cullenking

LSD is not a "light" psychedelic by any sense of the word. It's pretty great in many ways, but one of the big downsides is the duration of the drug. Mushrooms would be a better first bet, solely because the duration is significantly shorter. "light" is a hard term to use for any psychedelic as most can put you into total, terrifying ego loss. That being said, safe and sane mushrooms are your best bet IMHO. Just read trip reports to get an idea of the proper set and setting to get the most from the experience.

We find it to be very good business to provide amazing customer service to all users, free or paid. It results in better word of mouth advertising. It's so appreciated by users that they will evangelize for your service, assuming it's something they use regularly.

The cost for support is low too, relatively speaking. Obviously not all businesses have enough margin to consider this, some support is more expensive than others etc.

In addition to the header info mentioned in other comments, email providers let you subscribe to email Feed Back Loops. You register for FBLs (man it's a neverending process since there's a never ending pile of new email providers), and when someone marks something as spam, the email provider (gmail/outlook/etc) will send an email to a registered address, you just listen for emails on that address. I wrote a custom handler to do this, as we already had a system in place to process incoming email from users (respond to comment email instead of replying on web form etc). I then unsubscribe the address in question.

Not all providers offer FBLs, in that case my internet provider gets an abuse notice which is forwarded along to me. Not a ton of activity there on a 500k person mailing list, the FBLs are pretty effective.

Also, since we have the email processing system in place, it's easy to detect bounces and auto unsubscribe people. I immediately unsubscribe on a hard bounce, and wait for 5 soft bounces before doing the same thing.

This is why I typically select the non GMO version of most foods that are prepared. I don't think the genetic modifications are problematic, but for wheat etc that typically means it's roundup ready. For fresh produce or fruit I don't mind as much since I control the washing, tho waxed apples can be problematic.

Sorry, I should have reserved my comment for a day when I am not recovering from a sinus infection :) Farming, in the midwest at least, was a dying but still widely practiced profession up into the early 80's. This also includes meat farming. The farm consolidation really got into the swing of things in the mid 80's. Add in the decimation of the auto and steel (and supporting industries) and you see a period from 1960 - 1990 that had an unprecedented level of people forced out of work due to automation and lost jobs.

The Trump comment was tossed in because it's been easy to forget about this stuff as a coastal living millenial, and the recent Trump phenomenon has brought it back to the forefront.

Sorry for the initial snarky comment!

Oh, you mean all the farmers and factory workers that made up the Midwest, which are now overwhelmingly trump supporters, largely because of the destruction of all economic opportunity in their region?

Glad that worked for you, but bed or not, there's a ton of fussing that's going to happen. Maybe your kids were different, but in my experience the bed just means they fall asleep faster (which is nice, not going to argue that), it doesn't prevent your baby from waking up every 2 hours all night.

We now have a good rhythm - wife lets me sleep through the night and I get up at 5:30am with Felix and let her sleep for another couple hours. Didn't really work great at the beginning.

Oh man, just coming out of the dark times (it's hard for the first few months), my little babyface is a bit over 6 months old. Everyone likes to offer un-asked for advice, and I'm no exception, but sleep sleep sleep. Bank it as much as possible before it's gone. Sleep dep is easily the worst part of being a new parent, it makes your brain go funny and makes it hard to cope with things. Be prepared to feel super depressed about your work performance for the next six months. That one actually hit me hard - your brain is how you do your job and your brain doesn't work properly for the first six months, so it's incredibly demoralizing. Lots of rewarding things in there too, but man, there's definitely a trough of sorrow you go through at the beginning!

ridewithgps.com | Portland, OR | Full Time | Mobile Dev

We are a current team of 9, building software for bicyclists. We have a comprehensive website that allows users to plan, review and organize their riding. We also have a class leading mobile app for iOS and Android that enables navigation, live logging and extremely battery efficient recording of bike rides.

We are looking for an experienced backend engineer (rails, node, mysql/mongo/redis, self hosted physical machines) and a mobile dev (iOS or Android).

The mobile developer candidate is skilled in either iOS or Android (or both!) and will work closely with our existing talented mobile dev. He currently works on both the Android and iOS apps, and we'd like to get a dedicated engineer for each platform.

The backend engineer should have the chops to help with various devops tasks (20% of role) as well as create solid, scalable work in rails and other web frameworks (80% of role). We have a dedicated front end engineer and would like to complement him with more bandwidth on the backend. Currently, my co-founder and I are the sole backend developers.

We are a fast growing, bootstrapped and profitable business that offers an excellent work life balance along with great benefits. Full medical/dental/vision plus a 10% matched 401k, bike reimbursement program and more.

Email cullen@ridewithgps.com if interested.

Yeah, you could say I used the comment as a soap box to rant about something that I experience all the time :) In some cases chargebacks work great and should be used. I've honestly never had to use one, since merely mentioning it to any merchant or service has been enough to get my problem resolved promptly. Sorry for the derailment :)

You are misguided in this. For the vendor/service provider/whatever, it's a $15 charge per chargeback regardless of the outcome. So If I sell you a monthly service for $6 per month and you forget to cancel it after three months, then at end of year check your statement and notice the charges and decide to make chargebacks to correct it...Then you just cost me 96 + 915, $189, which means I am in the hole $171 because you suck at managing your checkbook.

This is bordering on ranting, but happens all the time and is just a cost of doing business, which means my regular customers get to pay more to deal with people like you. Contact the merchant first, they are usually very prompt and want to avoid chargebacks like the plague, because they cost real money.

I plan on using it to track what database objects have a corresponding cached image thumbnail. 10 million objects in my database, thumbnails generated on the fly, fast get/set the unique ID of the object in the bitfield. very small storage for what you get.

It's a big deal to run (takes lots of hardware), but I really like nominatim. I've played with them all and it's the one I've settled on. Helps that I run it on a pair of OSM tile rendering and routing servers. Only downside to nominatim is the space requirement (~ 700gb), and the fact that it takes forever to build the database (24 - 36 hours on 256gb ram machines w/ SSDs....)

On the same note, I'd put nginx high up there. Aside from the occasional config funkiness (which I can forgive them for) it's an amazingly useful, versatile and efficient tool. Can't complain too much about it. I think nginx and redis are my two favorite often used pieces stack.

The Portland real estate market is extremely hot right now, and you can't get a decent house in a decent (or even not decent but "up and coming" neighborhoods) without an all cash offer, or way over asking price. Every friend that has been through the market in the last year has been beaten out of multiple bidding wars by all cash, no inspection offers 10+ % over asking price. Lots of bay area money moving up to PDX, tons of satellite offices opening up for tech companies, it's a big cultural shift that's happening pretty fast.

If the Portland real estate market is any indication, there are countless more people than you'd ever expect to be able to come up with $500k in cash.

Again incorrect, all company profits are taxed regardless of whether you withdraw it in the form of distributions. If you withdraw distributions in excess of your basis (your share of accumulated profits/losses in the company, it can be negative or 0) then yes the distributions you take above your basis are then taxed as capital gains. Don't do that. I strongly advise finding a reliable, recommended professional to talk to about this stuff. We found a fantastic guy through our business lawyer, wish we would have found him earlier.

Yeah, I just do the quarterly estimated payments. If your business is constant (not growing) it's easy to handle via extra withholdings. If you are growing, they at least make it easy so that if you pay an estimated tax that matches the prior years tax owed (paid quarterly) you avoid any penalties, even if you have to make a lump payment to settle up the difference when you do your taxes at the end of the year.

We have a pretty sophisticated business intelligence platform written in R that gets us estimated revenues within 10%, so I know how to budget through the year for taxes owed. I just pay my known quarterlies and keep enough in the bank to handle the remainder at year end.

The problems I have run into have been acting like I know more than I actually do. Our first accountant assumed I knew everything since I acted like I was making informed decisions, which led to some issues. He also made a few mistakes (not capitalizing on section 179 one year for example).

In regard to your question about why your misconception is common, no idea. Just a quick google shows lots of accurate descriptions of the benefits of an S-Corp. Maybe a misunderstanding with your accountants?

After moving to a larger (and much more expensive) accounting firm, and learning from our previous mistakes, I've had a much more pleasant time dealing with this stuff. It's all arcane and stupid when it comes down to it, but you have to learn it to effectively manage your tax burden. If you don't actively think about it you get absolutely screwed on occasion, as it affects everything about your business. And the mistakes get expensive as your revenue scales up.

This is getting totally tangential, but you can probably hardly imagine all the crazy rules regarding taxation in the case of a sales event. Operating as an S-Corp is fine and dandy, but creates an additional hurdle for getting investment and for sales. S-Corps can only be owned by individuals, so an acquisition or an investment means restructuring, but you are restructuring after a planned purchase, which says certain things about intent which makes the restructuring likely a taxable event in and of itself.

I strongly strongly strongly recommend talking to an experienced business lawyer, and having them recommend an experienced business tax planner. This isn't schemey tax avoidance stuff, this is fundamental planning so you don't get a surprise $200k bill at some point!

This is incorrect, the profits are not taxed as capital gains, see my above post. Only time you get taxed on profits as capital gains is when you make the mistake and take distributions in excess of your basis in the company, basically a rookie mistake, and then you get taxed cap gains on the amount in excess, and it's a double tax :(

The other two replies are incorrect (I have up until this year run our business as an S-Corp).

With an S-Corp, you pay your owners a reasonable salary. $50-70k is reasonable for our field according to our CPA. Any profits or losses from the business pass through to your personal income tax via a Schedule K1. The profits are taxed like normal income, they are not taxed as capital gains.

The tax savings come from the fact that the distributions you draw from the profits of the company are not subject to FICA (medicare, social security). This saves you upwards of 13%.

If you draw more than your profits for the year (say you run an accrual method of accounting, not cash, so you recognize revenue after services have been fully rendered, rather than when the cash comes in and you can have a large bank balance but no profit for that year), the excess is essentially double taxed with capital gains. A painful mistake, so track your AAA appropriately :)

Haven't used it while looking for a job, but we've used SO to post and have not had good luck. Craigslist yields better results for a mobile dev in Portland, and costs one tenth of SO. Additionally my business partner and I received no less than 20 unsolicited recruiter and contract services spam emails each, and I wasn't even on the job posting!

Glad to hear of it, sorry to come across as harsh. I was (and still am) surprised to not see any updates in the app since I got my devices delivered 3.5 months ago. Strongly recommend you guys kick out the occasional bugfix release without piling up fixes for a big release, helps make the project feel like it has a little momentum.

Your hardware seems to be top notch!

Ahh, good explanation of the group updates functionality. Is this a problem for a small group of 4, every 15 minutes? Seems like not too much bandwidth if you aren't talking about an update ever minute.

I've got a 4 pack of gotenna's, and the hardware seems good, but the android app is pretty bad. Pretty sure a solid Android dev could bang out an app with better functionality in a good solid weekend of hacking (assuming they were using an SDK that abstracted all the BTLE comms).

Android app is missing some great features like automatic group location updates. Right now you have to get location updates manually broadcast to you by each person in the group. Lots of crashes too.

I applied for an SDK but haven't heard anything back in three months. Feels like the project is dead, as there have been no android app updates in that time either.

This is actually a decent first time rebill success rate. With a consumer website we see similar if not a bit worse. Recurring billing with consumers can be tricky - lots of fraud and expired cards leads to declines, which means often times you have to re-sell your value to the customer to get them to update said card.

Bigger B2B is a different beast, if you are a core piece of someones business they will not let you expire.

Motorcycle racing. It's a surprisingly heady sport that takes intense concentration while you are doing it, and requires you to study and conceptualize what you do right and wrong to help improve your times. It's self-competitive and you have perfect metrics. You literally tick milliseconds off your lap times at the upper end of the sport. The racing part is secondary to the actual fun, which is going around the track at high speeds attempting to improve. Race craft is more about how to get around people that are in your way and slowing you down, instead of winning (though there is some of that too). The people involved are also, on average, very educated, smart and driven. This is party because it's an expensive sport depending on what you want to race, but also because the personality required to do well and stick with it has a ton in common with what a typical entrepreneur or other efficient businessperson requires.

Race weekend coming up, today is a practice day at the track ;)

The employee can still leave at 3pm, but maybe he shoots off a couple of his team-oriented emails at 6:30am. That shows he's indeed working early, so leaving early isn't weird.

One of my employees does this by spending the morning hours managing his inbox and otherwise catching up. Additionally, he always makes a fresh pot of coffee right when getting in. The coffee maker has a 2 hour heat timer, so when it dings at 8:30am it's a clear indication he was in the office early.

You don't have to be blatant. He isn't, but he's well known as the guy in the office that likes working super early, and no one gets bent when he steps out of the office by 4pm. They occasionally whine about how it's unfair he's a morning person and gets to enjoy the afternoon sun, but it's jovial joking about their night owl habits compared to his morning habits.

Basically, having a good team that understands and respects each other is the key. If you don't have that you miss out on many of the good parts.

Standing desks can be "affordable", though still not cheap. I've been using the Jarvis base, and putting my own locally sourced hardwood tops on them. The base is $500 shipped inside the US ($520 with the digital controller), and you can put whatever top you want on it. The Jarvis base is high quality, i've got 10 of them in my office now.

Here's a pic of my biz partner modeling one during our recent office move: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-UNFNw1p6-Xw/VG_WYEYFfYI/A...

Mississippi is the Albina neighborhood mentioned in the article. Used to be 90+ % black, now it's 50% or so and dropping pretty fast.