MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: A Unique User-in-the-Loop Agent for Investment Research
by nlpnerd | 2025-07-26 17:54:34+00:00
Hey HN,

I am a first time founder working on Vector -- an agentic platform for investment research and analysis. Looking for feedback on the public beta that was launched, specifically around the unique philosophy behind this product. Which usually ends up either really gamechanging or just dumb -- I recognize this and hence feel the need to try and validate things as early as possible.

This product was born from personal needs and frustration with existing platforms and tools. I am a retail investor myself managing a significant personal portfolio. Even though I only rebalance quarterly, it takes significant time and effort to keep up with emerging risks to my portfolio and even more time to research and develop conviction around new ideas for diversification. Seeking Alpha is a chore to go through with too much generic content, inconsistent quality and noise. ChatGPT and Perplexity Finance lack a decent workflow (too chatbot centric). Deep research might seem great at first, but the lack of control and verbosity becomes a pain very quickly.

Vector is designed around two core theses that we believe differentiate it meaningfully from existing solutions

1) User-in-the-loop. We recognize that AI agents still limited in reasoning capabilities and require guidance for many complex tasks. Secondly, we also believe that investment research is an open ended and rather subjective task. Useful research processes(ones that help consumers achieve/overturn convictions)require the means to let the consumer change/challenge the methodology and also the assumptions made.

2) Embed agents into well tested workflow, not force a chatbot on users. Many AI/LLM powered products out there today are chatbot first for some reason. Some claim that this is because natural language is the most powerful HCI given the capabilities of LLMs today. It is true in some instances but false for many others. For the problem we are tackling, a chatbot is not a natural workflow for investors and creates a lot of friction. Classic concepts like watchlist, stock screeners and trending news are actually well tested and very sensible. They do have limits, but that is where embedding agentic capabilities adds value instead of serving as gimmicks.

We’re releasing this early, imperfect beta not because it’s finished, but because the core theses behind Vector deserve to be tested. We’d love your feedback — even (especially) the critical kind — to help shape what comes next.

Public beta (Free): https://vector.deepinsightlabs.ai Discord server: https://discord.gg/CKzKWaex Website: https://www.deepinsightlabs.ai

P.S I would remove the sign-up and login for easier access, but the watchlist functionalities require unique identity for users to work. Apologies for that.
by toast0 | 2025-07-26 17:55:27+00:00
I've written firewall rules in many dialects, include Linux with ipchains and iptables, FreeBSD with ipfw and pf.

I will say, they all pretty much work, until you get into more esoteric stuff; do you want to drop syns where the last 16-bits of seq match the client's port number? Do you want to drop UDP RTP packets for a specific SSRC? If so, that need may guide your firewall choice. If you need to sync states between two stateful firewalls, that pushes you to pf with pfsync. Etc.

I guess I didn't see a big difference in perceived happiness between any of the rules systems? pf.conf is maybe more picky and checks everything at once, which is nice so you don't end up with a half baked ruleset.

Otoh, pf has the feature that OpenBSD changed the rule syntax, and the ported versions didn't; I'm not sure a forced migration of rule config would have sparked joy for OpenBSD users anyway, but it certainly doesn't spark joy when I read current documentation for the OpenBSD pf and can't apply it directly, and have to translate the config language to the original language.

Pf also has the extra special feature that Apple ported pf to MacOs but some things don't work properly for a host firewall (synproxy in mac os pf only works if the mac is operating as a router, not as a host... And mac os's tcp stack has no syn flood mitigation, beyond having a small listen backlog or not accepting syns directly from the internet). That's an Apple failing, not really a pf failing, but still, frustrating.

I'll have to look again and see if FreeBSD pf has gotten the features I need from ipfw, so maybe I don't have to run two firewalls at the same time. :(
by jazzyjackson | 2025-07-26 17:55:30+00:00
Throwing in Moscow with Europe is a choice. Spain and Portugal are doing their own thing according to your rail gauge map, true, but there are many city pairs crossing multiple borders that are accessible nonstop, see the route map for the Austrian sleep railroad, nightjet.

https://www.nightjet.com/en/dam/jcr:6a8041cb-0131-4ad3-84fd-...
by quesera | 2025-07-26 17:56:01+00:00
It is Linux-specific to some degree.

There's a culture of documentation in BSD which exceeds Linux. There's a larger commercial/reputational market for a Linux book of course, but that attracts different writers, who are often not as good/knowledgeable/motivated/dedicated/etc as the BSD documentation writers.

Additionally, BSD has a culture of simplicity and consistency which is entirely absent in Linux. This makes documentation more clear and much more durable.
by gnabgib | 2025-07-26 17:56:01+00:00
Discussion (132 points, 11 hours ago, 25 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44691935

2024 (212 points, 53 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40107456

2022 (274 points, 70 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32170592

2017 (204 points, 45 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14232692
by vanderZwan | 2025-07-26 17:56:25+00:00
> It keeps WASM simple

At the cost of complicating JS string implementations, probably to the point of undoing the benefits.

Currently JS strings are immutable objects, allowing for all kinds of optimization tricks (interning, ropes, etc.). Having one string represented by a mutable arraybuffer messes with that.

There's probably also security concerns with allowing mutable access to string internals inside the JS engine side.

So the simple-appearing solution you suggested would be rejected all major browser vendors who back the various WASM and JS engines.

Access to constant JS strings without any form of mutability is the only realistic option for accessing JS strings. And creating constant strings is the only one for sending them back.
by The_President | 2025-07-26 17:56:27+00:00
Gentlemen, we're working on a new app called Eyeroll. It's a revolutionary new dating app, where our users can rate the women they have dated based on favorable and/or unfavorable attributes. Every month, our marketing team will generate a scoreboard of profiles that score highest on all mainstream attributes, and our search and filter function will rival that of Amazon (including the much requested sort by lowest first.) We're seeking $23-to-$23.5 million in funding to get our product over the finish line.
by jksmith | 2025-07-26 17:58:13+00:00
Exactly. So let's expand. A good reason to have AI everywhere is that it is capable of giving you a fair answer for just about anything. So ask it to do some data analytics stuff, like what Tableau or PowerBI can do. It can provide maybe 60% of the same functionality that most users require (provided data access, blah blah). Ask it do patient pre-triage. It will get you within 60% of a ballpark answer. Ask it to diagnose a car problem, or a crop rotation plan. Once again, it get's you in the ballpark. So what I'm suggesting is, the current state of the art has no Dunbar limitation and no bias toward any particular domain. It's like a 10k person team that doesn't care what it's solutioning (L1). Generalize the L1 to provide high assurance foundational functionality (workflows, custom workitems, some general way and tools to get from a strategic opinion to an executable fact).

People are still limited by Dunbar's number, so they need domain specific vocabularies to help them describe solutions to smaller groups. Maybe a direction exploitable by lisp at the L2 level.

But with an AI native L1, it doesn't care about the domain but would need to hold up the whole organization. Ada assurance. So it produces a 60% solution that has to be consumable by any particular L2. Multiple enterprise apps with a common base layer. No need to provide connectors or bridging apps for separate ERP, SCM, BI, HR vendors. Complete line of site, real time analytics and real time budget adjustments, eliminating need for budget cycles. It's kind of the Deus Ex God app. Deprecates need for separate Salesforce, Oracle Fusion, Tableau apps, separate vendor expenses, etc.
by cubefox | 2025-07-26 17:58:35+00:00
> Compare a complex homegrown data store to a relational database like postgresSQL. Both get the job done, but one has significantly more conceptual clarity and reliability.

That's a good example of what I said. Most software engineers don't develop new database management systems. They just use one. And if they merely use it, they don't need or benefit from nontrivial math. The math is abstracted away behind the intuitive SQL syntax.
by benoau | 2025-07-26 17:58:50+00:00
> Performance of Flash was awful on mobile.

Of course, in fact I watched Adobe unveil the final iterations of their mobile Flash Player plugin at conferences it was simply garbage. But then they shifted away from the plugin model to transpiling to produce native apps and it became much more viable, till Apple banned it and the entire industry had to stop using Flash in their projects entirely to support mobile.

Facebook didn't kill those games, as smartphones exploded in popularity the users shifted away from playing on school and work computers to playing on their phones, which precluded playing them on Facebook.
by Eric_WVGG | 2025-07-26 17:59:23+00:00
I believe the bounding box has to fit all the possible ascenders and descenders etc., so the em-height is proportioned within the box to whatever the highest and lowest marks in the typeface are.

But this technique isn’t correcting for some kind of mistake the typographer theoretically made, it’s adjusting for the fact that CSS sizes by the bounding box instead of the em-height. The font itself is unchanged and renders exactly how it’s designed, this just lets us use it in a more intuitive way.

IMO sizing by bounding-box was the wrong move in the original CSS spec, but that’s how digital type renderers have worked going back to the eighties, so the whole thing was probably too entrenched in the first place. And I have no idea if font standards of the day even had em-heights encoded in a way that could be read in font metadata.

Anyway, this whole feature is news to me, can’t wait to try it. Between this and text-box-trim (life changing), I’ve never been happier with web design.
by pyman | 2025-07-26 18:00:01+00:00
I was echoing the words of EU regulators, who've already imposed heavy regulations on US weapons manufacturers, pharma companies, social media, AI and now porn.

By the way, these goods and services don't represent freedom to the rest of the world. In fact, the US is seen as a protectionist country that promotes neoliberalism while imposing tight regulations to foreign companies.
by jeffrallen | 2025-07-26 18:00:11+00:00
I use https://sketch.dev, which seems to be approximately the same kind of thing. I find it is very organized, it does not need nearly as much babysitting as this guy is talking about. Perhaps a difference is the "todo read" and "todo write" tools, which it uses to break the main goal into achievable tasks, and then judge itself on if it has finished correctly or not. Also, Sketch is easy-going with corrections: if you tell it that it went the wrong direction, it quickly adjusts and follows your direction.

Anyway, two big thumbs up for agentic dev workflows from me, but only so far with Sketch.
by slashdev | 2025-07-26 18:00:34+00:00
There is a number. If the casualties were above 200,000 it would certainly make the case for a genocide much stronger. That's a high civilian to combatant casualty ratio. Hamas has an estimated 30-40K fighters. Numbers like that would mean a 10:1 civilian to combatant ratio which is high for a modern war. Higher than WWII[1], Vietnam, Iraq[2], etc. I'd at least have to admit Israel is prosecuting the war in a very cavalier way in regards to the lives of civilians.

The Iraq war, for example, had a roughly 3:1 ratio of civilians to combatants killed.[2]

If we take the Gazan Health Ministry numbers of 60k casualties of which Israel claims about 23K were Hamas fighters (neither number can be trusted at face value, but it gives us a starting point) then we see a ratio of 2:1. Which is pretty normal for war. Given how densely populated and urban Gaza is, how Hamas uses civilians as human shields, it's actually miraculously low. Not downplaying how horrible it is that so many people have died, but it could be much worse.

You could say the Hamas-run Gazan Health Ministry is understating the numbers, but it'd be hard to make a case for more than 80K[3]. You could say Israel has over stated how many Hamas fighters it has killed, but independant intelligence assessments estimate about 15K. If you take the absolute worst case estimate, it's 5:1, which is about the same as Myanamr, worse than Iraq, but better than Chechnya.

There's no way to twist that into a case for genocide. It doesn't fit. Lets look at what civilian to combatant ratio looks like in genocides:

Rwandan Genocide - 80 : 1

Armenian Genocide - 1000 : 1

Bosnian Genocide - 50 : 1

Yazidi Genocide by ISIS - 1000 : 1

Holocaust - 1000 : 1

It's clearly a war, not a genocide.

- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties

- [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War

- [3] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02009-8
by strcat | 2025-07-26 18:00:42+00:00
> The entire point of Replicant was replacing all mutable closed software, firmware, and blobs with open alternatives and they did to a large degree succeed at that isolated goal.

They did not replace firmware with open alternatives. Not updating firmware is not replacing it.

> Sadly this was, to your usual points, at the major expense of security making those devices purely research projects at best and not something anyone should ever actually use.

They steer people to devices with severe unpatched firmware vulnerabilities and an enormous number of severe unpatched software vulnerabilities in the case of Replicant. This is covered up and people are misled about it. These projects claiming to be focused on avoiding backdoors are in fact deliberately backdoored through not patching known vulnerabilities for ideological reasons.

> When you are stuck on a platform that requires closed firmware you are kind of stuck blindly accepting updates from the vendor to patch security bugs, stuck hoping they are not actually introducing new backdoors.

You still trust the developers of open source software and firmware. Open source doesn't result in all vulnerabilities being found, including intentional ones. It's not even close to providing it.

> This is why I reject platforms that require closed firmware in the first place to the fullest extent I can.

The platforms you're describing as having fully open firmware still have closed source firmware.
by jpc0 | 2025-07-26 18:00:43+00:00
Hears an idea,

Get Nvidia, AMD, Intel and whoever else you can get into a room. Get LLVMs boys into the same room.

Compile LLVMIR directly into hardware instructions fed into the GPU, get them to open up.

Having to target an API is part of the problem, get them to allow you to write Rust that directly compiles into the code that will run on the GPU, not something that becomes something else, that becomes spirv that controls a driver that will eventually run on the GPU.
by blendergeek | 2025-07-26 18:01:42+00:00
Free software and open source are two ideologies for the same thing. Free Software is the ideology of developing the software for the benefit of mankind (it's sometimes termed a "political" stance but I see it as an ethical stance). Open source is the ideology of saving money at a corporation by not paying the developers. Sure open source can benefit mankind but will only develop corporate software for money. When developing on my own time, I will focus on software that either personally benefits me or benefits other regular people.
by panick21_ | 2025-07-26 18:01:46+00:00
I explained what the issue was in technical terms, as I was following these issues in real time as it was developed and what communication from NASA and SpaceX was at the time. Then you made a smart-ass comment about how I was wrong and it was actually about safety. That wasn't incorrect if you want a one word answer but it also doesn't explain the 'why', and that's what I did.
by stego-tech | 2025-07-26 18:02:09+00:00
This. It’s come a long way since the early days of hosting content out of the home off Torrent Seeders, FTP Servers, and Shoutcast offerings, but support is still the biggest bugbear - both end user support, and product support of industry best practices.

Plex doesn’t automatically generate a valid certificate, for instance, even though Let’s Encrypt is a drop-in affair. Home Assistant’s own SSL support is an arcane nightmare out of the box, reminiscent of mid-2000s certificate processes. Proxies like HAProxy and NGINX can better support connection security and encryption termination, but now you have an additional layer to support and manage.

This is what I mean by “support has to improve [for self-hosting to be viable for the masses]”: if something isn’t as easy to setup in a secure manner as install, point to your content, and tie a DNS record to it, then that eliminates 99% of the potential customer base right then and there.
by subscribed | 2025-07-26 18:02:31+00:00
Could me MUCH, MUCH worse, they could use Epic's service like Bluesky does.

This Epic, which famously had to pay half of billion USD settlement when they got caught for law breaking (collecting personal data without consent. Clearly against the law, because they knew they're collecting details of children) : https://www.exterro.com/resources/blog/data-privacy-alert-ft...
by Zircom | 2025-07-26 18:02:47+00:00
It's less the people of the UK have chosen this and more of general apathy towards the state of the world today. The lack of unity and mobilization of the proletariat class to secure our rightful share of the productivity gains of recent decades has left us in a terrible bargaining position, and technology these days is such a huge force multiplier that it feels hopeless to go against governments, and to a lesser extent the huge corporations and elites that influence them (or totally control, according to some). Sometimes I wonder if we've already crossed the point of no return and that they've won and just nobody realizes it yet, and we're doomed to descend into some flavor of corporate dystopian hellhole future.
by Aurornis | 2025-07-26 18:02:55+00:00
> As I see it, it's pitched as a William Osman-inspired event. I wouldn't expect it to be a well oiled machine. In fact I'd expect it to be exactly how you framed it in the last paragraph.

This all makes sense for people who discovered it and hear about it through William Osman.

More broadly, it’s not marketed as a William Osman centered event. Spend some time on their website and there’s barely any mention of William Osman. Instead it’s about education, growing communities, and building careers: https://opensauce.com/about/

So for people in the in-group who rally around William Osman, the chaos all makes sense.

For people who stumbled upon the conference as a new maker fare with cool exhibits, it’s weird to show up and experience the vibe that orbits around William Osman and his friends.

Not suggesting it’s good or bad, but the disconnect is obvious throughout this thread. Even the Open Sauce website focuses on things like career building, but then people in this thread are being criticized for thinking the conference has anything to do with career building.
by nyrikki | 2025-07-26 18:03:17+00:00
PO?O is just an object not bound by any restriction other than those forced by the Language.[0]

From the typing lens, it may be useful to consider it from Rice's theorm, and an oversimplification that typing is converting a semantic property to a trivial property. (Damas-Hindley-Milner inference usually takes advantage of a pathological case, it is not formally trivial)

There is no hard fast rules IMHO, because Rice, Rice-Shapiro, and Kreisel-Lacombe-Shoenfield-Tseitin theorms are related to generalized solutions as most undecidable problems.

But Kreisel-Lacombe-Shoenfield-Tseitin deals with programs that are expected to HALT, yet it is still undecidable if one fixed program is equivalent to a fixed other program that always terminates.

When you start stacking framework, domain, and language restrictions, the restrictions form a type of coupling, but as the decisions about integration vs disintegration are always tradeoffs it will always be context specific.

Combinators (maybe not the Y combinator) and finding normal forms is probably a better lens than my attempt at the flawed version above.

If you consider using po?is as the adapter part of the hex pattern, and notice how a service mesh is less impressive but often more clear in the hex form, it may help build intuitions where the appropriate application of the author's suggestions may fit.

But it really is primarily decoupling of restrictions IMHO. Sometimes the tradeoffs go the other way and often they change over time.

[0] https://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/POJO.html
by SubiculumCode | 2025-07-26 18:04:05+00:00
One of my most celebrated recent "null result" was published in Biological Psychiatry, a journal with an impact Factor about 13 last I checked. Even though it was a null result, it was decently powered longitudinal study that provided evidence inconsistent with the prevailing view in autism research. Even if there exists a difference that we failed to detect, it probably much smaller than what others had expected on the basis of second-grade evidence (cross-sectional group differences).