1. Tell HN: Help restore the tax deduction for software dev in the US (Section 174) Total comment counts : 69 Summary A major effort is underway to reverse a tax code change that prevents software development expenses from being immediately deductible. Luther Lowe from Y Combinator (YC) is organizing alumni and urging US taxpayers to support this reversal by signing a letter to lawmakers. The change classifies engineer salaries as capital investments, resulting in costly depreciation over five years, increasing the expense of hiring software engineers....

1. DiffX – Next-Generation Extensible Diff Format Total comment counts : 33 Summary The article discusses the limitations of existing Unified Diffs used in software development for representing differences between text files. It highlights issues such as lack of standardization for metadata, encodings, and binary patches, which complicate the parsing process for various tools. The author proposes a new format called Extensible Diffs (DiffX), which builds on Unified Diffs by adding structured metadata and allowing the representation of multiple commits....