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Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

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Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#531

Post by bosie »

Zambyte wrote: post #520
bosie wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not sure we have the same definition of 'malware'. the problem isn't copying/syncing the file from one computer to another, that works just fine. but obsidian can't read outside its own app folder IIRC. i sync files with dropbox to my ios devices all the time.

I define "malware" to mean software that intentionally subverts the desires of the owner of the computer (unintentional subversion is a bug or a miscommunication). Apple arbitrarily restricts you from using your applications (obsidian) to read and write your data in a way that you can sync, to no fault of its own, your own, or the syncing service. I strongly encourage you to try associating this kind of behavior with…

Apple is upfront about it and I knew what I was getting (and not getting). To be honest, i can barely ever use any of my software the way i want it.

Obsidian's sync service for example has dark patterns and is a lot closer to your definition of malware as they are hiding how their sync works (versioning, bugs they know but don't advertise, merge conflicts that destroys data etc).

> I bet that would see that as a problem you would want to fix right away.

No. But I also don't know what "fix" means in this context? Not use Obsidian? As using Android is not an option.

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#532

Post by emodendroket »

jjav wrote: post #524
TheKarateKid wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think Evernote’s problem is that it should have just stayed a 1-2 person company. They ramped up costs, then pushed up prices, and customers mehhed out. This is the problem with most VC funded startups. You have millions invested into an app that really is a glorified CRUD service that somehow ends up with a team of 500 engineers, and 3000 more employees. When it comes time to actually make a profit, these compan…

> This is the problem with most VC funded startups. At one level I shouldn't care. The VCs burn the money, the users make a bad choice to rely on something that will inevitably disappear when the profit-seeking crunch comes, not my problem. But it's unfortunately for all of us because all this human energy (from users, developers) that gets wasted over and over on doomed-to-fail proprietary solutions could be so much…

On the other hand they’re paying us handsomely to tilt at these particular windmills.

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#533

Post by johnwalkr »

echelon wrote: post #10
yuppie_scum wrote: post #2

I just copy pasted all my notes into Obsidian, which doesn’t constantly nag me to subscribe

I really love Obsidian, I still have some major blockers. The git plugin is dangerously broken. I've had pushes from different computers overwrite one another. It doesn't show merge conflicts - it's happy to plow forward. I've reduced my usage since that happened. This is a huge problem. I need to have confidence the backups and merges aren't destroying notes. There's no easy way to open multiple workspaces simultane…

Could you perhaps change something in .git to fail in case of conflict?

What do you mean by using git lfs but not wanting files in git? Generally you should be able to use git lfs with any note app that supports git as long as you are able to enable lfs on whatever server you are using and are able to edit .gitattributes. It's just git with a bit of logic to only download the needed revisions of binary files instead of the whole history. But as far as I can reason, there's no practical difference if you're not often editing the binary files which you add because there's usually only one copy/no patches for the binary files.

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#534

Post by rehevkor5 »

cborenstein wrote: post #416
stevefan1999 wrote: post #252

In case if you want some Evernote alternatives, here's my shortlist: 1. Trilium Notes: https://github.com/zadam/trilium 2. AppFlowy: https://github.com/AppFlowy-IO/AppFlowy 3. Affine: https://github.com/toeverything/AFFiNE 4. Joplin: https://github.com/laurent22/joplin 5. Dendron: https://github.com/dendronhq/dendron (requires VSCode) As a programmer I liked Dendron the most but if you want it to be packed with absol…

I'm biased but I'd add-- - Obsidian: https://obsidian.md/ - Logseq: https://logseq.com/ - Reflect: https://reflect.app/ - Stashpad: https://stashpad.com/

I'm wondering what happy mediums might exist between the note-taking world, the wiki world, and the collaborative office document world.

Office-oriented tools like Nextcloud or Collabora seem to be oriented to classic Microsoft Word / Google Docs style documents... not as simple as Markdown or as web-friendly as a wiki page.

The note taking tools everyone's talking about don't seem to support collaborative editing. If they're file-based without a server, then you either have to lock the file for editing, or you have to always remember to sync first to avoid conflicts. Syncthing can't really handle that scenario very well.

Also, wikis usually aren't file-based... they require a database. Plus they don't seem to be as lovingly designed as the note-taking tools... they seem to have a very retro MediaWiki style.

Does anyone know of a self-hosted solution that checks all those boxes? File-based (perhaps aided by database driven indexing) with real collaborative editing, more web-oriented than Word-oriented?

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#535

Post by emodendroket »

seti0Cha wrote: post #440
prepend wrote: post #332

Earlier 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…

I agree that many of the features they were adding were useless (to me), but I disagree that you can encompass what they do with the description of storing and editing files. Their value was in the removing any concern a user might have about where a note is, both in terms of which device, and where on the device. There are a bunch of ways to sync and edit files, but I don't want to spend time or brain power on that,…

I feel like something more subtle was at work too. Much of my Evernote uses were just clipping Web pages to save for later or organize and search later and at some point I no longer did that. Why not? Well, I can take a few guesses. I graduated from college, for one. But also, I started reading more things on mobile devices, which didn’t nicely integrate with the clipping tool. Probably I now spend more time on social media sites than reading articles on random sites. Maybe it just got to be less trendy and exciting. I don’t remember any particular change to Evernote that made me drift away from using it.

When it comes to pure “notes” I find either Google Keep or Apple Notes are good enough and work with less effort on my part so that’s where most of my scribbles go.

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#536

Post by emodendroket »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #434
tempestn wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I would have happily paid them 10 bucks a month in inflation-adjusted 2012 dollars forever if they'd just maintained the apps and kept them up to date. Instead they focused on adding features few people wanted, and then completely rewrote the apps in Electron, resulting in a slow experience that was (and still is, years later) missing multiple core note-taking features, and is increasingly unreliable. I kept…

Electron is the single biggest scourge to end users since Windows ME.

Is it really though? I feel like it’s allowing many clients to exist that otherwise wouldn’t ever get written.

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#537

Post by derefr »

TheKarateKid wrote: post #496
prepend wrote: post #332

Earlier 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…

> I think Evernote’s problem is that it should have just stayed a 1-2 person company. They ramped up costs, then pushed up prices, and customers mehhed out. This is the problem with most VC funded startups. You have millions invested into an app that really is a glorified CRUD service that somehow ends up with a team of 500 engineers, and 3000 more employees. When it comes time to actually make a profit, these compan…

> Is a delivery app that is basically a glorified basic ordering system really worth 30% of the transaction? No.

To be fair, it’s only “an ordering system” if you look purely at pick-up ordering. For deliveries, these apps are two-sided real-time resource schedulers (allocating a driver to N orders they can efficiently deliver through pickups and drop offs on a single precalculated connecting route to optimize both time and fuel consumption.) The value is in the backend software, as the very same backend software should be reusable for e.g. routing driverless taxis.

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#538

Post by yuletide666 »

smarx007 wrote: post #397

My use of Evernote has been replaced with two apps a few years ago when they abandoned native apps: 1. https://obsidian.md/ for all the notes. 2. https://archivebox.io/ for almost all webpage clippings.

Any way to import or view things to archivebox on mobile?

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#539

Post by smarx007 »

yuletide666 wrote: post #538
smarx007 wrote: post #397

My use of Evernote has been replaced with two apps a few years ago when they abandoned native apps: 1. https://obsidian.md/ for all the notes. 2. https://archivebox.io/ for almost all webpage clippings.

Any way to import or view things to archivebox on mobile?

I have an Apple Shortcut to append a shared URL to a request https://domain.xyz/add?url=$sharedUrl

To view things is trickier. But the Readability and Mercury destinations render best.

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#540

Post by crystalgurl »

ndiddy wrote: post #418
crystalgurl wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was pretty nice to exit my startup for hundreds of millions of dollars. Yeah, I don’t think I’d like to settle for $150k. YMMV, but I suppose a lot of folks are taking a calculated risk and swinging for the fences. More power to em, if you prefer software be a certain way write it yourself.

Agreed, sure I fucked over my customers after my startup was bought by Google, but I didn't really care because I was able to afford three yachts. I didn't even bother writing the shutdown message myself, I paid some dude on Fiverr to do it. Maybe 150k is fine if you're willing to settle for an above-ground pool in some shithole state in the Midwest, but if you want to spend your time where the true work happens, and…

Humans have agency. If you enter into an agreement for software at a particular price (especially $0) that’s on you.
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