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chadashon In search of the least viewed article on Wikipedia (2022)

Yes, but in my experience, this applies more to people than to some of the topics discussed in the article. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a city, town, village or hamlet in the US without a wikipedia page (as an example, take a look at Jack Wade, Alaska [1]), for example. And I don't imagine that rare moth species articles get taken down. But you have to have some kind of policy in place so that every individual on the planet doesn't have a wikipedia page.

[1] On Google maps view, i can't maybe 8 houses there? https://www.google.com/maps/place/Jack+Wade,+AK+99732/@64.15.... But it's on wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Wade,_Alaska

chadashon In search of the least viewed article on Wikipedia (2022)

It is so fantastic that we have a single resource where I can find information on an unremarkable Peruvian moth, a random small town in Iran, or a type of reading material designed for Sunday reading in Victorian England. Before the advent of the internet this stuff wouldn’t be worth the paper it is published on. But now the cost of storing it in the cloud is effectively zero, so we get this amazing long tail of information that is just incredibly valuable. Thank you to the people who contribute and maintain this stuff!

Edit: what would be really cool is if I could leave a note on a page saying "hey, I visited this page and I'm looking to connect with other people interested in the Peruvian Foovius Barivius Moth"... ping me

chadashon Trucking startup Convoy closes operations with no buyer

thanks! this is great reporting.

I think that this list might be talking about unsecured claims though. I think that secured claims might be separate. So, for example, if an individual declares bankruptcy and they owe $500k on their house, that claim would come before child support payments. I am definitely not a lawyer and bankruptcy law strikes me as particularly complex.

The third priority is tough to parse. From looking over it quickly, it seems like this might be claims from doing business between when i file bankruptcy and when i go into foreclosure. Again, not a lawyer, but my guess here is that if I'm a store and I file bankruptcy on Monday, but don't have a trustee until Wednesday, and I put in an order for a palette of water bottles on Tuesday, then the distributor of the water bottles might have a priority claim.

chadashon Trucking startup Convoy closes operations with no buyer

Because trucking is an enormous industry and $3.8b is a tiny slice. Sure, it's a tough nut to crack, but if someone does crack it they can be worth a lot more than that.

chadashon Trucking startup Convoy closes operations with no buyer

Just to clarify your point about paying out employees... in what sense do you mean that? Some quick googling says that when a company goes into Chapter 7, employees become creditors for their unpaid wages, which means that they are at least in the same boat as other creditors (although it seems like they might sometimes be prioritized).

chadashon X begins charging new users $1 a year in New Zealand, Philippines

I think for the therapy group there’s also an aspect of wanting people to have some skin in the game. If you give something away for free, plenty of people will take it. But as soon as you put a mild obstacle in the way, even if it’s a small payment, you’ll weed out the people who don’t really want to be there.

chadashon [dead]

Haaretz is generally considered left wing, but also the most “serious” of Israeli newspapers. There’s no comparable newspaper on the right (like the WSJ is in the US), and it’s probably a a little further left in Israeli politics than what the NYT is in American politics.

chadashon Extreme parkour with legged robots

I wouldn't say I'm particularly afraid of heights, yet my heart pounded while watching this.

chadashon Lockheed CEO Pitches Pentagon on Subscription Software

4. Subscriptions can be better for aligning goals. If I charge you $20 upfront, then I just want to build whatever I need to build to make the sale. After that, I'm not really incentivized to improve things or fix bugs unless it's going to directly lead to more sales in the future. On the other hand, if I charge you $1/month upfront, you'll be paying more after a year and half, but if you aren't happy after 2/3 months, you can cancel and go elsewhere, and I'll likely lose money due to customer acquisition costs.

That said, I understand why people hate subscriptions. I'm not claiming there are no downsides. And also, yes, as you pointed out, this is the military/industrial complex, so who knows how this will play out.

chadashon Extracting Hacker News book recommendations with the ChatGPT API

No one reads Origin of Species either. I’ll bet that there’s a 100 to 1 ratio of people who have heard of Darwin’s book versus those who have read it. Same goes for many important (or at least influential) books. Mein Kampf, Das Capital and Newton’s Principia are a few more that come to mind.

chadashon Ask HN: Tips for Solopreneur?

Take a look at the second chat at https://jaredheyman.medium.com/on-the-176-annual-return-of-a.... The vast majority of returns for YC are for the companies at the tippy top of that chart (Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox and a few others).

YC certainly provides a nice package to founders. But they are definitely in the unicorn business.

chadashon Ask HN: Tips for Solopreneur?

> They can also literally kill your company. VCs have a very specific strategy: they give some money to 1000 companies knowing that 990 of them will return 0% in the hopes that of the remaining ten, 9 of them return %X000 and one returns %X0000.

+1 to this.

There are definitely different models for VCs, but in general, the big "brand name" VCs are in the unicorn business. This tweet [1] does a succinct job of explaining why.

The result of this is that as a founder, if you own 49% of your company and big-VC investors own 51% of your company and someone comes along offering to buy your company for $100m, your investors are likely to turn it down. For you, that would likely be a life-changing amount of money. For a big-name VC, it doesn't move the needle. In most cases, they'd rather roll the dice and end up with $0 then get their share of a $100m exit.

[1] https://twitter.com/jasonlk/status/1670021902612549632?ref_s...

chadashon Striking auto workers want a 40% pay increase–the same rate their CEOs’ pay grew

The problem with this is that the CEO of Walmart is a much more important job than the CEO of McKinsey but under this formula they would get paid a fraction of the amount, no matter how well they did for Walmart workers.

The end result of this situation would probably be a mad dash to automate away any blue collar work, which may not be such a great thing.

It’s a tough problem.

chadashon Striking auto workers want a 40% pay increase–the same rate their CEOs’ pay grew

The football coach is often the highest paid employee at the university. I wouldn’t be surprised if many rockstar doctors made more than some of their hospital CEOs.

chadashon Common mistakes in salary negotiation

This is highly dependent on the role. I have been tasked with growing teams where my mandate is to hire X number of engineers at various levels. If I found X hires and then hire X + 1 shows up and was a great fit, the company would make an exception. No exploding offers necessary.

On the other hand, sometimes you are hiring to fill a specific position rather than to generally grow a team. You have two candidates you like and you can't afford to let candidate 1 sit on the offer for three weeks. People treat it like it's nefarious on the part of the company to ever have an exploding offer, but sometimes it's just not practical.

chadashon Build a Business, Not an Audience

It’s not just this. I’ve seen many people get caught up in things like incorporation, or legal agreements, listening to start up podcasts or even designing business cards. I like ycombinator’s advice for early startups: if you aren’t building your product or talking to customers you are wasting your time.

chadashon Nobody ever paid me for code

i'm trying to think of the coding equivalent of wooden wrenches? Let's say that's an app written entirely with VBA. If I perceive that it solves my problems, then for most use cases, i'd be fine with it. I guess if it's running my bank account or it's a platform for deploying my code, maybe i'd care somewhat, but in 99% of cases, i wouldn't.

But the reality is that most code is written in a language that's good enough. It's a metal wrench that might be showing some rust. Do I think that PHP is a good language to start a project with today? Of course not. Do I care if you wrote your site 15 years ago and it still runs on PHP? Not really.

chadashon Nobody ever paid me for code

> Code can be the solution. Good code even more so.

I think I agree with the author here. Code is a tool. This is like saying "a wrench can be the solution and a good wrench is even more valuable". I'm sure that car mechanics have very strong opinions about various wrenches. But I'm paying to get my car fixed. Sure, it's nice to hear that your shop has the latest equipment, but at the end of the day, the thing that matters most is that you can fix my car.

Even as a developer, I hardly care about the code quality or what language you use if you provide a good and reliable service. I've never thought to myself, geez, I love AWS, but I really wish they'd move away from Java.

chadashon Modern tourism makes it difficult to appreciate the Sistine Chapel

The Sistine Chapel is lovely. I don't discount checking a box to say that you've been there. But while you are there, explore more of the vatican museum. There are countless artifacts there that would be the centerpieces of less important museums, but in the context of that museum, they might go unnoticed in a corner. I find this true of tourism in general. 80-95% of the crowds go to 5-20% of the things to do. In the Louvre, it's the Mona Lisa. In the Vatican it's the sistine chapel. Meanwhile there are museums filled with pieces that would probably auction for 8-9 digits, but for whatever reasons, are not well known to the general public and therefore don't get the attention. No one is taking selfies of themselves next to the 17th most valuable painting in the Louvre (much more so the 100th most valuable piece, which is still extremely valuable), but I assure you that the quality of the work is every bit as fantastic as the most famous ones.

chadashon A world where people pay for software

The link doesn’t talk about the SAAS model, which is probably the most profitable (and ubiquitous) one these days.

I know people like to rail against it, but I actually like the SAAS model. It keeps incentives aligned. It used to be that I might shell out $200 for a piece of productivity software. Now, I might pay $10 a month instead. The thing is that under the old model, a company was incentivized by make a sale but retention didn’t matter. Now, a sale is almost worthless, but retention is very valuable. Yes, over time I will pay much more with SAAS, but I also have companies that are incentivized to keep the software working. It doesn’t matter that I have a perpetual license on accounting software I bought in 2005… it no longer functions with my operating system anyway. SAAS helps solve this problem.

chadashon Driver.js: Product tours, highlights, contextual help and more

Sorry, this isn't practical for everything. Sure, a phone should be intuitive. And more importantly, you don't have to know how everything works at first pass. You can build it over time.

But, for example, I recently signed up for HubSpot as a CRM and while I think that overall, the product is well organized and intuitive, it's just difficult if not impossible to make it as intuitive as a smartphone. The product tours really help.

chadashon Driver.js: Product tours, highlights, contextual help and more

Step 1: open free tier or trial account with new app I want to take a look at

Step 2: open app, see your stupid tour, close it

Step 3: click around, realize this might be what I’m looking for but more complex than I realized

Step 4: look for that maybe-not-so-stupid tour again, realize there’s no way to restart it

It’s not all that different than opening up a piece of assembly-needed furniture that arrives in the mail. Usually I look to see it I can build it intuitively before I go to the instruction manual

chadashon On Becoming a VP of Engineering

You say this is an American thing. Is there a country you are thinking of that has this less engrained? My experience working with foreign cultures is often that organizations are more hierarchical, not less.

chadashon Pines – Alpine and Tailwind UI Library

The second paragraph here is a bit surprising. Do you have an example you can point to?

chadashon I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

> and companies claim they are doing so to build lighter laptops

A framework 13" is 15.9mm thick and weighs 2.9 lbs. A macbook air M1 is 16.1mm thick and weights 2.8 lbs. So it's pretty darn close.

I'm sure that thinner and lighter laptops exist, but yeah, the framework is pretty thin. And at a certain point, it stops mattering. Being thinner wouldn't really provide much utility at this point.

The fact is that repairability is just not profitable for companies like Apple or Dell. They would rather you replace your entire computer when your screen cracks. But I very much hope that enough people do care about repairability to keep Framework afloat (and profitable). As an owner, I was astonished how easy it is to take this thing apart and replace things; I would guess that most of my non-technical friends can probably replace a monitor or a touchpad on one of these laptops with very little difficulty.

chadashon Ask HN: Any software engineers here that switched to a business/sales role?

AE?

chadashon Ask HN: Is everyone becoming a Product Manager these days?

In my experience, product management is an innate skill that is very hard to learn or teach. This is not to say that you can’t get better at it, just that it doesn’t involve the sorts of skills that are easy to teach in a classroom, it is more about real world experience. In order to be good at it, you need to be well organized, good at talking to people, have a good intuition for design, and a strong ability to understand the domain you are working in, as well as your users.

The best product managers I know seem to have a natural talent for it. And plenty of them found their way into it by accident. Maybe they were working in another part of the business, but realized that they had a knack for understanding how the product could be better. Maybe someone told them that they would be good at it.

My take on it is that yes, lots of people want to be involved in tech, but don’t know how to code. Product management is a Way to do that that’s accessible to non-engineers. Some people will try it out and find that they have strong abilities at it, and many will fail at it. But I think it is seen as a desirable job.

That said, I think it’s an incredibly hard job as well. You have to deal with people above you constantly pushing on deadlines, you have to stay super on top of things, and you won’t succeed, unless you earn the respect of the engineers you work with. It can be very demanding. Most people don’t seem to have the skill set for it. And if you are in a company with a bad culture, it can be a very thankless job.

chadashon Launch HN: Fastgen (YC W23) – Visual Low-Code Backend Builder

I agree that the pricing for 2M actions is so high, that why even show it? But this doesn't seem like a typical use case for rapid prototyping, which is what this seems to be made for

chadashon How to Finetune GPT-Like Large Language Models on a Custom Dataset

I've read in a few places that it actually works worse in most cases. Much better to put the context in your prompt.

chadashon JPMorgan Chase and Co tracks employees to dystopian extents

> Upper management wants to see everyone at all levels back in the office five days a week. They have invested millions into the WADU system, and they want to get a return on that investment. That only happens whenever people are in the office as much as possible.

Lol. Millions to JP Morgan would be like dollars to the average person. Upper management there is not making any big decisions over anything involving less than 9, and maybe 10 zeros.