skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> preventing monopolies and encouraging open access and competition

Sadly, this bill doesn't even do any of these things...

It's essentially going to have the government make tax preparation software... and we already know they aren't good at making software.

As another comment already suggested, private industry is far, far better at software than the government will ever be, and they are already capable of making simpler software - but the current incredibly complex tax code doesn't allow it. The software has to be complicated because it's dealing with a complicated tax code.

But, anyone who's used TurboTax or HR Block et al, recently will attest to the simplicity of these programs already. Sure, it takes a long while to complete everything, but the most difficult part is gathering your affairs before sitting down. You essentially type data into the boxes the software tells you to. I recon no human being is capable of hand-filing taxes these days -- even the professional tax filing services are using this (and similar) software!

The only way to make it less of a hassle, is to simplify the tax code.
A Spark-based recommendation engine example on Google Cloud
Velociraptor-based math
> All this will accomplish is making sure that tax preparation is back where it was two decades ago

Nonsense. The tax preparation software did fine in the 80's and 90's when doing your taxes on your computer was a niche thing.

Propping up a tax software industry for the benefit of the few people who benefit from it is a drag on society. Why should I subsidize the R&D of the software to handle your complex taxes?
Perhaps not more than programmers/sysadmins, but there's a lot of harassment/DDoS in the gaming community.
They are only handling the simple cases for the free filing system. Basically only if you qualify for 1040EZ.
I imagine the average game - in assembly language - has several conditional jumps.
Numerous times over the past 15 years, IRC over SSL has been the easiest way I was able to connect to IRC networks at all when a network operator had a blanket ban on IRC traffic and/or the common IRC ports. These were mostly public wifi networks, and networks run by large institutions that were probably just trying to protect themselves and their users from botnet traffic, the same way they wouldn't let your compromised computer run a spam server. They were not malicious, but were weighing the costs to niche users against the benefits to their network.

VPNs and proxies could also obviously work, but introduce their own difficulties.
> I don't see any particular reason why workers in the US are more entitled to good jobs than workers in other countries.

There are things you can only do in the presence of inequality because inequality is necessary for specialization. If we require everyone in the world to have the same education then it averages out to something less than a high school education, which means we have no scientists or engineers or doctors.

Once you allow specialization it becomes advantageous to have geographic concentrations. This happens naturally -- Silicon Valley (computers), Detroit (cars), New York (finance), etc.

Exporting jobs increases inefficiency. People working on the same projects have to contend with timezone differences, people waste more time traveling, it's harder for the engineers to talk to the factory workers, etc.

The thing that makes more sense is to give US citizenship to promising engineers in other countries and let them move here, and let other countries specialize in other things (like agriculture or mining).
That's entirely unsurprising. The recent major Facebook outage was also caused by bad configuration IIRC.

See: http://danluu.com/postmortem-lessons/

> Configuration
>
> Configuration bugs, not code bugs, are the most common cause
> I’ve seen of really bad outages. When I looked at publicly available
> postmortems, searching for “global outage postmortem” returned
> about 50% outages caused by configuration changes. Publicly
> available postmortems aren’t a representative sample of all
> outages, but a random sampling of postmortem databases also
> reveals that config changes are responsible for a disproportionate
> fraction of extremely bad outages. As with error handling, I’m
> often told that it’s obvious that config changes are scary, but
> it’s not so obvious that most companies test and stage config
> changes like they do code changes.
Intuit is actually a hell-of-a-lot better than the average situation, where most people pay $200 to get their taxes prepared by unregulated tax-preparers at H&R Block or whatever.

Paid tax preparers make a mistake on roughly 60% of the returns, while the typical person only makes a mistake on 50% of their returns.

So... yeah. In any case, I use $20 TaxACT but do miss Intuit's integration with ADP's payroll system and a lot of their databases.

In any case, the $20 to $50 you spend on tax-preparation software is honestly a serious improvement to the status-quo... of paying an unregulated, mistake-heavy part-time tax preparer to do the job for you at roughly $200+.

If we can switch everyone towards doing their own taxes with TurboTax Deluxe edition at $50, that would actually be an improvement. That's the sad state of tax preparation in the USA.
> The things you described might take 10-20+ years. Between lenders tightening up and college prices coming down, you have a generation of poor people that can't go to college.

And so...?

Not being flippant. But if an entire generation of poor kids doesn't go to college, doesn't that mean employers have to figure out other ways to measure probability of success?

What if that generation takes online self-directed courses? What if that generation turns out to be way more self-starting and independent? What if that turns out to be the greatest thing to happen since the early 1900's when "make factory workers" became our educational mantra?

Honestly, I could see this being a great thing.
Craft Coffee is hiring a product-operations role – Build a profitable company
Holy moly, that's a very curious side effect of technology on culture.
Crazy cyberpunk look necessary to avoid computerized detection.
I can see this being the norm or strictly banned in the future.
You have to consider this from the perspective of the modern US politician instead of an engineer.

Of course they'd prefer another Health.gov style spending bill to build another sprawling web service, with the added perk of keeping the friendly government contractors well fed, instead of something that requires the real hard work by the politicians. And simplifying such a complex policy as the tax code would be real hard work.

Instant gratification that can be draws congratulation is always preferred to risking your political reputation attempting to solve the hard underlying problems - especially when they are riddled with special interests as the tax code has become.
Perhaps the problem is that I'm not a native English speaker, but I think the title is wrong. From the title, I understand that he is guilty and bad science will make him free. From the story, I understand he is innocent and was convicted using bad science.
Unsplasher – Unofficial Unsplash Client on IOS
"~ 1/3 of people itemize"

"The middle class is who is going to get screwed out of deductions."

I don't want to pick on you, but these two sentiments said so closely together proves that "middle class" means whatever the speaker wants it to mean.
Not quite, the sensor in the brain is pretty primitive. It's just best picked 96 neurons as opposed to many hundreds really required - and it didn't have a few years to train yet either. They are likely using excess computational capacity to denoise and predict higher order signals from neurons that are connected to the lucky 96.
"Black people were targeted in 72 percent of thousands of investigative street stops that did not lead to arrests during a recent summer."

If that's not racial profiling, I don't know what is.
I filed my income taxes in Austria, the US and now in Germany.
All of them are pretty easy to file.

The cited 13 hours is insane, and I never needed a 3rd party to help me.
But the US fax filing system is by far the simpliest. I only needed 2 hrs to file them every year.
In Austria and Germany it needs 5-10 hours, and they have insane buerocratic hurdles.
The US have a very simple PDf to fill out, and an excellent explanation.
In Germany I have now monthly stupid HTML forms to fill out with manually entering >50 zeros.

So I cannot really understand what's so complicated.
Bayes.js – MCMC and Bayes in the browser
I think it'd be a great idea for the market to send you signals that paying $50k for an art history degree is probably a terrible idea.

That's a hard question. It gets into the much larger matter of whether the market is a good arbiter of what has social and cultural value, or whether the government needs to step in and subsidise certain things because it really does know better than the wisdom of the masses, who will always prefer Cheetos and ballgames to polenta and Shakespeare.
IRCops have a long history of being change-averse and vitriolic. This just looks like more of the same.
The gods have smiled on us! They allow us to continue to work on their land!
Major edit: I was wrong. I've read parts of the report quoted around other places on the internet and now see that it does in fact give large substantiation to arguments of police being racists. Primarily the statistics having to do with situations that do not involve an arrest because of no wrongdoing found are really irritating.
And if we as a society believe that art history really is important, then we should subsidize jobs that employ art history majors. But the student loan part of the process can sort itself out privately.
Who was also a co-founder of The Huffington Post and, most interestingly to me, is the brother of comedian Chelsea Peretti.
why do you think that will wait for cars? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
Because the grip and weight balance will make one-handed reading more comfortable.
Well, 'undiscovered' means nobody can find a reference to it on google. My cousin noticed this around 1989, I very clearly remember him yelling at me when I did it wrong. He didn't bother to put a dated reference to it on the internet at the time...
2018: The Year U.S. Fighter Pilots Could Get Drone Wingmen
There's a conspiracy theory going around that the nonsensical pricing for Kindle ebooks is caused by a strategy from the big publishers to make the Kindle less attractive. Their worst nightmare of an Amazon monopoly on digital distribution is becoming more and more a reality. Setting the price for Kindle editions unrealistically high is one way to fight that.
And do you believe that monopolies offer choice, and drive down prices as well?

via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil#Monopoly_charges_...

"In 1904, Standard controlled 91 percent of production and 85 percent of final sales."

"The federal Commissioner of Corporations studied Standard's operations from the period of 1904 to 1906[31] and concluded that ``beyond question... the dominant position of the Standard Oil Co. in the refining industry was due to unfair practices—to abuse of the control of pipe-lines, to railroad discriminations, and to unfair methods of competition in the sale of the refined petroleum products''"

From the DOJ complaint, "The evidence is, in fact, absolutely conclusive that the Standard Oil Co. charges altogether excessive prices where it meets no competition, and particularly where there is little likelihood of competitors entering the field, and that, on the other hand, where competition is active, it frequently cuts prices to a point which leaves even the Standard little or no profit, and which more often leaves no profit to the competitor, whose costs are ordinarily somewhat higher."
I gave it a picture of a Captcha, and it said it was some giraffes against a fence. :) So at least we know they haven't broken Captcha yet!
Almost any sector of retail?
Seconded, in fact I'll go one step further.

YC has drastically increased the number of partners to meet the demand of a growing batch size. I've seen partners do more publicly for new garage startups (new YC companies) being strongarmed by large companies. Totally no surprises here.
I doubt it is a priority. But I can certainly recommend Amazon GPU-enabled instances (~0.6$/hour/GPU, not that much actually).
I'm not sure what point (if any) gwern is making here but, e.g., Ancel Keys died in 2004 at the age of 100. So, indeed, no wonder he's deceased: he would have had to be staggeringly old to still be alive now.

[EDITED to add:] On the face of it, the most obvious reading of gwern's comment is (it seems to me) something like "ha ha, of course they're dead, because they had stupid theories about diet and health so we should expect them to have died by now". If that is what gwern meant, then I think he was being unreasonable. (But I'm not at all sure it is.)
Perfect is the enemy of good. Perhaps with a bit of added rationalization to hide laziness.
One hand is great for me. I can carry my luggage in one hand, read with the other.
And in Europe and other western countries with national healthcare, people don't go bankrupt from unplanned medical emergencies.
Many elite schools practice need-blind admissions - Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc. Financial standing has no merit on admissions, and if you can get in, you get to attend regardless of the financial support you require.

Its a great system, but it unfortunately falls apart for the less-elite schools which don't have massive endowments to rely on.
Everything would be so much better if there was just a simple flat-tax. Same tax for all buissness and people. Same tax for incomes of all kinds.

And before the Progressives start rioting, its easly possible to make it somewhat progressive. Then we can foreever argue if it should be more or less progressive.

The amount of time saved by people and more importantly buissnesses is quite extraordinary. Additionally it would make finding tax cheaters far easier. The IRS could be much smaller. That also has positive effects on privacy.

The book "The Flat Tax" was released in 1981 and was implmented in some of the countries that became free after the collapse of the USSR.

I highly recommend this 1h podcast with the auther of the book:
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2007/04/rabushka_on_the.htm...
Tinker with a Neural Network Right Here in Your Browser
That's the small view of humanity again. Nobody in the US is in the bottom quartile. You also see this as a zero-sum game: a process of extracting wealth from someone and handing it to someone else. Trade increases the overall amount of wealth. It's important for policy to recognize, as I said, that there are winners and losers and mitigate the negative effects for the losers. But this can come from the new wealth generated by the trade. Remember: this is new wealth, created entirely from nothing, that did not exist before.
tysonjennings,

Your past 6 comments, going back 1167 days ago, are all marked [dead]
Yes, I'd like to see them so cheap they are sold on a wire tab in the supermarket, like calculators. I'd buy a bunch as throwaways!
>The plan appeared to be to use their connection and access to some rather “helpful” high brass to offload the technology for billions and then later sweep the fact that it didn’t work under the rug (this tactic has worked fabulously for the last 20 years). Avoid the FDA altogether.

they actually attempted exactly that back in 2012

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/12/02/inter...
Why do you keep suggesting a third part company is the solution versus the IRS providing the functionality directly?
In fact it's not disingenuous at all, nor a logical fallacy. You can derive those rough specs from the absolute numbers very easily.

If the top 10% earn 45% of all income and pay 82% of all income taxes, that means the bottom 90% are earning 55% of all income and paying 18% of all income taxes. Which is another way of saying, the bottom 90% are paying a very low tax rate.

And in fact, another important thing is extremely obvious as a connection to this:

The bottom ~50% in the US pay nothing net in income taxes. This is a pretty well known tax fact.

That means the bracket between 50% and 10%, that 40% group, is paying an increasingly very low rate as you go down the income scale, as the 10% to 20% bracket is carrying a high share of that remaining 18% income tax revenue base just as the top 10% group is. Put a very simple way: the bottom ~70% of income earners in the US, pay an extraordinarily small share of all income taxes, and inherently must have a low tax rate given their share of the income base (but that's also another trivially easy stat to retrieve).

Explain to me again how anything I said is incorrect or disingenuous, and or how the rich aren't paying their fair share of income taxes. The sole argument you have left that I can see, is to claim that the top 10% should go from paying 82% of all income taxes on their 45% income share, to paying 100% of all income taxes off of that 45% share of national income.
But this could be useful for someone with Alzheimers, or maybe a teacher that needs to remember his pupils.
Why is this being streamed from an unknown YouTube account vs. an official YC/MIT organization?

EDIT: Stream is actually real
A few big gotchas with LLC though.

Every year you have to pay a flat $800 to the state of California. Sucks if your business is not making that much, $800 can be a significant cost.

Self employment tax hurts bad. Basically this is Medicare and social security. Can be a huge amount owed seperate and in addition to income taxes.
There's no reason you can't have a CLI interface with graphics support. Granted the vt100-style terminals can't easily do it, but it was possible with the old REPL machines of the 80s (eg most micro computers which booted into a BASIC interpreter).

There are some also some terminal emulators in Linux that support inlined graphics, however I'm not sure how easy it would be to run them as a WM.
I think the package column is also showing C8, although I'm not familiar with the layout. Here's an example of what I currently see:

Package | CPU 0
Powered On 0.0% | POLL 0.0% 0.0 ms
C1E-SKL 1.3% | C1E-SKL 0.2% 7.1 ms
|
C3-SKL 0.0% | C3-SKL 0.0% 0.2 ms
RC6pp 0.0% | C6-SKL 0.0% 0.0 ms
C7s-SKL 0.0% | C7s-SKL 0.0% 0.0 ms
C8-SKL 64.5% | C8-SKL 99.6% 9.5 ms
| CPU 1
| POLL 0.0% 0.0 ms
| C1E-SKL 0.0% 0.0 ms
|
| C3-SKL 0.0% 0.0 ms
| C6-SKL 0.0% 0.6 ms
| C7s-SKL 0.0% 0.0 ms
| C8-SKL 100.0% 84.8 ms
| ...

What would I see if it were properly using C8?
Scoop?
Exactly, negligent drivers don't just kill themselves and there is very little you can do to prevent one from killing you.
Why now and why in Chicago are political institutions saying these things? Most people have known about theses problems all over the country and for decades. I watched a the history of the issue and the same issues were being examined one commission after another going back, IIRC, to the 1920s. The report says the problems have gone on for decades.

My guess is that it is due to political pressure. IMHO most corruption and injustice happens because there is no pressure on political leaders to fix it, while they face a lot of pressure from vested interests (the police, prosecutors, etc.). On most issues, the public pays no attention and if they do, it's only for a short time. As they say, 'all that is needed for evil to succeed is for good people to do nothing'.

But still, why now and why in Chicago would this kind of political pressure finally arise?

(And it remains to be seen if anything changes, which I would guess depends on whether the pressure can be sustained.)
That's pretty strong langauge ("don't just tell people your way is the way"), based on some comment by pg that happened almost ten years ago. The fact is many websites that have down-voting, for example reddit, have issues with users using it for disagreement when it should be primarily used to move comments down that don't help the discussions, or involve rudeness - kind of like your attack.

Note the exact quote: "I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness." (pg)

It appears to imply that the intention is actually for booing rudeness, but, in order to be symmetrical with agreement, it's not only for that. At least this seems to be pg's intention eight years ago, maybe we can grow beyond that. For example, I've seen plenty of down-voting when people are trying to be funny, and the mod telling this people off, because this is not reddit. It all points to wanting a constructive debate, which doesn't work if everybody just agrees.
I've been using Visual Studio Code a bit this past month and there is a lot I like about it. Anyone have thoughts on Code vs Atom? I know Code is based on Atom, but I'm not really clear on how they differ

edit: correction. After asking this, I read up a bit and Code is based on Electron which is the core of Atom, but they're fairly different after that.. Code is not a fork of Atom as I thought it was.
Absolutely correct. And that has nothing to do with the tax system, nor how progressive the US tax code is, and that problem can be legislated out of existence at any time by the US Government.
Why do you say that? To me, it seems disingenuous to discount the fact that they pay more by using a relative percentage instead of an absolute amount.

I may be in the minority but I believe governments shouldn't discriminate based on income for the same reason they shouldn't discriminate based on gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, etc. All people should be treated equal in the eyes of the law.
Ahh ... http://scoop.sh/
What are the pros/cons of using FireQoS vs. OpenWRT's SQM?
It would be great if you added a text box under the stars so I can (optionally) tell you why I didn't give you five stars.

For example, I uploaded a picture of my daughter as an infant, and it said, "This is a baby on a bed and he's :D" which I gave four stars to because it said he instead of she. But honestly you really have no way of knowing that. :)
> the "report" does not give validation to this

Are you talking about the report (have you read it?) or just the newspaper article?
Yeah, well....How long before the paid for articles are copied and released for free?
I'm just so baffled, since it is almost literally just creating a certificate and you are done (I run a couple of IRC servers myself). Even a self-signed certificate is better than none at all.
Not sure. But it's the one that was posted in the official Facebook event.