wouldn't work in the web app either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> If they added mind map as a progression, that would be the perfect tool. I really need a hybrid text editor/ list editor / mind map

<comment><USER88> Let us know when you find the perfect tool.

<comment><USER41> Whenever the perfect tool manifests, another demand appears to make it unperfect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER89> Notion is great in features, but it is just so slow and I find the editor hard to work with. Text doesn't flow nicely and it is clumsy to navigate between blocks. Some blocks are editable, some are stuck, etc. It is pretty hard. The speed gets me the most though. Maybe the website is actually better than the electron app, I always use the electron app.

<comment><USER90> Block navigation is definitely clumsy (maddeningly so), but I haven't had any issues with it being slow. Are you working with a lot of data on a single page?

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> Notion looks polished, the mobile app on the other hand is clunky, simple tasks like adding a member to a worspace is a hard task and if you don't close the android app completely it wont always update.

Like many others id like a version I could host myself locally, id happy pay for a licence to do so, and no id not expect any support at all. granted i'd expect yearly or monthly licences that had user limits, 10,50,100,enterprise.

Sadly i suspect that the reason there is no own-hosted version, be it paid or free open source is the fact that notion has been built around services like AWS/DO/RS for scalability and was never designed to be able to run in a single container and use a local datastore be it a MongoDB or (Ms/My)SQL(lite) database.

I may consider paying but not knowing where my data is stored, in what country, if it is encrypted or not or truly who has access is always an issue for me, as I'm sure it is for others.

Still a great service well worth checking out.

</comment><comment><USER92> This whole all-in-one thing has near-zero appeal to me :/

I have an urge to willfully resist entering monopoly scenarios. I prefer the ability to evolve process through a non-linear opportunity space (though I of course want to insulate the majority of others in my communities from being forced to grapple with that full infinite opportunity space :)

</comment><comment><USER93> I am in the process of moving my digital life to Notion. This includes my huge collection of bookmarks, 40+ browser tabs, dozen or so text files and content of some spreadsheets.

Here's my work in progress: [https://imgur.com/a/LKY7RlP](https://imgur.com/a/LKY7RlP)

</comment><comment><USER94> Does anyone use this with their spouse / significant other? Seems like a great tool to have shared docs, lists, todos, etc. I'm thinking things like house and car maintenance, financial planning, shopping lists, and all the other things that I normally keep in a combination of Google Docs and Apple Notes.

<comment><USER95> yes! we did start using it and loved it, until we realized needing to pay $20/month for it -- which was a bit out of our current budget.

<comment><USER96> I pay for one personal account and then just share a page with my spouse and then she can put anything she wants in it, including creating subpages. It works great for us.

<comment><USER97> A proper family plan would be nice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER98> We use them in lieu of JIRA. Overall I like the product!

I wish they had ticket numbers (I like to put ticket numbers in TODOs in the code for more context; I think it leads to more TODOs being done). I had to hack them in using timestamps and hashes.

The ability to see tickets assigned to you (and not in closed status) would be useful too

<comment><USER99> A friend of mine said, Confluence is much better than JIRA.

I started using Trello.

</comment></comment><comment><USER100> Only partly on topic, but I wish there was a Confluence/Notion-inspired knowledge management software that's embedded in Git, like git-bug: [https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug](https://github.com/MichaelMure/git- bug)

</comment><comment><USER41> Looks like a sleek and powerful interface, but at end seems to be just another kitchensink for manual input. No scripting or other automation and service-API is still in work.

Im always a bit surprised that programmer invest such an amount of time into recreating the same software again and again. Notes&Task-Manager are all more or less the same, and most of them are not something which a programmer really should use. Those people are handling code and data for other people as natural as a cook his knife. And yet when it comes to their own data they always go for the stale and static, the dumb solution which can is so different from their normal self. Why is that?

</comment><comment><USER101> How well does this handle large file attachments? One of the problems one of my teams has is that they regularly need to trade and update files that most collaboration tools can't handle (Several hundred megs to 1GB).

</comment><comment><USER102> Been a paid user for a while. I love all the UI elements, markdown support, cross-platform compatibility etc. I have used Evernote, Simple Note and Boostnote previously.

Some problems however:

Desktop app takes a while to load. I understand it's electron, but so are Slack and VSCode. I am ready to keep it open on Mac. But on pressing Cmd+W, it closes the app, though not quit. Re-opening from that state is still slow. No other electron apps do that.

Offline experience on mobile isn't good. When I am in subway and want to jot down something quickly, it searches for internet for a while before allowing me to do anything

<comment><USER86> Have they added tags support? Last time I checked there were no tags in Notion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER103> A great deal of comments here want self-hosted capability, understandably given the HN crowd. But really, Notion is (probably) not in a position to do that, given their code being proprietary from Day 1.

I run PageDash [1], a personal web archive service, and that is also the No. 1 ask. While I can understand it, for any startup to focus on self-hosting from Day 1 is probably a shot in the foot, unless I have an open-source model from Day 1.

Just a cautionary note.

[1] [https://www.pagedash.com](https://www.pagedash.com)

</comment><comment><USER104> Why is anyone using this? From reading the comments:

>Requires Google contacts to be shared to sign up

>Can't export my data

>Extremely slow on mobile (iPhone)

>Updates stalled, seems abandoned

>No Linux electron app

And I'm only half way through the comments.

</comment><comment><USER105> I've been using Notion for a couple of years now and it has consistently gotten better, faster, more useable, and more exciting.

I cannot recommend this product and the team behind it enough.

</comment><comment><USER106> I really, really want something like this as a desktop, fully native app, for personal use, and maybe with Groove-like peer to peer sync for small, closed groups.

<comment><USER107> > Groove-like peer to peer sync

This guy gets it.

Groove is one of my favorite examples of the damage done by Microsoft in the 90's. That product would STILL be useful today, 20 years later. I still wonder: Did Ozzie make the product _just_ to get acquihired?

Is there _anything_ that does this out there? EDIT: Now that I think about it, maybe OneNote does this in the background.

<comment><USER106> OneNote is fully webservice based these days, and tied to OneDrive/SharePoint.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER108> I would love to use a product like Notion, but I cannot leave my vim/Emacs keybindings behind!

Would be cool if they had the ability to import / export structured text.

<comment><USER109> [https://github.com/tmc/notion/tree/master/cmd](https://github.com/tmc/notion/tree/master/cmd) I wrote some tools to use notion from vim.

</comment></comment><comment><USER110> See a nice comparison here: [https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fabiospampinato/notable/ma...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fabiospampinato/notable/master/resources/comparison/table.png)

from [https://github.com/fabiospampinato/notable](https://github.com/fabiospampinato/notable)

</comment><comment><USER111> I love this.

Slightly OT, but does anyone have some links to open source apps / tutorials from creating pages that are fairly free form like this? I'm a backend kind of entity, so the front end is a mystery.

Edit: I'm not asking in an "I'm going to make my own" kind of way. I'm asking in an "I've always been curious how other devs solve problems / create things" kind of way.

<comment><USER112> Do you mean like the notion service? I'm not a notion user, but from the description here, it sounds a lot like Google wave with less hype and more "product focus"...

Wave is now dead(?) and Free:

[http://incubator.apache.org/projects/wave.html](http://incubator.apache.org/projects/wave.html)

[https://github.com/apache/incubator- wave](https://github.com/apache/incubator-wave)

</comment></comment><comment> crooked-v I've pretty much immediately fallen in love with this service. For me, the killer feature is that the 'share' functionality lets me share a public link to that page and subpages with no personal info included, so it can double as a pastebin/Dropbox-share replacement.

If they just had a way to associate shared pages with a custom domain, this could be a Medium replacement too.

</comment><comment><USER113> This is really, really awesome and has the crucial features I require out of a notes app, including pasting images from the system clipboard and a deep hierarchy of pages/folders.

Sadly, I just poured hours of time into putting all my stuff from OneNote into a self-hosted instance of BookStack. However, I like the looks of Notion so much, I am probably going to have to move again!

</comment><comment><USER114> Not sure how this product (if it's new) isn't running afoul on Presonus' trademarks for "Notion".

[https://www.presonus.com/products/Notion](https://www.presonus.com/products/Notion)

Presonus' product is for music but it is a software product, it is trademarked, and it is older than this one AFAICT.

<comment><USER115> Trademarks only protect against competition in the same category, or where consumer confusion is possible. They may both be "software products" (what isn't, these days?), but these products seem sufficiently removed from each other -- one a music authoring tool, the other a notes and project collaboration tool -- that I don't think trademark protection would apply.

</comment></comment><comment><USER116> Notion is my favorite app of 2018. It's seriously a game changer for my personal organization and how my team communicates.

</comment><comment><USER117> Does someone who uses Notion has a working pipeline to automatically import notes from Kindle Highligths?

</comment><comment><USER118> These "I will organize all your world" apps pop up at a non-trivial rate. Seems like they're mostly designing some database tables and then serving a front-end. Am I missing something? Is there something deeper than database design that I'm missing?

<comment><USER119> No. But I wouldn't dismiss them on the basis of being trivial to implement. The added value is in the UX.

</comment></comment><comment><USER109> Some cli tools here: [https://github.com/tmc/notion/tree/master/cmd](https://github.com/tmc/notion/tree/master/cmd)

I use these plus some vim recordings to do bidi synchronization of buffers

</comment><comment><USER120> We've been using Notion for a year or two now (a lot of people didn't like Confluence) and it's been working pretty well.

I particularly like how they construct URLs for documents; it always keep its ID regardless of title changes, but it also shows the title in the URL.

</comment><comment><USER121> I've been using Notion for quite some time now. It's pretty neat although I wish it was (a) faster and (b) had a better writing experience. I find Dropbox Paper to offer the best writing experience but Notion is unbelievably flexible, so I use it instead.

</comment><comment><USER122> There is an small bug that I found when trying to signup. The signup form doesn't allow signing up with .co domains [1].

[1] [https://i.imgur.com/NDcd6X1.png](https://i.imgur.com/NDcd6X1.png)

<comment><USER2> I've reported your issue to Notion.

In the past, they've been quite responsive about bugs (and even feature requests).

</comment></comment><comment><USER123> Notion feels like SVN. The implementation that is workable and delivers enough value to tolerate, but isn't quite there.

Somebody please take what they've done, fix the annoyances, and turn it into Git.

A single central source of truth is long long overdue

</comment><comment><USER124> I wish I could import stuff from Evernote into Notion. Just copying and pasting would be amazing. If I could copy and paste checklists (or maybe even just copy a list and turn multiple items into checklist items at once).

<comment><USER2> It's not a perfect import but they do have it: [https://www.notion.so/Importing- Guides-18c37b470e8941789548b...](https://www.notion.so/Importing- Guides-18c37b470e8941789548b68049af750b)

</comment></comment><comment><USER125> Does it allow exporting data to human readable form like csv? I am very wary of exposing myself to the risk of losing all this information and history if the company goes under or if I want to change to something else.

<comment><USER109> [https://github.com/tmc/notion/tree/master/cmd](https://github.com/tmc/notion/tree/master/cmd) Has some tools

</comment></comment><comment><USER126> Can anyone compare this to Dynalist? I've been experimenting with Dynalist as more of an information / brain dump tracker. A notepad, for people who can't write -_-. Yet, I'm not super happy with Dynalist.

Thoughts?

<comment><USER127> It depends on what makes you "not super happy", but as someone who uses Dynalist all the time for everything, I must say the only reason I haven't switched to Notion is that their free plan has a hard limit of 1000 "blocks" (vs. unlimited in Dynalist). I actually haven't used it that much, but Dynalist doesn't have many features so it's easy to compare them and come to a conclusion.

From what I've seen, there are only two things I still prefer Dynalist for: Zooming into nodes (minor issue, since in Notion you can quickly turn a node into a page and "zoom into" it) and contextual search (major one, global search is a real pain if you have lots of data - but you can still make up for it by being more organized than I am).

As for everything else, Notion is a clear winner to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER128> This is one of those products that I feel I should've come across earlier.

</comment><comment><USER129> I really like the make and structure of the notion, but lack of encryption beyond tls is a deal breaker to me. Also, their developer has no intention to implement encryption whatsoever, just like the Evernote.

</comment><comment><USER130> If somebody could develop some products like this that either create or extend open standards so we have the freedom to use any client or service provider we want, I'd throw my money at them so fast.

</comment><comment><USER131> 400 comments and now one mentions the missing web clipper feature, which is a deal breaker for me.

I guess that answers the question why this feature has been 'in development' for close to 2 years now.

</comment><comment><USER132> Unfortunately due to privacy concerns we have issues using this - I would be very interested if they offered a self-hosted option. Notion looks great and I might try it out for side projects.

</comment><comment><USER133> The product looks really really nice. Wish it had better accessibility, though - from what I can tell, everything is a div :/

No links, buttons, or anything (that I saw in my 5 min of checking it out).

</comment><comment><USER134> Oh, I love this. I'm especially fond of how well the keyboard integration works!

I JUST got my cofounder to regularly use Trello, though, so I'm not going to make him switch to this. Not yet.

</comment><comment><USER135> We use this for our companies sprints and it's been working out pretty well for the last few months. Give's us a LOT of flexibility in the way we want to do things.

</comment><comment><USER136> I've been working on a similar project more suited to my own tastes. It's free and online and in-progress. jumproot.com.

Sure, it's self-promotion, but highly pertinent.

<comment><USER137> While your project seems nice, at this point in time there is little overlap with the concepts found in notion.

Did you publish a roadmap, that would allow us to differentiate it from something more like evernote?

<comment><USER136> Respectfully, I disagree. Notion and jumproot both have the philosophy of an arbitrary node structure used for composition. I prefer my ui, that's why I'm working on it.

Thanks for your feedback though.

No I haven't published a roadmap. I don't liken jumproot to evernote much.

To illustrate my point, see the Viewer node types in the demo. You can see that it allows composition of documents using the node structure. Was super handy in university.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER138> I've been using Notion on and off for the past year, and have to say it's exceptionally well made and thought-out. If you haven't yet, give it a try.

</comment><comment><USER139> Really satisfied (free) user that will likely pay the monthly fee at some point.

It's friction-less, but with some rules/ideas in place to help you.

Well done Notion team, 100% satisfied

</comment><comment><USER140> Looks clean.

Would love to try some time but can't imagine porting all my notes (and knowledge base) from Evernote that I've accumulated over the years. Too exhaustive.

</comment><comment><USER141> Lotus Notes was not dead, it just got reinvented as Notion.

</comment><comment><USER142> Sorry, how is this different from Quip? Looks exactly same?

</comment><comment><USER143> Eh...this is nice, I really like it, but it's just solving the same problems that some of the things it offers to replace were solving. Call it Lessware.

</comment><comment><USER144> I use Notion for everything now - work and personal. The blocks are super smart.

I crowdsourced a bunch of workflows and product suggestions on Twitter: [https://twitter.com/TZhongg/status/1067234359915163648](https://twitter.com/TZhongg/status/1067234359915163648)

all I do is talk about Notion with my friends tbh. if anyone wants free $10 credit, here ya go: [https://www.notion.so/?r=02c3100209a54c48b22e19771ba4c916](https://www.notion.so/?r=02c3100209a54c48b22e19771ba4c916)

<comment><USER145> I expect posting a referral link on Hacker News to be frowned upon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER146> Gorgeous UI - whiffs of web brutalism, though not so "purposefully ugly" as sometimes that can get. Appears very functional without any cruft.

</comment><comment><USER147> Notion is synonym of inkling, Matt Macinnis invested, and it has drag and drop composition... I wonder if some people from Inkling are working on this.

</comment><comment><USER148> Why use anything that's not end to end encrypted this day? Why share you data with a server that has no actual reason to have your data in plain?

</comment><comment><USER149> What sets this apart from incumbents like Basecamp?

<comment><USER150> I haven't used either one in some time, but I would reframe the question: what makes you think this is similar to Basecamp?

If you're familiar at all with Basecamp, 10 seconds on the page makes it clear how different it is. If you're not, I guess I don't understand why the question is asked.

<comment><USER151> I'm wondering too, I mean the interface is obviously completely different but it solves the same problems. Why is whatever this interface is better since I already enjoy basecamp? Edit: Also highly enjoy basecamp's pricing.

<comment><USER150> Does the linked page not answer this? That's what I'm confused about I guess.

In a nutshell, the biggest philosophical difference between the two is that Notion is "free form" while Basecamp has a sort of built-in workflow.

(Take this with a grain of salt, I haven't used Basecamp since shortly after they rolled out the new interface and it was much more limited then than it is now. And I've only briefly used Notion.)

Notion is sort of a wiki, with built in to-dos and spreadsheets. You can build your own workflow or adapt an existing template to how you work.

<comment><USER151> The page needs to answer why freeform is better. Basically, explain benefits to the user not features.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER152> Tangent: How fine is it to build a business with a Somalian/International TLD? Could a rug be pulled underneath you?

</comment><comment><USER153> I'm using iOS default Notes and Things 3. Why should I migrate all my notes and tasks here and pay to sync?

It can't even cache online

</comment><comment><USER154> Alright...this looks great.

One question though, if it's electron based why in the world isn't there a Linux Desktop client?

</comment><comment><USER155> Best app in the game. Since we started using Notion we've documented any important procedure just because it's fun

</comment><comment><USER135> My only hope for Notion is that the Calendar gets updated so we can view different pages into one calendar view.

</comment><comment><USER156> So how does Notion make money? By mining your tasks/knowledge base articles? Analytics? Serving ads?

<comment><USER157> [https://www.notion.so/pricing](https://www.notion.so/pricing)

Basically it's free to start with limited data/upload and then a small ($4) monthly for a personal subscription that is unlimited. Team and Enterprise subscriptions from there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER158> For any existing users, is there a provision to create alarms/due dates attached to your notes?

<comment><USER159> Yes! You can type @Remind and pick a date/time for the reminder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER160> Has anybody compared it with coda.io?

<comment><USER2> I have.

Don't get me wrong: Coda looks like a fantastic product. It also has features that Notion doesn't have, like built-in support for charts inside the document.

If there was no Notion, I would give it a serious try.

But Notion just fits my use case better.

The biggest difference is that Code is like Google docs on steroids: the UI is structured as a collection of separate documents. Which makes perfect sense in an enterprise scenario.

Notion is hierarchical. It's just an infinitely nested collection of pages.

It makes for a different (and for me vastly superior) user experience.

But ultimately both products have free tiers so you should try them both to see which fits your use cases better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER161> Can Notion do infinitely zoomable lists, a la workflowy? As far as I can tell, it cannot.

</comment><comment><USER162> Who is so stupid to give up all contact information to anonymous people over website...

</comment><comment><USER163> This is so well made. I love the concept and the ambition of the idea. Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER164> Check out Dynalist for a more minimal (and slightly different paradigm) offering

</comment><comment><USER165> Got a chance to meet the founder a few weeks ago. He's a really cool guy.

</comment><comment><USER166> What's with the playboy bunnies as the team avatars on your homepage?

</comment><comment><USER167> Looks nice. Are we getting away from the term "ERP" by the way?

</comment><comment><USER168> I love notion, been using it to collaborate with my friend on a project.

</comment><comment><USER169> looks good as an alternative to my github wiki [https://github.com/hrnn/wiki/wiki](https://github.com/hrnn/wiki/wiki)

</comment><comment><USER170> Overall UI is nice but it takes a lot of time to create a new template.

</comment><comment><USER171> Why would I put my most important data on someone else's computer?

</comment><comment><USER172> Great app. We use notion as a team. Happy to see on HN front page.

</comment><comment><USER110> Can I send emails to notion and it will store them as notes?

</comment><comment><USER173> I had visions of Google Wave watching their screenshots :)

</comment><comment><USER170> I like the app but it is too slow to create new items.

</comment><comment><USER110> What are the advantages over Atlassian Confluence?

</comment><comment><USER110> Does it support math formulas in LaTeX notation?

</comment><comment><USER174> Another electron toy saves the day complete with flat buttons and hamburgers - I wonder how reliable and fast it is?

Is it that hard to make something in QT that doesn't eat up a gig of RAM?

</comment><comment><USER175> So... like Lotus Notes, reinvented/respun?

</comment><comment><USER176> This looks very close to quip.

</comment><comment><USER177> _Terms and Privacy_

 _TLDR: Notion does not own your data, nor do we sell it to others or use it for advertising. It 's your data, period _

</comment><comment><USER178> Looks a lot like OneNote, how this is different?

</comment><comment><USER179> does this work over in china?

</comment><comment><USER180> Somalia?

</comment><comment><USER181> What about privacy? I read through their pages and found nothing. Is it end to end encrypted? I don't want some disgruntled employee to leak my life plans. How is this protected against such event?

</comment><comment><USER182> Looks nice, but I am uneasy putting this kind of information into an opaque platform. Google, Salesforce, a self-hosted wiki...not going anywhere plus options to export and move.

If it were a desktop app with a local sqlite DB then, yes, definitely (for single user). If I could run a network security and host it on my company intranet, absolutely.

</comment><comment><USER183> Stopped reading after I saw emojis splattered EVERYWHERE in the UI.

</comment><comment><USER184> Only 1000 blocks for free

1000 blocks == 1/3 of Moby Dick?

that sounds like a terrible deal compared to evernote and all the other apps this promises to replace

<comment><USER185> > free

> terrible deal

God forbid that anyone ever charge for their software.</comment></comment>


Ashley Madison founder steps down - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/34090372 <comment><USER2> It seems the revelation there are no women on AM is far worse business-wise than the security breach (Maybe not legally). How can you go on as a business if your business model has been exposed as totally fake ?

I would also add, that by extension, there is no reason than competitors like gleeden.com have a different men/women split.

<comment><USER3> I wonder where all the women _are_? I'm fairly sure that the human race as a whole is 50/50 split; but dating sites are 99% men, the tech industry is 90% men, when I take public transport it's 75% men, pubs are 80% men, construction workers I pass on the walk to work are 100% men, etc etc. I can't remember the last time I was in a room which was mostly women; the last time I even got to 50/50 was high school... It's _really_ hard to avoid bias when the bubble that I live in is so skewed :/

<comment><USER4> Here's a real sample of most of the messages women get on dating sites:

hi [that's the whole message]

u r so beautiful [again, the whole message]

hey babe do u want a real man i will treat yuou lik a lady

This represents the _vast majority_ of messages men send on dating sites. And the volume of messages women get is insane. It is a firehose of garbage. Why would anyone volunteer to be on the receiving end of that?

<comment><USER5> I moderated on OKCupid for years, and this is so, so true.

In fact, it usually went more like:

"Heyyy guurllll lemme holla at you"

"Thanks, but no thanks"

"Fine bitch, you ugly anyway"

That, or dick pics. So many dick pics.

<comment><USER6> The first site that can reliably filter this stuff out before it even gets to the target will probably make enough money to form a small black hole. As a moderator, were you just responding to reports from users, or were you preemptively checking into messages, or something else?

<comment><USER7> No, it will cost them money because it's the men spending all the money on subscriptions. If they knew their messages were filtered they'd leave it droves.

<comment><USER6> You're assuming that everything would continue to work as it does now. I'm proposing that if you can filter out the dickheads, you could end up with a site where it's no longer just men signing up. If you're the only site where women actually _want_ to sign up, then you'll get all the men too, and you'll rake in the cash.

Also, you're assuming that the idiot men would even be able to tell. Women mostly ignore their nonsense now, right? So it wouldn't look much different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've gone from viewing the people in the database as maliciously motivated cheating jerks who deserved their outing to complete lame asses I simply feel sorry for. Very few of the women on the database were actually real. They charged for deleting data and never did. Every successive revelation makes the AM users look like chumps and AM employees look like incompetent fools.

I would have thought such a security breach would have taken down the entire business model but nope they're still going. I'm sure a lot more senior staff will have to step down in order to rebrand at some point so they can distance themselves from this disaster.

<comment><USER9> Also keep in mind that the whole affair thing was a branding change done in 2009 so many who signed up before may not have been looking for that. Then you have stories about people who were looking for a discrete relationship and wasn't commuting adultery they just needed to be discrete because of personal reasons (like living in a country that imprisons or executes people who are gay).

Plus anyone can add someone to the service AND there are plenty of people who enjoy the trill of simply looking and not doing anything.

So yeah I don't think it's a slam dunk that they're all "cheating jerks". Though I'm sure plenty are :)

<comment><USER10> > _" anyone can add someone to the service"_

Yes, though it's harder to add someone as a paying member using a card in their name and tied to their address. Based on the stories that have come out, it sounds like there are dates on those payments.

That doesn't necessarily mean everyone was a "cheating jerk", and even if they were, that doesn't necessarily mean a judgmental response is the healthiest response the rest of us can give.

<comment><USER11> Still relatively easy with some prepaid cards that let's you use whatever name and address. Also some billing processors don't even check the address.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder how many new signups they've gotten in the past 2 weeks. Does "any press is good press" apply in this case?

<comment><USER13> That would be the equivalent of people buying more eggs after a salmonella outbreak.

<comment><USER12> One could argue that's the safest time to buy eggs, since recalls will err toward false positives.

<comment><USER14> One could argue that, but I'm not sure what recalled eggs relates to in this analogy?

<comment><USER15> Adulterous... eggs.

<comment><USER16> I suddenly want an omelet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I figured Tinder would be putting these folks out of business anyway. It's like Netflix vs Blockbuster.

The hack and exposures, combined with the revelation most of the accounts are men.. yeah they won't make it another year.

</comment><comment><USER18> Sure he's gone, but he'll have to pay $19 to have his corp email account deleted.

</comment><comment> am-user Throwaway because obvious (BTW, it would be really cool if HN had a way of allowing anonymous posts not linked to your primary account without creating a 1-time account that just clogs up the user table).

I am an Ashley Madison user, although probably not typical in any respect. And yes, my details are in the leak. Me and my wife grew up and married within the mormon church, complete with its absolutely distorted view of human sexuality. After leaving mormonism, we came to realize our sexual maturity had been stunted and wanted to experience new things...we now have a somewhat open marriage. We set a few ground rules because we do love each other and didn't want to break up, but then we set out on our quests to find other partners.

I tried the tinder thing, and that was okay. I tried just going to bars, and that was okay. I came away feeling a little skeezy, despite being completely honest with my wife, because I had to be dishonest with the girls I was meeting...nobody in those situations responds well to "Oh, by the way, I'm married", no matter how clear you are about it being okay with your wife. I also grew tired of hookups and one night stands very quickly. I wanted to meet women that occasionally wanted to meet up, but were okay with the fact that I had a family life and couldn't just run away any time either of us wanted some. Tinder and bars were definitely the wrong target market.

While I was doing this, my wife skipped straight to Ashley Madison. Put up a few pictures, and within seconds she was getting more messages than she could read. Like literally 500+ messages a day. She tried to filter them by stating explicitly on her profile what she was _not_ interested in (specifically, out of shape or over 45yo). It didn't stop them. Most of the messages could be described as follows: Shrivelled or obese old men (my wife is 29 btw) well over 45 (including several senior citizens), accompanied by unsolicited dick pics, and messages about how they could last all night long or whatever. Some men were a lot closer to what she was looking for, but after filtering out all the garbage she didn't feel up to the task of trying to message back. She decided to ignore the messages and try messaging men herself. They either didn't respond, or they messaged back asking if she was a fake profile. She eventually was successful in finding what she wanted, but it was pretty significant effort.

I grew frustrated with the expectations of tinder and bars, and reluctantly decided to try AM. After seeing my wife's experience, I knew I was in for a sausage fest competition, but I also learned quickly what was a turnoff to women and I am pretty attractive myself, so I thought I had a chance. My perspective from the guy's side? For the most part, it is an extremely expensive scam. A single message will cost you $1-2 depending on the points package you bought (women don't pay for anything). If you want a priority message, it costs double that. All you get with a priority message is a guarantee that your message will not be buried in the 500+ message/day inbox of the woman you are trying to message. It can still get buried, but it only gets buried under other priority messages. I had 20+ messages a day from other women (or, more accurately, profiles of women). It was very obvious that most of them were fake, so I didn't bother with the obvious ones. Some of them were less obvious fakes. Some of them were scams to get you to sign up for other sites, or paid "background checks" from women who "just want to be safe". And occasionally, I got messages from actual women, but I never was interested in them.

I did have some success with talking to and meeting actual women. Based on my experience, I would estimate that 1000 is a pretty low estimate for the total number of active women on the site. I would probably ballpark 100-200 in my metro area, at least between 20-40yo. And here's another surprise...about half of them were single. In fact, all of the women I ended up meeting in person were single. But yes, it was quite obvious that the vast majority were completely fake.

I actually feel like I enjoyed my AM experience, but can totally understand why you wouldn't if you aren't comparatively young and attractive. For them, I guess you could blame it on AM being a scam site as much as you could blame it on having inflated expectations of what you could get out of it. I mean, if you are 50+, overweight, and have no clue how to talk to women, of course you aren't going to land a date with a 20yo hotbody. And yet it happened...thousands of men threw away their money in an attempt to hook up with my wife. I'd estimate AM made at least $5000 from my wife alone, in the two months she was active on it.

And then there is the leak problem. I wasn't worried about my wife finding out, and I'm not worried about divorce...but I am worried about my extended family finding my email address, because they are all super judgmental mormons (albeit with naive kind hearts). I have had to come up with a cover story with my wife if they approached her about it. My life won't end if they find out...it just will just become a lot more tense with my extended family. I also now have to worry about moral crusaders in background checks and other situations...I get the opportunity to tell people my situation is different while they smile, nod, and judge me as a sleazy cheater. That sucks. Add to that the fact that we couldn't delete our profiles without paying a ransom, and it totally sucks. And while the majority of the active users were likely men trying to cheat on their wives, there were tons of people just like me, as well as other situations (including single people, homosexuals, polyamorous, etc.) where they weren't cheating but they did want something direct and discrete.

TL;DR: Not a complete scam, just mostly. The site really was mostly a bunch of desperate men talking to bots and getting ignored by women, and paying out the nose for the privilege. And Avid Life Media is a pile of shit company that deserves their inevitable bankruptcy. Their executive team is both nefarious and negligent and should be burned at the metaphorical stake. I hope they shut down the company before the picture data gets released.

And maybe have some empathy for the users that got caught up in the leak, because all you have is proof that they signed up for a website, but you don't have any clue as to their situation nor intentions.

<comment><USER19> Beautiful post, thanks for the insights. The info that you only met single women is interesting. Do you suppose this may have been self-selected? Otherwise it implies the number of real married women on the site was indeed vanishingly small.

Adding a "post anonymously" checkbox instead of creating a throw away account may be worth pursuing, but it's hard to know if making anonymous posting easier would be a net positive for the site.

<comment> am-user For me, there was a convenience-oriented self-selection process. Having an affair is hard. You have to have time, alibis, and "laundered" money (typically an unknown credit card, maybe wads of cash, etc). When it is two married people trying to meet up, the difficulty is much harder just from scheduling alone. Even in my case, it was a lot easier than most to find times to meet up, but I still can't spend more than a night or two per week out late without feeling like a crappy husband or father. I found it much easier to deal with single women on the site because I was constrained on when I could meet up, but they weren't.

I think a good idea would be to have "verified-but-anonymized" posts tied to the amount of karma you have (just like downvotes). After building up some reputation, you could occasionally post an anonymized comment, and have it distinguished by the fact that it is done by an HN regular.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is so strange!

How can a business with 30+ million male users looking for sex outside marriage exist for 14 years while the site has no female users except for bots!!! Are you saying all those people were stupid enough to not realize they were not going to get laid(and kept paying too)?

It seems when you have advertising money and a cost structure that let's you make money and stay alive, you don't even have to have a real product! It makes sense to invest on people not ideas!

I wonder how many other BIG companies are pulling the same tricks to get unrealistic valuations (Twitter and Uber, they are not worth that much, especially Uber)

</comment><comment><USER21> I simply cannot fathom why anyone would sign up for a site that specializes in extramarital relationships instead of a general-purpose dating website or culture-specific or orientation-specific dating website. I just don't see what value it adds beyond putting "married, looking to swing/cheat" in your profile.

They say you can't cheat an honest man. So if you want to cheat someone, you might as well advertise to cheaters.

<comment><USER22> > _I simply cannot fathom why anyone would sign up for a site that specializes > in extramarital relationships_

Discretion. Most of the people on Ashley Madison presumably were wanting to keep their attempted affairs a secret. Most of them were probably not in "swinging" relationships, or indeed they would go to regular dating websites and just advertise their open relationship status.

> _So if you want to cheat someone, you might as well advertise to cheaters._

That's basically the sales pitch for Ashley Madison. "Want to cheat? Here's some women who want to cheat with you."

<comment><USER21> _Discretion?_

Hindsight has its benefits here, but I already automatically suspect _anyone_ asking for my e-mail address of turning around to sell it to the highest bidder.

If I'm looking for discretion, this is what I expect to see on the HTTP site: "You are being redirected to our secure site." And this is what I expect to see on the HTTPS site: "How to delete this site from your browser history and router logs" and "How to access our Tor hidden service."

Finally, on the Tor hidden site, "How to maintain anonymity while using Bitcoin" and "Create a new account".

But I'm probably more untrusting than most.

And there will probably always be people willing to visit [http://www.blackmailphishing.cc/new_mark.php](http://www.blackmailphishing.cc/new_mark.php) to create a new account and upload their dankest, dirtiest, and most embarrassing secrets, for free!

Wait. Wait. I got that address wrong. It's actually [https://www.opm.gov/investigations/e-qip- application/](https://www.opm.gov/investigations/e-qip-application/) . And they got hacked, too.

<comment> squeaky-clean I doubt most members care if some corporation, or spam mailing list, or the NSA, or a "hacker" gets their information. It's more about discretion from people they know, their wife, their friends, etc. I see friends and coworkers on Tinder all the time, but if I came across one of my married friends on there, I would probably tell their spouse.

>Finally, on the Tor hidden site, "How to maintain anonymity while using Bitcoin" and "Create a new account".

If you need to use Tor and bitcoins to avoid detection by your spouse.... Well I'd say stop cheating on them because (s)he's a keeper.

<comment><USER21> I'm not all that interested in avoiding detection by my spouse. I don't really want to do anything that I'd feel the need to conceal. Maybe the setup for a practical joke?

I was thinking more along the lines of skirting the bounds of some _malum prohibitum_ crime--like buying unlicensed Mickey Mouse apparel, or eating a protected species, or building an outhouse in the wrong spot--where a certain someone other than my spouse might come down on me like a ton of turds if it ever found out.

The gummint is a lot more concerned about policing my behavior than my spouse. And it's more uptight about what I'm doing when it's not around. Like a stalker, really. Tor and Bitcoin is demonstrably not enough to keep it off my back, and it is definitely _not_ a keeper.

<comment><USER22> > _I 'm not all that interested in avoiding detection by my spouse._

Yeah, that makes you not the target audience. Ashley Madison was sold as a place meet someone to have a secret affair with. The people looking for this generally wanted to hide it from their spouses most of all.

Undoubtedly, they had some customers that were on the site with their spouses' knowledge and approval, but this was most certainly a minority. That minority is probably bothered by this leak in the same way they are bothered by the OPM leak, but they aren't terrified of their spouses' reactions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This saga is getting better than Dallas. Someone should port it to TV.

<comment><USER24> For those that don't get the reference, Dallas was a long running prime-time drama (a "soap", back when they didn't air these solely during the daytime), that was known for its wild twists (such as the "who shot JR" plot line, which is considered one of the best moments of TV).

This isn't even close to the levels required for entertaining TV, but in my humble opinion, the comment is neither bad enough to downvote, nor good enough to upvote, I merely suspect a lot of HN's readership is just too young to get the reference or had a knee-jerk reaction to soaps in general (which, hey, I hate the overly-dramatic nature of soaps too; but apparently what Dallas did was still novel in the 80s, and worth dragging out for a pop-culture reference now and then).

<comment><USER25> Absolutely great TV. Think Silicon Valley but with a name tied to it. We need to get the naming rights to get initial viewers, but you and me, DiabloD3, we have a show here.

Treatment:

Name: Ashley Madison or some generic name so as to avoid copyright and naming issues.

Dramatis Personae: Ashley Madison President, Ashley Madison programmers, IPO Finance Team, Hacker team

Story Arcs:

A Story: Follow the Ashley Madison president as he goes about his 2014-2015 tour to promote the site across the globe, focus on the Japanese campaign, in preparation for the IPO. Detail the trials and tribulations of the IPO setup, pressures from the M&A team. Then lead up to the hack and the bourbon scotch being thrown against a wall as a man who built an empire realizes it is crashing. The programmers in Ashley Madison trying to figure out if the data was expropriated, how much, and lead up to the internal discussions on the blackmail offer.

B Story: The hacker group recruits team members, identify weak points and sets up to acquire the data. Once the data has been lifted, they struggle on what to do with a release, expecting to have received blackmail monies, fending off the popularity it brings to them and how to exit what they have done.

The season ends when the news report starts to detail you can get the database on TOR.

This could be on HBO, Amazon, or Netflix.

<comment><USER26> > the bourbon scotch

the what?

<comment><USER25> A dead giveaway that I am not a prolific hard alcohol consumer..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Meanwhile, we wait for AM founder to bend over for the soap.

</comment><comment><USER28> Worst thing they could have done. Now is the time to rally, not capitulate.

<comment><USER29> Tbf, the worst thing they probably could have done is run a scam business model then get exposed in one of the highest profile hacks in years. This is just icing on the cake.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Here's a different angle.

I'd recruit ex-AM employees. Their business model is brilliant even if is basically illegal! Imagine what they could achieve in an organization with even moderate ethics!

The users? That's another story. I'm checking each applicant against "the list". On the list? We could probably do better in that position.

<comment><USER6> I don't think the unethical part of their business model can really be separated from the brilliance of it. The site is basically a scam. If you remove the scam, there's nothing of substance left.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Let's hope he's not thinking of going into screenwriting.

edit: [http://gawker.com/the-ceo-of-ashley-madison-was-secretly- wor...](http://gawker.com/the-ceo-of-ashley-madison-was-secretly-working-on-a- scr-1726202879)</comment>


The Political Economy of the Sharing Economy - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@nickadamsjudge/sharings-potential-5e0a8764ce9c <comment><AUTHOR> Hey All, prelaunching wander.plus today: [https://medium.com/@nickadamsjudge/announcing-the- prelaunch-...](https://medium.com/@nickadamsjudge/announcing-the-prelaunch-of- wander-c15b57434c48) So I thought I'd share my thoughts on the future and market structure of the 'sharing economy.'</comment>


The J Programming Language [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/presentations/j-language <comment><USER2> Is anyone using J as a component in a "modern" application? I am looking for an excuse to learn the language, but my current projects are more traditional web applications.

I could likely find an excuse for it in data analysis/manipulation, but that seems like the obvious application.

<comment><USER3> I think everybody who is using APL would have good reasons to use J (which is actually APL's successor and was also created by Ken Iverson). If one is interested in these kind of languages, he should definitely also check out Arthur Whitney's magnificent K and Q ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_%28programming_language%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_%28programming_language%29)).

<comment><USER4> If you want to try out q there's a similar video available for it here: [http://www.timestored.com/kdb-guides/getting-started- kdb](http://www.timestored.com/kdb-guides/getting-started-kdb)

q isn't open source but it is widely used by most major banks to analyse their time series data and there are very well paying and interesting jobs available.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I really appreciated the pacing of this talk. In depth, but not too much so, with just enough of a taste to make me want to find out more.

</comment><comment><USER6> Too many special characters. This is why I don't like Haskell. As a polyglot, it's really helpful to have a piece of syntax spell out what it does. Python is usually really good at this. I don't get how it can be so hard for language designers to learn this. Why use ":+" when you can use "append"? Now I have to google "Scala append" every time I start writing a new Scala program. Good job. But at least the Scala example uses "+", which is sort of understandable with lists. You can suspect that it has something to do with appending when reading code. What does ">>=" even mean? Or "(($){.R)"? WTF? I give up. I don't like languages that try to fight me.

<comment><USER7> Stop trying to fight a language, then? Just learn those few unfamiliar constructs the language is build upon and start using it. Actually, in J there is not that much of what you need to learn, here is the full list: [http://www.jsoftware.com/help/dictionary/vocabul.htm](http://www.jsoftware.com/help/dictionary/vocabul.htm)

And here is a bit more involved explanation of what those words mean: [http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/HenryRich?action=AttachFile&d...](http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/HenryRich?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=J602_RefCard_color_letter_current.pdf)

If there is one thing I learned as a polyglot it's that language usage patterns differ and trying to use one language as if it was another is counterproductive. My advice is to learn more and practice more - at some point you'll start seeing higher-level patterns in language design and will be able to cope with many, now unfamiliar, features and design decisions.

<comment><USER6> I do see patterns in languages, it's just that the patterns are hidden below arbitrary nonsensical syntax that has to be relearned every single time I switch language. Some syntax, like Python's, is easier to remember and guess than other syntax. I conclude that Python's syntax is good and Haskell/J's syntax is bad.

Basically, I want the languages I use and have to constantly relearn to have a syntax that is quick to pick up after having partly forgotten it for the nth time. That requires memorable and guessable names and keywords.

<comment><USER8> I'd recommend reading Iverson's "Notation as a Tool of Thought" ([http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm](http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm)) . Operator looks for APL - and then for J - were modelled after mathematical notation, which had to be extended somewhat towards computations. But can you imagine writing on a whiteboard, say, "samples_transposed" instead of A'?

You definitely can use words instead of many symbols in J. I highly doubt though you want to do that for the core language. Much more productive - IMO - is to learn the vocabulary - which is very finite. Yes, I know it's a great show stopper for those considering learning J.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Dadgum has a great review of a J programming book here:

[http://prog21.dadgum.com/19.html](http://prog21.dadgum.com/19.html)

<comment><USER10> More Prog21 J posts:

[http://prog21.dadgum.com/14.html](http://prog21.dadgum.com/14.html)

[http://prog21.dadgum.com/48.html](http://prog21.dadgum.com/48.html)

[http://prog21.dadgum.com/121.html](http://prog21.dadgum.com/121.html)

[http://prog21.dadgum.com/141.html](http://prog21.dadgum.com/141.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> J is really fun. There are a lot of Project Euler problems you can hypothetically do as one-liners and that's highly amusing to me at least.

Edited to add examples: [http://www.hakank.org/j/](http://www.hakank.org/j/)

</comment><comment><USER12> I recommend installing a J interpreter on your phone or tablet. It's concision makes it a great choice for coding without a physical keyboard (specially with a specialized J virtual keyboard). It's great for, say, doing Project Euler problems while you're waiting in line.</comment>


The German entity who tried to trademark "hackathon" is now trying to undo that - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/koos/status/331368467510992897 <comment><USER2> Actually, the guy tweeting states in German that he has hired a lawyer to file for removal of the trademark. He's not the entity who filed the original mark (which got filed and has already passed the oppositional period).

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, thanks for the clarification!</comment></comment>


Wikidata Map July 2019 - <AUTHOR> https://addshore.com/2019/07/wikidata-map-july-2019/ <comment><USER2> Perhaps I'm the only one, but I'm not sure exactly what I'm looking at. Does this relate to Wikipedia? I kind of feel like it might really too people using the internet and their coordinates being displayed on the map, but maybe I'm just slow.

<comment><USER3> wikidata is a sister project of wikipedia. In the wikidata database many items have the coordinate field filled, e.g. Tokyo [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q7473516](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q7473516) is 35°41'2.00"N, 139°46'27.98"E.

The wikidata map puts a dot for every item in the database on a map to show coverage, and growth of coverage over time.</comment></comment>


BASE Jumper Explains the Importance of Accepting Death to Appreciating Life - <AUTHOR> http://www.theplaidzebra.com/base-jumper-explains/

<comment><USER2> _For Chris "Douggs" McDougall, his definition of insanity is a lifetime of boredom, comfort and caution, wasting away on the sofa and hiding from the inevitability of danger._

I'm too exhausted to go look up the exact fallacy, but this is something like a straw man. And, whatever it is, it's the same one the article's title makes.

Not everyone takes pleasure from doing fundamentally stupid things in terms of lifespan. If they did, as a species, it's extremely unlikely, statistically speaking, that we would have survived this long.

Espouse your insane idea of fun all you want, but please, don't pretend it's somehow objective or intrinsic to humanity.</comment>