Show HN: Infinite canvas notes in the non-Euclidean Poincaré disk • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Infinite canvas notes in the non-Euclidean Poincaré disk

#21

Post by uonr » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 12:49 AM UTC

levmiseri wrote: post #6

Loving the smoothness of this. One concerning thing is overlapping notes – I don't want to be fucking around with trying to move the canvas just right to read a note under another note and there doesn't seem to be any other simple mechanism to resolve this (especially for larger blocks/images). The 'untangle' feature doesn't really solve this.

I'm thinking LOD might help mitigate the overlap issue, perhaps by having an LLM progressively shorten the text until it's a single Unicode character.

Also, as other comments suggested, shading or similar techniques could help.

That said, I doubt this can be fully resolved unless the text is rendered in hyperbolic space, as another commenter mentioned. I'll need to experiment and see if that's doable.

Re: Show HN: Infinite canvas notes in the non-Euclidean Poincaré disk

#22

Post by mapontosevenths » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 12:50 AM UTC

This is neat. I built an LLM once that stored its embeddings in poincare space, and it was a struggle for me to visualise what it was doing at first. This would have helped.

Re: Show HN: Infinite canvas notes in the non-Euclidean Poincaré disk

#23

Post by uonr » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 12:57 AM UTC

mapontosevenths wrote: post #22

This is neat. I built an LLM once that stored its embeddings in poincare space, and it was a struggle for me to visualise what it was doing at first. This would have helped.

While developing poincake, I actually thought about building a language learning app using a similar approach. The idea was to map word embeddings onto a Poincaré disk so users could explore word relationships and clusters.

Re: Show HN: Infinite canvas notes in the non-Euclidean Poincaré disk

#24

Post by uonr » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 1:20 AM UTC

OneDeuxTriSeiGo wrote: post #5

I really like the approach but it'd certainly be nice to be able to use alternate topologies. Also it'd be nice if there was an underlying grid plotting the metric/distance function to help conceptualize distance/relationships better when you get to the edges.

[dead]

Re: Show HN: Infinite canvas notes in the non-Euclidean Poincaré disk

#25

Post by ofalkaed » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 1:58 AM UTC

uonr wrote: post #20

ofalkaed wrote: post #9

This would be fantastic on a tablet; stylus for entry and fingers for navigation would make it very efficient and a great improvement over the standard infinite page. I would probably pay for a non-web tablet version, it is rare my tablet is connected to the internet.

(I'm the dev) I tried it out on an iPad and it seems to work fine. Let me know if you run into any issues. Supporting direct stylus/Pencil input will definitely be a challenge, but I think it’s worth a shot.

It worked on my Android tablet but I can't scribble a note and draw a picture/diagram with the stylus. I don't know anything about iPads but on Android you have the USI pen and for any app that understands the USI pen, it interprets fingers and stylus individually, the stylus is active so the tablet knows when it is input from the stylus or input from a finger. The google Cursive app which is the standard Android note app shows this well, stylus only writes and fingers only pan/scroll/zoom unless you switch it into finger mode so you can write with a finger.

If you managed to give all the features of Googles Cursive app within your Poincaré disk paradigm, I would happily drop $100 on it, assuming it worked as an offline app.

Edit: should mention that I don't think this is worth $100, other than to the handful of people like me who it would be perfect for assuming it was well executed. You would probably make more charging far less. The paradigm could translate amazingly well to the tablet/stylus experience if the details are worked out well.

Re: Show HN: Infinite canvas notes in the non-Euclidean Poincaré disk

#26

Post by athrowaway3z » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 6:06 AM UTC

I like it. The one thing I'd absolutely add is a color difference between the background and the circle, or at least something to indicate the horizon which would provide a better sense of orientation.

Re: Show HN: Infinite canvas notes in the non-Euclidean Poincaré disk

#27

Post by Nesco » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 7:14 AM UTC

Pretty cool, I actually explored the same idea several months ago, as you can put a huge amount of information while keeping emphasis on local features

https://paperverse.net/

I see you also hade a similar idea on what happens when you click on an arrow

Re: Show HN: Infinite canvas notes in the non-Euclidean Poincaré disk

#28

Post by jakemanger » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 8:22 AM UTC

This is pretty cool. I'm curious, what do you mean "leverages your brain's spatial memory"?

Re: Show HN: Infinite canvas notes in the non-Euclidean Poincaré disk

#29

Post by est » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 8:24 AM UTC

That's insanely cool. Now how about actually compress text with LLM that summarize long texts with the non-Euclidean visulization...

Re: Show HN: Infinite canvas notes in the non-Euclidean Poincaré disk

#30

Post by rnhmjoj » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 8:40 AM UTC

jakemanger wrote: post #28

This is pretty cool. I'm curious, what do you mean "leverages your brain's spatial memory"?

Yeah, I don't know about the author, but my brain spatial memory is very much tied to Euclidean geometry. The holonomy effect (view is rotated when coming back to the same point) in particular is very disorienting.

It's cool, but I would never use this for real.