clogston

"18 months of credit monitoring? Crap, I've already got two of these."

Even more sadistic, have an entire batch dedicated to ONE of those ideas and see which company has the least poor execution.

Maybe if YC is their /only/ investor? I'm not familiar with how YC's initial investment is structured. But your scenario won't exist for many (close enough to all?) startups who have investors. What likely happened is the startup either:

1) raised their money in a priced round. It's therefore unlikely they have unilateral control of the board.

or

2) didn't do a priced round but went with convertible notes. Those initial investments are now interest-accruing debt on their balance sheet.

In either of those scenarios there's going to be immense pressure to not let the business get comfortable.

IRS requires you to authenticate yourself via one of two mechanisms if you efile (regardless of who you do your taxes with):

1) Prior year AGI

2) Electronic filing PIN

They can also issue a taxpayer a special Identity Protection PIN. If you're issued one of these you MUST use it.

There are two groups of people that don't need to "authenticate" at all:

1) Anyone who didn't file the previous tax year

2) Anyone filing by mail

The whole image is being stretched vertically in CSS ("background-size: 104% 160%;"). You can see the same distortion on the man's arm, the phone, and the pencil holder.

Definitely a "once seen, can't unsee" type of thing but I'll admit I didn't notice it initially. :)

It looks like the author for Metrics is also the author (one of the authors) of Dropwizard.

Everyone I know big enough to run a load balancer has had this happen.

The next step in evolution is to have your script look for specific text on a page, which will change 24 months later and have all the perfectly good servers pulled out of rotation.

> It would also be nice if you could disable spam filtering entirely and run your own client-side.

It's horribly convoluted but it /is/ possible to do so:

http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/69442/how-to-disa...

I've been running it this way for about 18 months now after having a few important emails get gobbled up by their spam filter.

> SOFTFAILs should not be used and they will cause problems

Many SPF docs recommend using SOFTFAILs, including Gmail's docs [1]. What's your recommended SPF setup for his use case?

[1] https://support.google.com/a/answer/178723?hl=en

> The author also doesn't show how the federal income tax is fundamentally different to what an employee would pay

Not disagreeing. For anyone wondering what the fundamental differences are:

1) As an independent contractor you are responsible for 100% of your FICA tax (social security and medicare tax). For most people the tax due is 15% of your income. This is in addition to your income tax. In an employee/employer relationship the employer pays for half of this. It can be a big shock to people who are hit with this for the first time.

2) If you're an employee, your employer is automatically withholding your income tax payments for you and sending them in to the IRS at a regular interval. As an independent contractor you need to be doing this yourself. If you wait until the end of the year and pay as one lump sum you'll likely be penalized.

I can't help but think these straight-laced, shirt & tie, crewcut environments aren't attractive to the type of diverse skillsets they really need.

I never advocated banning anything. The argument is closer to "cheap, high calorie low nutrition food is leading to an obesity epidemic." Tax fraud costs taxpayers billions of dollars[0]. There are surely many ways to combat this, but the correlation between fraud and it being free to attempt fraud en masse is real.

The link you provided points to industry participants in the Free File Alliance[1]. Some skeptics believe the industry has this program to appease the government enough to not pursue tax software created by the government. If you're one of the folks who believe we should have a more european-style system, participating in FFA probably works against that goal (I don't know that that's your stance just throwing it out there for others to consider)

I think it's also interesting from a business case study. I tried to make the argument that tax software isn't cheap to produce. What's the right way for competition to blossom if the cost to users is "free" and the revenue is made up via other less than savory means? Does small-guy competition have to resort to the same tactics?

[0] http://www.forbes.com/sites/leonardburman/2012/05/28/billion...

[1] http://freefilealliance.org/

Oh believe me I don't either. It's horrible an industry can crop up to assist with government inefficiency and eventually become powerful enough to keep the inefficiency in place.

Lots of speculation in this thread. Here's my hypothesis.

Federal tax return fraud is huge. It's a growing problem that the IRS is struggling to cope with and it's been going on for years. State tax return fraud has been largely non-existent... so non-existent in fact that USA Today reported the state of Minnesota got suspicious when there were 2 reported cases of fraud[0].

So what's going on and why is TurboTax being called out by these states? First off, know that when a tax return is e-filed either to the fed (who also handles most state e-filing) or directly to the state, every software provider transmits an identifier along with it. So if you get a bunch of bogus tax returns submitted it's trivial to see where they're all originating from. Second, the rise in federal tax return fraud has grown steadily in relation to the number of software providers offering a free option... the reason we haven't seen state fraud as rampant is because it has always cost money to prepare your state return with software. But what's new this year besides a dramatic increase in state tax return fraud? TurboTax's Absolute Zero campaign. That's right, a whole lot more people can file their states taxes for free using TurboTax's software. That may seem great at first blush if you qualify, but an unintended consequence of that is it's now a completely free roll for a fraudster to file a state tax return IN ADDITION to a federal one.

[0] http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2015/02/...

It's trivial for the IRS. They either cut a check (and mail it to an address) or direct deposit it in to an account. Most fraudsters opt for the check option... so much so in fact that one of the new fraud prevention mechanism the IRS introduced this year was to cap the total number of refund checks to any specific address at 10(!).

Unfortunately there isn't an existing easy way to find out if your SSN has been used to file a tax return. When you file your taxes via efile[0], the IRS system will reject the tax return if a tax return with the same SSN has already been filed for that processing year.

If this happens to you you're forced to file by mail.

[0] Doesn't matter who you use to do your taxes. Even an accountant that has access to e-file.

I would guess this is happening largely because Intuit started offering free state filing to a greater subset of users. This has been an ongoing problem at the federal level, but just started this year with the various states. Strong correlation between fraudulent returns filed and it costing $0 for a fraudster to take a shot.

No you're not held liable, but it's a giant pain in the butt proving that you're the actual owner of your SSN. It also significantly delays your refund (if you're due a refund).

There many tax software companies. The vast majority of them do not actively lobby against tax filing simplification.

> Simple clerical errors rarely invalidate a contract. I'm not a lawyer though so I don't actually know.

We need a name for this.

For those not reading the article, please note this isn't just a claim made by the defense. This came out of cross examination of a DHS agent.

  "You thought you had probable cause that Mark Karpeles
   was intimately involved, as the head of Silk 
   Road, correct?" Dratel asked Homeland Security agent
   Jared Der-Yeghiayan.

  "By the contents of that affidavit—yes," he answered.

We're running the Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana (ELK) stack with the recommended approach i.e.:

  logstash client
                   \
  logstash client --> redis -> logstash "server" process -> elasticsearch <- kibana 
                   /
  logstash client  

We have a high logging load (we log every request) due largely to IRS requirements. I've been really happy with it over the past 6 months but something that cannot be overstated is that you'll really need to become familiar with each one of the technologies used as each requires it's own setup and configuration. Not being familiar with any of them, it took me a solid 3 days to get to where the whole thing was usable and performant. Troubleshooting it is a breeze, and the whole system scales really easily, but a lot of that time was invested up front.

There's nothing at all dumb about this question! And the answer is most definitely "yes."

As a shareholder you should have an understanding of how many shares are authorized (i.e., how many units of measure the company has been divided in to) and how many of those shares are issued (i.e., how many units of measure have been given out and are no longer up for grabs).

The reason it's done this way and not via simple percentage (which I agree is WAY easier to understand) is a matter of practicality; as new shareholders come on board it would be prohibitively difficult to go back to all existing shareholders and modify their percentage.

There are two main options at the moment, with many simmers enjoying both:

1) DCS World (https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/world/) is the "framework" and comes with some free aircraft. There are paid aircraft options both 1st and 3rd party; DCS A-10C being the most popular.

2) Falcon BMS (http://www.benchmarksims.org/forum/content.php) which is the successor to Falcon 4.0

This sim still exists as Flaming Cliffs 3 (http://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/products/flaming_cl...)

In early stage startups, the title of CEO has more to do with who's in charge of vision and runway and less about org structure. Decisions are usually made based on an equity stake.

It's good to set expectation up front with each other, and a performance plan is one way to go about doing it. The downside to completely getting rid of a co-founder is:

1) They're likely going to take /some/ amount of equity with them (have a vesting plan!)

2) Getting rid of a co-founder before you reach critical mass will be detrimental to the business. If not, they probably weren't a good pick for co-founder.

It may not really matter at first, but based on my experience it quickly becomes an issue once you grow to a size where you're either fundraising or hiring. In our case, as soon as we started relationship-building with angels and VCs it made sense for us to choose who the CEO is rather than spend 5 minutes trying to explain why we (as 3 co-founders with equal equity) didn't need titles. Now that we're ramping even more towards fundraising I'm realizing just how much of a full-time job that is for the person with the CEO title. Someone in the company will have to take point on that front and it really makes sense for them to be CEO.

Agree on Smart Host. I really like the flavor they provided about the pricing recommendation I got from them.

Yes, indeed, they really do that. The person who has had their e-file reject must submit a paper return and call a special 800 number dedicated to this issue. It's a total double-whammy for the user. IRS tries to resolve these issues within 180 days... and if that delay of their return causes a financial burden they can file a petition. The wheels of progress turn slowly.