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Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

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Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#1

Post by rohith2506 »

This is a follow up of this thread ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22174828 ) which got some amazing responses but considering it's been almost two years, It's time for new edition

I'd love to hear about what interesting problems (technically or otherwise) you're working on -- and if you're willing to share more, I'm curious how you ended up working on them. This time, with a twist. Please include web technologies too if it's really niche and not a lot of people know about it

Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#2

Post by throwawayacc2 »

One of my hobbies is tax optimisation and finding and exploiting tax loopholes.

I’m a contractor, I work through my company. It’s way more tax efficient than being perm.

But, it could be even more efficient.

So, I did some research. Turn out, where I am, a business can have multiple business codes. Activities the company is registered as performing. Now, I was and still am a software development company. But I also added artistic production as a business code.

Why artistic productions? Well, because it’s the most liberal business code for expenses.

As a software company, I can expense travel for some things, the most useful for me being conferences. But that means I need to buy the conference ticket even if I’m not interested and can only expense accommodations for the duration of the conference. That’s good but a bit restrictive.

Now, as a artistic production company, I’m not limited by that. As long as I can prove I traveled in order to produce, well, just about anything that can be construed as being art, I can expense travel and I can expense accommodations for as long as I need. You can’t rush art, you know how it is.

So, obviously, first thing I did, I whipped up a blog, posted some random pictures every day and called it good. I’m not using company money to travel the world you see, I’m using company money in order to produce art. Haven’t paid a euro of my own money on accommodation or travel for close to a year now. And the best part, I get to deduce this from my profit.

I love the tax system. I really do.

But, doing this, I got curious. I thought, hey, why not make it better. So I thought let’s see what all the rage is with dalle and stable diffusion and all that. So, what I’m doing now is, I’m changing my approach. My art will no longer be just pictures taken quickly with my iphone. No no. I’m getting the picture and I’m sending it to an API I built. The API runs some computer vision, labelling what it sees, some classification, some stuff with the pic metadata, tries to put it all together and turns it into a description of the picture.

The description of the picture I took is used as a prompt for stable diffusion. And that result ends up being the art. I’d like to thank of my art as a modern commentary on the age old “is art imitating life or is life imitating art?” - At least that’s what I told my accountant and he concerned, it would stand up in the case of an audit!

So, yeah, tldr, I’m working on image to text and text to image to expense my nomad lifestyle on the company.

Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#3

Post by solardev »

throwawayacc2 wrote: post #2

One of my hobbies is tax optimisation and finding and exploiting tax loopholes. I’m a contractor, I work through my company. It’s way more tax efficient than being perm. But, it could be even more efficient. So, I did some research. Turn out, where I am, a business can have multiple business codes. Activities the company is registered as performing. Now, I was and still am a software development company. But I also a…

How much do you end up saving this way, through all that effort, rather than just paying the taxes?

Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#4

Post by sfpotter »

throwawayacc2 wrote: post #2

One of my hobbies is tax optimisation and finding and exploiting tax loopholes. I’m a contractor, I work through my company. It’s way more tax efficient than being perm. But, it could be even more efficient. So, I did some research. Turn out, where I am, a business can have multiple business codes. Activities the company is registered as performing. Now, I was and still am a software development company. But I also a…

It makes me sad that all these spun cycles could have been put to use doing something productive if only the tax code were simplified and the IRS automatically pre-filled our taxes, as is done in other, saner countries.

Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#5

Post by zschuessler »

I heard few song lines from a new artist I've discovered. It has me thinking on a problem I want solved. Although, I'm not actively working on it.

Why aren't there more employee-owned companies? And I don't mean solely shareholder programs, I mean actually owned by every employee and they are paid dividends of profit after all planned R&D costs. Similar to the Alaska oil pipeline bonus. Even interns.

All studies show that the companies structured this way that do exist (they seem few) have much higher output, quality, and happiness among staff.

After more research I found that this exists: https://esca.us/ - Wawa is a member, pretty cool.

Talking more to others about the idea I've heard interesting stories. Some machine tooling shops have an actual employee-owned setup. All employees are incentivized to make every product output great and keep profits high, because they all share the profits.

Anyway, I'm not actively working on this. But wanting to shape this idea more in the future. It feels like it could help the current state of America. But perhaps I'm too hopeful and naive :-)

---

Hobo Johnson - My Therapist:

"The idea's about equity, it's about wealth

Most think that it's dumb, you should think for yourself

If I buy a pizza place that makes a definite profit

Yeah, let's say yearly, the owners make $100,000 off it

And if I buy this pizza place for, let's say, $300k

And when the workers recoup in three years, I'll sign it over that day

And wouldn't everybody not see

They should buy their pies from me?

You'd rather have a boss

When you can work democratically?"

---

"Incentives are the strongest force in the world. They explain why good people do awful things, why smart people do stupid things, and why ordinary people do amazing things."

- Quote I have pinned from @morganhousel

Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#6

Post by koeng »

A little while ago, a patent for high throughput DNA synthesis using silicon chips went off-patent, so I have been learning analog IC chip design to build an open source high-throughput DNA synthesis chip. If it works, and I sold them at cost, it would reduce the cost of oligo pool synthesis by ~100x and possibly gene synthesis by 10x.

For about 8-9 years now my goal has been to build a cell from scratch for less than $1000 and enable anyone to be able to do so. While I’m handling the other bits elsewhere, DNA synthesis is a key technology primed for open source disruption.

Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#7

Post by throwawayacc2 »

solardev wrote: post #3
throwawayacc2 wrote: post #2

One of my hobbies is tax optimisation and finding and exploiting tax loopholes. I’m a contractor, I work through my company. It’s way more tax efficient than being perm. But, it could be even more efficient. So, I did some research. Turn out, where I am, a business can have multiple business codes. Activities the company is registered as performing. Now, I was and still am a software development company. But I also a…

How much do you end up saving this way, through all that effort, rather than just paying the taxes?

Quite a bit actually ( for me at least ) seeing as there’s progressive taxation. I’d reckon at least 30k per year. Probably more.

I take out only 11k or so per year from the company as personal income. That’s the tax free bracket. The rest I use is just expenses. And I pay myself minimum wage as well. Also tax free, but qualifies me for national insurance :D

I love the tax system!

Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#9

Post by Test0129 »

sfpotter wrote: post #4
throwawayacc2 wrote: post #2

One of my hobbies is tax optimisation and finding and exploiting tax loopholes. I’m a contractor, I work through my company. It’s way more tax efficient than being perm. But, it could be even more efficient. So, I did some research. Turn out, where I am, a business can have multiple business codes. Activities the company is registered as performing. Now, I was and still am a software development company. But I also a…

It makes me sad that all these spun cycles could have been put to use doing something productive if only the tax code were simplified and the IRS automatically pre-filled our taxes, as is done in other, saner countries.

Oh hey look its the "America backwards" trope again. How tiring.

Sure. The IRS could change things. But you're also able to do a lot more in America that they can't track. Other countries (e.g. Sweden, etc) are far "simpler", and homogeneous. For example, the depth at which one can trade various instruments, produce companies, etc is far far greater in America than almost anywhere else. This necessitates a somewhat (perhaps not as much as today) complicated tax code.

I would say this is very productive. The tax code isn't actually the problem. It's corporate interests like intuit who, through regulatory capture, make it impossible to truly solve the problem. Honestly, it cannot get easier than a 1040EZ which is what mostly everyone uses. In fact the 1040EZ is so easy you basically fill in the things to confirm the number the IRS already has is correct. OP, like myself, need more complicated solutions. I have a fairly vast portfolio of different investment types and OP has a business. In both cases, investing time into making the IRS's life difficult pays a return on par with bonds.

Re: Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?

#10

Post by travisjungroth »

I’m working on the expert elicitation of priors. We’re making web UIs to better capture human judgement, especially for forecasting. I work at a data driven company, sometimes I think a bit too data driven. I want to capture more intuition for our systems in a rigorous way.

It’s incredibly interesting and very niche. There are a handful of academic papers out there. I think it will be a big deal in the next 10 years.

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