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palidanxon I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA

Just curious what other types of 'gravities' exist in organizations? In a negative gravity example, something I've seen as a social contagion is when some people start resigning it tends to spread and then the organization slowly decays (or quiets quits)

palidanxon Ask HN: How much AI is in your writing?

For first drafts, I always write it by hand first, then later I'll ask AI for some feedback and thoughts. I find that the AI training data is based on really boring structured writing where it has to be

1. Introduction

2. Transition sentences

3. Middle paragraphs

4. Clean conclusions

which I find doesn't vibe with my style of writing where I tend to meander quite a bit then try to wrap things up back in a different manner

palidanxon The purist's guide to phở in Hanoi

pho 79 - cash only - this place is still the best and an old legend

palidanxon The purist's guide to phở in Hanoi

so pho tai refers to just the raw cut out of beef, you make a traditional beef broth. Here is a short cut way with an instant pot.

* Beef bones (neck or shin, the type of bones you get depend on how intense it will be)

* 1 chicken carcass

* Parboil for 10 minutes, throw away broth, rinse bones

* Parboil chicken carcass for 2 minutes

* Char onion and ginger

* Toast coriander, star anise, cardamom

* Add chicken carcass, bones in an instant pot, covered with water, and some salt and onion and ginger

* High pressure for 15 minutes (depends on quantity)

* Natural release

* Add spices, high pressure for 3 minutes (and if you are added brisket - nam, parboil that first and add it here)

* Season with salt to taste, mushroom seasoning (bot nem), or msg.

* Refrigerate overnight

For tai, you want to cut a some raw meat and just make sure your stock is very hot so it cooks

palidanxon The purist's guide to phở in Hanoi

In Orange County, CA there is another variant of pho ga kho, which literally translates to dried chicken pho. The rice noodles and chicken are stir fried, and served with a side of pho ga broth, and a sweet soy sauce.

Pho Dakao, 16171 Brookhurst St, Fountain Valley, CA 92708, United States

Also I got a recipe for pho ga from my aunt which is:

* 6 chicken legs, and 2 bone in breasts (or debone a whole chicken)

* Bring a pot of water to boil

* Parboil all pieces for 2 minutes, throw away the broth

* Char onion and ginger (in an air fryer or on a gas stove - air fryer is easier)

* Toast coriander seeds and star anise

* Add all ingredients back, bring to boil, then drop to a low simmer, and salt

* After 30 minutes remove the pieces, let it cool and debone

* Add the chicken bones back, cook for additional 30 minutes, season with salt and msg

* Optionally serve with a side of nuoc cham, but this variation has no fish sauce in the stock

How well this turns out depends on the quality of the chicken you buy. At the Asian markets, there are different breeds of chicken which have less meat, but are more flavorful.

palidanxon Show HN: Vibium – Browser automation for AI and humans, by Selenium's creator

Sorry, I kind of have a dumb question here. So we have a bunch of legacy selenium scripts that do end to end user testing, and occasion they break (either because of a network error, or devs committed something that breaks a test).

We were looking at seeing if a model could look at the screenshot of the failure, some of the original website source code, and try to fix the failing test.

My question is with vibium, would it make more sense to port the legacy tests over to vibium, and if a test fail, use its capabilities to try to self-heal?

palidanxon Ask HN: How do you have effective 1:1s with your manager?

As a manager, this is the framework I use

1. Staff updates their personal journal by Friday before our 1:1

2. Staff takes a one time skill assessment of all the tech dimensions we use on a likert skill so I know what they are strong and weak at (like might be weak in batch processing, containers, etc).

3. Staff periodically updates their career journey which has

-Start Date

-Elapsed Time

-What were your expectations in the elapsed time you were here?

-Review of skills matrix and what you want improved

-Current Role

-Desired Next Role

-Projects worked on in this year

-What skill sets did I learn in this years projects?

-Certifications

-Next year I want to accomplish

-In 5 years I want to accomplish

[ these are all the artifacts I use as a reference point ofr myself]

-- then during the 1:1 I ask

1. 'how are you?' --> And then I listen to see how their response is. Are they sighing a lot, are they stressed are they bored. I then follow up to make sure everything is okay emotionally or they have issues. I have noticed a lot of employees are not honest in what they say

2. I then assess how they are doing in terms of their

- project delivery

- tech skills

- soft skills

and get feedback accordingly.

Most engineers I have are doing well on projects and tech skills, but often need work on soft skills. I ask them to focus on soft skills by thinking of

- communication

- writing

- reading

For those who need help in communication I advise them to attend a Toastmasters class in person. Also I have been advocating for staff to read 'Supercommunicators' as a way to think about communication as a framework.

For soft skills, I believe the way of improving is being well rounded in the humanities, and not just going hard core tech.

palidanxon Ask HN: Is maintaining a personal blog still worth it?

Initially I sent out Mailchimp newsletters to my closest friends, but found the interface a bit clunky, so instead switched to Wordpress. What I do is write specifically for the audience of my friends, send them the newsletter, and post it on the Internet.

What I found kind of interesting, is when I would see some of my friends months later, they would cite something they found interesting from the blog. Occasionally, I peek at the metrics, and it is in the low single digits, but I'm okay with that as long as my friends have seen it.

My guess is with the inundation of shallow knowledge and posts people resonate with deeper writing.

palidanxon Quit Social Media (2016)

Oddly enough, the most beneficial thing I have is my Twitter account, because I can often DM airlines or companies support (like fedex support) for quicker responses.

palidanxon Ask HN: How to export photos from iPhone to non Mac computers

I use owl files to transfer to windows 11 over internal wifi

https://www.skyjos.com/owlfiles/

The kicker is you have to create a local user account lusrmgr.msc

then when you share the folder, give that person full permissions and security as specified here

https://www.skyjos.com/owlfiles/help/windows/help_windows.ht...

palidanxon iOS 18 spotlight "beginning letter" search glitch

How is it possible such a big bug got released to the general public?

palidanxon Show HN: I made a Chrome extension to clean up your Gmail inbox locally

I do something a little different, I tag all credit card payment notifications in a particular label, and wrote a google apps script where when a new entry is added, it adds it to my 'tasks'. That way I don't miss any credit card payments

palidanxon How to ripen and store avocados

When I used to live in Southern California, there actually are several different varieties of avocadoes with many of them not available in other parts of the country. Some examples are hass, lamb hass, pinkerton, mexicola (where you can eat the skin), and reed avocadoes. Reed avocadoes are my favorite and are the size of 5 hass avocadoes combined with a very buttery mouth taste.. They can take up to 7-12 days to ripe at room temperature, but once cut open, oxidiation is minimal due to the fat content in the avocado.

palidanxon Show HN: Paisa – Open-Source Personal Finance Manager

I played around with this quite a bit with chat gpt 4 with confirmation instructions, and after a bit of time it starts going haywire. I played around with just creating in a simple csv format, transactions date, name, category (asking it to categorize it), and amount. After a couple runs it started going haywire and hallucinating with transactions I never created.

I created an internal rails clone of financier.io and just created a spreadsheet web area i could copy/paste mass transactions in so i could add a batch at a time ( I suppose I could upload a csv also, but the problem is every bank has different formats)

palidanxon Community to Improve Travel Experience

Dittoing this. I think 'authentic' is a loaded word, as often in a Vietnamese Facebook food group I'm in, there constantly are arguments about what is 'authentic'. Is it someone who lives in country, the same ethnicity, the hometown where the food is from?

palidanxon Japan’s 72 Microseasons (2015)

Funny this got posted, because I just read about the 72 seasons in Nancy Singleton Hachisu's new vegetarian cookbook.

https://www.amazon.com/Japan-Vegetarian-Nancy-Singleton-Hach...

Oddly enough the more I think about it, Vancouver, Canada has seem parallels to Japan in terms of some of the produce (matsutake mushrooms and burdock root).

palidanxon Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?

https://www.dquach.com/

A scattering of personal newsletters, tech, and data engineering. For the personal newsletters that involve traveling, what I do is journal every day while I am in the destination country, and then when I'm at home, begin writing. Each travel post takes about 40 hours of writing, editing, and picture selection.

For the travel posts, I try not to rehash a history of a place (you probably could watch a youtube video or read a book for better perspective), but instead try to find something hopefully new and insightful to reveal

EG https://www.dquach.com/2023/04/05/personal-newsletter-2023-q...

palidanxon Software effort estimation is mostly fake research (2021)

Yea what you are doing sounds like reference class forecasting (shameless plug, a blog post I wrote about it)

https://www.dquach.com/2023/04/21/reference-class-forecastin...

palidanxon Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted

Weird thing is I began comparing things like Uber Eats reviews and Google Maps reviews for local Asian restaurants, and I see things in Google Maps are reviewed substantially lower.

For example some of my favorite Asian restaurants in the city are rated 3.5ish while Uber Eats is rated like 4.7. It leads me to believe a lot of people are rating Google Maps restaurants also based on service. One in particular

https://www.ubereats.com/ca/store/china-lan-lanzhou-beef-noo... (4.7)

https://goo.gl/maps/GnLmwJNRjBHP9UnN8 (3.9)

This place is awesome, and personally have experienced bad service but don't really care, so I do understand the Google Maps rating, but do find the whole rating system not helpful for me as I'm interested in good food and willing to accept bad service.

palidanxon Ask HN: Those making $1000/month or more on side projects – Show and tell

would you mind sharing what you are doing for AI integration?

palidanxon Ask HN How do I learn marketing?

I'd read

https://www.amazon.com/Predictable-Revenue-Business-Practice...

palidanxon Ask HN: Startup is going under, what to do now

Funny you say this, because I actually cite my failed start-ups when talking about my resume when chatting with bigger companies. It provides a uniqueness that you are a risk taker and you should use that narrative to your advantage to stick out separately from other candidates who may have a more traditional background.

palidanxon Ask HN: Is data science a dying profession?

so typically there are two sides of the house

1. data engineering - dealing with etl pipelines, data warehouses, data lakes, databases

2. data science - ai/ml, models etc

#1 preps things so #2 can do their jobs

palidanxon Ask HN: If ChatGPT charged a monthly fee would you pay?

I recently had a task to see how a migration from SAP Hana to other data warehouses, and I was able to ask questions, generate sample schema, and do comparative analysis with other data warehouses in about 10 minutes. The problem with Google is it would take more work to do some of the rudimentary analysis.

palidanxon The global health-care collapse

Unfortunately the US already spends quite a bit, and has one of the worst outcomes compared to other countries

https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/2....

palidanxon Ask HN: What sub $200 product improved your 2022

I have adult braces, and this has been a godsend ($30 USD)

https://www.amazon.com/Cordless-Portable-Irrigator-Rechargea...

Basically I can waterfloss after eating and not have to pull out ortho picks and a toothbrush

palidanxon Ask HN: What's your process for touristic travel planning?

Generally

1. Read a travel guide (like Lonely Planet or Rick Steves) for an idea of an itinerary

2. Read travel itineraries on Reddit or Google search

3. E-mail travel writers from the guide books and book a paid 1 hour zoom session to refine itinerary (I have found this to be extremely helpful)

4. Create a google docs and sheets of the itinerary

A new thing I've been playing with is ChatGPT to generate an itinerary

palidanxon Bring Back Personal Blogging

A lot of is my personal perspective on events, either things like travel or circumstances that have occurred to me which I thought were interesting. Below is a sample of an older newsletter about dentistry, a neighbor, and a long hike to Vancouver Island.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yerJQ3gLjUcahxyznkPHtwRQ...

I've been debating perhaps writing more of a public blog, but we'll see.

palidanxon Bring Back Personal Blogging

Everyone does get the same email

palidanxon Bring Back Personal Blogging

Since the early pandemic, I've opted to e-mail 100 of my closest friends quarterly some really long form e-mails. It does take me quite a bit of time, maybe about 40 hours of writing and editing.

What is interesting though, is when I see some of those friends after a long absence, they always would cite something I wrote from the newsletter of interest.

I know there is quantity vs quality tradeoffs out there, but its nice to know some thought I wrote still sticks after several months.