MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by redfern314 | 2025-04-18 03:12:47+00:00
Yes, one might argue it's a little misleading, but it comes across as significantly more genuine and less scammy than TurboTax. The federal filing is completely free, no matter which forms you have, and you just pay $15 per state. They also have the standard support upsells, but they don't push them crazy hard (I think it's one prompt between the federal and state sections).

I've used them for the past several years, never had any issues. Paid for audit defense one year when my return was especially complex (luckily haven't needed it yet).
by phil21 | 2025-04-18 03:13:48+00:00
Home Depot is usually pretty good. Bundles are available fairly commonly as starter packs if you need to start from nothing. The drill/impact kit is likely where I'd begin since both of those (gen3) are exceptional in my opinion.

Where it gets fun are the "buy a battery pack and get a tool free" deals. I had a bunch of text typing this out, but the stickied Reddit post covers it better[1]. You can typically get the tool you want for 40-60% off when/if it goes on sale using the "Home Depot Hack". Most common tools do at least once a year - the esoteric items are more hit or miss.

I rarely pick up a tool now at full price. Once I know I want one, I simply add it to a list and note when it goes on sale in one of those combo deals. I've also picked up way more batteries than I ever will need due to other sales as well.

The Milwaukee "buy more save more" event also works well if you need what is going on sale at the time.

Reddit /r/milwaukeetool is a good place to check in from time to time for sales. Slickdeals is great for setting up an alert, but the exceptional deals get sold out quickly once it hits that site. There are also Discord groups out there as well if you go deep down the rabbit hole.

Warning: Once you learn about Packout this becomes somewhat of an addiction for certain personalities.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/MilwaukeeTool/comments/1gwhvi9/the_...
by SoftTalker | 2025-04-18 03:13:51+00:00
If you just have W2 income and take the standard deduction, taxes are really quite simple to do on paper. It's a two page form, most of which you leave blank.

If you have self-employment income, business income, capital gains, 401k distributions, HSAs, 529 plans, etc. it can get complicated but at that point TurboTax honestly doesn't help all that much (unless it's gotten a lot better since I last used it). If you get to the point that your taxes are too complicated to do by hand you probably need an accountant anyway.
by skydhash | 2025-04-18 03:14:56+00:00
There are three main subproblems to your questions:

1. Find out what users wants. The answer to that is research and the only book I have is Just Enough Research by Erika Hall. I also found Essentials of Business Research Methods by Joe Hair Jr. et al.

2. Build the thing that the user wants. That's mostly the real of Software Requirements and I have two candidates for you:

- Mastering the Requirements Process: Getting Requirements Right by Suzanne and James Robertson

- Software Requirements by Karl Wiegers and Joy Beatty.

3. Build something that the user likes and that he can use. That's UX and I have three candidates this time:

- Observing the User Experience, 2nd Edition by E. Goodman and M. Kunlavsky

- Understanding Your Users, 2nd Edition by K. Baxter et al.

- The UX Book by R. Hartson and P. S. Pyla

All of those just emphasize having an objective view of what you want to bring to the users and a rational execution strategy. I haven't read all so I can't judge them, but I believe they will give you enough starting points for you to devise your own method.
by schrectacular | 2025-04-18 03:15:11+00:00
Might not be true for all setups, but I find that Plex is a resource hog. Navidrome and Jellyfin are a lot leaner. Plex was using quite a bit of CPU just browsing the library.

Plexamp sounds awful to me, trebly and thin. Googling around I found it was a common complaint.

It DOES handle multichannel audio well, though I don't think it can do Atmos natively.
by flenserboy | 2025-04-18 03:16:49+00:00
here's a guess: text was sharp on an Apple II with a decent monitor. font shapes were good. no matter how good graphics were on the C64 & Ataris, in comparison, text was always blocky & amateur looking. Tandy did better on this front, but it wasn't enough for them. pretty sure this is the same reason why the Amiga & the ST didn't make more inroads — people looked at them alongside the Mac & technical considerations were quickly forgotten. it's funny to me that this hasn't changed all that much — Windows font rendering looks awful to me, & I'll always pick a Mac or Linux box to use instead if there's a choice, just so I don't have to put up with the fonts. this wasn't always the case — the old system character sets used under DOS were pleasant to use.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-04-18 03:17:53+00:00
yeah that was really interesting. But what caught my interest the most was the hybrids. To me it was less about how "hard" it was to switch. But the really more about the horrible downside of when the two syndromes combine.

A big mega corp lobbying the government is in a way, a hybrid. And that is in a nutshell one of the fundamental problems we face in society. Is Donald Trump a hybrid? Donalds business interests are combining with a system that was designed to be honorable (the presidency).
by tempaccount420 | 2025-04-18 03:18:28+00:00
This is so much cheaper than re-prompting each tool use.

I wish this was extended to things like: you could give the model an API endpoint that it can call to execute JS code, and the only requirement is that your API has to respond within 5 seconds (maybe less actually).

I wonder if this is what OpenAI is planning to do in the upcoming API update to support tools in o3.
by vel0city | 2025-04-18 03:18:44+00:00
Their privacy policy directly states they don't sell user data.

https://ttlc.intuit.com/turbotax-support/en-us/help-article/...

But even then, assuming "they'll just sell it anyways", most of that information exists with other orgs anyways that could just as easily just sell it anyways. If I don't trust Intuit, why would I trust ADP or whoever my bank is to not sell my data either?

But sure, I agree, using any third party to file your taxes exposes you to that risk of yet another party potentially leaking/selling data. Once again though, to me that trade off of 14 more hours with my kids versus someone knowing what I paid in mortgage interest last year is pretty OK to me. Data brokers could just glean that same kind of useful information it means through the thousands of other things tracking me anyways.
by alephnerd | 2025-04-18 03:19:23+00:00
> Computers were more fun when they weren't for everyone

Or maybe you were just younger?

It's not like subcultures don't exist anymore - older people just don't know how to enter them. And it'll happen to us eventually as well.

And if we're honest, the democratization of technology was a net positive globally - there have been plenty of negatives like social media but a lot of positives as well like Digital Public Infra.
by tombert | 2025-04-18 03:19:43+00:00
I have the technical skill to handle the math, but there is no way that I'm spending fifteen hours to do my taxes when there's a free-to-low-cost thing readily available that will do a similar or better job in like 45 minutes.

I used CashApp taxes this year, and I liked it. It was actually free and it didn't do any upsell in the process.
by pmags | 2025-04-18 03:20:02+00:00
Thank you.

Carr is clearly wearing a huge golden Trump pin in the picture posted on his official Twitter/X page.

But I agree that the details from the Snopes discussion suggest there's little evidence of a "mandate" for his cabinet to wear one as per the title of the blog post I linked.

I concede the point that with regard to lapel pins the evidence only points to the lapdog-like obsequiousness of the FCC chair at this time. ;-)
by mediaman | 2025-04-18 03:20:36+00:00
This was solved a hundred years ago.

It's the same problem factories have: they produce a lot of parts, and it's very expensive to put a full operator or more on a machine to do 100% part inspection. And the machines aren't perfect, so we can't just trust that they work.

So starting in the 1920s Walter Shewhart and Edward Deming came up with Statistical Process Control. We accept the quality of the product produced based on the variance we see of samples, and how they measure against upper and lower control limits.

Based on that, we can estimate a "good parts rate" (which later got used in ideas like Six Sigma to describe the probability of bad parts being passed).

The software industry was built on determinism, but now software engineers will need to learn the statistical methods created by engineers who have forever lived in the stochastic world of making physical products.
by rramadass | 2025-04-18 03:20:46+00:00
That is quite the wrong way of looking at it. The vulnerability is in a implementation of SSH and not with the language/runtime itself; And it has already been patched. Erlang is a "managed" language and is quite secure compared to others.

You should definitely "sell" Elixir/Erlang/BEAM based languages to your management for a greenfield project; The opportunity is too good to pass up.

Nevertheless, if you would like to learn how to "harden" your Elixir/Erlang system, see the guidelines from the "Security Working Group" of EEF which i have linked to here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43717633
by sothatsit | 2025-04-18 03:21:16+00:00
2.5 Pro is free, and I'm sure there's a lot of people who have just never tried the best models because they don't want to pay for them. So 2.5 Pro probably blows their socks off.

Whereas, if you've been paying for access to the best models from OpenAI and Anthropic all along, 2.5 Pro doesn't feel like such a drastic step-change. But going from free models to 2.5 Pro is a crazy difference. I also think this is why DeepSeek got so much attention so quickly - because it was free.
by bigyabai | 2025-04-18 03:21:29+00:00
This is not a new phenomenon unfortunately, it's almost impossible to take the IDF's statement in good faith considering their track record: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_journalists_in_the_...

> In 2023, nearly 75% of journalists killed worldwide were Palestinians who had died in Israel’s war in Gaza.

> Scholars have estimated 80% of Palestinians killed are civilians. A study by OHCHR, that verified fatalities from three independent sources, found that 70% of the Palestinian killed in residential buildings or similar housing were women and children.
by crdrost | 2025-04-18 03:21:52+00:00
So when you've got an interval you usually mean two sounds that are separated in time. So like the iconic Jaws Melody dun-dan-dun-dan-dun-dan, those notes are separated by an interval that could be called one semitone, 100 cents, or a minor second, depending on who is talking.

Or in “Oh when the Saints Go Marching In,” the ‘Oh-when’ interval is two tones (four semitones), 400¢, or a major third, the ‘when-the’ interval is another minor second, and the ‘the-Saints’ interval is one tone or a major second. Adding those up we find out that “oh-Saints,” if you just omit the other words, is 700¢ or a “perfect fifth”, so “saints-Go” is a descending perfect fifth, -700¢.

Now you can play all four notes at the same time and you would still refer to these distances between the notes as intervals, but nobody is likely to describe this sound as a bunch of intervals. It is a “I(add 4) chord” in that context and the +100¢ interval between the major third and the perfect fourth is what gives it its spiciness.

So then you have to clarify whether you mean that we are playing one note first and then two notes together second, or are we playing all three notes at the same time, or are we playing all three notes separately.

If it's one and then two, or two then one, the higher note of the dyad will sound like the melody usually, and you'll reckon the interval between those two. People who have really well trained musical ears, instead hear the shift on the lowest note, but it requires training.

If you mean that all three are separated by time, then it's a melody. In this case these first four notes of “Oh When the Saints Go Marching In” would perhaps be described maybe as an arpeggiated major chord with a passing tone, same as I said earlier as “I(add 4).” I'm not actually 100% sure if that's the right use of the term passing tone or whether passing tones have to lie outside your scale or something.

If the three notes are played at the same time, that's a chord, specifically it's a triad chord. You might talk about the stacked intervals in that chord, a major chord stacks a minor third on a major third, a minor chord stacks a major third on a minor third, stacking major on major is augmented, stacking minor on minor is diminished, and there are suspended chords where you don't play either third, so sus2 stacks a fourth atop a second and sus4 stacks a second atop a fourth. So a lot of those have their own names, and some of those names get weird (like to stack a fourth on a fourth you might say “Csus4/G,” which treats the lowest note G as if it were the highest note but someone decided to drop it down an octave).
by pazimzadeh | 2025-04-18 03:22:54+00:00
Why would that matter? I'm not the one who stated opinions as fact:

> If you can avoid those 5 mistakes, a dishwasher will always way out-perform hand-washing

> Even if you think it's clean by hand, chances are there's far more residual residue and bacteria you can't see that a dishwasher wouldn't have any trouble with.

The inverse statement is just as likely to be true depending on the shape of the dish used, where it's placed in the dish-washer, etc.. You think just because the corners of a weirdly shaped dish doesn't have obvious gunk after coming out of the dishwasher that they are clean? Well, I trust my hand scrubbing method more since I don't have a camera to see where and for how long the water landed in the dishwasher.

You could swab a plate, do a dilution series and count colony forming units but there's no guarantee that the growth conditions of your petri dish will reflect what can grow in your body (i.e. will the spores germinate in your petri dish?)

What is well known is that washing with soap trumps heat (except 120+ degrees celsius), and you don't need to kill bacteria for a surface to be clean (in fact it's better to wash them off than to kill them). The fact that hand-washing is better for scrubbing corners with soap is obvious. Case in point, this burnt/sticky rice leftover on a pot that I stuck in the dishwasher a few hours ago as a test: https://imgur.com/a/wfnxMnZ
by Retric | 2025-04-18 03:23:24+00:00
> Evaluating emotional context would be similar to a chess engine calculating its next move. There's nothing there that implies a conscience, sentience, morals, feelings, suffering or anything 'human'. It's just a necessary intermediate function to achieve its goal

If it’s limited to achieving goals it’s not AGI. Real time personal goal setting based on human equivalent emotions is an “intellectual task.” One of many requirements for AGI therefore is to A understand the world in real time and B emotionally respond to it. Aka AGI would by definition “necessitate having feelings.”

There’s philosophical arguments that there’s something inherently unique about humans here, but without some testable definition you could make the same argument that some arbitrary group of humans don’t have those qualities “gingers have no souls.” Or perhaps “dancing people have no consciousness” which seems like gibberish not because it’s a less defensible argument, but because you haven’t been exposed to it before.
by tombert | 2025-04-18 03:23:28+00:00
I was actually fairly impressed with CashApp taxes. It seemed to work fine, it handled my State and Federal taxes just fine. Granted, I don't think my taxes are terribly complicated, but I think they're comparable to a vast number of users.

CashApp taxes is free and had zero upsell. I don't know what information they are farming out of this and if I did it might end up disturbing me, but at least it's free and was easy to use.
by jasonjayr | 2025-04-18 03:24:38+00:00
If this is to be true, then there needs to be stronger protections against collusion and monopolies, otherwise things will end up in a very bad place.

How do you escape a private business that is (a) big enough to buy up all the competitors, (b) uses IP law to prevent competition, (c) gives it's customers worse service and high prices?
by Terr_ | 2025-04-18 03:25:19+00:00
> trying to get everyone to filter

We never needed everyone to filter, just parents busy lobbying the government to impose crap onto every possible service and website across the entire world.

Instead, they should purchase devices for their kids that have a child-lock and client-side filters. All sites have to do is add an HTTP header loosely characterizing it's content.

1. Most of the dollar costs of making it all happen will be paid by the people who actually need/use the feature.

2. No toxic Orwellian panopticon.

3. Key enforcement falls into a realm non-technical parents can actually observe and act upon: What device is little Timmy holding?

4. Every site in the world will not need a monthly update to handle Elbonia's rite of manhood on the 17th lunar year to make it permitted to see bare ankles. Instead, parents of that region/religion can download their own damn plugin.
by whyenot | 2025-04-18 03:25:51+00:00
It took me 58 minutes to do my not that simple taxes (both state and federal) using Turbo Tax. The cost was about $200. Based on your time estimate, it saved me 1-2 work days of time. That seems like a good bargain to me.

What I don't like with Intuit is the sleazy ways they try to upsell you and to trick you into allowing them to use your financial information for non-tax purposes.
by tmshapland | 2025-04-18 03:26:15+00:00
It's amazing how little it costs to pay off lawmakers. I've seen this before in the first Trump admin where some private weather services paid a fairly small amount (tens of thousands) to get some NWS services shut down. Considering how much Intuit has to gain, they really didn't have to pay much. Great ROI.

"A glance at Intuit’s 2025 first-quarter lobbying disclosures gets at this continued, quarter-century saga. The company shelled out $240,000 to lobby members of Congress on tax-related issues."
by dayvigo | 2025-04-18 03:26:37+00:00
I've noticed the left, right, and center have all become more obsessed than ever these past few years with the idea the state and society aren't doing enough to forcibly protect people from themselves, that preventing potential self-inflicted harm due to a poor or risky decision is worth literally any cost; 1% aggregate harm reduction is now considered preferable to freedom of choice. No amount of risk is ever acceptable, and no one is allowed to perform their own risk calculus because they don't know better. And yes, as you said, abusive parenting is a major issue as well. Hard problems to solve.
by jmward01 | 2025-04-18 03:27:46+00:00
I believe companies should use every inch of leeway in existing laws to do business. It isn't evil, it is rational. However, I believe evil companies are the ones that attempt to change laws to do business. Businesses should not have a voice in law. Intuit is an evil company and they are making the lives of every person in the US worse in order to make a profit.
by mystraline | 2025-04-18 03:27:52+00:00
There was a person who captured a Logitech Starburst V2 packet capture from one of their management machines.

Using a tool called JackIt, demonstrated either sniffing all text from a keyboard, OR injection of an emulated keyboard through the dongle.

IIRC, the mouse was a clone Logitech that was even plugged in to charge.
by econ | 2025-04-18 03:28:30+00:00
I was most impressed by a Google Ad that showed up if you searched for the Dutch tax office. It would only show the name "Tax office" with a free to call phone number under it. Only the hyperlink pointed at a paid number 90 cent per minute.

Depending on how busy it is or how exotic your question one can easily be on hold for an hour or two. Then you get the bill and pay 54 euro per hour.

Google thought this was a great way to make money. The ad ran forever.

Makes you wonder which other phone numbers they highjacked.

Would they provide the same service if I copy some website?
by atrettel | 2025-04-18 03:29:03+00:00
I don't think I'll make a blog post about this, but since you asked I will describe what you have to do briefly. 10 to 15 hours includes everything:

- Downloading all forms and instructions.

- Downloading all 1099s and W-2 statements.

- Scanning any paper 1099 or W-2 forms I receive (rare now, thankfully).

- Filling out a draft of the forms slowly in pencil. This takes the most time. I have sometimes used spreadsheets for this but I find it is quicker to just use a calculator or even the Python REPL.

- Filling out a "hard copy" of the forms and double checking my math. This takes more time than you think if your state don't have fillable forms, but I have sometimes done it by hand very neatly rather than typing it up.

- And finally going to the post office to mail things. I never just put them in my mailbox.

2024 only took 11 hours in total mostly over 2 weekends. And as I have said in other posts here, I don't stress myself out about and take my time. You can probably do it faster if you want to.

The key is to just read the instructions for each form and follow them mindlessly and mechanically. I will admit that it is difficult at first, but you do get used to it, and despite my tax returns getting much more complicated over the years, the number of hours that I take has stayed the same.
by pests | 2025-04-18 03:29:31+00:00
The number was given just so we have a sense of scale of the project being talked about. Its not a competition nor are measures being made.

If you wrote a program that is 1,000,000 lines of code you could also write a blog post about your thoughts on "writing 1,000,000 lines of code".

You could also write a program that is 200 lines long and write a blog post about "writing 200 lines of code".

One is not better than the others, you are just informing your audience of the topic under discussion.