skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
i've tried so many different apps like this and i consistently return to my notes app on my macbook.

i'm not a fan of the UX or how it feels, but i can write notes all i want and add "keywords" or "tags" that i can search for and go through. todos, dates, important things, brainstorming, drafts, etc.

for example, for a book project, i'll write the word "preacher" at the top and then write some words that were in my brain. then i'll have 100 notes with the word "preacher" that i can search for and go through when i need to draft the idea. i can combine tags too, like adding "denny" to "preacher".

or for a work project, write the name of the project as the tag, some todos, meeting notes, design docs, resources, etc
Why? because the reality is these are NOT technical issues.

It's easy to recruit developers to make the next best editor. It's another to get them to read tax law.
It's not altruistic, its stripping the browser down to its most basic essence. It is the core functionality. Why do we humans have such a hard time acknowledging an abstract thing without dirtying it with our stupid ambitions?

Nothing good is viable with the current tech "economy", where software is an endless death-march of feature-bloat to justify the unlimited (also known as cancerous) growth required by venture capital or public markets.

But I bet a couple guys could pull off an Opera 2.0 and make a nice living for themselves. You only need a couple thousand paying users at a very modest subscription fee to cover a couple of developers' salaries
> Taxes were complicated before Intuit existed. What was the cause of that?

Well, people using the tax code to encourage certain moral and political views. Whether that's good or not depends on your political stance, and probably even various between particular deductions/credits.

But I don't think it's relevant. The tax code is however complicated it is. The point is that the government already knows, more or less, all the right answers. Put that information, in bill form, down, and bill the taxpayer; the commenter above you is also attempting allow for adjustments (such as for things the government might not know about, perhaps like a donation) to permit for the cases the government already know about. The question still stands: why can that not be done, thus freeing most people (whose tax situations are simple) from the burden of needing to file using today's system?

To your points about the rules, I think even in a scheme where the government sends a bill, the rules can quite easily change. Most of the rules today fall into either deductions or credits, or how we account for various sources of income. (E.g., normal income vs. capital gains.) That much could stay the same, and then the government can adjust its own accounting.
For the majority of people taxes were not complex before Intuit. I did my taxes by hand before they were a company. Trump's tax reformed made taxes a lot easier for most people, and before that Regan's tax reforms made taxes a lot easier.

At one time the rich in theory paid 90% tax rate, but via deductions that needed an accountant could get their real rate down to the mid 30%. Now most deductions are gone and their real rates are still in the mid 30% range. The rich needing accountants spread the idea that taxes were hard for most people when in fact with basic 4th grade math they were easy for most people.

I do use software. while taxes by hand are not hard, the computer doesn't forget to copy line 13b from form 1234 to line 36d of form 9876 - as I did one time. The IRS caught that mistake, but then I had to redo my state taxes, and the whole thing was a pain - all caused by forgetting something a computer does automatically.

Tax software makes it seem hard by adding a lot of waits while they calculate. In truth any 8 bit computer could do your taxes in less than a second once the numbers are entered - the rest is just artificial waits to make it seem like it is more complex than it is. That less than a second includes calculating all scenarios to see if you can save money with some deduction or not.

The above applies to 90%. There are situations where you need help - but if you don't already have an accountant to help you with your books that isn't you, and taxes are easy.
Totally appreciate the feedback and I agree with you that a well structured data set can be trivially analyzed. Heck, at that point you can use drag and drop stats packages too.

The data set I used for the demo has strings for income categories and a mix of categorical variables that the LLM had to transform, which is incredibly promising.

The insights that Claude generated also imply that it can do follow-up analysis.

This is less of a “hey write my regression code for me” and more of a “suggest the analysis, do it, find insights, and run follow up analyses”. That’s way more powerful and interesting.
I live in Seattle. There was a house on my street that had been torn down in maybe 2013-2014, that the owner of the lot sat on for a bit (it was one guy). He spent the next five-ish years slowly building a big, new house.

I’d laugh at how long it was taking him on a week-by-week basis while taking my dog on a walk. There it is, the house that will take almost half a decade to complete.

Well he finally does, and he sells the thing for close to two million dollars.

I then go look at comps during the same time period.

Because of his snail’s pace, he ended up probably making an additional 600-700k (or about 100k+ per year) because of how long it took him to build.

Jokes on me I guess!
We don't make concrete like the Romans did though.
In those conditions even plain, untreated wood lasts a long time. Many of those structures still have wood beams in pretty good condition.

ie, the durability of those structures is more due to where they are, than what they are made of.
Google is a lot more diversified than everyone on HN seems to think.
Specifically in the case of string length encodings, these objections don't seem to apply. The memory fetch is from a cache line that is already needed for the (beginning of the) string data, so only adds ops in the case of pure substring access (in which case C patterns of holding offset/length out of band apply). Similarly you're going to be accessing a string -- unaligned reads are the least of your problem if you're doing byte-at-a-time ops; and you can always align the string to a word boundary to get the varint to start at a word boundary.

I totally agree that as a general tool, varints have failures. But for (a) encoding pascal-style string lengths; (b) encoding often-small numbers on the wire; and (c) encoding codepoints they seem to apply fine.
the new bing search isn't that bad, at least on the iphone
I struggle with Costco's inconsistent assortment of products and poor online presence. I don't like going there to be crowded for two or three hours only to walk out with $300 in impulse purchases (I am weak, especially to food) but not what I came for.

And they're not good for all things. Their furniture might be reasonable quality but none of it belongs in my home, for example. Gigantic and dated-looking.
/me raises hand

We've got some seriously great government programs. I won't stop you from criticizing the visible parts of the government (politicians can be quite frustrating) but Medicaid and Medicare are both extremely efficient and Social Security is basically why we have such a high expected lifespan. Personally, I am quite thankful for the roads, rail lines, sewage and all the other things living in a modern society gives us.
The only thing that would make Intuit worse is if they were a division of the IRS.
Looks like hardware (Pixel especially) is also struggling as it is hardly mentioned?
I didn't make such a claim in general, only that it's not so hard to see how there can be such cases. Generally I'm skeptical that it makes long term business sense to either underpay or disrespect workers.
The best thing about Notion is that it’s not just (EAV) relational databases — it’s that freely mixed with unstructured rich text, including collaboration features like love editing and comments.
Rice's theorem may actually be more appropriate here (but it's a consequence of the halting theorem).

But it's important to note that just because there's no algorithm that works on ALL programs doesn't mean that the semantic properties of all programs are undecidable. Clearly for the particular programs where the program is bounded and guaranteed to terminate (e.g. no unbounded loops or recursion allowed) we can determine such properties, and I believe theorem provers in fact only allow such programs. And similarly you can restrict yourself to only the programs that you can prove will terminate in N steps (which might be excluding some programs that do terminate but require more than N steps of compute to prove).
I think the point is to avoid a situation like with Uber (where investors subsidised Uber rides to try to destroy most of the world's taxi industry, then replace with Uber and gather all the profits for themselves).

It's going to suck for the world in general if AI models destroy a lot of jobs but the productivity gains are all paid to overseas companies like OpenAI and Microsoft.
Makes me think of the quip along the lines “the expert has forgotten more than the beginner knows”
Only those buying news cars would own one. And that is beginning to happen.
Agreed, I think the complaints about IKEA sustainability is mostly just a luxury belief. IKEA furniture is cheaper because it uses fewer resources (especially less wood). When lightly used in a home environment a lot of it can last a very long time.
> Just to charge our current EV's, we need to run dedicated circuits at max capacity and it still takes a couple hours

No, you can use a standard clothes dryer hookup and charge overnight. You can even arrange it so that the car charger only consumes power when other high-powered appliances are not (e.g. water heater, dryer, stove).

> It just seems like batteries aren't the bottle neck. It's our efficiency to produce and distribute this electricity.

They may not be "the" bottleneck, but they definitely are one of them. With increased density comes either longer range or lighter vehicles. The lighter the vehicle, the more efficient it becomes.

> ICE isn't perfect, but it's an extreme dense form of energy and the output of it rotational energy. Which is exactly what our end goal is.

So you do understand why denser battery packs are useful then? Also, ICE is not a "rotational energy" and more or less than "EV" is. I don't understand why this is included.

> In electricity production we outsource it, then store it. Basically the same concept as winding up a spring loaded toy then letting it go when we want to use it. The spring isn't the source of power, it's just the energy storage. Just because we made the spring bigger and output more doesn't make it more efficient.

We didn't make the spring bigger. We made it smaller and lighter and got the same output. That is more efficient.

> We cannot even make the electric motors more efficient, we already run at 80-90% efficiency. What will we see? 1% more? 2% more?

Yes, we no longer have to improve efficiency in the motor itself. It's already many times more efficient than an ICE.

> All this electricity needs to transported but the power lines waste power, the charger wastes power, the AC-DC converters waste power, the EV motor wastes power. It's so many little losses outsourced to someone else.

And yet, after all those transformations and power losses, an EV is still a net gain in efficiency in most cases. An ICE sends about 20% of the energy to the wheels. An EV triples that in the worst case. This means the infrastructure that you get your energy from can lose a lot along the way and you still end up net positive. And it concentrates further efficiency improvements. That abstraction is huge.

> Personally, the battery pack prices are the biggest killer for me. I drive a 90s Toyota pickup. It's been problem free. I've driven it for years. Unless it rots to the ground, I'll never see a surprise bill in 10-20 years saying I need a new battery pack. My motor could entirely fail and it would be a $500 fix. Not to mention, it's entirely recyclable. People will give me money just for the metal.

This is also something we all need to keep in mind. You continuing to drive that truck is a benefit to the environment. I'm not trying to say you should scrap it and go get an EV. But for someone who doesn't own any vehicle, choosing an EV today is better than going with a new combustion car.
Japanese firm’s pioneering moon landing fails
I have bad news for you. Do you know what (n)curses is for? Its basically a library for those magic strings (and ascii control characters) that run extra routines in the terminal. And every terminal has these routines.
Maybe. Range anxiety is less of an issue. A 2021 Toyota Camry has a 15.8 gallon tank. Functionally 500 miles of range. Even to reserve a few gallons we're at 400 miles per tank.

Probably what would happen if this was a real concern is they'd just make the gas tanks bigger. It's not that hard to do so.
If its so competitive, why are profit margins so high? I understand AWS is at nearly 30%.
I have used bare netcat to transfer files. works well enough when the link is good, when it's not... Well I suspect that is when you dig out better tools.

nc -l 1234 > fname

nc host 1234 < fname
> don’t know what man stands for, don’t know the manual has sections, and aren’t interested in finding out

People that unwilling to learn— uninterested in even discovering that there is a manual and how to open it— don't belong in software.

The rest of the things you mention... whatever. Many people haven't heard a good pitch. They haven't had the relevant experience to see how investing in learning those things can pay off for them. But disinterest in finding out that there's a manual? That's wilful incompetence of a kind I've never seen and hope I never will.
Biggest battery on a Tesla Model Y is 81 kwh. To charge fully in 8 hours you need 10kw of power. Sounds like a lot. Central AC is about 4kw. An electric stove is 3kw, and another 3kw for the electric oven. A microwave is 1kw. Can you run your ac, oven, stove and microwave at the same time? If so, you have more than enough to charge an electric car. And that's if you drive 330 miles per day. If you drive 36 like the average driver, you can charge your car for the same amount of power as running your AC for 2 hours / day. Power just isn't an issue.
Or, stop withholding taxes and bill people monthly (or quarterly). Why should the government make the interest on money that should be in my account?
Do countries with 240v electricity charge faster?

The Nissan Leaf owners get longer range than that here I think.

Here has 240v
IMHO not true (unless you're talking about sun's energy). Just few examples:

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-permaculture-f...

https://www.permaculturenews.org/2014/07/15/fukuokas-food-fo...

https://returntonow.net/2018/08/01/the-amazon-is-a-man-made-...

https://news.mongabay.com/2020/07/in-syntropic-agriculture-f...

https://www.microfarmguide.com/syntropic-farming/
Speak for yourself, everyone I know here is quite happy on their “low salaries” and wouldn’t move to the US
You should have an accountant for that side business who will do taxes for you as part of services. They already have an unlimited account with someone for tax filing that can read from their computer so it is very quick. Plus there actually is good advice an accountant can give you.
‘Unprepared’ Twitter among tech firms to face tough new EU digital rules
> It can literally be a simple task that one would expect any working software developer to be able to complete without too much fuss.

Unfortunately this varies dramatically from person to person during a high pressure interview.

I interviewed a very senior developer once that actually used to be my current manager's boss. The coding question was pretty simple and most people didn't struggle too much with it. He BOMBED it. Like, you could have taken someone with 30 minutes of coding experience and they would have gotten as far as he did.

It was also very obvious he was just incredibly nervous so I put him through to the next round anyway. We hired him and he was great.
> More importantly, it announces a 70 billion dollar stock buyback.

I don't pay so much attention to investment news, but the last time I heard of huge buybacks was when Intel decided to drastically cut back its research and development. It seemed to not be good for Intel. Or maybe it was good for the ones making those decisions, if they are getting bailed out by billions of government money, I don't know. Maybe I have cause and effect mixed? It could be possible.
Nice to see my sincere recommendation of an excellent product from an indie dev get downvoted. This is why people can't be bothered being nice on HN.
No, we had a feature enabled intentionally and it intentionally scans tons of popular websites, the only accidntal part that it scans more websites then intended. There is no reason to pretend there is some bigger conspiracy.

If microsoft really wanted to scan ALL urls that badly, they can... always just do exactly that?
But when they actually implement fairly decent feature that has a bug in it... it's probably a bug yes. They really have no reason to be sneaky about it
The broader package I’m working on (PhaseLLM) is specifically focused on devtools for observability and robustness of LLM-powered products. I agree with you that there are lots issues with LLMs and taking them to production. I’m hoping products like this + making them robust will help improve the research as well as the UX.
Taxes in the Netherlands: go to website, log in with digital ID. Next, next, next, next, finish. Done. Less than 5 minutes. Income, savings accounts, mortgage, all prefilled.

For businesses, complicated households, people dealing with particular life events (divorce, inheritance, special medical deductions) it's a bit more work but still doable.

Our government is strongly incentivized to make taxes easy and even came up with a slogan: "taxes. we can't make them more fun, but we sure can make them easier".

It's clear why they want to make it easy: it takes an army of very expensive staff to address endless questions. And then some even more expensive staff to address tax appeals.
As long as you do not mess up intentionally the worst case is they hit you with a penalty fee, and often not even that. Or you miss out a deduction.

Unless you have an actual tax accountant, you’re just paying some teenager to enter your data into a higher-cost version of TurboTax.

https://johntreed.com/products/aggressive-tax-avoidance-for-...

This book is aimed at the real estate investor but may still be worth a read.
I believe Google is/was trying to do that using your credit card payment history.
What is your cost per mile? My 2017 Honda Accord Hybrid is running at 9 cents per mile at current gas prices ($3.30 per gallon) and that is purely city driving. Maybe 6 cents per mile on the highway.
Moving companies typically exclude particle board items like these from their insurance coverage. I've successfully moved a few IKEA items, but if they're taking 90% of the wood out of certain parts, I have to imagine they're going to be even more fragile now.
"Cloud" for the purposes of financial reporting also includes the consumer cloud services workspace/gsuite/gdocs or whatever they're calling it now, right? not just the stuff at cloud.google.com
Ad spend globally may be down; can a comparison be made to competitors' ad revenue to come up with a baseline there?

Youtube was a large contributor to growth in 2021-2022, and that engine appears to have slowed. (Not just the "Youtube ads" line that is separated out.)

Most likely the market is reacting to these results not being any worse. Cloud gains were already priced into the stock, in my opinion.
> If the type system is uncomputable, then the type system will never be able to resolve all uses of function pointers everywhere.

Can you elaborate on what you mean here, and the problems this might cause? Do you mean that some function pointers cannot be resolved to concrete functions? Or that the process of evaluating comptime may be infinite? Or some other problem where the compiler can't determine whether a function pointer is needed for a given function?
Again this claim without proof. That’s a pretty damning accusation, so you should provide a source or a way for us to verify it independently.

If it is “near impossible to turn that off” it means it is possible. How?
I agree, I find all of these things quite nice.

The construction of roads and rail lines though is enormously overpriced though. It's not like they'd just disappear if we stopped paying taxes.

Instead why not just pay for them directly and get _a lot_ more of them? What if your AAA membership built the actual roads you're driving on and you could buy an unlimited pass, or a pass based on your actual mileage or something like that?
> > Houses can sit empty without tenants for years but they’ll only go up.

> Do you have stats for how much of a problem this is? The problem seems to be vacancy rates that are too low, not too high.

No stats on my part, but I have some anecdotal evidence from Australia a couple of years ago. I definitely knew of several apartment complexes which were significantly empty, but advertised rents did not go down. The reasoning behind this was that banks used the previous rent for assessing value (which people used as capital for buying the next property). Because everyone essentially invested based on property price increases not rental income, it made more sense to leave the apartment empty and use the higher capital (based on a previous evaluation) to use for buying the next apartment, than to renting it out and not being able to buy the next property. L
For a commute of 40mi, yeah it makes sense. I've always liked the idea of EV for short commutes. But we're talking about high density batteries to fix the range issue.

An EV city would probably flip to high draw at night, when everyone charges. It would be like your whole neighborhood turning on a welder on max settings for 2 hours. You could probably turn down the fast charging to slow charging over night (so you can spare the grid) if you only commute 40mi but if they're talking about high density batteries you won't be doing a slow charge when you drain it. Especially in the case of semis/work equipment/planes, you will need that fast-fast-fast charger to charge your new high density batteries at the same rate.
We know, and we are!
In 80% of the cases where you mess up AND they notice they just send you a form saying “here’s our numbers” and you can say ok or complain.

They’ve even done that to me when I made a mistake that resulted in a smaller refund; they sent the “you fucked up” letter along with a check.
Sure but I’m not the one who made the original remark
These same tech players have complected the specs for the web/html/http so that only they can build browsers. There is no need for this, but here we are. And the whole Web Industrial Complex went right along with them because complexity is a nice revenue stream. Simplicity doesn't provide the rent seeking footholds that they predatory companies all exploit.
As a former mechanical engineer, any calculations involving pounds in any form I pretty much always converted to metric and then back at the end if need-be. The trinity of pound-mass, pound-force, and slugs is incredibly easy to screw up--at least as a student.