3
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hectormalot
Joined 1,183 karma
Building the best AI for phone-based customer service at Stellar (http://www.stellarcs.ai). I'm a self taught programmer (Ruby, Go, Python, TS, Rust) with a background leading teams across consulting and banking before Stellar.
dennis@stellarcs.ai
- hectormalot parentThx, forgot to double enter.
- Im in this business, and used to think the same. It turns out this is a minority of callers. Some examples:
- a client were working does advertising in TV commercials, and a few percent of their calls is people trying to cancel their TV subscriptions, even though they are in healthcare - in the troubleshooting flow for a client with a physical product, 40% of calls are resolved after the “did you try turning it off and on again” step. - a health insurance client has 25% of call volume for something that is available self-service (and very visible as well), yet people still call. - a client in the travel space gets a lot of calls about: “does my accommodation include X”, and employees just use their public website to answer those questions. (I.e., it’s clearly available for self-service)
One of the things we tend to prioritize in the initial conversation is to determine in which segment you fall and route accordingly.
- > On the other hand, if each service experiences the same hour per year of downtime but at different times, then the person is likely to be blocked for closer to 100 hours per year.
I think the parent post made a different argument:
- Centralizing most of the dependency on Cloudflare results in a major outage when something happens at Cloudflare, it is fragile because Cloudflare becomes the single point of failure. Like: Oh Cloudflare is down... oh, none of my SaaS services work anymore.
- In a world where this is not the case, we might see more outages, but they would be smaller and more contained. Like: oh, Figma is down? fine, let me pickup another task and come back to Figma once it's back up. It's also easier to work around by having alternative providers as a fallback, as they are less likely to share the same failure point.
As a result, I don't think you'll be blocked 100 hours a year in scenario 2. You may observe 100 non-blocking inconveniences per year, vs a completely blocking Cloudflare outage.
And in observed uptime, I'm not even sure these providers ever won. We're running all our auxiliary services on a decent Hetzner box with a LB. Say what you want, but that uptime is looking pretty good compared to any services relying on AWS (Oct 20, 15 hours), Cloudflare (Dec 5 (half hour), Nov 18 (3 hours)). Easier to reason about as well. Our clients are much more forgiving when we go down due to Azure/GCP/AWS/Cloudflare vs our own setup though...
- As I was typing this it came to mind. Will test against one of my own servers one of these days to confirm.
- 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).
- 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.
- Oops yes, that would otherwise make for very cheap solar.
- Netherlands. No distribution fees are separate.
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.
- 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)
- 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).
More than I expected.
- 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
Find the full vacancy here: https://www.stellarcs.ai/careers/software-engineer
EU work authorization is required. No visa sponsorship available.
Apply: e-mail is in my profile, please indicate HN in your e-mail.
- I think CFIT is appropriate. There’s loads of cases where pilots flew into a mountain due to lack of environmental awareness. Here’s a bizarre example: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/lost-and-confused-the-cr...
- Stellar | Software Engineer | Amsterdam, Netherlands, EU | Onsite/Hybrid | Full-time
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
More information: https://www.stellarcs.ai/careers/software-engineer
EU work authorization is required. No visa sponsorship available.
Apply: e-mail is in my profile, please indicate HN in your e-mail.
- Stellar | Implementation Lead, Software Engineer | Amsterdam, Netherlands, EU | Onsite/Hybrid | Full-time
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.
- The story is from a co-host with Boris Johnson for some award ceremony. It’s a great read: https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=2449074521979085...
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.
- I think that is a result of the economics with tips.
Restaurant owners need to balance between overstaffing (and thus spending too much) and understaffing (and having service suffer). The optimal point is different if your opportunity cost is $2 vs $15 per hour.
Thus, in a US restaurant, on average, you’ll see more waiters than in most EU places, given the same amount of tables.
- I think people also heavily underestimate what 1000s of years means. This type of storage has to survive 3x as long as the Egyptian pyramids. The problem is not just technological. At those timespans you can’t assume the country you live in - or the language you speak - to still exist.
- In some dimensions I recognize the slow down in how fast new capabilities develop, but the speed still feels very high:
Image generation suddenly went from gimmick to useful now that prompt adherence is so much better (eagerly waiting for that to be in the API)
Coding performance continues to improve noticeably (for me). Claude 3.7 felt like a big step from 4o/3.5. Gemini 2.5 in a similar way.compared to just 6 months ago I can give bigger and more complex pieces of work to it and get relatively good output back. (Net acceleration)
Audio-2-audio seems like it will be a big step as well. I think this has much more potential than the STT-LLM-TTS architecture commonly used today (latency, quality)
- Oh my bad, I thought you referenced contractors in general. In that case I agree: agreements are to be honored.
- I don’t think that’s shady? When I was hiring contractors it was always project based with mutual understanding things could end quickly if the project or collaboration didn’t work out.
Yes, they get paid 1.5-2x, and that also prices in that it’s not always 100% utilization. Only once had a contractor oppose that, but that was in the context of (severe) underperformance.
- Yes, by API usage. I think you can’t limit which files it sends.
- Likely because it is blended with cached token pricing, which is at $0.30/million. You can use ‘group by’ in the usage portal to see the breakdown.
- I’ve read a few of these in depth crash analyses: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/
I’ve realized that fires are a way bigger issue than you might imagine after a crash — things can go south really quickly. Multiple stories of planes going from “fire outside” to “people suffocating and burning to death in their seats” in minutes. Here’s one of a 737 in Manchester, taxied of the runway intact, 55 people died: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/fire-on-the-runway-the-m...
I might have taken my laptop bag in such a case out of habit before reading these stories, not so much now.
- 2 points
- It’s a bit more complicated than that.
At the point I make a loan, 2 things happen on my balance sheet: I have a new liability to you (the increased balance in your account), and I have a new asset (the loan that you’re expected to pay back). They cancel each other out and it therefore seems as if I’m creating money out of thin air.
However, the moment you actually use that money (eg to buy something), the money leaves the bank (unless the other account is also at this bank, but let’s keep it simple). Liabilities on the balance sheet shrink, so assets need to follow. That needs to come from reserves because the loan asset keeps its original value.
The reserve comes from the bank, not from you. Added layer here: Banks can borrow money from each other or central banks if their cash reserves runs low.
Finally: it tends to be the case that the limit on lending is not the reserves, but on the capital constraints. Banks need to retain capital for each loan they make. This is weighed against the risk of these loans. For example: you could lend a lot more in mortgages than in business loans without collateral. Ask your favorite LLM to explain RWAs and Basel III for more.
- ABN AMRO | Amsterdam, Netherlands | AI Developer | HYBRID | Full Time | Python
We're looking for experienced people who want to help with our GenAI program. Roles range from project management to engineering to data roles, although there is less hard data science where LLMs are involved.
We’re part of Strategy & Innovation and we work on new products and new technology roll-outs across the bank. The GenAI roll-out is one of our primary responsibilities.
We’re looking for people with a few years of work experience. This may also be in a different field, entrepreneurship or for example consulting. If you’d be comfortable taking 1-2 juniors under your wing you’re in the right ballpark.
Please note that we're not sponsoring visa's for applicants outside of the EU.
Mention HN when reaching out. My email is in my profile.
- Depends on your perspective. I think it’s like front-end development likely means you work _with_ React, not that you’re writing front end frameworks from scratch. In a similar way AI devs in our team work with LLMs, but they don’t create them from scratch.