Non-Euclidean Doom: what happens to a game when pi is not 3.14159 (2022) [video]
392 by robin_reala | 110 comments on Hacker News.
ads
New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: A web debugger an ex-Cloudflare team has been working on for 4 years
Show HN: A web debugger an ex-Cloudflare team has been working on for 4 years
747 by thedg | 183 comments on Hacker News.
Hey HN, I wanted to show you a product a small team and I have been working on for 4 years. https://jam.dev It’s called Jam and it prevents product managers (like I used to be) from being able to create vague and un-reproducible bug tickets (like I used to create). It’s actually really hard as a non-engineer to file useful bug tickets for engineers. Like, sometimes I thought I included a screenshot, but the important information the engineer needed was what was actually right outside the boundary of the screenshot I took. Or I'd write that something "didn't work" but the engineer wasn't sure if I meant that it returned an error or if it was unresponsive. So the engineer would be frustrated, I would be frustrated, and fixing stuff would slow to a halt while we went back and forth to clarify how to repro the issue over async Jira comments. It’s actually pretty crazy that while so much has changed in how we develop software (heck, we have types in javascript now*), the way we capture and report bugs is just as manual and lossy as it was in the 1990’s. We can run assembly in the browser but there’s still no tooling to help a non-engineer show a bug to an engineer productively. So that’s what Jam is. Dev tools + video in a link. It’s like a shareable HAR file synced to a video recording of the session. And besides video, you can use it to share an instant replay of a bug that just happened — basically a 30 second playback of the DOM as a video. We’ve spent a lot of time adding in a ton of niceties, like Jam writes automatic repro steps for you, and Jam’s dev tools use the same keyboard shortcuts you’re used to in Chrome dev tools, and our team’s personal favorite: Jam parses GraphQL responses and pulls out mutation names and errors (which is important because GraphQL uses one endpoint for all requests and always returns a 200, meaning you usually have to sift through every GraphQL request when debugging to find the one you’re looking for) We’re now 2 years in to the product being live and people have used Jam to fix more than 2 million bugs - which makes me so happy - but there’s still a ton to do. I wanted to open up for discussion here and get your feedback and opinions how can we make it even more valuable for you debugging? The worst part of the engineering job is debugging and not even being able to repro the issue, it’s not even really engineering, it’s just a communication gap, one that we should be able to solve with tools. So yeah excited to get your feedback and hear your thoughts how we can make debugging just a little less frustrating. (Jam is free to use forever — there is a paid tier for features real companies would need, but we’re keeping a large free plan forever. We learned to build products at Cloudflare and free tier is in our ethos, both my co-founder and I and about half the team is ex-Cloudflare) and what we loved there is how much great feedback we’d get because the product was mostly free to use. We definitely want to keep that going at Jam.) By the way, we’re hiring engineers and if this is a problem that excites you, we’d love to chat: jam.dev/careers
747 by thedg | 183 comments on Hacker News.
Hey HN, I wanted to show you a product a small team and I have been working on for 4 years. https://jam.dev It’s called Jam and it prevents product managers (like I used to be) from being able to create vague and un-reproducible bug tickets (like I used to create). It’s actually really hard as a non-engineer to file useful bug tickets for engineers. Like, sometimes I thought I included a screenshot, but the important information the engineer needed was what was actually right outside the boundary of the screenshot I took. Or I'd write that something "didn't work" but the engineer wasn't sure if I meant that it returned an error or if it was unresponsive. So the engineer would be frustrated, I would be frustrated, and fixing stuff would slow to a halt while we went back and forth to clarify how to repro the issue over async Jira comments. It’s actually pretty crazy that while so much has changed in how we develop software (heck, we have types in javascript now*), the way we capture and report bugs is just as manual and lossy as it was in the 1990’s. We can run assembly in the browser but there’s still no tooling to help a non-engineer show a bug to an engineer productively. So that’s what Jam is. Dev tools + video in a link. It’s like a shareable HAR file synced to a video recording of the session. And besides video, you can use it to share an instant replay of a bug that just happened — basically a 30 second playback of the DOM as a video. We’ve spent a lot of time adding in a ton of niceties, like Jam writes automatic repro steps for you, and Jam’s dev tools use the same keyboard shortcuts you’re used to in Chrome dev tools, and our team’s personal favorite: Jam parses GraphQL responses and pulls out mutation names and errors (which is important because GraphQL uses one endpoint for all requests and always returns a 200, meaning you usually have to sift through every GraphQL request when debugging to find the one you’re looking for) We’re now 2 years in to the product being live and people have used Jam to fix more than 2 million bugs - which makes me so happy - but there’s still a ton to do. I wanted to open up for discussion here and get your feedback and opinions how can we make it even more valuable for you debugging? The worst part of the engineering job is debugging and not even being able to repro the issue, it’s not even really engineering, it’s just a communication gap, one that we should be able to solve with tools. So yeah excited to get your feedback and hear your thoughts how we can make debugging just a little less frustrating. (Jam is free to use forever — there is a paid tier for features real companies would need, but we’re keeping a large free plan forever. We learned to build products at Cloudflare and free tier is in our ethos, both my co-founder and I and about half the team is ex-Cloudflare) and what we loved there is how much great feedback we’d get because the product was mostly free to use. We definitely want to keep that going at Jam.) By the way, we’re hiring engineers and if this is a problem that excites you, we’d love to chat: jam.dev/careers
New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: PostgreSQL index advisor
Show HN: PostgreSQL index advisor
399 by kiwicopple | 95 comments on Hacker News.
This is a Postgres extension that can determine if a query should have an index. For example, for this table: create table book( id int primary key, title text not null ); You can run `index_advisor()` to see if there should be an index on a select statement: select * from index_advisor('select book.id from book where title = $1'); And it will return (summarized): {"CREATE INDEX ON public.book USING btree (title)"} It works particularly well with pg_stat_statements[0] which tracks execution statistics of all SQL statements executed on your Postgres database. It leans heavily on HypoPG[1], an excellent extension to determine if PostgreSQL will use a given index without spending resources to create them. [0] pg_stat_statements: https://ift.tt/jDySqtr... [1] https://ift.tt/ZEUh0qk
399 by kiwicopple | 95 comments on Hacker News.
This is a Postgres extension that can determine if a query should have an index. For example, for this table: create table book( id int primary key, title text not null ); You can run `index_advisor()` to see if there should be an index on a select statement: select * from index_advisor('select book.id from book where title = $1'); And it will return (summarized): {"CREATE INDEX ON public.book USING btree (title)"} It works particularly well with pg_stat_statements[0] which tracks execution statistics of all SQL statements executed on your Postgres database. It leans heavily on HypoPG[1], an excellent extension to determine if PostgreSQL will use a given index without spending resources to create them. [0] pg_stat_statements: https://ift.tt/jDySqtr... [1] https://ift.tt/ZEUh0qk
New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: Sonauto – A more controllable AI music creator
Show HN: Sonauto – A more controllable AI music creator
441 by zaptrem | 230 comments on Hacker News.
Hey HN, My cofounder and I trained an AI music generation model and after a month of testing we're launching 1.0 today. Ours is interesting because it's a latent diffusion model instead of a language model, which makes it more controllable: https://sonauto.ai/ Others do music generation by training a Vector Quantized Variational Autoencoder like Descript Audio Codec ( https://ift.tt/0DPgaO9 ) to turn music into tokens, then training an LLM on those tokens. Instead, we ripped the tokenization part off and replaced it with a normal variational autoencoder bottleneck (along with some other important changes to enable insane compression ratios). This gave us a nice, normally distributed latent space on which to train a diffusion transformer (like Sora). Our diffusion model is also particularly interesting because it is the first audio diffusion model to generate coherent lyrics! We like diffusion models for music generation because they have some interesting properties that make controlling them easier (so you can make your own music instead of just taking what the machine gives you). For example, we have a rhythm control mode where you can upload your own percussion line or set a BPM. Very soon you'll also be able to generate proper variations of an uploaded or previously generated song (e.g., you could even sing into Voice Memos for a minute and upload that!). @Musicians of HN, try uploading your songs and using Rhythm Control/let us know what you think! Our goal is to enable more of you, not replace you. For example, we turned this drum line ( https://ift.tt/EaDjBSg ) into this full song ( https://ift.tt/EPSiZDB skip to 1:05 if impatient) or this other song I like better ( https://ift.tt/XztpqxP - we accidentally compressed it with AAC instead of Opus which hurt quality, though) We also like diffusion models because while they're expensive to train, they're cheap to serve. We built our own efficient inference infrastructure instead of using those expensive inference as a service startups that are all the rage. That's why we're making generations on our site free and unlimited for as long as possible. We'd love to answer your questions. Let us know what you think of our first model! https://sonauto.ai/
441 by zaptrem | 230 comments on Hacker News.
Hey HN, My cofounder and I trained an AI music generation model and after a month of testing we're launching 1.0 today. Ours is interesting because it's a latent diffusion model instead of a language model, which makes it more controllable: https://sonauto.ai/ Others do music generation by training a Vector Quantized Variational Autoencoder like Descript Audio Codec ( https://ift.tt/0DPgaO9 ) to turn music into tokens, then training an LLM on those tokens. Instead, we ripped the tokenization part off and replaced it with a normal variational autoencoder bottleneck (along with some other important changes to enable insane compression ratios). This gave us a nice, normally distributed latent space on which to train a diffusion transformer (like Sora). Our diffusion model is also particularly interesting because it is the first audio diffusion model to generate coherent lyrics! We like diffusion models for music generation because they have some interesting properties that make controlling them easier (so you can make your own music instead of just taking what the machine gives you). For example, we have a rhythm control mode where you can upload your own percussion line or set a BPM. Very soon you'll also be able to generate proper variations of an uploaded or previously generated song (e.g., you could even sing into Voice Memos for a minute and upload that!). @Musicians of HN, try uploading your songs and using Rhythm Control/let us know what you think! Our goal is to enable more of you, not replace you. For example, we turned this drum line ( https://ift.tt/EaDjBSg ) into this full song ( https://ift.tt/EPSiZDB skip to 1:05 if impatient) or this other song I like better ( https://ift.tt/XztpqxP - we accidentally compressed it with AAC instead of Opus which hurt quality, though) We also like diffusion models because while they're expensive to train, they're cheap to serve. We built our own efficient inference infrastructure instead of using those expensive inference as a service startups that are all the rage. That's why we're making generations on our site free and unlimited for as long as possible. We'd love to answer your questions. Let us know what you think of our first model! https://sonauto.ai/
New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: We built PriceLevel to find out what companies pay for SaaS
Show HN: We built PriceLevel to find out what companies pay for SaaS
451 by cluo21 | 126 comments on Hacker News.
Hey HN! Christine and Steven here. As a PM and engineer, we’ve both evaluated and purchased a lot of software. One of the biggest frustrations was figuring out how much it would cost us without having to go through the sales process. When we did have a quote, we had no idea if we were getting a good deal or ripped off. We built a site where you can see what other companies are actually paying for SaaS and enterprise software. Buyers contribute prices via quotes, pricing proposals, and other documentation to ensure quality. We unlocked Talkdesk for Show HN users so that you can use the product without needing to sign in or upgrade. Check it out at https://ift.tt/Ko9DdAm . Would love to hear any feedback, thank you!
451 by cluo21 | 126 comments on Hacker News.
Hey HN! Christine and Steven here. As a PM and engineer, we’ve both evaluated and purchased a lot of software. One of the biggest frustrations was figuring out how much it would cost us without having to go through the sales process. When we did have a quote, we had no idea if we were getting a good deal or ripped off. We built a site where you can see what other companies are actually paying for SaaS and enterprise software. Buyers contribute prices via quotes, pricing proposals, and other documentation to ensure quality. We unlocked Talkdesk for Show HN users so that you can use the product without needing to sign in or upgrade. Check it out at https://ift.tt/Ko9DdAm . Would love to hear any feedback, thank you!
New best story on Hacker News: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
581 by panqueca | 637 comments on Hacker News.
If you're feeling useless, remember that I exist. Let me give you some context. I work in the pipeline automation department of a company. Last month, our team decided to deprecate an internal tool due to several maintenance issues. So we created a pipeline that automates the implementation of this legacy tool, in case other teams needed to use it. (WHAT???) This month, a guy in my team found some improvement scenarios in the automation. So I was chosen to implement this changes in this legacy internal tool. The thing is, after I finished the adjustments, my pull requests are not getting approved due to adjustments meticulously requested by this guy in my team. Adjustments to make the pipeline automation even more resilient in complete unlikely scenarios. But this same week, my TL sent notices to all the other teams informing them that this internal tool has been deprecated and they should no longer use it. So what sense does it make to have a pipeline automation that implements the use of the deprecated tool? And if it has been deprecated, why would I need to make an adjustment for the automation to be even resilient if no one should be able to use it anymore? So why am I being allocated to work on in such waste of time like it? (WTF???) This makes me wonder, how many people have to work on something that they see no sense in doing at all. So once again, if you're feeling useless, remember that I exist.
581 by panqueca | 637 comments on Hacker News.
If you're feeling useless, remember that I exist. Let me give you some context. I work in the pipeline automation department of a company. Last month, our team decided to deprecate an internal tool due to several maintenance issues. So we created a pipeline that automates the implementation of this legacy tool, in case other teams needed to use it. (WHAT???) This month, a guy in my team found some improvement scenarios in the automation. So I was chosen to implement this changes in this legacy internal tool. The thing is, after I finished the adjustments, my pull requests are not getting approved due to adjustments meticulously requested by this guy in my team. Adjustments to make the pipeline automation even more resilient in complete unlikely scenarios. But this same week, my TL sent notices to all the other teams informing them that this internal tool has been deprecated and they should no longer use it. So what sense does it make to have a pipeline automation that implements the use of the deprecated tool? And if it has been deprecated, why would I need to make an adjustment for the automation to be even resilient if no one should be able to use it anymore? So why am I being allocated to work on in such waste of time like it? (WTF???) This makes me wonder, how many people have to work on something that they see no sense in doing at all. So once again, if you're feeling useless, remember that I exist.
New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: I've built a locally running Perplexity clone
Show HN: I've built a locally running Perplexity clone
482 by nilsherzig | 99 comments on Hacker News.
The video demo runs a 7b Model on a normal gaming GPU. I think it already works quite well (accounting for the limited hardware power). :)
482 by nilsherzig | 99 comments on Hacker News.
The video demo runs a 7b Model on a normal gaming GPU. I think it already works quite well (accounting for the limited hardware power). :)
New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: I made a cheap alternative to college-level math & physics tutoring
Show HN: I made a cheap alternative to college-level math & physics tutoring
360 by eltonlin | 163 comments on Hacker News.
Hi everyone! I’m the founder of Explanations (https://ift.tt/Nsb2em6). I’m building a website where students can get college level math & physics help for 1/10th the cost of private tutoring. You’d type a question, and your teacher replies by drawing a Youtube/KhanAcademy-style video; and this happens asynchronously throughout the week. When I was studying at MIT, I often had to wait 40-60 minutes in line just to get 5 minutes of “help” from a TA - when I needed 1-2 hours. I understood that TAs can’t spend all their time helping me. That’s understandable. But what made me bitter was that, the school went the extra mile to ensure I don’t have the resources to learn on my own, 1. Blocking access to solutions for past problems (to prevent cheating) 2. Purposely not recording explanations to increase attendance: https://ift.tt/lWA26sV 3. Insisting that Office Hours is a 1-by-1 format even when crowded (to prevent solutions from leaking) These policies have good intentions - it’s to encourage a synchronous, in-person learning experience. But in practice, it had side-effects: 1. Help resources become inefficient - because so much material is restricted, and so much time is spent on delivering live lectures, there’d often be 40 students competing for help from 2 TAs in a 2-hour Office Hours 2. Because help resources are inefficient, it’s very hard to catch-up: once you fall behind, you have no way to review past material efficiently enough to compensate the difference - like credit card debt 3.Every day, I’d wake up, go to a lecture I don’t understand, go to Office Hours so I can hopefully ask for a review (which’d would take a few hours), realize TAs aren’t willing to do that, then realize there is nothing I can do to recover. I fell into a depression for many years, and my bitterness fueled me to work on the early versions of explanations.app It turns out that universities succeed by being prestigious, not by teaching well. To win at prestige, be highly selective (by keeping supply low), keep a huge endowment (because it affects school rankings), and hire the best researchers (not teachers). This is actually the fundamental reason for the odd incentives in higher education, and something felt wrong. So explanations.app is completely inspired by KhanAcademy and Youtube. The mystery to me was - why weren’t there more Youtube teachers & KhanAcademy videos? I believe it’s a combination of: 1. People who teach college subjects well often have better opportunities e.g. work, research 2. Lack of rewards: even Youtubers with 100K views and 10K subscribers would have at most 1-5 paying members on Patreon On the one hand, there are all these free resources, where teachers changed the world way more than they ever got rewarded for. Then on the other hand, there is private tutoring - very effective - but very expensive e.g. $100/hour for college level subjects. I believe the balanced solution is a system where lots of students pay $10/week to a few teachers who make videos, like a paid, Q&A Youtube/KhanAcademy, so it’s personalized, effective, but still affordable. There are currently 2 teachers on explanations.app - Ben & Esther - both MIT grads, teaching physics & math for subjects like linear algebra and electromagnetism. 3 students - Laquazia, Lidija and Chandra from US, Serbia and Korea joined this month following r/physicsStudents launch: [https://ift.tt/SPlH7Tt] While explanations.app is focused on college-level math and physics, the platform is completely open for anyone to learn and/or teach. I hope you can try it :^) and give me the chance to work with you.
360 by eltonlin | 163 comments on Hacker News.
Hi everyone! I’m the founder of Explanations (https://ift.tt/Nsb2em6). I’m building a website where students can get college level math & physics help for 1/10th the cost of private tutoring. You’d type a question, and your teacher replies by drawing a Youtube/KhanAcademy-style video; and this happens asynchronously throughout the week. When I was studying at MIT, I often had to wait 40-60 minutes in line just to get 5 minutes of “help” from a TA - when I needed 1-2 hours. I understood that TAs can’t spend all their time helping me. That’s understandable. But what made me bitter was that, the school went the extra mile to ensure I don’t have the resources to learn on my own, 1. Blocking access to solutions for past problems (to prevent cheating) 2. Purposely not recording explanations to increase attendance: https://ift.tt/lWA26sV 3. Insisting that Office Hours is a 1-by-1 format even when crowded (to prevent solutions from leaking) These policies have good intentions - it’s to encourage a synchronous, in-person learning experience. But in practice, it had side-effects: 1. Help resources become inefficient - because so much material is restricted, and so much time is spent on delivering live lectures, there’d often be 40 students competing for help from 2 TAs in a 2-hour Office Hours 2. Because help resources are inefficient, it’s very hard to catch-up: once you fall behind, you have no way to review past material efficiently enough to compensate the difference - like credit card debt 3.Every day, I’d wake up, go to a lecture I don’t understand, go to Office Hours so I can hopefully ask for a review (which’d would take a few hours), realize TAs aren’t willing to do that, then realize there is nothing I can do to recover. I fell into a depression for many years, and my bitterness fueled me to work on the early versions of explanations.app It turns out that universities succeed by being prestigious, not by teaching well. To win at prestige, be highly selective (by keeping supply low), keep a huge endowment (because it affects school rankings), and hire the best researchers (not teachers). This is actually the fundamental reason for the odd incentives in higher education, and something felt wrong. So explanations.app is completely inspired by KhanAcademy and Youtube. The mystery to me was - why weren’t there more Youtube teachers & KhanAcademy videos? I believe it’s a combination of: 1. People who teach college subjects well often have better opportunities e.g. work, research 2. Lack of rewards: even Youtubers with 100K views and 10K subscribers would have at most 1-5 paying members on Patreon On the one hand, there are all these free resources, where teachers changed the world way more than they ever got rewarded for. Then on the other hand, there is private tutoring - very effective - but very expensive e.g. $100/hour for college level subjects. I believe the balanced solution is a system where lots of students pay $10/week to a few teachers who make videos, like a paid, Q&A Youtube/KhanAcademy, so it’s personalized, effective, but still affordable. There are currently 2 teachers on explanations.app - Ben & Esther - both MIT grads, teaching physics & math for subjects like linear algebra and electromagnetism. 3 students - Laquazia, Lidija and Chandra from US, Serbia and Korea joined this month following r/physicsStudents launch: [https://ift.tt/SPlH7Tt] While explanations.app is focused on college-level math and physics, the platform is completely open for anyone to learn and/or teach. I hope you can try it :^) and give me the chance to work with you.
New best story on Hacker News: Launch HN: Aqua Voice (YC W24) – Voice-driven text editor
Launch HN: Aqua Voice (YC W24) – Voice-driven text editor
373 by the_king | 127 comments on Hacker News.
Hey HN! We’re Jack and Finn from Aqua Voice ( https://withaqua.com/ ). Aqua is a voice-native document editor that combines reliable dictation and natural language commands, letting you say things like: “make this a list” or “it’s Erin with an E” or “add an inline citation here for page 86 of this book”. Here is a demo: https://youtu.be/qwSAKg1YafM . Finn, who is big-time dyslexic, has been using dictation software since the sixth grade when his dad set him up on Dragon Dictation. He used it through school to write papers, and has been keeping his own transcription benchmarks since college. All that time, writing with your voice has remained a cumbersome and brittle experience that is riddled with painpoints. Dictation software is still terrible. All the solutions basically compete on accuracy (i.e. speech recognition), but none of them deal with the fundamentally brittle nature of the text that they generate. They don't try to format text correctly and require you to learn a bunch of specialized commands, which often are not worth it. They're not even close to a voice replacement for a keyboard. Even post LLM, you are limited to a set of specific commands and the most accurate models don’t have any commands. Outside of these rules, the models have no sense for what is an instruction and what is content. You can’t say “and format this like an email” or “make the last bullet point shorter”. Aqua solves this. This problem is important to Finn and millions of other people who would write with their voice if they could. Initially, we didn't think of it as a startup project. It was just something we wanted for ourselves. We thought maybe we'd write a novel with it - or something. After friends started asking to use the early versions of Aqua, it occurred to us that, if we didn't build it, maybe nobody would. Aqua Voice is a text editor that you talk to like a person. Depending on the way that you say it and the context in which you're operating, Aqua decides whether to transcribe what you said verbatim, execute a command, or subtly modify what you said into what you meant to write. For example, if you were to dictate: "Gryphons have classic forms resembling shield volcanoes," Aqua would output your text verbatim. But if you stumble over your words or start a sentence over a few times, Aqua is smart enough to figure that out and to only take the last version of the sentence. The vision is not only to provide a more natural dictation experience, but to enable for the first time an AI-writing experience that feels natural and collaborative. This requires moving away from using LLMs for one-off chat requests and towards something that is more like streaming where you are in constant contact with the model. Voice is the natural medium for this. Aqua is actually 6 models working together to transcribe, interpret, and rewrite the document according to your intent. Technically, executing a real-time voice application with a language model at its core requires complex coordination between multiple pieces. We use MoE transcription to outperform what was previously thought possible in terms of real-time accuracy. Then we sync up with a language model to determine what should be on the screen as quickly as possible. The model isn't perfect, but it is ready for early adopters and we’ve already been getting feedback from grateful users. For example, a historian with carpal tunnel sent us an email he wrote using Aqua and said that he is now able to be five times as productive as he was previously. We've heard from other people with disabilities that prevent them from typing. We've also seen good adoption from people who are dyslexic or simply prefer talking to typing. It’s being used for everything from emails to brainstorming to papers to legal briefings. While there is much left to do in terms of latency and robustness, the best experiences with Aqua are beginning to feel magical. We would love for you to try it out and give us feedback, which you can do with no account on https://withaqua.com . If you find it useful, it’s $10/month after a 1000-token free trial. (We want to bump the free trial in the future, but we're a small team, and running this thing isn’t cheap.) We’d love to hear your ideas and comments with voice-to-text!
373 by the_king | 127 comments on Hacker News.
Hey HN! We’re Jack and Finn from Aqua Voice ( https://withaqua.com/ ). Aqua is a voice-native document editor that combines reliable dictation and natural language commands, letting you say things like: “make this a list” or “it’s Erin with an E” or “add an inline citation here for page 86 of this book”. Here is a demo: https://youtu.be/qwSAKg1YafM . Finn, who is big-time dyslexic, has been using dictation software since the sixth grade when his dad set him up on Dragon Dictation. He used it through school to write papers, and has been keeping his own transcription benchmarks since college. All that time, writing with your voice has remained a cumbersome and brittle experience that is riddled with painpoints. Dictation software is still terrible. All the solutions basically compete on accuracy (i.e. speech recognition), but none of them deal with the fundamentally brittle nature of the text that they generate. They don't try to format text correctly and require you to learn a bunch of specialized commands, which often are not worth it. They're not even close to a voice replacement for a keyboard. Even post LLM, you are limited to a set of specific commands and the most accurate models don’t have any commands. Outside of these rules, the models have no sense for what is an instruction and what is content. You can’t say “and format this like an email” or “make the last bullet point shorter”. Aqua solves this. This problem is important to Finn and millions of other people who would write with their voice if they could. Initially, we didn't think of it as a startup project. It was just something we wanted for ourselves. We thought maybe we'd write a novel with it - or something. After friends started asking to use the early versions of Aqua, it occurred to us that, if we didn't build it, maybe nobody would. Aqua Voice is a text editor that you talk to like a person. Depending on the way that you say it and the context in which you're operating, Aqua decides whether to transcribe what you said verbatim, execute a command, or subtly modify what you said into what you meant to write. For example, if you were to dictate: "Gryphons have classic forms resembling shield volcanoes," Aqua would output your text verbatim. But if you stumble over your words or start a sentence over a few times, Aqua is smart enough to figure that out and to only take the last version of the sentence. The vision is not only to provide a more natural dictation experience, but to enable for the first time an AI-writing experience that feels natural and collaborative. This requires moving away from using LLMs for one-off chat requests and towards something that is more like streaming where you are in constant contact with the model. Voice is the natural medium for this. Aqua is actually 6 models working together to transcribe, interpret, and rewrite the document according to your intent. Technically, executing a real-time voice application with a language model at its core requires complex coordination between multiple pieces. We use MoE transcription to outperform what was previously thought possible in terms of real-time accuracy. Then we sync up with a language model to determine what should be on the screen as quickly as possible. The model isn't perfect, but it is ready for early adopters and we’ve already been getting feedback from grateful users. For example, a historian with carpal tunnel sent us an email he wrote using Aqua and said that he is now able to be five times as productive as he was previously. We've heard from other people with disabilities that prevent them from typing. We've also seen good adoption from people who are dyslexic or simply prefer talking to typing. It’s being used for everything from emails to brainstorming to papers to legal briefings. While there is much left to do in terms of latency and robustness, the best experiences with Aqua are beginning to feel magical. We would love for you to try it out and give us feedback, which you can do with no account on https://withaqua.com . If you find it useful, it’s $10/month after a 1000-token free trial. (We want to bump the free trial in the future, but we're a small team, and running this thing isn’t cheap.) We’d love to hear your ideas and comments with voice-to-text!
New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: Glossarie – a new, immersive way to learn a language
Show HN: Glossarie – a new, immersive way to learn a language
346 by jonathanb88 | 150 comments on Hacker News.
Hi HN, For over two years I've been working on an App to learn languages (currently French, Italian and Spanish), together with my partner, a language teacher. I think it is finally ready to share with this community! The idea is to introduce vocabulary and grammar whilst you read eBooks in your own language. I've found that it is easier to remember vocabulary 'in context' and with regular repetition. Plus you don't have to carve out dedicated time for language learning. Other apps require you to build a habit around various exercises or ‘games’, whereas lots of people already read books. From testing with early users so far it's proving effective for building a basic understanding of a language and quickly getting to the point where you can read and broadly understand text in the target language. It’s even better in combination with other apps that help with listening/speaking like Pimsleur. There were lots of technical challenges making this. It turned out to be (reassuringly) hard to get accuracy to an acceptable level, requiring a rabbit-hole into machine translation. There was a lot of testing required to optimise the engine that chooses the translations to show and to reduce the friction when reading books. And the backend to support uploading books is a beast in itself. I’d love to share details if there is interest. Roadmap - Accuracy - 100% accuracy is the target, but at present there can be errors. Feedback from users will be important here so that accuracy issues can be generalised and solved at scale. Errors can be reported within the app - please do so if you spot anything! - Dynamic difficulty - rather than have a progression of difficulty levels I’d prefer to introduce vocabulary and grammar automatically in response to user progress, balancing against the friction of seeing unfamiliar words. There’s a lot ‘under the hood’ to manage this today, but plenty of room to improve. - More practice features - to reinforce vocabulary/grammar and support writing, listening and speaking. - Better eBook support - improving the formatting of eBooks within the app and providing more methods for finding good books to read. Use of AI - LLMs provided a step change in accuracy and have enabled a feature that explains translations and grammar to the user - vastly improving the utility versus a year ago. - I believe apps like this, which use AI to enhance or scale functionality rather than simply acting as a wrapper over APIs, will be the major beneficiaries as LLMs improve. Take a look, and let me know your thoughts or questions!
346 by jonathanb88 | 150 comments on Hacker News.
Hi HN, For over two years I've been working on an App to learn languages (currently French, Italian and Spanish), together with my partner, a language teacher. I think it is finally ready to share with this community! The idea is to introduce vocabulary and grammar whilst you read eBooks in your own language. I've found that it is easier to remember vocabulary 'in context' and with regular repetition. Plus you don't have to carve out dedicated time for language learning. Other apps require you to build a habit around various exercises or ‘games’, whereas lots of people already read books. From testing with early users so far it's proving effective for building a basic understanding of a language and quickly getting to the point where you can read and broadly understand text in the target language. It’s even better in combination with other apps that help with listening/speaking like Pimsleur. There were lots of technical challenges making this. It turned out to be (reassuringly) hard to get accuracy to an acceptable level, requiring a rabbit-hole into machine translation. There was a lot of testing required to optimise the engine that chooses the translations to show and to reduce the friction when reading books. And the backend to support uploading books is a beast in itself. I’d love to share details if there is interest. Roadmap - Accuracy - 100% accuracy is the target, but at present there can be errors. Feedback from users will be important here so that accuracy issues can be generalised and solved at scale. Errors can be reported within the app - please do so if you spot anything! - Dynamic difficulty - rather than have a progression of difficulty levels I’d prefer to introduce vocabulary and grammar automatically in response to user progress, balancing against the friction of seeing unfamiliar words. There’s a lot ‘under the hood’ to manage this today, but plenty of room to improve. - More practice features - to reinforce vocabulary/grammar and support writing, listening and speaking. - Better eBook support - improving the formatting of eBooks within the app and providing more methods for finding good books to read. Use of AI - LLMs provided a step change in accuracy and have enabled a feature that explains translations and grammar to the user - vastly improving the utility versus a year ago. - I believe apps like this, which use AI to enhance or scale functionality rather than simply acting as a wrapper over APIs, will be the major beneficiaries as LLMs improve. Take a look, and let me know your thoughts or questions!
New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: Memories – FOSS Google Photos alternative built for high performance
Show HN: Memories – FOSS Google Photos alternative built for high performance
690 by radialapps | 201 comments on Hacker News.
Memories is a FOSS Google Photos alternative that you can self-host (it runs as a Nextcloud plugin). Website: https://ift.tt/0ZCt5yF GitHub: https://ift.tt/GcopjPy Demo Server: https://ift.tt/L7xDe5U (demo runs in San Francisco on a free-tier cloud vm) Memories has been built ground-up for high performance and is extremely fast when configured correctly. In our testing environment, it can load a timeline view with 100k photos in under 500ms, including query and rendering time! Some features to highlight: * A timeline similar to Google Photos where you can skip to any time in history instantly. * AI-based tagging that runs locally on your server, identifying and tagging people and objects. * Albums and external sharing. * Metadata editing support * A world map of your photos, supported both on mobile and the web * Did I mention it's extremely fast? Would love to hear feedback from the HN community! :)
690 by radialapps | 201 comments on Hacker News.
Memories is a FOSS Google Photos alternative that you can self-host (it runs as a Nextcloud plugin). Website: https://ift.tt/0ZCt5yF GitHub: https://ift.tt/GcopjPy Demo Server: https://ift.tt/L7xDe5U (demo runs in San Francisco on a free-tier cloud vm) Memories has been built ground-up for high performance and is extremely fast when configured correctly. In our testing environment, it can load a timeline view with 100k photos in under 500ms, including query and rendering time! Some features to highlight: * A timeline similar to Google Photos where you can skip to any time in history instantly. * AI-based tagging that runs locally on your server, identifying and tagging people and objects. * Albums and external sharing. * Metadata editing support * A world map of your photos, supported both on mobile and the web * Did I mention it's extremely fast? Would love to hear feedback from the HN community! :)
New best story on Hacker News: Ask HN: Do you also marvel at the complexity of everyday objects?
Ask HN: Do you also marvel at the complexity of everyday objects?
423 by parpfish | 297 comments on Hacker News.
A few weeks ago I was doing some soldering and I started using a spool of insulated 22-gauge wire. Maybe it was the solder fumes, but I started thinking about what it actually took to create that spool of wire -- everything from the geologists and miners extracting ore, through all the metallurgy, industrial engineering, and plastics work. And I started to marvel at all the work and expertise it took to make something that I normally would've just considered a semi-disposable consumable item. It made me wonder whether that spool of wire was actually a piece of technology on par in sophistication with all the software that I build every day. It was such an odd moment, but it's has caused a lasting perspective shift. almost every day I'll look at some commonplace object I took for granted and think "this is actually so complex, no single human has all the knowledge or expertise to create it". I'm curious if anybody else has had a similar experience and/or what are some simple everyday objects that give you pause when you stop to think about their complexity
423 by parpfish | 297 comments on Hacker News.
A few weeks ago I was doing some soldering and I started using a spool of insulated 22-gauge wire. Maybe it was the solder fumes, but I started thinking about what it actually took to create that spool of wire -- everything from the geologists and miners extracting ore, through all the metallurgy, industrial engineering, and plastics work. And I started to marvel at all the work and expertise it took to make something that I normally would've just considered a semi-disposable consumable item. It made me wonder whether that spool of wire was actually a piece of technology on par in sophistication with all the software that I build every day. It was such an odd moment, but it's has caused a lasting perspective shift. almost every day I'll look at some commonplace object I took for granted and think "this is actually so complex, no single human has all the knowledge or expertise to create it". I'm curious if anybody else has had a similar experience and/or what are some simple everyday objects that give you pause when you stop to think about their complexity
New best story on Hacker News: Fine tune a 70B language model at home
Fine tune a 70B language model at home
606 by jph00 | 146 comments on Hacker News.
Jeremy from Answer.AI here. This is our first project since launching our new R&D lab at the start of this year. It's the #1 most requested thing I've been hearing from open source model builders: the ability to use multiple GPUs with QLoRA training. So that's why we decided to make it our first project. Huge thanks to Tim Dettmers for helping us get started to this -- and of course for creating QLoRA in the first place! Let me know if you have any questions or thoughts.
606 by jph00 | 146 comments on Hacker News.
Jeremy from Answer.AI here. This is our first project since launching our new R&D lab at the start of this year. It's the #1 most requested thing I've been hearing from open source model builders: the ability to use multiple GPUs with QLoRA training. So that's why we decided to make it our first project. Huge thanks to Tim Dettmers for helping us get started to this -- and of course for creating QLoRA in the first place! Let me know if you have any questions or thoughts.
New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: AboutIdeasNow – search /about, /ideas, /now pages of 7k+ personal sites
Show HN: AboutIdeasNow – search /about, /ideas, /now pages of 7k+ personal sites
361 by louisbarclay | 87 comments on Hacker News.
Hi HN! It’s hard to find interesting people to work with on your ideas. Our solution: index the /about, /ideas, /now pages of 1000s of personal websites. There are thousands of cool personal sites out there, with amazing ideas on them, but there’s nowhere to easily search through. So we built a simple site that indexes 7k+ personal sites [0]. We were inspired by Derek Sivers’ Now page movement [1] and other IndieWeb directories [2], but we figured that it would be more useful if we: * Let you search directly across personal sites without having to visit them * Take the content from 3 specific pages, /about, /now and /ideas, to structure everything * Define /ideas pages as a space to articulate things you want to work on We hope this’ll be a cool place for people to find others to collaborate with - would love your feedback. If you’d like your site to appear at the top, add it via the form and add a last updated date of today (any format). It’s completely open source (MIT) and open to contributions [3]! Peter & Louis [0] gathered from: 1) https://nownownow.com and similar sites 2) checking all HN posts since 2020 with more than 100 upvotes [1] https://nownownow.com [2] https://personalsit.es [3] https://ift.tt/uYIaztV
361 by louisbarclay | 87 comments on Hacker News.
Hi HN! It’s hard to find interesting people to work with on your ideas. Our solution: index the /about, /ideas, /now pages of 1000s of personal websites. There are thousands of cool personal sites out there, with amazing ideas on them, but there’s nowhere to easily search through. So we built a simple site that indexes 7k+ personal sites [0]. We were inspired by Derek Sivers’ Now page movement [1] and other IndieWeb directories [2], but we figured that it would be more useful if we: * Let you search directly across personal sites without having to visit them * Take the content from 3 specific pages, /about, /now and /ideas, to structure everything * Define /ideas pages as a space to articulate things you want to work on We hope this’ll be a cool place for people to find others to collaborate with - would love your feedback. If you’d like your site to appear at the top, add it via the form and add a last updated date of today (any format). It’s completely open source (MIT) and open to contributions [3]! Peter & Louis [0] gathered from: 1) https://nownownow.com and similar sites 2) checking all HN posts since 2020 with more than 100 upvotes [1] https://nownownow.com [2] https://personalsit.es [3] https://ift.tt/uYIaztV
New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: Reverse-Engineering a Switch Lite with 1,917 wires
Show HN: Reverse-Engineering a Switch Lite with 1,917 wires
454 by uSoldering | 94 comments on Hacker News.
Hey Hackers. This is a project I solo-developed that turns completed PCB assemblies into an easy to use boardview with some accompanying boardscans. There are lots of easier and better ways of doing this, but this is an experimentation to do it as cheaply as possible, with the highest quality and lowest chance of errors. The technical details are in the link. Most public boardviews are almost entirely the result of industrial espionage, other than a few encrypted subscription based software platforms that provide extensive access. The process output is released as donationware, as my main concern is that even released as a low-cost purchase, there is a very strong culture to share this type of information at no cost. I would like to have a more sophisticated suggested donation system adaptive to user country, but I wasn't able to find a good solution. In terms of 'good startup ideas', I don't think this is one of them. The very high level of soldering skill required makes it difficult to scale, and the prevailing piracy culture makes it challenging to monetize. My main advantage is that costs are very low now that I have the entire thing working. Other than forge ahead at a loss and hope for the best, or to pivot hard leveraging the imaging technology, I'm not sure what other options I have. It feels too complicated and repetitive for shoft-form video content. If you have any feedback, questions, suggestions, etc., I'd love to hear them.
454 by uSoldering | 94 comments on Hacker News.
Hey Hackers. This is a project I solo-developed that turns completed PCB assemblies into an easy to use boardview with some accompanying boardscans. There are lots of easier and better ways of doing this, but this is an experimentation to do it as cheaply as possible, with the highest quality and lowest chance of errors. The technical details are in the link. Most public boardviews are almost entirely the result of industrial espionage, other than a few encrypted subscription based software platforms that provide extensive access. The process output is released as donationware, as my main concern is that even released as a low-cost purchase, there is a very strong culture to share this type of information at no cost. I would like to have a more sophisticated suggested donation system adaptive to user country, but I wasn't able to find a good solution. In terms of 'good startup ideas', I don't think this is one of them. The very high level of soldering skill required makes it difficult to scale, and the prevailing piracy culture makes it challenging to monetize. My main advantage is that costs are very low now that I have the entire thing working. Other than forge ahead at a loss and hope for the best, or to pivot hard leveraging the imaging technology, I'm not sure what other options I have. It feels too complicated and repetitive for shoft-form video content. If you have any feedback, questions, suggestions, etc., I'd love to hear them.
New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code
Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code
461 by Timot05 | 245 comments on Hacker News.
Hey HN! We are the founders of atopile. We’re building a tool to describe electronics with code. Here is a quick demo: https://youtu.be/7-Q0XVpfW3Y Could you imagine the pain of building an entire software product using only assembly code? That’s about how we felt designing hardware. We don’t currently have good ways to describe what we need, reuse existing designs and compile that description down to a product. We started atopile to fix this. atopile is an open-source language and toolchain to describe circuits with code. The compiler is here: https://ift.tt/JbLPiC2 Docs are here: https://ift.tt/8IHxLtk . For a detailed deep dive designing an ESP32 module, see this video: https://youtu.be/eMWRwZOajdQ We realized this was a problem in our previous jobs. Narayan and I (Tim) had to manually, draw and export all our electronic circuit boards. This lasted until our friend Matt, a software engineer, showed us his development workflow. All his projects were built, tested, and merged automatically via GitHub. So we asked: Can we build the same for hardware? We observed that the ability to abstract electronics effectively hinged on using a language to describe the requirements, so we came up with the “ato” language. In ato, you can break down circuits into modules, components and interfaces. You can nest and connect those blocks with each other. Here is an example with an RP2040 microcontroller: import RP2040Kit from "rp2040/RP2040Kit.ato" import LEDIndicatorBlue from "generics/leds.ato" import LDOReg3V3 from "regulators/regulators.ato" import USBCConn from "usb-connectors/usb-connectors.ato" module Blinky: micro_controller = new RP2040Kit led_indicator = new LEDIndicatorBlue voltage_regulator = new LDOReg3V3 usb_c_connector = new USBCConn usb_c_connector.power ~ voltage_regulator.power_in voltage_regulator.power_out ~ micro_controller.power micro_controller.gpio13 ~ led_indicator.input micro_controller.power.gnd ~ led_indicator.gnd led_indicator.resistor.value = 100ohm +/- 10% From there, the compiler produces a netlist that describes how the circuit is connected and selects jelly-bean components for you ( https://ift.tt/LZ6TOJw ). Our next focus will be to add layout reuse, mathematical relations between values and define circuits by traits (similar to Rusts’). At the moment, atopile is intended to design all types of printed circuit boards (PCB) with low to medium complexity. The circuit complexity that the compiler can handle will steadily increase until it becomes suited for production usage. We often get asked if the compiler is meant for chip design rather than PCBs, but that is not the case. The language is exclusive to PCBs. At least for now..! A big part of why the software community is so prolific is thanks to open source and open core technology. The ability to share software packages with each other and efficiently chain tools together has made the software world an awesome place for developers. As hardware engineers, we would love our field to benefit from this as well. That’s why we’ve made atopile’s core open source (Apache 2.0). We plan to generate revenue by selling entreprise targeted features, similar to GitLab. We would love to have your thoughts on the compiler! What’s your story in electronics? What would you want us to build?
461 by Timot05 | 245 comments on Hacker News.
Hey HN! We are the founders of atopile. We’re building a tool to describe electronics with code. Here is a quick demo: https://youtu.be/7-Q0XVpfW3Y Could you imagine the pain of building an entire software product using only assembly code? That’s about how we felt designing hardware. We don’t currently have good ways to describe what we need, reuse existing designs and compile that description down to a product. We started atopile to fix this. atopile is an open-source language and toolchain to describe circuits with code. The compiler is here: https://ift.tt/JbLPiC2 Docs are here: https://ift.tt/8IHxLtk . For a detailed deep dive designing an ESP32 module, see this video: https://youtu.be/eMWRwZOajdQ We realized this was a problem in our previous jobs. Narayan and I (Tim) had to manually, draw and export all our electronic circuit boards. This lasted until our friend Matt, a software engineer, showed us his development workflow. All his projects were built, tested, and merged automatically via GitHub. So we asked: Can we build the same for hardware? We observed that the ability to abstract electronics effectively hinged on using a language to describe the requirements, so we came up with the “ato” language. In ato, you can break down circuits into modules, components and interfaces. You can nest and connect those blocks with each other. Here is an example with an RP2040 microcontroller: import RP2040Kit from "rp2040/RP2040Kit.ato" import LEDIndicatorBlue from "generics/leds.ato" import LDOReg3V3 from "regulators/regulators.ato" import USBCConn from "usb-connectors/usb-connectors.ato" module Blinky: micro_controller = new RP2040Kit led_indicator = new LEDIndicatorBlue voltage_regulator = new LDOReg3V3 usb_c_connector = new USBCConn usb_c_connector.power ~ voltage_regulator.power_in voltage_regulator.power_out ~ micro_controller.power micro_controller.gpio13 ~ led_indicator.input micro_controller.power.gnd ~ led_indicator.gnd led_indicator.resistor.value = 100ohm +/- 10% From there, the compiler produces a netlist that describes how the circuit is connected and selects jelly-bean components for you ( https://ift.tt/LZ6TOJw ). Our next focus will be to add layout reuse, mathematical relations between values and define circuits by traits (similar to Rusts’). At the moment, atopile is intended to design all types of printed circuit boards (PCB) with low to medium complexity. The circuit complexity that the compiler can handle will steadily increase until it becomes suited for production usage. We often get asked if the compiler is meant for chip design rather than PCBs, but that is not the case. The language is exclusive to PCBs. At least for now..! A big part of why the software community is so prolific is thanks to open source and open core technology. The ability to share software packages with each other and efficiently chain tools together has made the software world an awesome place for developers. As hardware engineers, we would love our field to benefit from this as well. That’s why we’ve made atopile’s core open source (Apache 2.0). We plan to generate revenue by selling entreprise targeted features, similar to GitLab. We would love to have your thoughts on the compiler! What’s your story in electronics? What would you want us to build?
New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: Boardzilla, a framework for making web-based board games
Show HN: Boardzilla, a framework for making web-based board games
483 by joshbuddy | 83 comments on Hacker News.
Show HN: Boardzilla, a framework for making web-based board games Tldr: We’ve made a framework for web-based board games. You can try out some games over at https://boardzilla.io , or you can take a look at https://ift.tt/KXntf7s to learn more about how to develop your own game. Source is available at https://ift.tt/3igtrZh Hey y’all. My brother and I have made a framework for board games. During the pandemic we started to look at BGA but got discouraged by how old-fashioned the tools were and how cumbersome the development process was. We set out to make our own framework where you could use the same code for both the client and server. Our hope is anyone familiar with Typescript and CSS could code up a game without worrying about state management, persistence or networking. It’s still very much a wip, and we're rapidly adding features and games. But we’ve got our first draft of developer docs done, and we've put up a few games we've developed to showcase and test out the platform. Source for the games and framework is available on Github, and we’re excited to code more games and hopefully encourage other people to try it out. Happy for any feedback.
483 by joshbuddy | 83 comments on Hacker News.
Show HN: Boardzilla, a framework for making web-based board games Tldr: We’ve made a framework for web-based board games. You can try out some games over at https://boardzilla.io , or you can take a look at https://ift.tt/KXntf7s to learn more about how to develop your own game. Source is available at https://ift.tt/3igtrZh Hey y’all. My brother and I have made a framework for board games. During the pandemic we started to look at BGA but got discouraged by how old-fashioned the tools were and how cumbersome the development process was. We set out to make our own framework where you could use the same code for both the client and server. Our hope is anyone familiar with Typescript and CSS could code up a game without worrying about state management, persistence or networking. It’s still very much a wip, and we're rapidly adding features and games. But we’ve got our first draft of developer docs done, and we've put up a few games we've developed to showcase and test out the platform. Source for the games and framework is available on Github, and we’re excited to code more games and hopefully encourage other people to try it out. Happy for any feedback.
New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: Startup funding simulator
Show HN: Startup funding simulator
419 by zikero | 119 comments on Hacker News.
Hi HN We built a tool to help founders understand how modern fundraising (with safes) works, and how much dilution you can expect when raising money. The project is open-source. The code is a mess right now, but it'll get better I promise. You can also help with that. We didn't build this to make money. We genuinely did it because we were looking for it, and couldn't find it. We're in fact in the process of fundraising for a company, and at first glance the process looks simple. Just an excel sheet will do! But then the more we dug into it and tried different simulators, the more we realized that it's more complex than it looks. We even signed up to Pulley, Carta and others just to run simulations. But they're a bit confusing. TL;DR: Understanding modern startup funding and knowing how much dilution you'll face is hard. We built a tool that'll hopefully help with that. You can add Post-money Safes, priced rounds and issue options to employees, and you can see how that affects your ownership at every step. You can also simulate an Exit scenario and see how much money you'll be left with. --- Some examples of complex stuff: - There are many different types of safes. They all convert at the first priced round, but in different ways. Some are through discount, some are uncapped, some have a fixed valuation cap, and some have both a discount and a valuation cap. - All safes (before first priced round) convert at the same time. They don't dilute each other, which is what happens in the rest of fundraising. - Investors often require you to set aside some options. This one is particularily nasty. Basically, if an investor expects you to set aside 10% as options, and expects to get 10% equity, that's what should appear in the subsequent cap table. However, calculating the options is difficult, and is often a circular calculation (even Kirsty Nathoo from YC says it's complex and avoids showing the calculation in the Safe video "Understanding SAFEs and Priced Equity Rounds") - Safes and priced rounds can have pro-rata, but don't always exercise it - Pro-ratas of safes are taken from the priced round money, so you'd expect the safe holder's equity to remain the same if they exercise it. BUT ... it gets diluted by the new options issued. - Safes can have an MFN provision, which defers the valuation discussion/calculation until the moment the priced round is about to close. With a mix of discounts, uncapped and valuation caps, it gets tricky to know which deal is "better". - ... Assumptions and limitations: - Only post-money safes and priced rounds. - No down rounds. There's a bit more complexity around liquidation preferences and anti-dilution rights - we don't support that now. It only matters if you're simulating a "bad" situation. But come on, it's a simulator — Be optimistic. - No pro-rata caps. We might add that soon, to fully support the YC standard deal. But for now, if an investor gets a pro-rata, they can exercise either all of it (keeping their original ownership) or none. - Safes' pro-ratas disappear after the first priced round. (I think this is what happens normally?) - Remaining available options get redistributed evenly at exit. - The round is the investor. For the sake of simplicity, consider "Series A" as the combination of all series A investors into one, super-investor. Let us know what you think!
419 by zikero | 119 comments on Hacker News.
Hi HN We built a tool to help founders understand how modern fundraising (with safes) works, and how much dilution you can expect when raising money. The project is open-source. The code is a mess right now, but it'll get better I promise. You can also help with that. We didn't build this to make money. We genuinely did it because we were looking for it, and couldn't find it. We're in fact in the process of fundraising for a company, and at first glance the process looks simple. Just an excel sheet will do! But then the more we dug into it and tried different simulators, the more we realized that it's more complex than it looks. We even signed up to Pulley, Carta and others just to run simulations. But they're a bit confusing. TL;DR: Understanding modern startup funding and knowing how much dilution you'll face is hard. We built a tool that'll hopefully help with that. You can add Post-money Safes, priced rounds and issue options to employees, and you can see how that affects your ownership at every step. You can also simulate an Exit scenario and see how much money you'll be left with. --- Some examples of complex stuff: - There are many different types of safes. They all convert at the first priced round, but in different ways. Some are through discount, some are uncapped, some have a fixed valuation cap, and some have both a discount and a valuation cap. - All safes (before first priced round) convert at the same time. They don't dilute each other, which is what happens in the rest of fundraising. - Investors often require you to set aside some options. This one is particularily nasty. Basically, if an investor expects you to set aside 10% as options, and expects to get 10% equity, that's what should appear in the subsequent cap table. However, calculating the options is difficult, and is often a circular calculation (even Kirsty Nathoo from YC says it's complex and avoids showing the calculation in the Safe video "Understanding SAFEs and Priced Equity Rounds") - Safes and priced rounds can have pro-rata, but don't always exercise it - Pro-ratas of safes are taken from the priced round money, so you'd expect the safe holder's equity to remain the same if they exercise it. BUT ... it gets diluted by the new options issued. - Safes can have an MFN provision, which defers the valuation discussion/calculation until the moment the priced round is about to close. With a mix of discounts, uncapped and valuation caps, it gets tricky to know which deal is "better". - ... Assumptions and limitations: - Only post-money safes and priced rounds. - No down rounds. There's a bit more complexity around liquidation preferences and anti-dilution rights - we don't support that now. It only matters if you're simulating a "bad" situation. But come on, it's a simulator — Be optimistic. - No pro-rata caps. We might add that soon, to fully support the YC standard deal. But for now, if an investor gets a pro-rata, they can exercise either all of it (keeping their original ownership) or none. - Safes' pro-ratas disappear after the first priced round. (I think this is what happens normally?) - Remaining available options get redistributed evenly at exit. - The round is the investor. For the sake of simplicity, consider "Series A" as the combination of all series A investors into one, super-investor. Let us know what you think!
New best story on Hacker News: Tell HN: Russia has started blocking OpenVPN/WireGuard connections
Tell HN: Russia has started blocking OpenVPN/WireGuard connections
433 by itvision | 226 comments on Hacker News.
For the past three days Russians have been unable to use their VPN services working via OpenVPN/WireGuard protocols, and some even have reported that in certain situations SSH connections have stopped working. The prospect of an isolated Russian interweb has become oh so real. As a person currently residing in Russia I can confirm that I've been unable to connect to my favourite VPN provider for the past three days, not even its official application works. I've not seen any discussions on the English-peaking Internet, not it's been in the news for some reasons despite its importance in preserving freedom of information and opinions. In the Russian internet it's being hotly debated here: https://ift.tt/sUkKHJI... More on the topic: https://ift.tt/A7B4HIS
433 by itvision | 226 comments on Hacker News.
For the past three days Russians have been unable to use their VPN services working via OpenVPN/WireGuard protocols, and some even have reported that in certain situations SSH connections have stopped working. The prospect of an isolated Russian interweb has become oh so real. As a person currently residing in Russia I can confirm that I've been unable to connect to my favourite VPN provider for the past three days, not even its official application works. I've not seen any discussions on the English-peaking Internet, not it's been in the news for some reasons despite its importance in preserving freedom of information and opinions. In the Russian internet it's being hotly debated here: https://ift.tt/sUkKHJI... More on the topic: https://ift.tt/A7B4HIS
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)