Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47264356

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

Source: https://www.ft.com/content/97bda2ef-fc06-40b3-a867-f61a711b1...

When someone occasionally engages, I extremely quickly dismiss them in the most polite, but firm, way possible. I also intentionally keep a demeanor that generally signals I’m not open to random conversations (I avoid eye contact etc.), but that often doesn’t work. At the gym it is particularly problematic, I’m focusing on gathering strength for my next set and sometimes people bother you even if I am wearing headphones.

I truly do not have a problem with who I am, I’m comfortable in my shoes.

As such, never in a million years I would approach a stranger to strike up a conversation, it would seem an incredibly rude thing to do towards them, on top of clearly not having any desire to engage from my side.

I’ll talk for hours straight to my wife, close family and the very few friends I have though!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46941454

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45664312

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

This is a story that really happened, I’m not making things up. A few years ago, myself and other colleagues exercised some ISO in a startup we were working for. The exercise left us exposed to a steep AMT tax, it was a 6 figure tax bill (this was expected and we knew that going in, it was offset by some liquidity opportunity on the side).

Now, if you know what you are doing, it’s possible to get back all that extra AMT tax you paid as credit in future years, you just really need to be aware of the mechanics that enable that via form 8801, it requires variable carryovers for N years until the credit is extinguished. But it’s no big deal, even the TurboTax wizard is fully capable of the functionality! A colleague of mine, with his fancy CPA, completely missed this.

It wasn’t until several years later, when I casually mentioned that I was happy to have finally used up all the AMT tax credit, recouping my full 6 figure bill, that he literally said “what are you talking about?!”, and just there we learned that his CPA completely missed the situation (my coworker being clueless also certainly didn’t help). He called me later that evening to get the name of the form 8801, and confirmed it wasn’t there in his previous tax returns. I don’t know how the situation ended, but it’s possible I saved my colleague 6 figures that day, if he acted fast and painfully amended N years of prior tax returns, and hopefully fired the CPA.

There are more modest variations of this, for example your averagely talented CPA is most likely not going to go beyond the 1099 and, say, go look up what percentage of your money market fund interest was state tax exempt and ensure you get a credit.

For these reasons, I just don’t use CPAs and consider the time I spent to learn my taxes well spent and I’m fairly confident I’m doing a better job than any CPA for my specific personal circumstances, aided by tax filing software and some reconciliatory spreadsheets. I just wish I had a software for the expat situation, since the EU/US taxation is such a nightmare and it’s what I’ll find myself in when I early retire soon.

I always understood the sentiment of waiting until the first dot release for bug fixes, but refusing to update while still being in the ecosystem seems clearly a losing battle not even worth fighting for.

I’m old enough to remember the Windows 98 -> XP -> Vista regressions and inconsistencies in UX, and I expect Apple to be headed that way.

A mid-size US tech company I know well went fully remote after a lot of insistence from the workforce, prior to the pandemic they were fully in office.

Soon enough they started hiring remotely from EU, and now the vast majority of their technical folks are from there. The only US workers remaining are mostly GTM/sales. I personally heard the founder saying “why should we pay US comp when we can get extremely good talent in EU for less than half the cost”. EU workers, on average, also tend to not switch job as frequently, so that’s a further advantage for the company.

Once you adapt to remote-only, you can scoop some amazing talent in Poland/Ukraine/Serbia/etc for $50k a year.

And some other portion of the population, anecdotally much larger than what I would have thought, orders DoorDash/UberEats regularly, what a stark contrast.

I am in a good financial situation, but I still could never stomach the prices of those apps, $30-40+ for any item once one includes fees and everything. I recently got a promotion through my credit card that led me to take another look at DoorDash, and my local grocery store deli sandwich, which is already very expensive at about $10, would have been $25+ on there.

Yet it’s full of people using them, multiple times a week and for an entire family. I had coworkers casually mention that they spend $2k+/mo on DoorDash orders. It’s one aspect of the American consumerism that always baffles me.

Startups I worked before, who lost talent due to FAANG poaching (myself included), did not even have the business acumen to fight that, which would have been trivially possible by offering some liquidity at their “inflated” valuation. Instead, they kept those liquidity opportunities gated to senior management and investors. So I am applauding the difference in behavior here.

When employees are generously (and proactively) compensated for the financial milestones of the company, HN be like: it’s a bubble, it’s irresponsible, investors are fools, off with their heads!

I applaude OpenAI and its investors for approving these moves. Even if it’s a bubble, sharing some of it with employees “before it bursts” is a noble action. I worked in startups where management kept employees in complete illiquidity until full wipeout inevitably happened, while many senior folks were able to take some off the table in targeted secondary transactions.

It's clearly interesting to speculate the ideal solution on the Internet, but after having been here 10+ years I worry that it's just never going to get better.

I wouldn’t even be interested in a house. Just give affordable cookie cutter apartments in a 50-floor building somewhere.