vidbina

Love this! Looks nice (I can't design it), works smoothly. Kudos on you for building something simple and just getting it out there.

Universe knows, there are many bells and whistles you could have tacked on, possibly dooming this project to stay in the "project shelf" for a much longer time.

What's your story on starting this? Needed the tool yourself and couldn't find anything that worked for you, was trying to learn new tools, lost a bet?

Felt (still am, actually) this problem too. Started with the same approach (Vanilla Emacs) a few years back in order to really learn the ins-and-outs after giving DOOM and others a shot and feeling like I didn't have the faintest what was really going on with all the magic. I somehow did end up falling in love with Emacs again[^1].

Won't lie... there was a fair amount of cursing involved and, despite the love, I wouldn't recommend many to venture down this road[^2].

Now I have gone the literate config way in my dotfiles https://github.com/vidbina/dotfiles/tree/main/emacs and I jump between Cursor (vscode-based), Neovim and Emacs for different tasks on a daily. I also found https://github.com/dustinlyons/nixos-config/blob/main/module... just a few days ago which could be a useful resource when you're building yours up.

> Unsolicited tip: Take it as a hobby! Picked up a bunch of useful learnings from my Emacs experiences (a. literate configs, b. comfort around working with LISPs, c. bigger appreciation for parts of the GNU ecosystem, d. more in-depth understanding of how my devtools work which helps me debug issues in Neovim or vscode when I see them) but still think that I'm cursed by wanting to go down this road so badly. Wish I could just vscode my way through life and build dope stuff, unencumbered!

P.S.: I found Emacs far less painful ever since I started rubber-ducking with ChatGPT about my elisp and configuration problems a few years ago, so now is definitely a nicer time to take the plunge.

1: Used Emacs heavily in college over 12 years ago when I would boot the Windows + Novell groupware school computers into my own Ubuntu config with my Emacs and embedded dev toolchain from my pendrive.

2: The single-threaded-ness and related ocassional unresponsiveness/hangups still grind my gears.

Trying to expand my understanding of what tools/processes teams use to get things done efficiently. Especially the ones managing technically complex scopes.

I've been with teams that used Confluence+Jira, Notion, GDrive, etc. and noticed pretty much all these teams struggle to maintain the quality/freshness/relevance of the content while keeping the act of recording intel low-barrier enough. In some cases, engs (including myself) just kept private repositories of insights that were not shared org-wide that would have really helped the team out and that ended up leaving with the folks.

Somewhere I'm sure we've been using the tools wrongly, or perhaps had the wrong tools for the stage we were at and am curious to learn how y'all solve these problems in your companies.

My thesis is that co's that learn to ace the knowledge- and progress management game will be best positioned to build great products and develop high quality tech (quickly).

Hoping to get schooled by y'all!

Nice! All the best to y'all. I can already see y'all killing it in YC BTW so pls apply. DISCLAIMER: I'm not an investor, so what do I know. Just a fanboy atm!

Oh snap, when you sign up you get a learning track. This kicks DuoLingos ass. Like practical stuff (conversational aids) right away instead of useless practice sentences like "the monkey has a ball".

In all fairness, I bailed on Duo about a year ago after a full year of maintaining a streak and feeling I wasn't learning much.

This is so dope. Wanted something like this for a while. Was about to ask about tips for folks trying to ease into a base-line language level and then started fiddling with the Translator feature (which wasn't superquick to spot but very helpful now).

For the FAQ: How long have y'all been at it? Who is in the core team and what are your backgrounds? Would love to know the background story of the team. Just figured y'all are based out of ZH (ch) and SF (us) and noted the their.news submission but know nothing else. Super curious!

I share the pain of musing over license options.

From a pure business perspective, I feel like there are more data points out there that have won (as in, "survived") by shipping proprietary software.

Don't want to make moral judgements here about proprietary-vs-FLOSS but within my hacker bubbles, one biases themselves to be partial to FLOSS very easily. If I were to ship "some things" (it really depends what the thing is) as proprietary, this community may not take too kindly to that move (and neither may I).

On the other hand, I don't think that the world at large really cares. Sometimes it feels that one can either be a) financially well off or b) more beloved by the hacker community. These things are not mutually exclusive like that but the union of these is rather rare. Hard choices!

I find it inspiring to see how a interpreter that outlives me has such passionate and skilled contributors keeping it alive or rather, rejuvenating it with new life. Also impressed by the notion that someone could obtain such a strong command of, what I would consider, a somewhat "intimidating" codebase to own.

Happy Emacs user here and excited/grateful to see how well the ecosystem is currently doing.

I feel you there. Sticking around long-term may also not be sustainable for everyone.

It takes a lot of energy (to wade through the ups-and-downs) as even running a co in a "profitable" situation isn't always as rosy as one hopes it to be. There are lawsuits, internal politics, competitive drama, etc.

Cashing out allows one to regain some headspace, take care of family or address other personal matters that need attention (or have been inducing some strain) and finance the next idea that one may have had on their minds.

Furthermore, things tend to get more corporate-ish as orgs grow because more structure is needed/required and this may not fit every personality type very well, so I guess builders will do themselves a service to hop out once the train shifts into a different gear to allow folks that are better at that game to take it from there.

Just hope that Adobe doesn't end up ruining things because I feel that is usually the issue with acquisitions. The buyer just dulls things down or they actively kill to push one of their overlapping overrings.

BTW. I resolved the anchor issue. Was so fixated on longer-horizon points that I didn't even register how much of a quick win it would be to drop the anchors and thus keep some "guardrails" in place. Thanks for that.

Thanks for the input. I feel your pain about the "project drawer" problem. Have too many pet-projects myself that don't ever see the light of day because they are too (s)crappy and I'm too ashamed. This time around, I had set the day as a hard deadline to ship (also as a bday gift to self) -- regardless how scrappy . I then told some buds about it to add some peer-pressure to the mix (thanks to my accountability buds). This helped and I'm happy for all the feedback I'm getting. Could have hacked another few weeks on this before getting input, but I've been following startups for long enough to believe that there is much value in the early feedback. I also need to learn to be less ashamed of my shit code and embrace that I'm not a great programmer and I no longer have to gatekeep the quality of my stuff out there for the world to see. No matter how hard the feedback may hit, I want to learn to absorb those punches.

On Reddit (r/orgmode and r/emacs) and on the SystemCrafters discord (Emacs communities mostly ) folks were kinda interested but ATM I'm touching upon something niche here that may perhaps be too small warrant a time investment beyond a pet-project. Could also been that this thing didn't really reach a wide enough audience (a total of about 300 pageviews according to Plausible is peanuts, really ) to say something meaningful about it yet, so the jury isn't completely out yet.

Since it's an own itch, I'll continue with the collaboration bit. Also as a learning exercise since I've been wanting to build something with collaborative editing features to cut my hands a bit more on CRDT-based tech... we all need study projects, anyways.

Yes to the calendar view! That would be one of the next ones up because I also long for such a perspective on a doc that has deadlines or timestamps. We're flirting with the idea of a few other perspectives as well -- like a diff perspective e.g.: show me what happened in the Prose/Kanban/Calendar perspectives between a week ago and today) git may be useful. This could be convenient when someone returns from vacation and wants a quick glance overview of what happened meanwhile.

Git as a database would allow folks (devs, in particular) to interact with the data without us having to roll an API, editor extensions or utils. Nearly all devs that would be part of our audience are git-users and understand how to make and merge changes. It also removes the burden of domiciling someone's data. As a dev-tool, it may be fair to expect that devs know best where they want this data to live.

For tracking entries, git is definitely not the best option because the docs are quite fluid/malleable and tasks can be split, changed or reordered between commits without us being able to trivially map previous tasks to current ones. I already had a bud suggest that reeling in CouchDB for some stuff may be helpful here, so we're going to have to experiment here to see what sticks. On the other hand, perhaps the modern task/proj-mgmt paradigm is too rigid in this regard anyways. Perhaps there is a place for sculpting collections of tasks that can morph into something unexpected altogether without much effort. Tracking a task's full-lifecycle may therefore not be as important as facilitating for the flux and fluidy that we are aiming for ATM where we can't map every event to a single ledger entry with a unambiguous lifecycle and identity. I believe that the incumbent paradigm has enough tools available already, so playing into the more fluid org camp would be a more useful contribution to the tooling landscape, I'm guessing.

I use Latin quite frequently to infer the meaning of words in a number of languages including but not limited to English, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. Quite oddly, I'm generally not even aware that I'm inferring meaning of a word by simply studying the roots. In that sense I'm quite grateful for being taught a limited portion of its fundamentals while in high-school. All I am saying is that we may use certain bits of knowledge or certain dormant skills without our awareness to their utilisation.

All of our former experiences help us shape intuition, the same intuition which we may use to make decisions in seemingly unrelated fields. I have therefore become somewhat careful in dismissing a skill, domain of knowledge or lesson for apparent lack of use. The human brain is a fascinating machine; even while we sleep ideas and solutions take shape and who's to say which information is used to form those mental artefacts?

The moment we manage to cover the "education gives us control over our impulses" part for a majority of the population, democracy would truly work to our benefit. Although some may not actively rely on whatever they may have learned in a math class, they may still use some of that information to form intuition and subliminally guide them in their thought processes. Engineers who studied or practiced the arts in some portion of their lives may subliminally transfer some of their learnings from that domain into their work as well. Simply arguing that one doesn't need higher math because they don't actively use it is therefore unfair.

I continually study more sources to improve my competence as a software developer. I have seen too many blunders as elementary as divisions by zero in code and understand that a decent understanding of math and CS aids in writing "better" programs. I have also experienced multiple accounts where my math/CS background, however limited, helped me find the right direction to venture towards. It helped me develop some sense of intuition that is extremely valuable in my line of work. So I will keep on studying.

> Internet is a great leveller I hope that the increased connectivity of our world will have a profound impact on the legal constructs utilised by parties to secure earnings. As you, I also hope that we will have worked through the issues by the time I'm old, but history tells me that profit is a great motivator to keep archaic constructs intact. Today's world is filled with business models that don't fit our somewhat more globalised reality. The money talks.

Netflix seems to spend a fortune in encoding and distributing this type of content. I think that distribution may not always be as simple of a problem and should not be marginalised as such. Especially if you consider the numbers in terms of demand and quality expectations for such services.

I will have to leave too if Netflix succeeds in blocking such services. Between The Netherlands and Germany (two neighbouring countries) the offering of shows is significantly different. It sucks having to figure out which shows to choose for replacements of the exciting stuff you were watching before. Frustrating how territorial licensing deals are still made in a world that seems to be getting smaller, with couch-surfers, businessmen and average Joes/Janes crossing borders ever more often.

If licensing deals are time bound, Netflix would have to renew them periodically, thereby granting publishers the opportunity to renegotiate terms. They can't screw themselves in the long term that way, while the distributor has the freedom to deliver content to everyone. Wouldn't that work? I'm a travelling user and I'm frustrated by having to decide which shows to choose as replacements every time I cross a border :-/. Personally I feel today's world no longer has a place for territorial licensing.

Absolutely! I've just started looking into functional languages and am discovering a world of patterns that are ubiquitous within the paradigm. I have only experienced conses in Erlang so far (and in Haskell even though I had no idea that they were called that way). Just looked it up on wiki, so thanks for pointing it out (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cons).

Slack does the notification thing by default there is not real option to opt out. On the contrary most teams with non devs on -board swear by this app. Slack happens to ignore the "Do Not Disturb" mode, which is pretty much respected by all other applications that throw notifications. Basically there is no convenient way to silence notifications yet while the application runs.

But you're right. I have resorted to checking Slack just few times per day as well rather than being online constantly.