skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> US taxes may be complex, but they aren't punitive.

The taxes aren't, but compliance certainly feels like it is. I owned a dormant UK company that I set up when I was living in the UK. The reporting for that as a US citizen is nightmarish (look up form 5471). People who are any sort of edge case who want to be tax compliant pretty much just can't be without spending mega $$$ on accountants. The only thing that is reasonably straightforward is for people with a single employer on w2 income. And even then, other countries put the US to shame for that circumstance, most don't even require filing anything to their tax authority.

> "the stuff they want to sell on eBay is at a lower price than their cost basis"

Yes, this is exactly what I'm describing. Many people I know use eBay as a sort of garage sale online. All their inventory is used items that are worth less than the original price they paid for it. They may make $1k or so across the year at best. They'd rather just not sell online, not make the money, and not worry about tax reporting when platforms start throwing terms like 1099-k around.
Or a closed magnetic rail which you unlatch when you fire. The idea that you should use an actual spinning arm is needed is what everyone has a problem with.

A sane solution will be something that's closer to a large water mains pipe supported by a roller coaster frame.
GitHub deserves better that comic sans
Uber bowed part way and they never even got close to getting their app banned.

That in-person meeting was more than any rejected developer got.
How does the education most Americans get K-12 compare to other G20/OECD countries? Unless I'm wrong, we're like #15 or worse in a lot of educational benchmarks, right?

What could federal/state/local governments do (other than divert money from wealthy areas into poorer areas) to make American children receive a more "world class" K-12 public education?
Different data showing the same thing, Finish teachers are not paid well: https://www.chalk.com/resources/most-least-paid-teachers-in-...
50 years ago, high school math at most schools ended with trigonometry. Today a large fraction of college bound seniors have taken calculus, and STEM students have taken two years of calculus. And yet, 50 years ago there were lots of math-phobic kids who, today, are expected to perform at some modest level (50 years ago, they stopped with algebra I).

It is true that 50 years ago a fraction of kids were learning just fine, but more recently the goal has been to make that fraction larger, in a society that actively devalues learning.
The scary part for a lot of people is that this new $600 threshold puts a reporting burden on low value personal property that few people bother documenting their basis in. Until very recently, this didn't matter, because it was very unlikely someone would hit the $20k threshold from these sorts of ordinary "garage sale" activities.

Most Americans are scared of being audited. Whether or not that's a rational fear, it drives a lot of consumer behavior.
Half of all supermarkets in Finland have e-ink screens for product price tags along shelves. It saves tons of printing. In a country full of trees. Must be great value.
I don't believe this was a case of bullying at all. It was a light ribbing. It also aligned with an archetype (of being able to engineer our way out of human problems) that's especially salient for some people on here, yet totally lost on others. The contradiction is funny, too, because it's classic human folly. Whether or not the commenter is anything like that really doesn't figure into the calculus of how necessary or good this instance of another commenter's snarky side comment was: there are no material consequences, no damage to anyone's reputation (except for some votes), and no one was even the butt of a joke here - it was the idea of the smart engineer with the engineered solution to a human matter which doesn't need solving. That's what we're laughing about.

Regarding all the talk about ridicule, it was intended as a rebuttal to the idea that humor at someone's expense is _never_ appropriate. It is appropriate and even healthy for a society to be composed of individuals who can withstand a bit of a ribbing when they unwittingly find themselves representing human folly in one of its many forms, and who can stop and ask, why did that happen?, and potentially learn from it, if it came from a moment of lacking self-awareness, or if it was just bad luck (everyone - everyone - winds up in the crosshairs sometimes.)

Truly no ill will meant, just wanted to defend the social function of ridicule. It probably ended up being a lot more of a well, actually thing than I intended. Which I do get teased for sometimes.
Desiring uncoolness in one area does not imply such a desire in other areas and hypocrisy is not the only reason why this might be the case.
Video is only three minutes long but should be required watching for all managers. Thank you for sharing.
HN can be a tough crowd, for some very good reasons. It's got a fair number of people with PhDs and real world accomplishments etc.
I'm working on a B2C product as an indie founder and I run into this quite a lot. Though from my perspective a lot of the "physical vs non-physical" disconnect is also about the fact that people who have not had direct experience in the creation of a software product are unable to extrapolate from what they're currently seeing.

I think that's actually completely reasonable though; people take things at face value. But what that means is that all the potential in the world means nothing unless you can show via features how that's a good thing and what the impacts are.

This impacts the product I'm working on because there's a lot of stuff on a base level that seems like similar products in the space but the real value is the integration of systems and data to fundamentally change the interactions. And until recently, we didn't have much of the "Big Picture Ideas" on display for our users.
Today you'll probably get in trouble for tamer wedgies, so, yeah.
I hold a pragmatic set of views. I would like us to become less road dependent, but I don't think you can ignore the degree of investment that has been built on the existing road system. Breaking and devaluing existing uses is a social cost incurred by a change in modes of transport.
Absolutely this. Many small businesses (probably many food trucks) are only profitable because they do not pay taxes.
I am thin and not the typical profile for sleep apnea. I started waking up in the middle of the night with severe hand pain, needing to urinate (nocturia) and had a headache in the morning despite getting 8 plus hours. Doctor sent me to the sleep lab. Unrelated, I thought to myself, but submitted. The lab said the hand pain was a red herring, thought it was neck related, and gave me a home test. Results came back, mild sleep apnea (10 AHI, under 5 is considered normal). I was given not a lot of guidance, said to get a CPAP, which is the gold standard.

I was in a ton of pain, so I dutifully bought one and started monitoring my data using SleepyHead. Getting the right pressure was key, as was finding the right nasal pillow fit and making sure no mouth leaks. The first month was brutal, but my body started adjusting. The first night I slept well I woke up with a refreshing feeling I hadn't felt since grade school. That motivating me to keep going. I read sometime later that when you have an apnea, your vascular system constricts in the extremities and dilates going to the head to prioritize getting oxygen to the brain. Sure enough, that was what had been happening. My hand pain was the feeling of lack of oxygen or lactic acid build-up, I'm guessing. The headaches were from too much blood pressure going to the head (I've since found that a cold compress on the neck or a naproxen can help that if it occurs). The nocturia came from the fight or flight response when the adrenaline of apnea kicks in. All three symptoms went away when I started getting down to <2 AHI.

However. Though I grew to be used to the CPAP, I never liked it. It made a good night better but a bad night worse. I started having unrelated back pain which made it hard to sleep in certain positions with the headgear on. And during the summer my allergies made it near-impossible to get enough air (I found fluticasone to help though). On a whim I bought a snore-aid mouth appliance. It didn't work initially because it made my jaw hurt so much, so I stuck with CPAP and began using the mouth appliance with less mandibular advancement during only the last 3 or so hours of the night. Finally a work trip came up and I decided to rip off the band-aid. I took only the mouth appliance, and found I could tolerate the further advancement. It worked, no more apnea events, mind still clear in the morning, no hand pain etc. I waited a couple weeks, then packed away the CPAP. I had been on it for 3 1/2 years. I wish the sleep lab had mentioned that option for my condition.
I had that thought, until the focus went to phones available in eu/asia, with One+, Nothing, POCO being mentioned, and none of those are brands targeted at average users only caring about a phone that basically works with no fuss.

Even Xiaomi feels a bit borderline, they have very affordable and mass targeted phones, but anyone not caring that much would go no wrong with a Samsung, probably discounted at the same price as the equivalent Xiaomi phone.

The main beef against the Pixel phones seems to be that friend's story about the back getting hot sometimes, which is valid, but anecdotal to say the least.
That's a lot like people saying android is slow and laggy when they bought the cheapest one they could find at target and compared it to a thousand dollar iPhone.
According to that article, that car isn't available yet and is only going to made in extremely limited numbers.
This reads like an old lady harping over nothing consequence. Did the author of TFA try to contact the Gentoo folks about this discrepancy before writing this incendiary blog post assuming negative/incompetent/ignorant intent? People are doing their level best to be respectful of other's wishes, but it's tough to account for every edge case.

Is the author of the unlicensed code upset? It doesn't seem so.
Why not be part of the solution?
Oh wait, being part of the solution doesn't generate attention.

Thanks for posting this, xena.
It's funny -- and I do sympathize, it's always frustrating when you have some preference and the market moves so you can't get what you want, it happens to all of us -- but when people particularly bemoan newer technology as being unable to be maintained or upgraded or having built-in obsolescence... I have to wonder, why aren't they still using their 12 year old battery-swappable phone, upgrading their pin-compatible 486 motherboard, or driving their all-mechanical car from 1963.
Canada doesn’t allow for private practises and it’s in a bad place
Even what you call LibGen isn't LG. These are LG forks, actually running against LG and pretending to be LG. LG was set up to create other libraries on its basis. Each of the forks aggressively fights for own dominance in all ways, and they resist the development of other forks by naming themselves LG and sucking in all the funds to personal possession without public reporting. Being forks themselves, they have closed the open project for own ambitions and for money grab.

Their values are incompatible with LG, and all what's left similar is the external part of letting download books, without which there would be nothing useful to look at.

Yeah, and the herculean work is actually done outside such aggregators by myriads of smaller collections, digitizing, binding, processing, collecting, and channeling millions of handmade books into rivers of literature, for free and ready to grab. The growth is global and isn't relevant to what the forks do.

Sorry to tell.
Yep, Kali.

I remember using Kali to play Warcraft. It was tunnelling IPX over TCP/IP, on 28.8k dialup.

It was an amazingly good UX.
Breaking up Google and Meta would be a huge boon to all of us. Think of all the extremely intelligent and driven people who are being paid dump trucks of money to build internet surveillance or psychological manipulation technology at scale.

They could be working on so, so many more interesting and important problems.
The formula on that page is a fixed benefit based, not on average salary, but the average salary at the end of the teacher's career - last five years.

This is nothing like a 401k.
Surprised about Tor Browser though - it's basically Firefox ESR with some tweaks with the Tor package bundled (that can be deleted). Performance should have been the same. And since they also prioritise privacy (more than Mozilla) I figured it is a better bet for uBlock Origin - wonder which tweak causes that slight difference between it and Firefox?

Also, what about the new Orion (Beta) browser based on Safari / WebKit? If I remember right, they claimed they had made changes to WebKit to support uBlock Origin better and properly than either Safari or Chrome.
Code that uses the `unsafe` keyword can be safe, though.
Evidence comes from experiments, not simulations. You don't get to overload the word "evidence" in this way, not on my watch.

A model can't produce evidence, it can only predict its possibility, and give hints to the experimenter on where to find it.
I will admit it difficult to get accurate numbers, but this Wikipedia article claims CompuServe had 600K and Prodigy had 450K+ subscribers in 1990: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_(online_service) It references NY Times articles that are pay walled.

This graph shows roughly 12,000 BBSes existing in 1990: http://bbslist.textfiles.com/support/statistics.html How many users do you think each one had? 50? 100? Of course there is some overlap and it's impossible to figure out actual unique users. Regardless, it is way more than 10K. One large BBS alone (Rusty and Edie's, which got busted for piracy in a big scandal) had over 14,000 subscribers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rusty_n_Edie%27s_BBS

And that last article from The Atlantic says there are 20 dialup BBSes existing when it was written in 2016, not within 2 years of the WWW arriving: "Did any direct-access, telephone-dial-up BBSes survive the internet’s proverbial asteroid? Sure enough, there are about 20 known dial-up BBSes in North America"

The Internet killed BBSing, that's for sure. But that didn't happen until the mid 90's when it went mainstream.
Climate change reports are all pretty clear we need to move to smaller, less powerful cars to meet our climate pledges. And produce less of them.

I think starting to see cars as a simple mean to go from A to B instead of a symbol of freedom, status or virility would really be a huge win.

I also hope that on the long run it would help more city dwellers accept the idea of sharing cars instead of owning one. Collectively owned self driving cars could really help reshape our cities, reclame the insane amount of space we dedicate to roads and parking spots and funnel money into more public transit.
What are you talking about? Which "certain" states? Iran, my old country, may be the 9th largest consumer of alcohol per capita [1,2]. There are hundreds of deaths due to wood-alcohol poisoning every year [3], mostly from people making moonshine from raisins and not being diligent enough to remove the stems, in lieu of access to safe drinking alcohol. I personally know many people who abuse alcohol just to be able to tolerate living under an oppressive theocracy, especially worsened in the last few years due to US sanctions which have made many everyday and essential goods inaccessible.

But it's very hard to find any data (let alone official data) on any of this, because nobody wants to suffer 72 lashes with 0-gague electrical cable at the hands of Iranian police for having admitted to have had a glass of wine or whatever one night.

Alcohol is an aspect of human civilization since per-historic times (as old as farming if not older) and always will be, regardless of what puritan Christians or foaming-at-the-mouth Mullahs might think of it.

Across the board (addiction, alcohol, abuse) any type of "zero-tolerance" "bring the hammer down" policy e.g. a blanket ban on alcohol has always been at best orthogonal and usually antithetical to harm reduction. As someone mentioned in the above comments, nuance is everything in providing support to the vulnerable --- ask any social worker. Religious guilt enjoys no such effectiveness.

(Sorry, two of the citations are in Persian, I couldn't find English sources. Google translate could be a workaround.)

Edit: spelling.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/persian/iran-features-49967036

[2] https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789241565639

[3] https://ir.voanews.com/a/iran-alcohol/5362942.html
> Mathematicians like to believe the likely apocryphal tale that Nobel didn't endow a prize for math because the likely first winner was sleeping with his wife

It’s certainly apocryphal. Alfred Nobel never married.
Ugh, he picked the wrong game to make a counterpoint with. The Switch, and especially Smash Ultimate is fantastic in the same scenario.

You can get 8 wired GameCube controllers to play flawlessly and setup faster than you could on the old XBox setup. You also have the option of ad-hoc network play if everyone had their own Switch. One small console, one optional TV and done.

The Switch was also a terrible example because its still one of the only consoles you can start playing right away with. Insert the cartridge and you're done.

All the other crap usually requires long times of hard disk installing from the disk before you can do anything along with Internet access nagging.

He's spot on though that some games have made a tedious mess in both their multiplayer and single player startup times.
I said it before and will say it again: the way public high schools are arranged is cruel towards both the kids and the adults. (Also counterproductive, but first of all, cruel.)

Teenagers are forced into groups of the same age, within 1 year tolerance. This is the age of learning of social structures, building social ties, learning about various forms of social status, etc. They need to be inside a rich social structure to learn all that.

Instead, they are locked up with their peers, and a lonely adult. What can they do?

Of course they try to build various social structures of themselves, but since they are all peers in most regards, the only structure they can build is a gang. The more bold (and often violent) becomes a leader, others follow.

The only way to raise in status is to join a gang, and fight for a higher rung, or to start a gang. The more violent gang leaders do everything to make actual learning seen as despicable, because they'd hate to see a competing hierarchy based on academic success. Confronting the lone adult, a dangerous but not too dangerous enterprise, becomes a way to show bravery to others.

While some students may cause more problems and be more prone to violence than others, the cause is not the presence of such students, like presence of oil is not a cause of a fire. It's the system, the way classes are formed, that ignites them.

BTW 100-150 years ago high school was elective and required certain determination to get into it. This is why it did not show these problems so much: the students joined because they valued the academic success hierarchy, and could form structures along attaining better grades at the very least. (A teacher had many more violent response options, too.) But today's public high schools receive students with different incentives, even filtered against attaining academic success, because kids who eagerly want to learn go to various competitive high schools (charter, Catholic, private).

This is very sad, both because it keeps happening, and because nobody is coming up with a better structure, it's not a topic of a wide discussion in the society.
Elmo is kind of arrogant. The other muppets had the same fears, anxieties (and hopes, wishes) as the children watching. We related to them. We saw how they solved their problems.

Elmo is kind of awesome, perfect, full of energy, unflappable. And he seems to know it.
RE: the N/A in ripgrep dependencies specifically, it's a little clearer on my machine (newer version of cargo-license maybe?). Slightly complicated but still above board https://github.com/hsivonen/encoding_rs#licensing

> Custom License File (1): encoding_rs
It does not help that some of the complications in the tax system are actually intended to make things simpler for most people.

For example the 401k and IRA rules basically exist to encourage people putting money into retirement investment accounts. The idea being that having to account for all the capital gains, divendends, etc would otherwise discourage such investments. But of course the current rules for these are a bit of a mess, with nonsense like the backdoor Roth IRA being possible.

another example of a simplification that actually mostly works is the exception to capital gains on the sale of your primary residence. Indeed, unless you get a Form 1099-S or have exceeded the the $250k ($500k married) gain, you don’t need to report the sale in any way on your tax forms.

That absolutely simplifies taxes for most people who are selling their home, but it simultaneously makes the tax system as a whole more complex.

Similarly there are a lot of weird rules and exceptions over on the business side to try to better align things with Generally Accepted Accounting Principals, in order to avoid the need for businesses to have to keep two sets of books, one for taxes, one for everything else. This adds an obscene amount of complexity to the tax code, especially since not only are special exceptions to the normal tax rules granted for GAAP, but there are a bunch of extra rules intended to prevent specific ways of trying to abuse this.

Scrapping all of that could majorly simplify the tax code. But it would actually makes taxes a lot more complicated for many businesses.

None of this is to say that all the complexity is there for this reason. There is a lot of use of the tax code to create weird subsidies for certain industries. There is even cruft like some special rules whose benefit to taxpayers is far outweighed by the extra work needed to use those exceptions. Rules defined by court cases that were never codified due to a weird exclusion in the codification, and much more.
> Most Americans are scared of being audited. Whether or not that's a rational fear, it drives a lot of consumer behavior.

This is so true. I'm terrified of the IRS in a way I'm simply not terrified of HMRC. I don't think it's rational at all, but going through the rigmarole of "file these papers you don't really understand, if you screw up, your life is going to get turned upside down" every year for their entire adult lives definitely plays into it.
Unfortunately a great deal of the web works best on chromium. I use FF every day for reasons such as TFA, but it's getting harder and harder. On the same (old-ish) machine Brave runs rings around FF in basic web performance.

Maybe the EU can fork Firefox?
> Lucid Air Sapphire will be offered as a limited-production model, with deliveries planned in the US and Canada next year. The price is $249,000 USD and $325,000 CAD.

https://www.lucidmotors.com/stories/introducing-sapphire-pin...
Why do things so often break down so intelligibly into these 2x2 matrices? Like the "urgent vs important" one? Is there a word for this phenomenon?

Are people primed / wired to more readily understand things when they're explained in a "two tribes" way?
Look-busy-as-a-service, I like it! Of course, it seems quite possible that a lot of the output might be perfectly good to just submit as reports that won't be read etc.