skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In an opinion piece for The Daily Caller and on his site, Rep. Peter Roskam, R-Ill., said “making the tax collector also the tax preparer creates an inherent conflict of interest while forcing citizens to relinquish control of their taxes to the government.”

The government already controls taxes and thus citizens’ incomes. In a time when so many are worried about privacy, few voice any concern about the enormous privacy problems inherent in the forced full disclosure of the intimate details of one’s financial affairs.

Fiscal year 2019 is forecast to have federal revenue of $3.422 trillion[0], of which $1.688 trillion will be from individual income taxes. That means repealing the income tax and replacing it with nothing would take the federal budget not back to the founding era or even the nineteenth century but to the Clinton years[1].

[0]: https://www.thebalance.com/current-u-s-federal-government-ta...

[1]: http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/federal-receipt-an...
Oh man I did not know this existed I am completely aligned with this.

Easily this is what I love
About the python community is that so many awesome folks just step up and do something when they seen deficiencies vs waiting for someone else to get around to it (lookin at you Swift)

I myself am prototyping a tool chain that will compile python to static C code and then compile that (with the interpreter embedded) into a binary that can be easily distributed.

Nothing on GitHub yet but it’s what I hope one day soon will fix the distribution story once and for all!
Smaller parties and independent candidates will still be left out because the Big Two control access to the ballot.
>Groups of people or interest groups should be allowed to bring their case to legislators to try to convince them.

Why should YOU or you and your friends be allowed to lobby MY congressman if you're not in a district he or she represents? They're in office to represent their constituents, not whoever has the most money to throw their way. Lobbying should be limited to constituents only, not include gifts, donations, or further benefits post-office.
How languages shape the way we think
Yeah, I think that's a good point and, I think, an important differecne between math notation and programming languages.

I think mathematicians thend to use a lot of "notational slang" or "ad-hoc syntactic sugar", if you will. This will make the notation often look imcomprehensible for people not familiar with the exact domain - however, there is usually a consistent meaning behind it. If one wanted, the notation could be "desugared" into a more rigid (but more verbose) form that expresses the same.

To take big-O-notation as an example, if you write something crazy-looking like

x + 5 = O(x)

What you mean is

The function "f(x) := x + 5" is a member of the set of functions "O(x)".

Where "O(x)" is itself shorthand for a convoluted set expression.

Similarly, if you write

x^3 + O(x)

You mean Take x cubed, then add the result of some function from the set O(x). (Whether you mean any function or one specific function is again context-dependent but usually it's made clear which of the two is meant.)

Contrast that with programming languages, where you often have a rigid syntax but higher-level semantics being quite fuzzy.

E.g., equals() and toString() in java are straight-forward to write but they can "mean" quite a lot of different things depending which kinds of objects you call them.

e.g., the "obvious" meaning of equals (value equality) works only with immutable value types - yet the method is defined on any kind of object. So it might also mean instance equality - or even entity equality if you deal with ORM proxies - or even wilder things...
A "sitting is killing you" article based on a study of 35 people.

Is this going to launch another wave of conflicting articles published every-other-week saying how to minimize it?

"Eat fish 5 times a day while standing!"

"New study: fish 10 times while doing squats!"

"Latest: the fish does nothing! You need a 'weightless desk' in low earth orbit."
It isn't unique to this case - anyone who is different will get genuine questions over it. But there are a few problems I have with it:

1) The medical details of my life aren't any of your business. And people tend to let their curiosity cross those lines. They don't do it deliberately, and it doesn't bother everyone. But it is absolutely personal.

2) When we do get questions, we get the same questions all the time. To be blunt, I get tired of answering them.

3) For my particular problems, I have a pile of symptoms and things that trigger them, but no formal diagnosis of anything (even after years of doctors). I just don't like to get into it because once people dig in, they start trying to help. Try this herb, try this pill, see my doctor, etc. They mean well. And they really think they are suggesting things I haven't already done. But all it really does is rekindle old frustrations.

So everyone is different. Many people won't have my obvious bitterness from #3. Some people are fine with questions. But you never know. We are all different people. So I'd recommend not asking questions. But at the same time, that doesn't mean to avoid the subject. There is a nice balance where you just talk about the direct impact it has on the current situation without turning it into a huge conversation. And if you get to know someone well enough, just ask them directly if they mind questions.
Where are you seeing that? Also, fine density/volume/mass, does it really change the argument?

There is some optimal size for this region when it comes to certain functions, probably relative to the size of other regions. That size is probably suboptimal when it comes to other functions and there are tradeoffs going on.

The press release seems to be assuming that thinner is bad automatically.
You're going to have a hell of a time following the twisted plot of The Americans: it's got more wigs than RuPaul's Drag Race!

https://www.buzzfeed.com/adamdavis/wigs-wigs-everywhere?utm_...

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/04/th...

http://www.tvguide.com/news/the-americans-favorite-wigs-disg...

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2015/04/16/the_americans...

http://www.vulture.com/2013/03/all-of-the-wigs-worn-on-the-a...
Show HN: Under $10 – A List of Awesome Products Under $10 with Free Shipping
I live in a major metropolitan area where the salary for a senior developer/architect is between $125K - $145K - not a bad salary, the cost of living isn't that high. I haven't been able to find rates above $90 an hour as a contractor. But the only way I could be guaranteed enough hours to make it work would be going through an agency, after they take their cut, it's usually $70-$80 as a W2 contractor (meaning they pay the employer's side of Medicare, Social Security).

When I can make $140K as a employee, with paid vacation and paid time off and much cheaper health benefits (hypothetically - I'm covered under my wife), it's not worth freelancing.
yeah i agree that seems like a generally desirable state of affairs.

not sure if i'd sign the statement "you typically communicate via a fairly narrow, well-defined channel, and not via a morass of side-effects" though ;)
Isn't UCLA among the top universities in the world? How can they publish a research like this (asking a few questions to 35 people) and draw such formidable conclusions? The title sounds like they've discovered something new that applies to all humans...
Curious if you have encountered Halide (http://halide-lang.org/) and if so, your impression or thoughts. The main advantage is being able to easily express optimizations like the one you mentioned, allowing you to experiment with different optimization parameters/ideas more quickly.
Typical for "Hacker" "News" that this is downvoted.

It's a gigantic boring and occasionally amusing echo and marketing chamber.
I came across this when it was posted to HN a year or two ago and ended up finishing the whole thing. Thank you for making it.
this is more a problem with misuse and not email itself.
* actual threading is better as you always see to which mail the reply belong (except for the retarded Gmail conversation view...)
* quoting - if you are doing 'char like then turn it off / remove), for more in-depth discussions it's very handy.
* keep your address private and sane - I rarely receive spam and if some website sends me crap I unsubscribe (or cancel account).

there is a' delta chat app that uses email as 'backend' and it works quite well)
org-mode + babel is excellent. But again the social aspect necessary for adoption is much less developed than Jupyter (the emacs community is very social, but small).

In that Jupyter files are just json files, I hope that there it will be easier to switch between the two in the future. Like [1], [2], and [3].

[1] https://github.com/gregsexton/ob-ipython

[2] https://github.com/jkitchin/ox-ipynb

[3] https://github.com/millejoh/emacs-ipython-notebook
Plenty of countries had to catch up with the UK.

And Russian empire was not that much backwards. Their economy was agriculture-based. But they had quite a few smart people. The only lacking thing was push from the government to industrialize.

Let alone they were far from catching up with the West by the time WW2 started or at any other point in their history.

It’s impressive in the same way that holocaust is impressive.
WhatsApp photo drug dealer caught by 'groundbreaking' work
As someone who has practiced over 19 years very intensively, my opinion is that pop science and culture overplays the effects of moderate meditation (say 30 min per day) in a short term and mostly misunderstand the effects of long term meditation.

The starting assumption of a secular meditator (like me) usually is that we want to develop some abilities. You are you, just better.

If you meditate a lot, or very long time, there comes a point where you realize that it's not just developing cognitive abilities. Your motivations and perspective change as well. It's not just you doing meditation practice. The practice is also working on you. Eventually you are going towards direction where you don't want to go and it can create lots of negative feelings, including fear and hopelessness (sometimes called the Dark Night of the Soul). This is the end of the road for many people. They lose the interest and do something else.

I think it's easier for people of religion because they have innate trust that everything is going towards something better and others have done the same.
Using \text{} instead of \sin is, arguably, plain incorrect. Or at least at odds with the tex philosophy of separation between content and formatting.
In this theoretical democracy with publicly funded elections would I, a completely independent citizen be able to buy ads in support of my desired candidate? How about making lawn signs to campaign? Or even just going door to door for him or her? All of the above is a gift of either my time or my money. Should all of that be banned? It's the problem people face when opposing Citizen's United. Money is inherently connected to speech.
Yes, kitchen is a half-assed organic chemistry lab for doing what's basically alchemy.
Hacker stole casino's high-roller database through a thermometer in fish tank
Mix is great! Webpack is very powerful and complex, but 90% of the time I just need to compile CSS/Sass and ES6 Modules. For these common scenarios, Mix makes this super-simple without having to dig into the Webpack config. If you stick with the very sensible defaults, your config can be as simple as:

mix.js('resources/assets/js/app.js', 'public/js')
.sass('resources/assets/sass/app.scss', 'public/css');

Here are the docs: https://laravel.com/docs/5.6/mix
I think in that era electronic equipment often came with schematics in the West, too. I'm pretty sure our TRS-80 manuals had a schematic, and I remember opening up a few transistor radios to find the schematic screen-printed on the inside of the case.
I recently bought a WV Atlas with adaptive cruise control and front assist. It also has a variety of other sensors and assists. It is no way an AV, but these features IMHO add a lot of value. If every car had them, I bet road safety would increase significantly. I agree with the article. I think it is a big deal.
I noticed this experience a few weeks ago.

I was having big trouble getting to sleep and my partner's snoring was agitating me. I decided to relax and meditate.

I noticed myself trying to "cure" my agitation. I decided to accept it. But then I realised that I was forcing myself to accept it. Instead of some 'conscious decision', I eased into just being conscious of it. I just felt it and it washed away, replaced with a feeling of pure contentment I've never experienced before. That applied to "trying to sleep" too.

I slept well not long after that. It was a profound feeling.
Yeah, they are known crooks who want to retain their middlemen position at the cost of the public. Quite disgusting.
You can get automatic vectorization (with -O3) like this:

bool is_sorted(const int32_t* input, size_t n) {
int32_t sorted = true;

for (size_t i = 1; i < n; ++i) {
sorted &= input[i - 1] <= input[i];
}

return sorted;
}

And the performance is similar to the AVX version (benchmarked on a MacBook Air early 2015):

$ ./benchmark_avx2 1048576
input size 1048576, iterations 10
scalar : 6379 us
SSE (generic) : 3544 us
SSE : 3704 us
My example : 2769 us
AVX2 (generic) : 2679 us
AVX2 : 3360 us

So I'm getting 2769us with the above 5 simple lines of code. It's just 3% slower (that might be noise).
Famed Donkey Kong Player Stripped of High Scores, Banned from Competition
That's actually how statistics works. You don't need 100,000+ people to make a readily generalizable conclusion.

If the differences are significant, they'll appear with as few as 35 people, carefully selected, and give you a confidence level of X that it applies to a population size of Y.

Whilst I don't know the details of this particular study, I do recall doing homework problems about correlation confidence.

In layman's terms, maybe this example will help:

Imagine a study where they found that 100% of people who were "sitting" had bent knees. Essentially no one could bring their hips and ankles closer together without bending their knees. With such a significant correlation, you could generalize from a population of 10 to one of trillions so long as the ten was randomly chosen, and there were no other correlative factors.
Not at all! They could be carried.
When Bill Gates Went to Washington
California tried this for a trial of their state taxes. Response was overwhelmingly positive. Yet lobbyist for big tax firms fight against it.
Building binaries for macOS is painful and also requires a mac hardware itself.
You misunderstand: the file format itself needs to have at least horizontal and vertical DPI values to be generally useful.

Many film scanners for instance are say 2400 dpi vertically and then some other DPI value horizontal depending on the film or picture format. Anamorphic lenses are used to scale a wide-aspect image onto a 4:3 sensor.

Some scanners and printers even have different DPI for different color components.
Video from 2016 showing exactly that:

https://www.tesla.com/videos/autopilot-self-driving-hardware...

If you use this to market your car without any caveats, don't be dismissal of some people who might read into that your car is capable of self-driving, when in reality its clearly absent of anything of the sort.
Photo of the Week from the Georgian Food Courte
Oh, gotta outlaw all forms of political fund-raising too, then; apparently it's ok to give money to your neighbour unless that neighbour is running for office. Am I still allowed to spend my own money on an ad in the newspaper extolling the virtues of my preferred candidate?
"Medicine - People always need care"

The demographics of baby boomers vs subsequent generations seem to confirm this one as an employment growth area for the US.
Unless you have you entire state stored persistently across refreshes, then hot loading takes care of getting into the exact state you were in again. Make a small change -> immediately visible in the UI. Before hot reloading, make small changes -> (automatically) refresh page -> navigate to where you were, and set up the state again you were in.

Hot reloading saves so much time, and means you'll check for smaller increments, because it's painless.
The Extraordinary Case of Mr Yamazaki and his ‘Hitaisho’ Teaching Method.
"The researchers next hope to follow a group of people for a longer duration to determine if sitting causes the thinning and what role gender, race, and weight might play in brain health related to sitting."

This is just a preliminary study. It´s too soon to get any conclusions. But, it´s a good starting point for a hypothesis. I will like to see the results of the final study, even that is going to take a long time.

I have seen many times links between sedentary life and illness. But this one looks promising as tries to find a mechanism on why this happens at the brain level that may affect cognition.

And yes, before doing a more expensive study, they asked 35 people for a preliminary study. You don´t spend a lot of money to try to prove something without first trying to disprove it on the cheap.
Translation for developers: before spending a lot of time to test something you first do a smoke test. If it passes you invest the time to test it fully. Otherwise, you go back to writing code.
You can deduct state taxes which adds up. Really 24,000$ is easier to hit than you might think.
Teaching jobs have decreased where I live, and are paid lower than they were, despite an increasing population of children.

One reason is technology - not all education tasks can be replaced, but some have been already. Combine that with increased competition for jobs generally, and I don’t see education careers being future-proof.
Where is the AI that can fold laundry (clothes, linen, towels)? Do laundry (sort, pre-treat, load, unload, clean lint filter)? Do dishes (clear table, scrape food into compost or trash as appropriate, separate to recycling as appropriate, load, unload, put up)? Keep a lawn (mow, edge, trim hedges, move trimmings to compost, trim trees)? Put up Legos after a 5 year old? Pick up around the house and tell you where it placed or last saw an object when queried?

And where is the AI in a humaniform that does all of the above?

There are tentative steps towards some of those activities, but we’re still in the early years with imbuing our machine intelligence models with the equivalent of our kinesthetic sense, object recognition and classification, and natural language interaction. And it is far from clear that we can get there with purely current statistical heuristic-oriented technology. We can only try, but the amount of effort required just for folding clothes to date reminds me of the elaborate Ptolemaic models, or as if we’re trying to build Excel by poking ones and zeroes into memory.

More tinkering required, be back later.
>"so we aren’t fully appreciating the maddnes it would be a free job market"

Of course not, as you probably wouldn't have this weird "retirement age" thing in the free-market absent government intervention. It's almost unheard of, and I'm not surprised. Reading through this thread of all the little "abuses" and "loopholes" that people are figuring out to game the Government-decreed system of retirement is very worrying and eye-opening.
The new popular oversimplifications tend to be really patronizing to the previous ones
UAF vulnerability in the Menu Management Component of Window Manager
Something like https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks ?
'My Special Aflac Duck' is a robot to help kids with cancer
I find spiders quite freaky, yet I find crabs quite endearing. This strikes me as very odd.

ps. Ive been actively trying to overcome my aversion to spiders by handling them when I put them out. Starting with very tiny ones and working my way up.
The ‘Adults in the Room’ Need to Take Trump Seriously on Syria
Just got back from a trip overseas. The most calming, enjoyable part wasn’t the beaches, the food, the tours, etc. It was zipping around on a scooter all day.
Opentaxsolver starts with the following imperative sentence: "Select tax program." That means I must know a priori which tax form corresponds to my particular tax situation.

Choosing the correct tax forms is the job of the software, not the layperson. If it cannot or will not perform that job then it isn't a wizard (or at least not on the same level of time-saving as Turbotax).

If it's not a wizard then it isn't the FLOSS analog of Turbotax.

Edit: clarification
Social security and Medicare are individual income taxes and add up to quite a bit even if people pretend they are not 'income taxes'.

Cutting close to 3 trilllon from the federal taxes would mean vast disruption and many older workers and other beneficiaries ending in deep poverty.
Some New Zealand ancient DNA experts have concerns about the analysis:

“So, the data that the whole argument is based upon is DNA from one sample that was produced without using standard ancient DNA protocols and analysed without using standard ancient DNA authentication methods. The data presented, to an ancient DNA researcher, ring alarm bells and appear very much like damaged and/or contaminated DNA."

https://www.sciencemediacentre.co.nz/2018/04/13/when-did-swe...
I have found a free spreadsheet online,and I mail a paper return. The spreadsheet is surprisingly good, and I can use it in libreoffice. I started doing that after finding $22,000 worth of errors in years past. I call it paper protest.
It would be nice if there was an online sandbox where you could easily play with the instructions.
combine several languages in a single document without any issues

You can do this with RMarkdown as well, despite the name, and run notebooks in RStudio. Much better experience than Jupyter in a browser.

https://yihui.name/knitr/demo/engines/
In my early career I was a car seat engineer which gave me a life long interest in seats. If you look at historical chairs it is amazing how recently the comfortable chair was introduced. I peg it at around 1920, about 30 years after the Morris chair, which was the beginning. Think of the colonial era Windsor chairs. You can imagine great thinkers sitting in them pulled up to their desks creating and thinking. But no way could you sit for the 10-12 hours a day most HN readers do. Go back further to images of classic times. Sitting devices were definitely not capable of being used for extended periods. So yes, it is worth thinking about the impact of comfortable furniture on how much we sit. But later. I am getting up to get a cup of coffee.
I don't think sex robots are going to be as prevelant as the blogger thinks. I couldn't even consider a sex-robot. That just seems gross and pathetic to me and I'm like a 1 or 2 out of 10 on looks scale.

I think us ugly guys just adapt to being single most of the time and sex just becomes something you don't ever really think about. I don't care how realistic these robots are, I think they always be a niche product for a small handful of weird guys.
ite, I don't find the message objectionable, but the tone and writing. Don't know why others have downvoted you.
Doesnt a cloud vm do this?