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cedricd

908 karma · joined October 5, 2012

cofounder at Narrator (narratordata.com)

YC Badge: 0x31430d28FAf744B9012E8116F80d58D735180c79

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cedricd··on Launch HN: Magnitude (YC S25) – Self-optimizing inference engine for agents
Looks interesting! Is there any way to skip or speed up the 'Assessing Models' step? I'm unable to download anything because it's been taking forever. I'm sure you could apply some quick heuristics or do a lookup or something to filter models. Or trust the user a bit more -- I already know which models fit on my machine. As it stands I'm stuck at that step and can't use the app.

Maybe have it run silently in the background and assess on demand when a user selects / attempts to download a model. It's not quite clear why all need to be assessed before I can download the first model to try.

cedricd··on A Better Light Source for Scanning Color Negative Film
I've scanned a few hundred images using an iPad as the light source. I've tried both a white screen and a bluish screen designed to basically invert the orange cast from the negative.

Both seem to work well. The bluish thing works quite well, but it turns out that different rolls need slightly different light color to compensate, so it wasn't worth the trouble. In the end the best result was buying a license for Negative Lab Pro[0] to post process everything

[0]: https://www.negativelabpro.com/

cedricd··on IEA: 20% of 2023 new car sales globally were EVs, curbing oil demand
I think a statement like that merits a source. You mentioned tires being ablative. 30k miles of tires being worn off ~= few pounds of material vs 600 gallons of fuel (assuming a 50mpg ulev).
cedricd··on Extreme video compression with prediction using pre-trainded diffusion models
Netflix did VMAF for this: https://github.com/Netflix/vmaf

It checks a reference video against an encoded video and returns a score representing how close the encoded video appears to the original from a human perspective.

cedricd··on Launch HN: OutSail (YC W23) – Wingsails to reduce cargo ship fuel consumption
Only a guess, but drag would probably be a concern and could very likely undo the effects of the solar arrays.
cedricd··on 30% of YC companies exposed through SVB can’t make payroll in the next 30 days
It asked specifically if they couldn't make payroll for the next 30 days

Also -- it's 30% of those who responded to the survey. So lots of startups could be banking with SVB and have not bothered to fill it out. Maybe those less likely to make payroll would be more likely to fill out the survey

cedricd··on GPU mining no longer profitable after Ethereum merge
I'm fairly sure that Bitcoin mining just isn't as profitable to mine with a GPU -- it's more cost-effective to use an ASIC designed for that purpose.
cedricd··on Starlink is now on all seven continents, enabled by its space laser network
You're definitely right, but one mitigating factor is that Starlink satellites are in a pretty low orbit. They'll naturally decay relatively quickly and drop out of orbit at end of life.

Edit: a link that goes over some of this https://www.spacex.com/updates/#sustainability

cedricd··on Tell HN: Otter.ai bot recording meetings without consent
I've been liking https://fathom.video a lot. Integrates well with Zoom. I think you can choose which recordings are shared with teams -- and their transcription is pretty good.
cedricd··on Welcome Home, Garry Tan
Jen Wolf and Brett Gibson

https://blog.initialized.com/2022/08/jen-wolf-and-brett-gibs...

cedricd··on Why is Snowflake so expensive
I'm glad the author also points out how customer (mis)use can blow up data warehouse costs too. No matter how efficient Snowflake could get, using the warehouse too much or with unnecessary queries will ultimately have a larger impact.

The trend in the data space currently is for usage to increase -- as more companies adopt dbt they're running more and more prebuilt (materialized views) queries on a scheduled basis, rather than on demand. This is overall a good thing in that data is becoming easier to manage and use, but it does come at an increase in warehousing costs.

I think eventually the pendulum will swing back to tools that help optimize warehouse usage, as long as they allow for the same increase in productivity as dbt (disclosure - I work for one such company)

cedricd··on Midlife: A Philosophical Guide
At 29 I took a year off everything and traveled. One thing I've learned in the decade+ since is that every year that goes by makes it harder to do. If you're feeling the itch just do it. You'll have a lot of years in your career so don't think you're missing out on anything -- assuming you're able to make the finances work.
cedricd··on How San Francisco became a failed city
Could be a contributing factor. As for me I live downtown in Manhattan in a 'nice' neighborhood (though in downtown they're nearly all nice). The equivalent in SF is the opposite.

One thing could be that there are real neighborhoods where people live in the denser parts of the city. Our public schools (in Manhattan) are extremely good, so families do actually live there. AFAIK folks generally leave SF once they have kids.

cedricd··on How San Francisco became a failed city
You shouldn't have to live that way. That is bad and not normal.
cedricd··on How San Francisco became a failed city
What I don't get, living in NYC, is why it's so much safer (seemingly) than SF. Yes, we have homelessness and crime, and it has sharply risen during COVID, but not to this point.

NYC is a much bigger city, politically very liberal, and our politicians aren't exactly amazing, so what's different?

cedricd··on Sheryl Sandberg stepping down as Facebook COO
Yeah. I suppose I mean that she's been disappeared for the public eye for a while, so why leave now? My guess isn't that maybe she's lost too much influence and just doesn't find the job interesting anymore.
cedricd··on Sheryl Sandberg stepping down as Facebook COO
That's pretty surprising. I know that there has been tons of controversy swirling around the company the past few years, but things have seemed relatively quiet lately, other than their recent bad revenue growth.

Do people here think this is a shakeup at the company or that she legitimately wanted to do something else?

cedricd··on Ffmpeg Buddy
A few hundred thousand videos? I'm super curious what your use case was. I really can't imagine the scenario for this :)
cedricd··on The Life of a Backpacker in Asia in the 1970s (2018)
The trick (unfortunately) is to slow down. If you don't have a tight schedule, and can sort of wander, you can start somewhere well known and end up somewhere off the beaten path pretty organically.

You'll also meet a network of longer-term travelers who exchange info about where to go (and not go). You don't have to go somewhere that literally no one has been to see something a bit unique, magical, and mostly devoid of casual tourists.

cedricd··on It looks like you’re trying to take over the world
The one skill that we're undeniably the best at in the animal kingdom is throwing. No other animal even comes close.
cedricd··on Legal Concepts for Founders
It can happen, but it's rare. Read up on 'piercing the corporate veil' if you're interested. It generally happens in cases of fraud, gross misconduct, criminal behavior, etc. In a more common scenario of a company going bankrupt through the normal course of business the founder's assets will be protected.
cedricd··on An asteroid killed dinosaurs in spring, which might explain why mammals survived
I was going to say that the landmasses could have been pretty different back then. But I took a quick look and it looks like they were broadly in the same place with respect to N / S hemispheres.
cedricd··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2022)
Narrator AI | Marketing / Brand Designer | Remote | Full time | https://www.narrator.ai

At Narrator we've built a new kind of data platform that allows people to answer any data question in minutes. We do this by using a fundamentally different approach: everything in your data warehouse becomes an event stream that can be queried and combined in any number of ways.

We're looking for a brand / marketing designer for our home page, sales decks, and potentially some product designs.

We're US-based but all work remotely.

Check out the job here:

https://bookface.ycombinator.com/company/12598/jobs/49002

cedricd··on The Fireless Cooker That Feeds
Explaining this just to make sure I get it.

When we cook we're bringing up food to a certain temp, then maintaining it at that temp till it's done cooking. If we could perfectly insulate it, then it could hold that temp as long as we want without being on the fire. So the only energy input is getting it hot -- after that it's cooking on its own.

So this is trying to approximate that by insulating the pot.

I always sort of assumed that there's a lot of heat 'loss' from food itself heating up -- as in most the cook time is getting the food up to the temp (i.e. when cooking a steak), not waiting for it to cook at the temp. But I suppose that for certain grains and stews and things that thinking is wrong.

cedricd··on The horizon problem for faster than light travel
Surprisingly it's not that much. At a constant 1G acceleration you could travel across the galaxy (100k light years) in 12 years (from your reference frame)[0].

I definitely agree that such travel would require enormous amounts of energy.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_travel_under_constant_ac...

cedricd··on Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
My answer to maintaining a minimal set of photos on a local machine isn't great unfortunately. The desktop holding all the photos acts like a file server and I connect my laptop to that when browsing images.

There's a way to do it that I find somewhat risky: pay a bit extra for permanent storage. Normally Backblaze will remove deleted files in 30 days (I pay for a year). If you do permanent then you can delete your originals from your local machine and Backblaze will keep them presumably forever. That approach makes me nervous personally :)

cedricd··on Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
I'm surprised how technical and homegrown all these solutions are (well, it's an HN crowd so maybe I shouldn't be). I'm a techy too and pretty into photography, but I've gone the other way.

I store all my photos on a desktop computer and use BackBlaze to automatically keep everything backed up.

It violates the 3-2-1 rule but in the 10ish years I've been using this approach I've had tons of harddrive failures, had to restore some backups due to my own mistakes, but I haven't lost a single image.

I used to do complicated sync stuff but I found that the more moving pieces there were the more I would lose photos for various reasons.

cedricd··on YC’s $500k Standard Deal
That's true. I wasn't sure what else to call it. I guess it's more investment upfront at a later valuation. It's almost like a SAFE where the next SAFE acts like a priced round.

It's a non-trivial amount though -- it's probably the case that the next funding round for most YC companies gets low millions. So that's a nice chunk of the round.

Getting it upfront is unique though, and really quite valuable at this early stage. Still curious if YC will allow opting out -- I don't think I would have -- but still curious.

cedricd··on YC’s $500k Standard Deal
I'd be curious to see if YC founders, for whatever reason, are able to choose to opt out of the 375.

Overall I think this is a great move, and it's good for founders going through the batch. But they could have reasons to not want to give more equity to YC (maybe have more room in SAFEs for strategic angels, stuff like that).

edit: I originally called 'more equity' pro rata, which is not correct at all.

cedricd··on A routine gem update ended up creating $73k worth of subscriptions
It's clearly a breaking change how a core feature of the library behaves. This is extremely unprofessional on the part of the maintainers. I'd completely lose trust in the gem.

They knew they were making a breaking change, documented it, and didn't increment a major version number. That breaks the entire point of semver.

Also, this is generating SQL ffs. Like how more nasty of a breaking change could you make in terms of potential impact to live apps that upgrade? The experience in the post is a perfect example of how badly this can go wrong.

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