justswim

It looks like it actually got the wrong letters there, no?

Hi HN,

In the days since I've launched Mixfont, an AI font generator, I've gotten a good amount of feedback that's been skeptical of the quality of AI-generated fonts. I've also seen some articles shared discussing how high quality AI-generated fonts are still 3-4 years away.

I wanted to challenge these claims as I personally believe that the raster->vector font generation pipeline that's being used in Mixfont today is already good enough for the vast majority of use cases for decorative, display, stylized, etc fonts. While I think that creating a legendary variable font is not quite possible, I do feel that for most projects using AI-generated fonts is already high quality enough for many designers.

To prove out this hypothesis I've put together an AI Font Quiz, where some of these fonts are licensed from real font foundries, while others in this quiz are 100% generated with AI using the Mixfont model. You can try typing and testing out all of the fonts, and when you're ready you can select whether you think the font is AI-generated or human-made.

I would love to get your take on whether or not you can tell the difference between the AI-generated vs human-made fonts. I think that if AI-generated fonts are high enough quality, things will change quickly for the font industry in general.

I would appreciate your feedback and would love to hear what you score! Eric

I can try to add some alternative login methods on the playground. In the meantime you can run the inference stack that's available on Github! Thanks for checking it out.

Kapwing | San Francisco (SF), California (CA) | Onsite | https://www.kapwing.com We're a series A stage company building an in-browser, collaborative video editor (think Figma for video). We think content creation should be easier, accessible, and more collaborative.

We're looking for full-stack engineers that are interested in building a polished, consumer facing product that enables many content creation use cases. This job consists of everything from building the frontend tools to making sure our backend is scalable and reliable.

We're backed by top investors including CRV, KPCB, Shasta, Village Global. We have a culture of doing a lot of random things to grow our company and we write a lot about our startup journey on our blog: https://www.kapwing.com/blog.

I'm a co-founder, feel free to reach out directly if you're interested: eric@kapwing.com; or check out our open roles at https://www.kapwing.com/careers

HI HN,

I've gotten pretty worried about the developments in video deepfakes, and I wanted to raise some awareness about what's possible with fake videos today. I put together this quiz around real vs fake videos and I've been sharing it to see how well folks do. It's hard for me to tell how easy it is to complete it, given that I was the one who made the quiz, but I think the tech has come a long way and it's pretty scary how good it'll get. Especially in the context of the upcoming elections. Would love to get your thoughts!

One of the things that we did at Kapwing (https://www.kapwing.com) was manually edit videos using our own platform and sharing these videos with bloggers to try to convince them to use Kapwing. We could create a relevant video from an article that they wrote, and then share them the link to the project so that they could edit it directly with our tool.

Another random thing we did was try to make chalk posters on the streets of SF. We chalked our logo out in front of the 4th and King Caltrain station so that tech people would see it when coming out of the station. Unfortunately, that only worked for a day though, because the SF crews are very good at powerwashing the sidewalks.

Ahh, that's bad grammar - I can fix that. Thanks for the catch.

That's good point ... I just figured it was a little bit more of an inclusive term since it does handle stitching the frames together. But agreed that it could be more clear.

Hi Hacker News!

There was a recent post on Show (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28120247) for a collab notebook that allowed anyone to create AI art. We took that code and made a hosted version that makes it easy to get a video with just a query - no setup or coding experience necessary. Just click to the page and you’ll be able to create new art for free.

The generator is based off of the notebooks (https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1n_xrgKDlGQcCF6O-eL3...) written by Hillel Wayne (https://www.hillelwayne.com/) and Katherine Crowson.

You just type a query and you’ll get both an image and a video that the gan will generate. Because it’s seeded randomly each time, no two videos will ever be the same even with the same query.

Would love to get your feedback or see what you make!

Kapwing | San Francisco (SF), California (CA) | Onsite | https://www.kapwing.com

We're a series A stage company building an in-browser, collaborative video editor (think Figma for video). We think content creation should be easier, accessible, and more collaborative.

We're looking for full-stack engineers that are interested in building a polished, consumer facing product that enables many content creation use cases. This job consists of everything from building the frontend tools to making sure our backend is scalable and reliable.

We're backed by top investors including CRV, KPCB, Shasta, Village Global. We have a culture of doing a lot of random things to grow our company and we write a lot about our startup journey on our blog: https://www.kapwing.com/blog.

I'm a co-founder and CTO, feel free to reach out directly if you're interested: eric@kapwing.com; or check out our open roles at https://www.kapwing.com/jobs

Kapwing | San Francisco (SF), California (CA) | Onsite | https://www.kapwing.com

We're a series A stage company building next-gen creative tools (think Google Docs for images and video). We think content creation should be easier, accessible, and more collaborative.

We're looking for full-stack engineers that are interested in building a polished, consumer facing product that enables many content creation use cases. This job consists of everything from building the frontend tools to making sure our backend is scalable and reliable.

We're backed by top investors including CRV, KPCB, Shasta, Village Global. We have a culture of doing a lot of random things to grow our company and we write a lot about our startup journey on our blog: https://www.kapwing.com/blog.

I'm a co-founder and CTO, feel free to reach out directly if you're interested: eric@kapwing.com; or check out our open roles at https://www.kapwing.com/jobs

Kapwing | San Francisco (SF), California (CA) | Onsite | https://www.kapwing.com We're a series A stage company building next-gen creative tools (think Google Docs for images and video). We think content creation should be easier, accessible, and more collaborative.

We're looking for full-stack engineers that are interested in building a polished, consumer facing product that enables many content creation use cases. This job consists of everything from building the frontend tools to making sure our backend is scalable and reliable.

We're backed by top investors including CRV, KPCB, Shasta, Village Global, and we have 35k+ videos made on our site every day. We have a culture of doing a lot of random things to grow our company and we write a lot about our startup journey on our blog: https://www.kapwing.com/blog.

I'm a co-founder and CTO, feel free to reach out directly if you're interested: eric@kapwing.com.

Kapwing | San Francisco (SF), California (CA) | Onsite | https://www.kapwing.com

We're a seed stage company building next-gen creative tools (think Google Docs for images and video). We think content creation should be easier, accessible, and more collaborative.

We're looking for full-stack engineers that are interested in building a polished, consumer facing product that enables many content creation use cases. This job consists of everything from building the frontend tools to making sure our backend is scalable and reliable.

We're backed by top investors including KPCB, Shasta, Village Global, and we have 25k+ videos made on our site every day. We have a culture of doing a lot of random things to grow our company and we write a lot about our startup journey on our blog: https://www.kapwing.com/blog.

I'm a co-founder and CTO, feel free to reach out directly if you're interested: eric@kapwing.com.

One of the biggest problems that I've faced in my life has been getting admitted to a top university. At some top schools, the acceptance rate can be as low as 4 or 5% of applicants. It's way too competitive. So, I set out to solve this pain point and the result is Sidedoor.

Sidedoor partners with coaches at the nation's top university to guarantee your admission at colleges including Yale, USC, and many more.

In just a few clicks, you'll be able to reserve a spot at the school of your choice. No legacy status required. And don't worry, you don't need to be athletic - just wealthy!

Hope you enjoy the service, and please let me know your thoughts!

Hey HN, Rick Roller is a Chrome Extension that will randomly rick roll the user.

I wanted to pull a fun and harmless prank on some of the officemates who are always leaving their computers unlocked when they leave their desk, especially for April Fools' Day. So I put together a quick extension for Rick Rolling them :) The results have been pretty great so far. Hope you like it!

Yeah definitely (I'm Eric, a co-founder at Kapwing). Julia and I have so many advantages it's crazy. We are really lucky to start out with. I appreciate your feedback and hope you know that we often think about how we can be more cognisant and responsible with who we are.

I'm Eric, the other cofounder at Kapwing! Our product vision for now is an online video editor (think iMovie in the browser).

We're definitely not a pre-planned acqui-hire play haha. We're completely bootstrapped and just trying to build a website that can pay our bills and make money so we don't have to go back to the corporate grind. We would love to build a reputation for the product but it's hard and takes time. For now, we just wanted to share about our startup experiences along the way!

The video editor itself might not be too relevant for the HN community but I think our startup learning lessons definitely can be.

For anyone looking for the documentation it seems you can find it here: https://airship.readme.io/v1.0/docs

As the CTO of a growing website (https://www.kapwing.com) we have been looking for a tool to make it easier to test certain features / changes on a smaller scale. I signed up reluctantly because I am curious about how your SDK works. But I was disappointed that I wasn't able to find any examples or info on the amount of work it would take to integrate.

My initial questions are: - Will this work with frontend React code? - Do I need to create separate database hooks? - Can I create UI experiments without writing code? - Does it integrate with Stripe if we want to test conversions?

I'm the CTO at Kapwing (https://www.kapwing.com), where we use MoviePy for all of our products (all of which help users edit video online). Sometimes the documentation has been enigmatic but overall the library has made it really easy to create a video processing backend without having to dive deeply into combining ImageMagick and FFMPEG at a low level.

Funny enough, MoviePy makes it so easy to edit videos that we also use it to edit images. But the way it works is when a user uploads an image, we convert the image into a video format, edit it with MoviePy, then convert it back into an image. A little inefficient, but it works better for us than writing a completely different branch of code to handle images.

Having worked with MoviePy for a while my main ideas for improvement would be: 1) Create a callback for video editing progress so that it could be outputted to the frontend, etc, 2) Make predefined transitions - currently transitions need to be manually calculated, would be nice to have smarter presets to make it easier to create something like a slideshow, 3) improve threading over multiple CPUs - not sure how possible it would be for the library itself to handle this but from our initial tests ffmpeg by itself seems to handle threading more effectively

Not quite yet, but we're looking into it. Any reason why you prefer having the .srt file? Is it helpful for uploading to other sites?

It's free to use but we add a watermark. It costs $2 to remove the watermark for a single video, $10 for a monthly subscription for unlimited videos without watermarks. But actually you can also remove the watermark for free too. We wrote an interesting post about that here: https://www.kapwing.com/blog/skipping-our-paywall-with-an-ap...

As for the CPU usage - it is quite intensive so we set up a Linode instance dedicated to processing the videos. It costs us $80 a month, but Linode throttles it automatically. That's nice because if a lot of videos are being created, it just means that they get created slower for everyone. But they don't fail.

Yes, we primarily rely on MoviePy (https://github.com/Zulko/moviepy/) to do the heavy lifting on the actual native video editing part of it. It's an awesome library!

dotSUB is really cool, but it doesn't burn the subtitles directly into the video. This is really important for content creators on social media, because they don't get to control the player through which the video is watched. So this is an important differentiator for Kapwing!

joshshifman is right. On the Facebook and Instagram mobile apps, where tons of videos are consumed today, videos play without the sound turned on, and there's no way for creators to have the captions show up without burning them directly into the videos. There's a lot of research (https://www.facebook.com/business/news/updated-features-for-...) that shows that subtitled videos perform better for marketers and content creators.

It is hard to do in simple software like iMovie. The timeline UI makes it difficult to enter text and set the timings in an easy way. We like the idea of being able to subtitle a video without having to download any software too.

So yes, there are alternatives, but we believe that our product is much easier to use.

Unfortunately not right now, but we are working on it. You can however change the font color! Thanks for checking it out.

Hi everyone! I'm Eric, one of the developers behind this. Adding subtitles to videos has been a really hard problem so we wanted to make a simple web tool for it. The other tools online only let you create an srt file or just overlay subtitles. But for content on social media, it's really important to burn the captions directly into the video. So that's what this tool is for! Thanks for checking it out!

https://www.mixfont.com

Ranks well for "font generator" a fairly high traffic query. Almost zero cost but unfortunately does not make money right now either. eric@mixfont.com

So crazy, my palms are sweaty just thinking about it