skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What is still preventing FOSS Tax Software in 2020
HN, as tax deadlines loom closer in the US, what is preventing a FOSS version of Tax Software?

One that doesn't have any dark patterns and caters to 80% of common requirements majority of the population has. The proprietary software can still cater to the remaining 20% of cases which can be arguably complex.

I'm sure there's tax rules that are constantly changing and keeping up with them is difficult, but I'd imagine this is where social coding such as GitHub etc... would flex its strength.

How would one go about structuring a project like this without it being torpedoed by the current incumbents who arguably wouldn't want something like this to become mainstream.
HN seems guilty of frequently using obscure acronyms. Is this an SV culture thing? Is it that hard to type things out or use a text-expanding app?
You can buy a 2tb drive for $100. $200 and you've got 430 DVD's worth of data redundantly stored. $300 and you've got local redundancy AND offsite backup.
There's an active border dispute currently going on between India and China. Probably equivalent to early movement of a pawn in a game of chess.
Running spot instances effectively with Amazon EKS
The app is not the entire problem so banning it won't/doesn't have to solve the entire problem either.
Then use cryptomator. https://cryptomator.org/
> it's not publicized anywhere how shadowbanning works

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

The account you mentioned isn't banned, so I'm not sure why you're bringing it up in this context. It has, however, shown signs of being an ideological battle account—quite distinctive signs in fact—and I've already warned it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23665090.

New accounts that have come here to use HN in the intended spirit don't typically post exclusively about racial statistics, immigration, China, why lynchings were not as commonplace as people suppose, and similar things for their first 52 comments. Could it be that that is just a random streak and a wave of intellectual curiosity is about to come? Sure. But at some point, if it walks like a duck, we ban it.
His critique was that you would need astronomical amount of data, like a gigabyte, to model the US economy.

Computer systems have gotten fast enough that a 00s Pentium 4 can handle all of the US economy, with the rest being a problem of gathering inputs.
Wow, $3500/month on lease? In my country, folks "earn" one eighth of that on average.
Let's tackle both. Harmful anti-trust violations are rampant.
Have Nitro keys on the way. Looking forward to your writeup, mate.
No one uses or takes those.
I’m not exactly sticking up for Apple as much as I’m trying to demonstrate practical thresholds that would realistically limit this behavior. I don’t think Apple wants 100,000 upset customers let alone millions.

Hardware requirements for software is a decades old concept, and it’s true they deprecate and obsolete supported software and hardware on for older platforms, but it’s rare I’ve seen Apple taken a user hostile approach here within supported lifetimes though it has happened yes it is rare.

Their developer experience on the other hand does not see the same care and attention a lot (most even) of the time. That’s because, and I believe this strongly, Apple never wants 3rd party software to have platform influential power over them again, like Microsoft and Adobe did for decades. It’s sad but not unsurprising that their platforms can be very developer antagonistic if you don’t take their happy path (and sometimes even then). To them though, it doesn’t matter until it affects a large quadrant of the Apple consumer base and in some occasions yes not even then, but largely it’s the consumer who has the biggest voting block with Apple in terms of pressure on the platform, as I’ve watched it play it they never had a history particularly after the iPhone came out of having the best developer relations relative to say, Microsoft, who provides a very positive experience in comparison

It’s just not in their DNA because of the fear of having too powerful of vendors putting pressure on the platform that they otherwise control outright. When you look at their policies in this context they make a heck of a lot more sense (even if you don’t agree. I certainly do not always)
Typical horseshit FTFA:

>"This utter failure to suppress a disease that most other countries managed to contain..."<

Almost no country has done acceptably. Only Taiwan contained it and only b/c they were recently burned by flu and had set up contingency plans complete with government buy-in, corporate help, production facilities and storage stockpiles.

As for "decline": organized science has to take the blame for this monstrous f/u. We now know that Science the Emperor has no clothes. What's more, our pandemic response hasn't improved since the Middle Ages.

As for technology:

Masks - No valid scientific studies exist,

"Simple distancing" - No valid scientific studies exist,

"Social distancing"- No valid scientific studies exist,

Vaccine development - Nothing, Nada, Zip,

Treatment - Nothing except HCQ+Zinc early, but half the population won't admit it b/c politics intervened,

Antivirals - Nothing (remdesivir doesn't work),

ICU Treatment - Turn-of-century state of art (oxygen),

Epidemiology - Ouija Board math. (Where _are_ the good math modelers?)

This isn't an American decline, it's a failure of all of Western Civilization from the top all the way down to the 3rd world: we thought we knew what we were doing, we certainly were paying for a lot more than we got, but we got very little from science and technology. We put men on the moon but forgot to do scientific studies on the efficacy of face masks!

We should slaughter the experts' jobs, shit-can entire organizations and start again building new versions of the CDC, WHO, and FDA. And that's just for starters.

[at least we have a spell-checker on HN than allows me to correct "shitcan" to "shit-can" - that's the kind of hefty progress we can count on in this century.]

...returns to his cellar where he grinds chinchona bark and stockpiles zinc tablets in preparation for the worst.
In the US you are a criminal if your business is dealing with large amount of cash everyday. That’s how credit card got the market share. Companies make the law so you will use their system. They dont profit if you use cash whywould they allow you to do that.
Yeah, I still check on it every once in a while and I updated a small app to JDK11, but the industry has changed a lot since then. I know Java is still huge, but IMO that's in spite of Oracle, not because of them. The proverbial ship has sailed for me. If Oracle told me the sky is blue, I'd be looking up to verify it.

I completely gave up on JavaFX the day Microsoft bought Xamarin. My impression at the time was that Oracle just didn't care about JavaFX and barely supported their own developers. AFAIK they never did anything to encourage 3rd party developers even though there was some really cool stuff. Ex: Microsoft ended up owning RoboVM.

I also remember being frustrated the first time I looked at the JavaFX repo myself and saw how few committers there were. All the while Oracle would be simultaneously claiming they're investing in the tech, but actually dumping stuff [2] on the community. It's like they viewed open source as nothing more than a way to externalize costs for things they didn't want to maintain.

I never had the inside track on anything, so I don't know what the real story is, but my impression of it has always been that it was badly managed by someone higher up the chain than the people that managed JavaFX directly. Based on my experience everyone on the JavaFX team always made a ton of effort and tried foster a small but growing community.

Speaking of community, it was plagued with the same kind of doublespeak. Oracle would be on the mailing list telling everyone they wanted to work with the community [3] at the exact same time they were telling all of us to file our bugs using a plain text input box on bugs.java.com. How the hell do you submit a runnable test case using a single, 4 line high text box?

And if you need any kind of indicator to demonstrate Oracle's lack of ability to foster a developer community or provide developers with modern resources, go look at that bug filing system I keep complaining about. It's still the same awful system that looks like a holdover from the 90s.

This is all just my opinion, but I honestly believe Oracle squandered a huge opportunity with JavaFX.

1) https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8091544

2) http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/openjfx-dev/2015-Janu...

3) http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/openjfx-dev/2015-Dece...
Yes and no. Right now we're in a period of decline of code and want everything to be configurable and enumerable by control panels and slick GUIs, after a long period of needless complexity and broken ecosystems only navigable by domain experts. Eventually, we'll realize that our declarative configs behind our control panels and slick UIs fail at enumerating the complexity of particular problem domains and we'll write scripts to glue together those systems in better ways, and then someone will make the suggestion that hey: we can do this with code!

And then we write the code and our ecosystem gets broken and we build needless complexity, and we realize that 90% of the time a simple config file will work. And then we replace the config with a control panel. And then we need more options, so that becomes a slick GUI.

And so on, and so forth.

IMO we have been optimizing the design of digital experiences for professional/commercial applications for 30 years and we have about 30 more years before we get it "right" and that solution will be (more or less) HTML templates. A declarative low level language that expresses everything possible, surrounded by multiparadigm languages that can compose it, and user interfaces that compile visual representations into those contextually. There's no one best approach.
In that case, I just click the icon for my pw manager (1Password in this case), and the modal shows me the same message.
Already India start doing it, its UPI system enable us to avoid cards for all type of payments with processing fee. Also Rupay backed by GOI enable us to use those cards in abroad using vast connection.
White Supremacist Infiltration of US Police Forces: Fact-Checking
The problem with the javascript ecosystem is that javascript ecosystem rejects the problems with the ecosystem.
"1. A REST API should not be dependent on any single communication protocol [...]"

I guess HTTP verbs are right out?
Apple's A12Z Under Rosetta Outperforms Native Arm-based Surface Pro X
It's like a poor man's version of AWS Glacier
> "And what happens when we no longer agree with these 10 people? Can we even get to that point if the entire narrative is so heavily controlled?"

What people seem to forget is that popular internet platforms are always controlled. When you join a site like; Reddit, HN etc.. you agree to play by their rules. The rules are not always fair but that's because it's their platform, not yours.

The reality is, you can say anything you want on your own platform, but you do not have that right on someone-else's platform... nor should you

Basically, the internet is open and free, but platforms are walled and guarded... and that's fine
Self-Taught ML Expert Agnis Liukis Became a Kaggle Grandmaster
Are you saying cytokine storms are the only mechanism causing thrombosis in COVID-19? I was under the impression that SARS-2 itself also had the ability to cause clots. Is that incorrect?
If you want to rage at anyone, try raging at the criminally incompetent administration that has led to tens of thousands of unnecessary additional deaths, and the way they have committed crimes against humanity from the day this pandemic started.
Americans do the American Exceptionalism Poe's Law thing nonstop and I alternate between exhaustion and a sense of humor about it.

I mean, "a history of suppressing minorities" in the summer of 2020 is very funny. It does feel like Gen Z kids are aware of global events enough to not fall for this, so maybe it is ending.
It's Not Garbage (2016)
But it obviously hinders their business if they don't, in the US at least. Even most food trucks typically have Square terminals (or similar) for card transactions.

Which leads me to believe that it's generally worth it for businesses, despite the "fees".
Techdirt actually are a "free speech advocate" if you look at their past history of articles.
Yes, it's quite common to have cameras pointed at the surf-zone, both public and private. Surfers and beachgoers use them to decide where and when to go to the beach. Utilizing these untapped resources with AI has been brimming with potential for awhile now for things such as this.
Oracle Opens Second Cloud Region in Hyderabad
It's been some time last I checked, but isn't OpenID Connect provided anymore by Goog/Fb? Why wouldn't that be a reasonable choice if you wanted a protocol that, from the dev side of things, allowed you to uniformly target external auth providers, or your own?
This makes me wonder - is it possible to make a "smart camera" with an open-source circuit diagram and laymen-interpretable circuit verification indicators? Like suppose you want to sell a CCTV system for this exact situation, that's got a pretrained detection model implemented on some inference circuitry hooked up to a streaming camera. You publish the circuit diagram and any other operating specifications, and you want to convince people that the physical device they have in their hands is impossible (or at least very expensive) to alter, say by adding a hard drive or wireless modem or whatever. Are there sensors you could attach to the circuit such that modifications to what is interconnected would manifest as deviations from published sensor values? Some sort of md5 hash analog for hardware?

That all assumes you've solved the problem of training a good enough detector (presumably from a similar dataset) which has its own difficulties, but OP's question made me wonder about the aspect i described above.
Yeah if you're really taking this seriously it's worth investing in an LTO-4 drive and some tapes.

There might be a better medium available nowadays but if I seriously wanted to have a piece of data fifty years from now that's where I'd start.
India's First Covid-19 Vaccine Candidate, Set for Phase I, II Human Trials
But this is just what Hayek's work is all about: to show _why_ central planning is ineffective. It works with theoretical arguments and there is no need to use real-life examples.
Thank you for that very amusing article.
UPI is godsent. Probably the only good thing to come out of demonetization.
I use it everyday, from buying groceries at roadside stalls to paying for my life insurance.

I have pretty much stopped using cash altogether and use cards mainly in those outlets which don't have upi.
I'm not sure what the relevant facts would be around an extremely value based argument of who is responsible for educating a society.

I guess we could look at the general fact that education is one of the better investments to increase a nation's GDP, bit I'm more concerned with the ethics than the money.
Federalism reflects a principle that works even in a pandemic response, which is that local units of government are better equipped to evaluate the local situation and respond accordingly. The federal government was too big and ponderous to quickly react to the situation in NYC (which after all comprises a mere 2.5% of the US population). Meanwhile, other states locked down too quickly and for hard because that’s what was required in NYC.

Note that when the pandemic hit, the EU room a back seat to the National governments, even though the EU has a CDC itself. And in Japan success was largely due to local effort: https://fee.org/articles/did-japan-beat-covid-19-with-a-dece...

See also: https://www.hoover.org/research/decentralize-covid-19-respon...
If a single SKU costs 50k, what are the development costs?

Insane.
Could Stripe swoop in and make a play to become a third major CC option? I feel like they have the core infrastructure in place and are still nimble enough to make it happen if they wanted.
I've never used either of these computers, but maxing the specs on a System 76 Thelio Massive gets you:

- 2x Xeon Platinum 8280 (28 Cores each, 2.7 - 4.0 GHz)

- 2x 768 GB ECC DDR4 Memory (6x128GB per CPU, 1.5TB total)

- 1x 2TB NVME drive

- 1x 28TB SSD

- 4x Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti (11 GB, 4352 CUDA Cores each)

- $ 53,356

I've never used either or anything remotely close to either that or the mac pro, so I could be missing something, but the system76 seems like much better value than the fully maxed Mac Pro at $ 53,899
We tell people that we're banning them, and why: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... - but only once the account has an established history. We treat new accounts differently, for reasons I've explained before:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21288858

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20666742

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20289994

It's a bimodal distribution. With established accounts, we warn them before banning, usually several times, and then tell them we're banning them and why. With new accounts, we don't say we're banning, because banned-new-accounts are overwhelmingly spammers and trolls—often serial trolls who have been banned many times and know exactly what they're doing. The cost-benefit of explaining why we're banning the account in those cases is completely different. To repeat from one of the comments I just linked to:

it is a balance between transparency and defending the site against abuse. If we tried to give every banned account the same high-effort attention that we give established users, we'd do nothing else all day and still not get through them all. That would just be a new vector for people to DoS the moderators. A small number of abusive users can create a large number of disruptions. There is also a significant amount of spam, and if we told spammers we were banning them, they would spam us with emails demanding attention, asking why, and telling us how high-quality their articles really are. Actually they do this a lot already, and it's a pain.

This does leave one class of accounts who unfortunately are the losers in this cat-and-mouse game: new accounts that get shadowbanned even though they were neither spammers nor trolls. It sounds like that is what happened in your case. Sometimes a new account shows up, and in its first post(s) behaves like a spammer or a troll would. That's when we use shadowbanning, but since we don't see the future, later it sometimes turns out to be a legit user who goes on to make good posts that get killed because we banned them.

This happens and it sucks. We can't see into the account's future posts, nor can we ever know for sure that an account is spamming or trolling...it's all just pattern matching and sometimes a pattern matches on the early data points and diverges later on. The only solution I know of in such cases is to correct it later: either because we notice good comments that are [dead] and investigate, or because we hear from other users "hey, are you sure $username should be banned"? - and we look them up, see the mistake and unban them. It's particularly helpful to alert us to such cases, so if anyone notices an account that is banned and shouldn't be, we'd greatly appreciate hearing about it at hn@ycombinator.com.
Docbook is a markup format in either XML or SGML which was designed in part by O'Reilly for the publication of their books (although I do not believe it has been used for this purpose for many years). The XMl variant is far more popular today, but that's not saying a lot as Docbook itself has become rather obscure.

It doesn't really take on the problem of equations but does handle structured documents in a way which is much more flexible and arguably powerful than LaTeX, since you can use the full power of XML tooling including e.g. XSLT to define document components.

That said, I think it's quite simply too verbose to be popular, not to mention the tooling around it tends towards archaic. I had a friend who was an extremely heavy Docbook user but had configured his emacs to insert most tags by key-chord, making it much more efficient to write. It's very hard to deal with if you don't do that.
This release brings many performance improvements, including a new garbage collector.

In terms of language features, the biggest new feature are the "to be closed" variables. They can be used to ensure that cleanup routines are always called, similarly to RAII in C++ or try-finally blocks.
Doing what, exactly?
I don’t think it has anything to do with communism. The CCP is not communist except by name.
Really, any second form of backup would be a good idea. Preferably, it should be stored offsite and separate from any other backups.
The article references [1] which says,

"Visa holds a 60% share of the credit and debit card market, followed by Mastercard with 30%, according to Ellis, with American Express far behind at 8.5%."

That puts Discover + AmEx at 10% or so.

1. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-visa-mastercard-stocks/sw...
> have a complete disregard for tax law.

BTW, you have no idea what you're talking about. I mean, none:

- foreign creators don't owe tax in the US

- tax is on goods, not services. No good, no tax.

- most artists don't pay personal tax because they're below the minimum

But Patreon is collecting, and keeping, the tax that leaks, just like ebay does now.
I am being genuine.

I'm not sure the country has taken the necessary step up in early education to even have the population have a baseline understanding of what interest rate is. I didn't learn that anywhere in elementary, middle, or high school. I had to figure it out on my own.

I don't think that's acceptable. I think that leaves our population vulnerable to predatory companies, who have a disproportionate ability to lobby the government to allow them to stay predatory.

I envision a capitalist hellscape where the population is kept purposefully reapable.
+1 for Mercury. We also switched to Mercury after 8 months with SVB. It is crazy how much difference a good UI makes and the time it saves.
In the case of Facebook being banned, there is precedence for that.

https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/01/23/facebook-banned-in...
Stripe and PayPal aren't charging you on behalf of the credit card companies--they're making money off the transactions themselves. They're not going to charge you less for processing a debit card payment any more than they'll charge less for cheaper credit cards (using Visa instead of AmEx). Besides debit and credit transactions, there's also atm/direct transactions that cost even less (and likely have no fraud protection from your bank; the links I have posted below don't say much about this as it's not used often). Credit cards are also allowed to charge extra (though merchants rarely do around here, except at gas stations), but my understanding is that that's illegal with debit cards.

See here for info:
https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/research/average-credit-card...

https://www.thebalance.com/debit-or-credit-315293

https://pocketsense.com/pinless-debit-card-rules-9651.html

https://consumer.sd.gov/fastfacts/credit.aspx
Wow, it even decreases dementia? Crazy

https://www.webmd.com/skin-problems-and-treatments/red-light...

I guess the new LED bulbs miss a lot of frequencies that were present in incandescent (black body radiation) bulbs. I wonder if we'll see a bunch of "light frequency deficiency" diseases arising as a result.
Overconfidence. We somehow cling to this absurd notion that we're capable enough to perform an emergency recovery if necessary. Never mind that we've already experienced the difficulty of losing data one way or another, the delusion yet persists.

I just wish affordable tape drives never disappeared.