News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

andzt

Re:Mark Zuckerberg responds to critics of his $45B pledge on Friday December 04, 2015 @02:42PM (#10678589)
First, he's not moving money currently. He's pledged to move a tangible asset to a new entity.

Second, if you had read his latest comment or understood how a LLC functions and taxes apply, you would know that the LLC will have to pay taxes on the sale of those assets.

Third, any profit the LLC makes from investments in for-profit organizations will also be taxed.

In a previous comment I made on charities and trusts, he would be more likely to be avoiding taxes if he did create a charitable remainder trust for his kid. There's an immediate tax benefit, you get to use the yearly distribution any way you see fit, and there's no guarantee the money will ever see a charitable cause.

Re:Mark Zuckerberg’s Philanthropy Uses L.L.C. For More Control on Thursday December 03, 2015 @11:04AM (#10670311)
As a correction to your assumption and other comments in this thread, charitable trusts (depending on the many ways you can set these up) do not guarantee ANY money will ever be given to charity. Most require a distribution, but many do not dictate how this distribution is to be used or put a limit on how much can be distributed (although large distributions may still incur taxes). It's often used as a way to pass on an inheritance to avoid or limit tax consequences.
Re:What's Behind the Exodus from Rent the Runway? on Thursday November 19, 2015 @01:04PM (#10596324)
My wife has rented several dresses online and usually orders 1-2 dresses and they offer free 'backup' sizes. Great for fancy events, themed parties, weddings, etc. where you'll realistically spend several hundred dollars on a nice dress that for some reason you can only wear once.

Heaven forbid your friends see you in the same designer dress twice...

Bonobos is carried in some Nordstrom stores, not sure about AYR. I'm actually thinking of giving their pants a second shot once the Nordstrom by me re-opens and I can try enough pairs on to find ones that fit well - if the store carries them.

Link: http://shop.nordstrom.com/c/bonobos-clothing

TBH, I still haven't had great luck with their pants. They just don't fit well, even trying several different configuration options.

On the other hand, their dress shirts are very high quality and fit (me) extremely well. They get me every time there is a sale on their dress shirts (like today).

I think the real difficulty with these business models is that the sizing numbers vary WILDLY across retailers, so there's a lack of consumer confidence when shopping - even with free shipping and returns. A 34x34 pant is not the same at J Crew, Banana or Bonobos. There are several other measures that impact the fit dramatically, of which the average consumer is not aware.

Re:The Future of Developing Firefox Add-ons on Friday August 21, 2015 @10:46AM (#10097805)
As someone who has written several extensions across all the different browsers (IE COM Interop FTW!!!) over the last few years, Chrome's dev experience is by far the best in my humble opinion.

Firefox's experience was hamstrung by having to learn XUL and a new and different set of tools and way of doing things. Their approval process and packaging scheme was surprisingly not as streamlined as I would have expected from them either. Chrome's experience is fairly standard and intuitive HTML, JS, and JSON interactions. In most cases it really shouldn't take too long for someone to port or migrate an old Firefox plugin to the new format.

Re:CefSharp – Embedded Chromium for .NET on Wednesday August 19, 2015 @05:55PM (#10088801)
Awesomium is also an excellent product I've used before to embed the chromium engine in WinForms and WPF apps...

http://www.awesomium.com/

Legacy systems...

That being said, as a (forced) Oracle customer I have been and will continue to do everything in my power to migrate off of Oracle's eco-system. This ridiculously offensive post by their CSO is just more motivation.

Re:.NET Native Performance on Tuesday July 21, 2015 @12:22PM (#9923383)
I would have loved to see this a few years ago on Windows Forms/WPF apps as well. Performance was an issue as the libraries continued to expand and grow with additional interdependencies.

.NET Reflector came in handy once or twice to copy out a few library functions to avoid adding another reference dll.

All pre-2007 versions have been end of life/support for a while now. So yes.
*then some other companies with similar scale and profitability can afford to do it too

It in no way means all or most other companies can afford to do so.

Re:Lenovo's Promise for a Cleaner, Safer PC on Friday February 27, 2015 @01:05PM (#9120265)
I would love for any manufacturer to offer a "Just Windows" version. On my last Windows desktop, I freshly installed Windows 7 when it came out and it was a much better experience than the brand new Windows 7 laptop I had purchased, but with the additional manufacturer bloat. Immediately re-installed a fresh version of Windows and the performance and experience drastically improved.
Re:In Search of Cervantes’s Casket on Tuesday January 27, 2015 @02:02PM (#8954972)
Why is this acceptable? Digging up bones to identify a man who has been dead for 400 years seems pretty disrespectful. What is the real motivation here?

When I die super famous and having made a profound impact on history, please let my body decompose in peace.

Re:Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform on Wednesday November 12, 2014 @11:07AM (#8596169)
From Hanselman's post:

"ASP.NET 5 will include a web server for Mac and Linux called kestrel built on libuv."

Re:Reddit CEO Calls Out Former Reddit Employee on Reddit on Monday October 06, 2014 @02:46PM (#8417438)
Normally required as part of a severance package. Pretty standard.
Re:CERN Particle Clicker on Thursday August 07, 2014 @11:15AM (#8148106)
one liner: var interval = setInterval(function(){document.querySelector('#detector-events').click()}, 100)
Re:The Legality of Ride Sharing in Aviation on Friday July 11, 2014 @12:50PM (#8021138)
Definitely on those two. Also, I'm confused on why the "region" is really a city and not a full geographic area.

To clarify: is the point of the service to offer flight sharing for convenient flights all over New England to get to remote or local airports faster? Or is this only to go flying/sightseeing for fun?

Re:Why We Cancelled Our Kickstarter And Funded It Ourselves on Tuesday March 18, 2014 @02:01PM (#7423721)
What about confidentiality and privacy?

Love it, but some of my notes are highly confidential. Obviously, I could use a separate notebook, but is there any thought towards privacy or assurance from these guys that no one is reading these notebooks when they're digitized? The video makes it look like a fairly manual process. Ordered one anyway to try it out.

Agree with you on the ass part. But to give you some information:

A) AOL most likely self-insures... Why? Exactly because of catastrophic events like this increasing your premiums for all of your thousands of employees, even though most of them are probably healthy and low risk. Insurance companies don't care! It's usually better to self-insure until you run into these catastrophic insurance events. B) Agreed. It's disgraceful for any executive of any company to publicly share any type of individual insurance information. Also, borderline illegal.

We have had similar discussions in our own company, which is much much smaller than AOL. It's definitely not directly caused by Obamacare, but we've watched healthcare costs significantly rise over the last few years. And it's mostly these "catastrophic" cases - major surgeries, expensive pregnancies etc. We are try to figure out how we can continue offering great benefits but we'll probably have to make a change. Not to save our billion dollar profits (I wish), but so we can continue to function as a company and employ some great people...
The brands you've focused on already have great online shopping experiences. The regional and small independent furniture retailers could really benefit from something like this where they don't have the knowledge or time to focus on their online experience.

Also, have you seen the numbers on big ticket furniture items bought online? Check out Wayfair's data. They're incredibly low so I doubt you can make enough money just through affiliate programs.

I'm assuming they're not re-selling anything. They're acting as a data aggregator to simplify the product search process to a single site. They then link to the site and, in the case of Amazon, they get money through affiliate programs. Had a similar idea for shoes. Didn't work very hard on it and only made a few pennies before I shut it down.
Re:Soylent: An Offbeat Food Idea Investors Are Taking Seriously on Thursday October 31, 2013 @09:46AM (#6646735)
One of the ideas I want to find out by trying Soylent is: What happens when hunger is no longer an issue? Will I still crave juicy burgers and fries everday at 12pm? Will I really be satisfied by only eating small bites if I'm already full off Soylent? I definitely see myself using this on days where I'm just too busy to run out for lunch, early morning breakfasts, or as good healthy travel food. Not sure I'll replace my whole diet.

What a cool experiment though...

Re:Hacking the Olympics on Wednesday October 16, 2013 @02:09PM (#6561178)
While I think this is really interesting, I do think it's slightly disrespectful of the sport and the Olympic games in general. Good luck getting rocked at the Olympics Paul!
Re:Boston Marathon Blasts Kill 2, Police Say on Monday April 15, 2013 @04:38PM (#5554170)
Still finding suspicious packages around the city... Please stay safe!
Guys... stop clicking the link so I can get my order through.

k thx

Re:How we wrote our app for MS Office 2013 on Thursday March 28, 2013 @02:12PM (#5456593)
Have you found any significant increase in users from the "discoverability by being in the Microsoft App Store"? Also, any reason you didn't implement this as a classic COM plugin?

We wrote similar apps for Outlook 2013, but didn't see much traction. Also, compared to classic COM plugins (which are also still supported by 2013), the API is very limited. That combined with no backwards compatibility makes me think that it would have been better to implement this as a COM plugin for better coverage and functionality...

Re:Taskbox - Turn your inbox into a task list on Friday September 28, 2012 @01:16PM (#4586622)
MailPilot is also about to open up a beta today in about 4 hours, so not sure it's worth investing in another kickstarter to make a similar project. I want to play around with MailPilot to see if I like the metaphor of my inbox as a task list.
Well now that the API is available, YOU could write that relevant app ;)

Older »