skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let me offer an alternative version of why people take the presumably-government roles and do them as private contractors: avoidance of byzantine requirements and cynical implementations of laws aimed at preventing fraud, waste, and abuse (FWA). People drastically overestimate FWA because they commonly describe or conceive as FWA government projects which they don't like. A couple examples:

It's relatively hard to get any work done at my job during the month of April, because about half the building is 85-88F (in a temperate mid-atlantic climate). That means that people will work in other cooler offices (problem when no one carries a cell phone) or just find reasons to leave early. I used to battle about this, but then I learned that it was for the unmovable ideal of economizing. Unfortunately, I'm a victim of economizing a 1970s building with huge plate glass windows that don't open.

Second example:office supplies. A supervisor asks me to have a room set up for a meeting. After determining that what I need is not kept on hand, I try to buy them through the government catalog as I'm supposed to. My internet connection fails, so I reboot my desktop (roughly 20-30 minutes). When it fails again, I lament that I probably have a dozen faster computers at home, ranging from 10 year old tablets to a raspberry pi, and with that I take the opportunity to step away from my office (low 80s in the summer, when this takes place, because the AC can't keep up.) I go down to my car where I can use my own air conditioning and my phone to look at the same website. The supplies aren't on the catalog, so I just order them for $10 on Amazon. Fast forward one week, when my supervisor asks how I have it ready so soon, and I get criticized for buying the supplies outside of the supply system with my own money. I place too high a value on my sanity, apparently.

Edit: I should mention that most people at this office are paid quite well relative to the area
I have to say that I agree. I think a punishment and/or fine should have been implemented. But $70M? Where does that money go anyway?
A number of company, including Google and probably Microsoft forbid copying code from Stack Overflow because there is no explicit license
All of those are investment banks.
> Then change the law.

Aren't you the one trying to change the law here by requiring corroborating evidence in all cases?
FAANGs have 10s to 100s of thousands of employees. "Vets" are a lot less irreplaceable than you might think.
In high school "AP CS" class in the early 90s, a friend of mine was annoyed at the stupid "security" software the school installed on the macs (system 7). It was basically just a system extension that asked for a password on startup.

Poking around, my friend noticed a slightly hidden/obscured file that had a file size that matched the number of characters in the password. N char password, N byte file. The file didn't have the password in plaintext, so my friend asked the teacher of a common way to scramble a byte. The teacher quickly suggested, "XOR?"

So my friend decided to try XORing the bytes in the file with a few values to see what happend. His first guess was right: the password was "obscured" with:

for (char *p = password_str; p != NULL; p++) {
*p ^= 0xC9;
}

Why did he guess 0xC9? He was a total Trekkie/Trekker. 0xC9 in binary is 11001001.

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/11001001_%28episode%29

I guess we know what show the author of the "security software" likes to watch...

Epilogue: my friend quickly did the obvious thing and made a boot floppy with a small program that printed out the password, so we had access to most of the computer in the school and discovered all the passwords we weren't supposed to know. I think we only used that to play bolo (early tank proto-battle-royale). However... several years later in my first year at university, I happened to talk to someone attending the local high school. The had a copy of my friend's boot floppy! I know we never bothered to upload it a BBS, but somehow it ended up in the hands of quite a few high school hackers in multiple cities.
The problem isn't that the IRS won't make a painless tool. The issue is that Intuit actively works to make sure the tax code stays as complicated as possible. Ideally the tax code is so simple that complicated tools aren't necessary for your average filer.
And furthermore, the primary problem with scaling out the number of clusters is that it hamstrings one of the primary value propositions of kubernetes: increased utilization. The scheduler can't do its job without yet another scheduler on top if you spread your workloads outside of their sphere of influence.
Packing everything together is a "selling point" until you find that a service can fill up ephemeral storage and take down other services, or consume bandwidth without limit.

Let's not forget the potential security implications of not keeping things properly isolated.

People who were around when provisioning on bare-metal was still a thing already learned all these lessons. Somehow it seems they have been forgotten by all the people driving hype around Kubernetes.
Atrocity Guide has a video on Bob's Game:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A47maEySTdI
This year we tried doing our taxes using both TurboTax and FreeTaxUSA.

TurboTax has a much worse interface, it took almost twice as long to complete the taxes despite having an identical return. TurboTax did find about $50 more return for us somehow despite having entered the same information into both sites, but that amount is less than the fee TurboTax would charge so we ended up submitting through FreeTaxUSA instead.

Next year I don't think I'm even going to bother with TurboTax.
Oh wow, that smells a lot like Terry A. Davis v2.0.
I'm looking forward to HolyC++.
We should have kept developing Usenet. Handing control over to web browser providers was a mistake.
Business here.

Guess what we get it's hard but we have to do it so we can plan release, usage (with Sales) and spit out revenue targets to justify the initial spend.

It's all about confidence of estimates. Many small things are easy to estimate and have high confidence. We're good at that stuff.

Where it gets super difficult are greenfield new products that span across multiple teams,both engineering and business. Without burning your entire budget on the estimation process you just have to have exceptional buy-in from all teams and start working, that's the best way.

Where things get tricky are when one business vertical suddenly has a new urgent #1 priority during the build and has to divert away attention and resource. Everyone can lose momentum so takes some business and engineering craft to hold it together.

All part of the gig.
So basically, it's just a slack call with the video off?
H&R Block wanted to upcharge me additional $$ just to fill out a Schedule D on top of the $$ tier fee (the past few years these forms were included in that tier price). They lost a long term (10yr?) customer by trying to grift me this year.

I used https://www.taxslayer.com/ instead this past year, a bit more DIY but if you've done your taxes for years and they're generally the same year after year it's not that hard to read your docs and type them in the boxes. You pay for Support level, not tax form access with this service.
"I love that you get on a call with real native speaker"

Wow! Seriously? How do you feel the same way about the people you work with, if they aren't native speakers?
The Free Software Foundation (FSF), a Massachusetts 501(c)(3) charity with a worldwide mission to protect computer user freedom, seeks a principled, compassionate, and capable leader to be its new executive director. This position can be remote or based in our Boston office.

The FSF is committed to the notion that users are entitled to control their computing, individually and collectively, and therefore to control the software that does that computing. The executive director will work closely with the president, board of directors, and all Foundation staff to achieve this goal.

The FSF faces many challenges as software becomes increasingly central in the exercise of all fundamental human freedoms, including speech, association, privacy, and movement, and as software owners seek to exploit their control over us to profit at the expense of those freedoms. The executive director has a vital role in enabling the FSF to continue meeting these challenges, starting from the strong base that has been built in the last thirty-five years. The Foundation has recently reached record-high membership numbers and was awarded a perfect score from Charity Navigator, as well as its eighth consecutive four-star rating. Efforts to improve the Foundation’s governance are underway.

The executive director is the FSF's chief employed officer. The position reports to the president/CEO and the board of directors, and is responsible for management of all other staff, all day-to-day operations, and oversight of the Boston physical office. The successful candidate will have the opportunity to hire for additional key positions in the management team.

While not a member of the board of directors, the executive director provides support for the board, including facilitation for and participation in meetings, strategic planning, goal setting, and policy formation. The executive director, working with the president, is the public face of the Foundation.
At UofIowa we had two interesting home-grown RPGs. One was 'AG' which stood for the initials of the author Alan Guiles. It consisted of modules e.g. AgWild, AgTown, AgFt (fight) etc. Written in HP 2000 Acess BASIC. You had a small text grid printed with your location marked as a '*'. Each module had a different view. At any module you could meet a monster and end up in the 'fight' view, which was a linear scale beginning with the monster at the top and you at the bottom. You could advance, retreat, hit or fire an arrow or spell. The arrows and spells were ranged. You could also Evade and avoid the fight, which didn't always work.
There were some other interesting modules like an Inn where you could gamble (blackjack, roulette...).
It was single-player but everybody appeared on a top-score screen. It was a big deal to get on the 1st page! I did it once.

The other was called 'Wilder' and was done by Jon Sawyer. It stood for 'Wilderness' and was multi-player. You could Yell and Listen and communicate with other online players. Some kind of combat with monsters. I don't recall if you could fight P2P? Have to ask Jon about that.

Anyway there were quite a few 'mainframe' games written at about the same time at Iowa - a two-player war game WR12, a real-time Star Trek game labelled 'Begin' (because the login module was called 'Begin') with multiple fleets and three or four kinds of weapon. It still has a fan site! And smaller simple games like Trek3D, TREK1D (a joke), Combat, Patrol and several more.

It was a big deal, with students getting access to terminals for the first time and getting inventive.
> Who is stopping the IRS from making a competing easy to use tax filing website? Are people suggesting Intuit is stopping a good product team from operating within the IRS?

Yes. The IRS signed an agreement with a coalition of companies called the Free File Alliance (including Intuit) stipulating that if the latter would provide free filing, the IRS wouldn't create a competing product. [1] Intuit then delisted the TurboTax Free File page from search engines [2] so taxpayers would only be able to find the version that directs users to pay. Only 3% of taxpayers took advantage of Free File products — remember, these are products made by tax prep companies like Intuit — even though over 70% are eligible. [3]

[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...

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

[3] https://www.propublica.org/article/free-file-online-tax-prep...
I wish discord would support fast account user switching. I vastly prefer it to slack but I also enjoy having good workplace hygiene so having my gaming friends pop up during my work hours is less than ideal.
Putting walls up is incredibly cheap, that's like the least interesting thing to automate. Plus it'd be hard (read: expensive) to move them from the factory to the site, and it'd be hard to get them into place when they're on site.

For things that are actually hard to build or easy to move, like cabinets or roof trusses, we're already building them in factories
> Going rate for someone in India that is as good as me is about 60% of my pay

Ah, totally not an inflated sense of self worth... do you have a source for that number? New grad salaries for even graduates of top CS programs in India are between 1/4th and 1/3rd of $100k [1]. For most other good graduates it's lower.

So what you said is incredibly ignorant and arrogant. Do better. You're not as special as you think.

https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Software-Engineer-Ba...
This actually happened to me:

https://www.voo.st/

We shut down the business an abandoned the domain. Someone registered the domain, created a similar-looking website by hand (recycling a lot of the text and images), and added spam. It even has my old company address.

This is a .st domain, about $35/yr. The web design work cost something too. More than I would have expected the link juice from a single website to be worth.

What we really need is some sort of DNS record or meta content we can add that tells search engines "this domain is being abandoned, destroy all link juice".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony
They put the company who wants the built the bypass in charge of storing the building plans, and nobody is surprised they put a “beware the leopard” sign up in front of it.
not a fan of this argument.

musicians, artists, all kinds of athletes, all grow by watching observing and learning from others. as if all these open source projects got to where they are without looking at how others did things.

i don't think a single function, similar syntax or basic check function is worth arguing about, its not like co-pilot is stealing an entire code base and just plopping it out by reading your mind and knowing what you want. i know developers that have certainly stolen code and implementation details from past employers and that was just fine.
>When React first come out, the whole notion of mixing HTML and Javascript code was, if anything, widely rejected.

And it still is. Mixing JS and HTML/DOM does result in fragile code and you shouldn't do it. React VDOM and JSX is not the same thing .. at all. Again, JSX isn't new. XML-based declarative UI frameworks with data-biding were an old thing by the time React arrived on the scene. That's how Flash Flex (MXML) and Silverlight (XAML) worked, for example.
the IRS has actually partnered with the "Free File Alliance" which is a group of companies that partner with the IRS (Free tax filing for incomes < X).. So Saddly I feel the hope of the IRS just sending you a bill is slim.

Intuit is one of the members:

https://freefilealliance.org/free-file-alliance-members/

https://freefilealliance.org/about/

Its a little weird. One would hope they would just send you the bill.. I filed my taxes late with an extension. I could go to the IRS site and get all the documents they had filed by banks and my employeer, for me. They have that info...
Then why do you want to work for Apple?
> if somebody decided to hurt you by spreading rumors

We have libel laws to address that.

GPs point is that Google, Facebook, et. al. are premptively censoring non-mainstream content just to protect themselves. They don't really care about the public.
Interesting question! But without having a goal in mind, it's hard to comment on it. If you have some goal that you're shooting for regardless of which of these options you choose, and it's just a question of which option will be better for that goal, then explain what the goal is. If you don't have a clear goal, then I don't see how you can compare them.

If you are a US citizen or permanent resident, then you have an opportunity to be involved in a cool startup that's closed to most people. And a the same time, you would probably be overpaying for grad school compared to most people. So choosing the startup would be playing to the strengths of your position imo.
Things like this make me hate the internet in modern times. Let's remove the skin-tone chooser, use a super neutral color to kill this Black vs White tribalism. The things we humans choose to conflict over is startling.
When I click into a specific stock, the top set of charts needs more space. The pop ups get cut off at the bottom.
Fungible vs non-fungible seem to be the concept hiding behind pets/cattle. You can substitute a dollar for another, you can't substitute your favorite rock for another.
Interesting, so it only restricts what congress can do. I didn't know that. Thanks!
The single most reliable way to come to a loathing of the software development process is to engage in it for a living.
Already said in this thread, but I think it's ridiculous that when people think about abusive big tech, they never think about Intuit.
Their business is literally the idea of creating friction in federal and local tax systems so they can extort people in exchange of removing some of those synthetic frictions (emphasis on "some").

A sinister business model in every possible way.
Facebook’s newsletter platform Bulletin is now live
This feels a lot like reading about TempleOS
> I wish they supported PGP for messages as well

Does anyone support PGP for messages?
Well then it's a good thing it's not aimed at you. This is aimed at people that were already working on-site before the pandemic. If anything, it sounds like Apple is realizing that there is benefit to being able to work from home while also realizing that their entire history is based on people collaborating in-person. If you were worth it to them, you'd get one of those exemptions mentioned in the article.
We don't even need to pretend it is an outside-of-technical-people problem. Developers (and just people in general) are just as guilty at mis-estimating their own capacity for work.

By this I mean we forget we have other things - we don't accurately account for meetings and side-tasks. We underestimate the complexity of even simple tasks. We don't account for the flames we fight habitually without much consideration. We don't even recognise the amount of time we spend just relaying and receiving information. Those intriguing and important (and still work related just not explicitly about the task we have estimated) slack messages and water cooler moments aren't accounted for in our estimates.

Most estimates are inherently given on a "if I am in a perfect working environment with no interruptions" basis and we don't even acknowledge _that_.

This is all before we even begin to appreciate that even perfect world estimates are hard because, as Ron Jeffries said:

Even with clear requirements — and it seems that they never are — it is still almost impossible to know how long something will take, because we’ve never done it before. If we had done it before, we’d just give it to you.
The very concept of ownership is a social artifact, and as such, is not immutable. What does it mean for the 0.1% to own all the means of production? They can't physically possess them all. So what it means in practice is that our society recognizes the abstract notion of property ownership, distinct from physical possession or use - basically, the right to deny other people the use of that property, or allow it conditionally. This recognition is what reifies it - registries to keep track of owners, police and courts to enforce the right to exclude.

But, again, this is a construct. The only reason why it holds up is because most people support it. I very much doubt that's going to remain the case for long if we end up in a situation where the elites own all the (now automated) capital and don't need the workers to extract wealth from it anymore. The government doesn't even need to expropriate anything - just refuse to recognize such property rights, and withdraw its protection.

I hope that there are sufficiently many capitalists who are smart enough to understand this, and to manage a smooth transition. Because if they won't, it'll get to torches and pitchforks eventually, and there's always a lot of collateral damage from that. But, one way or another, things will change. You can't just tell several billion people that they're not needed anymore, and that they're welcome to starve to death.
Lobbying has nothing to do with free market.
Retail is not really a winner take all market though. It has very low barriers to entry. There are multitude of options to use as an alternative to Amazon.

https://www.emarketer.com/content/amazon-dominates-us-ecomme...

To Amazon's credit, they did move fast and bet big on online retail first. But since it is a low barrier to entry business, there is next to profit to be had in it, so they really do not have an incentive to keep pouring into it. Why bother playing for 2% profit margins versus Walmart and Target and Home Depot and Costco when you can earn 15%+ as a platform.

If people stop using you, then oh well, switch to web services or media which have double digit profit margins, but it is not really a big loss. So I would say the uncaring attitude is due to lack of profits margins, compared to their alternative.
How do you verify the salaries, and how do you decide which firms to have in the site?
I think being a nanny is the most future-proof job
Elon Musk now lives in a $50K house at Starbase, Texas
The citizens without the ability to directly recall the elected are to blame? There is a serious power and attention imbalance here, and the laws to do not leave the power in the hands of the citizens outside of a single day every few years.

It's hard for me to believe they are the source of the problem, particularly with such a shabby fourth estate.
This. I currently work with a CTO whc has less experience than me, because he founded the company, he's CTO by default.
A local, independent, tax preparer. There's plenty of individuals who are partially retired that help file simple tax returns for ~$50 during tax season.
Sailing on Solar Protons
Talking over the phone, which doesn't have great voice quality to begin with, about a potentially stressful and time critical situation is not something accents help with there is nothing wrong with that statement.
I don't think that's a fair assessment. If it is mental illness, it's probably the same illness that leads people to become independent artists in the first place.

He mentioned that he got an offer to work for Nintendo and lead his own team by a rep at GDC, but he turned it down because he didn't understand what they were offering him. I could 100% believe that because I could 100% see myself doing the same thing.

He also later said that the ridiculous behavior was all a viral marketing stunt gone wrong, which, again, I 100% believe because I could see myself...maybe not actually doing it, but certainly coming up with a similar idea to get attention for the project I worked so hard on.

IMO the best thing for him to do is lay low until everyone forgets about him, so that he can release his game in the future, maybe under a different title. Although that might be hard because it seems the Youtube documentary crowd has started to shine a spotlight on him recently (that's how I learned about this guy a few weeks ago)

Also, he did release a game titled "Bob's Game" on Steam, but it was a puzzle game rather than an RPG. I think the idea was that the RPG told the story of a game developer named Bob who was working on a game, and the game he released was the game developed by the Bob character in the RPG. It's a pretty cool concept, and I really hope this guy gets around to releasing the full thing some day.
How does this work, do they only interview at places that don't already have anyone experienced with the technology?