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chadashon How and why I built Japan Dev

Well, it sure got me interested in hearing more about the story. As far as competition, as the article makes clear, it wouldn't be that easy to compete. You'd need to be located in Japan, read English (or you are unlikely to have read this article in the first place), and then go through all the hurdles that they went through.

chadashon Adam Neumann’s new company gets a big check from Andreessen Horowitz

> Adam Neumann is basically Elizabeth Holmes...

With one big difference. I've worked in a WeWork. I know many people who have. The product is real and it did fundamentally change the idea of coworking (you ever heard of Regus before WeWork came along?). And I'd work at a WeWork again. It was a great experience.

chadashon Excel is pretty dang cool

once you count consumers, you get into semantics. Like is C/C++ more used than javascript, because all the javascript essentially runs in browsers compiled from C++?

chadashon Excel is pretty dang cool

Excel is "written" by many more people than javascript

chadashon Google’s caste-bias problem

Not to say that this is authoritative, but an article in the Harvard Law Review argues that "caste discrimination is a type of racial discrimination, religious discrimination, and national origin discrimination — all covered under Title VII".

Nonetheless, my hunch is that legal or not legal, this kind of discrimination would be extremely unpalatable to most Americans across the political spectrum.

https://harvardlawreview.org/2021/06/title-vii-and-caste-dis...

chadashon U.S. annual inflation rate drops to 8.5%

Last I checked, Florida has about 6% of the total US population, but more than 75% of property insurance litigation. The situation is insane.

chadashon Thinking with pen and paper

in general, I use my computer for taking notes. But I recently started using pencil and paper for designing quick low-fidelity mockups for things that my team is going to implement and it's wildly better than working on the computer for several reasons:

- pencil/paper is just so much quicker

- if you think it, you can draw it... quickly. It's more flexible.

- key advantage: when non-engineers (or even engineers) see higher fidelity mockups, it's very easy to get caught up on some of the details like where a button goes or how big the font is. With pencil/paper, everyone realizes that it's a rough sketch and that the final product isn't going to look this way.

After I write things up, I scan them with an app to a PDF file and then email that out (or attach to a ticket). Of course, pen/pencil isn't great for final designs... there's no substitute for a high-fidelity mockup of what somethings is supposed to look like. But I find it very useful to start with the UX and then work on things like CSS last.

Some key tools I use:

notepad: $5

pencil: $7 (I really splurged here for the pentel Orenz, my favorite mechanical pencil, but a $1-2 pencil will be 95% as good)

6" ruler: $1.76

1/2" binder (I like to keep my drawings): $4

I've thought about investing in a ReMarkable tablet, but I find it hard to justify the cost since pen/pencil work so well.

chadashon FTC takes action to stop Opendoor from cheating potential sellers

> Are they counting the 4-6% real estate real estate commission the agent would take that Opendoor customers arent paying?

your overall point stands, but Opendoor does have a 5% "service charge" that's on par with an agent commission.

chadashon The Best iPhone

I mean it's all relative, but yeah, $429 starting price for a phone coming from a company that is known to support their products for a minimum of 5 years is really not bad. Especially since these phones hold their value far better than any other brand on the market. I bought an iphone SE (2nd gen) in 2020 for $450 and sold it for $230 in 2022, so it worked out to about $110/year. It was a fantastic phone, but I upgraded to a 13 mini because my work offered to pay for the phone. I used to have a Moto E, which I think most people would consider a "cheap" phone and a) it wasn't a great phone b) i had no desire to keep it more than 2 years and c) by the time i was done using it, it's secondary market value was low enough that i didn't bother selling it.

chadashon Rebellion at DataRobot over insider stock sales

There are necessary protections in place for minority shareholders in public companies. For example, I can't just buy up 51% of a company and then vote that the company is now going to give all of its profits to me.

The same situation should apply here. Employees are typically minority shareholders and as such, should get some basic protections. Early liquidity has significant value. I'd bet that plenty of employees would give up a percentage of their equity in order to cash out at least some of their shares early. Giving this ability to larger shareholders and not to smaller ones is very similar to saying that only large shareholders get to share in profits.

chadashon Instagram is shifting to videos – users aren't happy

This seems like wishful thinking. Why assume that academic intelligence makes you less creative? Do you think that people who graduate with high grades out of Harvard/MIT/Stanford are less creative than people who graduate from second-tier universities because they are too bookish?

I think the reality is probably that it's hard for any large company to be truly innovative. Once you get to a certain size, red tape and size make you slower. You also have an existing golden goose that you don't want to kill (for these companies, ad revenue), so you are more constrained. Furthermore, you only care to take risks that have massive payoffs... new ideas at Google need to be $1b+ to make a dent and $50m ideas don't really matter much anymore. In any case, are there any large companies that don't do leetcode that you would consider innovative? I'd argue maybe Amazon (1 day delivery) and Apple (M1 and M2 chips), but not so much in their software divisions where the leetcode happens.

chadashon Fake Dog for Home Security

To add credence to this post, I once heard an interview with an incarcerated burglar who claimed that dogs where the one deterrent that scared him off. He said that an alarm as only as good as the response times of the police and he's usually in and out of there in five minutes anyway. But who wants to risk it with a dog? Better to just move on to the next house.

A few more tips:

- Best place to hide valuables is in the kitchen pantry. Master bedroom is the most common place, but who is gonna think to go through your snack food.

- A lot of burglaries happen in the winter in the late afternoon or early evening when it is starting to get dark out, but before the homeowners get home from work.

- Your house is only as strong as the weakest link. Fancy locks can be bypassed by breaking a window. Design your security system to handle low level burglars (who probably don't know how to pick a lock), not foreign spies. For most people, this also holds true for online security.

chadashon Shopify to lay off 10% of workers in broad shake-up

Yeah, but probably with lower total comp.

chadashon I remember feeling derisive about marketing as a young techie

Sorry for being pedantic. Response wasn't directed at you specifically, but at the wider audience, some of whom might not understand the distinction. But my guess is that John Carmack does get the distinction and was intentional with his wording, although obviously I could be wrong :)

But even in advertising, there's a huge variance of ethics. I don't love targeted advertising based on my search history. I'm perfectly fine with my favorite history podcast being able to continue because of casper ads. In that case, casper isn't tracking me specifically... just assuming that history podcast listeners might be good mattress customers.

chadashon I remember feeling derisive about marketing as a young techie

I think you are conflating marketing with advertising. Advertising is a subset of marketing, but wouldn't include things like:

- Writing clear and effective home pages (e.g. the Get Started button is the most prominent affordance on the https://reactjs.org/ homepage)

- The design of that homepage is marketing. Have you ever felt more comfortable using a product that has a nice website?

- Engineering blogs (e.g. the https://www.backblaze.com/blog/ seems to make it to the HN homepage every few months... they aren't just writing this stuff for fun)

- Making your product easy to get started with isn't strictly marketing, but letting people know that it's easy to get started with sure is (e.g. good documentation)

- Having a good pricing strategy is marketing. (e.g. make three tiers for different customers, but try to steer people to the middle one)

- Having a good pricing discount strategy is marketing. (e.g. AWS is basically free for students because they know who those students will want to use when they are making decisions in the work force in a few years)

A key thing is that not all marketing needs to be done by the marketing department. Marketing is about understanding the market and what will make them use your product. This is important even for software engineers.

Edit: fixed typo above and adding below. =========================================

Also, there are ways of getting the word out that aren't advertising but are done by the same sorts of people. For example, GoPro didn't buy online ads or TV commercials when they were a young company. They gave away GoPros to people doing crazy stuff and had them upload their footage to youtube.

Trader Joes doesn't buy advertising, but mixes up their inventory regularly in order to generate buzz. They'll even take popular items out of production, which I've always suspected is a marketing ploy meant to get people talking about them.

Lamborghini is another example of a company that doesn't make ads, but they fiercely guard their reputation. In fact, their marketing department is hiring right now for someone to manage their "car configurator" (https://configurator.lamborghini.com/), a product that they see as part of marketing.

chadashon High property taxes are good

It works because they just need to come up with a total value and how it divides between land and house doesn’t matter much. My property taxes also separate out land and it puts the land at like 25% of the total value, but in reality someone would easily pay >50% for my land just to demolish the house and rebuild.

chadashon High property taxes are good

I looked there and a bunch of the examples show places where it used to be used (which is probably a good indication of how hard it is in practice). The rest have very vague details and none of the examples there really go into any depth on the details of how they value land in practice. So I'm wondering if anyone knows which country has a good model to look further into.

chadashon High property taxes are good

Because 90 year old grandpa can't move as easily as us youngins and it's not his fault that the neighborhood gentrified around him. At this point he can't afford to the taxes on a studio either. But anyway, the process of moving is really pretty tough at that age, even the logistics of finding a new apartment and hiring movers. Now, you move out to the suburbs because you can't afford the city anymore, but you don't drive because you are 90, so it isn't so easy to buy groceries anymore. You gotta find a new ophthalmologist, cardiologist and primary care doctor instead of seeing the folks you've been going to for the last 10 years.

Maybe 65 is too young for retirement age, but I certainly feel that there is an age at which old people should start getting special privileges, like the right to not have to move. And the rest of us can wait our turns and hope that we get to take advantage of those privileges some day.

chadashon High property taxes are good

My point is that a lot of (and maybe most) 90 year olds are not really capable of moving. Moves are a pretty big pain in the ass in your 20s and 30s, but doing the process of finding a new apartment and physically moving are much harder at that age. And then you move to somewhere cheaper because the whole point is you can't afford the city anymore, but now you need to find all new doctors (many 90 year olds have multiple doctors they see regularly), figure out how to see family (perhaps you remained in your old place because your family lived nearby), get to the grocery store (you're 90... you likely can't drive). It's not practical.

chadashon High property taxes are good

The biggest problem (IMO) is that it's not so simple to value land. Where I live, being two blocks over can make a huge difference. It's easy to say "you paid $500k for your house, so we're gonna tax you on $500k". It's much harder to accurately say what someone would have paid for the land were it not developed. I understand the benefits of LVT, but how do you solve this? Are there any good examples of governments that use LVT in practice [1]? What do they do?

[1] In practice and as a primary means of property taxation. For example, proponents of wealth taxes talk about Switzerland, but the percentage of wealth that gets taxed there is quite small and nowhere near what proposals for wealth taxes in the US are aiming for. In other words, what's a good country to look at to see LVT used effectively?

chadashon High property taxes are good

> You can always choose to live in a cheaper home.

So your 90 year old grandpa has been living in a two bedroom apartment on the lower east side for 65 years. When he moved in at age 25, it was considered a crummy but affordable neighborhood, but now it's expensive and desirable. You want a 90 year old to have to move? I agree that maybe a 65 year old couple no longer needs to be in a 3,000 square foot home, but there are a lot of cases that make this complicated.

chadashon Amazon memo: Here’s why we should acquire Ring (2017)

I don't know much about this, but some quick research shows that it was actually for $525 million [1], and interestingly, they put up their intellectual property as collateral ("a batch of 10 Marvel characters, including Captain America, the Avengers... and Nick Fury").

It's worth noting that a line of credit can be against the business itself, the owner of the business, or it can be backed with specific collateral, such as stocks, for example. If you are large enough, the bank will get creative on what you can use as collateral, although I'd imagine that in general it's easier to borrow against a Manhattan office building (many possible buyers) than the intellectual rights to comic-book characters (very few possible buyers).

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110805065546/https://variety.c...

chadashon Amazon memo: Here’s why we should acquire Ring (2017)

A revolving line of credit with a bank. Basically, bank says you have (to make up some numbers) revenues of $15,000,000/year and profits of $5,000,000, so we think it would be pretty safe to lend you up to say $1,000,000 that you can borrow whenever you want to run your business and you'll pay it down on some agreed upon interest rate (which is likely not fixed, but some percentage over prime rate[1]). Notably, you don't have to borrow, it's just available with pretty much no questions asked whenever you need it. Kind of like a credit card, but with a lower APR. It's very commonly used even for profitable businesses since cash inflows often don't match expenditure flows, especially if your company is growing.

For example, maybe you grew your company a lot this year and ran out of money in November, but a bunch of your customers will be paying you large sums when annual renewals renew in January. You can't just not pay employees in December, so you borrow for a month or two in order to smooth over payroll and other expenses and then pay it back in January.

Typically, a revolving line-of-credit is going to help with month-to-month expenses, but won't be enough to massively grow your business. For example, if you are a startup, a bank won't give you nearly as much money as a VC, but at the same time, you probably don't want to give up equity in your company every time you are temporarily behind on payroll. If you are a very large and established company, you'll likely have other, cheaper ways of getting money for your day-to-day business. For example, Commercial Paper is basically a short term bond issued by large well-known and creditworthy companies that need to smooth over payroll and other operational expenses. But by the time you are doing things like that, you probably have an entire corporate finance department handling these sorts of things. A revolving line-of-credit is much simpler.

[1] prime rate is the interest rate that big banks can borrow at which is typically lower than what you can borrow at. They'll borrow at rate Y and charge you rate Y+Z.

chadashon An installation-art company called META (or Meta.is) is suing Meta (or meta.com)

While I am not a fan of Facebook/Meta, I actually hope that they do not lose this case. If you want to name your company after a word that is in common usage, then you should have to deal with the fact that others may use the same word for their own purposes. JP Morgan seems like a name that hardly limits anyone trying to name their company. Apple or Meta are just words in common usage.

chadashon Helion Needs You

From a legal perspective I'm not sure, but I'd say 10 days is the minimum you'd see for a full time salaried position. But it's considered low for skilled professionals and would be a dealbreaker for many people. For skilled professionals (lawyers, engineers, etc.), 20 days is a more common number to see. This doesn't include sick days, which are usually counted separately.

chadashon Helion Needs You

10-15 days’ vacation is pretty bare minimum if you are trying to get top talent. Maybe think about adding 5 days onto those buckets to get higher quality candidates.

chadashon The euro has tumbled near parity to the US dollar

Well, it rounds to the same number. But if you really care about an arbitrary line being crossed, then just know that as of 21:31 UTC, the Euro is still slightly higher than the dollar at 1.0039618 and it has not dipped at or below 1.00 yet.

chadashon A new trade and liberal arts school: “College of St. Joseph the Worker”

I need a plumber. And I don't care what plumbers in Vietnam charge, because I need a plumber here. And if everyone I know made twice as much money, we'd still need plumbers, maybe even more so, and we'd just pay more for them.

chadashon Ask HN: Sue after poorly managed SPAC?

I have no idea about your odds of winning or whether it is worth the hassle… BUT, I doubt that suing will make much difference in your career. A lot of hiring managers won’t google you. Those that do may not care. I’m not saying NO ONE will care but my hunch is that most won’t.

chadashon Ask HN: Do you trust solo entrepreneurs?

> Also, keeping a SaaS online does cost money. And those costs increase as you scale. If you are small enough that you can run on a free tier, you are too small for me to have confidence that you are sticking around.

Sure, it depends on what you are doing, but I imagine that for most paid SAAS models, the cost of cloud computing is a small fraction of what they bring in revenue. In many cases, so small as to be effectively $0. As an example, stack overflow gets hundreds of millions of visits a month, but is run on two physical servers (plus an additional two for backup). As a more personal example, I have a small SAAS side project and my server costs run me about 0.5% of my revenue (the rest is all profit other than the value of my time). I could probably get that down to 0.1% with some code refactoring, but even with the current code, I could easily 10x my number of subscribers and not increase server costs by even $0.01.

To add to this, in my experience, the companies I've worked for have tons of extra capacity with their cloud services. For example, using t3.large vs t3.small instances at 4x the price indiscriminately. Why? Because server costs are just a rounding error compared to paying a bunch of $100k+ salaries.