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timsuchanek

380 karma · joined October 3, 2014

founder of https://expand.ai/ (YC S24) https://x.com/timsuchanek
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timsuchanek··on Building a robotics research setup that lives next to my desk
This is really exciting. Incredible that you can do this for this budget at home. Unthinkable a couple years ago.
timsuchanek··on Claude Opus 4.8
thanks for always providing this very much on time. I'm wondering what the next, harder challenge could be? Maybe some animated svg?
timsuchanek··on DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode
I hope they use DuckDB
timsuchanek··on Quack: The DuckDB Client-Server Protocol
This is very exciting. Now we just need this for Postgres as well.
timsuchanek··on Claude Design
Rate exceeded.
timsuchanek··on Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines
This is very exciting. It enables a cross platform, language agnostic plugin system, especially for agents, while being safe in a VM.
timsuchanek··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2026)
expand.ai (YC S24) | SF onsite | Full-Stack Engineers We're building infrastructure that makes the web queryable for AI agents. Already in production with major AI labs. Looking for experienced full-stack devs who are comfortable wielding agent swarms to ship fast. Small team, well-funded, high intensity. founders@expand.ai
timsuchanek··on Show HN: Emdash – Open-source agentic development environment
Let's go! Love that this is a solid OSS alternative to what's already out there!
timsuchanek··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2025)
expand.ai | SF | https://expand.ai

Do you want to turn the internet into a database with us? We're building a foundational building block for the agent economy. We work a lot (6 days) and in person, have a cracked team of people creating their own languages, hardware design, repeat founder...

Looking for backend/full-stack engineers: https://expand.ai/careers/founding-engineer

timsuchanek··on Launch HN: Better Auth (YC X25) – Authentication Framework for TypeScript
Better auth is by far the best option out there. We've adopted it and couldn't be happier not having to manage 2 sources of truth.
timsuchanek··on Postgres Just Cracked the Top Fastest Databases for Analytics
Congrats on the launch! Does it support ordinary db migrations with the normal Postgres interface?
timsuchanek··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2025)
expand.ai | Onsite in SF, CA | Full-time | expand.ai Want to turn the internet into a database? Let's go!

More about the founding engineer role: https://www.expand.ai/careers/founding-engineer

timsuchanek··on A Letter to the American People
Why is this not on the front page anymore?
timsuchanek··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2025)
expand.ai (YC S24) | https://www.expand.ai | Backend, ML | Onsite in San Francisco

At expand.ai, we turn the internet into a database. We are doing bleeding edge web agent research.

We're hiring a founding engineer.

We care less about your particular background, be it AI, ML, backend, full-stack... What we care about is that you're passionate about programming. We are solving technically very hard problems. See more in the role description.

Given that I'm a solo founder, we can afford giving you a bit more equity than most startups ;)

More about the role: https://www.expand.ai/careers/founding-engineer

You can apply to tim@expand.ai

timsuchanek··on Web scraping with GPT-4o: powerful but expensive
This is also how we started a while ago. I agree that it's too expensive, hence we're working on making this scalable and cheaper now! We'll soon launch, but here we go! https://expand.ai
timsuchanek··on BMX: A Freshly Baked Take on BM25
Amazing! When will we have this in the major databases?
timsuchanek··on Hello OLMo: A truly open LLM
Great to see e2e openness. One of the only true OSS models out there, vs most of the models releasing the binaries (weights). Surprised that they didn’t mention Mistral 7b in the comparisons.
timsuchanek··on Readyset: A MySQL and Postgres wire-compatible caching layer
This is one of the deepest deep tech startups I've seen in a long time. I had the pleasure to meet some of the folks at RustConf in Portland.

Readyset is basically reimplementing a full database, at the absolute bleeding edge of db research, enabling global partial replication of any kind of data.

A solution desperately needed, as databases grow.

You can think of it as an intelligent LRU cache in front of your database. An important step towards fast globally distributed applications.

I hope this project will get more publicity and adoption - it's very well deserved.

timsuchanek··on The underground world of hobby tunneling
Minecraft addiction in real life
timsuchanek··on Pkl, a Programming Language for Configuration
I like the syntactic sugar of directly validating types through modules. However, configuration at some point always converges towards Turing completness. I’m biased but imo nothing beats TypeScript and schema validation tooling like Effect.Schema or Zod. Yes it’s more code to write but you’re not locked in and can adopt the system as needed.
timsuchanek··on Show HN: Running LLMs in one line of Python without Docker
Looks interesting! Your llama 2 demo is unfortunately down: https://imgur.com/a/MLw6dAk
timsuchanek··on 100K Context Windows
Curious what this will mean for the vector db vendors. Imagine finetuning would be quick and cheap. Could there be a world where vector dbs aren’t needed anymore?
timsuchanek··on GraphCDN is now Stellate and raised $30M
The number is actually greater than 1,000 right now. No, we're not scared of Fastly or Cloudflare and are actually cooperating with them. What makes you think that "they will just clone the moat"?
timsuchanek··on One Job, One Pay – Globally
- some people will be vastly better compensated than others in terms of cost of living > Agreed. And other factors like taxes and quality of living are all playing a role for what the person will ultimately receive. Interestingly enough, oftentimes these balance each other out. Higher taxes? Usually better infrastructure. Lower taxes? Maybe hospitals less good.

We might not agree in all points, but where we apparently strongly agree is on this point: "remote work has shown us most people are generally equal in output"

We agree with that. The only next step we do from there, is that for us, it matters, that for the same output, the company pays the same compensation. Why not go further? Why not think a step further from paying the same and adjusting it based on factors like cost of living, quality of living? Because that's very hard to quantify. We say, that the boundary of this decision is, how much we as a company pay to the human on the others side. We can't control what exactly will arrive, there are different taxes, health insurances etc, which all have an impact on what you ultimately earn.

timsuchanek··on One Job, One Pay – Globally
Agreed.
timsuchanek··on One Job, One Pay – Globally
Well, we don't need to make salaries public in order to have internal transparency.
timsuchanek··on One Job, One Pay – Globally
Actually 11 by now ;)
timsuchanek··on One Job, One Pay – Globally
Tim, Co-Founder here. Yes, this applies to everyone within the company, including the founders and investors.
timsuchanek··on Lessons learned from running GraphQL
Depends how fast your data changes. SWR can be very effective for that. I suggest having a look at GraphCDN (bias alert, I’m one of the founders, so take it with some salt ;)
timsuchanek··on Lessons learned from running GraphQL
You could do that or directly cache at the edge [0] - makes it much faster for the user and is cheaper. https://graphcdn.io does that.
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