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d13hardon Coghead Grinds To A Halt, Heads To The Deadpool

these days it seems a lot of the burn rate is in sky-high salaries. employees seem to be treating the fund as a piggy bank. i've been speaking to a lot of VC-backed small ventures in the bay area and even in these times, $150k starting salary is not being balked at or even questioned. $150k seems to be the floor for negotiation with many. and thats for engineering...god only knows what the "ceo" is earning, likely $250k or more.

d13hardon Ask HN: Just cashed out for 2M. What now?

Brilliant! My advice is to stay in cash (or equivalent).

you'll need it to pay the IRS + state their 50% (if for example, you are a california resident). oddly enough lots of people forget about this simple fact. depending on how the deal is structured, there is a good chance that your tax bill is $1 million. oh by the way they then adjust your next year's taxes upwards and want quarterlies...so leave some money for those (you will get most of it back since your gain is non-recurring)

but still, you're a millionaire.

edit: whoops! i see you say you are in canada. well i suppose the tax situation is likely comparable....

d13hardon Yelp and the Business of Extortion 2.0

yelp is ner the top of a long list of sites that

1. people love

2. cannot make money

3. should have found a way to get bought in 2006

get in line behind zuck

d13hardon Why You Should Design Fixed-Width Websites

i strongly disagree. fixed width works in the world of 1998...everyone with a 17 inch monitor on their desks. today screens tend to be very big (24 inch monitor) or very small (iphone). the only viable method for addressing the inverse bell curve of monitor size is with liquid layout.

d13hardon How the Crash Will Reshape America

California seems overpriced and the state budget is in bad shape

i live in california and love it...i think in so many ways it is the best place in the world to live...but i must admit (with trepidation since i hold so many state bonds)...that the state is doomed.

the size of the fiscal crisis here is not "state size", its "nation size". but california cannot engage in printing money, deficits, or anything else a nation can do to temporarily ease through. tax revenues are dropping like a rock in every city in the state as EVERYONE lines up to get their house re-assessed to get lower taxes.

california was crushed in the housing bubble and prop 13 makes revenue collection even more inflexible. i personally intend to have my property taxes cut in HALF, which is actually accurate and fair given that houses on my street are now...half off. whatever happens i will be paying less in taxes by some amount. now repeat for tens of millions of people...

and there's no stock market windfall to offset the gloom. google and apple are just high-salary employers now. that won't save this state. suffice to say i think the state finances are in doomsday mode. thankfully my kids do not go to public schools...

d13hardon Judges Plead Guilty in Scheme to Jail Youths for Profit

i would think you would want a strongly typed language for something like this

d13hardon The Hangover Theory

probably the first time i vigorously disagree with krugman....and oddly he appears to be in stark contrast to some of his own writings.

austrian economics has probably become too dogmatic for some, but i do think there is validity in the notion that recessions realign capital flows in more constructive directions. look at what we are trying to do now - fight excess debt brought on by overconsumption with more debt to support overconsumption.

the stimulus bill subsidizes the purchase of new cars...but we just spent ten years watching people blow too much of their net worth on cars...is more of this really constructive? what next...government mandates that we all buy (taxpayer subsidized) home theater systems?

i'm troubled that the government is working hard to promote the same reckless overconsumption that put us in this mess to begin with...but it won't work, people out there are getting the message that debt is poison.

d13hardon Introducing Mozilla Bespin, a Canvas-based IDE

i prefer something like itsAllText, which lets me fire up my own local editor for any textarea (using it now with emacsclient). employing a local editing tool lets me keep all my keyboard shortcuts, which is why i use one editor instead of another.

what i would really like to see is direct embedding of your choice of local editor directly into the textarea. there's no way to satisfy everyone with one editor.

but still, bespin is very cool and an improvement over plain old textareas

d13hardon How the Crash Will Reshape America

- debt fueled consumption is over

- american wages will slowly revert to global standards where there is global competition...i.e. start getting used to hiring managers talk about the "bangalore price" just as people in manufacturing have been beaten about with the "china price".

- stock markets will be continuously pummeled by volatility and mandated selling (boomer 401k liquidation)

- the big "IF" - can the dollar survive. we've basically entered a zimbabwe-like state of fabricating huge volumes of new currency to prop up fiscal fractures that were themselves caused by excessive abuse of currency in the 90s. one must ask, at what point does the dollar break? my guess: US debt of 25 trillion

d13hardon Is Mixx The New Pownce?

mainstream news is a scale game. if you aren't yahoo news, cnn, drudge, etc...its almost impossible to survive

d13hardon Thoughts on Yahoo BOSS Monetization (from Duck Duck Go Founder)

monetizing BOSS is a decent idea in theory, but its clear they should have telegraphed this earlier in the program

the real issue here is that this will not and cannot reverse an obvious issue with ysearch - it continues to underperform google in use, revenue, and quality. selling ysearch to msft to me is a no-brainer, the costs for running this service are astronomical, the ad system (panama) is a perennial underperformer, and frankly search is not critical to yahoo's bread and butter businesses...banner ads on key properties like news, sports, finance, mail, and groups.

ysearch has never really made financial sense for the company, i suspect bartz will not be religious about making futile frontal assaults on google like jerry was