MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sarchertech | 2025-06-07 03:32:19+00:00
Have you taken out a secured loan in the last year over x amount?

Take the value of the asset assessed by the bank and the price paid for the asset to find the total value that is unrealized gain.

Divide that by the total value to get percent of collateral that is unrealized gain. Multiply that by the loan value. Then multiply that by the tax percentage.

All you need is for banks to report secured loans to the IRS and it’s easy.
by tjwebbnorfolk | 2025-06-07 03:32:26+00:00
You're talking about making a 30-year duration bet that inflation will not increase. If you call that risk-free, then all I can say is I have a very different idea of what risk means.

I'd argue a much better 30-year bet is that somebody like Coca Cola will be able to charge an amount for their product that reflects whatever happens with inflation much better than betting on a fixed rate of 5% that can never increase.
by sircastor | 2025-06-07 03:33:04+00:00
Yes, but every large company in the US would view the nationalization of SpaceX as “shots fired” and investors would likely panic worrying that their stock portfolios would be at arbitrary whims of a tiff between the administration and the CEO.

Your rationalization of it is not unreasonable, but the market would panic in a bad way if the government showed it was willing to take extremes.
by ngneer | 2025-06-07 03:34:10+00:00
I am not too familiar with the latest hype, but "reasoning" has a very straightforward definition in my mind. For example, can the program in question derive new facts from old ones in a logically sound manner. Things like applying modus ponens. (A and A => B) => B. Or, all men are mortal and Socrates is a man, and therefore Socrates is mortal. If the program cannot deduce new facts, then it is not reasoning, at least not by my definition.
by brigandish | 2025-06-07 03:34:20+00:00
> How do you discern a person roleplaying some secret agent scenario vs. a person actually plotting something?

Meta data and investigation.

> That's not something a search function can distinguish.

We know that it can narrow down hugely from the initial volume.

> It requires a human to sift through that data.

Yes, the point of collating, analysing, and searching data is not to make final judgements but to find targets for investigation by the available agents. That's the same reason we all use search engines, to narrow down, they never produce what we intend by intention alone, we still have to read the final results. Magic is still some way off.

You're acting as if we can automate humans out of the loop entirely, which would be a straw man. Is anyone saying we can get rid of the police or security agencies by using AI? Or perhaps AI will become the police, perhaps it will conduct traffic stops using driverless cars and robots? I suppose it could happen, though I'm not sure what the relevance would be here.
by N3Xxus_6 | 2025-06-07 03:35:16+00:00
Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities across numerous domains, from programming and technical support to cooking instructions and research enhancement. However, they continue to struggle with precise symbol manipulation in tasks requiring rigorous logical reasoning, mathematical proofs, and complex algebraic operations. As a student of philosophy and computer science, I find this intersection especially fascinating because of the connections between logical precision and conceptual clarity.
by hollerith | 2025-06-07 03:35:19+00:00
OK, but you've changed the topic from tax accounting to financial accounting/reporting.

In the US, it remains the case that programmers salaries must be treated as an expense (i.e., cannot be amortized) when calculating the company's income statement, balance sheet, etc. Not following that rule will get the accounting firm signing off on those financial reports in trouble (with the SEC, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, and maybe even the Justice Department if the purpose of the violation was to defraud investors).
by antibull | 2025-06-07 03:36:04+00:00
You got this. You will make it. The way that you make the best samurai sword is with heat and pressure from a hammer. This is that part of your life. Do not lose hope in the flames of life's forge. Every blow of life's hammer is forging the future you. On the other side of this you are sharp and ready for battle. Churches may be able to help you. I know it sounds wierd to suggest them, but Christ is a redeemer. You're one generous person away from being back on track. Libraries and coffee shops can be your office for now. Good luck and I'm praying for you.
by bigcat12345678 | 2025-06-07 03:37:00+00:00
Hmm The payment link does not require login And I paid and the credits vanished into thin air ...

To the poster, please find the customer service to fix

https://buy.stripe.com/cNicN59Bqf6K4q92Qrbwk00?prefilled_ema...

Also, I cannot find my queuing job after closing the page.
by Huxley1 | 2025-06-07 03:38:30+00:00
I only recently learned about the Section 174 change, and honestly didn’t expect it to have such a big impact.

I used to work at a small startup, and most of our spending went toward engineers’ salaries. If we had to amortize that over several years back then, I don’t think we would’ve made it.

It’s surprising how a single line in the tax code can quietly make it harder for small teams to hire. Makes me wonder how many other policies are silently shaping things behind the scenes.
by mattmillr | 2025-06-07 03:39:27+00:00
Those two scenarios are only comparable if you isolate happiness and taxation and completely ignore things like social services and inequality.

I think you're referring to Nordic countries which consistently rank as the happiest countries and also have relatively high tax rates (4 of 5 Nordic countries rank in the top 11 tax rates globally. Norway has oil.) The high taxes that "make everybody poorer" also fund extensive social services that contribute to happiness.

However, this conversation is about making (a class of) workers poorer by using tax policy that puts downward pressure on their salaries. Tax revenues will stay the same, so social services will not be increased. Economic inequality increases because the workers became poorer, the C-Suite and Board Members don't.
by Spivak | 2025-06-07 03:39:43+00:00
Right but on-prem doesn't mean you escape SaaS pricing. It'll still be $10/user/mo but now you have to run it too. A lot of times you'll pay a premium on the hosted price to get an on-prem version.

Software pricing is a reflection of the fact that it's not a consumable good and the humans that make it have ongoing expenses like rent— not necessarily that it's hosted. Even in the bits in a box days the business was built around recurring revenue, you could choose to not buy the next version but it implicitly relied on most people not doing that.
by fakedang | 2025-06-07 03:41:21+00:00
> It starts getting more competitive when you are at the highest tier at ElevenLabs ($1320/month), but because of their pricing structure I'm not going to invest the time in finding out if it's worth it.

They do have a grant programme through, which gives 3 months free of the largest tier.

https://elevenlabs.io/startup-grants
by genewitch | 2025-06-07 03:41:29+00:00
I actually misremembered. Titanium dioxide is or will be banned in all school foods, and will require explicit labeling in louisiana https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2025/06/04/did-louisiana...

I thought i was doing my usual "oh they already did" thing but it only affects me. Oh well.
by godelski | 2025-06-07 03:41:37+00:00
You could even argue that ML does classical vision in addition to other stuff.

CNNs learn gabor filters. The AlexNet paper even shows this [0]

Or if you look at the work ViT built itself on, they show attention heads will also learn these fillers. [1] That's actually a big part of how ViTs work, the heads integrate this type of information

[0] https://papers.nips.cc/paper_files/paper/2012/hash/c399862d3...

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.03584
by esseph | 2025-06-07 03:42:06+00:00
"iPhone Shortcuts always asks permission to access file"

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254931245

iOS Shortcut danger

https://cyberpress.org/unveiling-risks-of-ios-shortcuts/

But anywho, cve.org lists 78 shortcut vulnerabilities across many platforms.

I know you'd like to believe the world we live in shouldn't require permissions for a user to create a shortcut and then access it, but that... Is actually the world we live in, and have been in for a very long time.

Security is hard and it's not getting any easier as system complexity increases.

If you don't believe me, ask your favorite LLM. I asked Gemini and got back what I expected to.
by themanmaran | 2025-06-07 03:44:10+00:00
I think the negativity is overkill.

I've been toying around with the exact same idea the last couple weeks. It's mostly GPT 4o image => some image cleanup, but honestly a lot more finicky than I originally expected. Lots of prompt engineering. So OP probably put in a fair bit of effort here.

Also each animation probably costs $1-$2 in GPT costs to make [1], so not something that's easy to throw a free tier on.

[1] https://openai.com/api/pricing/#:~:text=Image%20Generation%2...
by Tor3 | 2025-06-07 03:44:35+00:00
In Japan individual crackers are typically wrapped in plastic inside the package, possibly due to the high humidity, possibly for social reasons (or both). Gift packets of for example chocolate also always use individually packed pieces. In the grocery store, if you buy plastic-wrapped on-styrofoam fish or meat and some other foodstuff, the cashier will always put this in an additional plastic bag. Eggs are packed in plastic (in my home country that would be cardboard). And so on and so forth. We bring our own bags,typically, but there's just so much plastic..
by inkyoto | 2025-06-07 03:45:14+00:00
There are not really any newer instruction sets as we are locked into the von Neumann architecture and, until we move away from it, we will continue to move data between memory and CPU registers, or registers ↭ registers etc, which means that we will continue to add, shift, test conditions of arithmetic operations – same instructions across pretty much any CPU architecture relevant today.

So we have:

CISC – which is still used outside the x86 bubble; RISC – which is widely used; Hybrid RISC/CISC designs – x86 excluding, that would be the IBM z/Architecture (i.e. mainframes); EPIC/VLIW – which has been largely unsuccessful outside DSP's and a few niches.

They all deal with registers, movements and testing the conditions, though, and one can't say that an ISA 123 that effectively does the same thing as an ISA 456 is older or newer. SIMD instructions have been the latest addition, and they also follow the same well known mental and compute models.

Radically different designs, such as Intel APX 432, Smalltalk, Java CPU's, have not received any meaningful acceptance, and it seems that the idea of a CPU architecture that is tied to a higher level compute model has been eschewed in perpetuity. Java CPU's were the last massively hyped up attempt to change it, and that was 30 years ago.

What other viable alternatives outside the von Neumann architecture are available to us? I am not sure.
by hansvm | 2025-06-07 03:45:43+00:00
The thing it's being compared to (desktop software) had the same functionality with none of those costs, and it was easier to develop. That's somewhat like a grocery store hiring a dozen egg-sitters to keep the egg supply emotionally supported or some other nonsense and then using that as a justification for the high prices they're able to charge, where an x% profit margin on the unnecessary job translates to significantly more money to the store.
by hinkley | 2025-06-07 03:47:22+00:00
Absolutely not.

If the cost of doing something goes above quadratic, you shouldn't do it at all. Because essentially every customer interaction costs you more than the one before. You will never be able to come up with ways to cover that cost faster than it ramps. You are digging a hole, filling it with cash and lighting it on fire.

If you can't do something well you should consider not doing it at all. If you can only do it badly with no hope of ever correcting it, you should outsource it.
by xedrac | 2025-06-07 03:48:14+00:00
I wanted to use FreeBSD for my home gateway/firewall/dns/dhcp server, but unfortunately my 10 GbE NICs didn't seem to have drivers, so I ended up going with Nix instead. I used FreeBSD many years ago as a workstation, and found the experience to be quite memorable. It's nice to see that it's still chugging along.
by demosthanos | 2025-06-07 03:48:15+00:00
Startups have to face that five year window every time they start up.

Each and every startup will have a year 0 where they're spending more than they earn, and under the new Section 174 they will only get to deduct 10% of their employee's salaries that year. In year two they get to deduct 20% of year 1's salaries and 10% of year 2's salaries, which is still 30% of what the established players will be able to deduct. By year 4, if they make it that far (which most startups don't) they'll finally be at 90% of a full deduction.

Add to that the fact that startups also by definition have a much higher rate of growth than established companies and you'll find that a startup almost definitionally will be paying substantially more in taxes as long as it remains a startup, because they only get to deduct an average of the last 5 years of expenses from this year's revenue in order to calculate this year's profit. That's fine when your last five years are more or less similar to this one, but it's terrible when you've been growing.

The net effect of this change can only be to disincentive startups and cement big, slow established players.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-06-07 03:48:26+00:00
It’s not a gotcha. The Defense Production Act requires paying market value. Market value is subjective. The US government isn’t going to use share sale to determine market value if they attempt to nationalize. They don’t even adhere to the law and separation of powers today. Why would they provide a favorable valuation?

They can set the value at something they feel will barely stand up under judicial review.
by cryptoalex | 2025-06-07 03:49:46+00:00
I am working on QRID.com - encrypt your data via QR code. Build E2EE applications that encrypt data on the client-side without using passwords. Instead of entering passwords, use QRID app to scan QR code displayed by the E2EE application. Got mobile apps for both iOS and Android. Also developed some cross-platform E2EE applications like Password Manager, E2EE Notes, Vault (encrypts files and directories into .vault file), and some command line tools to encrypt/decrypt files, environment variables. Few other things I am really excited about are in the works.
by parpfish | 2025-06-07 03:50:01+00:00
I can see some benefits to in-person sports betting.

Putting money on a game you don’t care about can make it exciting.

Getting a bunch of people watching a game together with money on it is a way to drum up a crowd of enthusiastic temporary fans for any game, which might lead to a fun high energy atmosphere.

The problem is that the crowd will likely have divided rooting interests and things could get… confrontational
by bnycum | 2025-06-07 03:51:24+00:00
I develop software for flight data analysis at a company that makes flight data recorders. Our focus is mainly helicopters, but some fixed wing. Dealing with aircraft that may takeoff or land at a base, hospital, roof, parking lot, football field, airport, golf course, etc I feel like most of my days are spent on all sorts of falsehoods about aviation.
by colechristensen | 2025-06-07 03:51:41+00:00
Yup.

A whole lot of chemistry process is just X dissolves in Y but not in Z, and using that in order to separate and purify.

In this case metal oxides dissolve in glass (sand, which is a silicon oxide, mostly) but gold doesn't A) oxidize under reasonable conditions or B) dissolve in the glass. Sand or glass waste is melted, the not gold dissolves into the molten glass.
by georgemcbay | 2025-06-07 03:52:30+00:00
> the easy part is done but the hard part is so hard it takes years to progress

There is also no guarantee of continued progress to a breakthrough.

We have been through several "AI Winters" before where promising new technology was discovered and people in the field were convinced that the breakthrough was just around the corner and it never came.

LLMs aren't quite the same situation as they do have some undeniable utility to a wide variety of people even without AGI springing out of them, but the blind optimism that surely progress will continue at a rapid pace until the assumed breakthrough is realized feels pretty familiar to the hype cycle preceding past AI "Winters".
by ednite | 2025-06-07 03:54:00+00:00
I can’t speak to the world of startups or venture capital, I’m way too far from that ecosystem, but I’d like to add a perspective from the sidelines.

What stands out to me right now is just how loud the expectations around AI have become, especially among non-technical folks. It’s not just “Bitcoin hype” loud, it’s bordering on “AI will solve everything” levels of noise. For those of us who’ve been around a bit longer (sorry, younger HN crowd), the current buzz feels reminiscent of Y2K or the first dot-com wave.

Back then, I was early in my career, but I vividly remember the headlines, the overpromises, and the sheer volume of attention. The difference now is, there’s a lot more substance under the surface. The tools are genuinely useful, and the adoption curve feels more practical, even inevitable. That’s what makes me think AI might become to this era what the smartphone was to the last, not just a novelty, but an everyday dependency.

That said, I’ve also learned a lot from voices here on HN, especially when it comes to the financial realities behind the tech. If there’s one throughline in many of these discussions, it’s that financial viability, not just hype or innovation, is what ultimately determines whether this all collapses or truly transforms the world.

Just my 2 cents.
by wodenokoto | 2025-06-07 03:54:02+00:00
Oh, come on.

The Qatari leadership is intelligent and understands how foreign politics is done. And they haven’t been gifting jets to Obama or McCain.

It’s not Trump that has to accept the gift in order not to be impolite.

It’s the Qatari understanding that Trump should not be treated as a representative of an institution, but as a King, whom you gift to in order to get favors.
by ryandrake | 2025-06-07 03:54:18+00:00
This is an excellent question that the AI-boosters always seem to dance around. Three replies already are saying “Nobody cares.” Until they do. I’d be willing to bet that some time in the near future, some big company is going to care a lot and that there will be a landmark lawsuit that significantly changes the LLM landscape. Regulation or a judge is going to eventually decide the extent to which someone can use AI to copy someone else’s IP, and it’s not going to be pretty.
by invalidname | 2025-06-07 03:54:53+00:00
I can't speak for Halal but in Israel Kosher is considered a scam by quite a few people. The idea that Kosher is given by a private entity isn't exactly correct. It's a rabbinical institute, not a private business. Their incentives are problematic.

In order to get a Kosher stamp you need an "observer" who is some guy you pay to hang around and make sure you do everything right. Sometimes the guy is actually helpful, but usually it's just some nephew of the Rabbi who hands out the kosher certificate.

Their main focus is to keep you purchasing only other products deemed kosher. Not the quality of the food or even cleanliness. If you annoy the wrong people you can lose your certificate and essentially get black listed. You can't open on a Saturday etc.

I used to joke that the easiest way to gauge the quality of the restaurant is in an inverse proportion to the size of its kosher sign. Most restaurants in Tel Aviv (excluding, Humus, Falafel or Shuwarma places) are not kosher.
by Retric | 2025-06-07 03:55:11+00:00
That depends heavily on how competitive the sector is. Restaurant POS software covers a the largest array of different companies and businesses models I’m aware of. SaaS is generally quite expensive in that market.

In the bits in the box days, quite a lot of the world was skipping version numbers. That was a huge reason for SaaS pricing in the first place. Worse boxed software generally needed some improvement to justify upgrading, SaaS is heavily optimized for rent seeking.
by gametorch | 2025-06-07 03:55:13+00:00
TL;DR:

I started making a video game. I assumed 2D video game art generation was a solved problem. It wasn't. I tried to solve it and ended up getting close. This post's URL provides an example of how far image generation models have come (and how far coding LLMs have come, because they built that entire website, with my assistance, in 2 months).

Long Post:

I originally started programming because, like many others, I wanted to make video games. A bachelor's degree in Computer Science, a few internships in Silicon Valley, and some year-long stints at various companies that shall not be named here -later, I ended up where I started from: making video games.

I set out on my game-making journey intent to fully embrace change, because the times they are a-changing, as they always seem to do. First, I'd write the game in Rust, a language which I wish we had when I was in college (though I admit learning C is absolutely a pedagogical rite in any up-to-snuff CS program). Second, I'd use LLMs to guide me on my way.

I quickly found my bearings with the Bevy game engine [1]. I implemented Flappy Bird for practice. Sailing was smooth. It was time to make the game I originally intended to make.

Early in the development of the game I found the need to procure assets. I had already stumbled upon Meshy [2], a web app that let's you create 3d meshes from prompts. I think this is a great product and I gladly paid for it. However, I was making a 2D game, and 2D games need 2D assets. I assumed the 2D-equivalent of Meshy existed and I could pay for it.

How wrong I was. Alas, I could simply ask ChatGPT to generate 2D sprites for me, no? No. Well, yes and no. Yes, in the sense that ChatGPT does generate some pretty damn good looking sprites. No, in the sense that hours of painful manually cropping and Photoshop work was about to beset me. So I took matters into my own hands and tried to build it myself.

1. https://bevy.org/

2. https://www.meshy.ai/discover
by runarberg | 2025-06-07 03:55:57+00:00
You think IQ is a real thing because people administer IQ tests to find disabilities. I beg to differ. I think that IQ is indeed a made up construct, and whether or not a test which claims to measure it is used or not has no bearing on whether or not that thing exists or not.

Note that your argument is a whole another argument from what your grandparent made (and what your parent was arguing against), which is why I went ahead and explained the pseudo-scientific nature of population IQ (which your grandparent is arguing against my in a nibling thread).

One should never dismiss the link between IQ and the eugenics movement. IQ is not a good theory, nor is it good science, we can (and should) do without it.
by bjt | 2025-06-07 03:56:14+00:00
Or are cynical Americans living in an alternate world, blind to how much better the rule of law is here than most other countries? The commenter's comparison was to Russia. When was the last time Putin lost an election?

I'd say we're slightly behind western Europe as far as rule of law goes, not really sure about the advanced east (Japan, Korea), and miles ahead of just about everywhere else (eastern Europe, Russia, Africa, China, etc). Yes, even with Trump in office, though he really makes me worry.