skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If anything, I can't think of any aspect of mindfulness meditation that requires visualisation. You can do mindfulness meditation with open eyes - one of the popular introductory books (Mindfulness in Plain English) specifically describes mindfulness of breathing on the basis of focusing your vision towards the tip of your nose, and part of the reason is to maintain focus without being distracted by visual input.

Keeping the eyes half-open during meditation is a common way of preventing falling asleep.

I'm utterly unable to visualise for the most part except for one experience that was totally revelatory to me during meditation years ago, which I after learning about aphantasia realises must be what most people experience all the time.. But the inability to get my minds eye to work has never been a hindrance to my meditation as far as I can tell. If anything I do not get distracted by visuals, yet there are more than enough other distractions so I'm mostly happy about that during meditation.
I can't stop music from running in my head, as a background to the constant noise of my thoughts. They coexist.

It's interesting how different our experiences are. I do not think you are brain damaged, just specialized in a different way.
I also find that all the pseudo-print fonts that people choose for Tufte-style sites are either blurry or have wildly inconsistent stem widths. Maybe it's a Windows thing.
The point of simplified models is to organize thoughts.

The only perfect model of reality is reality itself. Assumptions are fine if they're reasonable
Wow, $20 is good pay for a teller. Nice to be working for BofA with that going on.

Second thought: Wages are rising, jobs are plentiful. But what happens when the roaring economy changes? Will BofA stay the course?
Honest question. Why do you feel you need any device when driving? Other than for navigation I suppose. As a confessed user do you actually feel it's important to have access to a device while you drive?
This blows my mind. Here in AU, I can lodge mine online through a web portal. It's pre-filled with a variety of information including my reported taxable earnings (through company reporting), my superannuation information, my private health insurance (reported by those companies), any dividend payments made to me, etc. If any of the pre-filling is wrong (in my experience, it never is unless there's info it doesn't know about), I can correct it manually.

I basically only have to enter the deductions I wish to claim. Of course, if I earned money on the side that wasn't reported, I can self-report it too.

The only reason you'd pay for an accountant here is if you have complex tax affairs, or wish to save yourself time. Even when using one, you're ultimately responsible for the accuracy of your tax filing, and you're supposed to review the submission they draft.

I certainly believe that tax law should be understandable by the layman if all they're doing is a simple salaried employment, and by extension in all cases a person should be able to complete their tax requirements entirely on their own (even if that involves learning a large amount of tax law knowledge). There's something deeply unsettling to me about the concept of tax law being too obscure for the everyman to file themselves even in simple situations. Tax is a contract between the government and its citizens. The idea that a third-party private entity must be involved by law seems, to me, very opposed to the libertarian concepts that the US apparently holds dear.
While we're all talking about internal imagery, does anyone have an equivalent 'deafness' in music?

If I concentrate hard I can very clearly hear music as if I'm listening to it, though I often need to subvocalize to keep it on track
Don't need a robot for that. Pigs will eat anything.
Do you actually get the prevailing n-month CD rate of interest in that scheme, or is it purely to teach fiscal discipline? What's the point of collectivizing it? And it seems like people poor enough that they can't access traditional banking products would have a real problem with lack of liquidity if they have an emergency and need their savings immediately.
It seems that runtime should grow quadratically with the number of atoms. There are n^2 pairs of atoms interacting with each other, so n^2 interactions to account for in each step.
Why is it that the simulation takes exponential time? Is there an approachable explanation (honestly curious)
GoDaddy Acquires CoBlocks, ThemeBeans and Block Gallery
It’s not really about making people more or less aware of what they are paying.

The point is to make filing taxes as time consuming and obnoxious (and therefore emotionally painful) as possible, ideally without the public connecting the dots and getting outraged.
Reported donations also don't capture that lobbyists can threaten to contribute to an opposing campaign. A candidate receiving a $10k donation may also have received a $70k threat (in the form of a donation to an opponent) had they decided otherwise on an issue.
If republicans wanted to make a system where people would save the most money we'd just reduce the tax loopholes and simplify the system - the system we have now actually only has the wealthy pay the least money.

Some would say the republicans think this is a feature.
One problem I can see with a standardized computer filing system is that there is unlimited ability to build complex tax law.
> This is just a hack and doesn't solve the real issues.

The real issue is the incentives created by shareholder capitalism. While I would like that solved, that solution is so far away that I'll take whatever hacks I can in the meantime.
Sure, but tapping the unused power of my high-end desktop PC seems to be far more valuable than doing the same thing to a mobile device with a constrained power profile.

How can I be sure I'm not being taken advantage of?
In my case, songs or melodies are nearly always playing. If I'm awake, chances are that something is on in my mind's radio. Conversation and writing seem to be the only activities that consistently quiet the music, though there are other times during the day when it's less noticeable.

This isn't always pleasant, to be honest, and since I first noticed it a few years ago I've wondered how common it is and whether training can stop it. No luck so far.
Hey, I wrote this! Happy to answer questions.
While I'm not the kind of person who usually heeds their own advice but here I go:

1. Keep practicing speaking frequently, ideally with native speakers. I bet your writing skills are so good because you've unknowingly perfected them over the years of reading and writing comments, posts, etc on the Internet. Therefore, the same goes with speaking, you gotta tough it out and give it time until yours can improve.

2. Try dubber ducking to yourself out loud new concepts/things (in English) you've learned, even better if you could find someone to listen to/explain to.

3. Have mock interviews, ideally with somebody who's in the industry so they could come up with interesting questions on the spot, which would force you to have to learn to come up with suitable answers.

4. (I don't see myself ever doing this but worth suggesting nevertheless) Start a podcast or vlog discussing technical topics (without scripts.)
ProPublica estimates that the tax prep industry has spent $6.6 million to advocate for the IRS filing deal.
Is this legal?
The referenced film from 1938 (The Negro Farmer) is quite fascinating: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bd1ROfEGkrQ

Apparently it was produced to help the government justify the expense of federal gov funds.
I think that these scripts should A) not run endlessly in the background while you're not using the website and B) be mindful of how many resources you actually have available.

I think the battery concern is valid enough and it's something that I didn't really consider since it doesn't affect me personally much[0]. I still think the tradeoff of not having ads is worth it though. Perhaps let users choose whether they want ads or mining?

[0] My portable devices are a ThinkPad with a slice battery that lasts me 9 hours of continuous normal use and a phone with a 20kmAh battery bank so I often forget battery life is a problem for some people
Sure, if you think it's that easy. Problem is that there are lots and lots of examples of people spending ridiculous amounts of money in politics trying to sway an election, and losing anyway.
I used to run an ag tech automation startup, and we were working on how fulfillment center robots could be repurposed for indoor agriculture. This allows a complete change in economics. Strawberries are an important crop, but on-demand nutrition for animal feed and other segments where robotics allows complex alignment of supply chain and resources may be more lucrative in the mid term. Like Walmart just in time delivery for commodities.
I'm solely in the consumer camp: I don't produce food, I buy and eat it (I don't buy and sell it either).

I think we've been trained to assume cheap food is a goal. I think the goal should have been clearer: cheap enough but not too cheap

The economics here are complicated. It benefits me to have cheap food, but if the cost is ag workers with systematic health problems, low income, farmers going bust, prison labor being used, its actually not really an overall benefit.

The price of strawberries needs to reflect the real costs here which include paying pickers a living wage.

Replacing pickers by robots only masks the problem, the problem of low paid workers remains: if they aren't picking, what are these people doing, and whats the wider cost?

Here in Australia we have this problem. We exploit backpacker labour (visiting kids on restricted visa) to do picking, we exploit migrant labour from island communities (we actually used to predate them for virtual slaves. Wierd history. Read up on "blackbirding") to do picking. And, we have a duopoloy in the supermarket supply chain which abuses market power to avoid paying farmers a living income stream, sometimes arguing over 10c or 20c price differences.

its really not helping to drive the cost of food down all the time. It has to be a realistic price, or you can't have safe, strategically suitable, sustainable, locally grown food.

I don't want soylent.
At the end of the day, if money buys access and money tends to accumulate in a power law distribution it means that access - and thus influence or even speech are not equally distributed. So, while it may not be a bribe, it’s hard to see it as fair.

Moreover, if paid access is required and that payment goes to the politician - or their campaign which is just an extension of the process to keep them in power, I’m not sure how you can see it as anything other than a bribe that is legitimized by a few layers of well educated lawyers or other experts who do some work to make a case that is inevitably aligned with the best interests of the “donor”. That still sure sounds like pay to play politics to me.
Google Cloud has SLAs with reasonable depreciation schedules. Google's free consumer services, not so much...
>As someone who has only ever experienced sight when my eyes are open

Do you not dream?
You are saying that IRS should write a TurboTax competitor.
More CCNY than Columbia, perhaps, but institutional outsourcing of stress and risk for inadequate pay, security, and healthcare is a huge part of the problem.

And not just for academics, though as a group they have distinctive challenges.
Personally, I wouldn't consider it Mozilla Corporation's moral obligation to resign over including an add-on by default, that can be disabled.
> Netflix has been using anti-consumer dark patterns for years.

Examples? "Trailers in your face on the main menu" is not a "dark pattern": there is no element of deception involved. It's simply a user experience that you dislike. Similarly, removing AirPlay support may suck for consumers, but it's not deceptive.
"With every year it is more likely that one day you will not be able to create a website using the technologies of your choosing and you will not be able to make it behave as you see fit. Others will make those decisions for you."

This is already how it is for almost everyone and it's... fine? I don't know about the rest of you, but I can't even be bothered to keep up with emerging web standards, let alone make any decisions about them.
Simplifying the tax code in the 80s was the public sales pitch. The real strategy was to dramatically cut taxes on the wealthy (e.g. by eliminating the top several marginal tax brackets).

But keep in mind, the Democrats controlled congress, so reform had to gain bipartisan support.
Is the Green New Deal Dead?
You can't really be sure that you're not being taken advantage of, but neither can you with ads. I still run into ads that hijack my back button on my phone all the time.
This is such an odd post. Who expects someone to work 140 hours a week?

>Who complains about someone leaving their kid in daycare?

The mothers in Yahoo who can't work from home any more and can't afford the $300 a day daycare in SF.
Key Kubernetes Concepts
Perhaps I have overblown the ability to recall taste or smell, or at least it was incorrect to say there isn't some level of breakdown in comparison to the spatial/visual recollection we were discussing.

In general, I think of it in the terms you might hear someone on the food network describe a dish. "High notes", "low notes", "mellow", "pungent". On Sunday I made biscuits and sawmill gravy (good southern boy that I am). Sawmill gravy has a distinct profile, it's a base of nutty/earthy from the roux and peppery. I start describing the constituent parts, however if you asked me to describe "peppery" now it's getting more difficult. The only way I would have to describe it would be how your tongue and throat burns when you taste it.

You can see I'm getting more vague and conceptual.

It's entirely possible that as you say this is just "textual" data, however that feels like a drab description of what feels to me like a more vivid experience. It feels as if there "more to it" than just recalling information.

Unrelated, but I also think it's interesting how as we start talking about other senses how entangled memory is. We aren't talking about a nondescript sphere hallucination in my visual field anymore, but rather a memory of my Sunday brunch. When I imagine the smell of beer I inevitably will recall the last time I was at the bar with some mates and the spatial/visual memory of that space as well as my emotional state, etc.
I've visited San Franscisco a few times. First in the 80s, it was a lot nicer then. Most recently last year, where I found the awful zombie apocalypse around Moscone Center. What a change!

I hope SF can find a way to revitalize, sort of like NYC has done. It seemed to go through some dark times in the 70s, but now is much nicer. Wishing the same luck for SF.
Do it. If you mount an action camera on your bike it has a wide enough field of view that you can record the idiots while still steering a safe path.
My ex made me realize I had this a few years ago. It was like everyone here says, the literallity of seeing things in my mind escaped me. I'd always assumed sayings like counting sheep were just metaphorical.

It kind of goes to show you how moritifyingly behind we are in understanding and articulating our cognition. Autism was right up there until a few years ago. I believe there's a lot we still have to open up to ourselves. I'm not religious, but maybe exploration of the self and mind is more warranted than our society currently expresses. Of course, it's easy to slip into quackery, but I almost wonder if it'd be worth a few more nut jobs if we collectively self analyzed more deeply. Maybe there's a lot out there to our happiness and evolution were missing out on if it's taken this long to realize there's a sizeable number of people who can't sense internally.

Funny side note - despite having Aphantasia I have two degrees in physics. I could never follow in class (literally couldn't imagine what the prof was trying to hand model) and animated gifs made everything instantly understandable. The agony I felt in those programs seemed a little more justified after I was told about Aphantasia. A little.
The USA has "deductions", which are convoluted rat races where everyone does a bunch of paperwork so they all get a small discount which is cancelled out by higher overall rates. The IRS can't tell you which deductions to take, since they don't know your whole life situation.

It's the same structure that makes you pay 3% extra for everything you but so you can get 1-2% back as a credit card refund, and makes you get a supermarket loyalty card, and frequent flier miles, etc.
How do you differentiate deductions from loopholes?
Emphasis on "modern" --- I distinctly remember using some web chat clients with IE6 in the early 2000s, and they didn't need hundreds of megabytes of RAM (average PCs had a total of between 64 and 256MB of RAM) and the whole (single-core at the time) CPU to do what today's web apps do.

For anyone who knows what I mean, it might be interesting to write such a "lightweight" web client for e.g. Slack, restricting yourself to whatever JS abilities were available in 2000 or so, yet imitate as much of the features and appearance of the web client today as possible. Chances are it will still work with "modern" browsers too, and use a tiny fraction of the resources of the current one. All the better if it gets noticed and DMCA'd.
Thank you for the link. It sounds like they are talking about a TSA regulation, and not necessarily a law, though.
Still very interesting, however, and I appreciate you following up.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190410021520/https://techcrunc...

Gotta hit ESC just after it loads.
Inheritance is a conceptually more complex issue that isn't just about code reuse and doing things slightly differently than a parent. Composition doesn't make such assumptions. It only assumes that the parts conform with some interface.
I'm not affiliated but I've been using freetaxusa.com for several years now and their system does everything I need, including contract based income, capital gains, etc in the free version. State tax costs < $7 ($15 now, must have been an early file deal) if you are feeling lazy.
Worse– it sounds to me like PR-speak for "3rd party TVs are adopting AirPlay, and we can't collect telemetry about the device that users are streaming to."
I can, and I draw with more mechanical precision from memory than from sight. I used to be quite good at drawing, but I'm out of practise.

However I know precisely where in relation to each other the window frames in my bedroom are, for example, and how they are shaped, and their colour, and how the panes are separated, and what colour the curtains are and how to reproduce the brushed appearance of the curtain rod, and so on.

I can't see it. But I know exactly where very small details are in relation to each other, so I can reconstruct it piece by piece mentally and put it to paper.

I've mentioned elsewhere that prior to realising most people are literal about seeing things in their mind, I saw myself as a very visual thinker because of that. My spatial recall is well above average.

Imagine a blind person knowing where everything around them in places they are familiar with, I guess, except I have the benefit of being able to learn the spatial relationships through sight, and can also recall e.g colours though I can't see them.
Ask HN: What are good things to do when your manager leaves?
My engineering manager is leaving our team to pursue a different opportunity. This is the first such change for this team. In your experience, what are some things I should keep in mind during the upcoming transition? Are there good questions I should ask before she leaves?
I'm sure it's just coincidental that senators and their family/friends frequently get lucrative positions on the boards of various companies, investment sweeteners, and actual positions in these companies for family. For example Joe Biden, a leading Democrat, has been in bed with the credit card industry for most of his career and supported/written legislation in their interest. MBNA was one of his biggest donors and hired one of his sons at an executive level, no doubt with very high pay.

The campaign contributions are just window dressing for the rest of it. It absolutely is bribery.
I guess as a last resort....kinda trying whatever for cancer after the doctors send you home to die. Just as you can improve it, you can also fry it (whatever is left anyway)
A better way to do 2 would be to do away with withholding. After a year of that we’d see a radically different tax system.
I literally see this happen almost every time I'm at a stop light. Someone in the queue is looking at their phone and by the time they react only a handful of cars have gotten through a light that's normally timed to move them all. Multiply this by hundreds of intersections and the effect leads to rising travel times and frustration across the board. I've also noticed a large uptick in people running stale yellow lights/newly red lights, I believe this behavior is precipitated by the red light texting crowd.
That was a plus from my point of view. I don't want my machine getting independent opinions about how to manage itself; it's my machine, after all.
How can the US tell a Chinese company they need to sell something?

As far as I can tell this was an entirely legitimate business transaction. It is now up to the users to determine if they want to stay with the platform.

Besides, the best way to mitigate this risk is societal change. How would the average person go if their porn viewing history was public knowledge? Poorly, I bet. Perhaps we should "simply" stop judging each other's sexual preferences so harshly. (I realise this is a tall order)
Fair enough, but that's a different argument from "it is 100% categorically wrong for anyone to have to incur any material cost to access the laws". If travel has costs and you have to travel to the library to learn it, that already violates it.

And you're still sidestepping the issue of the codes having a cost of production like any intellectual work, in terms of deciding e.g. the optimal balance to put in terms of safety vs cost of a building code. It doesn't cost for each access, but they do have to amortize that cost, and it makes sense for the cost to be allocated toward those who do specialized work in that domain.
You put it into words better than I could. That's the exact same for me.
Couldn't tell you what the philosophy or justification behind MA's stair riser requirement is.

Have you considered that perhaps the engineers who contributed that change to the MA residential code have done their homework, identified value worth pursuing (whether for safety, building optimization, new material availability, future planning, etc.), and decided it was worth going through what surely isn't a painless ECP process to amend what you've dismissed to be trivial minutae?
Who wants to co-found a new 'electric coffee' product?
I can't describe the face of my family members to a sketch artist. I mean, I know I can recognize their face if I see it, but I can't take 2 of them and tell you who has a bigger ear, or nose or lips, or if one has a more round or oval face. This is with my own family members I see often. I use to think that people who claimed they could visualize where lying and making it that claim up until a few years ago.