tristanho

Man, OK. We're not Facebook, I just don't think we had the resources to do something like that. It's a small private beta of a bootstrapped company's reading app... very different from a billion+ user service like Facebook.

On goodreads/X, we have a loooot of users who use neither of those, so I don't think that approach would have work.

I take your feedback and will try to do better next time. We really just didn't think people would care that much, as far as I can tell you're the only person who has brought this up with us.

Wow, I've never heard about this -- sorry about that!

We specifically let all Readwise subscribers in at the same time (with an email that went out on the same day), giving them access before the general public. I wasn't aware there was actually more we could have done. Were we supposed to let people bid on them? How would we deal with conflicts across two subscribers?

Hey all, founder of Readwise here, happy to chat about this if anyone is interested :)

Doesn't this does seem like a bit of an... exact rip off of turbopuffer?

Down to the style of the webpages and the details of the pricing?

Here's the pricing calculator, for example:

https://share.cleanshot.com/JddPvNj3 https://share.cleanshot.com/9zqx5ypp

As a happy turbopuffer user, not sure why I'd want to use Chroma.

Thanks! Kobo is hard because it's proprietary software, but we would like to...

However, there is a wide range of eink devices that already exist that run Android (check out Boox, Meebook, Daylight, though there are many others) -- we've optimized Reader to run great on these devices :)

I think the image urls provided in the RSS feed are just broken, eg this one is linked in the latest article:

https://fabiensanglard.net/2168/french.webp

No, unfortunately their API doesn't return the actual html content of the saved articles :( just the urls and all the metadata: highlights, title, author, image, tags, location, etc

I really wish they did :/ some things aren't even on the internet archive and are probably saved uniquely on Pocket's servers. Would be sweet if they could open source that data.

Cool! The import should auto-retry, but in case something gets snagged there you can also always do `cmd+k -> pocket` to retrigger a full import.

Totally hear you on price.. Reader is built for people who spend a lot of time reading and can justify it (and the sub also comes with access to our Readwise product too).

We also have a 50% off discount for students as well folks in countries with depressed currencies (eg India, South American countries, etc) which might help.

We try our best, but are also bootstrapped and have to charge enough to keep the company sustainable!

That is definitely one of the biggest painpoints, and we feel it ourselves for whatever it's worth!

However, if you're just looking for a replacement for Pocket, you only need the Reader app/extension and it shouldn't be clunky at all.

It's only if you want our highlight-specific reviewing/exporting functionality that you would also need the Readwise app... still not ideal, but merging two complex products like this without making the experience janky/complicated for new users is a really really hard problem!

You can connect Pocket to Readwise Reader ( readwise.io/reader ), via Pocket's API, which will let Reader view all the tags, metadata, highlights, etc.

Even if you didn't want to use Reader, you could then export from inside Reader and Readwise to pull out CSVs of all of your articles+highlights -- no subscription required.

(full disclosure: founder of Readwise here, obviously if you want to try our Reader app that would be sweet, but at least wanted to offer this way to get a more complete export)

This is basically our exact experience at readwise.io too. Originally, everything was through Heroku.

We started by moving our heroku redis and postgres to redislabs and crunchy respectively, which were 10x+ better in terms of support, reliability, performance, etc. Then our random addons.

We recently moved our background job workers (which were a majority of our Heroku hosting cost) to render.com with ~0 downtime. Render has been great.

We now just have our web servers running on Heroku (which we'll probably move to Render next year too)...

End of an era. Grateful for Heroku and the next generation of startups spawned by its slow decline :)

Honestly just loading all vectors in-memory (and stuff like sqlite, pgvector) is totally fine when you're dealing with O(100k) vectors, but beyond that all the workable options like pinecone get gnarly, slow, and ridiculously expensive.

The best option by far I know of is turbopuffer.com , which is like 100x cheaper than pinecone and seems to actually scale.

Since it's not listed in the suggested vector dbs section of the slides, wanted to lob it in as a solid suggestion :)

Sort of off topic, but for diagrams like the author seems to want (well, maybe a little lower fidelity, but good enough for any software system mapping I do), I love using Kinopio (kinopio.club)

Didn't see any mentions here.

Related: I've ordered this build-your-own tensegrity kit, which is really fun to build https://pretenst.com/

Very different to read about vs get a feel for them in your hands.

They also have an open-source simulator for the structures https://github.com/elastic-interval/pretenst https://pretenst.com/app/#construction;Halo-by-Crane (written in Rust!)

Hmmm yes, I wonder if this project was discovered/shared here before it was really ready to be published.

Very excited for the code/demo when they're ready!

Does anyone have a good idea of when OPFS will be broadly available in all major browsers? And what's best to use as a pseudo-polyfill in the mean time?

Something relevant is absurd-sql, but unfortunately that's not even close to production ready :/

https://github.com/jlongster/absurd-sql

Hey! Totally understand this concern with the browser extension. I mentioned this in another comment, but there was no way to build the full functionality without these permissions, though we do hope to make a lighter version of the extension in the future for more privacy-conscious folks.

However, completely understand the request, and we do value privacy/security super highly. All extension data stays local on your device unless you actively press the extension button to save a page/content. You'd have to read our source code and network requests to confirm this right now, of course.

Another commenter also mentioned, we do indeed have a super light bookmarklet that can serve this purpose in the mean time as well

``` javascript:(function()%7Bopen('https://readwise.io/save?title='+encodeURIComponent(document...)() ```

Hope that helps!

Unfortunately, there was no way to make the _full_ extension work with only activeTab, as we have some functionality that is incompatible (one such example: if you open up a page you've previously saved and highlighted in Reader, we show your highlights overlaid on it seamlessly).

That being said, we do want to make another version of the extension that works for more privacy conscious folks, and will defs use activeTab for that! Just requires a little more engineering effort.

I totally understand the request though, privacy is super important. All extension data stays local on your device unless you actively press the extension button to save a page/content. You'd have to read our source code and network requests to confirm this right now, of course.

Thanks! Yeah, part of the motivation for Reader was that our original readwise app was integrated with a bunch of these apps like Pocket and Instapaper... and we saw them completely fall by the wayside.

Our users were constantly asking us to fix things with Pocket/Instapaper that were out of our control, so they kind of pulled this app out of us :)

Heyo!

1. Yes, absolutely. Ex-Pocket users are some of the most common folks using Reader right now.

2. We don't really have a bookmark import yet... we strangely haven't really had enough requests (yet) to build it, but not against it!

3. You can always export all of your saved links+metadata to a CSV file, and all your highlights/notes to markdown (as well as various note-taking app integrations we have). We also have a nascent api which right now only lets you export your highlights/notes, but will be adding support for all of your links and such as well!

Heyo! Yeah, our parser doesn't work great with HN threads (yet! i'd love to get it working...)

But in the mean time the Reader browser extension also acts as a web highlighter. So after activating it, you can highlight any text directly on the web page, and then add tags/notes to those as well. Those highlights will sync back into Reader.

Yes, we do use common third party apps for analytics/ads. We do not share personal reading data with them. Amazon is just used for their Oauth login API for example (for an easy sign in flow for users), and mixpanel is a very common analytics library that we use to understand product usage, but it does not get reading data either.

You also omitted the term "non-identifying and aggregate information" in your quote from the policy.

I especially take umbrage to your claim that "you are the product", when again, 100% of our revenue comes from customer subscriptions.

What you're saying is simply not true -- we're a small team of bootstrapped hackers that have worked on improving reading for five years and the lies about us aren't appreciated.

Ah, sorry about that. Indeed, we do have that splash screen page, but for speed of development we just quickly threw it into our main webapp.

Will change that for next time, thanks!

This is simply not true. We not sell user data to anyone at all. The business is _entirely_ funded through customer subscriptions.

Heyo disqard -- thanks for the feedback! You can actually already do something like this.

From readwise.io/export there is a bulk markdown option which lets you save all of your highlights/notes in a zip file, with one markdown file per document.

Automating this via a kind of folder sync is not something we do yet, but could be cool! We do have an api that makes it really easy to pull out all your highlights/notes too readwise.io/api_deets#export

We definitely do not share reading data with meta or google.

Honestly we installed those a while back when experimenting with ads, but dont use them anymore… will look at ripping out!

It’s not fully offline — we sync data across your many devices, have a cloud service that parses the clean versions of documents using ML, etc

It’s just that once your device is synced, you will be able to use it + read fully offline, then have those changes sync once you’re back!

Heyo! Yeah there’s a free trial for 30 days and after that you can definitely export all data (links, metadata, highlights, etc)

Hey Sytelus, it sounds like you might have installed the wrong app. You’re describing our classic “Readwise 1.0” app, which admittedly could use some design work! (and of course is not a bookmark/reader app)

This post refers to our new Reader app, which you can install here on mobile:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/readwise-reader/id1567599761

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.readermobi...

Thank you!

1) Haha yeah, the inverted colors was kind of a quick hack to make some folks happy. That css looks great -- will definitely explore something like that with our designer :)

2) Not a bad idea at all...