Saris AI | Full-Stack + ML Engineers | Full-Time | Onsite / Remote | Montreal, Canada
Hi HN, we are an YC alum founding team rethinking back-office workflows for banks and credit unions. We're tackling a $100 billion problem with the kind of automation problems that require long-context reasoning, tool orchestration across many critical systems, and strict compliance loops: the ones without known answers.
We've shipped real agents that handle real customer workflows in production. With a growing customer base and live deployments, we're scaling up fast and looking for deeply technical builders who want to have outsized impact early.
IMO this diagnosis is still one level away from a more fundamental truism, which is that people don't want to pay anything for digital goods. Running servers can and has been massively simplified over the last couple decades, and I don't see any inherent technical barrier preventing it from being as simple as registering for an account on FB (i.e. anyone can do it). The deeper problem is the lack of willingness to pay (directly) for anything online.
The reason for this is complex, with lots of unclear cause and effect dynamics (e.g. did our unwillingness to pay push the ecosystem to gravitate towards ad-based revenue models, or the other way around?). The inevitable race to the bottom between competitors, under the massive incentive for platforms to centralize/consolidate (if you charged any amount for your service I can always under-price and out-compete you) is likely a major contributor. We do not exhibit such reservations against payment for anything physical, probably because of the innate sense we have that anything in physical reality should have a cost, yet not so in the digital world.
I’m not sure I agree with that. People wanna pay as little as possible but they gladly pay for Netflix or whatever. People spend a lot of money on Amazon because they make it really easy to pay. One of the original promises of cryptocurrency is it would make micro transactions easy and painless (with something to do about trust, but… that goes in the opposite direction than consumers would like as it’s the provider that doesn’t have to trust the consumer instead of the other way around like with credit cards which allow you to back charge stuff).
The key is still making stuff easy to pay for. Low transaction fees. Low risk to the consumer. Low friction overall. Ideally we would want to enable that without enabling monopolies like Amazon. Because the low friction is Amazon’s real moat.
Netflix sets up a very obvious dollars-to-value relationship. "Subscribe" and watch "things you already want to watch" - easily.
Most types of online monetization fail that test: subscribe and then you'll use this website for 15 minutes, then the promise is it will do something later that will be worth $10 a month to you. They're the gym-membership of digital services.
They want you to pay to join, but you don't actually know what you're getting and you don't know if you're going to find it usable at even a minimal level. Netflix deals with this too: they sell you access to a movie catalogue, not a specific movie - built into the model is a hedge against local risk for a product which already has very broad appeal.
That's why micropayments are a neat idea. Sure, I'd pay a dime or a quarter to read you crappy news site. A quarter doesn't matter, as long as you don't bug me, I'm not subscribed to anything, and I just click. That's kind of what Bitcoin was promising... Of course for several reasons, that doesn't actually work with Bitcoin.
Steam does amazing because it’s all so easy and well developed. Steam is also very conservative in its development and doesn’t add stuff for the sake of it, like so many other companies fall for (Norton Crypto anyone?)
Also, we think we are there when it comes to UX, but I feel we haven’t even started to make good UX paradigms.
I am fervently anti crypto, and haven’t seen any argument that makes me move an inch, because all of the current alternatives are so much safer and easier. However, the idea of an internet wallet does appeal that’s distributed rather than centralized does appeal on some level. Crypto enthusiasts should focus on that more.
Agreed. There are significant audiences where cognitive load is a much bigger barrier than spending actual money. But people do want privacy, independence, and control, so I think non-centralized services could still work.
I think "virtual server" is the wrong abstraction here. It's like "radio with pictures" or "horseless carriage" in that it's telling us we haven't found the right new way to think about it.
people don't want to pay anything for digital goods
Which brings up a different problem: Web3 assumes that everything you do online will cost money. Even assuming that fees go to zero, virtually nobody wants that. Web3 advocates will say that the money you earn will offset what you spend, but you only have to look at Patreon/Substack/OnlyFans earnings to see that it won't happen for most people.
It also strikes me that there’s an implicit requirement to “already have sufficient capital” to operate in the crypto space - even more so that normal finance. I don’t see middle-to-low income people being willing to adopt this as any interaction will burn even more of a limited resource than normal mechanisms.
If the majority of people can’t get in, or can’t afford to do anything in the space, is there any real chance this will actually take off?
Now I’m sure someone will respond along the lines of “crypto is an investment/asset not a currency, etc etc etc” in which case, why is it trying to do all these currency things?
Arguably, everything does. You just also either sell something at the same time or someone else subsidises it for you. Neither of those approaches are forbidden in web3. It may be more explicit at least.
More generally though, "everything" there means state changing operations. Read only doesn't.
We are an education technology company, providing the leading mobile platform for universities and colleges across North America. We deeply care about student success, and work hard to make sure that students stay in school, stay engaged, and graduate successfully.
We are a distributed workforce, and fully embrace remote work. Currently we are hiring for multiple positions in remote roles across North America.
We are an education technology company, providing a mobile platform for universities and colleges across North America. We deeply care about student success, and work hard to make sure that students stay in school, stay engaged, and graduate successfully.
- This particular problem was artificially constructed with the specific goal of demonstrating quantum supremacy. It has little to none practical use. Essentially they looked what the easiest thing is for current quantum computers to do, and formulated a problem based on that
- Because of the above point, this does not mean that the quantum computer can do anything useful (definitely not factor numbers). It is nowhere near high fidelity enough to run highly error corrected algorithms (which Shor's and Grover's algorithms demand)
Since this is a mostly theoretical exercise to begin with, it's weird that they mention the computational cost of the classical method in terms of real computer times on supercomputers, and almost don't mention the theoretical bounds. The practical cost doesn't matter much as far as demonstrating quantum supremacy is concerned.
As far as I know, the key to claiming true quantum supremacy in this case, is actually the proof of the theoretical complexity of the classical algorithm. The quantum computer is obviously efficient at solving the problem, considering that the problem was constructed with what a QC is good at in mind. And the hardness of any classical algorithms had been somewhat demonstrated already, by Aaronson and Arkhipov in 2011. They managed to show that if there is a polynomial time classical algorithm capable of solving this sampling problem, then the polynomial hierarchy would collapse, which is seen as extremely unlikely (on the same level as showing P=NP).
PS: Aaronson recently gave a 3-part lecture at ETH as part of the annual Paul Bernays lectures. Links to recordings and PPTs here: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4301. Part 3 is specifically about this topic, and gives a good high level overview of the current state.
We are an education technology company, providing a mobile platform for universities and colleges across North America. We deeply care about student success, and work hard to make sure that students stay in school, stay engaged, and graduate successfully.
More generally speaking, when you optimize on a particular set of metrics to the extreme (when it comes to social issues this is what utopias try to do), you will inevitably cause another set of metrics to be correspondingly de-optimized to the extreme (which can be qualified as dystopian).
There is no way to optimize everything simultaneously because many things are fundamentally inversely correlated with each other (e.g. security vs freedom). So you either have a state that is relatively balanced (everything is mediocre), or a state with more spread (some aspects are really good and some are really bad).
Take a... Syria during civil war society and compare it to... Norwegian society.
I'd argue Norway has vastly more security and freedom. Increasing one didn't increase the other. And both metrics are pretty close to maximum.
Using your example of security vs freedom, yes there are measures you can take to increase security at the cost of freedom.
But there's also many measures you can take which do not compromise freedom. As a very basic example, having laws against murder. These laws (I can't imagine) effect "freedom" in any meaningful way, so I can't agree that they're fundamentally opposed in some kind of inherent way.
What we call security and freedom (and utopian for that matter) are just words, definable in any number of subjective ways.
But a theoretical Utopia is something theoretically perfect, which while technically possible, we probably agree is not practical.
I suppose my point is that subjective, indefinable properties like "infinite security" and "infinite freedom" are not fundamental, literal forces that increase when the other decreases and vice versa.
They're just words, and anything is possible, including a society where everyone enjoys maximum freedom and maximum security (by some definition)
Though I obviously don't know exactly what OP meant, but maybe there is a difference between simply looking at Norway as a pretty close to utopia versus doing that from scratch in one step, skipping the organic "annealing" of culture and politics.
Simply having a few determined goals means the design necessarily have to be biased against the unmentioned goals. And those might be important for the general state, but it can be a hidden preference.
Bias against the unmentioned goals? Sure, plausible. But theoretically is argue not necessary.
There's no reason why all goals could be covered, in some not to hard to imagine system (perhaps a post-secondary society simply allows anyone with a grievance to get in touch with whoever can fix it, if it should be fixed,as opposed to having a bunch of top down goals)
Also, I don't see why being optimum in one goal, let's say transparency, wouldn't help many other goals, like freedom and security.
I just don't think these concepts are as simple as levers, and I think anything is possible.
That said, humans are far from perfect, so their societies are difficult to perfect.
But with enough education, knowledge, and a sprinkle of genetic engineering, maybe?
It's harder to optimize a system if there are a lot of dimensions.
For example, tax report transparency is bad if you have inequality and also lack an efficient anti-hate-crime enforcement system, because then people will lynch/rob rich folks.
So even just getting closer to the optimum takes time and a lot of resources.
> I just don't think these concepts are as simple as levers, and I think anything is possible.
Exactly. It's a complex dynamic system with path dependence. Trajectory is everything.
> But with enough education, knowledge, and a sprinkle of genetic engineering, maybe?
Maybe :) Though the problem is that without a great society powerful tools will be used to entrench the interests of those that lead the existing not-so-great society.
And it's very hard to align the interests of the leaders with the commoners.
That does indeed appear to be the core problem in societies in this and the last century (and before, presumably.)
I'd argue that social democracy seems to be doing pretty well at distributing income and wealth and power. It's a shame "social" is a dirty word in the states.
If the EU can develop successfully over the next few decades into something superpower-like, maybe the benefits of such a system will become attractive to other powers and the ideas will spread.
Or maybe the China system of repression and threatening the neighbourhood will turn out to be more competitive globally and we'll see more of that.
And pardon the absurd typos in my last comment, my phone's keyboard is pretty terrible. I'd fix them but HN doesn't allow edits after a certain amount of time so the gibberish must remain.
I put it more bluntly, the Smart People who have all the solutions greatly overestimate their own intelligence, to the detriment of the victims of their hubris. This is by and large independent of political leanings.
I agree. It's also worth noting the lifecycle of most optimizations, including the non-partisan variety:
1. Early on many benefit and costs are minimized per capita.
2. As the benefits diffuse across the population, smart/wily/greedy individuals push the optimization to squeeze more value for themselves.
3. Benefits begin to centralize among the smart/wily/greedy. Awareness of costs starts to grow. The general population becomes ambivalent. Regulation can keep the system in this state for a while, but it too will eventually be optimized.
4. The arms race of optimization ultimately excludes all but the smartest/wiliest/greediest from any benefit while the rest of the population eats the cost. The optimization is now Bad For Society™.
My gut says this pattern is true for any social construction, from marriage and markets to card games and communism. The only meaningful insight I take away from it is that ideological conflict (competition between optimizations) is literally the foundation of a functioning society.
The relative balance that tension provides doesn't strike me as mediocre. Without it, everything devolves into an oscillating heaven and hell, mirroring your ideology.
> ideological conflict (competition between optimizations)
This is an important idea. Optimality shifts when the environment shifts, and some ideas which work well in one environment may end up working badly when the world changes.
Because the world is inevitably complex and stochastic, we need enough dynamism in society in order to continually adapt, and for that we need a system that permits competing ideas, as well mechanisms to limit the amplification of the effects of bad ideas (good democratic institutions do a decent job at the latter).
Using 'optimization' here makes it an odd construction where I don't think I've quite understood what you are trying to say.
Is it synonymous with social change? Most social changes aren't optimisations, they are complicated changes to how resources are distributed; leading to unpredictable outcomes.
Take social welfare. This can probably be considered a social optimisation and most reasonable people would agree that some level of welfare is appropriate. But there doesn't seem to be any particular agreement on the economic or social front about whether the optimum amount is more or less. Or what we are optimising for.
Optimization in the sense of optimizing for a specific (often ideological) outcome, rather than optimizing away an objective inefficiency.
Social welfare is a perfect example of "competing optimizations" precisely because there are so many different (and often mutually exclusive) organizational models and success metrics.
From your linked definition, it is a word "coined by Thomas More (and used as title of his book, 1516, about an imaginary island enjoying the utmost perfection in legal, social, and political systems"
Taken metaphorically, a utopia is a idealized state of affairs where perfection (optimality) is reached. This state of affairs is imaginary however, because the world in which such a perfection is attained is also imaginary. Attempts to achieve it in our reality (communism, etc.) ends up running up against a complex system of nonlinear tradeoffs, which is what I imagine the OP is alluding to.
There was a discussion of the SR-71 a few months ago that I found excellent. One of the comments took the opposition approach - The SR-71 was an engineering failure, because it leaked fuel, it required tight tolerances and most of the parts were thrown out because of it, etc [1].
I think it's a correct view. I think they're absolutely right about the SR-71. I posted a comment arguing they're wrong, because I think my comment is also a correct view. The SR-71 is the wrong plane for many, many applications. For the few that needed it, it was an absolutely vital tradeoff. Engineering isn't just about optimizing a metric. It's about optimizing many metrics, and finding a set of tradeoffs that fits. It's about finding the point on the line where people are satisfied.
Perhaps - Engineering is about finding the proper fitness functions, and then finding the optimal solution from there. Both are hard problems. Having the right fitness function/requirements gathering is the most screwed up stage of any development, and software developers are no exception, but I feel our industry has gotten away with a lot. Optimizing globally is often an unbounded problem, so finding efficient approximations (like evolutionary algorithms or hill climbing functions) is often the right approach - But that doesn't mean you shouldn't try for the correct one.
What does correct mean? Engineering is about solving problems.
Ultimately it was the right solution for a very specific scope and time. The knowledge gained helped avoid nuclear conflict — an extreme benefit worth a lot of cost.
Once satellites matured, it’s utility was reduced. Once drones were a thing, it’s utility went to zero. Top-secret state of the art stuff in 1990 is on the deck of a mueseum today.
There is a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4zfmcTC5bM) from the PBS Infinite Series that covered this topic as well, for people that what a visual version of the explanation. I'm still sad that the series/channel was shutdown though, such a great series.
PS: this article/video essentially defines the naturals from the fundamental set theory axioms. This other video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTUVdXI2vng) from the same PBS series shows how you can then use the naturals to construct other types of common numbers, up to the reals.
Regardless of other reasons for this observation, I think sampling bias, or the inspection paradox probably contributes to it.
Assuming that you are:
- equally likely to have the desire to learn/create something new during any given time period
- busy for the majority of your time (e.g. you are employed in a time-consuming job)
Then you are more likely to find that you want to learn something new while you are busy (since whenever you randomly find something you want to learn, you are more likely to be busy than not).
If you swap the second assumption to "idle for the majority of your time (e.g. you are unemployed, or employed at a more relaxing job)", then you are probably more likely to make the opposite observation.
Hi HN, we are an YC alum founding team rethinking back-office workflows for banks and credit unions. We're tackling a $100 billion problem with the kind of automation problems that require long-context reasoning, tool orchestration across many critical systems, and strict compliance loops: the ones without known answers.
We've shipped real agents that handle real customer workflows in production. With a growing customer base and live deployments, we're scaling up fast and looking for deeply technical builders who want to have outsized impact early.
See more about the role & apply here: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/4281413302