Show HN: Hiro – Fast and responsive notetaking meets semantic search

This is incredible and ignore the haters.<p>My advice: fine-tune this for different verticals. I&#x27;d really love to use a tool like this for taking notes for law school classes. Wire up the search engine with cool parsers (e.g. a legal citation parser[1]) or something that pulls the decision[2] of a case from Wikipedia just by writing the case name.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/unitedstates/citation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;unitedstates&#x2F;citation</a><p>[2] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._Federal_Election_Commission" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Citizens_United_v._Federal_Elec...</a>

I quite like the notes aspect. Good job!<p>The search feature is a total miss for me however. What problem is it solving? I already have Google, I don&#x27;t need subpar search built into my notes app.<p>And searching automatically on highlighted text seems particularly confusing. I quite often highlight text while writing, not intending to make searches in the sidebar. It also took me too long to realize search results were being appended at the end of the list, not at the top.<p>The search text is also confusing. &quot;All loaded, keep going.&quot; Say what now?<p>On the business model, $9 a month seems too steep as compared to the value prop of, say, Netflix. But I&#x27;m a cheap curmudgeon, so you should probably raise prices for all I know!

I like it as a proof of concept. I don&#x27;t like it as a product.<p>In general, and with notes especially, focus is important. You are essentially doing the opposite by bombarding the writer with distractions as they write.<p>I&#x27;m afraid your search would have to get shockingly smart for it to provide any real value to the writing process. Then again, I am only 1 potential customer and perhaps I&#x27;m just not your demographic so good luck!

First thoughts from Chrome on Mac. Questions are stream-of-conscious rather than requiring real answers.<p>Looks sharp. Why is it offering me Wikipedia links in the right column? OK, at least I can make it go away.<p>Whoa, why does the page keep moving right-and-left every time I&#x27;m about to type. Oh, it&#x27;s when I mouse over the left column. I tend to move the mouse cursor out of the way of my text area when I&#x27;m typing, and if I stow it to the left it triggers the slide-over as it passes over the left column.<p>Figure out that the 3-stacked-horizontal lines can close the slider. Click again to re-open --- that makes sense. But if I click to close, then move the mouse cursor off the page to the left it reopens. Repeat a few times, give up, leave it open.<p>Start typing. Nothing happens. Scan the screen for a typing cursor. Can&#x27;t find one. Tab? Nope. Type again, don&#x27;t see anything changing. OK, I guess they want me to click somewhere. Another couple dizzying screen slides, and I can type.<p>Ok, let&#x27;s change the silly title I put in to start with. Up-arrow, up-arrow, nothing is happening. There seems to be no way to get there from here. Tab, shift-tab? Nope. Guess I&#x27;ve got to click. But I really appreciated that both Tab and Return took be back to the text from the title.<p>Type a bit, looks clean. But not sure what I&#x27;m supposed to be doing. I&#x27;ll try creating a new &#x27;note&#x27;. For the first time, open the slider on the left intentionally. Click &#x27;new note&#x27;. Eeeeek! I&#x27;m greated with a giant multi-colored blocker in the middle of the screen. And it&#x27;s wobbling a few pixels back and forth at about 2 Hz, making me nauseous.<p>Escape doesn&#x27;t work. Back button doesn&#x27;t work. Must get out of here. Click to close.<p>Maybe there is something I can read on the home page that would explain this better. Wait, the back button still doesn&#x27;t work? Wait, they&#x27;ve broken reload as well? Maybe the unlabeled button on the bottom left. No --- that brings the wiggling nausea back! Fingers reflexively close the whole window with Ctrl-W.<p>Take deep breaths, write quick first impressions on HN.<p>I like the simplicity of the overall look. Design is very clean. But I wish things would&#x27;t keep happening when I move the mouse, and didn&#x27;t feel like I was able to test any of the features before being forced to sign up.

I&#x27;ve been looking for the perfect note taking application for a while and here are the things I&#x27;d really like that nobody else seems to have in one place (I understand that these things likely do not coincide with your goals but I thought I&#x27;d put them out there anyway on the offchance you implement them :) ):<p>- Strong (technical) security so that the server is a knowledge free environment (no staff, governments whatever can read my notes). Ideally through client-side encryption (perhaps the search would grab some tokens and send them to the server for processing, rather than having the plaintext document on the server). Perhaps the encryption should be optional and encrypted notes wouldn&#x27;t be sent at all? As a non-American, I _really_ don&#x27;t like being forced to put my data on American servers where I essentially have no rights. The alternative to this is having a way to specify that the note should remain offline (in localstorage or somesuch) and never touch the server.<p>- Ability to take the app offline and have it work mostly the same (without search of course)&#x2F;<p>- Web clipping (see the Evernote web clipper) with image rehosting<p>- Markdown support<p>- Desktop client<p>- Client side plugins (these make the rest of the above much easier), ideally written in something like JS or Python.<p>- Full-featured API<p>I really just want something where I can feel like I&#x27;m in control. When I use most services it feels like I&#x27;m surrendering something (security, convenience, privacy, ownership of my data).

I suggest that you add a typing-notation which means, &#x27;search this&#x27;. Perhaps, &quot;[supreme court smith maryland]&quot;. Then, when the close-bracket triggers the search, one of the &#x27;pin&#x27; options on the results will offer single-click replacement of the &quot;[*]&quot; with a persistent association to that sticky sidebar-result.<p>If different users can plug in different search-backends, many hypertext-writing domains could be accelerated, including Wikipedia, legal, blogging, etc. Maybe even you could have an image-suggesting mode for finding quick (and perhaps liberally-licensed) supporting images?<p>(I&#x27;d add Pinboard&#x2F;archiving-support as well... so everything pinned gets snapshot against link rot.)<p>Your links&#x2F;refs column is also a bit reminiscent of <a href="https://gingkoapp.com/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gingkoapp.com&#x2F;</a> – your two projects can probably draw inspiration from each other.<p>Good luck!

I take almost all of my notes in an outline style, which means lots of bullet points.<p>So far, I haven&#x27;t been able to find a note-taking program that does bullet-outlines better than Word, and that&#x27;s a shame.

Yet another notetaking app, What about sync across devices; security&#x2F;encryption; lock-in? Only ten notes in the free plan. What does this offer over notational velocity or Simplenote? This semantic research thing will have to be shit hot to justify even nine clams a month. What even is the archive, ffs? Haven&#x27;t seen any searches. Is Disconnect or adblock+ killing them? [Update: searches appearing after about 10 mins] At first sight - and how many apps ever get a second? - this is laughably misjudged. And now I&#x27;ve noticed it doesn&#x27;t zoom text reliably in the latest Firefox, trimming the top or bottom line. To expect to charge for this right now seems a bit bloody cheeky. And in use: <a href="http://oi40.tinypic.com/8xn3sy.jpg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;oi40.tinypic.com&#x2F;8xn3sy.jpg</a>

This is a cool idea and the execution is slick too, but I&#x27;d like to know more about anonymity and privacy of both content and search results.<p>I&#x27;m talking about both the privacy of cloud notes, and of the explicit searches when terms are selected with the mouse for a narrow search.<p>People often take notes about things that are private or personal, and this is explicitly creating a historical association between your thoughts and (public) web searches on those thoughts.<p>You normally think of notes as a self-contained thing (even if the container is in the cloud), while this is broadcasting your note terms to third parties as you compose them.<p>I can&#x27;t find a privacy policy link. So I&#x27;d like to know more.

I like the idea, but in my brief test drive (before I ran out of searches) I didn&#x27;t find much value in the discovered links on the right.<p>Some samples which illustrate the value of the semantic search would be helpful. The screenshot shows a virtually empty note with links on the right. What amount and type of content is best suited to the semantic search?

Although this is really pretty, I&#x27;m not sure I get the concept.<p>Is this a web-based version of Notational Velocity with a sidebar that does a websearch on certain elements of what I&#x27;m writing?<p>Draftin.com already serves me well as a web-based note-taking thingy, plus great collaboration tools.<p>I guess here&#x27;s the question: what&#x27;s the use case for the sidebar?

This is really cool. The app is beautiful to look at. I find the search useful, particularly being able to pin results to the document. Highlighting a word and getting a list of synonyms is great, too.<p>This fills a niche similar to Microsoft OneNote&#x27;s, but with the complexity scaled down admirably. Great job.

I don&#x27;t get it. It seems like a very basic version of evernote posting everything that I write somewhere else. I am not comfortable with my text going to other unknown places.

I don&#x27;t know why people are hating the search links on the right. It&#x27;s a neat idea. There were many times in school when I had to write a simple paper where something like Wikipedia sources were acceptable. If it was something I knew about before hand, I would write a good chunk from memory and then back check it against Wikipedia and other sources online. This might have been a great tool for that initial run.

Does anyone know of an open-source&#x2F;forkable alternative that comes close to matching the functionality here? Not necessarily the searching piece, just the note management and content editing screens. I&#x27;ve seen a number of them fly by on HN over the past several months, but didn&#x27;t capture any of the links.

I built something like this before: <a href="http://spiktra.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;spiktra.com</a>

some feedback (most of it minor):<p>- the text cursor seems oddly tall to me...<p>- shift-tab should dedent, not indent<p>- the searching google thing.. is weird. I don&#x27;t get it.<p>- not having bullets is =(<p>- not having indents maintained on newlines is =(<p>( notes are often hierarchical)<p>- doesn&#x27;t work offline (can keep typing, but nothing saved). check out localstorage and appcache.

Interesting, I was thinking the semantic search was actually somehow searching your content and interrelating it and finding patterns. This is pretty cool too, but imagine a notebook that found the common themes among your own notes. That would be pretty cool!

Quick little nitpick thing, but how do you scroll within the document? I was messing around putting a ton of newlines, but I wasn&#x27;t sure how to get back to the top of the document without using my keyboard arrow keys.<p>Beautiful UI by the way. Nice job!

Can I not share my FB friend list? Otherwise I&#x27;d like to extensively try it out

I like it but wouldn&#x27;t pay for it. The search sidebar is appealing with the pin-it icons. Search results were pretty good if a bit generic. Doesn&#x27;t seem to be very semantic but still a nice toy.

(1) who owns this content?<p>(2) can this be exported?<p>(3) is this publically searchable?<p>(4) how is this better than org-mode?

The only thing missing is : <a href="https://github.com/daviferreira/medium-editor" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;daviferreira&#x2F;medium-editor</a><p>Good job, well done!

You could use a filter for &quot;adult&quot; content. The top result for the (non-pornographic) film list I pasted in was something about &quot;Milf Porn Movies&quot;.

You could create plugins for existing editors like Vim, Emacs or Sublime Text 2. This way the users would feel home but with the semantic search service helping them.

Good idea!<p>Nitpick: The <i>Read More</i> section on the right seems a bit of a misfit for a product that seems to take away distraction. I found it irrelevant and distracting.

Markdown support would be awesome, great interface. Although, the hover to show the sidebar would be better handled with a click event in my opinion.

I used this in my android, and a big broken part was the lack of ability to use the back button. Whenever I pressed it, went back to HN.

It&#x27;s amazing. I currently use AIWriter and it&#x27;s not available on web.<p>Hiro meets all my expectations. Great work. Thanks!

Does not work offline! No choice for me.

Where is the search function? A good notetaking app should have awesome note search.

good idea in theory, but the search is &quot;ridiculously&quot; slow. Not to mention the fact that it doesn&#x27;t work after the first search. Also, you&#x27;re using the term &quot;semantic&quot; wrong.

This rocks reminds me of NVAlt for mac which I use for note taking locally.

Is it just me or is the site down?

love it!

I prefer the phrase: &quot;It&#x27;s Always Free&quot;.

The home page sounds kind of pretentious, so much so that I&#x27;m not even sure I want to try it.