ex_ex_nihilo

I would be fucked on my first expense report. "Why did you fly out of Charlotte, NC if you live in Seattle, WA?"

That is true, but ending sentences with prepositions still makes you sound like you don't know how to English. "Where are you at?" Just no. Why add the extra word that doesn't clarify anything? "Where are you going to?" Even writing it makes me cringe. Granted, if doing otherwise would make the sentence sound awkward, go for it. e.g. "Ending sentences with prepositions? That is something up with which I will not put!" I am such a pedantic nerd that I still write that way and try to find a way to make it sound less awkward.

When I was in academia, it was considered acceptable for one to alternate between his and her when the gender of the subject is unknown. Using his or her every time does sound stilted, but proper grammar often sounds "weird". My highschool English teacher's favorite phrase was "things that 'sound right' are often wrong". That's the beauty of this fucked up language. I refuse to believe that masculine pronouns being the default gender neutral is some conspiracy by the patriarchy, but that's just me.

A couple of years ago I was walking around downtown SF, and I noticed someone had drawn a chalk outline on the sidewalk and labeled it "techie fuck". I had a good chuckle. We are not loved there.

And yet it still grates on my ears every time someone uses it in the singular. But the same things happens when someone ends a sentence with a preposition or splits an infinitive, and neither are those consider grammatical faux pas anymore.

More power to you! Everyone should find his own preferences and strengths and lean into them, imo.

I am a very extroverted person and require social interaction to not become depressed. My job is a little different in that I'm customer-facing and have to travel to customer sites from time to time. I also have a family (wife and 2 young daughters), and I enjoy the opportunity to interact with them throughout the day. I have a separate area of the house that is mine, and they know not to disturb me while I'm working (which is often, but on my own schedule). To clarify: Wife is a SAHM. I also work for a Bay Area startup, which has perks in terms of flexible schedule and unlimited PTO.

I would never go back to commuting to the same place every day. It's cool that he does the coworking thing, but I've been working remotely for 6+ years fulltime (and I have other periods of 2-3 years at a time working remotely interspersed through my 20+ year career in software), and I would not give it up for anything less than a C-level role at this point. Most of the benefit to me is the lack of routine. Routine stifles my creativity. I don't want to go to the same place or do the same thing every day.

We chatted last week and I was sorry to hear you went with another contractor for frontend dev. The bait and switch wasn't my intention, UpWork doesn't really let you present yourself as a team. Best of luck.

That's not how option valuation works. They're worth the difference of their strike price to the price of the underlying intrinsically. So if his strike is $110 (which it's not for reasons others have pointed out - he was issued options on common stock), he gets the appreciation of the stock after IPO once he exercises. If the stock plummets after IPO, his options will expire worthless. Though they are probably LEAPs, and it's weird to denominate options per-share like that. Normally contracts are for 100 shares and it always confuses me the way companies award options.

So go work from a coffee shop or take a walk. I'm not sure if anyone has told you, but it's not been normal for humans to go to an office five days a week for 8 hours a day for most of human history.

If you were individual 1099, then no there is no advantage really. And you have to pay self-employment tax. If you were B2B 1099, there are ENORMOUS advantages. My average effective federal tax rate on ~$250k/yr is right around 1.8-2.2% because I'm 1099 B2B and have a great tax attorney and accountant. Obviously on paper I make like $30k a year or something stupid like that, I don't know. My attorney adjust things monthly or quarterly as necessary, starts new LLCs or whatever is required.

Yes, if he's married filing jointly the standard deduction is $24k. Meaning he pays zero taxes. If he's unmarried his standard deduction is still most of his salary (~$12k), and the remaining amount would fall into the 10% tax bracket. But he would qualify for tax credits with income that low. Also very likely social services and safety nets. His effective income tax rate should be negative.

Reading these comments, it's apparent most people have no idea how this shit works. I thought here of all places, I wouldn't see people falling into the "I don't understand how progressive tax brackets work" trap.

So you don't apply VAT to inelastic commodities. We have in fact figured this shit out. Austrian or Keynesian are not the only two choices available to us, despite what some would try to lead you to believe.

Most people would hold that offering a bribe is not the unethical action, accepting the bribe is the unethical side. So if you're implying that the companies acted unethically by bribing politicians, I beg to differ. That is like blaming a lion for killing gazelles. Corporations are in competition with one another. It's a winner-take-all world, and they will always seek every edge they can get. If you want to hold someone accountable, vote the bastards out and elect someone with a spine.

Exactly. There is such a thing as fiduciary duty. As a board member, if I find out my CEO is overpaying on taxes because he feels like it's the "right thing to do", his ass is getting canned. Our competition is not going to do that, and you get no brownie points for being a naive simp. This is a competition, not a drum circle.

Amazon paid no income tax. Amazon paid a shitton in taxes, and will continue to do so.

It is probably the case that profitable companies pay too little in tax, but articles like this are misleading as hell.

Individuals can only do this for 7 years FYI. Corporate carry forward is much longer (is there even a limit? I'm not sure. I usually don't keep my corporations that show a loss for longer than a few years before dissolving them and forming new ones).

Cool thanks, I did not know about that.

If you want to sell software, it's good to be situated physically next to the biggest software companies in the world. I work in the Valley (but live on the East Coast), and having your company immersed in that culture can have benefits. There is a certain perception that persists, a certain level of legitimacy you are granted just for living alongside the Big Boys. Along with the accompanying downsides, of course. The answer to why VCs stay in the Valley is because it's been working for them.

Postgres is not an alternative to Mongo, though. Provide a noSQL alternative if you want an alternative. RDBs and non-RDBs seek to address different sets of problems, and sometimes you do not want or need a relational database.

Nothing can make shit and rotting carcasses smell good. A lot of people think weed smells amazing. I love the smell. As another poster said, it's like anything else you enjoy. I like the smell of coffee, beer, freshly-cut wood, etc. Mostly because of the memories they invoke. Same with cannabis.

Austin is a midsize city.

It is true and mostly accurate by some back of the napkin math I've done. What stops people from doing 51% attacks is a few factors:

1) If you can pull off an attack for a few hundred bucks, it's probably on a coin that will only net you a few hundred bucks. Remember, these coins are thinly-traded altcoins, many of which only do a few hundred bucks worth of volume on exchanges in the first place.

2) Once you pull off your attack and people realize what happened, the "free" coins you get back will be worth shit because nobody will want that coin.

It's not as much of a free lunch as it might seem at first blush. I most certainly possess the domain knowledge and skill to pull off a 51% attack, as I have contributed code to Bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies, written open source mining software, etc. But I would need several million dollars in starting capital to make the kind of money that would make me even consider it. That time would be better spent hacking away on a project with the potential to make me sustainable income, or a client project where I'm paid by the hour.

The "owners" of the hardware are private miners. The rent-a-miner business (NiceHash) just connects sellers of hashrate (miners) with buyers of hashrate. The miners don't care what they are mining, and they get paid in BTC regardless of what their hardware actually mines. NiceHash is just a marketplace that automatically mines the most profitable coin by what people are willing to pay for hashrate. None of the hardware belongs to NiceHash.

Your question is still valid and good, but not in the way you have phrased it. The real answer is: laziness. NiceHash is easy and steady. If you have a nice gaming rig, you can make a few extra bucks a day by selling your hashing power while it's idle. If you are a serious miner, you probably don't use NiceHash.

It's only ridiculous if you don't think about it.

You are a bit confused. The == operator specifically does implicit type conversion. You want to use === to avoid implicit coercion. And you always have the option to explicitly coerce type, as I explain below.

Javascript's type coercion leads to some wacky things like

[] == []

false

But it's actually all perfectly consistent once you understand what the compiler is doing with type (and JavaScript is compiled, not interpreted). == is an operator that will always try to coerce its operands to numbers, but the way it gets there can be circuitous.

You can specify type in JavaScript and avoid implicit coercion, you can use type constructors (generally worse) or certain unary operators. Ex:

var foo = "12"

var bar = +foo - 5; //+ explicitly converts foo to a number

In the above case, Javascript is coercing the strings to numbers.

=== does no type coercion. You can also coerce types manually. JS is not statically typed, but it is typed.

Javascript is a typed language.

Wow, my school's not even on the list and our graduate program for CS/CE has less than a 13% acceptance rate.