skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I guess it would be easier and better to just strangle them by simplifying the tax code, sending pre-filled returns to everyone and making a simple and accessible web app for people to file theit taxes with a few clicks.

Intuit aren't alone in this scheme. There must be people who think taxes should be complex and scary, so would be against making it easy and convenient. What I wonder though is: aren't there any such people in the rest of the developed world where filing taxes IS simple?
I work at Code for America on the Tax Benefits team, and we're working on a different website to apply for the Child Tax Credit. (See https://www.getctc.org/ and https://www.getyourrefund.org/. )
From the original article:
> Alas, all [People's Policy Project's website] can do is funnel users into Intuit's terrible [child tax credit] site.
Today at work, I'm learning how to use the IRS's e-File SOAP API in the hopes that we can build a flow that is easier to use than Intuit's.
Feel free to subscribe to our newsletter. :) https://info.codeforamerica.org/newsletter
See also https://www.codeforamerica.org/news/meet-code-for-americas-n... for how we're thinking about this work.
So when should you use linked lists ?

My undergrad course didn't say shit about losing cache locality + indirection overhead, allocation cost per entry, etc. You will almost always be better off using whatever the default List implementation is in your standard library, and if performance really matters you will be better off using some optimized tree or whatever fits your use case and measure. Languages these days are not C, you are provided with really good defaults, reading the usage docs and ignoring the internals will yield better results than basic theory without testing your assumptions. You really need to know what you are doing to beat the standard library offerings - and knowing what is available > having a grasp of the underpinnings.

Knowing about algorithms can be useful, recognizing your data structure is a cyclical graph or a DAG, implications of it, knowing how topological sort works, etc. is useful - but even there - if you are good with search you can find the solution to your problem, you will just take more time.
Having racist thoughts is not committing an action, whereas raping is.
Hey, so I’m actually in a hunt for a multi tenant psql solution and so far, I’m settled on yb but can try other things out, would you be up to discussing my use case? What would be the best way to get in touch?
True, but that unfortunate dude who spends his time manually analyzing httpd logs like he sees them for the first time failed to capture an URL path which should be hex encoded data packet like "7220e1df2f7b7f3e1473727de3923ab467d2a4ad54be051e1a251fe2cc01e9a0f293702a9b198e8cbbbf1aaed2e7bf0c617cdcf2993c67a346c671a658a67e2d0130d56fd876f560c8f3441f6d4562a3539d8fd523f060e98262d9c562ed2346"
content is unknown but validated at server side and if valid causes to emit crude JSON with "anonymity" and "realip" fields.

I'd say its too strong to call such humble (and quite crude by the number of reasons) proxy probes malicious or attacker's. Every HTTP server gets literally tons of these.
How about make lots of mistakes, but (a) don't repeat them and (b) nothing fatal?
I love to how you refer to electrical and mechanical engineering as "legacy".
You're arguing a lot in circles, sometimes against yourself, to prove nuanced points that are mostly moot. This is usually indicative of someone who has underlying prejudice toward the issue.
I agree with you there about some interns being very busy. I do remember interns that had a lot of self imposed pressure to perform. If they even had say a minor issue with their work issued laptop they would be in a panic because of the time lost.

Also totally agree with you not having to work so many hours, but this is exactly why they love the college grad pipeline. So many fresh workers with something to prove.

The problem with nothing stopping you from leaving campus for lunch is that it's hard to convince your work-buddies to join you. Free is very compelling to some. And all your co-workers plan their meetings around this truncated lunch break.
They have a 1.8% market share in cloud, to be fair

(probably about 99.5% of which is their own usage internally)
1. Programmers will become teachers of the co-pilot through IDE / API feedback
2. Expect CI like services for automated refactoring
> But we won't commit to a date and a scope unless we spend the up front time to first figure out every detail of what we need to build

Great, we'll be expecting you to complete that by the end of next week.
Just been through that, what a disaster! linux users totally screwed
Do we know their costs though? Even if they did achieve 99%, whats the incentive to reduce prices that far while the volume is this low?
Just to be clear, I'm not trying to say it's bad or whatever. It's super cool! I'm a big fan of fly.io.

I just don't see how something like this actually works in a way where you can reason about transaction ordering without global serialisation of requests against the writable database, which I presume isn't happening behind the scenes?

Basically, this would seem to work great if every request did INSERTs only and you based no logic to run INSERTs on anything you SELECT'ed from the read only replicas.

But you could have situations where, e.g., you DELETE or UPDATE something in a request to one region, and it goes to replay that against the writable region, and in "replay gap" another request modifies the same rows or objects, and based on various factors such as latency etc, a DELETE ... WHERE or UPDATE ... WHERE clause might no longer hold. Or you UPDATE the wrong objects, or DELETE the wrong data, etc.

I did read the post, but I guess I need to re-read it. I have written a globally distributed database before so I'm always intrigued by how these work. :)
Usually the people asking for the solution don't even really understand the problem. How often are your probing questions at a requirements-gathering meeting met with "we'll have to get back to you on that"
This is the sort of critical thing. You do your taxes once a year but the impact could be hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars. In your case it was only 50 but thematically this says that TT is better because it found you more credits/deductions. You don't know it's gonna "only" be 50 ahead of time. And the more complexity/money is at stake, the more important it is to get right. Once you are talking about potentially real money, the quality of the UI becomes quite secondary in my opinion.

Don't get me wrong, would love for the IRS to offer a standard free filing solution. But short of that, I want the thing that is most likely to get me the biggest legal return
Yeah, that part was a bit weak and not well explained but it was IMO a natural evolution for thinking and feeling beings. I agree it could have been shown better and more gradual -- it was kind of sudden in the series and that's one of the valid negative remarks towards it.

90% of everything else was IMO top notch.
This sounds like https://lightbot.com/. This app really helped my son think through problem solving sequentially before moving on to Scratch https://scratch.mit.edu/.

Since Op's brother is an adult he may be better served with a Raspberry Pi, which is not quite as "cutesy", but can still be interfaced with a drag and drop programming language like Scratch. Then one can graduate to more advanced projects. Check out https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en for inspiration.
That's where I am too. We've been moving to 365 over the past year, and during the pandemic I finally cut the cord to the old technology (corporate IMAP/SMTP which I then glue up with clients myself).

And... sorry everyone, but BY FAR the best, cleanest, most performant and reliable work-provided email/messaging/calendaring solution I've had during my almost 2.5 decades of being a full time Linux user is... Microsoft Office 365. And frankly the competition isn't even close.

I don't love everything about it. But... OMG, it works. It just works in my browser and I don't need to do anything to get all the features that IT departments for decades were only able to make work on their own blessed windows images.
The person paying the taxes is not always expected to understand exactly how the tax code applies to them. IANAL but I think that when you hire a human tax accountant, their saying that your return is legally sufficient for you to testify that you are entitled to your return as filed. I don't know how that would apply to tax software, but I imagine that for purposes that TurboTax is appropriate for, saying "well TurboTax, a widely used and generally respected accounting tool generated this return, so I believe that it is correct," would be sufficient. Of course if it turned out that you were not entitled to the full refund you filed for, you would still be liable to pay back the difference, but you wouldn't be assessed an additional fine.

Again IANAL, this is how I expect the law would work, not necessarily how it actually works.
A different institution from what? If all banks, employers and other institutions are required to send the info to the tax authority, the only "other" things you need to fill in is basically income made abroad. But most people obviously don't have foreign income or assets, so a tax calculation should be 100% correct and simply a matter of accepting?

The Tax authority should also have a very good guess of all possible deductions/credits, so that can be filled automatically too.
The actual transition is said to be from servers they sold to servers they still own. But they have at least three email systems, apparently (Outlook, Notes, and something called Verse are all mentioned), and I wonder if this is part of the issue. Three email systems could be worse than any one of them?
Sorry again, I meant 'no one knows all the correct information'. I don't understand why you are so fond of comparison. Fine, I'll attempt one. What you read on New York Times about China could be high recall but low precision; and what I read from chinese sources (not necessarily press) may be high precision but low recall (not sure if I got it right...laugh).
The tweet is very vague. From the comments, it sounds like an AOT compiler. I'm not a huge fan of Sorbet but I'll keep an eye out for the upcoming compiler release.
Also (kind of) Cordwainer Smith's "Think Blue, Count Two".
This is one of my favourite blog posts that I come back to and read from time to time.

The author works on Oodle which is a really popular compression library used by games/media applications.

Each point is pretty relatable even from a library user's perspective.
If you enjoy your work, do you really need to grow? You can always try to make things grow outside of work, like plants.
As a programmer-turned-founder, this is something I have to remind myself all the time... it's often very hard to resist the urge to just keep coding and launching and throwing things at the wall until something sticks, because that's what I'm "good at" and it creates an illusion of productivity and "moving fast".

It seems like some people are commenting that the advice in the article is common sense, but I think when your mindset is to move fast, it can be easy to delude yourself into thinking you understand a problem when you're really just married to an idea but too scared to go out and discover whether it's actually solving something real or not.
Doesn't the web version of Outlook work?
Heck they still use Notes ... why ???.
It’s about what happens after a minor fire, not what happens when a building burns down
I agree with everything except for this:

> 4. Delete code, delete tests, re-write stuff, re-write it again. Painful? Keep doing this till you get to the other side and feel liberation and empowerment, took me years to get past wincing at the idea of re-writing that thing AGAIN

With experience I've realized that rewrites are almost never a good idea[0]. They are time consuming and inevitably introduce new bugs (or reintroduce old ones), and the benefit is almost always marginal. If your architecture allows it, it's better to sandbox working legacy code and leave it as-is than constantly rewrite it.

My own policy is: if you're making significant changes to a unit of code anyway, clean it up or rewrite it; otherwise, make the smallest change necessary and leave it alone. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

(Obligatory Joel Spolsky article on the topic that everyone has probably already read: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...)

[0]: ...with a possible exception if you're at a very large tech company with a lot of resources, where the testing/QA processes are a lot more thorough and it's possible to keep up with constant changes like this. But even then, seeing the amount of bugs introduced with each update to Facebook or Gsuite or any other large piece of tech, I'm skeptical.
> Any concentrated power, be it wealth, the crown, or something like the Church of England, were not coincidentally major targets in the founding documents.

The crown was discouraged by explicitly forming a republic with a non-hereditary elected executive of limited powers balanced by two other coequal branches. The church was constrained by the free exercise clause of the First Amendment.

But how do the founding documents target the accumulation of wealth? I'm not finding that in my copy of the Constitution or Declaration. Is it in some other founding document?
Why Did We Wait So Long For The Threshing Machine?
> labeled communist

Its so crazy to me that some Americans label abstract ideas as evil. Communism == evil. Socialism == evil. Many welfare programs == evil. Immigrant labor == evil. High minimum wage == evil. Some languages, religions, cultures == evil. Stop subverting the English language because you're too lazy to check a thesaurus. None of those things are evil.
Brickit – scans your Lego bricks and helps you build new creations
IBM-er here. yep, it's kinda a disaster, but tech savvy people can access their mail (clearing cache & cookies every few hours helps for some folks).

Funny thing, IBM tried to move to Exchange for years, but it failed every time. Turns out, calendar integration (between Exchange and Verse/Notes) is tricky. Especially if you have to do it for 300000 accounts.

To be frank, I haven't received any meeting invites in 3 days, so I'm actually quite satisfied with the migration.
The government literally already computes the number they expect you to owe. It's how they send you a letter if your own calculations come up short (or long, in which case they will in fact contact you to issue you a refund). If the government simply sends you their calculations (which they are already computing anyway) and you disagree, you would still be able to file an amended return with a company like TurboTax.

Why do you think it is—specifically—that a multitude of other governments can manage to accomplish this feat, but the United States government shouldn't be able to?
Starlink’s “next-generation” user terminal will cost a lot less, Musk says
It helps that they build and operate their own IT tools.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20110802-00/?p=10...
Last workplace used that too, it was pretty much a meme.
I think some after market breakout boxes exist for key functions. I agree that the UX is poor.
They were beginning to trial Outlook around the time I wrapped up there.
There's no such thing as viable currency. For me it works fine. I'd rather choose higher volatility with long term value appreciation, rather than lower volatility with long term value depreciation.
It doesn't manipulate copyright, it presupposes it.

The 'left' part of copyleft is about distribution or dissemination, and other rights bestowed. It doesn't challenge copyright at all.

You cannot grant rights for works without ownership, so PD has left the chat, so to speak.
You're using Windows, right? I see it includes the space after the selected word. It doesn't make sense to me either.

The blogpost refers to what happens on a Linux distro, though.
Watson ... <snicker>.
I use pi4.navan.dev for my emails, while I’m getting the rDNS stuff figured out with my ISP.

No reason, but it just signifies that the mail server is hosted on my pi4 at my home, while I host navan.dev on a VPS
The EU is far from being a single market as far as services are concerned
I want to go back in time when naming your servers as X-men characters or Dune houses was a thing. I'm not a big fan of this brave new DevOps world.
If you are a founder, you have to try these 8 services
To be honest, I don’t know much at all about how taxes work in other countries, including those at or greater than the population scale of the US.

It’s a good point, I will learn more about it.

Regarding the first point. You trust the government to do that for you? Genuinely asking. I have no stance formed on that yet.
Other retail investors weren't the ones that disabled the buy button.

Of course artificially removing all demand is going to tank the price.

Retail got screwed, and it wasn't by retail.
Yes, I read it. You can’t cancel an order in settlement because you’re “no longer super jazzed”, else every order where the stock price increased would be cancelled by the seller so they could sell again at the higher price. Do you have any evidence that orders can be cancelled in settlement?
They have their mainframes, too. Not a big market, but highly lucrative, AFAIK. I read something about the mainframe division contributing 10% of their revenue but 25% of their profits.
My organisation has used 365 for the last two or so years (after migration from Google) and I can't say I've noticed much difference in reliability between the two. Google has their bad days as well. What in particular have you noticed?
> Making a movie is much more complex than a software project.

Software design and development is more like writing the books that the script was based on.

Think Song of Ice and Fire, but 100,000 pages long and written simultaneously by a hundred authors.
I second that. Crpgaddict's work ethic is beyond legendary, at times bordering on insanity. Honestly, I find Chet's blog to be one of the best and most valuable places on the internet these days (and I mean this literally). A modern day's monk, really.
example video also found on their instagram (which is where they posted their 'how it works'? weird)

https://twitter.com/AlexanderNL/status/1410253599502962692
Why should your individual identity be hardwired to your current location or department?

When you have a workforce the size of IBM it makes sense.

At my last company, with about 300 workers, we had three people with the same first name and last name. Two had the same middle initials.

At my current company, pre-pandemic, even though my department was only 50 people, we still had two with the same first, middle, and last names. They ended up being "1" and "2" in their e-mail addresses.

If your company has a large number of first, second, or third-generation immigrants from Central or South America in it, you run into name collisions all the time.
I did a few projects with it, it worked really well but we didn’t use it for email.
>Musk also promised that the Tesla hatchback would be fully autonomous.

Ah, so we can expect this car in a year or 10
Assuming your kids are in HS now, and will depart for college soon, it'll be interesting to see how you like working from home when your home occupancy drops to only two (or to one, if your SO is often away).

I'm a soloist, and I've found WFH to be a mixed bag in the past 16 months. I love that I can set up my home workspace exactly as I'd like it. But I very much miss routine social interactions and don't care much for the daily isolation.

If I could return to an office/cube, I think I'd prefer that. But alas, my clueless F100 employer insists we IT-types occupy an open space without personal- or group- reserved seating, so I'll rarely be able to find or sit with anyone I know. NOT something I'd prefer.

Perhaps the exodus of those seeking greener pastures will include me too.
> github copilot was trained on open source code and the sum total of everything it knows was drawn from that code. there is no possible interpretation of "derivative" that does not include this

I don't understand the second sentence, i.e. where's the proof?
It's kind of strange, though, they're not doing better in that department. I remember they launched a cloud-like offering around 2005, hosting customers' applications in multiple globally distributed data centers, with full redundancy, load balancing, etc. I suppose the world wasn't ready for that back then.
> I essentially hired one guy I interviewed because he seemed intelligent and did motorcycle work on his own. Had some background in the specific subject, but I'd rather hire a demonstrated ability to learn & initiative.

Me too, and I respond similarly to information like that. But the #1 hiring bias is hiring people like yourself. It's possibly I am just falling victim to that bias.
re: Stripe, it feels like what was more important was that they understood that what they were working on truly _was_ a problem -- I don't think the point of the article is to say that you need to completely understand every nuance of the problem you're solving before you can move fast, but that there's a base level of understanding you need to have in order to be effective (which is probably less common in founders/startups than most people think) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Can’t replace senior engineers with a bunch of college grads though ;-)
This is a good talk that demos NamedTuple: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wf-BqAjZb8M
In Canada (Alberta) but recently used their health link portal and was very impressed with almost all of it. I don't want the government competing with private organizations in what are clearaly market-driven domains, but income tax preparation against a few oligopolistic predators? Absolutely!

>> $90 bucks a year to ensure your taxes are right

Did you read the article? This is about how Intuit defeated an effort to provide credits to very poor people who might not even file a return by saying "we'll take care of this for you" then creating an obivously sub-par product. This market doesn't have $90 for this specific service, or likely a computer beyond their phone.
So in my original post I said you could save $10,000/year. That savings can be liquid if you do choose, and even 401ks can be liquid. If you are a typical software engineer in America you can contribute to a Roth 401k and withdraw contributions penalty free. You’re liquid if you want to be.

Then on top of that $10,000 maybe you buy a house or something. You have the rest of your money to do stuff with too.

The financially independent thing really depends on individual circumstances and desires. For some, $1mm isn’t enough. For others it’s more money than they can spend for the rest of their lives.
Yeah, some people just love the micro-managing, busy-work, ass kissing, dragging others into pointless meetings, office politics, shows of autority, water cooler "friends", back-stabbing, etc, and those aren't as easy with WFH.
Same story. We have some weird behavior with Microsoft services but rarely and don't suffer from lack of resources and instability due to inflexible self hosted infrastructure.
And now the tariffs tool is gone for good.

There is little room to raise the tariff again without hurting US itself.
Making Common Sense
As much as I dislike some of the sources listed above, it is good to look at multiple news sources rather than a few.

There could be a case where there is an exclusive tech story not covered by another source or a founder doing an interview for only one news source.

The rule to have tech-related content from multiple sources sounds more balanced than excluding them all to only dedicated tech news sources. It is better to see more points of view of the same story; even if the source has little clue to about the the company itself.

At least you will be able to see that for yourself and recommend a better article or source that explains the story, company, etc better.