Hacker News: rajivayyangar

New comment by rajivayyangar in "Buoyant software – improves when models improve"

rajivayyangar — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 18:04:08 +0000

I've been searching for a term for what differentiates certain tools, workflows, or startups that improve models versus those that degrade or hold back the models. I am really stoked on the term "buoyant". I wrote a PG-style blog post where I broke down the metaphor of buoyancy and how to think about different solutions.

Buoyant software – improves when models improve

rajivayyangar — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 18:04:08 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.rajivayyangar.com/buoyancy/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49378053

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by rajivayyangar in "Show HN: I trained a 125M model to autocomplete piano on-device"

rajivayyangar — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 18:00:32 +0000

The results strike me as comparable or worse than you could get with a Markov model. I think it reveals the gap in understanding between LLMs and music. I think you need to either: - Set up a pipeline to decompose music into, say, harmonic sequences and melodic sequences, and then have the LLM work on some more fundamental or more high-level layer of musical composition and then re-translate it back into actual sounds. - Develop a better dataset and train the LLM more natively on musical examples.

Does anybody know of a project that has produced more convincing results?

New comment by rajivayyangar in "Show HN: Skilldocs – Figma for Markdown"

rajivayyangar — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 17:57:45 +0000

It's heavily inspired by a past product - Wisp (super collaborative docs) - which inspired my last startup: Tandem (YC S19) - a virtual office for remote teams.

Show HN: Skilldocs – Figma for Markdown

rajivayyangar — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 17:56:45 +0000

I got fed up with Notion, so I built my dream document editor. It's all markdowned so it's easy to view skills or other agent-related documents. It's got the collaboration features I love from Figma (shared cursory and the ability to follow) and Google Docs (comments, realtime editing). Then you can export the diff and comments to an agent. I've been really liking it for talking over skill documents live on a call. I'm curious if this resonates with other people. More generally, I feel like notion is less and less relevant in an age where documents have a very different purpose and Markdown is king. Curious what people think!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49377939

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by rajivayyangar in "Product Hunt isn't dying, it's becoming gentrified"

rajivayyangar — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 19:35:47 +0000

(I'm the CEO of Product Hunt) This isn't far off the mark, but I do want to push back on two things.

One: "VC backed companies have the funds to be able to boost their launch on PH to guarantee their launch will be in the top 5." - absolutely not. We do not tolerate paying for votes or other means of artificially boosting score.

Two: "its going to be a lot harder for you, the side hustler, the soloprenuer, the full time bootstrapper" - It's true that the bar is higher, but it's because The Market is more competitive. It was a personal goal of mine when I stepped in a year ago to make Product Hunt into a place where you can launch your side projects and they can rise to the top. To do that, we need to reduce the noise a bit and ensure that community and organic signal are balanced. This is difficult, but we're working on it. For example, Chris Van Pelt's side project OpenUI (open source v0) was #2 of the day a little while ago - hunted by a friend without any launch prep.

Product Hunt changed my life - I launched a side project that got tons of traction and it caused me and my friends to jump in full-time and start a company. I want to make Product Hunt an even stronger force for changing lives than it's been in the past, but that requires evolving the platform for the market in 2024.

Portal Windows for Electron

rajivayyangar — Thu, 26 Aug 2021 16:06:17 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.tandem.chat/portal-windows/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28316741

Points: 61

# Comments: 47

New comment by rajivayyangar in "[dead]"

rajivayyangar — Fri, 04 Jun 2021 17:07:59 +0000

Cool - simple, to the point. Love the "now" vs. "later" suggestions.

New comment by rajivayyangar in "Ask HN: What does your BI stack look like?"

rajivayyangar — Tue, 12 Nov 2019 21:30:33 +0000

Saving, shared queries, easy link sharing, and basic charts with some intelligence. It also has excellent query UX (auto-complete, etc.).

Most of all, it's really fast. It fundamentally depends on your DB of course, but PopSQL doesn't add any extra bloat the way Mode does.

New comment by rajivayyangar in "Ask HN: What does your BI stack look like?"

rajivayyangar — Tue, 12 Nov 2019 18:01:18 +0000

As a data scientist (startup / Yahoo) turned product manager (4 startups), I've used a variety of stacks in the past - from plain SQL, to Mode, to Mixpanel, Looker, Interana, and Hive.

Recently we started using PopSQL (https://popsql.com) and love it.

When I don't have a dedicated data team, my philosophy is:

1) Make it difficult to get wrong answers

- Don't use Google Analytics. It's too easy to generate incorrect charts, and too difficult to verify them.

- Have a limited sandbox of reports for non-SQL writers

- Keep the SQL close to the report, so it's easy to verify the underlying query.

- Push people to learn even basic SQL

2) Make it quick and easy to ask iterative questions - PopSQL is way faster than Mode. Like 20x faster.

3) For metrics that matter (e.g. KPIs), instrument them directly and even build a custom analytics dashboard if it's important. (beware dashboard clutter! https://twitter.com/andrewchen/status/1193619877489192961 )

New comment by rajivayyangar in "Launch HN: Tandem (YC S19) – A Virtual Office for Remote Teams"

rajivayyangar — Fri, 02 Aug 2019 08:49:48 +0000

Funny - one of our teammates used to do this at a previous company. We built in a similar function for remote workers with a Slack integration. It sends a little message with pre-formatted responses that indicates you'd like to talk on Tandem.

New comment by rajivayyangar in "Launch HN: Tandem (YC S19) – A Virtual Office for Remote Teams"

rajivayyangar — Fri, 02 Aug 2019 02:18:41 +0000

The maker-manager dilemma is real - which is something we try to address with the prominent Focus mode. At the same time, a big reason we show the app status is so that the "business owners" can hopefully take cues and minimize their interruptiveness. For example, as a product manager, I will often decide not to bother my co-founder Tim because I see he's in a coding editor (and thus in deep-focus).

New comment by rajivayyangar in "Launch HN: Tandem (YC S19) – A Virtual Office for Remote Teams"

rajivayyangar — Fri, 02 Aug 2019 00:03:46 +0000

We've built it with the internal/with-your-team use-case in mind, which lets us eliminate a huge amount of friction! There are also some really useful things we can do around presence.

New comment by rajivayyangar in "Launch HN: Tandem (YC S19) – A Virtual Office for Remote Teams"

rajivayyangar — Fri, 02 Aug 2019 00:02:18 +0000

I hear you and I love Cal Newport's work (as well as PG's Maker-vs.-Manager essay). For us, the Focus mode was critical to allow people to disconnect. In addition, we find that organic, short conversations on Tandem are much better than endless back-to-back meetings.

New comment by rajivayyangar in "Launch HN: Tandem (YC S19) – A Virtual Office for Remote Teams"

rajivayyangar — Thu, 01 Aug 2019 21:38:32 +0000

Awesome to hear! Yes, quick collaborative reviews of PRs are a big use-case for us internally too.

New comment by rajivayyangar in "Launch HN: Tandem (YC S19) – A Virtual Office for Remote Teams"

rajivayyangar — Thu, 01 Aug 2019 21:37:11 +0000

Compared with Slack and Zoom, it's way faster - just click and start talking!

Think of it as push-to-talk, 2.0, with a richer sense of presence (seeing what work app, so you know if you're interrupting anything).

New comment by rajivayyangar in "Launch HN: Tandem (YC S19) – A Virtual Office for Remote Teams"

rajivayyangar — Thu, 01 Aug 2019 21:34:30 +0000

Yes, when you join a new room, you're unmuted. However if someone pulls you into a room, or pulls you into a direct conversation, you start on mute. This is intentional - it allows frictionless communication while respecting everyone's privacy.

You could try using CMD+SHIFT+m to mute yourself immediately after joining a room.

New comment by rajivayyangar in "Launch HN: Tandem (YC S19) – A Virtual Office for Remote Teams"

rajivayyangar — Thu, 01 Aug 2019 20:58:47 +0000

Awesome! Yes we’ve taken a more functional, less literal approach than Sococo. Bernat likes to draw an analogy that the first washing machine was a wheel of hand-shaped paddles. We think we’ve found something much better and less skeptical.

New comment by rajivayyangar in "Launch HN: Tandem (YC S19) – A Virtual Office for Remote Teams"

rajivayyangar — Thu, 01 Aug 2019 20:05:57 +0000

Thanks! It's not the secret to life, the universe, and everything...or is it?

New comment by rajivayyangar in "Launch HN: Tandem (YC S19) – A Virtual Office for Remote Teams"

rajivayyangar — Thu, 01 Aug 2019 19:44:25 +0000

Tom Moor (Sqwiggle founder) is awesome! We talked with him early on and got a lot of inspiration. We've found that showing the app status gives a lot of the same feeling of presence as Sqwiggle without the sense of being watched. The always-on-video (even lo-res) was always a bit controversial.

The "google alerts" for pages idea is interesting. We'll think on it.