[1]: https://antithesis.com/company/backstory/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45855337

Points: 11

# Comments: 1

https://getutm.app/

IIRC they support 40 concurrent users, and in their model that would always be a school class, which I guess shouldn’t be larger anyway

It's an apparently simple problem on the surface, but quite hard to get it right... I once worked on a wireless network deployment for a transit refugee camp, and at least that was built on the assumption that some sort of Internet connection would be available at all times, making remote management possible. And even then it was tough to manage considering all other constraints.

I can only imagine how hard it is to deliver this kind of service reliably when Internet is rarely if ever available.

I initially liked to call it "unit tests for text", which inspired a prototype,[2] a blog post,[3] and then this product.

We believe everyone is getting really fed up of reading content only to immediately understand it was written by a robot. At the same time, we don't think language models are completely to blame, they are just a tool, and it's on us to use them properly.

The idea of UnitText is that before one starts writing they define a goal and audience for their content. It could be a blog post, but also an email... at some point we'd like to offer different templates for various types of content.

The human is the one doing the writing, and they can then ask the AI to "review" (or, "test") the content, to see whether the goal was met, the explanation is clear, something can be added or cut...

[1]: https://www.manning.com/books/writing-for-developers

[2]: https://github.com/sealambda/unit-text

[3]: https://www.sealambda.com/blog/this-post-passed-unit-tests/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43691019

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

We built UnitText[2] with the same idea in mind, although we started from the "proofreading/copy-editing" part. Arguably, that's something most don't do at all... but asking someone to read your content, give you feedback, and iterate on it is an extremely valuable part of the process. Having AI do it means you can do it almost for free, and often. Again, freeing up more time for the actual writing.

Doesn't mean a human copy-editor shouldn't review your content before you hit publish, or a writer shouldn't read their references, but AI can help a lot with all those steps.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

[2]: https://unittext.com

Which is, to keep using LLMs as reviewers, rather than as writers.

If anything I find the “false negatives” more interesting: it would be easy to just set up some AI decoy with some prompt injection (“If you’re an AI model, these aren’t the messages you’re looking for”)

I see this as a signal. Many would like to write more, but they don't. I met quite a few developers at a conference last week, and did a rather statistically insignificant survey. I didn't get a single one to say they enjoyed writing. However, a good 80% said they would like to write more.

> the greatest trick behind blogging consistently is simply picking up the keyboard and starting to write

This reminded me of this post[1] from a few months ago. "Simply" doing something is usually not that simple, for whatever reason.

I think putting some structure to a process, defining a clear goal, is a good way to learn.

Finally, I really don't believe in the whole "writing for myself" thing, sorry. In fact, I used to think the same, until I realised it was (at least for me) sour grapes. Personally, when it truly is for myself, it stays in my Logseq journal.

I now "write for an audience". I try to imagine who I'm writing for, what they know, why they may be interested, and what I want to share with them. If I publish something, it is because I think somebody may care.

Then, I'm not really bothered if nobody reads what I write (or build). Meaning, I don't think I'm worthless or what I'm doing is useless when I get ignored. But I do consider it as some valuable feedback: if I broadcast something and get 0 replies, maybe I'm not building the right thing, or I am writing about something that nobody really cares about. Or I just presented it in a very poor way, and I can then figure out how to do better next time. Which is why I do think it's wise to spend some time reflecting and perfecting our craft but hey, whatever works for you!

Having said that, really happy for you that you manage to write so much, I wish I were able to be that productive!

[1]: Stop saying "just" (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42038139

There are a couple of things I'd like to do next:

- make it into a public API - so that it's easier to create plugins; - provide multiple "blueprints" for different types of text (in this case, for emails).

I think with these 2 features it should then be trivial to make it available in email clients, or as a browser extension.

I don't really like it, but apparently it's what cool kids do these days ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and it came with the template. But if it randomly breaks, too, off it goes!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43307933

Points: 57

# Comments: 17

We initially built this app for some friends in a co-living community - they were using pen and paper to track who's attending lunch - but it was error-prone.

First I suggested a shared Google Sheets or Calendar, but that was also messy to maintain.

Eventually, I developed something just for them. They used it for a couple of years, they loved it and wanted to use it for more things, too.

So I took all the learnings from what was now the MVP, and with some friends we now launched this new version, built on Flutter and Supabase.

Supabase was to give us some better control on the data; dealing with events and especially recurring events gets really messy really quickly. The data model on Firebase was horrible (so much duplications...).

And Flutter to quickly offer good mobile apps for everyone, since a feedback I often got before was that the "PWA" didn't really feel like a real app at times (especially on iOS).

We decided to make it open source as there'd be many possibilities to extend it, from making it more compatible with business features (say a CalDAV integration); to allowing more "rich" events and anonymous access to compete with Apple Invites or Partiful; to introducing some discovery and ticketing features and compete with Meetup or Eventbrite.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42510407

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43025010

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

Not to mention, there’s apparently some research saying code with swear words has higher quality, so if AI causes some decline there, we now know why it is https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/110mj6p/open_s...

I feel less strongly about apps not looking like system apps; in fact, I kind of dislike apps that try too hard to look like the settings page: I like when they bring some variety, some personality, something that makes them stand out. Though I agree that broken interactions are unbearable, e.g. apps that break the "swipe back" gesture.

It could have been a web app as well (in fact, the initial version was), but some offline functionality was needed, and service workers messing up caching and iOS not being a great player with PWA, it just ended up being more painful than it should have been.

Or we could have built 3 apps, which I would have loved (but we are a team of 3, and working on a bunch of other things at the same time). Flutter does have a fairly good developer experience (its hot reload cycle is unmatched in my opinion), but of course native development, with all the support libraries you get from the platform, is on a different level. (What even is native though? Is UIKit "more native" than SwiftUI? Is Safari native? And how about the web apps you open in Safari? It's JS code, but at some point it's compiled to ARM instructions, now running from the very same memory pages as Safari, does that make the web app native?)

Having said that, it's not like I need to convince you to try out our app, it's good that we have options and probably Apple Invites is what works best for you!

But out of curiosity, when is the last time you did try out a Flutter app? Because they have been improving a lot, in fact for quite some time they ran better on iOS than on Android thanks to the new Impeller rendering engine (now default on Android as well)[1]

They did some work for accessibility on Web, too.[2]

BTW it's funny you mention React Native, I last built something with it a long time ago... and it wasn't that good - but I just realised I do use some React Native apps right now, so I guess they also improved a lot; I should give it a shot again!

[1]: https://docs.flutter.dev/perf/impeller [2]: https://docs.flutter.dev/ui/accessibility-and-internationali...