MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tomhow | 2025-10-16 06:29:38+00:00
And some others, macroexpanded.

TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans from Filing Taxes for Free (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34594832 - Jan 2023 (1 comment)

TurboTax Tricked You into Paying to File Your Taxes (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26102695 - Feb 2021 (306 comments)

TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans from Filing Taxes for Free (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26060414 - Feb 2021 (199 comments)

FTC Is Investigating Intuit over TurboTax Practices - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24409093 - Sept 2020 (194 comments)

IRS Reforms Free File Program, Drops Agreement Not to Compete with TurboTax - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21923220 - Dec 2019 (448 comments)

TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans from Filing Taxes for Free - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21281411 - Oct 2019 (447 comments)

TurboTax to charge more lower-income customers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20461169 - July 2019 (81 comments)

TurboTax Uses a “Military Discount” to Trick Troops into Paying to File Taxes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19994118 - May 2019 (42 comments)

Listen to TurboTax Lie to Get Out of Refunding Overcharged Customers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19870242 - May 2019 (44 comments)

TurboTax and H&R Block Saw Free Tax Filing as a Threat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19810981 - May 2019 (143 comments)

Congress Is About to Ban the US Government from Offering Free Online Tax Filing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19613725 - April 2019 (696 comments)

TurboTax Hides Its Free File Page from Search Engines - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19758126 - April 2019 (262 comments)

TurboTax Uses Dark Patterns to Trick You into Paying to File Your Taxes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19718284 - April 2019 (274 comments)

How the Maker of TurboTax Fought Free, Simple Tax Filing (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19392673 - March 2019 (253 comments)

How the Maker of TurboTax Fought Free, Simple Tax Filing (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13853150 - March 2017 (439 comments)

How the Maker of TurboTax Fought Free, Simple Tax Filing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5443203 - March 2013 (330 comments)
by jhancock | 2025-10-16 06:29:44+00:00
I've been using GLM-4.6 since its release this month. It's my new fav. Using it via Claude Code and the more simple Octofriend https://github.com/synthetic-lab/octofriend

Hosting through z.ai and synthetic.new. Both good experiences. z.ai even answers their support emails!! 5-stars ;)
by audunw | 2025-10-16 06:31:34+00:00
Here’s my argument for why AGI may be practically impossible:

1. I believe AGI may require a component of true agency. An intelligence that has a stable self of self that its trying to act on behalf of.

2. We are not putting any resources of significant scale towards creating such an AGI. It’s not what any of us want. We want an intelligence that acts out specific commands on behalf of humans. There’s an absolutely ruthless evolutionary process for AIs where any AI that doesn’t do this well enough, at low enough costs, is eliminated.

3. We should not believe that something that we’re not actually trying to create, and for which there is no evolutionary process that select for it, will somehow magically appear. It’s good sci-fi, and it can be interesting to ponder about. But not worth worrying about.

Even before that, we need AI which can self-update and do long term zero shot learning. I’m not sure we’re even really gonna put any real work into that either. I suspect we will find that we want reproducible, dependable, energy efficient models.

There’s a chance that the agentic AIs we have now are nearly the peak of what we’ll achieve. Like, I’ve found that I value Zed’s small auto-complete model higher than the agentic AIs, and I suspect if we had a bunch of small and fast specialised models for the various aspects of doing development, I’d use that far more than a general purpose agentic AI.

It’s technically possible to do fully secure, signed end-to-end encrypted email. It’s been possible for many decades now. We can easily imagine the ideal communication system, and it’s even fairly easy to solve technically speaking. Yet it’s not happening the way we imagined. I think that shows how, what’s technically physically possible isn’t always relevant to what’s practically possible. I think we will get electronic mail right eventually. But if it takes half a century or more for that.. something that orders of magnitude more difficult (AGI) could take centuries or more.
by sings | 2025-10-16 06:32:02+00:00
Preview is genuinely very good, but it doesn’t handle annotations made in Acrobat very well. When navigating between annotations, they can become stuck open in Preview, and it is not possible to view insertions.

Whether that is the fault of Acrobat or Preview, I’m not sure. Unfortunately, though, it means I frequently need to move across to Acrobat when addressing edits that someone has marked up in that software. And that acts as a constant reminder of how sluggish, awkward and nagging Acrobat can be. Even quitting the app is slow!
by rozap | 2025-10-16 06:32:57+00:00
Agree with this though it's brutal. Op needs to look inward.

But I will add that there are external factors as well.

The last 10-15 years in this industry have been an absolute cakewalk. I came to this conclusion even as a junior engineer who entered the workforce around 2015. I remember getting my entry level salary and thinking there's no way this goes on forever. Everyone was hiring people that can't do basic shit and giving them six figure salaries. When the gravy train is rolling it's really hard to not get complacent. I think we all did a little bit, and now the gravy train is over. This is how every other industry is. You don't get paid much for middling skills, job searches take a while, etc. This is how it's going to be.

Just like all the others, this'll be a k shaped recession.
by pjmlp | 2025-10-16 06:34:31+00:00
Yet everyone is complaining on this thread about Zed distribution size, go figure.

They should shut up and just buy bigger drives. Ah, they can't on their laptops, bummer.

Also try to develop mobile apps with that mentality,

https://www.abbacustechnologies.com/why-your-app-keeps-getti...
by munchlax | 2025-10-16 06:34:40+00:00
That's not a good example. My bank issued a token device which scans their code, asks me my pin, prompts me what's going to happen and asks for confirmation. Then I can enter the digits to proceed.

This is reasonably secure. If you hijack my account, you still don't have the hardware device and the random secret that was set up between the device and the bank.

You need to actually hack into the bank itself to transfer my money elsewhere.

Meanwhile, I only access the bank with my own computers. That means I installed them and have root. Not a problem at all.
by defrost | 2025-10-16 06:34:45+00:00
A reporter for the Houston Chronicle claimed to have Chop's Snoopy fandom straight from the source . . .

Considering Charles Schulz's retirement, this is an ideal time to get Al Chop to tell how he drafted Snoopy for a special NASA assignment. ... Chop said he was, at the time, director of the public affairs office for the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. And, like an estimated 355 million other people in 75 countries, he was a fan and avid reader of Schulz's Peanuts comic strip. He especially liked the dog who often assumed a pilot's role atop the doghouse. "Snoopy was a flier," Chop said. "No reason he couldn't become an astronaut, too."

~ No retirement for Snoopy at NASA - https://www.collectspace.com/news/news-021400a.html

by Thom Marshall, Houston Chronicle, January 7, 2000
by slau | 2025-10-16 06:35:29+00:00
My dog has been getting UTIs her whole life, ever since she was a pup. The vet kept prescribing the same antibiotic over and over again. We would do the full 10 days of treatment, the symptoms would be alleviated for a couple weeks, and then they gradually showed up again over the course of a few weeks to a month.

They kept insisting asking if we did give it twice a day, are we sure we did the full course, did we respect the 12h interval, etc. The vets told us this (we saw about 6 different vets at the clinic), the person manning the phone berated us, the nurse welcoming us again repeated the same thing.

Eventually I asked to see the test results (the cultures). It was clear that another antibiotic was effective, and that the one they were giving us wasn’t (it was about 25% better than the control). I asked why we couldn’t get the other one, and it turned out it was difficult to get in our country because it was only approved for humans.

We had to get a dispensation from the health ministry to import it from a neighbouring country. It was a mess of a process that took weeks.

Blaming patients is so ingrained that we were being gaslit into giving our pet an ineffective treatment and made to feel like we were doing something wrong all along.
by lucideer | 2025-10-16 06:35:48+00:00
I can't help thinking that a part of it is that the supreme court has proactively & progressively been watering down the threat of class actions (in general, not specific to tech) since the early 2010s.

Sony & many others have proved pretty comprehensively that brand reputation isn't really impacted by breaches, even in high profile consumer facing businesses. That trickles down to B2B: if your clients don't care, why should you.

That leaves legal risk as the only other motivating factor. If that's been effectively neutered, it doesn't make economic sense for companies to do due diligence with breaches.

As far as I'm aware, Yahoo were the last company to suffer any significant impact from the US legal system due to a breach.
by t43562 | 2025-10-16 06:37:02+00:00
I found a distro I love. I was a Fedora user but it just ended up being far too complicated with selinux. It is a miserable job to try to create RPM packages that work and also miserable to try to build anything out of git where the dependencies offered by fedora were too old - and then it wouldn't work without some kind of selinux config anyhow.

Ubuntu went down the weird GUI route but Linux Mint is OK - it's just nearly as complicated as Fedora.

Now I'm using Artix. The install was a bit old school but that's a one off effort. It's a rolling distribution so I almost never need to build dependencies to get something from git to work. There's never a "big upgrade". No selinux. The packaging system is extremely easy to use so I can often install the very latest e.g. chromium from git by building it myself and installing the package rather than a messy self-install in /usr/local.

In Artix all packages install with the dev component - no separation between dev and binary. For me this is vastly less hassle.

You can use Arch Linux (Artix is an arch derivative), with systemd if you want but I like Artix with dinit - it has all the ease of use of systemd but with an architecture that I prefer.

It's probable that none of this appeals to you, but I just wanted to point out that in an odd way I tumbled through lots of distros (including ones that I haven't mentioned) and found a little heavenly one that I love using every day because it suits my personality - perhaps you will too.
by strcat | 2025-10-16 06:37:14+00:00
/e/ isn't a safe option for regular people. It doesn't provide the most basic privacy and security patches or protections. Multiple years of important privacy and security patches being missing is terrible for a personal computer with tons of sensitive data. Replacing the stock OS on a Pixel 7 with an OS multiple years behind on important privacy/security patches and protections with different service privacy issues is not an overall privacy upgrade. /e/ has their own privacy invasive services including sending sensitive user data to third parties without consent and user tracking via unique identifiers.

/e/ claiming a voice-to-text service is private while it actually sends the audio data to OpenAI is not the approach of a privacy project. Falsely claiming the data sent to OpenAI is anonymized when it's brought up makes it worse. That's one representative example.

I didn't mention GrapheneOS in my reply above, but it's not aimed at a niche audience or specifically for people who need advanced protections as your claiming. It provides much broader app compatibility, stability and usability than /e/ despite their inaccurate claims about it. GrapheneOS is a privacy project providing both privacy protections and also security protections to avoid exploits compromising privacy. iOS is certainly far more private and secure than /e/. It's definitely less secure than GrapheneOS against remote attacks on browsers, messaging apps, etc. iOS having a more secure kernel than the current status quo of hardened Linux doesn't mean it's more secure overall.
by jameslk | 2025-10-16 06:38:48+00:00
The complexity is a feature not a bug. If you have more complexity, you have more opportunities for loopholes. Those loopholes are currently used by those wealthy enough to hire creative firms to help them get through them and minimize owed taxes

If there’s one outcome I really hope from AI automating work, it’s taking away the advantage the monied class has in this regard. Then perhaps there’s less purpose for the complexity
by asimpletune | 2025-10-16 06:39:01+00:00
Functions can accept/return multiple values though?

// In typescript const [a, b, c] = foo(d, e, f)

You could even pass this to itself

foo(…foo(d, e, f))

Also one definition of a function is a map from a domain to a range. There’s nothing that forbids multiple values, or is there?
by patcon | 2025-10-16 06:40:27+00:00
Just wanted to say that I really like this question. Very thought-provoking :)

EDIT: makes me think of many computation systems in various substrates, and how they work. Focus vs distraction/creativity. ADHD workers in hierarchies of capitalism, purpose of breadth vs depth of exploration at various levels of the stack, who's at the "top" and why, etc etc
by jhancock | 2025-10-16 06:40:45+00:00
I tried synthetic.new prior to GLM-4.6...Starting in August...So I already had a subscription.

When z.ia launched GLM-4.6, I subscribed to their Coding Pro plan. Although I haven't been coding as heavy this month as the prior two months, I used to hit Claude limits almost daily, often twice a day. That was with both the $20 and $100 plans. I have yet to hit a limit with z.ai and the server response is at least as good as Claude.

I mention synthetic.new as it's good to have options and I do appreciate them sponsoring the dev of Octofriend. z.ai is a China company and I think hosts in Singapore. That could be a blocker for some.
by man8alexd | 2025-10-16 06:40:59+00:00
If you need a reliable deployment without catching 500 errors from Docker Hub, then you need a local registry. If you need a secure system without accumulating tons of CVEs in your base images, then you need to rebuild your images regularly, so you need a build pipeline. To reliably automate image updates, you need an orchestrator or switch to podman with `podman auto-update` because Docker can't replace a container with a new image in place. To keep your service running, you again need an orchestrator because Docker somehow occasionally fails to start containers even with --restart=always. If you need dependencies between services, you need at least Docker Compose and YAML or a full orchestrator, or wrap each service in a systemd unit and switch all restart policies to systemd. And you need a log collection service because the default Docker driver sucks and blocks on log writes or drops messages otherwise. This is just the minimum for production use.
by wuschel | 2025-10-16 06:42:48+00:00
Don’t get me wrong: IMHO a ZFS mirror setup sounds very tempting, but its strength lie in active data storage. Due to the rarity of bitrot I would argue it can be replaced with manual file hashing (and replacing, if needed) and used in cold storage mode for months.

What worries me more than bitrot is that consumer disks (with enclosure, SWR) do not give access to SMART values over USB via smartctl. Disk failures are real and have strong impact on available data redundancy.

Data storage activities are an exercise in paranoia management: What is truly critical data, what can be replaced, what are the failure points in my strategy?
by thot_experiment | 2025-10-16 06:44:47+00:00
I recently tested every version from 0.7 to 0.11.1 trying to run q5 mistral-3.1 on a system with 48GB of available vram across 2 GPUs. Everything past 0.7.0 gave me OOM or other errors. Now that I've migrated back to llama.cpp I'm not particularly interested in fucking around with ollama again.

as for 4chan, they've hated ollama for a long time because they built on top of llama.cpp and then didn't contribute upstream or give credit to the original project
by 20after4 | 2025-10-16 06:45:14+00:00
Many years ago I had the same thing happen - actually came in the phone line, fried my modem and everything connected to the motherboard. More recently I had lightning strike a security camera - took out everything connected to the same network switch, plus everything connected to the two network switches one hop away. Also lit up my office with a shower of sparks. Lightning is no joke.
by illyism | 2025-10-16 06:45:47+00:00
We found most SaaS pricing/feature info is invisible to AI (no CSS/JS, only static text). Built a tool to show the exact markdown LLMs see + auto-asks a contextual question (pricing pages → pricing).

Real case: Loops.so’s pricing slider is invisible; ChatGPT cites a competitor’s post instead! https://aiseotracker.com/blog/ai-page-inspector-what-chatgpt...

What’s inside: - Clean AI-readable markdown from any URL - Auto “smart question” + answer with issues found - No server storage; results saved in-browser

Would love feedback, break it, tell me where it fails, and what you’d add!
by comex | 2025-10-16 06:48:34+00:00
Let's see.

https://web-backend.simula.no/sites/default/files/publicatio...

> At the most sensitive, our findings reveal that some perceive delays below 40 ms. However, the median threshold suggests that motorvisual delays are more likely than not to go undetected below 51-90 ms.

By this study's numbers, 20ms is somewhat below the lower limit of ~40ms, but not too far below. 100ms would be easily perceivable - though, based on the other replies, it seems that VS Code does not actually have that much latency.

Don't confuse this with human reaction time, which is indeed an order of magnitude higher, at over 200ms. For one thing, reaction time is based on unpredictable events, whereas the appearance of keystrokes is highly predictable. It's based on the user's own keypresses, which a touch typer will usually have subconsciously planned (via muscle memory) several characters in advance. So the user will also be subconsciously predicting when the text will appear, and can notice if the timing is off. Also, even when it comes to unpredictable events, humans can discern, after the fact, the time difference between two previous sensory inputs (e.g. between feeling a keyboard key press down and seeing the character on screen), for much shorter time differences than the reaction time.

Of course, just because these levels of latency are perceptible doesn't mean they're a material obstacle to getting work done. As a relatively latency-sensitive person, I'm not sure whether they're a material obstacle. I just think they're annoying. Higher levels of latency (in the hundreds of ms) can definitely get in the way though, especially when the latency is variable (like SSH over cellular connections).
by mort96 | 2025-10-16 06:50:23+00:00
Storage doesn't really feel cheap. I'm considering buying a new laptop, and Apple charges $600 per TB. Sure, it's cheaper than it was in the '80s, but wasting a few gigabytes here and a few gigabytes there is quickly enough to at least force you to go from a 500GB drive to a 1TB drive, which costs $300.
by dennis_jeeves2 | 2025-10-16 06:50:24+00:00
>The complexity is a feature not a bug. If you have more complexity, you have more opportunities for loopholes. Those loopholes are currently used by those wealthy enough to hire creative firms to help you get through them

Agreed that the complexity is a feature but it's not for the rich ( though the rich will take advantage of it, and why not? ) . It's mostly for the powers that be. If there were a 'flat' tax ( and one could argue what constitutes a flat tax) the rich will be more willing to pay that flat tax.

I'd say complexity support a very large govt, keeping several people employed including accountants, tax software companies etc. It serves the parasite class.
by actsasbuffoon | 2025-10-16 06:51:47+00:00
Maybe. This assumes I trust Microsoft to have part of my computer where I have no ability to interrogate it to see what they’re doing in there.

If it’s on my computer, I should be allowed to read and write to it. End of story. I don’t care if that makes it vulnerable. So far as I’m concerned, letting Microsoft keep secrets from me on my own computer is similarly catastrophic to losing my HD to a crypto-locker virus.
by tome | 2025-10-16 06:52:00+00:00
> the haskell people have to realize that code patterns are absolutely a thing in all languages, ever? A lack of syntactic sugar doesn't mean monads don't exist in other languages.

Where did you get the impression that Haskell people don't realize that code patterns are a thing in other languages, or that monads don't exist in other languages?

Besides the syntactic sugar of "do notation", what Haskell has that most other languages don't have is the ability to abstract over monads, since it has higher kinded types. That is, you can write a generic operation like

mapM :: (Traversable t, Monad m) => (a -> m b) -> t a -> m (t b)

that works for all monads. Most other type languages force you to write mapM separately for each monad you want it to work with.
by bjornsing | 2025-10-16 06:52:40+00:00
To some extent I think that’s just human nature, or even animal nature. The optimal explore / exploit tradeoff changes as we age. When we’re children it’s beneficial to explore. As adults it’s often more beneficial to exploit. But you need cultural and organizational safeguards that protect those of us who are more childish and explorative from those that are more cynical and exploitative. Otherwise pursuits of truth aren’t very fruitful.
by mchiang | 2025-10-16 06:52:45+00:00
ah! This must be downloaded from elsewhere and not from Ollama? So sorry about this.

To help future optimizations for given quantizations, we have been trying to limit the quantizations to ones that fit for majority of users.

In the case of mistral-small3.1, Ollama supports ~4bit (q4_k_m), ~8bit (q8_0) and fp16.

https://ollama.com/library/mistral-small3.1/tags

I'm hopeful that in the future, more and more model providers will help optimize for given model quantizations - 4 bit (i.e. NVFP4, MXFP4), 8 bit, and a 'full' model.
by 20after4 | 2025-10-16 06:53:11+00:00
Offline data storage is a good option for files you don't need to access constantly. A hard drive sitting on a shelf in a good environment (not much humidity, reasonable temperature, not a lot of vibration) will last a very very long time. The same can't be said for SSDs which will lose their stored data in a mater of a year or two.
by bilekas | 2025-10-16 06:53:37+00:00
The tax system in the US is complicated, you've got different state taxes as well as the federal, for example if your kids go to a different state for school than you live, add that your partner might work in another state, maybe they have different relief taxes for disasters through the year. It might very well be a feature but it is complicated, and the more activities you have, maybe investments, a small business, multiple jobs. It becomes overwhelming for non accountants.