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Amazon R&D spending is more than that of all companies and government of France

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Re: Amazon R&D spending is more than that of all companies and government of France

#61

Maybe they need to spend even more to figure out how to show Adidas shoes when I search “Adidas shoes”. Seems that’s a really hard CS problem. Once they have that, maybe they can show products ordered by price when I select “Sort by price low to high”.

You must have some sort of poisoned history with amzn. I just tried what you describe, and it works perfectly.

Re: Amazon R&D spending is more than that of all companies and government of France

#63
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Section 174 is a harebrained law aimed solely at "punishing" successful engineering companies. It is a Trump-era law designed to appease voters mad at what they view as successful big tech "intelligentsia." It will destroy startup culture. I can't wait until we automate the people cheered this law on, out of a job.

As a software developer I also salute that law, As italian I always voted against governments who wanted to detax r&d, if its done and funded by governments for the collectivity, then it benefits everyone, but if a private company is going to r&d for the benefits of their shareholders, then they can also pay their fair share of taxes instead of leeching from the collectivity I always felt, from outside, that anti tru…

Section 174 has nothing to do with "detaxing R&D".

The US tax code already requires that self-classified R&D expenditures be treated as capital-expenditures, and subject to a 5-15 year depreciation period.

Section 174 requires that any and all software development costs be treated as R&D expenditures, and thus capitalized/amortized.

The total tax paid at the end of the depreciation period will be the same, but the upfront tax in the first year of a given expenditure is now 5-15x higher (depending on where the work was done).

Re: Amazon R&D spending is more than that of all companies and government of France

#64

Maybe they need to spend even more to figure out how to show Adidas shoes when I search “Adidas shoes”. Seems that’s a really hard CS problem. Once they have that, maybe they can show products ordered by price when I select “Sort by price low to high”.

One thing I absolutely cannot understand is the "price range" functionality seems to be broken as well. Maybe it's the same root cause and/or change which broke price sorting but when I put in a range of say $100-$200 searching for "network switch" the first result is $240, the 2nd result $90, and the 3rd result $120 and legitimate results go on for tens of pages. So it's not that there isn't anything for sale in that range, it's not that there weren't enough results to display so they needed to pad the numbers, and it's (seemingly?) not that they are just trying to push a higher dollar sale... it's just plain broken?

Re: Amazon R&D spending is more than that of all companies and government of France

#65

Maybe they need to spend even more to figure out how to show Adidas shoes when I search “Adidas shoes”. Seems that’s a really hard CS problem. Once they have that, maybe they can show products ordered by price when I select “Sort by price low to high”.

You must have some sort of poisoned history with amzn. I just tried what you describe, and it works perfectly.

Tossing another anecdote onto the pile, I just searched "Adidas shoes". The first four hits are not for Adidas shoes, after that they all are.

All four of those non-Adidas hits are "Sponsored" results, but that's not particularly easy to notice (for one of them it's almost impossible).

I would agree with GP that Amazon product search often leaves much to be desired. It's hard to search for X without getting accessories for X, competitors to X, products that can be connected to X. This is annoying at best, and crippling if you want to, say, sort by price (all the cheapest matches will be accessories or otherwise not what you wanted).

Re: Amazon R&D spending is more than that of all companies and government of France

#66
post #62

There is not a single chance that Amazon spends $73B/year in R&D, numbers are completly wrong or they mean something different.

Product development, as in product teams and writing software, i.e., what most people at Amazon or on Hacker News do, is R&D.

Re: Amazon R&D spending is more than that of all companies and government of France

#67

Maybe they need to spend even more to figure out how to show Adidas shoes when I search “Adidas shoes”. Seems that’s a really hard CS problem. Once they have that, maybe they can show products ordered by price when I select “Sort by price low to high”.

It is a human problem, there's not necessarily a technical solution.

How do you define a Adidas shoe? Something with the same name could easily be fake

Re: Amazon R&D spending is more than that of all companies and government of France

#68

Maybe they need to spend even more to figure out how to show Adidas shoes when I search “Adidas shoes”. Seems that’s a really hard CS problem. Once they have that, maybe they can show products ordered by price when I select “Sort by price low to high”.

You must have some sort of poisoned history with amzn. I just tried what you describe, and it works perfectly.

Same exact experience.

Re: Amazon R&D spending is more than that of all companies and government of France

#69
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a software developer I also salute that law, As italian I always voted against governments who wanted to detax r&d, if its done and funded by governments for the collectivity, then it benefits everyone, but if a private company is going to r&d for the benefits of their shareholders, then they can also pay their fair share of taxes instead of leeching from the collectivity I always felt, from outside, that anti tru…

> if a private company is going to r&d for the benefits of their shareholders What if the R&D is open-sourced? Or what if the R&D would be for a product genuinely beneficial to people? Think a new drug, or infrastructure like Google Maps, etc.

The people who make a living doing the work need to be paid somehow.

Re: Amazon R&D spending is more than that of all companies and government of France

#70
post #3

I believe Amazon classifies all costs of software engineering under R&D.

In Australia we have a tax break that means 80% of all R&D costs are repaid by the government. Everything we can ever possibly classify as R&D is classified as R&D. If I take a dump on company time it's R&D because I'm a software dev and therefore thinking about developing stuff while I'm in there.

That's not actually allowed, it's meant to be research with an "unknown outcome" or some similar wording. But lots of companies ignore yhat and claim regardless.
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