PaulMest

Joined 15 years ago

Karma
552
Submissions
116
Member since
Dec 5
I help startups with product, engineering, and strategy. Currently building an AI Assistant with a small team in Los Angeles.

Email: paul+hn [at] CleverPoint.co

Interests: ML, React, React Native, NodeJs, Python/Flask/Pandas, Data analytics, product management, startups, mobile

Formerly...

Started first business when I was 15 building software for fortune 500 companies. Acquired by largest customer. I worked for them through high school and college.

Cofounder/CTO: Circadian Risk

Head of Product: Early stage startup in SF (Close.co)

Founder: Mythly Studios

Microsoft life: System Center Advisor

Part-time Video Blogger: channel9.msdn.com/shows/PingShow/

View on Hacker News

Recent submissions

Comment · 7 months ago
Comment · 1 year ago
Sadly this is still the case. Cloud Run helped us get off the ground. But we've had two outages where Google Enhanced Support could give us no suggestion other than "increase the maximum instances" (not minimum instances). We were doing something like 13 requests/min on this instance at the time. The resource utilization looked just fine. But somehow we had a blip in any containers being available. It even dropped below our min containers. The fix was to manually redeploy the latest revision.

We're now investigating moving to Kubernetes where we will have more control over our destiny. Thankfully a couple people on the team have experience with this.

Something like this never happened with Fargate in the years my previous team had used that.

Comment · 2 years ago
This sounds like my exact scenario. Can you outline in a bit more detail how you traced it back to the origin to ask to be put on a blacklist?
Comment · 2 years ago
Comment · 2 years ago
Very cool! I built a no-code version of this for my friends' birthdays where all of the clues were about them (inside jokes, dumb bets, catch phrases, etc). I just printed out categories in a grid on a sheet of paper and had a bunch of questions listed out in OneNote on my phone and manually kept score. I didn't put penalties in place if somebody got it wrong to encourage people to participate vs just optimizing for score. "Jonpardy" and "Joshpardy" are two of our friend groups most cherished and repeatedly cited events from the past 10 years.

I've dabbled with the idea of creating some real implementation of this. I most recently put together an @Midnight / After Midnight no-code game for a friend's bachelor party. The buzz-in mechanics and score-keeping are somewhat similar. Maybe you could repurpose your core logic for several different game show themes?

Comment · 2 years ago
It's pretty rare to give someone 10%+ equity after a business has been operating for several years. Even if you brought on a professional CEO, I wouldn't expect to see that. I've seen some founders put together special agreements to transfer some of their own shares to a person recognizing that they'll be taking over a big part of their own role and that it wouldn't be fair to dilute the rest of the company.

Regardless of what you do, make sure there is a vesting schedule in place (e.g. a 4 year vest + 1 year cliff).

Comment · 2 years ago
Comment · 3 years ago
Comment · 3 years ago
I didn't watch the whole video, but found the summary to be helpful. You can see it at 37m21s: https://youtu.be/fvwOa7TCd1E?t=2241

spoiler: Of the 6 cars they tested, Tesla Model Y had the best performance in terms of miles per kWh and total range. But it still clocked in at only 81% of claimed range.

Comment · 3 years ago
I rarely have to use Superchargers because I have charging at home. But when I do, it's about $25 for an 80% top up (e.g. going from 10% -> 90%) in my Model Y.

Just looked it up: $0.45/kWh the last 4 times at Tesla Superchargers in California.

Comment · 3 years ago
I don't use Svelte, but I appreciate the principled approach and the clear explanation.

I primarily coded in Python for 4 years. Then I founded a company that didn't need as much data science and my primary language switched to JavaScript (2 years) then TypeScript (4 years). Overall, I really like TypeScript. But I do absolutely miss being able to cmd + click into a function/class from an open source package and see the actual implementation and not just a type definition. This is probably the biggest day-to-day frustration I have with TS compared to JS and Python.

Comment · 3 years ago
I was a huge fan of Scrabble growing up. I like how simple this is and would probably be fun playing with my mom daily for a bit (similar to Wordle).

I like your game for what it is, but anchoring it to Scrabble confused me a bit when I first played. It was missing a couple of keys aspects for me:

1) Bingo bonus (+50 for using all of your tiles)

2) Optimizing your tileset so that future turns have a better chance for a bingo.

Also, minor nit: the colors for the letter multipliers (purple and red) in your game also confused me because in Scrabble the red x3 is a word multiplier and not a letter multiplier. You could consider using light blue and dark blue if you want to align to the traditional game.

Comment · 3 years ago
Comment · 3 years ago
I created a callbox bot using Twilio about 10 years ago. It started as something simple: when my callbox bot is called, play dial tone 9 (to signal the callbox to open the door) and then send me a text message that someone is coming up. I wasn't too worried about people abusing the system and this worked really well.

Over the years, I've made it more complex. I added a simple menu system using text-to-speech and accepting the DTMF tones for the selection. This way I could tell people to enter a secret PIN and they could provision themselves access to my lobby. If they didn't know the secret PIN, there was an option to have it patch through to my phone so I could screen the guest using normal voice and I could manually press 9 on my cell phone.

It also has an SMS interface where I can select different modes and hours of operations. So when I host a poker night, I'd txt my bot "poker" and it would it update the menu system to be Poker themed so that when guests were at the callbox they'd be greeted with poker puns. When my friend comes to visit from Austin, I'd txt "StarCraft" and he'd get to hear some dumb SC2 puns. I have 20+ different modes now for various occasions over the years. Now when people visit they get their phones out and record the greeting half-expecting something that they would want to remember or share on social media.

Sadly, my building just replaced their callbox with a newer model that does not accept secondary input. So once the call is connected to Twilio, if the user touches any button on the callbox (e.g. to enter a secret PIN), it will disconnect the call. I suppose it's now time to use some voice-to-text options to bring back the interactivity, but I suspect the lag would make the experience more frustrating than fun.

Comment · 3 years ago
I'd guess that https://neon.tech/ could help with this. Neon is branded as "Serverless Postgres". They have APIs to create branches of your database.

So you could effectively:

1) Create a snapshot of your production DB -> DB_2A

2) Then create a snapshot of that snapshot -> DB_2B

3) Now you have two copies of the exact same database. Run your query/workload/migration on DB_2B.

4) Run some metadata queries against DB_2A and DB_2B and compare the results.

5) If your metadata queries are inline with expectations, delete the snapshots. If not, leave them around for a bit for manual inspection.

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