Show HN: Kvak.io – Online Notepad | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Kvak.io – Online Notepad

kvak.io

90 pointslevmiseri59 comments

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There seem to be some SSL issues https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=kvak.io

yes, please enable https for this. Looks nice and simple

Thanks! Will address this today.

A possible security concern is that this can store arbitrary HTML, including script.

http://kvak.io/?n=f9f2o1r2pd64

Ironic how you posted a note without a password so anyone immature enough (me) could just tamper with your example.

That breaks the visitor counter, since it relied on updating the underlying document to update the counts!

I was going to go ahead and hide the lock button entirely to avoid this attack, but decided I would get some work done today instead.

EDIT: after a bit more hacking, I removed the password and hid the lock button. Nothing that would stop a determined adversary :) (Also, I kept the Khajit change in your honor)

Great. Thanks!

Fix for this incoming. I don't want to limit HTML insertion in general, but I'll make sure scripts are not possible.

A lightweight online note-pad for any quick text-sharing needs. Let me know what you think or if you find any use for it!

Neat! I like how it's lightweight, not enough lightweight stuff on the web nowadays (except for HN). Allowing the option to set human readable permalinks might be useful.

I like the unintrusive UI, but what I would really like is markdown support. I am not sure if that fits _your_ initial idea, but I'm a tech person, so, for me that's a must.

Also, add https, because google will punish you.

Otherwise, well done.

I created https://markdownshare.com/ to allow anybody to create/share/render markdown.

Unfortunately these kind of sites are an abuse magnet, so it is in the process of being retired.

I think any sustainable site/service like this has to be self-hosted, or come with a subscription. Because otherwise dealing with all the bots, spam-submissions, and other abuse is just too depressing.

MarkdownShare looks like a pretty neat service, I'm sorry to hear that people took advantage of it!

Interesting that you mention a subscription service would more sustainable. I'm actually building a markdown note-taking app [1], that is based around a note-card format. We are currently developing a way to share a markdown card with a secure link.

[1] https://supernotes.app

I know exactly what you mean. I made https://Write.wtf majority of it is just junk.

Neat. Have you implemented any anti-spam controls? How much does it cost to keep it running?

Would a captcha have helped?

I suspect it would have helped initially, but then it becomes an arms-race.

Have you seen clientside-encrypted pastebins like 0bin[0]? The idea is to absolve the host of legal responsibility, since they can't even access the data without the decryption key in the URL.

[0]: https://github.com/sametmax/0bin

Can you expand on the types of abuse you saw? Was it all just spam, or was some of it legitimately 'dodgy' ?

A combination of (bot) IP addresses making 20+ requests a second, to post SPAM. Half the abuse was people just making lots of requests in short spaces of time, the other half was just people submitting spam, more slowly. I added rate-limiting to deal with the worst offenders, but mostly they'd keep POSTing away, ignoring the error-codes I was sending.

All submissions would get a random ID, something like this example chosen at random:

https://markdownshare.com/view/b5abadcc-c0fb-473e-a34d-f27c0...

There were numerous bots who'd try to spider/probe the site collecting all the links. Handling millions of 404s a month wasn't much of a pain, because the service was pretty efficient, but it was just another source of annoyance.

Finally, and God only knows how, I'd get a ton of DCMA takedown notices for alleged copyright infringement. That's what pushed me over the edge into first of all making it read only, and secondly planning to kill it at the end of the year.

Wow thanks for that. Makes one stop and think before coding anything similar. :(

What do people gain from spamming your service? Referring especially to the ones that kept going despite error codes being sent their way.

Just bots spamming forms I guess, hoping to get indexed and ranked on google.

The same thing you see on random blogs, I don't think there's anything specific about my service in particular - just badly coded bots that don't have retry logic and blindly spam the same content to thousands of sites that accept comments, content, and pingbacks.

Ahhhh they are trying to collect backlinks. That makes sense.

What would help a lot, if you could customize the generated parameter in some way. Together with the password feature noone could "hack" into it anyways.

Also you could easily get rid of the "?n=" param I guess and just build a slug like http://kvak.io/fsf2o1r6yw5

Both great ideas. Getting rid of "?n=" is definitely coming (current links will of course keep working). Custom URL is also now on the list of next improvements.

cool, looking forward :) I will abuse this then as a grocery shopping list to share with my girfriend

That's cool! Reminds me of old notepad.cc and https://onthesamepage.online/ with very similar mechanics and philosophy, but for visual drawing.

Have you considered using ProseMirror [1]? It's a nice wrapper around contenteditable that makes things like inline math editing [2] much easier to set up.

[1] https://prosemirror.net/ [2] https://github.com/benrbray/prosemirror-math

How I yearn. http://kvak.io/?n=bpf2o1s1jn1u0

This could be handy when you post on a forum or underneath a new article. Sometimes you want to go into more depth but technically limited on space or frankly it would be too much. You could have a link to note for those that wanted to read more. Would like it if I could host on my server, and had markdown (as said) plus some basic tracking info - # clicks etc.

http://kvak.io/?n=lef2o1r142f1i6

NewPassword1

Looks nice! You seem to be missing an about page and a privacy-related page though. What tech stack is behind?

It doesn't work for me after I enter a password to lock it. I cannot type in anything.

Does anyone know of a replacement for the chrome extension papier? Made a new tab in chrome into a persistent notepad. I built all my note taking around it and my only option seems to side load it from now on.

What what the name of the similar service launched a few years ago by telegram ?

https://telegra.ph/

Any article published on telegr.ph renders beautifully on Telegram apps.

The apps have a 'instant view' feature. It loads insanely fast for most news websites

Example of an article published on telegra.ph, if someone wants to see how it looks with content: https://telegra.ph/Why-Using-WhatsApp-Is-Dangerous-01-30-4

Very interesting tool. I wonder what the business model behind this might be. How do you intend to make money? Do you even want to make money with this?

I don't intend to make money out of this. A happy little side project that's easy to maintain and improve over time.

Down?

> Not Found on Accelerator > Description: Your request on the specified host was not found. Check the location and try again.

Can you describe the tech stack behind this?

The entire thing is just a vanilla HTML/CSS/JS connected with Firebase.

Could you make it redirect to https automatically please? Will the source code be available?

This is a great way to quickly share text between my personal phone and my work machine :)

Not great for secrets tho

Password for editing is not worth it, but a password for reading will be totally worth it.

Will love to self host something like this. Would you be willing to open source it?

I can't help but notice that this was done in django.

It was not. If the code suggests that, then it's just because I'm not a very good developer. All basic HTML/CSS/JS + Firebase.

Oh, I didn't read the code, the favicon shown by my browser confused me.

This is amazing. As simple as it can be. Good job!

Would be great with client side encryption

This is really good, extremely simple.

adding a QR code generator would make this super mobile friendly.

reminds me of shrib.com/

Why should I use this when there is HN for collaborative discussion?

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