scrozier

Pledging your fortune to charity is not taxation, and calling this a tax bracket is misleading.

I came, I sat, I conquered. So simple, yet immediately effective. (Full disclosure: I'm a regular meditator, so it's pretty easy for me to slip into mindful awareness.)

Thank you for this!

Fair enough.

I appreciate your optimistic take.

Shopsin's is not closed! They are now at Essex Market (Essex and Delancey, in the Lower East Side). Next building over from me. I think some of Kenny's offspring took it over (but not sure of that). Not quite as fun as the old place, but still a pretty quirky menu.

It's amazing to me how much can be written (and published, and rewarded) about something so obvious. Parents, this is why your kids' tuition is so high.

I think this is a valid point. bash is an overly complicated tool...so I'll write another tool on top of that (with none of the decades of debugging that bash itself has undergone) to make bash...LESS complex?

The problem is with bash itself.

We tend to undervalue ease of use and overvalue "cleverness."

Case in point: git. Very clever tool. Ease of use: terrible. But Linus wrote it and Linus is clever, so it must be us that's the problem.

We get what we value. Let's value ease of use more.

They are not arguing semantics, they are getting to the very premise/context of the paper.

I think it was the "uh." :-) If I read it without it, it's not so bad. And I know we all dash off comments quickly sometimes. Apologies if I overreacted.

Here's another way groby_b could have said the same thing:

"I spend a lot of time designing UI for international users. In these circles, the issue you're talking about is referred to as 'BiDi' text input. If you would like to know more, ping me! Sometimes Googling isn't fruitful if you don't already know the lingo."

Maybe this sounds better to you, too. If not, maybe I'm wrong. It happens a lot. :-)

Instead of gatekeeping "the space" with insider abbreviations and belittling the author, you could appreciate that they raised awareness of the issue.

I listened to his Röckdöts on YouTube. Pretty interesting, and done well by the Third Coast Percussion Quartet.

I think _maybe_ he meant that you can't tell that you heard a C and an F, only that you heard a perfect fourth. Even that's not 100% true: some people can tell. And it's certainly not what he said.

As a musician and a computer scientist, I'm always interested when music stuff gets posted here. I looked this guy up; he's a bona fide composer, apparently. He looks at music in a very technical way that doesn't sound much (to me) like how musicians talk about music. He also says some wrong things. For example, "We cannot identify the interval between two notes just by listening." Um, yes, you bloody well can. In fact, "ear training" is a core skill in music theory education.

And he counts rhythms starting with zero. If you did this with any group of musicians, they would shout you out of the room. Imagine Mick Jagger yelling, "Zero, one, two, three!"

I'm not saying he doesn't have his reasons, but these sorts of things incline me to think he's not in the mainstream of musical culture. Which is fine, of course, but may be misleading to readers who think they're getting traditional musical information.

Well, not incredibly wealthy by American standards. Working man. No college. Worked at an oil refinery in the Toledo, Ohio area. But he was so frugal that he accumulated stuff, including real estate, throughout his life, and was the beneficiary of a great economy, overall, in the last 70 years. He wound up with a decent nest egg, which amused him greatly.

A few years before dad died, I flew up to help him "clean up some stuff." I did make some progress against the poison ivy in the back yard, but he wouldn't let me in the house and, in the end, we took two phone books to the recycling center.

Dad had 6-8 boats of various descriptions, but one part of the description of each was, "unusable." He also collected outboard motors, which sat on stands in the musty cottage basement. Never thought to combine the two, I guess.

This is insightful. My father died 2 1/2 years ago, leaving my siblings and me with 6 houses and 3 commercial properties, all full--basement to ceiling--with junk (except one of the commercial properties, which was rented). "They are not interested in anyone else have [sic] a say in the matter," is exactly right. My dad wouldn't even have a conversation about it. He didn't get angry or anything, he just passively refused to engage. It's a gigantic mess for us to clean up now.

It was coupled, for my dad, with extreme frugality. He seemingly willfully deprived himself (and his family) of any fun or comfort by acquiring cheap versions of everything, or rigging up odd simulacrums of things, like the whole-house "air conditioner" he made from a cleaning bucket and some coffee cans. He bought a boat, then put such an underpowered motor on it that it was a joke. We had water skis, but they were rotted and just sat sadly against the wall, unusable.

Oh, my time's up? See you next week, doctor.

lol...I came to post this EXACTLY. Having been in, or on the periphery of, the startup world for a long time (ending about ten years ago), I've come to see it as pretty vapid, unimaginative, and even downright destructive. If a bunch of young-ish guys (and a few women) with elite upbringings want to have an incestuous little money party, well, good on them, I guess. But all the eloquent words trying to obscure the theme of "I want to make a whole bunch of money" is wearing thin on me.

I'm afraid this sounds really generic and a bit desperate. I don't see any of the guiding principles really looking at Tumblr's strengths.

Not sure how you read that into my comment. I'm saying that trained, skilled designers don't need formulas and tools like this to achieve pleasing and functional results.

I'd be happy to be wrong, but this sure feels like another instance of a numbers/formulas/algorithm-oriented person wanting a shortcut to visual style. This site is full of these, in many areas of endeavor. As a musician, I particularly notice posts that do this kind of thing with music ("I've Invented a New Musical Notation That Makes Everything Easier!").

I just get sad for the designers who have to battle this stuff every day. No programmer would take "input" on their code from a nurse (say), but designers face "input" on their decisions and their craft at every turn. I've yet to meet a designer who was longing for a web form to input a bunch of numbers to generate some type sizes.

But I could be wrong. It happens a lot.

Or...you could work with a designer whose training and experience it is to make things like this look nice and work well. Instead of trying to have an formula or algorithm for everything, just because that's what you know.

I know it's not a contest, but I just turned 65. I'm currently an individual contributor at a small-ish SaaS company.

I've been a systems programmer, software development director at a well-known retailer, consultant, and (mostly) an entrepreneur who started four companies.

I still LOVE to code. Nothing like the satisfaction, though I enjoyed all the other things I did too.

Ageism is real in our industry. Note the comments below from 30-somethings who are worried their careers are over! Honestly, I'm pretty up-to-date with skills and knowledge. Plus I have so much experience, I know what works and what doesn't work, in the meta sense (architectures, organizations, etc.).

I recently even took on a side gig with a start-up. At our ages, you have to know someone who knows you and knows you'll be good. The good news is that, at our age, we know lots of people.

I think you're just missing the whole venture capital/startup ecosystem concept. VCs and founders are well aware of accounting principles and can/should plan accordingly.

BTW, I founded and ran four companies and faced this very situation plenty of times. In my day (this was a while ago), we generally had to, or did, amortize development costs. I'm not saying I loved paying the tax bills, but the concept is neither farcical nor ridiculous.

Well, yes, increased tax revenue, of course. There may be no/little difference in the long term; that's over my economics pay grade. It seems like the model of raise a lot of money, spend a lot of money, expense it, pay no taxes, then go bankrupt is a pretty straightforward way there might be a difference long term. And that's a very common scenario, I think you'd agree.

> Do you see a difference between software development in a consulting business model (instant one-off benefit) and software development in a saas product business model (benefit over multiple years)?

Yes. Not sure what that has to do with this discussion.

> Can you provide the good arguments for capitalizing software development costs and not expensing it?

Yes. The well-established accounting principle of matching income and expenses.

> Can you explain the reasoning of charging taxes to a company that has revenue beyond merely 1/5th of its expenses (actually 1/10th in the first year, or 1/30th for international operations) and hence still heavily investing cash?

Yes. See the answer to your second question. Companies often have to make investments. If they buy a Big Machine, they don't get to write it off in one year. There's nothing nefarious about amortizing costs over their useful life.

That could well be. But maybe it's not so obviously a good thing as it may sound to startup ears. Matching income and expenses is a pretty good way to keep your financial head about you.

Founders work for free because they're investing, taking a risk like all investments. If they lose the bet, they lose. No harm, no foul. That's true of any investment you and I make. People lose money on investments every day.

There are a lot concepts being not very well defined here: employment, investing, taxation, salaries. It's not all one thing.

What is it that you think "we" are having both ways?

> any employee you hire who's doing software development would cost you (1 + 4/5) times their salary in the near term

How can that be true? You only pay them once, not 1 4/5 times.