skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Instead of the US government acting like every other 1st world government and giving us a pre-calculated tax bill since they already know what we owe

They don't know what a given taxpayer owes. They can estimate based on various filings, but there is some stuff that is only reported by the taxpayer when filing. That said, it isn't an excuse to push all the work onto the taxpayer when almost all of what a typical taxpayer needs to fill out could be pre-populated.

> we're forced to spend hours tracking down documents and hoping we didn't mess up and get audited

That the IRS audits taxpayers is evidence that it doesn't ever conclusively know what some people were supposed to pay in a given year, let alone by 15APR of the following year.
> The number of Android devices silently running without security updates

That is not the fault of Google but of SoC manufacturers (look inside leaked Mediatek kernel code / BSPs, the quality is horrenduous!), device manufacturers (for adding tons of bloatware that has to be certified for each Google/AOSP update) and carriers (for adding even MORE bloatware).

However, Google should finally add the requirement to fully open source everything needed to run stock Android (i.e. BSP, kernel and drivers) as criteria for Play Store certification.
Right. I thought it was pretty bad form for him to call this "spam," as though they're the ones wronging him.
Yes for sure. Not that it makes a difference, but this is due to 30 minutes of travel at 60ish mph. No traffic delays.
I agree. The situation with the mail is extremely worrying as it indicates more corruption may be on the horizon.

If there was ever a time for Americans to be diligent, it is in ensuring that the election is fair and that the results are honored.
Right, the communication is the problem, not the medium. We don't yell at at phone line operators because nazis have cell phones and we shouldn't.
No, the way to 1989 wasn't all that peaceful. For example there was the martial law and repressions against "Solidarity" during 198x in Poland. And you forgot the 1968. The resolve of the East Europeans in 1989 was pretty clear that if USSR brings in tanks the people will continue to stand up even in the face of the tanks, and it will be 1968 all over the place. The 1968 provided credibility to that. Thus the USSR and the regimes supported by it backed finally down.
His example of using portals to solve "a real problem" is really interesting to me, because it seems to point to a much more fundamental problem with UI development via HTML and browsers.

The example involves a common page design: left hand table of contents, right hand (typically most of the width) with current contents (chosen via ToC). Jump to a new section, and the scroll position in the ToC is lost.

He describes how to use a portal to fix this.

Compare with desktop GUI toolkits. The ToC would be its own element (GtkListView or QtWhateverList or NSThisNThat). The contents would be their own element (GtkTextView or QtCanvas or whatever). Both are drawn independently of the other. You can call for an invalidation of part of the window. You do not need to consider them part of a single window rectangle that will always be redrawn in-toto for a page load.

Now, my (weak) understanding of why we've ended up with things like React is that in part they are an attempt to solve this by effectively creating the equivalent of a widget heirarchy inside the browser. When a React implementation of his example gets new content, it doesn't invalidate or even necessarily "redraw" the ToC, and it tells the browser what to do by invalidating certain DOM elements (or even just one DOM element).

I think he misses this as a key reason for the movement towards frameworks.

But ... notice that the browser will probably (I'm not 100% sure about this, would appreciate comment from someone who knows), re-render the entire rectangle the contains the page.

Desktop applications don't work this way. If you turn on Quartz debugging on macOS you can actually see the rects on screen that are re-rendered to reflect invalidation by the application (e.g. after new content needs to be displayed).

Maybe I have this wrong, and React and similar frameworks have leveraged a subtle capability in the browser to invalidate a DOM element as a way to only re-render part of the on-screen rect.

But assuming that I've have this roughly correct, this model in which the "atomic, indivisible rendering unit" for browser apps is the page rect seems fundamentally disadvantaged and mis-designed compared to desktop apps.
> HTML has failed on a basic level, to keep up with the ways that users want to experience content, and that designers want to present content

HTML was designed to be a way to create and link documents so that someone or a machine at one end of a distributed network could access it on a different network, not become an app platform. Everything else done beyond that is a perversion of HTML.

It would be interesting if there ever was a standard app container runtime that doesn't use HTML/JS/CSS. I guess that the last serious attempt at that were Java Applets which never took off.
Yes! People who compare python to Julia miss the point. Python is not really used as a programming language, Python is the new bash.
To be fair, if I were her I wouldn’t want to be there either. Two governments breathing down my back, my career on the line? Even if I wasn’t only allowed to preside this case because I had the right sympathies - how many other things in my life will I sacrifice for one moment of integrity?
It depends a lot :).

For the tax system it was developped with lots of free software, and support purchased to French IT companies. It was hosted on a big (for the time) linux server farm.

Here are a few interviews and slides by the director of this project, unfortunately in French (didn't check automated translations, might work):

https://www.toolinux.com/article/jean-marie-lapeyre-copernic...

http://www.supelec-rennes.fr/sic/JOURNEES/05_10_20/lapeyre.p...

The free software community in France was very happy to see one major ministry doing this kind of projects at the time.
They're not all done in a completely-controlled clinic - indeed the 25,000 person study highlighted here, with followup after around 5 years, of course had the subjects going about their daily lives except during original enrollment & occasional check-ins.

But when outcomes are finer-grained than "did the subject die or get diagnosed with a major new disease", or short-term, or need high compliance & regular monitoring, RCTs can become a lot more intense & expensive.
1. Random thoughts and things I find
2. At least once a week
3. self hosted with ghost
4. https://www.michael1e.com/
They also spend obscene amounts of money killing online filing being provided by either state or fed.

They spent more than 1.2 million in direct lobbying against California's online tax preparation & declaration system pilot (ReadyReturn) between 2001 and 2010.
> It's a document presentation format, and that's all it should ever be.

Here's another way to think about it. The web is competing with platform-specific apps (iOS, Android, macOS, Windows, etc.) to be the primary computing platform of the world (in terms of how the general population interacts with computers). Your position seems to relegate the web to a secondary/niche platform by definition. Do you agree that the web should be a secondary/niche platform?

Disclosure: Google Web DevRel (work on https://web.dev)
According to the courts, the Constitution does not apply at borders. See https://www.aclu.org/other/constitution-100-mile-border-zone for more.

Most US spying programs violate the 4th amendment. And have been ruled Constitutional as long as the targets are not US citizens. And if you want to seize someone's assets, you just sue the assets. The owner has been ruled to not have standing to object. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_forfeiture for more.

Despite our law enforcement and government swearing to uphold the Constitution, it seems to be more useful as toilet paper sometimes.
The implicit excuse of the US during the Cold War was "It's okay if we break a few rules, because we're fighting against an opponent that is literally evil".

That excuse starts to break down when the two sides become more and more similar, which might be what we're seeing now, but it's never a good situation to be in, even before it breaks down.

See also, the internal US political scene.
First law of the Internet: you cannot delete something from the Internet.

Second law of the Internet: you cannot keep track of where something is on the Internet.
You’ve defined No Agenda or Curry as just being “deviating from mainstream media,” decided that is what I must mean by alt-right, and worked yourself up into a lather about it.

How you can determine what I am or am not conflating based on my statement about a single media property and the guy behind it is beyond me.

We get it. You’re a fan. You don’t want to be a fan of an alt right guy. That’s your conundrum to work out, not mine.
Does anyone know any tutorial, article or any learning material related to creating BitTorrent-powered applications? Something simple, like sharing pictures or even text files.
A daily habit to be happier and more self-aware
Hey Everyone

Like most people in this fast-changing world, I have always been struggling with day-to-day overwork that caused emotional burnouts and a mess in my head. Every day I was noticing how stress, irritability, and anger influenced my productivity and life quality.

I have been searching for some "mental health framework" that can be applied to track my pain points and help control myself when negative emotions kicked in. After doing some research and consulting with various specialists, I discovered CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy). The whole CBT idea is aimed towards changing human's attitudes and behavior by analyzing and tracking their emotions, thoughts, images, and beliefs.

That is what inspired me to create the Mental Mirror with the straightforward name
The app helps you to look at your "mental self" at any time and understand the most crucial mental states, triggers, and build your control strategy. All this is done by taking small 2-3 minute reflection sessions and focusing on yourself for this short time frame.

I am excited to launch the app today and make it free at the Product Hunt for the whole day. This is just the start, so please do not hesitate to give me some feedback, share your ideas and suggestions which will definitely help to improve the app.
And the difference in mask wearing.
Selling a Thread Pulled from Someone Else's Tapestry
I've created scripts to automate some repetitive or complex tasks. I've done this for two teams. I think it was an improvement since it eliminated human errors and freed up developer time. Some of the other developers appreciated it, but most people didn't really care.

I also came up with an architectural improvement not used anywhere else in the company that allowed us to close a security vulnerability related to a file copy process. I think the tech lead and the manager who owned the vulnerability were happy. Nobody else cared.

I think these types of improvements are fairly common and add up to great things, especially when multiple people have this mindset. Unfortunately in my experience most people don't have that mindset because it's not part of the culture where I work. Don't hold your breath for recognition or appreciation. The only way to achieve that is by improving something for the 'business people'.
> The fact is that the government, like a thief, says to a man: Your money, or your life. And many, if not most, taxes are paid under the compulsion of that threat.

Yes, but I like civil society, infrastructure, paved roads and what little social safety net we have in this country, so...
It's license (fair code) sucks.
Although the story and your account are United States centric, I live pretty remote British Columbia, Canada and the same mentality, personalty types exists here as well. As the crow flies, I am less then 300KM to downtown Vancouver yet a trip to the closest town center for supplies is a 10 hour round trip in the truck and that is on a good day. I do not leave the house without chainsaw, firearm and various other sundry gear and items as i may have to sleep in the wilderness overnight or repair my truck on the side of a dirt road.

I do all our property maintenance and repairs etc., even if I could convince a 'professional' to come out this way, the expense would be anywhere from 3X to 10X for the same job in town.

Self reliance and self-sufficiency are not new, trendy traits, it is a necessity for survival that has always been that way and it will probably never change for the people living in this part of the world.
The problem with ignoring them is that left to their own devices they'll outlaw your way of life directly or indirectly.
"Deficient" is not the same as "lower end of the normal range." If you suspect you are deficient, go to a doctor.
I wonder how you can get a dev kit for this.
I wrote the blog post. Unfortunately I was not able to include every study on Vitamin D, and had to pare it back to the largest and/or most significant studies. Most of the studies you mention are small and published in obscure journals.

As for my argument, I would never claim that Vitamin D is "a pretty useless vitamin". It is extremely useful, and is lifesaving for people with hypoparathyroidism. But that doesn't mean we should all be taking it. Note that the studies you mention are looking at treating something, not preventing something. Many of the people supplementing are doing it because they believe it will keep them healthy - and this does not appear to be the case. That is more the point of my article. The articles you cite are interesting and hopefully will produce larger trials.
I fondly remember learning and using Chef back in '10 when it was all the rage. Seemed to work really well given the basic AWS architecture (no containers & microservices) that we had at the time. Also notable was the thriving and friendly community that Chef had going for itself back in the day.
All I can say is that chef is in progress now
Forgot to say that the french tax authority open sourced the (after FOIA-like pressure - called "CADA" in France) code that computes the tax amount from the tax form entries. It was written in a custom language (with documentation):

https://github.com/etalab/calculette-impots-m-source-code

You have each year code in the repo.
Also, for what it's worth, we have really good helicopter support in this region too. Both medical transport as well as short haul / wilderness extraction. So response can be a lot faster if necessary.
The problem is if you don't buy from the commercial line you're asking for trouble. I just had a Seagate drive fail after 2 years of use. The WD drive it replaced had been in service for years. Consumer grade has apparently really degraded quite significantly the past few years, so much so I'm seriously starting to reconsider whether the "Apple tax" might be worth it - or is Apple now using low-grade components too?
Not that I am aware of. Only alternative is iMessage, but if you enable "Messages in Cloud", your data will be backed-up to "Guizhou-Cloud" and they might or might not be encrypted there.
Post your private keys here
Yes, good point. I agree community wasn't a perfect word to represent what Hobbes meant. I considered using "society" and "the leviathan", maybe they would work better.

It is interesting to consider that part of the book, it does seem to disagree with Hobbes at first glance. Hobbes did say that the state of nature was violent. However I think he also thought that a fear of violence would spontaneously cause humankind to organise into societies. So I'm not sure he'd necessarily be that surprised to find a lack of evidence for prehistoric warfare.
That is an instant morale problem.
https://what-if.xkcd.com/88/
> Their employer reports their income, deducts an appropriate amount of taxes, and sends it to the government.

How does your employer know what "the appropriate amount of taxes" is? In the US I have always had trouble setting this to where I'm not at least 5% off in one direction or the other, and I know more than my employer about what my withholding rate should be.
I promise I'm not a shill, but yes I do indeed love HotJar and find it essential for getting new sites off the ground. I've uncovered countless UX improvements by watching HotJar recordings. And thanks for your generous free tier!
So, part of that is that even when an ambulance gets there, what happens next?

The nearest hospital in rural areas is guaranteed to not be even a level II trauma center. So it takes 30 minutes for an ambulance to get on-scene, then maybe it's an hour drive to a trauma center (optimistic), or they're going to need to get a helicopter, which can easily be another 40 minutes of waiting.

That urban EMS crew might be shooting to load-and-go with the patient inside of ten minutes. That means even with 20-min response time they can deliver the patient to a trauma center within an hour. Out in the boondocks, the golden hour is laughable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_hour_(medicine)
No, thanks. Unless the person giving me the demo is the CEO, their entire salary and taxes are being taken out of my price, and it's most likely not the kind of company I want to do business with.
That’s the one constant with population growth. The remote parts of the world won’t be so remote as time goes on.

On your point about space travel, it doesn’t even have to be that far. The moon or mars aren’t that terribly far on conventional rockets. If we could terraform mars for our arrival, though, that would be cool. Maybe this unlocks another explosion of population growth, similar to the industrial revolution and improvements in medicine?
What has your Vert.x experience been like?

I've been using it in production for 3 years and regret selecting it.
Martial arts goes a lot further than I think most people realize. You gain pain tolerance, bodily self control, and a greatly increased awareness of your vitals and physical limits.

In the protests where you see people covering tear gas canisters with cones or hurling them back, more likely than not those are martial artists or other athletes who train regularly. Your ability to act decisively and correctly in a scary environment greatly improves.
Yep. I went to only one BLM protest, but everyone was very conscientious about mask wearing.
If it is possible for a significant period of time, then it is possible. Saying something is impossible because it "only" lasted for 50 years is stupid.
I am lucky in that fact that I am a position where my opinions are listened to and respected. I have spent the last few years trying to improve a number of our processes. If I wasn't in this position, then chances are I would have moved on to greener pastures almost immediately.

Source control discipline is probably the single most valuable thing I have worked to improve. We still have a long ways to go, but we went from a place where on a team of roughly twenty developers with many active projects would constantly have to ask "Who has the latest code?" to a place that practices disciplined code management.

When I first started, my jaw almost hit the floor. I couldn't believe that no one actually knew how the source control worked (at the time TFVC). It is hard for me to explain just how bad things were. There were instances of features completely disappearing from production because some one never checked in the code.

Check-ins were at best months a part and production versions of code were scattered on different people's PCs.

After a long, long time we have most developers on board with good practices. There are still some who refuse to follow industry best practices, but our team, and the products we create have a much higher quality.
> It would be interesting if there ever was a standard app container runtime that doesn't use HTML/JS/CSS.

Flutter Web is attempting something like that I suppose. Not that I think it will take off.
I don’t know what you’re talking about. They literally turned around and tried to leave the very first time someone told them to do so. The rest of the trip was them trying various ways to get out that were blocked by fire.
1. 'Random' as I develop a new direction.

2. Aiming for twice-weekly.

3. Regular web host w/WP. In the interest of 'stop playing around with tools/static sites and just write'.

4. https://jamesgill.net/articles/
My rule of thumb is that if the weather isn't crap a substantial portion of the year than the people are probably crap. Then you take the binary result of that and multiply by the distance to the nearest few luxury European car dealerships to get just how crappy/not crappy the people are. It's actually quite accurate regardless of local population density.
For sure. Being a one man army has it's perks and challenges. I hope this project has a community form around it.

The JVM is more underrated/unknown than it should be in the startup space, tools like what you're making make it far more accessible.
That's a generous free tier - unlimited databases!?

I've been enjoying the blog posts about graph databases and technology choices.

Looking forward to checking this out. Good luck with the launch!
They could be referring to some like Appalachia too? That does include the bottom of Ohio near the WV / KY / PA borders (where I grew). I'd believe that these rural places could have the "pioneer personality" they're describing.
Check Out Best 20 CSS Animate Background
I can’t understand how one can care about privacy for communication but not when it comes to money.

Money is a means of communication; we use it as a medium and metric for communicating value.

Unless we have truly fungible cryptocurrency as an alternative to corporate or government digital currency, all our private finances are inseparable from the surveillance machine that is now slowly emerging from adtech and fusing with capital control/KYC/AML systems.

Don’t look at where you are today, but where we are as a global community in 10 years.
You mean Antarctica.

But it is a fascinating story, thank you for bringing it up!
I think that's a pretty myopic view... Personally, I think taking more chances to positively affect your workplace "technopolitical ecosystem" ultimately improves your ability to do your job.
Locked down in the Ritz-Carlton: Winning the quarantine hotel lottery
We used a tool called Freshdesk in which sending an email to a particular email id creates a support ticket.
Also you can reply from it's dashboard. We had b2b customers who used to send a lot of queries everyday. This tool helped in distributing queries among the team.
Earlier it was only one person mostly who was handling all queries, thus was overwhelmed.
Also it has auto rules which can be used to set priority to the tickets.
Very useful tool when you have a sizeable number of customers. It helps in providing better customer service also as very few tickets go unanswered .
I apologize as it's slightly off-topic, but for anyone that is stuck working on old gear that still uses a java interface/JNLP and doesn't want to run JAVA 6 - here's an open source project that's keeping JNLPs alive and as secure as they can:

https://openwebstart.com/

https://github.com/karakun/OpenWebStart

Been a life saver for me (and I am in no way affiliated).

When I switched to OpenJDK I was dead in the water for JNLPs until I found it.
https://archive.vn/SbH6G
Added some clarification - Yes, the incompleteness theorems only concern the behavior of mathematical/formal systems themselves. But to me it seems perfectly reasonable that correspondingly, there may be features of the universe ("true statements") that cannot be modeled ("proven") by any given physical theory ("formal system"). I cannot prove this, but nobody can prove the opposite belief, either.