I'm building Duolingo for blackjack card counting. It's a Progressive Web App so you can install, learn, and practice cross-platform, and it is designed to combine a mastery-styled lesson plan (e.g. you can't move onto until you demonstrate mastery of the current lesson) along with exercises and tools for keeping the skills sharp. A complete novice should be able to pick it up and become a profitable blackjack player.
It also contains tools for scouting casinos, logging sessions, calculating effective profit-per-hour based on table rules, and other things a professional would need.
I'm in the process of polishing it up, and am aiming to launch Fall 2026. Current pricing plan is to be ~$10-15 per month for the pro tools, but provide the offline capabilities, lesson plan, and learning tools completely free without ads or weird gimmicks like a limited number of lessons or practice per day.
From the article I read it didn't say employee was attacking them hours every day. From the articles the employee posted a message on an internal slack "Outrage Notification" channel which looks to be an internal venting channel containing similar content.
Atlassian has values "Open company, no bullshit" which they selectively use. "Open company, no bullshit" until it isn't. Example, this case, upsetting Mikes ego.
I was on a team at Atlassian that got constructively dissambled after not being happy with some changes for the worse. Worst retro I've ever been in, all developers heads on desks, manager: "suggest how we fix this issue", developers silent as every answer from the developer got the reply from manager on the lines of "no, you know we can't do that anymore". Then the digging through historic slack messages and social media posts started followed by departures...
That was a very long time ago now, seems not much has changed.
I’m building a blackjack card counting tool for people to learn how to count and how to identify games that are winnable. It is designed to take a completely novice to an advanced, winning card counter, using a Duolingo like approach - mastery based learning across sequential modules. Minus the ads and dark patterns.
That sounds super cool! When you say Duolingo do you mean spaced repetition? If yes, have you identified what type of spaced repetition approach you will take?
Hey look judging from how this thread evolved in the last several hours, at least it turned out that the bait worked and a bunch of people were dumb enough to take it?
This is the proper approach when deciding whether to use any type of tool or technology. Is the increased amount of cognitive overhead for someone with minimal exposure to your system (who will have to maintain it when you’ve moved on) worth the increased performance on a dollars-per-hour basis? If so, it may be a good option. If not, it doesn’t matter how much better the relative performance is.
1. If the government is in charge of deciding the tax policy and collecting the taxes, it creates a potential conflict of interest if they are also in charge of telling you how much you owe. In theory, they could charge you more than they're legally allowed to, but how would you know unless you (or someone else) also calculated your taxes? A common suggestion to this is to have the government give a return that shows what they _think_ is owed, but this creates a conflict if the government accidentally underbills you, since you're not likely to correct the mistake. In order to ensure compliance on both sides, both the government and individual need to prepare the tax return. Otherwise, one party risks being overcharged/underpaid.
2. Tax evasion is an effective law enforcement tool for catching criminals, so by putting the burden on the individual to report taxes, you add another tool in the law enforcement toolkit. From the state's perspective, it is more compelling to tell a jury "this person owed $5 but only paid $1" than "this person owed $5, but only paid $1 because we told them they only owed $1." Tax evasion is how famous gangsters like Al Capone and other shady-characters have historically been caught[0]
The tax prep industry is lucrative largely because of lobbying and consumer ignorance. There are plenty of free-file options for folks below certain income thresholds, as well as non-profits who will do your taxes for free. There are also lots of free tax-prep sites, but they are being drowned out by the advertising and lobbying of the for-profit tax-prep industry.
To add my own 2-cents: if your income comes from investments, 1099, or W2, you likely can do your own taxes in about an hour. I personally use TaxHawk [1] since it's free for federal and $16 per state return, and has the same kind of interface as turbotax and the like. If you want to save on that $16, you could use TaxSlayer [2] instead -- I've used all of them, and personally prefer TaxHawk. Just remember to decline any of the upselling they do just before you submit your refund. You probably don't need the premium service, a dedicated tax pro, nor audit protection.
#1 works fine in stores and restaurants. Why would the government be different?
#2 isn't a strong enough reason to justify the significant out-of-pocket costs and lost productivity of the US tax system. If the tax collector is regularly finding only $1 of $5 tax obligations, that seems better solved by improving the collector's record-keeping, not hanging civil and criminal penalties over the heads of 350 million citizens.
> works fine in stores and restaurants. Why would the government be different?
I'll posit a hypothesis:
Scale and morality interpretation differences.
I've yet to have a > $1000 restaurant bill (not even close), and the experience I got and the reciprocity instincts in me compel me to correct it if say they were to forget to charge me for my guac or give me more change than i was owed.
Whereas in the Gov't there is scale that tempts people to choose immoral paths, and also there's a morality of efff the government in a lot of people's minds. It's an abstracted entity of which we mostly do not enjoy the experience and cannot treat humanely (it's not a person).
I get where you're coming from. But I don't know which is cause and which is effect.
Suppose your friendly neighborhood restaurant stopped giving you the check at the end of the meal, and instead had a stern sign on the table saying "Pay what you owe. Underpay and we call the cops."
I’m building a tool to automatically move deposits into new bank accounts with better rates and fees. It will operate continuously, so I never have to search for the “best” bank account — I’ll always have it. Think wealthfront for checking and savings.
I work in software now, but I was an accounting major, CPA, and worked in Public Accounting for 4 years before making the switch.
Accounting actually is more of a trade, and I felt like the majority of classes they taught helped me on-the-job as an accountant. People who like systems engineering would enjoy accounting, because it's getting to the nuts-and-bolts of our financial system and understanding both the how and the why. Whether you're international conglomerate Apple, Inc or software engineer calderarrow working a day job, the laws of accounting still apply.
But I would not recommend paying more than you need to for an Accounting Degree. The Big 4 will recruit anyone from anywhere, and as long as you have a degree (which is usually required for the CPA License) and a 3.3+ GPA, you can get a job in any major city. Assets + Liabilities = Equity whether you're at community college or Harvard, so get the cheapest degree you can get.
Also, try to squeeze 150 credits into your undergrad curiculum, as some CPA licenses require 150 credit hours. This is typically 4 years of undergrad (120) + 1 year of a master's (30). The added cost of tuition for those classes isn't that much, but being able to get out and start working a year sooner is a ~$60k decision that is worth it if you can do it.
As for why I left accounting: I started learning Python to help me automate some of the boring parts of my job [0] and fell in love with software. It just clicked for me in the same way that accounting did, and now I work in fintech, where I'm able to blend the two.
It also contains tools for scouting casinos, logging sessions, calculating effective profit-per-hour based on table rules, and other things a professional would need.
I'm in the process of polishing it up, and am aiming to launch Fall 2026. Current pricing plan is to be ~$10-15 per month for the pro tools, but provide the offline capabilities, lesson plan, and learning tools completely free without ads or weird gimmicks like a limited number of lessons or practice per day.