MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gamblor956 | 2025-06-07 04:46:58+00:00
The appropriate analogy is:

Imagine a restaurant spends money on employees to build 100 tables, 500 chairs, etc. Those tangible goods would be capital assets, so the labor costs of building them would also be capitalized.

This change to the tax code is just bringing the tax treatment of software development in line with how every other industry is treated. IOW, it was closing a loophole. A very valuable loophole, whose beneficiaries used it to get filthy rich, and bragged about how their industry was so much more valuable than everything else, even though a lot of that value was due to the exception software was getting in the tax code.

Notably, in the current version of the budget as of 6/6, the loophole is temporarily coming back, though given the Musk-Trump feud, it's very possible it will get pulled again to try to mollify the hardline deficit caucus.
by const_cast | 2025-06-07 04:49:47+00:00
I can't remember the last time a tech company has collected less data than they admit.

If you read the privacy policies you agree to, they have access to everything and outright admit it will be logged. That API option is merely a request, and absolutely need not be respected.

I can't believe we're still doing this rigamarole. If the product is not specifically designed, engineered, and open-sourced to be as privacy protecting as possible and it's not literally running on a computer you own, you have zero expectation of privacy. Once this has been proven 1 million times we don't need to prove it anymore, we can just assume and that's a very reasonable assumption.
by gamblor956 | 2025-06-07 04:51:54+00:00
What taxes do unprofitable US businesses owe that this would be deducted against?

An unprofitable business doesn't pay income taxes. Businesses are taxed on their net income (i.e., profit).

People are railing against this as the cause of tech's recent underperformance, but it was a non-factor for the vast majority of tech companies, because most tech companies aren't profitable and wouldn't have paid taxes anyway.
by lostlogin | 2025-06-07 04:54:36+00:00
> Sounds like a list of edge cases just like any other area.

That's exactly the point. The famous example (Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names) has examples I have encountered in medical databases. If a programmer somewhere didn't fall into the trap, patient names in a medical database would have been better managed and may have avoided duplication, lost records, etc.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18567548
by broken_broken_ | 2025-06-07 04:55:57+00:00
I have worked for financial services companies that used FreeBSD both in EC2 and on the metal in data centers (self managed). The two features we used all the time were zfs and jails. Each service ran in its own jail for isolation. One (not even beefy) server could run all the services which was insanely cost efficient. A cloud migration was undertaken at some point to have a hybrid setup, using a mix of Linux (k8s) and FreeBSD, and costs skyrocketed. It’s a trade off because in the data center we had to buy and replace our own disks, react to fires taking place, being only in one country etc. AWS gives you multi region, and tons of good stuff, and that has a price.

ZFS was not leveraged that much but it saved our beacon once when a table in the production database was accidentally dropped and we could instantly rollback to the previous zfs snapshot (there was a tiny bit of data loss as a result but this did not matter too much for this application - uptime was more important). ZFS was also used for backups I believe.

A few times I used dtrace in production to troubleshoot.

When we introduced Linux to our fleet of FreeBSD servers, every team picked a different distro organically so it was a bit of a zoo. With FreeBSD on the server you only have the one variant.

I still use and like both, but I must say I really like that FreeBSD is a kernel+OS integrated together.
by patmcc | 2025-06-07 04:56:13+00:00
If they're producing a capital asset, you do retain the right to the fruits of their labor, even if they quit.

The rationale behind amortization isn't exactly the idea that the asset can be sold, it's that the asset is producing revenue over multiple years. For software, the asset is the codebase.

Let's say you hire a single software dev, for one year, and they write Excel++, which you can sell for the next ten years. It would be entirely appropriate to amortize the cost of creating that software over those ten years, based on the matching principle (a fundamental idea of accounting, matching expenses with revenue).

The issue in the real world is that's not how the software industry actually works, 99% of the time.
by DocTomoe | 2025-06-07 04:56:31+00:00
Well ... Boeing got themselves into the perfect storm. They need this flight to work right, after the catastrophic first attempt. But the longer they wait to get things right, the more eyebrows will be raised. They need a good flight, now.

But they do not determine the schedule - it's determined by NASA, which has about a thousand problems of itself right now, and cannot afford to screw up either.

I do not envy anyone in that chain of delivery right now.
by bigyabai | 2025-06-07 04:56:36+00:00
> Out of interest, have you built an agent?

I wrote one with Google's BERT in 2020 because I was hair-on-fire ecstatic over the idea. Cargo-culted an inference library and hooked it into a Slack bot to post the changelogs. You can guess how that turned out, but yes, at one point I shared the dream. Nothing I've seen has motivated me to try again, the pace of Claude and ChatGPT releases haven't inspired me to try again.

My worry is that you're getting too hyped up when there's not really any serious evidence the issues can be solved. It would be cool if it did, but again, refer to the flying car - great dream, but avgas isn't getting any cheaper. Nor pilots insurance.

> Like, why don't we have Renovatebot for that class of KTLO?

Liability? If you don't keep the lights on, the business is critically impaired. AI agents doesn't use the right address when sending the power bill - cute error in testing, catastrophic error in real life. How do we, as engineers, realistically stop an AI from doing that? How can we introduce heuristic variability without opening avenues for catastrophic, unfixable failure? You might be throwing developers under the bus by advocating for them too strongly here. "Pushbutton idempotency" and "robot that cleans my room" is a square peg trying to fit in a round hole.
by opo | 2025-06-07 04:57:11+00:00
As your wikipedia link states:

>...While online articles in the 21st century have claimed that Mansa Musa was the richest person of all time,[91] historians such as Hadrien Collet have argued that Musa's wealth is impossible to calculate accurately.

We don't know the exact wealth of Manda Musa and there really isn't a good way to compare wealth between different eras. Even in the same general timeframe, wouldn't the khanates of the mongol empire be considered more wealthy?
by palmfacehn | 2025-06-07 05:00:13+00:00
Great progress. Bookmarked.

For purposes of generative worlds, I have an additional requirement for interchangable equipment and weapons. I.e. a single sword or armor sprite should fit with all humanoid characters, in all animations. I suspect this could be achieved by training against "clipping" tests.

As a start, there should be projections for all four cardinal directions.

Limit the output to palettes of a given size, for classic recolors via GL shaders.
by tomhow | 2025-06-07 05:00:21+00:00
The guidelines ask us not to do this. If an article seems unfit for HN, please flag it and email us at hn@ycombinator.com so we can have a look.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.
by lostlogin | 2025-06-07 05:00:55+00:00
From messing about with MR scanners:

An MR Faraday cage attenuates the RF signal about 100db (according to the engineer who built it). Phones work as long as the door is open 1mm or so. Blue tooth works through the cage just fine. Wifi doesn't work very well anywhere near the cage.

MR scanners get nice pictures with the scan door open, but the if the scanner next door has its door open (so 2x scanners running with door open), images are wrecked.

Also, the coastguard sends you grumpy letters if you leave the door open and scan (at 3T).
by iwanttocomment | 2025-06-07 05:04:06+00:00
At the end of the day, adding advertisements will bite them in the ass, especially with longer movies, because they can't schedule as many screenings per day as they have in the past.

If that doesn't do the trick and they don't backtrack, and you have to catch a movie at AMC (god help you) just come later. Currently, AMC says the movie starts at 7:00pm, we all know to come at 7:25pm to catch the end of things. If they add 10 minutes of ads, make that 7:35pm. You don't have to see the ads, just don't trust the start time.

AMC has provided a unilaterally terrible experience for filmgoers for years, and they should be ashamed to be one of the primary operators in the country. I love and support the independent cinemas in my area, and when I think of AMC, I think of popcorn-strewn hallways, worn-down seats, and having to navigate a depressing half-dead mall in order to go there. While I'm empathetic to those who only have AMC in their area, otherwise, just go somewhere that actually knows how to run a movie theater.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-06-07 05:05:00+00:00
That isn’t the asset valuation, that is the range of assessments interested parties make with respect to asset value. Because market clearing transactions are rare in many asset markets, those extremely high variance estimates of asset value are all you have to work with. It is only marginally better than no information at all. Too make matters worse, the rare transactions in these markets frequently have a lot of complicated structure such that the nominal price is not reflective of the underlying value.

tl;dr: Many assets have no meaningfully assessable fair market value. These are investments with extremely long and indefinite time horizons before the asset value can be assessed in a reasonable way. You can look at it as a peculiar type of risk capital portfolio with an extraordinarily long time horizon.
by const_cast | 2025-06-07 05:05:44+00:00
The reason X "just worked" is that it's very bad, obolsete software that nobody would touch so we all just got used to the things that didn't work.

High DPI, multiple monitors, hot-plugging, OpenGL... these things were hacks and pretty much never worked right. There's also very necessary for modern computers. We all just didn't care.

So what if my thunderbolt dock needed a reboot to connect a monitor? So what if youtube drops a few frames here or there? So what if I need to enforce vsync across the entire desktop just so I don't get splitting? So what if vertical bars appear for a few seconds after suspend? So what if 1.25 scaling looks like ass?
by runarberg | 2025-06-07 05:07:21+00:00
I see: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

You seem to have a similar view as Eric Turkheimer. Believe in IQ without all the racist stuff (and obviously don‘t believe it is inherited). I want to go even further. I think I remember Kareem Carr had a nice debate with Turkheimer on Twitter, where Carr said:

> In my opinion, I think we would all be better off if we thought of IQ not as "intelligence" but as a measure of "standardized test taking ability".

https://en.rattibha.com/thread/1653076849717825536

In my opinion we need to sunset the term IQ. It has a troubled history and is just bad science. I also think the whole field of psychometrics has a lot to answer for. I’m not sure that field has a future (at least not as a science).
by patmcc | 2025-06-07 05:08:34+00:00
Yes, I think there are two similar but subtly different flaws in that always.

1) Accounting rules are to match revenue with the expenses responsible for them, which I think is a good principle. If your workers make something now that provides revenue for 5 years, it makes sense to spread that expense over 5 years too. In many cases, you would want to do that as a business, makes it more clear how your business is profitable vs not.

2) Decisions whether to "build vs buy" a capital asset should not have massive tax implications. If I buy CoolSoftwareProduct from someone and resell it for the next 5 years, I'd have to amortize that. Should be similar if I hire a coder to write CoolSoftwareProduct instead.

(This doesn't mean that "salaries should always be amortized" is the right answer, of course, I think it's a very silly law)
by 9x39 | 2025-06-07 05:08:38+00:00
The rule of law gets down to nitty-gritty levels, too, not just a reality show at the highest altitudes: trust the police don't extort you, the ability to gain relief in court (small claims or civil), trust things you build won't be looted overnight, trust in your neighborhood to walk at night or leave something unlocked, trust in your bank to wire things, trust in your title companies, trust in your package deliveries, etc.

It's not perfect, but you could do so, so much worse.
by Disposal8433 | 2025-06-07 05:09:32+00:00
If anything could approach a tenth of what AGI is supposed to be, we will all have to live with $2 because that AI will be closely guarded by a few billionaires. Human greed will not disappear if a philosophical concept right out of science fiction books comes to life.

I'm not positive at all about what AI can bring to humanity.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-06-07 05:12:10+00:00
The windows on this were extremely impressive to me. That is, I feel like this would have been way easier if all the windows were just on flat sections, but one set of windows have about their bottom third on the bottom curve, meaning he had to fabricate curved window frames and curved window panes, which seems really difficult to me. He could have easily "cheated" and put those windows just a tad higher so they were fully on the vertical back wall. Making them with that curve just shows a crazy attention to detail and really added to the illusion of the brick sculpture feeling like a flexible rug.
by efitz | 2025-06-07 05:12:25+00:00
I don’t think it really changes the narrative. 2020 was also a congressional election year, even had Trump won (as he appeared to want desperately) he could not have been assured of a Republican congress.

My argument is simple: Occam’s Razor

The Republicans in congress put the provision in solely as a gimmick to get past the CBO.

Frankly I don’t think legislators in either party are competent enough to have foreseen the consequences and even if they had been they wouldn’t have put a bomb like this in that would be more likely than not to backfire and affect them.

I just think that too often people interpret incompetence as malice, especially nowadays when things are so polarized that it’s fashionable to hate people who differ with one’s political opinions.
by boroboro4 | 2025-06-07 05:13:58+00:00
The access of private data between different agencies (or whatever) across executive can be (and probably) illegal. And if this access will be considered such it would be impossible to revert.

On other hand we have government trying to do something, and their potential harm is delay their plans until courts will consider the case.

You need to compare not only immediate harms, but more importantly potential harms of the emergency order in case if final decision differs from (assumed) emergency one. You also make merits question to be very straightforward but it’s not – other courts ruled plaintiffs have good chances to succeed on merits.

I think the balancing act here is clear.
by Animats | 2025-06-07 05:14:20+00:00
There's plenty of unclassified info available. Start here.[1] This is an overview document from Defense Acquisition University, a unit of DoD. It's a painful PowerPoint. You have to plow through a lot of really boring military documents to get the details.

EMP doesn't address small devices much. Small devices with no wires connected are not very vulnerable, because the energy is mostly at somewhat longer wavelengths, meters or tens of meters. Worry about cell towers, not cell phones.

Other than the power grid people, the civilian sector doesn't look at EMP hardening much any more.

[1] https://www.dau.edu/sites/default/files/Migrated/CopDocument...
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-06-07 05:14:52+00:00
> ... and you trust the dependency author ... it's only a small step to auto-merge

I disagree for the reasons listed above, but let's focus for a moment on 3rd-party dependencies here, versus trusted ones. Given the numerous scenarios I listed above, it's a huge step from "using a 3rd party library" to "trusting the author of it".

We'd have to start with "...and you don't trust the author", because for most 3rd-party dependencies, the author has given us neither sufficient evidence to do so, nor sufficient recourse if that trust is violated.

> Relying on a human reviewer, regardless, is a weak guarantee.

Relying on countless random 3rd party to not own you when they know people are pulling in their code as a dependency is a far, far worse guarantee. How would that strategy have protected someone against this supply-chain attack?:

https://www.wiz.io/blog/github-action-tj-actions-changed-fil...
by smolder | 2025-06-07 05:17:13+00:00
Plastics and other oil-derivative, crucial materials should be the main use of crude oil and methane, not energy. Save the oil to make things that don't have an easy replacement. Replace oil burning with solar, wind, nuclear, etc., and use the underground reserve of hydrocarbons for noble causes like medecine, or for the type of investments that add to the net good for our species.
by pranay01 | 2025-06-07 05:17:19+00:00
hey, SigNoz maintainer here.

> an official first-party product on top

So, seems like the direction you are going is trying to enable ingestion to different ClickHouse instances (Cloud/BYOC/Self hosted) and then use HyperDX as the query & visualization layer on top.

I think, fundamental difference we have at SigNoz on how we approach this is that we want to solve for observability and the fact that we use ClickHouse today is just a point in time fact. In future, we are open to use any other datastore which may be more performant for observability. We can also use different databases to augment different use cases in observability.

>Ultimately from a product philosophy standpoint, we aren't big believers in the "3 pillars" concept, which tends to manifest as 3 silos/tabs for "logs", "metrics", "traces" (this isn't just SigNoz - but across the industry).

I am not too sure on how this works in practice, do you expect people to write metrics and logs query in the same explorer. From our experience, the query writing experience is very different for logs and metrics and you need different defaults to make the query writing UX easier for users.

Though I agree, the ability to query across signals is an important point and we are already doing work on this at SigNoz (https://signoz.io/blog/observability-requires-querying-acros...).
by burnt-resistor | 2025-06-07 05:17:29+00:00
Putting a bunch of much more viscous radioactive material within proximity of each other is simpler than squishing and maintaining confinement of plasma under extreme conditions.

Fission reactors are relatively "easier" to simulate as giant finite element analysis Monte Carlo simulations with roughly voxels of space, i.e., thermal conductivity, heat capacity, etc. I happened to have been involved with one that was 50+ years old that worked just fine because of all of physicists and engineers who carefully crafted model data and code to reflect what would be likely to happen in reality when testing new, conventional reactor designs.

The problems with fusion are many orders-of-magnitude more involved and complex with wear, losses, and "fickleness" compared to fission.

Thus, experimental physics meeting engineering and manufacturing in new domains is expensive and hard work.

Maybe in 200 years there will be a open source, 3D-printable fusion reactor. :D
by jorangreef | 2025-06-07 05:21:02+00:00
I’m not disagreeing that diskless crash recovery protocols exist.

In fact, an early version of TigerBeetle implemented one of these from Cowling and Liskov’s VSR’12 paper.

However, since then, we invested in TigerBeetle’s stable storage, for reasons which I won’t go into further here.

If you are curious to learn more about all the stable storage techniques in TigerBeetle in particular (again, this is not trying to suggest that VSR can’t also run without stable storage, or to deny other techniques such as object storage or tiering!), but if these things are interesting for you, and if you do want to learn more, then I’d recommend diving into “Durability and the Art of Consensus”.
by apparent | 2025-06-07 05:22:14+00:00
I went to see Mission Impossible the other day. It was the first movie I'd seen in theaters in a long time, and honestly it was underwhelming. I have a projector at home and don't generally care about seeing the latest movies (it used to matter to me but no longer does). I don't know when I'll be back, it was that mediocre of an experience.

My sound system isn't as good, but it seems like a better investment to add a couple rear speakers to my Sonos setup instead of continuing to see movies in theaters (at nearly 20/person!). Adding speakers would also make music and TV sound better, not just the movies.
by thrance | 2025-06-07 05:23:18+00:00
The progressives were never in power...

Tell me, how will the "Big Beautiful Bill", that adds multiple trillions to the debt while gutting essential social programs, will fix your "debt bomb"?

To me, it appears like straight up stealing, putting all the country's wealth in tax cuts to the rich and government contracts to military contractors. All the while placing the country on a sure path to financial and social ruin.
by Swizec | 2025-06-07 05:23:32+00:00
> We have been through several "AI Winters" before

Yeah, remember when we spent 15 years (~2000 to ~2015) calling it “machine learning” because AI was a bad word?

We use so much AI in production every day but nobody notices because as soon as a technology becomes useful, we stop calling it AI. Then it’s suddenly “just face recognition” or “just product recommendations” or “just [plane] autopilot” or “just adaptive cruise control” etc

You know a technology isn’t practical yet because it’s still being called AI.
by yojo | 2025-06-07 05:23:49+00:00
I get that the article is about applications, but the applications have a dependency on 3rd party models, and that dependency is costing them most (all? More than all?) of their revenue.

Put another way, if I make $100M in annual revenue, but am paying out $110M to the API I wrap, it’s not nearly as compelling a business as that top-line $100M number makes it out to be.

In the previous generation of startups, expenses were mostly dominated by headcount, and the cost of actually delivering the service tended to be small. The story was “keep growing revenue, and if you need to show a profit, stop hiring.”

An AI startup built on other people’s models has to hope that the foundational models end up being fungible commodities, otherwise any margins you might gain will get squeezed out by your LLM provider. Alternatively, you can train your own model.

I don’t know what Cursor’s userbase looks like. If everyone is paying for Pro but using their own API key, that’s obviously a high margin business.