bcroesch's comments

We released Raif v1.1.0 today: https://github.com/CultivateLabs/raif

For anyone not familiar, Raif is a Rails engine for building LLM powered apps. Highlights include: - adapters for various LLM providers - high-level abstractions/models for working with LLM's (Raif::Task for single-shot tasks, Raif::Conversation for chat interfaces, and Raif::Agent for building agentic features) - web admin for viewing/debugging LLM requests/responses

v1.1.0 highlights include: - Support for images and files/PDF's in Raif::Task's - Embedding generation - OpenRouter, GPT-4.1, and Claude 4 support - Stats section in the web admin - Automatic retries for LLM requests that resulted in server errors

Full changelog is here: https://github.com/CultivateLabs/raif/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md

Another Cultivate Labs person here. You're absolutely right re: predicting stock prices. A prediction market isn't going to beat the market consistently. People looking for that use case end up disappointed.

Prediction markets are more valuable to companies for things where there isn't already a large, liquid source of information flow. E.g. all the on-the-ground workers know a project is going to be late, but no one speaks up due to fear/office politics. Management thinks all is well since no one said otherwise.

A PM is an effective way of taking a bunch of siloed information/knowledge (in employee's brains), aggregating it, and presenting it to decision makers.

Kinda depends on which platform you were on (GJP used several). Some were prediction markets while some were opinion pools, both of which are scored/rewarded differently.

Our company (Cultivate Labs) recently acquired Inkling Markets (a very early YC company that built prediction market software) and have been building a new version of the PM platform, which will hopefully address some of the risk/reward quirks.

If you're interested in this stuff, you might be interested in the two topical PM sites we're launching: -https://sportscast.cultivateforecasts.com/ (obviously focused on sports) -https://alphacast.cultivateforecasts.com/ (officially launching later this week, focused on global finance, politics, & tech).

There was an article in NPR a while back about the Good Judgment Project (which was run by Dr. Tetlock - mentioned in the article). In some cases, betting/prediction markets (& other similar tools) were beating intelligence analysts - http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2014/04/02/297839429/-...

For anyone who is interested in this topic, Dr. Tetlock just released a new book about it (http://www.amazon.com/Superforecasting-The-Art-Science-Predi...).

We're also hosting a public forecasting tournament for him and his team that focuses on geo-political forecasting: https://www.gjopen.com/

We typically only put one app on a server, especially since Digital Ocean is so cheap. If things are tiny apps, we just stick them on a $5/mo 512mb droplet.

100% agree with you. FWIW, this is much more heavily tested on ubuntu 12.04. One of the reasons we submitted it was the hope that we'd get more people to test & contribute. Goal being that you don't necessarily have to pay for heroku & can still own your servers, but can set up a new server in just a few mins.

If you run into hiccups, feel free to hit me up directly - [email protected]. The plus side of this is that once you do get it figured out once, setting up other servers really is extremely quick.

SEEKING FREELANCER - Chicago, IL - remote possible

Federis Group We're a small software consultancy looking for front end and full stack engineers. Rails and/or mobile experience a plus, but not strictly required. Our team is based in Chicago, but we're open to remote as well.

Contact: [email protected]

Chicago, IL - Federis Group

We're a small software consultancy looking for front end and full stack engineers. Rails and/or mobile experience a plus, but not strictly required. Our team is based in Chicago, but we're open to remote as well.

Email: [email protected]

Good call. Admittedly, I put this together very quickly yesterday when we ran into the issue of wanting to share a link. Would be nice if you could somehow avoid rendering a whole page, but I can't think of anything off the top of my head that would allow you to do that.

Currently, everything is based on virtual currency, so it isn't really gambling. It's primarily meant to be about entertainment, not about gambling with real money.

Unfortunately, not yet, but we definitely hope to eventually. We just recently finished up the initial version of the iOS app, which was our first priority. Don't have the manpower yet to take it more than one step at a time :)

I especially agree with the part about going for walks. I work from home a lot, and I walk to CVS to buy something almost every day, just so I can get out of the house. Amazing what 15 minutes without a screen in your face can do for your mental clarity.

Thanks for the feedback. I think several of your feedback points are things that we need to clarify to users, because we feel like there is definitely a significant value proposition to users. For example:

-Managing multiple registries at multiple stores is a pain. Automatic sync helps alleviate that headache.

-We allow people to add any item on the web or with a barcode. Now you can register for a random item at a random store without having to set up a whole registry there (if they even offer the option).

-We do price comparisons on each product. Other players just aggregate your registries, but don't detect that you might have the same exact mixer at Target and Bed Bath & Beyond. This way, we can show guests where the mixer is the cheapest -- you don't care where it comes from.

As far as making money, we use affiliate links for any product at stores with affiliate programs. Fortunately, Amazon tends to be cheapest for most products and has a good affiliate program.

Thanks again for the feedback.

We already add affiliate links for Amazon (and other stores). That's the primary business model. Thanks for the feedback though!

I was struck by a pretty similar sentiment (and was somewhat surprised by it). Maybe more negative pieces will subsequently come out, but I was surprised to find myself thinking that some of the leaks may actually be helpful in producing a unified, multi-state agreement on how to approach the situation in Iran. I couldn't believe that it was actually other countries asking the US to bomb Iran.

Yes, I definitely agree that it depends on the topic.

That said, I didn't want to limit it to a specific topic (e.g. just learning a new language) and hoped that people would enumerate some of their preferred topics and corresponding methods, just as you did :)

I was also curious about how people go about choosing what topic to dive into next, if it's anything beyond the normal ongoing mental list of interesting potential topics.

Not saying that he's wrong, but does it seem odd to anyone else that a group of people who are clearly very smart and successful would create a wiki to document their illegal scheme of collusion and price fixing?

This whole thing makes me wonder...

Many startups are started/coded by young programmers in or fresh out of college -- people who probably haven't really earned their 'black-belt' in programming through time and experience. This would lead you to believe that many startups (even relatively successful ones) have plenty of bad/buggy code under the hood, but they have the benefit of not being out there under the scrutiny of public eye.

That said, if you're a young (and thus, probably somewhat inexperienced) coder, it would seem you can get stuck in the conundrum of wanting to have enough experience to write good code, but also wanting to go for starting a company while you're still young. Would love to hear opinions/thoughts on how to solve that conundrum.

These won't necessarily teach you how to do it, but reading them definitely helped motivate me when things got slow. Hearing the experiences and successes of other startups/founders always gets me excited to get to work.

Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good - Sarah Lacy

Founders at Work - Jessica Livingston

The Facebook Effect - David Kirkpatrick