Show HN: Shelf – A better way to share knowledge across teams and organizations - <AUTHOR> https://shelf.io <comment><USER2> I don't see any mention of the ability to self-host. That's a deal breaker for many people. I trust that my internal network is going to stay up; however external connections can be severed and I'm dependent upon you as a company to keep your resources online. If you're down, my knowledge access is down. That destroys productivity. I appreciate the idea and the execution looks good; however for the product itself I wouldn't trust SaaS since I can't control whether it's up or down.

<comment><USER3> > If you're down, my knowledge access is down.

Even for companies that want to cloud host, there's a concern about if something happens to Shelf itself (eg: the service suffers a major multi-day outage or goes out of business). There needs to be a contingency plan (which is probably some form of self-host).

If usage of a product like this is successful, it both becomes a critical operational system and represents thousands of hours of time invested populating it. There needs to be assurance that investment is not lost and the business is not 'down' in case something happens. I work at an SMB and we use quite a few cloud-hosted services, but whenever we do we discuss the balance of how critical a service it is and what our contingency plan would be. Sometimes it's switching to a competitor (and maybe importing history), sometimes it's pulling the open source version and hosting ourselves.

The product looks great, but all I can see is "Data backup and recovery" as a feature. I don't know what that means or what happens if shelf.io disappears, so that's a huge red flag for me, unfortunately.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this topic. It's a challenge for all SaaS products I believe but yes, the more business critical the product the more important to address.

Apart from self-host and open source, do you have other suggestions on how to address this on a product level? Would you feel comfortable with structured exports for example?

<comment><USER4> Check out www.enterpriseready.io to get a deep understanding of the standard features that enterprises require (ie SSO, RBAC, audit logs, on-prem deployment, reporting etc). Happy to talk through any of the features, I contributed about 80% of the content. We also built Replicated.com which powers the on-prem delivery for other applications like Travis CI, npm, CodeClimate, Circle CI and a bunch of others. We think about these problems all the time and how we can best help solve them. Happy to share what we've learned there as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Enterpriseready is a good site, agreed. I'll also check Replicated to see how you support on-prem and would gladly take your offer to hear more about your learnings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> After browsing the home page for ~30 seconds, I had a popup pushed in my face asking me to enter my e-mail address. I understand that building an e-mail list is important, but please don't do this. I'm taking the time to check out your product, don't bug me while I'm doing that.

<comment><USER6> People don't want ads, don't want crypto-currency mining and not not even "popups" asking for emails, want free trials.

Frankly, you just have to click the "x". How hard it is ? I do not understand why does it bug you so much.

<comment><USER7> Every damn site does this. I'm in the middle of reading an article and boom, I get a popup in my face asking for something. If it were just one site, that'd be fine. It's not -- it's an epidemic. News sites, shopping sites, blogs, charities, tech articles, they all nag and nag.

The nagging and attention-stealing is everywhere. Every time I buy something online that's not Amazon or Apple, I get signed up for an email newsletter. I get spam in the mail, often from, say, furniture companies because they have some kind of sneaky thing that gets leads from pages I visit. I've never bought anything from Flos, Design Within Reach or Bonobos, but in my mailbox the crap goes.

These things add up. It's just a never-ending deluge of materialistic effluent.

<comment><USER6> And probably you dislike

\- ads

\- mining inside your browser

\- paying

I dislike all of these too. But complaining about a "modal window asking for email which you can close" seems mean. The nagging and attention stealing is everywhere and you can easily ignore them or at least tell an alternative solution to these guys.

<comment><USER7> As I said, if it were only this site, it'd be fine. But it's the entire frickin' Internet at this point. Almost every single browser experience is entering a world of nagging or shameless selling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I'm one of the founders of Shelf. We think teams and organizations are wasting too much time locating and sharing knowledge.

Been working on helping solve this this issue for quite a while now keeping things in more of a closed circle of beta users until recently. Why? Because we wanted to build a well rounded product based on customer feedback before opening this thing up.

Anyway, so far we've built Shelf primarily on a NodeJs stack making heavy use of microservices and recently more and more Lambdas with (and sometimes without) the Serverless framework. And we built a web clipper as browser extension for Chrome and Firefox to make it easier to clip and share web content.

Would love to get your feedback on if and how you experience the pain point. Of course feedback on the product itself would be great, too, if you want to give it a spin.

<comment><USER8> I want what you're offering, but I do need real security assurances, beyond "secure hosting".

> _Enterprise-level security: Single Sign-On (SSO), Data backup and recovery, > Role-based permissions, Secure hosting, AES encryption_

Ok but that's "consumer level" for SaaS.

For Enterprise, you need to prove to me that a malicious insider at your organization can not access the enterprise's data. Dealing with insiders and RBAC models is particularly interesting when offering search.

You need to provide full access and full change audits trails.

You need to provide a business continuity plan, as noted in a sibling comment.

You can make a more trusted claim by getting your solution HIPAA certified. If you are compliant for storing personal medical information, you're basically there for "enterprise-level security".

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for that input. Totally agree that HIPAA certification is a good approach to prove full coverage of what you've mentioned.

<comment><USER9> Is "HIPAA certification" an actual thing? As far as I know, the various HIPAA "certificates" offered by private companies are not universally recognized, nor do they have clear legal relevance. See TrueVault's FAQ: [https://www.truevault.com/hipaa- compliance.html](https://www.truevault.com/hipaa-compliance.html)

<comment><USER10> It's not. You typically sign whats a called a BAA[0] with an entity that is covered by HIPAA compliance. In other words, if a hospital wants to use the software they would make the SaaS provider sign a BAA. This then subjects both the hospital to HIPAA as well as the BAA. The best you can do is basically get audited by an external firm, not dissimilar to how PCI compliance works (which also doesn't have a certification, but has QSA certifications).

[0] - [https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/covered- entities...](https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/covered- entities/sample-business-associate-agreement-provisions/index.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The site looks great and good job on shipping it out!

I probably don't fit as your target customer, so please take my feedback with a grain of salt.

After digging around your site for a bit, it seems like your "special sauce" is to bring incredibly powerful search features for multiple data types/sources all from a single authoritative place (Shelf.io)

Based on your YouTube videos, I really like the ability to parse rich data on the internet and input it for my team to see. Seems like a great product marketing/engineering folks during the high level brainstorming phase.

Use case: 1.Software Engineer: Reads a cool article on Medium about some software technique and wants their team to consider it for their their new beta project.

2.Marketing person: Gets inspired by a video/image for a new ad campaign that they are designing and wants to share it with their team.

Also as an end user, I really like being able to see your actual product and how it works without needing to signup or give out my information. If the product seems like it can solve my pain point within 45 seconds of an intro video and 5 mins of playing with a demo site, then I'll commit to a email signup. Basecamp's "How it works" tab does a great job of this.

On the flip side, I feel that Salesforce doesn't need to do this, since they already have market share and a great reputation for their products.

I would take your "Intro to Shelf" YouTube video, cut the first 25 seconds out and embed it somewhere convenient on your website.

Highlight an example use case through a short video. I think Grammarly does a great job with this in their "new social media manager video" FWD TO :15 seconds [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ak-Y56SfkS0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ak-Y56SfkS0)

Also for your voiceovers in the Youtube videos, I would invest in a good audio recording mic. The audio seems a little distant,and hollow. I use a Zoom H5 recorder, it is a decent product for what I need/require.As a lay audio person, This is my reference point for good voice audio. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUhisi2FBuw&t=15s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUhisi2FBuw&t=15s).

I know you guys are in start up mode, and need to ship. But as random end user, this is what I'm perceiving. Hope this helps! Good Luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, great detailed feedback on what we can do to make it easier and more pleasant to get the gist of Shelf right away. It's really appreciated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> When tagging an item during editing it is unclear how to seperate tags. Semi- colon? Colon? Space?

When you use the wrong seperation an error is shown _after_ you switch focus to the next input field. Worse: the (appearently badly formatted) tags are wiped instead of giving me the option to replace the bad characters it found.

The number of tags allowed is unclear too.

It turns out that tag-field is completely whacked. At a 30(?) characters it assumes you've meant that set of characters as a tag. Unless your previous tag (delimited by an [enter] as it turns out) has a 10 or so characters too. Then it cuts of your next 30 character tag and deletes it.

Feature request: expiration dates on items.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for taking time to try out Shelf! And for providing your feedback as well.

Tags: delimiters are [comma], [enter] and [tab]. 50 tags are the max. 30 characters are the max. We'll see how we can make tagging a better experience. Including suggested tags based on content/previous behavior.

Can you explain what you mean exactly by: expiration on items?

<comment><USER12> Nothing goes stale faster than documentation. What I'd like to see is that when someone adds documentation he/she also adds an 'use before' or 'expires on' date.

So that folks coming after them know that the docs are probably no longer valid.

<comment><AUTHOR> Got it. I first thought you wanted that content to disappear altogether. Thanks for clarifying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Kudos to the product team that wrote the various "Shelf vs. X" posts. These are well done and very useful for quickly understanding the Shelf product value.

IMHO more companies should do these kinds of posts because they emphasize fast product-market matching, using decently-informed decisions.

</comment><comment><USER14> Interested? ENDURE WAVES OF POPUPS BEFORE UNDERSTANDING THE PRODUCT!

<comment><USER15> Want to know what it does? A picture is worth a thousand words, so try squinting at these tiny screenshots on your mobile phone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think there is a typo on the Why Shelf? page. "Important information is buried in email inboxes, cloud storage platforms, communication tools, project management tools and the list goes on. _platforms and more._ "

'platforms and more.' seems like it was supposed to get edited out or something.

<comment><USER17> Great pickup. Will make changes shortly. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Half of the IT world seems to be trying to solve this problem :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice validation that the pain really does exist! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> So. Confluence. At least that's what it looks like form available tiny screenshots on the landing page.

Or Confluence with cards. That's what it looks like on Product page.

<comment><AUTHOR> I see how you could come to that conclusion. At first glance, yes similar. However, Confluence really is a Wiki on steroids. Great to link with Jira, collaborate on Specs or the like. You can use it for document storage but not what it's built for. We use Confluence internally in the Dev Team ourselves and for that it's great.

Shelf is for curated content, not direct collaboration or Wiki. For that, we integrate with what was built for it, such as Google Docs.

Here is a comparison with Confluence, hope that helps: [https://shelf.io/shelf-vs-confluence-comparison](https://shelf.io/shelf-vs- confluence-comparison)

<comment><USER19> > Find, organize, and share your distributed team's most valuable content

...

> Compared to Confluence: cannot create editable wiki pages, cannot "Build an > Internal Wikipedia of company knowledge" etc.

Erm. How is this tool helping to "Find, organize, and share your distributed team's most valuable content"?

I currently work at an organization with over 2000 programmers and engineers. They would laugh at your face if you told them they cannot write free text in the "Knowledge management tool".

<comment><AUTHOR> All good. That's not really the use case for Shelf. You'd publish final versions of deliverables on Shelf, not necessarily your whole work-in- progress.

Just to share a different perspective, not even to disagree with your view: Think of a marketing team that wants to publish and share presentations to be used by sales reps. Or a team of researchers that wants to curate different types of information (docs, links, videos) for later perusal. Enrich each of those with meta data. These are different use cases, that's where Shelf shines.

<comment><USER19> > That's not really the use case for Shelf. You'd publish final versions of > deliverables on Shelf, not necessarily your whole work-in-progress.

Hint: It's not just work-in-progress.

Hint 2: Everything changes

> Think of a marketing team that wants to publish and share presentations to > be used by sales reps. Or a team of researchers that wants to curate > different types of information (docs, links, videos) for later perusal. > Enrich each of those with meta data.

Yeah. Perhaps.

Still there are plenty documents which are not "work-in-progress". Onboarding instructions. Delivery checklists. Descriptions of system and organization components. Policies. Roadmaps. Guidelines. Manuals. etc. etc. etc.

I see great value in a "manage all your things in various accounts" tool. I wouldn't go as far as call it "manage knowledge of your distributed teams". You need to be able to also create knowledge inside the tool.

Because if you need to drop out of your management tool all the time to create anything, you will end up using Google Drive if all your docs are in Google Drive, etc.

Also note: the only reason I know that you manage content from various sources is that someone mentioned an intro video and I managed to find it by going to the footer of the page and clicking on tutorials.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's great feedback, definitely more food for thought. Thank you! It's a fine line between cutting features vs. trying to solve too many things at once.

Our current approach to the collaboration part can be seen when you link a Google Drive account. When you want to edit a Google Doc it takes you right there, no need for the GDrive UI. You can actually create a Google Doc from within Shelf.

Also, "good" to hear what you wanted to know but didn't learn immediately from the website. We'll surely be working on making the use cases and functionalities more clear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Looks like "Evernote for teams"? Evernote does have some of those features, but I think a team-focused app like this makes sense.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right, Shelf does have some of the Evernote functionality, I guess most notably the web clipper. What we focussed on is more of where Evernote falls short. Which in my opinion is good and easy collaboration across teams.

An advantage of Evernote for now is that Shelf doesn't have offline note- taking. What do you think, is this something hugely important to have?

<comment><USER20> I definitely like offline note taking, but I don't know if it's a deal- breaker. I agree that Evernote's collaboration is weak (which is fine, Evernote's focus is personal notes - and I think it makes sense to have a note app that is team focused).

</comment></comment></comment><comment> dorian-graph First, before I sound too critical, congratulations on launching your product.

> The average organization uses over 20 different platforms to manage their > content and the problem is only getting worse.

[[https://xkcd.com/927/](https://xkcd.com/927/)](https://xkcd.com/927/\]\(https://xkcd.com/927/\)) ;) From experience, the problem usually isn't with the technology/physical tools, but with people's behaviour. Things like screening content so people have more trust in it is good, but people still need to at least begin to input content.

Though as far as being something that sits between lots of different tools and platforms, the comic still applies, and I've seen a few of those products come and go over the last couple of years.

I found the comparisons on the 'Why Shelf?' page odd. You mention SharePoint, Confluence and Bloomfire at the top, yet don't do any comparisons to them, only to things which are obviously different (e.g. communications platforms).

<comment> 52-6F-62 Off topic, but FYI -- HN doesn't use Markdown. I make this mistake regularly and have to try to ninja edit each time.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc](https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc)

<comment> dorian-graph Ah that's right, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> To be clear: Shelf is a webapp (though at least not Electron-based).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, that's right. At the moment it's a web app. Adding an installable version, possibly via Electron is something we've thought about and probably makes sense to unlock some functionality a web app just doesn't have permissions to do (such as file system access). You can also install our web clipper which is a browser extension but that's not needed to use Shelf.</comment></comment>


How To Go From $0 To $1,000,000 In Two Years - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/04/how-to-go-from-0-to-1000000-in-two-years/ <comment><USER2> While some of those are good points, I'm convinced that the successful entrepreneurs didn't start by reading a techcrunch article about how to make x amount of money. Sure some get inspired and try, but the real entrepreneurs just get out there and do it. No one has to tell them to take the leap, he (or she) has to tell others that it's perfectly normal for him to take the leap. He's convinced himself that taking a leap and doing it himself is the only way that he can be happy and successful. And that's how I am. I started working for startups as my first job out of high school, I learned a lot, and kept moving up. My parents and rest of my family and friends constantly said and even say now 'When are you going to get a real job with benefits and security?' and I politely say, never.

It's the resilience that is baked into my personality and how I work that I never give up and I always make things happen. It's quite a delusion I'm sure because I have this I can always make it work out mentality while everyone else around me says I'm crazy, but in one way or another I always manage to work it out. I haven't hit a 'home run' yet but I've always worked for myself and always managed to pay the bills. Just in the two years from being out of high school I've come pretty far by my own standards. I'm co-founding a startup now and we just launched two weeks ago at a local university, we gained 1,200 users in just under two weeks at this small college. It's a small victory in a long line of uphill battles along the way to success but it's the only thing I can imagine myself doing. And I'm going to keep doing it.

<comment><USER3> I would guess that the "successful entrepreneurs" category is sufficiently diverse to resist pigeon holing. I'm personally not a fan of anything that implies that you have to jump into a fast and loose market right out of high school to become an entrepreneur.

I'd wager there are plenty of folks that got fed up with their jobs after reading any number of self-help rags-to-riches articles or books and went on to have successful self-employed careers, some of which probably ended up in the millions of dollars.

Maybe it's because I'm corporately employed, thirty, sick of the grind and working to get out, but the "this is who I am; this is what works, and if you're not this, then you can't get it anywhere else" implication rubs me the wrong way.

On a different note, I can tell how little I've replied to this sort of article over the years by how many times I had to spell check entrepreneur (got it that time. boom. little victories, amirite?)

[edit: I also want to say that this isn't an attempt to try and slam the OP. Seriously, congrats on your success so far, and I hope you do just as well and better in the future. I just think there are a lot of paths and destinations in success, and even the cliche market of motivational memoirs and self-help guides can kick someone in the ass occasionally and get them to make the move they need to.]

<comment><USER4> Your guess is well-supported by facts.

> The average age of first-time entrepreneurs in all industries is 43; in tech > industries, the average age is 39. Only 16 percent of the fastest-growing > and most successful companies in the United States had venture investors. 11 > percent had revenues of more than a million dollars.

[http://www.kauffman.org/uploadedFiles/FactSheet/EntreAndEcon...](http://www.kauffman.org/uploadedFiles/FactSheet/EntreAndEcon061812E.PDF)

According to the US census bureau, about half a million new firms are established each year (where a new firm is defined as having at least 1 employee on payroll, so this doesn't count everyone starting a website in their spare time). 16%, 11%, these are of big numbers, bigger than the couple dozen companies you might read about on TechCrunch each year.

<comment><USER5> > The average age of first-time entrepreneurs in all industries is 43; in tech > industries, the average age is 39.

This obviously doesn't mention how successful those older entrepreneurs go on to be.

I'd like to know if there is a significant difference in the success rates of tech companies started by 18 year olds and 28 year olds. Does it actually make empirical sense to start a company when you're 18, or do those 10 years of working drastically improve your chances such that you should hold off?

<comment><USER3> I'd be totally interested in (being spoonfed) research on that, just out of interest.

I think my bumper-sticker take away, though, would be "it's never too early to try and it's never to late to get started."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I highly recommend James Altucher's book, I Was Blind But Now I See. You can get it for $.99 on Kindle: <http://www.amazon.com/Was-Blind-But-Now- ebook/dp/B005VPXXVM>

Its the story of how he built a web design business, exited for ~$12 million, drank himself broke and nearly to death, and then built himself back up (he is a VC now). Its about learning to be happy even though you sometimes feel like you're broken. I drew a lot of lessons from it that help me daily.

</comment><comment><USER7> "Everyone is always on the lookout for "the next big thing." The next big thing is finding rare earth minerals on Mars. That's HARD WORK. Don't do it! " ..... I disagree.

It almost feels like techcrunch is stooping down to businessinsider style sensationalism.

<comment><USER8> That's how they justify posting every article to HN/Reddit/etc. "Online means relevant!"

<comment><USER9> I hope you're not insinuating that every internal memo that Kara Swisher gets BCC'd on isn't actually worthy of some smartass blog post.

Seriously though, it's funny to see Swisher post every lame email from Yahoo corporate and write about it like it's the second coming of investigative journalism.

<comment><USER8> It's hard to be a decent journalist, sometimes too hard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I really liked this quote:

"You don't have to come up with the new, new thing. Just do the old, old thing slightly better than everyone else. And when you are nimble and smaller than the behemoths that are stuck with bureaucracy, you can often offer better sales and better service, and higher touch to your customers. Customers will switch to you."

Still, coming up with the new, new thing can be the most creative & fun.

</comment><comment><USER11> Most of this advice is pretty terrible when taken generically. Really you could boil all of his success down to "be good at selling anything".

<comment><USER12> I find generic advice like "be good at marketing/sales/etc" to be really useless. HOW do you become good at marketing/sales/etc? Because each situation and company is different, the how can only be gleamed from details of stories. The meatier and more detailed the story, the more useful.

<comment><USER11> My experience is, people who are good enough at sales to turn nothing into major success, such as the subject of this story, aren't taught. They're natural. They've been hustlers since they learned to talk. So you can't just apply what they did if you aren't the same way.

<comment><USER12> I completely disagree. I've learned a lot from natural salesmen and marketers, and have improved on both fronts due to learning from their battlefield stories.

<comment><USER11> I don't mean you can't become a better salesman through learning. I'm saying you can't learn to be the kind of hustler who takes an idea you can't even personally execute and turn it into a million dollar salary in two years. That takes natural ability. The article frames it as if anyone can do it

Which I think is okay. The world needs less people who sell and more people who make.

<comment><USER13> I don't think the article makes the case that anyone can do it.

I follow Jame's blog and he definitely doesn't say anyone can do it. His own life story is an example of this.

One message that he does try to say is the simple act of hustling.

Just do it is so cliched but why can't we take baby steps? Why not go out and spend the next 3-6 months validating a business idea by talking to people, potential customers, etc. Or maybe spend 3-6 months really getting in-depth understanding of a niche and seeing if there are any gaps that technology can help?

This advice is for myself but I think its quite relevant. For me, I have the tendency to spend time just thinking through an idea without spending any real effort to do a litmus test for it. I have to take a more realistic approach which is to have mini-failures that don't cost too much in terms of time and money and hopefully one of them will click. If this means going through 5-6 iterations within a span of 5-6 years until I "make it" then so be it. I'm not looking to be the next anything. To me hustling is going out there and putting myself in front of people that can help shape the idea. It is not sitting in front of my computer and just building an MVP since I'm not looking to build a business based on eyeballs but something that provides more direct value.

Anyway, I would suggest a more relevant article that James wrote is the following:

[http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2011/04/the-100-rules-for- being...](http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2011/04/the-100-rules-for-being-an- entrepreneur/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Altucher is kind of known for his sensationalist article titles. However, in this case the content of the article is solid and pragmatic, particularly the bit about "picking a boring business." If your main goal is to work for yourself, finding a not-so-sexy niche is the way to go. Potentially less competition, more room to breathe, and plenty of opportunity.

</comment><comment><USER15> While this is a really nice article, I found this comment really funny:

 _How To Go From $0 To $1,000,000 In Two Years?_

Start with $2,000,00 _

</comment><comment><USER16> What was Braintree's value proposition? As in, why did everyone switch to his service? Was it lower fees? If so, how do they offer lower fees in such a mature, crowded market?

</comment><comment><USER17> "Rule No. 6: Say YES!", aka. "Rule No. 6: Lie to customers."

<comment><USER14> Instead of "if you build it, they they will come." For Altucher it's actually, "if you pretend you can build it, they will come."

This is a common theme in some of Altucher's other stories. I think it would only be lying if you acted like you had already built it. However, selling your ability to build a future product is definitely not lying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Will this work for me?

</comment><comment><USER19> I love his writings!</comment>


Ask HN: What do you think of my landing page copy? - <AUTHOR> What would you change or what do you think needs more clarification? Thank you!<p>https://bootstrapcreative.com/shop/bootstrap-quick-start/ <comment><USER2> The top body of text - "The problem isn't what you know… but what you don't." \- I'm finding the font weight or background color is making the text hard to read.

"What will I learn section" \- this line bothers me - Learn what is responsive web design and the history behind it and how Bootstrap framework makes it easier. Maybe change it to "Learn what responsive web design is, the history behind it, and how Bootstrap framework makes it easier to implement."

I feel all the points in that list should end in a period - they sound like complete thoughts.

"And since the book and reference guides are hyperlinked PDF files and not videos, you can save them on your computer (no DRM) and even read offline if you need to."

Maybe change that to "And since the book and reference guides are hyperlinked PDF files and not videos, you can save them to your computer (DRM free) and access them at any time." but that might be picking nits - I just don't like the word "even" in the sentence.

The pricing at the bottom - starter, pro, design - I might put that into a panel or table and line up each point horizontally. Looks very freeform and again, is hard to see how each package compares to each other and read horizontally.

</2cents>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your time and 2 cents. I really appreciate it. I will definitely make these corrections.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You probably need some kind of freebie.

part of one of the ebooks that someone can download for an email address or something.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I have two spots on the page to download a book sample. I had them higher up on the page but it seemed people would download the book sample and stop scrolling the page.

[https://bootstrapcreative.com/shop/bootstrap-quick- start/#sa...](https://bootstrapcreative.com/shop/bootstrap-quick- start/#sample)

[https://bootstrapcreative.com/shop/bootstrap-quick- start/#re...](https://bootstrapcreative.com/shop/bootstrap-quick- start/#resources) (sneak preview link)

At what point of the page would you expect to see a free sample offered?</comment></comment>


Scion: Motivate for art entrepreneurs - <AUTHOR> http://www.scion.com/motivate/

<comment><USER3> I think this requirement says a lot about Scion's goal:

        [ ] I am between the ages of 18 - <USER2>

The (10,000+ word, with table of contents) T&C's also include mandatory arbitration, anti class-action, and a jury waiver. To their apparent credit, they say this is opt-out'able. At any rate, this appears to be a highly restricted and promotional latch onto incubator culture, similar to how they have previously attached themselves to graffiti and tuner subcultures.</comment>


An old-school shell hack on a dot matrix printer - <AUTHOR> https://drewdevault.com/2019/10/30/Line-printer-shell-hack.html <comment><USER2> Oh my gosh, I'd forgotten about the ed joke (link at the bottom of the article). Magnificent stuff.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not a line printer; those are very (very) different than a dot matrix printer, and it's an interesting use of a dot matrix printer, anyway.

<comment><USER4> They have the same sort of form feed, but usually with wider paper and green bars. iirc they print a whole line at a time, which is why they are so-named. It's easy to see how one would get confused, since there is `/dev/lp` and `lp` or `lpr`

yea, if I `man 4 lp` (manpage for the device) on Amazon Linux 2 it is telling me about "parallel line printers" \-- (`man lp` (for the lp command) mentions "hardcopy device, such as a printer or microfilm recorder".)

Very cool nonetheless.</comment></comment>


10 reasons why you should organize a FedEx day - <AUTHOR> http://www.theenterprisearchitect.eu/archive/2013/07/23/10-reasons-why-you-should-organize-a-fedex-day

<comment><USER2> Some reasons why you shouldn't organize a FedEx day (ie, a 24-hour hackathon. This is different from a company-sanctioned hackathon that occurs during business hours. I think those are great.)

1\. It can bad for your employees' health.

2\. It shows a lack of respect for employees' personal lives.

3\. It discriminates against workers with families.

4\. You don't compensate workers for it

5\. You can't write good software when you are tired.

<comment><USER3> These assumptions are unfounded.

1\. One hackathon is not going to be detrimental to an employee's health.

2\. It would be a lack of respect if the company made it mandatory, which is borderline illegal considering it's unpaid.

3\. Again, hackathons are 99% at-will events. Also, it's not like they're being held every week either.

4\. True, which is why they're not mandatory.

5\. That is purely your own opinion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm glad this article implies that employees need not stay up all night, as Facebook Hackathons seem to promote. Such events are heavily biased toward the participation of the young and childless who have few mandatory scheduled responsibilities outside the workplace such as childcare. Of course, participation ostensibly is voluntary, but it's clear that there are career benefits such as making oneself known to upper management by presenting one's hack. Companies who schedule these sorts of events likely send a message unknowingly -- If you can't pull and all-nighter, you ought to consider working somewhere else.

<comment><USER5> As I approach this number, I am reminded every day that the median age of Facebookers is 28 and Googlers is 29.

<comment><USER4> In total contrast, I once worked for a staid, rural insurance company where the majority of employees were middle-aged with children. "Flexible" hours meant that one could arrive at work anytime between 6AM and 9AM. Clearly, the flexibility was extended to those who wanted to arrive early so that they could be home by the time their children were getting off the school bus. Twenty-somethings who wanted to venture into the city to see a show (easily an hour drive) still ostensibly had to arrive at work just a few hours after getting home. These family-friendly policies sent a distinct message to the young/childless -- the company regards your happiness as secondary to that of those with children.

Edit: I regard such policy biases as companies' choices to make, but I doubt that many consider sufficiently the messages these events/policies/etc send to particular employee segments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Never heard them called FedEx days before, I agree 100%

(When I clicked the link I was expecting a story about having one day a week when delivering stuff to the office is okay)

</comment><comment><USER7> We're doing 2-day sprints at work, and it largely has the same effect in terms of productivity.

Very clear, concise, sharp goals that are actionable and measurable.

Programmers can decently estimate what they can do in a day. I know I struggle to estimate for longer projects.

<comment><USER8> Questions...

Is there any concern of burnout with maintaining such a pace?

What happens if something slips the 2-day goal?

How do you deal with something that requires more than two days? Split it up over multiple sprints? What if you can't?

<comment><USER7> It's a startup, and I've read 10+ articles on HN saying "< 40 hour work week is most efficient for technical work".

While I agree, focusing on getting something shipped every 2 days isn't a huge pace. It means you iterate tightly and goals are understood to be scoped to only 2 days of work.

If something slips the 2-day goal, it's debt, and it's expected to be nailed first-thing in the next sprint. It's a flexible system.

For bigger projects, you _have_ to be able to split them up. I honestly can't think of a single project where you couldn't break it down into constituent parts in which you could iterate through several sprints to finish it.

If you're doing research-based work, I'll admit this probably isn't the best approach. However, from a business and personal productivity perspective, it's working very well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I understand the cultural allure of a single event -- pizza, beer afterward, etc. If a company wants to allow all employees to participate, why not have a demo day every couple of months where teams could present stuff they worked on during that period. People could self-organize partially by their own time availability. Enforcing the time-boxing rules would be hard, but I don't think this is an integral aspect of what makes hackathons a cultural success.

</comment><comment><USER9> A place I used to work at organized a hackathon ... that started on Friday at 6pm because that was the only way to get support from management.

It did lead to some interesting projects, however.

</comment><comment><USER10> Or, every day should be a FedEx day.

<comment><USER4> At one company where I worked, the advertised benefit to employees was, "You get to choose what you build for the company! You can INNOVATE!" Not these words, but this was the message. If you want to take initiative to improve things around here, you have to do so on your own time.

Interestingly, I ended-up spending much of the hackathon day an evening fixing a production problem which was of obvious urgency. Some mild shaming from management ensued when I had nothing to present -- a clear message.</comment></comment>


Mysterious Mac Pro Shutdowns Likely Caused by Chrome Update - <AUTHOR> https://variety.com/2019/digital/news/mac-pro-avid-shutdowns-chrome-update-keystone-1203348549/ <comment><USER2> _"We recently discovered that a Chrome update may have shipped with a bug that damages the file system on MacOS machines,"_

My first thought was "if applications can damage file systems, something is wrong with the system (driver buggy or a leaky kernel boundary)".

Reading [https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/15235262?hl=en](https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/15235262?hl=en), it seems Google is a bit sloppy in the way they formulate this. Their code accidentally overwrote _/ var_ on systems with System Integrity Disabled or absent.</comment>


Martian Immigration Nightmare - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/zarkonnen_com/status/826833214601826304 <comment><USER2> Who says he doesn't want to stand up for people not being able to come home to the US? I believe he's using his valuable position carefully and picks his fights wisely. Although standing up for those people is currently the "right thing to do", it would immediately earn him Trump's opposition which would endanger his strategic position through which he currently sells renewable energy, e-mobility etc masqueraded as "American jobs".</comment>


Pro Display XDR - <AUTHOR> https://www.apple.com/pro-display-xdr/ <comment><USER2> I don't know why this is posted now, but since it's here I wanted to share this review which I thought was incredibly well crafted and refreshing to watch.

[https://youtu.be/rtd7UzLJHrU](https://youtu.be/rtd7UzLJHrU)

<comment><USER3> That review was incredibly well done and effectively dismantled many of Apple's overblown claims.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> ..and in the meanwhile, I still can't use my Dell UP3218K with the latest-and- greatest Macbook Pro. Thanks Apple.

<comment><USER5> Forgive me, but is this a joke? You have an 8K monitor? If yes, would you mind if I asked why and how you use this? What makes it worth it?

I'm in the market for a new monitor. I'm coming from the first "nice" monitor I've ever had: a ~$300 27 inch LG HDR 4K. I thought it would be perfect, but to be honest it leaves a lot to be desired. It's not even bright enough to beat the light coming through my office windows. What am I really paying for at these higher price tiers? Is it possible to meet somewhere in the middle? I do graphic, but not video, work.

<comment><USER4> I use it exclusively for programming. An 8k monitor is not a necessity, by any stretch: A good, large 4k monitor is more than enough for coding. I'd rather not voice an opinion about graphics or video usage because I don't know about the needs of these fields.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > _Available VESA Mount Adapter_

Finally. The crazy lengths that 3rd party adapters go to to convert Apple displays are crazy, and it's absurd that they haven't used VESA for this long.

</comment><comment><USER7> What about it?

<comment> phoe-krk It's new, it's hardware, and it's Apple. News about Apple hardware often hit the HN frontpage.

EDIT: misread the page; thought that's a new screen from Apple.

<comment><USER8> It was announced like a year ago...

So is the news that it's now orderable for people who can afford $6K for a monitor amid a pandemic?

<comment><USER9> I admit I was looking at this exact model yesterday to upgrade my current work at home monitor, though I can nowhere near justify the price...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What's the nano glass option thing and why is it worth $1k?

<comment><USER11> > While both the standard glass and nano-texture glass options of Pro Display > XDR are engineered for extremely low reflectivity, it helps to consider your > work environment when deciding which one is right for you.

> If you're in an especially uncontrolled lighting environment, there's an > innovative matte option with nano-texture glass. Typical matte displays have > a coating added to their surface that scatters light. However, these > coatings lower contrast while producing unwanted haze and sparkle. The nano- > texture on Pro Display XDR is actually etched into the glass at the > nanometer level. The result is a screen with beautiful image quality that > maintains contrast while scattering light to reduce glare to the barest > minimum.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Maybe I didn't get this right but does it really come without a stand/mount? And only those two options are compatible?

<comment><USER13> The VESA mount is compatible with basically any third-party stand or arm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Lots of product announcements but no word about iPhone. No iPhone 9/SE 2 in March then?

<comment><USER15> The iPhone has been updated every September for many years.

<comment><USER14> I guess you are not following the news. There has been a rumor for a low end iPhone coming out this March. Nothing to do with the high end iPhones of September.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'll buy it once someone figures how to get it running in Linux, on non-Apple hardware.

</comment><comment><USER17> no mention of motion or response times. they're important ergonomic factors, much more so than 6k for a 32" screen you're 3' away from imo...

</comment><comment><USER18> 1,000,000 to 1 seems like crazy hype. I assume that's like the brightest color to the blackest black. The thing is, at 10 bits the brightest white is 1023 times the second darkest gray. I doubt anyone can tell the difference.

<comment><USER19> The intensity is not a linear function of the bit value, the intensity is more or less value^2.2, which does give ~1e6 to 1...

See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_correction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_correction) for the gory details.</comment></comment>


Shouldn't Robots Be Doing My Taxes By Now? - <AUTHOR> http://sunlightlabs.com/blog/2012/shouldnt-robots-be-doing-my-taxes/ <comment><USER2> Here's a fun example of why the government should maintain its own databases and use them to pre-fill your taxes.

This year, the state sent me a letter claiming I had paid zero taxes in 2010. They said I had to pay 100% of my tax liability right away or face liens, etc.. Of course, this was patently untrue--my employer had actually withheld more than my total tax liability for 2010. (I know this because I still have my 2010 W-2). So I was entitled to a refund for 2010, but the state was saying I owed them the full amount, plus penalties.

After contacting the state about this, they said the problem was that my W-2 form had likely become "detached" from my 2010 return.

So apparently, the state relies on a _paper copy of your W-2 attached to your return_ to determine whether your employer has paid them the withheld taxes. If they can't find the W-2 you send them, they assume your employer didn't pay them anything on your behalf. Given that employers are already making electronic payments each quarter, why can't the government just derive its W-2 data from that? (I know, I know--they're probably not collecting that data right now. But the point is they could do it as part of the quarterly payment process.)

EDIT: Another funny bit to this story. I asked the state to confirm that my employer had indeed paid the amount reflected on my W-2. I figured that if the error was on my employer's end, I could take it up with them. But the state refused to say one way or another, citing confidentiality.

<comment><USER3> Eugene McCarthy said: "The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty."

<comment><USER4> I've never understood this logic.

We fear bureaucracies, if they became efficient, would become efficiently brutal and callous. We don't want them to become good at being brutal and callous. Therefore we should fight against efficient bureaucracies in favor of brutal and callous inefficient bureaucracies. And if their inefficiencies make them seem brutal and callous, that's just all the evidence to know that making them more efficient would lead to even more brutality and callousness.

<comment><USER5> Eugene McCarthy didn't say ineffecient bureaucracy was brutal an callous. It's just annoying and maybe callous. That's the point. Also, um, you know who had an efficient bureaucracy, with computers and everything, in the 1930s? Yeah, --Godwin'd

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As a developer who's married to a CPA, here are my thoughts:

1\. Taxes are a hard problem. Besides basic W2s, There are a lot of deductions to know about, and it's hard to keep track of all of them.

2\. Depreciation schedules. They vary from item to item, and there's a bit of a grey area on what you can use, and what you can't. What can have bonus depreciation?

3\. Calculating cost basis is too damn hard for most of us. Not just stocks, but partnerships as well.

4\. When can you take a distribution from a business? How many times is that money taxed?

5\. Add another 50 use cases, one for each state.

6\. How do the states interact for individuals with diverse activity? Easily 2^50 cases here, and my gut say more like 50!

7\. Foreign activity. Good luck with that.

The bottom line is there still is enough complexity that this needs to be done manually. Not to mention there are a lot of things that are legitimate judgement calls, and vary from accountant to accountant (or auditor to auditor when dealing with the IRS).

So, that's why robot's aren't doing my taxes any time soon.

<comment><USER7> About 60% of tax payers submit a 1040A or 1040ez return. This is a dead simple return. The IRS already has all of the information needed to process these returns. The IRS could trivially set up a website that has two pages: 1. Verify this information is correct. 2. Where should we mail the check.

The _only_ reason they don't is that there is a HUGE industry that exists solely to fill out these trivial forms for intimidated people. HR block, et al will never allow the tax system to be simple.

<comment><USER8> There is already software out there to handle your federal income taxes for free. However, to use _Free File Tax Software. This program is available if your AGI is $57,000 or less:_ <http://apps.irs.gov/app/freeFile/jsp/index.jsp?ck>

<http://www.irs.gov/efile/article/0,,id=118986,00.html>

PS: Anyone can still use free forms: <http://www.irs.gov/efile/article/0,,id=237156,00.html>

<comment><USER9> Why a $57,000 limit?

<comment><USER10> Supposedly if you are over that limit you are rich enough to pay for a commercial software. Apparently government does not want to take business completely from the likes of Intuit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was on a StartupBus to SXSW this year- at the pitching stage, one of the guys pitched an idea based around simplifying people's taxes. He was a qualified CPA himself, and had years of experience working in the tax industry. No-one volunteered to work on his idea. The winning StartupBus team was a site that let you make your own custom breakfast cereal.

I suspect that if we want to ask "why isn't tedious process [x] automated by now?", we should be looking at ourselves for answers.

<comment><USER12> Do you know who the CPA was? Is he still working on the idea?

<comment><USER11> He is- looking at his blog he actually submitted a YC application:

<http://www.cameronkeng.com/>

(after the first day on the bus he and another guy broke off from their team to work on the tax idea- so it wasn't a total lost cause, but wasn't the highlight of the competition that it could have been)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There exists a school of thought that says making taxes painful is a great way to remind you that taxes have visible consequences on your life just like spending does, which is a point of non-trivial interest ot the American polity. Someone subscribing to that school of thought might rationally oppose non-economic ways to make taxation less painful as a way to prevent a transition to invisible (or even fun!) higher taxes.

I'm stopping here to avoid committing politics on HN.

<comment><USER14> It's funny you mention this.

I worked at an e-commerce store that shipped a lot internationally. In the beginning, we had calculations for all of the tariffs and taxes required to ship and added that to the end (ups would allow us to pay for this up-front to make it easier for our customers).

Customers would bitch at us all the time about how our prices were too high. We changed it so they had to pay for all of this separately (and so they knew that we weren't the ones increasing prices) and the bitching stopped.

It's one of the reasons I don't want taxes hidden on goods sold in the US. Because people won't think about it and won't really know when the government starts raising taxes.

They will just assume it's the big, evil, companies overcharging.

It's happening right now with gas. Many states have additional taxes/gallon and people just assume it's the stations.

<comment><USER15> In Europe taxes (like VAT and those on petrol) are usually included in quoted prices, and people are quite aware of them.

<comment><USER16> Not really. In Ireland & the UK, VAT in the region of (22%ish or 17%ish), prices of goods in shops and online are quoted 'VAT inclusive' (likewise petrol), it's only 'trade', i.e. companies that sell products to other business (who then have to charge VAT to the general public) are sold 'ex VAT'.

<comment><USER15> Oh, that `trade' exemption also applies to Germany. I think that's a common consequence of VAT systems, that only the consumer is quoted inclusive prices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It can be done. In the UK, most people don't even do a tax return. And let's say you're self employed.. if your tax affairs are reasonably straight forward, you fill out a handful of numbers and dates on a Web site, get an estimated tax bill within minutes, and you're done. You then get sent a proper statement later. In a system with flat taxes, it'd be even easier.

I think the author touches on the real problems in the last couple of paragraphs. The American government isn't particularly good at spearheading initiatives that benefit voters without allowing "lobbyists" or commercial interests to take over. It also doesn't help that you have the federal and state structure (as good as it may be for other things) since the decisions can't be taken by one central place given all the local tax laws.

<comment><USER18> I seem to recall that there's something about the way the way that the US income tax works, legally, that prevents that from happening. That is, your income tax has to be something you pay rather than something someone pays for you.

<comment><USER19> Most people have their employer automatically deduct a chunk each paycheck. The annual forms are to figure out exactly how much you owe and whether you need to make up the difference or get a refund check. Most people get refunds.

It's more complicated for the self-employed, or if you don't want to loan the government money for free.

<comment><USER17> Most employed people in the UK also have their employer deduct taxes from their paychecks. The difference, though, is that if that happens and if someone doesn't declare their tax affairs as being more complex, the tax authorities assume everything is order and no tax return is required.

I suspect other things have an impact on this system working though, such as the much lower ownership of shares and tax-attracting investments in the UK, as well as the generous tax-free allowance for capital gains (I'd need to make a realized gain of something like $20k in a year to pay any tax on shares, for example.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm pretty sure Intuit lobbied pretty hard to kill any and all progress that would allow most people to have their taxes automatically completed for them, equivalent to the 1040AUTO mentioned in some of the other comments.

<http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100723/09055310339.shtml>

</comment><comment><USER21> Another option would be to simplify the tax code to the point where normal humans could do their own taxes in a few minutes.

<comment><USER22> But tax expenditures are the only way for anti-government types in government to spend money! ;-)

The complexity doesn't come from the simple cases: it comes from the cases that are legitimately complex. Carried interest, investment gains, charitable contributions, foreign income, corporate debt and so forth aren't reducible to a simple equation. For the vast majority of Americans taxes are simple: for many of the rest, they will never be simple unless they are abolished all together.

<comment><USER21> Carried (really, any) interest: income. Investment gains: income. Charitable contributions: good for you. Foreign income, less taxes paid upon repatriation: income. House purchase: congratulations.

The tax code is complex because it gives the government power over us, because there is a huge industry built around it and because rich people can use it to their advantage.

<comment><USER23> Agreed except for foreign income: we have treaties with most countries to avoid double taxation: If I've paid taxes to Turkey for money earned in Turkey, why do I pay it again in the US?

Now, things get more complicated with foreign investments. If you've paid taxes on the investment in Ireland, you've likely paid less than you would in the US -- so that doesn't quite work. That's where things get complicated.

<comment><USER24> should all work like multi-state commuter taxes--i live in NJ, work in NY, and my NY tax is credited against my NJ liability (leaving no liability to NJ, as NY rates are higher (at least with the extra NYC tax thrown in)). tax treaties (as exist between many states) just make the revenue sharing easier from the governments' point of view.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> My father did mainframe dev contract work for the IRS and once told me it's a miracle you even get your tax returns every year. :) There's quite a mess behind the scenes due to a number of failed new projects at the cost of taxpayer money.

I wish we could automate all of this but taxes themselves are also still a sort of art with all the exceptions. Technically there are rules about when you qualify for things but from my experience accounting firms operate more like law firms in that they help you figure out how to meet the bare minimum to legally qualify for various returns.

<comment><USER6> > accounting firms operate more like law firms in that they help you figure > out how to meet the bare minimum to legally qualify for various returns

My wife is a CPA, and many dinner conversations sound just like this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> THIS:

"Better yet: since the agency is already receiving that data from all those financial institutions through a separate stream, how about organizing the data for me and simply letting me sign off on my automatically-generated return? I suspect that a lot of people would like that, given that the alternative is spending a spring day doing paperwork."

Especially for those who only have a single W2 or a similarly simple state of affairs, it is quite ridiculous the amount of pain you have to go through (and preparation fees you have to pay) CONSIDERING THE GOVERNMENT ALREADY HAS THE INFORMATION!

I definitely think tax preparation firms are lobbying to keep from simplifying the preparation process.

I remember one year around 2005 or so I was able to file my (federal) return by telephone directly with the IRS for FREE (I was a student and had only the one W2) and it was relatively painless but the next year the option seems to have disappeared. Anyone remember that?

<comment><USER27> Not only do they have the information, but they also are already calculating your taxes. How do you think they determine that you've made an error?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I once complained on a message board that sales tax should be included in the sticker price, so that I know ahead of time what I'm going to pay.

I still feel that way, but someone pointed out that it would further hide from consumers the fact that the government takes money out of every transaction. Now I contend that every sticker should tell me both the price with taxes, and the price without. This would make it very clear how much I would have to pay without government intrusion, and how much extra they get from me.

I'm getting the same vibe here with income taxes. Taxes used to be a _much_ more contentious issue before it was taken out of every paycheck prior to the worker seeing the money. Now the single pain point in paying taxes is an hour's worth of paperwork once a year. Eliminate that friction, and the government becomes an invisible siphon, sucking money right out of the economy, with hardly anyone noticing.

By all means, make paying taxes easier, but don't obscure the fact that someone is taking your money, all the time, without giving you a choice in the matter.

<comment><USER29> > ...but don't obscure the fact that someone is taking your money, all the > time, without giving you a choice in the matter.

I've always been curious about this point of view. While it is true that you are paying money in taxes throughout your life, it is also true that at the same time you are receiving the benefits, to some degree, of that taxation in the form of public infrastructure and spending. How you experience life from your moment of birth depends on how those in the past have spent and dealt with issues like taxation and public spending and how you take advantage of those things, knowingly or not.

If you could choose to not pay some or all of the taxes you pay now, would you? Would you ever spend that extra income to benefit people who you will never meet or interact with? Would you ever spend that extra income to benefit people you actively disagree with or find repulsive?

<comment><USER28> I didn't say we shouldn't pay taxes, or that there aren't benefits of having the government those taxes pay for.

But _nobody_ gets a say in the matter. And _everybody_ should be aware of this most basic function of the government.

I'm basically advocating taxpayer awareness, and government oversight. I'm not a member of the tea party and I don't want to get rid of all taxes. I feel that some friction is welcome when paying taxes, because otherwise people will be less aware they exist, and the government will have an easier time raising them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm working on a tax startup. The two products we're working on right now is taxcast.co (semi-finalist on the startupbus at SXSW) and autotax.me.

Taxcast.co is a system that forecasts your tax deductions, audit proofs your information and calculates your current and future tax liability.

you can check out the demo here: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4CuvWkKW4w&context=C4404...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4CuvWkKW4w&context=C44040d8ADvjVQa1PpcFMR8iGVGidoILkFShlJzk1Av- qJay210Hw=)

Autotax.me is going to help you deal with your independent contractors. It contracts, files and audit proofs your 1099 taxes. It's almost like an HR/Tax service in one.

You can check it out now but its still really rough/ugly. The functions work but there's no real UI so that's what I'm going to be finishing up.

Any questions, you can check out cameronkeng.com

if you're interested in any of these products, shoot me an email at firstname.lastname@example.com or tweet me @cameronkeng =D

</comment><comment><USER31> I work on optimization software and I'm pretty sure you could do some serious damage to the government's tax collection efforts if you hooked up a genetic algorithm to some very good accounting software to minimize taxes.

The problem with GA's is that they frequently exploit loopholes in their setups, so you get solutions that technically satisfy your evaluation criteria but it's not what you really want. This process is basically what corporate accountants do manually to get ridiculously low tax rates for big companies. Congress writes the tax code but it will always have loopholes, and GA's will definitely find them.

Here's a recent blog post of mine that goes into some of the problems with GA's, which when you're looking for loopholes is actually a huge advantage:

[http://designbyrobots.com/2012/03/29/evolution-is- cleverer-t...](http://designbyrobots.com/2012/03/29/evolution-is-cleverer- than-you/)

</comment><comment><USER32> Auto-generating a tax return is one thing. Taking advantage of all your potential tax benefits and considering your edge cases is another thing. I've seen tax returns for many of inDinero's customers, and it's clear to me that their previous accountants took shortcuts in compiling the return.

Yes, it'll get filed. But there were probably more tax advantageous things they could have / should have done. Consider these examples:

1 - tax credits. How is the government supposed to automatically know that you're paying for child care? How are they to know that you just installed solar panels on your roof or that you just purchased an electric vehicle? Sure, they can make this "automatic" -- but then you'd still be going out of your way to report your purchase, and this is in no way simpler than the current solution today.

2 - does it make sense to be taxed as a partnership or sole-proprietor? For a lot of our customers, they're basically flushing $20k down the toilet because they didn't want to go through the tiny nuisance of filing as an S-Corporation. Pretty sure you don't want the IRS to dictate your tax treatment.

3 - should you depreciate your Aeron chairs over multiple years, or do accelerated depreciation which will allow you to deduct the entire amount in a single year? The IRS gives us the flexibility to choose, and it's questions like these that may require the help of a tax professional.

4 - deducting vehicle expenses. How is the IRS supposed to figure out how many miles on your car were used for business VS personal purposes?

5 - what part of your apartment was used exclusively for hacking? No way for the IRS to know that the number is 250/1500 square feet.

In short, putting together a tax return isn't that hard. The difficult part is hunting down all of this other information that we have no way of just knowing.

Instead of asking why robots couldn't be doing our taxes by now, we might rephrase the question to read "how can we do year-round accounting in such a way that taxes are 10X easier to take care of?"

</comment><comment><USER33> The real problem is not the lack of systems but the ridiculous complexity of tax law. Since the complexity is unlikely to go away any system would have to handle it - and this is not an easy task.

Given that the OP works for an organization which is "focused on digitization of government data" it is quite peculiar that he doesn't understand the problem domain any better. It's quite a joke to think that it's a matter of throwing in some web forms here and there.

In complexity I would say it's up there with his favorite Apollo quote. Maybe not on par - but close. Just thinking about the size of the rule engine which is required makes my head hurt.

<comment><USER34> Not just complexity, but vagueness. Good luck writing a program that calculates what's "reasonable". Was the construction work a "repair" or an "upgrade"?

How about determining what would be a reasonable amount for someone to pay if they were in the shoes of the businessperson but dealing at arm's length?

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Estonia could be a good model for this - supposedly over 90% of people file online within 5 minutes.

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/15/estonia- uss...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/15/estonia-ussr-shadow- internet-titan)

</comment><comment><USER36> I owed them money a few years back and had to pay them using some online payment system.

It was necessary to do this because they failed to implement the payment plan that they agreed to. So interest was piling up and they weren't withdrawing what I owed them.

So I sign up on this system. They had to MAIL me the password. By USPS mail!

So it finally comes. I log in and pay off the entire amount.

Later, I find out that the system applied the payment to the wrong year. Apparently this was my fault somehow, as the system defaults to the current year, not the year that you owe on.

So I have to call to get that straightened out. The person applies the payment to the correct year. yea!

Now can I find out my balance? Is it paid off? "Let me transfer you to the department that can do that."

Apparently, that's a different skill set altogether. No way to check it online. Why would you ever need to do that?

Finally get to a person who can tell me. And it turns out they started the original withdrawal of funds from my bank. So now they owed ME money.

And that came by paper check, delivered by USPS of course.

</comment><comment><USER37> Beware answered prayers.

Over in my corner, we have a State provided income tax simulator and filer. Not too pretty, but correct and useful; it's done in Java and runs under Windows, MacOS and Linux.

It's been so successful that most tax returns are nowadays filed with it, and quite a few public offices where people used to queue up to file their (paper) returns have been closed. There was never much of a setup/tradition of filing by mail like in the U.S.

Over the last couple of years, they've improved data cross-referencing to the point where I can get most of my form pre-filled from the government.

<comment><USER9> The horrors of Java! It's a single app, and it's cross-platform... oooooh.

Now sit down and let me tell you a tale of Intuit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> The thing is, complicate tax code is merely a welfare program for tax lawyers and accountants. If we made taxes easy, or automated parts of the process that are the same for everyone, we would be cutting off the supply of money to the leeches. Since they don't want that, and they are better at being parasites than the groups normally attacked for parasitism (teachers, postal workers etc), they successfully lobby against making taxes easier for most people.

</comment><comment><USER39> Belgium has had this for a few years now. In my case everything is prefilled, even the deduction for charitable donations. Basically this is a US-specific problem.

You can see a flash demo (in dutch) of the belgian tax-on-web app here: [https://eservices.minfin.fgov.be/taxonweb/static/nl/demo_v2/...](https://eservices.minfin.fgov.be/taxonweb/static/nl/demo_v2/player.html)

<comment><USER40> Was going to say the same is the case here in Denmark. Your employer reports your earnings, your banks report your balances, etc. And if you need to enter some extra information, like mortgage interests or driving reimbursement it's all done through a website and a new report is generated instantly. I suspect all this automatic reporting might clash with the average american's perception of personal privacy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> If I was ever elected president, I would direct congress to reduce the size of the tax code by 10% each year. If they fail to do so then 10% are automatically eliminated - eg all those whose last digit of the article number is 3.

The real reason for why things are so screwed up is corrupt politicians who use their power as a fund raising mechanism. For example there were several taxes added temporarily to see if they worked well. They did, but congress doesn't make them permanent. Instead they wait to be paid each time to renew them temporarily again. (This started in the Reagan administration.)

See this excellent talk by Lessig: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ik1AK56FtVc>

The whole tax provisions as fund raising is covered at 7m30s.

</comment><comment><USER42> I'm not sure what the comparison between UK (where I am) and US taxes is, but I found the process here very easy. I load up an online form, I fill in the data and click submit, they tell me how much I owe and I pay. Very easy, the hardest part is saying goodbye to all that money.

<comment><USER11> The comparison, sadly, is totally different. The UK system is relatively simple (I never even had to do a tax return when living there), the US system is a byzantine labyrinth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> It won't be happening any time soon. Here's why:

[http://www.republicreport.org/2012/corruption-taxes- fivemins...](http://www.republicreport.org/2012/corruption-taxes-fivemins/)

</comment><comment><USER44> This seems like a startup opportunity. Take photos of your standardized forms, upload them to a server, server calculates your taxes, only asking questions when the pertinent data is missing from the forms.

IMHO this service should be offered by the government(s) themselves (and if it was, it would mean even less data needed to be entered; after all, they have copies of all your forms already), but fat chance on that.

<comment><USER45> This is exactly what HRBlock and Intuit currently do. They have hooks into all the payroll processors and investment companies and will download your W2s and any 1099s from the relevant company. Then you just answer a bunch of questions.

The problem is that a private company shouldn't have to offer this service. The government should do it for you for free because it helps them get their money faster and easier. However, as the article and others noted, those private companies realize this would be very bad for their business and have lobbied to stop it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Back before my life got a whole lot more complicated and I was a simple wage slave I recall filing my 1040EZ by phone. This was maybe 15 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER47> Assuming our tax law remains insane, I actually prefer having private tax preparers. The IRS's incentive is clearly to make me pay much tax as possible, whereas for private tax preparers it's to make me pay as little tax as possible.

If our tax law were simple there wouldn't be much difference between the two, but in its current state there is. Thus I think the tension between the two groups is healthy.

</comment><comment><USER48> My concern about this is that if we fail to simplify taxation laws before any singularity then we'll reach the point where only robots are capable of processing taxes.

I have to echo the comments here about the UK system. It's unbelievable to someone that's only experienced the Inland Revenue, but they're about the biggest non-event ever when compared to their equivalents elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER49> Some countries do already. In Norway, you get a your tax papers (well, paper; it's only one sheet) pre-filled. You only have to take action if they got it wrong.

At least this works for normal employees. It gets slightly worse when you have your own company.

</comment><comment><USER50> I do my taxes on paper!

I'm a professional software engineer. I know how software works and how it doesn't work.

I don't trust automated tax software at all.

Fortunately, even the 1040 long form is a simple pen&paper algorithm that I can do in a couple hours.

</comment><comment><USER51> The flawed assumption being that tithes are solely financial. The government would be content to burn your "money" in a pit; your submission and mental buy-in are what it's really after.

</comment><comment><USER52> There are many good reasons to move to the US but having just done so I look around at friends filing and complaining about their taxes and dread having to do it myself.

</comment><comment><USER53> Why debate the complexities of filing taxes when the tax code is kept needlessly complicated?

</comment><comment><USER54> The 1040EZ is not exactly a hard form to fill out: <http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1040ez.pdf>

One side of a piece of paper. You enter 12 numbers, and need to look up one value in a table too see how much tax you owe.

</comment><comment><USER55> The bigger question is why am I still doing taxes once a year?

<comment><USER56> How often do you think it should happen? Federal income tax is once a year. Sales tax, tolls on roads, etc. happen much more often.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Have you been to H&R block? They already are!

</comment><comment><USER58> SEVERAL countries does taxes electronically --and i don't mean the lame way irs does here, where doing it eletronically means auto-filling two boxes in the PDF to take somewhere else later. Brazil, 3rd world mind you, has a java application (for years) where you fill in some boxes and it not only calculates everything it also allows you to compare different ways to use your exemptions. It's not very good if you have a corporation, but that's because they choose so. not because oh my god it's impossible to code something so complex.

Everyone talking about how difficult it is to implement all the rules have no idea how software works apparently. if it's already worded as rules, you can code something to work with them just like a human reading those rules. People code more complex systems than taxes every hour.

Now, if you take the irs.gov experience i just had this month... every link is link-bait to PAID services. And that's the ONLY reason we don't have robots doing our taxes.

Someone that already have robots doing our taxes make enough money to pass legislations that allows them to put links in the IRS own site that have more visibility than link to the forms.

tl;dr capitalism, bitches.</comment>


CSS for iPhone 4 (Retina Display) - <AUTHOR> http://thomasmaier.me/2010/06/css-for-iphone-4-retina-display/

<comment><AUTHOR> _The reason is, that because every pixel is half the visual size, you may have to double the values of many CSS properties. For example text-shadow: 0 1px 0 #fff; which is like a half visual pixel on the iPhone 4._

If this is true, I'll be kind of pissed. I shouldn't need a special stylesheet for basic properties like border widths if the iPhone's browser is supposed to show the real web.</comment>


Using CSS With No HTML At All  - <AUTHOR> http://css-tricks.com/using-css-without-html/

<comment><USER2> "But it's almost 2011, who's still using XHTML anyway?"

This caught me totally off guard. My experience has been that XHTML is much easier to manage across browsers than HTML 4. Can anyone chime in as to whether I'm crazy?

<comment><USER3> Yes, you are. There is zero benefit in using XHTML with text/html. You can have lowercase tags and quoted attributes in HTML4 if you want so. You don't pollute your markup with meaningless "/" which browsers treated as the invalid attribute anyway. Ok, it's not actually meaningless but
 in HTML(SGML) means completely different thing than in XML, only browsers did not implement that part properly. Is short: if you were using XHTML markup with text/html MIME, you were using marketing XHTML, which was parsed by browsers' engines as HTML not XML anyway. If you were using application/xhtml+xml MIME type you'd know the difference. It would be interesting to see how XHTML was "easier to manage across browsers" given that IE does not even understand XHTML.

I used XHTML for a short while before I learned what it actually meant. Then I switched to HTML4.01, now HTML5. The nice thing about HTML5 is that it let's you have any syntax you want and it is not based neither on SGML nor XML.

<comment><USER4> Could you explain the
 vs
 difference in HTML? HTML5 spec says that void elements may optionally include slash[1], and from the wording I'd assume that it means that they should be treated equally.

[1] <http://dev.w3.org/html5/markup/syntax.html#void-element>

<comment><AUTHOR> As I understand it, basically the 'self-closing tags' are considered valid markup, but this comes under WHATWG's philosophy of trying to be inclusive as much existing markup that is out there as possible (within reason). This is in opposition to the strictness of XHTML's approach.

This post by hixie indicates that self-closing tags are allowed to 'ease migration': [http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/help- whatwg.org/2008-Augus...](http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/help- whatwg.org/2008-August/000137.html)

I believe the 'spirit' of the spec would imply that
 is the best practice when writing new markup. HTML5 maintains no pretence of being XML.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Winning the War on Error: Solving the Halting Problem and Curing Cancer [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdmQUlD7P40 <comment><USER2> 23:10: "Cancer is not one specific disease. Cancer is actually many diseases put together. In fact, cancer is many rare diseases -- if you take cancer to the limit, it's likely the case that the same cancer has never occurred twice.

"If you look at the genetic footprint of cancer, even within the same patient -- as I'll explain in just a moment -- you get very different cancers from the same originating source. And I'll explain why that is. That's why this sort of very information-driven approach to curing cancer is absolutely critical."

26:29: "... the genome has syntax. And in fact, it has a semantics. And beyond that, it has an instruction set too."

30:00: "So when you're fighting cancer, you're fighting evolution itself inside your own body."

</comment><comment><USER3> Talking about that, I feel obliged again to mention the work of Damien Woods, Yannick Rondelez and Nicolas Schabanel who are actually assembling DNA tiles implementing wang tile gliders (a la game of life) and then "higher" primitives up to a nano Turing complete machine.

An odd feeling to watch his slides (I don't have them as of now sadly)

<comment><USER4> If you find them, I'd be interested in seeing them.

edit: is it these ones? [https://tapdance.inria.fr/woods/download/UCNC%202014%20Woods...](https://tapdance.inria.fr/woods/download/UCNC%202014%20Woods%20slides.pdf)

<comment><USER3> The talk I saw was from Nicolas Schabanel only, and his presentation was aimed at undergrad so the content has a smaller scope. But I recognized some fundamentals in this (213 pages!) PDF.

Here's Schabanel website: [https://www.irif.fr/users/nschaban/index](https://www.irif.fr/users/nschaban/index)

I don't think what I saw is published here, but you might enjoy his publications nonetheless

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Link to another lecture by this lecture, mentioned mid op, where the lecturer live codes an abstract interpreter like the one discussed in the op

[https://youtu.be/POvX4hYIoxg](https://youtu.be/POvX4hYIoxg)

</comment><comment><USER6> I was at Curry On! but missed that talked. Everyone kept telling how good it was so I watched it as soon as it was put online.

While Matt's (medical) story is truly inspiring, the link with the other (CS) part is really dubious to say the least.

Still, it shows how transposing ideas from a discipline to another can yield leap and bounds advances, although in this particular case it was fortunate that this happened very quickly after the technology to do this became available.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, the 'real engineers build sturdy bridges' argument falls down when you realize that there aren't hundreds of malicious adversaries trying to blow up the bridge at every hour of the day...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> A fun recent example mitigating the halting problem came from an affectionate troll level(o) in mario maker

I'm unsure whether the underlying implementation uses approximation techniques, as the op suggests, or if Nintendo simply identified potential halting offenders and added a layer of checks to overcome the intractable issue

note: the clip is loud and includes the player yelling fuck; in case that offends.. that said, the whole level playthrough is a lot of fun

(o) [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Hg4OjsC3Ty8&t=1102](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Hg4OjsC3Ty8&t=1102)

<comment><USER8> I'm pretty sure it makes the level creator finish the level before they can upload it. They only have to manage it once though :)

<comment><USER5> Yeah, but this is about player death stead level completion

In the clip the level maker cleverly constructed a trap wherein the player gets stuck between two blocked doors which creates an infinite loop passing Mario back and forth

The game engine realises what is happening after the second pass and just kills Mario closing the loop

<comment><USER8> Oh, I see what you mean now by mitigation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In the talk he says he cured 5 diseases in 12 months. Not bad.</comment>


A modern, concurrent web server for ruby - <AUTHOR> http://puma.io/

<comment><USER2> The logo reminds me of how the 256 color palette was augmented by combining them in patterns.

<comment><USER3> It's a reference to CMYK. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMYK_color_model></comment></comment>


YouTube Playlist of Netflix Tech Talks (Microservices, ML, Chaos Engineering) - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqXBqaWzmb_c0d3jHhxk8cF0ldP6EGfvL <comment><USER2> Boo missing two of my talks "latency, availability and cost: withstanding regional outages", and "precision chaos"

<comment><USER3> Maybe you can share the links so the author can add them in the playlist?</comment></comment>


Wpcom – A curated directory of resources and tools for WordPress - <AUTHOR> https://www.wpcom.org <comment><USER2> This is a shameless self-plug. I have written a few WP plugins because it is not as secure I wanted it to be:

\- WordPress does not come with proper password hashing, and uses the phpass library. [https://wordpress.org/plugins/password- hash/](https://wordpress.org/plugins/password-hash/) will change this to use bcrypt/Argon2ID

\- Comment forms do not have CSRF tokens, and hackerone/tickets for them have been neglected as trivial. [https://wordpress.org/plugins/comment-form-csrf- protection/](https://wordpress.org/plugins/comment-form-csrf-protection/) This plugin adds a CSRF token to comment forms.

</comment><comment><USER3> Proceed with caution. A fair amount of wordpress's reputation for bad security comes from 3rd party plugins. There aren't many (any?) restrictions on what they can do.

<comment><USER4> Well, is exactly the same for any npm package or any python package as do many other languages, a lot -if not all- bad security comes from 3rd party plugins.

<comment><USER3> Technically the same perhaps. But the actual history is pretty different. WordPress plugins are notorious for RCE type vulnerabilities.

<comment><USER5> I wrote one during my early years, in fact [1]!

1: [https://jeremyaboyd.micro.blog/2016/11/20/that- time-i.html](https://jeremyaboyd.micro.blog/2016/11/20/that-time-i.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Kinda surprised not to see WPengine on the list.

<comment><AUTHOR> There is actually: [https://www.wpcom.org/resource/wpengine/](https://www.wpcom.org/resource/wpengine/)

Though we don't recommend it due to bad pricing policy, bad reputation on TrustPilot and from other testers, and personal experiences. There are way better hosting alternatives that is currently listed and marked with yellow background on our platform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> How slow does WP get if you load all of these onto it at the same time? How much would it resemble a Swiss cheese, security-wise?

<comment><AUTHOR> Load all of these? Why would you do that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is the Wpcom site itself a theme?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a custom built theme by us.</comment></comment>


LG's 55-inch 'wallpaper' OLED display hangs on the wall with magnets - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2015/5/20/8628861/wallpaper-oled-lg-display

<comment><USER2> Are they comparable in video quality to LCD displays?

What are the advantages besides being thinner? I mean, I can understand using OLED in a cellphone or a tablet, but when hanging on a wall what's the difference between 2mm and 2cm?</comment>


Conversational UI Principles – Complete Process of Designing a Website Chatbot - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/swlh/conversational-ui-principles-complete-process-of-designing-a-website-chatbot-d0c2a5fee376 <comment><USER2> Slightly off topic but does anyone know of an example of a chatbot that is useful for something other than pissing off your customers?

<comment><USER3> Supposedly the first that comes to mind [http://www.donotpay.co.uk/](http://www.donotpay.co.uk/) ( Guardian story about it [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/28/chatbot-a...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/28/chatbot- ai-lawyer-donotpay-parking-tickets-london-new-york) )

<comment><USER2> Well donotpay.co.uk has already managed to piss me off by requiring I register an account before even being able to test it.</comment></comment></comment>