MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by timr | 2025-06-14 04:54:58+00:00
> Yes, it's a huge problem for small startups. Many of them went from not making revenue in the eyes of the IRS to being profitable and having massive tax bills.

Let's be clear: as a small startup this means that you went from not making any money (i.e. losing money), to losing slightly more money. It certainly sucks that you get a tax bill when you're not profitable [1], but the tax is still proportional to revenue, which for many early stage startups is small, and should be growing rapidly enough that the marginal investment in your meager R&D team is worth it. And if it isn't growing, you have bigger problems and probably shouldn't be hiring anyway. You budget for it and move on, just like you budget for anything else.

My point is that the rhetoric around this issue has made it sounds like your median founder is going to stop founding in the USA and go so somewhere else, but that's fairly silly. It isn't good to not be able to deduct salaries, but it's probably not a "massive" problem.

For the truly early stage startup it doesn't even merit consideration, because you're not making enough money for the tax to come close to a salary. US Corporate tax rate is 21%. Assuming that you aren't able to deduct anything at all, you'd have to be making $1M a year in revenue (real annual revenue, not theoretical extrapolated future revenue) to get close to a fully loaded engineer.

Where this definitely will hurt is in a large corporation that is bringing in billions of dollars in revenue, and employing many thousands of people in R&D. That's a real knock to the quarterly report, which can (and will) be found by cutting the fat -- of which there is a lot.

[1] and, to be clear, I think the change in rules are dumb and should be reverted.
by PeelingLayers | 2025-06-14 04:55:22+00:00
It’s pretty obvious if you do your own company’s taxes. The old 174 allowed all software engineering work to be deducted on year on - you put in effort you get tax offsets for future profits. If that effort fails you can get acquired and the value of your salary work becomes someone else’s valuable tax offset. Bigger picture it make VC returns a LOT BETTER, which makes startups more viable with more funding, which makes good outcomes more likely - jobs, public companies that grow retirement of Americans, etc. For public companies it’s also really valuable - Meta can reduce its massive taxable profit by hiring all potential startup founders who would otherwise become competitors and keep them on the books with non-competes in exchange for slowly vesting equity. By the time your equity vests you are in your thirties and in child-making mindsets and startups are less tempting. When 174 expired Meta became very very different financially with all that expensive labour they couldn’t write off anymore and they laid off huge swaths of it. Because of the high interest rates, those potential competitors would struggle to raise money anyway.
by kulahan | 2025-06-14 04:56:23+00:00
> Let's be clear: as a small startup this means that you went from not making any money (i.e. losing money), to losing slightly more money.

That’s not how it’s playing out in reality at all. Are you lying or confused? Small groups working on government grants are getting hit with six figure tax bills. They aren’t undergoing a minor shift; this is something that will destroy many small businesses working on research specifically, if nothing else.
by LoganDark | 2025-06-14 04:56:24+00:00
I am a frequent LSD user and I do it for fun and healing.

I don't know about PTSD (although it did help me after I got hit by a truck, and also after I hit my head and nearly died), but it helps me get through stressful times. It also helps me become productive again when I feel like I'm too burnt out to work. I don't know how exactly this happens, but I assume it's something like giving me enough tunnel vision to forget about background/subconscious anxieties.
by fogzen | 2025-06-14 04:57:14+00:00
Yes, for some kinds of operations on some kinds of data structures. The keyword/property is "monotonicity". Monotonic functions are guaranteed to terminate under fixed-point semantics.

Look into Datafun: A total functional language that generalizes Datalog. Also be sure to watch Datafun author Michael Arntzenius's Strangeloop talk.

https://www.rntz.net/datafun/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gC295d3V9gE
by lelandbatey | 2025-06-14 04:58:07+00:00
The statement you quoted is ambiguous. I'd say "Claude makes the boring parts of coding super fast, tearing through the stuff I didn't want to do and helping me get to the stuff I did want to do."

I'm an experienced dev (this year is my 10 year anniversary of 'officially' being in the industry). I've been using Claude Code over these last two weeks. It's like a magical code generator tool e.g. protoc; if you can describe the rote and boring "do this tedious x->y translation", then it can probably bang that out with tests in a couple minutes, making it easy for you to focus on the logic. It's not that Claude Code is doing the "programming", it's more like Claude is doing the typing (and it types REALLY fast). Literally imagine if you could type as fast as you could think, like just saying "oh I'll need functions covering x/y/z behaviors and cases, similar to the other functions already present but tailored like <way>." All you had to do was type that sentence and it wrote basically what you would have written, but instantly.
by derefr | 2025-06-14 04:58:37+00:00
From the perspective of "design the manhole cover first", the reason is that manhole covers aren't just round — they're (very subtle) domes.

A dome is:

1. the best shape for taking stress from very heavy trucks putting all their weight on them without the manhole itself gradually bowing, and

2. is best at transferring that stress equally into the manhole wall (cast concrete cylinder) itself. (A square manhole + manhole cover would disperse force unfairly, potentially gradually cracking the manhole walls / requiring stronger walls. A flat circular manhole would disperse force upon the center of the manhole equally onto the manhole walls, allowing for lower-material-cost manhole walls. A domed manhole cover additionally disperses force from most points on the dome equally into the manhole walls — important, as vehicles won't necessarily be driving over the exact center of the manhole!)

...but really, this is the wrong direction to work in. The original reason manhole covers are round, is simply that the walls of a manhole are best made round, for the same reason drink cans and barrels are best made round: a closed cylinder is great at taking compressive force from a lid above; passing it through as soft, equal tensile force through its walls without buckling strain; and then turning that force back into an equal compressive force on the floor / subsurface.

Most manholes are generally small closed cylinders acting as maintenance areas for nearby pipes, with the pipes coming in through the sides of the manhole walls, and the concrete bottom floor of the manhole resting upon compacted earth.

In this situation, any shape for the manhole other than a cylinder — if driven over for years/decades by cars — would gradually pound the uneven force acting upon the manhole's floor into the earth below, unevenly accelerating soil subsidence. Eventually, you've created a sinkhole below the road, right outside the manhole wall on one side.
by PeelingLayers | 2025-06-14 04:58:37+00:00
The funny thing is the full write off in section 174 was pretty much the key to a bigger middle class. By repealing it, the president created an ailment that he will only cure if he can get himself dictatorial powers. It is really valuable to the US tech sector and it made it pretty obvious why Silicon Valley had to get into politics this cycle. The old 174 allowed all software engineering work to be deducted on year on - you put in effort you get tax offsets for future profits. If that effort fails you can get acquired and the value of your salary work becomes someone else’s valuable tax offset. Bigger picture it make VC returns a LOT BETTER, which makes startups more viable with more funding, which makes good outcomes more likely - jobs, public companies that grow retirement of Americans, etc. For public companies it’s also really valuable - Meta can reduce its massive taxable profit by hiring all potential startup founders who would otherwise become competitors and keep them on the books with non-competes in exchange for slowly vesting equity. By the time your equity vests you are in your thirties and in child-making mindsets and startups are less tempting. When 174 expired Meta became very very different financially with all that expensive labour they couldn’t write off anymore and they laid off huge swaths of it. Because of the high interest rates, those potential competitors would struggle to raise money anyway.
by dchftcs | 2025-06-14 04:59:11+00:00
I guess Mark Zuckerberg likes Alexandr Wang a lot. They have a lot in common. They both value intensity and are willing to engage in morally dubious tactics. The culture of Scale sounded quite a bit like Meta these days (and not Meta in mid 2010s) and may indeed be what Zuckerberg envisioned Meta's culture should be. So even if Scale's product isn't the best, it probably seemed like delegating to a copy of Zuckerberg himself, so it just "felt right".

However, a top research lab needs to be competitive yet still have an environment that fosters intellectual honesty. Meta Gen AI did not seem like that, and I don't think Scale's culture is like that either.
by btilly | 2025-06-14 05:00:08+00:00
If I understand what I just Googled correctly (definitely not guaranteed), the reason why Cantor's argument can fail in NFU is that NFU does not necessarily allow you to build a function that returns things in X, out of a function that returns functions returning things in X.

So it has non-computable functions, but also has a type system that tries to avoid allowing self-reference. And that type system gets in the way of Cantor's argument.

I clearly hadn't thought of this possibility. It is a constraint of a kind that doesn't show up in the computable universe.

And so, going back, if the the Russian constructivist school does indeed center on computability, then my first answer to you was correct.
by teruakohatu | 2025-06-14 05:01:59+00:00
Wojcicki's non-profit "TTAM Research Institute" domain was registered last month [1] and the current Powered by GoDaddy landing page went online around 5 June. [2]

Anyone know if its a legitimate non-profit or one of the "sort of" non-profit?

From the press release [3] ...

> TTAM Research Institute (“TTAM”), a nonprofit public benefit corporation based in California ... The TTAM Research Institute is a nonprofit medical research organization dedicated to helping scientists and non-scientists join together to unravel the mysteries of DNA - the code of life. TTAM believes everyone should have the opportunity to access their individual genetic code and be empowered to contribute it to scientific research. The TTAM Research Institute was founded and is led by Anne Wojcicki.

[1] https://who.is/whois/ttamresearchinstitute.org

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/https://ttamrese...

[3] https://investors.23andme.com/news-releases/news-release-det...
by jrflowers | 2025-06-14 05:03:07+00:00
According to the American Cancer Society, it is estimated that there will be over 62,000 more cases of breast cancer than prostate cancer in the US this year, and will kill over 6000 more people.

>The American Cancer Society’s estimates for prostate cancer in the United States for 2025 are:

>About 313,780 new cases of prostate cancer

>About 35,770 deaths from prostate cancer

https://www.cancer.org/cancer/types/prostate-cancer/about/ke...

>The American Cancer Society's estimates for breast cancer in the United States for 2025 are:

>About 316,950 new cases of invasive breast cancer will be diagnosed in women.

>About 59,080 new cases of ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) will be diagnosed.

>About 42,170 women will die from breast cancer.

https://www.cancer.org/cancer/types/breast-cancer/about/how-...
by komali2 | 2025-06-14 05:03:29+00:00
Could read a book or a paper, though of you have your smartphone set up to not be allowed to deliver unwanted distractions from that kind of media then yeah I agree with you, there's not shit else to do on a subway. People watching is only fun to a point.

This is part of why I much prefer above ground trains, at least you get a view then.
by HDThoreaun | 2025-06-14 05:04:01+00:00
Im not seeing a plan here. I agree that the Israeli rights goal to annex the west bank is a huge problem and probably makes a peace that the palestinians accept impossible. Im not so sure Israelis want to annex gaza as much as expel the gazans. The more analysis I do the more doomed the situation looks.

> Palestinians should be given land somewhere and/or forced to emigrate.

This is what the Israelis are trying to do. No one is willing to take them.
by chneu | 2025-06-14 05:04:03+00:00
Really it's advertising. It's just much worse online because it's deceptive and sneaky.

Advertising is a privacy and social health nightmare. It pressures people to do things we shouldn't be doing. It normalizes unhealthy behavior for profit. Among a ton of other issues.

Society has suffered immensely since advertising really took off in the 70s. Especially when the US started to allow advertising towards children. That's when US propaganda(and extreme capitalism) REALLY went into overdrive. Then with the advent of social media in your pocket it became constant to the point people hardly recognize how influencial/manipulative it is.

I block advertisements on all my devices. The difference is massive. I cannot overstate how different the online world is when you don't see advertisements.
by Eisenstein | 2025-06-14 05:04:40+00:00
The parent wasn't attacking you, they were saying 'be honest about what you want'. It seems you are incredibly defensive, because on some level you realize that whatever extra advantages you are getting from the bill are going to be paid for by someone else (our future economy, probably, when the value of the dollar gets destroyed because we keep borrowing money to give it to people who already have a ton of it instead of investing it in our infrastructure and workforce).

It isn't 'masochism' to give back to society, since without it you wouldn't have the ability to make money at all.
by bradknowles | 2025-06-14 05:05:15+00:00
You can send power without wires, over short distances. Induction charging on devices like iPhones and Apple Watches are common examples of that.

But it gets exponentially more difficult to transmit power wirelessly, the greater the distance between the receiver and the transmitter, especially if you want to send large amounts of power that way. Certain bands of radio waves can be transmitted long distances, and could b turned back into electrical power on the remote end.

But by then you will have successfully converted a multi-kilowatt power source into the source antenna into a few microwatts at the receiver. Not very efficient.
by seydor | 2025-06-14 05:05:18+00:00
We have 'instinctive visual cues' for depth and light coming from above, hence why button gradients are so immediately effective,because our visual system recognizes it in milliseconds. we don't have "instictive visual cues" for refraction and lensing , that's why we are confused about underwater distances . That's why magnifying glasses make us dizzy. I just can't believe this is coming from apple.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-06-14 05:06:35+00:00
> We had a cheap LaserJet 1000 printer at my first job back in the day.

Those were good. I also liked the 1100, in spite of it being an early software driven laserjet.

I had a particular soft spot for the little 1010/1012 lasers. They were persnickety because they require a software defined USB port and Windows 7 was the last OS supported. With a little kludging they work on Win 10. I'll find out soon if they do Win 11.

But like every good HP experience, it's in the past.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-06-14 05:06:54+00:00
> Brains process sequential electrical signals from the senses, and send sequential signals to the muscles. That's it.

Not a neuroscientist but this seems like a vast oversimplification to me based on what I've read

For one thing, the brain isn't sequential. There's a ton of parallel operations in there

It also isn't a purely electrical network either, there's tons of chemicals involved

It sounds so easy to compare it to an electrical network but it really, truly is much more complex
by HDThoreaun | 2025-06-14 05:08:15+00:00
All code has been seen before, thats why LLMs are so good at writing it.

I agree things are looking up for LLMs, but the semantics do matter here. In my experience LLMs are still pretty bad at solving novel problems(like arc agi 2) which is why I do not believe they have much intelligence. They seem to have started doing it a little, but are still mostly regurgitating.
by timr | 2025-06-14 05:09:10+00:00
> That’s not how it’s playing out in reality at all.

The math is straightforward. You can make wild assertions all day long, but ultimately, you have to have significant revenues for this to matter on the margin.

> Small groups working on government grants are getting hit with six figure tax bills.

Setting aside the...let's say "rarity" of what you're describing -- small, for-profit groups applying for government grants (oy) as a startup -- for these orgs to truly be getting "six-figure tax bills", it means that they have to be making about half a million dollars a year in revenue (minimum), with no deductions at all.

I'm not saying that small startups aren't getting tax bills or that those bills don't suck; I'm saying that they don't explain industry wide hiring trends.
by codetweep | 2025-06-14 05:11:11+00:00
The article sort of glosses over a major distinction regarding the surgical approach to endometriosis -- 90+% of OB/GYNs are trained to ablate (burn-to-destroy) the affected tissue, whereas more recently, a crop of surgeons have begun to specialize in excising a wide area of tissue surrounding the affected tissue. Many times, the tissue to destroy is not on the surface - it is deeply infiltrating what it has adhered to. Burning it is just like cutting grass, it'll come right back. Success rates with excisional surgery are markedly better, but not a silver bullet.
by tsimionescu | 2025-06-14 05:11:55+00:00
I think what the poster above means is that any formal system in which, say, 1 + 1 = 75, even if internally consistent as a set of symbols, would not be considered a valid logical foundation for mathematics by Hilbert, because it directly contradicts physical reality. Of course, this is under the assumption that 1 and + and 75 are meant to have their usual meanings, not that we've redefined the + operator to mean "the 73rd successor", nor that we're operating in some exotic numerical base where 75 is just a different set of symbols to describe the number 2.
by steve_adams_86 | 2025-06-14 05:12:12+00:00
The individual suffering from it probably shouldn't be lumped into some macro-social group of people who are 'playing victim while receiving equal treatment'. They're a person suffering from an extremely painful condition by no fault of their own. It could be your mom, your sister, partner, friend. How much money is raised for breast cancer makes no difference for their circumstance.

What's worse is that there are countless stories of women being denied care and treatment for this condition. It goes undiagnosed for years. Yet it's known to be debilitating in some cases. That's outside the bounds of normalcy and isn't made any better by hypothetical equal treatment.
by perching_aix | 2025-06-14 05:12:14+00:00
From what I understand, while in these two topics it is true that gender disparity sways towards women, in others it tends to sway the other way.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/dec/18/women-have...

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33232627/#:~:text=NIH%20dise...

I think this topic is better discussed without displays of victimhood anyhow (or maybe all topics are).
by twelve40 | 2025-06-14 05:13:49+00:00
True, that AI button is shoved pretty violently in unexpected places, and surprises me in an unpleasant way, since I've never considered Meta itself as a place to search for information, let alone something trustworthy.

But this is actually interesting. Asking for medical information in the past was the realm of Google Search, now a combo of Google/Gemini/Chatgpt/whatever. Could it be they are going to try to bite off a chunk of that market? kind of like how they chose not to compete with Google search in 2010's. But now are taking another pass at it?
by spankibalt | 2025-06-14 05:13:54+00:00
Added comment, as I've missed this before:

> You keep claiming that I had a preference for 3D games but I made no such statement.

How absurd, I made no such claim. I simply referred to something you brought up: the visual aesthetics of 2.5D raytraced games from ca. '91/'92, which was your yardstick to judge the (graphics) capabilities of competing eco systems, i. e. to determine when PC games began to "look better than their counterparts" from the homecomputer world. Which, to me, is just a generalization; a fallacy.

You either didn't read my posts properly, or are deliberately putting words in my mouth. So unless you offer up some serious numbers, detailed use cases, cultural insights, war stories, et cetera... this conversation has run its course for me. For the record, the rest of my reply is here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44273046].
by notjoemama | 2025-06-14 05:13:56+00:00
Light is comparatively and objectively slow in comparison to the distances that exist. Andromeda is 1M light years from us. From that perspective, 300k kph is oddly slow actually. I love the passion that you're brining to the table though. It reminded me of the blue giant stars whose lifespans can be as short as tens of millions of years, more often hundreds though. For billions upon billions, I suppose that would be white and brown dwarfs. Although, if we could orbit black holes and harness the energy of gravity, then we're really talking long time scales. Cracking the aging problem would allow us to think in very long timescales. But I do wonder whether the human psyche could handle such long lifespans.
by zxexz | 2025-06-14 05:14:21+00:00
I advise people to at least consider the “years of life lost” approach to thinking about this [0]

Prostate cancer and breast cancer suck. All cancer sucks, it’s a blight on civilization.

Don’t pit diseases against each other like that. They’re not sports teams.

[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10279998/