polytap's comments

polytap | 10 years ago | on: Obama Forgives Student Debt Of 400,000 Americans

Compared to many other institutions, Stanford does a good job of dealing with that issue. 85% of students receive some form of financial aid. There is no family financial burden for incomes $60k/year and lower.

polytap | 10 years ago | on: Show HN: CuriosityStream – Netflix for non-fiction

You might want to consider naming your pricing plans differently.

There is a plan offering standard definition streaming called "Basic", and a plan offering high definition streaming called "Standard".

Those two words are often synonymous.

polytap | 10 years ago | on: TurboTax Takes Aim at Smaller Rival in Fight for Filers

Yeah, they really seem to have taken it up a notch this year.

I was presented with a refund that was only possible if I purchased a small business plan. When I declined, the UI reduced my refund by $2k and also said I'd have to re-enter my personal information it had saved from last year, basically penalizing me.

Curious, I went to H&R Block and began to file my current-year taxes from scratch. Lo and behold, HRB's basic service level calculated my full refund.

polytap | 10 years ago | on: One in Three Farms Is Using FarmLogs

There are more than 2 million "farms" in the U.S. Snag "One in Three" of those as paying customers (at nearly $1k/year) and it's very unlikely you'd need to use TechCrunch as a marketing and PR platform.

polytap | 11 years ago | on: Offer HN: Free Use of Agricultural Land 30 miles Northwest of Chicago

Great idea and gesture to the community.

Does any of your land receive irrigation?

I'd like to send you several surface and subsoil sensors to deploy that will communicate back to me via GPRS. Just a couple of minutes is needed to deploy each sensor.

And it would be very helpful if you could send back a soil sample at my expense.

Does this sound practical?

polytap | 11 years ago | on: Garduino Rotary Phone: Saving my garden using Twilio, Arduino and Sinatra

SoCal.

The professional/industrial environmental sensor market sucks.

Pretty much any sensor offering high precision is sold exclusively through authorized resellers that in turn hold the logged data captive and liberate it manually through what amount to expensive professional services contracts.

I'd like to smash that.

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