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Launch HN: Parsewise (YC P25) – Reason Across Documents with an API

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Re: Launch HN: Parsewise (YC P25) – Reason Across Documents with an API

#41
post #36
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A launch post is not a place to attack other users personally. Neither is any other HN thread for that matter, so please don't do it here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I do respect your moderation, however I addressed the statement, the choice of words, not the person.

To sarcastically reword someone's statements using fake quotation marks* to depict them as exploitative is at minimum an accusation of insincerity, and the snark adds an additional layer of aggressiveness. You also used "cognitive dissonance" as a trope to basically accuse them of lying. All this is personal and, since it was an attack, crosses into personal attack.

(* also not allowed here btw: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)

Re: Launch HN: Parsewise (YC P25) – Reason Across Documents with an API

#43
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A launch post is not a place to attack other users personally. Neither is any other HN thread for that matter, so please don't do it here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Noted — and I did wish the founder success. I have no personal ill will towards them. But what I'd ask HN to consider is this: our world, and the technology we introduce into it, isn't apolitical or free of normative stakes and real, harmful implications for people. Treating where you've worked and what technology you've stewarded into being as an ethically neutral fact isn't neutral at all. What concerns me is that…

Sure, and HN hosts many threads where people debate these points. We're not against that and often as not agree with them.

But this is a startup launch thread about something unrelated, and hounding someone about an ex-employer is a tenuous ground for bringing such material up. It's the sort of thing this guideline (from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) asks people not to do, even apart from the personal aspect:

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

More about that here in case helpful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48750103

Re: Launch HN: Parsewise (YC P25) – Reason Across Documents with an API

#44

"With experience and support from" is a nice landing trick! How do you extract and relate to each other the facts from the documents that require comprehension and not simple similarity matching using common embeddings models?

Haha thanks, the reader can try and guess which is which;)

We actually don't use embeddings or vector similarity, since those tend not to work well in specialist domains (e.g. for the OfficeQA benchmark where we have 90k pages talking about US treasury numbers, they would be mostly mapped to a very small embedding space because it's all the same topic, with small variations across years, expense categories etc.).

We use LLMs for the extraction and comparison as well, and we route between different models depending on the complexity of the comprehension of the given step required (and by this I mean routing between our pipeline steps; we currently do not dynamically try to judge individual cases for complexity like OpenRouter Fusion).

Re: Launch HN: Parsewise (YC P25) – Reason Across Documents with an API

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learnt a lot at Palantir, though always worked in commercial so no ties to security state (for the better or worse). (Also side-note, we are working towards enabling frontier performance with smaller open models that allows our customers to protect their data. https://www.parsewise.ai/officeqa-sota ) And I do get genuine joy from helping our users, so love it is:)

[flagged]

Do you ask this to all HNers who have worked at Meta, Google, Microsoft and Amazon - the latter three who Palantir relies on to even exist?

I.e. half of HN?

Re: Launch HN: Parsewise (YC P25) – Reason Across Documents with an API

#49
Does this also extract semantic relationships and data dependencies between fields?

In the past I'd built an internal tool that transforms insurance PDFs to structured data. I wanted to extract explicit data dependencies between fields to perform validation.

Insurance forms can sometimes have 30-40 pages and they can have fields on page 40 that depend on fields on page 4 with a few nested if conditions. Would Parsewise be able to extract those relationships?

If yes, how do you do it for large documents?

Re: Launch HN: Parsewise (YC P25) – Reason Across Documents with an API

#50
post #6

I worked recently on an internal tool to achieve this kind of things, mostly plugging mistral OCR to gemini to extract structured data from documents. We then perform automated diffs too. There seems to be an insane amount of competition in the "Intelligent Document Processing" market, like for instance parseur, whose founder is often on HN himself. What do you think sets you apart from competition like : 1) Mistral…

Great question! 1. We are working with the assumption that OCR is (or soon will be) solved at super low prices. So if we have the extracted data, what can we do with it? Where we see Parsewise making a difference is for use cases that span across documents. I.e. if you are extracting the same 5 fields from every invoice, there are lots of solutions as you listed (+ reducto etc). However, once you have a set of docume…

What about deterministic parsing?

Basically using templates to extract info from recurring doc structures ??

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