amerkhalid

I used to use CPA for years when I had decent freelancing clients. The CPA was great as I can email him any tax question anytime and he usually answered in details for free.

But as for saving time, I would not consider that a benefit. It still takes me hours to gather all the forms from various websites, take photos of other forms that were mailed, receipts, and other expense stuff. The benefit was that I had an expert available to make sure it was done right.

You will still need to proactively tell CPA about any changes in your life.

I stopped using my CPA when I missed a deduction for buying a new car. But later I asked him how do I know what are important tax related things to avoid missing any deductions and breaks. He started sending me a giant pdf to fill out. That was more work and less user-friendly than simply using TurboTax.

Always keep local copy that is not writeable by iCloud/Google Drive.

I use iCloud and Adobe Lightroom. In LR, I make sure that it keeps full resolution photos on a removable drive. Then I back up that drive to a NAS once week or so. Backup folder on NAS is mounted only during backup.

These type of comments almost always come from non-parents.

In a way, they are right. You can raise your kids without influence of social media but that is not easy or cheap. It would definitely require homeschooling. One of the parent will need to be stay at home parent. Probably need to avoid urban and suburban areas where kids can easily hangout with neighborhood kids. Avoid social gatherings where other kids will have access to social media. Basically, unrealistic for most of the people.

Or we as society can come together and regulate social media, just like how we do with alcohol, cigarettes, speed limits, etc. Yes, there is less freedom in this but living in societies always had some freedoms removed.

Same here in Frisco, Texas. Teslas are so common here and pretty much it is always Asians driving them. I keep hearing that Tesla is the new Toyota.

But talking with some of the Tesla owners, many feel embarrassed by Elon. Many say that they will not buy another Tesla or they have some other reasoning to justify their purchase (like Elon has gone crazy but we shouldn't punish the entire company for it etc)

Like others said, using dev tools in a browser, I have been able to make my life easier many times.

Also I have found many toys for babies and toddler are really loud for no reason. I usually open such toys and remove speakers or if sound is important I would add a small resistor from some other toy.

Another thing that is sort of related to tech skills is ability to research and learn new topics. I was absolutely not handy but in last few years I have learned various home improvement/maintenance such as changing toilet flush, masonry, taking care of pool, and probably many more such things. But this can be a little bit of curse too. There are many times where I took on a project after watching various YouTube videos, only to find out that it is not as straightforward. For example, masonry needs a lot of practice and that project needs to be redone.

I have considered this question many times for my side projects. On long term, I want to transition to native apps. But for now, I am sticking with web apps for side projects.

The reasons why I want to move to native dev eventually:

1. It seems more fun, better access to hardware, you can build more experimental apps like a network monitor that plays/generates music based on network stats, you could tell if something is wrong from another room.

2. Speaking of monitoring, you can build apps that are local-only and you don't need to worry about your servers being up on your vacation etc.

3. And with local only, you don't have to worry too much about privacy laws.

But the big cons of native apps for me are:

1. Monopoly of app stores and difficulty of distributing applications outside of them. As a consumer, I appreciate quality controls that app stores provide but as a dev, I am not a big fan of them.

2. Lack of any open-source IDEs for app dev in Apple's ecosystem. I would focus mostly on Apple's ecosystem but I don't like the idea of being tied to XCode. I really like that in web dev, I can spin up $5 VPS and start coding with vim.

3. And even more specific to my situation, I am a web dev at work, so there is extra cognitive load when learning native dev.

The pros and cons of web dev are essentially reverse of above. You can start web dev really easily, there is no one gatekeeper, there seems to be more jobs for web dev. But it is hard to build interesting apps on the web. Everything on the web seems more salesy, less innovative.

The reason why I am sticking with web dev for now is due to cognitive load. Though sometimes working on something different from your day job actually feels refreshing.

Even in large orgs, devs have so many different responsibilities, I just cannot see them be able to do their job if limited to working on tickets only.

This seems like outsourcing sweatshop kind of practice.

> It takes more time and resources to manage it

For most of the new web projects, setting up your brand new server is pretty well documented process and should not take more than couple of hours.

It get complicated when you grow and add more servers or components. But at that point, you should be able to afford a part-time consultant to handle complicated tasks or just use Cloud then.

Not an excuse to not explain what happened. If they want to maintain trust, they should give some explanation.

One more vote for ChatGPT’s simple and intuitive UI. I personally find most of modern web design over the top, with bare minimum information, just fluff.

I guess it depends on your target market, average consumer probably is easier to influence with certain designs and average technical user probably prefers less clutter on their tools.

Not sure where you are but in the US, you don’t need any business license for many types of businesses especially when freelancing. And you can invoice using any method including handwritten.

It is probably smarter to do something better than handwritten invoice but I am glad there are not so many hurdles to starting a business here. I have dealt with a lot of contractors here who don’t even issue a paper invoice for small jobs, they just tell me how much I owe and I just pay.

Small jobs probably are not worth suing for. But I’m sure if I don’t pay for a big enough job, they would sue me.

I read it as a critical comment. Perhaps read it in my mind as "it's legal but not ethical..."

I would agree with OP, especially if your goal is to be a good parent. If you want do just basics of parenting, then it is not hard to pursue other goals.

I got young kids who definitely need a lot of personal attention, got appointments, playdates, driving around, etc. I could cut out a lot of these activities but then they end up watching tons of TV. I keep thinking once they are older, then I will have more time for personal projects but my friends with older kids are just as busy. If their kid is in sports, then forget about any freetime. They are always driving them to trainings, games, etc. One friend wakes up 3 in the morning to drive their kid to swim practice. They sleep in the car for 2-3 hours, then take their kid to school.

If your kids are not in the sports, then it does not look as bad but it seems they are always doing driving for their kids.

But I also think part of being a great parent is to teach your kids to pursue their dreams. And the best way to teach that is by showing them how you pursue your own dreams. Now how to do it all without burning out, I am still trying to figure out. (Or maybe I need to accept that it is not possible to do so)

I don’t care about sports much. Grew up in society where cricket is religion. I suffered through too many boring live matches at home.

Never understood the appeal of live sports or watching games in person. Some teams I followed, I just looked up if they won or not, next day.

Went to a random soccer match a few years ago. That was one of best experiences of my life. The energy of crowd gets you really in the game. Everything else in your life doesn’t matter for a few hours.

It changed my perspective on watching sports in person. Same thing with watching sports at home or in a bar with really passionate fans is a lot fun and way better than watching it by yourself or with not very passionate fans.

In our neighborhood, some streets have speeding problem. Some neighbors asked city to install speed bumps but the city refuses to do so those because then emergency vehicles will be slowed down too.

Yes, parents should not have unlimited rights to determine what is good/bad for their children.

Social media is a powerful, addictive and dangerous. Pretty much anywhere on this earth, parents will end up in jail or lose custody of their kids, if they give them harmful substances like drugs. Social media should be regulated like how drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes are regulated.

Not sure if this is what is really happening but if someone almost always gives 5 stars, that sounds like they might be getting paid for reviews.

Btw I have also started give mostly positive reviews only as negative reviews can come back haunt me (stories about businesses suing people for negative reviews).

It used to be but these days there is no real difference. I prefer Apple Maps mostly because it has no ads and works better with Apple Watch.

Offering gaming servers might be an option. Just make sure you don’t give out root access to anyone.

I think it may have something to do with less strain on your eyes when focusing on distant screen than one up close. I have Quest 2, I really enjoy watching flat 2d videos on it. Even with screen-door effect, sometimes, I prefer to watch shows on it.

We got 2 kids, 6 and 2. We both work full-time. Our priorities are kids first and then career. So we have made decisions that are not maximizing our earnings potential like taking a WFH job over higher paying positions.

We are okay with it for now. As someone who eventually wants to do my own thing, I’m not too worried about climbing corporate ladder. Probably when kids are older and need us less, I will re-start working on my side projects. In the meantime, I’m improving my technical and leadership skills.

I do want them to pursue their dreams though and if I don’t pursue mine, then it would be pretty hypocritical of me. So I think we should set an example for them with our actions. Just need to take care of responsibilities before chasing big dreams.

One thing, kids are hard but they teach you things that will help you in career. In my younger years, I was impatient with others, had hard time being assertive, didn’t know how to work with distractions in background. Now kids have taught me all these skills which let me be better teammate and mentor.

> Describe how 10,000 photos of your child is on par with access to electricity?

It is not. Electricity is just an example, probably a bad one. I would take it over photos any day.

But I am sure there are some modern conveniences that are really important to you while for others they are not as important. If you lose access to those conveniences, you will feel greatly emotional whether anger, sadness or some other emotion. And most people will sympathize with you and a few people will think that it is pathetic to obsess over whatever it is. And they will repeat same old cliche, "back in the days".

Just because it is not important to you, it does not mean it is "pathetic" if it is important to someone else.

I used to work in consumer-facing tech support shop where we mostly troubleshoot computers. I saw too many people crying in public because they lost all their data including photos of their kids. And only thing they cared about was for us to recover the photos. And if we recovered photos even if only a few, people would cry with joy. They brought us cakes, cookies, and other things as gifts. And if we failed, some people had almost mental breakdown.

Based on while probably small sample size, I do think feeling distress over loss of photos would be a normal reaction for majority of humans.

I am sure they will survive but it would be huge loss and emotional shock.

It is like saying losing electricity forever should not be catastrophic event, people were living happily without it for 1000s of years.

A few months ago, I discovered Mac Whisper, thanks to fellow hn user[1]. This is great and works perfectly. I take stream of consciousness notes with a lot of silence. This transcribe these notes and let me search through my notes with simple text search.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37777259

One idea might be RFCs. Instead of telling him to go solve a problem, ask him to investigate and write a proposal for fixing it. Add some requirements such as proposal should have one ideal fix and two alternatives that require less resources. Engineers want to do ideal solutions even if they are cost prohibitive.

This way then you can point out anything that he missed and select a practical solution.

However, ideally, you would want everyone to write RFCs for any larger project or that engineer will feel targeted.

A company that forces certain operating system upon its employees may not have right priorities or IT budget. Not dealbreaker but it would make me a little reluctant even if they are forcing my preferred OS.

> from the bottom by those who have yet to grapple with the fact they dont have friends or hobbies and need you in the office so that they dont feel like such embarrassing losers.

Two anecdotes supporting this.

Back in my early career I worked with this dev in their 40s. He always brought his gaming laptop to office and would stay late in the office. He had family and kids, this was the only time he could play games without being bothered.

At another job, we had a director who was workaholic and would schedule meetings at insane hours like 7PM. You were not forced to take meetings in person, could dial in but still it was insane. Rumors were that she was going through divorce and work was escape from personal life. Escape from your life is fine but do it without making everyone else's personal life miserable.

I can see such people wanting RTO.

> For me, the magical period was the early 90s, when I was growing up.

> In 15 years, are people going to be talking about the current internet as the time when the magic was there?

I remember seeing stats/meme that you will hear the best music in your teens and early twenties. It is because in our teen years, things make big impact on us.

So it is likely that the internet and other media has similar effects and todays teens will be reminiscing about current internet when they are 30+ or so.

Love this.

I am still working on my minimalist theme for hugo. Your blog is pretty close to what I have in my mind.

old Amazon - Their customer service in 2000s and early 2010s was just unbelievable.

Once $800 lens was stuck in shipping going back and forth between various UPS hubs. I called Amazon, they saw tracking info and overnighted me a replacement lens. When the original lens finally got delivered, I called Amazon to return it, they initially told me to keep the lens for my troubles.

I didn't believe it, so I reminded the CS that it was $800 lens, if she was sure. She doublechecked and issued me return label. (I know)

Anytime, I had any issue with Kindle, no matter how small, they would send me a new Kindle even if it was out of warranty.

Many times when I tried to return an item, they simply told me to keep the item and issued me refund. (Though they still do it but not as much).