There's a good thread on Hackpad's waaaay premature announcement that they were open sourcing their code on the original hackpad/hackpad repo: https://github.com/hackpad/hackpad/issues/1. Wonder what the story is and why the actual release was so delayed.

EDIT: Spelling and grammar

They fired the guy who made them open source and held the release until their Notes product was ready.

I can only confirm this via a throwaway for lots of reasons, but this is correct.

Note: I am not Alex.

I'd be careful about using a throwaway. At least do something to mask your IP address and other digital footprint.

You're posting to the YC forum about a YC company whom you're connected to. People involved may be reading, and it's just a short phone call away..

> Note: I am not Alex.

Likely story. :)

Thanks, whoever!

Couldn't find anything official to verify that, or any previous comments on Hacker News / Github mentioning someone being fired. Could you provide some supporting information?

like the other respondents I'd just really appreciate if you at least casually attributed what you've stated to where you heard it, e.g. "heard from someone who worked there" or just heard from whoever. I believe you, since you made an account for this comment, as far as your attribution remember you're anonymous here, it's not going to get back to you.

Interesting, where did you hear that?

Was there ever any explanation for the delay?

Nice of them to put it there. Two points.

1. My confidence in the continued existence of Hackpad is falling by the day and it saddens me as it is where I keep all my stuff.

2. I really would like to get access to the Dropbox Notes beta to see if it is a direct continuation of Hackpad. Seems it is almost impossible to get access to it though.

Notes is really good. It just saddens me that Dropbox does not base those systems on top of Dropbox but somewhere separately. I wish I could just get .md files or something similar in my Dropbox from what's on notes.

What about using something like Notational Velocity / nvAlt (which will keep your notes on Dropbox, and has mobile clients available too)?

Writeily Pro is an awesome Android app, and open source. It can save its files to any directory on your SD card, so as long as you get that directory syncing, you're good to go. ie. it's sync service agnostic

http://writeily.me/

nvAlt never played well with Dropbox for me. I tried to use it at home and at work, sharing my notes/documents via Dropbox and I had all kinds of sync issues unless I was super dliligent about closing the client on one machine before opening it on the other (something I didn't always remember to do and once I'm at work, I can't close the home one and then can't use it all day etc)

DB Notes is clearly a spiritual continuation, and some things are directly continued (fonts, limited styling, minimal composition area), but it's also got features that are distinct from the original HackPad, like sidebar comment threads (somewhat like Medium's comments).

It definitely shares a lot, but it's not just "hackpad with the dropbox logo"

Sidebar comment threads is a really good move. I have many hackpads destroyed by inline comments.

Notes has a Hackpad importer that lets teams migrate their pads into Dropbox Notes, so you don't have to worry about losing a place where you can lee your Notes.

The Hackpad import on DB Notes works really well and they have an option to redirect all your old Hackpad urls to the newly imported notes, which is pretty nice. The only catch with Notes so far is there is no way to back them up / export them from the DB Notes interface.

write into hackpad support! someone will let you in :)

Check out https://slimwiki.com

I really wish that, someday, I could click on a cool link on Hacker News for a service that's personal document storage and syncing and, near the bottom of the page, would read the text "host this on your own server using [these instructions]."

You should give https://sandstorm.io/ a close look. I would describe it as a personal server platform. You can host it yourself or use a cloud provider. You can install ported apps or write your own. I'm using the cloud beta right now, and it's really cool. They claim that porting apps to Sandstorm is pretty easy, and I think their live demo proves them right: there are some useful apps ported already (https://sandstorm.io/apps/).

I feel this same way. Unfortunately, everyone seems to think otherwise.

Seafile maybe? I never used dropbox but I think it can do all the same. Installation is trivial nowadays and setup is 10 minutes maybe.

Try https://www.aerofs.com

The App Store link no longer works (US store). I'm guessing this is the beginning of the end.

Signing in with Google requests to view your contacts. Come on, really?

Hmm. Not only do they make unnecessary, irrelevant, and generally overreaching demands on your privacy, but you get modded down for objecting to it. Sounds like a great product. Where do I sign up?

Absolutely nothing makes me reach for the back button faster than a "X requests access to Y" notification that doesn't explain exactly why X needs access to Y, and what X will do with its newly-granted access.

For ephemeral collaboration, just use an semi-anonymous EtherPad fork like PiratePad.

http://piratepad.net/

Or if you want an anonymous pad with video chat, http://snapmeet.io

That's not anonymous. It talks to cloudflare.com, bootstrapcdn.com, fonts.googleapis.com, mxpnl.com and cloudfront.net in addition to snapmeet.io. None of the connections are over https and there's probably quite some cookie sending and fingerprinting involved.

Similar projects exist that use OpenDocument Format as the underlying file format.

https://github.com/adityab/Manticore https://github.com/kogmbh/kotype

Another cool, live EtherPad fork which has existed for a long time (anonymous pads, w/o source): http://piratepad.net/front-page/

another one is http://meetingwords.com/

Wonder if there are any improvements here that could be pulled back into the open source Etherpad-light?

Hackpad is wonderful. We use it as a quick tool to discuss our ideas. It's more readable, gives a proper track of changes, and is effective. Having known that it has gone open source makes feel even better.

However, didn't Dropbox bought Hackpad earlier ?

clicking "Take a test drive" link on hackpad main site results in "Refused to execute inline event handler because it violates the following Content Security Policy directive: "script-src 'self' 'unsafe-inline' " in Chrome

Interesting still based on the original Etherpad rather than Etherpad-lite which is actually based on Node.js and works much better.

Etherpad-lite has a lot of interesting plugins.

This was open-sourced a while back. Looks like they hollowed out the repo though. Is that bad etiquette?

https://github.com/hackpad/hackpad

No, it wasn't, it was only announced and then took until now to be actually released (see the issue in the repo you linked)

That repo never had code in it.

That's what it looks like

I want to turn this into a mac app. Was not expecting java.

HackPad is a fork of EtherPad, which was all JavaScript on Java! It uses the Rhino JavaScript engine. Believe it or not.

So Dockerize it and have the data backed up to an S3 bucket. Then you'd just docker pull, start the container, and surf to it locally.

Ya, i'll definitely be exploring. I always loved hackpad, but didn't use as much as I would if it was a native note taking app (like JustNotes which I use)

Looks like there's an OSX client in https://github.com/dropbox/hackpad/tree/master/client/osx

Cool, thanks!