rietta

Data not continuously copied is lost. Ironically the most future proof media is becoming increasingly rare. Those gold layer dvds may last well into the future but the readers will not be available.

Hard. I am slowly writing a book set in the future where we are a “digital dark age” where little to nothing is known about our time tentatively called Professor Bitrot.

If the software written in a one year period of time for $100k is an asset then I, as a small business owner, can go to the local credit union and take out a loan on favorable terms with the that asset as collateral. No, of course not! They would laugh me out of the branch or the loan would be credit card interest rates. Software is demonstrably NOT AN ASSET like a major piece of equipment.

I am writing my member of Congress right now.

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I'm writing to express my urgent concern regarding the negative impact of the 2022 Section 174 tax code changes on small businesses like mine. As owner of Rietta, Inc., a small cybersecurity firm, I still do much of the technical work. My wife and I have three young children under 6. My family and I have been directly negatively impacted by these changes from the 2017 act.

Previously, the tax code helped us afford open-source and experimental work that benefited customers. For example, modernizing applications to run on Docker improved testing and deployment. Our State government clients now benefit, but this was once experimental. Now we're largely back to just work-for-hire consulting, treated as cost of goods sold. I don't have the cash to pay for experimental software development only to then amortize it over five years. If I have $100k revenue and spend $100k, the current code allows only a $20k deduction. I owe taxes on the other $80k despite no cash or documented asset value. Experimental software doesn't work like that in this field.

I started this business 26 years ago. We provide important long-term custom programming and update work for private sector and State government clients ("STATE A" and "STATE B" judicial branches). Often, we work with code we didn't originally write.

As a professional computer scientist and business owner, I rely on my CPA for tax compliance. If I've erred in my example, that's on me. But I can tell you this amortization requirement particularly cripples small businesses like Rietta, Inc., where cash flow is critical, severely limiting the quality of services I can afford to provide. I support undoing this tax change.

This US tax code change directly impacted my small business in a very real way that was directly felt by my household. In the past, it was a big boon for us and helped me afford to pay for some open source work and experimental things that helped our customers in the long run. Now we are back to mostly doing work-for-hire consulting. Even the experimental work I am doing, I am just paying for it and writing it off as typical business expenses. I cannot afford to take the credit because that means no deduction for this year. I don't have the cash in this small business context.

Thousands is probably hyperbole, but there are many, many!

One that I find regular use for when copy+paste does not work because I am either connected to a terminal emulation, vm, or something of the like is typeitforme. It takes the contents of a text file and sends them through the keyboard buffer after a few second delay (that allows me time to switch focus to the window I want the typing done).

I currently have it as a entry in my ~/.bash_aliasas file.

alias typeitforme='sleep 3 && xdotool type --file '

This works in stock Ubuntu Linux. You can check out the xdotool documentation for ideas how to refine it to do more.

Fair point, but I only had limited HN commenting time budgeted, not getting a video set up to test this idea. I did confirm that the overlay feature exists via the official ffmpeg documentation.

I never found bash scripting disagreeable. I have thousands of scripts for both work and my everyday computer usage. I keep a ~/bin folder in my path where I place useful scripts that I have written for my own use. One thing that keeps me using bash for this purpose over Python or Ruby (which I use for serious programming) is that I can take a command line invocation that I manually constructed and tested and put it in a script without modification.

Wow, you are not wrong. I just asked Gemini "how can I use ffmpeg to apply a lower third image to a video?" and it gave a very detailed explanation of using an overlay filter. Have not tested its answer yet but on its face it looks legit.

Seems like very short notice!

I have had a touch of it for a few years. I have been very careful to protect my hearing. Always listening to headphones on the lowest setting. Always wearing hearing protection while operating lawn equipment. I have been an amateur competitive shooter and always double up with plugs and muffs. Then in 2022, I had a terrible double ear infection the same week I competed in a local USPSA (IPSC) match and boom that was it. Ironically the ear doctor thinks it was the infection. I showed him the system I use for shooting. It doesn’t bother me anymore though it is always there when there is silence.

I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is the extraordinary ability does not have to germane to your employment. I am aware of the the story of Gabby Franco - who appeared on a season of Top Shot years ago. She was on the Venezuela Olympic pistol team for the 2000 Summer Olympics in Australia. This status as an Olympian got her entry into the USA and eventually citizenship. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mar%C3%ADa_Gabriela_Franco

I have been a big fan of delayed_job for a while. For a time went with sidekiq + Redis but found the juice not worth the squeeze. The biggest issue was complex logic that got run before the current sql transaction finalized. Weird timing bugs and wacky solutions with after_commit hooks and random delays. Not an issue if the database is the sole source of state.

I remember thinking that the Visual Basic runtime was unacceptable bloat overhead and now this. Cool work though. Also reminds me of self extracting WinZip files.

My lay scientist feel is still that Pluto is a planet, or at the very least have been grandfathered in. The New Horizons reporting 10 years ago just solidified this in my mind. The geological processes are more telling than having cleared the orbital neighborhood. That would just mean that get far enough out and nothing can be a planet no matter how massive. All that said, this massive of an object that far out is very interesting. It would be a very, very cold out there. Would even a gas giant be a solid at that distance? Are there any geological processes possible?

I love it! "Computer...Ah, hello computer!" immediately comes to mind.

I didn't make these rules. Just pointing out why this stuff is flowing down hill from government regulations and the overreaction of the private companies who have in the business model no allowance for nuance or human intervention at scale. Make rules so tight that people who are neither paid nor empowered to make decisions can enforce it.

It’s for serving legal notice!

It seems to me that this is not a fair test. There is sentiment and there is budget. A product that costs a little more is one thing but double the price hits budget barriers. Most people do not have 80%+ discretionary budget.

I am impressed that the FSF has kept up the same office / mailing address for 32 years at the time the article was written!

It's the standard here in the USA. The other standard is the US Legal at 8.5 inches by 14 inches (216 mm by 356 mm). This is what is used in court settings (hence the name) but also things like paper mortgage statements will typically come printed on that. That is much similar to your A4 size.

I am familiar with A4, A5 and such. But I think that fewer and fewer people are. It's just not something used every day.

As a side note, most of the big important house bills and statements I still insist on receiving via US mail for protection reasons. There is a risk if I only had them emailed to me that my wife would not have access. If I were to suddenly die, I don't want my wife with our kids to miss a critical bill. By having them show up at the house in physical form provides a bit of defense in depth here.

By the way, for those unaware of the general set up, QEMU provides a complete software emulation of a CPU from that era as well as a Sound Blaster 16 card. The software just runs like it did back then - maybe a little faster without tuning the emulator to slow down.

Yeah, I personally will not subscribe to this. I am a grown man and I strongly dislike watching depictions of violence and want nothing personally to do with porn. My wife works in mental health and is well aware of suicide and counseling people.

I am not hiding my children from the world, but I am also not letting a toddler or a kindergartner cook on a stove or metaphorically speaking "putting a loaded weapon in their hands" too soon. There is plenty of real world stuff they do not need to be concerned with at this time.

There will be a time when they are mature enough to deal with the adult world, but now is not that time.

I appreciate you sharing your perspective here.

Please do not read too much into this as me trying to control our kids beyond normal parenting and making sure they learn to grow up to be strong, confident, and caring for others. They do have age appropriate access to the Internet and an iPad with modern educational games on it as well.

There is disagreement among bible believing Christians about Genesis. I remember clearly reading it for myself as a child and realizing that the day counting did not start until the third verse. It starts out saying in God created the universe and everything in it in verse 1 without reference to a time frame. It's worth looking up Hugh Ross videos as he presents on this stuff in a way very different from the young earth creationists. There is a Northern Irish professor by the name of John Lennox who gives a very good lecture too. I presume that many here are well versed with many of the high quality secular professors, so I specifically wanted to point out two who are coming from a Christian point of view. Not everyone fully subscribes to Bishop's dating methods.

I too was very exposed to that idea but I was not restricted from reading science or anything I wanted.

I originally posted this over the weekend and it didn't catch on. I didn't realize HN auto reposts under some conditions! Let me know if you have any questions about the emulation set up.

Wine has been very useful for a few decades now. I got to admit though, I seldom find myself running serious software with it. I end up with Windows itself running in a virtual machine. I remember that it actually ran my VB6 applications like Whois Web (https://rietta.com/whoisweb) and RoboGen (https://rietta.com/robogen) very, very well twenty years ago!

Does anyone here know Elmer Larsen personally? A little digging online found that he later became a city council member and a mayor. I always love learning about some of the earlier independent developers and what they went on to become.

Published this last year after introducing my daughter to some old DOS educational games. She is going to be starting Kindergarten soon and my plan is to set her up with her own computer with older educational titles to encourage learning computer skills, typing, and more. Not just the tap and swipe UI of the modern iPad educational games.

With a single member LLC it is just an extra form on your personal return at least!

You have to satisfy the business requirement, which may be pretty easy to do. I am not sure. Just indicate it's for your side hustle business.