MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ninetyninenine | 2025-04-18 04:07:41+00:00
But I’m also Asian myself and all my relatives and everyone I know from China is the is way.

It’s a stereotype. Asian tiger moms. Asians are good at math. Math competitions, test scores. Quantitative metrics everywhere point to a worth ethic that is viciously high.

My conclusion of course is derived from quantitative evidence from general populations and iq scores by country. When I mentioned Cupertino I did it only to say that all the quantitative evidence happens to align with my anecdotal experience.
by pastage | 2025-04-18 04:07:48+00:00
I do not understand you guys, I do not care about my taxes. They are fairly complex by Swedish Standards because I deliberately loose money In some area that gives me tax cuts, but not overly so.

Every year I get a digital form to sign from the tax office, I pay residual taxes and send it in all digital. This takes me in totalt 20 minutes including everything. Everything is prepared for me all I have to do is check if everything is correct. I can not fathom even copying those numbers correctly from diffrent sources in under an hour.

I do not want to do my taxes. I just want to be informed so I can double check and pay them.

Spending an hour doing taxes seems crazy ineffective .
by jmathai | 2025-04-18 04:08:24+00:00
I prefer Free Tax USA over Turbo Tax. Switched several years ago and haven't looked back.

The last 2 years, I paid the $8 for chat support to answer some questions I had and both times their answers saved me a lot more than the $8. Very knowledgeable and can see my numbers to give me specific guidance and answers.
by mlyle | 2025-04-18 04:09:03+00:00
The weight limit is 70 pounds = 31.8 kg. Lead is 11.35 g/cm^3.

Small flat rate box, 21.9 x 13.7 x 4.12 cm = 1236 cm^3 = 14kg; you can fill 100% with lead and mail it. Tungsten is also allegedly fine, but it will weigh 23 kilos and be quite difficult to pick up (can't get a finger under an edge...)

Medium flat rate box = 95kg; you can fill it 33% with lead, or ~45% with steel and mail it.

Large flat rate box = 144kg; only 22% lead.
by jasonriddle | 2025-04-18 04:09:19+00:00
Yes,

https://www.intuit.com/privacy/statement/

>> How we share your personal information

> For mergers and acquisitions. If we are involved with a merger, asset sale, financing, liquidation, bankruptcy, or the acquisition of all or part of our business to another company, we may share your personal information with that company and its advisors before and after the transaction date.
by ksec | 2025-04-18 04:10:39+00:00
It is not about ads being positive, but as a necessary evil. And we could at least discuss about the tech behind it, the performance of it without being shut down and downvoted so the whole thing disappeared.

>but it has not been for at least a decade.

Actually yes since around 2013 - 2014. HN has plenty of decent Ad discussions on both buy and sell side pre 2013 / 2014.
by CSMastermind | 2025-04-18 04:11:29+00:00
Okay, I decided to benchmark a bunch of AI models with geoguessr. One round each on diverse world, here's how they did out of 25,000:

Claude 3.7 Sonnet: 22,759

Qwen2.5-Max: 22,666

o3-mini-high: 22,159

Gemini 2.5 Pro: 18,479

Llama 4 Maverick: 14,316

mistral-large-latest: 10,405

Grok 3: 5,218

Deepseek R1: 0

command-a-03-2025: 0

Nova Pro: 0
by viraptor | 2025-04-18 04:14:10+00:00
It's not about a secret super duper version, just specialisation. If military needs a product for location finding they can train that to a much better quality in a much smaller space than chatgpt, which needs to do just about anything. You can spend 100% energy on the task you want instead of memorising the bible.

Medical industry does it. Coding autocomplete solutions do it. Large deployments of support agents do it. Etc.

> most powerful computer intelligence on earth

There's more than one dimension. Chatgpt is way worse at classifying my data than my custom 30k weight model. (And around infinity times more expensive) Which is more powerful? Yeah...
by gostsamo | 2025-04-18 04:15:12+00:00
There is an old russian tv series called Kitchen where the mc starts his job by stripping the labels from bananas. On the question "what is the sense of that", he gets the answer "for balance in the universe - somewhere there, there is someone else putting the labels on the bananas".

Spending 15 hours on filling data that the government mostly knows and can calculate is exactly one of those balancing acts of the universe that nobody needs.
by chasing | 2025-04-18 04:15:24+00:00
> I believe companies should use every inch of leeway in existing laws to do business.

No. You can do things that are immoral, harmful, predatory, and generally shitty while still being perfectly legal.

And people who want fewer regulations hampering businesses need to realize that this only works if businesses work within ethical guidelines that are not mandated by law. Otherwise the government will need to step in and protect people.

But to reiterate: Just because it's legal doesn't mean it's not evil.
by kapitanjakc | 2025-04-18 04:15:30+00:00
From my personal experience, nothing scientific or proven here.

I sit in a small office since last few years. A year or so ago I started to get less mentally active, as in things were going on in automatic mode.

And I did not feel good in general, a friend who practices Yoga advised me to do breathing exercises.

15-30 mins of deep breaths in open space in early morning, after shower, before breakfast. Followed by 3-5 min of rapid breathing. And finishing with taking as much air as I can and holding it for 30 sec to a min and repeating it for 2-3 times.

I do feel active after that, I wonder if it's related to these studies.
by rriley | 2025-04-18 04:16:45+00:00
USPS actually allows a bunch of odd items if they meet basic requirements:

- Potato: write the address directly on the skin and add postage - Coconut: often mailed from Hawaii gift shops - Brick: just needs postage and an address - Inflated beach ball: address it directly, ships like a parcel - Plastic Easter egg: fill it, tape it shut, and label it - Flip-flop: address the sole and send it off - Small pumpkin: allowed if it’s dry and not restricted by ag rules - Live queen bees (plus attendants): surface mail only, special label - Day-old chicks: special packaging and timing required
by anon84873628 | 2025-04-18 04:17:02+00:00
Exactly. It's marginal benefit vs marginal harm. Teens can "communicate freely" over text, voice, and video calls, including sending each other photos... TO THEIR CONTACTS.

There is no need for location based recommendations, streaks, nudges, etc. They should be building their social networks in the real world. And if they need friends outside of school, that can come through parentally facilitated activities like sports, clubs, etc. Later you start playing Magic the Gathering at the nerd shop or go to "shows" at the VFW hall.
by AIPedant | 2025-04-18 04:18:26+00:00
Margaret Sanger's creepy and scientifically repudiated motivations are not relevant to the discussion. It seems like you are playing a dishonest word game: "eugenics" is a set of ideologies and policies which specifically excludes individual choice so that society can impose its views of genetic fitness. But you are using a slippery and unspecified definition that seems to change shape depending on what point you're trying to make.

As to birth control and abortion, you are flat out 100% wrong, they have nothing whatsoever to do with eugenics. These exist because people don't want to disrupt their lives with the difficulty of raising a child. In 99.9% of cases the genetic fitness of that child is completely immaterial. Birth control was also not significant in Margaret Sanger's eugenics writing: she advocated sterilization, and her support of birth control distinguished her from other eugenicists since she thought "fit" mothers still had a right to limit the number of "fit" offspring.

Which leads to another point: you are misstating "positive eugenics." Positive eugenics is encourage "fit" people to have more kids, not to encourage everyone to "reproduce in the best way possible." Again it seems like you are being plain dishonest - which is especially frustrating because I don't think you're arguing for eugenics, you're just trying to win an argument on the internet, and that argument rests on a dumb word game which ignores reality.

Genetic testing actually is a bit more relevant, but there are sharp distinctions between "medically justifiable interventions" and "attempting to optimize your children," and even optimizing your children is not the same thing as eugenics. It is irresponsible and childish to use the same term without being careful.

The goal of enhancing individuals and the human species by engineering the genes related to some characteristics and traits is not to be confused with the barbarous projects of eugenics that planned the simple elimination of human beings considered as 'imperfect' on an ideological basis. However, it impinges upon the principle of respect for human dignity in several ways. It weakens the idea that the differences among human beings, regardless of the measure of their endowment, are exactly what the recognition of their equality presupposes and therefore protects. It introduces the risk of new forms of discrimination and stigmatization for those who cannot afford such enhancement or simply do not want to resort to it. The arguments that have been produced in favour of the so-called liberal eugenics do not trump the indication to apply the limit of medical reasons also in this case.

(https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000233258_eng)
by plorkyeran | 2025-04-18 04:18:33+00:00
I used to use TurboTax but then compare the pdf it generated line-by-line to the pdf from the previous year, and caught things I'd missed fairly often. One year though I was having trouble finding where in the UI the field I needed to set was, and concluded that the whole process was stupid. I then switched to just filling out the forms directly using my previous year's as a guide, and found that it just didn't really take any longer. This year I spent about an hour on my taxes with W2 income, RSUs (with an incorrect cost basis), ESPP trades, dividend/interest income from four different brokerages, and some stock trades to report.

I do think TurboTax or a competitor makes sense when you have a novel-to-you tax situation to deal with. Probably the hardest part of filing taxes is just figuring out which of the supplemental forms are applicable to you. I absolutely would have missed the foreign tax paid one on my own, for example. When your tax situation is the same as the last year just with different numbers I don't see much of a point.
by nagaiaida | 2025-04-18 04:18:39+00:00
coming back to raku after basically any other language is a breath of fresh air. i haven't even been worrying much about when the ast stuff lands cause i can't think of anything i would even want to mess with that much, even though i seem fundamentally incapable of engaging with lisp/prolog/forth without giving in to the siren song of metaprogramming. to me that's a very strong sign of how much it gets right as a base language.

i do all my automation with one tiny 20 line raku script that manages a thousand things. hell, the entire monitoring site for our frog is basically just a pile of mixins with a neat little pipeline interface unifying everything from request profiling and html templating to reading from and filling that cache in parallel whenever it remotely pulls the sensor data off various things and gets the current webcam frame.
by zugi | 2025-04-18 04:18:44+00:00
I realize you're just repeating frequently reported information, and Intuit has indeed lobbied against the IRS creating a free competitor to their product. But Intuit has not lobbied to make taxes more complicated. Congress does that well enough on its own. If you reread the original ProPublica piece that kicked off all the Intuit-hate 6 years ago, you'll see they imply it but carefully don't actually say it or back it up; others quoting the article were less careful.
by ty6853 | 2025-04-18 04:19:13+00:00
The risk perhaps not so much moral injury, but that combat and war is almost like a drug. Imagine going back home to a toddler raging about the wrong color cup, a narrow set of civil rules, and flipping burgers after living a life out the back of a pickup truck with nothing but a rifle and your buddies keeping you alive.

Fucking boring.

But I'm no killer, just a guy who spent a few months in a civil war, and met a lot of people who met the Hemingway quote:

"Those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it never care for anything else thereafter."
by sandspar | 2025-04-18 04:19:44+00:00
Huh? Rome had career soldiers. Don't quote me on the numbers, but a Roman soldier might see 2-5 major battles and dozens of dustups and minor skirmishes. They served for 25 years. Overall death rate was 25-40% but most of that was due to disease or accidents - due to spending 25 years walking around in the woods - not combat. And European medieval wars were fought by part-time soldiers whose main job was making money for their lord. If "few" people survived ancient military campaigns, why would medieval lords fight wars at all? Surely fighting a war isn't worthwhile if at the end of it you have merely a "few" employees left.
by wyclif | 2025-04-18 04:20:02+00:00
Maybe I'm just out of touch because I haven't done taxes by hand for years, but 10 to 15 hours? After I read your first sentence, I seriously expected you to say 2-3 hours.

I don't doubt that it really takes that long for you. I just think it's ridiculous that anyone should spend that amount of time on something that should be a lot more simple, streamlined, and efficient.
by bpodgursky | 2025-04-18 04:20:37+00:00
No, actually the person asserting that a thing exists has the burden of proof.

You can demonstrate that the military has fighter jets better than civilians. Easy. You have no evidence at all that the military has super advanced AI systems consumers don't have. And in fact all anecdotal evidence for the past 3 years is that OSINT is as good or better than the DoD capabilities for photo analysis.
by roenxi | 2025-04-18 04:21:22+00:00
I mean sure. You're asserting a bunch of mitigating circumstances. The point of a trial is (its in the name) to test the evidence to see if it justifies a response. That step got skipped, so we can't really say if those mitigating circumstances are a good enough justification under the law.

If that is your standard then under what conditions is the US president going to be prosecuted for a crime? He or she will always claim there are mitigating circumstances and/or that they think their actions were legal. Nobody is going to stand up and say "oh gee, I've just done something clearly criminal!".

I suppose I'll put my challenge one more time just to be clear - if you feel the US executive unilaterally assassinating a US citizen without even any particular accusation of a crime is clearly legal, what conditions do you anticipate where the US president would be charged with a crime? While acting in an official capacity? The Trump decision codified it but the standard has been set for decades if not centuries - unless Congress gets involved there isn't going to be a prosecution.
by xmprt | 2025-04-18 04:21:34+00:00
The letter of the law is the same for rich and poor people but the implications are very different. Neither rich nor poor people can steal or sleep under a bridge but rich people have money and homes so those laws essentially don't apply to them.

Likewise, tax laws are the same for rich and poor people but rich people can take advantage of more loopholes and ways to structure their income to make their effective tax rate much lower. Even just owning a house gives you access to a pretty big tax "loophole" in the ability to deduct interest on your mortgage.

The problem isn't that people are taking advantage of loopholes but rather that the loopholes were created and still exist.
by gblargg | 2025-04-18 04:23:25+00:00
Free tax programs are what allow taxes to become so complex that you need a program (or paid CPA) to help fill them out. I refuse to have to get a program to fill them out.

A big benefit of filling out yourself is knowing how to minimize the tax burden. Using a program or CPA you never really understand how tax is calculated and the tax consequences of various financial choices you make throughout the year.
by thephyber | 2025-04-18 04:23:42+00:00
HomeDepot is one of the few warranty retailers. The “Special Buy of the Day” is updated a few minutes after midnight and usually has power tools about 10% of the days or the year. Right now HD is running their “Black Friday of Spring”. Some of the best deals for hand tools are in-store clearance, so you just have to be in the store and find it (SlickDeals will try to announce those, but inventory for those are store-specific).

Sadly one of the best ways to get cheap Milwaukee M18 tools is the “hackable” sales from Home Depot: when 2 SKUs bought together makes them both cheaper, but if you buy them online and have the 2 SKUs sent to different HomeDepo stores, you can cancel one of the SKUs later and the non-cancelled one is deeply discounted. It’s probably a violation of ToS, but customer service reps allow it and support it, so maybe it’s not actually a violation… ? It feels like corporate may eventually ban users who abuse that and cost more money than they are worth.

Milwaukee doesn’t sell via Amazon or eBay and there are notoriously good Chinese clones on those sites.

I did get 3 decent Milwaukee (mostly M18) deals on Woot.com, but you have to jump on those quickly.

There is a great website that does good price history + price comparison between HomeDepo, Lowe’s, and WalMart but I can’t find the link. If anyone has it, please share.
by singron | 2025-04-18 04:23:53+00:00
I'm not OP, but if you are a reasonably high-earning professional common on this site, you trigger a ton of stuff. I used to take about that long to do mine, although I've gotten much faster. In a normal year, I typically file forms 1040, Schedule A, Schedule B, Schedule D, Schedule 2, 6251, 8606, 8949, 8959, 8960, 8995 + state versions of some of those. I'm also married, so I calculate all permutations of joint/separate with itemized/non-itemized, which also requires you to actually figure your taxes instead of leaving it blank and letting the IRS do it.

It gets really complicated very quickly, but if you are single, have less income, and it's only from wages, it's much simpler.
by atonse | 2025-04-18 04:23:56+00:00
I’ve been ruminating on what’s a good tech interview methodology since mine is good at finding junior programmers but not senior ones.

But what if we did a 2-3 hour pair programming session where we fix bugs in an open source project?

I think it would cover hard skills (actual coding), soft skills (git, reading and writing PRs) and address the “I don’t want to do free work for a company under the guise of an interview”

And so what if we use AI? Realistically, that’s how coding will be done anyway.

Thoughts? Has anyone tried this?
by tstrimple | 2025-04-18 04:27:03+00:00
I’ve found they excel in different areas. For wood working, dewalt is the clear winner. They have some of the best most cost effective major woodworking tool like planers and table saws. Milwaukee has an edge on impact drivers and little else. If you mostly work with wood, Dewalt is better. If you need impacts for auto work, Milwaukee edges out dewalt. It’s rarely worth investing in both platforms because the batteries are the most expensive component.
by tomhow | 2025-04-18 04:28:14+00:00
I'd hate for you or others to read the GP comment and for your perception of HN to be altered, without any further detail or nuance to be presented for consideration.

Gumroad is not a YC company and its founder has no influence over HN or YC. Joe, whilst being one of the most successful, is still just one YC-backed founder out of more than 10,000, and doesn't represent YC. Paul Graham, YC's co-founder (who, whilst retired, is still actively involved and is very influential at YC) heavily criticises the current U.S. administration almost every day on Twitter. The other figures named in the GP comment have no involvement or influence on YC, and indeed some have had very hostile disputes with YC partners and notable founders in the past.

This is not to claim that we moderators are perfectly impervious to every influence and incentive at every moment. Awareness of our own potential to be biased and influenced is essential to being able to do this job effectively.

I just think it's important to point out that things are not nearly as simple as the GP comment purports.
by smcameron | 2025-04-18 04:28:29+00:00
The shock when you opened up the Armatron expecting a series of electronically controlled motors and found out it contained instead only a single motor that ran continuously and an incredibly ingenious and entirely mechanical train of linkages and gears to implement shoulder (rotating and bending), elbow, wrist (rotating and bending), and gripper, with no electronics at all is almost indescribable. It was simultaneously somehow slightly disappointing (I was hoping to hijack the imagined electronics to modify the thing to be computer controlled) and also just astonishing that such a thing could be designed. You expected electronics but instead got something from the mind of a modern day Da Vinci.
by avalys | 2025-04-18 04:28:34+00:00
If I am thinking about how to express a complex idea in writing or speech, I’ll certainly have an “internal monologue.”

But if I’m just thinking about something myself, my thoughts just exist as abstract thoughts that aren’t tied to language. My brain is constantly thinking, but I’m not thinking in English!

I could express the same sort of disbelief you did - I can’t imagine how slow and inefficient it must be to have to do all your thinking in terms of words as opposed just operating on the underlying ideas directly.
by ModernMech | 2025-04-18 04:28:50+00:00
> Even as a human programmer I don't actually understand your description of the problem well enough to be confident I could correctly guess your intent.

Yeah, you understand what I meant. The code Gemini gave you implements the behavior, and the AI I used gave me pretty much the same thing. There's a problem with the algorithm tho -- if there's a heading too close to the bottom of the page it will never highlight. The page doesn't exhibit the bug because it provides enough padding at the bottom.

But my point wasn't that it couldn't one-shot the code; my point was that I couldn't interrogate it into giving me code that behaved as I wanted. It seemed too anchored to the solution it had provided me, where it said it was offering fixes that didn't do anything, and when I pointed that out it apologized and proceeded to lie about fixing the code again. It appeared to be an infinite loop.

I think what's happened here is the opposite of what you suggest; this is a very common tutorial problem, you can find solutions of the variety you showed me all over the internet, and that's essentially what Gemini gave you. But being tutorial code, it's very basic and tries not to implement a more robust solution that is needed in production websites. When I asked AI for that extra robustness, it didn't want to stray too far from the template, and the bug persisted.

Maybe you can coax it into getting a better result? I want to understand how.