brianfitz

I have:

1. Lost a pair 2. Lost one bud from a pair 3. Washed them 4. Swam in the ocean with them 5. Had a pair generally degrade

So I know once I buy a pair, I'm good for about a year until I need another. That's also when I tend to notice the new features. :-)

Flipboard. https://about.flipboard.com/

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/centimillionaire

Great work and as a product guy, I find the preview environments feature explained on your website to be a potential game changer. Being able to spin up and seed environments on demand via pull requests keeps things very clean as I could just look at a particular branch in isolation without the need for fixed dev -> stage environments. By seeding the data, it also means I can "replay" the same scenario again if the developers deploy a change while in the review process.

We needed a tool that gave us the same experience as Heroku but on AWS, so we went with Nullstone (https://nullstone.io). Everything is nicely managed in a style you'll be familiar with and takes advantage of open source Terraform modules they publish.

I believe he was using the source article. One example was a leap in public polling around how our government functions (33% jump in being able to identify the three branches of the US federal government).

Also highly recommend the book “The Phoenix Project”. It highlights common pitfalls and solutions through a narrative of a character thrown into their first time leading a team.

So we’ve created one loophole. What if I buy multiple properties below the threshold? Is the limit per household? If so, does this apply to people heavily leveraged with little net worth who own many rental properties? The rent is income, but they often make improvements to the homes and take a cash-out refinance to pay for the cash down payment on a new property. If we do this to homes, and the wealthy move their money to a new place, such as venture capital, do we try and re-price those illiquid assets each year? If one IPO’s and they take a loan against the stock to buy a home, do you give them their previous year’s mark-to-market payment back to them if the stock goes down the following year and they get a margin call? I’m just going through a few scenarios but this would quickly inflate the tax code to an almost unmanageable state without creating just as many more new loopholes. Imagine trying to grow a startup and being worth X on paper with no actual gains or money in the bank. If you don’t include it, it suddenly becomes a tool for someone else to use within the assets you’ve excluded. If you don’t exclude it, you may force an early sale of promising new businesses to their competitors to cover a tax bill on the unrealized gains.

The special treatment is at the time of sale. My comments were in response to taxing the appreciation at the time of a new loan (such as taking a second mortgage).

This would also affect most home owners. They purchase a home, it goes up in value, and they refinance or take a second loan rather than sell the property. The wealthy do this as well with property, art, and securities. Trying to tax unrealized gains (like a home that has appreciated in value) would be a new mess of tax legislation with holes you could drive a semi-truck through.

Yes, but the idea is to set controlled fires to prevent these larger uncontrolled ones. It not only requires regular controlled fires, but when they are performed, for how long, and where are all critical. The remaining factor is you have to ensure the controlled fires do not burn too hot. This is knowledge that was passed down from the indigenous people of Australia, but apparently has not been well understood (it’s not easy, especially the part about hot enough versus too hot).

https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-14/traditional-owners...

I remember a friend talking about how he didn't take Youtube options for some consulting work he did for them in their very early days. This was almost exactly 10 years ago and his comment was that he could have wallpapered his entire house in all the worthless equity he had been paid over the years. It was always hard, it was always rare, but only the winners get press attention.

Markets will factor in all known information ahead of a fine such as this — the possibility that it’s coming and some guess at the size and impact. In doing so, this would depress the price of the stock leading up to any news.

Let’s assume that the estimate for the fine was exactly on the money — $5B. In this case, you’d still expect to see a jump in stock price due to the removal of uncertainty. Uncertainty can pull down prices just as much as bad news.

Throwing out any opinions of what Facebook did, the size of the fine, etc. this is the type of simplistic reporting that gives the news media a black eye. It also happens quite a lot with science reporting such as an article last week on tube that could isolate sound based on its shape. The author made many leaps that were ripped apart on HN.

Any particular instance won’t get noticed by the majority, but eventually an article will get published to an area of your expertise and it’s just glaring. When this happens enough times, you begin seeing the news in a much more nuanced and different light.

TL;DR - The money available to any one company is small (hundreds of thousands) which means it could only ever be a supplement. Since they are very difficult to apply for, it could be argued you’re just better off to spend time raising money from entities that can provide more capital down the road. Also, traditional capital can be spent on all aspects of the business. However, these grants are generally very restrictive on what the money can be used for.

Wheeler’s delayed choice excitement is referred to as a thought expirement both by the physicists in the article as well as the first line in its Wikipedia entry. Like Einstein, he worked through many thought excitements that suggested an outcome, but couldn’t be tested at the time. However, many of Einstein’s proposed experiments that have since been observed are still referred to as his thought expiriments.

We may be saying the same thing, but worth making the distinction.

For the other poster (diggsey), it will be difficult to answer your question about the novelty of these newly run expiriments without a full read of the article.

TL;DR: There was a loophole found in an older thought experiment that indicated that at the quantum level, nothing is real until it is observed.

A discovery was recently made that found a way to add an unknown variable into the mix such that an expiriment where the future seems to affect the past was possibly explained away by a classical model.

However, a new experiment was proposed to show whether the new classical model actually was the explanation — and it turns out this classical “loophole” can not explain it.

So we’re now back to the beginning where it once again appears that nothing is real until observed at a quantum level which is also referred to as “anti-realism”.

I remember reading this when it was originally posted years ago and have had time to think about the implications. I am just over 40, so most of my class reunions were organized through Facebook and was amazed at the turn-out possible because of these new social networks. For my mother, there were simply people she no longer knew how to reach — including one of her best friends from childhood. Years went by until Facebook gained traction and they were reunited.

The point being, it is just as likely that the writer of this post wasn’t left out any more than he would have been in the past. What has possibly changed is that a funeral lightly attended by only a few in the past could now reach the many. In the past, he would have missed hearing about the death and would have missed the funeral. In the present, the same thing happened but now feels left out.

It’s a benefit to the mother who lost her child, but a detriment to the friend who feels left behind.

Allan who also responded is fairly inline with the answer to this -- except one key point: the company can write whatever they want into the contract regarding recourse, but the IRS will only recognize the loan as legit for tax purposes if it has a liability associated with it beyond the stock as collateral. This liability to the key execs will be reflected as a line item on the company balance sheet. And even if the company doesn't aggressively pursue the debt (which they can sue for), you're still on the hook to the IRS for the reason scurvy mentions below.

They likely were giving her additional grants later in the life of the company upon reaching certain milestones to make up for her dilution at a strike price that required millions of dollars to exercise. You can get away with founder stock very early on, but at some point, it becomes untenable as the value of the company grows.

We can agree to disagree. As a two time founder, I had to go through a lot of discusssions with our legal and even my own to grasp the upsides and downsides of what Elizabeth did by trading risk against a lower future tax liability. My take is that you're confusing a normal cashless transaction versus a structured loan as an executive of the company to purchase stock today to hold for a long term horizon. The risks are very real and the liability is very real. I meant this to be a way to share some specialized knowledge I have on the subject to answer why she has an actual liability and why this isn't handed out to just any employee. This isn't coming from book knowledge, but real working knowledge of this arrangement. But at the end of the day, everyone is free to do their own research. :-)

As stated before, it doesn't work that way. Google the horror stories on those who have excercised options (and held the stock) on a liquidity event who had to pay taxes on gains that existed at the time of the transaction, but later dropped in value. Even though they never saw a gain other than on paper, they get hit with a tax bill they can no longer afford. And the stock is unhelpful because it's current market value is no longer reflective of what it was at the time the IRS recognizes the gain. In your scenario, she could only cover her tax bill with the stock if it were at a equal or higher value as when she excercized them via the loan: https://blog.wealthfront.com/exercise-stock-options-taxes/

That might seem like the common sense answer, but is the danger in exercising options and holding them. In this case, the previous poster was correct -- once they forgive the loan, the $25 million becomes taxable income.

The reason it doesn't seem to make sense is that no actual value was gained in the end. However, the IRS (and our tax laws) don't see it that way. Instead, they back at the value that was gained at the time of the transaction. They don't care what happens to the value in later years.

It's done in order to start the clock early for capital gains. If you excercise shares at the same time you sell them, that transaction is treated as regular income. If you excercise the shares early by purchasing them, then they can be taxed at the lower capital gains rate down the road. There was a response in the thread that asked if this is fair -- to that I would answer that when the purchase is handled as a loan, it is a real liability to the employee (usually the CEO or founder). If the company tanks or the clock ticks too long for a liquidity event, the note has to be paid. So this could be a very risky proposition for an average employee, even it were offered.

Rate of return goes hand in hand with risk. The man in the article took greater risk and, because successful, became a multi-millionaire. There is success bias built into this because while a large percentage of millionaires are entrepreneurs, a large percentage of entrepreneurs are not millionaires. Also, the idea that you cannot become a multi-millionaire through saving (and inside a 401k) is coming from a guy who never tried it. From those who have tried it, it is indeed possible. :-)

Simply targeting the higher end market doesn't tell you anything about the margins of the business. You need to know the size of each segment of the market and then what can be done to increase margins in each segment. For Tesla, they can't simply stay in the higher end of the market as they need to get greater economies of scale with more volume. Like with the Model 3, they want to move down-market so that they can make the business model work in the long term. As it stands, they only serve the high end of the market and lose money on each car they sell.

Accredited investors only? If so, even lowering the floor to $10k might not help the OP (geared toward helping swanson with the details rather than any kind of suggestion).

Edit: and Kapil has answered :-)

She can't reveal the patients to them, so Facebook wouldn't be in a position to give a specific reason -- only generically how the algorithm is calculated.

Because those companies will hire from the population living in those cities. English is the international language of business, so all things being equal, you'd choose a population that is fluent in English as a second language.

Dan, I'll chime in. I don't know your circumstances, but when I read a critique like this my first question is always "where has the person travelled?". It's very difficult to spend time in places devoid of capitalism and not notice the differences. Due to my past work, I travelled all over the globe to both established and emerging markets -- and work simply can't explain the levels of disparity. What repeatedly made a difference was ownership. For example, the poverty in Addis Ababa is overwhelming. Once you get past that, the second thing you'll likely notice is that the government has a tight grip over business there. There are no McDonalds, Starbucks, or any recognizable brands there. This is for the "benefit of the people", but really is just there to protect government interests (the coffee place nearly has the exact same Starbucks logo). In one area where there were nice homes, a single individual owned the entire lot of them. Unlike the US where you might be able to acquire property or make free choices about a new business, your choices are restricted there. There is much talk in the US about the top 1%, but this defines the "99%" by limiting the sample size to only those living within capitalism. On a global scale, the top 1% is anyone making over $34k a year.

I am guessing they outsourced the creation of their logo with similar success: http://bit.ly/1HoypyB