skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Those features are really only viable at the scale of large commercial tax software, not the efforts described in the submitted post.

PDFs aren't exactly used in a standardized way, so trying to make this work for even a fraction of the numerous tax form issuers requires a lot of work, and a lot of ongoing maintenance. You'll need to prioritize the actual tax forms, and annual updates to those first.
At least Oracle supports open source.

Apple does not.
how lucky we are as a civilization that technology has not yet made a similar punitive equation feasible for time as it is for money.

i.e., imagine if it worked this way for penalty of incarceration, where your mugger forfeits 10 years of their life, and transfers them to you, extending your own by the same amount - less attorneys' fees, of course.
I buy Apple computers precisely because I want a machine I can use for that long. I used my last Macbook Air for 11 years without having to replace anything, so was less wasteful than a person swapping out components every year. Its screen is toast so it's a headless server now.
Apple A15 Die Shot and Annotation – IP Block Area Analysis
Funny you mention that, the first time I tried to use Credit Karma Tax, either last year or the year before, they punted on me for having lived in two states.

I agree with your sentiment, but not resolution. The truest resolution is in simplifying the tax code, which Intuit and co do not want.

Edit to add:
When CreditKarma gave up on me, I tried FreeTaxUsa. It sounds like a scam I know, but they are top notch, and cheap. Highly recommend.
It's 2021 and you see no problem with this?
Hi, lead author here. You're definitely getting at the core of the issue. An effective shader programming models needs to support modularity and composition of shader code, while also supporting GPU code specialization and interop between host and GPU code. Large game engines provide layered tools that aim to provide these features, and they are very useful especially for users who aren't experts in graphics programming (e.g., artists and technical artists). I'll use this opportunity to shamelessly plug our prior work, which explores these aspects of shader systems in more detail: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3355089.3356554 (preprint here: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2f8448n2 )

Even with these layered tools, the host-GPU interop is still something that shader programming systems have to contend with directly, in contrast to "unified" systems like CUDA and C++ AMP in the GPU compute world. As you point out, translating C++ to GPU-compatible code is just one step in the process. Our work looks at the next step: once we can write both host and GPU shader code in C++, what's missing? What we discovered is that by merging the host and GPU halves together in C++, we inadvertently broke the critical shader specialization optimization. So our work presents a method to support shader specialization in a first class way, while also meeting our other design goals.
2021 Facebook Outage
State law claims are tried in federal courts all the time under subject matter jurisdiction and joinder rules. Both state and federal claims are probably at issue here. PACER would yield the answer.
>> Generally not the kind of thing for open source

Hard to know in advance, if OS communities can do something well or not. There are examples of taking on pretty sprawling problems successfully. On multi Language, portability and such they can often beat the "armies."
Tempting. Sadly, if we let the sheep have their FB, the likely result will be that we lose whatever semblance of democracy we have left. Already we're down to one party that belives in free and fair elections. Our system depends on informed citizens, not massive authoritarian psyop experiments. The longer we go where the majority can't get overwhelmingly popular policies accomplished, the closer we get to turning to any strongman who promises bold action, no matter how nightmarish that would be for most people.
Because most of the outage happened in the early hours of the morning AU time, so not that many people online.
Ask HN: Can world-changing industries still emerge from garages?
It seems like there's a lot of complexity required to move things forward nowadays. Increasingly, knowledge is being siloed in corporations and academia. Not to mention, there's a financial barrier to many fields (quantum computers, BCI, supercomputing, AI, etc)

Is it still possible to create cutting-edge technology with a small group, a tight budget and a garage?
I can only assume you're being sarcastic, but this kind of attitude only benefits these corporations. It is a common tactic by the rich oligarchies to defund and delegitimize government institutions so that they are scorned by the population and eventually privatized -- a move that only benefits them in the end. I would suggest Noam Chomsky's "Requiem for the American Dream: The 10 Principles of Concentration of Wealth & Power."
Who do you see as current AWS customers paying bills like that? My guess is that's very niche. People who expect to use petabytes of bandwidth rarely just throw things on AWS and eat the bills. And if they do, then it sounds like they wouldn't be moved to switch anyhow.
Paid software like Turbotax has hand-holding via the web interface or helpline chat over the app. Tech support is included in the price.
I will admit it's super frustrating to read a review of a flagship Android phone. Even from reputable places like Anandtech. They'll rave about the latest Snapdragon and how it'a a 10-20% improvement year over year. And yet it's 40% slower than last year's iPhone. I understand Android users don't have a choice. We can't get the A15. But journalists should be telling the world the truth over and over in every flagship Android review. "Your $1500 Galaxy S21 ultra has a worse SoC than a 3 year old iphone."

I've been an Android user since the original G1, and every year I wonder why I don't switch to an iphone. Maybe this year.
The FB-down-event was like a giant internet traffic test. What was learned?
I mean, we will now have data for what happens when WhatsApp/FBmessenger (2 top messanging apps) go down for hours. What did people do, did they switch apps, and to which apps? Did they websearch alternatives?

But besides that, other things went down as a result of people trying alternatives (they flooded Twitter and brought it down ddos style), and flooded gmail and brought it down.

Basically kind of giant reroute of internet traffic and activity.

Corporate meetings on the affected platforms went down. How was business affected?

IoT devices went down. What vulnerabilities were shown?

Other countries, not using FB et all, were probably not affected. What did we learn?
That greatly depends on the incident and the organization. I’ve personally been on numerous incident calls with C-level folks involved.
The government doesn’t make ovens or light bulbs, but does maintain the infrastructure. I think there’s a distinction to be made there.
Nice dishonestly selected single benchmark screenshot.

https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m1-vs-amd-ryzen-...

The Ryzen 5900HX is more than 70% faster than the M1 in Cinebench Multicore... and 1% slower in single core.

You know. Real world shit.

Also. Max 16GB Ram for the M1. L Oh fuckin' L. Even my Celeron laptop could do more than that.
Just being aware of the risks and counters helps a lot.

Most people don't understand the risks beyond "I can get hacked" and because they don't understand the how or basic counters they treat it like a freak weather event that can't be forecast.
> Severely limited by the I/O they possess

My iPhone 11 and iPad Pro have more, and more varied, I/O devices available than any of the ~6 computers and dozen or so video game consoles in my house. Like, I could buy more for the others to make them compete, but the i-devices just come with tons of stuff, plus can connect to lots of the same USB devices my other computers can (including, notably, anything MIDI), plus most of my bluetooth peripherals. And they can use external monitors/TVs (mirroring only, but still).

I guess there's a chance my Nintendo Switch comes close, but then, it can't connect to as many BT and USB devices.
CalyxOS, or GrapheneOS, flashed to a Pixel device will be a far better degoogled experience than plain AOSP. Though I don't think CalyxOS's chromium webview is fully degoogled, iirc. Something about too many apps breaking.
If they ever get a complete cloud offering, that might be disruptive. But I don't think this is disruptive now. If you do, please be specific about the customer segments you think will be switching over the next 6 months and what your estimated impact is to AWS's $15 billion in quarterly revenue.
Trying it now. Seems a bit slow to be useable with hotjava (hotjava is a complete dog though). Been digging around looking for a binary of Netscape Communicator but no luck so far.
The whole blog post seemed like a click and bait to me.

Nothing is "explained" other than what we knew already, that some unlucky SOB shot themselves in the head with a BGP shotgun.

I understand, they have no way of knowing what happened inside Facebook. But they could give some detail about exactly what the BGP updates were, the structure of the IP space served etc.
Right. For most people that are on a payroll and maybe have a 401k and what not, tax preparation should be easily automated. In some EU countries, the government will send you a draft that you basically just have to sign and send back. For the remaining 20% (likely even less than 10%) of people with more exotic investments, it is probably safe to assume that they either have the knowledge to handle the edge cases themselves or the wealth to pay someone to do it for them.

It should also be noted that the IRS already has all of the information about you anyway. Your bank, your brokers, etc all send copies of your financials to them. At that point, filling in a tax return by hand is basically a potential form of punishment for not doing your homework right.
curious, what is this dongle called and where would I get one to give it a try?
No one has mentioned "gray failure", https://www.cs.jhu.edu/~huang/paper/grayfailure-hotos17.pdf

> Cloud scale provides the vast resources necessary to replace failed
components, but this is useful only if those failures can be detected.
For this reason, the major availability breakdowns and performance
anomalies we see in cloud environments tend to be caused by subtle
underlying faults, i.e., gray failure rather than fail-stop failure. In
this paper, we discuss our experiences with gray failure in production
cloud-scale systems to show its broad scope and consequences. We also
argue that a key feature of gray failure is differential observabil-
ity: that the system’s failure detectors may not notice problems even
when applications are afflicted by them. This realization leads us to
believe that, to best deal with them, we should focus on bridging the
gap between different components’ perceptions of what constitutes
failure.
No. Many bad things are legal that most people don't do. People taking the actions and profiting from them deserve the blame. That includes developers and designers, plus plenty more people.
I would love to be able to block all calls from Texas. Every day I get 5+ spam calls, starting at 7:30am, almost all from Texas. If I could block all of Texas, then 90%+ of the spam calls I get would go away.
I feel like this is a kind of XY problem that could be solved theoretically by agreeing on a more streamlined tax-regulation.
It will take away the ability to fine tune tax deducts and so forth, but in return we can more easily design software to handle our taxes.
I find that not having this automated nowadays with the advancement in computing resources that we have at disposal today is surprising.
The general population is highly domesticated. The defining aspect of domestication is the surrender of one's capacity to do violence in exchange for peaceful symbiosis. The domesticated are accustomed to filling rigid roles in society -- a society they believe to be benevolent and infinitely stable.

Those of us that are not so domesticated, we wild ones, we who intimately comprehend history because we understand the nature of violence and power, are dying with anxiety as centralized powers gain more and more power over us every year.

Your wife has no understanding of violence and power, i.e., she is domesticated. That's why she has "nothing to hide."

The funny thing is, people have been aware of this property of human nature for thousands of years, but every generation that lives through hard times is shocked when they are forced to rediscover these principles -- as you seem to be discovering. If you continue to investigate why your wife thinks as she does, you'll come to the points I've made above and the behavior of the compliant masses will make much more sense -- and will leave you with quite a terrible feeling if you truly come to understand how most people will pretty much blindly comply with any prevailing authority that has seized the capacity to commit violence.
Federated data sharing is the core use case of the magic Postgres database we’re building at Splitgraph [0]. We’d love to help you solve these problems! The ideas you’re describing are exactly what we want to achieve – data sharing should be as easy as changing the table names in a SQL query. It sounds like your use case would be a good fit for what we’re building. If you’d like to learn more, please send me a note – email in profile.

[0] https://www.splitgraph.com
Such a standard is unlikely to ever introduce end-to-end encryption.
They linked to their replacement fee policy. Keep it out long enough past the due date, and they'll charge a replacement fee, but the fee will be removed if the patron returns the item.
Why would breaking Facebook down and regulating them solve anything related to the global dependence on WhatsApp? Aren’t the only people who know how to run these services already running them?

Like, do we expect the government to take WhatsApp away from Facebook and then create government contracts for companies like Oracle to maintain the infrastructure? So we’re back to square one but with the bureaucratic mess of the government involved?

The answer to all of this is very rarely “break it apart and give it to the government.” It might work for utilities and public works, but do we seriously believe that apps - the interfaces of the utilities - need to be regulated? I don’t get these arguments, and I see them everywhere.
> one person can have hundreds of thousands and even millions of followers that basically encourages flamewars, short inflammatory comments

Honestly you just described reddit, too, except of course for the follower count—but the point is that reddit doesn’t have to have that many participants in a discussion thread for it to reach a level of toxicity same as Twitter.

Sure, social media did make information more accessible, but the vision of the internet before Web 2.0 was that it’ll democratize information without the trade off that comes with social media today—because that trade off is exactly what we hated then about the status quo.
I can't wait when it comes to brew and I can use type unions like str | int | None
And then retracted by NYT:

> Correction: Oct. 4, 2021. An earlier version of this article misstated a Facebook team’s means of getting access to server computers at a data center in Santa Clara, Calif. The team did not have to cut through a cage using an industrial angle grinder.
I do support HTTP, although currently it has to be HTTP/1.1. It came about around the same time as HotJava, 1997, so the earliest versions may not support 1.1, but I'd guess the later ones do.

If you have an opportunity, the URL is in my profile.

It would be amazing if you found the time to read and write something using that platform.

I'm planning to set up a 1.0-compatible node, if only for Mosaic and IE 2.0.
ONE corporation, will it notice?
There is also IE5 and Outlook available. It apparently came with a primitive Windows compatibility layer: https://youtu.be/_AoyQeUzbEU
A New York Times reporter said employees had trouble getting in, and I don't see a retraction. So I believe that is true:

https://twitter.com/sheeraf/status/1445099150316503057
I only replaced PSUs on my MacBooks when Apple switched from MagSafe to USB-C.
I'll believe it when I see it. Seriously, just label robocallers terrorist already. Offer rewards to people willing to turn in the hedge honchos. Sanction the countries that refuse to prosecute them.
A quick list of other nice things in the release.

Performance:

* faster hashing for a variety of types (Array, Symbol, and a few others)

* faster ldiv! for QR factorizations

* faster findall for AbstractArray

* faster expm, log2, and log10

* faster isless for floats

* faster @fastmath versions of exp, exp2, exp10

* faster cbrt, sinh, exp for Float16

* Improved array resizing on push!

Features

* Exact determinants for BigInt matrices

* lpad/rpad now use text-width instead of bytes

* Make it significantly easier to use MKL (or other BLAS
libraries)

* opaque closures (complicated mostly internal feature)

I'm sure I've missed a bunch in this list (I compiled it by scanning through the commit list)
IMO, the MSM can't learn anything from this, or any other exposure of their ridiculous lies because it's their job to lie and distort, thereby shaping public opinion favourably for their masters.
As it happens, this individual was the shortest-lived connection I had on the platform. I had gone back on, received and accepted the friend request, and they posted that shortly thereafter, at which point I immediately unfriended them. It wasn't long after that I decided to scrap the whole endeavor.
What about the legal enforcement actions from the social security agency?
The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell.

Simone Weil
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJmY37wR7bo
Great until you realize some of them may later use your voice to create a voice profile and then blackmail you.
There are myriad options for communications. Being "regulated" won't make any of them more or less reliable (though probably will insulate them even further from competition).
This is not a real datacenter case but normal social hacking. On the datacenter side you have many more security checks plus many of the times the helping hands and engineers are part of the same company, using internal communication tools etc. so they are on the same logical footprint anyhow
> I'm a Gen X-er

none of this has anything to do with you. good night and please don't do this again.
Yes, software can be much simpler if the real world wasn't so complex.

The reality is that governments use taxation as one of their tools to reward certain behaviors and population segments and to discourage/punish others. Simplifying taxation is taking that power away from governments. Why would any government choose to divest itself of those powers?
FoundationDB would like a word.
> They might still use distributed servers from AWS.

Once again, since HN readers are so thick ...

They never used AWS for streaming, unless it was a test of some kind, or maybe to feed origin servers in their CDN, etc.

The only conceivable situation where they would is if AWS rolled out a new region in Oceania or somewhere else remote and there was no alternative at launch time.

Source: ex-Netflix.
> If your aunt is using a wired phone, I recommend getting a model which has Caller ID with voice announcements. This is great and does not require any effort to learn -- phone says "RING RING CALL FROM 1-800..." and you just tune it out.

I would normally say "n=1" and "YMMV", but in this case n=everyone I've ever had this discussion with and the mileage has not varied. I don't know about you, but I have received exactly one phone call in the past year from a 1-800 number, and it was legitimate. You know how many calls I receive daily on average from people spoofing what they think is my local area code? Seven. Sometimes it's none, sometimes it's 12, but I have been tracking it for this exact purpose and the average is 7. That's too many.

Do you think anyone would have adopted email if the only two options to deal with spam were 1) read the text in the body and manually delete it if you can recognize the scam or 2) disable incoming mail from anyone not already in your address book? Of course not! And it's high time that the company charging me for my expensive phone and my expensive service plan do something about the expensive attention I waste when getting interrupted with these extremely preventable attempts at exploitation. Not to mention the poor victims who fall for these scams and lose their retirement savings because they grew up in an era before incoming calls became synonymous with massive social engineering dragnets.

I apologize for ranting- I recognize you were offering a workaround in the meantime for the parent and I've upvoted you for that; I rarely rant on HN, but this topic and the apathy surrounding it really ruffles my feathers and I needed an outlet.
I think that's not a reasonable expectation. Unless you believe that setting regulatory clauses in doing business as "de facto" control. But then so does any business.

Much like every other nation on Earth, the government will seek to take a hand in the largest businesses operating in their jurisdiction.

"Expecting" the Chinese government to control every business in China is very dystopian and baseless. They couldn't do it even if they wanted. The same way my country can't regulate a simple scooter ride-sharing startup during a pandemic...

I wouldn't question China's control over companies like Alibaba. I wouldn't question the US' control over companies like Google. Which again is a totally different ballpark.
Hi, lead author here. Thank you very much for posting our paper!

I have replied to some of the comments, and I am happy to answer questions and have further discussion about our work!
Having followed Apple very closely for more than two decade and tried very hard to convince myself that was the case, their PR and Marketing are simply very aligned on this issue. Especially after Katie Cotton stepped down.
There's an extra 'p' at the end of this URL. It's invalid. Update it to: https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/04/china/xinjiang-detective-tort...
https://www.rtl-sdr.com/

Don't go for the 15$ bare-bones options. Buy one of the 50-100$ kits so you have at least some basic antennas and necessary cables.
I see this comment on every single article about taxation on reddit and HN, but can you be a bit more specific and identify what this lobbying does and actually point at some examples?
This is so disingenuous. From day one, Facebook have done all in their power to make themselves a monopoly while simultaneously trying to avoid all of the legal restrictions that normally apply to a utility service.
Offline Web Apps: HTML5 Cache Manifest
I work in a different social media company that has had some visible outages. Its always hilarious to see how wrong people are with their confident speculation. It's a good reminder that people online are often full of shit.
Mobile OSes as a whole seem to have lowered the standard for PC OSes. "Android/iOS do it so it's fine if we do it!"
"How can a book from 1982 "debunk" experimental evidence that has been obtained 20-39 years later? It cannot."

Well, it talks exactly about the points you mentioned and that are listed in Wiki. This book was decades ahead of its time. Seriously.