I have 1Gbit at home, but almost never reach those speeds when downloading games. It’s one of those cases where it makes sense (I want to play now!), but I’m under the impression the limit is upstream (at steam most likely), rather than on my connection. (I do get those speeds on speed tests, doesn’t seem to be my setup).
Steam is tricky cause it has multiple potential bottlenecks. The steam cache, internet connection, decompression (i.e. cpu) and storage. Often hard to tell which limit you're hitting
ISPs happily collaborate with and put speed test servers in privileged locations on their network so you will get higher speeds there even if the actual peering to the outside world is much slower.
You can try Fast.com (Netflix) or Cloudflare’s one which are explicitly designed to work around this by serving the test data from the same endpoints the serve actual customer data, so ISPs can’t cheat.
This still doesn’t guarantee however that you will achieve this speed to any random host on the internet - their pipe to Cloudflare/Netflix may very well be fat and optimized but it doesn’t guarantee their pipe to a random small hosting provider doesn’t go over a 56k modem somewhere (I jest.. but only a bit).
Given that whether you get 30mbit or 30gbit from Netflix won’t make a blind bit of difference it’s not that useful a test. It doesn’t do upload either as Netflix is all about consumption.
Test to where you want to exchange high speed traffic.
I get about 2Gbps max on Steam and Xbox on an 8Gbit connection. The limit could also be due to your disk drive while Steam is installing the downloaded files.
You might check what region Steam is downloading from (it's in settings -> Download or something similar). If it's selected poorly, you might do better by picking one yourself.
It depends. 80% of my electricity cost is taxes. If I produce it using PV, the consumption is never taxed, and the benefit is pretty substantial, on top of the market electricity price. (One rarely finds low risk investments that return 20-25% year)
Roughly speaking the electricity is about €0.06 with about €0.20 in taxes on top. So offsetting consumption nets me about €0.26 cents per kWh.
The installation of a 2800kWp system cost me about €2600 and generates between 2400-2750kWh annually, so about €650 euro. In a 10 year timespan that’s an IRR of 20%, creeping up to 25% for 20 years.
Thanks for the numbers! I had no idea taxes were such a large fraction elsewhere. Good to know/consider. I'm most familiar with California. (and actually can't give a % that is taxes offhand)
After the first year of having PV, I determined my own payoff time of about 5-7 years, so that was nice and self-justifying, and haven't dug deeper into details on that.
Partly, I did the electrical work myself (dug a cable to the shed, added a breaker, etc). Asked the installer to put the panels on the roof and connect it to the existing line. The roof is low, so access was easy and they were done in a less than 2 hours, kept the cost low.
Just happen have some stats on that (non-US context): 60% picks up a local number, about 40% picks up a foreign number (specifically the stat I have is a US number calling someone in a non-US geography).
Stellar | Amsterdam, the Netherlands | Onsite (2 days remote OK) | €70-100k + equity | https://stellarcs.ai
Hey, I'm one of Stellar's founders. We're building voice AI for large contact centers.
Everyone thinks contact centers are boring. They're wrong. It's the last place where companies actually talk to their customers. We listen to calls every week and it's fascinating. AI here actually helps real people: shorter wait times, 24/7 support, lower cost.
Stellar skips the robotic text-to-speech pipeline entirely and works directly with voice. Our conversations are remarkably human, also in non-English languages and local dialects, where most AI sounds like a bad GPS navigator.
On top of this, we're great at integrating with the complex systems at enterprises, and meeting their compliance requirements.
We're cash-flow positive, growing fast with enterprise clients queuing up, and all founders still code. We need engineers who can jump between our Go and TS backends and React frontend. This role is perfect if you:
* Want massive ownership at a small team (not pretend "impact" at BigCo)
* Actually enjoy solving hard problems (real-time audio at enterprise scale)
* Think making AI sound human in niche dialects is a fun challenge
We're building AI voice agents for enterprise contact centers. We focus on remarkably human-like conversations, regulated environments and support for non-English markets (Dutch, German, French, etc.).
All our founders can code, but we're growing and getting busy quickly. So, we are looking for a (senior) Software Engineer: Go/TypeScript (Encore.dev/React). If you're strong in other languages, entrepreneurial and eager to learn, we'd still love to talk. Build core platform features, guardrails, integrations, and tools that help our AI agents handle millions of customer calls.
You'll thrive here if you:
- Want high ownership and direct customer impact
- Prefer building directly with users vs. in isolation
- Enjoy technical challenges at the intersection of AI/audio/enterprise
- Have the ambition to grow into a technical leadership role as the team grows
We're building AI voice agents for enterprise contact centers. We focus on remarkably human-like conversations, regulated environments and support for non-English markets (Dutch, German, French, etc.).
1. Implementation Lead: Lead customer deployments from POC to production. Technical understanding required, coding skills not a requirement. You'll work directly with enterprise clients to integrate our AI agents into their existing contact center infrastructure.
2. Software Engineer: Go/TypeScript (Encore.dev/React). If you're strong in other languages, entrepreneurial and eager to learn, we'd still love to talk. Build core platform features, guardrails, integrations, and tools that help our AI agents handle millions of customer calls.
You'll thrive here if you:
- Want high ownership and direct customer impact
- Prefer building directly with users vs. in isolation
- Enjoy technical challenges at the intersection of AI/audio/enterprise
EU work authorization required. No visa sponsorship available.
Apply: e-mail is in my profile, please indicate HN in your e-mail.
One reason I could think of is that they may return the database (or cache, or something else) response after generating and storing the OTP. Quick POCs/MVPs often use their storage models for API responses to save time, and then it is an easy oversight...
Having some experience with both, I think they are quite different. N8n looks quite polished and seems primarily concerned about connecting pre-made blocks. There are custom code blocks (JS and Python only, with limited ability to import libraries), but it’s not something you’d use by default. I thinks it great for less-technical users when compared to windmill.
Windmill OTOH supports a bunch of programming languages for steps (Go, Rust, Python, TS, etc.) and seems to have a much more “code first” approach. Reusable blocks are more like code templates compared to n8n.
Hard to say which is better. I really like the ability in windmill to just write code for each step and it comes across more powerful, but it feels less polished and intuitive when compared to n8n.
I'm not ashamed to admit than n8n feels more polished. There are a few reasons:
- Our team was and is still much smaller. We were 5 for the first 2 years, we are now 10 (year 3), and are continuing to hire to follow our growth.
- They have been around for longer and mature for longer, more time to iterate. We have reached some level of maturity recently and are now spending more iterations on polishing rather than new features.
- Their surface area is smaller, windmill does A LOT and expose more for the better or worse.
n8n has done a lot of things really well and although we have a different audience, there is a lot to learn from what they did very well and we have the upmost respect for them. We have some overlap, but I think ultimately we strive in different kind of orgs and will cohabit rather than compete.
While you're here, may I ask something about Windmill? My impression of n8n is that it's similar to Zapier in the sense that it mainly focuses on linking pre-made integrations, while Windmill is more of a workflow engine like Temporal. But while I see on your landing page that Windmill also boast lots of integrations, clicking on any of them take me to a sort of community script sharing interface, where it's not really clear how fully fleshed out any of the integrations are.
Are these two things being wrongly compared to each other when they're actually meant for different purposes? Or is Windmill indeed a good point of comparison?
With Johnson I at least had the impression that he understood the showmanship aspect of it really well. Less so with Trump, at least it seems less polished.
It indeed was Boris - thank you! It's weird to compare my faulty recollection to the actual account; only 2 occasions narrated, not dozens - though it is implied, and the narrator wasn't an intern.
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