Nicheloom visits: 58,257 all-time · 7,637 in the last 7 days

The opportunity tracker for new startups.

Today: 1,008 launches · Niche of the day: specialized calculation tools · See what launched today →

Fig

Experimenting with long horizon prediction for personhood

Get picks like this daily. Today's launch numbers, the top launches, AI and tech news, and a daily opportunity pick, straight to your inbox.

Want to reach these readers? Sponsor an issue.

Hey HN,We explored how decision-making happens under severe information asymmetry and used career exploration as a test subject. In practice, people converge on a small set of highly legible default paths, with little visibility into credible alternatives.That’s why we’re building Fig, a tool for reasoning about career paths when the next step isn’t obvious, given the dependence on fleeting personal preferences.Most existing tools respond by collapsing uncertainty into a single recommendation or by modeling careers as linear trajectories. That works reasonably well at the recruiting stage, but fails earlier, during discovery, when paths are nonlinear and highly path-dependent. At that stage, the challenge is understanding which sequences of moves are even plausible.Fig is built for that gap. It treats career exploration as a reasoning problem rather than a prediction problem. The system builds context from multiple signals, including structured data like résumés and work history, alongside behavioral signals such as long-form content people actually engage with (for example, YouTube watch history related to skills or domains of interest). These inputs are grounded in observed career transition data to generate and compare multiple plausible trajectories, instead of producing a single “best” answer.Fig helps users reason about what they could do, given their current state, constraints, and how different choices tend to compound over time.You can try it here: https://figcareer.comWe’d appreciate feedback on whether this framing is useful, where it breaks down, and what additional signals would make long-horizon decisions easier to reason about.Happy to answer questions!

HN · launched Jan 30, 2026 · 6 upvotes (top 75%) · 0 views

Niche: career assessment and development platforms · 91 launches, 11 in the last 7 days ▲ +38% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags

  • Horizontal
  • Model & infra
  • Developer
  • AI-native
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

Could you build this?

Partial The UI for career exploration is simple, but constructing accurate probabilistic career trajectories and long-horizon outcome simulations requires proprietary longitudinal data and specialized statistical modeling.

What it would actually take: Requires a rich longitudinal career dataset (e.g. millions of scraped LinkedIn profiles or labor statistics), a vector search/graph DB for career transitions, and predictive recommendation models to simulate alternative trajectories and probability distributions under sparse data.

Discussion

2 comments analyzed.

Concerns raised: Unrealistic career path suggestions (CTO after 2 years), Unclear how YouTube history and chat data influence recommendations, Suggestions appear derivable from resume alone without added value from extra inputs

Feature requests: Better calibration for career progression timelines, Transparency on how different data sources impact suggestions

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 428 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #354 of 429 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 90 days after the earliest competitor.

The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.