cplusplusfellow (u/cplusplusfellow)

cplusplusfellow commented on Thousands of small businesses are struggling because of R&D amortization twitter.com/mjwhansen/sta... · Posted by u/IndoCanada

yencabulator · 2 years ago

Is anyone here capable of cogently summarizing The Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act of 2024, its likelihood of passing into law, and whether that will actually fix this?

(As far as I can read it, if passed it would delay this until 2025, likely with the intent to change the laws before that but with more time to debate.)

cplusplusfellow · 2 years ago

How typical of Congress to intentionally set up fights every 2-3 years over completely obvious BS, and summarily shut down the government and scapegoat something else like top-line rates on the "working rich" while playing class warfare politics.

cplusplusfellow commented on Thousands of small businesses are struggling because of R&D amortization twitter.com/mjwhansen/sta... · Posted by u/IndoCanada

gumby · 2 years ago

To be fair, accelerated R&D amortization (immediate full expensing in the year the expense was incurred) is a tax loophole. Essentially, the default tax treatment of expenses is basically to take the expense same as you would treat it under GAAP, but some people (I am one of them BTW) think that we should put a finger on the scales for the case of legitimate R&D.

Now though I happen to think accelerating it is a good idea, everybody thinks their particular loophole is a good idea. To say that removing the special treatment is a policy mistake is a reasonable position to take, though opponents have a reasonable position as well (as I said I'm in favor of the special benefit). But to call this change unfair is, IMHO, unreasonable.

It's also bogus to plead ignorance as the twitter poster did: "as they'd never had to amortize software development before, and didn't think of the work they do as R&D." Their accountants sure did, because otherwise it would not have qualified for the R&D exemption. And their accountant would have to tell them what to do to make it qualify.

cplusplusfellow · 2 years ago

I respectfully disagree. By these arguments, literally every deduction from revenue to calculate taxable income is a "loophole". How far does that go?

What's more absurd than life itself is that you can deduct 100% of a 6000GVWR truck which you financed for 7 years, but my engineers salaries aren't deductible because I'm "building some product" so that's "development".

I mean give me a freaking break.

cplusplusfellow commented on Boehm-Demers-Weiser conservative C/C++ Garbage Collector hboehm.info/gc/... · Posted by u/swatson741

rbehrends · 2 years ago

This needs some qualifications.

The above problem is about latency of stop the world collectors in a domain that requires extremely low latency. And if you think that stop the world collections are representative of garbage collection as a whole (i.e. the "bad rap"), this is just not being up to the state of the art. (It's just that generational/incremental collection is hard to impossible without having support for write barriers/read barriers/snapshotting on the compiler or hardware side, which makes that a practical no-go for a language that was never designed to have GC support.)

But in terms of throughput, the BDW GC actually performs pretty well, competitive with or beating malloc()/free() libraries. This is plenty enough for a number of applications, especially when it comes to batch processing. In fact, even the stop the world latency is (combined with parallel marking) plenty good enough for a number of types of regular GUI applications, where you don't have the fairly extreme latency requirements of standard video games.

It is also worth noting that manual deallocation (especially via RAII) isn't a panacea for latency, as that is just as prone to large pauses due to cascading deletes [1].

[1] While in theory you can do that lazily, in this case you're losing timeliness of deletion and may actually have worse worst case latency than a modern GC that can stagger its work to have bounded pause times. The benefit of RAII is that you may be able to plan these deletions, but even that can be surprisingly difficult at times, requiring extra management to keep data structures alive longer than normal. [2]

[2] Note that lazily deleting objects in RC to avoid pause times is not necessarily the answer; for one thing, you're introducing much of the complexity associated with incremental GC again (especially having to do X amount of deallocation work for each allocation), or risking considerable space overhead. https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/964001.964019 It also remains a difficult challenge when you're dealing with objects that aren't of bounded size (e.g. large arrays).

cplusplusfellow · 2 years ago

For all of the reasons you note above, this is why I've almost exclusively dealt with arena-style allocations of fixed-object-sizes when doing ultra low latency work.

cplusplusfellow commented on Thousands of small businesses are struggling because of R&D amortization twitter.com/mjwhansen/sta... · Posted by u/IndoCanada

User23 · 2 years ago

So far as I can find the last time Congress bothered to pass a budget was 2016 with the prior one in 2010.

The government has been funding itself instead with “continuing resolutions” which pretty much just continue spending as the prior year modulo marginal changes. Incidentally this is why federal deficits have exploded since 2010: the financial crisis “one time” trillion dollar stimulus has been continued every year since.

cplusplusfellow · 2 years ago

But it would be so draconian to not increase spending insanely every year!

cplusplusfellow commented on IBM scraps rewards program for staff inventions, wipes away cash points theregister.com/2024/01/1... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar

duxup · 2 years ago

I worked at a company where a yearly bonus structure was conceived of by a team in HR who were IMO bad with numbers. Many emails went out about how it worked and so on.

One year we got $300 (or less...) bonuses. It was just how the math of this complicated system worked out.

A lot of feedback was given about that program and it wasn't positive. They came back to a few of us asking us to elaborate. I told them "I once got a $300 bonus working at Little Caesars (American pizza chain) for selling the most crazy bread in a month."

They finally got the hint and canceled the entire thing, it was better not to have it at all IMO, more demoralizing having it around. $300 is better than nothing, except when it sends the wrong message.

cplusplusfellow · 2 years ago

Companies really, really want their employees to perform specific behaviors that they desire, except they don't want to compensate them extra.

In truth, a base pay + bonus structure that is commensurate with the outcomes the company desires is the best solution.

Leaders shouldn't trust folks who go into HR to come up with these.

cplusplusfellow commented on Remote work % in industry not correlated with excess productivity growth frbsf.org/economic-resear... · Posted by u/firstSpeaker

Swizec · 2 years ago

> Does Working from Home Boost Productivity Growth?

Does it have to?

Remote work is great because it reduces carbon emissions, reduces noise pollution, reduces traffic, increases residential rent revenues, increases work satisfaction, increases hobby engagement, improves child rearing, and generally gives people their time back.

If we can get all that and maintain the same productivity, working from home feels very worth it.

cplusplusfellow · 2 years ago

Really difficult to comprehend why this is so difficult for people to understand. I recently started sharing a small office on the lake with a friend. I have about 180sf of it to myself. There are boats that cruise by, views are incredible, the environment is fun an inviting -- and I still have my privacy. It's like WFH but 5 feet from the water.

I've been a WFH advocate for 22 years, having spend 20 of those working in my own home. I still refuse to go downtown, but I don't mind going to a place like this. I still work about 70% from my house, and 30% from the office. I work from the office when it suits me.

Perhaps if they weren't trying to shove us into a singular zip code from a radius 50 miles away, distract and annoy us, force us to deal with traffic, not to mention the personal and monetary expense of it all -- I'd be willing to entertain the idea that an office is "better."

cplusplusfellow commented on A battery has replaced Hawaii's last coal plant canarymedia.com/articles/... · Posted by u/toomuchtodo

toomuchtodo · 2 years ago

Enough sunlight lands on the Earth every 2 minutes to power humanity for a year [1]. ~500-600GW of solar will be deployed in 2024 globally, and we are accelerating to 1TW deployed annually [2].

Commerical nuclear fission is unviable at this point [3], even at nimble startups [4] [5], but proponents are free to argue in support of it to anyone who will still listen. Renewables and batteries have reached an escape velocity trajectory [6].

This global energy system will eliminate energy poverty in our lifetime, and like bankruptcy, it'll happen slowly, and then all of a sudden.

[1] https://www.ku.ac.ae/two-minutes-of-sun-enough-to-power-a-ye...

[2] https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2023/12/25/all-i-want-for-christ...

[3] https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april...

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38894631

[5] https://neutronbytes.com/2023/01/24/nuscales-smr-costs-hit-h...

[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37502924

cplusplusfellow · 2 years ago

We have enough fissile material to support the planet for 10s of thousands of years, so the nuclear proponents can speak in theoretical maximums and still beat you. You don't have enough raw materials on planet earth to continue making solar panels for the next 10s of 1000s of years, given that you need to replace the panels every 10-20 years (optimistically).

Commercial nuclear fission is completely viable for anyone not allowing it to become unviable with lawsuits. See: China.

Downvote me all you want, but you'll live in poverty when there are no factories in your town because the lights turn off during a snowstorm.

cplusplusfellow commented on A battery has replaced Hawaii's last coal plant canarymedia.com/articles/... · Posted by u/toomuchtodo

toomuchtodo · 2 years ago

https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline

https://www.energy-storage.news/global-bess-deployments-to-e...

Start where electricity is expensive and/or the revenue you steal from thermal generators (grid support mentioned, synthetic inertia, black start capability, etc) supports the economics, and work your way down as battery costs decline and you force thermal generators to become uneconomic due to compressing their runtimes. Think in systems.

cplusplusfellow · 2 years ago

If only the "systems" we were considering were meant to provide limitless and virtually free electricity (nuclear), which is congruence with the "systems" of reducing poverty.

cplusplusfellow commented on The future of nuclear energy in a carbon-constrained world (2018) energy.mit.edu/research/f... · Posted by u/simonebrunozzi

acidburnNSA · 2 years ago

All the passive cooling/passive anti-meltdown reactors of the past struggled operationally because to get there you have to use somewhat exotic coolants with low vapor pressures at high temperatures. Liquid metals, organic fluids, molten salts, etc. all have serious operational challenges and were largely phased out because of them. Water coolant took off after out-performing them. So it's not so easy.

cplusplusfellow · 2 years ago

Are you familiar with all the newer generation technologies that haven’t been phased out and are under development?

cplusplusfellow commented on The future of nuclear energy in a carbon-constrained world (2018) energy.mit.edu/research/f... · Posted by u/simonebrunozzi

acidburnNSA · 2 years ago

A classic MIT report series. Of note is where it says they think cost performance is basically unrelated to specific core design. So all these thorium, molten salt, liquid metal, organic, blah blah reactors coming back, while cool, are not necessarily aligned with the key problems in nuclear, which are currently construction project management related.

I'd love to see some more startups focusing on the real problems in nuclear (project delivery, standardized QA procedures, standardized licensing document templates, analysis checklists, inspection techniques, data management, etc. ) rather than more and more and more somewhat goofy re-hashes of 1950s prototypes.

Maybe should have [2018] in the title?

cplusplusfellow · 2 years ago

> are not necessarily aligned with the key problems in nuclear, which are currently construction project management related

I think the hope is that with passive cooling and passive anti-meltdown characteristics, the complexity of the constriction can be reduced. And that has exponential returns for cost structure.