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apodolny

130 karma · joined March 16, 2016

Co-Founder of Scribe (scribe.com)
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apodolny··on Muse Spark 1.3
I like the approach of providing a discounted version of the API that is used to train vs. the full price version. Seems reasonable and transparent.
apodolny··on Felix and I
For anyone reading this story as a cautionary tale on having children, you should know that this is not my lived experience of parenting (or the described experience of many of my peers). The way he describes it is the exact opposite of my experience:

> "if you feed me a BIG tablespoon of shit every day and then switch to just a little teaspoon daily, I won’t suddenly start liking the taste of shit."

I genuinely love time spent with my child. I had a similar experience to him and Felix in my 20s and am glad I did, but I'd never want to go back there. That was right for me then and I deeply feel that parenting (alongside a software engineering career I love) is the most joyful, rewarding place to be in my 30s.

apodolny··on [dead]
> "To keep the trend honest we computed it on a fixed panel of 594 companies that appear in our data every year, 385k reports in total, so the decline you see is the same companies getting stingier."

Isn't there a selection bias here? The average tech company that has stayed in business since 2015 presumably grew quite a bit and can now be choosier.

apodolny··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2023)
Scribe | Senior Software Engineer, Growth Engineer | React (Next.JS), Python | SF or Remote | https://scribehow.com

Scribe is a product-led growth (PLG) startup with 1M+ users based in San Francisco that is growing our team on the basis of user love and revenue. Our product is dead simple - record yourself doing any workflow, and Scribe will auto-generate step-by-step documentation to share with colleagues or customers anywhere. Behind the scenes, we have lots of compelling engineering challenges to make that happen. Join us on our journey to make capturing and sharing knowledge fast, easy, and fun!

Apply at https://scribehow.com/careers

apodolny··on The Frustration Loop
We've found that rolling our own spam model can be very effective (especially at improving precision). Many sites have their own quirks around what material counts as spam which leads to false positives or negatives wherever your site differs from the norm. No need to go to GPT4 though. We've found even low compute algorithms like random forest perform quite well at the task. You do have to create your own training set, but even a few hundreds or thousands of manually sorted examples can work pretty well.
apodolny··on My $0->$100M->$0 in 5 years story
A little frustrated by the ambiguity of the $100M in the post. Is that capital raised, ARR, GMV? Makes a big difference in terms of understanding what kind of business they built.
apodolny··on My Problem with the Four-Document Model
Glad someone has written about this!

We talk about the Diátaxis model a lot at Scribe (scribehow.com) where we feel like the how-to guide gets very little love from most of the traditional documentation platforms, which feel like they were all designed for reference material and not much else.

apodolny··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2023)
Scribe | Senior Software Engineer, Growth Engineer | React (Next.JS), Python | SF or Remote | https://scribehow.com

Scribe is a product-led growth (PLG) startup with 1M+ users based in San Francisco that is growing our team on the basis of user love and revenue. Our product is dead simple - record yourself doing any workflow, and Scribe will auto-generate step-by-step documentation to share with colleagues or customers anywhere. Behind the scenes, we have lots of compelling engineering challenges to make that happen. Join us on our journey to make capturing and sharing knowledge fast, easy, and fun!

Apply at https://scribehow.com/careers

apodolny··on Drag Your GAN: Interactive Point-Based Manipulation of Images
Playground AI (https://playgroundai.com/) does a lot of this.
apodolny··on US Says All SVB Deposits Safe, Creates New Backstop for Banks
Here's my understanding of the plan based on the Fed's description[1]:

The Federal Reserve has created a new program that provides a backstop to banks based on the par value of their assets, rather than the market value. This is huge because the issue here is that the assets on a bank’s books are baskets of loans (typically mortgages or loans to the US government) that are very safe but have lost market value because interest rates have risen. However, at par (what they'll pay over their lifetimes), they cover all the bank’s deposits.

Mechanically, the way this would work would be that if a bunch of depositors all withdraw at once, rather than the bank having to sell that basket of loans at a big loss, they’ll borrow from the Federal Reserve instead. That way, they won’t take a loss and won’t end up insolvent. Depositors get their money and everyone would be happy. Since everyone now knows this is possible, in all likelihood this won’t actually get used that much because it’s safe to leave your money in the bank.

[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/mone...

apodolny··on The End of the English Major
"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain." - John Adams[1]

[1] https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L178005...

apodolny··on Ask HN: I have diagnosed ADHD and cannot work with Slack anymore – advice?
Changing notifications settings can get you pretty far. Also worth spending time chatting with your manager or peers to understand exactly what the expectations are for response time. It may be that you have a lot more leeway than you're giving yourself.

Here's how I configure my notifications, FWIW: https://scribehow.com/shared/How_to_Manage_Your_Slack_Notifi...

apodolny··on Show HN: Scribe generates step-by-step guides for GUI workflows
Hi — sorry about that. If you want to see some example Scribes, there's a gallery with some basics here: https://scribehow.com/gallery. The real difference here is how these are made.
apodolny··on Show HN: Scribe generates step-by-step guides for GUI workflows
Hey all, looking forward to hearing your feedback on Scribe - a browser extension and desktop app that automatically generates step-by-step guides for any GUI-based process you choose to record on your computer.

Me and my cofounder originally set out to build an RPA tool. Along the way, we discovered that the bigger problem most teams were facing had to do with capturing and sharing each individual’s specialized knowledge. Most of this knowledge wasn’t written down, let alone stored in some sort of shareable format. With hybrid and remote working models becoming the new norm, this struck us as a problem that really couldn’t wait any longer, so we decided to address this need instead.

We wanted to create something that felt quite different to the manual and tedious nature that’s often associated with putting together process documentation or how-to guides. That meant that Scribe had to be able to intelligently recognize the key steps in your process, while still feeling very lightweight and easy to use.

The tool generates instructions and screenshots based on your clicks and keystrokes to build your step-by-step guide--to do this, there were a few key technical challenges we had to solve: 1. Going from a set of keystrokes and clicks to actual steps 2. Recognizing when to take the screenshot (i.e. before you do a key action) 3. Reconciling different DPI screens (pixel densities) 4. Automatically identifying and combining similar (but distinct) steps

We have Basic (free) and Pro (paid) tiers. Basic gives you a Chrome extension to record web-based apps while Pro comes with a desktop recorder so you can record any program on your computer. I’d love to hear your feedback on either. If you’d like to check out Pro, you can use the code HN2021 after you sign up for a one-month free trial.

apodolny··on Show HN: Secure sensitive info while recording videos live or screen sharing
Yes - this is definitely an issue, especially with text data. One thing I’m curious about: Google Street View apparently adds noise and then blurs. Is this a viable option?
apodolny··on [dead]
As someone who has tried a bunch of video coding tutorials, I've felt like video is actually a pretty bad format for a lot of how-to content. You want to move at your own pace through the material. My team built Scribe to allow you to record a task and then output a step-by-step user guide. Would love thoughts/feedback on ProductHunt.