The most important piece ever written about startups, probably. Applicable to doing anything new.
For startups, the devil's in the details though. The goal is to scale but you get there by doing things that don't scale successively.
Readit Newsnicodjimenez commented on Do Things That Don't Scale (2013) paulgraham.com/ds.html... · Posted by u/bschne
nicodjimenez commented on Launch HN: Reducto Studio (YC W24) – Build accurate document pipelines, fast · Posted by u/adit_a
For accurate and easy PDF to Markdown / LaTeX / JSON check out:
https://github.com/mathpix/mpxpy
Disclaimer: I'm the founder. Reducto does cool stuff on post processing (and other input formats), but some people have told me Mathpix is better at just getting data out of PDFs accurately.
I tend to agree with this. These days I usually use LLMs to learn about something new or to help me generate client code for common APIs (especially boto3 these days). I tried Windsurf to help me make basic changes to my docker compose files, but when it couldn't even do that correctly, I lost a little enthusiasm. I'm sure it can build a working prototype of a small web app but that's not enough for me.
For me LLMs are a game changer for devops (API knowledge is way less important now that it's even been) but I'm still doing copy pasting from ChatGPT, however primitive it may seem.
Fundamentally I don't think it's a good idea to outsource your thinking to a bot unless it's truly better than you at long term decision making. If you're still the decision maker, then you probably want to make the final call as to what the interfaces should look like. I've definitely had good experiences carefully defining object oriented interfaces (eg for interfacing with AWS) and having LLMs fill in the implementation details but I'm not sure that's "vibe coding" per se.
nicodjimenez commented on PDF to Text, a challenging problem marginalia.nu/log/a_119_p... · Posted by u/ingve
Check out mathpix.com. We handle complex tables, complex math, diagrams, rotated tables, and much more, extremely accurately.
Disclaimer: I'm the founder.
Mathpix is ace. That’s the best results I got so far for scientific papers and reports. It understands the layout of complex documents very well, it’s quite impressive. Equations are perfect, figures extraction works well.
There are a few annoying issues, but overall I am very happy with it.
Thanks for the kind words. What are some of the annoying issues?
Just tested with a multilingual (bidi) English/Hebrew document.
The Hebrew output had no correspondence to the text whatsoever (in context, there was an English translation, and the Hebrew produced was a back-translation of that).
Their benchmark results are impressive, don't get me wrong. But I'm a little disappointed. I often read multilingual document scans in the humanities. Multilingual (and esp. bidi) OCR is challenging, and I'm always looking for a better solution for a side-project I'm working on (fixpdfs.com).
Also, I thought OCR implied that you could get bounding boxes for text (and reconstruct a text layer on a scan, for example). Am I wrong, or is this term just overloaded, now?
You can get bounding boxes from our pdf api at Mathpix.com
Disclaimer, I’m the founder
nicodjimenez commented on Why LLMs still have problems with OCR runpulse.com/blog/why-llm... · Posted by u/ritvikpandey21
Check out mathpix.com we have a hybrid approach towards OCR that features accurate layout understanding (with accurate bounding boxes) plus accurate OCR outputs.
Disclaimer: I'm the founder and CEO.
nicodjimenez commented on How to scale your model: A systems view of LLMs on TPUs jax-ml.github.io/scaling-... · Posted by u/mattjjatgoogle
Shameless request for help: if anybody has experience with seq2seq on TPU, and you want to do a cool project to deploy a world class Pytorch image parsing model to TPU (and do this quickly), please contact me immediately for a well paid and interesting job opportunity at nico [at] mathpix.com.
nicodjimenez commented on Dear friend, you have built a Kubernetes macchaffee.com/blog/2024/... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
I love that the only alternative is a "pile of shell scripts". Nobody has posted a legitimate alternative to the complexity of K8S or the simplicity of doctor compose. Certainly feels like there's a gap in the market for an opinionated deployment solution that works locally and on the cloud, with less functionality than K8S and a bit more complexity than docker compose.
Agreed, something simpler than Nomad as well hopefully.
I've found a huge boost from using AI to deal with APIs (databases, k8s, aws, ...) but less so on large codebases that needed conceptual improvements. But at worst, i'm getting more than 10% benefit, just cause the AI's can read files so quickly and answer questions and propose reasonable ideas.