Hey Hacker News, I'm one of the (two) co-founders of Supernotes, a PKM where your knowledge is stored as taggable, linkable and nestable note-cards. A bit like a zettelkasten system for the digital age.
We recently did a major overhaul of how sharing works on Supernotes [1], and added ability to share / embed your note-cards around the web like tweets. With no strict character limit, the ability to edit and full markdown + LaTeX maths support; Supernotes cards are a lot more flexible. Some great examples include reusable checklists, highlighted code snippets and interactive study cards; see them in action here [2]
A bit of background. We came up with the idea for Supernotes while at university a few years ago, while being frustrated with a mess of folders and long-form docs that were a pain to share and collaborate on. We found that storing everything on note-cards made it a lot simpler to link thoughts, ideas and knowledge together. Everything, from the design to the code of Supernotes has been built by just the two of us.
We'd love for you try out Supernotes (all our features are available for free), and hear what you think. Also feel free to ask any questions and I will be happy to answer them!
Bear is a really powerful markdown editor, and we are big fans ourselves. However, you are tied down to the apple ecosystem, and it still relies on files / tags with no hierarchical organisation.
Supernotes is entirely web-based and responsive, as you can log on and access your notes from any device. We are working on desktop and mobile apps at the moment!
Similar to Bear Supernotes uses tags, but our note-cards are also nestable. For example, you can write a note-card with a brief summary on a book you are reading, and then add child note-cards which are quotes from that book.
Once you have written a few cards you can filter by tags, connect cards together with bi-directional links and even add those child cards into other parent cards – we are the only PKM with a true multi-parent hierarchy!
If you lose internet connection, the platform enters a read only mode where you can still search for cards, but you will not be able to make edits / create new ones.
Full offline functionality is planned once our Desktop Apps are out, so very soon!
I only had reading cards offline in mind & hadn't even considered editing/creating cards offline, so that's already more than satisfactory for my needs. Thanks!
It's actually not the best channel, but we're long-time HN readers ourselves and know that a lot of people around here are interested in PKM! Development is moving fairly rapidly, so whenever we release a new feature we think HNers might appreciate we make a new post.
Since the last time SN was posted on HN, we've added:
- public sharing pages
- embedding
- pinning
- today view
- visibility (show / hide cards)
- and more!
Impetus for this post was the embedding though because we're really excited about the possibilities for that feature. Have a lot of great new features in the works as well, so you might see more posts in the future...
Craft is cool too! A lot like Notion, which is actually the tool we use internally for a lightweight CRM and such (though as we've progressed with SN we find ourselves using it less and less).
I definitely think people are more accustomed to documents vs. cards, but we've many users say they enjoy the card format more once they acclimate. The real power in the cards though is less that they look like cards and more just encouraging people to be a little bit more modular / atomic in their thinking (which humans seem to do anyway). Other great tools like Roam/Obsidian do this by encouraging your atomic thoughts to be represented as bullet points and that can work great for some people too, but one of our goals is to have a fairly portable format that you can use anywhere (hence the push for embedding) and cards works very well for that.
On Supernotes you can also turn on "seamless mode" which makes delineation between cards disappear entirely so it just looks like you're reading a document, and we want to add more flows like that in the future so that the line between cards and docs blurs even more when you want/need it to.
One of my (mostly unspoken) goals of Supernotes is actually that one day someone will write an entire book using our notecards. Create parent notecards that represent the chapters, child notecards for paragraphs within each chapter, drag cards around to quickly restructure your book, automatically generate a TOC based on that structure, one-click export to dump the whole thing as an epub... I think that would be very cool.
Cards help me personally in in Mind Mapping and is the kind of thing that can also be done in a group. It involves getting something to write upon (ideally poster board paper and a mix of different colored magic markers) and thinking non-linearly while filling that paper up with ideas.
Of course! The best channels for us have definitely been growing organically through seo-targeted blog posts, productivity communities and comparison sites.
Looks like a fancy version of a wiki. Ward would be pleased.
I'm worried about the "drop a note-card" on websites I visit, sounds like some Google / Amazon level tracking going on, why do I feel I'm ( my data ) about to be monetized?
We take privacy very seriously [1], and respect that your notes are yours. Our business model revolves around power users paying for our product and we will never sell your data to third parties.
Are you people working on a bulk data export anytime soon? It's not a feature you use right away, but it's what allows confidence to sink your time in a platform.
Right now you can export all your note-cards as a single markdown file, or use our API [1] to cherry pick which data you would like. We are working on more comprehensive front-facing export options at the moment.
Anki is great and I actually use it myself for language learning and such.
Supernotes is a notecard system rather than a flashcard system (though we actually plan to allow you to have "flashcard notecards" on Supernotes, along with spaced repetition, at some point in the future).
But for now Supernotes is meant as more of a note-taking app, so if you're in a lecture or a meeting taking notes or jotting down a recipe or a grocery list or anything else, that's what SN is great for. Active sharing is also important in the design, so you can have a shared grocery list or notes or anything else.
And with the new embedding, obviously the goal is that you can create content on Supernotes and put it in your blog or wherever else, and if you ever modify the card on SN you don't need to edit your blog post because the embed is pulling your content directly from our servers so it propagates everywhere you've shared / embedded it automagically!
I really like the considerate cookie prompt and clean design.
I want a product like this that syncs to the cloud file system of my choice for both portability and ease to edit on my desktop.
I would try this product but don’t want the mental friction of yet another blob of my data that’s in some proprietary store. Even if they are cool, like this seems, and will export/import.
A good example of this is ynab back in the day where they just had a file protocol on top of dropbox. And Moneydance still does this.
I’m paying for data storage and am steady comfortable with the the encryption, privacy, etc. if all this needs to do is store and organize markdown, then that should be done on a file base.
I need every note I write to exist forever. I’m cool dragging a folder around my whole life. I don’t want to drag around 100 companies.
I use Notable tied to a save folder in Keybase file storage for this purpose. You can set the folder to whatever you want, like a Dropbox or Google drive folder. The interface is similar to this actually, and it's free. All markdown based.
That's definitely fair and the "bring your own cloud" structure was originally how we were going to build Supernotes.
However, besides being able to organize your own knowledge in a better way, one of the main pain points we were/are trying to solve with Supernotes is sharing pieces of information. What we noticed with a lot of other systems is that you end up with a situation where you're creating content, and then at some point want to share it with a friend/co-worker/lover. With systems structured as you describe, what usually happens is the user just copy-pastes the content into their messaging app of choice (or email or similar) and that's that. The problem with this is that the info then immediately becomes stale. If I edit the content at some point down the road, in order for you to get the updated version I would need to send it to you on Signal again. With Supernotes, because you're sharing the actual card object on the SN platform, any changes you make to cards are reflected in everyone else's system.
In my case I think the simplest example is recipes: I have a sister that is a pastry chef, and we like sharing various recipes with each other. With the way Supernotes is structured (around cards + multi-parent hierarchies), she can share recipe cards with me that I then integrate alongside the recipe cards that I've made myself. If at any point she updates one of these cards, it's updated for me too. But unlike with a shared folder/file system, with a multi-parent card system I can easily hide her content or move it somewhere else on my system while on her system it continues to look exactly how she wants it to look. This was difficult enough with a centralized system and would've been practically impossible with a "bring your own dropbox" structured system, which is why we went with the former in the end.
But absolutely, we want users to still feel like they wholly own their own content (because they do[1]), which is why we eventually plan to add E2EE capability for your cards as well as continuing to build out our API[2] (want users to be able to easily get at their content without having to go through our interface) and export functionality.
I think a simple approach to this problem, and I think it’s an important issue, is to just assign a guid to each file and create a link with that guid that pulls the individual note from Dropbox/whatever.
This can be on top of the file structure and this is sort of how google docs and Dropbox already function where there’s a file structure and also a permalink.
I think it’s hard to balance ease of use with portability. I imagine that’s why there are so many homegrown solutions. For me, keeping knowledge is really important and I value this as more important than being able to easily share and integrate information with others (something I almost never do). But if there’s a market for recipe clubs or whatnot that might be really important.
I think this is the difference between independent mental models and shared mental models. Where for a wiki, a group needs to agree on a shared mental model and work together. For note taking, I don’t want to preemptively think in a common model so that I can easily share 1% of my thoughts.
I do this currently by keeping a bunch of markdown files in gdrive and sending links to particular items when I want to. The link is never stale and changes are visible immediately, and I can even grant edit permissions. AND I can port that to any file system that ever existed or will ever exist through dragging and dropping. I can even keep the same files synced into gdrive/Dropbox. Of course when I port, all the links die.
> I think this is the difference between independent mental models and shared mental models. Where for a wiki, a group needs to agree on a shared mental model and work together. For note taking, I don’t want to preemptively think in a common model so that I can easily share 1% of my thoughts.
This is actually exactly what we are going for with the notecard + multi-parent hierarchy system – a hybrid of the two. You structure your own cards however you want, and if someone shares a card with you then you can easily integrate it into your own structure. So you have shared content, but not shared necessarily structure, which is generally a requirement of other collaboration tools like Google Docs or Notion. But it is also very important to us that even if you are not collaborating / sharing at all, Supernotes is still a great tool to use for PKM, it just really shines (we think!) when you also want to do granular collaboration.
I use google Keep notes all the time because it syncs and has a fast UI with just the right amount of features, gonna give this a try see how it stacks!
Google Keep is great for quick to-do lists and ideas. however once you have 100+ notes that it can get quite difficult to organise. This is where Supernotes has an advantage giving users a lot more flexibility, here's just a few differences:
I guess I'm staying with Joplin synced to nextcloud myself after burning myself once or twice and seeing others being burned again and again by hosted services but I think there is absolutely is room for your product.
Totally get how frustrating it can be with hosted services. We're trying to do things a bit differently, having an API that's accessible from the start, being able to quickly export all your note-cards in markdown and involving our community [1] with our development. More comprehensive export / cloud sync options are in pipeline for even greater peace of mind.
> One tip: Be sure to not make your free tier too generous so you don't have to go back on it later :-)
With a mere 40 cards (+20 for each referral) in the free tier, I hardly think they're in danger of being 'too generous'. 40 cards seems barely enough to outline one set of related thoughts. Maybe two sets if the ideas are relatively shallow.
This is exactly the kind of thing I've been looking for. It's not an absolute necessity, but mobile apps would basically make this an instant buy for me.
Thanks, have you tried our mobile web app? It works pretty well, especially if you add it to your home screen. Mobile apps for Supernotes are on the horizon though!
I also really like this, I don't care for sharing per say but the note organization + tags is very promising. I am hesitant to commit to anything with a "coming soon" label, I'd rather pay the price when the features I want (i.e. ios app) exist rather than pay ahead for the promise.
I keep seeing notes / zettelkasten / second brain projects posted on HN. But for the HN audience, are any of these satisfying?
As a person who builds software, a decent chunk of the content I would like to gather in a second brain or zettelkasten system is about code (in multiple languages). But the systems I see popping up here are 95% text focused. They typically let you write code snippets, but to run them, or see anything about how they interact, you have to copy them somewhere else and create a suitable environment in which to run them.
The best solution I've managed to set up so far is emacs org-roam set up alongside a set of toy projects, where note files can link to specific lines (it's brittle) in files in those toy projects. I found org-babel too cumbersome to configure, and too hard to deal with code snippets that depend on libraries.
But I hope someone builds something like a zettlekasten + repl.it mashup which removes the setup burden, such that it can be fast and easy to take notes which include a snippet of code from a paper, without having to stop to create a project with a list of dependencies, a build script, etc.
I tried many of them. All of them are innovative in some ways and scratch certain itches well, but none of them are perfect (i.e. good for my set of use cases with no compromises) yet, so I am still looking and regularly trying new ones. (As long as it is easy to mass import data from TiddlyWiki/jsons)
I built my own PKM tool to solve this exact problem. I spend a ton of my time in VS Code and GitHub, and I wanted a really simple way to store/access my code snippets and notes, without having to leave the editor, and in a way that I could manage them as GitHub gists and repos: https://aka.ms/GistPad.
As an avid past user of Google Notebook, this really takes me back. Feels very familiar. Makes you wonder again why Google shuttered the project or why they replaced it with something like Keep.
There's a lot of Synology NAS users who use DS Note (the Synology solution), which is functionally fine, but the UX is poor. If I could use Supernotes as just a client, but use my own hosting, it'd be excellent.
Is there a way I could use Supernote with my own data? Eg if I have markdown files on my ftp / webdav or other, could I load them in Supernotes? Could I export the .md to ftp or other?
PS: what did you use to create your community site? I like the solution. Is it Discuss?
At the moment the backend architecture of SN is definitely not suitable for that unfortunately, due to necessary trade-offs we made to enable low-friction sharing between users.
One possible way to do this would be to use our API to create some sort of intermediary service that allows this, but that is not something on our roadmap at the moment.
Yep, the forum is Discuss. We were originally using Spectrum but honestly it was kinda terrible haha. We also really like how with Discuss it was (relatively) easy to setup SSO so our users login with their SN account and everything just works. Would definitely recommend!
57 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 131 ms ] threadWe recently did a major overhaul of how sharing works on Supernotes [1], and added ability to share / embed your note-cards around the web like tweets. With no strict character limit, the ability to edit and full markdown + LaTeX maths support; Supernotes cards are a lot more flexible. Some great examples include reusable checklists, highlighted code snippets and interactive study cards; see them in action here [2]
A bit of background. We came up with the idea for Supernotes while at university a few years ago, while being frustrated with a mess of folders and long-form docs that were a pain to share and collaborate on. We found that storing everything on note-cards made it a lot simpler to link thoughts, ideas and knowledge together. Everything, from the design to the code of Supernotes has been built by just the two of us.
We'd love for you try out Supernotes (all our features are available for free), and hear what you think. Also feel free to ask any questions and I will be happy to answer them!
[1]: https://supernotes.app/changelog [2]: https://supernotes.app/blog/posts/embed-your-knowledge/
Supernotes is entirely web-based and responsive, as you can log on and access your notes from any device. We are working on desktop and mobile apps at the moment!
Similar to Bear Supernotes uses tags, but our note-cards are also nestable. For example, you can write a note-card with a brief summary on a book you are reading, and then add child note-cards which are quotes from that book.
Once you have written a few cards you can filter by tags, connect cards together with bi-directional links and even add those child cards into other parent cards – we are the only PKM with a true multi-parent hierarchy!
Really like the product.
If you lose internet connection, the platform enters a read only mode where you can still search for cards, but you will not be able to make edits / create new ones.
Full offline functionality is planned once our Desktop Apps are out, so very soon!
I say this because Supernotes has been posted five times in the last nine months.
Since the last time SN was posted on HN, we've added:
- public sharing pages
- embedding
- pinning
- today view
- visibility (show / hide cards)
- and more!
Impetus for this post was the embedding though because we're really excited about the possibilities for that feature. Have a lot of great new features in the works as well, so you might see more posts in the future...
Does the concept of "cards" resonate with people? To me, it feels too constrained, but I haven't tried out Supernotes yet.
I definitely think people are more accustomed to documents vs. cards, but we've many users say they enjoy the card format more once they acclimate. The real power in the cards though is less that they look like cards and more just encouraging people to be a little bit more modular / atomic in their thinking (which humans seem to do anyway). Other great tools like Roam/Obsidian do this by encouraging your atomic thoughts to be represented as bullet points and that can work great for some people too, but one of our goals is to have a fairly portable format that you can use anywhere (hence the push for embedding) and cards works very well for that.
On Supernotes you can also turn on "seamless mode" which makes delineation between cards disappear entirely so it just looks like you're reading a document, and we want to add more flows like that in the future so that the line between cards and docs blurs even more when you want/need it to.
One of my (mostly unspoken) goals of Supernotes is actually that one day someone will write an entire book using our notecards. Create parent notecards that represent the chapters, child notecards for paragraphs within each chapter, drag cards around to quickly restructure your book, automatically generate a TOC based on that structure, one-click export to dump the whole thing as an epub... I think that would be very cool.
Could you tell us which channel works the best for you?
Unfortunately more traffic ≠ more subs.
I'm worried about the "drop a note-card" on websites I visit, sounds like some Google / Amazon level tracking going on, why do I feel I'm ( my data ) about to be monetized?
[1]: https://supernotes.app/privacy/
[1]: https://api.supernotes.app/docs/
It's only natural that most people gravitate towards easier to use and nicer looking software.
It's a very simple flashcard program. What is so hard about it?
Just take a look at this video, and the apps ui, and tell me this isn't a clusterfuck: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Y35WiKNbCU
So yeah, for a simple flashcard app, it might be easy to use, but if that's all you need there're better tools.
As for it being free.... Yes, and that bothers me. I would rather pay $$$ for a great product than use an okay one for free.
Supernotes is a notecard system rather than a flashcard system (though we actually plan to allow you to have "flashcard notecards" on Supernotes, along with spaced repetition, at some point in the future).
But for now Supernotes is meant as more of a note-taking app, so if you're in a lecture or a meeting taking notes or jotting down a recipe or a grocery list or anything else, that's what SN is great for. Active sharing is also important in the design, so you can have a shared grocery list or notes or anything else.
And with the new embedding, obviously the goal is that you can create content on Supernotes and put it in your blog or wherever else, and if you ever modify the card on SN you don't need to edit your blog post because the embed is pulling your content directly from our servers so it propagates everywhere you've shared / embedded it automagically!
I want a product like this that syncs to the cloud file system of my choice for both portability and ease to edit on my desktop.
I would try this product but don’t want the mental friction of yet another blob of my data that’s in some proprietary store. Even if they are cool, like this seems, and will export/import.
A good example of this is ynab back in the day where they just had a file protocol on top of dropbox. And Moneydance still does this.
I’m paying for data storage and am steady comfortable with the the encryption, privacy, etc. if all this needs to do is store and organize markdown, then that should be done on a file base.
I need every note I write to exist forever. I’m cool dragging a folder around my whole life. I don’t want to drag around 100 companies.
This and most such tools should be a folder structure of .md files.
You can then open that same structure in e.g. Ulysses or VSCode.
iCloud storage is “built in” on the Apple camp and OneDrive or Dropbox are ubiquitous enough on the Windows and cross-platform camp.
However, besides being able to organize your own knowledge in a better way, one of the main pain points we were/are trying to solve with Supernotes is sharing pieces of information. What we noticed with a lot of other systems is that you end up with a situation where you're creating content, and then at some point want to share it with a friend/co-worker/lover. With systems structured as you describe, what usually happens is the user just copy-pastes the content into their messaging app of choice (or email or similar) and that's that. The problem with this is that the info then immediately becomes stale. If I edit the content at some point down the road, in order for you to get the updated version I would need to send it to you on Signal again. With Supernotes, because you're sharing the actual card object on the SN platform, any changes you make to cards are reflected in everyone else's system.
In my case I think the simplest example is recipes: I have a sister that is a pastry chef, and we like sharing various recipes with each other. With the way Supernotes is structured (around cards + multi-parent hierarchies), she can share recipe cards with me that I then integrate alongside the recipe cards that I've made myself. If at any point she updates one of these cards, it's updated for me too. But unlike with a shared folder/file system, with a multi-parent card system I can easily hide her content or move it somewhere else on my system while on her system it continues to look exactly how she wants it to look. This was difficult enough with a centralized system and would've been practically impossible with a "bring your own dropbox" structured system, which is why we went with the former in the end.
But absolutely, we want users to still feel like they wholly own their own content (because they do[1]), which is why we eventually plan to add E2EE capability for your cards as well as continuing to build out our API[2] (want users to be able to easily get at their content without having to go through our interface) and export functionality.
[1] https://supernotes.app/terms/
[2] https://api.supernotes.app/docs/swagger
This can be on top of the file structure and this is sort of how google docs and Dropbox already function where there’s a file structure and also a permalink.
I think it’s hard to balance ease of use with portability. I imagine that’s why there are so many homegrown solutions. For me, keeping knowledge is really important and I value this as more important than being able to easily share and integrate information with others (something I almost never do). But if there’s a market for recipe clubs or whatnot that might be really important.
I think this is the difference between independent mental models and shared mental models. Where for a wiki, a group needs to agree on a shared mental model and work together. For note taking, I don’t want to preemptively think in a common model so that I can easily share 1% of my thoughts.
I do this currently by keeping a bunch of markdown files in gdrive and sending links to particular items when I want to. The link is never stale and changes are visible immediately, and I can even grant edit permissions. AND I can port that to any file system that ever existed or will ever exist through dragging and dropping. I can even keep the same files synced into gdrive/Dropbox. Of course when I port, all the links die.
This is actually exactly what we are going for with the notecard + multi-parent hierarchy system – a hybrid of the two. You structure your own cards however you want, and if someone shares a card with you then you can easily integrate it into your own structure. So you have shared content, but not shared necessarily structure, which is generally a requirement of other collaboration tools like Google Docs or Notion. But it is also very important to us that even if you are not collaborating / sharing at all, Supernotes is still a great tool to use for PKM, it just really shines (we think!) when you also want to do granular collaboration.
- Infinitely nestable hierarchy
- Note-cards support multi-parents
- Bi-directional links between note-cards
- Pinned note-cards
- Filter note-cards by tags, author and more
I guess I'm staying with Joplin synced to nextcloud myself after burning myself once or twice and seeing others being burned again and again by hosted services but I think there is absolutely is room for your product.
Totally get how frustrating it can be with hosted services. We're trying to do things a bit differently, having an API that's accessible from the start, being able to quickly export all your note-cards in markdown and involving our community [1] with our development. More comprehensive export / cloud sync options are in pipeline for even greater peace of mind.
[1]: https://community.supernotes.app/
I've just trashed Dropbox, Microsoft and to some degree Google over that in another thread :-)
With a mere 40 cards (+20 for each referral) in the free tier, I hardly think they're in danger of being 'too generous'. 40 cards seems barely enough to outline one set of related thoughts. Maybe two sets if the ideas are relatively shallow.
[0] - https://zettelkasten.de/
As a person who builds software, a decent chunk of the content I would like to gather in a second brain or zettelkasten system is about code (in multiple languages). But the systems I see popping up here are 95% text focused. They typically let you write code snippets, but to run them, or see anything about how they interact, you have to copy them somewhere else and create a suitable environment in which to run them.
The best solution I've managed to set up so far is emacs org-roam set up alongside a set of toy projects, where note files can link to specific lines (it's brittle) in files in those toy projects. I found org-babel too cumbersome to configure, and too hard to deal with code snippets that depend on libraries.
But I hope someone builds something like a zettlekasten + repl.it mashup which removes the setup burden, such that it can be fast and easy to take notes which include a snippet of code from a paper, without having to stop to create a project with a list of dependencies, a build script, etc.
Is there a way I could use Supernote with my own data? Eg if I have markdown files on my ftp / webdav or other, could I load them in Supernotes? Could I export the .md to ftp or other?
PS: what did you use to create your community site? I like the solution. Is it Discuss?
One possible way to do this would be to use our API to create some sort of intermediary service that allows this, but that is not something on our roadmap at the moment.
Yep, the forum is Discuss. We were originally using Spectrum but honestly it was kinda terrible haha. We also really like how with Discuss it was (relatively) easy to setup SSO so our users login with their SN account and everything just works. Would definitely recommend!
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