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Not to be contrarian, but genuinely curious about the challenges buying in Japan.

We recently bought a condo and it was shockingly easy. Out of various annoying admin tasks in Japan, this was extremely straightforward.

Did you look at the parts and content, or just leap to this assumption?

My first couple days with Fusion had similar outcomes, and this is totally credible. There are extremely talented YouTubers that have information-dense guides through many features. It's totally plausible with that and having a mentor showing you a tool to succeed here.

Why add negativity to something cool? There is a build log! It's well done and tangible! It's not slop! Celebrating is always more fun than humbugging.

Since you are also going for your A&P, would love to hear your assessment of build-assist planes and modern rotax powerplants!

And a lot of the pilot deaths are not because of in-the-moment skill deficiencies.

Stick and rudder skills aren't that useful with fuel exhaustion and bad weather planning. It's much easier to stay safer in a plane vs motorcycle.

I wish people treated cars and motorcycles properly, especially in the US. Until then, no motorcycles for me either :(

I am building an app that is for a niche market, and I wouldn't have started without LLMs.

The hard part of this app is great design, requiring intentionally designed workflows and lots of real world testing. The code isn't the interesting part and now code isn't taking most of my time. It's great!

Once the design is nailed down and workflows tightened up, I don't expect much active development and can focus on distribution and marketing.

As a solo dev, this feels totally doable but ask me in 6 months.

This is a timely observation and feels right to me. I needed to get a relatively simple batch download -> transform -> api endpoint stood up. I wrote a fairly detailed prompt but left a lot of implementation details out, including data sources.

Opus 4.7 built it about 90% the same way I would, but had way more convenience methods and step-validations included.

It's great, and really frees me up to think about harder problems.

Or try the other side of the spectrum and pick up tai chi. I started practicing almost 15 years ago (grudgingly) and it's surprisingly great!

Happy to help find a place that fits. In my experience, martial arts schools are very much a vibe-compatibility thing.

Malcolm Gladwell's description of that accident and amplification is simplistic and not very accurate. There were many errors made that caused that accident, including ATC failing to follow protocol.

English is the language of aviation because in 1951 the countries with the most living pilots and aircraft spoke English. It is not because of any trait particular to English.

Merely for the viability part: I use the $20/mo plan now, but only as a part-time independent dev. I will hit rate-limits with Opus on any moderately complex app.

If I am on a roll, I will flip on Extra Usage. I prototyped a fully functional and useful niche app in ~6 total hours and $20 of extra usage, and it's solid enough and proved enough value to continue investing in and eventually ship to the App store.

Without Claude I likely wouldn't have gotten to the finished prototype version to use in the real world.

For Indy dev, I think LLMs are a new source of solutions. This app is too niche to justify building and marketing without LLM assistance. It likely won't earn more than $25k/year but good enough!

In a modern car, or if you adequately rev match, the clutch wear is extremely small. Only if you are aggressively down shifting will that be a problem. It’s also only wear at that point in time, not the entire time through engine braking.

I would expect them to do the bulk of their training flights out of airports with minimal congestion and lower landing fees.

They don’t have to be trained in class B airspace to get their type rating.

Landing fees already have this built into the structure, along with waived fees for fuel purchases, etc.

It probably is reasonable to look at occupancy percentage along with engine type, and adjust landing fees based on that. Two out of 18 souls on board with a turbine? High landing fees, divert some to an ATC fund.

You'd have to change more regulations, because airports don't close when ATC closes, it regresses to an untowered airport environment (and related airspace designation).

ATC is there to provide specific services that increase safety and throughput (mostly by sequencing and separation).

If you did this with the ruling class, they'd likely pass regulations that would benefit themselves disproportionately and hurt general aviation (the small little Cessnas flying around). There is already a bunch of problems with privatized ATC, don't make it worse.

As a counter-point (and I know nothing about Gitlab), but GitHub and Shopify are both prominent Rails apps with pretty good security records. GitHub wrote about it last year: https://github.blog/engineering/architecture-optimization/bu...

I think the answer to your question is the same as any large application: pay attention to your supply chain, architect your systems well, if you don’t know how to do things securely go learn before building (or learn as you go, but that has consequences typically).

I'm pretty sure they do, though. Lucid owns Atieva, the company supplying the batteries for Formula E. What they've learned through the many seasons directly goes back into the vehicle's battery.

https://lucidmotors.com/media-room/atieva-powers-season-6-fo...

There has been so much research on this, and this article seems to ignore much of it.

The book Accelerate is a good start.

All that is true, but it’s also getting better. And 16mpg over shorter routes (a 100nm flight vs 200 mile drive is not unusual) makes it harder to compare apples to oranges.

We don’t really have hybrid planes yet, which will likely help in the most inefficient parts of flying (climb).

My comment is to add more information to the discussion to consider many aspects, not to make claims that it’s a fuel-sensible method of travel. I am excited for innovation here, just like I am excited for the continued improvements in hybrid and electric cars.

Take a look at the more economical modern GA aircraft. A Cirrus SR22 can run at 10 gallons per hour, with a ground speed of 160+ mph.

Yes, it’s more total fuel consumption than a car (but in an hour covering 2x the distance, and allowing to travel more directly) but not at all close to turbine or turboprops. At the extremely cheap (accessible to more pilots) side for pressurized planes, fuel burn is going to be 40gph and it just goes up from there.

There are many variables, and winds work for or against—but by doing good flight planning you use the winds to your advantage.

There is also a lot of research on better aviation fuels (100ll :(((). I’m excited about that part of it, more so than the current electric planes (although electric self-launching gliders are pretty neat)

MOSIAC is going to make light sport aircraft more useful, which will also help in this area.

Tons of interesting stuff happening here!

I didn't genuinely enjoy parenting until my kids were all above 6, and it was gradual. My kids are 16 and 14 now, and at the start of their summer break I left a job I really liked to spend as much time as I could with them. Their problems were more thought provoking and time intensive, navigating tough tradeoffs. I love helping them through these moments, teaching critical thinking, and we still have fun doing things.

When they were younger, I tried to find some longer focal point and figure out what my role and goals were as a parent. I found that, and it helped relieve some of the repetitive stress of parenting young kids.

I don't know the source for the "75% of the time we spent with our kids happens before age 12" but I hope it isn't true. Kids are inexperienced people, and experience cultivates interesting people. I also believe an hour spent with a glassy eyed baby barely counts compared to a thoughtful, focused 15 minute discussion with a teenager.

I hope you find your groove. It took me a while.

I’ve been at Stripe for 4 years, joined as an IC then shortly transitioned to an EM. Previously was an EM, and remote for 12 years total.

Noticeable differences:

- While I’m remote people tend to default to throwing time on my calendar, which means a conversation sometimes doesn’t happen. We use Slack, so I am highly responsive on Slack to ensure I’m still talking with folks I need to and would rather ping someone unnecessarily and ask about something than miss out on information. Ding words and DMs to offset the barrier to adding calendared time to talk.

- Capturing all “collisions” (we have awesome stairs to encourage this) is a lot different. As a remote, when I’m in the office it’s a bit special and people come up to me. When working in an office, I get less “Hey, what have you been up to?” conversations.

- Timezones are definitely harder in the office. In an office people generally have fixed blocks of time, since commuting has a cost. Being remote (from home) there is no commute cost, so I can split my day up if I need to without working overly long days. I worked with engineers in Europe, so having this flexibility to hop on a call at 6am and then take a break to hang out with my kids before school is super cool.

What doesn’t change? I believe the most effective management practices aim for predictability, and having inclusive behaviors. Also it doesn’t change how you show up to the job. When I’m in meetings, I need to look fully engaged and present, whether remote or in the office. I think this can be harder in a home office, being surrounded by your things vs. an empty conference room.

Happy to talk more about my experiences here or remote in general!

Is there a method for HN to get beta access?

I currently have 12 direct reports, approximately 50/50 split between remote and HQ engineers.

Onboarding: I create onboarding documents for every incoming engineer broken down by week with 1 or 2 "people to meet" items in the checklist. There is one person in HQ, one person remote (if available) for a remote engineer onboarding. If the engineer is in HQ, they don't have a remote person assigned but they're tasked to meet with everybody on the team. The expectation is within the first couple of weeks to have met at least once with everybody on the team. There are some suggested questions only if they ask (I like to let people feel around and will ask if they feel comfortable talking to strangers, etc).

Management: I'm fairly process oriented, but believe in very light weight processes where every step in the process has some value to an actual person. When we plan our tasks, I ask for rollups on what we're really trying to do and why. This enables me to talk about people's work and know what I'm talking about. The benefit is that we give coherent answers, and have a list of things that are ongoing that are at a higher level than tasks and lower than long-term plans (2 week segments).

For growth, every half I ask a series of questions about their aspirations for the next 6 months and align them to our company's evaluative criteria. I write it down, share with them to edit and correct (this makes sure I understand it). Then at the end of every month, we spend time in our 1:1 to read through and make changes. It goes from a fictional forward looking statement to a writeup of what's been done. It helps frame the larger items that are easy to forget, and a place to put in the small unexpected wins. At the end of the half it is a great asset to see what they've done and for me to bring into performance review conversations.

For culture and team-building, I push for quarterly get togethers (which turns into every 6 months, coordinating a lot of people is hard). Mostly I try to make sure folks are working together and not just adjacent (working on different things in a team is not teamwork). The team also drives conversations to email or scheduled conversations, so folks don't have to be watching Slack to see a decision that may impact them and be lucky they're around (we have a lot of timezone spread, too).

Hope this helps!

Here is an example listing from a user, which is better than our own: http://donedid.io/organizations/newscron.com

Personal favorite is listening to Jerry Colonna on This Week in Startups. He talks of trials and tribulations of the startup life, acknowledging the often hidden fact that we're all humans: http://thisweekinstartups.com/jerry-colonna-independent-life...

What is the strategy for when Apple disallows sales based on the Magsafe adapter?

This happened to HyperMac (now HyperJuice) batteries back in 2011. I still have mine, ordered before Apple lawyers went after them. It's wonderful.

Edit: Adding link to Wired article: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/01/hypermac-is-back-with...

Oh, one more thing, spend an hour watching this: http://thisweekinstartups.com/thisweekin-startups/jerry-colo...

Jerry Colonna was at the top of the business world, partnered with Fred Wilson, and couldn't out run his depression. How he solved it isn't going to work for you, but he tells a wonderful story and really talks about what can be at the core of our desires.

If the idea of success over a year at a time is interesting, I recommend reading 18 Minutes by Peter Bregman. It's a very practical guide to this approach.

I entered the professional field after some minor community college experience right during the .com bubble (1997). It was very difficult to get my foot in any doors, largely due to the lack of a degree.

After 5 years of experience that went away, partly from the changes in the tech environment and also my experience.

It is competitive when you are starting out, but developers are high in demand. As someone now more in an employer role (which I'm not hiring now), I would look at Open Source work over a degree. If you have a github account with a maintained project or two, especially with a few stars, I'll think you are more qualified than if you have just a BS.

Are you more motivated to conquer your depression or to sidestep the situation?

From an opportunity standpoint, this could be a chance to overcome a difficult personal challenge (depression) while also being able to do something many don't (go to university).

I hope that you find your answer.

Wow! Thank you. This is really awesome feedback.

I really did drop the ball on that, this is the second person to bring that up. I intended to record a video for the launch explaining it (Premortems in 60 seconds) but couldn't find a mic.

I think my favorite post explaining Premortems is on the iDoneThis blog: http://blog.idonethis.com/post/43078049631/the-perks-of-cons...

Again, thank you so much for your great feedback. I really appreciate the time you spent writing it up.

I only spent 3 days on the app so far, it's a weekend project for me, so I'll be making these changes soon (hopefully this coming weekend)