We don't need more doctors - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/05/13/christensen.doctors/index.html

<comment><USER2> Have any of you been to a nurse-practitioner-managed clinic? We have. 90% of the time when you go to the doctor, you just need the sanity check and the antibiotics. For those cases, the clinic totally beats the doctor's office.

This doesn't seem like a minor thing:

* You don't need to have a relationship with a clinic to drop in. Changing or losing insurance doesn't change the clinics you can visit.

* Clinics are much faster than doctors offices.

* Clinics are much more flexible than doctors offices (again: you just drop in).

* Clinics are much, much cheaper than doctor's offices.

It's been said that a big part of our health care problem (after things like geriatric care) is that front-line services are being provided by hospitals to people with acute conditions, without insurance, who haven't had access to preventitive care. This sounds like a concrete step towards fixing that.

<comment><USER3> "90% of the time when you go to the doctor, you just need the sanity check and the antibiotics."

Actually, most of the time the patient just needs the sanity check and a prescription for something to alleviate the symptoms of their condition (i.e. a cough suppressant) enough for them to be able to get a decent night's sleep so their body can heal itself. Antibiotics are way overprescribed. Most of the time you don't need them.

<comment><USER4> Antibiotics are often used as a placebo, since doctors can't prescribe placebos. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have been formulating the opinion that we need more doctors. Most doctors will tell you they work too many hours. This can't be good for anyone. The only thing it does is allow them to make more money. Many need that cash: pay off loans, ROI for all their training etc..

What would happen if doctors only worked a 4 day, 40 hour work week? We would obviously need more doctors to make up the shortfall. There would be costs associated with that, but once we doubled the number of doctors, there may be some great financial and quality benefits for all parties. The only downside is most doctors would make less, but they would have still be upper-middle class and have a very comfortable life.

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure I agree with all of your assessment.

The doctors that make all the money do it in private practice, and they also arent the ones who are generally over worked.

Some specialties make more money than others, and those specialties attract doctors who value money. However, working for public hospitals in many places, or some specialties, you know you are working with people who do not value money (at least not as a primary motivator).

Remember -- the doctors who make the real money in medicine do it becuase they own their practice. This is just like working as an electrician or owning your own electrician company that employees 10 people. Owners make more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Clayton Christenson's book, _The Innovator's Prescription_ , is very good. It outlines the processes of business disruption that are beginning to affect the health care industry status quo, including these quick medical clinics against the GPs, enhanced diagnosis tools for GPs disrupting specialists, and the rise of narrowly focused, high throughput specialty institutes that focus on one type or genre of operation and do it extremely well (using principles adopted from the Toyota Production System).

A recommended read for anyone interested in the future of the industry.

</comment><comment><USER8> _But we need to move away from the "guild" mentality that has kept boundaries narrow and created regulatory, licensing and reimbursement obstacles to new models of health care delivery._

Fair enough, and some of his ideas seem good, but the "guild mentality" is precisely what's keeping the supply of doctors down. There are regulatory burdens on both sides of the equation, and I don't think it's entirely clear which way things would move if they were relaxed.

</comment><comment><USER9> It's so hard to get good information on this issue because so many of the people we get our information from are themselves key stakeholders in the process. Of course the general public wants more doctors. That would generally mean lower prices, lower waiting times, etc. And of course the AMA will insist we don't need more doctors.

<comment><USER10> The article isn't exactly an AMA shill insisting we don't need more doctors. Rather, it's a guy pointing out that we have a shortage of _medical services_ , and suggesting that non-doctors (e.g. nurse practitioners) can provide some of them.

"Rather than calling for more doctors, which would have been difficult for the government to impact anyway, what the country really needs are policies that pave the way to more avenues of care, which is well within the government's control."

<comment><USER11> The issues are related, though. Non-doctors are banned from performing certain medical services, and the supply of doctors is restricted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Some of the commentary at the bottom of the link is good.</comment>


Ask HN: why are devices with the Flappy Bird app fetching $1k+ on ebay? - <AUTHOR>

So I need to ask your opinion, the flappy bird app creator pulls their app during its success this weekend, then people list their devices on ebay for astronomical prices....seriously, am I missing something? http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57618649-1/$100k-used-flappy-bird-phones-not-really-flying-so-high-on-ebay/?subj <comment><USER2> Some people have more money than sense, and ayy feel that FB is historic enough that it's worth paying a load of money for a phone that has it. Apparently someone has already paid $10k for one...possibly in the belief that it'll be worth more in the future, but more likely shill buying between people and their friends in an attempt to drive up the price. People who are already renting ebay stores may consider the sales commission a worthwile advertising price to attract foolsih buyers. [http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_sacat=0&_from=R40&_nkw=flapp...](http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_sacat=0&_from=R40&_nkw=flappy+bird+phone&LH_Complete=1&LH_Sold=1&rt=nc)

When I see this sort of thing I think back to the Beanie Baby craze of the 90s; I worked just up the street from a store in SF's financial district and when a new toy was coming out there would be a long line of financial industry types standing outside from the small hours of the morning to buy a small stuffed animal in the apparent belief that it was a hot new asset class. They're still traded and collected (isn't everything?) but for tens or low hundreds of dollars rather than the thousands that people were anticipating.</comment>


What To Do if You're Laid Off - <AUTHOR> http://scobleizer.com/2008/01/23/what-to-do-if-youre-laid-off-in-2008-recession/

<comment><USER2> I laid myself off too - after spending a year working stealthily on an online business!

To be honest, I can't understand people (as described in the article) who see being laid off as the time to sit back/chill out/do nothing/start drinking... I have so little time to do what I want, to learn about what I'm interested in, to create what I want to create, to write, etc... Being laid off seems like a fantastic opportunity to spend time on all these things!

<comment><USER3> Funny thing about time: you never use it the right way when you have it. When you don't have it, you can only imagine all the right things to do with it.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, why is that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Robert Scoble: "Do things that will get you to be recognized as a world leader in the field you want to be in."

Stephen Colbert: "Get your own talk show. It pays well and the benefits are unbeatable."

<comment><USER6> I accept your apology.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Or go back in time and save some money.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Get up off your butt, do something, anything, get creative, talk to people, volunteer, do what you'd be doing if you were getting paid. Great advice.

Funny, for a minute there, I didn't know if he was talking about finding a job or starting a business.</comment>


Quitting Smoking - <AUTHOR> http://jacobsingh.name/content/smokes

<comment><USER2> I think a big part of the challenge of quitting, and what the OP seems to still be hanging onto is identifying as a smoker. If you're a smoker, it's what you do, it's a part of your life, and you'll always be a smoker.

I've always struggled with how in AA you're taught that you are an addict, no matter how long you've gone without. Of course, their studies hold more weight than anything I have to say, but many of us sucked our thumbs as children. It was an addiction for many, and yet, those people aren't considered thumb suckers. It's something they did, it isn't a part of their identity.

I have a friend whom I recently convinced to stop smoking. She's only 3 weeks in at this point, but says she has no desire to smoke. We talked at length about never referring to herself as quitting, or being a smoker, but just letting it be something she used to do, but doesn't find enjoyment in anymore and doesn't want to do.

Maybe that will be of some use to the OP.</comment>


Did you ever wish you had a mentor to guide you? - <AUTHOR>

Dear fellow hackers and entrepreneurs,
Did you ever wish you had a mentor to guide you?  I know I do.  I do not want to make all my mistakes alone.
So instead of just finding me a mentor - I am working on this - I wonder how one could solve this problem in general and organize some kind of exchange or meeting point for would-be mentees and mentors.
The problems I see consist in keeping up a high signal to noise ratio and respecting the privacy of all parties involved.  We will also have to work out the incentives for al participants.
If one could extract a viable business model out of such an exchange - that would be an added bonus.  But that's not a requirement.  In true P.G. style I try to figure out how to build something people want first.
Matthias.
P.S. Please point out any spelling mistakes - I am not a native speaker.  Thank you. <comment><USER2> I think there is a genuine need for this, even in these times of faster, easier access to information.

(Since you asked for spelling corrections: "[...] to work out the incentives for _al_ participants"; should be _all_. Also: "The problems I see _consist in_ [...]". In this case, _consist of_ would probably be more appropriate:

<http://www.bartleby.com/68/65/1465.html> )

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the corrections - I should have been more careful. Too bad I can't edit the post any longer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> the advice of a mentor is essential to building a broader realization but ultimately you will have to follow your own instinct and make your own decisions.

<comment><USER5> Agreed.

That's the trick -- a good mentor will show you the world and tell you about different places you might want to go. He can even help you book the ticket, but he can't make your decisions for you. A mentor is not a cofounder, is not a coder, and is not a partner.

It's like my father-in-law, the carpenter who lives out of town. I know nothing of wood-working, so if I need some work done, I use him as a mentor. He doesn't show up and do the work, but he guides me around the arena and shows me what to worry about and what not to worry about. Maybe I'll hire out contractors, or maybe I'll do it myself. In the modern world, you can't do everything yourself, so it's good to have somebody with that information.

Good mentors are priceless, and we use them all the time without thinking about it. But you have to be clear about roles and expectations.

<comment><USER4> priceless indeed

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> that's pretty much the idea behind the metalab (<http://metalab.at/wiki/Folder:V5a-en>) - people working on projects together (and besides one another), mentoring each other.

</comment><comment><USER7> I am not sure if this is a service people need. The people that need mentors the most probably refuse to get them. People that know they need mentors and actively seek them out eventually find them.

Also, you're talking about a small segment of a small niche numbers-wise. Of all the people in the US, only a portion are entrepreneurs or business owners. Of that segment, only a portion are actually successful and will actually be good mentors. Also, how will you qualify the quality of the mentee? No one wants to waste their time, especially if you already have several mentees.

<comment><USER2> He doesn't say his site will limit itself to mentoring about business.

As for evaluating mentees: that's a good question. I guess it's not very different from selecting any other type of associates (employees, cofounders), just the stakes are not so high: it's less traumatic to terminate a mentoring relationship if things go wrong. There is no money at stake, and any time investments have supposedly paid for themselves until not long before it became clear it was not working out.

The standard solution to hiring (written application, followed up with interview) should be a good start.

<comment><USER3> I did not even say I want to solve this problem with a web site. But I saw the same problems you pointed out.

For example making the service expensive would weed out a lot of people who are not serious about it. But I do not believe high price this would actually be a solution.

Perhaps matching mentees and mentors is not that different from matchmaking in a romantical sense. We could learn some things from dating sites.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've long thought that the mentor/mentee model was the way to go in this business. There are simply too many wrong doors to open and things to chase that don't amount to much. And I'm speaking only for the technology side -- I imagine the business side is just as bad.

Good luck with you idea. I don't have any concrete suggestions except finding a market will be tough: there are lots of things that "should" happen that never seem to work out.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I know that will be tough.

I am not primarily interested in finding a market for this idea. Foremost I am looking for a mentor. (Or even a mentee - if someone believes she can learn a thing from me.)

<comment><USER5> I've done technology mentoring for several years now on the side. I've found that you have to be co-located for it to work effectively. It's one thing to be a voice on the phone or an icon on IM, it's something else entirely to drop by for lunch, take a look at the build, and roll your sleeves up and pitch in. That's a face-to-face kind of thing. As another commenter pointed out, a lot of people don't feel like they need any help. Those that might entertain the idea want to see that you can walk the walk and not just talk the talk -- which is exactly as it should be.

So I'd look locally if you can.</comment></comment></comment>


Sec. Robert Gates announces sweeping defense reforms, IT consolidation - <AUTHOR> http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0810/080910kp1.htm

<comment><USER2> Yep, definitely cut contractors. That's the deal isn't it, a great hourly rate when times are good to compensate for zero job security when times are bad. Everyone who changes from permie to contractor understands that, no-one has any business complaining.</comment>


Conservative News Sites Track You Lots More Than Left-Leaning Ones - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/right-left-news-site-ad-tracking/ <comment><USER2> OK, fair enough.

But are you willing to point out when the Left is more likely to engage in dirty shenanigans?</comment>


3 Types of Innovation-Structured [Apple], Unstructured [Amazon] & Open [Google] - <AUTHOR> http://trak.in/tags/business/2011/08/08/innovation-types-structure-open-apple-google-amazon/

<comment><USER2> How about Microsoft's?! Vintage Innovation?

<comment><USER3> Such as Microsoft Bob?

<comment><USER4> How about Xbox?</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What big successes have come from people involved in the startup scene? - <AUTHOR>

It seems to me that the people who start big, successful web businesses do so from outside the 'startup community'. By that I mean that Mark Zuckerberg wasn't on HN (or the 2004 equivilant BBS).  He wasn't blogging, or going to meetups - he was quietly building a product (and working freelance I believe).
The same with the Skype guys.
So I'm wondering, can anyone point to a web presence from someone who built something big, but from before they built it?  I'm looking to be able to follow someone from 'Hey, is this a good idea?' to 'I've just sold - I'm now an angel'. <comment><USER2> Did the startup scene have a web presence where people used their real names? It does now, there are a lot of CETFOs on Quora using their real names, answering questions about startups. Lets see where that leads.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think the best things in the world is to be successful without people knowing that you are. So you can live peacefully with your FU money.

I am sure plenty of people are successful in terms of business growth and earnings but they get no media coverage.

</comment><comment><USER4> Some of the cloud stuff is from people from the "startup scene", I think: Dropbox, Heroku, etc.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Surely there must be people on HN who were posting while they started up, and went on to be successful? The site's been going three years now...

</comment><comment><USER5> you might recognize this guy

<http://infolab.stanford.edu/~sergey/>

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a great example. He wasn't involved in startups though, more an academic capacity turned into a business. Pretty much a classic example of working on something quietly and turning it into something awesome.</comment></comment>


The ETF Tax Dodge - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2019-etf-tax-dodge-lets-investors-save-big/ <comment><USER2> Matt Levine has an excellent explanation of why this isn't as big of a deal as it seems (read down to Heartbeats) [1]

> On the other hand I am not convinced that one should look at the transaction > in isolation here. My view of the situation is not only that "an ETF is a > mutual fund that doesn't pay taxes," but also that everyone accepts that. > There just seems to be broad agreement among investors and regulators and > policymakers that an ETF is supposed to be tax-efficient, that ETF investors > get to defer capital gains until they sell their shares. (Again: This is a > very widely advertised benefit of ETFs. 7 ) Some ETFs ran into a bit of a > technical problem that might have required them to pay taxes, and so they > developed a very technical solution that fixed it. The fact that the > solution is a little shammy-looking would be a problem if everyone expected > them to pay the taxes, but since people don't expect that, any old solution > will do.

[1] [https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-29/deals-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-29/deals- on-the-train-are-everyone-s-business)

<comment><USER3> With respect to Matt Levine, the exact opposite is true. ETFs were a tax dodge that became embedded in the system. To get technical, Congress enacted §311(b) exemptions in 1986, exempting gain recognition for in-kind distributions for Subchapter M companies as §852(b)(6). At the time, mutual funds rarely distributed property in kind. The first ETF appeared in 1993, and the spectacular tax advantage is a big reason for its success. Given their popularity, ETFs are also given regulatory exemptive relief from parts of the '33 and '40 Acts. I'd argue this is like frequent flyer miles -- the IRS basically gave up on collecting them as taxable income because everyone thought of them as free.

Credential - I'm a lawyer and value investor @ [https://lembascapital.com/](https://lembascapital.com/) and I spend a great deal of time looking at fund structures.

PS Other smart mutual funds began distributing in kind once they realized this tax structure was sufficiently embedded. See e.g. Sequoia Fund, the famous value investing mutual fund (at least pre Valeant) - [https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB921028092685519084](https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB921028092685519084)

<comment><USER4> > With respect to Matt Levine, the exact opposite is true.

You may want to re-read what he wrote then, because you're literally just restating what he said. He even covered the history of the tax break, noting, as you did, that the law changed decades before the first ETF appeared in 1993.

Levine is explicitly saying that this whole thing came about by accident decades ago but _today_ it has become "embedded in the system", and everyone, up to and including the regulators, believes that the point of an ETF is to be tax efficient, so they're going to let them be tax efficient, even if that requires some legal gymnastics.

> I'd argue this is like frequent flyer miles -- the IRS basically gave up on > collecting them as taxable income because everyone thought of them as free.

Exactly. What exactly do you think you're disagreeing with Levine _about_?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> People are missing the point. This is not a tax dodge in the sense that you never pay the taxes. It's a tax dodge in the sense that you postpone paying taxes in the year when they are due (which is the most common kind of tax dodge).

It's absolutely correct that the ETF shareholders will pay the tax one way or another, either now on an annual cap gains distribution, or when they sell the shares later. It is NOT double taxation, because you either pay now or later, not both.

The issue is that the government cares deeply that you pay taxes in the year that you incur them. The US government, as you may know, has massive debt, and so getting the tax later costs it money in interest payments. They care about this so much that if you owe a lot in taxes, you actually have to pay them in quarterly installments, so the Feds don't have to wait a whole year to get your money.

Since ETF's are buy-and-hold investments, it could literally be decades before you actually send in a check for taxes that would ordinarily be due today.

<comment><USER6> > The issue is that the government cares deeply that you pay taxes in the year > that you incur them. The US government, as you may know, has massive debt, > and so getting the tax later costs it money in interest payments. They care > about this so much that if you owe a lot in taxes, you actually have to pay > them in quarterly installments, so the Feds don't have to wait a whole year > to get your money.

Which is very silly, because the government pays a lower interest rate on its debt than the average returns from the stock market. So the government would actually come out ahead to carry more debt now and allow you to accrue more taxable appreciation, because the tax paid on the market gains from the money not paid in tax until later are more than the interest the government has to pay on its debt in the meantime.

<comment><USER7> I may equally lose that money. There's a reason that government debt pays less. The sooner they get their money, the less time it is exposed to that risk.

<comment><USER6> From the perspective of the government the risk is extremely diversified -- across all taxpayers and all investments. And it remains the case that the average returns from the stock market exceed the average interest rate on US government debt.

<comment><USER7> If you squint, that is a Keynesian argument, since it potentially justifies government borrowing more money and handing it out for the economy to invest. It is just a matter of degree - again my point that it is not necessarily a good idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It seems to me that this "tax dodge" means that ETFs work the same way basically every investment in the world works (under US taxation). You invest money in a thing, thing goes up and you hold: you pay no taxes; you sell the thing: you pay taxes on the gain.

Redeeming ETF into and holding shares of the underlying index also acts the same way: you pay taxes on any gains when you eventually sell the underlying shares.

I'm not seeing a "dirty little secret" here. That Fidelity's mutual fund is not able to accomplish the same level of tax efficiency as the SPDR or iShares ETFs reads to me like a flaw in Fidelity's execution, not an illegal dodge on State Street's or Blackrock's side, IMO.

<comment><USER9> Except these institutions are not paying taxes on the gain??

> _Typically, when you sell a stock for more than you paid, you owe tax on the > gain. But thanks to a quirk in a Nixon-era tax law, funds can avoid that tax > if they use the stock to pay off a withdrawing fund investor._

<comment><USER8> Suppose you and I take $100K each and mutually invest 50:50 in something together. Maybe we bought two identical houses for $200K total (or even bought a duplex together). Later on, the houses have gone up in value to $300K, even later I decide that I want out, we look things over and decide that the fair thing is for me to take one of the houses. At the moment that we take that action, no tax is (nor ought to be, IMO) due.

Later, when/if I sell the house, tax is due on the $50K in gains. Just like in the ETF case.

In the alternate treatment seemingly contemplated by the article, we could instead agree to sell one of the houses, jointly pay taxes on $50K in gains, and give me the sum of $150K-taxes, the gains of which I'd pay taxes upon again. You'd also have effectively paid taxes when you hadn't done anything but invest and hold. There's a pretty good argument this is unfair to me (to tax me twice on one gain); there's an almost ironclad argument that it's unfair to you.

It's no surprise that the treatment that is both more reasonable and more profitable is the one that ETFs seek to implement.

(Fees and other weirdnesses around real-estate ignored above for simplicity.)

<comment><USER5> You may decide that tax ought not to be due when you take one of the houses, but under the law it IS due. For me to take one of the houses, we would have to change the ownership structure and there would be a transfer price for that.

<comment><USER10> > change the ownership structure and there would be a transfer price for that

The transfer price in gp's example would be zero, wouldn't it.

<comment><USER5> Probably not. If the transfer price is zero, then that now becomes my tax basis in the property. So assuming again that I put in $100k originally, and now take out one house worth $150k, then sell it, I'm going to pay capital gains on the full $150k, not just my $50k gain.

What probably happens is that I sell you my share in the holding entity for $150k, and the entity sells me the house for $150k.

There are cases where you could simply dissolve the entity and distribute the assets, which would avoid the sale and resulting taxes, in which case you're just re-titling it and not selling it.

Tl;dr: this gets complicated really quickly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> >Imagine that a grocer got a tax deduction every time someone returned a box of cornflakes to his store. Heartbeats are when the grocer asks a friend to buy all the boxes and return them, just to pocket more deductions. >Fund managers and bankers say the trades are perfectly legal...

How is this legal, this seems to me to be fraud?? If this was small town grocer and John Doe, how would this not be rolled up into a defrauding the government?

[https://www.justice.gov/jm/criminal-resource- manual-923-18-u...](https://www.justice.gov/jm/criminal-resource- manual-923-18-usc-371-conspiracy-defraud-us)

<comment><USER12> It's a poor metaphor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Taxes have an outsize impact on markets.

People shouldn't really care about the difference between 15 versus 25 percentage point taxes if they feel they're timing the market right. But if you look at a chart of redemptions and CG taxes (check Wikipedia), it turns out a 5-9 percentage point decrease occurs around 9-40x increases in redemptions during the low tax period. This is basically why you observe Republican (i.e. low tax) administrations experience traditionally low stock market prices—everyone is selling and turning their imaginary paper into cash!

Capital gains taxes are essentially the free shipping of equities. They totally distort people's behavior disproportionate to their impact on returns, most of all by discouraging normal (retail) investors from selling when their gut tells them to, and then they bear most of the losses. Obviously a more equitable scheme would make capital gains taxes progressive instead of time based.

Just to make it clear about the article, if you made ETFs pay the taxes we'd get even more correlation and asset inflation. The best example of that is the cryptocurrency market.

<comment><USER14> To address the timing problem, one could make capital-gains taxes time- independent, or smoothly-varying with time.

Making capital-gains taxes progressive would address an entirely different set of concerns, and applies a different set of forces onto the market.

<comment><USER12> Cap gains are taxed in progressive brackets on an annual basis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> When all is said and done, this ends up seeming like pretty much the exact same treatment that "like-kind exchange" gives to Real Estate. In both cases you're allowed to swap an asset without capital gains at the swap time (but your basis stays at the low old price, so you eventually will).

I'm not sure how much I like these rules, but either they're both "dodges" or neither is.

</comment><comment><USER16> But don't investors eventually pay the tax when they sell the ETF?

<comment><USER17> Yes, but meanwhile the deferred taxes compound. The question is wether rebalancing an ETF should trigger taxes or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> How would ETFs (and passive investment systems in general) work without this trick? If there were no tax free way to do rebalancing, how could you really track the exchange?

<comment><USER12> Mutual funds do this by distributing capital gains to investors annually. Yes, that would be one reason they might lag the index.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> If ETFs are able to dodge taxes that mutual funds cannot, why do people still invest in mutual funds? Different risks?

<comment><USER20> One disadvantage of an ETF is that you have to pay a brokerage commission each time you trade it. Many mutual funds have no fees for buying/selling shares. If you have a savings strategy like automatically investing a percentage of every paycheck, the commissions on ETF trades could add up quickly.

<comment><USER12> Brokerage commissions are $0 for Vanguard ETFs in a Vanguard brokerage or Fidelity ETFs in a Fidelity brokerage, etc. This isn't a real downside unless you want to trade ETFs in a brokerage account unaffiliated with the ETF.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm willing to join in the outrage at Wall Street (a|im)morality but this one doesn't particular bother me. Let me explain why.

So imagine an S&P 500 ETF went from a $10B valuation to $15B in 5 years. Lots of transactions took place as the index gets rebalanced. Companies leave the index. Others take their place. No tax is paid by the fund. You're tempted to be outraged. Let's say that the offset tax amounts to $1B for simplicity.

But consider: someone invested $10k in that fund and held for 5 years. They sell and owe taxes on $5k.

If the ETF had been paying taxes that $15B would be $14B and the seller would owe taxes on $4k instead of $5k.

In Australia, when you hold a company and it, say, pays dividends. It typically pays corporate taxes on that. As a stockholder you not only receive that dividend but you receive a credit for taxes paid (called "franking credits"). If the dividend is fully franked (meaning the full corporate tax rate was paid) then you might receive a $700 dividend and $300 (30% of the gross $1000 dividend) in franking credits. When you do your taxes, if your tax rate is higher than 30% you pay the difference. If it's less you'll get a refund.

This is to avoid double taxation, basically. In the US, you don't have this. Earn income through a company, it pays taxes, it pays a dividend and you pay taxes again. This was the whole reason for the (misguided) passthrough entity tax break with the Trump tax cuts. It would be a lot easier if US dividends were just taxed at source and they came with a tax credit that could be applied to, say, US tax liabilities.

So, you can view heartbeat trades as simply a way of avoiding double taxation. It's at least debatable. After all, if you invest in a company you only pay taxes when you sell on the gain (dividends notwithstanding) so this is really just treating ETFs the same way.

<comment><USER7> It's only double taxation if you arbitrarily consider the transfer of the dividend from the company to yourself to be a non taxable event. Until that point the money isn't "yours" in the full normal sense. If I buy 1% of Exxon I don't have the legal right to extract 1% of its income.

Another argument for "double" taxation : corporations are artificial entities created by law with significant privileges, such as shielding owners from direct liability in most cases. That's a privilege society extends and it is arguable reasonable that it is subject to a different tax regime than capital which is owned directly by the individual.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> That's brilliant. Love the visualization as well.

</comment><comment><USER23> should be... "One of Wall Street's Dirty Little Secrets"

note: title was changed from its original posting of "ETF Tax Dodge is Wall Street's Dirty Little Secret"</comment>


Why no company that values their data should ever "Go Google"  - <AUTHOR> http://e1ven.com/2011/04/14/why-no-company-that-values-their-data-should-ever-go-google/ <comment><USER3> Why don't people make backups anymore? I know that using Google Apps is much easier than running your own stuff in-house. It requires much less time and resources, but at the same time there are still best practices and disaster recovery plans that should _always_ have something about backups in them. And just having them isn't good enough. They also need to be followed. Having worked at a place without these ( and attempting to get them implemented ) versus where I currently work that has them and follows them, I have to say, there are a lot fewer times where I feel like screaming here. Do it, and stop expecting 100% uptime and availability of all docs/important information from any service, internal or external. Nothing is 100% but there are many ways to make it less stressful.

<comment><USER4> 100% agree. We are developing service which tries to solve some of these problems, so I'll do a shameless plug here.

One way to address these kind of problems is to use cloudHQ to synchronize your Google Docs with SugarSync (clickable: <http://cloudHQ.net/sugarsync>). (We are releasing dropbox this weekend).

Here is our idea: there are many different cloud storage services and each of them is very good for a particular use case but not so good for other use cases. For example, Google Docs service is excellent for collaboration but not so good for storage. On the other hand, Dropbox or Sugarsync service is excellent for storage but not so for collaboration.

So if data is continuously synchronized between Google Docs and lets say SugarSync storage, then you can always fall back to SugarSync when Google Docs becomes unavailable and vice versa. In order words, you can use other service as a standby site in case of service unavailability, malicious or accidental deletion of files, etc.

<comment><USER5> That sounds amazing, actually. A service which synced Google Docs documents directly to my Dropbox is definitely something I would be interested in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is precisely why I think it's insane that people trust their email - <USER2> nexus of their online presence, normally the key to every account and their primary communication tool for everything from conversations to account statements to a free service. It's not 1996 anymore, this stuff matters. I pay for Rackspace email. When I have a problem I can call a human and get an answer. As far as I'm concerned it's a bargain.

Google doesn't do human, it doesn't matter if it's a free gmail account, a serious-money adwords account or your entire business on apps, you're just a number if something goes wrong you're on your own, shouting at the unmoving monolith.

<comment><USER7> I've got Google Apps for Business, and when all of our mailboxes were unavailable I contacted Google at the number listed on their website, talked to a human, got it resolved in about 30 minutes.

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure that they followed the support instructions, the email excerpt said to reply if that wasn't the right solution but it just says they sent another support email.

It probably would have been better to call, I mean you are paying for 24/7 phone and email support.

I haven't had any problems with getting support through Google Apps for Business, I might be an exception though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not that it matters much, but I called them several times, and replied to the original email. But I think you're focusing too much on the specifics.

The problem is that your mail is crucially important to you, but rather less important to Google. In such a scenario, it makes sense to change your plan to something under your control, even if it's painful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Yes, because we all know that when we run these systems outselves, they never go down.

<comment><USER10> When Google breaks, you're basically stuck waiting for them. If your own system breaks, at least you can attempt to fix it.

<comment><USER11> When your hosting company goes down, you're basically stuck waiting for them.

The only way to ensure that you never have downtime is to not use the Internet, and keep all your servers connected to a nuclear reactor, all inside a mountain. That covers power and not being flooded or hit by a tornado, anyway.

Even then you'd better be careful not to trip over any of the power cables or type "rm -rf /" as root.

<comment><AUTHOR> For mission critical things, you want to reduce the points of failure, and ensure that when things DO go wrong, you have a reasonable escalation path.

It's now been over 8 hours since it went down, and no fix from Google yet. 4+ days on the missing file.

If I was running in house, I could have entirely restored the mail server from tape by now. I could have swapped over to a hot-spare in a few minutes. I could have failed over to our backup internet service. I have a lot of options.

With Google, my option is to wait.. And hope my business doesn't lose too much money while Google gets around to fixing it.

<comment><USER12> As another example of handling cloud services going offline, consider this case by SmugMug:

[http://don.blogs.smugmug.com/2007/01/30/amazon-s3-outages- sl...](http://don.blogs.smugmug.com/2007/01/30/amazon-s3-outages-slowdowns- and-problems/)

"""So what are we doing differently? Simple. Amazon serves as "cold storage" where everyone's valuable photos go to live in safety. Our own storage clusters are now "hot storage" for photos that need to be served up fast and furious to the millions of unique visitors we get every day. That's a bit of an oversimplification of our architecture, as you can imagine, but it's mostly accurate."""

You can always maintain a hot-backup, fail-over of your site on your own servers -- perhaps with reduced functionality until the scalable cloud services come back online. For a mission-critical site, this would seem to be a reasonable tradeoff.

<comment><USER13> Are you, by chance, a Python programmer?

<comment><USER11> English doesn't have """triple double quotes"""?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Dropbox has an advantage here, in that all files are stored local (mirrored, really) in user's computers, and they are backed up. It doesn't scale to shared editing, though.

I'm turning more and more to plaintext/markdown on Dropbox.

<comment><USER15> Dropbox-style mirroring is still susceptible to the hypothetical "service problem killed/corrupted a file, the mistake was happily sync'd down to all mirrors."

In short: if you're reliant on the cloud service for your _backups_ (as distinct from your sync'ing), you're at risk.

<comment><USER16> Dropbox stores different versions of files so even if files are corrupted/deleted and this change is sync'd up to them, you can still restore your files.

<comment><USER5> But so does Google Docs. The problems start happening when all versions of a document are corrupted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> In case anyone cares to hear a counterpoint, I run a nearly 20,000 seat Apps domain and the service and transparency we receive from Google is leaps & bounds better than from any vendor of similar size. Perhaps my happiness makes sense given how much we're paying them compared to, say, e1ven's company.

</comment><comment><USER18> I think a lot of this is not about security or service level. It's psychological, it's about control/trust. When it's under your control and you can fix things yourself, you psychologically feel more safe. If you rely on someone else and they say "we're working on it" but don't give you an estimate, you feel a lack of control. It may be that doing things yourself has worse uptime/performance/etc than relying on someone else, but the psychological effect of that loss of control when something bad happens is huge.

</comment><comment><USER19> <http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/features.html>

Support and reliability

24/7 phone and email support for critical issues

99.9% uptime guarantee SLA

<comment><AUTHOR> We have that ;) I called them, emailed them, and asked for updates in as plain of terms as possible.

4+ days on the missing file, 8+ hours on broken email.

<comment><USER20> Quite simply, Google appears to be in material breach of your SLA. Where is your lawyer?

<comment><USER21> 99.99% over what time period?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I might of missed it, but are you using Google Apps (free) or Google Apps for business ? <http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/features.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> Business. We pay them $50/user, for quite a few users. Thanks for the clarification, I've edited the top paragraph to make that clearer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I would be afraid that in a dispute Google could do a PayPal and lock you out of your data. I would also be concerned that Google would provide law enforcement access to your data without your knowledge, consent or a warrant.

</comment><comment><USER24> Just Googled around and found <http://www.backupify.com/> or maybe something like <http://www.ltech.com/google-apps/products/google-docs-backup>

Has anyone tried those products?

<comment><USER25> Mixed reviews on the Google Apps marketplace for backupify: [https://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/viewReviews?pr...](https://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/viewReviews?productListingId=5941+16825965296321823984) \-- 27 users take 21 days to backup? Might well be the Google Apps infrastructure that's not up to the task. Looking at my company's Google apps domain, we probably have several million threads and are close to a terabyte of data. I imagine backing that up via IMAP could take a while.

<comment><USER26> Those are fair criticisms of Backupify to date. We've recently totally reworked our throttling mechanisms, to our initial backup times are decreasing rather rapidly. But, to your point, we are at the mercy of how fast Google can give us the data through their API. That said, given Google's general uptime, the likelihood of Google losing a file before we can back it up is pretty remote. Not zero chance, but really unlikely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> What type of SLA's did you agree to when you signed up for Google Apps?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's sort of the point.

It's a big deal to us, not a big deal to them. We'd pay extra for a tighter SLA if that option were available, but as it is, on outage hurts us a LOT, and them not very much.

That would seem to be prescription for bringing it in-house, despite how little I want to do that.

<comment><USER28> Find a small local IT company to use. It's been my experience that they are very responsive and do really care and many of them are very high-quality (old Unix guys). Google are just so large and so far away. They can't be everything to everybody (try as they might).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Personally, I use Google Docs every day, and I back up all of my docs on a regular basis (easy to do). Same with my GMail: use POP3 to keep a backup copy locally.

I would not consider running my own services and not back up my data. If you use GMail and/or Docs for free or as a paid customer, still, why would you not make local backups?

</comment><comment><USER30> It gets much worse than this.

A lot of businesses are completely dependent on Google via organic search and AdWords for 90%+ percent of their revenues (without even realizing it).

What happens when you log into your AdWords account and you're greeted by this cryptic message:

<http://www.devside.net/images/adwords-account-suspended.png>

Except that you've done nothing wrong, have never been warned, are not a spammer, and are completely legitimate.

 _What happens is that_ after contacting Google you soon realize that a monopoly with no customer support is the most dangerous one.

</comment><comment><USER31> Please stop paying them.. companies seem to only learn through the wallet

</comment><comment><USER32> No person or organization should put itself in a position where it depends only on an external source for either security or backups. Whatever else might or might not be "mission critical", I think this inherent is.

Come back and tell me that relying on using Google docs while keeping local backups is problematic or awkward. That would be a fair complaint.

Toshiba isn't going to help me if my drive goes down either. Whether they send a nice or not nice email isn't the point.

<comment><USER18> This sounds great, but in practice is impossible. Are you personally as an individual going to take care of 100% of your own backups? Are you going to drive the tape over to the other facility that you own, make regular checks that you can restore, etc? No.

Ultimately you are going to rely on someone else and something else. Be it your IT guy, the company that hosts your backups, the power company, the company that makes the machines you keep your backups on, etc. You can distribute this so that you rely on lots of someone else's and any one or more of them can fail, but often you'll still have one point of failure somewhere (the guy who monitors the distributed backups for example).

<comment><USER32> No,

I mean each organization needs to have in-organization backups and each individual needs to back-up their machine.

Yes, _my_ IT guy. I need to have an institutional relation with my backup guy, not just a paying relation. The IT guy could send the data to three different online backup services but me having a personal and institutional relation with him makes sure that whatever scheme he uses will _remain_ reliable as other things change.

The point is that every organization has at least one _mission_ , one task that it is worth doing within the organization rather than offloading to another entity. And backup is always going to be close to that mission.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I worked for a company that switched to Google Business a few years ago. The one thing I'll say about the experience is that administering the back end totally sucks.

The UI in a lot of places makes no sense. For instance, there are settings for when you set up an email list that are labeled so obtusely that you're not really sure of what you're selecting.

Another thing that totally bit us once was when dealing with document ownership in Google Docs -- a lady in marketing had created a bunch of documents, then later left the company. After scouring the back end for about an hour (literally), I concluded that there was NO WAY for the admin user to reassign the owner of the document to a different person. I ended up having to log in as that person (luckily we kept people's accounts active for 6-12 months after they left) and switching the owner that way. Totally absurd. (If I'm wrong about that, please do tell.)

As far as customer service goes, it's definitely a minus. They don't make it easy to tell you who to call or email when you do have a problem, and once you get there, the time before your problem is resolved can vary wildly (from hours to days). That really sucks when you have a salesman breathing down your neck because he can't use his email.

</comment><comment><USER24> So are you actually switching off Google?

<comment><AUTHOR> We've moved from Google Docs to Dropbox, at least as a placeholder; We're still trying to find a better long-term solution. AeroFS is leading the pack, once it is out of beta.

For Email, we plan to, but it's a bit more complicated.

I'll need to imapsync each account, so it's going to be messy, so I'll need a week or two to plan it out, and build/test a new Zimbra server.

<comment><USER34> Try <http://www.MigrationBox.com> if you want to save the messy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> In another news scientists discovered that water is wet...

</comment><comment><USER36> This is precisely the reason why I don't use Google Docs for any mission- critical documents. Store them in Dropbox or some other shared, automatically- backed-up system where you can easily retrieve a copy from somewhere.

Always have redundancy too. We keep most of our files in Dropbox. But we all use Time Machine too. We also use version control for a lot of our work.

This might seem like overkill, but each has a specific use and purpose with the added bonus of providing us with backup redundancy.

</comment><comment><USER37> I think this is the problem with all cloud services. The liability costs involved in dealing with worst case scenarios are potentially so huge, the majority of providers have terms and conditions which relinquish all responsibility when bad things happen.

The only real solution is backup, and the only backup that can truly be relied upon is one you make yourself; in which case the point in making use of a cloud service in the first place is pretty much reduced.

</comment><comment><USER38> >We've been running flawlessly for 6 months, paying them $50/user to avoid handling it ourselves.

if you open Excel and put some typical numbers into it (like commodity hardware cost, networks, electricity, data center mortgage, basic maintenance employees, 40% margin, etc...) you'd see that $50/user/month is just basic usage - timeslice to run provided software on provided hardware. There is no room in that number for a real person dealing with your specific issue. An elephant can't squeeze into a needle eye, even if he promised it to you in writing and accepted the money - just look at the elephant and at the needle with your own eyes.

<comment><USER39> You might already know this already and that's just a typo, but the actual price is $50/user/year, not per month.

<comment><USER38> if it is per year then it is a real miracle of mass scale production at Google.</comment></comment></comment>


Trump calls for US Postal Service to raise Amazon's shipping rates - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/12/29/trump-calls-for-u-s-postal-service-to-raise-amazons-shipping-rates/?utm_term=.c9f11107b95d <comment><USER2> Most people have Amazon Prime which means that packages usually ship via the free two-business-day service using UPS or FedEx. Raising the USPS rate would have limited and probably negative impact.</comment>


"Dumbing Self Down" - <AUTHOR> I was scrolling on Google on how people felt about having to dumb themselves down in order to have friends and it's very sad. You have people that genuinely have a hard time "meeting people where they are" mentally and feel alone with their own thoughts.
My 14 year old is now experiencing having to dumb herself down in order to have friends but she's handling it ok for the most part. Doing much better than me, lol.
I guess a great question would be,
#1 If you struggle with dumbing yourself down to be in others company, what do you do to help deal with it?
#2 If you mastered getting over this feeling, what did you do to overcome it.
I don't think I am better than anyone, it's just some conversations are harder than others because the lack of substance and productivity. It makes me feel almost cavemen like. Having to purposely avoid some actions and what to say is tiresome ... I just rather be alone with my own thoughts but they won't let me do that either lol. <comment><USER2> It sounds like you are having some personal issues though. Specifically, in regards to accepting people. I think this would come up in therapy quite strongly if you went, though I am not saying you need to go.

Over the last 9 years I have changed my life around quite drastically. Yet, my family and people that I used to know well only remember me as the old version of myself. And so, a lot of the conversations stem from that perspective. Which, honestly, is both draining and pathetic at the same time.

But because fighting over it is not worth the effort, I try to accept it as much as I can.

</comment><comment><USER3> I maintain this list of things that I know make me feel good. What I call my daily sources of nourishment.

When I encounter a negative trigger, I focus on things on that list. I know whenever I am fully occupied with things on the list, the easier it gets to brush off/deal with whatever is building up on the negativity queue. The key for me was to actively/proactively add/subtract things on the list.</comment>


Software is 20% technology and 80% psychology - <AUTHOR> http://www.saidsvec.com/2009/05/11/technology-vs-psychology/ Do you write software for a living?  Or design hardware?  Or maybe some of each?  While the particular projects any two software or hardware designers do may be worlds apart, we can characterize what we do in the same way: our work is 20% technology and 80% psychology. <comment><USER2> Ssh, don't tell the aspbergers.</comment>


StumbleUpon Modifies Core Functionality, Inconveniences Users - <AUTHOR> https://getsatisfaction.com/stumbleupon_help_center/topics/notification-and-stumbles-being-sent-to-email?topic-reply-list[settings][filter_by]=all <comment><USER2> People still use Stumbleupon? I though everyone gave up on like 4 years ago when they turned it into a horrendous POS.</comment>


Ask HN: I earn 14K post-tax in a baltic country, worth moving to Bay Area? - <AUTHOR> I work remotely for a Bay Area company and get paid SF money. The CoL here is very low, my rent is around $400 for a 4-bedroom apartment. Have 2 kids (3 and 5 years old), wife is happy, our whole family is here. But ...
I want my kids to learn proper english and I don't know how long sustainable I can keep up working remotely. I'm always working alone and need to put more efforts to keep up with technological advancements. Second, I have the feeling that my career will get a hit in the long term and that I could learn more by joining a proper big-corp (Google, FB, Apple, etc...) I have the abilities to join them very easily. Most of my friends are already working for them.
I know Bay Area is very expensive. I made the calculations and seems like I'll be able to put only around $1K money aside (for $200k annual minimum while working for a big-corp). Currently I can put aside at least $10K money each month from my current gig.
My concern is that my kids would have harder time in the future to learn english (the younger the easier they can learn english) and that I might not be able to join these companies in the future due to ageism and not be able to keep up with technical knowledge.
So, is worth moving to Bay Area, get a hit money wise but increase quality of living (nature, career, etc..) or is it better I earn as much money as possible? <comment><USER2> Since you are already working remotely, my advise would be to consider other places where the cost of living is not as high as SV. Anywhere else in the US or other English speaking countries for instance.

I am in Indian. I've lived and worked for 2+ years each in Singapore, Germany and now in Ireland. So I know a bit about moving countries and the associated pros and cons.

I would highly recommend considering Ireland, Australia, New zealand if you are looking for English speaking countries with a good standard of life (in fact better, if you factor in health, social services and kids education) vis- a-vis cost of living.

If you are adventurous you might also consider places like Singapore or Malta or Dubai ...all of which have a good tech scene.

Don't get hugh up on 'keeping up with technological advancements' and ageism. Ageism is, in my (most likely biased) opinion a US tech industry specific thing (I am 40 and have not yet felt that's a disadvantage). As far as tech stacks go, keeping up with them can be done anywhere and you don't necessarily /have/ to work on the latest and greatest in a professional environment all the time. As you age, you'd realize the actual rate of advancement in tech, in real innovation terms, is pretty darn slow.

HTH

</comment><comment><USER3> Former Bay Area tech worker here, also working remotely now from Central Europe. IMO if you are already making SF money and working remotely, you have it made. Keep saving 10k and enjoy a more relaxed life. Your kids can learn English from youtube, duoLingo and Khan. Maybe your city has an American School or something equivalent.

You have to decide if career climbing is what you really want, because along with that comes long hours, stress, likely a lot of business travel and other headaches. Personally I don't have a hard time keeping up w new tech and to fix the working alone thing I work at a co-work space. I get as much social interaction as I want.

If you really want them to be in a native English environment then move to the US but not the Bay Area. cost-of-living arbitrage! You can literally live anywhere since you are already remote. The US is full of beautiful areas, just take your pick.

Re: ageism, it will be the worst in the Bay Area. Other places are more open to workers with experience.

</comment><comment><USER4> There are other tech hubs you should look into:

Seattle, Washington

Boston, Massachusetts

Austin, Texas

Atlanta, Georgia

Raleigh, North Carolina

Denver, Colorado

Boca Raton, Florida

Don't limit yourself to the Bay Area.</comment>


San Francisco California Residential Rent and Rental Statistics - <AUTHOR> http://www.deptofnumbers.com/rent/california/san-francisco/ <comment><USER2> Quick math. If a person is paying 1654 /month in rent, and 12 months in a year, and you're paying 30% in taxes. 1654 * 12 * 1.3 = 25802

25k of your gross salary is going to your rent!</comment>


The insignificance of statistical significance [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.johndcook.com/SupremeCourtRuling2.pdf

<comment><USER2> The problem with statistical significance is really not about weighing type I vs type II errors. It's much more about 1) basing decisions conditional on the data rather than the null, 3) dealing with nuisance parameters, 3) combining information from both from prior sources and through dependencies across unknown quantities and 4) having some flexible and coherent recipe for tackling inference when confronted with new applied problems.</comment>


Personal Development Articles from Hacker News - <AUTHOR> Last try:
---
Is there interest for a weekly newsletter containing just the Personal Development articles found on the HN front-page? I've made a tiny letter for this purpose: http://tinyletter.com/personaldevelopmenthacker
First issue is here: http://tinyletter.com/personaldevelopmenthacker/letters/personal-development-hacker-1
Back story: for over 10 years now I've been reading HN with a certain pattern: I ignore over 90% of the tech / startup / silicon valley stuff and mostly focus on the personal development articles (learning, focus, productivity, health) and also lifestyle business articles (indie hackers, solo founders)
Every week I'll dig up the best links and comments on:
- productivity, personal development & inspiration
- small/lifestyle businesses / one man shows
- side projects
- some articles on family life or parenting
- occasional tech articles when they relate to the above
I'll do my best to avoid:
- political news
- bitcoin, uber, tesla or other tech giant news
- latest js frameworks, most tech links
- startup / VC oriented pieces
To my knowledge there's no place to read just those articles and I know it would save me lots of time digging thorough HN. I'd like to know if this is something the community is wants, so I'm open to all feedback <comment><USER2> I also want to do something like this. I and some of my friend have a private Telegram channel where we shares useful links. This weekend I have some free times and decide to just do something, and here is the result:

[https://betterdev.link/](https://betterdev.link/)

Basically I collect links that aim to help myself learn a thing or too and hopefully other people to.

</comment><comment><USER3> Clickables:

* [http://tinyletter.com/personaldevelopmenthacker](http://tinyletter.com/personaldevelopmenthacker)

* [http://tinyletter.com/personaldevelopmenthacker/letters/pers...](http://tinyletter.com/personaldevelopmenthacker/letters/personal-development-hacker-1)

</comment><comment><USER4> With this, i will probabbly not access hacker news again haha. Your list is basically what i search for in here.

Keep the good job :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the encouragement Pedro. Actually if someone already did this I'd gladly skip HN for it too :)

<comment><USER4> Hey man!

[https://gist.github.com/pedrofornaza/6b71569972de0e2bfa3c775...](https://gist.github.com/pedrofornaza/6b71569972de0e2bfa3c7756c77b115c)

I did this sometime ago. Its probabbly not working 100% but may help you. :)

Its as script to run on background (cron or alike) and raise desktop notifications when articles with the keywords you put in the script.

I had several ideas for this but i just stopped developing for lack of time.

Let me know if it interests you.

<comment><AUTHOR> cool! I wonder if the HN API can help there also?

I'll take a look as this could help me, but there'll also be manual work into this, such as sifting through all posts on the homepage, reading comments and submissions from certain power users, etc

<comment><USER4> To be fair, i didnt even thought about HN API. I was doing some tests to learn about the desktop notifications and did the "fast way".

Anyway, you will have to read it all but it can narrow a little bit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sounds great.</comment>


A look inside the Y Combinator interview room.  - <AUTHOR> http://dailybooth.com/jon/220842

<comment><USER2> Huh, as I was flicking through the photos, I was thinking how awesome the site was....then I saw the t-shirt photo; Grats guys — how'd the interview go?? :)

</comment><comment><USER3> There are a few "artistic" iphone shots of ycombinator environs on my tumblelog: <http://rdouble.tumblr.com>

<comment><USER4> Hey, House MD has got the same lamp in his office as Y-Combinator (and now I want to know where to get one).

<comment><USER3> _Hey, House MD has got the same lamp in his office as Y-Combinator (and now I want to know where to get one)._

It looks like a George Nelson "Saucer."

<http://www.ylighting.com/bub-saucer.html>

<comment><USER4> Thank you, much appreciated!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> for someone who's been around computers as long as he has, it's surprising that pg's only reactions around them are either happily surprised or insanely angry.

<http://dailybooth.com/tlbtlbtlb/221965>

<comment><USER6> Well, he's obviously a boolean.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER8> my camera isn't good with backlight or in a dark room. i would think that's a common issue. have you guys considered some kind of thingie that will correct the lighting?

</comment><comment><USER9> yeah this looks pretty cool. good luck guys!

random question...can i sync pictures to my twitter account (i.e. posterous)?

</comment><comment><USER10> c.f. <http://www.dailymugshot.com/>

<comment><USER11> <http://www.flickaday.com>

from his thread "The Story of My Startup"

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=479352>

But dailybooth looks superior imho. Good luck!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> cool service. i signed up! btw isight is not working on an older mbp + firefox 3.0.8</comment>


Apple fights back with appeal against EU Irish tax ruling - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/business-38362434 <comment><AUTHOR> source pdf (also mentioned in the article): [http://g8fip1kplyr33r3krz5b97d1.wpengine.netdna- cdn.com/wp-c...](http://g8fip1kplyr33r3krz5b97d1.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/12/SA.38373_State-Aid-implemented-by-Ireland-to-Apple_- non-confidential-ver....pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> guess I should have linked to this directly instead. but the article is a good TL;DR compared to that _monster_ of a statement :)</comment></comment>


Googles new language Dart linked to Android? - <AUTHOR> http://mobile.twitter.com/drkrab/status/112198271304335360

<comment><USER2> If Google does link Dart to the Android I think that will be exciting. Currently at least the apps are running off of XML and Java I think that if it had its own language. Though the second link went to an article with a tagline "...new programming language for structured web programming". That would be interesting but everyone and their mother is coming out or working on web programming languages.</comment>


Uber's Board to Discuss Leave of Absence for CEO Travis Kalanick - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/11/technology/uber-holder-report.html <comment><USER2> Dupe of: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14530797](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14530797)

</comment><comment><USER3> > "Or is this just window dressing on the way to more bad behavior?"

I think this was my comment on the last Uber article. They fired a couple of people, hired Holder and seem to be doing damage control.

This seems like more. We're going on anonymous sources here, so it will be interesting to see what really happens as a result. But it feels like Uber needs a massive culture shift as a company; like turning around an oil tanker on the edge of a hurricane type of shift.

> Uber is fighting significant employee attrition, the tens of thousands of > drivers it depends on are angry about their pay, and investors are concerned > that one of the most well-funded start-ups in history has come unglued.

I've met a lot of Lyft drivers who stopped driving for Uber. I've also encountered a lot of bad Lyft drivers, as Uber has a pretty strict rating policy and dismisses people with low ratings (leaving Lyft to pick up the scraps; like a driver who didn't stop for an ambulance).

Still, only people who are in tech or on sites like HN care. The majority of my friends still use Uber. Many think Uber and Lyft are just as bad to their employees. Advertising is a powerful thing. So it apathy. The vast majority of people either realize and chose to ignore, or don't care, that everything we have comes on the backs of an increasingly underpaid working class.

[http://khanism.org/perspective/trapped-in-the- cubical/](http://khanism.org/perspective/trapped-in-the-cubical/)

Will Uber fall apart in the next year? Unlikely. They have so much capital and infrastructure, they're making money and despite all the laws they sidestep and outright break, they still manage to stay on top while hiring drivers who can barely afford to drive, thwarting unions and providing people a cheaper way to get home after they're drunk.

Uber is the pinnacle of capitalism, and despite all the recent media backlash, they will PR the fuck out of it, run their damage control, symbolically change some things, maybe legitimately change some others, but in the end, they'll be around for a long time to come. Their success if built on an extreme amount of _disruption_ and considerable risk that has paid off.

It's not in a vacuum. It is one of many industries that have climbed to the top of the world in this fashion over the past century. The rise of questionable tech companies, adding to the existing questionable oil, manufacturing and retail companies of the last century, should raise serious philosophical questions about what humanity is evolving to become.

<comment><USER4> Great comment. I agree with all of it, except your closing sentiment.

It's evolving to become a place where goods and services previously only available to billionaires became available to millionaires and then became available to the middle class and then became available to the poor all over the World.

In 1900, the US had 4,192 cars. 1681 ran on steam. 1575 were electric and 936 had an internal combustion engineer. Only the super rich and hobbyists had them. The Model T was released in 1908. On May 26th, 1927, 15 million Model T's had been produced. Today, 88 percent of Americans are drivers and there are 1.9 cars per household in a country of 321 million people. Furthermore, most of those without a car have access to buses and trains. One day we'll evolve to become a society where everyone will have access to on demand transportation as reliable as running water, available everywhere.

Transportation isn't the only industry impacted by this evolution. Even the uninsured in America have access to more and better medical care than John D. Rockefeller did in his day.

We can symbolically condemn capitalism until we go blue in the face, but the fact still remains that it is the only reason this planet is able to sustain 7.5 billion people at the current quality of life. 100, 200, 300 years ago plagues and famines were common and many suffered and died due to causes that fewer and fewer people in the present will ever have to worry about.

Are all of the institutions produced by capitalism perfect? Far from it, but even those institutions have flaws that we can correct if, as a society, we're willing to put a price on them to incentivate some entrepreneur to solve it in the pursuit of profit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> _grabs pop corn_</comment>