adanto6840

This is exactly why you need a tax professional. You're linking to an article that is related to whether or not you can "write off" bad/uncollectible debt; it's not relevant. The first sentence most likely "disqualifies" you from the article's contents entirely -- you're probably not a small business that is using accrual-basis accounting, it sounds like you may not even have an entity at all (which is fine).

You need a tax professional (or even a semi-pro); in the interim, I'd suggest solely relying on what you read on the IRS website.

Generally speaking, by default you are likely cash-basis -- but yeah, this income & especially with "high variance", get with a professional. If nothing else, figure out whether you actually need a loan or not before applying/asking for one...

IANAL/IANA-tax-pro -- but you almost surely do not need a loan.

What you need is a bookkeeper and/or a CPA, and probably some business/tax advice from a professional (ie attorney, CPA, etc) - probably not a loan.

Wow, sorry to hear that. I'm also in Vegas and have very similar loads (2x 5-ton, 1x 2.5ton, pool/spa, car charger, etc) -- but I luckily already had 300A service.

I agree with the some of the other comments; you absolutely can "get by" with 200A. FWIW, I rarely use 50% and my car charger can pull >=72A by itself ("dual onboard chargers").

I checked into smart panels just because I was interested, and that may be the way to go for you (Span wasn't serving this area at the time FWIW), but you may have other options that are still up to code. My garage had an extra unused "dryer" outlet even, prior to installing the dedicated charger, and I have another outlet in an exterior garage too (probably was originally installed for welding, I've never used it).

It's certainly doable as far as the physics go; how much hoop-jumping you'll need to do to pass an inspection though, is another question, but it might be less than you think.

I'm not sure what the inspection requirements are for the "isolated solar" idea, but I'd _guess_ that it's similarly cost prohibitive (not sure if the "NVE off-grid fees" would apply at existing residence or not), and you lose some of the benefits of solar -- net metering & pseudo-arbitrage of TOU rates + "balancing" panel/system load (mostly applicable if you do ESS), etc.

Feel free to reach out (email in profile); I'd enjoy hearing more about the situation & perhaps could provide some guidance or ideas. :)

Do many cars still have a single height "head-unit" space available in them these days? My wife's 2017 Hyundai doesn't. The last car I had that could accommodate a 3rd party head-unit install was a 2004 Subaru, and it required buying manuf. replacement bevel for where the OEM clock went IIRC. Maybe latest car stereos are just entirely headless?

Thank you! :)

I'd probably suggest checking out Reddit (r/hvac for pros, and r/hvacadvice for homeowners) -- you'll generally get really good advice, often from professionals, if you provide good inputs/context.

If you have 2+ floors, you probably need (or have) zones, and it may be worth paying a professional to engineer a solution that meet your requirements. I recall finding some small businesses online that do exactly this for a nominal fee (<$500 IIRC).

You might also consider looking for residential HVAC companies that also do commercial refrigeration; the conceptual physics for commercial refrigeration aren't much different from residential HVAC, just specialized refrigerants & components that are tailored to those use-cases (ie labs often require extra-cold freezers, etc).

FWIW, my gut is you'd be happy with most variable-speed offerings, if sized appropriately. Low humidity here makes it easier, but I'm sure you can do what you want, but it may not be cheap.

If you remove the service panel there's a screen that displays what capacity they're running at. My installer had some issues initially, and Bosch actually had 2 regional reps (corporate) visit the site themselves. I'm sure the protocol exists somewhere, but the guys they sent wouldn't have known and I don't believe they connected anything to the board -- the Bosch reps couldn't even correctly explain to me how/what logic controls the speed of the interior blower fan (two speed).

I actually never really did get an answer to that question -- what/when will the interior fan go to it's "second speed" (when only sending 1 cooling signal & letting the Bosch board have 100% control over capacity), so we ended up wiring my units to be "remote" controlled, like a 2-stage system - though it's then critical to enable an extra setting ("Reverse Staging" on Ecobee), otherwise you'll just end up with short-cycling when stage2 cooling calls are made. If you search the topic you'll probably stumble on my Reddit thread which has quite a bit of detail on the topic. =D

I wish you luck; I do think it's the future. FWIW I think your product's ideal audience/target market is probably not here/us, but I think a relatively large addressable market does exist. How you can best reach & tap into that market, at a price point that make sense & while providing a (sales) UX that actually converts -- I think those are the main challenges you'll have to solve.

Initially, thought it would be easy -- it's all simple logic, right? Will be far less tedious & mundane than doing web/app development, right? Haha. I was in for quite the rude awakening, but luckily the challenges ended up being a pleasant and enjoyable surprise (at least on the whole).

Lots of work is the answer, though.

We actually got to Early Access release in ~11 months (~20 man-months). We had to learn a new programming language & learn a game engine during that time, too (and learn what a game engine really was/what it meant). Really though, I think the most difficult (and important) part was more about learning the nuances of game development, even just understanding the (understandably high) UX expectations that a player has from a game -- it took a while to really "get there" and I'm still learning, every day.

It's also worth mentioning that SimAirport was really not very good when we initially released it -- definitely rushed to release, far too early, and it was a mess at that point. After the EA release another ~3yr of full-time development went into it (and more dev resources), and it became a much better game/product in that time.

I wish I could work on SimAirport forever.

That's the downside with the games industry; it's ultra competitive and the amount of competition is increasing every day. Much of "the money" is heavily concentrated at the "top" of the pyramid, amongst a relatively small selection of titles. It's not the easy way, I can say that with confidence.

It's incredibly rewarding & gratifying to hear that, thank you!

I still firmly believe that making games -- especially under an "old-school" business model (ie no loot-boxes, no microTX, etc) -- has to rank extremely high on the "work gratification" scale.

I'm obviously super small -- but it's AWESOME to know >80k people have played SimAirport for >20 hours and ~20k have played >100hrs (!!) -- so damn rewarding!

I always enjoy seeing your posts on HN; I'm honored that you played the early versions of SA (and admittedly a little embarrassed at how rough & unpolished it was back then).

Really appreciate the kind words, means a lot coming from you -- thank you!

I don't remember if we actually shipped it or not, maybe it was only on a beta branch (or maybe it's sitting on a git branch still), but I actually implemented an "infectious disease" concept at one point. I think the idea at the time was for it to be a holiday "easter egg" maybe, but I don't recall for sure. I do vividly recall testing it one morning, though, and I had the "contagion" values (way) too high. I'm pretty sure the concept was wholly taken from Theme Park, where I recall one post-coaster puking agent could yield a rapid mess. The day I was testing my copy, I ended up making a video of the hilarity that ensued when a single infected passenger deplaned and suddenly there were hundreds (maybe thousands) of agents (passengers) all "stumbling around" spreading the ultra-contagious disease like wildfire, making a disgusting sound & leaving the floors covered with ick. I'll have to search the repo history -- maybe it's worth revisiting!

A disease tycoon, eh? Like SimAnt, but on a wholly different scale? =D

Would love to connect if you're ever in Vegas! Thanks again for the kind words, makes my day & sincerely means a lot to me. :)

I think that the ratio has substantial variance; it has also changed over time, somewhat dramatically, as Valve/Steam have made changes & added features/UI/UX that I suspect are intended to increase the % of users who leave reviews.

About 5 years ago, the belief was that the ratio was in the realm of 1 : 50-100 -- based on my own data & data shared with me by other indies. Even then, there was substantial variance; genre, theme, price point, developer involvement, discounts, review score (proxy for player experience/overall game quality), etc -- were some of the key variables that I believed were having a significant impact on review-to-sales ratio variance between games.

Over time, changes to the UX have been made (by Valve/Steam) which appear to have increased the rate at which players leave reviews -- quite substantially, it seems.

On the whole, I think that a far higher percentage of players are leaving reviews now (ie a lower review-to-sale ratio), but I also believe that the variance is even higher now than it was before. It's still helpful for making estimates, but I don't think it's as highly-correlated as it once was (~5yr ago it was much more consistent & highly correlative).

Sounds like you may have had a whole-home energy audit done already -- including a blower door test? If not, I'd highly recommend it; I paid ~$500 for one a few years back which included thermal imaging, blower door tests, airflow measurements & calcs, current/draw measurements for all energy-consuming devices, thermal load calcs, etc. You may find better pricing even -- ours included a detached structure/office, and house is relatively large, multiple HVAC units/solar/pool/servers/etc...

In my case, I didn't end up with any super directly-actionable insights -- but it was still very well worth the money IMO. Even just to confirm that we weren't losing/"leaking" energy egregiously. The reality was, our household simply uses a lot of energy - hah.

I mention this all because, at the time, we were just about to replace our HVAC units & we had just installed solar + storage.

I'm located in Las Vegas -- summers are HOT (!) -- but our units (2x 5-ton Bosch heat pumps) can near-trivially keep us at 70F (or cooler), even on the hottest of days. I try to "push" the thermostats up a bit (we leverage a ToU energy plan), but there are days when the battle isn't worth having & the wife needs it at 69F -- and, even on the hottest Vegas days, we're able to hit it (can be expensive to do so, depending on time of day -- but is totally doable).

Edit to add -- Oversizing a system can very easily lead to issues; short-cycling, humidity control, etc. The ideal system will run nearly non-stop on "design" temperature days. See if you can find any highly-rated Bosch installers locally; they'd likely be willing to "oversize" a system since the Bosch units are "variable capacity" (inverter-driven), which means you're less susceptible to hitting some of the common issues/concerns when oversizing traditional systems. Alternatively, the high-end variable-speed options from major brands are generally well-regarded though they can be extremely expensive (the price segmentation, and resultant value propositions, are bordering on dubious IMO).

Wish you had been around a few years ago, before I took the plunge on two 5-ton Bosch "BOVA 2.0" heat pump units -- I'd have seriously considered your product.

The Bosch units are inverter driven and contain some interesting tech; we've had some issues with them, unfortunately I'm not sure that the HVAC industry is ready for such tech, but I do generally think it's the future.

I continually wish (and search Github bi-annually for) there was a way to see what frequency ("capacity") my BOVA units are running at -- aside from just being able to see the "staging" (purely controlled by temperature delta via Ecobee). There's a USB port on the board, but I can't find any info/data on it & obviously I don't want to take chances on >$15k -worth of HVAC units. But it'd sure be nice to see, at the very least, what the capacity/frequency is -- without having to physically take screws out to remove the panel covering the board.

Alas, maybe some day -- perhaps once my units are out of warranty I'll be daring enough to try and get something from that (very tantalizing) USB port.

I started a small "no-name" studio to build games handful of years ago. Built and released two games thus far -- SimAirport & SimCasino.

I'd potentially be interested, my email is in profile if you'd like to reach out. :)

Me too. Usually the pilots will mention it if they receive an RA, though. I think TCAS might even be disabled (or nerfed?) at low altitudes like this -- not positive, though.

From what I've read, it sounds like this airport is not equipped with the ATC-equivalent of TCAS -- which I think would have been sounding all kinds of alarms (how early?) in the tower for a scenario like this.

What's the best online venue/forum for one to read & learn more about this hobbyist scene?

I can reproduce this very close to 100% of the time (on some of the styles) with a specific string - my string contains an apostrophe & ends with "III" suffix.

It also reproduces, but only some percentage of the time & on some styles, with only the string "III" (no quotes).

As a kid we had a very simple (mercury) thermostat which had two levers -- one for heating set-point & one for cooling set-point. I recall it working quite well.

How often is an autopsy performed?

I don't know the answer but my guess is that the majority of deaths do not have an autopsy performed, especially in 65+ age range.

Edit -- I looked it up, sounds like ~7% of US deaths have an autopsy currently, so I'd guess that the data is influenced by healthcare quality (I didn't read it, perhaps they try to control for that?).

  Location:  Las Vegas, NV
  Remote:    OK (not required).
  Relocate:  Yes (willing).
  Technologies:  C#/DotNet (+ Unity), JS, Ruby, PHP, Python, HLSL/rendering/shaders, C++, C, and (many) more...
  Résumé/CV:  Upon request.
  Email:  hn@dantonio.info
  I made:  SimAirport [0] & SimCasino [1]
  

Entrepreneurial senior-level software leader with over 15 years of experience and a track record of success. Wide breadth of technology knowledge and business experience. Proven ability to lead teams, solving difficult problems while consistently delivering business results.

SUMMARY:

I've founded multiple successful companies and have several successful 'exits' under my belt. Most recently, I founded and bootstrapped an indie game-dev shop which has designed, built, marketed, and shipped two successful desktop titles -- SimAirport and SimCasino, available on Steam! :)

OBJECTIVE:

I'm currently looking for interesting & challenging opportunities -- especially interested in building & leading high-caliber teams, solving difficult problems, and building real business value. I place a high premium on working with subject matter that I find interesting (some of which includes: AV, rendering/shader/GPU dev, computer vision, simulations, 'IOT', networking, performance/optimization, complex systems & algorithms, hardware/electronics, agent-based AI/behaviors, EVs/solar/energy storage, and more).

I'm generally not looking for "generic web" roles, though I certainly might make an exception if the project subject matter was a great "fit".

Please reach out if you have something that you think might be a good fit! :)

hn@dantonio.info

0 - https://store.steampowered.com/app/598330/SimAirport/

1 - https://store.steampowered.com/app/1158420/SimCasino/

LOL. That's legitimately entertaining and hysterical.

Didn't see this until today, sorry.

See here for the Texas Holdem rules that WSOP uses: https://www.wsop.com/poker-games/texas-holdem/rules/

Search for "muck" to find the relevant entry, also below for convenience:

Any player who has been a legal part of the game can ask to see a called hand, even if the cards have already been mucked. Abuse of this privilege can result in denial by the dealer. When a winning player asks to see a mucked hand, that hand will be considered live, and the winning player can lose their pot. When any other players ask to see a folded hand, the hand will remain dead.

Years ago I played live games quite often (Vegas), and I do still play a few times a year (also Vegas). I've seen players make the request maybe 20 times total, and probably had the request granted ~50% of the time. When denied, it's usually because the cards were already intermingled in the muck, but on a few occasions it was due to the requestor exhibiting some level of 'menacing/antagonizing intent' to begin with.

You will definitely get yelled at if you attempt to flip someone's cards yourself, 100% of the time. At higher limits, it may get you removed from the game or worse. You can ask/request the dealer to show the mucked hand, though. I'd still suggest that you not request to do so -- it will almost assuredly piss someone (or multiple people) off. There are some rare occasions where it may be worth it and/or warranted, but they are few and far between.

Most common is when someone shows their hand to "half" the table immediately before mucking (at showdown), which often will cause the other half of the table to want to see too. Most dealers handle it well and just move on to the next hand while the players 'disseminate' the (usually useless) information.

For most of the sites, the software was reading the text-based "hand history" to collect data. When hands were mucked at showdown, the contents of the mucked hands generally appeared in the plain-text hand history (and most UIs provided a way to view them or to replay the hand action-by-action).

There were a couple of sites where this wasn't the case, or where the hand history wasn't provided in a simple text format (or at all) -- but generally, that's how it worked for the majority of the poker sites/clients.

The reason for being able to view mucked hands (at showdown) is because you can do the same in live games, at least that's the house rule in the vast majority of live rooms. It's almost always frowned upon, to varying degrees, to actually request to see a mucked hand - but generally IS allowed by rule (ie WSOP events explicitly allow asking to see hands mucked at showdown, though an 'anti-abuse' discretionary clause is included in that rule, too).

  Location:  Las Vegas, NV
  Remote:    OK (not required).
  Relocate:  Yes (willing).
  Technologies:  C#/DotNet (+ Unity), JS, Ruby, PHP, Python, HLSL/rendering/shaders, C++, C, and (many) more...
  Résumé/CV:  Upon request.
  Email:  hn@dantonio.info
  

Entrepreneurial senior-level software leader with over 15 years of experience and a track record of success. Wide breadth of technology knowledge and business experience. Proven ability to lead teams, solving difficult problems while consistently delivering business results.

SUMMARY:

I've founded multiple successful companies and have several successful 'exits' under my belt. Most recently, I founded and bootstrapped an indie game-dev shop which has designed, built, marketed, and shipped two successful desktop titles -- SimAirport and SimCasino, available on Steam! :)

OBJECTIVE:

I'm currently looking for interesting & challenging opportunities -- especially interested in building & leading high-caliber teams, solving difficult problems, and building real business value. I place a high premium on working with subject matter that I find interesting (some of which includes: AV, rendering/shader/GPU dev, computer vision, simulations, 'IOT', networking, performance/optimization, complex systems & algorithms, hardware/electronics, agent-based AI/behaviors, EVs/solar/energy storage, and more).

I'm generally not looking for "generic web" roles, though I certainly might make an exception if the project subject matter was a great "fit".

Please reach out if you have something that you think might be a good fit! :)

hn@dantonio.info

I also like Route53 -- moved all domains (from various registrars, including a few from GoDaddy) over to Route53 years ago and haven't looked back since.

It's everything you need from a registrar & DNS provider with nothing you don't: a thoughtful interface that is responsive even with a large volume of domains, no up-sells, first-class API capabilities (which is great for volume/bulk operations), and the pricing is solid/reasonably low-margin with no gimmicks, no front-running.

Only thing to note is that, at least last I looked, Amazon isn't actually the registrar -- it's some kind of 'affiliate' setup with a 3rd party, but AFAICT it's essentially Amazon.

You're not wrong and I generally agree. In my experience, the issue that comes into play most often is performance optimization. Usually "generic" optimization (read: CPU side) is fine and testing the game on other target platforms (not just Linux) is often beneficial and commonly brings about changes that have positive impacts for the game across platforms.

Where it rapidly can get dicey is optimizations related to rendering, and that's also commonly a massive "unknown" up-front. This includes "GPU" optimization itself (ie shading) and also optimizing for CPU=>GPU pipeline/bandwidth -- both of which are difficult to abstract and/or the abstractions that exist tend to leak a lot.

The latter is the area where I've personally experienced the most pain and those situations are often full of unknowns & full days of developer time spent working on/debugging platform-specific issues from an actual Linux test machine. Having to devote full days of developer time to Linux-specific GPU-related debugging is painful -- specifically because it rarely generalizes or improves experience on other platforms. For a small/indie team, it's extremely expensive because of the big "unknowns" that exist (ie lack of familiarity & uncertainty of outcome, etc), and especially because of the opportunity cost/the time spent is likely to benefit <2% of customers, at best, which is a very difficult pill to swallow unless you've got a really big pie to begin with!

I'll end the same way that I began: Proton very good, great even! =D

Proton is very good.

The current reality is that it really does increase the testing surface area by a substantial amount. Even if it's only +10-20%, the addressable market on Linux is nowhere near that size, so it is really difficult to make a good business case for supporting Linux natively. Large studios could certainly do it, though it'd basically be getting "subsidized" by other target platforms; small studios though, not so much, the math just simply doesn't make sense currently.

The engine abstractions only do so much for you - at the end of the day, it's another thing you have to test and provide support for, with the latter being the most troublesome and resource-intensive, in my experience.

  Location:  Las Vegas, NV
  Remote:    Yes.
  Relocate:  Yes.
  Technologies:  C#/DotNet (+Unity), JS, Ruby, PHP, Python, HLSL/rendering/shaders, C++, C - and many more...
  Résumé/CV:  Upon request.
  Email:  hn@dantonio.info
  

Entrepreneurial senior-level software leader with over 15 years of experience and a proven track record of successfully delivering results. Wide breadth of technology knowledge and business experience.

I'm currently looking for interesting opportunities -- especially interested in building high-caliber teams, solving challenging problems and, ideally, working with subject matter that I find interesting (audio/video, game dev, shader/GPU dev, computer vision, "IOT", client/server, performance/optimization, and more).

Please don't hesitate to reach out if you have something that might be a good fit! :)

hn@dantonio.info

Shameless plugs for the two games I created, incoming! Both games use an "actor/agent" -based AI.

The AI is driven via needs-based utility scoring & heuristics, and action/object selection uses attenuated-delta scoring; this creates agent behavior that is "opportunistic". The AI itself is largely based on prior work, substantial portions of which I believe can be (at least largely) attributed to Don Hopkins, who I see posting here pretty regularly. :)

SimAirport - https://store.steampowered.com/app/598330/SimAirport/

SimCasino - https://store.steampowered.com/app/1158420/SimCasino/