Hacker News: strobby

New comment by strobby in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)"

strobby — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 09:28:56 +0000

Very cool!

New comment by strobby in "Tell HN: People laid off in my company due to IRS Section 174 changes"

strobby — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 07:35:46 +0000

US product company with a portion of their engineering team based in India. Suddenly their India costs cannot be expensed in the same year and they can only deduct 1/15th of the costs. There’s no guarantee they would be in business for 15 years to realise the deferred tax benefits.

New comment by strobby in "New tax rules on R&D expenses may lead to layoffs for devs"

strobby — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 07:33:50 +0000

VC portfolios are typically incredibly unprofitable so this would not matter today.

Tell HN: People laid off in my company due to IRS Section 174 changes

strobby — Wed, 13 Dec 2023 20:23:21 +0000

30 engineers were laid off from the company I work for that does consulting for a US customer. The reason given was that the company’s runway got blown up due to the inflated tax bill they received as a consequence of Section 174 changes that require software development to be capitalized and amortized over 15 years (international).

Sharing this here as I don’t see much noise about this issue here or on mainstream media and just wondering how other small business and startups are handling this.

More info: https://www.onlycfo.io/p/new-tax-rule-is-terrible-for-software

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38633668

Points: 28

# Comments: 6

New comment by strobby in "Ruby on Jets: Like Rails but serverless"

strobby — Sun, 22 Jan 2023 06:25:01 +0000

Sure its a layer of abstraction but super leaky if you want to do anything meaningful.

New comment by strobby in "Show HN: Recycle your old Spotify playlists into new ones"

strobby — Sat, 26 Nov 2022 10:53:40 +0000

Do you delete the tracks from your servers after the playlist is generated? :)

Thanks, this works great!

New comment by strobby in "Ask HN: Have you stopped reading most news?"

strobby — Tue, 01 Nov 2022 11:25:57 +0000

Used to be always on Twitter, YouTube news channels, Reddit and various online publications. But over time, I've cut everything out except HN & The Economist. The Economist has a free-market bias but gives a decent round of up what's going on in the world.