Hacker News Reader

lkestelooton The Consequences of Limiting the Tax Deductibility of R&D

The title is about R&D, but because of Section 174 changes, this applies to all software development, whether "research" or not. If you're making a dumb app, you can't deduct the expenses (including salaries), you have to capitalize them. It's brutal for a small company.

lkestelooton Typesetting and printing a family memoir (2017)

mostly for fun!

lkestelooton Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/09/programmings-dirties...

"Here's the industry's dirty secret: Programmers who don't touch-type fit a profile. ... Here's the deal: everyone is laughing at you. Or if they're your close friend, they're just pitying you. Because you suck."

lkestelooton Ask HN: Anyone have stock option horror stories?

The fair market value was $3 per share. I calculated my AMT to be $0 and exercised. The company then retroactively quadrupled their fair market value price and I suddenly had a $10k AMT bill. The company was private, so I couldn't even sell the shares to pay for it.

lkestelooton Starting a TypeScript Project in 2021

WOW! Thank you!

lkestelooton Starting a TypeScript Project in 2021

Has anyone experimented with making a custom version of Deno that has its TS files built-in? I want to give my user exactly one binary that they can run to use the tool I'm writing, as if I'd compiled it in C/go.

lkestelooton TRS-80: a TRS-80 running a custom Associated Press ROM

There are a bunch of Model III emulators: http://www.trs-80.com/wordpress/emulators/

Including my latest online one: https://www.my-trs-80.com/

lkestelooton Neural Nets (1994)

Heh, the URL is "plan" because this was a .plan, a file in your home directory that others could see using the "finger" utility. I remember having flame wars entirely over .plans. It was like a super primitive Twitter.

lkestelooton Joan Feynman has died

Oh no! I _just_ finished reading James Gleick's _Genius_ this weekend, and I'm halfway through _No Ordinary Genius_ (both about Richard Feynman). The latter has many long quotes from Joan, and I was wondering just yesterday if she was still alive. She sounded pretty great. (And I highly recommend both books.)

lkestelooton Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?

"Unless you’re using an OLED or AMOLED screen and your dark mode is truly black – not dark grey, not dark blue, BLACK. There is no difference in power consumption."

I thought this was a myth. I looked into it last year and found that power consumption was (roughly) proportional to brightness.

At a meta-level, I'm surprised that something with so factual (and testable) an answer can still not be settled.

lkestelooton Registrars raise alarm over proposal for big .com fee hikes

I feel like .com should be much more expensive than it is. Too many people squatting. I have friends who have dozens of .com, and not even "just in case", they're just collecting them because they like the sound of them. Then when you have a real idea all the good ones are taken, most unused.

The .com TLD is supposed to be for commercial use, so for a real company it shouldn't be a big deal to pay $50 or $100 per year or more, and it would free up good domains to be actually used.

lkestelooton List of Twitter mute words for your timeline

Exactly. In some interfaces you'll be eventually switched back to "Home" automatically. You can tell this has happened because Twitter becomes less awesome. When I find myself thinking, "Why does Twitter suck today?" I scroll up and find that I'm back on "Home".

lkestelooton Ask HN: Are there books for mathematics like Feynman's lectures on physics?

You're right that in principle it's possible. But say you were a great teacher, and knew that clear teaching was worse than imperfect teaching. Could you actually make your lectures less clear on purpose?

lkestelooton Ask HN: Are there books for mathematics like Feynman's lectures on physics?

Came here to say this. The professors I've learned the most from were the ones who weren't awesome at explaining things. I didn't understand them and had to struggle through the material. That struggle made the material stick more. I think ideally you want a professor who's 80% good at explaining things, but leaves enough gaps and says things just confusingly enough that you have to engage your brain. Feynman was too clear, which allowed my brain to coast.

At a meta level, I think this means we'll never (as a society) be great at teaching, because teachers who make us work make us feel like we're learning less. We prefer (and rate more highly) the professors, like Feynman, who make us feel smart.

lkestelooton Show HN: Array with Constant Time Access and Fast Insertion and Deletion

The key to having things named after you is to give them generic names. Name your thing "array", literally, everywhere in the readme and the code. Then people using it won't have any choice but to say "igushev's array" and that'll stick in the long run.

lkestelooton Cascade: A Just-In-Time Compiler for Verilog

See the last paragraph of this page: https://lkesteloot.github.io/alice/alice4/

lkestelooton WaveDrom Editor – Digital timing diagram rendering engine

I've used this a bunch! I found it invaluable to helping me think through the timing of FPGA components. The best part is you can embed it in your own web page: https://lkesteloot.github.io/alice/alice4/fpga-rasterizer.ht...

lkestelooton Self-Control Relies on Glucose as a Limited Energy Source (2007)

Right. Also more notes and links here: http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/12/book-review-willpower/

lkestelooton Unpopular ideas about social norms

> against human nature to upvote things we don't agree with

In this case you don't have to agree with the statement, only agree that it's unpopular. Maybe they're disagreeing with the facts in the statement's premise? Then they should say so, I think.

lkestelooton Unpopular ideas about social norms

Yeah, the items on her list aren't that unpopular. Your item isn't on her list, or anything like it. Even an article listing unpopular opinions isn't going to dare list actually unpopular opinions.

lkestelooton Unpopular ideas about social norms

I would love to see a survey where people are asked both "how much do you agree" and "how likely are you to say so publicly". Given enough questions, it'd also be interesting to find out if the Left or the Right generally feels more suppressed. (I'm obsessed with the possibility that Clinton lost because the Left pressured people to deny that they supported Trump.)

lkestelooton Ask HN: How do you manage your day to day work logs?

I use a Google Doc. I insert each entry at the top, with the date and a bulleted list of things I did (each check-in, each meeting with notes, and anything else I discovered or decided). It's also a good place to jot down who I had lunch with (and things discussed), Meetups I went to, vacation days I took, etc. I keep this in an open tab and write stuff as it happens. I name the Doc after the year, like "Work Log 2017" and switch to a new doc January 1. It's been invaluable.

lkestelooton Porting Unix to the 386: a Practical Approach (1991)

In 1992 a friend and I ported BSD/Net2 to the Mac II, and found (weeks into the project!) that kernel functions like fork() and exec() and all of TTY were missing. We thought we were screwed, but found 386BSD and grabbed its versions. I don't know if other BSD ports (like NetBSD) did the same or wrote theirs from scratch. We were certainly indebted to Bill Jolitz for saving our project!

lkestelooton Charles Simonyi on Intentional Software Joining Microsoft

I interviewed for the Intentional Programming group at Microsoft back in 1993! Their demo back then was amazing. I thought they'd have something out within a few years, and 24 years later I don't think anything commercial has come of it.

lkestelooton Sharp 80: TRS-80 Model III Emulator for Windows

Here's one I wrote in Go, though I just noticed I never bothered putting on a license. Let me know if you want me to. https://github.com/lkesteloot/trs80

lkestelooton Alphabet adds patent claim to Uber intellectual property theft lawsuit

> Uber is the MOST likely to push it too fast

Sure, I think that's a plausible scenario. It's also plausible that Uber will succeed (they've succeeded a lot!) and this will light a fire under everyone's butt and create amazing competition, pushing all car makers into this space earlier than they would have otherwise.

Of course we don't know, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't guess. My scenario above seems most likely to me, and therefore stopping Uber lets car makers rest of their laurels a bit longer.

And by the way I would take this further: I'd like to government to provide immunity to self-driving car manufacturers for the next few years while they develop their technology, the same way that vaccine makers are immune to health damages from their products.

Remember that we should be willing to kill hundreds of people with self-driving cars just to push the technology forward even one week. (600 people per week die in the U.S. in cars.) Of course I agree with you that this is politically untenable, but it's still what should be done.

lkestelooton Alphabet adds patent claim to Uber intellectual property theft lawsuit

But if those deaths were to occur tomorrow, absolutely the ends would justify the means. There's no judge in America who would kill 10k people tomorrow just to do justice to Uber. But because those are in the future (and as you say, hard to prove now), it's not even considered. But they're real deaths of real people.

There's going to be a year when self-driving cars become ubiquitous and deaths from cars drop to almost zero. The previous year, many thousands will die in cars. Those deaths are avoidable by pushing this agenda forward, and preventing Uber from moving forward hurts the agenda.

lkestelooton Alphabet adds patent claim to Uber intellectual property theft lawsuit

Okay, I'm all for protecting intellectual property and dissuading employees from taking IP with them. But if this injunction delays self-driving cars by even a little bit, it'll cost thousands of lives. If the deaths were going to happen tomorrow, no judge would allow it. But because they'll happen seven years from now, no one considers it.

lkestelooton “Health benefits” of moderate drinking disappear when controlling for wealth

I had also read elsewhere that the worse health of non-drinkers (relative to moderate drinkers) could be explained by the fact that many non-drinkers are recovering alcoholics, and had already trashed their bodies pretty badly. A study (can't find link) controlled for this and found that non-drinkers are healthier than moderate drinkers, even without controlling for wealth.

lkestelooton Hyper 1.0.0

> I’ve accidentally closed panes a number of times by a poorly-timed keystroke.

PSA: In iTerm you can hit CMD+Z within a few seconds to unclose a tab or window.