> I was curious about the possibility of doing this myself, and I asked ChatGPT. Not surprisingly, it knew a lot of the various tapes, file formats, sizes, processing, storage, and after it asked some clarifying questions, it was quite optimistic about me being able to do this myself

Between this, it seems like it helped with so many different parts of the process:

1. Asking for how to do technical things, like transfer video from these old VHS to a newer computer.

2. Writing code for the web portal to host the videos.

3. Writing VLC plugins to help with data entry.

4. Transcribe audio into text.

Similarly, a coworker recently made a website that imitates what Alpha School does to incentivize his own kids to finish their homework all in the span of a weekend, and it's cool to think of the kinds of projects that less or minimally technical people can do with the help of ChatGPT to guide them.

Of course, the debugging techniques and the debugging and problem-solving techniques that you get from being a professional programmer helps a lot with taking what LLMs give you with a grain of salt, and knowing what they're good at and what they're not. But it is a superpower for sure.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46746802

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# Comments: 5

Out of curiosity, what do you think contributed to this working better than even OpenAI agent or some of the other tools out there?

I'm not that familiar with how OpenAI and other agents like Browser Use currently work, but is this, in your opinion, the most important factor?

> An infrastructure provider that exposes OS-level controls, not just a browser layer with Playwright screenshots. This is important for performance as a number of common web elements are rendered at the system level, invisible to the browser page

If you haven't tried the app in the last few months, can you try it again and let me know what parts are feeling slow for you by emailing me directly at peter@wanderlog.com? I'd love to take a closer look, and especially if you've got specifics with screenshots/videos, I can try to fix some of these myself too.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42831249

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42576551

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At the same time, Google is in a tough spot here. The files and documents in your Google Drive (or Gmail) are incredibly sensitive. One possible solution is using the https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive.file OAuth scope, which only lets you access files a user has explicitly shared with the app. I'm curious if iA Writer has limitations that makes this a bad user experience, but from a user security point of view, I can see why I want the apps that get to see my whole Google Drive audited too.

[1] https://developers.google.com/drive/api/guides/api-specific-...

https://university.webflow.com/videos

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37637287

Points: 4

# Comments: 2

At a glance, it seems like it's going for lots of similar goals (run LLMs with interoperable APIs):

https://github.com/lm-sys/FastChat

It works without any server-side scraping using background tabs and hidden iframes, so nothing about your search hits any servers other than Southwest’s.

Can you help try it out and let me know if you run into any issues? It had a bunch when we launched it earlier this week, so if you run into any, please email me at extension-support@wanderlog.com!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33562220

Points: 3

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> To document the interaction between firm and machine age, we lean on 1.56 million transactions covering 70,000 models of machines. Across a wide range of industries and equipment types, young firms acquire older capital, whereas older firms are more likely to buy new capital

This seems to line up with what I've heard from friends in biotech and mechanical companies. One friend lamented that "at Apple, we had the best of everything: suppliers, equipment, machinery. Here, we make do with what we've got and find creative ways to work with them." Similarly, on the YC forums, we often see used lab equipment listed for sale, and there are whole industries around this.

Pretty neat! Definitely a part of the startup or industry network effect I haven't thought of before. I wonder what other examples of startups working with super-janky second-hand machinery are out there.

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

Most of the hate I'm seeing here is focused around work-life balance, but even the author acknowledges that "I don’t think people should cry or feel like impostors or skip their vacations regularly." There's so much more here! Kudos to Brie too for really putting herself out there like this.

Taking apart what the article mentions, the fulfillment she felt at work came from:

- A sense of shared mission: of the mission statement, "it was a little abstract, but we believed in it enough to recite it with pride"

- Being pushed to do better: "My work was meticulously but warmly critiqued by my peers and leaders alike, and my work got better and better because of it"

- A community and culture: "It felt like magic, but there was deep thought, care, and intention behind everything. I had a tingly feeling that I was part of an organization that had cracked something about creating a great culture"

Forget work -- think about a side project, a hobby, a sport -- anything that you've applied yourself to. Does it feel good to hold yourself to a high standard, in the company of other peers who are into the same things?

That sounds like something we can all get behind!

Stripe may not have been perfect, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater here.

Maybe this is a healthy dose of paternalism? I feel like there would be more people who regret not buying life insurance in this case than people who regretted the minimal $250 outlay

Wow, do companies now use Reddit for support? I'm curious how exactly Reddit comes into the customer support volume estimation process

This definitely sounds about right -- I'm pretty sure most places I worked and most other Y Combinator companies in my batch just took the standard forms from somewhere (e.g., the Orrick forms library) and used them, without thinking too much about the terms. [1]

If there's something in the terms that actually seem objectionable, it's likely the hiring manager, recruiter, and other people in your recruiting process have never thought about it either. By pointing it out, you're often educating them too on what the offer letter says, and providing valuable feedback for the recruiting process.

[1] https://www.orrick.com/en/Total-Access/Tool-Kit/Start-Up-For...

Not only that, Paul and Michael have seen plenty of startups, and at least in recent memory, the number of vertical search and consumer startups that Y Combinator has funded hasn't been that high

As a consumer startup, I know this issue firsthand. Paul and Michael assume that if you build a better product, they will come! That's simply not true these days.

Instead, you need to:

- Build a better product

- Option 1: Figure out a channel with enough growth on an existing platform. This likely means you're doing SEO for your new search engine

- Option 2: Get your customer lifetime value high enough so you can pay for ads. This is tough, since it's a bit of a chicken and the egg problem since most search engines are monetized with ads

As the founder of Wanderlog (YC W19; https://wanderlog.com), a consumer vacation planning app [1], I definitely remember the idealistic days when I thought the best consumer product on its own would win! But growth doesn't just come, and the same can be said of vertical-specific search engines.

[1] Try searching "[your city] itinerary" on Google vs. Bing: it's much more likely you'll find a small blog rather than Lonely Planet or the local travel bureau as the top result

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29771265

Points: 146

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29121098

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