Hacker News Reader

Comment by mattstrayer | Hacker News Reader

co-founder here: feel free to ask any questions!

whenever i see a free to use cloud service like this i think either 1:

- they won't be able to afford to run it much longer and it'll shut down with apologies about being a hobby project that got out of hand

- they start charging more for it than i'd like to spend once i become reliant on it

don't see any links to any source code... so doesn't seem to be something i can host myself... i typically try to avoid investing in services that i don't have some kind of guarantee with either way (that i'm paying to keep it running, or that i can fork it or host it myself when the hobbyist gets bored)

why should i invest the time in using your product?

Can I export or host the data myself?

For work sensitive notes I can’t/won’t use an untrusted sync mechanism.

Totally a fair use-case and request!

Right now we don't have support for a local storage mechanism or self-hosting. We are extremely keen on privacy and are very open to working towards either of those two options.

Yeah, I couldn't imagine hosting my Most Important Notes on a freebie service whose provenance I don't entirely know.

Notes are self host for me.

Two questions:

1. Doesn't seem like there's support for latex-style math? (Or, at least couldn't find it in the documentation and putting an equation between $$ doesn't seem to work). Is this planned?

2. Is there a way to export your notes?

other co-founder here:

1. Currently there isn't support, but not opposed if there is a need. 2. Also, there isn't a way to export (or self host) as of now.

Just some background - We originally built this out as a standalone desktop app (~4 years ago) and then re-worked it for the web around the same time. We were planning to eventually rewrite the desktop app for just that reason - to have the offline syncing and cleaner export UX.

If this had TeX I'd be interested immediately. There's no great way at the moment to mathematical notes, it's a big pain point.

Obsidian has LaTeX support out of the box. And there are some awesome plugins to make it even better, check out https://github.com/artisticat1/obsidian-latex-suite.

I didn't like Obsidian's TeX support very much. Primarily because it is very difficult to get macros working (especially across files). There are some plugins that try to do it but when I tried they didn't work very well. And anyway the features I'm interested in are sharing, collaborative editing, and having a good way to present things that are typed up.

Also my points. I would like one of these apps to actually show some love for technical (math) people.

So far, I find Obsidian to be the best for us.

I actually run an app that does support mathematical documentation. I initially created it for mathematical publishing but didnt see enough interest so marketed instead as a generic document publishing app.

Would love to get your take on it - https://relentless.so

What are the advantages of this over, say, Obsidian?

Lowercase really shines when you want to take notes free-form and then be able to share those notes out into the world. You can easily make a note public & even cooler than that you can turn a lowercase note into a presentation with just a few clicks.

Here's an old example I pulled up -> https://www.lowercase.app/@matt/p/1f6c83d5-2869-4024-a687-fc...

In my editor I was able to just group parts of my note into logical slide sections and then publish.

Edit: you can move through the slide show with your left and right arrows.

REQUEST: Please add an option for a monospace/code font. I see that <pre><code>...</code></pre> works very well (good monospace block style), but I have to inspect and edit the source.

With this, we could be able to use it for code!

THANKS!

Thank you for the suggestion!

Who is the target audience?

Folks with technical experience but not necessarily web devs. When you want more out of Google Docs, Notes, etc. but don't want to invest the time in building it yourself. Or, that's not your skillset.

- Syntax highlighting - "one off" Public pages - Slide presentations - embedding task lists with dates

Also, was a pandemic project...so ppl were just using tech and sharing in different ways than they had been.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com