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hubraumhugo

8,293 karma · joined June 23, 2019

Building the data layer for agentic investing @ kadoa.com

Also made HN Wrapped (hn-wrapped.kadoa.com)

Happy to chat about ETL, data, AI, startups, or anything else: adrian@kadoa.com

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hubraumhugo··on Startup Nights 2026 is comming up on 5-6 Nov. in Switzerland
As a Swiss founder, it's great to randomly see this popping up on HN :)

Switzerland has everything to produce successful startups: top universities and talent, stable and sovereign infrastructure and government, capital, and liberal tax and company laws.

However, the reality is different:

As if starting a company isn't hard enough, Swiss (and I guess EU) culture doesn't really recognize entrepreneurship as a valuable career path. You hear a lot of "Are you sure about taking that much risk?" and when you fail you get a "I told you so".

You would think there's plenty of capital here, but unfortunately not in VC. It's getting better, but many Swiss early-stage investors still ask for a detailed 5-year business plan and four due diligence calls for a 5k ticket in your round.

In SF, everyone helps each other out with their network, intros, and so on. In Switzerland, most startups and scaleups still operate in closed gardens and ecosystems are rare or slowly developing, which makes building a network really hard.

Events like these hopefully help to change this :)

hubraumhugo··on An update on Wayback Machine access
There is a HN article on abusive AI crawlers on the front page almost every week, but we rarely talk about the path forward. Web scraping has been around for as long as the internet, and it was fine because we had established best practices (rate limiting, self-identification, robots.txt, etc.) that the industry agreed upon. Now we have AI labs and their crawlers that don't care about any of this gentlemen's agreement. So how do we go from here? Is adding more difficult Anubis and Cloudflare bot protection really the solution? How many millions of human hours and billions in infra costs are we willing to spend on this arms race?

Some approaches that I think are promising:

- A robots.txt V2[0] as a standard way for website owners to state how bots and AI crawlers can use their online content and where to go (e.g. distinguish search from AI training use cases, point to a downloadable file instead of crawling everything, etc.).

- Something like Web Bot Auth[1] as a non-centralized standard for self-identifying bots and agents cryptographically. This would allow websites to allow or deny bots very precisely.

- what else?

[0] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-vaughan-machine-reada...

[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-meunier-http-mes...

hubraumhugo··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)
I started a fun side project to reduce my screen time and get back into focused reading (thanks AI...): Unscroll turns articles I bookmark online into a personal printed magazine that I can then read offline [0]. I just printed the first personal edition that I will read on my flight next week, including a few articles I found on HN :)

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

hubraumhugo··on Site Is Closed on Sundays
Love it. I started a fun side project this weekend to also reduce my screen time: turning articles I bookmark online into a personal printed magazine that I can then read offline [0]. I just printed the first personal edition that I will read on my flight next week, including a few articles I found on HN :)

[0] https://www.unscroll.ch

hubraumhugo··on Creepy Crawlies
There is a HN article on abusive AI crawlers on the front page almost every week, but we rarely talk about the path forward. Web scraping has been around for as long as the internet, and it was fine because we had established best practices (rate limiting, self-identification, robots.txt, etc.) that the industry agreed upon. Now we have AI labs and their crawlers that don't care about any of this gentlemen's agreement.

So how do we go from here? Is adding more difficult Anubis and Cloudflare bot protection really the solution? How many millions of human hours and billions in infra costs are we willing to spend on this arms race?

Some approaches that I think are promising:

- A robots.txt V2[0] as a standard way for website owners to state how bots and AI crawlers can use their online content and where to go (e.g. distinguish search from AI training use cases, point to a downloadable file instead of crawling everything, etc.).

- Something like Web Bot Auth[1] as a non-centralized standard for self-identifying bots and agents cryptographically. This would allow websites to allow or deny bots very precisely.

- what else?

[0] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-vaughan-machine-reada...

[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-meunier-http-mes...

hubraumhugo··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2026)
Kadoa | Software & Web Scraping Engineers | Remote | Full-Time | https://kadoa.com

We are building the web data layer for finance. Our coding agents build, monitor, and repair deterministic ETL pipelines that produce the most reliable web datasets for investors. We serve many of the top hedge funds and asset managers.

Open roles:

- Senior Software Engineer: https://www.kadoa.com/careers/senior-software-engineer

- Web Scraping Engineer: https://www.kadoa.com/careers/web-scraping-engineer

Reasons you’d love working with us:

* Work with a a lean and very talented team of engineers in a drama-free and distraction-light environment.

* All founders have spent years in the trenches writing web scraping and ETL code and still do it almost every single day.

* Fully remote job with flexible working hours and vacation.

* Work at the forefront of applied AI in finance. Our agents are in use for mission critical production pipelines.

* Minimal distance between the code you ship and the customers who use it. You will get to work with some of the world's top investment firms.

If you're interested, please submit this form: https://forms.gle/JRYUvcbkcdMNejzG9 and I'll be in touch. Not a fan of doing this, but similar to others, my inbox is drowning in AI-generated job applications.

hubraumhugo··on Don't be a meat proxy
We added this communication rule to our company handbook: "If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort" (coming from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48497609) and it's working well so far.
hubraumhugo··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2026)
Kadoa | Software & Data Engineers | Remote | Full-Time | https://kadoa.com

Kadoa is the web data layer for finance. We use coding agents to build, monitor, and repair deterministic data pipelines for investment firms, so they can make faster and better decisions.

All founders have spent years in the trenches writing web scraping and ETL code and still do it almost every single day. We are growing fast, have a drama-free and distraction-light environment, and try to minimize the distance between the code & data you ship and the customers who use it.

We are looking for people who share our passion for software craftsmanship, data, and AI. We're a lean remote team and are looking for low-ego generalists with high agency that can help us build a platform that combines the most intuitive UX with world-class accuracy and performance.

Open roles:

- Web Scraping Engineer: https://www.kadoa.com/careers/web-scraping-engineer

- Senior Software Engineer: https://www.kadoa.com/careers/senior-software-engineer

If that sounds like you, please email me at (adrian at kadoa dot com) and mention HN in the subject line. Please include any relevant Github projects.

hubraumhugo··on Midjourney Medical
It's great to see money made in one of the few remaining unregulated fields like math and software applied to problems in the heavily regulated healthcare industry. There is an asymmetry in healthcare innovation that nobody ever got fired for blocking a good thing, but you can lose your job for approving a bad one.

I'm also following the very inspirational journey of the former Gitlab CEO who battles cancer by founding companies with his own money [0].

[0] https://sytse.com/cancer/

hubraumhugo··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2026)
Kadoa | Web Scraping / Software Engineer | Remote | Full-Time | https://kadoa.com

Kadoa is the web data layer for finance. We use the best coding agents to produce the most accurate web datasets, so the leading investment firms can make faster and better decisions.

All founders have spent years in the trenches writing web scraping and ETL code and still do it almost every single day. We are growing fast, have a drama-free and distraction-light environment, and try to minimize the distance between the code & data you ship and the customers who use it.

We are looking for people who share our passion for software craftsmanship, web data, and AI.

Open roles:

- Web Scraping Engineer: https://www.kadoa.com/careers/web-scraping-engineer

- Senior Software Engineer: https://www.kadoa.com/careers/senior-software-engineer

If that sounds like you, please email me at (adrian at kadoa dot com) and mention HN in the subject line.

hubraumhugo··on Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC
With SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic, we're likely to see 3 of the largest IPOs ever (by a wide margin) this year. Will existing institutional investors trim other positions to allocate a lot of capital for these mega listings or is this not a concern?
hubraumhugo··on Show HN: A website that tracks every stock trade Congress makes
At least it's not disclosed in any of his 278-T transactions (1,391 trades, which is not the full picture)
hubraumhugo··on Show HN: A website that tracks every stock trade Congress makes
The data pipelines need some more work to be OS ready, but it's on my list.
hubraumhugo··on Gemini 3.5 Flash
Just updated my HN Wrapped project with it and it does well on my totally unscientific LLM humor benchmark: https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com
hubraumhugo··on Claude.ai unavailable and elevated errors on the API
It's rare in history that a software product can be so unreliable without any negative business impact because it's the category leader and demand only keeps growing.

Reminds me of the early days of World of Warcraft, when servers went down frequently because Blizzard couldn't keep up with all the load. Everyone was frustrated but of course nobody stopped playing.

hubraumhugo··on Scoring Show HN submissions for AI design patterns
Love the idea. Let me get to this over the weekend and open-source it, then ping you via email.
hubraumhugo··on Scoring Show HN submissions for AI design patterns
Appreciate the feedback, just updated the title to be more clear.
hubraumhugo··on Vercel deployments were created without Middleware
In a separate email, they note:

> For affected deployments created during this window, any requests served until 21:10 UTC did not execute Middleware. The issue has been fully remediated and no redeployment is required.

> If, for authentication, authorization, or access control, you are exclusively relying upon Middleware, this incident may have allowed requests to bypass Middleware logic that would normally run. We recommend that you analyze your logs for the period between 11:20 UTC and 21:10 UTC on March 6, 2026, for any potential unauthorized access or activity.

hubraumhugo··on Nano Banana 2: Google's latest AI image generation model
It's working pretty well for generating an xkcd comic for your HN profile: https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com/

Previous nano banana frequently made speech attribution errors, the new one seems a lot more consistent.

hubraumhugo··on GPT-5.3-Codex
Anybody else not seeing it available in Codex app or CLI yet (with Plus)?
hubraumhugo··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2026)
Kadoa | Multiple roles | Remote | Full-Time | https://kadoa.com

Web scraping hasn't changed in decades: engineers still write brittle scripts that constantly break. Kadoa automates the entire web data pipeline with AI agents that build, maintain, and validate scraper code themselves.

All 3 founders have spent years in the trenches writing web scraping and ETL software and still do it almost every single day. We’re making sure every team member can do the best work of their career at Kadoa.

We are growing fast, have a drama-free and distraction-light environment, and try to minimize the distance between the code you ship and the customers who use it.

We are looking for people who share our passion for software craftsmanship, web scraping, and AI.

Open roles:

- Senior Frontend Engineer: https://www.kadoa.com/careers/frontend-engineer

- Senior Software Engineer: https://www.kadoa.com/careers/senior-software-engineer

If that sounds like you, please email me at (adrian at kadoa dot com) and mention HN in the subject line.

hubraumhugo··on Europe’s next-generation weather satellite sends back first images
I recently met a European space startup founder and was surprised to learn how much space innovation is happening in Europe with ESA. Europe wants to become less depended on SpaceX and NASA, and is heavily investing there. More funding + strong aerospace programs at universities like TU Munich has led to companies like ISAR Aerospace (SpaceX competitor), which is great to see.
hubraumhugo··on 65% of Hacker News posts have negative sentiment, and they outperform
dang's explanation sums it up nicely:

> It's human nature: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias. Everyone does it, but we perceive other people as doing it more than we do, which is itself a variation of the bias. You can even see it in the title of the OP, in the word "overwhelmingly". That's excessive: the negative bias is noticeable, but if you look closely, it's not overwhelming. (To make up some numbers, it's more like 60-40, not 90-10.)

However, it often feels as if it is overwhelming; in fact, one or two datapoints, plus negativity bias, are enough to create just such a feeling. The feeling gets expressed in ways that trigger similar feelings in other people, so we end up with a positive* feedback loop.

The interesting question is, what factors mitigate this? how do we dampen negativity bias? or, how do we get negative feedback into our positive feedback loop of negative affect? That must also be happening all the time, or we'd be in a "war of all against all", which isn't the case, though (again) it may feel like it.

* ['positive' in the sense of increasing; a positive loop of negative affect!]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40430263

hubraumhugo··on Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes
Politics aside: If this is all true and was a snatch and grab, it will go down as one of the most impressive military operations in the 21st century.
hubraumhugo··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2026)
Kadoa | Multiple roles | Remote | Full-Time | https://kadoa.com

We’re on a mission to give humans and LLMs reliable and fast access to web data.

Web scraping used to be the same for decades (brittle scripts that break constantly). We're automating that end-to-end with LLMs that build and maintain data pipelines. We're also heavily focused on making ethical scraping the default (robots.txt checks, rate limiting, etc.).

All 3 founders have spent years in the trenches writing web scraping and ETL software and still do it almost every single day. We’re making sure every team member can do the best work of their career at Kadoa.

We are looking for people who share our passion for software craftsmanship, data, and AI.

We are growing fast, have a no-bullshit culture, and try to minimize the distance between the code you write and the customers who use it.

We have openings for:

- Senior Frontend Engineer: https://www.kadoa.com/careers/frontend-engineer

- Senior Software Engineer: https://www.kadoa.com/careers/senior-software-engineer

If that sounds like you, please email me at (adrian at kadoa dot com) and mention HN in the subject line. AI slop applications will be filtered out immediately ;)

hubraumhugo··on Tell HN: Merry Christmas
Merry Christmas HN! You're one of the few constants among the many variables in my life, please never change :)
hubraumhugo··on Google's year in review: areas with research breakthroughs in 2025
"The Thinking Game" is an absolutely fascinating and inspirational documentary about DeepMind and Demis Hassabis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d95J8yzvjbQ

Makes you really optimistic about the future of humanity :)

hubraumhugo··on Show HN: Books mentioned on Hacker News in 2025
Would love to learn more about how this is built. I remember a similar project from 4 years ago[0] that used a classic BERT model for NER on HN comments.

I assume this one uses a few-shot LLM approach instead, which is slower and more expensive at inference, but so much faster to build since there's no tedious labeling needed.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28596207

hubraumhugo··on Show HN: HN Wrapped 2025 - an LLM reviews your year on HN
Thanks. I now run a two-step process: first pass reads through all posts and comments to extract patterns, second pass uses those to generate the content. Should be much more representative of your full year now :)
hubraumhugo··on Show HN: HN Wrapped 2025 - an LLM reviews your year on HN
Ah, I've found the issue. Turns out I didn't account for case-insensitive HN usernames like yours :) should be fixed, love your current xkcd :D
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