HN user

randall

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http://twitter.com/randallb.

Founder Vidpresso (YC W14, acquired by Facebook)

meet.hn/city/40.9115386,-73.7826363/City-of-New-Rochelle

More: https://twitter.com/randallb/status/1076215761872379904

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github.com 6mo ago

Show HN: Gambit, an open-source agent harness for building reliable AI agents

randall
91pts27
github.com 1y ago

Show HN: Create LLM graders and run evals in JavaScript with one file

randall
28pts2
contentfoundry.com 1y ago

Show HN: A big tech dev experience for an open source CMS

randall
58pts28
boltfoundry.com 2y ago

Show HN: Turn long videos into short videos

randall
5pts5
lewisandquark.tumblr.com 9y ago

Neural network good at naming guinea pigs

randall
1pts0
www.epishow.com 10y ago

Show HN: Record a podcast completely in the browser

randall
51pts7
www.epishow.com 10y ago

Show HN: Record a podcast completely in the browser

randall
8pts2
wordsafety.com 10y ago

WordSafety – Check a name for unwanted meanings in foreign languages

randall
431pts276
www.epishow.com 10y ago

Show HN: A tool for effortlessly creating podcasts

randall
4pts1
tomtunguz.com 11y ago

The Decreasing Follow-On Financing Success of Startups

randall
25pts2
blog.earbits.com 12y ago

Earbits is back online

randall
113pts24
justinkan.com 12y ago

What I learned about online-to-offline

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118pts13
techcrunch.com 12y ago

Vidpresso (YC W14) Offers Low-Cost Tools for Adding Tweets and Ads to Broadcasts

randall
31pts5
news.ycombinator.com 12y ago

Show HN: Our little bootstrapped startup is powering CNN's ticker for NYE

randall
154pts43
www.brianalvey.com 12y ago

The burden of a startup CEO's roadmap

randall
2pts0
www.learnboost.com 12y ago

Prolific Node.js contributors LearnBoost acquired by Automattic

randall
3pts0
thisanimatedlife.blogspot.com 13y ago

Pixar's Chris Horne Sheds New Light on Monsters University

randall
321pts115
articles.latimes.com 13y ago

Sriracha hot sauce purveyor turns up the heat

randall
9pts1
harj.posthaven.com 13y ago

The rejection letter investors should send

randall
3pts1
www.wired.com 13y ago

Clayton Christensen Wants to Transform Capitalism

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5pts0
scott.a16z.com 13y ago

The “I just got bought by a big company” survival guide

randall
104pts34
news.ycombinator.com 13y ago

Ask HN: Outsourced sales in Pakistan?

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4pts0
www.overdigital.com 13y ago

The Hidden Licensing Costs of HLS Video Playback

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2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 13y ago

Ask HN: Sales compensation without opposition?

randall
1pts0
www.bbc.co.uk 13y ago

Petrol 'produced from air and water'

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1pts0
eightmedia.github.com 13y ago

Hammer.JS - Low-fat JS lib for touch gestures

randall
11pts0
www.f-secure.com 14y ago

Heavy Salting of Passwords is Not Enough, Use CUDA.

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2pts0
www.kickstarter.com 14y ago

Show HN: Wovyn, physical world sensors for developers

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78pts39
datingandmatinginamerica.com 14y ago

How to date an Entrepreneur

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2pts0
www.nomachetejuggling.com 14y ago

When To Work On Technical Debt

randall
1pts0

This is the least informed take i've ever seen.

I worked at fb, and I'm 100% certain we sponsored VLC and OBS at the time. It would be strange if we didn't sponsor FFMPEG, but regardless (as the article says) we definitely got out of our internal fork and upstreamed a lot of the changes.

I worked on live, and everyone in the entire org worships ffmpeg.

So two things.

1/ crypto signing is totally the right way to think about this. 2/ I'm limiting prompt injection by using chain of command: https://model-spec.openai.com/2025-12-18.html#chain_of_comma...

we have a "gambit_init" tool call that is synthetically injected into every call which has the context. Because it's the result of a tool call, it gets injected into layer 6 of the chain of command, so it's less likely to be subject to prompt injections.

Also, relatedly, yes i have thought EXTREMELY deeply about cryptographic primitives to replace HTTP with peer-to-peer webs of trust as the primary units of compute and information.

Imagine being able to authenticate the source of an image using "private blockchains" ala holepunch's hypercore.

i have a slightly different but related take. the models actually are getting smarter, and now the challenge becomes successfully communicating intent with them instead of simply getting them to do anything remotely useful.

Gambit hopefully solves some of that, giving you a set of primitives and principles that make it simpler to communicate intent.

So I look at something like Mastra (or LangChain) as agent orchestration, where you do computing tasks to line up things for an LLM to execute against.

I look at Gambit as more of an "agent harness", meaning you're building agents that can decide what to do more than you're orchestrating pipelines.

Basically, if we're successful, you should be able to chain agents together to accomplish things extremely simply (using markdown). Mastra, as far as I'm aware, is focused on helping people use programming languages (typescript) to build pipelines and workflows.

So yes it's an alternative, but more like an alternative approach rather than a direct competitor if that makes sense.

I think that works out tremendously well for Nintendo, especially when you look at the Wii-U vs the Switch.

I shot a video at CNET in probably 2011 which was a single touchscreen display (i think it was the APX 2500 prototype iirc?) and it has the precise dimensions to the switch 1.

Nintendo was reluctantly a hardware company... they're a game company who can make hardware, but they know they're best when they own the stack.