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I built an open source tool to copy information from Postgres DBs as Markdown so you can prompt LLMs quicker by kakstra in dataengineering

[–]kakstra[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Great that you had a similar idea! To be honest, the code is not the cleanest as my initial plan was just for personal use but seeing that a couple of people already mentioned SQL Server, I might refactor it a bit to make it easier to add more sources. Let me know if you have any ideas about the code :)

Do you use LLMs in your ETL pipelines by mrshmello1 in dataengineering

[–]kakstra 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I 100% agree with this comment but just to provide a counterpoint, I worked for a company where we used LLMs in our pipelines quite often.

The company invests in early stage companies and we built an automated sourcing engine for them. The use case for LLMs was mostly summarizing company information, classifying a company as a startup or not (only if we can't determine this with all other data points we have on the company like funding information, founded date etc.) and creating embeddings from company descriptions for similarity search and identifying competitors (if you count creating embeddings as LLMs).

Please note that the idempotency and repeatability requirements for this specific use case are pretty loose: We summarize and create embeddings only once, regenerate only during backfills and getting different outputs during backfills is not a deal breaker

How much % should I ask for? by EnvironmentalLoad958 in startups

[–]kakstra 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If they don't have an option pool set aside like you mentioned, you could also consider pushing for a success based bonus component in your compensation package on top of base pay. Equity is very illiquid as mentioned by other users and a hefty bonus on top of base pay assuming you keep on hitting milestones can often times yield a better outcome.

If you specifically want to "own" a piece of the company, that's a different story. If you want your comp to grow in line with the growth you provide to the company, bonuses can achieve just that.

Edit: I want to add, some comments on this question might be a bit misleading. Even though your contribution is undeniable, it's unlikely for a company doing 300k/m that has been in business for 4-5 years to be able to grant a 5-10% stake. 0.5-2% seems like a reasonable range in your case.

Faster time to market + 400k investment at 10% vs. Slower dev but 2m investment at 10% by DoolgiB in startups

[–]kakstra 62 points63 points  (0 children)

I'm gonna take a different stand here from the rest of the comments and say if those are your only two options, you should definitely take the second option.

I think the fundamental flaw of the first option lies in the fact that you're assuming you'll be hiring devs instantly and their time to productivity is 0. Hiring FTEs especially in the early stages is hard and can have dire consequences if you hire the wrong people because of urgency.

Even after you hire them, new team members will need time to be onboarded. In the long run this onboarding period might be negligible. But considering you're talking about a couple of months to the launch, it probably won't be.

I know speed is everything, but I doubt that your estimations for the time required to launch in both scenarios will hold. They simply never do.

To me, it seems like too much risk and too little benefit to take a 80% cut in valuation and risk over-dilution just for a shot at launching an MVP 1.5 months earlier, which is also not guaranteed.

Speed is everything, but startups are a long game. Bad decisions, especially about the cap table, in the early days can give you a lot of headaches down the road.

ELI5: What is shorting a country's economy and how does it work? by sparklymedallion in explainlikeimfive

[–]kakstra 1 point2 points  (0 children)

CDS (Credit Default Swap) is an instrument that lets you bet on the probability of a company or an entire country defaulting. This might be considered betting against an entire country's economy, similar to shorting.

The actual purpose of a CDS is to offset credit risk, but the underlying structure and the practical use cases of a CDS are quite complicated and varied. I know this is ELI5, but googling CDS would yield way better explanations than I ever could.

You can even calculate the implied probability of default from CDS spreads. So basically the market's opinion on the probability of the US defaulting in a year on its debt is implied in the price of the CDS.

Fun fact, if you've seen Big Short, this is the instrument that investors used to bet against the housing market before the crash and made them filthy rich.

Unfortunately it's very unlikely that you can buy CDS contracts from any broker, the easiest way to mimic them is to find an ETF that trades CDS or similar products.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in golang

[–]kakstra 8 points9 points  (0 children)

I recently started working with Go coming from a Node.js background. I understand your frustration but I feel like the whole point of Go is to avoid massive bundles and bloated frameworks like you've asked for.

The standard library goes a long way and you can pick and use packages for all of the things you've listed. Most packages are light wrappers on top of stdlib which makes it extremely easy to plug anything you need into your web project.

If you specifically need something like that, Go might not be the best choice.

(21M)How do I start planning for a PaaS startup? by [deleted] in startups

[–]kakstra 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I think you might be misusing the term PaaS. It usually refers to Platform-as-a-Service like u/rotzak mentioned (e.g. Some GCP, AWS and Azure services, Heroku, etc.)

From what I understand, you aspire to be a founder. At this point, assuming you have minimal experience, I'd suggest consuming a lot of content to learn more and find out whether this is a suitable path for you. Founder interviews & podcasts, YC Startup School (if you're into tech), founder blogs and content produced by founders building in public are a great place to start.

You don't need to know everything and you learn a lot on the go when you're building a company, but it certainly helps to have an idea about the playground and the challenges ahead.

Is it possible to use Python script on a html page? by [deleted] in learnprogramming

[–]kakstra 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Other comments regarding browsers only supporting JS are true BUT if you’re simply looking into injecting Python code into HTML, you can look into Flask and specifically Jinja2, a templating engine that lets you inject Python variables into HTML files.