Hacker News: serjester

New comment by serjester in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2026)"

serjester — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 16:59:44 +0000

Akur8 | AI Engineer | NYC (Hybrid) | Full-time

Akur8 builds the OS for insurance pricing - our SaaS platform helps 320+ insurers worldwide model risk up to 10x faster using transparent ML.

We're hiring an AI Engineer to join our team. We're building systems that transform tens of millions of messy, unstructured regulatory documents into actionable intelligence. If evals, agentic fine-tuning, and agent orchestration are the problems that light you up - not just things you've read about but things you actually have opinions on - we'd love to talk.

The team is small and talent-dense. You'll ship to production, talk to real customers, and have genuine ownership over what you build.

Come join us at https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/akur8. Mention in your application that you saw our post on HN.

New comment by serjester in "Mercury 2: Fast reasoning LLM powered by diffusion"

serjester — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 02:53:29 +0000

There's a potentially amazing use case here around parsing PDFs to markdown. It seems like a task with insane volume requirements, low budget, and the kind of thing that doesn't benefit much from autoregression. Would be very curious if your team has explored this.

New comment by serjester in "Claude is a space to think"

serjester — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 19:23:35 +0000

The vast majority of people don't need smarter models and aren't willing to pay for a subscription. There's an argument to be made that ads on free users will subsidize the power users that demand frontier intelligence - done well this could increase OpenAI's revenue by an order of magnitude.

This is going to be tough to compete against - Anthropic would need to go stratospheric with their (low margin) enterprise revenue.

New comment by serjester in "Ask HN: How to do a Personal Cybersecurity audit"

serjester — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 01:19:22 +0000

Karpathy had an amazing tweet about this if you’re interested in a deep dive.

[1]https://x.com/karpathy/status/1902046003567718810

New comment by serjester in "Launch HN: Pulse (YC S24) – Production-grade unstructured document extraction"

serjester — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 18:46:26 +0000

This is a hand wavy article that dismisses away VLMs without acknowledging the real world performance everyone is seeing. I think it’d be far more useful if you published an eval.

New comment by serjester in "Launch HN: Mentat (YC F24) – Controlling LLMs with Runtime Intervention"

serjester — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 01:33:42 +0000

Congrats on the launch - you're value-add is quite confusing as someone that's at the applied AI layer. This comes off as more of a research project than a business. You're going to need an incredibly compelling sales pitch for me to send my data to an unknown vendor to fix a problem that might be obviated by the next model release (or just stronger evals with prompt engineering). Best of luck.

New comment by serjester in "Ty – A fast Python type checker, written in Rust"

serjester — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 23:22:50 +0000

I'm not sure if they're gearing up for an announcement, but about 9 days ago they dropped the preview warning from their README. I'm assuming they're still working through final housekeeping items before formally announcing it.

[1] https://github.com/astral-sh/ty/commit/7a6b79d37e165f2e73189...

New comment by serjester in "Python is not a great language for data science"

serjester — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 18:32:17 +0000

Seems like their critique boils down to two areas - pandas limitations and fewer built ins to lean on.

Personally I've found polars has solved most of the "ugly" problems that I had with pandas. It's way faster, has an ergonomic API, seamless pandas interop and amazing support for custom extensions. We have to keep in mind Pandas is almost 20 years old now.

I will agree that Shiny is an amazing package, but I would argue it's less important now that LLMs will write most of your code.

New comment by serjester in "Build vs. Buy: What This Week's Outages Should Teach You"

serjester — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 01:20:01 +0000

If cloudflare goes down, you can blame them. If your hand rolled solution fails when cloudflare exists, you’re going to have a tough pitch to leadership why you’re in charge of the technical roadmap. Choose your battles, and this is not a hill worth dying on.

New comment by serjester in "Gemini 3"

serjester — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 17:02:25 +0000

It's disappointing there's no flash / lite version - this is where Google has excelled up to this point.

New comment by serjester in "Honda: 2 years of ml vs 1 month of prompting - heres what we learned"

serjester — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 17:38:03 +0000

As someone that also worked at a large automakers, I think you’re making large, unfounded assumptions.

Warranty data flows up from the technicians - good luck getting any auto technician to properly tag data. Their job is to fix a specific customer’s problem, not identify systematic issues.

There’s a million things that make the data inherently messy. For example, a technician might replace 5 parts before they finally identify the root cause.

Therefore, you need some sort of department to sit between millions of raw claims and engineering. I would be curious what kind of alternative you have in mind?

New comment by serjester in "Honda: 2 years of ml vs 1 month of prompting - heres what we learned"

serjester — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 14:54:43 +0000

Seems like a very natural fit for fine tuning - would have loved to see more on the LLM side.

New comment by serjester in "2 Years of ML vs. 1 Month of Prompting"

serjester — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 15:58:58 +0000

Did you try fine tuning the LLMs?

New comment by serjester in "Benchmarking the Most Reliable Document Parsing API"

serjester — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 18:58:24 +0000

This is just a company advertisement, not even one that’s well done. They didn’t benchmark any of the real leaders in the space (reducto, extend, etc) and left Gemini out of the first two tests, presumably because it was the best performer (while also being multiple orders of magnitude cheaper).

New comment by serjester in "Deepnote, a Jupyter alternative, is going open source"

serjester — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 18:57:05 +0000

A lot of the comments on here are too pessimistic. Deepnote has had the single best jupyter interface for years now - unfortunately locked behind a cloud subscription though. Jupyter itself has been stagnant for far too long, and it's much appreciated there's more options coming online that have a modern level of polish.

Marimo is great, but it's good to have competition in the space (especially when both projects are still owned and maintained by VC backed companies).

New comment by serjester in "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger Version of Uber H3 in Rust"

serjester — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 22:50:46 +0000

One of the big ones that hasn't been mentioned is all of a hexagon's neighbors are equidistant. As a result, h3 is a better fit for flow modeling - stuff like telematics. This has some nice properties for ML too.

You can see one of my jupyter notebooks that dives deep into this with h3 here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/18jIVEbE_1QbwTbHdMqj0AVqguf2...

New comment by serjester in "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger Version of Uber H3 in Rust"

serjester — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 19:03:14 +0000

H3o is an awesome piece of work. I created polars bindings for it(another reason I love polars) and last time I benchmarked it, it had 5X better performance than even duckdb’s C++ implementation.

https://github.com/Filimoa/polars-h3

New comment by serjester in "OpenAI x Broadcom [video]"

serjester — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 19:57:43 +0000

I feel like interviews with Sam always leave you underwhelmed - OpenAI needs more compute, he’s excited AI will accelerate science, and some sort of subtle hint he doesn’t care about copyright holders, while saying the exact opposite.

Would have loved to see a deeper explanation of how they will make something cost competitive with the Nvidia / AMD and where Broadcom is helping.

New comment by serjester in "Launch HN: Extend (YC W23) – Turn your messiest documents into data"

serjester — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 19:13:00 +0000

This is the most confusing pricing page I’ve ever seen - different options have different credit usage and different cost per credits? How many degrees of freedom do you real need to represent API cost.

New comment by serjester in "Launch HN: LlamaFarm (YC W22) – Open-source framework for distributed AI"

serjester — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 19:15:56 +0000

Congrats on the launch. YC 2022? I'm assuming this was a pivot - what lead to it and how do you guys plan on making money long term?