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Isn't this a useful form of price discrimination, though? The coupons allow you to sell your products at full price to those who are price insensitive, while also allowing you to sell at a discount to price-sensitive buyers. Only the latter are willing to go to the hassle of looking up the coupon codes.

My wife installed a plug-in on our family computer that looks up coupon codes for you at checkout time. But often they don't work, so I don't even bother with them. To me, that suggests that even if its 'easy' to find the coupon codes, the coupons still work as a form of price discrimination.

In addition to focusing on international, they are still focused on very small companies. I went to a conference for small solo entrepreneurs this year, and they had a heavy presence. They also acquired/supported indie hackers. Now that they are giant, it would be so easy for them to write off the small customer, but they continue outreach. Its strange that I have such positive feelings about a payment processor, because payment processing isn't a major issue for our business, but they have just been good to do business with compared to the 3 other processors I had before, and that makes me like them.

Exactly. I signed up with stripe maybe 5 years ago. At that time, I was trying to find a processor, and came close to signing with a bank. The bank wanted me to sign a long-term agreement, the agreement had disadvantageous and confusing terms with unclear costs, and it was more expensive than stripe at baseline. The sales process was really sleezy: I only discovered all those terms because I read the contract carefully before signing.

Before that I used two other processors, both of which had a confusing mix of monthly and per-transaction fees.

If you are a very, very large business, maybe you can do better than stripe. But if you are small or even medium size, I am skeptical there is a better deal out there.

Thanks a lot! You are right, a masala was just what I was looking for. The Shan products mentioned below seem to have a ton of sodium, but the everest products you mention let you add your own sodium and sugar to taste. I just ordered some to try out.

I don't think I'm exactly in your target market, but I have a related problem: We cook a lot of healthy foods at home (e.g. skinnytaste), and Indian recipes are the only ones that never come out.

I suspect it is because we never get the spices right. We went to an indian cooking class many years ago, and the woman who taught it hand ground all the spices herself. The results were amazing, but who has the time?

If you had a service that coupled premixed spices with recipes that use them, that would have been really exciting to me.

We can already buy various pre-made pastes/mixes at the grocery store, but they are really unhealthy.

If we could get the spices, then have control of all the fresh ingredients (meats, veggies) and also all the unhealthy ingredients (salt, anything with fat, etc), that would be attractive to me.

I know that is not what you are doing, but just for the future (a) spices are cheaper to mail and shelf-stable (b) the spice mix is probably the secret sauce of what makes it taste good, and it is difficult to duplicate in my experience (c) leaving the other ingredients out would allow home users to follow either a healthy recipe (fat free yogurt) or special occasion recipe (heavy cream!)

Anyway, FWIW, when I read the first lines of your description, that is what I was hoping for.

Yes, it is a deduction of 20%.

Thanks for posting this, I have been looking for just such a summary. I think I will be a significant beneficiary of this provision (as I currently understand it, anyway), but I agree with other commenters that I wish we could just make things simpler and more fair.

Over the last 10 years I have had experience with small business taxes, small business retirement plans, and various estate-tax avoidance schemes. The tax code is a joke. It rewards people who have the resources to game it, and it employs an entire class of people who specialize in doing just that. Its demoralizing, but while it exists, everyone has to play the game.

Edit: Also, that same site has an even more detailed summary of the deduction here:

https://evergreensmallbusiness.com/sec-199a-qualified-busine...

When I was in my twenties, I didn't think marriage sounded that great either. I am 42 now and love being married. Here are a few thoughts:

* I really understood the desire to marry when I found someone who was right for me. My wife and I are highly compatible. It is great having a teammate in life. I had many relationships which were good, but didn't rise to this standard. All the time, I think about how much I respect and value her.

* I value stability for my children. I love my children more than I could ever have anticipated, and the home we create for them matters a lot to me. Also, there is no one else who understands your parenting project the way your spouse does.

* My wife and I laugh a lot together, usually just before we fall asleep or just after we wake up. The intimacy and comfort is fun.

* For me, I didn't like the idea of marriage until I was ready for it. What I mean is that when I was young I wanted to work all the time, and I felt poor and was constantly worried about money. By the time I met my wife, I had had enough career success, and had enough savings, that I was ready to be really generous without feeling stressed about it. I mean generous in the broadest sense: with my time, with my emotional security, with my financial resources. Marriage seemed more threatening or risky before I got to that point.

* The 'contract' is negotiable - we have a prenup. That said, I don't ever expect it to have any meaning for us, but don't get hung up on that.

I could name a lot more reasons, but those are the main ones that come to mind.

My advice is: Keep trying to meet a lot of people. Eventually, you will meet one who after a year or two makes you say "If I could lock this situation in, I would be ecstatic," and she will feel the same way. Then, marry her! The day I got married, I couldn't believe my luck. Many years later, I feel far more lucky than I did the first day.

Also, I love this essay on marriage: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/slates_10th_...

I spent two years building an automated system for building resident block schedules. I made it to a beta with a very large residency, but for a combination of technical and incentive reasons it was impractical to grow. I actually revisited the concept recently with a revised business model that might have addressed some of the growth challenges. I did a kickstarter, but didn't generate enough interest to pursue it again.

I also spent maybe 1 year prototyping a system meant to analyze the performance of wealth managers. I used financial statements from friends and family to see whether I could produce anything useful. But, the more I got into it, the more I realized it was difficult to produce a compelling automated analysis, even given a complete history of all the manager's transactions. It was too easy to swing the result by subtly changing the assumptions.

I also investigated an all-inclusive management system to help foundations for public high schools manage fund raising, etc. Again, I did a kickstarter-like campaign for it, and found inadequate demand.

FWIW, I have a Mid 2010 Mac Pro. I found it was getting slow. I tried putting a lot of memory in it, to little effect.

Then, I put this:

https://www.amazon.com/OWC-Accelsior-PCIe-SATA-Adapter/dp/B0...

And this:

SAMSUNG 850 PRO 2.5" 1TB SATA III 3-D Vertical Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) MZ-7KE1T0BW

In it as my system drive. The volume looks external (its got that orange and white icon), but everything has worked perfectly for about 18 months. It boots just fine.

For me, the performance increase with this change was incredible. Its like a new computer. I my OS and all my installed applications on it. I keep all my data on traditional drives in the other four bays. Its like a brand new computer. It was completely worth it. Right now, I use it for very intensive workloads of various kind, and never even think about replacing it.

Finally, you can find a lot of info online about whether you should enable TRIM or not. FWIW, I did do it, and its been working fine for 18 months:

https://www.cnet.com/how-to/installing-ssd-on-mac-trim-mista...

I cannot remember at this point how I copied the data over. I do remember that whatever method I found on google worked quite quickly, and that there were no hassles with it. After doing some kind of copy operation, I booted to the new drive and never went back.

Hope this helps.

I really love this idea! There are so many great places to live, if only you could find a good programming job there. I left Seattle for St. Louis to be close to family, and it was the best decision I ever made. Glad to see that Zapier is willing to try to innovate in this area! I hope it will spread.

Assuming you are a software developer, I think you should reconsider your "price should approximate production cost" reasoning. I think it will hold you back if you eventually try something entrepreneurial.

When I started a small software company, I originally had a similar understanding. I subconsciously thought that the software should be priced to pay for its development cost, plus some profit. I was not very successful, until I realized that the product should be priced as a percentage of the value it delivered to the customer. Customers don't want you to do a lot of work, they just want their problem solved for a price that is reasonable relative to the benefit of the solution.

This idea reverses several of your conclusions:

1. The product should be priced based on how much value it delivers, and only those companies that can deliver the product for significantly less than that price will stay in business. Once a company finds a need that people will pay for, it generally makes sense to drive the cost of production down while maintaining the same benefit, thus maximizing profit.

2. The more value a company creates with the resources it uses (the greater its margin), the more left-over resources it will have to invest in producing still more benefits, or to return profits to its original investors.

So, going back to the cost of digital content, I am happy to pay for it, as long as I end up feeling the movie was worth watching for the price. And if they can produce great content without many resources (or with lower cost of delivery), all the better. My problem, right now, is that there is so much great content I cannot ever hope to watch it. But that is not a problem that really bothers me, I am happy to keep paying to have a long list of shows I'd like to watch, if I could just find the time.

Just downloaded it, the app is really elegant. Really nice work. I have used weight watchers in the past, so here are a few thoughts:

1. Its not totally clear to me what the goal of the app is. Is it going to help me lose weight? Help me avoid unhealthy foods? Why am I tracking? Do I get to choose why I am tracking? Tracking is a big commitment, so I would lead more with what the benefit is, to motivate me to decide to track.

2. I really love the weight watchers approach of boiling everything down to a single point count. I have been around WW long enough to see them change the meaning of the points to incentivize different behaviors. For example, raw fruits and vegetables are generally zero points, even though they clearly have calories. High sugar foods are higher in points than their calories would suggest. I find a point system much more useful than a calorie system.

Overall, if your goal is to help people lose weight, I'd suggest you look at what WW has been doing in their app, and also in how they have changed their point system over the years. I actually think WW overall (including the meetings) is an amazing system.

Interestingly, I have gotten to the point that I basically know the points of everything I eat regularly. Originally, I loved the WW app because it was so comprehensive, but now I just use a tiny notebook and pen. Its a lot faster than messing with the app.

This is so true. Having children is such a tectonic shift in lifestyle that I think it is very hard to anticipate how it will impact your priorities. I was close to both my parents and grandparents before having kids, but I felt a new, deeper connection to them after we had kids.

Just for your interest, I worked for a company that believed micro-payments was the way to pay for content on the internet in the late 1990s. It was called Qpass. The idea was that you could buy some credits, and use your Qpass at any of the sites in the network to pay for specific articles. Qpass wasn't able to make that model work at the time.

Qpass ended up pivoting to helping wireless carriers with flexible billing solutions for digital content.

[1] http://www.seattlepi.com/business/article/Qpass-sold-for-275...

Couldn't agree more. Also, again from "Hoop Dreams", it was as though the basketball players believed that having entered college was going to transform their career prospects in itself, regardless of what they learned. If you see college as some sort of mysterious potion, then you might think any college will transform you. You don't see that college is at best a tool for developing skills that are relevant to building a career.

I agree with 1. My wife and I just re-watched "Hoop Dreams", which she had never seen. There is a moment where Arthur Agee goes on a recruiting visit to a 2 year college, and is shown offering 4 different generic career ideas to 4 different adults in quick succession. ("Architect", "Business", "Communications", etc). Its like he is guessing at what a career might be, he doesn't have a frame of reference. So, I think the lack of awareness in underprivileged environments may apply to high level career paths in general, not just SD.

Regarding 2, I also agree. I think right now, the school (and possibly home) environments are so sub-optimal that we really have no idea what most underprivileged kids are capable of. But that problem is vastly larger and more intractable than the "could we teach kids pragmatic SD skills" problem.

As much as I want to believe that some kind of pragmatic software development curriculum could offer a scalable career direction for some of these kids, its not clear to me that it would really solve either of these problems. So, I continue to think about it occasionally, but not pursue it.

Also, I once tried calling underprivileged schools in my city (St. Louis), asking about opportunities to tutor kids in CS/computers. In each case, I got blown off, or referred to the city-wide magnet school, which teaches a tiny fraction of the most gifted students, many of them from the county.

1. Write children's books - because I love reading good books to my children, and if successful, the revenue scales and they have great recurring revenue potential (much better than adult books, I think).

2. Try to bring software development education to underprivileged kids in some way that eventually scales and has real career potential. There is part of me that feels this has potential, because the opportunity for self-development is so high, and the cash costs of the tools low. There is part of me that worries it is futile, because I suspect software development jobs actually require more deep and diverse basic knowledge of math and reading than I could hope for in underprivileged environments.

FWIW, we have both automated and machine-based checkout at our grocery store, and I choose the machine-based when I can because its faster, and I usually have a wife and kids waiting at home.

So, sometimes the more automated option is also the option that involves more net 'humanity' for me (or at least more time for close/meaningful human relationships).

For me, this retail model would be attractive.

Separately, I agree that automation may be displacing people who need assistance as a result, but I think the best way to address that is to offer government assistance, not to avoid the valuable automation.

When I was a kid, we ran around our neighborhood as a pack every day after school, and all summer. We would explore the woods, explore new construction houses near us after the workers left, play sports, and thousands of other activities.

Unfortunately, the environment has changed for my kids in ways that makes this difficult to duplicate:

1. Other kids aren't home anymore, they are all at structured activities. There is no neighborhood pack to play with.

2. Parents aren't home either, they are working. When I was a kid, if you got a splinter or scrape, you just went to the nearest house and someone's mom patched you up. All those houses are empty now.

3. If you keep your kid home to play freely, they miss out on all the social stuff going on in the structured activities. Much as I dislike all the structure, it is where the other kids are.

I agree it sounds great to let your kids roam free as we did, but I think in practice the environment has changed in ways that make it difficult.

When people wonder what would happen if index funds become too popular, I usually refer them to Warren Buffet's 2005 essay, 'How to minimize investment returns':

http://www.mymoneyblog.com/how-to-minimize-investment-return...

It is essentially a thought experiment about what would happen if everyone switched to one big index fund.

But, it glosses over the issue of individual security pricing and corporate management, which would become issues in a 100% pure index environment.

Of course, we won't ever get a 100% pure index environment, because the closer you approach it, the more incentive there is for active managers to exist.

I think what is really happening is that as more people use indexing, the less talented active managers are driven out of business. A small number of very talented active managers may eventually find themselves in a highly competitive market to exploit pricing inefficiencies, and they will end up incidentally providing management oversight and marginal pricing services to the indexers. These active managers will probably look more and more like private equity firms (taking an active hand in management), and less and less like traditional arms-length traders.

As long as this small number of talented firms isn't allowed to collude with each other, or self-deal unethically by controlling management, everything should be fine. In fact, having met some less talented active traders in person, I suspect that the quality of marginal pricing and managerial oversight may go _up_ as the number of active managers decreases, and the less informed and talented among them are eliminated.

FWIW, I went to stackshare today and was interested in the stackups feature. For the first time ever, I decided to click that I used something (bootstrap), then I ended up registering through github and submitting my site.

However, once I was logged in, I could not find a way to get back to stackups. The top/left home icon takes me to trending tools and stacks. Posts seems to be stacks of major companies. Tools and services doesn't have stackups.

I searched for searched for "Stackups" in your search bar, and the top result was "Stackups". I clicked more. It lists 50 results, but then no actual results were listed.

I was only able to get back to the stackups by logging out, and returning to the home page. Maybe I am missing something obvious, but just FYI that was my experience.

For what its worth, I felt this way when I was 28. I ended up leaving a very good job to start a very small business. Although its a tiny niche business, it ended up providing an amazing life for me and my family. I am 42 now (yikes!).

When I was 28, I had a specific dream (starting a business) but was afraid of the risk. In your case, its not clear to me if you have a dream but don't know how to get there, or if you wish you had a big dream, but aren't sure what it would be. My advice applies more to the former than the latter.

My advice would be:

1. If you are really dissatisfied with your job, look for a way to shake things up. I left my good job to go to business school, then quit after a few months when I realized I'd learn more by trying to start a business. Business school wasn't the answer, but I wouldn't have quit the job directly, so it facilitated things. Its hard to know in advance what will work, but if you are stuck, try something new.

2. Keep your eyes open for opportunities. The business I started was related to experience and contacts from my previous employer.

3. As soon as possible is the best time to take risks and make changes. It won't be any easier to take risks as you add in more responsibilities (house, kids, etc).

4. Do your best at whatever you are doing, but don't worry too much if your plans don't work out exactly as you thought. I thought I wanted to be an industry titan. That was not in the cards. However, once I had kids, it turned out what I wanted was a really flexible schedule. In retrospect, if I was an industry titan, I suspect I would be looking for the exit (actually, given my skill set, I probably would have been shown the exit).

I obviously don't know you, or much about you. But in my case, shaking things up to pursue my dream really worked out well, FWIW.

I tried Realm for an OS X desktop app a few months ago. I initially liked it, but was surprised when I discovered the threading requirements (one realm instance per thread, cannot pass realm-based objects across threads).

1) When I see that a library has a note about threading, I generally expect that it will either be "its thread safe" or "these operations are not thread safe and you need your own synchronization." I think having no ability to share realms/objects across threads is really unusual, and it would be better if the docs made that requirement clearer at the beginning.

2) My use case was reasonably simple - background thread A listens for messages about some expensive work to do, it updates the UI thread with the work, and then it spawns thread B to do that expensive work and keeps listening, thread B updates the worklist on the UI thread on completion. Based on my understanding of realm, I was going to have 3 copies of each object, one on each thread. Traditionally, I would expect one in-memory copy, with the threads using synchronized methods to modify the data. Then, when thread B completes, it just updates its work item and then notifies the UI thread to re-render.

Maybe I misunderstood it, or there is some really simple architecture to handle this issue, but that is how it seemed to me from the documentation.

It does, and I wondered why Google hadn't targeted it first. Its simpler,and there is a compelling business case.

I wonder if their decision was driven by political savvy - self driving cars help the blind/elderly, and automate work most people are glad to see automated. Self-driving trucks are going to have a major employment impact which will likely draw political resistance.

Is the statement "more passive money implies more arbitrage opportunities" actually true?

1. I think passive money is generally not taking any position on whether an asset is over or under priced, and as a class tends to be very inactive. I doubt it either increases or decreases arb that much.

2. I think what would increase arb opportunities would be:

A. A critical mass of misinformed active managers

B. So few active managers that the market is gameable

However, as the number of active managers decreases, one would think that the misinformed ones would go first (A), and that (B) won't be a linear progression, but a sudden tipping point at a very low level of active management.

Actually, I sort of think the final statement is reversed. As the number of active managers declines, and the average active manager becomes more competent, it will become harder for the active managers to find profitable arbitrage opportunities.

Thanks for that link, really helpful.

This econtalk provides some nuance for your point:

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/04/bryan_caplan_on.htm...

There are many reasons to believe that college is more about signaling than knowledge. While admission is an important part of the signal (certainly at the high-end), completing college is probably an important signal in the mid-range and below. Completing college is probably associated with work-ethic, the ability to follow rules successfully, etc.

I think the most interesting thing YC could do to promote prosperity in the US is some kind of 'fellowship' for technologists with an interest in helping the impoverished to 'embed' with social service organizations and try to learn how to help them.

I don't think most people who frequent HN, no matter how well intentioned, understand the factors that cause people to be stuck in poverty, myself included. I think you would have to get close to the problem to have really useful ideas. I have ideas, but they are more like questions to be honest.

Some ideas I have thought about in the past:

* An app that helps people learn that they are in a failing school district, and helps them systematically develop a plan to get out of it. I live in St. Louis, and around the time of the This American Life episodes on the Ferguson schools, I spent a lot of time wondering how you end up sending your kids to the worst of the 550 public school districts in the state. The question in this case is: what are the characteristics of people who send their kids to bad schools, and to what extent can they help themselves if given the right tools?

* An app that helps people find others to share resources with (shared living, etc). The idea here is that poverty may be driven by the breakdown of the family, which provides first-line social insurance when working well. Kind of like match.com for poor people with kids looking to team up. The question here is: Is there some subset of improverished people who are very high-functioning, but so limited by childcare and low-wealth that they cannot lift themselves out of poverty. If so, could these people be matched and help each other by sharing resources?

* Trying to create a program that directly funnels kids from underperforming schools into computer programming and IT jobs without going to college. Perhaps to be hired by large corporations who will ultimately spring for night-school to round out their education. Here, I am thinking about a section from the book The Prize, where a bunch of Newark teachers go to insane lengths to try to get one kid with some athletic talent enough tutoring that he can achieve an ACT score of like 14 and qualify for a college scholarship. That strikes me as significantly less scalable than a program that tries to give poor kids a marketable set of skills coming out of high school. It would still be a small set of kids, but maybe larger than the number who have athletic talent (and its not clear athletic scholarships yield good outcomes anyway). The questions here: Could some non-trivial group of impoverished high school kids be funneled directly into employment with the right vocational technical skills and support from major corporations?

With all these kinds of ideas, however, I think you would have to get really close to the people you are trying to serve to have any chance of building something that would help them. And that means 'embedding' with them for a non-trivial period and really trying to figure out what will work.

None of these ideas are like startups, in the sense that I think in the best case scenario they aren't likely to scale very well. I think they are more likely to cherry pick a small number of resourceful/talented people who might otherwise have remained mired in poverty.

That's better than nothing, but my intuition is that when you get into the details of poverty that there are no highly scalable solutions. Everything is going to be messy. These stories have informed my opinions on messiness:

Netflix Rich Hill Undefeated Waiting for Superman

Audio This American Life on Ferguson Schools

Books Our Kids (Putnam) The Prize Work Hard be Nice

Articles http://www.tampabay.com/projects/2015/investigations/pinella...

Just a few days ago I spent $200 to purchase a multi-domain wildcard certificate so that I could host multiple secure domains, with multiple subdomains, on a single elastic beanstalk app. It was such a headache to figure out that I needed the multi-domain wildcard cert, then to find one to purchase for a reasonable price.

Now, 5 days later, AWS lets me create one for free in 3 minutes, with zero hassles. I cannot select it in beanstalk yet, but I am sure that will come. I am consistently amazed by how frequently AWS satisfies needs I barely knew (or didn't know) I had.