lkesteloot

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.

mostly for fun!

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.

WOW! Thank you!

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.

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.

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.)

"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.

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.

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".

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?

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.

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.