Now I want to set up a Patreon or Go Fund Me to fund an open source web clipper by those who worked on Evernote’s.
I’ve never really found anything that worked that well.
Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off
121–130 of 869 posts
Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t accept that. If those procedures are failing, then someone should be getting 5xx alerts. Before they started failing, unit and integration tests should’ve been raising alarms. A site that remains persistently broken has a lot more wrong with it than just some software bugs.
Just because a 5xx alert is sent doesn't mean that someone will do anything about it, even if they didn't just lay off the entire staff. I'm sure some PM triaged the 5xx notices and anything coming from close account just gets pushed to the bottom of the queue. Obviously, I have no knowledge if that's what actually happened. I'm just continuing the advocacy of the devil
While that’s clearly true here, it’s a giant red flag if a PM is ignoring… a giant red flag.
Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off
#123I feel like Evernote is a prime example of the pains of trying to convert free users to paying users for the same features, something we see in many VC funded software from its era. Once you give something away, it's damn near impossible to take it back, even if you plead your case as honestly as Evernote did. Evernote was great. Honestly, it was worth paying for. But they gave away the farm too early, and folks feel…
Also Obsidian is a small team (< 5 people IIRC?) and they don't have to monetize as aggressively to make back the money that VCs have funded them with.
Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other hand, it should be possible for software to be done. I have never used Evernote, but I am not sure how much innovation is required in the note-taking space.
Software is never done if the software it runs on is never done. Making that transition is not easy, and tech debt can accumulate to the point where you have to make substantial changes. In the meantime, UI standards/tastes change. Now you're at the right spot for a re-write
Its usually driven actually mostly by hardware. Which is driven by games (and now apparently AI).
Hardware gets better so UI gets more glittery, everyone tries to "stand out" by looking/working best, so the UI "taste" changes. Or hardware form factor changes, so everything needs re-written to support it, etc.
Next hardware re-write will be some mix of AI/low power. None of the "green" energy stuff will deliver in time, nuclear won't happen in a way that is both safe and any-time-soon, and meanwhile power-hungry AIs will be battling for cpu cycles and watts with other devices.
Your devices will be very low power and the majority of modern software will be laughably ill-equipped to handle that. Or it will run on giant mainframes that look nothing like x86 desktops or even server farms, more like specialized super computers.
Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
it'll be very good. it won't resolve conflicts for you, though - just like Dropbox or Google Drive also wouldn't. It's last-write-wins, so you either need to keep your devices connected and syncing at all times, or you need to be careful when you edit the same files on different devices. I use Syncthing for all kinds of things and it's excellent, but it's not really a silver for bullet for mutable data like text file…
I'll look into it, thanks for the suggestion! The risk de-synchronization poses can probably be mitigated with automated local backups.
BTW, just a second vote for Syncthing, here. It's basically my "move data around" Swiss Army knife.
Need to get my Keepass database on my phone? Syncthing.
Need to back up my reMarkable to my NAS? Syncthing.
Need to replicate game saves between my PC and my Steamdeck because the game doesn't support Steam Cloud Sync (I'm looking at you, Subnautica)? Syncthing.
I run Paperless as a document management system and use Genius Scan on my phone. I use Syncthing to automatically move scans from my phone to the Paperless inbox folder.
And none of that data resides on a third party cloud. Just encrypted, peer-to-peer sync. It really is fantastic.
Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off
#126I use Obsidian for note-taking, but Evernote for my "digital shoebox" of receipts, PDFs, photos of wine labels, insurance statements, etc. They are all quickly findable through a combination of OCR and tags. Does anyone have a good alternative for this use-case?
On phones Microsoft lens has free pdf OCR scanning. That and Onedrive would probably work. Instead of tags you just put keywords in the file names. I'm not sure how well it would handle photos of wine labels.
Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off
#127Obsidian.md for the win. I used to use evernote way back when they started, was cool software, then they started scaling and added worst search UI I have ever come across. That day, I deleted my account and went markdown with my own storage. Don't see the benefit of why your notes should be controlled by others.
It's not open source. If migrate from Evernote, at least it's better to migrate to FOSS. Sadly, most FOSS solutions lack mobile app support.
logseq is open source, but you gotta pay for (e2ee) sync. Joplin is open source and you can do e2ee with a joplin server or s3 backed. I didn't care for Obsidian. logseq for me.
Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off
#128I use Obsidian for note-taking, but Evernote for my "digital shoebox" of receipts, PDFs, photos of wine labels, insurance statements, etc. They are all quickly findable through a combination of OCR and tags. Does anyone have a good alternative for this use-case?
If you're willing to self-host, I've found Paperless to be quite good:
Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
What happens if you try to sign up for a new account? Similar level of malfunction, I assume. I am so sick of this reality. Endless dark patterns to get your money. Nearly impossible to get out. Why ever make a good product when you can just seek rent and fall into that perfect optimum of cheap-enough that cancelling is not worth the pain.
There have been stories of how convoluted and practically impossible the unsubscribe process from Amazon Prime is. At almost every step, the system sort of nags you with "Do you REALLY want to do this?" almost with a trolling attitude! If this is the case with proper big tech capitalist, think what will the scenario be with smaller pleb capitalists like Evernote in this grave recession.
Amazon got suspicious that a CC I was using is not mine and locked my account. But they continued to happily charge "not mine" credit card for Prime fees. And I couldn't login into locked account to cancel Prime. Took hours on the phone with clueless support to finally cancel that. Account is still locked.
Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off
#130I use Obsidian for note-taking, but Evernote for my "digital shoebox" of receipts, PDFs, photos of wine labels, insurance statements, etc. They are all quickly findable through a combination of OCR and tags. Does anyone have a good alternative for this use-case?
Evernote alternatives for your 'digital shoebox'/'paperless office'. JOPLIN: Browsing through alternativeto [1], seems that the obvious replacement for a hosted 'non-tech' offering is Joplin [2] - a free, open source direct evernote competitor which includes Evernote import feature and cloud syncing. PAPERLESS-NGX: For the whole paperless office, scan/store receipts and PDF paperwork, I've been seriously looking at P…
Joplin doesn't have OCR built in. There's third party Joplin plugins for OCR but I don't know how well they work.