skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe but the point is they'll need to know vastly less data than the smorgasbord of hyper-parameters in use today.
Mike Cannon-Brooks – How you can use impostor syndrome to your benefit[video]
Literally all of that information is already being reported to the IRS by the relevant companies on forms 1098, 1099-whatever, W-2, W-4 and whatever other schedules apply. The IRS defines the rules, they built an engine to take all that into account to ensure you're not lying on your taxes. They just have to literally run it and send you the printout for verification with a remittance stub. The rest is regulatory capture and graft.

I wonder if I could FOIA myself my tax return from the IRS for the coming year haha.

Flat tax is totally unrelated and a conversation worth having. It's regressive, disproportionately impacts those least well off (the poor) and doesn't make sense when you index the taxes paid to the marginal utility of money. For someone who makes 10K/yr, 10% is 1K and may be the difference between rent and homelessness. For someone who makes 1M/yr 10% is 100K leaving them 900K to futz with. 1K to a poor person ls worth way way more than 100K to a rich person. That's why we don't do it. That's why almost nobody does it.

Flat tax is "simple" in the way it's always easier to re-write something from scratch: what you're left with tends to be a bastardization followed by a long and expensive lesson in how it got that way in the first place.

(For an example of what it might look like, the Canada Revenue Agency offers this already: https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/e-services/...)
You’re about to get destroyed if you haven’t already spent at least 2 months reviewing material and practicing.

Just a fair word of warning. I don’t mean to discourage you, but you can’t expect to waltz in with no practice for these things.
Most of these issues are solved if you can manage to get your hands on a copy of the LTSB (or whatever they are calling it these days, I believe the name has changed slightly) version of Windows 10. I would actually pay good money for this distribution, but it's only available through MSDN subscriptions or enterprise licensing.

It's a rock-solid, stable, garbage-free version of Windows. You don't get any half-borked feature updates, only security fixes. No Cortana, no Store, no Candy Crush.
I wouldn’t call a state constitution “some arbitrary rules.”
Red Hat will continue to support Python 2 until 2024: https://access.redhat.com/solutions/4455511
I do it every year. I have nothing to deduct so it makes no sense to pay someone else to fill in numbers I already have.
And if you jail enough people at random, you'll eventually jail a percentage of lawbreakers that reflects the actual percentage of people who break the law in your country.
> Implement their methods from scratch (i.e. numpy not pytorch)

lol this is basically impossible and completely pointless. please show me a numpy implementation of BERT or CycleGAN or deformable convolutions (note that jax != numpy). it's like suggesting implementing a kernel to someone who wants to learn about virtual memory or scheduling.

better advice would be take a paper and implement the model using pytorch without looking at their implementation and fiddle with that.
propublica is a good one to donate to!
Reminds me of this shadertoy:

https://www.shadertoy.com/view/MljXzz
In case folks don't know, burntsushi is also the author of ripgrep (rg), written in Rust, and possibly the fastest grep in the world at the moment.

rg has all but replaced grep for me.
> If there is no legitimate, productive outlet for it, it finds illegitimate and unproductive outlets. This is IMHO who communist states turn into mafia states: the mafia becomes the outlet.

The reason that former communist countries like Russia became oligarchies (what I think you might mean by mafia state) is because people with significant power in the previous communist system seized control of huge state assets during the disorder that accompanied the system's collapse, and in doing so took ownership of large pieces of the economy. Even under communism, power was closely held among a in-group, and that stayed the same afterward.

The oligarchy didn't emerge because average people were bored and provided for, didn't know what to do with themselves, and therefore decided to set up illegitimate enterprises.

Also, plenty of people in capitalist countries set up illegitimate enterprises like financial frauds and consumer scams of all sorts (remember 2008?), and capitalist societies have their own oligarchs - though we call them plutocrats instead.
Also "KFPS", presumably for "thousands of feet per second"
Spispy: Open-Source SPI Flash Emulation [video]
But this doesn't really matter as you can disable updates (group policies through WinPro). By the time someone is pressed to update for compatibility, there is already a solution to fix what the update broke. For the sake of enterprises, Windows will always have a switch to disable updates. And since it is hugely complex, and it needs to keep large portions compatible, there will probably be always ways to hack around.

Of course this state of things is far from ideal, and it's not easily available for everyday users. But I think an open source desktop OS could have never achieved the things that Windows is respected for.
Scientists have developed a new concept of mathematical modeling
You can in fact request a private letter ruling from the IRS. They are not obligated to respond to it, but typically do.

E.g. For §25D

https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-wd/201809003.pdf

https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-wd/1130003.pdf

You also apparently did not review

https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/n-13-70.pdf

(Which even has a contact phone number for the author; call it! Worse that can happen is they point you somewhere else.)

If you google "IRC §25D" you'll find a wide variety of resources. In reality, what you'd likely do is a read a bit, and try to come to reasonable conclusion. If the tax amount at issue is substantial, try to find someone with expertise in the topic. Also try to take ideas to their logical conclusion. If 25% of your roof is solar panels, do you think the credit should apply to the cost of an entire new roof as well? It's a credit to encourage energy efficiency, not regular upkeep.
Stocks post best annual gain in 6 years with the S&P 500 surging more than 28%
I think this is where things get unfair. As a system we are more comfortable taking advantage of these people’s ignorance than teaching them. As your said even savvy people don’t get this concept because it means understanding the whole system not just when they get their checks.
Windows isn't perfect on this, I've had to update software for the transitions from NT to 2000, 2000 to XP, XP to Vista and 8 to 8.1 and also for 64 bit support. Mostly because my app has driver level code.
2 Peter 3:1-10

1 Dear friends, this is now my second letter to you. I have written both of them as reminders to stimulate you to wholesome thinking. 2 I want you to recall the words spoken in the past by the holy prophets and the command given by our Lord and Savior through your apostles.

3 Above all, you must understand that in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and following their own evil desires. 4 They will say, “Where is this ‘coming’ he promised? Ever since our ancestors died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation.” 5 But they deliberately forget that long ago by God’s word the heavens came into being and the earth was formed out of water and by water. 6 By these waters also the world of that time was deluged and destroyed. 7 By the same word the present heavens and earth are reserved for fire, being kept for the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly.

8 But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. 9 The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.

10 But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare.
Every state has at least one representative in the House, not three.
Only if you don't care who you hurt on the way to your goal. We may have different definitions of sanity.
On the contrary. I would wager that the vast majority of Americans can do a very simple tax computation (especially after the Trump administrations' increase in the standard deduction, whatever you think about the politics of it) and get their taxes correct.

Yes, there are several million people with special cases. If there were 3 million of them, that's not even 1% of the population. A significant group, but hardly demonstrative of "basically no-one".

Income - [ 3 or 4 basic deductible items ] - [ N * exemptions ] - standard deduction => go to tax table => tax. Done.
So that means the planes were intended to be at levels 300 and 290. Is it normal to have only 1000 feet of vertical separation? It seems like the higher plane could easily lose 1000 feet in a few seconds before ATC could tell the lower plane to move away.
I don't have enough money for a vacation home! I'm full time in the Yukon when I'm not on the road.

Many people up North have solar setups and are off grid, usually with older lead-acid battery setups which work just fine.

Solar is great in the summer when the sun is up for 20+ hours a day, but slim in the winter when we only get ~4 hours of sunlight. Most people supplement with a generator for a couple of hours a day which is what I really hope to avoid with ideas like this TEC on the woodstove.

The stove is already pumping out so much heat, and it's so cold outside I feel like the temperature difference is just begging me to do something with it!

My other dream is to by land on moving water (river, stream) and make a little water wheel that turns an old pickup truck alternator. It will be killer in summer, but it's a problem in the winter because the water will be solid for ~5 months.
That does not require them to maximise their immediate profit, like they have just about to go bankrupt, though. They should strive to maximise overall return to shareholders.
Doesn't matter what the post is about. Always gimme context pls
I don't think getting updates for professional software has been a problem, it's mostly utilities and games.
Sure, go through the fastai material and maybe write a blog post about how you learned ML (read: DL) in a few months. What you really learned is copy-pasting code (as you mentioned) and some neural net tricks (like a good learning-rate to start SGD).

How to learn ML? Do fastai + reading Daphne Koller's and Chris Bishop's books on PGMs + re-implementing a paper on Gaussian process classification + another paper on GNNs + ....
I guess his point is to tackle it from a top-down approach. For me, that's how I am breaking ground in my ML study. I tried Andrew Ng's course, I didn't understand a thing.

Then I tried Kaggle's mini-course. It kickstarted me into ML and motivated me to learn the theory as I go. For example, when I got to apply Random Forest Regressor, I went to Wikipedia and tried to read on it. Got some idea. And the progress is good.

Maybe for some of us, I think top-down is motivating and makes the learning process enjoyable.
Someone else has already linked to Oblique Strategies, but I wrote a ~response to Christine's blog post. Mine is about randomness, Tarot, and Oblique Strategies: https://lesser.occult.institute/introducing-randomness-into-...
The same niche grep, sed, cut, sort, etc.. fill but specifically for csv and, using them together (xsv with other unix tools) can get you quickly very far on some tasks.
Perhaps he succeeded in going back to meet his father, but then the shock of seeing his adult son caused his father to have the heart attack.
> Analyzing a dataset of over 1.5 billion individual opioid prescriptions between 2011 and 2018, which were aggregated to the individual provider-year level, we find that recreational and medical cannabis access laws reduce the number of morphine milligram equivalents prescribed each year by 11.8 and 4.2 percent, respectively.

As a former marijuana user this seems obvious to me. I don’t understand why federal legalization has been so difficult. There are many benefits despite the potential of unknown risk.

Maybe my beliefs are a little out there. I wish for all drugs to be decriminalized. Portugal’s model seems to be working quite well.

https://time.com/longform/portugal-drug-use-decriminalizatio...
>Recognizing chords seems like a useful thing to solve?

It's also pretty easy to teach and learn for a practicing musician but much more difficult to teach a machine, since you run into issues with blind source separation.

Speech transcription is good enough provided we have enough preprocessing power, assume a single speaker, and know the language beforehand and have trained the model on a large number of previous speakers with the same dialect/accent.

In music, you don't know how many speakers there are (instruments playing), the dialect/accent (orchestration/chord voicing) changes on the fly, representations are non-unique and contextual, and artists intentionally subvert expected results to make good music.

Humans are just better at this and easier to train to do it than computers, for the moment.
> As a professional software developer, the tools available on UNIXy platforms are already much better in many cases than the Windows ports.

This is because everyone keeps trying to make windows unix/gnu. Embrace powershell it has everything GNU binutils does, but built in. As a professional software developer I NEVER have problems developing except when unixy devs don't test for windows or don't use cross platform tools.
FWIW, I mostly operate in the world of small businesses, and in tech and creative sectors.

Anecdotally, the majority of the small businesses I deal with don't fit your characterisation there. For example, MS Office is far from universal in this market now. Online collaboration and document editing tools are displacing applications like Word and Project. We're being forced to switch to online management and accounting systems because of issues with interoperability and government regulation, which makes Excel much less useful. Outlook/Exchange is giving way to Google Mail and similar services. I'm not saying any of these is necessarily an improvement or has no downsides, but it's clearly the way the industry has been moving. The specialists doing things like CAD or DCC still need the 800lb gorilla software in many cases, but those are niche markets.

The biggest problem with Linux on the desktop today is no longer application support, IMHO, but rather the lack of off-the-shelf PCs you can buy that way, with proper tech support and so on. We tried buying one of the Dell laptops that was sold with Ubuntu preinstalled, and it was one of the most disappointing and troublesome purchases we've ever made, largely due to the abysmal support when basic hardware failures occurred. (Also, the hardware itself appears to be pretty poor quality.)

If you could buy decent laptops with Linux preinstalled from the usual big name brands or off the shelf at your local bricks-and-mortar store, I suspect a lot of people would barely notice the difference any more, because so many of their software needs are either very basic or using online systems now.
This is the essence of the idiotic premise of the current administration that they simplified taxes enough to fit on a post card... The number of brackets isn't the source of tax complexity, it's all of the other shit. That's why that 'postcard' can be accompanied with dozens of supplemental forms. Predictably they killed the 'postcard' after one year:

https://www.businessinsider.com/the-republican-tax-reform-po...
Doesn't work so well for the self-employed, alas.
"Marijuana laws" are what caused this mess in the first place. The title of this post makes it sound like government is doing something rather than getting out of the way.
I'm completely tech literate and I STILL am afraid to use regedit. There are so many gotchyas, so little documentation, and many many side effects.
I built my first side project.

www.itswinwinboardgames.com

It takes your wishlist from BGG and analyses the geek market looking for the best prices for each board game in it.

I built it mainly with Python+Flask+Bulma, an all new tech stack for me, and I use it almost daily, because who doesn't like to find some bargains.

All in all, 95% of the advice floating around about how to start something is on point and I encourage everyone to launch THAT idea in 2020.
I agree but we can still reason with the current systems in use. MCAS crashing planes is not that different from metal fatigue IMO. In both cases, we can look back and say "Okay, that's how it happened and we screwed up because we made a design mistake" which is very different from Autopilot driving into concrete barriers because that's a very high-level mistake.

We wouldn't have a problem with the software not recognising barriers or mistake road lines correctly as long as this software doesn't claim to be able to handle high-level decisions and fail on something extremely obvious to humans leading to great damages.
How about fire fighting, defense, and the Internet?
You know what else was written in BASIC? The original Smalltalk interpreter https://youtu.be/pACoq7r6KVI?t=1189 . ("I'm not ashamed, I got it going quickly" - Dan Ingalls.) Obviously this was just a scratch implementation of what became Smalltalk-72, rather than a Smalltalk-80.
Every time you use a website with third party content, that's a positive story. Without the DMCA safe harbor many of them would have been sued out of existence by now.
Interesting. Does it work with Raspberry Pis and the CSI cameras? What about my Logitech USB camera? Would it support receiving a picture from eg a flatbed scanner over a parallel port?
I don't think I've ever seen someone use M, NM, or nmi for nautical mile. I've only ever seen nm. I used nautical miles a lot in a previous career, in the context of aircraft mission planning.

Telling people in the industry to use nmi or NM seems a lot like telling computer people to use MiB or GiB instead of MB or GB, or to pronounce gif "jiff". They're just not going to change.
Oracle has a feature called external tables that lets you map regular files to the database and run SQL against them. Works with csv or any format that can be loaded to the database with the normal database loading utilities. This is very useful for getting transformation and loading done in one step!
I was not been able to find list of supported cameras. Could anybody please point to it?
I think more or better automation makes sense. However, in this case, they are just trying a new tactic to deflect blame.

The fundamental problem was that they had new requirements and instead of allowing the engineers to create a new design, management wanted to save money so insisted the engineers shoehorn the new requirements into the old design with hacks resulting in a plane that was fundamentally unstable and ending with hundreds of people dying.

The solution to that problem is to have several executives from Boeing and the FAA in prison. Then break Boeing down and rebuild it as an engineering organization.

After that, yes, continue increasing the automation.
> many

More like several, and no high-prestige awards. They've also published several incorrect stories and hold the dubious honor of being the only publication Robert Mueller called out for publishing incorrect information as fact while he was still investigating.

The point is, they are Bloomberg / Politico / Huffington Post tier, not WaPo / NYT / WSJ / BBC tier or even The Atlantic / CNN / Fox / MSNBC tier.
We don't need a flat tax rate to simplify the system, though. A progressive tax rate is just fine, as long as it is consistent across all types of income with no, or few, deductions. Inheritance is income. Capital gains is income. We may still need some offsetting - it seems unreasonable to tax capital gains when moving your primary residence, for example (which the US does now, with some unnecessarily complicated value and time based offsets).
Don’t have access to the paper, but would love to see how they controlled for dropping opioid use.

The roll out of marijuana legislation overlaps quite nicely with an overall effort to reduce opioid prescriptions.

I imagine it would be difficult to control for that effect.
Run postgres in a container
For coffee especially it’s a big waste of time for me to leave the premises to go buy some coffee every time I want coffee. Even in the crappiest workplaces I have worked in - like the torn-up remnants of a Charles Schwab office that they had vacated, without removing all the trash, and some dubious middleman re-rented single rooms to startups - the inhabitants would informally band together to provide free coffee.
Might as well add “again” to the headline.
In theory, you are liable. It's just difficult to actually enforce that because most people won't actually spend a fortune in legal fees hoping they'll win it back down the road.
Surprised no one linked to his similar Linux list: https://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.t...
a) The great majority of the population who perceives a salary not needing to file taxes.

In the United States, and many other nations, the vast majority of taxes aren't collected from payroll. If that was the case, things would be easy. But there are hundreds of other ways that taxes are collected, and they vary from person to person.

More importantly, taxes aren't exclusively about revenue generation. They're used to encourage people to do or not do things: Save money, invest money, buy houses, have babies, buy cars, add solar panels, and thousands of other things.

There are plenty of people who shout "flat tax!" whenever this topic comes up. But they're mostly people who have only led simple lives where the IRS only touches them on their paycheck, or who don't understand the full range of how taxes are used.
I agree completely! I think it’s impossible to have a productive discussion about taxation on the national level when no one even knows how much they’re paying and where the money is going. Not that that information isn’t fairly easily attainable, but in my experience, very few people attain it and even fewer fully understand it.
Nah I'm going by the testing pyramid. Basically by 95% I mean all unit tests, which under the testing pyramid is the majority. If you follow different philosophies (which is valid and perfectly ok imo) and have more integration tests then unit tests then the 95% marker does not apply.

Integration tests or end to end tests or any test that touches IO or tests that measure performance are outside the purview of proofs. Proofs only verify pure logic.

Having a full formal model of an end to end system that can be verified with proofs is, I completely agree, really far away.

If 95% of your tests are unit tests then my statements apply.
bishop's book is a good suggestion (i prefer hastie) for ml but you have to admit that

1. fastai is neural nets
2. bishop's book (and whoever else's) are grad books that require considerable mathematical training to really profit from
3. the aforementioned books don't teach anything practical!

so ultimately i completely agree with the op of this thread - just jump in and read around when things don't work how you expect.
Now we are getting to the question if his aim is ethical or not. I think his obsession with reducing taxation at all costs is misguided and often counterproductive, but it is not insane.