apinstein (u/apinstein)

apinstein commented on Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026) · Posted by u/david927

apinstein · a month ago

Ever get an email or handout with a massive schedule - in text, image or pdf - and you have to hand re-enter dozens of events? I built ChatMyCal to fix this.

Copy/paste the email, or take a pic and it will perfectly extract the schedule and publish it as a subscribe-able calendar. Then “transfer” it to the group admin and save everyone else from the same thing.

On the inside, it’s basically Cursor for calendars. So you can use AI to batch edit things, decorate with coordinated icons, add rules to apply to all events, etc. It can also develop full schedules like “make a monthly book club for zombie books” or plan a weekend foodie trip to Miami. Not sure all the best uses yet!

apinstein commented on The guide to real-world EV battery health geotab.com/blog/ev-batter... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

oklahomasports · 2 months ago

81% of original capacity for many cars means when driving at highway speeds you will get like 250 miles or less range per charge. Still dramatically less than gas cars.

apinstein · 2 months ago

While true, this either matters for you or it doesn’t. Classic Innovator’s Dilemma.

My EV gets only 230mi range at max, and I only charge to 85% which is like 190mi. But I do it at home and never have any range anxiety.

The trajectories for battery improvements indicate it is just a matter of time before those with larger range needs are addressed satisfactorily.

If you cannot slow charge at home or work, it’s a tough story, EV’s aren’t right for you yet, and that’s ok. Roll out of slow charging is less clear that it will be solved in a scaled way. I am not one that believes that 5-10m EV charging is a good goal, it’s very high power and likely not a good price trade off for the time saved. Current 20-30m will likely be the broad solution for those that want EV and cannot charge at home, though I think that’s not a very good solution.

apinstein commented on OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss techinasia.com/news/opena... · Posted by u/breadsniffer

runako · 5 months ago

I am not willing to render my personal verdict here yet.

Yet it is certainly true that at ~700m MAUs it is hard to say the product has not reached scale yet. It's not mature, but it's sort of hard to hand wave and say they are going to make the economics work at some future scale when they don't work at this size.

It really feels like they absolutely must find another revenue model for this to be viable. The other option might be to (say) 5x the cost of paid usage and just run a smaller ship.

apinstein · 5 months ago

It’s not a hand wave…

The cost to serve a particular level of AI drops by like 10x a year. AI has gotten good enough that next year people can continue to use the current gen AI but at that point it will be profitable. Probably 70%+ gross margin.

Right now it’s a race for market share.

But once that backs off, prices will adjust to profitability. Not unlike the Uber/Lyft wars.

apinstein commented on Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo tempo.xyz... · Posted by u/_nvs

apinstein · 6 months ago

Here's the play. It's very simple, and it's quite good.

Stripe processes a LOT of money. The customers that get that money need to move it around. Often to banks. Stripe makes no money on that.

Over the last few years, stablecoins have become a preferred means to hold and move money (for convenience, etc).

Stablecoin providers make money on their float -- selling stablecoins means you get free deposits, and risk-free rates are presently around 4%. For every $1M in stablecoins your customers hold, you can make $40k/year. Stablecoin providers like Circle pay about half of that back out to partners that sell the tokens.

Stripe is huge, and well-trusted by customers for handling payments. By adoption stablecoin infrastructure to control financial flows into stablecoins, they can amass huge amounts of stablecoin sales.

If even ~3% of their transaction volume gets held in Stablecoins, and they make 1% a year on that, it's about $1B a year in bottom line.

~$10e9 (daily avg vol) * 365 * 3% (converted to stablecoins) * 1% (net income) = ~$1B

apinstein commented on Do viruses trigger Alzheimer's? economist.com/science-and... · Posted by u/helsinkiandrew

Mordisquitos · a year ago

Penultimate paragraph of TFA:

'The first double-blinded randomised clinical trial to test the effectiveness of antivirals against dementia is now under way. A group of researchers mostly based at Columbia University are testing whether valacyclovir, an antiviral used against HSV1, can slow down cognitive decline in people with early stage Alzheimer’s. Between 2018 and 2024, the researchers recruited 120 patients and treated half with the antiviral. They expect to publish their findings later this year. John Hardy, whose research forms the basis of the dominant amyloid theory of Alzheimer’s, and who has been a critic of the virus theory, says that a positive result in this trial would begin to convince him otherwise. If Dr Geldsetzer and his team can secure the funding, a similar trial of the shingles vaccine may soon follow.'

apinstein · a year ago

Oh wow, a bunch of Alzheimer’s grants at Columbia were canceled, including the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. Unclear if this study was affected…

https://taggs.hhs.gov/Content/Data/HHS_Grants_Terminated.pdf

apinstein commented on Waymo robotaxis safer than any human-driven cars cleantechnica.com/2025/01... · Posted by u/hochmartinez

muth02446 · a year ago

IIRC Waymo only offers their service in certain places and does not use highways. Was this controlled for?

apinstein · a year ago

There are so many things to control for… - compare to taxi / professional drivers - locations - times

Still a great nominal achievement but anytime a sponsored research study doesn’t even attempt to control for basic things it raises a lot of red flags.

apinstein commented on Show HN: Free mortgage analysis tool to avoid getting screwed by closing costs closingwtf.com... · Posted by u/aaln

aorloff · a year ago

What actions can you take by the time you are at closing ?

I'm a licensed real estate agent, I actually got my license not just to learn about the business but to be able to save myself on agent commissions if I want to make an offer (if you can pass a CS data structures class you should be able to get a real estate license online in a matter of months), and I still would not try to optimize on closing costs.

Do I shop loans ? Absolutely. Are closing costs a scam ? Absolutely.

Would I try to optimize closing costs in the context of making a purchase ?

No.

In the time you have to decide the one really important question (whether to proceed or not) you need to spent it understanding the worst possible parts of the transaction you are about to make, NOT focusing on the closing costs.

Some class action lawyers should be worrying about optimizing these fees. Shop your loan, but spend your time investigating the property.

Pretending to be a site helping mortgage borrowers not get scammed while actually being a mortgage lead gen portal though : chef's kiss.

apinstein · a year ago

hmm. I don't see why not optimize closing costs. I have done so on 4-5 mortgages myself. When sourcing your lending options, if you are a good borrower at least, you will have multiple options. I always asked for a full closing cost estimate and compared. Usually saved $2000-5000 through a combination of:

- effectively shopping around items like title insurance, appraisals, etc by pointing out differences b/c competing vendors - identifying BS items that are not even on all offers, and simply having them removed. people like to add bogus fee lines.

For sure doing this as lead-gen is great. Agree that there is a huge risk of uploading personal info -- in the future local AI's will be able to do this. In the short term, they should partner with a known brand to give credibility.

apinstein commented on Trump wins presidency for second time thehill.com/homenews/camp... · Posted by u/koolba

creato · a year ago

> Most Americans want legal immigration, but the Democrats took too long to do something and then Trump was able to kill the bill last minute. It looked like the Democrats wanted to simply ignore it until they no longer could.

You forgot the part where they claimed their hands were tied, then finally did something about it 8 months before the election.

apinstein · a year ago

It’s fascinating how no one mentions that Trump didn’t pass comprehensive immigration legislation during his first term despite it being core to his platform.

This issue is a mess and has been kicked down the road for literal decades at this point. Maybe finally it will get passed…

apinstein commented on MVSplat: Efficient 3D Gaussian Splatting from Sparse Multi-View Images donydchen.github.io/mvspl... · Posted by u/jasondavies

littlestymaar · 2 years ago

Are there businesses doing it already or is the tech too immature to be used IRL right now?

apinstein · 2 years ago

I started and ran a real estate photography platform from 2004-2018. We started r&d on this in ~2016 when consumer VR first came out. At the time we used photogrammetry and it was “dreadful” to try to capture due to mirrors, glass, etc.

So I have been following GS tech for a while. I’ve not yet seen anything (open source / papers) that quite gets there yet. I do think it will.

In my opinion, there are two useful ways GS can bring to this industry.

The first is ability to use photo capture to re-render as a high production quality video similar to what people do with Luma AI today. While this is a really cool capability, it’s also not really that hard to do anymore with drones and gimbals. So, the experience of creating the same thing via GS has to be better and easier, and it’s not clear when that will likely happen due to how painful the capture side is. You really need good real time capture feedback to make sure you have good coverage. Finding out there’s a hole once you’re off location is a deal breaker.

The second is to create VR capable experiences. I think the first real useful thing for consumers will be so you can walk around in a small three or 4 foot area and get a stereo sense of what it’s like to be there. This is an amazing consumer experience. But the practicality of scaling this depends on VR hardware and adoption, and that hasn’t yet become commonplace enough to make consumer use “adjacent possible” for broad deployment.

I could see it being used on super high end to start out.

apinstein commented on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (July 2024) · Posted by u/whoishiring

apinstein · 2 years ago

--- Founder / Technical Co-Founder / Exec Leadership / Head of Product ---

  Location: Atlanta, GA
  Remote: Yes, but prefer hybrid/on-site.
  Willing to relocate: No, but open to occasional travel.
  Technologies: 25 years of full stack work in C/C++/Obj-C/php/js/ruby and more. Data Science in R. Embedded, MacOS, iOS, Web (1.0, 2.0, SPA). AWS/GCP. Postgres.
  Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alanpinstein/
  Email: please contact through LinkedIn

I am 3x exited founder looking to join an ambitious startup focusing on society-altering products. I am particularly interested in AI, biotech, and sustainability spaces.