Hacker News Reader

piazzon Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

This is good to know. I’ll probably play around with it sometime in the future.

BTW, appreciate your many great write-ups - they’ve been invaluable for keeping up to date in this space.

piazzon Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

Such a useful walkthrough.

It looks like Mitchell is using an agentic framework called Amp (I’d never heard of it) - does anybody else here use it or tried it? Curious how it stacks up against Claude Code.

piazzon Learning Persian with Anki, ChatGPT and YouTube

Shameless plug for anybody who has been through the hell that is Anki card creation for language learning - I built an LLM powered extension for Anki that allows you to wire up fields to arbitrary prompts, and then generate notes in batch (or selectively per field). I use it every day for generating example sentences, definitions, and TTS. Would have quit Anki ages ago without this.

https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1531888719

https://smart-notes.xyz

FWIW I did get a lot more mileage from building my own deck vs a custom deck too, would recommend that approach regardless once you're past the initial vocab bootstrapping phrase.

piazzon Overtourism in Japan, and how it hurts small businesses

> Another visitor was spending a leisurely week in Morioka alone before heading to Fukuoka for a few months.

Oh hey, that was me! Small (internet) world, huh :)

piazzon Magnesium Self-Experiments

> Do a bunch of other things

Curious about this! Currently trying to figure out a good 0.3mg melatonin dosing regimine for myself.

piazzon Show HN: Anki AI Utils

Thank you :) And, sounds like great fun. Shoot me an email (in bio) or let me know how best to get in touch.

piazzon Show HN: Anki AI Utils

Wow, so feature rich, congrats on the release. Love that the mnemonic generation takes into account your existing memory anchors (didn’t know that term).

I’ve actually been working on a similar-ish Anki Plugin for about 6 months - it can autogenerate any field via LLM in bulk, as well as images and TTS. I’m not explicitly targeting the med school use case as much yours (I use it for language learning), and it’s more GUI centric/geared towards non-technical Anki users who don’t want to fiddle with a bunch of different API keys etc. Was planning to launch HN soon but you beat me to the punch!

https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1531888719 https://smart-notes.xyz

piazzon Ask HN: Solopreneurs, how did you come up with your idea?

I would suggest building something that you yourself find useful / solving a problem that you regularly face that doesn’t have a satisfactory off the shelf solution.

Note that this implies spending time in a different problem domain than just programming all day (alternately read as: have a hobby or two).

I finally have a side project with traction & paying users and it’s because sheer frustration drove me to improve an inefficient workflow in my language learning process (hobby), which turned out to not be such a unique problem at the end of the day.

(Not to shill - I was a frustrated Anki user and built this to improve my own life: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1531888719 )

piazzon Ask HN: What are you working on (September 2024)?

That would be really cool. Unfortunately there's not much you can do on mobile with Anki extensions, so what you've described would have to be a standalone app. You could definitely wire up TTS fields with this add-on, but you'd still have to manually rate your answer.

piazzon Ask HN: What are you working on (September 2024)?

Same! There was another add-on that sort of did it, but it was broken with modern versions of Anki. Was very surprised nobody built this yet.

piazzon Ask HN: What are you working on (September 2024)?

I’m working on an Anki Addon that streamlines the hell out of the card generation process using LLMs. You can define a schema of prompts for your note type & fields, where each prompt can reference other fields, and use it to generate things like translations, example sentences, mnemonics, for tens of thousands of cards in batches or in the fly as they’re reviewed. These generated fields can reference other generated fields so it’s actually a fully fledged DAG under the hood! It also supports TTS in 50+ languages. Soon adding image generation support.

https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1531888719

It’s a paid service at $5/mo with a free trial. Just cracked $50/MRR! Baby steps, but the value is clearly there. Need to tighten up a couple things, especially the web presence and onboarding, before I start marketing more. The tragic irony is that I’m spending all my language learning time building this (alas there can be no other way).

piazzon FSRS: A modern, efficient spaced repetition algorithm

This is great, going to try this approach with my Japanese Anki reps.

Mind linking out to Katzumoto’s Anki advice? Is this this one? https://tatsumoto-ren.github.io/blog/setting-up-anki.html

piazzon LED lighting badly suppresses human melatonin production at night

You sound like me (unfortunately).

Did you ever find anything that helped?

piazzon I hired 5 people to sit behind me and make me productive for a month

sincerely hoping this is satire

piazzon Japan was the future but it's stuck in the past

> Extreme fasciation with the Japanese way of life has always struck me as roundabout white supremacy or misogyny cloaked in a cosmopolitan facade.

You're not wrong about the xenophobic tendencies and obvious monoculture, but the situation is far more complicated and nuanced that you're allowing.

An example: I have a black American friend who's lived in Tokyo for 30 years and plans to be buried in Japan. He lives in Japan because he never has to fear for his physical safety due to the color of his skin, like he does in America. While he will never be seen as "Japanese", for him your xenophobia is more typically represented as wariness or caution around foreigners, people not sitting next to him on the train because he is tall and looks different, versus in America having to contend with actual white supremacy, racist police, and hate crimes. His story is far from unique.

(As an aside, I think this is part of why these discussions about upsides/downsides of Japan are so interesting - it defies any simple explanation and the closer you look the more nuanced it becomes)

piazzon Show HN: Minimalist offline journal app with a chat interface

Love this idea and execution! Will try this out for a while. +1 for iCloud sync :)

piazzon New Brunswick monitoring more than 40 cases of unknown neurological disease

Comments like this are why I love HN.

piazzon Ask HN: What is a creative product you've discovered recently?

Craft (https://craft.do) has become my goto note taking / productivity / knowledge management app. I've tried Workflowy, Roam, Obsidian, and Notion before landing here. It has a great compromise of features I liked from all the different apps, native mac + iOS applications (huge if you're coming from Notion electron land), and a great dev team that's delivering new features at a rapid clip.

Edit: Matter (https://getmatter.app) has replaced Pocket / Instapaper / Email as my article reader & queue. Still early but looks quite promising.

piazzon Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

Thank you! And yes, 100% - RSS is near the top of my list of features I’m going to add next.

piazzon Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

https://piazza.photos/

This past month I built a photojournal blog to host my street photography & assorted other shots from this crazy year.

I both wanted a place for my photos to be viewable in higher resolution than Instagram, as well as to establish an ongoing chronological log of my life as it unfolds - as some kind of crazy experiment I will probably soon regret.

I built this from scratch with Next.js and Typescript. Probably spent more time in Figma designing it than I spent programming! This was a fun excuse to learn Next.js though - amazing how far we’ve come since CRA.

I haven’t officially “launched” (promoted on other channels) yet, so I guess I’m soft-launching on HN right now :)

piazzon The values of Emacs, the Neovim revolution, and the VSCode gorilla

My daily driver is VSCode with Vim editing and Emacs Spacemacs keybindings. I use a VSCode port of Emacs' Magit client for version control.

I'm genuinely curious, from other folks perspectives, what I'm missing with this setup. I've tried standalone Vim, I've tried standalone Emacs (Spaceamacs), and this is by far the best developer experience I've had. I don't know why I would ever switch to another tool, this feels to me like the best of all worlds.

VSCode Spacemacs: https://github.com/VSpaceCode/VSpaceCode

VSCode Magit: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=kahole.m...

piazzon Moral Competence

Jeez, this strikes me as such an unnecessarily harsh and critical self analysis.

The biggest issue I have with this take is that the author's distinction between moral "competence" and "incompetence", from what I've read, doesn't really have anything to do with a moral or ethical system. It seems like his morally incompetent have admirable moral intentions (help depressed people with CBT), but suffer basically from implementation failures. They don't know how to help effectively, and are taking all of wrong lessons from working in tech (searching for direct & measurable impact, searching for technological solutions etc) and could probably be gently taught how to help more effectively. Dividing the world of people who want to help into binary 'competent' and 'incompetent' groups will just serve to discourage people who want to help but don't know how.

I also don't feel like I have a sense of what a 'morally competent person' actually does, or how they design strategies to help effectively. The article feels like a lot of unfortunate self-flagellation for being 'morally incompetent' and not as much constructive dialog about how to actually help better.

Edit: To OP - maybe there is a perspective where you don't have to be so down on yourself here? Maybe this idea 'failed' from a cashflow & user acquisition perspective, but if it helped all of the people who downloaded and used the app, didn't you do good in the world? Maybe you didn't do good at billion dollar scale, but does that matter if you improved people's lives?

piazzon Is Apple Silicon Ready?

Anybody using it with VSCode? Appreciable perf difference?

piazzon Launch HN: Artifact (YC S20) – Personal podcasts with the people in your life

Just curious - did you guys present at last year's YC hackathon? I think I remember you! (we were the social film-camera team). Congrats on the launch!

piazzon Show HN: Dendron – A Hierarchical Tool for Thought

This looks extremely impressive and polished, especially for a single dev. Looking forward to trying. Congrats

piazzon New case studies about Google’s use of Go

I'm also majorly turned off by this attitude. We're knowledge workers - ostensibly paid nice salaries to think deeply and find reasonable solutions to hard problems, not just to turn a crank and shit out code as fast as possible. Sure, this is not your job 24/7, and there will always be boring code to write, but still, have some pride in your craft, you know?

piazzon New case studies about Google’s use of Go

Correctness isn't about fun, although fun is definitely a side effect. I agree Go is easier to read if you're primarily familiar with C style imperative programming, but once you've strayed from that a bit, a PR in Typescript is no more difficult to review than one in Go. The big benefit of languages with more expressive type systems is the confidence you get that your code will work as expected if it compiles - I felt this in Swift more than in TS, and very little in Go.

piazzon New case studies about Google’s use of Go

Super agree. Speedy compilation time of Go was my favorite feature. TS compilation is frustratingly heavy.

piazzon New case studies about Google’s use of Go