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Launch HN: Exa (YC S21) – The web as a database

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Launch HN: Exa (YC S21) – The web as a database

#101

Post by Mockapapella »

liam-hinzman wrote: post #63
Mockapapella wrote: post #51

Honestly I thought you guys had launched already (and didn't know you were a part of YC), been aware of you guys for years now it seems. Congrats on the launch! Hope the twitter issues aren't causing you guys too many problems. Normally I'd send this as a DM or email, but I think it could be useful for others to learn about how to use your service/the limitations of it. A couple weeks ago I made a search for: In earl…

I think I found it! Unfortunately we do not include tweets in our search index > TLDR LLM training runs are significant stress-tests of an overall fault tolerance of a large computing system acting as a biological entity. https://x.com/karpathy/status/1765424847705047247

Holy shit I think that might be it! I have been looking for that tweet for like a year now. Thanks!

Re: Launch HN: Exa (YC S21) – The web as a database

#102

Post by mdaniel »

willbryk wrote: post #30
mbeavitt wrote: post #3

This is super cool. You provide examples of “searches that work” - can you give an idea of the limitations here? What kind of searches won’t work?

We're a startup, so most of our resources go towards use cases that our users care most about. So the search should work best for - people, companies, papers, high quality written content (e.g., blogs, news). It should work well at more than just those (try Github repo search, it's quite good :D), but those are the best supported. Types of searches Websets doesn't currently do well at: - products (e.g., ecommerce sit…

> (try Github repo search, it's quite good :D)

Since you called it out, I gave it a whirl:

https://websets.exa.ai/api/trpc/getPreview?batch=1&input=%7B...

and it did nothing to the page at all, choosing to still show the "Full-stack engineers in SF that are great at design, and have worked at an AI startup" example table

I'm open to the fact that "I'm holding it wrong" or whatever, but the response payload included things that are clearly not GitHub Repositories

          {
            "id": "https://authzforce.ow2.org",
            "entityId": "https://authzforce.ow2.org",
            "properties": {
              "type": "custom",
              "description": "AuthzForce (Community Edition) - XWiki",
              "url": "https://authzforce.ow2.org",
and its .text contains no mention of ReBAC

later on it came closer

          {
            "id": "https://github.com/authzforce",
            "entityId": "https://github.com/authzforce",
            "properties": {
              "type": "custom",
              "description": "AuthzForce Community Edition",
              "url": "https://github.com/authzforce",
but, of course, no ReBAC in its .text either

It seems it is about 30/70 on finding the things I asked for, so I don't mean to imply it's worthless, but it is yet another example of "turns out, AI does not solve all problems"

---

I make a habit out of having the dev-tools open when interacting with things where the comments have explicitly called out "we were down and we don't check our response.statusCode" and that's the only reason I am able to offer you any feedback whatsoever

Re: Launch HN: Exa (YC S21) – The web as a database

#103

Post by liam-hinzman »

mdaniel wrote: post #102
willbryk wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're a startup, so most of our resources go towards use cases that our users care most about. So the search should work best for - people, companies, papers, high quality written content (e.g., blogs, news). It should work well at more than just those (try Github repo search, it's quite good :D), but those are the best supported. Types of searches Websets doesn't currently do well at: - products (e.g., ecommerce sit…

> (try Github repo search, it's quite good :D) Since you called it out, I gave it a whirl: https://websets.exa.ai/api/trpc/getPreview?batch=1&input=%7B... and it did nothing to the page at all, choosing to still show the "Full-stack engineers in SF that are great at design, and have worked at an AI startup" example table I'm open to the fact that "I'm holding it wrong" or whatever, but the response payload included t…

The API response you were looking at is the preview search, the full search linked below found 25 matches in a minute.

> github repos that are implementations of ReBAC authorization servers

https://websets.exa.ai/cmadcu6st004fmg0iofbytsfh

Re: Launch HN: Exa (YC S21) – The web as a database

#104

Post by [deleted] »

liam-hinzman wrote: post #83
AznHisoka wrote: post #71

I searched for 'data providers that start with the letter R that sell job postings data', and it's been 15 minutes and it barely verified the first row. But if it filtered it first to "start with the letter R", it would only have to look at perhaps 5% of the results it's trying to verify! So it's doing needless verification of results that will be thrown out by another filter that should've been applied first!

We were down for a bit! Ran your search, got 8 matches after analyzing 100 results. Took 40 seconds for the first match, and another 80 seconds for the other matches. We use an agentic search planner that adapts its search strategy as matches are found, but it could be smarter with substrings. https://websets.exa.ai/cmad36arq009fl30i4dvkc7wn

[deleted]

Re: Launch HN: Exa (YC S21) – The web as a database

#107

Post by wormius »

orhmeh09 wrote: post #45

Not to be confused with exa: https://github.com/ogham/exa

I hate name collisions and this sort of thing only reinforces my ire. It doesn't help that I'm already team anti-AI, but it would annoy me regardless of the tech. Why don't people even bother to look and be original? (I feel like I'm going "against the ideals of the site" when I get angry like this, but come on, people, it's a simple google search. If you can't be arsed to do that, why should we even give you money - would be my FIRST question as an investor, but I'm just an idiot not a world famous inventor of a non-released LISP and checks list - uh. Yahoo Storefront.

Still though, come on man, why people why. I remember when we had "domainsquatting" but I guess AI doesn't give a fuck about people's copyrights/trademarks anyway.

(Sorry to vent as a reply, but it was nice to see SOMEONE mention it at least, and had to give a hard agree on pointing it out).

Re: Launch HN: Exa (YC S21) – The web as a database

#109

Post by arglebarnacle »

wormius wrote: post #105

WHY DO YOU PEOPLE DO THIS? STOP WITH THE NAME COLLISIONS ALREADY. https://github.com/ogham/exa

A dead project that has been replaced with a fork with a different name? Maybe I’m missing something but this really doesn’t seem so bad as far as name collisions go

Re: Launch HN: Exa (YC S21) – The web as a database

#110

Post by wormius »

wormius wrote: post #107
orhmeh09 wrote: post #45

Not to be confused with exa: https://github.com/ogham/exa

I hate name collisions and this sort of thing only reinforces my ire. It doesn't help that I'm already team anti-AI, but it would annoy me regardless of the tech. Why don't people even bother to look and be original? (I feel like I'm going "against the ideals of the site" when I get angry like this, but come on, people, it's a simple google search. If you can't be arsed to do that, why should we even give you money -…

(ugh, while my point stands I guess technically it's a dead project, so I got egg on my face, gloat everyone gloat at the pathetic clown :P)
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