wkcheng (u/wkcheng) - Readit News

wkcheng commented on Show HN: Whispering – Open-source, local-first dictation you can trust github.com/epicenter-so/e... · Posted by u/braden-w

daemonologist · 11 days ago

Parakeet is amazing - 3000x real-time on an A100 and 5x real-time even on a laptop CPU, while being more accurate than whisper-large-v3 (https://huggingface.co/spaces/hf-audio/open_asr_leaderboard). NeMo is a little awkward though; I'm amazed it runs locally on Mac (for MacWhisper).

wkcheng · 11 days ago

Yeah, Parakeet runs great locally on my M1 laptop (through MacWhisper). Transcription speed of recordings feel at least 10x faster than Whisper, and the accuracy is better as well. Push to talk for dictation is pretty seamless since the model is so fast. I've observed no downside to Parakeet if you're speaking English.

wkcheng commented on Show HN: Whispering – Open-source, local-first dictation you can trust github.com/epicenter-so/e... · Posted by u/braden-w

wkcheng · 11 days ago

Does this support using the Parakeet model locally? I'm a MacWhisper user and I find that Parakeet is way better and faster than Whisper for on-device transcription. I've been using push-to-transcribe with MacWhisper through Parakeet for a while now and it's quite magical.

wkcheng commented on Dicing an Onion, the Mathematically Optimal Way pudding.cool/2025/08/onio... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

re · 13 days ago

> It turns out that making horizontal cuts almost never helps with consistency.

They made the horizontal cuts evenly spaced between the cutting surface and the top of the onion, which is nonsensical to me. I believe that a single horizontal cut at around 15-20% height would be better for uniformity than a horizontal cut at 50% height.

wkcheng · 13 days ago

Yeah, that's the way that I cut onions: you make vertical cuts followed by one single horizontal cut slightly above the cutting board.

This way of calculating doesn't take into account the creative ways you can make cuts. You could also do mostly vertical slices, and then slightly angle inwards when you do the final few cuts. That would get you a more optimal distribution as well.

wkcheng commented on I failed a take-home assignment from Kagi Search bloggeroo.dev/articles/20... · Posted by u/josecodea

silisili · 4 months ago

My honest feedback below from the perspective of a hirer. I'll start by saying I hate takehome stuff, for exactly reasons like this. It wastes everyone's time. They're fine as a 'last step before hire' thing, but not as a filter.

1 - Too much chatter. Part of the assignment is using judgment and working in ambiguity. I probably would have ran with what was given enough to knock out something small and local in an evening or two. Asking questions is usually fine, they even welcomed it, but seems counter to the original ask.

2 - Writing and sharing a proposal seemed like way overkill. You have to remember that these companies are now getting hundreds if not thousands if not tens of thousands of applicants, that is a lot to deal with if everyone does so. I think it's a bit of a disconnect...you feel like you're going above and beyond and being thorough, they feel like it's being a bit long winded and wasting time. That probably explains the nonresponse.

3 - The finished product seemed functional, but seemed a bit overkill on the infra and polish. This is probably a good thing to work with you, but ended up wasting a lot of your time if not being selected, which was the case.

4 - Maybe I missed something, but the requirement asked for terminal inspired. I'm not quite sure precisely what they meant by that, but didn't see any possible interpretation of that in the result.

Anyways, hope you don't take it too negatively or personally - you obviously are a talented individual and moreso seem to really care about your work. Just wanted to play a little devil's advocate with a different perspective.

wkcheng · 4 months ago

The attitude of the blog writer in their interactions also feels off. Just reading this blog post makes me think that this person is difficult to work with, requires extremely clear guidelines and instructions, and has a hard time making their own decisions. Maybe this is a good fit for a large, established company, but startups have their own needs.

"Create a terminal inspired email client so we can do an alpha test with some customers" is a reasonable ask for an engineer at an early stage startup. Of course, there would be a bit more specification, but a lot of the details would still be up to the engineer. This applicant wants more certainty than they can get.

This is illustrated by the line: "I would like to know what kind of response I could expect from Kagi if I drive it to completion." This is not a great request to make. There's no way they can answer that question, because there is no certainty available. They're probably getting a few hundred or a few thousand more submissions to evaluate.

wkcheng commented on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2024) · Posted by u/whoishiring

wkcheng · a year ago

Maestro AI | Senior Full Stack Engineer | REMOTE (US) Seattle onsite preferred, Remote OK | https://www.getmaestro.ai/

Hi, I'm William, the co-founder and CEO of Maestro AI. We're building an all-knowing chief of staff for engineering and product leaders. Maestro provides real-time, comprehensive insights, synthesized from Slack conversations, Jira tickets, and more. We allow leaders to stay in control of deadlines, accelerate their team, and understand and prioritize work.

Our goal is to eliminate information silos and become the OS that helps run engineering teams (and later every type of team).

Here's a recent demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xd7_0fURLxU

We're an early-stage, venture-backed startup, and you'll have the opportunity to shape our product and culture from the ground up.

We're looking for someone who takes pride in their craft, pushes their limits, and takes action to create something new. Our stack is Python on the backend and React/Redux/Typescript on the frontend. We're training our own models in addition to using existing LLMs.

To apply: Please email will+hn at getmaestro.ai with your resume, your Github, and a short note detailing a project you've enjoyed working on. View a full list of our roles here: https://maestroai.notion.site/Maestro-AI-Careers-51385f9fca9...

wkcheng commented on Building Enduring AI Products maestroai.substack.com/p/... · Posted by u/wkcheng

wkcheng · a year ago

We've been thinking about the things you need to be careful about when building AI products for businesses and put them in this article. Are there important things that we missed?

wkcheng commented on Diffusion models are real-time game engines gamengen.github.io... · Posted by u/jmorgan

wkcheng · a year ago

It's insane that that this works, and that it works fast enough to render at 20 fps. It seems like they almost made a cross between a diffusion model and an RNN, since they had to encode the previous frames and actions and feed it into the model at each step.

Abstractly, it's like the model is dreaming of a game that it played a lot of, and real time inputs just change the state of the dream. It makes me wonder if humans are just next moment prediction machines, with just a little bit more memory built in.

wkcheng commented on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2024) · Posted by u/whoishiring

wkcheng · a year ago

Maestro AI | Senior Full Stack Engineer, Senior AI Engineer | REMOTE (US) Seattle onsite preferred, Remote OK | https://www.getmaestro.ai/

Hi, I'm William, the co-founder and CEO of Maestro AI. Throughout my career in software engineering, I've repeatedly witnessed how fragmented workflows and broken processes can stifle even the most brilliant teams. That's why I started Maestro AI. Our mission is to streamline the process of software development, turning chaos into clarity so that teams can accomplish more.

Maestro AI provides real-time, comprehensive insights for teams so everyone can easily see what's happening, how projects are progressing, and where people are blocked. We eliminate information silos by aggregating data from multiple collaborative tools like Slack, Jira, Notion, and Github, enabling seamless communication and informed decision-making across the entire organization.

Here's a recent demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xd7_0fURLxU

We're an early-stage, venture-backed startup, and you'll have the opportunity to shape our product and culture from the ground up.

We're looking for someone who takes pride in their craft, pushes their limits, and takes action to create something new. Our stack is Python on the backend and React/Redux/Typescript on the frontend. We're training our own models in addition to using existing LLMs.

To apply: Please email careers+hn at getmaestro.ai with your resume, your Github, and a short note detailing a project you've enjoyed working on. View a full list of our roles here: https://maestroai.notion.site/Maestro-AI-Careers-51385f9fca9...