> DocuQuest: A platform that leverages LLMs to transform and simplify complex technical documentation into interactive, user-friendly learning experiences tailored for developers and engineers.
So "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" from Diamond Age, but for devs. A neat idea!
In general docs ecosystems tend to be heavy on only one of reference / explanation / tutorial. Would be cool to have a way to write one and get the others.
Actually this sounds great. I got way more out of codecademy’s in-browser, interactive challenges than I did in my middle & high-school classes programming classes. The "learn by doing" process really built my confidence. If you could "demo" your docs directly in the browser it's much easier to learn by doing. I think that'd drive up adoption and you might even crowdsource bug discovery.
Claude API error: {"type":"error","error":{"type":"invalid_request_error","message":"Your credit balance is too low to access the Anthropic API. Please go to Plans & Billing to upgrade or purchase credits."}}
SlopCharger: Broker free-tier accounts with fly-by-night AI providers cross-matched with the latest in prompt exploits to enable new billing efficiencies by running your HN AI shitpost on someone else's one-fiftieth of a dime! :sparkles:
How do you see AI becoming inaccessible pricing-wise? If anything it seems models are measurably more performant and measurably more efficient every month? People regularly run huge models locally on consumer hardware, which used to be unfathomable months ago..
Alright, but DocuQuest is actually a really good idea.
"DocuQuest: A platform that leverages LLMs to transform and simplify complex technical documentation into interactive, user-friendly learning experiences tailored for developers and engineers."
I recently found a vibe-coded app that generates courses on the fly from YouTube, including automatically generated quizzes. I forgot the URL, but the result was beyond awful. Questions were something like: "what was the title of the youtube video?" and other utterly stupid things.
Not saying that it isn't possible, but stuff like this does need the human touch.
>SciDigest: An AI-powered platform that transforms complex scientific research into engaging, digestible content for the general public, making scientific knowledge accessible and actionable.
This would actually be great. So many researchers have a marketing problem with explaining and getting people excited for their work.
I'm a popular science writer with eight year's experience doing exactly this (SciShow, Crash Course, Veritasium and recent winner of the Wellcome Collection Non Fiction Awards) without AI. Done right, the right coverage of even a pre-print reached hundreds of thousands/millions of people. But I've experimented with every SOTA model since 2022 with the most detailed and specific prompting I can think of (including multiple examples of transcripts of work already in the public domain) to see if it can replicate good quality science communication.
The content is usually reasonably strong but the tone is always off and it never quite understands what it is a reader/viewer needs to really get to grips with the topic if they don't already have a prior foundational understanding (though I notice this about a lot of other media outlets with professional science communicators too). It also has poor editorial thinking around what bits are most likely to be interesting and cohesive when considered as part of the whole piece.
But I'm still reasonably convinced as AI improves it ought to be able to replace me with the right workflow/context/prompting. I think there will always be a demand for my (and many other writers') talents as they are so it doesn't really bother me, but it'd be great to extend the work to all the many scientific discoveries that don't get the same attention. If anyone is serious about developing something like this, I'd be interested in partnering with them as someone with domain expertise on science communication and familiar with prompt engineering (email in bio).
I think you're right about the editorial thinking + what do people find interesting parts. But that doesn't have to be solved by directly by AI, it's easy enough to sidestep the problem and provide a nice interface for the human-in-the-loop part. I'd imagine that would save you a ton of time by having a nice starting point depending on how much you have to rewrite for tone.
That's true, it could just turn the writer's role into more of an editorial role. The main time-saving I have so far is being able to upload papers and get it to fact check for me. The editorial guidelines at SciShow are stricter than any academic journal I've published in: any non-trivial statement has to be supported by a direct, findable quote in (most-of-the-time) peer-reviewed scientific literature. I once had to find a citation for the idea that heat + fuel + oxygen generates a fire! (for this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEcaE0e0CZg)
LLMs make that much easier. As I collect primary sources during my drafting/writing phrase, I can type up any non-trivial claims I'm making in my script in a separate document, share that with the LLM and say "Quoting directly from the set of attached PDFs, identifying which document, and on which page the quote comes from, find content which directly supports each of these assertions" and it generally goes a great job. At any rate, I have to check each of those quotes for accuracy but the help in _finding_ those quotes in order to pass a stringent fact checking procedure is a huge help if I didn't scribble down the supporting quotes during my research phase. This is also, by the way, stricter than the fact checking process for most non-fiction publishing.
Feels like there might be an accuracy issue as well. Although that might make it perfectly suited to replacing whoever writes university press releases...
>I've experimented with every SOTA model since 2022
>The content is usually reasonably strong but the tone is always off and it never quite understands what it is a reader/viewer needs
A SOTA model fine-tuned with your choice of transcripts could probably get you most of the way there. There might be a customized, open-weight model already on Huggingface that meets your needs.
One question is whether the audience is discerning enough to care about the issues you're raising. This seems like it could be a variation of why the umpteenth Marvel movie beats out indie masterpieces at the box office. The audience for high quality becomes increasingly niche as the market's relatively low bar for quality is satisfied.
I've attempted this with pdftomp3.com where you can listen to PDFs. It has an "AI Explanation" mode where the content of the PDF gets explained. Its like a NotbookLM podcast, but I was earlier :)
Currently I'm working on an app for that, because thats where I listen to the MP3s anyways.
I've been using the NotebookLM "podcasts" for this. I upload an arxiv pdf and use the Interactive Mode to have them talk about it, while I can pause them to ask clarifying questions. It's been surprisingly efficient for me to get an initial grasp on things I'm not familiar with, at times prompting me to then go on exploring interesting rabbit holes.
I've received nothing but nice messages about the site after posting it and people seem to be getting a kick out of it. I feel like this (if barely so) meets the bar to give it a pass perhaps, especially considering that my voice is worth as much as yours and the next person, so without upvotes, it will disappear, just how it's meant to be. Hope that helps a bit.
I mentioned it because you didn't disclose that you're responsible for it. If you had mentioned you're the owner, sure. Though it comes across as a disingenuous recommendation when folk put stock in such things being in good faith.
Also, the product type you promoted is something that I've seen replicated many times, more often very badly. Mentioning such a product on an article aimed at AI slop seemed somewhat ironic.
I'll take away the note to mention my involvement when posting a comment, there's no harm in doing that and if it helps someone I'm happy to try and do that.
If anything, this was a very short and quite contextual piece of text-only advertising. If all online advertising were like that, I won't have to run an ad blocker.
No need to do that. The provenance does not matter as long as the content is interesting, which is the case here.
This is the original hacker's ethos: put something out there for others to use, and let the people make their own opinion about the thing itself, not the authoritativeness of its source.
This is not primarily an advertising site. See 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.
For me, undisclosed self promotion puts a very bad taste in my mouth, to the point of coming off as bad faith. I dislike pretending you're just mentioning a cool service since you're effectively trying to trick me with false social proof.
If the post had said "I made xyz which could auto generate domains for these ideas using ai to fully close the slop gap" I wouldn't mind and might even appreciate the additional fun.
SwearySkyscraper: A startup that develops novel and personalized swear words to help people better cope with pain, and integrates these swear words into a liquid damping system to stabilize skyscrapers during earthquakes.
A building that requires human pain to stand? I guarantee you this is something at least a few architects have fantasized at length about. Like ours, it seems to be a profession that attracts outliers.
Very cute but wish there was a filter for the flavor of the week ... I feel 60% of them will have LLM because of this bias. Last month would've been "powered by rust."
Lets not waste your $0.0005 and share this pretty decent idea with everyone:
> Graphene Labs: A decentralized, open-source platform for creating and sharing interactive data visualizations and infrastructure diagrams that can be hosted locally and integrated with real-time data sources
>Biomech Innovations: A wearable tech startup that uses genetic algorithms and AI to help zebrafish regenerate damaged organs, with a secrets management platform to securely store user data and a retro-futuristic assembly-level code editor for custom hardware designs.
Instant fun! Honestly, whatever tech I look for, I use built-in search engine of Hacker News first before googling it.
I'm not really sure why modern AI can't really do stuff like that anymore—I would guess a combination of being whacked with a crowbar to submit to humans (RLHF, but I'm not sure if it affects base models?), alignment stuff, and just being too smart.
Would love to see something like this with GPT-2 and how it compares
Ideascope: An AI-powered platform that generates personalized, innovative startup ideas by analyzing real-time trends and data from Hacker News and other tech communities
Can someone make this?
6. SignalPlay: A platform that transforms real-time WiFi signals into immersive gaming experiences, allowing players to interact with virtual environments based on their physical movements in the room.
Ha! Fun stuff. While some ideas are actually intriguing, many if its suggestions seem to be overly vague jumbles of common phrases and technology. "AI-powered databases to leverage personalized accessibility for team management..." Lol. Still fun though.
i was not expecting people to like the startup ideas so much, but it's a pleasant surprise!
i thought it'd be cool to let people vote on ideas that HN Slop came up with, so now you'll see an "i'd invest" button & that will let others vote on the idea on a leaderboard
hope y'all like it, keep sending the feedback, I'm listening!
> CosmicPlay: A startup that leverages GPU emulation and graph theory to build a next-generation video game engine that can render celestial bodies with nuclear propulsion and solar sailing capabilities, while generating AI-powered gameplay ideas from Hacker News posts
Code itself is not very valuable as well. What has value is the combination of all those things and application of them to some real problem in a form of complete solution.
Its relatively easy to generate "startup ideas", but even with a perfectly reasonable idea at hand the hardest thing is to bring it into life, overcoming every possible obstacle.
Feature request: option to select a year so you can get retro startup ideas from e.g. web 2 or crypto-mania eras!
> DocuQuest: A platform that leverages LLMs to transform and simplify complex technical documentation into interactive, user-friendly learning experiences tailored for developers and engineers.
So "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" from Diamond Age, but for devs. A neat idea!
In general docs ecosystems tend to be heavy on only one of reference / explanation / tutorial. Would be cool to have a way to write one and get the others.
Actually this sounds great. I got way more out of codecademy’s in-browser, interactive challenges than I did in my middle & high-school classes programming classes. The "learn by doing" process really built my confidence. If you could "demo" your docs directly in the browser it's much easier to learn by doing. I think that'd drive up adoption and you might even crowdsource bug discovery.
Publishing docs and example project and letting them get scraped into LLMs already accomplishes this pretty effectively.
Reminds me of this project
A game of learning your homelab into a cyberpunk mystery adventure | Hacker News https://share.google/WedMuRgx5WgreNqSN
Claude API error: {"type":"error","error":{"type":"invalid_request_error","message":"Your credit balance is too low to access the Anthropic API. Please go to Plans & Billing to upgrade or purchase credits."}}
SlopCharger: Broker free-tier accounts with fly-by-night AI providers cross-matched with the latest in prompt exploits to enable new billing efficiencies by running your HN AI shitpost on someone else's one-fiftieth of a dime! :sparkles:
EdgeSlop: now you can bring your own API key for a wider range of choices -- BYOAI!
This is deeply hilarious
Sorry about that, was sleeping and this got on the front page again, just upped the credit balance to fix!
Really should have been some caching involved. We didn't all need our own personal slop.
Jerf, everyone deserves their own personal slop
This is poetic, because AI will become inaccessible pricing-wise and all these AI slop shops are going to have a hard time keeping customers.
How do you see AI becoming inaccessible pricing-wise? If anything it seems models are measurably more performant and measurably more efficient every month? People regularly run huge models locally on consumer hardware, which used to be unfathomable months ago..
This reminds me of https://www.halfbakery.com/ which was much more fun, probably because the ideas came from actual humans.
Technically, so do these.
Ok, "came directly from humans" then.
Alright, but DocuQuest is actually a really good idea.
"DocuQuest: A platform that leverages LLMs to transform and simplify complex technical documentation into interactive, user-friendly learning experiences tailored for developers and engineers."
I recently found a vibe-coded app that generates courses on the fly from YouTube, including automatically generated quizzes. I forgot the URL, but the result was beyond awful. Questions were something like: "what was the title of the youtube video?" and other utterly stupid things.
Not saying that it isn't possible, but stuff like this does need the human touch.
>SciDigest: An AI-powered platform that transforms complex scientific research into engaging, digestible content for the general public, making scientific knowledge accessible and actionable.
This would actually be great. So many researchers have a marketing problem with explaining and getting people excited for their work.
I'm a popular science writer with eight year's experience doing exactly this (SciShow, Crash Course, Veritasium and recent winner of the Wellcome Collection Non Fiction Awards) without AI. Done right, the right coverage of even a pre-print reached hundreds of thousands/millions of people. But I've experimented with every SOTA model since 2022 with the most detailed and specific prompting I can think of (including multiple examples of transcripts of work already in the public domain) to see if it can replicate good quality science communication.
The content is usually reasonably strong but the tone is always off and it never quite understands what it is a reader/viewer needs to really get to grips with the topic if they don't already have a prior foundational understanding (though I notice this about a lot of other media outlets with professional science communicators too). It also has poor editorial thinking around what bits are most likely to be interesting and cohesive when considered as part of the whole piece.
But I'm still reasonably convinced as AI improves it ought to be able to replace me with the right workflow/context/prompting. I think there will always be a demand for my (and many other writers') talents as they are so it doesn't really bother me, but it'd be great to extend the work to all the many scientific discoveries that don't get the same attention. If anyone is serious about developing something like this, I'd be interested in partnering with them as someone with domain expertise on science communication and familiar with prompt engineering (email in bio).
That's super cool, I love the SciShow videos.
I think you're right about the editorial thinking + what do people find interesting parts. But that doesn't have to be solved by directly by AI, it's easy enough to sidestep the problem and provide a nice interface for the human-in-the-loop part. I'd imagine that would save you a ton of time by having a nice starting point depending on how much you have to rewrite for tone.
That's true, it could just turn the writer's role into more of an editorial role. The main time-saving I have so far is being able to upload papers and get it to fact check for me. The editorial guidelines at SciShow are stricter than any academic journal I've published in: any non-trivial statement has to be supported by a direct, findable quote in (most-of-the-time) peer-reviewed scientific literature. I once had to find a citation for the idea that heat + fuel + oxygen generates a fire! (for this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEcaE0e0CZg)
LLMs make that much easier. As I collect primary sources during my drafting/writing phrase, I can type up any non-trivial claims I'm making in my script in a separate document, share that with the LLM and say "Quoting directly from the set of attached PDFs, identifying which document, and on which page the quote comes from, find content which directly supports each of these assertions" and it generally goes a great job. At any rate, I have to check each of those quotes for accuracy but the help in _finding_ those quotes in order to pass a stringent fact checking procedure is a huge help if I didn't scribble down the supporting quotes during my research phase. This is also, by the way, stricter than the fact checking process for most non-fiction publishing.
>SciShow are stricter than any academic journal I've published in
Now there's a testimonial. I look forward to browsing the source links with each video!
Feels like there might be an accuracy issue as well. Although that might make it perfectly suited to replacing whoever writes university press releases...
>I've experimented with every SOTA model since 2022
>The content is usually reasonably strong but the tone is always off and it never quite understands what it is a reader/viewer needs
A SOTA model fine-tuned with your choice of transcripts could probably get you most of the way there. There might be a customized, open-weight model already on Huggingface that meets your needs.
One question is whether the audience is discerning enough to care about the issues you're raising. This seems like it could be a variation of why the umpteenth Marvel movie beats out indie masterpieces at the box office. The audience for high quality becomes increasingly niche as the market's relatively low bar for quality is satisfied.
> as AI improves it ought to be able to replace me with the right workflow/context/prompting
The bitter lesson may very well come for us all...
I've attempted this with pdftomp3.com where you can listen to PDFs. It has an "AI Explanation" mode where the content of the PDF gets explained. Its like a NotbookLM podcast, but I was earlier :)
Currently I'm working on an app for that, because thats where I listen to the MP3s anyways.
I've been using the NotebookLM "podcasts" for this. I upload an arxiv pdf and use the Interactive Mode to have them talk about it, while I can pause them to ask clarifying questions. It's been surprisingly efficient for me to get an initial grasp on things I'm not familiar with, at times prompting me to then go on exploring interesting rabbit holes.
https://www.comunicarestiintifica.ro/en/category/scidigest/
I am trying to do this, trying to generalize a workflow that at least has helped me grok a few papers.
I'm 99% sure I already saw a product launch on HN for precisely this idea.
This should be connected to https://comsensei.com to get an available domain for each one of the ideas. It's all coming together :)
You're promoting your own website based on AI-generated things on a Hacker News post aimed at generating AI slop.
I've received nothing but nice messages about the site after posting it and people seem to be getting a kick out of it. I feel like this (if barely so) meets the bar to give it a pass perhaps, especially considering that my voice is worth as much as yours and the next person, so without upvotes, it will disappear, just how it's meant to be. Hope that helps a bit.
I mentioned it because you didn't disclose that you're responsible for it. If you had mentioned you're the owner, sure. Though it comes across as a disingenuous recommendation when folk put stock in such things being in good faith.
Also, the product type you promoted is something that I've seen replicated many times, more often very badly. Mentioning such a product on an article aimed at AI slop seemed somewhat ironic.
I'll take away the note to mention my involvement when posting a comment, there's no harm in doing that and if it helps someone I'm happy to try and do that.
good for him i hope he makes it
Where do we draw the line at self promotion (advertising) then?
If anything, this was a very short and quite contextual piece of text-only advertising. If all online advertising were like that, I won't have to run an ad blocker.
No need to do that. The provenance does not matter as long as the content is interesting, which is the case here.
This is the original hacker's ethos: put something out there for others to use, and let the people make their own opinion about the thing itself, not the authoritativeness of its source.
As long as it's not apparently being done by a bot, who cares?
This is effectively an advertising website.
This is not primarily an advertising site. See 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.
> It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time
Yes. I was responding specifically to this claim:
> This is effectively an advertising website.
Which remains untrue even if you're allowed to post your own stuff from time to time.
Most of the time, the top post of a Show HN is someone else talking about their own project or something off-topic from the Show HN.
Self-promotion on HN is constant.
> not apparently being done by a bot
LLMs will make this very hard to detect, very soon if not already.
For me, undisclosed self promotion puts a very bad taste in my mouth, to the point of coming off as bad faith. I dislike pretending you're just mentioning a cool service since you're effectively trying to trick me with false social proof.
If the post had said "I made xyz which could auto generate domains for these ideas using ai to fully close the slop gap" I wouldn't mind and might even appreciate the additional fun.
I like how I submit a request and it never loads.
SwearySkyscraper: A startup that develops novel and personalized swear words to help people better cope with pain, and integrates these swear words into a liquid damping system to stabilize skyscrapers during earthquakes.
Those silly architects never thought of this.
A building that requires human pain to stand? I guarantee you this is something at least a few architects have fantasized at length about. Like ours, it seems to be a profession that attracts outliers.
It is the opposite of the usual process, where workers on the field turn the architect plans into swear words.
Very cute but wish there was a filter for the flavor of the week ... I feel 60% of them will have LLM because of this bias. Last month would've been "powered by rust."
Lets not waste your $0.0005 and share this pretty decent idea with everyone: > Graphene Labs: A decentralized, open-source platform for creating and sharing interactive data visualizations and infrastructure diagrams that can be hosted locally and integrated with real-time data sources
Yeah but the weird AI twist there is it wants to try to use Rust of all languages as a DSL target. “Step 1: Pick the slowest compiler we can find…”
>Biomech Innovations: A wearable tech startup that uses genetic algorithms and AI to help zebrafish regenerate damaged organs, with a secrets management platform to securely store user data and a retro-futuristic assembly-level code editor for custom hardware designs.
Instant fun! Honestly, whatever tech I look for, I use built-in search engine of Hacker News first before googling it.
I miss that small period of AI where it excelled at making random shit in this vein( see https://x.com/dril_gpt2 and https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/top/?t=all [somewhat nsfw text]).
I'm not really sure why modern AI can't really do stuff like that anymore—I would guess a combination of being whacked with a crowbar to submit to humans (RLHF, but I'm not sure if it affects base models?), alignment stuff, and just being too smart.
Would love to see something like this with GPT-2 and how it compares
Ideascope: An AI-powered platform that generates personalized, innovative startup ideas by analyzing real-time trends and data from Hacker News and other tech communities
Yep, I think this may be possible :p
Amusing, and shockingly I wouldn't be surprised to read any of the ideas it has generated on HN tomorrow...
I was going to say, is this really any different than Y Combinator Slop?
YC could literally replace RFS with this and it wouldn't make a difference lol.
Can someone make this? 6. SignalPlay: A platform that transforms real-time WiFi signals into immersive gaming experiences, allowing players to interact with virtual environments based on their physical movements in the room.
If you are looking for an offline solution, one I came across recently as a python one-liner (requires faker)
Ha! Fun stuff. While some ideas are actually intriguing, many if its suggestions seem to be overly vague jumbles of common phrases and technology. "AI-powered databases to leverage personalized accessibility for team management..." Lol. Still fun though.
No worse than a lot of actual companies. I would be totally unsurprised to see that description about a real startup.
I love the comment that goes with the idea.
Sloppy idea, cynical comment, what a perfect representation of Hacker News.
Yes, I made a cynical comment, what did you expect? At least, it is mine, not AI generated :)
Very fun and some of these ideas are.. actually not terrible.
Next step: an AI that generates patents.
And another that triages them.
Disruptive 'infra' startup offering connectivity between two or more 3rd party endpoints.
Getting rate limit error - This request would exceed the rate limit for your organization
You should use something like openrouter or portkey or similar for managing fallbacks
wasn't expecting this to get so big so quick, fixing now
should be fixed, sorry about that! should alternate between a couple models now
thank kier for claude code
> openrouter
What pieces of openrouter are open source? I checked out their main github repo, and it hasn't had any contributions in months.
Every time I read OpenRouter I think FRR https://frrouting.org/
Wish they would have used a different name.
would be great if I could provide prompt/context, for example specifying domain and scope instead of getting random proposals.
i was not expecting people to like the startup ideas so much, but it's a pleasant surprise!
i thought it'd be cool to let people vote on ideas that HN Slop came up with, so now you'll see an "i'd invest" button & that will let others vote on the idea on a leaderboard
hope y'all like it, keep sending the feedback, I'm listening!
I'm surprised there is no leaderboard idea containing word 'vibe'
This is awesome, thanks :D
This is AI at its peak lol
Let's hope.
when I make snarky comments about AI Startup Ideas from Hacker News, dang spanks me. guess i need to make a webapp to do it for me instead :)
LOL, the idea it just pitched me was inspired by the HN Slop submission itself!
I've been waiting for that to happen!!! Did you save the idea?
> CosmicPlay: A startup that leverages GPU emulation and graph theory to build a next-generation video game engine that can render celestial bodies with nuclear propulsion and solar sailing capabilities, while generating AI-powered gameplay ideas from Hacker News posts
lmao brilliant
Perhaps another reminder that ideas per se are not very valuable.
Ideas are valuable. Code can be written by AIs (and thus less valuable).
Code itself is not very valuable as well. What has value is the combination of all those things and application of them to some real problem in a form of complete solution.
Of course they have value but the code and the application are just a logical consequence of the ideas, so that's where the real value lies.
Its relatively easy to generate "startup ideas", but even with a perfectly reasonable idea at hand the hardest thing is to bring it into life, overcoming every possible obstacle.
Uh-oh, sorry Josh for burning your anthropic credits, it was fun while it lasted!
it's all good, happy to support your ai slop needs
[dead]
[flagged]
this can't be a real HN commenter...
I wasn't serious, I was just saying it was too nice of a comment lmao
Got flagged for being too complimentary. QED :)