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Schweigi

527 karma · joined April 3, 2012

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Schweigi··on Robinhood Trader May Face $800k Tax Bill
This is not how it works under the wash sale rule. In your example, the $900 loss would be added to the cost base when doing the second purchase. Because of that, the sell at $1100 will have a cost base of $1000.
Schweigi··on My apartment was built on toxic waste
Btw, if you live in CA you can use https://www.envirostor.dtsc.ca.gov/public/ and https://geotracker.waterboards.ca.gov to search for any known environment risk in your area.
Schweigi··on My apartment was built on toxic waste
How do you know this was the only person? Others might have complaint to the property management company. Besides that, not everyone thinks that its their own home who makes them sick and they will blame something else. Its possible that a specific area hasn’t been cleaned properly so only a few apartments will be affacted and not all 1800.

The only way to see what going on is by doing another Phase II ESA study. But those are expensive and you will need the approval of the owner which will be unlikely.

Schweigi··on Google is accelerating reopening of offices and putting limits on remote work
Heck, it's not even good enough for 1 day at home per week. It's basically only useful for cases where you need to stay home because of a sick kid or someone is coming over for house repair/maintenance.
Schweigi··on Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?
The Zoom client has already a built in calendar integration. Once connected, it will show you all upcoming meetings for the day including a button to join the call. It's quite convenient.
Schweigi··on UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews
Did you use the report functionality or did you go through support? If the review has no relation to your business it’s a clear violation of the review policies and you can report it. For us nothing happened after reporting such reviews and only after contacting support they got removed.
Schweigi··on UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews
Google Business (business.google.com) which is used for managing a business on Google/Google Maps has surprisingly pretty good customer support (for Google :) ). There is an option to request help and when you decline all the automated answers it's possible to send a text to a real person. Up to now all requests to remove reviews, photos, or previous/old business listings have been resolved in 2-3 business days.

In order to remove a review on Google Business it needs to be fraudulent or outdated - e.g. the business has been remodeled and the review doesn't apply anymore. But the list has over 10 different categories on why a review can be removed. So in reality I would say it's probably possible to remove any review. The customer for Google is the business, not the user as Google is promoting GoogleAds to local businesses so they need to keep them "happy" to increase Ad spend.

Schweigi··on The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed
Their advantage is that they are very mission driven and don’t really have to answer to anyone. I think its one of the key ingredients why Elon’s companies & adventures are so successful. A company or organization which is pulled in different directions because of politics or financial influence is always at a disadvantage.
Schweigi··on Offline Algorithms in Low-Frequency Trading
I did make my own option trading algo which is similar to the one in the Git Hub repo (but I used Scala, which gave me additional returns, jk :) ). Return totally depends on the delta of the options you write and the option symbols in your basket. Mine could be configured to be between 10-100+%. The higher the return the more volatile.

The idea of using multiple symbols like SPY and TLT is to reduce the tail risk. But in the end there is still tail risk like for example in the crash of 2015. Making the strategy delta neutral with hedging could improve it but I never completed that part.

There is an interesting book with all the math by Euan Sinclair about option writing and how to minimize the risk if you are interested.

Schweigi··on Robinhood is limiting purchases of stocks: AMC, Blackberry, Nokia, and GameStop
You’re right. I get the same message for Jan 29’31 300 CALL but do not get the message for the $330 or $500 strike. Looks like its only for ITM strikes.
Schweigi··on Robinhood is limiting purchases of stocks: AMC, Blackberry, Nokia, and GameStop
I just tested it with IBKR and was able to create a call buy order (exp 1/29, $500 strike) for a single contract.

Info: Market was closed so the order wasn’t executed but it was accepted by the order system before i cancelled it.

Schweigi··on Danes Get 20-Year 0% Mortgages
Fixed interest mortgages in Switzerland are usually only up to 10 years. The 5% underwriting limit is used to minimize the interest risk.
Schweigi··on How to Escape a Sinking Ship
There is a good book [1], which dives into why some people survive while others don't. One of the main takeaways is to break the rules if required. The other takeaway is to follow your instinct (like a child would).

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06VVMN5J2

Schweigi··on AWS Outage – 25Nov2020
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25209773 (on front page) for more discussion about the outage.
Schweigi··on AWS Cognito is having issues and health dashboards are still green
Indeed, we had the first AWS Kinesis issues already at 13:50 (UTC). Now it's still ongoing after two hours. The status page didn't even update in the first 45 min or so...
Schweigi··on All ICUs in Switzerland are occupied as of now
The data from your link is 10 days old. In the meantime many more beds got occupied.
Schweigi··on I’m deaf, and this is what happens when I get on a Zoom call
With the Zoom desktop app you can click a button on the top right to switch the view. This allows you to see the presentation and the gallery view at the same time (make sure to have a recent app version). With the mouse you can resize the view between presentation and videos if you like to make the videos bigger.
Schweigi··on Amazon destroys $1.5m of sellers inventory – now homeless
Amazon nowhere says that the invoices appear to be fake. Amazon’s reply is: “Illegible or didn't match records” - Illegible can mean anything, for example older as 365 days, as stated in the article. The second part about records not matching is just company speak to make it look like the vendor is to blame. It’s intentionally vague. My wife worked as a vendor manager at Amazon and she never checked any manufacturer receipts/had a way to check them.
Schweigi··on Ask HN: Best HVAC system for a new house?
You will need to dehumidify the air inside the building. But the building structure needs to be good. You can’t have gaps or isolation issues. Your right, the average home won’t be set-up for this.
Schweigi··on Ask HN: Best HVAC system for a new house?
We used to install a lot of radiant cooling systems already back in the 90ies when I was still working as an HVAC engineer before switching to software development. Mostly for commercial buildings like banks, offices and museums. It might be too expensive in residential homes but also in Switzerland we usually don’t do a lot of active cooling for residential properties.

Radiant cooling is definitely the most comfortable way to cool. In addition, it only requires small pipes for air circulation as the air is not used for the actual cooling. Thus less issues with drafts and space requirements.

If I would build my own home and money isn’t tight then I would definitely go for a radiant cooling system.

Thought you need to find a company with experience installing those systems. Since moving to the US I mostly see split systems. I’m not sure how many contractor here have experience with radiant coling systems.

Schweigi··on Celery 5.0
I can definitely confirm the issues. We had memory issues, stuck tasks and lost tasks (despite late ACK). It really requires a lot of fine tuning to get right. We started switching to AWS SQS four years ago and created a thin Django/Python wrapper [0] for it. Now we handle tasks in the hundred of millions a day and I don't want to think about how that would have turned out if we didn't switch.

But honestly, people working on Celery in their free time (i think) so who am I to complain. I can see that monetary support would be necessary to make it better. But in my opinion the project just got too big and it will be difficult to fix all the underlying issues.

[0]: https://github.com/cuda-networks/django-eb-sqs

Schweigi··on The IRS Sets a Trap for Cryptocurrency Tax Cheats
No paywall: https://archive.is/fFni3
Schweigi··on Eviction startup gets gig workers to help landlords kick people out
The article is incorrect about the CDC eviction moratorium as it makes it sound to be some automatic thing. The tenants needs to file a letter (template is at bottom of CDC order) to the landlord or court and only after that they “might” be covered by the moratorium. It’s still up to the court to make the final decision.
Schweigi··on How to form a California LLC without a lawyer
That’s why the operating agreement of the LLC should have a charging order protection. It discourages reverse piercing. A charging order protection will allow the LLC to stop distributions to a member who lost such a court case.

In case of an LLC taxed as a partnership the creditor will need to pay the taxes as stated on the K1 but doesn’t receive actual money. Obviously this will make it very unattractive to the creditor to go for a charging order on your membership in the first place.

Schweigi··on Modeling a Wealth Tax
The lump sum tax is only possible for non-citizens, who do not have direct W2 income from Switzerland. Local governments (if the state allows it) can use it as a shortcut to estimate the tax amount. Nevertheless wealthy Swiss citizen don’t leave Switzerland either. Probably also because there is no capital gains tax which offsets the wealth tax easily.
Schweigi··on Death Valley soars to 130 degrees, Earth’s highest temperature since 1931
The original article from Burt has much more info: https://www.wunderground.com/blog/weatherhistorian/an-invest...

- “About September 1912, Oscar Denton replaced Thomas Osborne as the Greenland Ranch USWB COOP weather station observer. Denton, of San Diego, began signing the USWB COOP forms in September, but the first form with data in his handwriting was December 1912. Denton served as the observer, caretaker, and foreman of the ranch for the Pacific Coast Borax Company until mid-August, 1920. Thus, Denton’s first full summer as the weather observer was the summer of 1913.”

- “When rain fell at the ranch, recorded amounts were almost invariably in the amounts of 0.01”, 0.10”, 0.20”, and 0.30”.”

- “There were occasional periods when the daily maximum and minimum temperatures would take on a persistent and rather unnatural numerical pattern.”

- “These instances suggest that Denton may have been just ‘filling in the blanks’ for days when he missed taking the observations.”

The original article list many other issues.

All in all it seems Denton wasn’t the most professional observer. Obviously 100 years later anything is difficult to proof, but it seems very likely that not enough care was taken when recording the numbers.

Schweigi··on Remote work is reshaping San Francisco, as tech workers flee and rents fall
People are definitely moving away from the South Bay too. It’s not only San Fransisco. We recently renewed our lease (apartment) in Cupertino and the lease went down 19%. Plenty of complexes nearby went down similar in price and even offer one month free rent.
Schweigi··on Tesla Gets Crushed in Germany by EVs from Volkswagen, Renault, and Hyundai Group
Previous article about the Zoe outselling in Europe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23963732

It seems in the end price and size are the most important factors in a lot of European countries.

I have a personal anecdote from my dad who bought a Smart EQ. He just wanted a good car for commuting and the Model 3 is too expensive for it.

Schweigi··on Show HN: Trail Router – generate running routes that prefer greenery and nature
Wow, great project. I was working on exactly this in 2015 using Grasshopper but never finished it. I like how much time you invested to solve all the tiny details around the edge cases. Like prefering certain streets, no-hills and trying not to run the same street twice. It wasn’t clear to me from the blog article, does prefer “green” also prefer water areas?
Schweigi··on Robinhood has lured young traders, sometimes with devastating results
Did you try the IB mobile app? It has quite a nice UI compared to the desktop trading software. For example the option chain builder is very easy to use on the app. Obviously if you need all the advanced features then the app will not be good enough.
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