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How is it free?

> When you subscribe to iCloud+, you can use a custom domain name


> and they may prefer different tools to us. > We would do well to accept this.

Why is it better to accept harm from bad tools, especially since we are the ones harmed by those preferences?


> Podcasts are built on an open standard, which is why they aren’t controlled by a bad algorithm and don’t have ads that spy on you

Of course they do, you can have regional ads depending on your IP. There are no "standards" "open" enough to kill ads And they are controlled by the same bad search/distribution algorithms any other type of mass media is

> and aren’t locked down to one app or platform

These exist as well, and sometimes the transition to a walled garden kills the historic catalogue


Tangential: given the lack of hinting, is it possible to achieve high quality results for small fonts, are there any examples/comparisons to actual fonts (that also can have bad quality hinting, so real comparison to well/poorly hinted fonts would be interesting)?

What a coincidence, was just looking for a replacement of Simplenote!

With hundreds of note taking apps coming and going, is there any single performant cross-platform non-Electron app with great conflict resolution for simple notes? Just to be more useful than an overpowered code editor + a file cloud?

Checked just 2 of these conditions here (native Windows and macOS and some iOS startup benchmarks) and there is literally not a single app!!! (to be fair, not every app is likely tested, but even without those it's 6 apps)

https://noteapps.info/features?group=performance


Obsidian is great and highly performant, even though it's using Electron. Electron is a huge advantage, faster development and the option to customise it easily with plugins.

It's not highly performant, its startup time is a multiple of that of native apps. Nothing is easy about plugins, APIs you expose/maintain define that, not Electron, and those can be good/bad in any system. Electron gives easier access to UI styling, but then again, real "easily" comes from the structure/stability of your UI, otherwise your plugins would break all the time. Also, same as with APIs - e.g, Joplin is Electron, but you can only style on a desktop. Then, of course, there are plenty of Electron apps that you can't style at all and that don't support plugins.

I'm happy for devs' "faster development", but as a user I care about "faster use", which Electron blocks outright


Startup time in Obsidian could be better (we're working on it!), but performance is more than startup time. It's making interactions fast throughout the entire app. Obsidian is only three developers but we spend a lot of time shaving off milliseconds everywhere we can. Keystrokes, scrolling, querying, navigating large vaults, opening and parsing large Markdown files, etc.

In 2025 we made reduced startup time on mobile under 0.5s (used to be several seconds), made search nearly instantaneous and released Bases to make complex queries equally fast (much faster than Dataview and other pre-existing solutions).

I wrote a bunch more on this topic here:

https://x.com/kepano/status/2004008730720194759


Thank you for this work! I had tried Obsidian every year or so and the performance switching/opening notes drove me crazy in the past. I like it to feel instant and I'm more sensitive to UI performance than others. Just tried again, and it passes the threshold for me!

Obsidian just launched Obsidian CLI too, if that helps. And sync.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46961430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47197267


I use Ticktick for my Markdown notes and todos. I can add tasks from my lockscreen. I have a single view of notes and tasks. Costs me 5 biriyanis per year, yes its localized pricing.

Been meaning to switch to an open source app out of principle, one which can handle rich notes too.


I should measure my expenses in biriyanis more.

I don't think even Simplenote was native on Windows (despite what noteapps.info says), there is no simplenote-windows repo and all signs point to simplenote-electron

yeah, unfortunately it was yet another Electron wrapper on Windows, though mobile/Mac (where it's more important) was native.

The website's idea is great, but unfortunately it's not comprehensive/reliable, otherwise finding an alternative would be much easier.


You could probably vibe code the perfect one for yourself at this point.

Of course, but if Elon=great you can ignore that

Vibe management at its finest

Oh, indeed, that's premium brand experience right there for you: all the basic stuff is broken, would you like to more apple services to go?

It's even weirder when people dismiss real issues as "works just great". Just use the great old version and ignore all future changes if they scare you!

Haha, this is essentially what the original maintainer (Dominik Reichl) does. He keeps a 1.0 and 2.0 version depending on which format you use.

> Many file sharing tools, sync tools, and some cloud platforms (Dropbox for instance) support delta syncs with block-level delta compression.

Ok, but "some" isn't even "many", and the core reason why the single-file problem doesn't go away with sqlite

Instead the new solution must be dumb-cloud-friendly any rely on multiple files, and definitely split all the pdfs and icons away from the few kilobytes of actual user passwords


> but "some" isn't even "many"

True, but it’s a start.

Splitting the file into pieces is certainly not the right way to go about it though, as you would just be poorly emulating VeraCrypt! The most robust sync solution is an actual protocol (like Bitwarden), otherwise dumb file syncing is going to have the same issues it usually has.


Veracrypt is a single file container, did you mean Cryptomator? And how does a protocol help with a dumb cloud with local file access? You'd still need to define a local scheme

Nope, I meant VeraCrypt. As I assumed you meant splitting attachments into their own BLOB. This means you would have the KDBX file, then the attachment blob. I’m saying that you might as well use a purpose built encryption container tool.

As for the protocol my main argument is that passing around a file with dumb syncing is always going to have issues. The only real way to mediate it is to have a defined schema and standardized sync protocol between keepass clients. This would make them behave more like a centralized password manager. However, this approach would require some sort of relay infrastructure and just ends up emulating syncthing but for application specific data rather than simple files. It’s far out of scope for KeePass IMO to build a p2p sync protocol.

Editing this comment because a user in this thread actually acknowledges this point:

> Solving sync and sharing cannot be done on whole database file level, as it implemented now in KeePass. Changes need to be tracked at the password record level, all changes need to persisted as operations log and that log needs to be distributed across devices.


> I’m saying that you might as well use a purpose built encryption container tool.

Which is what keepass is, it just fails in a few ways (built to contain passwords and attachments) some of which are what the format change suggestion is supposed to fix. So I don't understand the conceptual disconnect.

> passing around a file with dumb syncing is always going to have issues

That's true of everything, including the protocol. But also, how does it help if you think the protocol is out of scope anyway, so shouldn't block non-ideal improvements? Let's not perfect be the enemy of the good?


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