codingdave

I think many of us don't worry about whether someone answers us in a thread. Fretting over how a thread went after you said your piece doesn't improve the goal of HN: curiosity. If people agree with your comment, there is no need to jump back in. If they disagree and you jump back in, it just feeds arguments. When you do say something, do it because you feel you have something worthwhile that adds to the conversation. Do not comment just to promote your own voice. And once you have said something, move on.

Do you want to play the VC game? Where you push for high growth, whether or not that is what makes sense for the business? Where failure is preferred over growing into a small sustainable business?

Because if you answer to that is "No", then you should not apply, no matter who you are. YC plays a very specific game. It is not the best game if your goal is to build a company. It is the game to play if you want a high-risk, high-reward experience where a small handful of people get rich, while most other people do not.

Some people want to play that game. If you are one of them, apply. I have no idea if the odds favor you or not, but I guarantee you will not get accepted if you don't apply.

At the same time, if you choose not to apply, or do not get in, don't worry about it. Many people have no interest in that path, and lead quite fulfilling lives being completely outsiders to all of it.

Typically, that would be a reason to close the browser tab and not post it.

I emphatically disagree with the premise. Sometimes high performance comes from focusing on the small picture of just what needs done today. Or just what you want to do today. Or what you can do today.

The big picture does matter. Priority does matter. So this UX has a valid use case. But that use case is about making sure things progress and you don't utterly forget something important.

Also, this quote: "Other apps push you to get more done."

Again, big disagree. My to do list doesn't push me, it is a just a list. Even the management of my property (which is large because I own a forest, wetlands, some small ag, outbuildings, and the actual home), which I run on a Kanban board doesn't push me. It just organizes it without a timeline. If anything, this app is far more pushy than anything I do today.

In other words, this really smells like one person's personal organization style. If they find other people with the same style, they may find a market, but I suspect they will instead find that there is a reason that seemingly every coder has at one time or anther written their own To Do app. Because everyone wants something different.

Soon to learn the lesson of "If you build your company in a way that you are 100% dependent on an outside vendor, a day will come when you fail because that vendor changes something."

I've been working with government entities for document management for 15 years now, writing software that does exactly what we are talking about - versioning, tracking, publishing legislative records both through the authoring and approval cycles and then to the public. I have not worked at the federal level, but with small government - school districts, small towns etc.

Those years tell me 2 things:

1) Yes, absolutely version control for legislation is critical.

2) That doesn't mean Git is the right answer.

Since I don't work at the federal level, I don't know what system they use, but I do know that their workflow is already based on specific changes - they will write up the changes to a document, then apply the changes and publish a new document. Those documents are posted on congress.gov. So they do have a versioning workflow and public accessibility, just not the same style as software devs are used to. I'm sure it could be improved, but I'm not sure forcing them into our working style is the right answer.

The real goal here is not "Use Git". That is an implementation detail, and one that has also been presented and discussed quite a bit in my niche of the industry. Mostly, it is unwanted. Or was unwanted the last time the discussion went around. Git makes sense to software engineers, but not to the general public, and not to any of the document authors I've worked with. Maybe we can add a UX layer to fix that, but that isn't the bigger point...

What we want is to work towards the actual goals: For the tracking to be more detailed, with more transparency including not only authorship of the change, but the source of the change. And presumably, some commentary as to why the change was made. Then all of that should be available to the public.

If git works as a data structure that supports a solution that meets those goals, fine. I'm not anti-git. But when designing solutions, we need to start from the goals of the system, not the data layer. And we need to design solutions that the document authors will actually use, not force them to work like us.

I wrote something similar, but I had a different take on it. I let you paste in the text, then it steps you through breaking it apart, helping you to determine what each bit of text was, and a drag/drop UI to diagram it. But I approached it with a deliberate zero-AI approach. The idea is that careful reading of text is a skill, and many people are losing it. So I wanted to provide a playground for people to practice it.

I also figured that people who write badly might see what is wrong with their writing when a diagram shows just how off their words really are. My teenagers think that the resulting diagrams would be a brutal yet effective way to combat the misinformation online.

In any case, I wrote it. But then I stopped because I wasn't sure where to really take it. But it feels a bit validating to know that I'm not alone in seeing the value of breaking down written text.

It is almost like LLMs have gotten over their initial tells and now the tell is that they write these walls of text. This article reads just like the walls of text that my coworkers at one of my gigs paste all over the place. Any single sentence looks OK, but the overall wall has no flow. No cadence. No difference in tone between stating facts and drawing conclusions. Headers, lists, and charts thrown in for variety.

I'm not sure - maybe humans can write like this, too. But it is the written equivalent of a monotone voice, and I find it very difficult to keep enough attention to read such articles, regardless of their authorship.

This is the same answer as growing a for-profit product. You need to stop spraying random marketing attempts, and look deeper at who uses it today, and why. What problem does it solve for them? Who else has that problem, and where does that audience actually spend time - both IRL and online. Then you craft a message that clearly and concisely show them that you understand their problem and have a solution available, and you share that message in the specific locations that your specific audience knows and trusts.

> I'd be pretty scared.

Scared of what, exactly? It looks to me like the site is primarily static content, so operational costs should be reasonable. He could scale down to just static content, and even if traffic decrease, it is not an existential crisis. Or am I missing something?

I know 2. That is out of the 3 people that I live with. Sure, this household is probably an outlier, but I think people inside the tech bubble do not realize the depth of the anti-AI sentiment from outside the bubble.

From the HN Guidelines: "Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity."

You've now posted this 3 different times in the last couple days.

You still tell people to download a zip and run that code. And on some other page you linked from your github it says to enter your AI key.

An OS doesn't need to be downloaded and run in Windows. This continues to be sketch AF.

> Capture a whole chat with one click: the full transcript, a summary, goals and decisions.

The full transcript? Yikes. That is just going to burn the tokens down in the next session really quickly.

Is it so hard to monitor your session, and just ask for a context snapshot when you hit 90%?

I dislike that. IMO, if the content cannot stand on its own, it did not need to be posted. A comment that adds something to it, to initiate a discussion, is fine. But a comment that just says what that post is? That is neither interesting nor engaging.

Such comments also encourage the idea that people "own" the threads they start. I've seen people get mad when people take the conversation in a direction they did not want, or add instructions telling people what to talk about and putting constraints around discussion. Such things stifle interesting conversation.

So I land heavily the opposite direction. Just post, and leave it at that. If the community finds it interesting, discussion will ensue.

Now, Show HNs are their own thing. An initial explanation is absolutely appropriate for a show HN. But it should be part of the post, not a comment.