skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I switched, blissfully, away from Quicken/Quickbook/Xero/all that heavy crap to very simple and elegant textfile-based accounting (ledger/hledger) and it's been the best and most flexible accounting experience I've ever had. I finally feel completely in control of my companies' books.

I love the idea, but not being an accounting expert (maybe you are), I'd be afraid that some immaturity or lack of expertise in the software would cause a big problem in a critical way. What makes you confident in it?

Also, how do you share data with accountants, etc.?
1. That didn't stop people blogging before :D

2. Money happened pretty much. First people started monetising their blogs, then they turned into books, which turned into multiple books and youtube channels and then it was no longer a blog and more of a company.

and additionally:

6. The younger generation is used to having their actual face plastered all over the internet and thus feel more natural making videos with their own face and voice.

--

I, and I think a good part of the HN crowd, are in the generation where we had actual friends we only knew by their handle/nickname and never saw their face unless there was a meetup of some sort and we actually went there.

For me, using my own face, or even name, to present any sort of content just feels wrong in a visceral way.
It might suck initially, but that doesn't mean a lot. Healthcare.gov works pretty well today (not perfect but gets the job done for most people), despite the shoddy rollout.
Building a new Apple Lisa 2/5 around an existing Lisa CPU card
I vote for Spy Party as the perfect game

- sufficiently random

- entertaining theme

- 1v1 so no dependence on teammates

- extremely high skill curve with no obvious optimal play but fun at all levels

- short and without one side feeling like they cannot possibly win

- no particular reliance on twitchy reflexes
Also, my wife paid a joint filing online under my SSN, and the system couldn't figure that out

It's not surprising the system couldn't figure that out. There is no such thing as a joint-filing under a single SSN. You need to include both spouse's SSNs or ITINs on the 1040 to file jointly, and the return is treated as a "joint" return (meaning, equally by both spouses).
Recent and related:

Building a collaborative pixel art editor with CRDTs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37832432 - Oct 2023 (23 comments)

An interactive intro to CRDTs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37764581 - Oct 2023 (130 comments)

Normally we downweight multipart posts after one has had significant frontpage attention (see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... for why), but this seems to be something of an exception.
Not for one second do I believe that all the people are thinking about the exercise of authority and the consequences thereof when they cast a vote, hence I don't want to further such attitudes.

That aside, you seem to advocate a pretty broad change to laws restricting voting when you want all(!) opinions and attitudes to count. What do you see as template there on how to shape the franchise (e.g., what to do about minimum age, insanity)?
Number of people who died by becoming tangled in their bed sheets
There is zero chance of being discovered. You pay your freelancer, own the project, throw it up on your GitHub, no one will ever know.

Meanwhile, you get to spend more time with your kids.
Ah this implies definition of wealth is purely $ value, not what their inflation-adjusted “afford to buy material goods and services” value.
Does that mean I can FOIA for the source code? I ask in all seriousness: I believe some things are withheld/redacted due to "national security" but if they hard-coded mainframe credentials in their source code that's not my fault
>In fact, elections in other countries, like Mexico, usually have at least 95% of votes certified by the next day, even if the last few percent drags their feet for some reason.

I don't know what this means. "Certification" is when a state finalizes the official legally-binding results for elections. Votes aren't certified, election results are. It's when a state says "Coca-Cola got 832,992 votes and Pepsi got 902,311 votes" and enters it into its legal and historical record.

All US states take time to certify results precisely to make sure the process is carried out correctly. They do things like archiving paper ballots, electronic records, and signed affidavits in case of legal challenges, processing provisional ballots and same-day registrations, and cross-checking the number of registered voters who showed up with the number of ballots cast at each precinct.
Hopefully they don't live in the UK, so that yes they would have carte blanche here. If there's one thing the UK knows how to do, it's to make me feel better about living in Canada.
I got some incomprehensible statements one time from a joint venture. I paid an accountant to do my taxes since I couldn't figure out. There answer to me was "I have no idea what this is trying to say, so I'll just submit it. If you get audited let me know and we'll work it out"
And now we have "reaction videos" where a more famous internet celebrity with millions of followers watches random funny videos and gets paid for it - while the actual creators don't get anything.
2016 terminology for shutting down people calling out bad behavior. Lazy. Going to call me a Karen next? Seriously, the world is not your sock puppet, boss. You’ll get just as much done being decent.
From a quick glance at their site, it looks like a bed bug trap with a sensor (probably weight) in it that broadcasts the presence of bugs inside the trap via LoRA. There's no microphone, no camera, and it doesn't even connect to WiFi.

EDIT: Seems like there is a camera involved, but it's inside the enclosed trap.
> I don't want operating systems to be a government-provided 'public good'.

Huh. Interesting example. I actually do want to see a government produced public good operating system.

Where we're going, operating systems will either be ad filled messes or locked down walled gardens. A public good option would be required to meet high bars for interoperability while also not ad funded.

It's one thing to regulate away a market (make things illegal) and a very different situation if the government is just setting a bar for quality within a market.
>Arizona, California, Massachusetts and New York have decided to work with the IRS to integrate their state taxes into the Direct File pilot for filing season 2024.

There's the notable point. If states integrate into it, it's a game changer. No need for the vast majority of filers to use any 3rd party.
They just haven't opened their eyes yet, bless their hearts.

Being from Georgia where we didn't really have a unique BBQ identity (mostly a mix of SC and Western NC styles) but living in Eastern NC now i can appreciate all the styles.

My preference is for BBQ though. Style: yes!
Yes, there is a server component. Your tasks, notes, and other settings are stored on the server, so when you switch computers, you don't lose any data. I am planning to add a private option with optional server sync down the road for folks who might be interested in that.
The model is that someone with a W-2 and a 1099 or two and just taking the standard deduction should be "Yep, looks OK." If it gets more complicated than that you probably need to either spend a bunch of your own time or hire a professional.
>1. My government will use this tech only for good.

Precisely, and even now there are a steady stream of examples of people in power using tech for no good, here's just a tiny snippet of examples where police had mis-used databases to spy, stalk and harass:

USA:

N.J. cop used police databases to stalk ex-girlfriend, investigators say
https://www.nj.com/monmouth/2023/01/nj-cop-used-police-datab...

Officer Fired for Allegedly Using Police Database to Stalk, Harass Women
https://www.newsweek.com/officer-fired-allegedly-using-polic...

Australia:

Former policeman accused of using force database to stalk ex-wife and girlfriend https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/former-policeman...

Former federal police officer faces new charges over stalking of ex-girlfriend
https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/6138318/former-federa...

(Note the two above articles are not the same person)

UK:

Met police officer 'used CCTV cameras to stalk his ex-girlfriend after telling her to take up sex work to pay her bills'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11868575/Met-police...

Creepy cop saw attractive woman on the road and 'looked up her license plate number so he could stalk her on Facebook'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2178556/Officer-Jef...

The more you look, the more you find - and this barely scratches the surface of ways that systems that hold personal data can be abused.

When designing any new law, we must always consider the fact that there is no such thing as "good guys" and "bad guys". The potential for abuse must be extremely limited and the benefits of the law should legitimately outweigh the potential abuses.
I don’t research viruses, so I can’t tell you if GoF is the right tool to fight a future pandemic or not. What I do know is that if a deadly virus with a 30% CFR is spreading rapidly, I want the experts fighting it to have every tool at their disposal. I don’t want them artificially handcuffed in finding a cure/vaccine by the feelings of some Hacker News posters like me and you. Happy to stipulate that this should be an emergency capability, but frankly I don’t know enough about the value of preemptive GoF research to determine whether that’s a good balance.
I don't feel the need to do so at this point, but I do feel the moral imperative to spread the alarm on a disastrous industrial process (when precautions are not taken) that many in the maker movement are woefully unaware of, the same way I would if I suddenly became aware of the dangers of asbestos and was on my way to work when I overheard a conversation among hobbyists about spraying asbestos foam around in their bedrooms without much knowledge of it.
I do believe that fully remote teams should meet in person, but 90/10 is a bit much.

At my last company, there would be a fiscal year kick-off event in February where the entire company would meet. Last year was in Chamonix, France. This year was Da Nong, Vietnam, though I got laid off two weeks before that event happened.

They would also do regional gatherings around Sept/Oct. Last year, the Western half of the USA met in Lake Tahoe, and the Eastern half met in some lodge in Connecticut, and everyone else (Mostly Europe) met in Spain.

I think it's really important to meet the human being behind the screen.

My current employer is mostly remote, but does have an office in Santa Clara. My team did an on-site there a few months ago. Was great to meet everyone and strategize for the next year. Sure, we were in the meeting room for hours, but I'd rather spend hours in a meeting room than hours on a Zoom call.
That and also it's not so useful if it can't import from bitcoin.tax and TurboTax exports, since there's so much in tax prep that depends on numbers from the year before, and ultimately the value of tax prep software to me is roughly the time I spend on tax prep vs. what I could get in terms of hourly rate as a hypothetical software consultant outside my day job.

If I have to manually input 5 billion crypto and stock transactions including every damn weekly staking reward just to pay taxes it's just bleh.
Neither party is obligated to the interests of the people living in this country. I'm not saying this is necessarily bad advice but there are some problems that require actual citizens to do something aside from vote.
"I have everything to hide" sounds like a good slogan to advocate for privacy.
Forest fires are a natural state of forest and required for a healthy forest for many types of forest.
I mean, if using googletagmanager makes you mad, wait until you hear about the whole id.me business:

https://epic.org/report-id-me-lied-to-the-irs-about-wait-tim...

I don't think there is any stipulation that the US government can't use products sold by US based companies. In fact, they enjoy doing it. You should ask your elected representatives to prohibit tracking on government websites; if they pass a law, the IRS's web design team will follow it.
> Then compare that with VMware,

Their virtualization tools are niche, being squeezed by whatever the cloud provider offers for "free" on one side, and KVM (and platform-native hypervisors) on the other. You rarely hear them mentioned.
Why do you think this? NYC, which spends extraordinary amounts of money on the NYPD, still only spends 10% of its budget on public safety[1]. The 4 largest categories are education (20%), transportation (15%), environmental protection (15%), and housing and economic development (15%).

[1]: https://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/understandingthebudget....
That wasn't quite what the 2nd Amendment was originally about; nobody back then could foresee modern policing; if the police or the United States government have it out for you, good luck fighting them off with an M16 or AK-47 or even like an RPG. The most likely case is that they just kill you; the best case is, what, that you become a white Ahmed Shah Massoud, maintaining an insurgency in the Appalachias or something?
This is great news; no matter how restricted it may be initially, I think having a "guaranteed-free" tax filing system will be great for most people, especially lower-income people.

The private companies have demonstrated pretty clearly that they will do everything they can to avoid people actually having free tax filing, and while ~$50-100 might not seem like a ton of money, keep in mind that at the current United States minimum wage ($7.25 as of this writing), it would take upwards of working 6-14 hours just to pay for tax filing. $100 is a lot of money when you're not a yuppie software engineer.

I suspect I did enough crazy stuff with stocks this year that it probably won't apply to me at first, but hopefully by 2025 or 2026 I can stop giving money to Intuit or Jackson Hewitt.
Do you have a web site set up?
Eh, Frasier is definitely a narcissist, but I wouldn't go that far. He means well, but typically only if it also benefits him. That tends to be most protagonists in sitcoms though. Frasier was a static character and didn't really grow as the show went on.

Compare that with Niles who grows throughout the show after losing everything. Niles at least realizes being rich isn't important if you're not happy.
One thing I really want to see is an official form where if you answer all the questions, to the best of your knowledge correctly, protects you from liability for incorrectly filing your taxes.

End of the day with TurboTax and co, you, as expected, get a "not our system, not our problem" type response when dealing with the post-filing ramifications.

There seems to generally be a lot of "I'm not sure if I did it right" anxiety in the general population.
Interstate commerce? Just spitballing...
+1 on this.

SF's differentiator in the Bay during the 2008-16 period was cheap office space due to the collapse of the "Wall Street of the West" during the GFC.

Otherwise, people would live in SF and commute down to RWC southwards to work. There was a time only 13-15 years ago when major tech companies didn't exist north of the Oracle office in Redwood Shores.
Yeah, I mean, nobody knows how to skirt the law better than cops, and they of course never exactly phrase it in such a way as to be extortion. It’s bullshit, and I’ve talk to people from all over the country and I think it’s pretty pervasive. But my business relies on permits that they sign, and it just feels like I could probably spend a lot of time and money and ruin myself fighting it, over what is really a relatively small tax.

I suppose that’s how they continue to get away with it. We’re all hoping someone else falls on their sword.
Same logic for health care?
Knowing that the author owns a famous "startup incubator" intended to discover and grow companies that will either 1) turn into a giant like Amazon or Google or 2) be sold to a giant like Amazon or Google puts a certain spin on this. In particular, this passage seems to be a pretty thinly veiled way of saying that giant corporations are a natural consequence of a healthy economy:

> It's obviously true that the returns for performance are superlinear in business. Some think this is a flaw of capitalism, and that if we changed the rules it would stop being true. But superlinear returns for performance are a feature of the world, not an artifact of rules we've invented. We see the same pattern in fame, power, military victories, knowledge, and even benefit to humanity.

It relies on a flimsy claim: this consequence is not caused by social conventions. Are not all of the examples given some manifestation of "rules we've invented"? Which of these things have any significance sans any sort of social context?
Unfortunately, there is no Linux support at the moment. Since the app uses Electron, adding Linux support down the road might be easier. I just haven't gotten around to it yet. Just curious - do you see yourself using an app like this?
The US has a long history of tax credits and deductions that people finagle to pay as close to their actual tax obligation as possible. (ie. if you do not do this, then you are quite literally paying more than your actual obligation according to the tax code).

The government isn't aware of your donations or losses, or whatever. So you have to tell them about it. Tax preparation software, historically, was designed to make this process easier by prompting you for all sorts of details you may have forgotten or were un-aware of. In essence, the software was supposed to replace a paid tax professional.

Today, most people use Standard Deduction since it was raised so high by the Trump Administration, and the need for credits and deductions has been greatly diminished. However, the need is still there for many folks, and not all tax filings are simple.

The nirvana for tax filing would be a single page online that disputes any facts the IRS already knows (such as informing them about donations or the like). But, our tax code itself needs to be vastly reformed and simplified before that can become a reality.
> So wouldn't the bg check expose the candidate? (E.g., my boss would know I'm thinking about leaving)

HR at the orgs I've worked for call that a reference check and it is usually concurrent with the other background check processes before the offer. The background check I'm thinking of is more like criminal history, work eligibility status etc., potentially drug screening etc. I know I have no criminal record but I'd really like to know that whatever service HR is using to screen agrees with this before I quit my job.
Everyone I know who has spent serious time digging into GH actions has eventually spent an equal amount of time moving off it, because it sucks and is crazy expensive.
Only the free'ish customers (eg: Easy 1040) will care - and they were low profit to companies like Intuit, etc anyways.

All other taxpayers will continue to use systems that ideally maximize deductions as government continues to tax endlessly.
nice addictive game!

shameless plugin - I made a game which is totally different but the gameplay is kind of similar to this where things come down from top and you have to get rid of them to stay in the game.
https://www.squashbyte.com/
The comment you originally replied to didn’t say that.
Declaring taxes in Brazil is free, but it's hard work (if you dabble with stocks, for instance). For 1/5 of the value of the minimum wage you can hire a accountant that does it for you. I think the service is worth it's price. All i have to do is send them a bunch of documents and they make sense out of it.
On the other hand, that's a whole lot of people -- probably almost everyone who is not a homeowner, and quite a few who are.
Ah, I see you're quoting the "every seat occupied, full load, with a trailer attached" weight. To be clear, the trucks you referenced weigh only ~7000 pounds.
In orginal DOS DooM yes. But why do we have those cool source ports for.
ZDoom is very good one, with spawned SkullTag, with spawned Zandronum.
ZDoom support jumping/crouching, freelook (limited and very usefull).
DECORATE + ACS support for modding. Zandronum adds up client/server multiplayer with dedicated server support. It even have OpenGL renderer for those heavy mods.

I personally play on software with freelook and no autoaim at all. You can shoot just above monsters heads (and you often DO! when fighting strong monsters).
My favorite part is that California has a roster of handguns approved for sale. The pretext for its existence is consumer safety (it is entirely separate from bans on stuff like assault weapons or large magazines), but the actual effect is that you have a very limited selection in stores, and most of the designs are very dated.

But if you're a police officer? You get an exemption! Apparently, the state has no regard for your safety as a consumer, and allows you to buy whatever you want...
Fun share, thanks.

The specification process was no more formal on the IE team, some years later. The span tag, which admittedly was a pretty good idea, was conceived and added to the product over a weekend.

I was very conflicted when span's creator (name long forgotten, sorry) shared this story. Young me cared very much about rules, order, specifications, standards, interoperability, QA/test and such.

Now? Not so much.
Credit to Joe Biden and the Inflation Reduction Act for making this possible.

If Trump wins again he's going to have a lot of work destroying all the progress Biden has made in just one term.
Enjoyed using floutwork so far. The power of setting your intention and using the app/service to get things done was both novel and transformative.
At least they're giving people a full 9 months to relocate, including aligning it with the typical school year.
Wordpress.com – Russian malware hidden in home folder
> No amount of mypy, pydantic, pyright, ruff, black, can convert python into a production language.

Ah yes, because Python was never used in production ever, not at Google, not at Dropbox, not ever.

The "static typing above all else" cargo cult is getting ridiculous.
In case anyone else is struggling with random Russian casino posts appearing in your wordpress.com website, I found the culprit.

The instance has 2 folders. htdocs & a read-only wordpress folder with sample content with I cannot alter.

The text in the sample matches the spam posts.
"./themes/organic-stax/1.4.6.1/demo/default-demo-content.xml: <content:encoded><![CDATA[Имеется множество формальностей, которые приходиться придер..."
(see pastebin link for more)

I have shared this with wordpress support and they stopped replying to my emails. Now I have to check and delete any new posts every day.

Will update if wordpress.com finally addresses this.
I always thought it was weird that something so complex, easy to mess up, and important to the government would require a third party external dependency. For a while towards the end it really kinda became a shining example of late stage capitalism. You, for all intents and purposes, NEEDED to do business with one of these handful of entities or you are in violation of the law. If you can't afford that you'll have to do this literally impossible stack of paperwork instead.
Can you elaborate on that, perhaps with some substantive example?

I believe that these companies lobby to keep IRS from providing free tax prep, but I do not think that they lobby to make the tax code more complicated.

It’s my understanding that the tax code is complicated as a result of disparate efforts to increase support among voting blocks, to encourage/discourage behaviors, and to reward supporters/backers.
That, and makes for a great low-impact scapegoat.