Viewing profile — jmharvey

CPAs aren't cheap, and most people's tax situations really aren't that complicated. Even for high earners with lots of investments, it mostly comes down to collecting a bunch of fo…

I've used TurboTax, H&R Block, and TaxAct software in the past, before switching to freetaxusa a few years ago. The major difference is that Freetaxusa isn't constantly trying to u…

There's a similar mechanism for most horse races in the US, though instead of it being just the winner's entry, all of the horses in the race are offered for sale at a certain "cla…

I'm a fan of the workflow where the PR gets squashed in the upstream git repo, but the individual commits are preserved in the PR in the code review tool. I feel that Phabricator h…

The DA treats anything less than automobile burglary as not worth their time. The way the law is written, smashing the window of a car and taking the contents is simple vandalism a…

It's not like that at all. The sunglasses aren't that expensive.

It depends on what you're trying to optimize for, and how much you're trying to optimize it. If what you're concerned about is maximizing the odds of getting a jackpot, all you nee…

Afaik (and I watch this fairly closely) there hasn't been a study. There are a lot of anecdotes, typically of the form "a person won a few million but spent like they had an income…

One thing I appreciated about Anchor was that, unlike most California breweries, it didn't focus on highly-hopped, high ABV beers. I'll miss it.

As I recall, back in the day (90s) my family subscribed to a regional daily paper, a local weekly paper, National Geographic, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, Reader's Digest, Smithso…

$100+ monthly phone bills often include the cost of the device, not just the service.

Watts are a rate. Joules per second.

The extra B is for BYOBB.

It sounds both somewhat difficult (the typical galaga player doesn't exactly aim carefully) and extremely tedious, both for players and for spectators. It reminds me a bit of the (…

If anything, Buffett/Munger proves the rule: on the org chart, there's no question that Munger reports to Buffett. In practice Buffett isn't trying to call shots day to day, so Mun…

Another common geographic mental misplacement is the degree to which the east coast of the United States runs northeast/southwest. The closest US state to Africa is Maine.

Somewhat counterintuitively, the billion-dollar jackpot lotteries' expected values often shrink as the jackpots grow, because the media circus pulls in a lot of players and increas…

I've bought the number 1,2,3,4,5,6 on numerous occasions, but my lottery play isn't really representative of the typical player. A few years back, the Quebec Lottery published its …

In my experience, the mom and pop outfits usually have a reasonably modern system from verifone/square/etc that accepts tap to pay; it's the giant behemoths (e.g. USPS or Lowe's) w…

> Our stronger engineers work much more efficiently at home That depends on how you measure efficiency. On many teams, the strongest engineers maximize their impact by helping othe…

0.0008%

A banana's mass is on the order of 100g, so it's 20x as radioactive in terms of mBq/g, not 2000x

Out of curiosity, when was that? The last time I was in a place with 25c beers, I was watching the 2001 Daytona 500.

This reminds me of a startup CFO I worked with, who could see the big picture. In the early days of the company, they worked in an office that shared a bathroom with a half dozen o…

Are there recruiters out there who pitch based on hours and money? Every pitch I get is all about the vision/team/prospects for success. And, yes, "prospects for success" in some w…