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378 pointsneilparikh67 comments

I'm very confused how everyone thinks this looks good?

I can only speak for myself but I find the font hard to read. The background color is very distracting (and frankly ugly). When using code highlighting the foreground colors clash horribly imho.

The icons are small and on a large monitor hard to see. This is made worse by similarity between the icon color and background.

When I see this all I can think about is John Nunemaker's statment: "But we are hackers and hackers have black terminals with green font colors!"

On the bright side I like the name, and the command line tool is neat.

The font is the one set by your browser. The css only says font-family: monospace. If you don't like it, then change it in your browser's settings.

The problem for me is that the text is bright enough when you are typing, but becomes too dim after it is saved.

How can a color be ugly?

I quite enjoy it's simplicity.

The colour scheme is (or is based on) Solarized, a popular theme. I have no issue reading it, and find it looks incredible.

Dark background and light text is much more natural for a screen. Light background and dark text works for paper, but makes no sense on a screen, it's like staring into a lightbulb.

Turn down the screen brightness to match the light that would be reflected off a sheet of white paper in your working environment.

that doesn't give you the same contrast as a piece of paper, in bright environments, so this also results in eye strain

Also mystery meat navigation. It was bad UX in 1998 and it's bad UX in 2012.

My favourite pastebin is https://gist.github.com/

No account needed, public/private, pastes are git repos, and history.

I wish someone (not my game, so it's best if it's not me) would combine: - hastebin's elegant, simple and pretty UI; - ideone's IDE features (compiling, running, debugging, ...) - gist's concept of making pastes git repos with easily accessible history

http://www.stypi.com/ ?

Looks good, but fails at ideone's features. Also, not a git repo, although history is nice. In other news, I think you just replaced etherpad lite for me.

Here's a clone of Gist that I like, the other features could be added via a fork - https://github.com/justinvh/quark-paste

I like http://paste.lisp.org.

Right now it does not have realtime highlighting, but I think it is obvious to the first-time user what to do. Personally, I like the simple and easy-to-use interface as well as the information and control it gives you at the same time.

Here is an example paste:

http://paste.lisp.org/display/127268

Very beautiful, but I think the future is actually something like http://ideone.com. I'd also like to be able to manually set the language for syntax highlighting purposes. I have to give these guys major props on the simplicity/prettiness of the UI and providing keyboard shortcuts for everything (even for twitter!).

EDIT: Oh, and like some other commenters I liked how the URLs are made of consonant-vowel pairs, so as to make them pronounceable. Very cool touch!

EDIT2: I promise to not edit this further, but I'd also like to congratulate them on the sane colorscheme. Very easy on the eyes, espec. compared to something like pastebin.com

you can change the url to correct the language. ie: http://hastebin.com/lerapaduma.erl (auto detected), to http://hastebin.com/lerapaduma.rb

Thanks, mate.

Yes, this is a very nice feature. I noticed that mine was autodetected incorrectly[1] but just for shiggles I changed the extension to `.js`[2] and it highlighted properly.

[1]: http://hastebin.com/qumirixiqo.lisp [2]: http://hastebin.com/qumirixiqo.js

Re pronounceable: I wonder if it makes any sense at all to use full words (from a dictionary), assembled into sentences (using a grammar). They'd be much longer, but (possibly) more readable and memorable. I'm sure this has been done - I wonder how it worked out?

The key generation is swappable. Currently I have implemented "random" and "phonetic" but this would be a neat (and easy to add) addition. I'll look into it.

The problem with this approach is that it implies relevance to the domain.

If I link you to http://hastebin.com/daqasujoko.rb you're thinking either "that's a ruby file" or "that's a URL".

If I link you to http://hastebin.com/foodcatsphone.rb you're thinking "what does this have to do with food, cats or phones?"

Note I specified a grammar, though no semantics. This means sentences, that (usually) will be bizarre and surreal. Like nonsense phonemes, nonsense sentences will (usually) not have any apparent meaning; though both can be suggestive.

A "random" example might be "acatimpliedoncolourlessphones.rb"

It's amazing to me that ideaone is not hacked every day. I wonder how they do it.

I don't care how elegant everyone seems to find this, it took me more than 0 seconds to figure out how to use, I'm sticking to http://paste.pocoo.org/

It looks like a terminal/repl to me.

First I tried ls, then I tried to type in some lisp code.

It did not work! ;-) /s

This is pretty easy to use. But I don't think the issue with pastebin clones is ease of use.

With all those language, it didn't even have a proper Lisp! Big minus points for that. (It did have Scheme though, but that doesn't have the word "Lisp" in its name.)

I'd say 80% of the ease of use of Hastebin is in the URL. ;) I'm going to remember it, probably whether I want to or not.

If I install the gem I only have to remember a five-character verb, and it's a fun verb.

"Pocoo" isn't even a word in my language, I have to remember a subdomain, and "pocoo.com" forwards to a random Chinese (?) e-commerce site that appears to sell tchotchkes.

From pocoo.org:

The name “Pocoo” bears no meaning and multiple tries to find a suitable Backronym failed. It originally was chosen because it sounded “cute” and is now also the name of our logo owl. Pocoo is pronounced /ˈpokʉː/

Elegance is the point! Okay, so you spend a minute reading the usage page. Big deal. Learn it once and you're done. Plus you get an awesome Ruby Gem for pasting from the terminal! Definitely worth the 10 seconds it takes to figure out.

+1, at least basic info of what it is, its uniqueness and how to use is missing.

http://hastebin.com/about.md

source: https://github.com/seejohnrun/haste-server

I like the simplicity of the interface, though it seems to insist that everything I save is Erlang code. I also wish the haste command wasn't a special Ruby client; something POST-driven like http://sprunge.us would be fantastic.

Looking in the code for the client [0], it turns it already uses a POST to create a paste.

[0] - https://github.com/seejohnrun/haste-client/blob/master/lib/h...

I'm curious, do you use a library to generate the pronounceable URLs?

If you look at them, they're just consonant-vowel pairs. Did I misunderstand what you were talking about?

Unfortunately this includes substrings which aren't at all phonetic, like "qo". It would be nice to see a generator for actual pronounceable 'words', with consonant clusters, etc.

yes and then register the .com for all of them

I'm not the one who made this, I just thought it was quite useful and posted this. You could try and create an issue to ask. Sorry!

As neilparikh already commented it does take POSTed data, you can use it as such:

  curl -d "$(cat test.rb)" http://hastebin.com/documents

Which returns:

  {"key":"kixuxorico"}

Meaning you can find it at http://hastebin.com/kixuxorico

If you wanted to be slightly more complex, you could define a quick bash function such as:

  haste() { 
    curl -sd "$(cat $1)" http://hastebin.com/documents | 
    sed -e 's/{"key":"/http:\/\/hastebin.com\//' -e "s/\"}/\.$(echo $1 | 
      sed -e 's/.*\.//')\n/"; 
  }

or in a single line:

  haste() { curl -sd "$(cat $1)" http://hastebin.com/documents | sed -e 's/{"key":"/http:\/\/hastebin.com\//' -e "s/\"}/\.$(echo $1 | sed -e 's/.*\.//')\n/"; }

Then use it as:

  haste test.rb

Which returns:

  http://hastebin.com/momawevota.rb

This is awesome! If you start getting a lot of traffic and want to monetize, I suggest making sure your ads are completely unobtrusive and keep them with the minimal design of the site. Ugly annoying ads are the downfall of most other paste sites.

First impressions is that the minimalism compromises usability. I did have to think for a moment.

(1) The control panel hides really long lines.

(2) Really long lines! A bigger gutter would be good on the right hand side. In fact, that would free up the entire right hand side for the controls and whatever else.

(3) The colour scheme got in the way for me, especially with syntax highlighting. Increasing font size drastically improved it for me so I have to ask, have you considered a bigger default font.

(4) Would be cool if you showed a list of recently edited documents (via cookies or whatever). That way I wouldn't accidentally lose stuff.

There are quite a few things I really like about it. It makes it really easy to quickly share something without having to choose the language for it to reasonably syntax-highlight (and the ability to change the URL for more precise highlighting is very nice).

My main gripe is the hotkeys. In the latest stable Chrome, some hotkeys (control+n, control+t) don't work, as they perform the native chrome operations (open new window, open new tab).

maybe if enough people complain to google, they'll change this bug from WontFix to Fixed... http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=33056 very annoying bug.

Hastebin is cool, but wish it could be keyboard only on chrome and ctrl-n/ctrl-t are the perfect shortcuts.

I for one don't like default actions being taken away from me. I use ^N ^T and ^W constantly, and a page taking them away from me would be extremely annoying.

I'll switch them up to ^shift-n, etc tonight Thanks for the feedback

Any reason not to keep the old ones as well?

Wouldn't that conflict with "New Incognito Window"?

If the page you were using was an editor using emacs keybindings, you may be very annoyed that chrome is the only browser that those keybindings don't work in.

what makes this even more annoying is that chrome makes it easy to create an application shortcut, so you can have a window that is just an online editor: so awesome! but it can't work with your keybindings! how do they say: oh snap!

so close, yet so far away.

Note: Though I work on Chrome, I'm not on the UI team, so this is really just my personal opinion. I don't have much say in these areas.

Hastebin should change their shortcut keys to something that isn't already in use by the platform.

Overriding the established meanings of Ctrl+N and Ctrl+S is rude to users who rely on them.

This is no different than a Mac application (for example) implementing special behavior in cmd+tab or cmd+~. You'd be confused.

This bug is such a disaster.

It comes up all the time as the reason web apps will never be able to compete with native apps. Pressing Ctrl-W in your text editor and having the window immediately close is one of the worst possible user experiences.

I love how the generated URLs are crafted to be pronounceable - nice touch.

Wow, this is really nice. 30 days seems a bit short though. I'd love to use this for testing (for projects that download from services on the internet) but if I don't run the test for a month, it'll break.

It might already be available, but I was unable to find it at first glance: is it possible to set pastes to expire? Private, expiring pastes are why I prefer Pastebin over sites like Pastie.

30 days since last view : http://hastebin.com/about.md

edit: Also it says text you paste is not crawled by spiders but you shouldn't expect privacy.

Other alternatives for publishing notes (not code):

* http://pen.io - for example PAGENAME.pen.io -- no account required, and you can edit if you have the password to the page, however you can't format the text)

* http://hackpad.com - account registration is quick and you can format your text

language detection is a bit broken. Both documents I tried were wrongly detected. ascii text was read as .vbs, and a rails controller was read as .py.

I see in the comments I can just change the suffix to get different highlighting, but just thought I'd mention this.

My thoughts exactly. I wrote a line of plain text and it thought it was .vbs. It got a .py right, but only because I made sure it was distinct enough from Ruby for it to know the difference.

I like it, simple and gets the job done and has keyboard shortcuts.

Seems to be developed in node.js and supports Redis, Memcahced or File based storage and uses phonetic key generation.

Impressive to see how little code there actually is in the actual application too.

what is it really? it took me some good effort to figure out what it was.. i still like pastebin more. Minimalism is apparently not always a good thing.

I like what they did with the text area, but how could they change the style of its scroll bar?

Hands-down the best pastebin design I've seen.

Gonna use this instead of pastie from now on.

I like it very simple to use

you should add a linux utility so i can pipe stuff to it... like $ cat mydata.tab | cut -f1,2,3 | sort | uniq | hastebin > hasteoutputurl.txt

and hastebin puts the url in std out and maybe an option to put the url in std err and pass thru the input

If you read the other comments here you'd see multiple people talking about the fact that hastebin already has this: http://hastebin.com/about.md

  cat something | haste

don't even know how to use it, what is it for? one more hacknews junk

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