skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The fun part about advances is that in the first year they don't have data to set your advances so you have to back pay the taxes for the first year in full after filing the first year's taxes in the second year in addition to now having to pay the advances on that year so even if you saved all the money you expected to have to pay in taxes during the first year you also need to have saved up enough to pay the advances but the more money you made (allowing you to set more money aside), the higher the advances will be.

You can negotiate to have your advances reduced but the government really doesn't like it when businesses (including freelancers and solo entrepreneurs) have a high difference between their advances and the actual taxes. This also goes for declaring your VAT (which depending on how much you make you'll have to do monthly or quarterly as an advance and then alongside your income tax) and while in that case you basically set the advance yourself you'll get in trouble if it doesn't match your actual VAT (difference between charged and paid).

You can file your own taxes and if you're a regular employee there are tons of non-commercial orgs you can go to that will assist you in doing that but if you're a "business" (even if it's just you and you haven't incorporated) they'll often not help you.

BTW the reason you can just forego filing your own taxes as an employee if you just want to be taxed on your wages (and don't have anything else to declare, e.g. interest on savings) is that your employer already had to do the taxes on your wages and benefits for you. So it's not like the government just does them themselves, it's just done by payroll instead of you.
However as long as rent increases are capped at the maintenance cost increases I don’t see the negative effect

If the rent increase (and thus profit) is capped, but the market price isn't then it soon becomes rational to sell your rental apartments, stop being a landlord and invest in something with better returns. You see this a lot in Sweden. More and more rental apartments are being turned into owned apartments, sold off and removed from the rental markets since it's simply the most profitable thing to do.

nor does it affect many people besides the landlord.

It affects people who need an apartment and who want/have to rent instead of buying. Make being a landlord too hard and risky and you get fewer landlords and fewer apartments to rent on the market. When I got a job in Norway (no rent control) it took me two phone calls and less than a week to find a rental apartment in the part of town I wanted to live. When I got a job in Sweden (strict rent control) it took me months to find a place and it was a short term contract for a place way out in a shitty suburb far from where I wanted to live.
This isn’t a fix. Warrants are easy to fake, not necessarily easy to verify.
A society that literally enable cheaters is not going to go far, and it's actually (like in this case) going to backfire to the (poor and) honest people.

It's the same in France.. some basically end up paying gypsies to forcefully remove tenants that dont' pay
Why can't you let people have fun?

Guitar hero players (or at least, the subset of players in who are interested in very difficult tracks) are not trying to produce melodies or jamming harmoniously ; they're doing high speed, high precision pattern matching.

This is like berating gamers playing Elden Ring where they could do HEMA instead !
That would require the state to attract (and compensate) IT talent. As far as I know, they are trying..
In our office, this created in-group out-group dynamic within the meeting each time. The in-person people were making jokes to each other and commenting stuff while online people had no idea. So, result is that the same meeting have one group coordinating with muted microphones and other oblivious. Perfect.

It did not created some kind of real split (yet), but the potential is super clear and it is pretty much guaranteed to happen.
In Europe (in most countries as far as I can tell), electronic filing is administered by the government, and it's easy to use (often prefilled for simple situations). As mentioned in the article, in the US, electronic filing is offered for free only to taxpayers below a certain income threshold, and the service is offered by private companies. They often pay themselves back with tax advances at usury rates. I can't help but think that it is another example of how the US tax system is beholden to private interests.
As of yet we've only been into the office a couple of times and mostly as an excuse for a social event. I didn't actually mind the time we spent working in the office, as we deliberately all came in as a team. I did however have to bring some headphones and plug in to get any work done, same as the old days.

I don't mind the chance of scenery and would be happy to do it once in a while. I just hope the flexibility we have at the moment is retained. Thankfully my current employer has cut office space so much it would be impossible for us all to turn up if we wanted to.
I guess they never heard of crystal lang
What phone company is that?
However, Capitalism inherently rewards corruption. If you are a corrupt politician and earn $10 million through corruption you can invest your money and the capital gains alone will exceed any politician's salary and this is ignoring that you will earn more every single year due to compounding.

You can burn the amazon down and then invest the earned or saved money and economists will tell you, you are doing well and that you have a god given right to that wealth.

Communism doesn't even try to address the root cause, it's actually making the problem worse by concentrating everything at the top.
If they have enough time.
That sounds terrible for you.

I'm a greybeard who wears socks-n-crocs, I have lan parties all the time in my house, and sometimes I nap in the afternoon so I can hack at odd hours. I think you should do what brings you joy. Maybe not all the time, because taxes and your health are important too, but at least some of the time.

> Nothing is ever as it was in the "good old days".

Some things aren't as good, but many things are, and at least some of those things are better.

Maybe not for you though? Everyone gets old, so of course, on the whole, at some point things for you are going to look worse than they used to be, but guess what: you're also going to die, so if you think the whole point of your life is about you, all you'll ever see is decline, so I think the best move is to think the whole point of your life is about something else, that way you can see things getting better and become a part of that.

Maybe you will discover life is about the community we're a part of and you need to get to a lan party: Some of those middle-schoolers might have fun playing games with their parents too.

The infinite is great.
> Frankly, this is an awful idea. Investment in real estate is basically the best way for the middle class to use their savings to build wealth and long-term financial stability.

There are a lot of things that are profitable but not good for society as a whole. Land as an investment vehicle is one of them.

> And I don't see how modern property law is geared toward the interest of small landlords. In every major city—i.e. the places with affordability problems—the laws are extremely friendly to tenants and hostile to landlords. Sure, there's the peculiarity of Prop 13 in California, but I don't see how you can generalize that to any other part of the country.

These policy wars are happening constantly in most densely populated parts of the US. Here's an article covering one example outside of California: https://crosscut.com/opinion/2021/06/do-renter-protections-r.... I disagree with the characterization of status quo renters rights in the average American city as being hostile to landlords and friendly to renters -- what would be an example of a policy that you classify as being in this category?
I was surprised to see that allocating with numpy is actually 2x slower than allocating a list:

In [4]: length = 10000

In [5]: %%timeit
...: #preallocating list
...: pre = [None] \* length
...: for i in range(length):
...: pre[i] = i
...:
346 µs ± 10.3 µs per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 1000 loops each)

In [6]: %%timeit
...: pre = np.empty(length, dtype=int)
...: for i in range(length):
...: pre[i] = i
...:

688 µs ± 20.3 µs per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 1000 loops each)
> I think the original use case was just terrorism but I'm pretty sure it's been used against other crimes as well.

As with every dystopic "anti-terror" measurement, this is correct.
In Sweden they sometimes do it with a phone, as you can Swish to pay directly to phone numbers. I'm not sure how they register with a bank and their ID though, maybe it's not theirs or they share it.

Nevertheless, they really shouldn't exist. There should be enough housing and emergency provision to help people in emergencies, and they need to crack down hard on the foreigners that come and use it as a way of sending money back - e.g. https://metro.co.uk/2017/02/20/gang-of-beggars-pictured-gett...
Use of antibiotics by women in midlife linked to later cognitive decline
> Even between GNU/Linux distributions, compatibility is difficult.

So... what's the point of this nitpicking then, if one GNU/Linux is hard to make work well with another GNU/Linux?

Maybe we can just continuing referring to the GNU/Linux distros as Linux for short, and the non-compatible ones like Alpine and Android can be referred to as... Alpine and Android?
As I recall it was a silly thing where you received the bonus as physical cash (ie paper money) and you could still receive other comp like stock or a monetary bonus to a bank account.
I don't understand the headline. What's the 'worst part of working from home' in this context?

In my case, my employer isn't forcing anyone to come back to the office, but there's definitely an unspoken understanding that 'collaboration' and 'team feeling' will improve if we're at the office more often.

But when I go to the office it perfectly reflects the experiences described in the article: I'm almost always the only person from my team in the office at the time, or otherwise the only other team-member has their work to do, and I have mine, so we sit next to each other on the considerably less comfortable office chairs than I have at home, and work 'side-by-side' with our headphones on, and pretty much don't speak to each other any more than we usually do in Meet or on Slack.

I tend to use the days for wondering around and chatting randomly with other people at the office: hang with the Sales people, mosey past the Support team, spend half an hour in the office kitchen.

I guess this is ok if the idea is to be a more socially cohesive group, but it's disastrous for my productivity, and I always have to work twice as hard for the following days at home - even though it takes a while to regain my focus afterwards, so the rest of the week is often a little bit disrupted by the wasted day at the office.

I don't want to only work at home for the rest of my life though - but it feels like we haven't worked-out what the new situation should be just yet. And in the meantime, managers are just thinking in outdated terms of getting everything back to 'normal'.
The Magellanic clouds are also visible to the naked eye.
You mean like a state owned enterprise? That would go against decades of free market ideology. Even if we had somehow ended up with a state owned malware development organization it would probably have been privatized by now.
Can't you also do this with Microsoft Access or LibreOffice Base? I think it's called QBE, or Query By Example.
In Brazil, with a huge informal economy, you can now find all sorts of small street vendors with a card reader. Also the government has successfully rolled out Pix less than 2yrs ago, with now 50% of the population as registered users. Pix is the smartphone payment protocol which has basically nuked cash transactions countrywide, or at least where mobile networks work.

So, at least in Brazil, card readers are already on the way out for informal workers, and even some SMBs, and Pix with its QR codes and phone numbers are in.
First the companies offshored the jobs, now the employees offshore themselves.

At some point, somebody will start asking why the Indian working remotely in India is paid less than the American/European expat working remotely from Bali.
Interestingly, you could buy a midi adapter and hook up something like a roland electronic kit. Kind of a learning tool.. just that it wasn't good at teaching good habits.
Karl's channel is a great place to dive into. I guess he started as just a speedrunner, but in recent years he's been making terrific videos on deep mechanics of speedrunning, on cheating and cheat detection, etc. And he's done significant journalism on shady business in adjacent topics, like records-keeping organizations and the market for retro game cartridges. He's even been (being?) sued by Billy Mitchell (the King of Kong guy), whom Jobst calls the biggest conman in gaming.

Really good channel to check out and support.
After this Google realised they would need to compete with Facebook on compensation and today employees at either company are paid a lot more than equivalent employees 15 years ago.
Javelin: 250k

Launcher: 250k

Getting to engage the Russkies via proxy while maintaining moral high ground and zero American casualties: priceless
Malware isn't bad, like guns, it depends on the one using it. There are legit uses, e.g. governments or simulations of real attacks.
Software dev is part function and part art. All of us live somewhere on the reductive 1D dichotomy "function" <-> "art". Some (not all) people more on the "art" side prefer an open canvas which involves having direct access to the computer. Some on the "function" side find that commoditized software is safe and repeatable software. These two perspectives differ but often because of interests. There's more than enough room out there for both types of devs.
That the CCC thanks Microsoft ... hell is freezing in multiple places ;)
I use vim for almost all my development. I'm using vim ranging from small projects (<10k lines) to very large projects (>10M lines). I never experienced vim to hinder me understanding large projects, nor does it slow me down. There are no features in VSCode (or equivalent) that I'm missing in vim. Actually it's the opposite: the learning curve is steep, but when I was comfortable enough with all the vim key bindings and features, development actually got faster and better using vim compared to using VSCode equivalents. It forces me to think more before I start coding.

I do need to code in VSCode sometimes when it's work related though.
Why you need to stay home and isolate? Is it required in your country?
> About finding smart locks dystopian, I feel like a lock that notifies lock/unlock is far better than say a device like nest cam/door bell with abilities to capture video/pictures and for whatever reason are more widely accepted than smart locks.

You're missing the big difference here. A Ring doorbell is both trivial to remove when someone moves out, and generally under the control of the tenant. Smart locks are neither.
Fair enough, it was strange to read.
To be clear, I was calling the researchers who wrote those papers disingenuous, not you. I've reviewed scientific papers. I have seen some true garbage. This is probably why I have a pretty low tolerance for bad papers or paper puffery. Those papers are skirting around inconvenient facts to make their conclusions appear stronger, which they should not be doing. Nothing is wrong per se, it's just intentionally not clear.

As an example of what I mean, take the Buonanno paper you linked. They say "We measured induction of the two most abundant premutagenic DNA lesions in the epidermis, cyclobutane pyrimidine dimers (CPD) and pyrimidine-pyrimidone 6-4 photoproducts (6-4PP) (4), as a function of UVC fluence in 3D human skin constructs immediately after exposure using the immunohistochemical approach previously described (7)."

It's natural to ask the question, is that the right thing to measure? There is no reason to suspect that 222nm and 254nm light will cleave the same bonds, so you might get a completely different set of dissociation products. Reference [7] has nothing to say on this subject (plus is citation incest) and in fact links back (as Reference [16]) to Reference [4], so that's the one. Except... it doesn't support this claim. At all. In fact it kind of suggests the opposite, that you can get pretty wide variation here depending on the incoming light: "In addition, we showed that the sequence distribution of CPDs induced by natural sunlight is very different from that induced by UVC (254 nm) at sequence positions specifically containing 5-methylcytosine bases."

So when I find crap like that in a paper that has a general air of puffery (as one, regrettably, must often take on these days in order to secure funding), I get really damn suspicious. I am not claiming anything is wrong, or that any claims are false. I am simply saying that the provided evidence is not sufficient to establish at least one of the paper's claims, and the authors are not forthright about it.
Just use a persistent Emacs server and forget about startup profiling.
The article is interesting, but there's really no point making little micro-optimisations like this in Python (yes a 35% increase in speed to one small part of your program is a micro-optimisation). If the code is really performance critical (by which I mean, the person running the program would notice a difference) then use a more suitable compiled language e.g. by calling into a C extension module like numpy. But, most of the time, making small performance tweaks will result in no noticable impact.

Some optimisations in pure Python are genuinely worth it, but they're usually by using a totally different data structure to change the asymptotic complexity e.g. if you repeatedly use `x in foo` in a loop then it's worth making sure foo is a set rather than a list.
It depends on the dialect but in many cases the /l/ is syllabic.

The difference is mostly in whether the second syllable is just the /l/ or also contains a schwa. I don't think there are any dialects where the word is monosyllabic as that would probably require making the /t/ completely silent (not just a glottal stop).
there is a lot more going on here than just zoning.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/70649591/can-linux-kerne...

Your platform isn't your optional dependencies.
It's actually an exquisite concept. It gives the machine pathos... like watching someone hold their guts in after being shot.

My co-worker called me upset a few weeks ago with a story. I didn't understand why she was so upset at first. She said she found a 1-foot-long lizard in her office when she walked in that morning. It took her 20 minutes to gently coax the lizard out the door and then herd it down the hallway, past the other offices, and out the front door of the building. She sat down on the curb and watched it while it stood on the sidewalk. I was like - this is a great story. Why are you upset?

And then she told me that as she was sitting there, a few seconds later, a crow flew down and grabbed the lizard, turned it over and ripped its belly out while it struggled. Somehow, the crow left the entire heart of the lizard laying in the grass, which she took a photo of, which I have, which is both awesome and very disgusting.

The reason this art piece makes me think of that story is that we don't expect gore and guts and blood to suddenly spout out around us and mess up our nice clean antiseptic reality, but really, isn't our blood and guts what built the machines? The pathos comes from our projection of our own loneliness and fear of death. Onto the broken machine, the struggling lizard, the abandoned toy: That will be us one day.
TurboTax was first released in 1984, according to Wikipedia.

That's ~20 years before Sweden got everything prefilled for some of the population. As an example.
It sounds like the author is getting old. I am not saying that to dismiss him. But when you grow older you have more responsibilities and you start value your own time differently. All this computer hackery at home was fun back when I had lots of time at hand at home. But nowadays I work with computers all day and don’t want to bother with technical issues at home.

For a long time I didn’t even have a real computer at home. I was mostly watching YouTube on my chromebook and checked my bank account. Wrote the occasional letter. That’a about it.

Now I got into casual gaming a bit and enjoy playing games on my linux laptop. But I am using Ubuntu and not Arch or anything weird. I try to keep the tinkering to a low profile to keep it enjoyable.
I think it's important to always remember it's not the computers that are trying to tell us what to do, it's the people who build those computers and the software running on them that are trying to tell us what to do.

Computers, in their fundamental nature, are exactly as you describe them. Such devices will always be available (if nothing else, in the form of electronic components). We just have to refuse to use the machines that want to control us.

Also relevant: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
This is the same as my office in London. There's little point going in, and when I have done, my experience is the same as this article - waste 90mins in each direction getting in, to sit on my own, and reply via email + Teams.

But, well, "collaboration".

I'm sure it's time and cost effective for senior management that are paid $$$$ and only have a really short commute from the office. But not for the other 99% of the workforce.
> The phone number is listed on the warrant.

You should not rely on any information on the document you want to verify - look it up yourself.
We had a small office in a smaller town (Odense) in Denmark and reopened ~July 2020. We had no masks within the office by agreement among ourselves, but were very strict in our personal lives. We really enjoyed the interaction during lockdown, and I think that our commutes were all less than 10 mins helped.
It would be preferable that real estate becomes so hazardous and awful to “invest” in for any party it becomes cheap enough for most people to buy and use for its intended purpose.
Ah yes. This is horrible when a big chunk of the meeting are in the same room with several others joining online.

Honestly, given the choice an all face to face meeting is the best. However, with any kind of cross location collaboration this quickly becomes impossible (even before WFH). An all online (ideally in their own workspace) meeting is far better than any other mixed mode alternative.
For one, in many jurisdictions it can take two, three, even four months to evict a non-paying tenant.

Many cities will give free attorneys to tenants being evicted. So now the landlord has a bunch of factually dubious and difficult to dispute allegations made against them.
This is so deeply wrong. You will go to jail if you act like this.

> Look, if you want to preserve your rights you've gotta stand up for them.

You have absolutely no such right to refuse to comply with subpoenas, search warrants or court orders not delivered via your preferred means.

> Expecting them to show up in person in some capacity and show you the paperwork is fully reasonable

It’s not reasonable, because actual judges will not partake in such games. They will just hold you in contempt.

It might sound reasonable to a layman, but your lawyer will think you’ve gone crazy.