anon4lol

... but I love Taco Bell so much it hurts.

Maybe they want to be on the winning side this time (just joking). My guess is that the trump campaign is spending on ads on YouTube, while the Biden campaign isn't. There seems to be a lot of mashups and videos comparing statements of Biden now and years ago. I get the impression the general tone of most of the videos on YouTube are negative for Biden, and probably not the best place to spend ad money. Especially considering that YouTube will start recommending political videos trying to get click rage engagement going on.

I made the mistake during the last election clicking on a promoted video about Hillary and my god I had to spend weeks clicking "don't recommend this channel" in my feed. YouTube will shove political video recommendation down your throat. I don't like political commentary regardless of what side of the ideological spectrum it comes from.

LOL.

Twice the passengers; same number of restrooms.

I wonder if the extra airline profits will cover the possible payout of a lawsuit where a mother's lap baby twists out of her arms and plonks six feet down onto the hard aluminum floor.

I can't wait for the first flyertalk post asking how many air miles they should get as compensation for being urinated on by a passenger overhead, or dealing with a gassy passenger overhead.

Too funny.

We just went through the process of finding childcare for our infant. Originally, we were going to have my wife's parents move in to help, but her father was suddenly diagnosed with lung cancer, forcing us to scramble for child care. With my wife's student loans, it wouldn't be prudent for her to not work.

Childcare costs more than twice as much as our mortgage. We live in a blue state where many businesses feel compelled to pay $15/hour for unskilled labor. We interviewed child care providers who wanted $18-$22 per hour with no certifications, degrees, or training. We looked at au pairs, but the agencies all wanted $8k-$10k up front with no guarantees.

Your hypothesis is wrong. At one point I was thinking of changing careers and gave a serious consideration to getting a law degree. I've had long conversations with several attorneys and did plenty of research. You would be surprised at how little most new attorneys make. Unless you land at a firm, you'll end up scrambling to find your own clients as a solo practitioner. Some give up and end up working in the business world on the edges of the legal profession.

One used to be able to self-study, pass an exam, and practice law. Now it virtually always requires 3 years of law school, at a cost of thousands.

This is state by state. In most U.S. states, you have to go to an accredited brick-and-mortar school, graduate, and pass the bar exam. At that time, there was only two online law schools, both in California. I believe that in CA (maybe one other state) also will let you apprentice for a licensed attorney and pass the bar to become a licensed attorney.

Some random nobody/front-end developer starts using Windows... this just seems so out of place on HN.

It's not. They should do what I do -- silently "crop dust" the other cubicles as I drift past on my way to an unimportant meeting.

But seriously, I have a cubicle-mate that goes through a box of tissues every two days. He is constantly grunting and blowing his nose. He also spends 15 minutes brushing and flossing in the bathroom twice per day. I say 15 minutes, because he has his phone propped up with a timer.

Every time my noise cancelling headset runs out of power and needs to be recharged, I re-evaluate my life choices and my tortured existence.

Wrong title. Should be "The Burden of Working in an Unprofessional Environment with Jerks."

This is a natural outcome of promoting work, not as a job, but more of a lifestyle to ring out as much as productivity as you can from young, unattached people. There isn't a boundary between work/personal life like there is everywhere else. I've seen different attempts at this on both the west and east coasts. Forced communal lunches, free food, comfy couches to sleep on "if you need to," game rooms, required outings, "bring you whole self to work," etc.

Working in these environments is draining, because some people seem to take pride in saying the most inappropriate and cringe-worthy things, and they go unchallenged. When you work in that context where no one is expected to be professional, it will cause problems; however, when you make the mistake of believing your job is more than a job, you will end up angry and vengeful.

For some reason, this seems to be much more the norm on the north-east and west coasts.

I've formed and run an sole member LLC, S Corp and C corp. Sometimes I get people asking me about forming a company to do EBay, Amazon FBA, and other side gigs. Here is basically what I tell anyone who asks (cliff notes version), off the top of my head:

1. If it's not making money, it's a hobby.

2. If it's making a little bit of money, don't form an business entity. Just do it as a sole proprietor - this is basically the easiest thing to do. Just open a separate bank account for the business and Schedule C on your tax return. Save ~25% of income in savings account for self employment taxes and taxes. Converting to an LLC, S Corp, etc., is always a possibility later.

3. Your choice of business entity will have consequences down the road that your attorney or accountant may not explain to you up front. For example, I did most of my consulting through an LLC on the advice of an accountant who convinced me to give up my S Corp. When my wife and I went to purchase our first house, they convinced me drop off of the mortgage application because they didn't like the fact that I was "self employed." If I had kept the S Corp, I would have W2 wage income and they wouldn't have batted an eye.

4. The rules regarding business entities vary state to state. Some states will allow a single member LLC and single owner S Corp; others may not. Make sure you understand your state laws and the taxes. Some states have an income tax; others have franchise tax. You can form the corporation in another state, but you will likely have to register as a foreign corporation in your state. For a few years my corporation was chartered in Delaware, and I would register in a state when I had business activity there.

5. The IRS has no sense of sympathy or humor when it comes to payroll taxes. State governments are even more fanatical about getting their money, on time. Penalties can be severe. I was depositing payroll taxes quarterly and was surprised when they wanted me to start depositing monthly. They notified me with a 17% penalty.

6. Understand that filing a tax return can trigger the requirement to keep filling out tax returns even if you don't owe anything. If you shut down the business, make sure you spend the time and be persistent in closing tax accounts or you will get notices for years. Don't trust it when a government employee says the account will automatically get closed.

7. Understand that with an S Corp or LLC you will have to do the business tax return first, before you do your own tax return. If you are an minority owner of a corp, make sure they get the tax returns done on time and you won't get surprised. Once you get surprised with a $20k tax bill...

8. In some cases a C corp can make sense, regardless of what everyone says.

9. Make sure you setup a proper retirement account and make contributions. This can payoff over the long term, even if you business isn't super profitable. Make it a priority.

I have plenty more, but that's a few thoughts.

I really hate articles like this. The company provides home health visits, requiring a nurse. Nurses don't work for $7.50 hour. Reading closely, it was for entry-level positions, probably in a certain department. Skilled positions would require market rates.

Translation: in an economic down turn they killed the bonus, raised the pay for customer service reps, and are now claiming a moral victory as if the growth was caused by paying people more.

I have a Ring doorbell camera and a camera in our garage, mostly to see if the garage door is closed. The "crime alerts" are annoying, so I've basically turned off all the notifications. Looks like amazon has figured out that crime sells security equipment.

We had a problem with teenagers were ringing our doorbell and screaming late at night around 1 a.m. It became a nightly ordeal, and sometimes several times a night. Sometimes they would kick the door and run away. Surprisingly, some of them were teenage girls. Since my wife is pregnant, I knew this had to stop. There is no way I wanted to deal with this with a newborn infant.

The comments on NextDoor are funny to me because it is filled with wingnuts and busy bodies. When I asked for advice on how to handle this situation, I was shouted down by social justice warriors who told me not to call the police because it was racist. I said fine, I'll just tell the registered sex offender who was recently released from prison (for abducting and raping a young woman) that there are young women harassing us, oh and by the way, all are neighbors are conditioned to ignore their screams and we won't call the police... because it is racist. Oddly enough, none of the social justice warriors replied to say I shouldn't.

I called the police and posted the videos on YouTube and sent them the link. They found them and calmly talked to them. Problem solved.

I had the opposite experience. My father got laid off the year before I was to enter college. Because of the way financial aid worked at the time, it looked back at three years of parental income. He was cashing out his retirement to keep paying the mortgage and buy groceries, but on paper we were too "rich" to qualify for any financial aid. I worked a full time job and enrolled at a community college at night. I paid my own way and worked hard. I never said no to anything and would travel to remote sites if they needed someone to go. I never took out a school loan.

I moved cities for an awesome job and moved in with my best friend from high school. He was on his second year in an engineering program at a major university. I was working full time and going to community college classes at night, while he worked part time and was living on financial aid and loans. I was incredibly jealous. He would go out drinking every night, always had cash to do whatever he wanted, had a nice car, took amazing vacations and I can't tell you how many times I would wake up and see a different girl who spent the night.

Later on, when I looked at my peers who were buying houses and nice cars, I had assumed they were doing better than me, had better jobs, or had help. Nope. They were up to their eyeballs in debt. Some lost jobs and lost everything. My best friend ended up moving away after a suicide attempt and never heard what happened to him.

Lastly, I decided to go back to school for a second degree in electrical engineering. Not because I needed, but because I wanted the challenge. I had to retake some lower level courses that didn't transfer. Overhearing young adults complain about not having time to do anything, school is so hard, and then talking about the party where they smoked pot all night is just cringe-worthy.

You shouldn't feel inadequate at all. I certainly don't.

Selling you minute by minute geolocation from your phone: Acceptable. Credit card companies and retail companies selling your purchasing history: Acceptable. States selling license data and even your license photo: Acceptable. Municipalities selling property tax information to anyone: Acceptable. Unicorn companies monitoring your every move and everything you do on the internet: Acceptable.

Motel 6 employees giving registration information to law enforcement for free: NOT OK.

That is awesome and fascinating at the same time. I genuinely hope you make a dent in the universe and succeed. I hope you post an update with your success dealing something out the door and dealing with the NRC.

Just curious. It looks like you formed Atomic Alchemy in 2018 and from the "YC W19" in the title I can assume you've been accepted in YC in 2019. Is this correct?

If this is correct, can you bring an already formed startup to YC? I have always assumed YC was targeted towards very young "I have a million dollar idea" type entrepreneurs, given that they require you to move to SA for three months for $150k in seed money.

In any event, best of luck.

"Apple Tax?" When I purchased my last beefy workstation, I looked at Dell, HP, IBM, and clones. When I purchased my 2008 8-core workstation, Apple was hands down the cheapest option. It lasted 10 years until I finally decommissioned it (no more OS updates and slow 3GBps disk I/O). With the last upgrade of PCI SSDs, it still performs just as well if not better than any new laptops I've used.

Depends on what model. The IT department gave me a dock and I couldn't get it to work with my Dell laptop. It was insufficient to charge the laptop, and I got tired of trying. Later a BIOS update plus driver changes will get it working on windows, and there are people successfully here using their dell thunderbolt dock with Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.

Ultimately, I gave up and bought an intel nuc with an M2 SSD and plenty of ram. It just works.

I've been developing C/C++ for over 20 years on everything from large scale high-performance clusters to 8 bit embedded devices. Most of my career I have been consulting and I've had the opportunity to work in almost every domain, and I've had to work with a lot of other developers.

My thoughts are this guy is type of the developer I hate to work with most. The style and naming Windows and Borland C++ specific, so this probably grew organically from Win3.1/NT. This probably pre-dates STL, but holy cow. Given how he misuses some terminology, he is probably a self-taught programmer from days of old.

Generally, when I see that a developer has decided to use their own typdefs to represent intrinsic data types, it's a bad sign. However, what I see that this guy created his OWN class as a replacement for bool, I know I'm going to be rewriting a lot of code.

There is no way I would use this library, regardless of the terms.

Most states have laws on the books that forbid you from calling your business a "bank," "pharmacy," or other restricted business unless it actually is. Simply doing so is enough to trigger regulatory intervention. I'm really surprised that they are advertising their services as the "Hacker Club Bank."

Then I finally saw a disclaimer at the bottom of one of the pages: "Hack Club does not directly provide banking services. Banking services provided by Silicon Valley Bank, an FDIC-certified institution."

Seems a little sleazy to me, but still, a neat service.

...described type 2 diabetes as the body's natural way to limit weight gain.

Hogwash. If that were true, I'd be skinny. Aside from the standard low fat calorie restricted diets preferred by nutritionists, I've noticed that there seems to be two prevalent themes with respect to currently marketed dietary advice targeted towards T2 diabetics:

Theory #1. High fat intake or the "wrong" fat intake causes insulin resistance by infiltrating the cells or "clogging up" the insulin receptors on cells. Solution: buy my low fat vegan diet plan.

Theory #2. Eating carbs spikes glucose, which intern spikes insulin. "Insulin resistance is a function of having high insulin levels all the time." Solution: buy my low carb diet plan, or buy my book on intermittent fasting.

I second the AccuCheck fastclix. The needles are silicon coated so they don't tear tissues -- so very little pain. I hated using the other brands of lancets. The needles are encased in a cartridge, so you can throw them away in a trash can and don't have to worry about anyone getting a stick or punching through a trash bag.

RAID is not a backup strategy.

I've lost data with the Intel onboard raid, several times, so I refused to use the Intel raid implementations; if you are going to utilize RAID, I've learned the hard way to pay for a proper RAID card and cage (or use the tried and true software raid setups).

If you loose the RAID array, take a break before you start fixing it. A client had their subversion repositories with over a decade of work on a Windows server, depending on a RAID setup. It fell down and turns out they didn't have any good backups. The IT guy tried to fix it and nuked the super block and did who knows what else.

They ended up packing up and sending the entire server to some firm that specialized in data recovery and spending a small fortune.

Retirement: Maxing a 401k and Roth Ira is $23,000/yr

A SEP will allow you to put way more away than that. Better would be a "back door Roth" and transition from SEP to Roth and pay the income tax out of pocket each year.

Healthcare: Insurance for a family is about $600/month or $7,200/yr. Let's add another $500/yr in expected expenses and another $1000/yr in emergency savings. Total $8,700/yr

You can get a better deal if you go with a Health Savings Account (HSA) + HDHP. HSA funds, if you don't use them, turn into retirement funds.

As someone who has had several CT scans (and paid for CT scans), the idea that a CT scan is better than a physician feeling your abdomen is absolutely ridiculous. Pumping contrast agents into everyone who has pain is a very bad idea. Moreover, enforcing decisions by algorithmic rules is problematic, especially considering who might be making those decisions.

I used to love to go to sears. As a kid I would spend hours thumbing through the Sears catalog, and circle Christmas gifts to give hints to my parents. At one point most of the appliances and tools in my house were Sears brands.

Unfortunately, reading some of the comments to a story gives me headache. Especially the "corporations are evil" type comments. Sears was killed by two factors: 1) Lampert's self-dealing and attempt to extract personally enrich himself, and 2) optimizing everything to extract as much cash as possible, from every facet of the business.

When I was younger, there was a classic business case presented in an MBA program regarding frozen pizzas. A food company sold frozen pizzas that was great and had a very strong customer loyalty. In search of more revenue, an MBA calculated the cost savings if they reduced the number of pepperoni. Unsurprisingly, they made more money and no one complained. Bonuses were handed out. Year after year, they started to "optimize" the pizza. After several years of this, sales tanked. Customers stopped buying. They hired consultants who performed focus groups and they found out that customers didn't want a cheese pizza with a few toppings. They never fully recovered revenue back to the original levels even after trying to win back customers. Once they broke the customer's inertia, customers started exploring other options and found better ones. The key take away is: don't be myopic and only focus exclusively on short term gain because you may run your customers off.

I have seen this pattern repeated over and over. Amazon is the now biggest example. Every interaction I have with Amazon is getting more onerous. It used to be I would go online, search amazon and order. Now the product search results are festooned with ads, sponsored products, and the product that I want at higher prices, while the lower priced products are hidden. They arbitrage postage. New ads on prime video. I can go on and on. Eventually people aren't going to take it anymore, and when they do they will find better, cheaper options. I know I have.

This happened at Sears. Every time I interacted with sears it was less enjoyable. The products became cheaper and lower quality. Recently, I wanted to purchase an olympic weight set. Heavy cast iron weights. Sears used to have home a large selection gym equipment. It is one of places where someone will go in to buy a barbell, and will return for more products like a curl bar, more weights, and pick up a few other items while you were there. Nope, they had determined it was more profitable to become a market place and take a commission and not hold inventory. They optimized the inventory to only hold items that sell well or have high mark-ups.

Being a cynic, I really don't think Lampert cares. Although I don't think BK was the plan all along, he is obviously using it as a financial engineering tactic to shed obligations while he owns all the real estate. His self-dealing was so bad a number of investors were threatening lawsuits a few years ago. Ultimately, he will kill the company and still walk away with a dump truck full of money.

Never mind. I found the answer. The prevailing advice now is: call them valued employees, but pay them as contingent/contract workers. Some companies have "perks" that include reimbursement for accounting/tax preparation in the "employee's" host country -- they deal with the income reporting, health care, and tax issues.

I had an idea for a business idea that never got off the ground. However, before it flamed out, I wanted to hire some overseas people that I personally knew to help. However, I got conflicting advice about how to actually pay them. I wanted to do it the legit/legal way, so they would have taxable income and pay their withholding. I got advice from just pay them with PayPal to bank-to-bank-transfers to forming a back office in the foreign country.

I strongly suspect these distributed teams are taking shortcuts.

With contingent employees in the U.S., you can just 1099 them at the end of the year; W2 employees will require reporting and withholding depending on the state they live in. But what about foreign employees? I'd love to hear from anyone who has done this.

How would this actually work in practice? Do bank to bank transfers, or are all of the workers simply contingent employees that invoice and paid in USD or local currency? I suspect they are avoiding paying payroll taxes and not reporting to the foreign taxing authorities.

You can request a waiver from the FAA, right now. It is free and good for 90 days. Here is a list of granted waivers: https://www.faa.gov/uas/request_waiver/waivers_granted/

Disclaimer: I'm a licensed private pilot and have a registered drone.

I can sum this up simply: jerks ruin everything. Drones were unregulated and would remain so, except for people being jerks.

Pilots have areas they can't fly below a certain altitude because the noise would rile up wildlife, like flocks of birds; jerk drone pilots, oblivious to this, started zipping through those areas and national parks, scaring up the wildlife (and annoying people), which led to them being banned around national monuments and parks.

Drones have also interfered with commercial approaches at airports in Class B airports so they became banned around airports, unless permission is granted from the airport. The FAA came out with regs requiring you to register, and you had to make sure you acknowledged that you had to be permission to fly in class B airport, from the airport. Simply stated, it was so that if you were an jerk and your drone crashed, or you injured anyone on the ground they could find you. Seems reasonable to me.

The new regs are just an incremental update. Many flights operate on VFR (Visual Flight Rules), which is basically "see and avoid." Most commercial flights operate in IFR (Instrument Flight Rules) where air traffic control system guarantees you separation from other aircraft. Of course, they can't see small drones on radar, so they can't vector you around them or talk to the drone operator. There was a case where a black hawk was struck by a drone last year, requiring an emergency landing. The NTSB ultimately found the guy through the manufacturers serial number, because he his drone never returned.

There have been many, many bad actors using drones to harass neighbors, spy on women, and it's getting ridiculous. When a licensed pilot has an accident, they know the NTSB and FAA will investigate. You file a safety report and own up to any mistakes, or it will be very bad. The NTSB is very thorough and is primarily interested in keeping future accidents from happening. However, drone pilots run away abandoning their hardware.

I think the next iteration will be drones required to have transponders, so air traffic control can see them, and a pilot who has TCAS can see them also. This just means they will be become more expensive, and over time, hopefully transponders and ancillary avionics will become cheaper on aircraft as these companies push into general aviation.

I have a theory that every popular website will ultimately become MySpace clone, ramping up advertising/revenue until it drives off all of their users. With all of the ads, and promoted products, Amazon is stepping closer everyday.

I've been an amazon customer since they started. I've ordered thousands of books. However, this year, I cancelled my prime membership. I got tired of them not delivering packages. Sometimes they were delivered to our postal box; sometimes the front door; and sometimes not at all. I gave up and discovered that brick and mortar stores often have better products and I can get it immediately.

As far as people saying they get free months of Prime, my wife had packages never delivered and we would complain, they would just apologize and refund the purchase. Packages that were late? They just apologized. Once, the driver couldn't find our address, so he called the technical support who called my cell phone. I had to walk two blocks waving my arms before he found me.

Now, I find when I'm searching for something, I find that I don't get the best price. If I search long enough, I will find the same exact item cheaper. I'm convinced the search results are prioritized to make them the most money, not the best price or best match.

After canceling, I bought an electronic device and paid for fast shipping. The package was shipped out of the local warehouse, where they gave it to the U.S. Postal Service to deliver. The shipping cost via USPS was probably around $4. If I remember, they charged me around $12.50 for expedited shipping. They arbitraged the postage. I felt scammed.

I only shop at Amazon as a last resort now.