akcreek

One of my businesses doesn't have an affiliate program nor do we offer public coupons, yet coupon sites still have dozens of fake coupons from us along with fake usage counts on the coupons and fake reviews.

Since they can't cookie stuff on us to make money they are just trying to get additional eyeballs for ads by organically ranking for anyone searching for a coupon for my brand.

I don't know that story, but it reminds me of one I heard about Theranos where they would demo their technology for investors, partners, etc. Supposedly they would take the blood sample then say let's tour the facility, meet Elizabeth, etc. while the machine does it's work... the rest of the story is the same as yours.

It's possible. I hope that he'll use the money in ways his mom and I would consider to be more constructive, but once he is old enough he gets control of the account and we have no say in it. Fingers crossed.

This is how my wife and I are saving for our son's future. We gift him money (you can each gift up to the limit without reporting it or decreasing the lifetime gift limit) and then we invest the money on his behalf via a UTMA account with Vanguard.

He'll owe taxes upon withdrawal in the future, 17 years from now at the earliest, but he'll also have full freedom to use the money any way he sees fit. So school, starting a business, buying a house or letting the investment ride until retirement.

I do not understand that logic at all. Having a household income $303K says nothing about how much down payment you are able to afford.

Discussion from the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16476731

That's what I've always heard and I can only speak to my personal experience on this, but we track open rates on our marketing emails and have a 36% open rate historically. I'm sure this isn't everyone who is opening them as some percentage have images disabled, but to me this says that a large percentage of our clients do have images enabled as I doubt our actual open rate is tremendously higher than what we are seeing reported.

Clicking unsubscribe isn't the only way to know if the email is good. If your email client loads images then it will be known if you opened the email which will also give your IP, geolocation, device type, client name, user agent, etc.

Depending on your email provider if you mark it as spam that could also be known by the sender if your provider supports the complaint feedback loop.

Here are the docs to see what info is available when sending through mailgun.

https://documentation.mailgun.com/en/latest/api-events.html#...

Do you pay self-employment tax? If so you can likely deduct the cost of your medical insurance for yourself and your family. I deducted $6,157 for myself and my wife last year through my single member LLC. Line 29 on IRS form 1040 [0].

[0] https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1040.pdf

This is from 2013[0], but the avg. inheritance in the US at that time was $177K according to an HSBC survey.

[0] http://money.cnn.com/2013/12/13/retirement/american-inherita...

I should have better specified... the rate per night makes sense for the place in Seattle, but is way overpriced for the place in Louisville.

Gave me the exact same rate for my current apartment (1600sq ft Capitol Hill Seattle) and my previous condo (1100 sq ft NuLu Louisville, KY). My rent here is 3.5x what my mortgage was in Louisville and from personal experience in both places the demand for short term rentals in Louisville is nothing like it is in Seattle. So yeah... probably not accurate for the addresses I checked.

Not specific to this site, but the cavalier use of this type of statement bothers me because I highly value honesty, integrity, ethics, etc. even on the internet where accountability is limited.

If that line is truly their goal then why not just say that,

"Building the best place to find remote jobs"

That small change honestly communicates why the site exists, why I should be interested in it and why there are limited legitimate job postings at the moment. It also tells me that this site is still evolving and I should check back.

"The best place to find remote jobs."

I get really annoyed when such blatantly false statements are slapped onto a website. If you can't say that honestly then it is a great opportunity to be creative with messaging and say something that adds value.

This has been a pet peeve of mine for as long as I've been running online businesses. Our competitors are always #1... all of them, at the same time.

I need an accurate way to count words on a variety of documents, with and without renderable text. Could be an image, pdf, docx, etc. The renderable text isn't an issue, but the non has been for me. I've tried several OCR products and none have worked well as we often have something like an image of a hand written document or a low quality scan of an old document. Maybe something with computer vision instead of OCR is the right solution though as I don't need to know what the text says, I just need a count of the words or characters for languages that use symbols.

How are chargebacks handled on the App store? I would assume a scam like this will receive a relatively enormous number of chargebacks.

I've got uBlock origin, but it doesn't block anything on Pinterest. That brings up a good point... on Pinterest it is hard to tell what is and isn't an ad because the only differentiator is the text below that reads "promoted by...". Everything else looks like a normal pin, except usually the content doesn't make any sense with my feed so I think look to see who is posting garbage so I can unfollow them and usually it turns out to be an ad.

I've used Pinterest for a couple of years or more to save images of cars, motorcycles and houses and the ads are just as terrible for me. I almost never get on there anymore because of the garbage they are pushing on me. Just not interested and it ruins the entire experience to have to wade through these terrible ads that have nothing to do with how I use the product (or anything else related to my life).

-edit-

The suggested pins for me are just as irrelevant. I spent quite a bit of time marking each irrelevant pin and ad as such, but it didn't seem to help. I finally turned off suggested pins, but ads aren't optional.

The cacao is pretty good, but the other new flavor, nectar, is terrible IMO. Tastes like liquid pez. I still prefer the original flavor for meals. Cacao tastes more like a treat than a meal.

He was sarcastically alluding to Bill Gates.

Another vote for the Capital One Spark card. We are getting $500/mo + back via the 2% cash back, which has been a much better value for us than the miles we were getting previously with an Citi AAdvantage American Airlines card.

I have a reminder setup to request a statement credit at the end of each month and it hits our P&L as income.

Something else to be aware of is that some business cards will hit your personal credit score. The Capital One Spark card I have does, but the Citi AAdvantage card I had previously doesn't.

I pay in full every month so it actually improved my credit score a few points as it added $30K in available credit with 0% utilization, but if you are going to carry a balance you could take a hit on your personal credit score - especially if your available credit utilization is high.

Money was wired to an escrow service who was informed of the situation ahead of time and expecting the incoming wire.

In the past I've used http://devdocs.io/, which is available offline.

I spend about $20k/mo with Adwords and, at least in the US, Google charges every $500. I'll often have multiple charges from them on my card per day during the week. I find it very annoying to have all of these small charges to review on our expense report and asked that they increase the threshold and they refused.

I've never not paid a bill (it's automatic), but I find it extremely hard to believe that once the payment failed at 500 Euro they would allow the account to accrue 99,500 Euro more in charges. That is assuming they have a similar threshold to charge where this user was.

This might be the thread you were looking for (with 500+ comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12379518

I've never really had separation between home and work. I started my first business in college and have worked for myself ever since. I've had offices/warehouse related to some of the ecommerce stuff I've done, but even then I'd work from home a lot. My brother is a developer at an agency that I sometimes consult for. They keep a desk open for me there too so if I want to work around people I'll go in there.

So there isn't much physical separation of home and work and there is really no mental separation either since I own my own business.

For the most part I'm able to turn it off when I need/want to. If I'm not feeling productive or just want to do something else I can set the work down and pick up a guitar, go work out, ride a motorcycle, go see a movie, etc. and not think about the work until I get back to it. If I couldn't do that I'd probably prefer more separation of home and work.

I bought a really small business in the translation industry late last year. Since purchase our monthly revenue has grown ~ 190% and we have solid plans to continue the growth. We have 4 people on our internal team, but everyone works remote and part time (approx. 20 hours/week) including me. Our main workforce is made up of freelance translators (about 45 of them at the moment). I handle development, marketing, strategy, etc. and the other internal staff handles operations and customer service.

Our translations are mostly used for immigration purposes so it is a really gratifying business as many clients go out of their way to express their happiness with our service. We are dead serious about our business though... lots in our niche are not, but I won't bore you with the details.

About a year ago I started moving towards not selling my time. It has taken a while to wind down all of those relationships, etc. but it has been the best and most lucrative decision I've made in my professional life. I now have just a single commitment where I sell my time and I've got it down to 2-3 hours per week. It will soon be zero as well.

I definitely wish I would have started this sooner or actually never started selling my time at all. I worked only for myself for the first 5 years out of school then the last 5 mostly for others (as a contractor - never an employee).

When live chat came on the scene customers loved it, but many businesses were slow to adopt since it comes with additional expense (software, staff, etc).

Increased customer satisfaction, increased conversion rate (for some), reduced time per ticket all helped ease businesses into it, but more than anything I think businesses see their competitors using live chat and feel they must to keep up. Live chat hit a critical mass at some point a few years ago and then it exploded to where even the smallest businesses utilize it.

I believe that people would rather communicate via text when they can so consumer demand could drive adoption of this platform much quicker than live chat. It's also not as big of an ask for a business in a lot of ways as switching from email to live chat was, if they are already using live chat.

We can either integrate with the existing chat and just add on SMS/MMS as a channel or offer the live chat portion on the same platform. The biggest issue I think will be the additional cost.

I don't think cost is enough to stop it if it is truly what consumers want. Think about free shipping - it is a serious loss for many small ecommerce businesses, but they still do it to be competitive.

I started by reading the documentation: https://www.sketchapp.com/learn/documentation/

After that I dove into a design project and learned further by doing and researching when I needed something I couldn't figure out.

There are additional resources here as well: https://www.sketchapp.com/learn/