I tend to do extensive research (that process in itself would involve LLMs too, sure) in a tech plan, a product spec, etc. and usually end up with a really solid idea in my head and like say, five critical key points about this tech plan or product spec that I absolutely must convey in this document.

Then I basically "brain dump" my critical key points (including everything about it, background/reasoning, why this or that way, what's counterintuitive about it, why is this point important, etc.) in pretty messy writing (but hitting all the important talking points) to a LLM prompt, asking it to produce the document I need (be it tech plan, product spec, whatever) and ask it to write it based on my points.

The resulting document has all the important substance on it this way.

If you use LLM to produce documents like this by a way of a prompt like "Write a tech plan for the product feature XYZ I want to build", you're going to get a lot of fluff. No substance, plenty of mistakes, wrong assumptions, etc.

I like karaoke and I grew up with the Asian style karaoke with the music video behind and the karaoke lyrics at the bottom.

Sometimes I want to do a song and there is no karaoke version video like that.

A few years ago I came across ML models that cleanly separate the vocals and the instrumental music of a song. I thought of the idea to chain together ML models that can take an input music video file, extract the audio (ffmpeg), separate the tracks (ML), transcribe the lyrics (ML), burn the lyrics back with timing into the video (ffmpeg), and output a karaoke version of the video.

This is an early version of the app, Mac only so far (since I use Mac, despite it being an electron app.. I do eventually want to make a Windows build), I've only let a few friends try it. Let me know what you think!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47328060

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47289328

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

For devs who currently think this way, I suggest thinking about it more deeply from the perspective of a developer: Let's say you want to start a company/startup from a passionate idea you had. What do you think happens when you build it? In reality, do you truly expect "build it and they will come"? What happens when you bought a domain, put up your product on the web, or the app store? I can tell you what will happen: there will be zero people signing up to use it. Posting it on a Show HN or Product Hunt is an illusion of ease to publicize a product. A PH launch is a carefully planned and curated process involving hours and hours of marketing work to prepare for. A Show HN post will go unnoticed with no clicks 99.9% of the time.

And if you just work in a bigger company, as a non-founder, and say "this isn't my problem, I just build stuff for a job", what do you think the founders did to build their company so there are users who sign up and pay?

I'd argue this is true for social networks like Facebook actually. There was a magical period in Facebook between 2005 to 2010 or so where it was mostly college friends, high school friends, some work friends, and we all actually shared what we thought on our posts, shared links to interesting stuff, etc.

When all the relatives started being added to your network the vibe became decidedly different, and then acquaintances, people who aren't close, etc. and everyone has that one experience where one time they post something and someone who isn't close get offended, whether it's political or not, and they gradually share less and less.

I don't know if this "should" be how it is but this is the reality based on what I observe now. Hopefully you have some relationships you can reach out to.

In the old days, not-socialize people tend to be forced to socialize anyway; but techonology enables them to not-socialize 99% of time now. Likewise, socialize people needed to put in more effort to socialize in the old days, but now it's easier than ever.

When more people realize this, the discourse should shift from "technology creates this trend" to "technology widens the gap between X and not-X".

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44738879

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44610688

Points: 15

# Comments: 0

Most huge screw-ups happen to well-intentioned, knowledgeable software engineers, who simply made an honest mistake.

The correct way to handle it, on the company/management's perspective, is not to fire the person who made the mistake, but to allow them to correct it (perhaps with help from others). And that is indeed what happens in most cases. There are certainly poorly managed companies who would fire someone in these scenarios, but they should be less common than otherwise.

I'm not going to name any names: in the late 00s/early 10s I worked in one of the highest-profile, high-growth tech startups of its era, and I've personally made a blunder that corrupted literally millions of user records in the database. This incident was known internally as one of the most disastrous technical things that happened in the company's history, among a few others. The nature of the product was one of very quickly updating data, and updates were critically important (e.g. is affected by user spends) and hence restoring from DB backups of even the night before was unfeasible. There was irreparable damage where a whole team of us had to spend the next few weeks painstakingly hand-fixing data for users, and coming up with algorithms/code to fix these things as users use the product as they go. As you expect in this anecdote, I did not get fired, I was part of the team that worked tirelessly following this incident to fix user data, and I continued to have a good, growing career in my remaining time in this company (the next few years).

I myself for example have had headache and migraine issues for more than 25 years. I understand deeply an incredible amount about what causes my migraines, how they feel, how I help with it, and so on. I understand migraines more than anyone else I ever know in my life because I observe, pay attention, study, and try different things so much. I understand it more than most doctors I talk to. But I also know that everyone's migraines are a little different and not everyone gets triggered by the same things (though there's a lot of overlaps) and my solutions may not help for everyone. I'd totally write something like this for migraines if I had the time (I don't :( ).

In stressful periods, it's likely not stress crushing the immune system, it's the indirect relationship that stress causes bad quality sleep and low amount of sleep, that in turn crushes the immune system.

If, even if under stress, you manage to work out a system/habit that allows you to get proper sleep, you'd likely be ok.

I get that most leisure computing has moved off of desktop to mobile in modern days, but there's definitely enough of us nerds who're on a computer a lot (even if just for work, if nothing else). It can't be any less than in the late 1990s when ICQ was popular.

I do have a personal Notion, but the things I keep in it are like list of restaurants we want to try and haven't yet, list of travel destinations we want to go at some point, the trash collection schedule, things like that. Basically references/bookmarks.

I don't keep reading lists, knowledge I learned, or anything like that in an archive. I rely completely on my own memory in my brain for those. (I also don't open up tabs with intentions of "I'll read this later". Either I read it and close it, or don't. If it feels semi-interesting but long, I just skim it, then close it.)

If anything interesting comes up, I talk about it, typically in a group chat (I have about half a dozen group chats with various friend groups or ex-coworkers groups that are active). If a discussion took place about something, I will likely remember it. If I remember some key points, if something comes up in the future about it, I will remember enough to look it up, whether by Google or by LLM. *

I've lived this way for decades professionally and never found myself missing a piece of knowledge in any context that I wish I had. In other words I don't find a use to keep a personal knowledge base.

For those reading this, maybe it helps you think about whether you need one like this as well. Perhaps like the article author here, you might feel more relieved not having one.

* I also want to note that I operate this way at work / in meetings as well. I find that if I try to take notes during meetings, I can't pay attention fully, and can't digest the information being discussed. It works much better if I don't take any notes at all, pay attention in the meeting, and if there's anything important from the meeting, I try to write it down afterwards (typically in a Slack message) from memory. 99% of the time it works fine and once in a long while I might miss something (but someone else who reads my Slack message would fill out what I missed).