Naga

I agree completely with your points, and I'm sorry be that guy, but "literally retarded" is offensive language and is frankly below the level of discourse of HN. I'm not one to be the PC police but really, come on. You can make your argument without resulting to slurs like that.

https://www.verywellfamily.com/what-is-the-r-word-3105651

I would love suggestions of French language sites! I have found them quiet hard to find, especially of a more than surface level discussion.

I forgot about these until this post. I used to have one when they came out, and I worked at a retail store where all of our kiosks had these.

Does anyone else get electric shocks often from them? I would get them anytime I touched the metal case of it. I never thought to google it or anything.

Is it? You've taken two facts (1. Interface redesign and 2. 50% growth last year) and assigned causation to the first. In my persepctive, reddit has been digging into the cultural psyche for a long time and has been growing steadily. The news uses it to replace local journalism now. Anecdotally, a lot of people I know are now talking about things they saw on reddit (I've been a user for ~10 years). I think the interface design is not relevant to growth. If anything, it probably decreases it, although I think the type of users they are attracting now don't care as much as people who post on HN do.

There's an attitude on HN that "my bosses who know and study business are idiots and don't understand anything about tech", usually in terms of either wanting bosses to get out of the way or improve themselves so they aren't making bad decisions based on things they don't understand.

This course is probably geared towards those type of people (or educating people who will become bosses one day)! It's a technical course in a management school, it's not for programmers. It's not as in depth as it could be because that's not what it is intended for. This should be exactly what the people complaining about bosses making bad technical decisions should want, but I think people just want to complain instead.

As a native English, but non-Apple user, you're right this is confusing nomenclature, but I intuited what it was supposed to mean.

The performance critical parts of emacs actually are written in C, such as the low-level primitive functions.

The purpose of financial statements is to provide value to the users. It should be assumed that assets equal liabilities and equity. There's value in providing a separate liability total, since it gives a snapshot of the financial position of the company, more so than having to derive that from the total liabilities and equity.

I live here in Ontario, and you're right the sky did not fall. The rounding isn't a big deal really, even on scale. It rounds to the nearest nickel, which is or is not in favour of the consumer/business. For example, $2.07 rounds to $2.05, while $2.08 rounds to $2.10. This should net out to an immaterial benefit to either side. It also is only rounded when paying cash. Card transactions are not rounded.

FYI Sales tax is 13% in Ontario now

Mostly off-topic, but relevant to another famous meridian is a song by my favourite band: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCFo0a8V-Ag

You're probably thinking just of the US, because Alexander Mackenzie crossed North America first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Mackenzie_(explorer)

What are those hardcore players playing now instead then?

On Canada, generally yes, it is.

A good opportunity is here to rep my favourite band, with a relevant song: Daredevil, by the Tragically Hip.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9K1EnQeAviU

What a great combination. I didn't know it existed! I discovered Purdy through Downie years ago, but didn't know about this. I'm still in such grief over Downie dying just over two years ago, which is strange for a man that I did not know and only met briefly once. I have been a Hip fan since I became conscious of music and culture and it just grew into something I could no longer contain. Thank you for sharing.

I don't think that's fair to Amtrak. In Canada, Via Rail also fails to deliver the service that works everywhere else in the world.

That's definitely not true. I'm not an expert in US tax law, but there are a number of important differences between accounting and tax income/expenses:

* Fines, as other people have stated, are usually not deductible. They aren't in Canada, for sure, and they are added back to income (i.e. you're taxed on that amount).

* There is usually a big difference between how leases are treated for accounting purposes and for tax purposes

* Accounting requires that things like accounts receivable to be measured at the expected value. Accounting generally requires an allowance to be booked as an expense for doubtful accounts, even if you don't know which accounts are doubtful. This is usually done on a basis like, historically 2% of accounts are doubtful, so we'll book that expense. For accounting, that's fine, but for tax purposes only actual bad debts are deductible.

* In Canada, capital gains are taxed at 50%, while for accounting purposes 100% of the gain is included in income.

* Capital asset purchases are not deductible, but are depreciated instead over time

* There's limits on things like meals and entertainment. In Canada, only 50% of them are deductible as it is assumed there is always a personal portion to a meal.

So it's not like everything is always deductible, there are many things that income is adjusted for for tax purposes.

With anything with double entry bookkeeping, you can book an expense each month for $200 for clothing and have a liability account set up as a clothing reserve account. Then you would have a built up total over time, less anything you purchase.

For what its worth, I'm an accountant in my day job and our software doesn't differentiate between debits and credits. Debits are positive and credits are negative. You get used to it seeing it all the time.

Taxes are assessed at a percentage of income. If a fine is deductible, you have lower income, and your taxes are lower, yes. But you paid the government for that right! If your tax rate is 30% and you pay a $1000 fine, you save $300 in taxes. But you paid $1000 for that right!

For what it's worth, I use this app on a daily basis and haven't found any deceptive behaviour. It's pretty annoying that now I have to download the APK from his website instead of the Play Store, so thanks for that Google.

The Canadian flag was also the Union Jack until 1965!

Canada was actually the big brother of the Commonwealth. It was considered to be the "Eldest Daughter" of Britain. Remember, all the other dominions were in worse positions than Canada.

Sounds like its probably a Commonwealth/United States type of thing, as there is another poster here from Australia who said they know what it means. I'm from Canada and it makes perfect sense to me.

As someone who lives in Quebec, I assure you that the government does not legislate what languages people can speak. They're picky about signs and menus and whatever, but you can't tell people what language to speak. There was a motion in the legislature to urge people not use "Bonjour-Hi" as a greeting, but that's not binding, and cannot be.

I don't think that Slack's business model is that different from other companies, from a marketing perspective. Sure, they acquired you as a customer in 2014 and don't need to spend anymore on marketing, but other companies spend huge amounts for marketing in the first few years and then spend less over time (think: you picked a detergent brand and keep using it without further marketing, for example). I actually think it is appropriate to recognize the expense now (or in whatever year it occurred), as there is no way to measure what benefit they are getting now from it. Isn't Slack burning now so it won't have to later? If that is true, does that sound like an unprofitable business?

That being said, specific marketing costs already are amortized over the life of contracts - if you pay commissions to sales staff, those are allocated over the life of the contracts that are signed. If you pay inducements (such as free months of service, or whatever), those are amortized over the life of the contract. However, general marketing expenses like ads are recognized in the period that they occur. There are a number of reasons for this: maybe adtech can decide who saw what ad and made a purchase because of it, but that is generally hard to tell. The other is that how do you know what the life of the contract will be. Your company pays $1000/year for Slack, and you likely will, but what if something changes? Slack can't know what you're planning to do. They'd have to make an estimate, and estimates are open to manipulation by management.

Management's incentive is to decrease expenses in the current year to make themselves look better to investors, so they're going to say that their expenses will be good for 20 years. How can they be certain? There's also the other way they can manipulate it by saying that "oh, this was a bad year already, we might as well recognize marketing expenses now to make a bad year worse, so next year looks better". Since there's no actual measurement basis, there's no corroborating evidence either way.

Source: am an auditor, albeit not familiar with US GAAP.

Michael Lewis writes about him in Flash Boys, his book from a few years ago.

You're right, text is a much better medium. However, at least for me, I listen to podcasts at work mostly, or when I am doing something physical like dishes, where reading is impossible (or impractical).

Dozens of dollars? More like hundreds or thousands.

But to your point, is all entertainment fungible? I don't think its really comparable. Magic is a competitive, fun game to play with lots of strategy and community behind it. This isn't to say that a $2 Steam game doesn't have those, but people play Magic specifically because it is Magic, not because it is generic entertainment.

I've started using Anki for this. It's basically flash cards that are shown to you at increasing intervals in order to keep it fresh in your memory. It's made the HN front page a few times over the last year.

https://apps.ankiweb.net/