MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by coldpie | 2025-04-14 14:09:18+00:00
Towards the end of this article, the author recommends and links to another article about doing your own taxes[1]. I think this is a good suggestion. I've been doing my own taxes for years. In my experience, it is about the same level of effort as using the tax software. Instead of typing your numbers into tax software, you type the same numbers directly into the IRS's forms[2] and maybe use a calculator a couple of times. While there are some nooks & crannies that may take some time to figure out the first time you do them, the general approach is always the same: add up your incomes, subtract your deductions, apply tax to the difference, subtract your contributions. Done. Keep that algorithm in mind and it's quite easy to just follow the directions and see how each step is accomplishing each part of the algorithm. The first time you do it yourself, you can compare your final return against what the tax prep software did for you last year to sanity check your results.

If I was running my own business or something, I'd probably hire an accountant, but for individuals who only have some W-2s and 1099s and stuff, it's just an hour or two of simple math and you're done.

[1] Sadly has more AI generated slop at the top, but what're you gonna do. https://www.mikekasberg.com/blog/2024/03/15/i-did-my-own-tax...

[2] https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/free-file-fillable-form...
by acdha | 2025-04-14 14:09:20+00:00
> The trusted and valued employee yesterday can turn on a dime and become malicious when they feel they have been wronged regardless of whether that is independently true.

On the flip side, treating them like a crook seems more likely to inspire that kind of revenge instinct. Most people would understand removing privileged access immediately but giving them a dignified exit seems more likely to prevent problems.
by aetherson | 2025-04-14 14:09:25+00:00
It's not really possible to have nice uncontested stats about this because the definitions of the rounds aren't fully neat, there are potentially generational effects, and how you divide up industries isn't fully neat either.

In a typical year, a double-digit number of tech companies IPO (there was a big jump in 2021 and then a crash in 2022/2023, with 2024 seemingly back in the double-digit range). https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-four-decades-of-u-s...

Let's be really clear, though: there's "getting good value for options" and then there's "getting some value for options." It is straightforwardly true that in general big public companies have better comp than pre-IPO companies: the guaranteed value of equity in your Metas or Googles or even lower-tier public companies is generally higher than the expected value of pre-IPO equity, even if you are relatively risk-insensitive.

That is importantly different from "the value of pre-IPO equity is zero," or "it is a one-in-a-million event to get value from pre-IPO equity."
by Frieren | 2025-04-14 14:09:54+00:00
> The government should make all this easier. The US is one of the only countries in the world where people have to report their own income to the government every year (and a big reason for that is the companies like TurboTax that make so much money from it). In almost all cases, the government already knows how much tax you owe before you tell them anything. If fixing this was a priority for our politicians, none of us would have to file taxes ever again!

The conclusion makes a lot of sense. So many people wasting so much time is extremely expensive for the USA. And all of that waste is created because a couple of corporations bribe politicians to make public services worse. (And probably because the goverment can say that they "saved" money by not spending what is required to make it less wasteful).
by throwaway519 | 2025-04-14 14:10:15+00:00
Pretty flawed also really.

Basically, anyone that paints knows that the more colours are mixed, the more they tend to brown. Yet because of that misunderstanding in the 1960s in Caltech, in CS more colors = white.

Crazy stuff. A great example of technical debt in systems design where we have all this jazz like sRGB, HSL, HSV, etc, trying to reset that basic mistake in physics from 60 years ago.
by comrade1234 | 2025-04-14 14:10:17+00:00
In the past I’ve been happy with the irs. One year I had to sell a domain to Sony because they trademarked it and so I could no longer use it for my initial purpose. I got a decent amount of money and included it as income. A few years later I got a letter from the irs saying it should have been classified in some other manner and here is your refund.

But lately they’ve been terrible. With every correspondence i send I get a letter months later saying they got my letter/form/etc but haven’t had time to review it yet. This goes on for over a year before it’s resolved. They’re sitting on lots of refunds for me…
by shadowgovt | 2025-04-14 14:10:41+00:00
I worked at a company with a US division and a German division.

It was stark, the difference in process between the two countries. Leadership was openly complaining about how they couldn't close out shuttering the company because it was going to take six months to handle legal compliance in Germany.

This was during an all-hands, and one delightfully brave soul who knew it didn't matter much what he said since we were all exiting anyway commented in the public channel "Because of those laws, the American employees also get a six-month heads up instead of a locked door when they drive in in the morning, so today, we're all very grateful to Germany and our German peers."
by pc86 | 2025-04-14 14:10:56+00:00
The Venn diagram of people who are sophisticated enough to make these kinds of investments with better odds than gambling and people for whom $10k is hard to scrape together is indistinguishable from two circles. I'm sure there are some in the intersection but it's such a small piece of the pie we can effectively call it zero.

If you want to gamble that's your right I'm sure there is a roulette table somewhere near you. But the social harm caused by allowing dentists and grandmothers to invest in seed stage startups greatly outweighs any social good caused by letting that near-zero overlap get rich a little easier.
by grayhatter | 2025-04-14 14:11:16+00:00
> The use of @fieldParentPtr here [...]

the *hypothetical* use here...

This simple example as written is actually correct, and not actually unchecked illegal behavior. But this is just a bit of pedantry, because it would be unchecked illegal if you use this in a more complicated example.

I mention it because it's important to note, it can be done correctly, as you obviously just did it correctly, by accident. That said, I still agree, there're no guardrails on this pattern.
by duxup | 2025-04-14 14:11:27+00:00
I think there's more nuance than that to it. I've made mistakes on my taxes, not been charged with a crime.

Small oops mistakes, I've never heard of someone being charged criminally.

BIG "yeah that was intentional" kinda obvious under-reporting of income, that turns into charges at times.

I actually had a big misunderstanding in terms of amounts once where the IRS thought I cashed out a large 401k. They simply sent me a letter and we mailed back and forth and I showed them that in fact I didn't cash it out and it just moved and it was all good.
by pessimizer | 2025-04-14 14:11:42+00:00
Liberals' trust in authority figures has soared since 2016. It's not just doctors, but also the FBI, CIA, and the Pentagon. Anything that seems critical of Trump, even in a symbolic way, is trusted.

I think incidences of injustices and abuse of trust from institutions actually strengthens movement liberal support of them. I think they see corrupt institutions as the most vulnerable to Trump attacks, and therefore the most in need of defense.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-04-14 14:11:46+00:00
This is true, but progress is being made.

https://directfile.irs.gov/ is the IRS' direct file service, for those interested. It is supported in concert with 25 states from a tax filing perspective, and is free. From their email newsletter, improvements are rolling out month by month (continual expansion of tax scenarios supported).

https://www.irs.gov/filing/irs-direct-file-for-free
by xenospn | 2025-04-14 14:11:59+00:00
I’m exactly in your target market. Some feedback:

1. The UI is not very usable on mobile. The date selector is not intuitive and it’s not clear if the budget is per night or overall.

2. What do you mean what kind of traveler am I? This is for a digital nomad, I’m going to be mostly working. None of the options that you showed made any sense. Also, why would I need to choose all of these before showing me the options? Just show them on the map and color code them according to the traveler type, if that is so important.

I went through like 3 screens and then gave up. Didn’t get a listing.
by coldpie | 2025-04-14 14:12:12+00:00
You do not go to prison. This is a lie the tax prep lobby wants you to perpetuate. The IRS sends you a letter letting you know what you did wrong. If you agree, you either pay them the difference or cash the check they sent you. If you disagree, you file a dispute and there's a whole system for handling that.

Yes, it's stupid that we do it this way, but there's no need to propagate the tax prep lobby's fear mongering.
by vunderba | 2025-04-14 14:12:21+00:00
I'm not dismissing LLMs, but there's a reason that the current crop of LLMs aren't writing hit scripts for TV shows, books, etc. The suggestion to use a "magical effect" is the equivalent of asking an LLM, "How can I break into this password protected computer?", and it responds, "You should use an exploit.".
by ravenstine | 2025-04-14 14:12:28+00:00
That, too, has been a factor of my thinking as of late. There was a time where I would have left a job (or manager) if I didn't like it that much or if I just had something I wanted to do where the job got in the way of it. I've quit my job to work on an app, and another time I quit both because I hated the job and so I could work on a hardware-based project. I knew I could just get a job again when I need one, and luckily I did both times. Today, I wouldn't do that... or at least not unless the level of intellectual pain caused by a job were just that severe. Not only had the software industry desperately needed an adjustment for quite some time, but the job market is kinda bad all-around, and I do think that many are in denial about how AI will probably suck up a lot of the programmer jobs that subgeniuses such as myself are capable of. My current manager isn't that bad but, if they were as bad as the worst manager I've had, I would just maintain the mindset of coasting and not letting the stupidity get to me.
by larodi | 2025-04-14 14:12:41+00:00
I really dont' care about the names, but given this massive valuation and the value of asset from security perspective, I can see some similarities. Of course 1.2 bn in 2013 is not 36bn in 2025... but still seems (to me at least) a massive over-valuation if you consider the workforce size, or the fact this company sells nothing (explicitly at least), but only collects data.

So I guess this data was either super useful, or it was a way to take some money out from the corpo in a very convenient way. But I can tell you there are hundreds of map companies which crowdsource one way or another, and dozens if not more navigation companies, and none was similarly valued in 2013.

MapBox is valued at 1.2b in 2023, though it's much more influential than WAZ for the whole GIS market (which is 0.8 in 2013 money perhaps). Carto is valued at roughly $350m, TomTom, a market leader is at $500m iin 2025, so you tell my how Waze is 1.2bn at time of acquisition in 2013, having had zero technical or other innovative contribution for the geomatics or gis or web cartography? It was created to avoid road closures in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv?

I mean - let's put this in perspective for a moment, and somebody tell me why was Waze priced at 1.2bn if not for its founders and its very useful crowdsourced data.
by WaitWaitWha | 2025-04-14 14:12:42+00:00
Most nations I lived in, I got a bill or refund for taxes. In general it is "here is your bill/refund. If you disagree you have to prove you are right and we are wrong" - the government-prepared tax return model.

It is not this "we know how much you supposed to pay, but you tell us first, then we will charge you interest and penalty if you guess wrong, and you have to prove you are right and we are wrong" - the self-assessment model.

The government-prepared tax return model does work well for most simple returns. As soon as it gets a bit more complex it becomes an issue. there is also a concern with separation of duties, missing deductions, and the fight to get correction remains. Finally, government math is about as safe as bathing with piranhas with a bloody nose.

Maybe a hybrid solution?
by pdimitar | 2025-04-14 14:13:12+00:00
Nope. Neovim. And even there some of the "distros" got on my nerves. I guess at one point I'll just learn Neovim's API and make my own blend like everyone else.

NOT looking forward to it. But I suppose there's no other way.

I still view Neovim as a huge improvement over Emacs though.
by Gerardo1 | 2025-04-14 14:13:17+00:00
Only if you don't examine that proposition at all.

You still have to review AI generated code, and with a higher level of attention than you do most code reviews for your peer developers. That requires someone who understands programming, software design, etc.

You still have to test the code. Even if AI generates perfect code, you still need some kind of QA shop.

Basically you're paying for the same people to do similar work to what they do now, but now you also paying for an enterprise license to your LLM provider of choice.
by solardev | 2025-04-14 14:13:21+00:00
That's fascinating. You should do a writeup about it!

I had thought (perhaps incorrectly? it's not something I've spent a lot of time pondering) that a stateful connection like this is fragile in the real world compared to HTTP because it requires some sort of manual reconnection to the server on network changes (like if you're on a phone in a train or in a car), and that it would require both the server and app itself to be aware of what is dynamic realtime data, what is cacheable, what is stale, etc. Like kinda related to your other statement about state... doesn't this mean you're sharing and syncing state across both the server and the client?

Competitive video games operating over UDP are the closest everyday analogy I can think of, where the server handles most state (and is the ultimate source of truth) but the client optimistically approximates some stuff (like player movement and aiming), which usually works fine but can lead to rubber-banding issues and such if some packets are missed. But most gaming happens between one server and just a small handful of clients (maybe 100 or 200 at most?).

In a web app, would the same sort of setup lead to UI jank, like optimistic updates often flicking and back and forth, etc.? I suppose that's not inherent to either HTTP or websockets, though, just depends on how it's coded and how resilient it is to network glitches.

And how would this scale... you can't easily CDN a websockets app, right, or use serverless to handle writes? You'd have to have a persistent stateful backend of some sort?

One of the things I like about the usual way we do HTTP is that it can batch a bunch of updates into a single call and send that as one single atomic request that succeeds or fails in its entirety (vs an ongoing stream), and it doesn't really matter if that request was one second or one minute after the previous one as long as the server still knows the session it was a part of. Like on both the client and the server, the state could be "eventually" consistent as opposed to requiring a stable, real-time sync between the two?

Not disagreeing with you per se (hope it didn't sound that way), just thinking out loud and wondering how the details play out in a setup like this. I'm definitely intrigued!
by HenryBemis | 2025-04-14 14:13:26+00:00
> I really was just a fuckin cog in a mega corp.

Sorry to hear. Yups you are/were/will be. It happened before. It will happen again. Perhaps not to you, but to me, him (pointing left), her (pointing right).

Save as much as you can. Invest as much as you can. "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong."

I don't seem to sound like an asshole. For the past couple of decades "your services are no longer required - please return your laptop" happens on a monthly basis. If you follow the news (and I believe all of us here do), every now and then we read about Company XYZ laying off 3000. Company ABC laying off 5000. So, it's just a roulette and it has to do where the ball will sit. It's not personal (in 99.9% of the cases).

I had the 'pleasure' a few years back to work for a global bank and I was asked on a quarterly basis to give names of who will be gone on the next round(s). Nothing personal. Simple arithmetic.

So.. save, invest, keep emergency fund(s), and you will be ok.
by quantadev | 2025-04-14 14:13:27+00:00
I agree. Saving web-links is a solved problem. Saving the CONTENT afaik is not solved and I've wanted a solution for YEARS, as well as the rest of humanity has needed this (including those who don't even know they need it, haha!).

Closest thing would be to "print" to PDF but that always creates a trainwreck in the PDF and is never good enough for me. Looking forward to trying Omnom if it's open source.
by evilduck | 2025-04-14 14:13:29+00:00
High or rising TIOBE ranking might as well be viewed as a warning sign, like “why are people struggling with this language so much?”

Especially with AI tools integrated into IDEs and able to usually get you over small hiccups with syntax or explaining a language concept interactively and with RAG on the language and framework docs, personally searching through the SEO slop is increasingly a waste of time.
by b450 | 2025-04-14 14:13:49+00:00
The authors here are claiming, as your quote states, that biological evolution is just one instance of a more general phenomenon. I'm not sure that's contrary to the views you're expressing. You wrote:

> The expectation that life is somehow special is wrong. There is, as far as we can see, no difference in the quarks in a dog and those in a rock

But the authors' examples do include the "speciation" of minerals! As I read it, the authors describe:

- some initial set of physical states (organisms, minerals, whatever)

- these states create conditions for new states to emerge, which in turn open up new possibilities or "phase spaces", and so on

- these new phase spaces produce new ad hoc "functions", which are (inevitably, with time and the flow of energy) searched and acted upon by selective processes, driving this increase of "functional information".

I don't think it's saying that living things are more complex or information dense per se, but rather, that this cycle of search, selection, and bootstrapping of new functions is a law-like generality that can be observed outside of living systems.

I'm not endorsing this view! There do seem to be clear problems with it as a testable scientific hypothesis. But to my naive ear, all of this seems to play rather nicely with this fundamentally statistical (vs deterministic) picture of reality that Prigogine described, with the "arrow of time" manifesting not just in thermodynamics and these irreversible processes, but also in this diversification of functions.
by shadowgovt | 2025-04-14 14:14:09+00:00
So the key thing here is that this didn't used to be how things were at Google.

People outside the ecosystem disbelieve, but I had the mixed privilege of watching the company evolve from a spicy startup to a megacorp. There isn't one point in time you can put your finger on when it shifted, but the shift happened. And for Googlers who'd been there forever, they were legitimately startled to learn that all their years of work hadn't made them insiders as the lines were drawn and management consolidated into something more approximating a traditional corporation.

If there's a lesson here, I think it's that there is a difference between a company like old Google and a company like new Google, but if you only want to work at old Google, you have to pay very close attention to the signs that things are changing around you. Capitalism, to be certain, incentivizes drift in that direction, from small outfit where everyone knows everyone to 100-thousand-person megafirm with concerns about its tax obligations to Ireland.
by judge2020 | 2025-04-14 14:14:10+00:00
It hardly ever raises to the level of crime.

The issue is that the IRS has 7 years to audit a tax return, and since taxes are due at the time you receive the income, the interest is backdated if you happen to underpay taxes and it compounds. So if they audited your 2019 return today and you underpaid $1k, you’d owe $1333 today with compound interest over those 6 years.
by adrian_b | 2025-04-14 14:14:49+00:00
Sentences like this, i.e. "everything turns more complex", must be formulated much more precisely in order to become true.

The article talks a lot about biological evolution, but in that case the only claim that is likely to be true is that the complexity of the entire biosphere increases continuously, unless a catastrophe resets the biosphere to a lower complexity.

If you look only at a small part of the biosphere, like one species of living beings, it is extremely frequent to see that it evolves to become simpler, not more complex, because a simpler structure is usually optimal for constant environmental conditions, the more complex structures are mainly beneficial for avoiding extinction when the environmental conditions change.
by bluGill | 2025-04-14 14:14:50+00:00
I like Python of short scripts. Anything over 100 lines and bash is painful. Python works great up to about 50,000 lines of code. Anything larger than that and I need a strongly typed language. A larger number of programs/services/scripts can be done in less than 50,000 lines of code and python is easier than getting those type details right, but as you get bigger than that the effort of getting type details correct becomes well worth it.

The lines of code numbers above are somewhat arbitrary and not a hard block. Instead their are a continuum, the more lines of code you have the harder code is to maintain. Languages offer various things that make it easier to maintain long programs, but they just help, 10k lines of python will always be easier than 10 million lines of Java.
by smueller1234 | 2025-04-14 14:14:54+00:00
Google's internal systems have been written against the Colossus semantics for many, many years and thus benefit from it's upsides (performance, cost efficiency, reliability, strong isolation for a multi tenant system, ability to scale byte and IO usage fairly independently, tremendously good abstraction against and automation of underlying physical maintenance, etc) while not really having too much of an issue with any of the conscious trade-offs (like no random writes).

On the other hand, if you've been building your applications against expectations of different semantics (like POSIX), retrofitting this into your existing application is really hard, and potentially awkward. This is (IMO) why there hasn't been an overtly Colossus based Google Cloud offering previously. (Though it's well publicized that both Persistent Disk and GCS use Colossus in their implementation.)

One of the reasons why it would be extremely hard to just set up or build CFS elsewhere or on a different abstraction level is that while it may look quite achievable to implement the high level architecture, there is vast complexity in the practical implementation side. The tremendous user isolation it affords for an MT system, the resilience it has against various types of failures and high throughput planned maintenance, the specialization it and its dependencies have to use specific hardware optimally.

(I work on Google storage part time, I am not a Colossus developer.)