skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So the IRS mails you a questionnaire that asks these questions, you send it back, and they calculate your taxes automatically. No need for the $40 TurboTax fee, no need to type your W-2 information.

But if what you say is true and the IRS can't calculate what you owe, that would mean they have absolutely no idea what you should be paying and you could get away with paying basically anything you want as long as you're not randomly selected for audit.
I always thought of their waffles as "a tasty chemical amalgamation that a soulless corporation was trying to pass off as food". I'd think it's a pretty rare waffle that doesn't have chemical leavening.

I think they could improve their cooking in some respects by using microwaves more. I really hate bacon that isn't crispy, and surprisingly enough, a microwave will do that quickly when used properly. I've only ever seen one restaurant do that openly. It's a mystery to me why all of the awful fast food chain breakfast sandwiches don't take advantage of the technique.
1 min of TV news about Al-Qaida's terrorism creates ~5 more victims of terrorism [pdf]
Well, it does avoid them needing to rebrand if they decide to pivot...
In San Diego the surcharges were deemed legal: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/restaurants/sd...
*Go with templates
Yeah if merchandise is sitting on a retail shelf long enough that the tax changes multiple times before it's sold, you need to rethink your stocking choices.
I am more curious how they managed to output a 1000 kHz tone through those speakers.
Thank you! Currently using XXH64 to good success for small keys, and xxh3 looks fantastic as the next upgrade.
See https://github.com/vlang-io/V/issues/3#issuecomment-46780844... and the following two comments.
You only need to update your drivers license when you change states, not when you change residences. (And if you don’t drive you don’t need to do that either.) And you don’t neee to notify USPS of your mailing address.
Maybe you're not American? Or haven't done taxes?

In the US, you can deduct your work expenses if you so choose (such as required clothes, for instance). Since you did this on your personal card, how would the government have any idea that you bought that suit for work? And the same goes for donations to non profits.
She’s a first time rapper/singer. What do you guys think?
No. Don't add complexity, state and attack surface with no reasonable cause.
Unabashedly, I think leaving in it pure C would have been better. Well, if that was of their main reasons. Although, it sounds like they wanted more "infrastructure".

There is a lot of C infrastructure, almost anything can work with C too...
Belgium as well. Your employer reports your income to the tax administration, your bank reports your house mortgage for tax deduction and so on. For me it’s pretty much just a bunch of checkboxes check. The hardest part is getting my electronic id to work to log in to the bloody site.
Yes. In fact you'll find the better ones on the shelves of technical libraries [1], both in the US and in other English-speaking countries.

Introductory:

The Chemistry of Powder and Explosives by Tenney L. Davis.

Advanced:

Chemistry and Technology of Explosives by Tadeusz Urbanski (English translation by M. Jurecki).

Encyclopedic:

Encyclopedia of Explosives and Related Items by Basil T. Federoff.

Advanced applications of explosives, toward the destruction of materiel and human beings:

Tactical Missile Warheads by Joseph Carleone.

When I was an undergraduate I even found a book about nerve gas on the shelves -- Some aspects of the chemistry and toxic action of organic compounds containing phosphorus and fluorine by Bernard Charles Saunders. Dig into the citations and you find a further wealth of detail, papers now universally accessible through sci-hub.

The main obstacle to making effective bombs isn't restrictions on information. It's that most people inclined to violence [2] can't or won't teach themselves something new even if given a wealth of high quality literature to do it with.

[1] And on Amazon and Library Genesis.

[2] Most non-violent people too have trouble with learning on their own. People who keep learning new things may overestimate how common that ability is in general.
Let's start with an MVP then.

For federal taxes, the government takes your W2 and 1099s, and prepares a tax return, with the standard deduction. If you either know you have a complicated federal situation (and people know if they do), or think you can do better with itemizing your deductions, then you have the option to do it differently.

Then, iterate every year to make it a little better, until 96% of people don't have to think about it.
> Even though I know how it works, and why it works, I'm still kind of surprised that individual DNS records have individual TTLs. It feels unfamiliar/alien, compared to all the other hierarchy-of-caches systems I work with.

In HTTP, TTLs are per-resource.
If they don't know automatically, it's only a failure of automation or lack of interfacing with credit agencies and state records. They certainly have the power to know all those things, and they will find all that out, if they choose to audit you.

But forget about the IRS automatically collecting what could possibly be relevant from everyone. If some of that stuff isn't automatically reported, there's no reason to force reporting, The IRS would operate as it already does, choose a percentage to audit and get those records from that percentage (0.6% of total filers or 933k people, including 15% of people who make over $15mil) anyway. (That panopticon you're worried about? Don't worry, it's only watching approximately a million people per year, no big deal, right? I realize 1 million is not 327 million, but I have difficulty getting upset about broader financial surveillance (you could even make it optional, so only people who think they're likely to get audited would opt in) when 1 million people per year already get that treatment, plus harassment (granted some of them brought it on themselves, but many did not and just made stupid errors that a better system would have avoided completely, or didn't make any errors and the IRS is just fishing)

The vast majority of people only end up reporting stuff the IRS already knows about (W-2, 1099, marital status and children that were already reported for the last N years, etc.) What good does it do to have people manually file the same information employers and financial institutions already file? If the IRS is not getting some information, and someone's going to lie and tell them it's all good when they get a summary and tax bill, they're going to lie on their taxes even if they're preparing them manually.

All the current system is, is a hand-out and make work scheme for tax preparation people and companies.
I read somewhere recently that fixing the deficit of carbon in agricultural land world-wide would actually require more carbon than has been added to the atmosphere through fossil fuel use. Getting all those farmers to do it, however, would be difficult.
The reason I brought it up is that the knowyourmeme.com does not cover the celebration when a cancer victim died, but it does cover the harassment, death threats and bomb threats. No physical attacks however, and I never heard of that so I would actually be interested to hear more about that part.

As a side not however, I personally treat anonymous threats a bit different from statements which is done with peoples real name next to the logo of the game studio that they work at. In part because here in Sweden we have a reality show which premise is to locate people behind anonymous threats and shame them, while also provide free lawyers to those few victims that get to be on the show in order to file civil suits. The accused troll is always either regretful or deny the accusation.

In contrast the people who celebrate the death of John Bane do not regret the statement nor deny it. They think they are justified in their behavior. To me that is significant.
IMO these are distinct phenomena. This one comes more from the fact that pain makes a stronger impression than pleasure. Running into an opposing opinion online is painful.
This reminds me of the story of the first rifles.

They had lots of problems - they were slow to load and reload so the rate of fire was limited. They would misfire or not fire if it was raining. They were noisy so they were easy to locate. They were very inaccurate.

In all respects the longbow was a much superior technology, quiet, fast and refined.

why would anyone invest in rifles over longbows?
Social Media Are a Mass Shooter’s Best Friend
I funded both major party candidates in your area to be anti-darkhorn. Other people in your seat agree that anti-darkhorn is a bad thing but they fear their vote won't be counted if they support any third party. So, all your friends, family and educated voters still vote for one of the major parties.

In other countries (other than Canada/UK), you would have the support of your friends, family and other voters, even if their vote didn't count initially, the vote is counted in other ways to give representation.

Welcome to FPTP where people don't have much representation. Allowing people like me to lobby for anti-darkhorn policies.
So I use simpletax.ca. (It's free, but will ask for a donation after you file.) (Also, I don't work for them.)

In it, there's an option to login to the CRA via your bank account (oauth?) and it will populate a bunch of data for you.
I think you are begging the question. Years where child custody or marital status changes are probably not simple if you look at it statistically.

And killing the mortgage interest deduction would be great, so we can make it work for those people too.
How Hashing Could Stop Violent Videos From Spreading
From what I've seen D looks like an amazing language. I've been particularly interested in the -betterC flag.
Tax agencies do exactly that in many other countries (that also have child credits etc).
Isn't that why there is an audit process? Audits are a tool to ensure compliance with a stochastic threat due to high cost of research and enforcement. For things they can check automatically they already do, but audits can find more detailed things, at a higher cost to carry out.
When you stock up on coffee from Colombia, is it already roasted?

I think somewhere between 5-15 days is pretty generally accepted as the "fresh" period after roasting (caveat: except for espresso). Some people even freeze their beans if they don't think they'll start the bag soon enough after getting it, or if they get large bags.

You definitely _can_ make coffee with weeks-old beans (or months-old beans), but there's a distinct difference in taste when consuming shortly after roasting (after the degas but before it goes stale). According to [1] (random source among tons for a google search for "how long are coffee beans good after roasting"), beans aren't considered "stale" until around 30 days, but are definitely still usable; stale bread and flat sodas are edible too, but a lot of people prefer the better taste.

[1] https://making-nice-coffee.com/how-long-does-coffee-stay-fre...
This would be killer for the workplace and tracking these incidental materials without spending people hours to do so.

At home, if this is on a per-item basis, I could see you being able to set expiration timers too, and triggering a re-order then.
Ask HN: Could Auto Correct prevent killers from gaining infamy from their deeds?
All we need to do is add the monster's name to a dictionary and have social media platforms change the name to "The monster that..." sort of a white/black list of bad people that commit despicable acts. Maybe?
It seems like there is a lot of overthinking.

Generally, we don’t want people doing serious harm to other people for personal gain.

This covers muggings, murder, blackmail, other forms of extortion, etc.
You should check out his invest like the best podcast. This will likely be a big business.
> “A possibility is that news of shooting is spread through social media in addition to mass media” she said.

This is your evidence that viewing violence leads to violence and that people like you need to censor what everyone else sees and says.

We've had this argument with violent video games and there is absolutely no solid evidence they make kids more violent. Every study that has come out claiming they do has been debunked.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/evidence-based-livin...

A recent analysis finds that research on video games is prone to false positives and false negatives, which leads to faulty conclusions.
Another review finds that much of the research on violence and video games is affected by publication bias; essentially, studies that concluded that video games lead to aggression and violence are more likely to be published than studies that find violent video games don’t have an effect on violence. As a result, large reviews of the data conclude violent video games lead to aggression without considering research to the contrary. There is emerging research that finds no link between violent games and negative outcomes, such as reduced empathy, aggression and depression.

> This is the second time in two days that I've had to correct a science-illiterate HN user

We are so lucky to be blessed with someone of your mental magnitude. Thank you so much for putting up with our inferiority, oh great one.
The effect of media attention on terrorism (2017)
ah..crap. I messed up. Its GTD.
TurboTax and Quicken are free for everyone making under $60,000, which would be most people whose taxes are simple enough that it could be done with a questionnaire.

The IRS has some information about what you make obviously, because employers withhold your income. But they have very little information about deductions. Of course the IRS could calculate a maximum tax amount and put the burden on you to apply for deductions, but Republicans would flip their shit because it’d be a huge effective tax increase. They want tax season to be painful every year.

Which gets to the point that is whizzing by everyone’s head. Intuit and Quickin aren’t single handedly lobbying to keep tax filing complicated. You could probably crowd fund an opposition if that was true. Intuit and Quicken are leveraging a political situation that exists for other reasons.
sorry GTD
Ask HN: What is your personal Murphy Law tech quote?
It is simple to make something complex, and complex to make it simple.
You can, verilator https://www.veripool.org/wiki/verilator is a free and very performant way of doing so. It's not that hard to get into. SwerV https://github.com/westerndigitalcorporation/swerv_eh1 uses it and Chisel uses it as a backend.
I.e. a failure to implement a surveillance state in which the government knows every move you make, financial or other, so there is no need to claim anything and provide receipts: they have that already, and more.
Plutocratic oligarchy.
I suspect some "compliance cars" are ugly so they don't sell too many of them (since they lose money on each one).

And as to the leaf, I think it was actually modeled after the Prius, and it sold well since there are 400,000 of them out there.
Jsweet – Java to JavaScript Transpiler
This goes against point #2 that the investor for the most part doesn't matter.
I think what the OP meant was “cases in point: Alef & Limbo”. (These were languages that were introduced with Plan 9 and its successor Inferno, that didn’t catch on.)
It's pretty common, and not just in California. Here are some examples from WA.

http://www.workingwa.org/action/surcharge/list
I have never spent more than 90 minutes doing my taxes, and I have done them myself (on paper or with software) for 20 years.
I’m pretty sure the federal government tracking details about where people live and what they spend in daycare is one of the signs of the antichrist. (No, seriously, the federal government doesn’t track this information about you. It can use its police powers to get that information if necessary, but that’s different.)
There's plenty of empty government land on the California Coast.

The main reason there aren't more desal plants is because ejecting the leftover brine into the ocean is an environmental concern.
Forecasting the Future of Blockchain: A Systematic Analysis
The argument isn’t that “everything is predestined” but there is still free will. That’s illogical by definition (and theologians are not intellectual weaklings). Rather the question is wheather, despite God’s omniscience, we still have free will.

The question therefore is: is God’s omniscience equivalent to predestination?

Some think yes (no free will. some Protestants and Muslims). Some think not (therefore we are free. Catholics, ppl who reject omniscience.)

Personally I like Tolstoy’s take on the whole thing in WnP, because it betrays how deep his understanding of physics is (he even scratches at chaos theory).
The last time I looked at PagerDuty (a while ago) it didn't have any kind of "calling tree" equivalent for validated notification escalations.

Couldn't really see how that could be true, so I'm assuming I didn't understand the product.
I suspect Facebook won't be around in 10 years. Social media sites and services tend not to last forever, and with the way public opinion seems to have turned against the company and the inevitably of a competitor coming along with a new focus/different features, it's almost certain Facebook's days are numbered.

Eventually, they'll be another Myspace. Another Digg. Another Friendster. Whatever.

In the short term, well that's harder to predict. They'll probably get in a bit of hot water over their attitudes towards privacy and the spread of 'fake news' on the platform. They're already being called up in front of governments to answer for their actions, and I suspect things could get much worse for them there.

And then the inevitable will happen. People will keep calling for Facebook to change, and eventually it will. In a way that basically destroys the selling point of the site and drives people off to that hip new startup offering an alternative.

The cycle continues.
> SipHash is disfavored in Rust these days

I wasn't aware of this!

What do people use instead?

(I remember reading that part of the motivation for making SipHash the default Hasher was that its randomness guards against hash flooding attacks. Is that something people care about in practice?)
Doesn’t sound familiar, but honestly if it’s a meat and 3, with anybody who frequents HN we’d probably have a mighty fine lunch.
What's the logic of giving a discount for a big lawn?
yes it is one of the few things I look forward to when I return back to the south.
>Shutting down a largely toxic website that fuels the flames of extremism is an order of magnitude less alarming than 50+ people losing their lives.

Under that logic, let's also shut down Twitter, Facebook and Reddit.

Also, one thing has nothing to do with the other.

>I don't really see much value lost in taking 4chan down, just like it's not a big deal if Stormfront or an Isis affiliated site was blocked.

Censorship is fine if it's against people you don't like?

>Freedom of speech doesn't mean you get to do whatever you want, with no threat of consequences.

It means you get to say whatever you want without the state or other people attacking you for saying it.
They could make it work like how most of us use "enterprise" software:

1. Fill in the obvious things like your name.

2. Click "submit" and let it highlight what's missing. Fill in those things.

3. Repeat until it stops throwing exceptions.
Simpletax is a free service, but it's proprietary software, as far as I can tell. It's in the same category as TurboTax.
It’s his ritual, man, let him have it!
The Native Americans used to set fire to the landscape every year - at least in Oregon, and I’m pretty sure California to a degree as well. I think California was literally on fire the first time missionaries sailed up the coast.

I agree - controlled burns are effective at keeping brush at manageable levels, and fire is a natural part of the forest ecosystem. And part of California’s climate. Developing too close to the wilderness edge is putting more human lives at risk. (I own farm and forest land, and am involved in conservation and restoration; I’m familiar with the challenges.)

But Climate Change is rapidly becoming the dominate factor for one simple reason: hot, dry, things burn. And Climate Change is making things hotter and drier.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2018/11/clima...
That's a pretty impressive bump you negotiated! Same company, or a different one?

I'm in fintech too, but I'm not an engineer; more like a dime-a-dozen Excel monkey. Most people I know doing programming are terribly paid (<250k per month); they make even less than generic office workers, who make over 1600 yen per hour.

Having entered my 40s and not being in management, I suspect that my chances for a pay increase have long passed. I went to graduate school in my spare time (when I was working nights) and might try going into academics if I can't take company life any more.

Do you expect to see increases beyond that 14M or do you think that's the cap?
What also helps immensely both in noise and road wear is that no trucks are allowed on 85.

They also designed in sound-absorbing walls.
The idea of eating at a bunch of Waffle Houses in order to make social commentary on the South and America sounds like an outlandish thesis topic for that dude who's been getting his PhD for 12 years now. So naturally I loved this.
I'm pretty sure the real reason its complicated is because politicians are all trying to get deductions or special rules for their favorite special case. I thin its simplistic to blame tax preparers.

Actually simplifying tax is one good thing Trump has done. Hopefully will continue.
I'm not sure if this is HN appropriate content, and is mostly a social/culture topic that's pretty removed from tech.
TurboTax is not free if you need to include gains/loss from multiple sources of income. I.e., this year I made far less than $60,000 but as a student with a part time job, internship stipend, and petty stocks, I would have required TurboTax Premium.
It would be a lot easier to invest in a small company if there was a guarantee that the project would be made open source if the company doesn't make it. Unfortunately, that rarely happens, and then you're stuck. (Doesn't even have to be a small company - people have been worried Evernote for years.)
Same here.

I think it's accidentally truncated, the full video id here: https://youtu.be/zt0OQb1DBko
Also in Canada. Yeah i know people that work under the table that do this. They'll report traceable sources of income while leaving untraceable income out. It's fairly illegal. It's actually one of the ways they get small time drug dealers, they'll go after them for tax fraud.

Personally, my taxes are simple enough that I could do them with the book if I wanted. I've found suitable tax software that doesn't cost me and is fairly easy to use. I'm not sure what it's like in America, but if you don't have a family, own property, run a business, or make a bunch of income from investments, doing taxes with a calculator really isn't that difficult.
It's not 3 but 9%.

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
When I was a kid I got a two deck cassette player and alarm clock combo. I used it as my alarm for about 16 years, and I still get a weird feeling if I hear that precise tone. It makes me feel a bit sleepy and disoriented for a split second. With the same clock I also started to wake up to the sound of the system powering up the speakers to play the torn before the tone sounded. It seems I’d slap the snooze button in my sleep so I had to get a new alarm.