Ask HN: What tasks cost money through a UI but are free in code?

1 points by instagraham 9 days ago | 3 comments

As someone who only recently started getting their feet wet thanks to vibe coding, I am kind of amazed at all the free tools out there.

An example: ffmpeg (which I've used for a long time) is a classic case of "if you can figure it out, it's free; if you can't, I can sell you a shovel" with virtually every video downloader tool out there using it. Users who don't know about it must either rely on the shady tier of online video downloaders or pay for some of the better ones. I used to think there was a hard-coded limit to downloading files in 4K until I realised yt-dlp and ffmpeg existed.

Another example: TIL the Bluesky Jetstream protocol is completely free, which is amazing to me because of all the data and inference you can get from it (similar APIs, albeit from much larger social datasets like Google Maps and X, are not free.

It seems that the entry barrier to a lot of useful tools over the last two decades has been a minimal ability to code. Since that barrier has now dropped, would you share the best things out there for those of us willing to experiment with code, data or just out of curiosity?

OFC I'm not against paying a developer for adding convenience for us noobs. But I would like to better understand the free-tier world because it does change some of my notions about economics in this space.

dtagames 9 days ago |

To paraphrase Ansel Adams (who was speaking of cameras), "There is no one best tool for the job, only the best tool for the kind of thing you're trying to make."

Another way of saying it is that the world of software is so vast, from DIY homegrown to open source libraries to closed commercial apps that there isn't one "best" of any of it, or even 10 best.

I'd say your explorations will take you the furthest if you focus on a problem domain, learn all about it that you can, then find out what software exists in that problem space and whether or not the world would benefit from something new from you in that area.

instagraham 9 days ago | |

I get your gist, but I'm not looking at this as a developer but as a journalist. The reason I specified tasks is it broadens the scope to "What I can use" from "What I must pay for".

For example, most people - and especially in my field where many journalists have old laptops - assume you could never run AI models yourself. Finding out Google Colab exists and has a liberal free tier was kinda crazy.

Another: the most privacy-safe way to transcribe interviews would be Whisper on-device, but the second best might be Whisper in a Colab doc. The uploaded files are deleted after each session and you can terminate the runtime and start a new one. AFAIK the data is relatively safer than other approaches (I prefer running transcription locally myself.) It only takes a line of code and a code block to get Whisper running, but few do this and for them, the space after that - Turboscribe, Notebook, etc - relies on compromising your data in some way or the other.

dtagames 9 days ago | | |

You've hit on it. Your own needs and experiences as a journalist are quite different from other users. It's very likely that good tooling for that audience is non-existent, and that might be worth writing or writing about.