Hacker News: oakst

New comment by oakst in "Model 4: Our best model yet for local dictation and cleanup on Mac"

oakst — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 04:31:41 +0000

Axel here, one of the builders of Epilude. Appreciate the question.

Whilst the subscription plans work as any normal SaaS subscription, we're fond of pay-once models that don't tie you into continuing to pay for a product unless you feel you continue to get value from the updates we're shipping to the product.

We currently think of model updates as part of the updates that we continuously ship to make to the product better, and so we include model updates in the "one year of app updates" that come with the Pay Once option. At the moment, I think this approach makes sense, but we're of course open to feedback.

In any case, I'll update the info on the website to clarify this. Thanks for pointing it out.

Model 4: Our best model yet for local dictation and cleanup on Mac

oakst — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 14:21:29 +0000

Article URL: https://www.epilude.com/news/introducing-model-4

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48979263

Points: 12

# Comments: 2

New comment by oakst in "Migrating a production AI agent to GPT-5.6: 2.2x faster, 27% cheaper"

oakst — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 14:49:46 +0000

On the infobit, I've been trying to build in a similar completely local LLM cleanup step into Epilude. Willing to share anything you've found especially useful in producing good spellchecks/cleanups in your local setup?

New comment by oakst in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)"

oakst — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 17:53:06 +0000

Local voice dictation and text editing for Mac. We'd tried most of the available options but wanted something that runs completely locally, is fast and has a good UX.

https://epilude.com

New comment by oakst in "The Threat to OpenAI"

oakst — Sat, 31 Aug 2024 22:18:22 +0000

Really interesting perspective

User Research with Humans vs. AI

oakst — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 11:50:26 +0000

Article URL: https://jakobnielsenphd.substack.com/p/research-humans-ai

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39916219

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Stop testing your designs with prototype tests

oakst — Thu, 29 Feb 2024 13:22:53 +0000

Article URL: https://www.wondering.com/blog/when-prototype-testing-slows-you-down

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39548958

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by oakst in "AI-led user interviews enable product teams to capture more insights"

oakst — Tue, 26 Dec 2023 22:30:59 +0000

Axel here (the founder). You raise a good point and I agree with your sentiment. The aim shouldn’t be to replace direct conversations with real customers, which undoubtedly lead to insights that are hard to capture in any other way today. The problem I’ve heard from most product teams I’ve spoken with is that it can be hard to speak with customers often enough to reach this type of insight quickly enough to inform product decisions. That’s where AI-led user interviews can help, as they allow you to interview a large amount of customers and identify patterns and themes within hours (instead of days or weeks).

AI-led user interviews enable product teams to capture more insights

oakst — Tue, 26 Dec 2023 16:58:31 +0000

Article URL: https://www.wondering.com/blog/capture-more-insights

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38773476

Points: 1

# Comments: 2

New comment by oakst in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2022)"

oakst — Fri, 02 Dec 2022 17:27:39 +0000

Ribbon | London, UK | Onsite/Hybrid | Full Time

https://ribbonapp.com/careers

Ribbon is a user research platform that helps product teams build more user-centric user experiences. We're a team of builders, researchers and tinkerers passionate about helping others understand their users and build impactful products.

We're hiring an iOS Engineer to work directly on building our iOS SDK.

More information and apply at https://ribbonapp.com/careers

New comment by oakst in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2022)"

oakst — Tue, 01 Nov 2022 20:29:47 +0000

Ribbon | London, UK | Onsite/Hybrid | Full Time | https://ribbonapp.com/careers Tech stack includes TypeScript, React, Node, Redis, MongoDB Ribbon is a user research platform that helps product teams build more user-centric user experiences. We're a team of builders, researchers and tinkerers passionate about helping others understand their users and build impactful products. We're hiring for roles including:

- iOS Engineer

- Full-stack Engineer

More information and apply at https://ribbonapp.com/careers

New comment by oakst in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2022)"

oakst — Mon, 03 Oct 2022 18:23:46 +0000

* iOS Engineer

* Full Stack Engineer

* Account Executive

More information and apply at https://ribbonapp.com/careers

New comment by oakst in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2022)"

oakst — Thu, 01 Sep 2022 19:20:47 +0000

Ribbon | London, UK | Onsite/Hybrid | Full Time | https://ribbonapp.com/careers Tech stack includes TypeScript, React, Node, Redis, MongoDB

Ribbon is a user research platform that helps teams build user-centric user experiences. We're a team of builders, researchers and tinkerers passionate about helping others understand their users and build impactful products. We're hiring for roles including:

* iOS Engineer

* Full Stack Engineer

* Account Executive

More information and apply at https://ribbonapp.com/careers

New comment by oakst in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2022)"

oakst — Wed, 01 Jun 2022 15:46:54 +0000

Ribbon is an in-product user research platform that helps product teams build user-centric user experiences. We're a team of builders, researchers and tinkerers passionate about helping others understand their users and build impactful digital products.

We are venture backed seed-stage company working out of London, UK and offer competitive compensation and equity, private health insurance, 25 days PTO (excl. bank holidays). Join us!

Ribbon wants to make it easier for product teams to interview users

oakst — Thu, 25 Mar 2021 10:03:23 +0000

Article URL: https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/25/ribbon/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26578269

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Robinhood Raises $3.4B to Fuel Record Customer Growth

oakst — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 20:34:34 +0000

Article URL: https://www.indexventures.com/perspectives/robinhood-raises-34-billion-to-fuel-record-customer-growth/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25993484

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by oakst in "Sick of spending time on Auth, we built an open source 'Stripe for Auth'"

oakst — Thu, 17 Dec 2020 18:53:59 +0000

For what it's worth I think email verification functionality would make me more keen to use a service like this!

New comment by oakst in "Ask HN: How to effectively get feedback from users?"

oakst — Tue, 03 Nov 2020 08:20:47 +0000

I think it depends a bit on what type of feedback you're after. For quantitative feedback tools like hotjar.com's surveys can be quite effective (https://www.hotjar.com/tour/#polls).

For qualitative data such as user interviews/calls the solution for most teams is either to spend a lot of time on find users to talk to and set up calls or to pay companies like usertesting.com for access to their panels.

These tools don't allow you to get quick (and for most teams affordable) access to your own users for user interviews though, which is something that was enough of a pain point within my own team that we've built a tool exactly for that (https://tryribbon.com).

The Mom Test is also a great read on how to get useful user feedback in general (https://amzn.to/383bo92).

New comment by oakst in "Show HN: Ribbon – Video chat with your own users"

oakst — Thu, 24 Sep 2020 19:52:31 +0000

Good question, the option to video chat is only shown to your users when you (the owner of the website) indicate that you want to video chat. As soon as you've already found someone to chat with (or you cancel the chat) no other users will see the option to join your video chat.

New comment by oakst in "Show HN: Ribbon – Video chat with your own users"

oakst — Thu, 24 Sep 2020 10:01:00 +0000

Some really great points.

Most of the user researchers & research ops people I've spoken with currently use some form of monetary incentive (credit for their own product or cash) to incentivise users to join their user research sessions. This process would work the same with Ribbon, although outside of the platform. In the next few days I'm adding functionality for the interviewer to be able to customise what message users see in the user recruitment pop-up, so that they can let users know about any compensation they will get for their time. In the mid-term another way to make running user research even easier is to help facilitate those payments directly on the platform.

The floating video is a really interesting idea! I've opted for making the script as light as possible, with all of the video chat functionality being hosted on Ribbon. This is to make sure the script doesn't slow down any website it is added to. Further down the line it will be interesting to explore how to make the user journey even more frictionless whilst still keeping website performance top of mind.

Screen sharing is another functionality that's proving really useful in remote user testing. I'm adding that over the coming month!