posobin (u/posobin) - Readit News

posobin commented on Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2025) · Posted by u/david927

posobin · 6 months ago

I'm working on SPHNX, a voice-based AI coding interviewer. While problem solving is crucial for passing interviews, in a live interview you are also getting tested for your communication, debugging, thinking on the spot, testing, code clarity, and other skills. You can't practice these on leetcode, but it's easy with SPHNX. I've just added rich feedback reports last week that turned out more helpful than I expected.

Right now it works as a mock interviewer for algorithmic (leetcode-style) problems, you can sign up for the waitlist here, I'll send you an invite right after:

https://sphnx.dev

It actually works pretty well, but we're having trouble getting users (some sign up but don't end up doing even a single interview?!).

We're thinking whether we could sell a version of this to companies to do their technical screens in, perhaps with problems that are more similar to the actual software engineering work (e.g. debug existing piece of code, write tests, and extend it).

We're generous with interview credits if you give us good feedback =)

posobin commented on How we sped up Notion in the browser with WASM SQLite notion.so/blog/how-we-spe... · Posted by u/jFriedensreich

tillulen · a year ago

I tried Coda a few months ago. The feature set was very appealing. Coda turned out to be slower and more buggy than Notion, especially when routinely working with databases. The typography and graphic design were also less polished. I kept using Coda until I could no longer tolerate its issues and then have moved everything to Notion.

posobin · a year ago

I work at Coda and would love to hear more about your experience. We are focused on our tables and formulas and I am surprised to hear that you had such a bad time with them. Feel free to reach out at gleb at coda dot io.

posobin commented on Show HN: Ampie – See HN or Twitter discussions mentioning the page you are on ampie.app... · Posted by u/posobin

modeless · 4 years ago

I believe that the "tabs" permission does allow you to read the current URL without granting the ability to modify the page. It's also possible that some of the functionality could be built with the chrome.declarativeContent API or other alternatives. I'm sure there are features that would be impacted, and I doubt that most users would understand or care about the reduced permissions. But I would.

posobin · 4 years ago

The main thing is that the extension would still have to be able to run its JS on any page to be able to show the interactive sidebar. Not sure there is a way around that, unless chrome decides to implement the sidebar api that firefox has (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...), then the sidebar code doesn't have to run in the same context as the page.

posobin commented on Show HN: Ampie – See HN or Twitter discussions mentioning the page you are on ampie.app... · Posted by u/posobin

0x008 · 4 years ago

I'd rather they be transparent with the data they collect.

posobin · 4 years ago

Yeah, I will write it down on the website. As I mentioned below (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28700703), I do not store the URLs that you go to (though of course you have to trust me on that), and as all the processing is done on the server, that URL doesn't get sent to any external APIs (though if I go through with adding reddit I might need to send it to the reddit API).

I do collect some telemetry statistics (right now the number of times you have seen the sidebar + the number of times you clicked/scrolled/closed it), aggregated hourly.

posobin commented on Show HN: Ampie – See HN or Twitter discussions mentioning the page you are on ampie.app... · Posted by u/posobin

willhinsa · 4 years ago

I love the idea. I like the concept of the name, a fun shortening/nickname for "Ampersand", which in this function also makes me think of the "Yes, And" concept from improv comedy. For me as a user, the drawback to the name "Ampie" is that it also makes me think of Google AMP, which certainly isn't my favorite thing lol :)

I didn't love that the plugin is automatically active on every page I open; I was expecting that it would be a button in the toolbar that I could click at my leisure to see what discussion of a particularly interesting article was. I really do love the Twitter integration with people who you follow, but again, I wish it was kind of an on-demand plugin, or maybe just a site I could go to at my leisure and input a URL to see a nice big display of all the discussions about something specific.

I'll be turning it off for now as I'm already prone to too many distractions, but I might toggle it on sometime if I want to deep dive on something and see others' comments about it.

posobin · 4 years ago

To use it as a button, you can try the bookmarklet: https://ampie.app/url-context

Would love to hear about your experience if you do use it!

posobin commented on Show HN: Ampie – See HN or Twitter discussions mentioning the page you are on ampie.app... · Posted by u/posobin

sdwr · 4 years ago

Beautiful! I have a soft spot for meta stuff like this, a vine climbing up a tree. I'm not a fan of browser extensions though, shit gets clogged up.

posobin · 4 years ago

You can use it as a bookmarklet instead if you go to https://ampie.app/url-context!

posobin commented on Show HN: Ampie – See HN or Twitter discussions mentioning the page you are on ampie.app... · Posted by u/posobin

lancesells · 4 years ago

It was a little hard to follow but I thought it had a lot more charm than a lot of sites I see.

posobin · 4 years ago

Thanks! My intent definitely was to make it a little bit chaotic =) I will try to figure out how to make it a bit easier to follow, heard some advice to space it out a bit possibly.

posobin commented on Show HN: Ampie – See HN or Twitter discussions mentioning the page you are on ampie.app... · Posted by u/posobin

xojoc · 4 years ago

Shameless plug. I've built something similar at https://discussions.xojoc.pw/ It returns the discussions on Hacker News, Reddit and Lobsters. In the future I'll also add Lambda The Ultimate and Less Wrong. But intead of an extension you can use a bookmarklet.

posobin · 4 years ago

Actually, ampie also has a bookmarklet that you can add at https://ampie.app/url-context!

But as I said elsewhere, in my experience I rarely use it myself since that requires a bit of effort to click and with an unknown reward it rarely seems worth the click.

posobin commented on Show HN: Ampie – See HN or Twitter discussions mentioning the page you are on ampie.app... · Posted by u/posobin

0x008 · 4 years ago

Hey, I think it is a fantastic idea! And I am really excited which blogs I will discover with this.

HOWEVER,

3 things I noticed:

- Why do I need to register?

- Why cannot I disable twitter? I don't want to see twitter recommendations.

- It is incompatible with dark mode extensions because the css is somehow not inverted correctly (not sure how much you can do about that).

posobin · 4 years ago

You need to sign up to prevent the api abuse.

Thanks for the feedback, disabling twitter is in the plans! Which dark mode extensions are you using?

posobin commented on Show HN: Ampie – See HN or Twitter discussions mentioning the page you are on ampie.app... · Posted by u/posobin

ekzy · 4 years ago

It's funny how every now and then an extension like this comes up on HN. Nice execution, I like your homepage too. I wrote a comparable extension with a similar vision about 5 years ago (with Clojurescript): https://jazzytomato.com/hnlookup-chrome-extension-clojurescr...

posobin · 4 years ago

Ampie is written in clojurescript as well! https://github.com/posobin/ampie

I have actually seen your extension when I was trying to figure out how to get started with making one in cljs. I've used shadow-cljs though instead of figwheel.