Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by bfeist 25 days ago
Nice to see this here. I’m the developer who made this. The idea for this started when I was chatting with co-creator, Dave Charney and we asked, “I wonder if all the questions kids could ask of astronauts have already been asked.”

If you select “About this project”, there are technical details on how we did it.

6 comments

Awesome project, I just read the "About this project" section and extremely impressed! This is one of those projects I love as an adult and will be using, but I really wish I could have had this when I was a kid. Killer job!
Yes, I was going to guess semantic embedding from playing around and seeing the search responses. Thank you for "About this project".

I'd love to extract just the foreign language from Pimsleur foreign language lessons, for faster review before trips. Your pipeline has many elements in common for what would be required.

I really really really love the implementation here, super fast search, amazing filtering and showcasing the video, definitely will address the curiosity of young (and old like myself) .

Congratulations on the amazing delivery. Truly great solution

This is fun. The question -> video flow could be so useful for many other things.
YouTube PM if you are seeing, this is your "AI project".

Instead of just filtering user asked questions. We could probably just use an LLM to find interesting sections in video which has answer to a particular question.

What is PM?

I am hoping it is someone elses AI project lol.

Product Manager
Thanks for making this..I was trying to accurately find timestamps in a video from a transcript sometime back, was not aware that this is called "phoneme alignment" and whisperx already solves this !
One thing occurs to me about the debate between apps and web-apps. This site is really cool, but it also seems likely to be one of the endless semi-hobby sites that you check it out again after a few years and it's 404. The one thing nice about 'offline' apps is that they're always there. It'd be amazing to have a downloadable version of this. It seems it should be doable, excepting bandwidth costs if it takes off!
Unfortunately it’s almost a TB of video. The project is opensource so you could run the pipeline to grab all the videos yourself. https://github.com/bfeist/ask-an-astronaut