MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Zams – Build AI agents that automate sales work
by nddave | 2025-07-23 17:28:55+00:00
Hey HN,

We just launched Zams — a platform to build AI agents that automate repetitive B2B sales tasks like CRM updates, deal follow-ups, lead research, and forecasting.

You describe what you want in plain English, and your agent gets it done across tools like Slack, Notion, HubSpot, Salesforce, and more.

Zams agents run in two ways: - Command agents – Triggered on-demand from Slack or the web - Ambient agents – Run in the background on a schedule, using context from docs, emails, and dashboards

No brittle workflows, no “if-this-then-that” builders. Just intelligent agents that act.

We started building Zams 60 days ago. It’s now live, running across 100+ apps, and already in use by dozens of sales teams.

If you’re curious about agentic automation or tired of duct-taping tools together, we’d love your thoughts and feedback.

Upvote us on PH: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/zams-2

Best, Nirman Dave
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-07-23 17:30:18+00:00
You do not need to know much, if any, Erlang to be productive in Elixir. Some libraries you might call will be written in Erlang, but those tend to have been around long enough that you don't need to look inside. Being able to read the Erlang docs can be helpful, because the OTP has a ton of helpful functions, but that's mostly just learning what Erlang calls its types.
by kbdiaz | 2025-07-23 17:30:21+00:00
My problem with AI in Zed is not that it's there, but that it feels like it's always behind in AI code editor paradigms. They were pretty late to the party to add edit predictions, and their agent UX is pretty behind the game. Recently, Cursor added background agents which I feel is a game changer and I now feel it's a deal breaker when choosing an editor. It makes me wonder if choosing to build their own GUI framework in Rust was the right move. Zed is a great code editor, but for me, it's not a great AI code editor.
by philipkglass | 2025-07-23 17:30:40+00:00
I write primarily Scala too. The frontier models seem reasonably good at it to me. One approach I sometimes use is to ask for it to write something complicated in Python, using only the standard library, and then once I have the Python refined I ask for a translation into Scala. This trick may not be applicable to your problems, but it works for me when I find an interesting algorithm in a paper and I'd like to use it but there is no existing Java/Scala implementation.

I use AI assistance to generate code and review code, but I haven't had success trying to use it to update a substantial existing code base in Scala. I have tried using both Claude Code and Cursor and the handful of times I tried there were so many oversights and mistakes that resolving the mess was more effort than doing it manually. I'll probably try again after the next big model releases.

Current frontier models have been the least useful to me when I'm asking them to review performance-critical code inside Scala. These are bits of my code base that I have written to use a lot of mutable variables, mutable data structures, and imperative logic to avoid allocations and other performance impediments. I only use this style for functions highlighted by profiling. I can ask for a code review and even include the reasoning for the unusual style in the docstring, but Claude and Gemini have still tried to nudge me back to much slower standard Scala idioms.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-07-23 17:30:45+00:00
A war can itself contain a genocide, and one would argue that's the norm. Most genocides occurred during wars, a notable exception being the Myanmar one.

Israel has made it clear that the existence of Palestinians in Palestine is what they are fighting against. That's a genocide by every definition I've ever seen, and several people high in Israel's government are quite open about that fact, too.
by adsharma | 2025-07-23 17:31:01+00:00
The most relevant topic in this space is: processors got wider, more speculative etc. But if you measure IPC across a wide range of workloads it way less than 1 instruction per cycle.

Talking about this to software engineers (this is pre vibe-code era), you get a response like "this is too low level and not worth it".

More such talks needed!
by TheNewsIsHere | 2025-07-23 17:31:06+00:00
I agree with your last point, but as someone who co-owns a technology business that doesn’t have an “Enterprise” sized bank account, I still have all of those needs.

The SSO tax in particular is ridiculous.

Functionality like HA or SSO being gated behind enterprise licenses only makes it harder for smaller businesses to “get there”. My business is comprised exclusively of technology professionals. We tend to be really cheap customers to have because we typically only raise a ticket when something beyond our responsibility breaks.

And from the community side — I already have enough credentials to maintain in my personal life. It’s annoying when you can’t use SSO with a community edition product. I like having SSO at home. It makes life so much better, and it also makes me more likely to use a product in my business, which makes it more likely I’ll buy a license to backstop support.
by trod1234 | 2025-07-23 17:31:52+00:00
Companies won't be talking about killing your dog though, so if you conflate this onto things lawyers may have required that suspicion may be completely un-based pigeonholing efforts.

Long policies can be needed depending on the litigiousness of the working environment. I used to work in an industry where that was beyond common, and it was required to be defensible in court. Accounting for factors that aren't commonly known like biases of judges towards individuals vs companies.

It really comes down to the legal landscape.
by travisgriggs | 2025-07-23 17:32:22+00:00
I did 4 months of Cursor. Figured I’d try 4 months of Zed, and see from there. I’m about 3 months in and so far might stick with it. I’ve generally been pleased with it. My only issues really have been

a) all the settings are just in a file, not even a commented skeleton, and with a decent change rate, hard to invest in learning them; I’d love something like the jetbrains settings dialog

b) the stupid placement of the burn mode button; it’s so easy to accidentally turn this on and not realize (done it twice now). Would love an option to just remove said button

c) I wish there was more panel control; I’d like to place outline and project views BOTH in a panel, but you only get two full height tools in the left/right panels.
by Eggpants | 2025-07-23 17:32:49+00:00
Disagree. The tab completion is very annoying when you’re trying to type. I know, I know, AI hipsters think typing code is so 15 minutes ago. Get off my lawn/keyboard.

Its agent AI assistant isn’t bad but sadly the restore points button in the AI panel seemed to be broken.

The fact it reminds me of sublime text is a big plus for me.

The rust evangelism is annoying. Really. No one cares what language a program is written it.
by wat10000 | 2025-07-23 17:33:20+00:00
It's more like, "you complain that people throw sand in your eyes, yet you also throw sand in people's eyes, curious." This is not "yet you participate in society." Unlike participating in society, these behaviors are entirely optional and they can stop any time they want, they just prefer not to. Editorial independency doesn't absolve them. It just means that they're doing the right thing in one area but not another.
by agent281 | 2025-07-23 17:34:25+00:00
IMO, Haskell is less helpful for an LLM because of its advanced language features. The LLM is reasoning about the language textually. Since Haskell is very tense, the LLM would need a very strong model of how the language works.

I think languages with more minimal features and really good compile time errors would work well with LLMs. In particular, I've heard multiple people say how good LLMs are at generating Go.

Personally, I like languages with type inference so this wouldn't be my preference.
by jchw | 2025-07-23 17:34:35+00:00
> I'll make a claim -- does anyone disagree (?) -- the incentives are not pointed in the right direction. Unless developers are paying directly for the functionality they want, that's misalignment. So enshittification seems probable, maybe inevitable, unless something structural changes.

Exactly.

AI autocomplete I just don't care about. OK, but they do offer an AI subscription service. I'm using LLMs almost not at all currently, but at least right now this does seem like a viable path to getting a lot of money. I worry, though, that in the long run, the margins will just get squeezed by competition here, especially when a lot of deep-pocketed competitors can charge nearly nothing and get away with it. Zed also very nicely offers the ability to drop in an API key for their AI agent features... which is awesome and the right thing to do, but not good for profitability.

Obviously, the issue with simply charging money like Jetbrains is that Jetbrains already has built a world where they have a super complete IDE package and even then they only really charge a relatively small amount per month for the privilege. It works because for software the development costs for a given piece of software is relatively "fixed" (not entirely, but close enough) whereas the revenue you get grows as you acquire users. But now that the market is saturated, it's going to be hard for someone to jump in and try to be like Jetbrains in any way, and if you're charging money it's even harder to compete with most of the other code editors that are ~free.

Worse, it's hard to charge money and remain completely open source. Linux users will mostly not even realize you're doing it because the packages will just keep working for free since the software is open source. And Zed really does benefit from being open source, maybe more than many other open source offerings; it really seems like the community did a lot of work on making Zed work well on Linux. (By the way, if any of you who worked on the Wayland support for GPUI happens to read this, thank you very much for the excellent work.) So it's hard to say "just go closed source!"

I hope Zed Industries got a good deal on whatever funding they received and are being somewhat conservative with their funding too. Even though it's hard to compete in this market, they've built something that is very hard to build and basically not paralleled as far as I'm concerned. There's clearly something here and finding a less shitty path to monetizing it would be very, very good for us all.

(And I am willing to pay, though I know they need to find something that will make a lot of people want to pay, not just people like me.)
by samus | 2025-07-23 17:34:37+00:00
This is absolutely a thing. For comparison, banking regulation basically makes banks extensions of the intelligence services and forces them to tell off law enforcement in case "suspicious" account activities are detected. Usually banks will also close the account, but the regulations ensure the customer will never find out why because the bank will stonewall them to ensure they don't accidentally tattle.

https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunki...

Even if no formal regulation to that effect exists for social media companies, intelligence agencies presumably have sufficient leverage to ensure similar access.
by more_corn | 2025-07-23 17:34:55+00:00
This is why it is of crucial importance for companies to take things like this seriously. A customer complaint can quickly become a crisis and lead do serious damage to the brand.

Anyone with any training in crisis management would immediately refund the purchase price, apologize and offer a discount on a replacement.

The negative publicity of this post alone has cost the company millions in customer goodwill.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-07-23 17:34:56+00:00
Zed has everything I want out of an editor, the AI stuff wasn't really a concern to me since its always been optional, but I fully appreciate where they're coming from. I think Zed is one of the good gems of our time. I have been looking for a decent spiritual successor to Sublime, and Zed to me is really good at it.
by fragmede | 2025-07-23 17:35:35+00:00
It doesn't matter how rare the scenario is in reality, fear often isn't rational, but it makes us do things and we have no control over it. My point isn't that the fear is rational, it isn't. But unless you have a method to prevent people from assuaging their irrational fear by buying a certain vehicle, (or voting a certain way, for that matter), what is your proposal?
by 2b3a51 | 2025-07-23 17:35:39+00:00
Oddly enough for reasons(+) I've been looking into Gnome's workflows and I have Debian Wheezy with 3.4 on an old machine and Debian 12 with Gnome 43 on the current laptop.

I spent a happy hour drawing 'workflow diagrams' based on my interactions with the UI doing ordinary stuff. As might be expected most of the time I was in the 'desktop view' i.e. interacting with windows in one or more spaces. Only a small % of time was spent in either of the overviews (activities and applications, now relegated to an icon on the Dash).

Can you isolate what it is about Gnome 3/4 that you like more than (say) a traditional bottom bar DE like xfce?

(+)Looking at Endless OS. They use Gnome DE but with some modifications that I was trying to pin down the logic of. Main one is a persistent Dash that auto-hides.
by sandstrom | 2025-07-23 17:35:51+00:00
"What are your main use cases for search or log indexing?"

To me, storing and searching logs is quite different from most other search use-cases, and it's not obvious that they should be handled by the same piece of software.

For example, tokenization, stemming, language support many other things and are basically useless in log search. Also, log search is often storing a lot of data, and rarely retrieving it (different usage pattern from many search use-cases which tend to be less write-heavy and more about reads).

I know ElasticSearch has had success in both, but if I were Manticore/Typesense/Meilisearch I'd probably just skip logs altogether.

Loki, QuickWit and other such tools are likely better suited for logs.

- https://github.com/quickwit-oss/quickwit - https://github.com/grafana/loki
by wat10000 | 2025-07-23 17:35:59+00:00
I don't understand much about aerospace engineering, but adding time, complexity, and expense sure sounds a lot like "extremely difficult to make safe" to me.

I guess people just want to argue. I have three different people replying to me effectively saying, "you're wrong, it's not because it's difficult to make it safe, it's because it was difficult to make it safe because of reasons X Y and Z."
by pphysch | 2025-07-23 17:36:00+00:00
> I'd invite you to try our full feature set, from clustering, to SDN to integrated Ceph management, to containers, backups including third party and our own backup server, and many more, all accessible through a REST API with full permission management and modern access control.

This would be appealing in a world where Kubernetes doesn't exist as a mature option.

Don't the vast majority of Proxmox users use it for small VM labs, without all the bells and whistles?
by bhouston | 2025-07-23 17:36:19+00:00
> How do you recover colour from a mono astro camera? Just run it for 3 exposures behind a gel of each of the R/G/B colours, then comp?

Essentially yes. To get faint details in astrophotography, you actually will capture a series of images of each filter with long exposure times like 3 minutes per capture with a total capture time per filter measured in hours. You then star align everything, then you integrate the captures for each filter into a single frame to remove noise and boost signal, then you comp them together.
by TuxSH | 2025-07-23 17:36:22+00:00
> For example, modern compilers will very rarely introduce conditional moves

For conditionally-selected data that lives in registers (and occasionally, on the stack), GCC seems to always use cmov (as it is much cheaper than a branch with possibly p=0.5 after all)

You do have a very good point about data dependencies.

Here a Aarch32 vs x86 vs Aarch64 vs x64 comparison: https://godbolt.org/z/hEac4sz7h

- for "c ? a : b" (where a, b, c are func args), all 4 versions use their version of cmov

- for "c ? *a : *b", x64 version uses cmov on the address whereas Aarch64 uses a "full" branch

- Aarch32 always use conditional instructions in these 2 expressions, and additionally, "a * (b & 1)" gets optimized into "a & ((b & 1) ? ~0 : (b & 1) /* = 0 */)"
by Sesse__ | 2025-07-23 17:36:45+00:00
Let me give you the last couple of routines that I was involved in vectorizing, no cherry-picking:

- Skip to the first unmatched } (i.e., if there's two { in there, you are looking for the third }), ignoring anything inside "", and that any character may be escaped using a backslash. (I've simplified away a bunch of complicating cases, or it would just sound unreasonable. The optimal path depends on whether you have e.g. PCLMUL.) - Skip to the next <, \r, \0 or & (note that the optimal path on SSSE3+ uses pshufb, or similarly VTBL on NEON) and return its position. A typical case is that it's ~10 bytes away, but it could be kilobytes. - Parse the decimal part of a double, given that only accuracy up to 1e-7 is needed. (The optimal solution differs somewhat between NEON and SSE2.)

The second one is the only one where I believe that autovectorization could have reasonably done a fair job, since it's so standard (but it didn't in practice).
by ahmeneeroe-v2 | 2025-07-23 17:36:59+00:00
"modern passport not existing in past" ≠ "free human movement"

borders have largely had guards, who had no obligation to let people through, or even to treat them fairly and not rob them. frontiers had bandits who existed solely to prey on travelers.

even if you could move to a different settlement, you did not have the same legal rights as citizens of that city.

the "modern passport" has done more for free human movement than anything that came before.
by Aaargh20318 | 2025-07-23 17:37:17+00:00
Is that a single exposure? How did you prevent the foreground from blowing out on that, were you in a super dark location?

Unfortunately I'm in a Bortle 5 to 6 area so I'd need quite a bit of integration time to get a decent SnR. There aren't really any proper dark sites in western Europe.
by dang | 2025-07-23 17:37:18+00:00
Please don't cross into being a jerk on HN. You may not feel you owe the person you're speaking with better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
by dinfinity | 2025-07-23 17:37:48+00:00
> I think The Expanse did a much better job of modelling the reality of future economics than trek ever got close to.

That is because The Expanse does a lot of "the stuff that happen(s)(ed) on Earth, but in space!". Don't get me wrong, it also does a lot of great scifi stuff, but the factions and people are quite one-dimensional unimaginative analogues of known factions.

This approach makes it relatable (and commercially more successful) but not necessarily more realistic. It's like predicting flying horse carriages and flying cars versus helicopters, planes, and rockets.

Related: IMHO, one of the worst things about the 'relatable extrapolation of the present' aspect is that it limits popular scifi enormously. There's usually some special space carved out for humans or very human-like creatures doing very human things with the environment pretty magically being incredibly Earth-like all the time for hundreds or thousands of years in the future, even though the lives of humans today are already incredibly alien compared to those of humans just 200 years ago.
by em-bee | 2025-07-23 17:38:12+00:00
maybe it's time to introspect

to learn what? that the language was not good enough? that it wasn't marketed well enough? that there was not enough community support? not enough word of mouth?

lisp users say they have a competitive advantage, as do smalltalk users. even pike at a time had a competitive advantage in that it was/is more performant than other similar languages.

some of us in the pike community kept asking ourselves why pike is not more popular. the syntax is not obscure. roxen was a killer webdev server, 10 years ahead of its time. but no takers. why? (probably a mix of lack of marketing and community support/encouragement from the financial backers, but other languages become popular without backing, so what gives?)

my point is that most times there is nothing you can do. unless you have the marketing power of sun (java) or google (go, etc), popularity of a language is mostly a case of luck and serendipity (ruby, python) or filling a unique need that no other language could (javascript, rust)
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-07-23 17:38:48+00:00
I’m not so sure that popularity has any kind of correlation with capability, quality, viability, etc. That has more to do with marketing, social media trends, buzzword compliance, and what’s caught the eye of the current crop of resume-driven developers and managers.

Tools like Elixir which are focused on solving problems, aren’t flashy or easy for web dev influencers (yes, they’re a thing) to tout, and have a bit of higher barrier to entry are probably at a disadvantage in this way, even if they’re actually quite good.

This is why the industry is stuck on a revolving door of JS frameworks and the n-hundreth React self-reinvention. It’s not about how good any of this actually is, it’s about how well it scratches the itch for that new car smell while also being easy to pick up and make grand declarations on social media about.
by throwawaymaths | 2025-07-23 17:38:54+00:00
really you wind up making only a handful of type errors that make it into prod.

there are other things that contribute to this like pretty universal conventions on function names matching expected outputs and argument ordering.

it does suck hard when library authors fail to observe those conventions, or when llms try to pipe values into erlang functions, and yes, it WOULD be nice for the compiler to catch these but you'll usually catch those pretty quickly. you're writing tests (not for the specific reason of catching type errors), right? right?
by throwaway-blaze | 2025-07-23 17:39:01+00:00
Telco != Techco.

Telcos are cash-flow businesses. They borrow billions with bond sales to fund spectrum acquisition and hardware / network deployment, then optimize payback and profit by taking $80-$200 per account per month from millions of people.

There are smart, forward looking people inside these companies who want to build for 3rd party devs. And they might even get the dispensation from some SVP to start working on an offering, and occasionally one of those makes it out the door to real developers. But ultimately, it isn't a priority for the C-suite, and when that SVP moves off to some other group or company, there's no more sponsorship for the "innovation".

As long as they take in billions reselling Apple/Samsung hardware connecting to Ericsson / Nokia hardware, they're not focusing on anything else.
by mike1o1 | 2025-07-23 17:39:36+00:00
My current project is using React Native (for native and web) and getting GraphQL setup was initially a pain, but having React and GraphQL subscriptions gives me enough of the "live" functionality, but without having to worry about connection issues. With gql-tada, I get fully typed experience on the front-end too.

If I didn't need native functionality, I'd probably just use the recently released `phoenix_vite`: https://github.com/LostKobrakai/phoenix_vite