GavinMcG (u/GavinMcG)

GavinMcG commented on Exit Tax: Leave Germany before your business gets big eidel.io/exit-tax-leave-g... · Posted by u/olieidel

pc86 · 18 days ago

No reasonable person on the planet can look at that table showing a €700k exit tax on a company making €200k/yr profit and think "yeah that sounds fair."

GavinMcG · 18 days ago

The article admits that the 700k figure “assumes the worst-case scenario that you take the high valuation of the financial authorities (factor 13.75) as base valuation for your exit tax. Instead, you could also find someone to assess the real value of your company, which is likely lower…”

A reasonable person could absolutely think it’s fair to impose a very high exit tax on someone who doesn’t want their books examined even when it would save them money.

GavinMcG commented on Ergonomic keyboarding with the Svalboard: a half-year retrospective twey.io/hci/svalboard/... · Posted by u/Twey

Twey · 24 days ago

I don't think there's _fundamentally_ anything hard about voice coding, but our current systems are terribly designed for it. We need programming languages that are much more keyword- rather than symbol-heavy, or more efficient systems of pronouncing symbols, or higher-level editing primitives, or maybe all of the above. There's some overlap with both stenography (which I know some people use for code, but I've never got around to setting up a theory for) and also structured editing projects like Hazel. Reckon we might see more of it in the future, if we're to make the ubiquitous and malleable computing dreams a reality.

GavinMcG · 24 days ago

Perhaps a stack-based language like Uiua would be well-suited.

GavinMcG commented on A Virginia public library is fighting off a takeover by private equity lithub.com/a-virginia-pub... · Posted by u/sharkweek

GavinMcG · 2 months ago

Might be a case of ginned up accusations of “poor management” to cover for political animus.

GavinMcG commented on VisionOS 26 keeps pushing Apple's newest platform toward the future sixcolors.com/post/2025/0... · Posted by u/tosh

jrm4 · 2 months ago

I really hope OP posted this to make fun of it.

This is absolute cope. Apple hasn't innovated much in years and there is nothing special in this whole Vision whatever.

GavinMcG · 2 months ago

What makes you think things need to be special in order to be pushing toward the future? A lot of the work of building something better is incremental and not especially innovative.

GavinMcG commented on Tell HN: Help restore the tax deduction for software dev in the US (Section 174) · Posted by u/dang

logifail · 3 months ago

> Normally, when you have expenses, you deduct them off your revenue to find your taxable profit. If you have $1 million in sales, and $900k in costs, you have $100k in profit [..]

I'm not sure it's helpful to simplify quite that much, doesn't this usually depend on whether we're talking about operating expenses (typically rent, utilities, salaries, supplies) or capital expenditures (typically buildings, land, intangibles...)?

GavinMcG · 3 months ago

It found it helpful that it was presented that simply. The point isn’t what else is or isn’t deductible, it’s that engineering salaries went from being deductible to being amortized.

GavinMcG commented on We Tested 7 Languages Under Extreme Load and Only One Didn't Crash freedium.cfd/https://medi... · Posted by u/nnx

iLoveOncall · 3 months ago

> Erlang's architecture allowed failing processes to be isolated and restarted without affecting the entire system. Even when large portions of the system were under duress, other parts continued functioning independently.

Disclaimer that I know absolutely nothing about Erlang except that I'd rather program in hieroglyphs, but how is a process crashing and restarting an acceptable failure mode?

The title says a single language didn't crash, but it literally does crash and restart if I understand correctly.

In any case this seems to be an extremely narrow test on an extremely specific use-case, where it might be fine to indeed crash and restart, but it's definitely not indicative of the performance of the languages as a whole.

GavinMcG · 3 months ago

Learning a bit more than “absolutely nothing” about Erlang would make a conversation more productive. The Wikipedia page [0] has some material relevant to your question under the “‘Let it crash’ design philosophy” heading.

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_(programming_language...

GavinMcG commented on How to cheat at settlers by loading the dice (2017) izbicki.me/blog/how-to-ch... · Posted by u/jxmorris12

yellowapple · 3 months ago

Depends on a lot of variables, I'd think:

- How dense is the wood?

- How much wood does each pip remove?

- How much water does the wood absorb per unit of volume?

- Are any capillary effects at play transferring absorbed water into the rest of the die?

- Is it better to soak the 6 side to take advantage of more surface area? Or the 1 side to take advantage of more soakable volume?

- Is the wood even uniformly dense to begin with?

GavinMcG · 3 months ago

Indeed. But given the ratios between the other five numbers and the waterlogged six, do you think it’s even remotely plausible that the water isn’t doing anything? For it to not be necessary, you’d expect that the die comes pre-loaded.

GavinMcG commented on How to cheat at settlers by loading the dice (2017) izbicki.me/blog/how-to-ch... · Posted by u/jxmorris12

yellowapple · 3 months ago

Is soaking the dice even necessary?

A naïvely constructed die - i.e. a perfect cube, but with pips dug out for each face - will already bias in favor of 6 rolls and away from 1 rolls simply because six pips require removing more material (and therefore mass) than one pip. Likewise with 5/2 and 4/3. The "precision" dice used in e.g. casinos address this by filling in the pips with material exactly as dense as the die's base material; the injection-molded dice in most board games (let alone wooden dice) obviously ain't constructed with that level of care.

This is also part of the reason why some dice games - particularly those typically played with cheap dice - deem 1 to be more valuable than 6 (example: Farkle) or require at least one 1 roll to win (example: 1-4-24). Or they'll require some number of high dice to make the game ever-so-slightly less brutal (example: Ship-Captain-Crew).

GavinMcG · 3 months ago

Is the bias from having more or fewer pips just as strong as the bias introduced by the water?

GavinMcG commented on My favourite fonts to use with LaTeX (2022) lfe.pt/latex/fonts/typogr... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

behnamoh · 3 months ago

I might pay the karma tax on this one but I've come to really appreciate "Times New Roman" (or TeX Gyre Termes + STIXTwoMath).

Like the OP, I used to care a lot about fonts. Heck, at some point my Windows boot time got slowed down because of the sheer number of fonts it had to load!

I used to think the default Latex font gives off a "serious" and "scientific" vibe. And I thought to myself: why would anyone ever use TNR when more "soulful" fonts exist?

Now that I'm older (33), I resort back to TNR or TeX Gyre Termes but with one change: I add "FakeBold" to text to make it look like old papers and books: https://x.com/OrganicGPT/status/1920202649481236745/photo/1. I just want my text to convey my thoughts, and I don't want any fancy "serifness" get in the way (so no to Bembo and Palatinno).

GavinMcG · 3 months ago

How much is FakeBold doing there, though? Easy to say it’s “just” TNR, but if the features of TNR that make it characterless have been supplanted with something soulful, then haven’t you just found a soulful typeface that you like?

GavinMcG commented on New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer waymo.com/blog/2025/05/wa... · Posted by u/prossercj

rlue · 4 months ago

The one time I ever rode in a waymo (in Los Angeles), I had a contradictory experience. My Waymo was attempting to make a right turn at a red light. We were stopped behind a human driver who was waiting for pedestrians to finish crossing before proceeding to make the turn. This was a college campus (UCLA), so there were lots of pedestrians. After a few seconds of waiting, the Waymo decided that the driver ahead of us was an immobile obstacle, and cut left around this car to complete the right turn in front of it. There was only one lane to turn into.

Luckily, no one was hurt, and I generally trust a waymo not to plow into a pedestrian when it makes a maneuver like that. I also understand the argument that autonomous vehicles are easily safer on average than human drivers, and that’s what matters when making policy decisions.

But they are not perfect, and when they make mistakes, they tend to be particularly egregious.

GavinMcG · 4 months ago

That mistake might induce human error—which is absolutely a source of danger—but it undoubtedly had a clear path to pull around the “stopped” vehicle, and as you said, you can generally trust Wayno not to plow into pedestrians. So what made it “lucky” that no one was hurt?