MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by beezle | 2025-06-06 20:24:44+00:00
Bloomstink has a short article on R&D expenses/tax credits as does Reuters on some of the back and current history.

But just as an accounting note: R&D expense has nothing to do with the company having revenues for an existing product, which already is allowed to deduct cost of goods sold, selling and admin expense. It is a cost related to future business and in that regard, it is not crazy to say it should be amortized. That in the past this did not happen, or that accelerated depreciation for other assets is in the IRS code is a function of the government wanting to effectively subsidize business investment.

https://pro.bloombergtax.com/insights/federal-tax/rd-tax-cre...

https://tax.thomsonreuters.com/news/the-future-of-rd-expensi...
by wojciii | 2025-06-06 20:24:45+00:00
I got fired a couple of times so far:

Once during the first 3 months because I questioned the design of the software I was supposed to develop.. I was told that I was discussing too much.

Another time I started doing exact what was asked of me and did some side projects at the same time...I was so bored. Got fired after some time and told that I was incompetent. The reason for my behaviour was they way management behaved towards me.

I later heard that the company lost millions because of this.

A third time I got unfriendly with a manager who was a nasty human and reported him to HR. This got me fired rather quickly.

Dear OP .. why are you spending so much time at work that you hate?
by MrArthegor | 2025-06-06 20:24:58+00:00
I haven’t remembered any policy like that in past decades, for my country even more ( in the US you have to go back to apartheid to find policy who are discriminated against group of people)

And in context of work or anything like that, the only policy who actively discriminate is the skill, and I don’t place this in the same level of DEI because you can acquire more skill, but you cannot change your color skin or origin for example.
by bigyabai | 2025-06-06 20:24:59+00:00
No hard numbers, no prototypes, but a whole lot of articulate hopes and dreams. I guess this is what we should come to expect when the industry invests in people over ideas.

So, let's address the elephant in the room; what will this solve? Today, chip design can be solved in highly efficient constraints using Verilog and no AI. Complex ASIC pipelines might benefit from a robot trying to optimize the logic, but I can't see how this would improve on modern RISC or SIMD architectures. If anything, trusting AI to write a "good enough" MVP is an opportunity for enormously inefficient mistakes to make their way into production chips.

Plus the other issue - maybe you can get your AI to out-perform Intel and Apple. But can you muscle your way into TSMC to start fabbing competitive hardware? Your AI-generated x86 chip could have twice the IPC of an AMD chip, but still end up slower if your clients are forced to fab it on 14nm silicon. Same goes for edge hardware - is your solution any cheaper than a Chinese STM-32 using GPIO?

The whole thing seems like a great idea for the 1950s, but a terrible solution to digital computer chip design.
by baron816 | 2025-06-06 20:25:48+00:00
Statistics like CPI really aren’t meant to be used to track inflation over many decades. It’s really only meaningful over a handful of years, and only when we’re talking about the economy as a whole (not to use it to say any individual or group is better or worse off). A dollar today can buy many things it could not buy 100 years ago.

The price of gold is a completely useless measure of inflation. Governments have a long history of manipulating its price as a policy goal. Even today, governments buy and hold large quantities of gold.
by mdaniel | 2025-06-06 20:25:53+00:00
I don't need it to beat the latest from nvidia, just be affordable, available, and have user servicable ram slots so "48gb" isn't such an ooo-ahh amount of memory

I couldn't find any buy it now links but 512gb sticks don't seem to be fantasies, either: https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-develops-industrys-f...
by lazide | 2025-06-06 20:26:58+00:00
There absolutely are genetic and racial components to how it’s used. [https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC311057/]. Caste is hereditary. Marriages between castes are typically heavily managed/controlled by elders within the castes/families involved [https://hms.harvard.edu/news/what-dna-testing-reveals-about-...].

Regional customs vary, but southern indian cousin marriage traditions in particular are heavily caste oriented.

The only thing not ‘race’ about it, is the word.

Spain and it’s colonies also had a ‘casta’ system with simpler and more explicit rules.
by kelnos | 2025-06-06 20:27:03+00:00
I don't think copyright term is a good rubric/measure here. For SaaS, a company can keep the software locked up indefinitely, regardless of copyright term. Employees can be contractually obligated not to publish source code, even if the copyright has expired.

Amortizing development cost over the useful life of the software is maybe a reasonable thing to do (I don't think it is, but let's for a minute say I agree), but determining "useful life" is not simple.
by californical | 2025-06-06 20:27:05+00:00
It is complex - is it better for the money to go back into the economy by paying high salaries to a specific group of highly-educated people? Or is it better for the money to go back into the economy through taxes, then disbursing the benefits to lower-income benefit programs?

I’m not sure what the answer is. The former is likely to drive some innovation, which I’m sure varies by company. Where the latter could also unlock innovation by giving the bottom-quartile of earners a chance to improve their situation.
by Retric | 2025-06-06 20:27:32+00:00
There’s a lot of evidence for this outside of communism. Housing markets for example are a clear example of economic inefficiency created by subsides. But you also see problems with farm subsidies, flood insurance, and a host of other related issues.

Markets operate on revealed preferences, which is just a massive advantage in terms of giving people what they want. There’s definitely a role for governments in economies around information asymmetry, safety, etc, but allocation of resources specifically doesn’t work well.
by mtlmtlmtlmtl | 2025-06-06 20:27:59+00:00
Exactly. I'm in Norway, and here, to watch the English Premier League legally, the price this latest season was over $70 per month. Keeping in mind the fact that most people will maybe watch one game(their team's game) a week, the prices are just getting absurd. There's no way to buy single games, subscribing to games for a single team, etc. To watch the 38 games your team will play last season, the only available option was to buy access to all 760 games. The company holding these rights is struggling financially, layoffs and all. Because their subscription numbers have plummeted

They've already crossed the threshold where this is no longer profitable. The next licencing deal will likely be so expensive, no Norwegian or Scandinavian company could possibly be able to turn a profit from it.

Of course, the CEO of the company has been in the media talking about how IPTV funds criminal networks and such nonsense*, calling for bans, yadda yadda. They're not listening to the market at all. Just using illegal streaming as a scapegoat. And I've decided, as long as this is how it's gonna be, they're not seeing a single dime of my money.

* I find the concept absurd. No matter where we spend our money, some of it ends up with criminals and various other despicable people, who will use it for evil. No one has the ability to prevent this. There's no reasonable expectation in current societal and economic structures for the consumer to somehow keep track of all their money once it leaves their wallet. This is no more the case for IPTV than it is when I buy a burger from some hole in the wall, which unbeknownst to me is a money laundering front. Or when I buy some chocolate and most of the money ends up with some white rich guy and not the children in Africa who harvested the cocoa. The whole argument is so intellectually dishonest and morally pathetic it pisses me off. And I don't even pay for IPTV.
by rwyinuse | 2025-06-06 20:28:26+00:00
Yeah, it's quite wild what European elites and scientists believed around late 1800's / early 1900's, and it wasn't limited just to anti-semitism or racism towards Africans, even if those groups had it much worse than most others.

For instance, in late 1800's Swedish scientists stole bunch of skulls from Finnish cemeteries, trying to prove that Finnish people are of different/lesser race than their Scandinavian neighbours. It took until 2024 for those skulls to be returned to Finland for reburial.

https://yle.fi/a/74-20110151

https://ki.se/en/about-ki/history-and-cultural-heritage/medi...
by throw310822 | 2025-06-06 20:28:50+00:00
Yes, so in other words "high genetic variance" doesn't really mean much. So all this talk about "variance been higher within ethnic group than between" is not very relevant. The phenotype that we can actually see has differences between ethnic groups that are bigger than the variance within them.

Last of course there's the idea that this variance must be restricted to the visible phenotype. Which sounds a bit like saying that the objects in a dark room must be all in the spot illuminated by the torch, and everywhere else the room is empty.
by Ancapistani | 2025-06-06 20:28:56+00:00
You've exactly described some of my very early memories - from before I had begun thinking in language.

To this day, one of the things that comes to mind when I think of a "door" is the way I conceptualized it before I knew there was a word. The best I can describe it is a combination of the act of reaching for a doorknob, followed by a plane hung vertically, pivoting inward from the right side. It seems to come from the act of opening a door... but the weirdest part is that while I was an infant in my memories of that type of internal dialogue, the conceptual representation I described describes the motion an adult would use to open a door.

I don't have aphantasia, have a very strong spatial sense, and ADHD-PI is a huge part of my life.
by acecreamu | 2025-06-06 20:29:17+00:00
OP here, I feel the information in my article got outdated too quickly, so wanted to quickly revisit my statements with respect to the current experience (as of 2025):

- I feel the in-person thing makes and breaks the YC magic, people who go through in-person cohorts feel much more connected to their batchmates and partners

- The batches got significantly leaner = more attention to each individual company

- Selling inside YC is a thing again (specifically for AI companies), since everyone around is doing AI and isn't lacking money YC companies basically buy from each other and get to 1M ARR together

- The investment premium is there, with YC startups getting avg cap of 25M comparing to 15M for non-YC startups of similar stage (even with greater traction)

- Bonus: the alumni events and off-site experiences became a nice addition, even for the previous cohorts

Overall, I feel we experienced YC at its lowest, and it's not fair to use it as a reference point. There are still challenges with dilution (MFN) and the alumni experience (you basically lose most of the access), but they definitely listened to the feedback and have made positive changes that founders can already feel.
by pyman | 2025-06-06 20:29:40+00:00
The CEO and CFO committed fraud. That has been proven and there is no doubt about it.

But you are not going after them. You are accusing the Head of AI of lying. This is someone who spent seven years at Amazon, led the AI department, and is well known and respected in the community. You are also ignoring all the information posted on the company's blog, site, linkedin, and social media.

Do you really expect me, or anyone in the AI/ML space, to believe a blogger who doesn't know the difference between AI and GenAI? No chance. We do not take it lightly when a blogger tries to damage the reputation of someone who has earned the respect of the industry just for clicks or ad revenue.

I'm more interested in the truth than in ruining people's careers.
by lokimedes | 2025-06-06 20:29:56+00:00
Most of that software could run on prem. The problem is that bundling hosting with the actual software in many cases translates into a way to confuse the expense of one for the other. Things that don’t incur operating expenses shouldn’t be charged as a monthly fee, that is rent seeking. Forcing someone to pay for “services” like hosting, “upgrades”, etc. to gain access to the software is what I find problematic. Now that the business model has become dominant, it is hard to find any software not on a SaaS-like payment plan. Adobe, Autodesk, Microsoft, etc. all sold software and now all sell subscriptions with little added value to the customer. But the cashflow of a rent model, as forewarned in “Wealth of nations” is so ensnaring it can only be avoided by law. Yet here we are.
by hinkley | 2025-06-06 20:30:06+00:00
One of those times when I was still learning that asking forgiveness is easier than asking permission, I wanted to eliminate a very expensive presence calculation that I and a coworker determined were accounting for almost 10% of average page load time. Some idiot in product has decided they wanted an OLTP-ish solution that told you -exactly- how many people were online and like a fool I asked if we could do a sane version and they said no. If you don't ask, then it's not insubordination.

For situations where eventual consistency is good enough, you can run a task in a loop that tries every n seconds to update a quantity. But as you say that can also saturate, so what you really want is for the task to update, then wait m seconds and go again, where m is more than the time you expect the task to complete in (<<50% duty cycle). As the cost of the operation climbs the time lag increases but the load on the system increases more slowly. If you want to, collect telemetry on how often it completes and set up alarms for if it doesn't for a duration that is several times longer than your spikiest loads happen.

I don't think voluntary rate limiting on the client side gets enough column inches. Peer to peer you end up footguning yourself if you bite off more than you can chew, and if you start stalling on responses then you gum up the server as well.
by joemi | 2025-06-06 20:31:24+00:00
I wonder the same thing too. Especially since there are all kinds of different techniques that people recommend. And because the ideal length of time for the different phases must surely vary from person to person, since it's a physiological thing and everyone's body is different. It really seems to me (disclaimer: I'm a layperson) like the important thing is just focusing on measured breathing, not the exact one-size-fits-all measure.
by ivape | 2025-06-06 20:31:33+00:00
Why are our representatives passing intractable, unreadable documents

Best guess?

1) These are actual laws so they carry all the legal thoroughness

2) Like managers, they don't write the actual code (they don't do the actual writing of the bills). So managers don't really care just how awful the code can be (or in this case, just how intractable the bills are)

3) No one is code reviewing (the public is to uneducated to even do so)

This leads to these things being drafted in the dark of night and passed in the dark of night. I'm open to AI in this case simply to even begin having insight.
by foldr | 2025-06-06 20:31:36+00:00
There are also morphological and genetic differences between, say, an average 'white' Swedish person and an average 'white' Spanish person. But our systems of racial classification tend to put them in the same group just because they both happen to have light skin. Naturally, if you take two groups of people who've long inhabited different parts of the world (with little to no historical interaction between the groups), then you'll find genetic differences. The point is that there is no biological motivation for the specific set of racial categories that the US and other societies have developed. An objective Martian biologist studying humans would not group us into 'white humans', 'black humans', ... etc.
by pier25 | 2025-06-06 20:34:19+00:00
Whatsapp has 3 billion active users.

Countries like Mexico or Spain have adopted it as the default form of messaging. Only today I used it to chat with our lawn maintenance guy, our car washer, and someone who's repairing our espresso machine.

I could maybe try to convince friends and family to use another app but I won't be convincing an entire country.
by DyslexicAtheist | 2025-06-06 20:34:29+00:00
bit of a self-own it seems. Start-ups and early stage companies might simply decide to start in a more friendly tax jurisdiction. E.g.: Switzerland offers a 135% deduction on R&D-related salaries in the year they are incurred, making it an attractive location for tech development

EU provides a large pool of experienced developers seeking new opportunities on salaries well below SV. Why pay 500K for a burnt out "rockstar" who spends more time on twitter than doing actual work when you can hire highly skilled people in Eastern-EU (or even in Berlin).

Section 174 seems unlikely to progress unless attached to broader legislation.

> "More promising is the Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act of 2024 (H.R. 7024), which proposes restoring immediate expensing for U.S.-based R&D investments through the end of 2025. " -- https://www.pwc.com/us/en/services/tax/library/tax-committee...
by solatic | 2025-06-06 20:34:30+00:00
OP isn't really arguing against SaaS (after all, OP recommends in the end either Cloudflare or Supabase, which are provided as a service...), that's just the clickbait title, rather OP is arguing against signing up for a hundred different vendors and the overhead of commercial relationships with a hundred different vendors.

Which is... not really controversial. Fewer vendors makes your life easier. Fewer dependencies makes your life easier. It would be awesome if you could build your entire product based on the standard library alone! Sadly... that's not really realistic. Nice pipe-dream though.
by tuckerman | 2025-06-06 20:34:34+00:00
I'm quite proud of humanity's ability to help build families where "nature" wasn't able to, I think it's quite beautiful and owe my son to IVF.

> There's a big difference between "killing" and "allowing to die."

I think this is subject to debate for a lot of people. For full persons (for whatever my definition of that is), I personally agree with you there is a (big) difference. For embryos, I don't really distinguish them because I see them both neutral morally.

I do somewhat worry about the long term effects of the sorts of embryo selection discussed in TFA though (not from a moral position but from a "do we _really_ know what this is going to do to the gene pool long term?" position)
by jerf | 2025-06-06 20:35:03+00:00
"(and it's highly frequency dependent on top of that.)"

Well, sure. Can people inside the cage see outside? (Or a hypothetical person for a small cage.) If so, then clearly, not all frequencies are being blocked. A lot of "Faraday cages" are explicitly designed for radio and deliberately let other frequencies, particularly the visual range, through.

In fact we all have direct experience with that. Our microwaves use a Faraday cage to keep them in. But we can still see through the mesh, and you can tell that the inside can see out because outside light can go in and bounce back out. (That is, while there's probably a light in your microwave, it's obviously not the sole source of light.) Blocks microwaves well, but visible light goes right through the holes.
by FireBeyond | 2025-06-06 20:35:05+00:00
There are so many issues with this. For one, I highly doubt the retrofit costing. You have to pull the thing apart to the skeleton, look for bugs, and then rebuild.

Also, I think Trump is more enamored of the jet as "one of the most luxurious private jets" than "functional equivalent of current AF1".

My take, given the timelines: it sees a modest fitting of some comms gear, but stays largely as is, because Trump absolutely has visions of it being his private jet.
by altruios | 2025-06-06 20:35:48+00:00
Game theory is not in the peoples' favor. Consider then every other company's game theory: 'go out of business unless... (we stop this research before it is too late and a cure is developed)' which can lead to some dark places.

Also: companies do not think like a person thinks. Insolation from consequences, diffuse responsibility, and other mechanisms come into play here.
by hinata08 | 2025-06-06 20:36:14+00:00
when you try to connect to some commercial streaming websites in France, you already have to upload your ID, film yourself with your camera, and enable biometrics, as the government forced them to do that "to protect children" (even as they're in the middle of a scandal about silencing children when things went south in some institutions up to 20 years ago).

last time I checked, China didn't force users to give in their IDs and turn on webcams to authenticate themselves on the internet. France does.

dystopia is never far away in France, and ppl always agree
by citizenpaul | 2025-06-06 20:36:20+00:00
IMO Vendor lock in is when you ask your boss why cant we use tool NEWTHING? Then they tell you its because they have a 5 year contract with Oracle/MS/IBM/Salesforce and that is what we are going to use. We aren't going to have 10 platforms.

Which means in 10 years they will really be locked in because no one is going to un-entrench that thing.
by bradain | 2025-06-06 20:36:49+00:00
I really dislike the tiny lisp implementation mentioned in the article. Part of the beauty of a real "lisp in lisp" interpreter is that it is meta-circular -- that is, the interpreter is able to interpret itself.

Using pmatch and some other tricks makes the interpreter shorter but prevents meta-circular evaluation, in which case you could have just defined the lisp interpreter as just being eval.
by ignoramous | 2025-06-06 20:36:56+00:00
You're right. Agent mode with select models (no o3 or Opus unfortunately) is available to Copilot Pro users (also provided for free to eligible FOSS developers) on latest VSCode (I hadn't updated it in over 5 months). Per docs, the newly announced Coding Agent (available on the website only) however isn't. And this was the source of my confusion.

https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/about-github-copilot/plan... / https://archive.vn/HxHzc
by JCattheATM | 2025-06-06 20:37:26+00:00
> Do you understand that a security model includes allocation of finite developer resources?

You went out of your way to avoid answering the question, so it seems the answer was no.

I don't think you have a clue what you're talking about, and are indeed just repeating things you've heard. I don't see this discussion progressing further because of that, instead devolving into an is-too/is-not back and forth.

Your claim the idea that allowing Graphene on a wider array of devices would somehow weaken it's model remains nonsense, and you certainly can't support it, although if you wanted to make an effort that was more than you just asserting and repeating things, I'd be interested to consider it.

Otherwise, you have a great day.