skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
IME it depends on how rural. Larger suburbs are pretty politically blue and culturally accepting where I've lived. A few years ago I moved to the suburb where my great grandparents once lived, then surrounded by farms. Now it's a bustling exhurb with two significant immigrant communities. Within the cluster our kids play at the households have 4 different languages.
The steelman case for opposing "auto-filing" or having the IRS provide tax preparation is that the intention of requiring everyone to file is that all citizens should be directly aware of the amount of taxes being assessed and the complexity of the tax code itself, with the objective of making people oppose legislative increases in the complexity of the tax code, and to make tax increases more intrusive so that legislators cannot increase taxes without people noticing.

I think, though, that this philosophy does not accomplish its ends -- people are mad at the IRS for making them do this work, not at the legislators for creating and maintaining a byzantine tax code. Ideally we would all choose politicians that favored removing complexity and reducing the amount of taxes, but the reality is that this is not usually a politically viable strategy.
In high school, college, and in my 20's a wrote a lot, but I didn't like it enough to do it as a career. Instead I spent my life writing code and wrote a programming blog for almost 15 years that used to appear some on Hacker News (https://thecodist.com). I recently revived it because I like writing and now have time. I never tried to make money on it; it's just fun writing about programming and technology. Writing for a living would have been much less fun than doing programming for all those years and paying a lot less.

I read a lot so I am glad there are people who still write for a living. Sadly the internet started off free, and now we are stuck with ads everywhere and paying writers a decent wage is becoming harder.
Unions are applicable for any number of employers and jobs, big or small, many or few.

Sure, threatening to quit is easy. But doing the easy thing isn't the same as doing the right thing. Unionizing allows us to prevent unpaid overtime, demand more vacation, better health care, fewer contractors, more diverse hiring, fewer hiring restrictions, and of course, things like wfh, child care, family leave, maternity and paternity. Things corporations making hundreds of billions in profits could easily do, but will never do unless we organize.
Hardware startup Telly launches a free smart TV supported by ads
> regurgitate tax information that has already been reported to the government

How does the government know my non-compensated travel and moving cost, wfh expenses, cash charity donations,etc...?

If people like you get the option to file directly with the IRS, fine by me so long as you don't make the rest of us pay more by losing the ability to play the game and save money.
Well, he’s not a “specist“.
Main issue here is that parents are allowing kids to use “phone” feature and not as much “smart” features. This is all on parents.

If parents only allowed “smart” features of the smartphone to be used…
That's why one can feel sorry for - and wary of - their engineers.
Maybe the author doesn’t realize this but “what-if-driven development” is one of the worst programming advice one can give.

The problem is that it gets interpreted as “I’ve been asked xxx but what if what they really want is yyy”. And this leads to missed requirements, premature optimization, and all other evils.
> NULL is idiomatic

It is today, but idioms are a human concept and who knows how things will be in 2033?
What is the advantage of SSE over streaming ndjson?
Exactly. Doing custom taxes could be opt-in. "Here's what we're going to charge you. If you think you owe less due to details we don't have, feel free to file the old way"
Important to note that this is different from the nogil project ( https://github.com/colesbury/nogil ) - this is about the feature that's landing soon in Python 3.12 which will allow multiple Python sub-interpreters each with their own GIL - hence enabling Python code to run multi-threaded in the same process, albeit with a fair amount of extra work to co-ordinate between those different interpreters.

The tutorial itself is fantastic - it's not an easy feature to try out right now but I got there by following the step-by-step instructions.

Also interesting is this project, linked to from the end of the tutorial: https://github.com/jsbueno/extrainterpreters

Posted my own set of short notes on my blog: https://simonwillison.net/2023/May/15/per-interpreter-gils/
> Eugene Debs. Or see Julian Assange. Or Korematsu. Or Joseph Nacchio

they didn't have billions to hire army of lawyers and make huge noise in media. Larry Page has those billions, so law and constitution actually protects him.
I'm guessing that since it's not a full-duplex connection you have to send those messages out-of-band, ie, with a separate POST request API
I've had four employment contracts in Europe (3x EU, 1x CH) and all included that clause
If your three friends cannot reach you 24/7 good luck getting to 10 friends.

We need less reliable systems, not more.
But surely, you're on the cusp of itemizing. Or have dramatically changing circumstances year to year. Otherwise, you're just wasting time.

FWIW, we are in the "on the cusp" boat. Another year or two and our mortgage interest vs principle equation will put us in the standard deduction range. And short of massive changes to either tax law or our income, we'll remain there.
> I think this might be part of the strategy of the current layoffs, to kinda push the issue with economic force.

what's going on with the current layoffs is that companies overhired from 2020 to 2022, and now they're over-firing to compensate.

there's also a snowball effect to it, because if you see that you could fire your people and re-hire roughly equivalent new talent for less, that's very appealing for the kind of manager who sees staff as a cost center.

and there's also a real estate invesmtent factor, both in terms of ego ("I met with architects for a year to build our shiny new campus, of course you peons will be more productive where I can keep an eye on you") and in terms of actual financials ("we've been spending $X per year for property taxes on this empty building").

of course it's always going to be a blend of factors, especially in an industry where tons of research proved open plan offices were detrimental and open plan offices became the norm anyway.
It's beaten by only two weights available models, it beats LLama 13B and Dolly. What do you mean it's training in a quasi-Transformer manner? Do you mean the language pretraining? That's been done before Transformers.

RWKV doesn't have the quadratic attention of Transformers, so I'd say it's pretty different.
23ish years after the Free-PC ended, we've come back around. What a world.

https://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/30/business/no-more-giveaway...
I see nothing wrong with this. In fact, I’d love for a company to give me a free car with ads on and/or in it for me to use during road trips.
ChatGPT-driven NPC Experiment 2
> why should we invest resources in expanding our free services when taxpayers don't use what we already make available?

It's not a service. It's an obligation. You want my money? Why do I have to find a "service" to get you to take it?

If you've never used one of those services, you should. Some of them have gotten better only very recently, some still look like fly-by-night scam operations that are trying to filch your personal information. The old adage "you get what you pay for" has never been more true.

> Is there data to support the notion that usage would meaningfully increase if we supported 100% of filing cases?

Yes. The billions of dollars spent lobbying the congress to prevent this very thing from happening.
Breaking Bad had a very decent ending. It wasn't overblown, it didn't have contrived plot twists, and it was consistent with the the way the characters behaved in previous arcs.
Consumer Solo: Building B2C as a Solo Developer
The one thing missing is automatically calculating your tapered pension allowance after rolling over unused, based on your previous tax years - that's why I get an accountant to file mine.
Ask HN: Any tech help out there for a techno-thriller inspired by post on HN?
A year after reading an article about Project Sapphire posted on HN — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30902890 — I have completed a draft of a novel that’s a bit technical in parts.

I read somewhere about how Andy Weir — author of ‘The Martian’ — received such help from readers of his novel before publication. This was after making it available to read for free on his blog (while he searched the universe for a literary agent).

The topic of the novel here is nuclear explosives, not botany and mechanical engineering. It challenges the idea that an improvised nuclear device designed and built by a rogue individual (or individuals) would necessarily be unwieldy and crude. The story revolves around a Russian kid who develops an unhealthy obsession with engineering and nuclear tech. It’s rooted in two true historical events:

1. Project Sapphire: a 1994 covert operation of the US government to remove 600kg of nuclear material from Kazakhstan.

2. The abandoning of the Semipalatinsk Test Site, also known as ‘The Polygon,’ which was the primary testing site for the Soviet nuclear-weapons program.

The current draft of the book is in the hands of my agent, but it can be read (or downloaded as a PDF) on Substack here: https://figment.substack.com/p/e43612dc-a4f3-4b89-880a-821ad9f0e931

I seek technical feedback, but welcome any thoughtful comments. If you are wanting to find areas in the ms with technical detail, just search for fissile, uranium or plutonium. Any desire to read the latter two parts of the novel, just email me for the links.

In advance, thanks so much.
I used both WebSockets and SSE. In one project, I even support WebSockets and a fallback working like what you describe.

I'm sold on using SSE for pushed updates. But how is regular requests + SSE easier on the server compared to WebSockets? It seems like an open connection to maintain in both cases plus additional http request for the SSE+requests case.
> Because educational institutions aren’t in the business of selling education: they give that away for free. Seriously, walk into any university campus and into a lecture hall, sit down and take notes. No one will stop you! No one will check ID. You can even talk to the professor and 99% of the time they’ll give you access to the course materials online at well.

Can confirm. When I was a senior in high school, a professor at Caltech even sponsored me as a visiting faculty member so I could check out books from the university libraries. No one in the administration even blinked an eye.

I ended up auditing several graduate aerospace classes like Ae105 & Ae121 and even worked on the AAReSt [1] thermal systems group project with several other graduate students who seemed to tolerate me most of the time. I still carry the ID around in my wallet as a keepsake.

[1] https://www.pellegrino.caltech.edu/aarest1
Not really. Software drivers alone will not get it done, at least not adequately (Asahi-related developers may come up with a software solution for Asahi, but it will necessarily degrade performance, so the effort is likely to be abandoned).

Thunderbolt supports PCIe, and for most devices Apple Silicon does also, but GPU is different enough from audio interfaces and NVMe that it isn't just a "load the driver and plug it in" situation. GPU is vastly more complex than other PCIe devices. Apple Silicon and x86 architectures are not compatible, so GPU for x86 is not going to work with Apple Silicon with merely a software driver.

It's going to take hw translation and other technology that is not yet available for Apple Silicon, thus Apple's recent patent applications,[1] showing that Apple is either exploring supporting outboard GPU or locking anyone else out from their method of doing so, but either way is no guarantee they'll complete development or release, because it seems just as if not more likely the roadmap for Apple Silicon GPU performance will outpace nVidia and AMD GPUs.

But, again, claiming, "it just doesn't have a driver for the GPU" is a staggering oversimplification.

[1] https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloa...
You could try nats jetstream
https://docs.nats.io/nats-concepts/jetstream

I've found nats to be very lightweight, and it can bridge (bidirectional) to kafka.

Edit: Oh it also supports websockets to the browser
I itemize, but it doesn't save me a ton. I would probably still click that button just to save me the mental headache and time spent.
Yes it’s the “getting a 2000€/year accountant” part that I thought I didn’t need (cause I never needed one in the us).
Since Chatbot Arena Leaderboard https://lmsys.org/blog/2023-05-10-leaderboard/ agrees with you, it's not just you.
The way it tends toward context-sensitive shifts in delivery is kind of amazing.

E.g., Using this text prompt:

You come to my home and ask this?
Who am I? WHO [laughs] AM [laughs] I?!
I am the Artificial Intelligence!

It seems quite prone to shift from a more natural human-sounding voice to a similar-tone but over-the-top artificial one for the last sentence (smoothly transitioning, usually, too), as if the speaker were an AI dramatically breaking cover.
Resilience to autosomal dominant Alzheimer’s in a Reelin-COLBOS heterozygous man
"Average" is great until you get a two or three-sigma week.
No, we are just unhappy with putting the "s" sound after the "th" sound. For some reason it just feels wrong.
I have to confess I don’t know what a data lake is. Halfway between a data puddle and a data ocean? There’s a lot of terms in this industry that you can avoid if you don’t work on that specific subset of functionality.

I do wonder if the marketing data from a 150-person org wouldn’t fit on a good old-fashioned database server. No need to get your feet wet.
> I'm in favor of banning Booleans (and if-statements)

I would love to hear your reasoning on this. I think that either I'm misunderstanding you, or one of us is crazy ))
Obviously typing from start to finish with few edits is also a "failed" result in such a program. Someone actually writing an essay should be creating structure, taking notes, rearranging paragraphs etc.

Then again you have a good point. Often you blat out an essay and then edit it. Same thing goes with typing in an AI generated template.
The stork's last thought being "again???"
> OK I signed up for Bard to try it, too, and it indeed did mention intersex dogs (TIL) and gender (complete response below). After reading it all, though, I found it pretty reasonable

I'm not sure that gratuitous patronizing part about "It is important to remember that sex and gender are two different things..." is considered "reasonable" anywhere outside some particular set of US coastal cities.
I said it once and I’ll say it again:

NAT is not actual “security”, and a good part of the spirit of the internet died when it became ubiquitous, along with puny asymmetric upload speeds
Google: Introducing Our New Project Starline Prototype
Arch Linux – News: Git migration announcement
Bard says "It is a play on the fact that there are many different kinds of people in the world, but the statement only lists two"

That is incorrect
> This is not a canonical list of bad stories or story cliches. This is a list of types of stories that we at SH have seen too often; it's not intended to be a complete list of all types of bad stories, nor are all the items on the list necessarily bad.
See this is exactly what I mean. People don't want to learn how to wfh.

There are easy solutions to these problems. Put up an away message and silence notifications. Set office hours when you will respond to messages. Time box. Give estimated response times. Provide an escalation method for emergencies. Keep a weekly rotation for support requests.

All of this is well established in fully remote companies. But you can't expect to completely change the dynamic and expect it to work perfect with no changes.
Might consider checking Tom Clancy's sources from The Sum of All Fears (which centers on a terrorist plot to detonate a nuclear device)

Also a fun 80s movie called The Manhattan Project (John Lithgow was in it)

Or the late-90s movie The Peacemaker (starring Clooney & Kidman)

I'm not a nuclear scientist. I haven;'even played on on TV, but your story could be pretty fun :)
This is pretty cool, except that every database looks like a commerce site. It might be good to have some different layouts available that look less commercial?

There are some databases that have entries with a long text description. Putting a snippet of that up front would make that clearer. Also, a single-column layout would look more like a blog.

Compare with an archive page on Substack.
> the users are rightfully complaining [because] their experience has been made noticeably worse in multiple ways to no benefit

Depends on your definition of rightfully. This is a ad-free, cost-free website. If they want to reduce server load or prioritize something other than non-JS experience, it’s their prerogative.

Especially when the complaint is “it’s slower on my client” and not “I can no longer access the data without JavaScript”

> Worse, they essentially get taunted.

Please explain?
That’s always the best with these things. It’s a giant cue cat!

Also I wonder how many verification cans it comes with.
Any sign of JSON schema in the registry? That would be great if so!
I'm curious what the terms of usage would be, since eventually people will figure out how to block all the ads one way or another.

Also after having seen a few cheap Walmart tvs, some with very intrusive ads I think there might be a market for this
The answer is quite simple, actually. It's a hardware business so they have to right-size their equipment to projected demand and the tool-up time in specialty hardware is long because of the need for specialty components.

i.e. they need to project out demand x years in advance because their things are expensive and slow to build, and their components vendors have the same problem with the additional problem that their components vendors only have one customer for some of their products: them.

There is no other equivalent use for much of what they need so if they fuck it up they've got too much equipment too fast.

This is a classic hardware business problem.
... That means each point is at a distance of sqrt(f(x)) from the circumference. And nesting random() n times is similar to random()^n, which explains why the first plot has them amassed in the center and the second has a more uniform distribution.

Why are they similar? For a rough idea, random() is a random number between 0 and 1, which on average is 0.5; random(random()) is a random number between 0 and on average 0.5, which on average is 0.25; and so on.
2G is deprecated so a lot of the newer phones won’t even support that..?
> I've tried and failed countless times to convince people of the utility of version control.

Don't pitch it as version control. Pitch it as "homework submission process" that has the side benefit of being a backup if their laptop crashes. Students are used to horrible homework submission processes (looking at you Blackboard) and quickly adapt to seeing version control systems as a pretty nice alternative.

And, for about 25% of your class, the lightbulb will go on and they'll start using version control even in their other courses.

> at least 50% of the population is incapable of learning Git without extensive coaching

Mercurial can be taught to mere mortals just fine. Same with Subversion. Same with CVS. I've done that for all three. People tell me that lots of artists use Perforce quite readily.

Git is the only dumbass version control system that revels in being obtuse.
> None of them can

Yes, but does it prove it?
My favorite use of this that I've spotted in the wild is https://nightride.fm (not affiliated, just a fan!). It's a Synthwave music site + community.

In particular, I noticed that EventSource goodies are used to broadcast currently playing songs on each station, as well as to provide anon read access to their IRC server via a simple vanilla javascript webapp.

WAY cleaner and easier than web sockets for this use case, and CDN friendly to boot!
Now this is where startups should be getting their names!
I'd probably take free ad-sponsored taxis but I'd definitely not want to let a company pay me to put a camera in my home.
It's a common misconception about Kafka and fsyncs. But the Kafka replication protocol has a recovery mechanism, much in the same way that Viewstamped Replication Revisited does (except it's safer due to the page cache), which allows Kafka to write to disk asynchronously. The trade-off is that we need fault domains (AZs in the cloud), but if we care about durability and availability, we should be deploying across AZs anyway. We've seen plenty of full region outages, but zero power loss events in multiple AZs in six years.

Kafka and fsyncs: https://jack-vanlightly.com/blog/2023/4/24/why-apache-kafka-...
When it can do arbitrary math (without agents) such as (923042334+234234)/5 then I'll be impressed.

Anyways this is really what we're discussing which is indeed interesting

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
>It's worth noting that the mandatory office attendance doesn't apply to ABK's executives. Recently hired execs like Chief Administrative Officer Brian Bulatao, and Chief Communications Officer Lulu Cheng Meservey, have full-time remote status.

So much for RTO being good for communication.
Relying on only renewables and long distance transmissions introduces significant geopolitical risks and fragility.

It would be, let's say, less than ideal if Europe were dependent on North Africa for their energy security.

In practical terms this would mean that large countries would feel the need to establish military control over critical energy production areas.

Energy security is no laughing matter in the Nordics. In the winter, without power, people die.

Even if the political and operational risks are acceptable, building long distance transmission is no simple matter. Everybody knows that more transmission lines are needed between Norway, Sweden and Finland, but regardless no real progress has been made. Heck, Sweden can't even manage to connect their north and south regions!

The vagaries of weather and the requirement for redundancy would require significant over-investment in generation capacity and long distance transmission networks.

Looking at averages in weather and wind is also very myopic. Power generation is instantaneous, so you have to look at sustainable base load. But the question is, can wind sustain any kind of base load since it is so variable?

On Saturday wind production was down to 53 MW in Finland, less than 2% of peak production. And that wasn't even the lowest this month. What are you going to do, build 100x more wind power? And even if you do, you are only producing less than 20% of total power required to power the country, so it's more like you need 500x more wind power.

Since you cannot do base load with wind power, nuclear is off the table, what are you going to do? Hydro power?

You cannot run off hydro power for days or weeks since the generation capacity just isn't there. For the Nordics, Denmark has no hydro, Finland only has about 20% of generation capacity and Sweden has about 45%. Norway is the only country that can run off hydro and Iceland is a very far away.

This means you are back to peaker plants. Say bye-bye to zero carbon emissions.

So all this brings us back to the questions, are renewables really a realistic and cost effective option compared to nuclear?