Hacker News Reader

Comment by twiss | Hacker News Reader

Hi HN! I made this. It has bulk import from Google Docs ;) thanks to a feature request from HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15478479

View on HN

Just curious (and no negative implications whatsoever): is "we made it so that only one person at a time can type in a paragraph. No longer can that annoying classmate delete what you just typed" code for "operational transforms are hard to implement, especially without a source of truth?"

Yes and no :) I did indeed not implement OT, but it's also a true story that I would create a Google Doc and share it, nobody knows what to write, I type a sentence, and my classmates delete it as a joke, to mess with me :)

But yeah, feedback on the collaboration is welcome. Do you think editing one sentence with multiple people is necessary, and if so why? And on the other end of the spectrum, Word-style edit requests (which need to be approved before they are applied) are also sometimes necessary.

It's good to have if you want to go peer2peer eg. not having a server in between. Btw, Google Docs don't use a OT, or only a simple one, it does depend on the server and that you are online.

A writing style that I try to use is that I just type ... don't look up words, just write YYY where I can't find the right word to use, then I read the text and fix all spelling errors, sentences, remove unnecessary parts etc. That way you can be in flow. But instead of you doing the fixing later, someone else can do it for you - while you are writing!

Do you have a source on Google docs not using OT? I remember reading Google's description of Google docs with a reference to seminal OT paper.

https://youtu.be/yCcWpzY8dIA?list=LL9RQYUX_WIjk8SAcyuarJEw About 25 minutes in. And it is called OT, so I stand corrected. It does require a server though. I was confusing it with CRDT.

Google Docs does use OT. Or at least it did about six years ago, and I doubt that has changed. Source: I cowrote the original implementation (which was not OT, it was a three way merge of complete HTML files), and I was around when a new team rewrote the entire app using OT.

Historical note: live three way merging of HTML files, being produced by content-editable div implementations in different browsers, which like to rewrite each other's coding decisions in arbitrary ways (suddenly all your BRs become Ps, whee!) is "fun" in a way that I don't really ever need to revisit.

My main use case for Docs is collaborative fiction writing. There's no concept of "paragraph ownership"; there will be two or more people editing the document, and we'll go over it a half-doze or more times, editing as we go.

The ability to make arbitrary changes is essential for this.

There's no permanent paragraph ownership in Airborn OS either, but it's locked for about 10 seconds when you edit a paragraph. Or are you saying that the two editors would be editing the same paragraph at the same time?

Yes, that also happens frequently.

To offer a different use case: as a high school English teacher I will commonly work through a paragraph with a student, commenting and modifying as we discuss. The lock out would be quite frustrating.

I use Google Docs only for work. It never happened that we inadvertently deleted each other's work but it happens that we have cursors in the same paragraph.

Maybe there are multiple reasons for that.

One is that we're not in the business of trolling coworkers and losing time, quite the opposite. However I can understand that when I was little that would be fun sometimes.

Another reason is that we often use another channel to coordinate our work, email (I'll be working on that), chat or voice calls. The risk of undoing someone's work is nil.

With the approach of Airborn it could happen that I have to say "please move your cursor somewhere else so I can show you an alternative" or fix a typo. That would be odd and make us lose time.

Or, you could just wait the ten seconds the lock lasts.

Sounds really pragmatic. Two people editing exactly the same thing at the same time sounds confusing; not just really hard to implement. i.e. Why would anyone want someone amending as they type. This approach makes the user experience simpler and simplifies the implementation. I like it :).

The only scenario where I can see this being a bad decision would be for bots. For example, if you had a spell checker loaded which ran as a separate user rather than under your own session; so the spell checker couldn't auto-correct words until you'd finished typing the sentence. Here I'm imagining something like Rosie the translator bot from the original Google Wave demo... But I don't think you have bots anyway, so this won't be a concern for the present anyway.

FWIW OT isn't the only algo you can use to implement collaborative editing:

* https://medium.com/@raphlinus/towards-a-unified-theory-of-op... * https://hal.inria.fr/inria-00071240

If you want a library it exists too:

* https://github.com/josephg/ShareJS

I for one welcome this decision. I would perhaps limit the locking to one sentence at a time (which may split into several after editing) rather than a paragraph, and with an optional timeout for inactivity.

I am a big fan of open source alternatives to Google and Facebook (see Qbix). Do you mind if I contact you?

should give users the ability to lock specific regions by selecting them

I agree. This may be a useful and simple way to implement locking. Often when editing for things other than minor punctuation or spelling, individual sentences or paragrapshs often get split or combined as statements are rephrased or ideas reorganized.

Sure! info at <the domain name of this submission>.

Suggest mode solves the problem elegantly. Google docs has had this for a while.

This is an immediate non-starter for me.

I have had plenty of real-world situations, with Google Docs, whereby I have fixed someone else's spelling (or vice versa) as they have been typing. Working on sheets/slides where this isn't available has always felt awkward in comparison, and I wouldn't look to get more of it.

Any plans to make self-hosting straight-forward? Granted, I haven't spent much time looking for it, but I've been looking for something similar to this for quite some time, and Nextcloud's Collabora isn't quite what I'm looking for.

Not really, because of https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=15596604. Why would you like to self-host? (Not implying that there are no valid reasons, just curious which reasons are important to you.)

Nothing in particular, I just already have a server set up with a good amount of storage because I didn't want to pay year-to-year for something like dropbox to save photos and videos to.

I'd also be interested in getting the documents to appear in my Nextcloud and vice-versa.

At the end of the day, it's mostly about having everything in a central location with a good set of backups in place.

I see. What are you missing in Collabora? There's also OnlyOffice for Nextcloud, which is quite a feature-complete editor, I think: https://api.onlyoffice.com/editors/owncloud

I wanted to look into self hosting because it's the only way, for security reasons, my company could use it.

Because if I'm going to bet on someone other than Google keeping my crap secure and accessible, I'm going to be betting on myself, not on some fly by night entity with a very limited runway.

Google locked me out of my documents. I have more trust in Google to provide a service than you. If Google does not reliably provide the service, I'm moving the service on-prem.

It seems like holding down a key does different things in different language alphabets. I can't seem to hold down a key and have it type the same character repeatedly in English, however (e.g. press a, expect aaaaaaa... until key up).

Weird. What browser and operating system are you using, and which locale/keyboard layout? (Not sure which of those matter, but it works fine for me.)

I bet it's Mac OSX. By default, holding down a key will pop up an option for diacritical markers (accents).

OSX 10.10 MBP 2015, Chrome (latest). I was using just regular ol' English. Changing to Korean works as expected though.

Request: I'd like to post an item based on the website description showing the image of encrypted contents and hashed filenames.

I cannot extract that image (useful collateral) from your page on Android given page presentation.

Here's a link: https://www.airbornos.com/images/documents-encrypted.png

Thanks!

Minor bug report: registering with a 64 character password fails. 32 characters seems to work fine.

Also a feature request: please add the ability for me to delete my account/data from your servers.

I wouldn't call that minor. Sounds like there's something odd about the way passwords are handled. :/

Another oddity is a 64 character password.

He probably uses a password manager and generates them randomly. Nothing odd about that.

It works fine for me with a 64 character password. Maybe the server errored out randomly that time. What browser are you using?

If you shoot me an email with your username, I'll delete your account and files manually.

How will you know the person emailing you is actually the owner of that username?

I'd send an email to the email address they signed up with to confirm.

Any intentions on adding support for right to left languages? This is the only reason why I have a Windows 7 virtual machine with Office 13 installed. I am looking for alternatives.

If you select an RTL interface language, the UI becomes RTL. And in Chrome, you can select RTL in the editor in the context menu. Are you looking for something similar to that in Firefox, or are there any other issues with RTL?

What I would like to do it write in both a RTL language and a LTR language: (second line is a translation of the first) Hello, world! שלום, עולם!

However, the exclamation mark in the second line does not come at the end of the sentence.

This is not good: https://image.ibb.co/b5dC7b/Screenshot_20171102_083647.png This is good https://image.ibb.co/kAdjLw/Screenshot_20171102_083825.png

Changing the interface language didn't seem to help: https://image.ibb.co/k2gtDG/Screenshot_20171102_084103.png

In Chrome, if you select the second line, right click -> Writing Direction -> Right to Left, it seems to do what you want. Does that help?

Yes, that works. (I can start using this more). As a suggestion maybe you should add the writing direction to the top options. I would not have thought to check the right click menu for anything other than cut/copy/paste, spell check and other less important things.

Congrats on shipping. I noticed a small glitch. Your demo page does not load properly during first time. If I refresh then it's working fine.

Update 1 - I'm using Chrome 56

Loaded for me on my first time visiting it (I'm on Firefox 56.0 on Ubuntu w/ UBlock on)

Hmm, that's not supposed to happen. It might be just that the server returned an error for one of the requests the first time.

Your code needs to detect and recover from errors, otherwise no-one will trust it to keep their text safe.

There's error detection and recovery for writing files, and creating accounts, but not opening the demo, currently.

Oh my gosh, this looks like months of work, even if the editors are OS, the beautiful homepage, the billing, replying to emails and keeping everything up...

Thanks a lot! It has indeed been years of work, and while the Firetext editor existed as a mobile Firefox OS app, a big chunk of work has still gone into it. The presentations app is closer to how it already was, though.

Bug: Select some text, press delete. It doesn't delete anything, or deletes just one character at the cursor. It should deleted all selected text.

What browser and OS are you using? It works for me.

Opening pubished documents seems to take a relatively long time?

Example, page with no content except "This is a test" takes over 3 seconds to load.

https://www.airbornos.com/pub#?f=c8d42cd38bfc2c26/87261eeee8...

Even without any browser involved, just curling it takes 1.5 seconds on my mac

    time curl "https://airborn-usercontent.herokuapp.com/pub#?f=c8d42cd38bfc2c26/87261eeee80726bf6eb9ed886ce7517c7435b1c267e4f50b48eae9582a6ef4c8"
    (....)
    real	0m1.570s

Thanks for the report. Unlike the rest of the website, that url is not behind a CDN (although the document itself is), mainly because it's on a different domain (for security reasons). For me it's relatively fast, but I'm close to the server. I'll try to get it behind a CDN, too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com