feels like notion is gonna be the next evernote
Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off
501–510 of 869 posts
Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off
#502Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sticking to plain text is like living in a cave - possible, but unpleasant. Why would you remove all the formatting and integration niceties of modern tech? > Every device, including ones long gone, and ones not invented yet, can read and edit plain text. So what? Every relevant device can also read and write a bunch of more useful formats
I absolutely love plain text notes. Maybe you could understand that just because you think something is unpleasant and ancient, the rest of the entire human race might not agree? Shocking I know. I can't stand any formatting whatsoever on my notes. I love plain text because it stays exactly as that: plain text. I don't want my dashes to be turned into spacers, I don't want my asterisks to be turned into lists, etc...
Not as shocking as you trying to speak for the whole human race, which evolved past no formatting while still living in the caves
Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off
#503Earlier quoted context omitted.
For me, it's an example of a company building an app that did a thing well, but not a thing people would pay for. And then switching out the app for this monstrous platformy enterprisey catastrophe that I sure as hell never wanted, and being told to pay for it. Just an endless series of features that I never wanted.
Evernote’s files are `.enex` which is a variation of html. At least, they used to be. I haven’t checked recently, but this was the case for many years. Don’t know if they’ve changed anything recently.
If you export it, you get XML, with embedded HTML in <CDATA TAGS, among other things. But the point is the same - it's not hard to parse. It also has base64 encoded images and pdf's. Don't know what else.
Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off
#504I really hope that this endless wave of layoffs ends soon. I've been let go twice in the last year. Every tech place is going through layoffs and is pausing hiring. I wrote a browser plugin to automatically fill out a lot of the job application forms, so that I can apply to more jobs in a day, and I get maybe one interview for every three hundred applications. I watch endless tutorials on YouTube about the best way t…
> Actually, no, the worst part is the fact that I have to pretend to believe all these companies about their stupid mission statement, and how they're going to save the world Maybe its really obvious you feel that way and you should find a company that has a product that resonates with you so you don't have to fake it. > You can't just do a task because you want a paycheck You can but don't be expected to be paid hig…
> Maybe its really obvious you feel that way and you should find a company that has a product that resonates with you so you don't have to fake it.
Easier said than done. It's not for lack of trying. I apply to lots of companies where I actually think that the project is cool, but they don't respond back to me. At that point, what exactly am I supposed to do? Just completely exhaust all my savings until I find my dream job?
I do really try my best to "get into" whatever the company is doing, but it's exceedingly difficult for me to do that, and it's even harder for me to fake enthusiasm.
> You can but don't be expected to be paid high end tech salaries for it.
That's fair, and maybe I should expect it, but it's still exhausting and I don't have to like it.
Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off
#505I 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…
I have to say changing to obsidian has been great. 1. there are opensource tools to convert from evernote to obsidian so it Just Works [tm] and you don't lose anything. 2. My docs are now in markdown in a normal filesystem so it's easy for me to back them up, sync them, have everything work on different OSs etc 3. I choose to pay for obsidian sync because I want to fund them but you don't have to 4. Community plugins…
I just started using Obsidian and I use the vim keybinds that Obsidian ships with. My only issue so far is I can’t move the cursor back to the title from the body.
Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off
#506Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is super-important. Sometimes the grass is greener on this side of the fence. VCs want to get you to grow rapidly because the only way to move the needle on their returns is to blow the roof off. However as a founder, this is proof you can have a great business and a great quality of life by keeping costs relatively low, the team relatively small, just cranking out code and having fun.
As a founder you probably don’t get wealthy either and a lot aren’t really satisfied with a $150k/yr total comp/benefits for their successful lifestyle business.
As a co-founder, I'd say you can get wealthy or at least comfortable.
But, we started with two people. At some point we needed funding. That put us on a track of angel investors, VC's, and a cycle acquisition, buyback, funding, acquisition, buyback, etc.
As the techie guy, I found that tiring and distracting. When we changed from software as a product to SAAS, it got a lot less fun. When we grew to 2000 employees (mostly non-tech), the company was a pain.
So after 20 years (to the day), we sold it and moved on.
Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off
#507Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure fair enough. That is the problem with many rules of thumb, where people interpret "all" and "always" to mean all and always. Especially evident in programming. E.g. "premature optimization is the root of all evil".
That’s one line everyone remembers snipped from somewhat more nuanced context. Knuth said: "Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature o…
Oh ... ye well Knuth makes my point. :)
Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off
#508I 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…
I was a paying customer for many years. Despite their continuous attempts to turn it into something I didn't need and eventually didn't want because they wouldn't leave it alone, they didn't manage to run me off until last year. That coincided with the acquisition but I honestly no longer recall if that was the final straw, as they'd been increasingly aggravating me for a while.
I'm still a paying customer.
But I don't trust them and haven't since they made it difficult to export all of your notes. And, they damaged tag-based organization by changing to only list notes that are at the bottom of the tag hierarchy - not those in the middle.
And, they want to be the sole custodian my data, and I don't like a company with that attitude.
Having been involved with system design including large servers for 50 years, I don't trust the cloud. Yeah, the huge cloud providers are staffed by really smart people and it is very unlikely you'll lose your data there (although I sure wouldn't trust Google - they're nuts with their product management).
But a small staff Evernote, under pressure to please investors by somehow adding features that will let them compete in spaces already pretty full - no, I don't trust them to adequately use the cloud to keep my data secure.
I do frequent .enex backups of all my notes.
I haven't switched yet, because it's a pain. But I sure do backups frequently.
And if I see a good alternative (maybe in this thread), I'll jump on it.
As long as I don't have to do the sysadmin all the time (I'd forget - busy with other things, or I'd make some dumb mistake); and as long as it isn't a giant pain to install and build. And as long as it has clients for MacOS (including Apple ARM processors), Android and iOS... then I'll look.
Ideas sought.
The last time I did this search (2020), I didn't find one I liked.
Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off
#509Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good question which can only be answered by them. But given the amount of money they raised compared to their likely acquisition price (bending spoons has only raise slightly more capital to buy all the apps they are buying than evernote did for its development), I don't think they've walked away with much financially.
Yep. For the founders in particular though, who had the most influence early on in taking the VC path, odds are they took some money out along the way, perhaps quite a bit more than had they stayed small.
Is this typically possible? My understanding is that most VCs insist on being paid first in the case of an exit, at least to the point of getting back what they put in. Founders and employees are typically last in the line.
Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off
#510Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it’s an example of trying to charge for things that are low value, and, more importantly, low cost. Storing text files in the cloud is super cheap. And having an app to easily edit those files is super cheap. It was free in the beginning because this is a “classic” software problem where it’s cheap to develop and close to $0 marginal dollars for a user. When Evernote started charging for dumb features and loc…
> Storing text files in the cloud is super cheap. And having an app to easily edit those files is super cheap. Are Evernote files just plain "text files"?
You can export your notes as HTML, or better, .enex files. The latter are XML, with embedded stuff encoded with base64.