its_down_again (u/its_down_again)

its_down_again commented on Show HN: Figr – AI that thinks through product problems before designing figr.design/... · Posted by u/Mokshgarg003

its_down_again · 2 months ago

In my experience, knowing you have glaring UX problems, or that product does not have an easy intuitive user flow is rarely the bottleneck for developing new & useful user facing AI applications.

There’s usually a very real and very hard to describe data related impracticality that voids the usefulness of a design that appears well thought out and complete.

Additionally enterprise AI products are built on custom integrations, and complexity of maintenance overwhelms the engineering team and leaves very little time to build out new things.

The simplest changes that come from knowing insider customer experience have significant impacts. If the default range for a duration filter is 5-30min, and it turns out the most interesting data is really on 1.5hr+ rows. Or adding search across legacy platforms that bury uniform information under deeply nested modals, which people spend 20+ a week clicking through to collect a usable sample set based on existence of a few keywords. But building a system that returns good search results is the hard part.

I do like the “build on top” pieces in your gallery. If it’s fast and reliable enough to collab during a discovery meeting, or a customer success meeting, that would be genius. Because then you’d have a way to pull customers into the right mindset to articulate frustrations with their current software, iterate on getting those frustrations get translated into concrete designs together, and at the end you walk away with something that proves you both understand and can solve their problem to any audience.

its_down_again commented on BYD builds fastest car autotrader.co.uk/content/... · Posted by u/trextrex

jansan · 5 months ago

I did not expect that anyone would take the first part of my comment seriously, but here we go.

However, this year a Ford SuperVan 4.2 made the Nordschleife in 6:48.393, so even without Sabine Schmitz a van was faster than the BYD.

its_down_again · 5 months ago

There’s no point comparing apples to deep fried oreos for caloric density. The 919 Evo is a fully de-restricted prototype based off a legendary homologated race car, not remotely in the same category. The BYD U9 is a road-legal EV, comparing the two doesn’t mean much.

Funny you mention the Ford SuperVan because that’s much closer to the 919 Evo in the "no homologation no limits" category than anything you could register and drive off a lot. A fairer and much more impressive benchmark is the road-legal Ford Mustang GTD running a 6:52. That's still far quicker than the BYD, with roughly two thousand less horsepower.

its_down_again commented on Show HN: Nestable.dev – local whiteboard app with nestable canvases, deep links nestable.dev/about... · Posted by u/anorak27

its_down_again · 7 months ago

Looks nice. For a true whiteboard experience, I think the 'Draw' tool should probably be the default rather than 'Select'. I was clicking around at first and couldn’t figure out why nothing was showing up.

its_down_again commented on Tesla plans to launch Robotaxis in San Francisco this weekend reuters.com/business/auto... · Posted by u/mikhael

its_down_again · 7 months ago

The San Francisco marathon is this weekend and I think it’s going to break the city for this Robotaxi launch.

There's major road closures for key arteries like Market st, Embarcadero, fisherman’s wharf, and the Presidio. Traffic always crawls and downtown will become a maze. Even 'human' drivers struggle because you can't cross large boundaries of the city.

Waymo launched in the city about a month before last year’s race. I took one to the starting line, but it couldn’t reach the actual drop-off. It stalled about 0.3 miles away and I had to run the rest. The issue wasn’t the route, but the chaos. Dense foot traffic, impromptu street closure re-routes, and unpredictable crowd behavior were hard to autonomously solve.

Tesla's robotaxi launch will have to overcome the same challenging mix of realtime conditions: limited access to closure data, learning of impromptu re-routing logic, unpredictable human crowds.

Definitely it’s a bold move to launch this weekend. If it works, great PR.

its_down_again commented on HN Slop: AI startup ideas generated from Hacker News josh.ing/hn-slop... · Posted by u/coloneltcb

Bjartr · 8 months ago

> DocuQuest: A platform that leverages LLMs to transform and simplify complex technical documentation into interactive, user-friendly learning experiences tailored for developers and engineers.

So "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" from Diamond Age, but for devs. A neat idea!

In general docs ecosystems tend to be heavy on only one of reference / explanation / tutorial. Would be cool to have a way to write one and get the others.

its_down_again · 8 months ago

Actually this sounds great. I got way more out of codecademy’s in-browser, interactive challenges than I did in my middle & high-school classes programming classes. The "learn by doing" process really built my confidence. If you could "demo" your docs directly in the browser it's much easier to learn by doing. I think that'd drive up adoption and you might even crowdsource bug discovery.

its_down_again commented on What I learned gathering nootropic ratings (2022) troof.blog/posts/nootropi... · Posted by u/julianh65

omnicognate · 8 months ago

I have chronic fatigue problems, which exercise exacerbates. I swim 3 times a week, but have to carefully regulate the intensity or it triggers post-exertional malaise.

The exercise is important for my general health but it isn't positively correlated with my cognitive functioning. Quite the opposite.

its_down_again · 8 months ago

I used to have plenty of energy running 40-50miles per week, but when I ramped up to 80mpw I started nodding off in my chair by 1 PM. Then despite the higher mileage and more intense training, my race times slipped. My half went from 1:23 to 1:28, and I felt drained, irritable and angry unless I took a long break. After digging in, I learned that very high mileage can deplete iron levels. Once I focused on improving my iron absorption, I finally got my energy back and everything clicked. Even while holding 80+ mpw for the upcoming SF Marathon, I still knocked 5% off my Bay to Breakers time (48:51 this year) and cut my 5K PR from 19:17 to 18:37.

its_down_again commented on Ask HN: Anyone making a living from a paid API? · Posted by u/meander_water

Bencheng · 9 months ago

I started as a dev shop and built 2 API products based on user demand.

1 is an OCR and document extraction service [0]. We started with three customers asking for the same services and found none that were really useful (and supported Chinese characters) on the market at that time. Lately the product pivoted to based on (fine-tuned) LLM/VLMs and focus on adding various features that LLM out of the box are missing (fine tune based on specific customers data, prompt tune for particular type of elements e.g. Checkboxes, split 100s pages of PDF into dozens of documents with a few pages)

We're at around 55k MRR, the price model is per page, and we sign annual contracts with most clients (with some discounts)

2nd is an open-source CIAM [1]; Around 35k MRR.

We knew nothing about marketing when we started, so we partnered with local GCP/Azure as an ISV to get our first paying customers, which drove us to the more "Corporate" segment of the market.

A huge challenge is obviously how to market the product, but customer support for developers is tough as well -- you have to be developers to provide support for other developers, and sometimes it feels like you're troubleshooting for another dev team.

For example, one time we had a client email us saying they were getting incorrect results from our API suddenly, after many back-and-forth emails, we finally asked if we could do troubleshooting with a video call and share screen -- turns out they were interestingly calling our API via a proxy with cache enabled.

[0] https://formx.ai

[1] https://authgear.com

its_down_again · 9 months ago

Curious how you landed on the idea to partner with local GCP/Azure reps. That’s a smart move, I didn’t realize they’d be open to helping. Did you pitch it as a way to help them close deals by offering custom solutions?

its_down_again commented on Copy Excel to Markdown Table (and vice versa) thisdavej.com/copy-table-... · Posted by u/thisdavej

its_down_again · 9 months ago

FWIW I built a streamlit app to extrapolate tribal knowledge in excel trackers into markdown wikis for vector database ingestion. Instead of uploading raw tables, it maps sheet headers to real headings to wrap each section in wiki-type format context pages. The UI lets you pick out QA sections from local files, but I’m stuck on how to persist selections and configs for repeat runs. Curious how others would tackle the issue of repeatable settings.

Code’s here: https://github.com/devin-liu/excel-to-markdown

its_down_again commented on DARPA zaps popcorn with laser power beamed 5.3 miles through air theregister.com/2025/05/1... · Posted by u/rntn

its_down_again · 10 months ago

This is fascinating. Could the same machine (PRAD) be adapted to zap mosquitoes in flight and help control disease vectors? Nothing’s worse than waking up to multiple mosquito bites and dreading falling asleep knowing there’ll be more.