News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by ausjke on Monday January 14, 2019 @01:50PM (#18905316)
I am uncomfortable to put all personal thoughts, diaries, etc into a non-self-hosting place.

Can they dockerize this and sell that so I can self-host the docker image instead?

for people that is not tech-savvy, what about they buy a docker-container-hosted-by-the-vendor-company but can encrypt the contents in a way that nobody else can peek into the content ever?

Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by throwaway382 on Monday January 14, 2019 @02:39PM (#18905763)
It looks like they use FullStory, so employees can probably see everything you're doing. I'd be surprised if they were recording without ever watching the recordings.

(FullStory records what you do in your browser. It records all DOM elements, so all your data is being recorded and sent to a 3rd party.)

Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by johnzimmerman on Monday January 14, 2019 @03:36PM (#18906215)
You can opt out of Fullstory tracking here > https://www.fullstory.com/optout/
Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by nofunsir on Monday January 14, 2019 @03:49PM (#18906319)
These types of "services" should be opt-in, not opt-out.
Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by flukus on Monday January 14, 2019 @05:47PM (#18907288)
Not that it should be necessary, notion should not be violating you're privacy by default, but at least uBlock/uMatrix block the entire fullstory domain by default.
Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by nofunsir on Monday January 14, 2019 @06:04PM (#18907409)
Precisely why I use it. Unfortunately it can't block everything, and it's under heavy attack[1], as we know.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14978228

Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by MarsAscendant on Tuesday January 15, 2019 @06:52AM (#18910506)
...Christ. DMCA against a plain-text list of domains? What is this, Shadowrun?
Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by hanspeter on Tuesday January 15, 2019 @01:04AM (#18909126)
In the EU they are by law. In reality not all websites disclose all services they share data with though. And all users click accept in the cookie pop-up anyway.
Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by thecatspaw on Tuesday January 15, 2019 @02:31AM (#18909403)
FullStory is not opt in.

Source: am European

Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by hanspeter on Tuesday January 15, 2019 @02:51PM (#18914333)
Have you seen those pop ups with a button to consent to cookies and a link to a privacy page where usage of 3rd party services like Fullstory has to be disclosed? That's your opt-in.
Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by thecatspaw on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @04:40AM (#18919445)
It is not opt in if I do not have an option to decline. "By continuing to use our website you agree" is not opt in and isnt GDPR conform.
Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by dawnerd on Monday January 14, 2019 @03:47PM (#18906303)
Does that also opt you out of their apps too? Guessing all this does is set a cookie for that browser.
Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by nofunsir on Monday January 14, 2019 @03:56PM (#18906376)
It sets the following:

{ "Domain": ".fullstory.com", "Name": "fs_optout", "Value": 1, "Path": "/", "Expires": null, "Store ID": "firefox-default", "First Party Domain": null, "Secure": false, "Session": true, "Http Only": false, "Host Only": false }

Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by jlgaddis on Monday January 14, 2019 @06:29PM (#18907569)
> "Session": true,

As in: this cookie will stick around as long as your browser is running, but when you close it and start it up again it will be gone?

Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by jen729w on Monday January 14, 2019 @09:18PM (#18908383)
If it’s like Matomo’s opt-out system, that cookie is required – it’s the very thing that turns on the opt-out.

When you opt-out of Matomo, the message warns that “if you clear your cookies, delete the opt-out cookie, or if you change computers or Web browsers, you will need to perform the opt-out procedure again”.

Matomo also honours the browser’s DNT setting, which is a) nice and b) rare.

https://matomo.org/docs/privacy/#step-4-respect-donottrack-p...

Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by dawnerd on Monday January 14, 2019 @06:55PM (#18907732)
Mine has an expires set: 2046-05-31T19:47:10.000Z
Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by jefersondaniel on Monday January 14, 2019 @04:04PM (#18906446)
Disabling by the browser will take no effect on the app or other browsers.
Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by owenwil on Monday January 14, 2019 @02:04PM (#18905442)
There's a reason nobody really does this: there's just no money in it. Nylas mail is a good example of this: it offered the ability to self-run it and pay them for the license, but nobody really did. I wonder what they would need to charge to make it feasible? $1000 a year? It makes me pretty sad, but it's just such a distraction for a company of Notion's size and stage.
Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by woolvalley on Monday January 14, 2019 @02:55PM (#18905897)
On-prem enterprise software does make money. You still charge money for it either way. A few examples: Github Enterpise, JIRA, etc.

And notion doesn't need to see their users data to charge money for a service. They could engineer it to be E2E encrypted for the group and not have the ability to see their customers data even with a subpoena.

Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by ymolodtsov on Monday January 14, 2019 @02:59PM (#18905929)
Enterprise is the key word here. Much more companies care about having control over their infrastructure. As for Notion, I guess even on Hacker News only a small share of users would care enough.
Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by edraferi on Monday January 14, 2019 @09:42PM (#18908486)
The ideal model for me is third-party syncing with client side encryption. That is:

1) sell me apps (desktop, mobile),

2) let me sync the content via my choice of providers (dropbox, iCloud, google drive, my own WebDAV server, etc)

3) Let me manually enter a strong password/key in all of my clients to E2E the data, so I don't really need to trust that sync provider.

Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by bunderbunder on Monday January 14, 2019 @03:27PM (#18906151)
It's possibly something many of us should care more about, though.

Suppose your company handles a fair bit of confidential information, and some of that information ends up in Notion as part of your general project management workflow. Now you've got to worry about Notion experiencing a data breach, and whether or not that breach could get you in hot water with your clients, or even into legal trouble.

With on-prem options, you can gain a little extra confidence, because it can all live behind a firewall instead of being directly exposed to the Internet at large.

Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by beat on Monday January 14, 2019 @03:45PM (#18906278)
But again, that's enterprise.

This started with the idea of a personal on-prem solution, which is probably not worth the cost to maintain for the company. I mean, how much is it worth to you to have an on-prem personal solution for a diary? Because that's the worry... people are afraid that their household budget or their database that tracks the content of various adult films or whatever is going to get exposed. That's mostly about embarrassment, not actual harm. That's not something worth hundreds of dollars a month to most people.

And really, if I want to write down my deep dark thoughts where no one will read them, I'll use paper.

Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by woolvalley on Monday January 14, 2019 @04:20PM (#18906607)
Personal users want E2E encyrption, so it doesn't matter who is running the server. And most users do not have the skill to run their own server. The technically advanced can just use the enterprise version if they really care about personal on prem.
Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by Too on Tuesday January 15, 2019 @04:25PM (#18915500)
Maybe we should change the notion that it's difficult to deploy an on prem service.

Why can't it be as simple as containerizing it and presenting it exactly like your would install an app on your phone, with the same possibility to grant permissions? App store provides automatic OTA updates so you don't have to bother about security. And the app itself should not have internet connectivity, connectivity is provided through authenticated tunnel into the container so the app cannot phone home in the background, you can only connect into it using the tunnel with your own password.

Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by beat on Monday January 14, 2019 @04:59PM (#18906925)
Even if you have the skill, is it worth the time to do on-prem, considering, you know, a pen and paper?

(Full disclosure: I'm a total bullet journaling convert. Given a choice between giving up my bullet journal and giving up Google Calendar/Docs and Trello, I'd give up the online stuff in a heartbeat.)

Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by zerkten on Monday January 14, 2019 @03:39PM (#18906231)
> It's possibly something many of us should care more about, though.

Definitely, but I'd argue that even with containers etc., we don't yet have the capabilities to make what we know is right, as easy to operate as SaaS.

> Suppose your company handles a fair bit of confidential information, and some of that information ends up in Notion as part of your general project management workflow.

Many folks that post to HN seem to miss this even though they are probably very technically capable. Many IT people in small/medium organizations don't have the time to consider this. Sometimes relationships with big organizations force this reality and threats get addressed, but it's not the norm. Most IT managers are under pressure to cut costs, reduce staff, modify accounting (review vs capital budgets), coexist with shadow IT, etc. Cloud solutions seem fantastic to them, and they don't have the energy to fight with someone in marketing who introduces a rogue solution because they don't understand how the current Wiki works.

Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by woolvalley on Monday January 14, 2019 @04:18PM (#18906597)
> a rogue solution because they don't understand how the current Wiki works.

That's usually a sign of an IT department not listening to the needs of their end users.

Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by zerkten on Monday January 14, 2019 @11:03PM (#18908779)
I think that's pretty common, so I don't disagree entirely. It can also be the case that you have increasing numbers of tech-savvy folks who feel that they can build their own tech solutions, but aren't actually equipped to build/select something that is equipped to serve the needs of their team or the organization.

This can result in the team being left holding the baby when certain individuals leave, data loss, security issues etc. In 15+ years of enterprise probably two-thirds of the time I've seen this issues and it has been predictable that it would work out this way, but IT didn't help themselves by pretending their solution was better. When IT tries to learn and adopts the tool, or incorporates the needs then things work out better. But, that's only a third of the time.

Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by qudat on Tuesday January 15, 2019 @09:59AM (#18911528)
The two examples you cited are centered around building software. How many of their clients are building software? It's not 100%.
Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by dkarbayev on Monday January 14, 2019 @02:19PM (#18905566)
Well, then we should create open-source analog of notion. I actually was itching wondering what could I create in OSS realm. Probably will have a look at this task :)
Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by QML on Monday January 14, 2019 @02:40PM (#18905772)
That seems to be pretty hard. I just finished a long search for an Open Source one-page markdown editor (no split windows for preview and editing): the closest I could find was an editor called MarkText but even that doesn’t have half the functionality of Notion or Dropbox Paper. It’s hard to compete with fully funded and devoted teams.
Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by andruby on Monday January 14, 2019 @02:52PM (#18905882)
I've been looking for something too. GetCanvas (now defunct but released as open source) was wonderful, but seems abandoned.

stackedit.io has been the closest that I could find.

Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by justinclift on Monday January 14, 2019 @03:40PM (#18906238)
Further down the page there's a mention of an OSS equivalent ("Outline"):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18906118

Haven't tried it out personally (only support signing in from Slack/Google), but it might be your kind of thing. :)

Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by OJFord on Tuesday January 15, 2019 @04:46AM (#18909949)
Trilium is close - it's _more_ flexible, (arbitrary scripts/css) but less 'for free' out of the box.
Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by stfwn on Monday January 14, 2019 @02:39PM (#18905762)
Bitwarden offers self-hosting as one of their paid perks (Docker image and documentation included), in addition to a free tier. It may not be viable as the only business model, but I appreciate that they cater to the small number of people that will make use of it and I imagine the token of goodwill does something for the product as a whole.
Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by zerkten on Monday January 14, 2019 @03:23PM (#18906115)
Bitwarden is a niche application which handles very sensitive data. Value is created when it is hosted internally by a security sensitive organization.

When it comes to business and productivity applications the situation is very different. Many IT admins are tasked with moving to cloud (or other outsourced) solutions. When you see posts you have to realize you, or I, who value autonomy and control may not be the expected customer of these solutions.

To reduce the economics further:

* Startups like this have a product which may not have a complete market fit or reknown. They can't build something that's most likely to stick e.g. a required mail system because a couple of cloud products own the market. Therefore, they move up the productivity stack to team and document collaboration.

* Since they aren't a mature product and will likely change it considerably in the short-term, possibly "firing" customers as they search for a bigger market, they'll need their product to keep up. If they host it, then they can change it end-to-end.

* Any time you release a product that gets deployed on-prem it's virtually impossible to get people to update in a timely manner. Even if you decide to provide an on-prem version to a potentially huge customer, the enterprise sales cycle means that there is a risk your product will have changed before it gets deployed, but some person/process will prevent you get updated to the latest version as they advocate for a competitor.

* Worse, they like the old version and want to stay on it. How do you support these on-prem customers? They liked the value at your cloud pricing, but the cost to support on-prem customers can be much larger.

Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by miles on Monday January 14, 2019 @02:27PM (#18905640)
As of last May, you can apparently export all of your data:

https://mobile.twitter.com/notionhq/status/99643620080931635...

Just shipped: export your entire workspace with one-click.

Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by lvs on Monday January 14, 2019 @03:45PM (#18906271)
I miss the days when you could buy a piece of software -- like, physically buy a license that allows you to use it in perpetuity on your own terms. Then, if you want to pay for some hosted features, it makes sense to have a subscription. But the default cloud subscription dependency business plan immediately turns me off to any product. I've got too many damn subscriptions, and I can't take on any more.
Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by VvR-Ox on Tuesday January 15, 2019 @06:42AM (#18910458)
I see the same problem with many products nowadays. There is a whole part of the economy following this and I wonder how so many users can cope with it.

Examples: - Adobe (PS, ID, AI,...) all cloud + subscription model since CS6 is gone - Music (Spotify & Co) - Movies/Series (Netflix, Amazon,...)

And there is many more not only focused on software products. That is why I pirate stuff first and then try to buy something that offers value to me (like vinyl from bands I like to hear) while supporting the real minds behind the work (I don't like companies just (ab)using their power for profit like amzn without delivering real value themselves).

Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by chpmrc on Monday January 14, 2019 @02:04PM (#18905438)
Couldn't help it.

> For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by notahacker on Monday January 14, 2019 @02:30PM (#18905679)
tbf I think the "I don't want to entrust all my notes to a startup that might not be here next year" issue is more relevant to the average person than "but surely you could roll your own if you were a desktop Linux user". On the other hand, I agree normal users don't want software to stick in docker containers, they want a nice friendly GUI that also happens to backup copies of their data somewhere they might be able to access them with another programme if the company ends their incredible journey.

One of the best things about Dropbox as an early adopter was knowning that if they died or got acquihired, you still had one or more local copies of everything you'd ever uploaded to them.

Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by ymolodtsov on Monday January 14, 2019 @03:00PM (#18905949)
Notion allows you to export your notes. Also, you can say that about any service, even one run by Google.
Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by notahacker on Monday January 14, 2019 @05:34PM (#18907188)
Oh, I agree that even Google isn't immune to "sunsetting" useful products. But I'd still rate files on my Google Drive as being a lot more likely to be still usable in 5 years time than a service from someone with a few million dollars in Series A funding to get big or die trying.
Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by camerondoll on Monday January 14, 2019 @04:39PM (#18906790)
They could sell a VPS with the app installed and only you would have access.
Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by perenzo on Monday January 14, 2019 @02:19PM (#18905563)
With https://collect-app.com I'm indeed trying to build such a tool that is not requiring any service and giving you back 100% of privacy and data control, right now. But it is in a very early state yet. But I would love to get some feedback on the idea.
Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by WalterSear on Monday January 14, 2019 @02:09PM (#18905488)
I'm developing an ipfs-based personal knowledge manager that works on similar principles.
Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by giodamelio on Monday January 14, 2019 @02:20PM (#18905575)
I have been contemplating making a similar thing for years now. Nothing I have used really has gotten me all the way.

Is it going to be open source?

Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by WalterSear on Monday January 14, 2019 @02:34PM (#18905706)
I haven't figured out. My current plan is to open source the layer that allows users to access their own raw data, to ensure portability.

Unfortunately, I'm not in a position to maintain the project if it doesn't bring in revenue.

Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by andruby on Monday January 14, 2019 @02:57PM (#18905924)
I've been looking for a Personal Knowledge Manager for a while (and been thinking about creating one). Feel free to message me if you're considering open sourcing or releasing it.
Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by WalterSear on Monday January 14, 2019 @03:09PM (#18906012)
I'll let you know when I make the initial public release.
Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by marviel on Monday January 14, 2019 @05:26PM (#18907114)
If you don't mind, could you ping me as well? I'm looking for a similar solution
Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by WalterSear on Monday January 14, 2019 @06:09PM (#18907442)
Definitely. I'm turning the last corners on the mvp, and very eager to put it in front of people.

I very much want to talk about it, but it feels a little meaningless to do so until I've shipped it :)

Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by giodamelio on Monday January 14, 2019 @06:25PM (#18907540)
Looking forward to it!
Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by krzysztof on Monday January 14, 2019 @02:32PM (#18905695)
For Diary/Journal use only: If you are mac/ios user i've created app which uses iCloud as backend, but you can export all entries to markdown.

https://pureformstudio.com/diarly

Think the reason for non-self-hosting is price really. One time purchase is.. well it's one time.

Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by n4s33r on Friday January 18, 2019 @10:15PM (#18945100)
Looks nice! would jump on this if it supported Android :)
Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by komali2 on Monday January 14, 2019 @01:55PM (#18905361)
That sounds like a good feature - I think the app is trying to replace current jira etc functionality for now, is that something that Jira and other offer?
Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by wongarsu on Monday January 14, 2019 @02:04PM (#18905441)
Jira has a self hosted version at very reasonable price ($10 one time for small teams with a single server up to $500k per year for high availability setups with >50k users).

The same is true for all other Atlassian products.

https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing?tab=self-man...

Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by kjksf on Monday January 14, 2019 @03:04PM (#18905976)
That $10 is a bait and switch price.

The next tier is 25 users for $2500. So it went from $1 per user to $100 per user.

JIRA is, by its nature, a multi-user software. The $10 for 10 users is clearly engineered to get small teams to commit to using it and then squeeze them when they grow.

That is a reasonable strategy for what is a product for companies i.e. enterprise software.

It wouldn't work for a product that is primarily for people who are paying from their own pocket, like, I assume, everyone here that expressed the want for a self-hosted version.

Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by wongarsu on Monday January 14, 2019 @04:55PM (#18906903)
In a personal use case you more than likely stay below 10 users forever. If you are a company paying multiple employees 2500 should be easy to justify: that's 25 users at 10$/month for Jira Cloud would cost you 2500 in 10 months, with hosted Jira it's just a one time payment
Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by deusuxmachina on Monday January 14, 2019 @01:59PM (#18905399)
jira offers task linking, which I don't think notion does.
Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by kjksf on Monday January 14, 2019 @03:06PM (#18905997)
Jira is a bug tracker.

Notion is a hierarchical note-taker/wiki with some additional features like simple databases, task lists etc.

They are not the same kind of software.

Also, you can link notion pages. They have a block element that is a link to another page and for inline links you can use the regular link (each notion page has its unique, stable url).

Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by dawnerd on Monday January 14, 2019 @03:39PM (#18906233)
Notion does but it's not well implemented. If you copy a link to a notion document and paste it in another it does create a link. Wish they made it a little more well defined though (I don't want to copy a link and paste it).
Re:Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, an... by phponpcp on Monday January 14, 2019 @04:48PM (#18906855)
That is like so not worth their time and energy