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tegansnyder

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Co-Founder @CompEngine.com by night, Technologist @3M by day.

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Couple things to look into if you are thinking of running a marketplace:

1. Tax gets complicated in marketplace model. Marketplace facilitator tax laws in US and some European countries require the entity running the marketplace to collect and remit tax.

2. If your channels have multi-warehouses and ship from different US states its important to remember there are 11 origin-based states in the US.

I'm looking for a solution in this space that lets you plot the waterfall effect. What I'd like this solution to do is the following:

1. Enter all my bills that require full payment each month 2. Enter my bills that can be variably paid (ex. credit cards, medical bills, etc) 3. Enter my monthly income 4. Enter my budgeted personal/home expenses (food, gas/transport, etc)

Then the solution should be able to model a few different paths to maximizing my savings and plot out a waterfall that says if I payoff X over 6 months and pay the minimum on Y then here is what my savings would look like.

I'd like to be able to see what my projected payoff dates for different bills are and what my projected savings look like if I was to follow the model.

I went to community technical college in 2005 and the primary course load was COBOL and JAVA. The college was a pipeline to to bring fresh COBOL talent into these big financial institutions. I'm not sure how many colleges are doing this across the USA currently, but I'm sure there are a handful.

Stripe Tax 5 years ago

Piggybacking off this... Has anyone built a really good tax exemption system. I know Amazon has a pretty decent system for their B2B that allows you to upload a tax exemption certificate for your state (US). Then they have some sort of auto validation process. I assume it calls out to each state's secretary of state system to determine the validity. I would be interested to know if anyone has seen a SASS service like this that other B2B providers can leverage for fully automatic tax exemption validation.

Stripe Tax 5 years ago

Random aside on marketplace tax and using Stripe Connect. It would be especially useful if Stripe had a field that allowed marketplace facilitators to ensure they are collecting the tax. Using connected accounts with destination charges allows platform account to receive the tax by placing it in the application fee field, but if you happen to also collect a commission that means you are combining your tax + commission and storing that value in the application fee field. Since marketplace facilitators are responsible for tax collection in the US having an extra field to put this tax in would be great.

We haven't tried anything yet. I'm about to get some users setup with ODBC access in Excel to make some manual data edits. Essentially we have some core data and some metadata that is managed manually and I'm looking for a light weight UI that these users can use to manage the metadata tables in Redshift.

Does anybody know of automated waterfall budgeting solution? I want to be able to forecast the future if I stick to my pay off plans. I want to be able to enter my bills, what I owe on them, then run scenarios on my financial future if I payed certain things off before others in waterfall fashion. Having an idea of the future helps motivate.

Ah the dial-up ISP days. As an young enterprising middle schooler 20+ years ago I started one with the help of my father. I remember stringing together a bunch of modems to a Postmaster and getting a rollover PRI line from the local telco. If my memory serves me it had 24 lines and would roll over if one was busy. We even made some of our own installation floppy disks and placed them at the local video rental store so people could self install. Fun times!

For those interested, they did something very similar in the 1990s with the goat population and killed something like 250,000 goats: https://allthatsinteresting.com/project-isabela

"A Judas goat was a female who would be captured from the wild, tagged with a GPS tracking device, and then released to find other goats, especially lovelorn males.

The sharpshooters would take to the air again, track the Judas goat, find her hidden companions and gun them down, always leaving the Judas goat alive so that the whole process would begin again. Track, slaughter, repeat. The team eventually used 900 Judas goats over the course of a couple of years."

We use DirectTV Now app on our Apple TV over a Comcast connection. I really like it. The only problem we have is Comcast imposes a data cap of 1TB. With 3 TVs going in the house, kids watching Netflix, and my wife and I watching a separate shows we occasionally hit this limit then get charged an extra $10 per 50GB. Seems ridiculous.

There are a lot of folks reevaluating their crawling engines lately now that Chrome headless is maturing. To me there are some important considerations in terms of CPU/memory footprint that go into distributing a large headless crawling architecture.

The stuff we are not seeing open-sourced is the solutions companies are building around trimmed down specialized versions of the headless browsers like Chrome headless, Servo, Webkit. People are running distributed versions of these headless browsers using Apache Mesos, Kubernetes, and Kafka queues.

Start Your Own ISP 9 years ago

I know of KDSI! We ended up selling to a guy starting a new business called RCOM in Kearney, NE. I worked with him for half a year getting everything transitioned. We sold our Kansas operations to telco called Nex-Tech. At the time the business was funded by my good friend's dad. Collectively we decided it was best for us to focus on our further education and go to college.

Start Your Own ISP 9 years ago

I started one of the first 56k dial up ISPs in Nebraska when I was 13 years old with the help of my parents. In high school I partnered with some friends after reading a CNET article about a WISP in Washington state. My friend's dad had a few businesses that needed to share a T1 line so we connected them wirelessly and sold the excess capacity to farmers in rural Nebraska and Kansas. It was an amazing experience. Working with networking gear, setting up FreeBSD servers, learning about NEMA enclosures, antennas, polarity, frequency hopping FHSS vs DSSS, 2.4,5.2,5.8GHz, and 900Mhz. We had our ups and downs and learned a lot about what gear worked the best. My senior year of high school we sold the company. I still browse my google history to feel nostalgia from those days :)

Can anyone recommend a good tutorial or reading on how to setup content-based (visual) image searching using a CNN to process images. I'm looking to build a POC of a reverse image search trained with in-house product data. In the past I've used the imgSeek but it is dated and not using neural nets.