MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Looking for someone to take over / acquire an early AI infra product (Rayrift)
by hari_prasadd | 2026-01-31 09:53:40+00:00
Hey people,
I’m in a tough spot right now, and I want to be upfront about everything.
,

I’ve been working on Rayrift (https://rayrift.com/) a full AI developer platform. Rayrift is a developer-focused AI memory layer. It helps AI apps remember users, conversations, and context over time instead of starting from scratch on every request. Developers can store, retrieve, and manage long-term memory with Python and TypeScript SDKs (https://github.com/rayrift/python-sdk + https://github.com/rayrift-manager/typescript-sdk), backend repos, frontend console, CMS, everything wired up and usable. It’s polished, I think the landing page could pass for a Framer or professional marketing site.

But here’s the situation:

The problem
I started Rayrift as something I believed in, not for money. I’m dealing with serious family problems at home, and I can’t keep investing time and mental energy into this like before. I have no users yet, zero, and growth has stagnated because I just don’t have the headspace or runway to push traction anymore.

I have infrastructure credits from cloud providers (2k on GCP and possibly up to 5k AWS credits once our LLP finalizes), but no team, no marketing, and no traction.

I know this sounds rough, but I want someone who actually can take this forward. Whether you want to pivot it, grow it, integrate it with your stack, or just build something on top of it.

Why might it actually matter?

Look at what’s happening in AI infrastructure right now. Companies solving even one slice of the AI problem are commanding huge attention and capital:

Mem0 raised $24M from top investors for building a memory layer for AI apps and has millions of API calls per quarter that’s after gaining adoption and traction.

Supermemory raised $3M+ in seed funding from well-known AI investors (like Google) for solving context and memory retention for LLMs.

These companies are similar in being infrastructural pieces for AI development, and they got real investment because they showed either product adoption or market fit.

I don’t have that yet, but the foundations are there - SDKs, console, backend logic, CMS, design and a clean landing site.

What I’m offering
If you are interested in:

Full backend repo (just ask)

Frontend console (fully available)

CMS stack

SDKs in Python and TS

Website + branding

Cloud credits available to deploy … we can talk.

This isn’t a $20M product right now. It’s not even a $200k product as is. But it could be something with direction and effort. I’m realistic about that.

Why I’m writing this here?

I’m not looking for likes or hype. I need honest advice or a potential handover. I’d be glad to share everything, chat about ideas, or negotiate what makes sense. I genuinely think someone with time and focus could take what exists here and make it into something real.

If you have thoughts, interest, or know someone who might, please comment or DM.

Thanks for reading.
by zelphirkalt | 2026-01-31 09:54:09+00:00
I think this is a good time for a shameless plug. The last 2 month or so I am working on my own project [1] for learning more characters. I have made a tool with powerful search function, training mode, and other useful features, such as displaying plots that show you your progress and whether you are reaching your daily training goal, and the ability to save searches, a la Thunderbird saved filters. It is written in Python and oldschool tkinter with custom widgets for a somewhat more modern and capable feel. It is very configurable. Though currently configuring it means touching a JSON file, as I have not yet bothered writing GUI for that.

I am mostly developing this for myself, to have the perfect tool for me, but I dare say, that I have not seen anything comparable and that I let my 10y+ experience in learning Chinese influence my design decisions. Oh, and it is free /libre software of course (AGPL). It comes with an ever improving vocabulary file that has tons of metadata about words, their usage, how to memorize them, etc. under ODbL (open database license).

[1]: https://codeberg.org/ZelphirKaltstahl/xiaolong-dictionary
by tpoacher | 2026-01-31 09:54:12+00:00
I don't think donation approaches are necessarily bad, but yes it should not be as simple as putting a kofi link at the top of a page.

This person doesn't just do that though. Right after the part where you've uploaded your own examples, there's a reminder: if you had fun buy me a coffee.

Though this is slightly offset by the fact that they state you have 2 free trials and then you pay. It's a complete incentives mismatch if you ask for coffee for something you explicitly presented to them as a marketing offer. Though, I suppose leaving the donation option on doesn't hurt in this case either.

In my experience, donationware works best when the donation request is polite, personal, uncoercive, unintrusive, and comes at a moment of surprise right after you would have seen actual value from a product, and from a product that has not otherwise asked you for any money so far (including showing you ads).

KeepassXC Android is a good example: the guy asks for a beer during octoberfest :)
by snicky | 2026-01-31 09:56:01+00:00
> 2. The writing system, which because it's not phonetic requires essentially the same level of effort as learning an entirely new language (beyond spoken Chinese).

This is an interesting observation. Another one that I sometimes mention to my friends who didn't have an occasion to learn Chinese before is that in this language speaking, reading and writing are actually 3 separate components. You can read characters without knowing how to write them properly or even remembering them entirely. Lots of my Taiwanese acquaintances forget how to write certain characters, because nowadays most of the text they write is in bopomofo on their phones. Bopomofo represents sounds, so basically knowing how an expression sounds and being able to read the character (pick it from a set of given characters for the chosen sound) is enough to "write" it.
by item007 | 2026-01-31 09:56:15+00:00
Totally agree — a recurring ritual beats any tool. Rewriting/distilling is basically how notes turn into something you can actually re-enter later.

One nuance I’m exploring is making that weekly “fix notes” time the primary UX: during the review, help you pick the few items worth distilling, link them to a small set of active projects, and extract 1–2 concrete next steps. Outside that window, stay quiet so it doesn’t become another inbox.

What cadence has actually stuck for you in practice: a short daily pass, or a deeper weekly review?
by nerdsniper | 2026-01-31 09:56:48+00:00
Also, it wouldn't matter if they tried to sell it below the market rate. It would turn into a crazy scalping game, and consumers would have great difficulty obtaining what they want anyways.

There's plenty to criticize the RAM manufacturers for. They've formed a cartel to undersupply for a long time now, keeping prices artificially high. GamersNexus did a recent piece[0] that spends about 5-10 minutes scratching the surface of that, but really gets the point across. If they hadn't done this, there would likely be more supply available today.

Without the collusion, RAM prices and supply would follow a pretty classic commodities cycle of boom and bust, with manufacturers overbuilding capacity, going bankrupt, leading to a shortage and high prices, and repeat. That was pretty much all of 1990-2010 or so.

RAM factories also have to choose between making DRAM, HBM, or NAND. These all compete for capacity planning. The GamersNexus piece also goes into how China was making a very strong contention in the NAND space through YMTC until the USA added YMTC to the Dept. of Commerce's "Entity List" and basically kneecapped that company. If USA hadn't done that, we'd also have more supply available today.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzfhhAfxK-A
by arter45 | 2026-01-31 09:57:19+00:00
I don't have a lot of payment experience, but AFAIK actual payment systems work in an append-only fashion, which makes concurrency management easier since you're just adding a new row with (timestamp, from, to, value, currency, status) or something similar. However, how can you efficiently check for overdrafts in this model? You'd have to periodically sum up transactions to find the sender's balance and compare it to a known threshold.

Is this how things are usually done in your business domain?
by keepamovin | 2026-01-31 09:58:20+00:00
Maybe ads-as-business-model is like political ideology - it is not a human universal but must adapt to the place: for instance collectivism over individualism in East Asia, theocratic conservatism over democracy in Afghanistan -- maybe ads as business model is despicable to some regions, but accepted in others? Albania it's apparently illegal for YouTube to serve ads?
by mschuster91 | 2026-01-31 09:58:37+00:00
> Xi is not facing those challenges.

He is facing other challenges, a lot of chickens are coming home to roost - chiefly the demographic collapse, the inevitable result of the one-child policy, but also the rise of wages leading other countries to be the outsourcing target, decades of selling out nature / the environment, a crashing real estate sector, brain drain...
by eeeeep | 2026-01-31 09:58:38+00:00
> the Biden admin's demands that all womens' spaces be opened up to men who self-identify as women

> there is no place or program that a male wouldn't be able to access the instant he said he was a woman

I find it refreshing to see this stated so plainly and without euphemism. It really does lay bare the insanity of this policy.
by shantara | 2026-01-31 09:58:53+00:00
I migrated from Apple Photos to Immich a couple of months ago, removing the iCloud subscription, and couldn’t be happier. It was the most hassle free piece of self-hosted software I’ve had so far. Very easy to install and everything just works. Context and OCR search are amazing. Mobile apps could be better, but they are constantly being improved.

My favorite feature is being able to setup a container on my Linux desktop that has a GPU access and can run ML workloads for image processing whenever I turn the computer on, as my NAS (where Immich resides) is a low power machine without a dedicated GPU. They even have ROCM support, so it works even without an Nvidia GPU. Being able to spread such workloads over your local network feels like a magic that has been forgotten in an era of blackbox cloud providers.
by padjo | 2026-01-31 09:59:04+00:00
"Intelligent charging of EVs could make your grid more resilient rather than less"

Could being the important word here. With advanced load shifting and V2H all sorts of cool things could happen in the future. My point is simply that switching to EVs at the Norway's pace is a lot easier in a country with an abundant predictable renewable resources, which already uses 3x more electricity per person than any other European country.
by spacechild1 | 2026-01-31 09:59:45+00:00
> I think ICE is trained to do the job that they're trained to do

The number of ICE agents has more than doubled in one year (from 10,000 to 22,000). These new agents have not received proper training and many have been recruited from problematic backgrounds.

> but I don't expect riot control and protest management is part of that standard job training.

Well, because they are not meant to be patrolling US cities in the first place. Currently, there are 3000 ICE agents in Minneapolis alone. That is 5 times more people than Minneapolis own police roce! 13% of all ICE agents are currently deployed in a city that makes up 0.15% of the US population. The purpose is very clearly to terrorize a democratic city that resists ICE unlawful and inhumane practices.

> In the Renee Good case I think the FBI and the state of Minnesota were going to work together in that situation and that's how it would have worked, but the local corruption was too hard to swallow and they backed out.

That's certainly not what happened. Stop kidding yourself.

> Don't really know who he is and I expect most people don't know who he is, because I consume far more information than most people.

If that is true, you're willfully uninformed. How can you even make any qualified statements about the Trump administration without knowing one of its most influential people? How can you assess the credibility of the DHS without knowing the (very prominent) people who are in charge?

> which ends up actually looking way more dishonest than they even paint Trump.

Don't worry, the Trump administration is doing all the heavy lifting here. We've reached a point where reality has surpassed the wildest satire. We can listen to Trumps speeches over here in Europe. We see what the administration is doing. There are no excuses!

Your seemingly levelheaded words are just thinly veiled complicity with the MAGA movement. In your last paragraph you really let the mask slip.
by item007 | 2026-01-31 10:00:20+00:00
That’s a great pruning heuristic. Is this mostly about notes/links, or do you apply the same rule to other inputs too (email, chat threads, bookmarked posts, PDFs, repos, etc.)?

For the non-note stuff, do you have a “recently touched” equivalent, or do you rely on different rules (e.g. archiving/search for email, starred threads for chat, etc.)?
by Turfie | 2026-01-31 10:01:05+00:00
I've thought about this too.
I do agree that open source models look good and enticing, especially from a privacy standpoint.
But these solutions are always going to remain niche solutions for power users.
I'm not one of them.
I can't be hassled/bothered to setup that whole thing (local or cloud) to gain some privacy and end up with an inferior model and tool. Let's not forget about the cost as well!
Right now I'm paying for Claude and Gemini.
I run out of Claude tokens real fast, but I can just keep on going using Gemini/GeminiCLI for absolutely no cost it seems like.

The closed LLMs with the biggest amount of users will eventually outperform the open ones too, I believe.
They have a lot of closed data that they can train their next generation on.
Especially the LLMs that the scientific community uses will be a lot more valuable (for everyone).
So in terms of quality, the closed LLMs should eventually outperform the open ones, I believe, which is indeed worrisome.

I also felt anxious early december about the valuations, but, one thing remains certain.
Compute is in heavy demand, regardless of which LLM people use.
I can't go back to pre-AI. I want more and more and faster and faster AI.
The whole world is moving that way it seems like.
I'm invested into phsyical AI atm (chips, ram, ...) whose evaluations look decently cheap.
by trhway | 2026-01-31 10:01:27+00:00
With transition to authoritarian and in the recent totalitarian Putin's Russia the Russian Mafia of 90s is pretty much no more. FSB and police have replaced them in the protection and extortion domain. Thus nowdays an arrested colonel FSB or police may easily have a couple cubic meters of money at home, to the envy of many mafioso around the world.
by mschuster91 | 2026-01-31 10:03:22+00:00
> If the current RAM heavy buyers, the AI powerhouses investors, don't get the into a profitable state of business, then sustaining this rhythm "for a long time" becomes impossible.

Exactly that is the problem with the "pork cycle" we are seeing [1] - there aren't that many manufacturers and ODMs around nowadays for RAM, storage, CPUs and GPUs. The ecosystem was so much more vibrant even 10 years ago. When the AI bubble collapses, it will take the entire world's economy down the drain, and I think that quite a few of the brands we have now will be extinct after this iteration.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_cycle
by throwaway2037 | 2026-01-31 10:04:01+00:00
> Quite likely this year we will have federal law that will allow selling cars with fully unsupervised self-driving, in which case the insurance/liability will obviously land on the maker of the system, not person present in the car.

You raise an important point here. Is it economically feasible for system makers to bear the responsibility of self-driving car accidents? It seems impossible, unless the cars are much more expensive to cover the potential future costs. I'm very curious how Waymo insures their cars today. I assume they have a bespoke insurance contract negotiated with a major insurer. Also, do we know the initial cost of each Waymo car (to say nothing of ongoing costs from compute/mapping/etc.)? It must be very high (2x?) given all of the special navigation equipment that is added to each car.
by beAbU | 2026-01-31 10:04:35+00:00
Plain oats is a pain in the ass to cook. It takes real long and requires constant vigilance. Instant oats just needs some boiling water and 30 seconds in the microwave.

I might be wrong, but I do think non-instant oats is more nutritious.

But to answer your question, it's a combo of laziness and taking care of future me. Nothing beats opening the fridge in the morning, groggy AF, and finding delish breakfast ready to go, and it's dirt easy to prepare with no pots to clean afterwards.
by mjd | 2026-01-31 10:05:06+00:00
There is something here that I do not understand. The article claims that

“[The tablet] is a copy of the night notebook of a Sumerian astronomer as he records the events in the sky before dawn on the 29 June 3123 BC”

But radiocarbon dating of trees buried in the landslide seems to have reliably dated the landslide to 7500 BC.

For example https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01695...

Update:

The Wikipedia article about the coauthor Mark Hempsell says:

“Hempsell got public audience as author of the book "A Sumerian Observation of the Köfels' Impact Event", with Alan Bond proposes a theory not accepted by the scientific community…”

The link posted in this thread by user arto calls the theory “pseudoscience”:

“Despite this new evidence, curiously in 2008 the impact hypothesis was revived by some pseudoscientists in connection to supposed observations of a meteorite by the Sumerians…”

Now it seems very suspicious that the article claims that the tablet is from 3123 BC, when it was excavated from the palace of Ashurbanipal (650 BC).
by reddalo | 2026-01-31 10:05:29+00:00
>They corned the market, drove everyone out of it, and are now rent-seeking.

It's almost dumping [1]: they gave a service away for free (even if they were losing a lot of money) just to make it unfeasible for any other company to start a competing service.

Vimeo could have been a competitor, but then they pivoted to a professional market and now that Bending Spoons bought them [2], I'm not sure they will even have a future.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45197302
by peterburkimsher | 2026-01-31 10:05:29+00:00
Good to see that there are others learning and creating! Another shameless plug for my translator site: https://pingtype.github.io

It takes text, adds colours for tones, pinyin, literal, and parallel translations.

There’s also a character decomposition tool at the bottom of the page which can be helpful if you’re able to recognise half a character but can’t remember the pronunciation for typing it.

The YouTube channel has some song lyrics, movie subtitles, and audio Bible that might help with learning.
by keepamovin | 2026-01-31 10:07:01+00:00
I released a browserbox variant many years ago that could ensure background playback on YouTube. Despite multiple posts here and on PH, it never gained any traction. It seemed people were simply not interested in overcoming no background playback for free on every platform (including mobile).

Same time, one can appreciate the YouTube business: once you give something away for free, people absolutely loose their fucking minds if you make it paid. Once you set the bar to zero for payment, people will murder in the streets and despise you if you reasonably charge for what could have been a paid product all along. So there's a psychological blocker to switching on payment that people are ready to go to war for. It's the same blocker that cripples "open source" sustainability. People quickly develop an entitlement-callous, and feel cheated if you require payment instead of just continuing to surrender value to them.

It reminds of how a group of primates will kill a handler who gives cake to one, but not the group. This "free / paid" tension triggers some kind of deep-rooted human fairness wiring that is really tricky to extinguish once activated. That's why you should never open source your code and never give stuff away for free, if you plan to posslby make money from it somehow or make it paid in future. Because if you ever withhold the siphon of value related to ads or other 'you as a product' models, they will launch a jihad against you.

I think it's interesting how the human fairness reflex, often correct, breaks down in the context of "provider / consumer" dynamics. Even if the provider is not some "evil mega corp" but simply a solo software creator, people will still feel you are attempting to rob them of all dignity and debase their honor if you require payment for what was previously gratis.

Oh well. Live and learn, YouTube.
by Grimblewald | 2026-01-31 10:07:04+00:00
Twitter is dead. What signs of life remain are the scavangers that consume every carcase. TikTok will go the same way. Twitter is basically just moltbook at the moment. tiktok will become clawtok. It's inevitavle. The reason tiktok became such a hit was it lacked the bushit of meta. Now it has the bullshit of meta, it will simply lose users.
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2026-01-31 10:07:30+00:00
Pedantry: not just the Spaniards.. they made the English pay too?

https://news.yale.edu/2015/09/22/living-artifact-dutch-golde...

America first. Because she's naturally exceptional at everything-- America is exceptionally unexceptional!!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46826867

(I would add that the Dutch come really close, but are not nearly as tolerant of.. a certain sort of (individualist) bigot, so that makes them second in that particular ("Calvinist"*?) arena :)

*GoogAI tells you to look at the history of Geneva and Puritan New England, if you need closer refs..
by Craighead | 2026-01-31 10:08:05+00:00
No, what they're saying is what they said, what you're implying reveals a strange bias. Web scraping through residential proxies? Please think through your thoughts more. There's much more effective and efficient ways to do so. Multiple bad actors, like ransomware affiliates, have been caught using residential proxy networks. But by all means, don't let facts and cyber threat intelligence get in the way.
by raincole | 2026-01-31 10:09:10+00:00
> Presumably i now either repeat the cycle

Most of the time this is exactly (foreign or not) institutions do.

Think about it, if the 10-dollar treasury is due and you got your money back, the US debt will go down by 10 dollars. However, in our reality, the total amount of US debt almost never goes down.

Of course some interest will be used in other ways, like spending on the US goods or staying as cash to provide liquidity. But at the end of the day, the most popular way to spend the money got from due treasuries is... to buy more treasuries.
by Dev_Master | 2026-01-31 10:09:22+00:00
Text (for HN post):
JPGify is a class-based, production-ready tool for converting images to JPG effortlessly.

Key Features:

Full drag & drop support for files and folders

Batch conversion with folder structure preservation

Skip existing JPGs to prevent overwriting

Adjustable JPG quality

Live progress bar with ETA and speed tracking

Auto-open output folder after conversion

Portable & lightweight; no installation required

Supports PNG, GIF, TIF, TIFF, BMP, WEBP, JPEG, HEIC

Ideal for photographers, designers, and anyone needing to convert large image collections quickly.