Excalidraw – a whiteboard tool that lets you sketch hand-drawn diagrams | Hacker News Reader

Excalidraw – a whiteboard tool that lets you sketch hand-drawn diagrams

excalidraw.com

79 pointslipis21 comments

In the future, would be great if outsiders wouldn't try to influence what gets to the frontpage of Hacker News. Here is the author of this project trying to push people to upvote: https://twitter.com/Vjeux/status/1219340291603230721

I'm pretty sure I have read somewhere on HN that people should not ask for upvotes. Here is a example of just that happening.

If more people flag the submission, it'll eventually get removed from the frontpage.

Edit: annoyingly, the author (vjeux) seems to have deleted the tweet by now (not sure what the accomplishes?) and I took no archive of it. Life goes on

Sorry about that! I don't really know what's the etiquette about this. I've always asked people to upvote for the initial submission so that it has a chance to get to the front-page. I'm happy to stop if that's against the rules.

Just found the place where it's mentioned, which I'm sure you've read before ;)

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Don't solicit upvotes, comments, or submissions. Users should do those things when they run across something they personally find interesting, not because someone has content to promote.

Going forward, it would be smart of you to assume that any community that uses voting, it's usually against the etiquette to solicit for votes. Especially if you haven't read the guidelines :)

Thanks for linking to the guidelines! I deleted my tweet about it. I'll wait to see if it goes to Hacker News by itself then :)

It is very against the rules; it's too bad, because this is neat and probably would have (in fact, probably did, given the ring detection stuff HN does behind the scenes) done fine on its own. I appreciate the gracious response and cancelled my flag on this post. But a comment pointing out vote manipulation, even if it's well-intentioned, is on topic and deserves its place on the thread.

Let's delete the Tweet and unflag it. it was an honest mistake

I'm not sure where you're coming from, where soliciting for votes/likes/whatever is NOT frowned upon. Only community I can come up with is producthunt, where it used to be frowned upon but doesn't seem to be anymore.

Edit: also, missing to read the rules of community before participating doesn't seem like a honest mistake. vjeux been around for a long time and I'm sure knows how to navigate the different communities. Also since the whole "no vote rings please" thing is mentioned in 3 or more places on news.ycombinator.com.

The tool deserves some visibility!

That's an opinion someone can hold.

In general, we let the HN community decide of what's worthy of visibility, and it worked out great so far. Let's keep it that way! :)

I agree with you, I think the content is also interesting, and would have upvoted it myself, if I didn't happen to come across the tweet at the very same time.

Maybe a re-submission as a "Show HN" from vjeux himself (but read the rules first https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html ) without any solicitation and see if it organically arrives to the frontpage, would be a good compromise.

Unfortunate, I had not seen the project before and thought it is really cool. I don’t care that much about the ‘hand-drawn’ style, but I like how simple it is to sketch out a diagram or wireframe very quickly!

I wrote a blog post with my thoughts on the project here if you’re interested: https://blog.vjeux.com/2020/uncategorized/reflections-on-exc...

You can also share your diagrams via links: https://excalidraw.com/?id=6264616665481216

I have been following it since a week and is awesome to see how it evolves.. PR after PR it's getting better. Yesterday used it to just wireframe a small feature. Awesome project!

Using hand-drawn sketch diagrams is useful, as it suggests it's a draft, not a finished diagram.

However, you can do all of this and more with powerpoint, it's my default sketching tool at the moment. More info: https://blog-insider.office.com/2019/07/03/sketchy-shapes-fo...

What's the deal with lines that are composed of two lines with a space in the middle? This seems a very odd choice for something "hand drawn"

Eg: https://excalidraw.com/?id=5650452045627392

It's how rough.js approximates hand-drawn sketchy lines. It looks great in some cases, okay in many others, but if they diverge too much, it looks weird. I think the intent is to evoke the style of sketching where everything is stroked multiple times with short lines.

It's an artifact of how Rough.js renders sketchy lines. It does that by creating some random offsets. For some random values, it may create this effect for long lines, which is not ideal. This is less pronounced in shorter lines. The latest release has tried to reduce this effect, but there is a small probability that it may still happen: https://roughjs.com/posts/release-4.0/

I made my first open source contribution on this project and watched how it evolved day by day. Absolutely love it!

Here is the repo: https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw

It was amazing to see the rapid progress on Excalidraw, all fueled by open source contributions but organized by Christopher. So cool to see what enthusiastic devs can hack together in short order

Found it pretty useful for note taking in classes. Awesome tool

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