Hacker News: fraserharris

New comment by fraserharris in "How to convert between wealth and income tax"

fraserharris — Fri, 22 May 2026 18:29:15 +0000

The entry level rate for >$10M AUM is ~0.5%

New comment by fraserharris in "Scientists find a way to regrow cartilage in mice and human tissue samples"

fraserharris — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 18:42:36 +0000

"Phase 1 clinical trials of a 15-PGDH inhibitor for muscle weakness have shown that it is safe and active in healthy volunteers. Our hope is that a similar trial will be launched soon to test its effect in cartilage regeneration" - Helen Blau, Baxter Laboratory for Stem Cell Biology & the Donald E. and Delia B. Baxter Foundation Professorship

New comment by fraserharris in "Guideline has been acquired by Gusto"

fraserharris — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 00:41:31 +0000

I recently had to select a 401(k) plan for our small startup. For a startup, the _employee_ fees was significantly better on Guideline (0.15 - 0.3%) than Fidelity (0.5% + $100 bookkeeping fee). The _employer_ fees were slightly more expensive with Guideline ($1,778 on Enterprise plan for Guideline vs $1,200 for Fidelity) but offered more features.

Important for founders in the US to know: you can put up to $70k annually into your 401k using profit sharing, which only some 401k plans offer. Your startup does not need to be making a profit to do 401k profit sharing. Employees may also be able to negotiate this!

New comment by fraserharris in "Sharpie found a way to make pens more cheaply by manufacturing them in the U.S."

fraserharris — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 22:26:27 +0000

It was a surprise learning how applicable your statement is when I was selling technology products into consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies. Consumer preference is very hard to change once it is established, and leading CPG companies spend an enormous amount establishing that preference.

New comment by fraserharris in "Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly"

fraserharris — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 17:55:46 +0000

Whatever fills the void for people. ie: instead of bowling leagues, people watch TV or play video games. It's arguably a worse product because it doesn't fulfill the socialization or exercise needs of people, but it does fill the same block of time.

New comment by fraserharris in "Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly"

fraserharris — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 17:16:43 +0000

Small organizations exist largely because volunteers will them to exist by donating their time. From our elementary school, it's clear the people who have time to volunteer are the stay-at-home parents. The dominance of two-income households eroded the small organizations, which created a market (distributing the costs over many more people) for large organizations to fill the void with a worse but market-serving product.

New comment by fraserharris in "I should have loved electrical engineering"

fraserharris — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 20:44:13 +0000

I majored in Engineering Physics with an EE focus. Our classes were scheduled so we took the dependent math courses a semester before the relevant EE topics (ie: learned Laplace & Fourier transformations before circuit analysis). The EE majors all took the related math & EE courses simultaneously and visibly struggled, with every class we took together having a bimodal grade distribution.

New comment by fraserharris in "AI startup Flock thinks it can eliminate all crime in America"

fraserharris — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 16:19:45 +0000

Paraphrasing from an Oakland police officer reflecting on the spike in crime 3 years ago to today: "Flock has been a game changer. The officers who use it are getting results. Criminals will steal a car, drive through a neighborhood and rob someone. Pretty quickly we can look up 'black BMWs driving around this location'. Maybe 10 come back, you figure out which is the likely one, and then can see where it shows up in the next few hours. Then you have officers on patrol in that area look out for it. The criminals get a police car tailing them & they ditch the vehicle. Instead of doing 5 or 6 robberies with a stolen car, they can do 1 or 2. That makes it much less worth it to do the crimes."

New comment by fraserharris in "Reports of the death of California High-Speed Rail have been greatly exaggerated"

fraserharris — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 20:07:48 +0000

Fresno / Central Valley is not the circuitous route, which is quite close to the I-5 near Bakersfield. The true circuitous detour is between Bakersfield and LA, where the route is planned to go East through the Antelope Valley with a station at Palmdale.

New comment by fraserharris in "London's Heathrow Airport announces complete shutdown due to power outage"

fraserharris — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 16:28:19 +0000

Business continuity planning & investment is an important part of running an enterprise.

New comment by fraserharris in "Why do transit agencies keep falling for the hydrogen bus myth?"

fraserharris — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 23:36:49 +0000

The reliability speaks to the technology immaturity. I agree with the inevitability of the EV drivetrain + charging off the existing distribution network being more reliable than competing technologies.

New comment by fraserharris in "Why do transit agencies keep falling for the hydrogen bus myth?"

fraserharris — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 21:24:59 +0000

AC Transit (eg: East San Francisco Bay) performed a detailed 2 year study (July 2020 - June 2022) comparing newer Hydrogen Fuel Cell & Battery -powered buses to existing Diesel, Fuel Cell, & Hybrid -powered buses, 5 of each type. The key results are the Hydrogen Fuel Cells have significantly more expensive infrastructure, fuel, and maintenance costs than Battery. However, both technologies are still less reliable than Diesel.

The results are broken down into 4 volumes, each covering 6 months. You can read them here: https://www.actransit.org/zebta

New comment by fraserharris in "Salesforce will hire no more software engineers in 2025, says Marc Benioff"

fraserharris — Thu, 09 Jan 2025 06:00:39 +0000

This is exactly correct. This is Salesforce's 3rd or 4th rebranding of Customer Data Platform, which has never taken off. This latest positioning is targeting Snowflake.

New comment by fraserharris in "Trump wins presidency for second time"

fraserharris — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 19:49:57 +0000

Lithium deposits are common -- Nevada has significant ones too. The question is if the lithium is concentrated enough to make extracting it financially viable.

New comment by fraserharris in "An intuitive guide to Maxwell's equations (2020)"

fraserharris — Mon, 03 Jun 2024 20:31:45 +0000

David J Griffiths' Introduction to Electrodynamics was a fantastic undergraduate-level E&M textbook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Electrodynamic...

New comment by fraserharris in "Show HN: We built PriceLevel to find out what companies pay for SaaS"

fraserharris — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 15:55:45 +0000

Support & maintenance have radically lower margins than software licenses. Without discounting rules, sales can craft deals that lose the company money.

New comment by fraserharris in "Amazon workers at 100 more facilities want to unionize: Amazon Labor Union"

fraserharris — Tue, 12 Apr 2022 18:32:20 +0000

Is that attrition rate inclusive of seasonal employees?

New comment by fraserharris in "An Engineer's View of Venture Capitalists (2001)"

fraserharris — Thu, 11 Nov 2021 19:15:35 +0000

More likely you got options, and they are taxed as income at a liquidity event (acquisition, IPO)... unless you were confident enough in the startup to execute those options & immediately pay the resulting taxes out of pocket. And you have to have that confidence before the valuation is too high & the taxes are unaffordable to absorb.

New comment by fraserharris in "Contract for Sale of Soul"

fraserharris — Sat, 06 Nov 2021 06:35:33 +0000

In California the seller discloses as much as possible to the buyer - i) house inspection and pest inspection, ii) disclosures from the county, state, utilities district, iii) advisories of risk of wildfire, lead paint, natural hazards, earthquake; and much more. This is so that the buyer has as little possible recourse to sue in the future for losses on the property. This behavior also enables faster real estate deals b/c the buyer is more willing to offer without contingencies.

New comment by fraserharris in "Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a public utility"

fraserharris — Wed, 09 Jun 2021 07:19:07 +0000

The 3rd hand story I heard ~2011 from a former RIM executive who was there at the time of Steve Job's demo of the iPhone was that Mike Lazaridis' (co-founder of RIM) reaction to seeing the demo: "It's impossible! The whole thing would have to be a battery!"