MathB.in

» see mathb.in as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

MathB.in was a pastebin for mathematics. You typed Markdown with LaTeX inside it and a preview rendered live beside the editor. When you posted you got a short permanent URL to drop into a forum or a chat window. That was all of it. It mattered because the alternative, for most of those thirteen years, was attaching a photograph of your notebook to an email.

Susam Pal built it and ran it alone from Sunday 25 March 2012. The first version was PHP; he later rewrote the whole thing in Common Lisp and released it under an MIT license, so the software has outlived the service and is still sitting on GitHub. The repository description now reads like an epitaph written in passing: "Mathematics pastebin software that powered MathB.in from 2012 to 2025."

On 23 February 2025 he announced the end and committed a read-only mode the same evening. The site got three more weeks. "I have regrettably made the decision to shut down MathB.in on Sunday, 16 March 2025. The website will go offline on that day." It did, and he posted the confirmation that afternoon: "After about 13 years of continuous service, MathB.in has been shut down today."

~ the rap sheet ~

~ one night of furious coding ~

His own account of the launch sits in the middle of a sentence. MathB.in "was launched on Sunday, 25 March 2012, after a single night of furious coding." The Wayback Machine took its first capture three days later. For something that then ran continuously for thirteen years and got rewritten in a different language along the way, one night is a startling figure for what it took to exist in the first place.

~ the seven-day clock ~

The reason he gave is the most useful thing in this grave. "Over the past 13 years, I have received notices from regulatory authorities whenever someone submitted content that triggered compliance concerns. Each time, my server would be taken offline and I would be given a 7-day deadline." Missing one of those deadlines put the hosting account itself at risk.

So what killed MathB.in was a public text box. Anybody could paste anything into it, and some of them pasted the kind of thing that brings a letter. A 2017 capture shows a post on the site advertising a cheat tool for a farming game, the sort of residue an open submission form collects over a decade. He put the position plainly: "at this stage of my life, I can no longer afford to spend time moderating user content... It only takes one dodgy submission to trigger compliance alerts."

I have never run a public paste box, and his reason for closing this one reads like a warning I happened to skip. Anybody can put anything into a form like that, and every time somebody does, the consequences arrive at one person's hosting account with a week's clock attached. Bandwidth was always the cheap part of a service like this. The expensive part is that the open submission form is simultaneously the product and the liability, and one person absorbs both ends of it.

~ the fork-it-yourself kit ~

One day after the announcement, Pal created a repository called MathCask. It is a starter kit rather than a service: you fork it and switch on GitHub or Codeberg Pages, and you have your own small math-notes site with no submission form in it except your own. The README is honest about the trade. "While this kit is nowhere near as quick and convenient as MathB.in, it does offer a reasonably easy way to set up your own little web space."

That distinction is what makes this a death rather than a move. A hosted service open to everybody was replaced by instructions for hosting one yourself, with a different audience and no shared permanent URLs at all. mathb.in now forwards to that repository over plain HTTP, through a Namecheap redirect. The HTTPS version of the address does not answer anything.

~ thirteen years ~

The software got a final version number to mark the day. Release 1.3.0 in the changelog is dated 2025-03-16, and its note says it "captures the state of the MathB project as it was on Sun, 16 March 2025, when the MathB.in service powered by this software was shut down." The last commit landed at 01:01 UTC that morning. It is a tidier death certificate than most funded companies manage, filed by the one person who had been doing all of the work anyway.

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