June 6, 2026
Cake is a lie, notes are forever
Show HN: Infinite canvas notes in the non-Euclidean Poincaré disk
This wild note app lets your ideas live on a weird endless circle and commenters are obsessed
TLDR: Poincake is a prototype note app that turns note-taking into an endless weird visual playground where ideas can spread out forever. Commenters loved the smooth sci-fi novelty, but the biggest fight was whether it’s brilliant or just too messy when notes start piling on top of each other.
A developer showed off Poincake, a prototype note app where your notes don’t sit on normal pages at all — they live on a strange endless disk where faraway ideas shrink into tiny dots. The pitch is simple: you can keep adding notes forever, see the whole mess at once, and even drop in little teleport links by pasting coordinates. It also supports images, came from the creator procrastinating on writing a novel, and, in a very 2020s twist, was partly built with help from artificial intelligence tools. Naturally, the comments did what comments do best: turn a quirky demo into a mini spectacle.
The strongest reaction was delight mixed with side-eye. One person called it a “really unique experience” and praised how smooth it feels, while another instantly went full sci-fi fan and dubbed it “Greg Egan’s notebook!” Others piled on with comparisons to HyperRogue, the cult game that also plays with bizarre geometry, basically saying: cute idea, but the nerds have seen this flavor before. And then came the practical skeptics, who zeroed in on the real drama: overlapping notes. One commenter bluntly complained they don’t want to be “fucking around” just to read hidden notes, arguing the app’s “untangle” button doesn’t really save the day. Another wanted alternate layouts and a visible guide grid near the edges so regular humans can tell what’s going on. In other words, the crowd loves the vibe, loves the weirdness, and is already demanding it be less confusing.
Key Points
- •Poincake is a prototype note-taking app that places notes on a hyperbolic Poincaré disk to create a near-infinite canvas.
- •The article says this layout is intended to keep all notes visible at a glance, support hierarchical organization, and leave room for adding more notes.
- •The demo supports text, images, import/export, coordinate copying, and coordinate-based teleporting portals.
- •The author describes the project as an early demo, invites feedback through GitHub Issues or email, and lists multiple planned improvements.
- •The author credits HyperRogue and older HCI experiments as inspirations and says LLM tools, including Claude, helped implement the mathematical parts.