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chadashon Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

If I’m the type of user who would ever consider paying, I’m most definitely not the type of person who wants to ask a stranger on the internet to setup a new spreadsheet for me every time I want to use one. I wouldn’t even want to ask a friend or coworker.

chadashon Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

This allows them to view but not to edit

chadashon Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

What I'd love to see is an easy workflow to make this supplant Google docs. Right now, let's say i want a shared spreadsheet. I need to:

1) Signup for an account

2) Create a workbook

3) Click share and put in friend's email

4) They get an invite

5) Now they need to sign up

6) They can edit my doc

I'm not a paying customer (or even a user... I just heard of this), so take this with a grain of salt, but what I'd love to see is a super-friction-less way for me to share a doc and make it editable without others needing accounts. Cut out as many steps as possible above. Doing this can be a great tool for marketing... what's better marketing than easily collaborating on a spreadsheet on a site that my friend is already using and that already looks very similar to tools I'm familiar with?

chadashon The business of winding down startups is booming

There are companies that specialize in buying up office furniture being liquidated. They buy it at a discount and sell it to the next company.

The thing is that sometimes they have leftovers that they can't really sell to another company and these will often be very cheap. I bought a used Steelcase Leap from one of these places that operated out of a nearby warehouse. A new Leap sells for $1000+. It was in near perfect condition, but it was a different color then the rest of the Leaps that they had, so no one buying in bulk was likely to purchase it. I bought it for about $200. They even steam cleaned it for free before I picked it up.

chadashon Mistral Large

I won’t eat at that restaurant anymore because the chef no longer publishes cookbooks. Oh, you say he will tell me the recipe as long as I agree not to use it to open a restaurant across the street? Well, f** him that’s not good enough. He built his career learning recipes from cookbooks who learned recipes from other cookbooks. He owes it to me to publish his recipes and let me do what I want with them.

chadashon Mistral Large

Say that you are building a b2b product that uses LLMs for whatever. A common question that users will ask is if their data is safe and who else has access. Everyone is afraid or AI training on their data. Saying that Microsoft is the only one that touches your customer’s data is an important part of your sales pitch. No one outside of tech knows who mistral is.

chadashon AI Restaurant Menu with RAG

> Physical menus are fine. They do the job. But if we're looking to actually improve upon them, current approaches miss the mark. They offer limited interactivity and flexibility.

Sigh. Am I the only one who likes to hold a physical menu and browse it? I never go into a restaurant knowing what I’m gonna get… I like to see how the menu is themed and decide from there. The UI on a physical menu is a vast improvement over any digital menu I’ve seen.

chadashon Cable companies, automakers try to derail FTC, FCC quest to kill misleading fees

Just make the billboard display the correct price for where the billboard is physically located. If you have a newspaper ad, make the price correct for the main city of distribution.

chadashon Prediction markets have an elections problem

I’ll offer the same bet but no transaction fee. But it pays out on Jan 1, 2028

chadashon Prediction markets have an elections problem

The answer is stupidly simple but only touched on briefly in the article. It is the fees and the limits bet sizes combined.

Let’s take a simple example, which is Donald Trump‘s current odds of winning the Republican nomination. Predictit currently has this at $0.92. Realistically I think the odds are higher. Not 100% but higher than $0.92. The problem is that the maximum I can bet is $500, so that’s 543 “shares” that I can buy. And I’ll make $0.08 on each share if he wins, so that’s $43. Then when I withdraw my money I will get a 5% fee, so my initial $500 turns in to $516. Oh, and then I have to wait until primaries, and for it to actually pay out. And there IS a non zero chance trump loses. Very few individuals will care about turning $500 into $515, so this bet makes sense. And since you have a cap on bet size, no institution will care either.

sounds like a rational market to me.

chadashon Rich People Don't Talk to Robots

I think this is a misunderstanding of what wealth management is. I have friends in private banking who have told me that some of their clients are hedge fund managers and they aren’t looking for stock advice, but more for things like tax help and succession planning. And a banker who will see to it that they can get their yacht financed using their Rembrandt as collateral, since even billionaires don’t necessarily have much liquidity.

chadashon Ask HN: What's the deal with the "open-source SaaS" trend these days?

Personally, an open-source project lets me take a little bit more risk on a startup's product. If the company goes under, I can always host myself, even if it's a bit of a pain.

chadashon Ask HN: Large companies with good customer support?

OXO. The company that makes kitchen gadgets. They are owned by Helen of Troy, a conglomerate which I don't know anything about. But I've called up OXO several times for small issues with products and within 3 minutes, I had a person on the phone, within 10 minutes I had confirmation that they are sending a new part or product, and within 3-4 days, I had a new, working part/unit sent to me.

Sure, a better experience would be faultless products, but even the best companies will have occasional mistakes and if you have good customer service, it makes me super happy to buy your products again.

chadashon Benchmarks and comparison of LLM AI models and API hosting providers

I love it. One minor change I'd make is changing the pricing chart to put lowest on the left. On the other highlights, left to right goes from best to worst, but this one is the opposite.

I'm excited to see where things land. What I find interesting is that pricing is either wildly expensive or wildly cheap, depending on your use case. For example, if you want to run GPT-4 to glean insights on every webpage your users visit, a freemium business model is likely completely unviable. On the other hand, if I'm using an LLM to spot issues in a legal contract, I'd happily pay 10x what GPT4 currently charges for something marginally better (It doesn't make much difference if this task costs $4 vs $0.40). I think that the ultimate "winners" in this space will have a range of models at various price points and let you seamlessly shift between them depending on the task (e.g., in a single workflow, I might have some sub-tasks that need a cheap model and some that require an expensive one).

chadashon Ask HN: Where can I find good legal documents?

IANAL, but there are some things where you should really get expert advice. Child custody is one of them.

I think with legal docs generally, you have to decide what the stakes are and act accordingly. In general, keep in mind that most lawyers won't take a case unless there's someone with deep pockets to sue. So for that $20k loan you give to a friend, a boilerplate template is fine; if they don't want to pay you back, a lawsuit is gonna cost you more than the loan anyway. You've got a new startup for website monitoring with 20 customers? Worry about growing your userbase, not the remote chance that you get sued and something in the boilerplate docs you used wasn't worded properly (of course, once you raise significant money or have significant revenue, those legal docs become much more important, and also this doesn't apply if you are working on something with significant risk, such as a medical device).

But child custody isn't one of those things. It is high stakes, the chances that your counterparty will sue you are very high, and a bad outcome might be one of the worst things that can happen to you. Personally, the possibility of losing custody of my children would be much more worrying to me than any financial lawsuit.

chadashon Software Engineers Say the Job Market Is Getting Much Worse

Wow. What saas are you using that’s so expensive?

chadashon The Magnitude of the AI Bubble

It's an interesting anecdote, but the floor on the stocks being talked about in this article is due to them already making tons of money. Warhols are worth a lot of money because a select group of people say they are worth a lot of money. The average person on the street probably wouldn't be willing to pay the price of an iPhone for a Warhol if they didn't know who he was. On the other hand, billions of people use Microsoft and Apple products, so it's not just due to an elite opinion that the stocks have lots of value. And it's not unreasonable to imagine a world where these companies dominate in AI and make much more money in the future.

chadashon FAA orders grounding of more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s

Some of the comments in this thread are talking about government corruption and safety issues but I think we should put something into perspective. Not a single passenger has died on a commercial flight in the United States in the last five years, and even then, it was a single fatality in a freak occurrence. To me, that’s not government corruption but mind boggling success.

To put that into perspective, you have a significantly better chance of winning the lottery than dying on a United Airlines flight.

chadashon Software engineering salaries come from one of three budgets

Amazon is unique. If you look at their revenue, the vast majority comes from E-Commerce. But if you look at their profits, the majority comes from AWS.

AWS is indisputably a software org, so it's clear that their senior leaders value software engineering. But I think that even Amazon's marketplace sees itself as a software org. From the early days, they always saw software as being a competitive advantage.

chadashon Give Us Something to Look At: Why ornament matters in architecture

> My grandparents will endlessly complain about the lack of good quality products on the market (knives, power tools, clothing) but at the same time refuse to engage in locally-made albeit more expensive merchants.

Not to say that they don't have valid complaints, but some of this is definitely selection bias. People don't complain about the things that have gotten better. For example, today, it's not rare for a car to last 10 years without serious issues. There are a bunch of car owners who have driven cars to 1 million+ miles and these aren't some specialty car, but rather the run-of-the-mill cars coming off of factory lines.

There's lots of good knives out there at price points that many people can afford. I personally own a Global 3 knife set (chef, paring, utility) that meets 99% of my cutting needs and cost $130. I've had them for 9 years and I expect them to last at least another 10 years. $130 is expensive, but not over a 20-30 year period. Same thing with my pots and pans (all-clad) which I expect to last me another 20-30 years, if not the rest of my life.

My iPhone is 3 years old. It has been dropped more times than I can count, but still looks new. The glass on it is simply better quality than what existed before. No, it won't last a lifetime, but it will last an acceptable amount of time for something that gets as much use as it does.

And with the internet, quality goods are more accessible than ever. With a few clicks, I have buy pens and paper from Japan, cooking-ware from France and Panama hats from Cuenca, even if I live in a small town in the middle of nowhere.

That said, my biggest complaint is with appliances. Good appliances exist (e.g. Miele, Speed Queen), but in general, there's little correlation between price and quality. You can buy an LG fridge for $1500 or for $4500, but they use the same crappy compressor, so the more expensive one won't last any longer (and in fact will probably break sooner because it has more features on it that can break).

chadashon Show HN: Better Seater – Wedding seating chart optimizer

This is very cool! I built a tool similar to this, but for elementary school, classroom placements, and people always ask me if I can modify it for wedding seating!

One question/comment. As you already know, finding the absolute mathematically, optimal solution is hard, if not impossible in a reasonable amount of time, but people don’t care, they just want good enough. Found with classroom placements is that people can put in all the information, get an answer that is very close to optimal (mathematically), And then take one look at it, and know something is off, because you can’t actually model every aspect of the real world. so what I started doing giving good solutions that are pretty different from each other. Teachers can usually take a look for 30 seconds or less and decide that one of them is better than the other. Do you have the ability to do this on your tool? To randomly shuffle and optimize from there?

chadashon The forecasting fallacy (2020)

I don’t have a background in this but I was under the impression that much of algorithmic trading is that there are trillions of pennies lying around and if you have an algorithm that picks up those pennies faster than anyone else, you make a lot of money. So it’s capitalizing on tiny market inefficiencies rather than directional predictions.

chadashon I am the fold (2015)

Engineering lead: "Let's use serverless functions. That way we will never have to worry about scalability"

chadashon Electricity That's Too Cheap to Meter

Don't get me wrong, it is great that we can harness wind and solar to generate tons of electricity. But as the article points out, they aren't consistent enough to provide electricity that's always on, which is something our society is built to expect. Last year, Contruction-Physics.com put out a great 3-part article on why nuclear is so expensive. It's worth a read [1]. But long story short, we hardly build them anymore (we last finished a new plant in 2016 and there are two more currently under construction, which takes many years) and regulations change all the time so there are very few people with real expertise at putting them together. And talented people certainly don't want to go into the field, because there's no guarantee of consistent work.

[1] https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power...

chadashon If only someone told me this before my first startup

Depends how you ask. If you ask people whether they would pay extra $ for a feature, they might be more hesitant.

chadashon I spent a year building an app and failed – The story of Taskwer

This is a classic two sided market. People who need money and are willing to sell services don’t know who you are. And people who are willing to buy services don’t know who you are. And the platform is useless unless you have both of those.

The trick here is to find a very specific niche to start with. Instead of the goal being “let me get this popular everywhere” your short term goal should be to find how to make it popular among a single existing community. Churches, mosques and synagogues are a good place to start. People in those groups already like to support each other and virtually all of them have one or more internal WhatsApp or Facebook groups where people who start a campaign can advertise to others in their community.

chadashon Ask HN: Vite or NextJS?

This is very helpful. Given your experience, would you use NextJS on your next project or are you indifferent?

chadashon Rolex fined $100M for preventing its watches being sold online

Because your watch will go down in value since people will assume it's fake when you try to sell it and you don't own the corresponding NFT.

Same reason I wouldn't buy a certified Jordan autograph and then sell the certificate of authenticity.

chadashon Ask HN: Survivors of "down rounds" – how did it go?

I haven't been in this situation, but I think it would really depend on a few factors:

- Is my cash compensation adequate? A down-round can make stock grants worth almost zero unless there's a huge rebound.

- Are people around me still motivated? I wouldn't want to be surrounded by sad coworkers.

- Are the founders still motivated? Their dreams of riches are probably evaporating. And a company with unmotivated leadership is not gonna be around long.

chadashon Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

My ideal is somewhere in the middle. I don't necessarily need a private office, but a shared space with a small team. This way, I'm privy to all conversations relevant to me. Knowing what's going on often trumps the productivity gains of a quiet work environment.

The issue is large open offices where I'm also privy to all the other distractions from other teams that aren't relevant to me.