crystalarchives

I'm a backend developer who's seen a lot of quality stuff for teaching programming, for example: * CodeSchool * Udacity * TeamTreeHouse * OpenCourseWare (MIT, Stanford)

My Googlefu is letting me down so I was just wondering if the community knows of any similar resources for designers to hone their craft since I'm not really versed in that community?

It seems that a lot of the reasons behind the economic issues that the United States and the rest of world has experienced is a result of exotic financial instruments created to increase complexity and thereby hide the underlying fundamental asset information. A side effect seems to be creating paper wealth that has absolutely no basis in reality, instilling a false sense of security of increasing gains until the scheme unravels.

As a result, I'm left to wonder why these instruments are not regulated in a manner similar to that of nuclear power plants, guns, or other such potentially dangerous inventions.

Is there a benefit that exotic financial instruments offer that I'm unaware of?

Otherwise, why is the US government not actively ensuring that these instruments are not allowed unless they are deemed to be a valuable financial tool?

The only reasons I can see are 1) Anyone with the domain knowledge to police these instruments are either in on the racket or get a cut for looking the other way. 2) There is actually a positive, valuable contribution that exotic financial instruments provide that I'm unaware of.

It seems that solving this problem would lead to some serious economic stability.

Any further insights would be much appreciated!

I never read the frontpage of Hacker News, only news.ycombinator.com/best in order to save time.

However, I've been finding it more and more depressing lately. Is it just me, or does it seem like America is getting worse and worse?

I'm a US citizen currently in Shanghai and it's been almost a year since I've been home so I don't know how bad it is on the ground, but from the news it looks horrible and only going downhill...

From the TSA http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/fngfo/why_i_stopped_travelling_to_the_us_and_i_largely/

To the VC world http://www.pehub.com/96111/its-not-a-bubble-people-its-a-pyramid-scheme/

To the government shutting down sites http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-government-shuts-down-84000-websites-by-mistake-110216/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+Torrentfreak+(Torrentfreak)

To IP laws http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2011021108493059

To academia http://blog.devicerandom.org/2011/02/18/getting-a-life/

More importantly, there doesn't seem to be anyone doing anything about these issues. Khan Academy and the Nissan Leaf seem to be the only positive posts. Just wondering what other people think.

I have a US LLC for my online businesses with a business account separate from my personal accounts. However, I'm not exactly sure how to separate them - I obviously use my business account for my business expenses, but when it comes to compensating myself through my business account I'm not sure exactly how to do it correctly.

I don't have a steady income currently so I just take out what I need from the business account into a personal account and "expense" it as salary.

Is that the correct methodology? If not, what is? Are there better ways to do this from a tax perspective? I would consult a tax attorney / accountant except I'm currently in Shanghai to take advantage of the lower cost of living and don't have access to any contacts of that variety back Stateside at the moment.

If you have any links to read up on I would also very much appreciate it!

I have a PageRank 5 website that I made a couple of years ago when I was preparing to interview for tech jobs in Boston. I collected a bunch of programming interview questions and wrote my own answers to them in C++ / Java, and decided to put them online for posterity. www.programminginterview.com

Fast forward to the present - I've quit my job and started working on my own projects full time. I moved to Shanghai to conserve capital (lower cost of living versus Boston), but unfortunately my funds are running low so I'm looking at my old sites to see if I can squeeze some money out of them to expand my runway.

Currently I'm just promoting "Programming Interviews Exposed" and other programming interview books on Amazon but the earnings are literally chump change, maybe $10 / month max. There are also some affiliate links to ThinkGeek.com but they've earned nada. I'm also selling links which I know is bad but it's another $25 / month which is kinda poor for a PR5 site. I used to have a job board but it got little to no traffic so I got rid of it.

Traffic is pretty good, very solid at 6500+ uniques per month, all very targeted and mostly from Google searches.

If the community has any ideas on how to improve the monetization of my site I would be eternally grateful!

We all know that suits have trouble picking good hackers. But I also think the opposite is true - I have difficulty detecting a savvy business person.

I'm in talks with a sales / marketing guy who knows a niche extremely well, having been a customer himself and having done a substantial amount of market research. He's looking for a hacker to implement a startup in that space, but I don't know if he has the chops to execute on the management side. Any advice?