heresjohnny

Pieter Levels (levels.io) is an amazing inspiration for any indie dev.

More and more sites are driven by lazily loaded content, though – for which javascript is a prerequisite. Do note that you’re excluding a significant amount of sites this way.

I was tempted to use Firebase for a new project because it looked so easy. I’m fairly fluent in Angular and it integrates extremely smoothly, so at a surface level it would be the perfect choice for the backend.

Stories like yours – thank you for sharing – plus horror reports about sudden 20k bills have prevented me from taking the “cloud” leap. I’m very glad I didn’t, especially because I also learned lots by setting up a web server and the application layer myself.

For simply executing queries I find any Postgres extension for VS Code sufficient. Being able to test sql within my IDE is huge.

This is super cool! Well done. You can make it better by separating stages by genre. One of my stages included both 999999999 and Dire Straits. That’d be an interesting collab for sure, but I don’t think it would work in practice :-)

I am grateful for my above average health, a well paying job, a fortunate housing situation, and most of all my energy and focus. I have the means to be creative during the weekend in cafes and inspiring places. Something I have realized: it’s easy to lose yourself in lifestyle and social inflation, giving the impression that you’re doing just average. In fact, you’re probably doing very well.

Absolutely terrific service, indeed. In terms of privacy you’re probably better off at Protonmail from a government surveillance perspective, but in my opinion you’ll pay with usability that way.

My two cents: 1) only pursue what you’re naturally interested in, you’ve got a long career ahead of you, and 2) build, build, build. What problems do you face in life? Fix them yourself with code and suddenly you’ve found motivation to learn.

How popular is the part of the product that is impacted? Do analytics show that it’s not that bad, and that the bug might go unnoticed? Is the bug resulting in an utterly negative experience, or is it something that the user can work around? Might the bug actually be already part of their workflow? Is fixing the bug going to raise more questions than letting it be? And a nice lump of gut feel on top of this.

Both the best and unnecessary gadget purchase: upgrading from an iPhone 13 Pro to a 14 Pro. Oddly, I truly enjoy the design and thinking that went into what is objectively a glorified notch.

A good life doesn’t necessarily require lots of money. It depends on what you qualify as “good” in life. If driving a 2022 model car is good now but prevents you from reaching financial independence, is it truly good? Same holds for a house in a perfect location, vacations, etc.

I would report this using the responsible disclosure program of the manufacturer.

Well done! Loads quickly, is legible and scales nicely on my phone. I’m not a fan of serif fonts, but that’s my personal preference.

I think you’re using an Alphabet trademark with this name. Did you check this?

In my experience not having a design system will produce so much overhead that investing in it early is warranted. It depends on how design-y your product is, though.

Hey cw12574, I wanted to take a peek but I noticed it’s offline. Could you share when it’s online again?

Nice! I might use this in a side project. I don’t see a license, though. What is it? :)

Hi krat0sprakhar,

At this point you could print the page to a PDF and then upload it. A browser extension for webpages (as suggested by others) is a good idea! I'll look into it.

Hey iav,

Cool! Would love to hear more. Perhaps you could reach out at hello@tuchu.app? :)

Hi jhvkjhk,

Thanks for your feedback. In theory all languages should be supported since TextRank should be language-agnostic. Having said that, I think that my current sentence similarity strategy (by word overlap) is not a good fit for "symbol rich" languages such as Mandarin.

I am not Chinese (or from Asian descent) myself. Tuchu comes from some rainy Sunday Google translating. ;)

Hi monkeydust,

Good idea! I'll note it down. :)

Hi mbroshi,

There's no translation being done at all! It's completely language-agnostic (apart from some hardcoded signal words, which I only noted down in English).

Really large documents such as entire books or theses are supported, but as you've experienced it results in a far from ideal experience at this point. Thanks for reporting this and linking to the document, now I know that this is a problem worth addressing. :)

Hi 0xffff2,

Thanks for reporting this! All feedback is really welcome. Firefox is supported. The error you encountered originates from the underlying PDF renderer which, depending on the browser you use, sometimes throws an uninterpretable error. It's on my list...

With respect to your highlighting results: I am aware that it can be a hit or miss at this stage. I've had really mixed feedback so far and I do have a theory that the quality of results may depend on the kind of writing (which is odd, bit I digress). If you could send your document to hello@tuchu.app that would be really useful!

Hi theaussiestew,

I did it by hand. The hardest part was finding a way to create the sentence similarity matrix in a fast way. I solved that problem by creating a Matrix class around Javascript's typed arrays.

For the complete picture, the app itself is written in Angular because I'm familiar with it (probably overkill, really) and I'm using Mozilla's pdf.js [1] to render documents.

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js

Hi anigbrowl, thanks for your thorough review! This is really helpful. I am aware that Tuchu's current strength mostly (and in many cases solely) lies with identifying sentences that summarize, not sentences that explain a concept or convey crucial detail. In that sense the claim of "highlighting the important parts" may indeed be a bit bold.

In my opening post I said that doing your own reading is still a requirement, but it might be good to also mention this on the site — at least until I find a way to improve the algorithm. One way could be leveraging pre-trained word embeddings, but this would require a server or downloading a large blob to the user's device beforehand. In any case Tuchu wouldn't be as fast that way.

Hey HN,

I created Tuchu because I wanted to increase my reading efficiency. It is a tool that automatically highlights the important parts of any document. Most documents take about two to three seconds to process. It's directed at students, researchers, or anyone with a reading list and little time for that matter.

During my studies I had to go through a lot of literature, for example when I had to select relevant material for my thesis, or when I had to familiarize myself with a course's reading list. Tuchu helped me to get up to speed in these cases. What started off as a command-line Python script is now a web application that does its analysis without any back-end. I don't get to see your documents.

The underlying algorithm that selects what's relevant is called TextRank, an unsupervised summarization method [1]. It models a document (or a collection thereof) as a fully connected graph. Its nodes are parts of the text — I use sentences — and the edges between them are weighted by a similarity measure, in my case simple word overlap. The subset of sentences with the highest PageRank are then highlighted. For good measure, I also highlight sentences that contain signal words that — in my academic experience — signify importance.

It's important to note that Tuchu is not a substitute for doing your own reading. It could make you a faster reader by directing your attention to the important parts, but you'll still have to ponder about the true essence of a document yourself.

[1] https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W04-3252/