10 ms·

Show HN: Grug Notes, a simple take on text notes

100 points by keizo 2y ago

Hey hacker news, I've worked on a note/wiki app nights and weekends for almost two years. While still missing some essentials and polish, I'm happy with the progress and some of my use cases: personal CRM, work notes, and a place to write/record funny things my kid says. I bought into the hype a few years ago with linking apps but quickly grew tired of spinners and steep learning curves, so I started over with a text box and my HTML skills from twenty years ago. Then Chatgpt came out, giving me the tools to add a bit of magic and dig into my stance on simplicity even more. I'd love to get a few more people testing. HN may not be the target user, but it's the best crowd for feedback. Grug Notes is an effort I've been able to fit in after my kid goes to sleep. As someone who is not always on a computer for my work, I became disillusioned with Roam Research, Coda, and Notion. I have no ambition to build a big company, but a cash-flowing saas sounds nice. Building this has been a source of flow and optimism when the rest of my life has been chaos. My entire career and current business is building carbon fiber outrigger canoes, but competing against good products made in China is nearly impossible. I've tried for 17 years. I may try for 17 more. But it's also very realistic that without some diversification into aerospace or tech, my days as a small business owner in manufacturing may be numbered. My last three years have not gone as planned personally and professionally, and the reality is that I've used programming as some form of escapism. I've enjoyed it and will keep working on Grug Notes indefinitely, but with my daughter starting pre-school next week and my regular business needing my attention, I'm at an inflection point. It's probably time I push to move beyond seven paying customers so I'm not paying server bills out of pocket. :) Anyway, I'd love for anyone to take a look, and I am happy to answer any questions about Grug Notes or canoes!

dankwizard 2y ago
another day, another post on HN about a simple text based note taking service that is the best. one. yet.
nwenzel 2y ago
HN is a place that appreciates craftsmanship over mass production. That can apply to apps or canoes!
- keizo 2y ago
  this is all a grand scheme to sell canoes to people in tech. :D
defrost 2y ago
Heads Up: On load ... Shucks. That's an error. Please try again, and if you continue to get this message, contact support. Hug of death? Disabling uBlockOrigin & extensions -> same result.
- keizo 2y ago
  Real users are the best way to find bugs I swear. Checking into it
  - keizo 2y ago
    took one query off the landing page. but still don't quite know why. switched to uvicorn from gunicorn since I had this last. but will see how cloudrun holds up lol.
    - defrost 2y ago
      Heh. No complaints from me, just a real user reporting back from the front line. Whatever you did, it loads now - cheers :-)
      - keizo 2y ago
        thanks for the heads up. Lowered max concurrent requests and a couple of other small changes. It's not totally solved, but it mostly staying up and seems to come back quickly when it fails. Suppose I need to learn how to load test in the future. :)
JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago
I hope people find it interesting because for me it's yet another AI-powered note taking subscription that may or may not send all your data to random people all over the planet. At least you should make it E2E encrypted which would solve most privacy problems. > end-to-end (...) encryption add friction How? > And we're building canoes over here, not storing nuclear codes. The good old "I have nothing to hide."
- shreddit 2y ago
  As long it’s an web app it cannot reliably guarantee e2e anyway, so where is the point
  - ffsm8 2y ago
    That's only spiritually correct. You can guarantee full e2e encryption with webapps, the issue is with the potential to leak the key to the middleman, giving them the ability to decrypt it as well - but itd still be e2e encrypted.
    - bastawhiz 2y ago
      It means you either need to persist the key to localStorage or a cookie. If you clear your browsing data or switch browsers, you can't just log in again, you have to use an existing device to share the key (e.g., with a qr code). That's the friction.
      - charrondev 2y ago
        Now I could be way off here, but could you hash/salt the users password in 2 different ways: - the first way would be used before sending the password to the server. This would then be hashed and salted again to be used for authentication with the server. - the second way would be used locally. You could have the user create a pin to go with the password that would be used to create this hash. This hash would be the key to decrypt the contents. It would never be sent to the server. I haven’t actually done the thinking or research to validate or invalidate something like this though. My uses of encryption have all been rather standardized.
namanyayg 2y ago
The first thing I see is a signup without even understanding what the product is or how it's different from my existing notes.md file. Why would I login before even knowing what it is?
- keizo 2y ago
  i have a lot of text explaining it. def open to ideas on how to explain more clearly though.
  - Zolomon 2y ago
    I would have appreciated seeing a <2 minute recording of it (GIF, animation, video etc.) to better understand what it is. I like the logo, though!
    - keizo 2y ago
      That's valid. I tried a few days ago, but it's pretty terrible and almost 4 minutes! I will shoot for 2 min next time.
      - purple-leafy 2y ago
        Shoot for sub 10 seconds. A gif. People’s attention spans are much, much, much shorter than that. Think 1-2 seconds. I think if you can’t get the idea across in 1-10 seconds you lose 99% of watchers
        keizo 2y ago
        If I've learning anything from modern instagram, this is it. :|
        marginalia_nu 2y ago
        People who aren't interested leave early. This has nothing to do with attention span. If you cut it to just a few seconds, then yes more people will watch the whole thing, but that doesn't mean more people will get anything out of it, it's just they don't have time to move on before it's over.
bun_terminator 2y ago
I don't want "AI" in my notes
- keizo 2y ago
  I hear you. I have avoided generative stuff, but I'm so lazy I'm quite happy to have it organize. Basically trying to build exactly what I want.
- dchest 2y ago
  This is a strange opinion to hear on HN. You don't want search and information extraction to be powered by a certain algorithm that is measurably better at this than other algorithms? Is it okay that this product uses timsort or you're only ok with quicksort?
  - eps 2y ago
    This is a disingenious comment at best. The GP was clear at what they don't want.
    - thornewolf 2y ago
      they were clear, but nearly every instance of that clear opinion I have considered illegitimate once i learn the rationale. Using the following words for simplicity, not to be inflammatory; It typically amounts to "AI stinky" or "I don't want big brother to have my data" I consider "AI stinky" variants invalid because this is one of many software development paradigms. simply because the market is overhyped, it doesn't mean that all applications are automatically useless. "big brother" fails to consider the incremental big-brotherness. we, when using tools like this, expose our data already. The incremental risk from an LLM provider seems small.
  - itohihiyt 2y ago
    I don't think it strange at all. Notes are personal. I don't want my notes online at all, let alone being feed into a language model likely managed by a third party that feeds them into it.
sebmellen 2y ago
I like the idea of self-organizing notes, but to me that would be more like an automatically-created semantic graph where I can write a random note and have it auto-sorted and tagged. So if I write down “Bob’s first kid’s name is John” it will segment that note into a section about “Friends and Relationships,” but if I write down “FAST Stroke Acronym = Face Arms Speech Time” that note will get segmented into “Medical Knowledge”. And then having some way to explore that graph of notes would be super cool.
- keizo 2y ago
  Every block and 'prompt' entity does get embeddings made of it, so the search works pretty well. Kind of with the goal of moving away from tags entirely. I've never found graph views useful, and I don't really tend to click around in my notes. Beyond clicking on my daughter's name, and in that case, all mentions are listed there. You can ask stuff like "What's Bob's kid's name?" and it should mostly answer. But yeah, there is lots of room for improvement -- I'm such a minimalist when it comes to notes, there's a narrow band of use cases I feel like it's good for at this point. I've never tried to organize actual deep knowledge with an app.
aconfer 2y ago
I think there's a lot of opportunity in this space with AI. It'd be interesting if you could take some metadata into account when organizing notes. For example, you might be able to guess when someone is home when they're accessing the site from a frequent IP address. This example is top of mind for me, as I just completed a move this weekend. I wish I had been better organized taking notes as I set up different home systems in the past, as it's now been a few years and I wish I had notes I could go look back on. Being able to filter my apple notes app by geolocation would be awesome. I love the idea of not having to worry about tags to keep notes organized. Nice work!
- keizo 2y ago
  Thanks for looking! I'm actually surprised Apple hasn't done this yet. The organizing and search stuff they do with photos, metadata, and image recognition is really great. So I'm sure they will. As a pwa, it'd be a bit annoying since it'll have to ask you every time to geolocate. At least, I think it's the same as mic access.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
bberenberg 2y ago
Good job on building and releasing this. Even if it’s not polished and has a long way to go, it’s good to push for progress. Hopefully the escapism of programming doesn’t harm your ability to enter aerospace or tech markets. It’s unfortunate that people on here have to post the same tired complaints on every side project people share. It’s fine, you don’t need the stuff they’re asking for. They’re not your target customers and they don’t seem to understand that. Plenty of others are upvoting the submission itself, keep on keeping on.
cloverich 2y ago
Congrats on shipping and the effort to stay motivated and optimistic. As a fellow parent in a similar boat working on a similar app, I deeply appreciate what it takes to get anywhere when all you have is, at best, 90 tired minutes. Also while it may be a form of escapism there is a stark difference between shipping something while learning new (valuable) skills, and tinkering with a novel under your desk indefinitely. Kudos on getting to that next step!
BaculumMeumEst 2y ago
Are you the author of the grug brained developer?
- keizo 2y ago
  No, that’s Carson Gross maker of htmx and actual smart legitimate developer :)
darajava 2y ago
I built Audio Diary (https://audiodiary.ai https://audiodiary.ai) which is basically a more consumer-friendly version of this. I like this though, it fulfils a different use case and I think with a bit more love on certain user flows it could have a lot of appeal to a certain type of user.
- keizo 2y ago
  Very nice! Seems like some of the native apps focusing on audio have done quite well. I hope you are as well. I do keep thinking long form audio and diarization would get me something practical more smb and trades people would consider using. My original personal desire was to replace my use of roam research which is not the most consumer friendly. Not sure how long I can stay focused on plain text without staying super niche, but sticking with it for now. :)
vundercind 2y ago
Grug notes, simplest option: text files. Org mode if you’re feeling fancy. Grug notes, lowest-friction option: whatever the native notes app is on the platform you most often have around to take or refer to notes (probably your phone).
layer8 2y ago
I appreciate that this is on the web page: "Who should not use this? If you're adamant about local first or end-to-end encryption".
mister_elevator 2y ago
No question here. Big fan of your canoes here in NorCal (and so is the rest of my club). Pueo was my first boat. Currently have a PueoX, and Noio. Thank you guys for sticking it out through thick and thin.
- keizo 2y ago
  Yessah! Secret ploy to make sure everyone in tech buys kamanu is working. All kidding aside, I appreciate it.
wishpal 2y ago
I am getting this error on signing up. "Shucks. That's an error. Please try again, and if you continue to get this message, contact support"
- keizo 2y ago
  Sorry, up now, but I'm still trying to figure the root cause. I've made several adjustments, but it still seems to happen even with quite a bit less traffic right now. The db server is fine, but the Cloudrun/Django side is getting connection errors. At the least, I've got some live load testing out of this and can make it a little more solid. :)
  - wishpal 2y ago
    Was able to try out now. Looks cool and this time I could test it out. Initial Feedback 1. Search is easy 2. Can start quickly on notes 3. Too many CTA's and actions in single screen - so a little confusing 4. Find/create looks same as search - whats the difference?
    - keizo 2y ago
      Awesome, thanks for going back to try, and great feedback! 1. It's been fun to implement. Always room for improvement, formatting results is up there. But surprisingly good with simple keywords and rag. There is some fun NLP in there, like filtering by date or navigating to that day if you just type a date. And doing rag only for questions. 2. Yep, high priority -- for me it's the small things like bringing focus to the text area by default, etc. 3. Absolutely. I'm into density and packing as much onto the screen as possible, so I ultimately have to click around as little as possible. But you're right; it's confusing. I occupy this weird space, being super nerdy but also wanting ridiculous simplicity, though not in a super consumer way. Wanting to stick to plain text, for example, markdown, etc, but also targeting smb and tradespeople is an odd path. My dad, of all people, had the same feedback. :) 4. Search/ask is for looking in your notes. Find/create is more like: I know this prompt/entity exists or add it. It's mostly a direct search for the 'prompt' names or entities and a shortcut to adding blocks to your day. For example, if you're having a meeting with a person or company and don't want to clutter your daily notes. Or even my changelog, I hit ctrl-k 2x, type chan, hit tab to get 'changelog', enter, and type away. It's also the only current way to find out what prompts are in your account. Still, very worth exploring if there's a clean way to get rid of find/create. I suppose there could just be an 'add block' button, and then you can pick your prompt on creation. Simpler UI, but I'm also not convinced it's entirely better. Probably worth trying, I'm sure there'll be a time I can circle back to iterate on it. Development is mostly dictated by what's most annoying at this point. And regarding the intermittent errors during this hn post, I think it was my db max connection django setting causing issues. Reset back to the default of 0, and it's been good so far.

100 points by keizo 2y ago

dankwizard 2y ago

another day, another post on HN about a simple text based note taking service that is the best. one. yet.

nwenzel 2y ago

HN is a place that appreciates craftsmanship over mass production. That can apply to apps or canoes!

keizo 2y ago
this is all a grand scheme to sell canoes to people in tech. :D

defrost 2y ago

Heads Up: On load ... Shucks. That's an error. Please try again, and if you continue to get this message, contact support. Hug of death? Disabling uBlockOrigin & extensions -> same result.

keizo 2y ago
Real users are the best way to find bugs I swear. Checking into it
- keizo 2y ago
  took one query off the landing page. but still don't quite know why. switched to uvicorn from gunicorn since I had this last. but will see how cloudrun holds up lol.
  - defrost 2y ago
    Heh. No complaints from me, just a real user reporting back from the front line. Whatever you did, it loads now - cheers :-)
    - keizo 2y ago
      thanks for the heads up. Lowered max concurrent requests and a couple of other small changes. It's not totally solved, but it mostly staying up and seems to come back quickly when it fails. Suppose I need to learn how to load test in the future. :)

JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago

I hope people find it interesting because for me it's yet another AI-powered note taking subscription that may or may not send all your data to random people all over the planet. At least you should make it E2E encrypted which would solve most privacy problems. > end-to-end (...) encryption add friction How? > And we're building canoes over here, not storing nuclear codes. The good old "I have nothing to hide."

shreddit 2y ago
As long it’s an web app it cannot reliably guarantee e2e anyway, so where is the point
- ffsm8 2y ago
  That's only spiritually correct. You can guarantee full e2e encryption with webapps, the issue is with the potential to leak the key to the middleman, giving them the ability to decrypt it as well - but itd still be e2e encrypted.
  - bastawhiz 2y ago
    It means you either need to persist the key to localStorage or a cookie. If you clear your browsing data or switch browsers, you can't just log in again, you have to use an existing device to share the key (e.g., with a qr code). That's the friction.
    - charrondev 2y ago
      Now I could be way off here, but could you hash/salt the users password in 2 different ways: - the first way would be used before sending the password to the server. This would then be hashed and salted again to be used for authentication with the server. - the second way would be used locally. You could have the user create a pin to go with the password that would be used to create this hash. This hash would be the key to decrypt the contents. It would never be sent to the server. I haven’t actually done the thinking or research to validate or invalidate something like this though. My uses of encryption have all been rather standardized.

namanyayg 2y ago

The first thing I see is a signup without even understanding what the product is or how it's different from my existing notes.md file. Why would I login before even knowing what it is?

keizo 2y ago
i have a lot of text explaining it. def open to ideas on how to explain more clearly though.
- Zolomon 2y ago
  I would have appreciated seeing a <2 minute recording of it (GIF, animation, video etc.) to better understand what it is. I like the logo, though!
  - keizo 2y ago
    That's valid. I tried a few days ago, but it's pretty terrible and almost 4 minutes! I will shoot for 2 min next time.
    - purple-leafy 2y ago
      Shoot for sub 10 seconds. A gif. People’s attention spans are much, much, much shorter than that. Think 1-2 seconds. I think if you can’t get the idea across in 1-10 seconds you lose 99% of watchers
      - keizo 2y ago
        If I've learning anything from modern instagram, this is it. :|
      - marginalia_nu 2y ago
        People who aren't interested leave early. This has nothing to do with attention span. If you cut it to just a few seconds, then yes more people will watch the whole thing, but that doesn't mean more people will get anything out of it, it's just they don't have time to move on before it's over.

bun_terminator 2y ago

I don't want "AI" in my notes

keizo 2y ago
I hear you. I have avoided generative stuff, but I'm so lazy I'm quite happy to have it organize. Basically trying to build exactly what I want.
dchest 2y ago
This is a strange opinion to hear on HN. You don't want search and information extraction to be powered by a certain algorithm that is measurably better at this than other algorithms? Is it okay that this product uses timsort or you're only ok with quicksort?
- eps 2y ago
  This is a disingenious comment at best. The GP was clear at what they don't want.
  - thornewolf 2y ago
    they were clear, but nearly every instance of that clear opinion I have considered illegitimate once i learn the rationale. Using the following words for simplicity, not to be inflammatory; It typically amounts to "AI stinky" or "I don't want big brother to have my data" I consider "AI stinky" variants invalid because this is one of many software development paradigms. simply because the market is overhyped, it doesn't mean that all applications are automatically useless. "big brother" fails to consider the incremental big-brotherness. we, when using tools like this, expose our data already. The incremental risk from an LLM provider seems small.
- itohihiyt 2y ago
  I don't think it strange at all. Notes are personal. I don't want my notes online at all, let alone being feed into a language model likely managed by a third party that feeds them into it.

sebmellen 2y ago

I like the idea of self-organizing notes, but to me that would be more like an automatically-created semantic graph where I can write a random note and have it auto-sorted and tagged. So if I write down “Bob’s first kid’s name is John” it will segment that note into a section about “Friends and Relationships,” but if I write down “FAST Stroke Acronym = Face Arms Speech Time” that note will get segmented into “Medical Knowledge”. And then having some way to explore that graph of notes would be super cool.

keizo 2y ago
Every block and 'prompt' entity does get embeddings made of it, so the search works pretty well. Kind of with the goal of moving away from tags entirely. I've never found graph views useful, and I don't really tend to click around in my notes. Beyond clicking on my daughter's name, and in that case, all mentions are listed there. You can ask stuff like "What's Bob's kid's name?" and it should mostly answer. But yeah, there is lots of room for improvement -- I'm such a minimalist when it comes to notes, there's a narrow band of use cases I feel like it's good for at this point. I've never tried to organize actual deep knowledge with an app.

aconfer 2y ago

I think there's a lot of opportunity in this space with AI. It'd be interesting if you could take some metadata into account when organizing notes. For example, you might be able to guess when someone is home when they're accessing the site from a frequent IP address. This example is top of mind for me, as I just completed a move this weekend. I wish I had been better organized taking notes as I set up different home systems in the past, as it's now been a few years and I wish I had notes I could go look back on. Being able to filter my apple notes app by geolocation would be awesome. I love the idea of not having to worry about tags to keep notes organized. Nice work!

keizo 2y ago
Thanks for looking! I'm actually surprised Apple hasn't done this yet. The organizing and search stuff they do with photos, metadata, and image recognition is really great. So I'm sure they will. As a pwa, it'd be a bit annoying since it'll have to ask you every time to geolocate. At least, I think it's the same as mic access.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

bberenberg 2y ago

Good job on building and releasing this. Even if it’s not polished and has a long way to go, it’s good to push for progress. Hopefully the escapism of programming doesn’t harm your ability to enter aerospace or tech markets. It’s unfortunate that people on here have to post the same tired complaints on every side project people share. It’s fine, you don’t need the stuff they’re asking for. They’re not your target customers and they don’t seem to understand that. Plenty of others are upvoting the submission itself, keep on keeping on.

cloverich 2y ago

Congrats on shipping and the effort to stay motivated and optimistic. As a fellow parent in a similar boat working on a similar app, I deeply appreciate what it takes to get anywhere when all you have is, at best, 90 tired minutes. Also while it may be a form of escapism there is a stark difference between shipping something while learning new (valuable) skills, and tinkering with a novel under your desk indefinitely. Kudos on getting to that next step!

BaculumMeumEst 2y ago

Are you the author of the grug brained developer?

keizo 2y ago
No, that’s Carson Gross maker of htmx and actual smart legitimate developer :)

darajava 2y ago

I built Audio Diary (https://audiodiary.ai https://audiodiary.ai) which is basically a more consumer-friendly version of this. I like this though, it fulfils a different use case and I think with a bit more love on certain user flows it could have a lot of appeal to a certain type of user.

keizo 2y ago
Very nice! Seems like some of the native apps focusing on audio have done quite well. I hope you are as well. I do keep thinking long form audio and diarization would get me something practical more smb and trades people would consider using. My original personal desire was to replace my use of roam research which is not the most consumer friendly. Not sure how long I can stay focused on plain text without staying super niche, but sticking with it for now. :)

vundercind 2y ago

Grug notes, simplest option: text files. Org mode if you’re feeling fancy. Grug notes, lowest-friction option: whatever the native notes app is on the platform you most often have around to take or refer to notes (probably your phone).

layer8 2y ago

I appreciate that this is on the web page: "Who should not use this? If you're adamant about local first or end-to-end encryption".

mister_elevator 2y ago

No question here. Big fan of your canoes here in NorCal (and so is the rest of my club). Pueo was my first boat. Currently have a PueoX, and Noio. Thank you guys for sticking it out through thick and thin.

keizo 2y ago
Yessah! Secret ploy to make sure everyone in tech buys kamanu is working. All kidding aside, I appreciate it.

wishpal 2y ago

I am getting this error on signing up. "Shucks. That's an error. Please try again, and if you continue to get this message, contact support"

keizo 2y ago
Sorry, up now, but I'm still trying to figure the root cause. I've made several adjustments, but it still seems to happen even with quite a bit less traffic right now. The db server is fine, but the Cloudrun/Django side is getting connection errors. At the least, I've got some live load testing out of this and can make it a little more solid. :)
- wishpal 2y ago
  Was able to try out now. Looks cool and this time I could test it out. Initial Feedback 1. Search is easy 2. Can start quickly on notes 3. Too many CTA's and actions in single screen - so a little confusing 4. Find/create looks same as search - whats the difference?
  - keizo 2y ago
    Awesome, thanks for going back to try, and great feedback! 1. It's been fun to implement. Always room for improvement, formatting results is up there. But surprisingly good with simple keywords and rag. There is some fun NLP in there, like filtering by date or navigating to that day if you just type a date. And doing rag only for questions. 2. Yep, high priority -- for me it's the small things like bringing focus to the text area by default, etc. 3. Absolutely. I'm into density and packing as much onto the screen as possible, so I ultimately have to click around as little as possible. But you're right; it's confusing. I occupy this weird space, being super nerdy but also wanting ridiculous simplicity, though not in a super consumer way. Wanting to stick to plain text, for example, markdown, etc, but also targeting smb and tradespeople is an odd path. My dad, of all people, had the same feedback. :) 4. Search/ask is for looking in your notes. Find/create is more like: I know this prompt/entity exists or add it. It's mostly a direct search for the 'prompt' names or entities and a shortcut to adding blocks to your day. For example, if you're having a meeting with a person or company and don't want to clutter your daily notes. Or even my changelog, I hit ctrl-k 2x, type chan, hit tab to get 'changelog', enter, and type away. It's also the only current way to find out what prompts are in your account. Still, very worth exploring if there's a clean way to get rid of find/create. I suppose there could just be an 'add block' button, and then you can pick your prompt on creation. Simpler UI, but I'm also not convinced it's entirely better. Probably worth trying, I'm sure there'll be a time I can circle back to iterate on it. Development is mostly dictated by what's most annoying at this point. And regarding the intermittent errors during this hn post, I think it was my db max connection django setting causing issues. Reset back to the default of 0, and it's been good so far.