skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is great news!

I really hope the IRS creates it's own site, they would need to advertise it heavily though, way way too many people think eFile = TurboTax. There's already vastly better options out there but very few people use them or know about them.

Edit: I think the real killer feature would be to pre-populate the "IRS e-file" with the information the IRS already knows about you. That would get people paying attention.
Yes - I just meant that we're going to see a ton of comments here from people who want to let it be know that they think Uber, Postmates, etc are super evil and everything the government can do to shut them down is what they deserve.

It is samethink. A lot of people posting here hold these positions because they read them in the last story about these companies and they want to join in on the rabble. And discussion or nuance gets lost in this blizzard of conformity of opinion. It gets boring after a while.
The Compact Calendar 2020-2021
i am genuinely curious what you mean by virtue signaling here.

do you think that anyone who posts a critique of worker-employer relations is just pretending? isn't a simpler explanation that they actually care about the issue?
Of course they did not use it. Tax software companies went out of their way to make sure this would be the case. After all their shenanigans, they might as well have put Free File option in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard.

Related: TurboTax Deliberately Hid Its Free File Page From Search Engines

https://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-deliberately-hid...

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19758126
Have you perhaps considered that your holier than thou attitude toward commenters who care about things is the most egregious example of virtue signaling in the thread?
They should implement something for the simple cases first. Like the standard deductions, no investment income, no business income scenario. That will probably handle 40% of the filers with one page of input.
Show HN: Anyone want to join my Podcast Club?
The first one starts "Hello. Welcome to Human Edge. I'm Ian Brown."

Human Edge is a Canadian television series - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Edge

Ian Brown is a Canadian journalist - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Brown_(journalist)
... umm those people are bat sh!t. I can only imagine how much that will be after this change.
Prices increase regardless.
That's too much time and work for 99% of users, even tech-savvy ones.

Think of it this way: lets say you value your time at $50/hour (very conservative for a tech-savvy person). If it takes an hour a month to admin that box, that's a $50/month e-mail service you have not including VPS/VM cost.
"Whataboutism, also known as whataboutery, is a variant of the tu quoque logical fallacy that attempts to discredit an opponent's position by charging them with hypocrisy without directly refuting or disproving their argument. It is particularly associated with Soviet and Russian propaganda."
Perpetual motion machines are fundamentally impossible by current understandings of physics. Fusion, from my reading, is more like a tremendously difficult modeling problem. Like protein folding. We can't sustain a productive reaction because we can't contain it properly, and we can't contain it properly because we can't yet predict the behavior of the plasma.
Perhaps that was it.

I've also talked to my chemist friends in grad school and they admit they didn't really start liking chemistry until their junior year, which is when they felt confident they could work in a lab and figure out an experiment on their own. I noticed this is different than my engineering classes where they got us working on open ended lab problems from the first semester. Obviously our solutions were poor, but it got us feeling like we were able to apply what we were learning right away.
ppl also talk a lot about union for tech workers. Its not feasible in tech because a sizable majority of tech workers are on various visa's that precludes them from joining a strike, making the union essentially ineffective. This needs to be addressed first.

Chicago has teachers union but filipino teachers on J1 cannot participate in a strike, it works for CTU because there are only a tiny fraction on J1 visa.
Sure. In a perfect world labor unions wouldn't need to exist because government regulations would make sure employees didn't abuse employees and employees have protections.

Unions are the logical outcome of lax labor regulations.
PhPstorm, JIra, bitbucket and xxamp
Inequality is not an inherently bad thing. I would rather live in a society where everyone makes a living wage except for some billionaires (some inequality), compared to a society where everyone makes a poverty wage (no inequality).
Our median income in California is the highest in the nation at $70k. Bay is $100k. California seems to be doing everything right in terms wage growth.

https://datausa.io/profile/geo/california
> Simultaneously, we have seen the greatest burst of prosperity in the developing world in recorded history.

Do you have any back-of-the-envelope estimate of how much of that represents late-arriving dividends from massive, top-down, non-market government spending on infrastructure (the interstate, the Internet), the Cold War, and the space race?
Wow, that's a very comprehensive list! I think it covers pretty much every item that makes Windows 10 unacceptable for my personal use (unfortunately, I'm required to use Win 10 in my workplace.)
Your assumption of "free markets" is a mythical one.
I think they get it mostly right for tax filing. But I find them to usually be pretty blinded by ideology when it comes to some topics and severely lacking in objectivity.
> The problem is no effective oversight. Laws without oversight are going to be obviously abused.

Lots of laws are privately enforced. DMCA doesn't have to be different.

If you file a false DMCA claim, even if unknowingly, you should be liable for damages. To the platform, for their cost in dealing with your B.S. An to the content owner, for their costs (including time and attorneys fees) and any lost or interrupted revenue.

I'd also make such judgements eligible for summary judgment, provided the damages are less than e.g. $25,000.
This is a false dichotomy and a strawman.

The only two options are not either participating in often misused, grossly overreaching, non-configurable telemetry programs or disabling them completely.

And power users are not dedicating themselves to not helping the product getting better. You've gotten the argument twisted. We love to make software better by offering up information about how we use a product. However, in this climate the rational response is to disable all telemetry until the situation is under control with better legislation.

Don't paint this with the wrong colors. Power users are not the irrational group here, and this 0.01% figure which you based your argument on isn't grounded in reality, and therefore neither is your argument.
Disclaimer: FTE at Verily (Google Life Sciences)

Sounds like this isn't the first time this has happened and won't be the last. Both Compass (the firm that employs these cafeteria workers) and Google both have experience working with unions and are committed to working through this. Happy that these employees are getting the representation they deserve. I hope this means that these people will get better benefits that Google FTEs enjoy and stronger protections.

As a FTE at Verily (an Alphabet subsidiary), the management's priorities are very clearly not focused on challenging the status quo in these areas -- they are focused on running the "core business". I can only guess the sentiment is similar within Google.

I look forward to seeing this issue continue to get light and hope that business priorities evolve to incorporate the more humanistic aspects of running a business instead of simply focusing on the bottom line all the time.
Running Tips
The DAC-6 legislation should help with this.
Lead poisoning can be much more obvious than that, and we've known for centuries that lead was poisonous.

The Romans knew it, and they still used it in their pipes and even in their drinks.
I am not trying to be antagonistic, but how is anyone (particularly the assumed tech-savvy users of HN) forced into the ‘spying.’ When you use these services the cost is the monetization of your data. FAANG isn’t even attempting to hide it anymore, and again, you are posting on HN and clearly know how these companies operate. If you use their service you are engaging in a transaction with them. No one is forced to use Google, use DDG. No one is forced to use Facebook, talk to people in person. I understand the effect of numbers on the practicality of avoiding these companies, it is limiting in many ways, but if you feel that strongly about it just avoid using the services.
How about WWII? If the challenges of climate change were treated with the same urgency the allies mustered together then, we might actually have a shot at avoiding complete disaster.
> the "human labor as commodity economy"

Unskilled labor is a commodity. That doesn't justify treating people callously.
It's unlikely that I wouldn't notice eating a piece of plastic the size of a sesame seed. Maybe occasionally, sure, but I sure notice tiny fish bones or the slightest bit of grit in clam chowder, or egg shell in a cookie. If I'm eating a bottle cap worth of plastic a week I would notice on a daily basis.
I'm at ~$2m now. Still no employees.
wasn't ride sharing created as a side money thing not a main source of income
So in your mind actual Pokémon games are deterministic, but the platonic ideal for Pokémon is not. Why would you assume the real Pokémon game was your mental model?

I mean the software implementation defines the game and it’s the only thing anyone has ever played. It seems to me any change you make results in a different game. It’s not like a game allowing pawns to move 3 spaces can be called Chess even if everything else was the same.
Free markets are as real as perpetual motion machines.
No, I understand that. What I'm pointing out is that if something has no realistic chance of being economically viable, then from the end user's point of view that's just as bad as if it were physically impossible. The only difference is society is spending billions while pretending an economic miracle will happen, even if that miracle is as implausible as discovery of a violation of the law of conservation of energy.
World poverty dipped. It’s true that inequality rose inside countries but it actually decreased on a global scale.

Environmental issues are a byproduct of human development, not of any specific economic system.
It is not clear to me how these issues would have been any better under socialist/communist regimes. If anything, the Soviet record on environment and workers health is abysmal.
I think that's what bothers me about "woke". It applies a binary state to a considerably more complex concept. It's like being "in shape." It's not a yes or no state. You don't achieve "in shape" and move on to something else. It's an entire lifestyle that requires constant work.

The concept of being woke is a convenient cop-out to declare in a single word that yes you agree with all those things all those other people are saying.

Also get off my lawn. I'm cranky about fundamental principles I hold dear being distilled down to a slang word so that it fits Twitter culture conversations better.
I always forget about the concept of gravitational engineering, probably because it's just a bit scary to think about the unknowns involved. If you could mass produce small black holes and position them you could pretty easily construct giant lenses capable of redirecting the output of a star to anywhere you please. That's more than a little terrifying.
We need pre-filled tax forms.

https://priceonomics.com/the-stanford-professor-who-fought-t...
I don't think it's unreasonable to ask the author what they meant to convey with a random link.
Feel better?
Yes, the huge difference is the crackpots are not costing society billions of dollars.
I think OC is pointing out that these companies are willing to provide benefits to their workers.

They're primarily fighting this because the employment-related taxes and costs are expensive.

What Uber/Lyft want is a new class of contractor that allows them to provide benefits to their workers without paying the taxes.
unless you're extremely rich[1] or you're a Scientologist.

1 - https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-sorry-but-its-just-ea...
2 - https://www.nytimes.com/1997/03/09/us/scientology-s-puzzling...
My 2020 vision has nothing to do with technology, but more on a personal goal: to become a better version of my current self.

I have lots of things I want to improve and those things will eventually influence the way I think about problem solving and becoming a better engineer / developer.

I know when I do those changes, the rest will follow.
> For some of us the dishonor for breaking our word is worse than being jailed unjustly.

I would guess the set of such people is very nearly disjoint with the set of people who actually have been jailed unjustly. With perhaps the exception of idealistic dissidents who have been jailed for the cause.
Cool cool. We can have our government stop recognizing the existence of corporations at the same time we outlaw unions. Deal?
Doing gradual smaller changes over time and reducing the delta removes the risk of having to update everything at once down the road. We use dependabot to prevent our services from becoming the legacy issues that no one wants to touch.

We'd rather fix small issues continuously than have giant overhauls when a bunch of packages need to get updated because we weren't staying on top of it.

I think about it like a CD pipeline for dep updates. Less risk if you ship smaller amounts of code.
Are you suggesting that employee cartels squeezing money from consumers is justified?

Want worker protections ask for that, no need to burden businesses any further.
Whose claims DO you believe about BPA, and what are those claims?
Torrent Freak isn't the right one to ask about DMCA notices. They don't pirate themselves. They're careful about it. Where they get their money, I don't know. So of course all DMCA notices filed against them will be bogus.

I'm actually waiting to hear more stories about abuse. When I look around, I see plenty of pirate sites and I'm all but certain they're not paying royalties to the artists. These sites aren't escaping because they're obeying the law, they're escaping because prosecution is so difficult. It's hard to file the right DMCA notices because the sites are such fly-by-night operations.

My guess is that the DMCA doesn't go far enough. I'm all for giving people more rights to fight back against phony DMCA notices. If Torrent Freak wants some treble damages for filing a fake one, I'm all for it. But in return I would like the ability to file quick and deadly DMCA notices on the real pirates.
I wonder if the system used for plastic bottles could also work for other types of packaging. Add a cost to the packaging that the consumer can get back when they bring the packaging to some recycling or similar place.
I think it was Anton LeVey who wrote about quadrilaterals being the most satanic shape because of their ability to make a person feel off-kilter no matter what direction they look at it. It's a sort of anti-fengshui.

OTOH, I don't recall if he ever mentions that in 3D space, there is are two vantage points that will make a quadrilateral appear as a square. If you believe the quadrilateral is satanic, then you probably would consider those two vantage points as being quite magical.
Basically, I write a script (or use an alias) for everything that I do repeatedly which would otherwise require typing more than 2-3 unique characters before using tab completion. The habit just makes life easier (and is fun and relaxing sometimes). I try to use names that are quick to type (like, not the same finger repeatedly) and which are memorable, or grouping things by first characters (if there is a theme).

(This goes with the idea, which I also try to encourage, that any repeated process should be first documented in some rough form at least (like a personal note-base or team wiki), then improved over time, via improving the doc, scripting it, and moving toward full automation based on balancing considerations of cost/benefit over time, YAGNI, and avoiding debt, and ideas from the "checklist manifesto", such as the realization that even smart people can forget important things, drop the ball sometimes, or leave.)

Edit: This also lets me script away differences between platforms, so I can just remember my usual little 1-3 letter command and it takes care of the rest, while the script records the details for reference.
100% agree. To me they seem to be playing this perverse game of knowing how much you owe based on your W-2s then not telling you, waiting for you to file and guess how much you owe just right. If you guess wrong tough luck, you get penalties years later.
I'm sure if it was a new turbotax.io startup it'd be popular.
Interesting account.

Created 15 days ago, negative rep, and every comments are on the same nature: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=greatscott404
I'm super bullish, but for a bit further out and for a different reason than the vast bulk of PL folks: a major value jump in AI.

The current wave of ML techniques are approaching a plateau. The current approach is use deep learning, then iterate by adding fancier models / more data / more compute. That loop has diminishing returns on time/$ spent, so it's now time for the next big value jump, similar to when DL models started to relatively easily outperform Bayesian models on certain problems.

Interestingly, both the problem domain of what to solve, and how fancy solutions work, increasingly looks a lot like programs. Relational learning, automation, ...

A growing subfield in the proof world is Program Synthesis, which looks at all sorts of techniques to do just that. Two lessons from there has been proof solvers can get you quite far, and increasingly, that you can combine traditional logic solvers with ML techniques to great benefit. If I was OpenAI, I'd take Microsoft's $1B and spend less on running bigger models and people doing incremental tweaks to them and a LOT on people working here.

(I do think proofs-for-programs also has bigger adoption hopes in areas like security, but that's a much more nuanced and domain-specific story. Meanwhile, we do see continued niche success for more niche NASA and DoD style work, so the small money train will continue driving the community's focus on stuff like OS verification.)
Exactly. We should repeal the minimum wage and the 13th amendment so no corporation should ever have to pay more than what a free market dictates.
> Its easier than ever to run your own servers, but today few do.

fewer in ratio/percentage or pure numbers. If it is later, I disagree. Running your own instance of federated platform or forum has never been this easier.
I have a discourse, pleroma etc running currently. There are lot of people running them when you dig around. What you find the problem is noise and search - both of which are dominated by big companies and pesky marketers hijacking. Anything big with traction has people paid by companies in big sums trying to game their post to the top.
If you don't have shit ton of traffic or content, you won't even get on google search unless you search for very specific keyword or direct name which very few do.

The search everywhere not just your search engine but on social media is optimized for the lowest denominator who searches for x when he wants y. The search learns the way to ignore your words or meaning completely.

So both social media and search are hijacked. What else is there for discovering things? specific niche forums which also needs to be discoverable for people to land on.

With so many gate keepers on what should be installed on your device - app store or playstore. I am surprised lot of quirky things still pop up from time to time. But then I look into my surrounding, no one else gets the same stuff that I do....which means I am living in an echo chamber.

Edit: example of companies fucking with search - https://ibb.co/Lzh5ktQ
Max Crashes Strengthen Resolve of Boeing to Automate Flight
This is great. I am sure this will help the Amiga Community which is still going strong.
My main beef with Google is very simple: I detest their practice of spying on me at every available opportunity and the extreme difficulty in avoiding them. I have several smaller problems with Google, mostly around various changes they've helped foist onto internet protocols.

Although Google isn't all bad (no company is), I do think that on the whole they aren't a positive force. As a dev, I honestly can't think of anything that would make working for them seem like a good idea.
For literally millions of years humans would have known well only a handful of other people, and likely met less than ~100-200 other humans at all throughout an entire lifetime. Crowds are a new thing under the sun.

Anyway, I like Christopher Alexander's "Interlocking Fingers" pattern: It seems someone has posted it here: http://iwritewordsgood.com/apl/patterns/apl003.htm

> People feel comfortable when they have access to the countryside, experience of open fields, and agriculture; access to wild plants and birds and animals. For this access, cities must have boundaries with the countryside near every point. At the same time, a city becomes good for life only when it contains a great density of interactions among people and work, and different ways of life. For the sake of this interaction, the city must be continuous - not broken up. In this pattern we shall try to bring these two facts to balance.

> ...

> Therefore: Keep interlocking fingers of farmland and urban land, even at the center of the metropolis. The urban fingers should never be more than 1 mile wide, while the farmland fingers should never be less than 1 mile wide.
Using anti-trust laws to ensure labor can't organize in a way it deems fit because that's free market...wow.
What about States? Should the IRS make a online form that will do your state tax too?
If your exercise plan includes stretches or weight training try out this unusual timer I built: https://stretchtimer.com

Source: https://github.com/mcapodici/stretch-timer
Yeah, and doctors have always been at war with disease. Good for them.
The urgency came only after long years of detente posturing...
Why isn't there a US version or a general competitor to Toutaio?
id argue that during the Obama administration steps were taken in the right direction to try to ween insurance companies off the employed/insured racket, but presently outside of this setup theres limited ability for real people to acquire health insurance on their own for a reasonable rate.

Part of this is due to the obstinate nature of some 8 US states that refuse to expand medicare, and part of it is due to multiple healthcare providers such as Kaiser walking out of the open marketplaces proposed by the Obama administration during his term. Then you have to look at what states are explicitly willing to cover as part of their expansion, or rather, what they wont cover. Abortion and contraceptive birth control come to mind, and certainly during the open drafting of the ACA these were outright muddled or restricted in nature. This means private/corporate insured people always have access to family planning, while those on the open market do not. It poses an uncomfortable class delineation.

If i had to postulate as to how US Healthcare will eventually reform, it would be with a whimper. Medicare will soon become large enough that the contraceptive mandate wont matter. Corporations (uber, lyft, amazon) are all becoming fairly callous to the idea that employees get anything at all, let alone healthcare, so its possible they will simply force the states hand.
Don't forget child labor. The market demands child labor.