Web scraping hasn't changed in decades: engineers still write brittle scripts that constantly break. Kadoa automates the entire web data pipeline with AI agents that build, maintain, and validate scraper code themselves.
All 3 founders have spent years in the trenches writing web scraping and ETL software and still do it almost every single day. We’re making sure every team member can do the best work of their career at Kadoa.
We are growing fast, have a drama-free and distraction-light environment, and try to minimize the distance between the code you ship and the customers who use it.
We are looking for people who share our passion for software craftsmanship, web scraping, and AI.
I recently met a European space startup founder and was surprised to learn how much space innovation is happening in Europe with ESA. Europe wants to become less depended on SpaceX and NASA, and is heavily investing there. More funding + strong aerospace programs at universities like TU Munich has led to companies like ISAR Aerospace (SpaceX competitor), which is great to see.
I work in the domain, and it is true that many of the startups will almost entirely use free data, like from the sentinel satellites via ESA. It really lowers the barriers to entry, if you have a nice idea.
EDIT:
We actually work close with one startup that sprung out from academia. The founders wrote their masters thesis on object detection and pattern recognition using sentinel imaging. They had basically one product: to detect certain objects. After a couple of years they had gotten a handful of customers (basically they'd receive coordinates to some are of interest, and then tasked with trying to detect something), which afforded them to purchase commercial data (from other types of sensors) for building more robust systems. This in turn grew their customer bas, and they started adding products.
Then they were acquired by one of the largest private space companies.
But, in any case, it all started with access to free data. Would they have started a company like this, if they hadn't had access to the data from ESA? Who knows, but it made it all much easier. And they were able to completely bootstrap the company.
Small odd thing, but that's the first tracking warning modal I've seen that says they don't actually use tracking. And I can decline the no tracking? Kinda funny.
Can you show some actual evidence of that? Because evidence actually shows that commercial growth in the US outpaces Europe by a gigantic degree. The traditional European companies like Airbus has made lots of loses. European companies are not even competing in the LEO race to any serious degree.
Their 'compete with SpaceX' Ariane 6 rocket has been an unmitigated disaster. And in order to 'compete with SpaceX' they are giving billions in subsidies to Amazon instead, I guess that is better. And its exactly what they didn't want to do when they designed the Ariane 6 program in the first place.
> companies like ISAR Aerospace (SpaceX competitor)
If anything they are a far, far, far inferior competitor of RocketLab. SpaceX isn't even in the same universe as ISAR.
The simple fact is, small rocket companies are not viable, and pretty much all of them are not profitable and/or go bust. RocketLab itself basically never made money from rockets, the pivoted mostly to in-space stuff.
Maybe one of the small European rocket companies can survive if it gets enough support from ESA, but then moving on to anything beyond that is going to be hard.
> NASA, and is heavily investing there
If we look at ESA and EU space budget, we can see that it goes up a bit, but nowhere near close to anything in the US.
So yes, there is some energy in the European space sector, but its very easy to overestimate, and specially if you look at it compared to the US.
maiaspace (https://www.maia-space.com/) also intends to compete with SpaceX and is an Ariane spin-off, they're meant to do their first launch this year and start putting satellites in LEO in 27
There is also a Spanish company which according to them, they were the first private European company to reach space with their rocket: https://www.pldspace.com/en/
There were once about 300 small rocket companies. About 250 of them are dead by by now.
The Europeans were late to the game, and their companies got some late investment.
Out of those 300 companies basically 0 of them have actually made money with rockets. Companies like RocketLab pivoted to in-space stuff and that's where they actually make money.
Pretty much every single small rocket company has lost money with small rockets and pivots to larger rockets where there is more demand because of constellations. But in Europe, that will be near impossible because of the Ariane monopoly.
And closing the case on reuse for small rockets is even more difficult.
I really think calling companies that have barley done a test-launch 'spacex competitors' is a silly. At best its a luxury competitor to SpaceX ride-share launches.
At this point, calling ISAR a competitor to SpaceX feels a bit like calling Pringles a competitor to TSMC, but it's certainly good to see some movement happening.
Except of course the Ariane chockhold never existed for small rockets. Because Vega exists. And for large rockets the "chokehold" very much continues to exist and shows absolutely zero evidence of going away in the next decade.
So far the support for these small launchers has been mostly for new missions and nowhere near in the volume to support even two of these small launch companies. Specially if Vega also survives as a rocket.
Europe simply does not produce enough launches for these companies. And all of them will suffer from very low launch rates and non will be able to seriously compete for international payloads.
- Top talent doesn't even want to move to the US anymore either.
I mean really I'm super progressive and LGBTIQ+ aligned. I'm not even flying there for a meeting anymore, sorry. My employer is European and I'm part of the inclusion team, they are understanding me refusing US travel.
> It's human nature: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias. Everyone does it, but we perceive other people as doing it more than we do, which is itself a variation of the bias.
You can even see it in the title of the OP, in the word "overwhelmingly". That's excessive: the negative bias is noticeable, but if you look closely, it's not overwhelming. (To make up some numbers, it's more like 60-40, not 90-10.)
However, it often feels as if it is overwhelming; in fact, one or two datapoints, plus negativity bias, are enough to create just such a feeling. The feeling gets expressed in ways that trigger similar feelings in other people, so we end up with a positive* feedback loop.
The interesting question is, what factors mitigate this? how do we dampen negativity bias? or, how do we get negative feedback into our positive feedback loop of negative affect? That must also be happening all the time, or we'd be in a "war of all against all", which isn't the case, though (again) it may feel like it.
* ['positive' in the sense of increasing; a positive loop of negative affect!]
We focus on negative outcomes because that relates directly to survival. Our brains are wired for it. Talking about negative outcomes means we learn about them and have a better chance of avoiding them. Plus, the fear response is much stronger and lasts longer than the happy / joy response.
Note that for humans and other social animals "survival" doesn't always mean life or death -- it can mean being included or excluded from a social group which indirectly affects survival chances.
You can't really put politics aside when the US was obviously dangling the return of the Monroe doctrine for Ukraine. Let's see what that "deal" looks like.
We’re on a mission to give humans and LLMs reliable and fast access to web data.
Web scraping used to be the same for decades (brittle scripts that break constantly). We're automating that end-to-end with LLMs that build and maintain data pipelines. We're also heavily focused on making ethical scraping the default (robots.txt checks, rate limiting, etc.).
All 3 founders have spent years in the trenches writing web scraping and ETL software and still do it almost every single day. We’re making sure every team member can do the best work of their career at Kadoa.
We are looking for people who share our passion for software craftsmanship, data, and AI.
We are growing fast, have a no-bullshit culture, and try to minimize the distance between the code you write and the customers who use it.
If that sounds like you, please email me at (adrian at kadoa dot com) and mention HN in the subject line. AI slop applications will be filtered out immediately ;)
Would love to learn more about how this is built. I remember a similar project from 4 years ago[0] that used a classic BERT model for NER on HN comments.
I assume this one uses a few-shot LLM approach instead, which is slower and more expensive at inference, but so much faster to build since there's no tedious labeling needed.
> Would love to learn more about how this is built. I remember a similar project from 4 years ago[0] that used a classic BERT model for NER on HN comments
Yes, I saw that project pretty impressive! Hand-labeling 4000 books is definitely not an easy task, mad-respect to tracyhenry for the passion and hardwork that was required back then.
For my project, I just used the Gemini 2.5 Flash API (since I had free credits) with the following prompt:
"""You are an expert literary assistant parsing Hacker News comments.
Rules:
1. Only extract CLEARLY identifiable books.
2. Ignore generic mentions.
3. Return JSON ARRAY only.
4. If no books found, return [].
5. A score from -10 to 10 where 10 is highly recommended, -10 is very poorly recommended and 0 is neutral.
6. If the author's name is in the comment, include it; otherwise, omit the key.
JSON format:
[
{{
"title": "book title",
"sentiment": "score",
"author" : "Name of author if mentioned"
}}
]
Text:
{text}"""
It did the job quite well. It really shows how far AI has come in just 4 years.
Thanks. I now run a two-step process: first pass reads through all posts and comments to extract patterns, second pass uses those to generate the content. Should be much more representative of your full year now :)
My impression was the same as the poster: it still over-indexes on a couple of recent posts.
Of course, it's possible that we've both been repeating ourselves all year long! I mean, I know I do that, I just think I've ridden more hobby horses than it picked up. :-)
It's fun, though. Thanks for sharing - a couple of my "roasts" gave me a genuine chuckle.
Perhaps it should also avoid putting too much emphasis on several comments to the same story: there was a story about VAT changes in Denmark, where I participated with several comments; but the generator decided that I apparently had a high focus vat, when I just wanted to provide some clarifying context to that story. I wonder how comments are weighed, is it individually or per story?
Specifically this roast:
> You have commented about the specific nuances of Danish VAT and accounting system hardcoding at least four times, proving you are the only person on Earth who finds tax infrastructure more exciting than the books being taxed.
Yeah, but I did it on the same story (i.e. context).
Though the other details it picked up, I cannot really argue with: the VAT bit just stood out to me.
Web scraping hasn't changed in decades: engineers still write brittle scripts that constantly break. Kadoa automates the entire web data pipeline with AI agents that build, maintain, and validate scraper code themselves.
All 3 founders have spent years in the trenches writing web scraping and ETL software and still do it almost every single day. We’re making sure every team member can do the best work of their career at Kadoa.
We are growing fast, have a drama-free and distraction-light environment, and try to minimize the distance between the code you ship and the customers who use it.
We are looking for people who share our passion for software craftsmanship, web scraping, and AI.
Open roles:
- Senior Frontend Engineer: https://www.kadoa.com/careers/frontend-engineer
- Senior Software Engineer: https://www.kadoa.com/careers/senior-software-engineer
If that sounds like you, please email me at (adrian at kadoa dot com) and mention HN in the subject line.
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