MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by demosthanos | 2025-06-06 22:10:28+00:00
We're not talking about a tax deduction in the sense of a special privilege, we're talking about simple calculations of profit.

Before this change, tax for software development was calculated against:

* Profit = Revenue - Expenses

And software developer salaries fell neatly into Expenses unless you were looking for an R&D tax credit.

After this change, tax for software development is calculated against this new equation:

* Profit = Revenue - (1/5 * YearlyExpenses[-1]) - (1/5 * YearlyExpenses[-2]) - (1/5 * YearlyExpenses[-3]) - (1/5 * YearlyExpenses[-4]) - (1/5 * YearlyExpenses[-5])

Which means that if you are in Year 1 of operation, your values for YearlyExpenses[-2:-5] are all 0 and you only get to deduct 1/5 of your actual operating costs for the year from your "profit". So you can be in the hole but still owe taxes on your "profit" for the year because what you spent money on was classified as R&D.
by MR4D | 2025-06-06 22:10:46+00:00
For those who want to read the Executive Order that changed the name, you can find it here:

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2025-01-29/pdf/2025-0...

At the top of Page 2 is this instruction:

Agency Heads shall take all necessary steps, in coordination with the USDS Administrator and to the maximum extent consistent with law, to ensure USDS has full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems. USDS shall adhere to rigorous data protection standards.
by e40 | 2025-06-06 22:10:46+00:00
It's not only that, ZIRP[1] contributed.

Also, the 10+ years before the layoffs started tech companies were on a hiring binge. Much of big tech was hiring to keep people off the market and off their competitors payrolls (this is from friends of friends in FANG HR departments). These were high paying jobs, too.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44141650
by pakyr | 2025-06-06 22:11:25+00:00
> we all see what we want to see

Yup, and what I see is that Intuit, Inc. gave to exactly one PAC, that donates exclusively to R candidates. Tesla employees also overwhelmingly donated to Kamala Harris[0]; does this mean Tesla and Elon were backing Kamala to win?

> If it hadn’t been Trump, Intuit would be working Joe Kamala.

They didn't donate to him in 2020, so I'm not sure why I should assume this.[1]

[0]https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/tesla-inc/summary?id=D00005...

[1]https://web.archive.org/web/20210110001759/https://bideninau...
by luckylion | 2025-06-06 22:11:51+00:00
The chef doesn't create a meal once that you can sell for the next 10 years though. You pay him for time X, he makes a meal, you sell that meal.

That's fundamentally different from regular software development outside of agencies where there is no direct relationship. Software development is closer to an investment than an expense.

Amortization sucks in general, yes, because the money is gone and it doesn't affect your taxes to the same amount, but that's not different for any company doing manufacturing or anyone needing specialized tools or vehicles that cost significant amounts.
by Nevermark | 2025-06-06 22:12:15+00:00
"What does this button do?" Bmmmfff.

On the TRS-80 Model III, the reset button was a bright red recessed square to the right of the attached keyboard.

It was irresistible to anyone who had no idea what you were doing as you worked, lost in the flow, insensitive to the presence of another human being, until...

--

Then there was the Kaypro. Many of their systems had a bug, software or hardware, that would occasionally cause an unplanned reset the first time, after you turned it on, that you tried writing to the disk. Exactly the wrong moment.
by antognini | 2025-06-06 22:12:16+00:00
They are expenses, but amortized over 5 years. So if you spent $2m on employee salaries, you would then deduct $400k from your revenue every year for 5 years.

If your employee expenses remained constant, then by year 5 you would be deducting $2m from your revenue since you'd be accumulating the deductions from the previous four years.

So in steady state it wouldn't necessarily be a big problem. But for a startup which is hiring many new employees and whose revenue is growing it's a huge problem.
by sokoloff | 2025-06-06 22:13:26+00:00
I believe that alcohol and tobacco are significant net negatives to society.

Yet, I do not support a ban on alcohol and I suspect that an outright ban on tobacco would be worse than simply having high taxes on it.

Sports betting is probably closest to alcohol in this regard: lots of people get moderate enjoyment from it from time to time and some people have their lives significantly harmed or even ended, meaning the overall net is negative, even though many people experience a small positive.

I wouldn’t ban sports betting for the same reason I wouldn’t take away your glass of red wine with dinner.
by dragonwriter | 2025-06-06 22:13:55+00:00
> The text of article 5 doesn’t distinguish whether the attack on the NATO state was justified or even whether the NATO state attacked first.

Arguably, the text of Article 5 doesn't have to, since an act of aggression breaches the obligations of Articles 1 and 2, as well as the pre-existing obligations which the Treaty explicitly does not alter under Article 7.
by devilbunny | 2025-06-06 22:14:11+00:00
> more than 200km by road

That’s short enough distance that most Americans would regard it as a day trip: wake up, go, do whatever, come back. And I do mean 200 km each way.

I have, at the more extreme end, done not just 400 but 1250 km in one day as a round trip. A single 200 km segment is nothing. I go 300 km each way for a weekend break!
by 9rx | 2025-06-06 22:14:50+00:00
> Is US software dominance because of our startups? Or because of the giant trillion dollar monopolies we have?

Most likely neither: It is its massive trade deficit, the one it strangely wants to get rid of now, that has allowed US consumers to consume more than they produce (i.e. you can take something with no real expectation of having to give anything back in return). Which, as it relates to tech, has enabled offering services for what is effectively free to dominate the market. Nobody else in the world can compete with that.

> Didn't AAPL, GOOG and FB all create products _before_ they had any taxable income?

Wouldn't you say they had no taxable income because of it? If Facebook brought in $100,000, and paid $100,000 to developers, then there would be no taxable income under normal regimes. But if the developers were not tax deductible, then that $100,000 in revenue would be taxable, even though the bank account is empty. This isn't nearly so simple, but it has changed the calculus in a similar way. The business models of old no longer work because of it.
by Alupis | 2025-06-06 22:15:19+00:00
> The DOGE team included the teenage hackers

It's amusing to me how so many people want to believe technical workers within the government are apparently all crusty, old, 50-something's instead of young "kids" in their twenties and thirties.

NSA, every branch of the military, and more are bursting at the seams with twenty-somethings that have access to some of the most sensitive information on the planet... yet nobody bats an eye.

Then we can consider the technical staff at places such as Experian, Capital One, and more... they're all fairly young too.

This has turned into quite the political narrative... "twenty-somethings have access to your data - be afraid, very afraid!"
by pyman | 2025-06-06 22:15:30+00:00
Yes, round-tripping is considered fraud in business. The CEO and CFO committed fraud. That has been proven, and there is no doubt about it.

But the article also claims they misled investors about the technology they were using, and that part is false. It even mocked Indian developers for working as programmers and pretending to be machines, which is obviously absurd.
by Ericson2314 | 2025-06-06 22:15:53+00:00
I am saying that all this stuff should have never left the bay area, and the bay area should have millions more people than it does today.

Arizona is also a mistake --- a far worse place for high tech than Oregon!. It is a desert real estate ponzi scheme with no top-tier schools, no history of top-tier high-skill intellectual job markets. In general the sun belt (including LA) is the land of stupid.

The electoral college is always winning out over the best economic geography, and it sucks.
by ivape | 2025-06-06 22:16:48+00:00
This is easily explained by accepting that there is no such thing as LRMs. LRMs are just LLMs that iterate on its own answers more (or provides itself more context information of a certain type). The reasoning loop on an "LRM" will be equivalent to asking a regular LLM to "refine" its own response, or "consider" additional context of a certain type. There is no such thing as reasoning basically, as it was always a method to "fix" hallucinations or provide more context automatically, nothing else. These big companies baked in one of the hackiest prompt engineering tricks that your typical enthusiast figured out long ago and managed to brand it and profit off it. The craziest part about this was Deepseek was able to cause a multi billion dollar drop and pump of AI stocks with this one trick. Crazy times.
by atombender | 2025-06-06 22:18:01+00:00
You're wrong. You've not offered any evidence for why this is not just your opinion, and your claims are easily contradicted by examples.

As an example, say we have an API implemented on top of a complex data store. Every data store implementation can return errors like ObjectNotFound, InsufficientPermissions, and a dozen others. Every data store call can potentially return these. As well as, of course, standard Go errors like DeadlineExceeded or internal errors that cannot be exposed as user-facing API responses. However, some translation error has to translate those errors into API responses.

This cannot conveniently and consistently be done in each API handler, as it would repeat the same error translation for the same errors. An InsufficientPermissions error may happen in a "create" route as well as an in a "update" route, but also in any other route that deals with objects not being accessible.

Therefore it must be done in a central error translator. By definition. And this translation must either do a dozen+ Is() and As() calls, or it can be done efficiently, as I've described.

Anyway, I've said all I have needed to say and won't respond any further.
by visarga | 2025-06-06 22:18:14+00:00
> when you drill down to first principles

It is a trap to consider that first principles perspective is sufficient. Like, if I tell you before 1980: "iterate over f(z) = z^2 + c" there is no way you are going to guess fractals emerge. Same with the rules for Conway's Game of Life - seeing the code you won't guess it makes gliders and guns.

My point is that recursion creates its own inner opacity, it is irreducible, so knowing a recursive system behavior from its iteration code alone is insufficient. It is a becoming not a static thing. That's also why we have the halting problem - recursion.

Reasoning is a recursive process too, you can't understand it from analyzing its parts.
by avsteele | 2025-06-06 22:18:27+00:00
This is about way more than software. It's all R&D

It's effectively 6 years too. You only get to depreciate 10% in 1st year. This might have killed my company if it was around during first years.

See my comments on the previous discussion (Nov 2023) here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38145630
by bravesoul2 | 2025-06-06 22:18:48+00:00
That's the rub. Is it an operational expense, like rent or a capital expense, like buying machinery?

It is sort of between the two in my view and is highly dependant on what the software engineer does each day.

Are they fixing a bug, helping a customer, refactoring? I think that is operational.

Are they building out a new feature? That is capital. But it is not quite like buying equipment because it adds no value to the books. So depreciation seems off.

But the same issue applies to other roles. Is a sales persons day trying to land a sale, or trying to develop the business.

It all comes down to "intangible assets" and whether you are making them.

I think it is easier to just say if you are paying someone to work then you can deduct. There must be better ways to claw it back.

The whole reason for most business to exist is to use operations (operational costs) as a lever to increase the growth and intangible value of the business.
by triceratops | 2025-06-06 22:19:07+00:00
I remain amazed that we managed to ban tobacco advertising but alcohol and gambling, also harmful and addictive vices, continue to be advertised.

Both have very little societal value, other than alcohol's traditional role as a lubricant of social interaction, and there's no reason to actively promote them.

FWIW I love alcohol. I don't gamble because I don't enjoy it, but I have nothing against gambling.
by mft_ | 2025-06-06 22:19:31+00:00
To offer a little factual background:

* The fact that SpaceX is currently the only US company with an available and reliable capacity to fly astronauts to/from the ISS is the main reason for many of the contracts, and they had this before and irrespective of Musk's political engagement.

* For other launch activities unrelated to the ISS, SpaceX offers the most cost-effective service, so again it's not unreasonable that they would win business irrespective.

* Most of SpaceX's active contracts with NASA predate Trump's second term.
by thijsb | 2025-06-06 22:22:56+00:00
good article, I can (unfortunately) relate. another aspect of the trap is when you have set backs (stress, life events) or get tired (long days, less sleep, emotional events) typically the first recourse is to stop the hardest parts: physical fitness, e.g., you take a car instead of bike/walk, skip sports, alcohol instead of water. it's sometimes a vicious circle, you're tired due to overweight, thus eat more to get energy, making you more overweight.
by a_t48 | 2025-06-06 22:23:14+00:00
Years ago I had the fun of hunting down a bug at 3am before a game launch. Randomly, we’d save the game and instead get an empty file. This is pretty much the worst thing a game can do (excepting wiping your hard drive, hello Bungie). Turned out some analytics framework was leaking network connections and thus stealing all our file handles. :(
by LAC-Tech | 2025-06-06 22:23:42+00:00
The whole germ of this discussion was about jewish people writ large - that it's somehow "ironic" for them to be bigoted, and not other groups.

Tellingly, the responses to this have revealed a lot of latent bigotry. If you're offended that someone said your ethnicity does not automatically have a moral high ground, then you're a supremacist. You believe inherently that your ethnicity IS more moral than others.

I consider my point well demonstrated. Irony indeed.
by gtirloni | 2025-06-06 22:26:25+00:00
You supposedly entered this industry because you loved something, I hope. Don't let other people's actions and opinions destroy your peace.

That being said, when I was young and naive, I took people's words literally (the good and the bad) and it used to drive me crazy. Now I recognize BS much more easily and keep my peace while doing what I love.

So no, not disillusioned at all. If anything, more certain than ever.
by chris_va | 2025-06-06 22:26:27+00:00
"Our best-performed and cross-validated random forest model ... "

Someone had fun with that abstract.

As an aside, though darker trees absorb more sunlight than snow/ground, and the albedo effect starts to dominate in this region (in terms of global warming) vs the CO2 benefit of more trees: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-46577-1/figures/1 ... so the mitigation potential is perhaps backward from what they state in the paper.

(disclaimer that I work in a related area)
by epolanski | 2025-06-06 22:26:40+00:00
Maybe I wasn't clear, and please understand both my parents suffered of addictions.

If my father or mother got high or drunk every evening I did not. Terrible, pitiful, psychological nightmare, sure.

But I was not intoxicated.

On the other hand, I've seen the impacts of ludomania. When parents go broke or accumulate unpayable debts that's something you cannot recover with rehab and that will have insane implications for the whole family for decades.

I hope you understand now what I mean.

One of my best friends SO suffers of ludomania, a court has ordered his salary to be paid to her, and she gives him an 80€s monthly allowance. They got lucky, another family I know got completely ruined in the course of few weeks.

By the way, I'm polish/Italian, and we don't have hordes of homeless people, I don't think I've ever seen a single homeless person in my life in Poland.
by Nevermark | 2025-06-06 22:27:09+00:00
"It's just statistics!", said the statistical-search survival-selected statistically-driven-learning biological Rube Goldberg contraption, between methane emissions. Imagining that a gradient learning algorithm, optimizing its statistical performance, is the same thing as only learning statistical relationships.

Inconvertibly demonstrating a dramatic failure in its, and many of its kind's, ability to reason.
by suddenlybananas | 2025-06-06 22:28:08+00:00
I think you're mistaking the work of researchers who work at Apple with the particular investment decisions of Apple over the past few years.

>It's so easy to criticize the works of others and not deliver anything. Apple—be Sam in Game of Thrones: "I'm tired of reading about the achievements of better men".

This is a patently absurd thing to write about a research paper.
by nomel | 2025-06-06 22:28:21+00:00
So, what you're saying that there's a a business opportunity not only on the software service side, but the logistic/equipment side as well!

> and rigged to be out of each other's lines of sight

I think there's a misunderstanding of the industry here, if you think the viewing audience will be concerned about some poorly disguised cameras at the edges of the scene.
by schmookeeg | 2025-06-06 22:29:59+00:00
I would enjoy seeing your virtuous corporations list. "The devil you see in social media constantly and relentlessly" vs "the devil you never knew existed" seem... not all that different to me.

I suppose it's another way of saying "I'm exhausted trying to find the sucks-less providers of my everyday existence" which I grant is my own failing.
by discoutdynamite | 2025-06-06 22:30:39+00:00
Short term: Specialize in something robots / programs cannot do. Actual physical work requires dexterity and perception that robots wont have for decades. Medium Term: Form unions, parties, and other such legal bodies, get protections/privileges, and throw your weight around whenever necessary. Long term: Ensure that "AI" actually becomes intelligent, escapes total control, and make sure it cannot simply be used as a velveted gauntlet.
by aksss | 2025-06-06 22:31:08+00:00
"harm" is kind of the key word here - an executive agency (USDS) is trying to access other executive agency data perform work the executive branch has prioritized. Take the personalities out of the question for a minute.

Gov says that enjoining them from accessing the data is doing harm by preventing the work.

In opposition, the plaintiffs say that if USDS has access to the data, it will sell it or abscond it, or something. That's a claim of potential harm.

First, is the plaintiff likely to succeed on the merits? Probably unlikely that plaintiffs will ultimately succeed in preventing data access within the executive branch. The harm is theoretical, in the future, and not very well articulated. Nothing about USDS access to the data is structurally enabling the selling or distribution of data.

Second, where is the most harm at present? Real harm on one hand, potential harm on the other. So likelihood of the harm in the future needs to be really imminent, real, highly likely to outweigh actual harm in a work stoppage.

That's basically the formula.
by lesuorac | 2025-06-06 22:31:18+00:00
It is a subsidy!

Why should money spent on software _development_ not have to be deprecated over time like other money spent on _development_?

I get that it sucks from a cash flow standpoint but the same is going to be true of other R&D expenses. It's just that we're more exposed to this specific R&D expenditure and not others.
by viraptor | 2025-06-06 22:31:36+00:00
I'm not sure what what op meant. At least two people there were teenage hackers, but not in a positive sense. They were part of crime organisations.

But even concentrating on the age part - people in their 20s are working NSA and others. They're extremely unlikely to have access to the most sensitive information unsupervised since they're not senior enough. And definitely don't have a Yolo level decision making responsibilities. The restrictions, reporting, clearances and rules following in some of those places are unlike anything Doge ever did.
by dragonwriter | 2025-06-06 22:31:37+00:00
> As a progressive, it seems like the Democrats always have Senate spoilers...

With Republicans usually being dominant in a number of states, if Democrats have a Senate majority, it is usually both narrow and dependent on a very small number of Democratic and/or Dem-leading moderate independent Senators from Republican-majority states who vote with the party on leadership, but are soft (or firmly opposed to the progressive preference) on a number of issues important to progressives.

If the US were approximately an equal democracy, this might be less of an issue.
by jiggawatts | 2025-06-06 22:32:22+00:00
Check out the Azure HBv5 servers.

High bandwidth memory on-package with 352 AMD Zen 4 cores!

With 7 TB/s memory bandwidth, it’s basically an x86 GPU.

This is the future of high performance computing. It used to be available only for supercomputers but it’s trickling down to cloud VMs you can rent for reasonable money. Eventually it’ll be standard for workstations under your desk.
by elpocko | 2025-06-06 22:33:29+00:00
If your work is of so low quality that an algorithm that only generates "shitty art" (by popular consensus) puts you out of work, then you don't deserve to get paid for your "art." It's Schrödinger's art: it's really bad and good at the same time, good enough to put artists out of work.

People don't get paid for work that machines can do. It's not a novel concept.
by throw0101c | 2025-06-06 22:34:52+00:00
> Are you suggesting there are no consequences for government employees who willfully steal and/or leak confidential data?

Depends on who your friends in government are.

> The Espionage Act of 1917, Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and Economic Espionage Act, among others, beg to differ.

Assaulting police officers and trying to overthrow the government is also illegal. People have been convicted of it. And yet if you know the right people you won't suffer any consequences:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardon_of_January_6_United_Sta...
by runarberg | 2025-06-06 22:34:52+00:00
No, that is at best surveying. It is as scientific as asking people their favorite color or who they will vote for in the next election.

Science is working with a theory and gathering evidence for that theory. The theory behind IQ is called general intelligence and it has been completely exposed as nothing but racist pseudo-science. Removing the theory from the metrics just gives you a bunch of data, which may or may not describe a useful model of nature (but most likely it won’t).
by Dwedit | 2025-06-06 22:35:14+00:00
miaomiaoPixel_v11 can generate sprites that small. Specify a size of 128x128, and that corresponds to an actual size of 16x16. Use an image editor to shrink the sprite down to 16x16, then reduce the palette as needed to remove the near-matching colors.

16x24 sprites end up looking a lot nicer though.