JacobAldridge

Did anybody else have an issue with "She wants to see a 10% growth?", and then Excel autofills the following quarters linearly (+$100 / $200 / $300) not exponentially (+10%)?

Never extrapolate your cells from just 2 fields folks!

Yes - if I'm interpreting that rapidly-changing GIF correctly, where previously people were drawn to the brand name now their eyes focused on "100% Orange" ... which completely commoditizes the contents.

"I couldn't find the stuff we normally get, so I bought this one because it was cheaper".

On a similar theme, I often think of Victor Frankl - "Between action and reaction, there is choice."

Another one I like:

"A Founder spends a few years doing what most people won't, so they can spend the rest of their life doing what most people can't."

(While it glosses over actual business success rates, and the "lazy, low risk" route to FIRE for many employed people, it's still motivating to me.)

I most commonly apply Chesterton's Fence in the context of new employees / managers. In that instance, it's more about naivety or ego ("I know better"), and less about needing to read the ancient runes to fully understand something.

I've seen so many people jump into a business, want to prove themselves, and start changing things without understanding the context in which that thing was built. (Similarly, though less often, businesses expanding into new products or markets.) "Tell me what will change if you stop doing X" is thus added to "Tell me what will change if you start doing Y".

To be fair, citing Chesterton's Fence just make me sound wise (and/or a little curmudgeonly); the better story for the point I'm making is the hospital bed where someone dies every Thursday morning at 10am ... only for video footage to reveal the cleaner unplugging machinery to plug in their vacuum cleaner every week.

An aside, but one of my more fun small pranks involved two fortune cookies in the office circa 2007.

I extracted the real fortunes, and inserted two of my own. When a friend dropped by, I handed him one and took the other.

His fortune read "You are an asshat".

Which surprised him somewhat, differing as it did from the usual fare.

What blew him away was when I cracked my cookie and withdrew my fortune: "Your friend is an asshat".

> I always wonder how many words have an etymology which predates written use significantly due to the "class" of people who use that word

I studied a bit of Shakespeare at university, and my awesome lecturer (https://researchers.uq.edu.au/researcher/619) was always very clear to note that for many phrases "Shakespeare was the first to write it down", which is quite different to "Shakespeare made up this phrase / word".

To your point, he of course was attempting to write for a variety of classes, including the illiterate (his plays weren't written to be published, that only happened after his death - they were ephemera to be performed and witnessed). His success may very well have come from using many phrases that the "lower class" would have recognised from use not just inference.

I momentarily thought "Me too", but it turns out there was a kid about 10 year younger than my dad who went to the same-named school at the same time but in a different State.

So ultimately all that searching his name revealed was that he's never attempted to cultivate an online presence.

Nice that some sites better remember ancient history than I do!

I'm still waiting for the business use case that recommends .rodeo

If you want to be global, avoid most country-specific domains, but there are a few exceptions that seem to have achieved traction - .io is tech-trendy, .tv was big for a while, and some can fit into the branding in a way like .us .in and the forthcoming .au (gold.au will be a very nice domain for whoever it sitting on gold.com.au right now).

There's also the potential to jazz up your name / brand / domain. I'm working with one company on a product right now, and while they had a cool 5-letter name for it they've actually re-named the whole thing to "Meet12345" because meet12345.com was available and 12345 certainly wasn't. Think getdropbox.com as an older, temporary example of this as well.

I have a similar 'rule' (advising to small businesses) - as a company scales from 1 to 12 to 35 to 120 to 1000 people [1], they move through different phases.

So I see a lot of my clients in the 12-35 person 'Process' phase being excited when they hire someone from a 120+ person company, because of all the expertise they can bring. But that 'Strategy' phase expertise, often when they have a full team and budget to execute their ideas, rarely translates to a smaller business where they also have to roll up their sleeves and GSD.

Sitting in a team building stuff for Meta is definitely a whole other ballpark to convincing Dave's Accounting LLC to give your Slack-competitor a chance.

[1] https://jacobaldridge.com/business/the-growth-transitions-th...

"Crypto-Soros" is an excellent reference; I believe some of the Pound's fundamental weakness stemmed from a period of high inflation and low interest rates.

My understanding of “foreign sourced” is that it usually applies to things like pensions, dividends, rental income. If you’re working, the source of the income is where you do the work - not saying you can’t fly under the radar and not pay tax, and each country has its own specific nuances and laws so Panama may allow it, but if you’re living and working remotely in a territorial tax country then that’s “locally sourced income” unless you can find laws or rulings to the contrary.

“The general rule for sourcing wages and personal services income is controlled by *where the service is performed*. The residence of the recipient of the service, the place of contracting, and the time and place of payment are irrelevant.” - https://www.irs.gov/pub/int_practice_units/ftc_c_10_02_05.pd... (my emphasis)

As someone with barely enough knowledge to be dangerous who has been learning more of late, can I just confirm you’re talking about Hal Finney? Or someone else?

I’m in Australia, so comparatively it’s also not far from Watford.

UnifiedAR | Full-time | North America Account Manager | Remote https://www.unifiedar.com/

At UnifiedAR we’re making Interactive Print (Augmented Reality) easy for our Print and Agency partners, providing a simple SaaS platform to help with their product extension.

Our growth comes from the success of our Partner channel, so we need an Account Manager to support our new and existing North American partners with Induction, Capability, and Performance. This is a non-technical role, and we’d love Print or Agency experience, so this is perfect for any HN lurkers (like me) who love tech but aren’t coders or engineers.

You’ll be learning from our leadership and investor team based mostly in Australia and Asia, so will have plenty of autonomy to solve problems and test your client-supporting ideas in the US, Canada, and Mexico.

Link for more info, or my email is in my profile.

https://www.unifiedar.com/account-manager-north-america/

Not even close! You can lose tax residency the say you leave ... or you can be overseas for years on end, and still be an Australian tax resident (did that myself for example!). The ATO is notorious for being one of the hardest tax systems to escape.

For my 8th birthday I was gifted about $30 total from a few relatives, juuust enough (iirc) to buy an annual subscription to MAD Magazine. My mother talked me out of it (or basically told me I wasn’t allowed).

One of the very few regrets in my life.

In due course, I’m very keen to teach my (toddler) daughter about money etc - but not at the expense of blowing some cash on childhood frivolities (especially ones that give joy for a whole year).

If you’re making Software Engineer money, I understand that the Foreign Tax Credit (FTC) is almost always going to be better than the Foreign Earned Income Exemption (FEIE) which is hard to revoke as your income increases.

I watched “Kelly’s Heroes” (1970) for the first time last weekend. Turns out the film was made in Yugoslavia (Croatia today) because the Yugoslav army still used WWII-era Sherman tanks, which were part of the plot so could be cheaply accessed.

(There were also some tax or funding reasons I believe.)

(Side note - holds up well for a 50 year old movie; and one of the best Donald Sutherland performances, in the same year he did MASH.)

It was also originally Startup News, and changed names about (iirc) 12 months later.

I was a regular at the HN London Meetups, when I was living over there, and fondly remember (after yet another founder anecdote on stage) someone tweeting “Do founders at dog food companies eat their own dog food?”

Many years later two owners of a dog food company attended one of my workshops, so I had the chance to ask them in person. They never had. (Although several younger employees had done so, with no side effects.)

Gabriel Weinberg, aka ei0Bauqu https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=epi0Bauqu

Linked 197 times, possibly referenced more than that; plus it’s a neatly exaggerated example of a joke that I’d imagine has been made many more times again:

“I have a problem I’m trying to fix with X.”

“Ah, so now you have 2 problems.”

I’ve only driven in maybe a dozen countries, but so far the US is the only one where the pre-payment thing existed. I was glad to have read about it in trip prep, or I would have stood there staring at a non-functioning gas pump for far too long!

To me, with a limited data set, Vardy does seem to have got smarter over the past few years. Still pace and power, but a little more skill even if it slows the ball down (perhaps as he gets older, or just wiser?).

Noting that transferring assets into Trust will often trigger a capital sales event (and tax), while potentially increasing asset holding costs (your home held by a Cook Islands trust may be subject to non-resident land taxes, for example, than many self-occupiers are exempt from) or life friction (I had a UK client who refused to work with me unless my main company was based in the UK, for example). Of course, these things are hugely jurisdictional - I would set the bar much higher than $250K net worth, but agree with your point.

Thanks for the comment! I’ve been doing a bit of research into various economic indicators aiming to help my (business owner) clients, and it pretty rapidly becomes a complicated mess of cause and effect.

Take Unemployment - a lag indicator of economic conditions (things were better/worse last month and so people found/lost work); but also in a small way a lead indicator of economic conditions (more people in/out of work and the wider confidence arising from the news has an impact on future spending).

At what point should a President, especially in their first term running for re-election, stop being able to fulfill parts of their duties?

Declaring war? Responding to an attack? Talking to other world leaders? Advocating Congress to act on matters? Signing bills into laws? Naming post offices? Being allowed into the Oval Office?

Independent of this specific situation, there has to be a line drawn somewhere. And that line is Inauguration Day. (A case could be made that some powers cease on Election Day for a lame duck President.)

But is ‘city mobility’ a lead indicator of ‘rising new COVID cases’, or a lag indicator of ‘declining active COVID cases’? I could make the hypothesis for either (or both), so are you using it to track improvements in a city or prepare for worsening conditions?

Fellow B2B Consultant here. I had the thread open to find some time to return and add my thoughts and experience.

Everything you’ve said is spot on, and I think you’ve hit everything of substance. Growing a consulting (even a tailored tech solution) business means making it a sales business first and foremost - you can prioritize delivery if you reach a point you want to plateau, but 0 leads is not that point.