I'm working on SPHNX, a voice-based AI coding interviewer. While problem solving is crucial for passing interviews, in a live interview you are also getting tested for your communication, debugging, thinking on the spot, testing, code clarity, and other skills. You can't practice these on leetcode, but it's easy with SPHNX. I've just added rich feedback reports last week that turned out more helpful than I expected.

Right now it works as a mock interviewer for algorithmic (leetcode-style) problems, you can sign up for the waitlist here, I'll send you an invite right after:

https://sphnx.dev

It actually works pretty well, but we're having trouble getting users (some sign up but don't end up doing even a single interview?!).

We're thinking whether we could sell a version of this to companies to do their technical screens in, perhaps with problems that are more similar to the actual software engineering work (e.g. debug existing piece of code, write tests, and extend it).

We're generous with interview credits if you give us good feedback =)

Very cool idea. It would help to have testimonials. Also it looks kinda janky on Safari mobile

Marketing/distribution/adoption is maybe the hardest thing about creating a new product or service

I think you have the right idea about focusing on companies, because they can be recurrent users, whereas people preparing for interviews will only briefly use the product

I work at Coda and would love to hear more about your experience. We are focused on our tables and formulas and I am surprised to hear that you had such a bad time with them. Feel free to reach out at gleb at coda dot io.

The main thing is that the extension would still have to be able to run its JS on any page to be able to show the interactive sidebar. Not sure there is a way around that, unless chrome decides to implement the sidebar api that firefox has (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...), then the sidebar code doesn't have to run in the same context as the page.

Yeah, I will write it down on the website. As I mentioned below (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28700703), I do not store the URLs that you go to (though of course you have to trust me on that), and as all the processing is done on the server, that URL doesn't get sent to any external APIs (though if I go through with adding reddit I might need to send it to the reddit API).

I do collect some telemetry statistics (right now the number of times you have seen the sidebar + the number of times you clicked/scrolled/closed it), aggregated hourly.

To use it as a button, you can try the bookmarklet: https://ampie.app/url-context

Would love to hear about your experience if you do use it!

Have you thought about a separate extension that just has a toolbar button that is mostly in a dull inactive state with a grayscale badge, but when there's enough discussion on a page, it both lights up and has an obnoxiously colorful number?

Even though I never mess with it, I find I'm generally aware when there's a badge on my adblocker. I believe that'd be enough to remind people to click it. The heuristics should be strict enough not to light up all the time, or maybe even support user-defined filters for advanced users.

After a while it's possible they'll subconsciously think about Ampie — and the dull badge will still convey "yeah, there's some discussion, check it out."

ps. I say separate extension because I'd be wary of giving it access to all sites and data, which I guess would be required if that was only a setting?

You can use it as a bookmarklet instead if you go to https://ampie.app/url-context!

Thanks! My intent definitely was to make it a little bit chaotic =) I will try to figure out how to make it a bit easier to follow, heard some advice to space it out a bit possibly.

I think padding and font size would do a lot.

Actually, ampie also has a bookmarklet that you can add at https://ampie.app/url-context!

But as I said elsewhere, in my experience I rarely use it myself since that requires a bit of effort to click and with an unknown reward it rarely seems worth the click.

You need to sign up to prevent the api abuse.

Thanks for the feedback, disabling twitter is in the plans! Which dark mode extensions are you using?

Ampie is written in clojurescript as well! https://github.com/posobin/ampie

I have actually seen your extension when I was trying to figure out how to get started with making one in cljs. I've used shadow-cljs though instead of figwheel.