I remember using Evernote in the very early 2010s, pre acquistion, and before OneNote got really good/had a cloud sync service.
Evernote was...fine, but the UX was very stilted. Text placement was very restrictive, and the spontaneous nature of taking notes was suppressed by it generally forcing you to type linearly as if it were a Word document.
I used it for the ability to seamlessly sync between devices, but once OneNote 2013 hit, I dropped Evernote like a rock in a lake. It had no competitive drive in terms of functionality once MS wiped the floor with them.
I left Evernote when it became increasingly bloated and clunky as a product (on iOS at the time), and as they started tightening the screws on the free plan.
My current generic note-taker is SimpleNote. It is Multiplatform, it syncs, and it's free. It does 1/20th of what Evernote does but that didn't matter.
This service should not cost more than 3 dollars a month, for example most of my previously Evernoted friends used to migrate to Telegram free storage. Maybe Telegram provides only mediafile storage with no advanced search - but the search algorythm among your text document should not be significantly costier than GNU Emacs in Org-mode.
Stepan Pachikov is so great guy, I listened a lot of his talks. I am sad to live without his software, without screenshot editing software having red arrows of some specific form and without the search which worked really well. Good-bye yet another greedy corporation.
I don't think folks think clearly about how their setup scales computationally when they are choosing their stack. I've been writing a lot of software designed for drop-dead simple self-hosting lately (can run CGI-bin or as a standalone server, based on the env it's invoked in), and I put my own instances behind CGI, keenly aware of the risk on the open internet. But I design .htaccess so that the main server is hitting caches for anything anonymous. This works Just Fine for hitting the HN front page in my experience on a 1GB VPS, since the request never even makes it to my Python code.
I think folks just don't prioritize these sorts of optimizations.
I've worked with a lot of "smart" engineers over my career with whom autoscaling is a completely foreign concept, or a half-baked concept at best. My favorite is devs pushing to migrate to k8s because it "scales" and won't hear a single thing otherwise.
For a static blog you dont need that. My blog made the (near bottom of) HN front page last year. I didn't notice a thing until I looked at the traffic report (using goaccess). Static site generator with the result served from a bottom of the barrel Hetzner VPS, using nginx.
If a blog needs "scaling" of any sort you are doing it wrong.
You don't need autoscaling for a basic blog to handle the traffic of Hacker News. People have had "this page is hosted on <vintage computer>" sites hit the front page that have stayed up.
I remember using Evernote in the very early 2010s, pre acquistion, and before OneNote got really good/had a cloud sync service.
Evernote was...fine, but the UX was very stilted. Text placement was very restrictive, and the spontaneous nature of taking notes was suppressed by it generally forcing you to type linearly as if it were a Word document.
I used it for the ability to seamlessly sync between devices, but once OneNote 2013 hit, I dropped Evernote like a rock in a lake. It had no competitive drive in terms of functionality once MS wiped the floor with them.
I left Evernote when it became increasingly bloated and clunky as a product (on iOS at the time), and as they started tightening the screws on the free plan.
My current generic note-taker is SimpleNote. It is Multiplatform, it syncs, and it's free. It does 1/20th of what Evernote does but that didn't matter.
This service should not cost more than 3 dollars a month, for example most of my previously Evernoted friends used to migrate to Telegram free storage. Maybe Telegram provides only mediafile storage with no advanced search - but the search algorythm among your text document should not be significantly costier than GNU Emacs in Org-mode.
Stepan Pachikov is so great guy, I listened a lot of his talks. I am sad to live without his software, without screenshot editing software having red arrows of some specific form and without the search which worked really well. Good-bye yet another greedy corporation.
Hug of death? Archives don't have it either
It's demoralizing that we live in 2026 and a modest level of traffic is still enough to take down half the web.
Agree.
I don't think folks think clearly about how their setup scales computationally when they are choosing their stack. I've been writing a lot of software designed for drop-dead simple self-hosting lately (can run CGI-bin or as a standalone server, based on the env it's invoked in), and I put my own instances behind CGI, keenly aware of the risk on the open internet. But I design .htaccess so that the main server is hitting caches for anything anonymous. This works Just Fine for hitting the HN front page in my experience on a 1GB VPS, since the request never even makes it to my Python code.
I think folks just don't prioritize these sorts of optimizations.
I've worked with a lot of "smart" engineers over my career with whom autoscaling is a completely foreign concept, or a half-baked concept at best. My favorite is devs pushing to migrate to k8s because it "scales" and won't hear a single thing otherwise.
For a static blog you dont need that. My blog made the (near bottom of) HN front page last year. I didn't notice a thing until I looked at the traffic report (using goaccess). Static site generator with the result served from a bottom of the barrel Hetzner VPS, using nginx.
If a blog needs "scaling" of any sort you are doing it wrong.
You don't need autoscaling for a basic blog to handle the traffic of Hacker News. People have had "this page is hosted on <vintage computer>" sites hit the front page that have stayed up.
why do you need autoscaling for an (essentially) static website?
Google shutting down it's public cache made it even worse.
The resource has died for me as well, but I used to read it when the post has appeared.