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messel

2,063 karma · joined August 30, 2008

Tech Co-founder https://tripnotes.ai & https://welco.me

Fractional CTO/Engineering Consultant https://tekhorizons.com

github: http://github.com/victusfate Twitter ID, @victusfate

author: https://victusfate.gumroad.com/l/xlhtbn

Howdy. I’m Mark Essel, an engineer that’s added cofounder, web developer and author to my bag of tricks. My quest is to rediscover my life’s passions, and leverage that drive into profitable business ventures.

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/victusfate; my proof: https://keybase.io/victusfate/sigs/SANc9xcXUJfNQw28Oh9OOChKWp59W_HIXb9KTQ3JvVw ]

Verifying my Blockstack ID is secured with the address 16PpGPz7jGJ8DCJZFko3ekMXsphFfXR6xd https://explorer.blockstack.org/address/16PpGPz7jGJ8DCJZFko3ekMXsphFfXR6xd

submissionscomments
messel··on FDA approves new kind of cholesterol pill
I didn't know either, not sure of veracity but https://share.gemini.google/0YDt55yyfITs
messel··on Ask HN: What is your worst lesson learned from using AI?
If you can use a typed language, you want guardrails. Unit tests aren't enough you want integration tests with headless browsers if applicable. It can automatically catch many of its own mistakes earlier.

Be opinionated on your rules files for how you want it to organize the data and code (I built a scaffold template I use all over https://github.com/victusfate/scaffold, fork it make it your own)

If it edits tests you need to push back on why. I'm seeing it too often go to switch case vs simple inheritance. It's too slow sometimes for simple one line change.

messel··on A Hacker's Guide to Machine Learning: MLUtils
Long time ycombinator news member sharing my latest book. It's designed for devs who can hit the ground running with python, and it's what I wished I had back in 2017 when I started building ML applications professionally for clients and startups. The book source code is OS and available here https://github.com/victusfate/HackersGuideToMachineLearningS...

ps I used to share blog posts here 14 years back from victusspiritus

messel··on A Hacker's Guide to Machine Learning
Greetings! Long time ycombinator news member sharing my latest book. It's designed for devs who can hit the ground running with python, and it's what I wished I had back in 2017 when I started building ML applications professionally for clients and startups.

I leveraged chatGPT as an assistant for descriptions and ideas about ML models. The book source code is open source and available here https://github.com/victusfate/HackersGuideToMachineLearningS...

messel··on Show HN: Tripnotes.ai: Intelligent Travel Planner
Yeah it's updated regularly with third party data + fresh crawlers. We do miss closures/relocations sometimes. We also sometimes mix up the content for place descriptions on multipage pages (saw that recently with a friends test recommendation for Peking duck, at a place that didn't carry it).
messel··on GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview
I've got LLM fatigue
messel··on GPT-4
AP English - the last hold out for human intelligence
messel··on Ask HN: Anybody working on personal data plumbing?
Bonus points if you tie this to a cryptocurrency that is "staked" by data owners (you and I). Sounds like a reasonable core idea to build on, good luck!

We do a ton of data plumbing at my current startup https://welco.me/ . Ps we launched our 2.0 app today

messel··on Show HN: Welcome Makes Travel Easier
Welcome's a travel app (iOS currently) which helps navigate new destinations on the fly. You can leave tips, ask your friends for tips, skip boring stuff, or lock in your favorites to have Welcome sweat the planning while you wander and enjoy. If you go off plan, no biggie. The app adjusts to wherever you are and picks out the best venues.

Here's a writeup on Techcrunch with more details https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/11/welcome-launch/

messel··on Ask HN: What to do after $8M (all cash, post tax) exit?
I'd go with 1 brokerage, Index fund most of it, keep 20% cash for misc investments (ethereum). Hire a trustworthy accountant.

It's only money. Now you have some, congratulations. Get back to focusing on the things that matter!

messel··on Lambda School Announces $14M Series A Led by GV
I like to think of what you folks are doing as the evolution of universities which often lead to inverted outcomes (massive debt, no work).

How can I best get a friendly dev involved (he has shipped a c# VR game and worked a bunch of custom js scripts)?

messel··on Life is Short (2016)
Just thinking about how many simultaneous breakthroughs occur, and expertise in so many areas is mind boggling. In contrast there are slower periods/cultures too, ie hunter gatherer societies.

You could spend one life to become an expert doctor only to have all that knowledge made obsolete by time.

messel··on Studying how the brain relinquishes childhood memories
I believe I remember potty training but my parents said I learned at 13 months. I'm likely misremembering using a tiny plastic toilet in the bathroom from that age to 2-3.

I can almost certainly remember the daunting climb onto a full sized toilet between age 3-4.

messel··on Show HN: Graphite – A decentralized and encrypted Google Docs alternative
Brilliant. Physical ownership is still a thing.
messel··on I Was a Bank Robber Until I Read Kant
I last read Kant in an intro to philosophy course in 1991, but a quick search shows Prolegomena as a good intro. https://www.amazon.com/Prolegomena-Future-Metaphysics-Immanu...
messel··on Fifty Years of Shannon Theory (1998) [pdf]
Focused on Information Theory in grad school at Stony Brook in 1996/97, and enjoyed Nam Phamdo's courses. Sadly after reading 8-9 pages I feel like much of this review is over my head now. The words make sense but the concepts are pretty dense.

I do remember the algorithms (Huffman coding), but the high level concepts are harder to remember - information being directly correlated to randomness (entropy). Information is the unknown (random?) message, that sounds more like noise. Channel capacity makes sense: based on noise there's an upper limit on how fast you can communicate bits and groups of bits.

messel··on Show HN: Tool for visualizing GitHub profiles
When I review GitHub usage like this, I can't help but feel the statistics don't represent which language I can best express my ideas with, and which are my most important projects (ie many work repos have very few stars)
messel··on The Uncanny Resurrection of Dungeons and Dragons
I'll give these a look, I also highly recommend Amber diceless (based on Zelazney's books)
messel··on The Myth of a Superhuman AI
Squirrel super memory: it's a combination of scent and memory http://jacobs.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Animal...

Possibly enhanced by smelling their own saliva? Just guessing

messel··on Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?
This is keeper, I'm at 350+ ideal weight around 230-240lbs (6'7") and looking for something to shake up my consumption that makes sense. I regularly exercise (20hrs/week low-medium impact) but eat fast foods
messel··on How a Kalman filter works, in pictures (2015)
For those familiar with least squares estimation, there's a good answer here that relates it with the Kalman filter http://dsp.stackexchange.com/a/2398

It's a little simpler to derive the least squares smoothing function http://stats.stackexchange.com/a/138342

messel··on Photonic Bell states creation around rotating black holes
The stretch is that in the future blackhole state can be changed and send information back in time? Not seeing it.
messel··on Brew commands send data to Google Analytics
I hadn't known until today. Need to think over a dev tool analytics with (mostly hidden) prompt. Looking at apt get analytics now as a comparison
messel··on We Tracked Down a Fake-News Creator in the Suburbs
Definitely, that's what I got out of it. Actually a pretty interesting win, telling tales. There's a market for this flavor of fiction and it'll spawn businesses and generate revenue like any other.
messel··on Dreaming in Reverse Engineering
This was a fun puzzle and learning challenge. Glad to see the next generation is still suffering with null terminators :)
messel··on SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed
update

23Gbps * 4425 satellites is

- 100k simultaneous 1Gbps users

- 1 million 100Mbps users

- 10 million 10Mbps users

Doesn't seem like much of a subscriber base to recoup a fraction of the costs

(My) Estimated cost for satellites and ground stations: 50-100+ billion, maintenance cost: few billion/year?

Might I propose instead genetically modifying insects to pass photosynthetic light signals in massive swarms controlled by ground stations (just for cool visuals) and spend the rest on ground microwave towers or anything else.

messel··on Why 30 is the decade friends disappear
Right on. 42, happily married, close friends have mostly moved away.

Long time gamer here. We play remote (roll20) and I meet new friends regularly to chat/bs for a few hours per week

messel··on Beyond 10,000 Lines: Lessons Learned from a Large Phoenix Project
I've been hoping to pick it up on weekends & time off but startup hours don't leave much free time. I worked on a few simple heroku / json phoenix apps last year. Hoping I can put together a useful but small web app next.
messel··on Firebase gets better analytics, crash reporting and more
detail: You don't have to worry about scaling up to 10-40k connections, which is great for small-medium apps (which is not scaling).

Once you go beyond that you have to manually shard and replicate data between shards and load balance your connections.

messel··on Machine Learning for Software Engineers
We need machine learning to learn about machine learning
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