jeztek

Hi HN community,

Eric here, CEO of Voltage Park. To add some context, we're announcing a new cloud consisting of approximately 24,000 NVIDIA H100s. Each cluster has H100 SXM5 GPU's fully interconnected with 3.2T Infiniband for peak performance. Pricing is as low as $1.89 / GPU / hour.

We think the current market for ML compute is broken, with access only available to the well-resourced. We're on a mission to make machine learning infrastructure accessible to all and will be opening up support for short term leases and hourly billing early next year.

We'd love to hear your thoughts around the ML compute shortage, what needs aren't currently being met, and what we can do to ensure that the AI ecosystem is healthy and accessible to a broad audience of users.

It's not easy but it's definitely possible, especially if you can stack the deck in your favor -- line up childcare and appropriately configure your company's work culture.

I juggled a day job and side-startup while my child was a toddler. My wife and parents picked the slack on the nights where I had to push towards a hard deadline and I leaned heavily on my team so that I could be present for family time. The company was profitable and we successfully sold it to a private party.

For my current startup, I was very up front with my co-founder about making sure I was around to do school drop-offs and pick-ups. We're fully remote so there's no commute and we predominantly work asynchronously to avoid meetings. I mostly work during school hours and pick up again in the evening after the bedtime routine.

It's not for everybody and doesn't leave a lot of "me" time, but I'm personally finding a lot of fulfillment in trying to build a family-friendly remote-first company.

Ah, okay I'm trying to understand your recommendation. Is it because not every tip has a research finding tied to it, which seems incongruous with the title? Or is it that the research finding doesn't explicitly tie to the recommendation?

Most of the tips do reference research findings, and you can find the reference by clicking on the subscript numbers or scroll down to the references section.

Some tips are more common sense and/or geared towards addressing a research finding. In the "arm's length" tip for example, the referenced paper discusses the importance of eye contact in computer mediated communications but doesn't explicitly say you should keep an arm's length to achieve the best eye contact. Was your expectation that the tip should link to research determining the optimal distance from the camera to achieve good eye contact?

Hey supermatt, thanks for the feedback, that's good to know! Is there an alternative wording you would suggest? We meant to imply that the tips were primarily derived from findings from published research.

It’s been a whole year since the pandemic started and video calls are still terrible. We've been doing a lot of research into how to make them better and wanted to share what we've learned.

We were aiming for something whimsical and easy to read so the tips primarily focus around illustrations that were inspired by IKEA instructions. For people who are interested in delving into the details we put the meat of the advice behind a "Why?" button.

This was also our first foray into writing a responsive site that renders well on mobile and desktop, built using Next.js and Tailwinds CSS.

What are some of your favorite video call hacks or tips?

You can vet who joins the channel by denying unauthorized users the room key. Users who don't have the key cannot post messages to the room.

User authentication, so someone is not able to impersonate you, is on the todo list but it is assumed that the server is trusted and won't go swapping public keys on you. A chat system that doesn't trust the server would need an entirely different design. You need to trust the server to perform basic actions like broadcast your message to the other users in the room.

That's fair, I modeled some aspects of the system after FiSH-irssi, which also doesn't have user authentication or MITM attack mitigation. That'll teach me to post to HN prematurely. Both SSL with proper endpoint authentication (and session keys) and user authentication are on the todo list.