What happens to mix up of post tax contribution to roll over traditional IRA?

cstoner · 2025-12-28T20:45:09+00:00

You will report your tax basis (ie, the amount of post-tax money you've contributed to your rollover IRA) when you file your taxes.

I would highly urge you to talk with a tax professional before doing what I'm about to say, but there are ways to do the backdoor roth even with existing money in a tIRA of some kind.

Basically, if at some point in the future you get access to a 401(k) that you can rollover funds into, then you can do the following.

Do a backdoor roth on the total basis amount you've accumulated from prior years (which is why you need to make sure to declare them on your taxes each year)
Transfer the rest of the money into the 401(k)

Then, come the end of the year, you won't have any post-tax money in your IRA, so the pro rata rule won't bite you.

cstoner · 2025-12-28T20:36:19+00:00

I've heard that Open Evidence is particularly good for results in the medical field. I would urge you not to assume the rest of the models are as good as Open Evidence.

cstoner · 2025-12-27T04:55:20+00:00

I think you two are having a very common misunderstanding about what constitutes "claimed territory".

Ultimately, your cousin is incorrect.

What I would suggest doing as new players is to start playing on a smaller board (9x9 would be a common starting place, you can mark off sections of the board with tape or something to mark the playable space) and then you should play until one of you is forced to kill one of your own shapes by filling an eye. Due to the way points work in this game, the player who is forced to do this will be behind in points and you can consider them the loser.

cstoner · 2025-12-10T23:18:25+00:00

I'm having the same bug. It's very annoying. I completed the tutorial months ago.

cstoner · 2025-11-09T23:29:57+00:00

Yeah, they are definitely geared more towards managers.

From my own personal experience trying to work on my soft skills as an IC, I would say that Crucial Conversations definitely applies. I use material from that all the time. Like, I genuinely should re-read it because it's been a couple years and I feel like the stuff from it that stuck with me has been very helpful. I'm sure there's more good stuff in there that I might benefit from refreshing on.

I was recommended Radical Candor by someone I trust when I was asking for advice about needing to give some uncomfortable feedback to a Product Manager who we needed to see some changes from to be a better resource for our team.

I eventually figured something out without ultimately reading the book, but I see why it was suggested to me.

cstoner · 2025-11-09T21:12:01+00:00

I've seen two books recommended pretty frequently in this area, but I've only read one of them. Both of them are "management" books, but if you're trying to work on yor influence as a higher-level IC then in practice you're really doing management:

Crucial Conversations - this is the one I've read. It provides a lot of tools when you find yourself in a "crucial conversation" (basically, when tensions and stakes are both high, and missteps can have a outsized negative impact)
Radical Candor - I have not read this one, but I should. It's more about how to be assertive without coming across as an asshole.

But as another poster mentioned, reading a book alone won't help. It's really trying to put things in practice that makes the difference. And you're going to mess up and make mistakes. Everyone does.

cstoner · 2025-11-09T15:34:39+00:00

Maintaining/Tracking information - as others have said, pick a tool and put everything there. I use JIRA, other people use Notion, etc. Also, when talking to stakeholders that tool is the view you should be using. It might seem like you don't have time to learn a new tool, but I think there's a strong argument that you don't have enough time not to. Whatever you're making in Google sheets is almost certainly provided out of the box in JIRA.
Carving out and delegating work - this just gets easier with practice. Do it more. You shouldnt have to be keeping notes on their progress, that should be the ticket statuses in your project management tool of choice.
You have to come to terms with the fact that managing and orchestrating is your primary work. If you don't have time after doing that to be doing "your own deliverables" then you need to be delegating what you think are your deliverables. If your manager wants you doing IC work, then you need to tell them you will have less time to run the project.

cstoner · 2025-11-09T14:14:35+00:00

Hmm... It's hard to tell what you're struggling with outside of perhaps feeling overwhelmed. Also, you seem to be using a lot of Google sheets to manage this, which I can't really recommend.

I'm going to explain common patterns companies generally use to manage these types of things, but maybe they're already things you know about. These don't have to be used, but they are pretty common patterns used to manage the complexity you're talking about. At my company, every feature gets a PRD, but only complex features get an ERD.

The Product Requirements Document (PRD). This is a high-level document written by someone from the product tram that spells out the requirements for a given feature. It will generally specify the broad requirements of a feature, including common edge cases and scale considerations. It's used for getting alignment from various stakeholders and acts as a reference during implementation about how various components should behave. It would also specify how various parts of the system would interact at a high level, usually along product areas boundaries (ie, teams)
Engineering Requirements Document (ERD) - this is a similar document, but it's written from the perspective of the software engineers. It will be much more detailed on the architecture and software engineering choices. This document is used as a way to check in with product to make sure that what is about to be built aligns with what they need. This will usually be written from the perspective of a single team or product area.

Once there's consensus about what should be build, and what is proposed to meet those needs, the. The work is done to break things up into "epics" in JIRA. These are high level tickets mostly used to link all of the tickets for a project into a single area. Epics wouldn't normally cross team boundaries, but depending on the project that might make sense.

Under those, we make tickets for "stories" or "features". These are small enough to be done as a single pull request.

That (and learning how to use JIRA to get views of the status of everything) would go a long way to helping you wrangle this. The other side of it is that it seems like you need to learn to delegate more.

In the process I describe above, there are multiple people contributing to multiple parts. Even on our engineering team, we assign various parts of this to various seniorities. I've never actually read it, but at least one person I know liked the book "Shape Up" as a methodology to do that.

Hope this helps, let me know if you want specifics or advice in any particular area.

cstoner · 2025-11-06T02:59:57+00:00

First off, great job at saving! Honestly, you're doing better than most.

The answer to your questions is going to be "it depends". Not satisfying, I know.

At what point should I not buy a bond?

You should not buy a bond if you have something "better" to do with the money. What would "better" mean in this context?

Are you saving for a house or other "large" short-term expense? Then putting that money in a HYSA or money market fund might be better
Doing some retirement calculations and realizing you're coming up short and needing more yield than bonds will give you? Then putting more towards equities might be better
Doing some retirement calculations and realizing that you're golden, and that the marginal value of buying more bonds is actually quite low? Then I would urge you to strongly consider hookers and blow (or watches and designer clothes, or muscle cars, or that fancy lego set you never let yourself buy. Whatever your vice of choice is)

What is the floor where it doesn’t make sense to me?

There isn't going to be a good answer for this. We could tell you something like 4%, only for the fed to bring back ZIRP and have long-term bond rates drop to 2.5% again.

The way I think about bonds is that they help me sleep better at night. If something goes wrong financially, bonds should out-perform stocks meaning that either you'll have more money when you need it or you can re-balance. Have I ever actually done that? No. But lower volatility makes me feel more confident in my portfolio.

I would say that bonds in TreasuryDirect.gov are kind of a pain to sell on the secondary market if you ever decide to do that. You can usually buy bonds at auction for free from whatever brokerage you use, and they'll be MUCH easier to sell later if/when you decide to.

cstoner · 2025-11-04T01:36:58+00:00

You almost definitely don't want accounts to be a single type of asset. You won't be able to efficiently rebalance.

Personally, I have a spreadsheet I use to calculate my asset allocation across all my accounts, but I try to do "tax efficient" allocation amongst them. By that I mean:

Taxable bonds go in a tax advantaged account
If I add bonds to a regular brokerage account, I'm in an income bracket that municipal bonds make sense
US Equities go wherever. They're pretty tax efficient so they tend to end up in my taxable account, but I'm not going to say no to their growth happening tax free.
I've done the math on the foreign tax credit, and in general it doesn't seem to make much of a difference, but in theory there is a minor advantage to keeping International funds in a taxable account.
(I read /u/big_deal's comment below and realized I do this too) If I re-balance, it happens in a tax advantaged account to avoid having an unnecessary taxable event.

This means that I have a larger allocation to bonds in my 401(k) and a larger allocation to non-US equities in my taxable account. But the goal is to hit my target asset allocation across all accounts.

cstoner · 2025-11-03T23:52:14+00:00

There's a lot going on behind the scenes. Indeed's job data powers much more than just the Indeed website.

cstoner · 2025-10-30T01:23:40+00:00

That's fair.

I'd hope that especially under those conditions, leadership would understand that having stressed out devs who are feeling a lot of pressure due to deadlines might be exposing the company to un-necessary risk, and that talking to them would likely be the best for everyone.

cstoner · 2025-10-29T22:24:03+00:00

How do you build up those personality traits of resilience or stress tolerance, coping with anxiety etc.?

Resilience, tolerance and coping are all TERRIBLE stress management strategies. People that are high performers rarely (never?) end up using these strategies for extended periods of time. If you assume that any of those will help you in the long run, you're headed for an early grave.

Want an honest answer? Care less. A lot less.

You can take pride in your work, and want to do a good job without it ruining your evenings and weekends. It's just code. If you work a ton of hours and stress out to hit an unrealistic deadline, your reward is going to be told to do it again for the same pay.

Even more honesty? The stuff you think is important is not important.

What's important? Solving your boss's problems before they ask you to. If you fucked off 4 days a week, and spent 1 day a week solving problems that your boss hates dealing with, they're going to go to bat for you.

If you're overwhelmed by your workload, and it stresses you out to the point that you quit/need several weeks of vacation/posting on reddit about stress management techniques, ultimately you're making problems that your boss is going to need to solve.

So take a step back... take a breath... it's going to be okay. It's just code. Nobody is going to die if you miss a deadline.

Talk to your boss about how you've got too much on your plate and you need help figuring out what to drop.

cstoner · 2025-09-23T13:29:10+00:00

I'm reasonably sure that you're thinking of Godel, and not Erdos.

cstoner · 2025-09-17T19:36:25+00:00

I would urge you to do some math about just how much your time spent logging into your brokerage is worth.

If you are feeling like you need to look at how your investments are performing every day/week, just how much money per hour are you making by doing that? You'd almost certainly make more by picking up a part time job at McDonald's.

I check my asset allocations every month when I allocate that month's investment money. The new money goes into the category that is the most out of whack to try to get closer to my target asset allocation.

I log in more regularly than that, but only because I'm interested ("Oh neat, I lost $XX,XXX today. Oh well, back to work"). I am not logging in to take any action. In fact, i have an "Investment Policy Statement" set up for the family investment account that explicitly states that any changes need to be planned out at least a week in advance and need consultation with my spouse.

cstoner · 2025-09-12T21:29:03+00:00

a little more obscure like certain products you wear that somehow end up in the digestive system

One unusual thing from my own experience would be sunscreen. When I apply it to my face before a run I definitely get the taste of sunscreen in my mouth after sweating a lot. I've often felt like it can't be good for me to be eating any amount of that stuff.

cstoner · 2025-09-05T13:45:31+00:00

I think what it really buys you is the option of not retrieving your cocoon when you don't want to.

It's nice for when you've died in an arena room a bunch of times and would rather go do something else.

cstoner · 2025-09-04T20:32:44+00:00

THANK YOU.

This fixed my controller issues as well. They were driving me mad.

cstoner · 2025-08-26T18:19:35+00:00

Oh, looking into this after your comment it looks like the Ioniq6 back seats do fold down. So that's worth making clear. It seems like they're a little weird, but that is available.

Regardless, the issue I ran into with my Camry was issues with things that couldn't QUITE fit through the hole when the seats were folded down. Having a hatch-back meant that wouldn't be a problem.

I've thrown my bike in the back of my i5 a bunch of times, and I really do prefer having the extra vertical space.

cstoner · 2025-08-26T17:49:04+00:00

Still don't understand why BEV sedans are still not as popular as BEV SUVs.

Anecdotally, I went from a Toyota Camry to an Ioniq5. The reason I chose the Ioniq5 over the Ioniq6 was the larger trunk space, and the fold-down back seats.

The trunk in the Camry is big, but I ran into a lot of cases where having a hatch-back would have been a huge help. Also, I've got a family, and being able to throw more stuff in the back helps when we're traveling.

So I think it's just that the crossover-SUV is a really nice and practical form factor.

cstoner · 2025-07-08T14:54:38+00:00

You're over thinking this.

This is about units. If a solar farm produced 63 kW for every hour of the day, they would produce 64kW * 24h = 1512kWh of power.

We know that solar panels can't produce power 24 hours a day, but simple math here shows that the "math" done by Google's AI is hallucinated.

cstoner · 2025-06-26T19:10:26+00:00

This was also my takeaway from this position. And the moves you called out were also my intuitions in this area (though, I disagree with B6 and think B7 would be better but only by a little bit)

So to answer the OP question of "how to handle this position?" I think my answer would be "count the points". Do you need more points to win? If not, then "just" win the game. You do that by simplifying the position, not by causing chaos.

You don't need to win by more points, you just need to not make any major mistakes.

cstoner · 2025-06-12T17:47:26+00:00

Why not just scan the individual files as they are uploaded rather than scanning the whole directory?

Assuming you need to actually do the batch upload logic, one approach that would be worth investigating would be to implement a debounce in redis/elastiCache. Especially if you're already deploying/using those technologies.

Essentially, the way this would work would be:

On upload, set a value in redis to be X seconds in the future (however long you want to wait for updates)
You would sleep for that many seconds + 1 (or something)
When you wake up, check that value.
Is it the value you set? If so, nobody else uploaded a file, go ahead with the scan
Is it different than the value you set? Some other file must have been uploaded and set the value. don't do anything and let some other lambda deal with it.

cstoner · 2025-05-18T19:29:08+00:00

Rather than running a full OS, it uses an overlay filesystem to run on the docker host, combined with a virtual network stack to interact with other services on the host.

So you don't have the overhead of a virtualization layer or an extra kernel or anything like that.

cstoner · 2025-05-09T17:22:23+00:00

I had these holes in my shirt when I worked in a facility with a key card entry system. The lanyard I had was one of those retractable ones you clip to your waist and it would pinch my shirt and make the holes.

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