Hacker News: OfflineSergio

New comment by OfflineSergio in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)"

OfflineSergio — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 00:32:50 +0000

I'm working on a new compontent for viewing PDFs in original format and structure but show text highlighting while a specific piece of the PDF is being played in the TTS engine. This for my app (https://with.audio). Which already supports PDF parsing and TTS of PDF files. WithAudio currently converts the input PDF to Markdown and performs TTS and synchronized text highlighting on the Markdown content. I want to do this on the original rendered PDF content itself.

Initial results are promosing Extracting the text and figuring out which lines belong to the same paragraph and then try to map those to the original positions in the PDF...

New comment by OfflineSergio in "Tesla’s autonomous vehicles are crashing at a rate much higher tha human drivers"

OfflineSergio — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 15:32:31 +0000

this is not good but the point is this can be improved much easier than improving human accidents rate. Both are very difficult problems, but one is certainly harder.

New comment by OfflineSergio in "The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat"

OfflineSergio — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 13:51:32 +0000

When it comes to cost rebuilding, we can't compare the software engineering with other industries(like cards or buildings). I think this makes it much more iterative compared to them. Living in North America, if feel like 99% of aparatments and houses can be grouped into 5-10 floor plans. I think thats because when you are designing a new building or house you really can't do much risk. You do what has already worked. Software also have trends, but they change so often. You also can't do A/B testing or targeting or measure every single interaction potential customer has with your product. The nature of building "Software" really brings so many options to the table which increases the number of iterations by order of magnitude.

New comment by OfflineSergio in "Pocket TTS: A high quality TTS that gives your CPU a voice"

OfflineSergio — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 03:57:55 +0000

This is amazing. The audio feels very natural and it's fairly good at handling complext text to speech tasks. I've been working on WithAudio (https://with.audio). Currently it only uses Kokoros. I need to test this a bit more but I might actually add it to the app. It's too good to be ignored.

New comment by OfflineSergio in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (January 2026)"

OfflineSergio — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 18:30:23 +0000

A one time payment app - interesting (I'm also working on something with similar moneytization solution). How are things going? I'd love to know the experience of another solopreneur, what stack are you using? I wonder - What are you using to parse PDFs and extract the text? I found that is a nightmare when was doing something similar for WithAudio (my app). - Are you just extracting the text or you are doing any post processing to identify which lines belong to the same paragraph or not?

New comment by OfflineSergio in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (January 2026)"

OfflineSergio — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 18:25:13 +0000

My project is WithAudio and is gonna be WithAudio for a while. Its a text to speech reader. Initially I decided to generate pargraph by paragaph. But that was not a great call as users sometimes might have to wait for the whole paragraph to be ready before they can listen. Now I'm working on changing it to sentence by sentence. I think that + adding 2 new languages would take most of my January's budgeted time.

https://desktop.with.audio

New comment by OfflineSergio in "What happened in Q4 in my personal project"

OfflineSergio — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 15:11:07 +0000

As its obvious in my profile, WithAudio is my personal project that started in 2025. Starting Q3 I decided to plan it quarterly and write a summary every month.

This was for Q3: https://blog.with.audio/posts/summer-2025-withaudio-updates

Looking at an empty screen is difficult for me, so I just did `git log --pretty=oneline --since="3 months ago" and gave the result to Claud and a reference to the other blog post to get a starting point. Then I read the whole thing 3 times and edited that. So AI is used in writing this but this is not written by AI.

What happened in Q4 in my personal project

OfflineSergio — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 15:11:07 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.with.audio/posts/q4-2025-withaudio-updates

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46465495

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by OfflineSergio in "Tell HN: Happy New Year"

OfflineSergio — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 16:37:22 +0000

Happy New Year!

2025 I'm proud of my 2025. I lost weight with a slow pace. I launched one of my projects and built on top of it and I'm currently at 99 items sold. Hopefull it will get to 100 by end of the year. Not gonna lie, bad stuff happened too, but I'm not gonna focus on those.

2026 If everything goes as planned, I'm hoping to see my my mother and brother after 4 years. I want live a bit healthier, and I want to grow the same side project. I really hope I scroll less shitty content.

This is the community I feel safe the most in and really helps me keep going everyday.

New comment by OfflineSergio in "Show HN: Ava – open-source AI voice assistant that runs in the browser"

OfflineSergio — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 19:42:42 +0000

Looks interesting, I spent some time on text to speech in browser this year. You might find it interesting. https://desktop.with.audio/reader

New comment by OfflineSergio in "Show HN: A minimalist, high-quality Text-to-Speech Chrome extension"

OfflineSergio — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 19:39:35 +0000

Hey! this looks cool. I'm curious how it works, can you share more? you said it's not a subscription and it's "pay for what you use". So hows the pricing work? Do you charge me or I'll bring an API key to some other TTS provider?

New comment by OfflineSergio in "Ask HN: What are you building as a side-project or side-hustle in 2026?"

OfflineSergio — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 19:32:01 +0000

https://with.audio/

One time payment text to speech reader application for Mac and Windows. Not a subscription because it runs 100% on your device!

I've been doing this in most of 2025 in my free time. It went way way better than I thought in 2025 and I'm gonna focus more on this in 2026 as well. I've actually sold licenses and I'm gonna try to find out new ways to promote it. It recently had a moment on Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1pseqsy/thank_you_...

New comment by OfflineSergio in "Ask HN: Any example of successful vibe-coded product?"

OfflineSergio — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 18:09:55 +0000

With all the AI hype lately, if a product like that actually existed, you would’ve heard about it by now.

New comment by OfflineSergio in "Ask HN: Best Podcasts of 2025?"

OfflineSergio — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 19:45:26 +0000

- "Complex Systems with Patrick McKenzie (patio11)"

- My First Million (www.mfmpod.com). I just don't know why, but for some reason I stopped listening to them in the past 2 months, but rest of the year I was really enjoying their content. Even older ones.

- Pivot and Prof G, mostly because of Scott Galloway. I really like him.

- Under The Influence with Terry O'Reilly. Amazingly good. Very fun to listen to and almost always brings joy and help me learn something new.

- All In, can't say I'm still enjoying this. It's way too political these days. But it's still something I listen to occasionally. When I listen I usually end up skipping half of the content to find something I like.

New comment by OfflineSergio in "Ask HN: Best Podcasts of 2025?"

OfflineSergio — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 19:43:35 +0000

Came here to say this! Complex Systems is not the best for me but it's for sure the new content I found this year. I find myself listening and sometimes pausing to search to learn more about what he is talking about.

Show HN: Listen to Any GitHub README

OfflineSergio — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 16:33:46 +0000

*On first use it can download up to 300MB into your borwser storage, but does it only once.*

The TTS part runs 100% in your browser, so the audio quality is much better on Desktop devices using Safari or Chrome compared to Android and iOS.

https://desktop.with.audio/reader/new?github

It also works for any link as long as the backend can fetch the content.

Check it out and let me know what you think. If you are interested in more details there is also a blog post about this: https://blog.with.audio/posts/web-reader-tts

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46412244

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by OfflineSergio in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)"

OfflineSergio — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 23:46:21 +0000

Still WithAudio https://desktop.with.audio . It's getting some attention and has actually sold licences!

Someone asked for a free license in exchange of detailed private review and bug reports. They have reported more than 10 bugs so far. I'm working on some of them right now.

WithAudio is a one time payment text to speech reader app. It's one time payment because it has no server and no recurring cost! A nice side effect of this is it's 100% private.

New comment by OfflineSergio in "If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?"

OfflineSergio — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 23:45:09 +0000

Because I can’t debug it and can’t understand it!

Show HN: One Time Payment Text Speech in the Browser

OfflineSergio — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 16:42:16 +0000

I loved speechify but had 2 problems : - its monthly price - its character limitations.

So I built WithAudio (https://with.audio). I've been working on this for the past 8 months. A one time payment desktop app that lets you listen or listen while following the text highlighting.

Soon I realised me and many users prefer to have the option to do this in their browser. So I built the browser extension. The extension is free but works only if you have the WithAudio app (which is a paid product).

Youtube demo: https://youtu.be/Vn3VwCLuPQU Chrome Extension: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/the-withaudio-web-c... Extension's source code: https://github.com/withaudio/withaudio-web-companion

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45968622

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by OfflineSergio in ""How to Lose $1.3B Dollars": Veritasium on Overconfidence [video]"

OfflineSergio — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 07:42:20 +0000

Saw this a few days ago, it was an interesting. I liked the part about people being wrong about how much they know about something but the video title and the incident seems like bad luck or bad timing as it is a standalone issue. The same mistake could have easy been a very success story in another year and another country with the same amount of knowledge and confidence about the knowledge.