Hacker News: Stromgren

New comment by Stromgren in "One Brain to Query: Wiring a 60-Person Company into a Single Slack Bot"

Stromgren — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:33:05 +0000

I run a SaaS business on the side of my job and have been for 15 years. There’s a million questions I’ve never had the time to dig into although the data was there. Retention cohorts, free to paid tier conversions, subscription upgrades/downgrades and so much more. Just this week, I decided to just let an agent have access through psql and go nuts, writing all analysis to markdown files. Reading through it, there’s a few things it misunderstood and as a result, some of the analysis was flawed, but all in all I’m honestly mindblown. It would have taken me months to write queries and even just coming up with frameworks of how to think about these metrics.

New comment by Stromgren in "The Claude Code Source Leak: fake tools, frustration regexes, undercover mode"

Stromgren — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 20:43:19 +0000

That’s how I’d want it to be honestly. LLMs are tools and I’d hope we’re going to keep the people using them responsible. Just like any other tools we use.

New comment by Stromgren in "White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit"

Stromgren — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 09:46:19 +0000

I’ve been involved in building a system that reads structured data from a special form of contracts from a specific industry. Prices, clauses, pick up, delivery, etc. A couple hundred datapoints per contract. We had many discussions around how to present and sell an imperfect system. The thing is, the potential customers are today transcribing the contracts manually and we quickly realized that people make a ton of mistakes doing that. It became obvious when we were working on assertion datasets ourself. It’s not a perfect system and you have to consider how you use the data (aggregating for price indexing for instance), but we’re actually doing better than what people are achieving when they have to transcribe data for hours a day.

New comment by Stromgren in "Mistral AI Releases Forge"

Stromgren — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 07:31:05 +0000

Agreed. I’ve used their platform to train smaller, specialized models. Something I could have done in Codelab or some other tool, but their platform allows me to just upload a training set and as soon as it finishes I have a hosted model available at an endpoint. It obviously has some constraints compared to running the training yourself, but it also opens up the opportunity to way more people.

New comment by Stromgren in "Iran War Cost Tracker"

Stromgren — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 20:07:46 +0000

I saw the cost of the three downed planes somewhere else and thought the price was huge. Now I see that it’s comparable to “First Tomahawk salvo”.

New comment by Stromgren in "Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter"

Stromgren — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 19:12:58 +0000

Yea it wasn’t meant as a counter argument either.

To be honest I haven’t even looked at competitors for some years. I guess one drawback of using third-parties for such a big part of the responsibilities is the lock in. The benefits of switching would have to be rather big for me to put in the effort.

New comment by Stromgren in "Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter"

Stromgren — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 18:36:32 +0000

I find Stripes fees excessive too, but I don’t think I’ll ever switch. I’ve been running a small SaaS product on the side of other work for >15 years and if it taught me one thing, it’s that I need to reduce the things I have to maintain, reduce manual work, reduce the things that can go wrong. There’s nothing worse than having to fix a bug in a codebase you haven’t touched for a year and possibly in a feature you haven’t touched in many years. I simply love that Stripe handles not just the payment, but the payment application, the subscription billing, the price settings, the exports for bookkeeping. I’ve had a few instances where my site was used fraudulently to check stolen credit cards and it was quickly flagged and I could resolve it with Stripe. I’m sure someone can mention alternatives and I’m sure that I could build something that would work myself, but they keep a big part of what it takes to run the business out of my mind and I’m willing to pay for that.

New comment by Stromgren in "Writing code is cheap now"

Stromgren — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 16:50:13 +0000

I very much appreciate this take. I will say though that I’ve had experience myself where using coding agents lead me to what I’d consider (in your terminology) a better mapping between information and code. Not because the agent was able to do things better than myself, but because, as my project grew and I got wiser on how to best map the information, it was incredibly fast for me to change the code in the right direction and do refactorings that I otherwise might not have gotten around to.

New comment by Stromgren in "Software 3.1? – AI Functions"

Stromgren — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 16:32:00 +0000

I use Tidewave as my coding agent and it’s able to execute code in the runtime. I believe it’s using Code.eval_string/3, but you should be able to check the implementation. It’s the project_eval tool.

In my experience it’s a huge leap in terms of the agent being able to test and debug functionality. It’ll often write small code snippets to test that individual functions work as expected.

New comment by Stromgren in "Nvidia and OpenAI abandon unfinished $100B deal in favour of $30B investment"

Stromgren — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 19:00:15 +0000

It depends where I look. Among colleagues and tech-native friends, I feel like there’s healthy skepticism as well as the excitement about new tech. On the other hand, all the investment podcasts that I’ve been following for years are nothing but ignorant AI hype and reciting articles about how all the jobs are about to disappear. I guess the people who doesn’t make firsthand experiences are not leaving the hype yet.

New comment by Stromgren in "AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox"

Stromgren — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 08:34:50 +0000

And if you make someone 3x faster at producing a report that 100 people has to read, but it now takes 10% longer to read and understand, you’ve lost overall value.

A better approach to determining gender from a first name

Stromgren — Tue, 01 Oct 2013 09:23:01 +0000

Article URL: http://genderize.io

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6475062

Points: 27

# Comments: 60

New comment by Stromgren in " My approach to guessing a gender from a first name."

Stromgren — Thu, 15 Aug 2013 19:29:46 +0000

Hey. thanks! The API doesn't actually use name sets like that. Though that was my first approach. I changed it to use lists of profiles from social networks. So when a name is requested it looks up every profile with that name and counts the number of times each gender is represented. If you use any localization parameters it will of course only look up profiles associated with the particular country or language. I quickly realized with the initial approach that my lists would never be sufficient, since most countries allow for almost any name to be given and when combining lists from the whole world, a lot of names would end up as unisex, that's why i went for a probability factor instead. Also i'm hoping that by using social profiles, it might one day be able to tell the gender of Superman or Catwoman and things like that. People can after all call themselves what they want on the internet.

I've actually thought about adding like a baseline of names from different lists though, to backup the names that are not yet represented in the dataset. Do you have a link to the names you are mentioning? Could be interesting.

New comment by Stromgren in " My approach to guessing a gender from a first name."

Stromgren — Thu, 15 Aug 2013 17:59:19 +0000

Hey Dillon. It only found one match for "Dillon" in the dataset, which was a male. If Dillon is gender neutral the probability will probably change into some decimal when the dataset grows.

New comment by Stromgren in " My approach to guessing a gender from a first name."

Stromgren — Thu, 15 Aug 2013 17:21:23 +0000

Thanks a lot. I'll look into this. Regarding missing names. I'm adding around 10.000 profiles a day to the dataset. So it get's better by the minute :) Not that huge a dataset yet.

My approach to guessing a gender from a first name.

Stromgren — Thu, 15 Aug 2013 16:41:09 +0000

Hi! A short time ago, i decided to try and build an API that would try to guess the gender of a first name. I thought this might be useful for segmenting user lists for campaigning, analytics or similar. My first approach was to use a dataset of approved names from a few European countries. This was in the believe that most countries had lists like this (Which they don't) and i planned to add them as i went along. I got wiser and the first feedback i got also told me that the API should be able to do probabilistic guesses and if possible, also offer some sort of localization filter to achieve more accurate guesses. I decided to take an approach of using large, growing datasets of user profiles from social networks. Each entry containing a first name, a gender, a country_id and language_id. At last, i exposed this datamodel through http://genderize.io It responds in JSON. Simple example: http://api.genderize.io?name=robin I am now looking to get some feedback on my new approach. What do you think of this way of doing guesses. What do you think of the API? Any feedback is welcome. The API is completely free by the way.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6219028

Points: 13

# Comments: 12

New comment by Stromgren in "Genderize.io determines the gender of a first name"

Stromgren — Sun, 11 Aug 2013 14:55:40 +0000

Hey Ryan

I think most of these names will result in prober responses now.

New comment by Stromgren in "Genderize.io determines the gender of a first name"

Stromgren — Sun, 11 Aug 2013 14:49:01 +0000

A "confidence level" will now be recieved :)

New comment by Stromgren in "Genderize.io determines the gender of a first name"

Stromgren — Sun, 11 Aug 2013 14:38:23 +0000

Hello.

I'm the author of genderize.io. At the time of your comments i was slowly getting this API up and running. A lot of sudden traffic made that a little hard :)

At the time, i was utilizing a few lists of officially approved names from a few European countries. We have those in Denmark, where i'm from, among a few other countries. This had led me to believe that most countries had lists like this and i was planning to add them as i went along.

I since change my approach, moving from the lists to large datasets of user profiles from social networks. This has given me the chance to update the API, adding probabilistic guesses along with the ability to add localization based filters.

My datasets are not that huge yet, but they're constantly growing.

Just wanted to say thanks for all the feedback i found in here and give a heads up on the update :)