MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by arcbyte | 2025-06-09 17:07:44+00:00
Corporate taxes are indeed levied on net income after expenses. Trading money for capital assets is not considered expense.

If you start the year with 0$ in your bank. After the end of the year you have made $200k in revenue. However you "spent" $200k on software salaries. However, because these are software costs, they must be depreciated over 5 years, so only 20% of that $200k software cost can be applied as depreciation cost which is considered an expense. So your net income for this year is $200k revenue - $20k depreciation expense = $180k. Your 15% tax on this is $27k.

So you made $200k and spent all of it on software, so your bank account is 0, but you owe $27k in taxes.
by atxtechbro | 2025-06-09 17:08:48+00:00
Signed. As a US-based developer, I fully support restoring the deductibility of software development expenses. This policy change quietly gutted countless startups and engineering teams—it’s long past time we fix it.

Appreciate YC and folks like @itsluther pushing this forward. This isn’t just a tax issue—it’s about keeping innovation and talent thriving in the US. Let’s get it done.
by asksomeoneelse | 2025-06-09 17:09:06+00:00
Indeed. As far as I'm concerned, the touchpads have been the killer feature of the Steam Deck. Emulating a mouse using a stick or the gyros doesn't click for me. The touchpads are just so much better when you need both speed and precision, be it for games (specially shooters and strategy games), or desktop mode (for navigation and web browsing). Plus, it works pretty well for typing text with the virtual keyboard.

I don't understand why none of the other manufacturers implemented those. I wish the Steam Deck had just a little bit of extra power, but I'm not willing to part with those pads. I'm eagerly waiting for the Steam Deck 2.
by jwarden | 2025-06-09 17:11:17+00:00
Yes good point. We'd have to actually flesh out the assumptions about marginal utility of wealth for low-income vs. the high-income group (as well as assumptions about individual utility functions), to demonstrate that this outcome was not optimal. I didn't do that in this article because it gets too mathy.

However, the optimality of QF does assume wealth equality. When you drop that assumption and assume diminishing marginal utility of wealth, you can show that QF is not optimal.

But I think you are right that the example in this article doesn't necessarily show that clearly. The example leans heavily on intuition (or emotional appeal). I think I will try to improve that section.
by mousethatroared | 2025-06-09 17:11:37+00:00
If we're tracing seeds, the Ancient Greeks openly acknowledged their debt to Egypt. Therefore the Egyptians invented the West.

But my point is that the West is Rome enlightened by Greeks and humanized by Jews.

What is Athens + Jerusalem? Eastern Europe. Orthodoxy. (No beef, btw. Ive been to Meteora and just missed a chance to stay in Mt. Athos)

What is Rome + Athens + Jerusalem? The Catholic Church.
by lhl | 2025-06-09 17:12:03+00:00
Yeah, actually for my batch usage, I usually push to 256+ concurrency, but on H100s at least, currently 64-128 is about the bend of the curve for where latency starts going out of control (this depends a lot on your context length and kvcache optimizations, though).

What I do for testing is that I will run a benchmark_serving sweep (I prefer ShareGPT for a standard set that is slightly more realistic for caching) with desired concurrency (eg 4-1024 or something like that) and then plot TTFT vs Total Throughput and graph Mean, P50, and P99 - this will give you a clear picture what your concurrency/throughput for a given desired latency.
by jonas21 | 2025-06-09 17:12:18+00:00
If it's software, you do need to amortize 100%. Section 174 (as amended by the TCJA) has specific language to this effect [1]:

> For purposes of this section, any amount paid or incurred in connection with the development of any software shall be treated as a research or experimental expenditure.

i.e. it needs to be amortized. That's the part that people find most objectionable -- software development is special-cased for unfavorable tax treatment that does not apply to other fields.

[1] https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim...
by cbosi | 2025-06-09 17:12:48+00:00
Genesis Cloud, a leading European AI cloud, has officially joined the EU AI Champions Initiative — a coalition led by General Catalyst and supported by 70+ European companies representing over $3 trillion in public market cap and 3.7M jobs. The initiative aims to accelerate AI adoption, boost competitiveness, and reinforce Europe's strategic digital autonomy.

Genesis Cloud offers secure, sovereign, and scalable AI infrastructure, including access to NVIDIA H100, H200, and B200 GPUs, with H100 multi-node premium configurations starting at $2.19/hr on demand. Built in Europe and powered by renewable energy options, the platform is optimized for LLMs, GenAI workloads, training, fine-tuning, and inference at scale.
by jessekv | 2025-06-09 17:12:56+00:00
My experience of the extension was bad.

The extension is a hack that allows them to redirect the searches from one of the available search engines to Kagi. So first you search, then e.g. the DDG page loads halfway, then the page flashes, you get redirected to Kagi. If you are lucky, you are signed in, and you wait for the Kagi results. If not, you sign in and type your search again.

On iOS, I made a shortcut that pops up a native text prompt for your search, then opens Kagi using your session token. I recommend this over the extension, it is fast snd reliable.
by dataflow | 2025-06-09 17:14:00+00:00
"Simulate a truly random coin" implies it IMO. You're not simulating a truly random coin if you need unbounded time for a single flip. The truly random coin definitely doesn't need that. It just feels like a scam if someone sold me such a machine with that description - I'd want my money back. I don't expect everyone would feel the same, but I think a lot of people would.
by refurb | 2025-06-09 17:14:01+00:00
> Had someone taken it seriously thirty years ago it's quite possible that the net amount of suffering that millions of patients have endured since then could have been reduced.

You can only say that with hindsight because of the data over the past 30 years.

What if the data showed the opposite? Then the doctor would have given his patients a worse outcome all on a "hunch".
by sam0x17 | 2025-06-09 17:14:04+00:00
I love how arrogant humans get when you hit at their “that’s supposed to be a human thing!” nerve. Sign language is language, dance is language, writing is language, speaking is language, semaphores in a sail boat is language, Morse code is language, two’s complement is language, a mushroom communicating with other mushrooms with a small vocabulary of tokens is language, to think otherwise is incredibly small minded.

You don’t need consciousness or phenomena or quailia to have language. Heck, every computer understands some sort of language. ChatGPT is capable of conversing in English better than anyone in this room, and it doesn’t need consciousness or any of that stuff to do it. Language is neither unique nor special.
by antics | 2025-06-09 17:14:18+00:00
So, the problem in its original framing is: can we simulate a fair coin flip with an unfair coin? As stated, I do actually think the von Neumann response answer ("this is actually technically possible") is fair, in that if I wanted a solution in O(1), I think I should have to say so ahead of time.

I suppose we'll have to disagree about whether this is incredible. The response shows that (1) this can be done at all, and (2) that the answer is exponentially likely as time goes on, not asymptotically, but for finite n. Incredible! You don't see finite-decay bounds very often! If you don't think that's incredible I invite you to ask a room full of people, even with the qualifications you deem appropriate, e.g., "solution does not need to be constant-time", or whatever.
by kirtakat | 2025-06-09 17:14:25+00:00
Not who you were responding to, but in your original statement you wrote "I do not think it’s healthy for adults to do this [sic] I think pets are wonderful for children"

By explicitly calling out that "[they] are wonderful for children" you are implicitly calling into question their value for adults. Whether that was your intention or not, it's certainly how I read your statement.
by jsherwani | 2025-06-09 17:14:45+00:00
In California, the maximum personal income tax rate is effectively closer to 50%, which is where my mind went, but you're right, it's different for companies.

In my example, the tax rate isn't the point though, it was used just to illustrate the math.

The main point is that it makes no sense to require amortization of software development expenses. The idea that this letter is an attempt to restore rationality in the tax code.
by demosthanos | 2025-06-09 17:15:04+00:00
If you're ripping off a competitor, sure, the salaries of your engineers roughly translates to the value of the resulting capital asset. But the most valuable work that software engineers do is the stuff that has never been done before. The salaries of your developers and designers and your product managers go first towards figuring out what a valuable capital asset would look like. Only after that can you start investing in the actual asset.

The same is true for all true R&D, which is why historically the government has tried to provide protections for R&D work to incentivize people to not just churn out the safe bet over and over again. Patents fall into this category, but software patents are (rightly) hard to come by. Through 2022, the risk of software development was offset by the ability to expense the costs and avoid a tax bill, and this was good policy if your aim is to encourage innovation.

The capital asset theory could still work if there were some way to appraise the value of the actual asset you created. But absent such a way, this thinking is deeply flawed for all but the most shovelware of jobs.
by rickydroll | 2025-06-09 17:15:09+00:00
Not a fan. When I tried it a few years ago, I acquired significant painful scar tissue. It was very Windows-centric, and Linux support was an afterthought. It was more arcane than Active Directory.

After I left Univention behind, I migrated to JumpCloud. It has its faults. Linux support is also secondary to Windows support, but for me, it was several orders of magnitude easier to work with than Univention or Active Directory.

I miss NIS. It made many aspects of managing a collection of Linux machines much easier than anything to date. I hope that the future EU project does not adopt Univention, or anything like Active Directory. Instead, look to where NIS was successful, where JumpCloud is successful, and come up with a better solution overall.
by orangecat | 2025-06-09 17:15:12+00:00
I'm a programmer, not a manager. I don't have a blog. AI is useful.

It is very strange that no real open source project uses "AI" in any way.

How do you know? Given the strong opposition that lots of people have I wouldn't expect its use to be actively publicized. But yes, I would expect that plenty of open source contributors are at the very least using Cursor-style tab completion or having AIs generate boilerplate code.

Perhaps these friends work on closed source and say what their manager wants them to say?

"Everyone who disagrees with me is paid to lie" is a really tiresome refrain.
by d0100 | 2025-06-09 17:15:23+00:00
I love programming, I just don't like CRUDing, or API'ing...

I also love programming behaviours and interactions, just not creating endless C# classes and looking at how to implement 3D math

After a long day at the CRUD factory, being able to vibe code as a hobby is fun. Not super productive, but it's better than the alternative (scrolling reels or playing games)
by adrianmonk | 2025-06-09 17:15:46+00:00
That's not the issue. What people are asking for is for software to be treated like every other profession.

That's how it should be, and that's also how it actually was until relatively recently. A new law went into effect that treats software differently. I believe Congress was looking for an easy way to generate extra tax revenue by tapping into the wealth of rich tech giants. Whatever the intent, the workers ended up being the ones who suffer because now hiring people has worse tax consequences than it used to.

So all that people want is to undo that, to take away that special rule that applies only to software, and put it back like it was.
by BoiledCabbage | 2025-06-09 17:16:16+00:00
Playing devils advocate for a min, your comment just a long way of saying "Don't get the very best thing - get the very best thing for you."

What tangible thing do you do differently from the advice this friend gave you? Or rather how did you shop before is your didn't look to see what utility it gave you in comparison to the cost?"

Let's say I'm in a situation where I need a bicycle for two months. I'm not going to buy the must expensive bike or there, I'm going to look around and buy a cheap bike that will be fair enough for two months. Are you saying before this advice you would research and buy the best bike out there?
by jonplackett | 2025-06-09 17:16:40+00:00
https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/gol-ui/product/fage-total-0-nat...

This is the yoghurt I was talking about. It’s a high quality brand here in the UK

54kal per 100g and 10g protein

3g carbs (zero of which sugar)

Ingredients: Pasteurised Skimmed Milk, Live Active Yoghurt Cultures (L. Bulgaricus, S. Thermophilus, L. Acidophilus, Bifidus, L. Casei)
by westurner | 2025-06-09 17:16:48+00:00
Best be ready, for Q-day:

> The looming ‘Q-Day’ should also be used as the stick to get approval to carry out a cryptographic inventory and roll out projects that foster cryptographic agility more generally.

> Q-Day will not be announced and businesses need to take action now in the face of a growing threat.

[...]

> “An orderly transition will cost less than emergency planning,” Holmqvist said. “It’s like Y2K but without an actual date.”
by rbultje | 2025-06-09 17:16:55+00:00
> This isn't changing if it is taxed or not.

This is untrue. The rule is not about taxation, but deductions/expenses. If your expenses cover most revenue, you owe little in taxes. With this rule, a particular type of expense (software engineering salaries) is no longer deductible from revenue to calculate taxable income over which taxes are owed. So you might previously owe no taxes, but now you do. The deduction might carry over to the next few years and eventually (after 6 years) you will reach the same point - assuming your salaries don't go up and your business doesn't grow. The remainder in deductions will be returned after the business stops employing software engineers. I'm not sure why anyone would want the tax code to incentivize a business outcome that all of us would consider failure.
by UncleOxidant | 2025-06-09 17:17:28+00:00
You're getting some pushback about the analogy to divination, but I think most people here are reasonably technically literate and they assume that everyone else in society has the same understanding of how LLMs work that they do. When I chat about LLM usage with non-technical friends and family it does indeed seem as though they're using these AI chatbots as oracles. When I suggest that they should be wary because these LLMs tend to hallucinate they're generally taken aback - they had no idea that what the chatbot was telling them might not be factually correct. I hope this revelation changes their relationship with LLM chatbots - I think we the technorati need to be educating non-technical users of these things as much as possible in order to demystify them so that people don't treat them like oracles.
by motorest | 2025-06-09 17:17:30+00:00
> The original CDC statement was something like "masks have not been shown to be effective for the general population".

It's preferable that we have the timeline in mind.

https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2021-07-27/timeline-cd...

One key aspect of the initial guidances regarding facial masks were based on the assumption that covid was not easily transmissible, which was proven to be false. Once that fact was acknowledged, the whole world pivoted towards widespread adoption of masks and lockdowns to hinder spread.

> It was definitely a black mark on the CDC response (...)

To be fair, the initial criticism towards mask adoption were based on what little they knew then. As the pandemic progressed and observations in somewhat controlled environments started to trickle in, the focus shifted to prevent a supply crunch that affected first responders. I recall that there was also a period where health officials admitted masks were effectice, but regular people would only wear them wrong thus they wouldn't work, which was also dropped.

What matters to keep in mind is that this adaptation took place in a timespan of a couple of weeks at these start of the pandemic. Thus, it's not possible to use this to justify any anti-mask and anti-prevention militancy.
by jll29 | 2025-06-09 17:17:32+00:00
That's a great explanation, thanks a lot for sharing it.

Some big tech companies affected have laid off teams around the world, perhaps in order to mitigate the numbers looking bad to investors; so in a way, this adversely affected tech employees globally.

Every country should have such a rule for software businesses, which is an industry where all the cost has to be upfronted, so that bootstrapping is facilitated. There are plenty of smaller markets where the VC model is not the most appropriate funding instrument.
by pinkmuffinere | 2025-06-09 17:17:35+00:00
The states known for “hippie”/“granola” attitudes, which largely align with the advice given here, tend to live longer than the states that don’t (scroll through the list in [1] to see this). Usually I would insist on a study, but the effect is so striking, and the mechanism by which it would work is so obvious, that I think this simple list is enough. And I’m sure there are studies too, I’m just too lazy to find and link one.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
by handfuloflight | 2025-06-09 17:17:39+00:00
> If that profit comes from advertising, and critically, if users don't expect advertising in their free LLMs, because they didn't see ads in generated output in the past, that will be very insidious.

Are the free LLM providers offering their service with a contractual obligation to the users that they will not add advertising to the outputs? If not, how is it insidious?

What definition of insidious are you using per https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/insidious?
by tossandthrow | 2025-06-09 17:17:59+00:00
While this does convey the idea, the premise is also biased.

> even though it has a total of $100K in the bank after the actual expenses were paid.

People running a business can perfectly understand the concept of liquidity. And yes, just because you transform money to something else, then it doesn't mean that you should not be taxed on it.

The extreme example is a company that buys gold on the last trading day of the year - now there is no profit! On the first day they sell the gold again and does tax eviction.

The core question is to what extend software constitutes an asset or consumption.

(Personally, I do not believe that software constitutes an asset in any meaningful way, but a practical tradeoff could be that software is a 10% asset)
by Scoundreller | 2025-06-09 17:18:02+00:00
Is the air free in Aussie stations? In Canada it’s usually a charge and a $10 compressor you can store in your trunk will pay itself off and more reliably work when you need it (especially if you have a slow leak & need it frequently).

In a pinch I’ve used a bicycle pump (which is fine for a top up, not so much for fill-from-flat).
by ryandrake | 2025-06-09 17:18:48+00:00
> The phone / computer works exactly as it did when you bought it. What changed is everything around it.

I consider that "everything around it" (The Ecosystem, as they say) to be part of the product I bought. When I bought my OldPhone N years ago, I could go to the app store and download versions X, Y, and Z of apps A, B, and C, and they worked. I expect today that if I factory reset that OldPhone back to fresh, I'd still be able to re-download those compatible versions of those apps, and that those apps continued to work as they did N years ago (barring some obvious, but still unfortunate cases like companies going out of business or turning down online services). That's my bar for "working."

If the world moves on, and people are sharing image formats that my phone was never able to read in the first place, or writing web pages my browser was never able to render correctly, then I have to accept that. But what I don't accept is the device manufacturer, or (usually the case) 3rd party apps telling me "your phone is too old, and we're no longer going to let you use it as you have for the last N years anymore!"
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-06-09 17:19:37+00:00
Counterpoint: GPT-4 and later variants, such as o3 and 4.5, have such a characteristic style that it's hard not to spot them.

Em dashes, "it's not just (x), it's (y)," "underscoring (z)," the limited number of ways it structures sentences and paragraphs and likes to end things with an emphasized conclusion, and I could go on all day.

DeepSeek is a little bit better at writing in a generic and uncharacteristic tone, but still... it's not good.
by marcosdumay | 2025-06-09 17:19:58+00:00
> you do not own your employees

Well, that framing is just wrong. The companies are paying taxes over what those employees created, not over the employees. Does the company own the software?

> The IRS is using a theory of value where...

Notice that all of your 3 points are exactly like any other kind of capital.

Most countries exclude salaries from the income calculation because it has good practical consequences (both on making accounting cheaper and on incentivizing companies to hire), not because of any theoretical problem.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-06-09 17:20:04+00:00
There could be a distinction between creating new value (greenfield), and maintaining existing value (brownfield). Most of my work is green field and I do consider it to be a capital asset, it's sweat equity as I don't pay myself, but I can't deduct my non-salary either. Others estimate the most of the software work is 95% brownfield.

An other issue is competitiveness with other jurisdictions that don't have these tax laws, but even if that were normalized there are jurisdictions that are far lower tax in general regardless of the classification.
by windows2020 | 2025-06-09 17:20:05+00:00
My recent experience has been similar.

I'm seeing that the people hyping this up aren't programmers. They believe the reason they can't create software is they don't know the syntax. They whip up a clearly malfunctioning and incomplete app with these new tools and are amazed at what they're created. The deficiencies will sort themselves out soon, they believe. And then programmers won't be needed at all.
by nvahalik | 2025-06-09 17:20:09+00:00
Absolutely.

Weighing everything (rather than using volumetric measures) is generally going to be the BEST way to ensure consistency and accuracy.

What's also important is that, in general, even if you are 20% off on something (e.g. I logged 2200 calories but I actually consumed 2600 calories) AND you are planning to eat at a caloric deficit, this usually will mean that you will still lose weight or body recomp. It'll just take a little more time.

But if you are just not tracking, it's _so easy_ to miscalculate your intake to the point where you think "oh this isn't that bad." However, the truth is you consumed 4200 calories and that's a big surplus.

So I/we tend to find the value partially in "simple tracking" to get you aware of what you are actually consuming and then find that transitioning to specific portions to be helpful for "dialing in" and achieving specific targets/goals.