Today, you can have the best technology but distribution is indeed the bottleneck. Getting noticed in the post-LLM world is tough.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47415206

Points: 11

# Comments: 3

API costs for LLM are getting ridiculous. By managing a 4K context window, I can get tiny local models to do advanced research tasks that require dozens of searches and building a knowledge graph for $0.

https://github.com/smhanov/laconic

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46958946

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

When I made it, nothing like mermaid, plantUML，lucid charts existed. The syntax of most tools was based on Java or graphviz and overly verbose. I was writing an email to a colleague at BlackBerry and wrote out the sequence diagrams as text. I spent the next week making a script to convert it to an image and put it online. Many other tools have since adopted the syntax and I'm happy it has become so widespread.

https://www.websequencediagrams.com/?lz=dGl0bGUgVW4AAwVkCgpB...

Premium version allows crossed messages: https://www.websequencediagrams.com/cgi-bin/cdraw?lz=dGl0bGU...

Coincidentally, the backups had stopped working a couple of months ago.

Fortunately I was able to copy the data to my machine, write some python to try to retrieve each customer's data individually, verify its consistency and merge with the older backup so most people didn't notice.

Afterwards I upgraded to the latest sqlite, as the one I had been using was six years old, and I have not had a problem since.

I created an HTML app to help you learn Mandarin or German. It's flashcards for vocabulary and writing. I was very excited about it a couple of years ago but then I stopped and now I'm the only one using it.

It's written in go and postgresql and Vue, and right now its just running inside of a "screen" session in a terminal on Linode.

My theory was that those people are looking to buy something. Also I hated ads. But I'm going to enable them universally soon, if only to stop the constant emails from ad companies.

My method is simple and has only four steps. 1. Write something cool and put it online for free. 2. Wait 4 to 5 years. 3. Gather all the emails asking if they can license it or pay you to adapt it. 4. Then slap on a price/marketing page emphasizing what everybody asked for.

http://websequencediagrams.com is my SAAS business. When I was working on 3GPP at RIM we had to spend hours in Visio moving boxes around, and pasting the results into word documents. It was a challenging layout problem. By 2007 I made a python script that did sequence diagrams automatically and put it online. I began to get emails from companies saying they wanted to license it, so I obliged. After I left RIM, I converted it into a freemium product. I have about 400 users paying $9 to $15/month.

http://zwibbler.com gets about 70 visits a day. It's a javascript drawing library with full-service from me. Again, it started as a free HTML demo, and I began to get emails requesting me to adapt it for pay. Instead, I created the front page that offers a complete solution for $1500. By answering emails and talking on the phone, I can get 3 or 4 clients a month without even trying. I figure out what they want and reposition the buttons to do it.

My favourite is http://rhymebrain.com because I don't have to do anything. Google just transfers $1-2K into my account every month for Adsense.

Apparently some companies still download employment agreements off the web that have the "at will" clause but this makes them invalid.