“Let’s have some fun I’m offering two grants of $5,000 for whatever you want” | Hacker News Reader

“Let’s have some fun I’m offering two grants of $5,000 for whatever you want”

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59 pointsCherian31 comments

I wish other people could take this into a recurring proceess. I've experianced that it's very hard to get research funded when you do not have a hard-science goal in the scientific community. For instance, right now I'm attempting to get funding to write software to do hard-science with but that is not fundable from normal sources (NSF) despite being a very good project that will enable researchers to study things that they were previously unable to.

Most grants today are "I want you to study X" not "Do something that's really worth the money" or "Build something that will genuenly help people or improve life for everyone".

disciplined minds by jeff schmidt talks about this "i want you to study x" phenomenon and how it tricks people into thinking they are truly defining their academic research direction.

Also, NSF likes to give large, recurring grants to big institutions, because that maximizes the $/effort ratio. Single-person software projects are below the level they like to fund. SBIRs are better for small amounts, but in practice they are so narrowly targeted that unless you lobbied 2 years ago for something to be in there, it won't be.

Take a look at experiment - https://experiment.com/discover

Is that not a similar idea?

The "Let's have some fun", part comes across as slightly condescending to me. Perhaps I'm way too cynical, but my first reaction was that this is a fairly novel way to grow Twitter followers and promote an agenda.

I'd love to take a month off. I need to get back to my blog and read through my massive Manning and Amazon backlog...

Is the Idris book on your list?

Not yet... i have too many angualr and F# and .net books queued up already...

Interesting. What are the tax implications, if any, for doing something like this? If it's an American giving a grant to another American, would it be treated as a gift (and thus be tax-free), or would it be treated as income?

i believe the gift tax applies once you get above $14,000 in value in any given tax year.

I can't speak to that but any gift of $11,000 or more is taxed.

The annual gift tax exemption is $14K for 2014 through 2017.

Source: https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...

No it's not. The US gift tax is widely misunderstood.

In the US, any gifts over $5.49 million over the course of your lifetime is taxed.

Any gift over $14k in a single year needs to be disclosed to the IRS, but it's not taxed. They're just keeping track of it in case you hit the $5.49 million lifetime cap, and they reduce the amount of your estate tax exemption by that amount.

It's all set up to stop people from avoiding the estate tax by gifting a lot of their wealth while alive.

The gift tax is accounted for by the giver, not the recipient, and is per-(donor, recipient) pair.

Person A can give persons C and D $14K each and that all falls under the annual exemption. Persons A and B can together give person C $28K and person D $28K and still be within the exemption (2 spouses giving to 2 kids is a common example).

It's not considered income, and it's not subject to taxes.

If it's above $14,000 in a single year, the giver needs to disclose it to the IRS on their tax return for record keeping purposes, but it doesn't get taxed unless it's cumulatively above $5.49 million over the course of the giver's lifetime.

I'd love to get a couple of welding simulators and a 3D printer for the crafting folks, but I get the feeling an email from a Tribal community college isn't the point.

You want to get that equipment for a community college serving a Native American tribe? That sounds like a great cause! (The person states they are looking to fund things that might go unfunded otherwise)

I got the vibe it was for an individual. I'll ask my boss in the morning then send a tweet. Worth a try.

She said it could be for anything to "get your life moving."

Just think about getting many people's lives moving?

I urge you to apply!

I have an idea for building tube guitar amps using solid state power supplies to save weight. Have a working prototype!

That's called a hybrid amp.

A few blackstars do that, vaccuum preamp and a solid state output stage. Oddly enough, most of those use a linear psu. The design I made uses switched psus with a vacuum preamp and vaccuum output. It has thunderous output power in 1/3 of the size/weight of a comparable power linear amp

So you're using a nonisolated power stage to avoid the transformer and diodes? The transformer also provides isolation from line voltages. Are you sure there isn't a reason the trade-off went the other way?

Linear power supplies voltage sag as they're overloaded. This famously exploited by some players to create "brown tone", or audio compression, as the input signal gets louder. I don't particularly care for this type of compression and a lot of other players don't either.

As far as safety, the input transformer is -boosting- your 120vac to 400vac-500vac :) So it's not protecting you from anything :D

My topology could be arguably safer... First, 120vac->24vdc via switching PSU. This actually provides the isolation you refer to. Then the 24vdc is split, part of it is switched down to 6.3vdc for the tube heaters and the other part is put through a ZVS boost circuit 24vdc->376vdc. Even with the double conversion, my efficiency is about 78%! I have complete isolation from AC via the first power supply. I bond my negatives to earth for safety. The best part is, this amplifier is dead quiet because the switching noise is very easy to filter.

There's absolutely nothing in this topology that's new; you're using bog standard off the shelf components that can be bought anywhere...?

I don't suffer from "not invented here syndrom", of course I did! Not going to take up glass blowing and make my own tubes lol.

There's also this mentality among Marshall/Fender that the 1960s-1970s were the only way to design guitar amps. Very few amp makers have diverged very far from their designs.

Among players, there's a lot of cork sniffing and brand worship unfortunately. I feel like "weight" is something tangible that anyone could measure: Saving 5-6lbs, running cooler, and being more portable are things that would appeal to a lot of people.

My point is: this shit exists already. There's nothing new about it.

It's hilarious; if you're out creating and inventing doesn't matter what subject area, you will always run into somebody who is dissatisfied with their own life and is out to crap on your creativity. You sir are correct, it does exist, because I've created the only one ;)

From my perspective it looks like somebody actually in industry telling a delusional 'creative' type that they should have done better product research before declaring they had something new.

Here's a hint: Let's say we're both right, hypothetically - no other product does this! However, since there's nothing about the design that's intrinsically yours (IE - it's combining a few undergraduate EE course projects at once) somebody else will go make it in China as soon as you demonstrate that there's a market.

Unless, of course, you really have discovered some new area of AUDIO CIRCUIT DESIGN (just about the simplest shit there is, circuit-design wise). Not...very...likely...

Well then, it's a good thing your perspective doesn't matter to me, you've proven you don't have the faintest clue what you're talking about ;)

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