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matteasonon Show HN: Writ.ly – Easy online Markdown editor

Brilliant, thanks - I'll check it out

matteasonon Show HN: Writ.ly – Easy online Markdown editor

This is great. I've started building a little notes app in Vue and I was wondering how to handle WYSIWYG Markdown editing so I'll definitely be digging in to your code for inspiration. Do you mind giving us a quick overview of how it works technically?

It would be nice if you could change the block type after creating it. For example I don't think there's a way to change an h1 to an h2, or a bulleted list to a numbered list.

The collaborative editing is neat too, are you using a library for that or is it bespoke as well?

matteasonon Show HN: I'm working hard on Hackerman, submit your email to waitlist;)

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

> If your work isn't ready for users to try out, please don't do a Show HN. Once it's ready, come back and do it then. Don't post landing pages or fundraisers.

matteasonon Show HN: Semiform – A new kind of web form, powered by LLMs

Off the top of my head, one way the validation could possibly work is for the tool to auto-respond via email with how it's categorised the data and give the option to confirm or correct it. ("Thanks for responding! Just to confirm, here's what I've recorded:...").

If the user marks it as correct it could have a verified tick or something on the admin side, and then form creators would only have to manually check over the ones without a tick (with the option to see the original text of the user's response and a form to correct the data)

Obviously it would also be useful for the form creator to author the question so that the possible options are given when they're non-obvious, but users don't always read :)

matteasonon Show HN: GPT4 and Your Twitter Bookmarks

You've got a couple of user quotes on the homepage. @omarz9 doesn't exist at all and @peteoliver follows 4 people and hasn't tweeted since 2017. Are those real quotes?

matteasonon Show HN: Semiform – A new kind of web form, powered by LLMs

It's a really interesting idea and the demos are a great touch.

I'd have a couple of concerns if I was looking to adopt this:

- Is it actually quicker than filling in a form, especially for questions which would normally be radio buttons or checkboxes? For example on the conference signup example I have to type the days I'll be attending rather than just clicking a couple of checkboxes

- The validation doesn't seem very strict. For example on the conference signup again, I entered 'John Smith, Saturday and Sunday, 4XL' and it recorded my t-shirt size as XXL. The fact that there's no user-visible validation step is problematic because in real life, if I submitted my response by email I'd have no way of knowing that the AI had misclassified that response. As the form creator I don't want to have to look through the raw text of every response to check if it's been recorded correctly.

I think the site feedback example is the best use case; at the moment I wouldn't trust it to work with anything with more concrete real-world effects like getting the wrong size t-shirt or being registered for the wrong days

matteasonon Launch HN: Onedoc (YC W24) – A better way to create PDFs

Really interesting product. I do agree that the pricing seems steep ($0.25/document on Pro on the most generous tier) but I don't know enough about pricing B2B products to know if that would be a blocker.

I agree that HTML -> PDF can be a really powerful tool. I worked on the UK government's tool to generate energy efficiency labels for consumer goods [0] and we ended up doing PDF generation with SVG templates, using Open HTML to PDF for the conversion. That ended up working very well, though as you allude to there can be some gotchas (eg unsupported CSS features) that you need to work around.

A few questions:

- Do the rendered documents support PDF's various accessibility features?

- How suitable is this for print PDF generation? For example, what version of the PDF spec do you target? What's your colour profile support like? Do you support the different PDF page boxes (MediaBox, CropBox, BleedBox, TrimBox, ArtBox)?

[0] https://github.com/UKGovernmentBEIS/energy-label-service

[1] https://github.com/danfickle/openhtmltopdf

matteasonon [dead]

Does the product actually exist yet? If not this shouldn't be a Show HN [0]:

> If your work isn't ready for users to try out, please don't do a Show HN. Once it's ready, come back and do it then. Don't post landing pages or fundraisers.

Either way, there's not nearly enough information on the page for me to trust this with anything. No privacy policy, nothing to show how information is stored or protected, nothing showing how it actually works - just a checkout page asking me to pay $2 for an unspecified service

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

matteasonon Show HN: I made a tool to transform Newsletters into Podcasts

Really nicely designed. I initially thought it was a tool for newsletter publishers but the step-by-step explained it well.

The pricing does seem a little steep in terms of the number of conversions per month. At the low end (basic, monthly) it's $0.90 per conversion, but even on yearly essential it's $0.66

The main call-to-action button says 'Start listening - it's free!' but then the pricing details don't include any information about a free tier or trial

It looks like you need to listen via the website, is that true? Ideally I'd get a private RSS feed (options for one per newsletter or a combined feed) that I could use in whatever podcast app I wanted

matteasonon Show HN: I made an app to create wall art mockups fast

Ah I've just found the filters, that's helpful. It's definitely not where I'd expect them to be; top right is where I'd expect sign in etc to live. They might be more discoverable with a text label right above the grid of templates, so they're in close proximity to the thing they're filtering.

matteasonon Show HN: I made an app to create wall art mockups fast

On closer inspection - are the templates AI-generated? There are some odd AI-ish inconsistencies in some of them (a toy elephant with no ears, stools with missing parts, light fitting hanging midair...)

matteasonon Show HN: I made an app to create wall art mockups fast

The mockups themselves are great. The templates look very high quality.

It would be great if the frame adapted to the aspect ratio of the uploaded image. At the moment the image is cropped to fill the frame. Even reordering the templates to prioritise those which match (or are closest to) the aspect ratio of the image would be a start, or the ability to filter portrait/landscape/square

matteasonon Show HN: I made a Typeform alternative

How accessible are the generated forms and the form builder itself? Has it been tested for accessibility?

matteasonon Bring back private offices

I built a white noise site which has a load of sounds which can help in a similar way (including thunder): https://ambiph.one

I find the 'bass rumble' and brown noise particularly useful for masking external noise, which I guess is pretty similar to a thunderstorm frequency-wise

matteasonon Show HN: Ambient ScotRail Beats

More background on how this came about: https://github.com/matteason/scotrail-announcements-june-202...

matteasonon Show HN: I built a simple user survey tool for SaaS

The design looks great. Unfortunately the surveys themselves aren't accessible, so can't easily be completed by people using assistive technology such as screen readers. For example:

- on the 'Report a bug' demo I'd expect the 'Did you discover a bug?' text to be in a <label> connected to the textarea with for="id", and the 'Please let us know what happened' text to be connected with an aria-describedby on the textarea.

- on the CSAT demo the happy face/sad face buttons don't have an accessible text alternative to the icons, for example using aria-label, so the buttons will be unlabelled to someone using a screen reader

matteasonon Show HN: A New Landsat Explorer – Earth science and observation for all

Did you submit a link to the wrong environment? The livingatlasdev subdomain doesn't resolve for me but livingatlas does

matteasonon Show HN: Txt Your Ex – Your Ex Has Moved On. Shouldn't Your Texts Do the Same?

I'd also want to see a robust privacy policy on something that's asking for not just my personal information but also why my relationship broke down

matteasonon It's OK to abandon your side-project

Thanks, I'll check out Hetzner. I'd been happy with NearlyFreeSpeech [0] until this project, who also don't charge for bandwidth, but for this project the audio files were orders of magnitude slower downloading from them than from S3 or Cloudflare. Maybe they throttle media downloads or something.

[0] https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/

matteasonon It's OK to abandon your side-project

Is the cost mostly bandwidth? Cloudflare free tier is a godsend for static sites. I have a project which is audio-heavy and has used 2TB of bandwith since the start of January. It would have been about $180 of egress costs from S3, but routing it through the Cloudflare free tier CDN with an agressive caching policy has basically eliminated those costs.

matteasonon It's OK to abandon your side-project

My modestly successful Show HN for my last project [0] was the third time I'd submitted it - the first two got no traction at all. It does feel like luck of the draw sometimes, and it can be very demotivating.

At least HN tolerates reposts if you don't get any attention the first time round [1]; if your launch bombs on ProductHunt, you don't get a second chance (ask me how I know!)

On gsky's about HN traffic lasting two days - that was definitely my experience, though if it's interesting enough it'll likely get picked up by other sites too. Blogs, podcasts etc are always picking stuff up from Reddit and HN.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38856999

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9772114

matteasonon Stop postponing things by embracing the mess

Thanks, glad you like it! I'm all ears if you have any suggestions (here or there's a feedback form linked at the bottom)

matteasonon Stop postponing things by embracing the mess

You might enjoy the binaural beats and ambient radio on https://ambiph.one as a free alternative (disclosure: it's my site). Not as science-y as brain.fm but it helps me a lot with focus

matteasonon Ask HN: Where have you found your early adopters

Thanks! It's one of the few side projects I've actually followed through on releasing. There are hundreds of similar products (Noisli, A Soft Murmur, myNoise, tons of apps) which is usually why I lose interest but I hubristically thought I could build something better, or at least different enough that people would be interested, or free enough that people would be able to overlook any missing features.

I guess lots of competition means there's definitely an audience for it at least.

matteasonon Ask HN: Where have you found your early adopters

I promoted Ambiphone [0] (white noise/ambient sounds/music) on HN [1], Twitter and Reddit.

The HN post made the front page and got me the most traffic and feedback I'd had so far (about 6k visitors). It also resulted in articles on BoingBoing and Metalfloss, among others, which also sent a decent number of users.

The 1440 newsletter [2] also picked it up - just a small one-liner in a list of interesting links - and sent about 8k visitors in one day.

On Twitter it got picked up, unexpectedly by quite a lot of DJs. Turns out that a lot of DJs get tinnitus and white noise can be really helpful to mask it. So I got much less traffic from that but some really nice feedback on how useful it is. That also led to The Economist's podcast team contacting me and I ended up featuring in a piece about ambient music and white noise apps.

I did try ProductHunt and it got nowhere. It probably didn't help that I didn't really promote the launch, but it also got buried under a lot of AI projects. Ho hum.

User numbers have stabilised now at about 600-800 a day. I'm not really sure where to turn next - I hate constantly banging on about it on my personal Twitter and reposts of things that have got traction are discouraged on HN and Reddit (rightly so). I'm happy that it's got a decent userbase though.

[0]: https://ambiph.one

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38856999

[2]: https://join1440.com/newsletter/florida-drug-imports-starsky...

matteasonon Show HN: NegosAI – Generate dazzling HD posters in seconds with AI

A couple of things I'd want to know if I wanted to use this professionally:

- What resolution are the generated images? If I want to use them as actual posters they need to be a decent resolution (ideally 300 pixels per inch)

- Its understanding of text seems about on par with other AI I've seen (that is, not very good). There are obvious errors in the collage on the login screen ('DELIVVERY', 'BUSY PEOPLE FOR TO TIME'). So I'd need to do some work to get these to actually be usable. You mention conversion to SVG in the FAQs but I don't really trust that to get me something easily editable - and then how do I match fonts, text effects etc with the rest of the image (especially if the AI has just made up a font).

- The 'Pro' plan (the only plan available) includes 'Unlimited uploads' - uploads of what?

matteasonon Receiving weather satellite images using SatDump

It is possible to receive images from the NOAA satellites outside the US though, since they're polar-orbiting: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/rtl-sdr-tutorial-receiving-noaa-weat...

matteasonon Receiving weather satellite images using SatDump

Ha, thanks! You probably saw it when I submitted to Show HN. Hope it's useful!

matteasonon I accidentally Blender VSE

Yeah I agree with this. Especially with stuff that's more experimental/exploratory, project management, deadlines and 'deliverables' kill my motivation.

A lot of the best work I've done has been a bit under the radar. It's easier to ask for forgiveness than to get permission.

matteasonon Receiving weather satellite images using SatDump

This link should show a full true-colour image from yesterday: https://go.nasa.gov/48cQIXE

And this one precipitation estimates: https://go.nasa.gov/49a68Nq