corwinstephen

Ask HN: Are there any companies doing good work in this space?

I'm looking for a new gig and have been shocked at how few companies seem to understand the types of solutions that stand a chance at making a difference re: these sorts of problems.

Zing

This would be a cool metric to use in various analyses. It's a number that's guaranteed to be shrinking fast in today's world and I'd bet there's a quality-of-life benefit to be had by trying to optimize for growing it rather than shrinking it.

Agree. The AI stuff is pure novelty, I’m skeptical it’s going to be truly adopted in its current form in any substantial way.

I’m with you on this, especially when people don’t realize that plugging GPT into some arbitrary product isn’t an original idea. It’s a bit cringe.

Hey everyone, I just wanted to say thank you for all the feedback. I'm slowly working my way through everything and finding it all extremely helpful. I'll make sure to document the changes that have been made in response to this discussion.

As an aside, I realized when I logged into this account to post that I created my Hackernews account over a decade ago, and scrolling through my post history and coming across the multiple Show HN news posts I've done throughout that time, thinking about the successes and failures I've had with those old projects, and realizing that this community has been here the whole damn time, being as generous and constructive and open-minded as it ever was... that's really cool.

Thank you everyone for being part of one of the best communities on the entire internet. Y'all are too good.

Definitely hoping to get more materials up soon! Sorry it's barebones for the moment, we have a lot to do!

Planning on adding more here! What formats do you prefer?

It's currently online only, but only because we haven't gotten that far yet, definitely want to make a native app that's fully local.

You're right, I gotta get that up asap!

Thanks! It's on the roadmap!

Glad to hear it! And thank you for the feedback. Mobile is a whole can of worms I have no idea how I'm going to tackle yet, but it's certainly part of the plan.

As for the "for free" part, that's funny, because I had it the way you're suggesting originally but changed it to this based on someone else's feedback :P

This is brilliant, thank you so much for the help!

This is super helpful to hear, thank you! I'm like you, I like using products that feel like they've been built by people rather than faceless companies, so I felt like this would be good to share.

I was too! I hope the way we've done it solves the problem!

Thanks for this!

To answer the question, Lunette would ideally be a combination of local and cloud and be available via web and native app. One product I tried that did this was Roam Research (https://roamresearch.com/), but the problem was they made you choose because the two (either saved to the cloud OR locally), whereas I think it'd work better if those two worked hand in hand. But that's complicated to build and beyond the scope of a proof of concept.

Ultimately I went with the web app because that's my skillset and I figured the best first step was seeing if it's even something people would use.

If I'm being perfectly honest, it never even occurred to me to consider the open source route. I'm not opposed to open source at all--I've done in the past--but one issue could be that I might loose the ability to be highly opinionated about the evolution of the product, and I think in this space where there are already a ton of "do a lot of things halfway decently" products, being opinionated about what Lunette is and is not could be key to its success.

This is cool!

I think my favorite part about doing this Show HN is all the interesting products I'm discovering, and seeing all the different ways people approach this space and this problem.

Oh snap, good catch. Thank you!

Interesting, I never came across this one in my search. I'm gonna give it a try, I'm curious to see how it compares.

I did try out a couple other editors that leaned on markdown though with mixed results.

One thing that stands out to me in particular with iA is the way they've implemented (at least based on the homepage video) note linking. That click-through implementation forces you to leave your document, which is something we explicitly didn't want, since typically what you're doing is scanning through your notes and your document simultaneously while you work out how everything fits together.

Awesome! You can use 'beta' as a coupon code to make it free. Thank you for checking it out!

Forgot HN doesn't have a DM feature. Just use code "beta"!

BTW ping me for a coupon code to make it free if you want to actually use it!

Edit: Forgot no DMs on HN. Use code "beta"!

Apologies, I've sort of been struggling with how to present the concept clearly and concisely. Here's an overview of where the idea came from: https://lunette.app/about

Basically, my wife and I both write, and we found ourselves bouncing around from app to app looking for something that felt good and like a place we could really be productive and creative but never found anything that felt quite right, both in terms of functionality and aesthetics. Products like Medium are subject to constantly changing business models and identities. Google Docs is cluttered and uninspiring. Notes apps probably came the closest... but this big realization was that writing is a process that's just one of many things you might do in any of those apps, and there are things that happen while writing prose that could be augmented if the app were specifically designed around that use-case.

As I mentioned in the about page, the first such discovery was that almost all writers I spoke to were doing the thing where they come up with ideas spontaneously and usually just type up those ideas at random places in the document, which makes a mess of everything. We set out to solve that problem as an MVP, but the broader goal is to continue to develop the app around the writer's use-case and make wrangling concepts into prose an easier process.

Unrelated to the discussion, just wanted to comment on Backstage's tagline:

“Build an ecosystem, not a wilderness"

which is ironic because a wilderness is arguably the most complete and perfectly functioning ecosystem you're gonna get.

At first I thought we were building things with "bricked" iphones.

The physical world is headed in the same direction as the internet. In 20 years, the built environment is going to be entirely comprised of identical materials and trademarked by a tiny handful of monopoly companies.

It seems like some people on here are into the idea and would use it. That's cool, but for me personally, I'm amazed that anyone is still into this kind of thing in 2022.

I learned about https://www.are.na/ at a meetup a couple years ago. IMO they're doing a solid job of bringing 1.0 wonder to the 2.0 world.

This is 100% correct. I run a govtech startup (similar to Seamless docs, the company mentioned in the article), and this was one of the key insights we've picked up over the last couple years.

When your process happens on paper, there's nothing forcing you to ensure it makes logical sense. You can draw whatever you want on a piece of paper, so a lot of the paper forms that people call "permits" are just messy reflections of the thought process of the person who originally conceived the process. Naturally, products that start by directly replicating a paper form are accommodating and perpetuating the lack of planning.

We've kind of taken a backwards approach where we don't accommodate direct translation of forms and instead provide tools that encourage people to think through the steps of their permitting processes to get them to make sense on a digital platform. More often than not, they discover glaring inefficiencies in the process which when fixed make everything work more smoothly even independent of the move to a digital platform.

Shameless plug: https://citygro.ws