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wenbin

1,860 karma · joined August 31, 2014

Maker of the best podcast search engine and podcast api: ListenNotes.com & PodcastAPI.com

Email: wenbin@listennotes.com

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wenbin··on Stripe's Knowledge AI Platform
so is it like CloudflareOS ? https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflare-os

seems every company that has spare engineering resource all builds such thing internally

wenbin··on Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work
They had a demo https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49101234
wenbin··on Superlogical
`ssh superlogical.jobs` gives me same vibe as telnet bbs when I was in college :)
wenbin··on Google Discloses $94.1B in SpaceX Stock, Marking 6% Stake
Alphabet is the modern day berkshire hathaway.

Alphabet’s investment holdings (eg, spacex, anthropic..) are worth in the same order of magnitude of BRK’s (~$300B)

The track record of google’s M&A is pretty good.

Except for search and cloud, many of Google’s important products were from M&A - Maps, Docs, android, doubleclick, youtube , deep mind, etc.

wenbin··on Monetization Gateway
It’s a great way for developers or ai agents to test drive an API without creating and account and getting an API key from the api provider.

This could also make abusing use / DDoS attack very costly

wenbin··on Pre-2022 Books
If contents are generated instantly via llm and packaged as books, videos, podcasts, pull requests etc, then they don’t deserve human attention.
wenbin··on A website that lists websites to submit your website to
At listennotes.com , we have to delete tons of fake podcasts submitted to our site [1]

why do people create fake podcasts? they want to get backlinks from all podcast directories

podcasts are distributed via rss feed. and spammers/"growth hackers" put tons of links in the rss feed.

and podcast hosting services (especially those allow free trials, e.g., rss.com, ) could help them one-click to distribute to a bunch of podcast apps / websites. this is like one-click large scale spamming automation

any examples? here you go -

* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/search?term=UU88%20

* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/search?term=%E6%B6%A8%E7%B2%89

* https://open.spotify.com/search/%E6%B6%A8%E7%B2%89/podcasts

most podcast websites / apps don't delete fake podcasts like we do at listennotes.com . so i guess the backlink hack w/ fake podcasts works. real human podcast listeners might suffer with spammy fake shows even on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

[1] https://www.listennotes.com/podcast-stats/#growth

wenbin··on Nobody clicks share buttons
From our experience at listennotes.com over past ~10 years - people do click share buttons. For us, it's still worth the screen real estate to place share buttons.
wenbin··on Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?
It’s basically bullshit jobs — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

The compensation can be high, but the psychological cost is real. Over time, that tradeoff isn’t always worth it: someone might earn more in the short term, yet pay for it with chronic stress, declining mental health, and even a shorter lifespan compared to a lower-paid role that’s more meaningful and less draining.

wenbin··on Three of our worst VC stories
This is awesome!
wenbin··on YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos
Maybe google web search should automatically label ai-generated articles
wenbin··on AI slop is killing online communities
dataset for ~40,000 ai slop podcasts - https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/listennotes/ai-generated-fak...

And Listen Notes is removing 4000 to 8000 ai slop podcasts per month - https://www.listennotes.com/podcast-stats/#growth

wenbin··on Deezer says 44% of songs uploaded to its platform daily are AI-generated
Similar stats for podcasts - https://www.listennotes.com/podcast-stats/#growth
wenbin··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)
I’m building CurateKit.com - a lightweight content curation tool.

I always have growing lists of short texts, facts, and links that I wanted to host on a standalone site rather than burying them in a notes app. The workflow is simple: a browser extension to clip links with remarks, which then feeds into a public-facing list.

I’ve also added a "Substack-lite" feature. Instead of long-form writing, it lets you send simple roundup email digests (e.g., "Top 5 links this week") to opt-in subscribers.

My personal blog (wenbin.org) is currently powered by the tool.

CurateKit.com is in private beta while I'm fine-tuning a few things now, but I’m opening up invites to the waitlist over the next few days if anyone wants to give it a try.

wenbin··on Shooting down ideas is not a skill
“pessimists sound smart , but optimists make money”
wenbin··on Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer
Does this mean AWS's #1 position is safe?

Every big cloud provider has its share of UX/stability/customer support issues.

At this point, it feels less like AWS is the 'least bad' option because alternatives are even worse.

wenbin··on Delve removed from Y Combinator
Curious - in this situation, does delve return money to YC? Or YC simply writes off the investment
wenbin··on GitHub is once again down
I guess vibe coding can't solve such problem for now...
wenbin··on Good software knows when to stop
Yea, good old days :)

The catch was that old boxed software eventually breaks on new OS versions or devices.

However, SaaS has the potential to "freeze" features while remaining functional 20+ years down the road. Behind the scenes, developers can update server dependencies and push minor fixes to ensure compatibility with new browsers and screen sizes.

From the end-user's perspective, the product remains unchanged and reliable. To me, that’s very good!

wenbin··on Good software knows when to stop
We should normalize "finished" software products that stop feature creep and focus strictly on bug fixes and security updates.

It takes real courage for a builder to say, "It’s good enough. It’s complete. It serves the core use cases well." If people want more features? Great, make it a separate product under a new brand.

Evernote and Dropbox were perfect in 2012. Adding more features just to chase new user growth often comes at the expense of confusing the existing user base. Not good

wenbin··on The Great Unwind
HN is full of tech savvy people. Yet an llm slop article is upvoted to the front page of HN...

Imagine how deceptive llm slop contents are to the general population.

wenbin··on AI Slop Report: The Global Rise of Low-Quality AI Videos
Same for podcasts (and other types of online contents) -

Here's a dataset of 26,000+ ai-generated "podcasts"

https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/listennotes/ai-generated-fak...

wenbin··on Stop crawling my HTML – use the API
if you use microfeed.org , you can use jsonfeed , eg, https://www.microfeed.org/json/
wenbin··on It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts
It's similarly insulting to listen to your AI-generated fake podcasts[0]. Ten minutes spent on them is ten minutes wasted.

[0] AI-generated fake podcasts (mostly via NotebookLM) https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/listennotes/ai-generated-fak...

wenbin··on AI False information rate for news nearly doubles in one year
Maybe some of them already embed some simple, secret marker to identify their own generated content. But people outside the organization wouldn’t know. And this still can’t prevent other companies from training models on synthetic data.

Once synthetic data becomes pervasive, it’s inevitable that some of it will end up in the training process. Then it’ll be interesting to see how the information world evolves: AI-generated content built on synthetic data produced by other AIs. Over time, people may trust AI-generated content less and less.

wenbin··on AI False information rate for news nearly doubles in one year
AI will create ever more AI-generated synthetic content because current systems still can't determine with 100% certainty whether a piece of content was produced by AI. And AIs will, intentionally or unintentionally, train on synthetic content produced by other AIs.

AI generators don't have a strong incentive to add watermarks to synthetic content. They also don't provide reliable AI-detection tools (or any tools at all) to help others detect content generated by them.

wenbin··on SynthID – A tool to watermark and identify content generated through AI
I really hope SynthID becomes a widely adopted standard - at the very least, Google should implement it across its own products like NotebookLM.

The problem is becoming urgent: more and more so-called “podcasts” are entirely fake, generated by NotebookLM and pushed to every major platform purely to farm backlinks and run blackhat SEO campaigns.

Beyond SynthID or similar watermarking standards, we also need models trained specifically [0] to detect AI-generated audio. Otherwise, the damage compounds - people might waste 30 minutes listening to a meaningless AI-generated podcast, or worse, absorb and believe misleading or outright harmful information.

[0] 15,000+ ai generated fake podcasts https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/listennotes/ai-generated-fak...

wenbin··on Subreply – an open source text-only social network
missed the good old days of telnet bbs & newsgroup :)
wenbin··on Datadog's $65M/year customer mystery solved
Earlier this year, we at Listen Notes switched to Better Stack [0], replacing both Datadog and PagerDuty, and we couldn’t be happier :) Datadog offers a rich set of features, and as a public company, it makes sense for them to keep expanding their product and pushing larger contracts. But as a small team, we don't have a strong demand for constant new features. By switching to Better Stack, we were able to cut our monitoring and alerting costs by 90%, with basically the same things that we used from Datadog previously.

[0] https://www.listennotes.com/blog/use-betterstack-to-replace-...

wenbin··on Ask HN: What API or software are people using for transcription?
https://Transcript.New
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