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.
"Here's the industry's dirty secret: Programmers who don't touch-type fit a profile. ... Here's the deal: everyone is laughing at you. Or if they're your close friend, they're just pitying you. Because you suck."
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.
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.
> At a meta-level, I'm surprised that something with so factual (and testable) an answer can still not be settled.
It is absolutely settled, and has been tested over and over again. Power is roughly proportional to the amount of light emitted[1], so having dark grey is absolutely a power savings over pure white.
[1]: This isn't totally true mostly because the display is broken into RGB elements emitting light of differing efficiencies and human perception of the brightness of those elements is not identical.
LCD screens are really cool! My dad had a half-broken one at some point, and we peeled the outer layer partly off. It was pure white underneath. Just constant white light, no matter what was being displayed.
But if you looked at the pure white with polarized sunglasses, you could see the image! The pixels don't turn on and off, they just change polarization. And there's a thin layer that blocks light of one polarization, but not the other.
Just a detail that isn't quite right in the article: black is actually the highest power state for LCDs. The backlight draws the same power all the time (for a given brightness setting) but the pixels draw more power when they are black.
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.
I have my own name registered, which I use for email. It would be a pain to give it up, and nobody else wants it anyway. I don't see why I should have to deal with a price increase. If a company can deal with these increases couldn't you also argue that buying from a squatter is not an issue? This has the advantage of pricing the domains based on demand.
You could argue that you don't want to reward squatting, but either way you're going to have to pay off some entity I don't think entirely deserves it.
Your suggestion is about a couple of decades late. Nevertheless, I don’t agree with it. Other gTLDs and ccTLDs May have issues of their own (price, control, lack of Whois privacy). Squatting will, and does, happen with other TLDs that are nowadays more common and recognized by laypeople. Making .com more expensive after all these decades will just enable rent seeking while harming millions of people. Many squatters would get a lot more money for their domains, and this would cause a rush to squat on more domains.
To handle squatting on .com better, my suggestion would be to have alternative TLDs available at a cheaper price (rather than making .com costlier). That could potentially help by making the others more popular (than now) and reduce the incentives to squat.
So my personal email account just got $490/year more expensive? Or $24990/year if we count non-english dictionaries?
And I ought not to have it because I'm not hosting an online store or marketing materials for a megacorp? Fuck me for trying to have something nice without commercializing it, right?
It should be priced the way Google priced .dev - Good names cost slightly more than what one can make from squatting, but not prohibitive for a real business.
People's personal names are unlikely to fall in that category.
I'm switching my personal website from .org to .us. There are a few major disadvantages of .us: 1. only available to people in the US, 2. private registration is not allowed. While the latter is not a major problem for my personal website, I have a project that I'd like to not have attached to my name, so .us isn't a possibility there. I don't know what TLD to use for that project yet but I'll figure something out. I'm open to suggestions.
Not having that seem to be a disaster, you wouldn’t believe the amount of calls I received offering to commercially make my website that were clearly personal by name.
Fair point, you're correct. Private registration not being available is the main disadvantage then, which as I said is not a problem for a personal website.
On the opposite end, I've had continual bouts with HugeDomains.com. Specifically, I have a theory that they buy domain search queries from Registrars. A handful of times I'll search and click on an available domain, and if I don't buy immediately, HD has registered the name in just hours. Poof! A landing page appears that it is for sale at $2,300 and can be financed monthly. I've searched through DreamHost and LeanDomainSearch and almost exclusively.
Note: I love Dreamhost, and have used them for 13+ years. The CEO responded to my tweet saying they do not sell queries.
Please be aware that there's many countries for which $9 is not a negligible sum. Essentially what you're saying is that anyone not willing or ABLE to pay more should be squeezed out.
Higher prices just introduce a deadweight loss to the consumers, and whatever added utility will just be captured by Verisign.
If we really want to stop squatters, I think we should be charging exponentially increasing prices for each additional domain. A domain could be $10 for a new customer, but cost $10,240 for a firm that already holds 10. Such costs wouldn't be prohibitive for people or companies, but incredibly serious for anyone who wants to squat domains.
Yeah. Some type of non-linear pricing would be a nice solution, but it would be tough enforce. Once you realize there are lots of fake companies on Google, you realize the domains would all get owned by dishonest people willing to lie and cheat to beat the system.
Another option would be to set a fixed price for ownership transfers and to forbid charging more than that in the ToS. It wouldn't stop squatting, but it would suck all the value out of it because I could negotiate with a squatter to buy a domain and turn around and report them to ICANN so the domain gets revoked and dropped back into the pool.
The biggest problem is that everyone involved, including ICANN, has a lot of incentive to create pseudo property with a limited supply so they can all participate in the rent seeking that comes along with limited supply property.
Even though they'd never admit it, domain squatters are great for ICANN, the registries, and the registrars. The squatters demonstrate domains have value and the (fake) limited supply creates a gold rush style urgency where no one wants to wait until tomorrow to register a domain because a squatter might grab it first.
If it's "no big deal" for a company to pay $1000 a decade more, why exactly is squatting a problem? Why not give that money to a squatter who'd likely sell it to you for a fraction of that.
This is a ridiculous argument that doesn't benefit the company or end consumers at all. Squatting isn't a problem for the vast majority.
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