authorfly (u/authorfly)

authorfly commented on Ask HN: What's the best alternative to Dragon NaturallySpeaking? · Posted by u/Openai2

vayup · 4 months ago

I am the developer of VoiceBuddy. If you use windows, give it a try. I have been using Dragon for 15 years, and made VoiceBuddy because I thought it can be a lot better.

www.voicebuddy.co

authorfly · 4 months ago

What changes did you make?

authorfly commented on Why Self-Host? romanzipp.com/blog/why-a-... · Posted by u/romanzipp

jimmaswell · 4 months ago

What's so complicated? I'm currently on DigitalOcean but I've self-hosted before. My site is largely a basic LAMP setup with LetsEncrypt and a cron job to install security updates. Self-hosting that on one of my machines would only be a matter of buying a static IP and port forwarding.

authorfly · 4 months ago

LAMP with dynamic webpages (I assume your approach) works just like it ever did (besides SSL)

But are you really keen to make a PHP dynamic webpage application where each page imports some database function/credentials and uses them to render html?

Can you keep the behavior of fluent userflow (e.g. menu not rerendering) that way? Only with minimal design.

When in 2006 most webpages had an iframe from the main content, an iframe for the menu, and maybe an iframe for some other element (e.g. a chat window), it was fine to refresh one of those or have a link in one load another dynamic page. Today that is not seen to be very attractive and to common people (consumers and businesses), unattractive means low-trust which means less income. Just my experience, unfortunately. I also loved that era in hindsight, even though the bugs were frustrating, let alone the JS binding and undefined errors if you added that...

authorfly commented on Why Self-Host? romanzipp.com/blog/why-a-... · Posted by u/romanzipp

czhu12 · 4 months ago

This is why I built https://canine.sh -- to make installing all that stuff a single step. I was the cofounder of a small SaaS that was blowing >$500k / year on our cloud stack

Within the first few weeks, you'll realize you also need sentry, otherwise, errors in production just become digging through logs. Thats a +$40 / m cloud service.

Then you'll want something like datadog because someone is reporting somewhere that a page is taking 10 seconds to load, but you can't replicate it. +$300 / m cloud service.

Then, if you ever want to aggregate data into a dashboard to present to customers -- Looker / Tableau / Omni +$20k / year.

Data warehouse + replication? +$150k / year

This goes on and on and on. The holy grail is to be able to run ALL of these external services in your own infrastructure on a common platform with some level of maintainability.

Cloud Sentry -> Self Hosted Sentry

Datadog -> Self Hosted Prometheus / Grafana

Looker -> Self Hosted Metabase

Snowflake -> Self Hosted Clickhouse

ETL -> Self Hosted Airbyte

Most companies realize this eventually and thats why they eventually move to Kubernetes. I think its also why often indie hackers can't quite understand why the "complexity" of Kubernetes is necessary, and just having everything run on a single VPS isn't enough for everything.

authorfly · 4 months ago

Yeah, you are very right.

If you start peaking success, you realize that while your happy path may work for 70% of real cases, it's not really optimal to convert for most of them. Sentry helps a lot, you see session replay, you get excited.

You realize you can A/B test... but you need a tool for that...

Problem: Things like Openreplay will just crash and not restart themselves, with multiple container setups, some random part going down will just stop your session collection, without you noticing.. try to debug that? Goodluck, it'll take at least half a day. And often, you restore functionality, only to have another random error take it down a couple of months later, or you realize, the default configuration is only to keep 500mb of logs/recordings (what), etc, etc...

You realize you are saving $40/month for a very big hassle and worse, it may not work when you need it. You go back to sentry etc..

Does Canine change that?

authorfly commented on Ask HN: What could I build to make your life a little easier? · Posted by u/uint9_t

Paradigm2020 · 7 months ago

Utility-wise: I specifically mentioned same amount of coffee so this one is moot.

Social: most coffee is consumed for takeaway and on Auto-Pilot. In the usa most starbuckses make 80%! From takeaway and 20% from sit ins (they tried to close some Starbucks locations because of this but the funny part is that sales drop more than the 20%... Probably because people take the "cost of the store" into their reasoning why they are spending 7-12$ on a cup of Joe.)

-regulating your emotions: if you are in a luxury position that's fine... Being / perceiving / stressing about being poor causes a drop of 8 IQ points. I know/understand what you mean and changing a default always causes stress but the question is always about short term pain vs long term gain... Nobody likes to change... Being told what to do... The app is not pressuring you - it's making you aware of options / costs that you might not have considered. (Did you know) The thing is that if the app is well made and you trust the maker you know you have a "friend" who is looking out for you... Even though you might still ignore him/her (think friends who smoke cigarettes etc...)

The brain's main goal is not too think because it tries to preserve energy... Unfortunately the environment is simultaneously safer (we killed all animals that literally can kill us) and more dangerous (our fellow humans who used to stand next to us having our back against the animals are often against our interests now.)

The question is always what is a low effort high reward substitute... I'd say takeaway coffee is probably one of the best options for a lot of people.

The art is just to visualize the profit you're gonna make in the future in the now --- because your brain focuses on the now... If I said to you that if you drink a coffee less every other day you'd "make" 4140$ in 5 years would you --- pretty sure for most people in dire financial straits they would... On the other hand not meeting with your friend for brunch once a month might save you more even but a friend is harder to substitute than some sugary beverage...

The question is always "why" - the "suffering" now is always certain (change is painful if it is not perceived as improvement) but by making the future gains big, visual and realistic people (can be) more self motivated.

authorfly · 7 months ago

I would say I wouldn't agree, but maybe our language in common is why we don't agree - for example, the idea that coffee is 80% takeaway... this global report puts it at 65% in cafe. My experience in most of europe is about 75% in cafe: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/cafe-mar...

So maybe your use of coffee is just different to you know, the old world ways that developed it.

authorfly commented on Ask HN: What could I build to make your life a little easier? · Posted by u/uint9_t

Paradigm2020 · 7 months ago

Debt pile visualizer...

The financial advise tends to be to pay off your smallest debt first, even if the interest is low, because it will give a mental boost...

So yeah the website would ask you to list your debts in order. (Student loan, car loan,...) And the interest rate.

Than it would make a (not too depressing) visual and ask you how much you can pay per month.

Bonus points for using Google sheets as a backend.

But main thing would be that people would be able to get helpful reminders / tips.

"You've saved yourself 500$ over the next 10 years, keep up the good work".

Christmas time "If you got a Xmas bonus and can double your loan pay off this month you'll speed up your debt freeness by 2.5 months"

"Did you know:A Starbucks frappucino cost 0.55c to make, and in ventti size costs 8$ and 400kcals (more than 2 ice creams). The coffee of the day cost 0.40c to make and cost 3$ and 10kcal. Caffeine the same.

Anyway v 0.1 probably only takes a day to make.

Cool initiative good luck

authorfly · 7 months ago

I totally agree with your suggestion for ordering, self-reporting the success and the "if x then imagine y!" you discuss and I get you didn't ask for criticism, but in your last example - the value of coffee to you might not be what it costs to make. The value can be a lot more for some people than others:

- Utility-wise: If you need to perform at work.. even if having it every day means the coffee nolonger changes from your original no-coffee baseline..

- Social: My girlfriend doesn't really go to the expensive coffee shop because it's worth the 2x marker. It's because she can chat about relationships, have security in her relationships with her friends and they can designate this as an unscheduled-long time to talk through issues

- Regulating your emotions For me at least buying something small and pleasant can avoid troughs/peaks. In fact overstressing the financial ratio of cost:price of a product causes these troughs for me. That's also why poorer people often buy small but tasty things, even when it's pricy for them, it regulates their mood up enough to slog through the rest of the 1am shifts with difficulty seeing the future (I have been there...)

That's why I'd be wary of having an app pressure you not to buy something. You don't always know the real reasons your body gets you to do things.

authorfly commented on Ask HN: Is it time to fork HN into AI/LLM and "Everything else/other?" · Posted by u/bookofjoe

freedomben · 7 months ago

> Hanging out on the "new" page and upvoting quality non-AI articles is an effective method of resistance.

Fully agree, and I in fact am finding that I actually find more stories I'm interested in that way than looking at the front page. For whatever reason, I'm increasingly getting out of sync (interests-wise) with broader HN. So many stories I think are great HN material (and would have been a few years ago) languish with almost no activity.

So there are two reasons IMHO to browse new: Surface better stories to front page for engagement, and find better stories

authorfly · 7 months ago

As you age your interests and curiosity change, in ways you often don't see until later.

Very common in computer science contexts. Young undergraduates always pick up the new tech and make something that seems alien and wrong first. It's not even the masters students.

Possibly the same Kiro - Agentic IDE post would have been as interesting to you as the launch of Atom or something related to VS Code, etc.

authorfly commented on LLM Inevitabilism tomrenner.com/posts/llm-i... · Posted by u/SwoopsFromAbove

evantbyrne · 7 months ago

I'm pretty bearish on the idea that AGI is going to take off anytime soon, but I read a significant amount of theology growing up and I would not describe the popular essays from e.g., LessWrong as religious in nature. I also would not describe them as appearing poorly read. The whole "look they just have a new god!" is a common trope in religious apologetics that is usually just meant to distract from the author's own poorly constructed beliefs. Perhaps such a comparison is apt for some people in the inevitable AGI camp, but their worst arguments are not where we should be focusing.

authorfly · 7 months ago

Would you say LessWrong posts are dogmatic?

authorfly commented on Data on AI-related Show HN posts ryanfarley.co/ai-show-hn-... · Posted by u/rfarley04

shaldengeki · 7 months ago

This shows a huge surge starting in 2023. I see you're counting all .AI TLDs; how much is this responsible for the surge? I think .AI TLD registrations took off starting in 2023, and one thing I wonder is if prior to 2023 we're mostly missing real AI Show HN entries, and afterwards we're mostly catching them.

authorfly · 7 months ago

I think you're right. About 20-30% of product hunt products were AI in late 2022 for example, but very few of them then used .ai.

authorfly commented on The 90% Gravity Problem: Why We Tend to Quit Right Before the Finish Line · Posted by u/darwinSir

authorfly · 7 months ago

> your perspectives

90% gravity / 90% done is a bad perspective. You don't really have data on how long the false positives would have taken to succeed.

Unfortunately, getting from 0 to $100 in revenue isn't always much harder than $100 to $200. Even though the first $100 is insanely hard, so can the next $100 be. People don't like to talk about this in the startup space but the statistics at innovation centres for startups etc are insanely clear: at any given revenue, most startups are only going to keep it above the current value for part of the next 6 months, then crash and burn. And upwards line, let alone exponential growth, is an outlier (and still leads to revenue decline the next year most of the times it happens). Unfortunately, finding something that works (a fly well or net ROI positive channel) often takes so much time maintaining you take your eye and progress off other aspects you would have focused on for success and it becomes a revenue wave when it stops working rather than a stable way to grow.

Second problem is young people think they won't tire.. after three years almost anyone has a period of burnout. Atleast althetes like Olympians or Baseketball players have off seasons, with startups, it's not so. This is why having great people with you who flux at different times and take care of stuff you take your attention of increases success, if you can keep conflict minimal. Yet, most young people also don't want to relinquish control, if they are honest.

That's my view.

authorfly commented on Ask HN: Startup shutting down, should we open source? · Posted by u/amadeoeoeo

sexyman48 · 8 months ago

I wouldn't do it. It'd be like a dead lover. Don't get suckered into prettying up her corpse on the off chance your opinion of necrophilia changes.

authorfly · 7 months ago

100%.

Dealing with 5 year old code is okay now. In 10 years it will cause you pain. It's like going back to an ex after you lose attraction. It never works out and hurts both parties (in this case your users, because you won't maintain it or want to pretty soon)