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Comment by hocuspocus | Hacker News Reader

I know it's not a fair comparison but I'm truly impressed by the quality of engineering shown by the Lichess team, when their main competitor was for example boasting about a migration to GCP and yet suffering from repeated outages due to fairly organic growth in popularity. While I believe they employ 100x more people.

Lichess' mobile app was a weak spot, however the v2 rewrite in Flutter is already pretty good while still in beta.

And keep in mind Thibault pays himself less than 60k/year.

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I don't think he needs to feel bad about increasing his salary. Make it 200k/yr and make his life easier, which can only be good for the project long term.

I don't know him personally but from the talks he's given, he seems to be ideological about Lichess and his own lifestyle, in a way that would be considered fairly anti-capitalistic by most of the HN crowd :)

Do you have links to any of these talks you could recommend?

Not OP but I can recommend this talk by Thibault (the founder): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZgyVadkgmI

IDK about France (where Thibault is from, and IDK if he lives there), but where i'm from, you would have a very comfortable life earning 5k every month, so his self-imposed 60k/yr salary doesn't seem unreasonable at all. At some point, more money yields diminishing returns.

> but where i'm from, you would have a very comfortable life earning 5k every month, so his self-imposed 60k/yr salary doesn't seem unreasonable at all.

(Some) HN commentators seems weirdly out of touch when it comes to salary outside of IT-heavy cities in the US. The other day someone claimed $125k/year for an employee wasn't "big money" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40927175), so I'd take any comments saying some salary is high/low with a box filled with sand.

To be fair that really isn't 'big money' in most of those cities, assuming big money has some connotation of significantly above average after tax and expenses disposable income in those areas, especially relative to your peers. I don't think it would be unfair to say that would be big money compared to many European workers in the same jobs though.

I don't know if that 5K is before or after taxes. You easily lose half of what your employer actually pays.

€60k pre-tax is roughly in the top 10% of incomes in the country based on a quick google. Not opulent, but definitely comfortable.

His salary is more like €55k though.

It's comfortable outside of Paris and other expensive cities. But he could easily double that given his background. Before quitting his job he already worked with Play and the Typesafe (now Lightbend) stack before the peak of its hype, when companies were paying top dollar for consultants.

Lichess is a great service to casual chess players like myself to get a quick game against another human. Never much of a wait.

What I do want to know is how does one pronounce Lichess? Lie chess, Le chess?, League chess?

According to https://lichess.org/faq#name: "Lichess is a combination of live/light/libre and chess. It is pronounced lee-chess"

They also link this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRpPqcrdE-o

I guess it's because of the lychee fruit?

Thanks.

/li:/ as in libre.

I’m team lie-chess.

Lichess is a great example of how efficient Wikipedia should have been (both on the code and organization level). :-)

I think you're highly overestimating how many devs Chess.com has

I am not, that's why I said employees not devs.

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