skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: I made a better Tax Estimator from my spreadsheet
Hey All,

I left my software career 2 months ago to write code that actually excites me. Ironically, the first thing I'm building is a tax tool.

A few years ago, I had a surprise 5-figure tax bill + penalties. Apparently the IRS withholds incorrectly even for simple wage income (becomes more of a problem for high earners). So I made a spreadsheet to estimate my taxes, and it got better and better over the years.

The spreadsheet worked, but without code it couldn't handle certain edge cases. And a lot of friends & coworkers mentioned they have the same tax issue. So I decided to make a web app out of it.

I think it's better than what's out there for a few reasons:

- You can quickly add your income sources and get immediate cumulative calculations-people often give up before making it to the end of the IRS or Turbotax estimators.

- There's a slider bar which tells you tax owed at any point in the year-great for quarterly payments because you won't need to go through the estimation process 4 separate times.

- You can click on each tax type to show a detailed breakdown of the calculation—I hate how existing tools just give you a number without explanation.

- You can save your tax estimate and update it later. People usually have taxable events throughout the year, and it's nice to quickly update the estimate rather than create a new one from scratch.

Tech Stack: Next.js, Supabase, Makerkit, Tailwind, Shadcn/ui, Echarts

I hope people find it as useful as I do, looking forward to any feedback!
Semi-relatedly, I had my parents sign up for https://www.charlie.com/
There are a bunch of great anti-fraud features including one that lets me be a co-pilot on their account.

Some features: it doesn't allow transactions while they are asleep, can block all transactions online except for merchants that you allow, limit international spend, and they have a feature that you can forward any email that you are curious about and it'll tell you if it's likely to be fraud.

highly recommend.
I still find it amazing how LLM translation capabilities are an almost accidental feature. Yet they still managed to leapfrog decades of research and billions of investment dollars in traditional machine translation.
Man, I envy the dedication and energy y'all have. I retired 10 years ago and have completely lost motivation and the ability to stick with anything.
BTW the key to getting work done in AVP while running on a machine (or any other active scenario, like housework or walking to the grocery store) is to enable some of the Accessibility features.

The normal dictation feature is so bad it is unusable for more than a sentence fragment. The one enabled via Accessibility is incredibly good, aside from a bit more latency than I’d like (but easy to get used to that), and enables mixed voice dictation and keyboard-typing, without switching modes.
i guess you could fine tune llama3 or something with your financial data, but I have no idea how that works or how effective it would be.

THere's a pdf somewhere online about Bloomberg training an LLM

https://www.bloomberg.com/company/press/bloomberggpt-50-bill...
Your definitely know your stuff !

For now as a POC we simply are using the t() function with a translation file. We'll see which features are important for us and we'll deep dive when needs be.

Thank you for your insight, I understand that translation is hard :)
Unlike other offshore bank havens, this one is fully transparent: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/boss.html
Self driving is a very difficult (and expensive to develop) engineering challenge.. I think it might end up being cheaper (and thus more likely) that the "solution" will be a legal one rather than an engineering one: Self driving vehicles will have a light and/or klaxon on them, if you see or hear it, it will be your responsibility to get out of it's way.

Thats how the issues with automobiles vs other road users was resolved in the 1920's. The impetus is there, corporations want more and more robots for everything.
I didn’t realize this was satire until the second paragraph. Well done.

As a firmware engineer who is trying to build a website in his spare time, I find CSS absurd. I’ve found SCSS and Sass make it much more bearable. The ability to represent a hierarchy concisely is awesome.
The only way to stop China from shipping bulk electronic components for these weapons over a multi-thousand-mile land border with Russia is for the West to wake up and start contemplating leveraging its power over China in the form of buying from other providers.. it's not enough to just buy from a neighbor that ships the goods from China and puts a package on them. It's also not enough to feel no pain and be unwilling to pay more because no one can bulk flood markets like China can.

The question is does the West have any guts here? Seeing Germany's chancellor pandering there this week suggests not
It is not so much an elite squad as more a bunch of people willing to spend the entrance fee and to commit their time. The exact requirements depend on the country you're in though.
So if that is your only concern but you are willing to spend time feel free to reach out.

About your actual question: The answer is "not really" no.
ETSI has a way to adopt existing standards: https://www.etsi.org/images/files/ETSI_PAS_Process_Guide.pdf
But CEN and CENELEC (which are probably relevant here) do not.

The effort from the blog post is partially about a long term plan to get the EU to change this. But in the short term it'll be hard to change the rules in time for the CRA standards.
Google Translate simply doesn't use a GPU for translation. It's as easy as that. There is a huge jump in cost associated with using the GPU.
Show HN: A free site to explore and discover 6,000+ plants
I’ve loved keeping plants since I was a kid. But the online world of plants can be confusing - strange vocabulary, plants going by conflicting names, and hundreds of niche websites. I wanted to create a site that would organize all of this info and make it easier to explore and discover new plants. That’s why I created GetAnyPlant, which aggregates and matches plants from dozens of online stores. It includes huge amounts of data on these plants along with filters and categories to help you search. You can also save plants to your wishlist and add notes to them.

I’m a data scientist by profession, so probably 80% of the work was totally new to me. I built v1 using wordpress , v2 using django, and v3 I pivoted to using react and next js for frontend.

I would greatly appreciate any feedback on the site as well as any advice on how to grow it.
Didn't "Attention Is All you Need" bill transformers primarily as a translation model?
I switched back to an iPhone SE, and it’s so much better at UX. There’s a single home button that removes you from any app. Swiping down from the top anywhere brings up your notifications. Swiping up from the bottom anywhere brings up controls. Double tapping the home button while locked brings up your credit cards, which are also authorized because the home button has a fingerprint reader. Holding down the power button brings you to the power off screen. This phone has functionally been an upgrade in usability across the board compared to my iPhone mini.
I only dabble with recreationally reverse engineering industrial/consumer grade HW and following blogs/conferences, so I can only provide a rough shotgun of search terms to try and hit something you're interested in:

- The Glasgow interface explorer is an example of a smaller FPGA making interface level RE tooling more accessible.

- The Chipwhisperer hardware has a focus on power supply glitching, side-channel attacks and general hardware security education/testing.

- There's a handful of FPGA-based implementations intended for high-speed protocol sniffing/MiTM (TCP/IP, USB and CANBus are both pretty common) on github etc, Cynthion is one example.

- Some recent projects have been trying to implement and improve the FOSS ARM Cortex programming and trace experience, Orbuculum ORBTrace probe is an example though the benefits aren't fully realised yet.

- In an odd use-case for an FPGA, I've personally seen hardware that enforces brutal/paranoid DRM/licencing via customised downloaded bitstreams to guards against reverse-engineering/copy efforts, all to most likely run a soft-CPU. I've read (unsubstantiated) that this approach appears on some military hardware.

- Slightly adjacent to specific FPGA projects, but the SDR tooing ecosystem has lots of cool stuff to play with for wireless signal identification/spoofing/re-implementation. HackRF, LimeSDR, GNUradio etc. If you want to get deep then there's lots of overlap with custom FPGA implementations.
Shoot down the planes before they drop them. Commentary on this recent trend usually attributes it to weak Ukrainian air defences, for example in this article:

> Russia’s air force appears to have been a key player in turning the tide of the war in the Kremlin’s favour in recent months at a time when Ukraine’s air defences are at a low ebb.

But also:

> The Ukrainian analysts write: “Russia uses UMPC bombs primarily to hit its targets in frontline areas, minimising the possibility of its own aircraft being hit by Ukrainian air defences. In just one week, from 26 February to 3 March, Russia used more than 500 [guided aerial bombs with a mounted UMPC]”.
Yes there are all kinds of capabilities that exist and that can be rapidly developed and refined to target these. The West would certainly be doing so if it were being attacked directly
GNU gnulib: calling for beta-testers
"that is video proof out of Zelensky's office"

Similar footage came out in 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea and the west just shrugged their shoulders and put sanctions on Crimea then kept trading with Russia like nothing happened.
Does it actually solve that problem, though?

In the photo demo all content is either 1-column or 2-column wide - and that already results in some very noticeable gaps. I don't get the impression that it can properly handle arbitrary aspect ratios. You're pretty much forced to stick to a single column width and fit all images to match, so not exactly an improvement over what we already have right now.
A leaderboard for speed runners would be interesting :)
You're right on expanding get on the hill. I didn't want to get too much in the weeds, but thank you for explaining it better.

I would push back a bit on your second point and say that there are many decisions around tactics made in business that are not confirmed with higher ups. This is why your expanded first point is so important. People at all levels of the org are making decisions all the time and you want them to have the most complete picture possible when doing so.
it's better on HN because you can get it combined with snide insinuations that they could have created a better layout system that would do all the things that CSS does, but also fix the various problems that CSS has.

However the glory days are evidently behind us, because these insinuations never end with "in a weekend" anymore.
I have never had typescript really get in my way and it does have an escape hatch if you need it so, personally, I would always prefer to use it.
Moreover a man with two watches takes the average and gets closer to knowing what time it actually is...
Given all of those pearl clutching adjectives used by the EFF in the article, it should be trivial that catalog a litany of the great injustices that have occurred. There’s Trump’s Russia-buddy Carter Page, and …

When the extremists on both sides oppose something - it’s probably a good idea.
Looks like a cool platform, but you won't be paying $1600 USD https://shop.unitree.com/en-gb/products/unitree-go2?variant=... :

> $1,600.00 USD

> Shipping costs $399 per unit, Remote Countries $500-$1000

> Not include customs duties, Please comply with local customs laws pay customs duties and clear the goods

By the time you are done, you will be paying between $2000 and $3500 for the base model. It might still represent good value, but it's still more than it is advertised.
The keyboard controls are particularly satisfying. Well done.
CSS is adding native nesting: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_nesting...
Modern version: As I put on my second watch, an error bar appeared and the boss music started playing.
Marble Madness vibes. One of my favorite nostalgia games.

I think having 3 lives per level with it resetting just that level might be better for starters, then the 3 lives for the entire game being a “hard mode”.
How much is the aggregate spending on YouTube videos?
The irony is that one of the largest contributions to the public library system was one of the richest guys ever. Carnegie funded over 2500.
In this regard the Netherlands is ahead of Denmark, and Amsterdam is ahead of Copenhagen — but it would probably still feel like minor quibbling compared to Iowa or wherever my colleague is from.
Adding ESLint and Auto-Fixing an Existing TypeScript Project
it's all they know about the real world!
I would argue many stories on hacker news are boring and just people self-fellating themselves. Who cares and to each their own my dude.
As I understand it, the hard part of a masonry layout is ensuring that items are laid out with the first items near the top of the screen and the last items near the bottom of the screen.

If you just plop your items into columns, the first items will all appear in the first column and the last items will all appear in the last column (left to right), which is not the behavior you want.

To my knowledge, the correct behavior cannot currently be created in CSS alone. (Or if it can, it must be a wild hack.)
Those are typically called "UMPK" rather than "UMPC"; the system is essentially analogous to the Western JDAM-ER - GNSS/inertially guided add-on kit to convert a dumb bomb into a guided, glide bomb.
Yes, it was primarly for translation. I don’t know how OP come to the conclusion that it was accidental
I don't think the world has invented a better pointing/control device than a mouse + keyboard: trackballs are nice, but the ball gets sweaty quickly, and they're not as fast. Touch interfaces are nice, but they're nowhere near as precise as the mouse. Trackpads are nice, but they stress the palm more than a mouse.

Similarily, VR interface would be nice, but I don't think it will be as precise as the mouse. Maybe the interfaces themselves will compensate, as they do now for touch controls, by making everything bigger and putting a lot of empty space, but will it be better? I doubt it.

Human hand has evolved to use physical tools, not by waving empty hands in the air to show abstract concepts. So I'm not sure why some people think the latter is some kind of natural behavior for humans. We use sticks, hammers, knives. Physical stuff. We have to know how it feels, what is the weight, the texture of the surface. By moving everything to virtual space we are depraving ourselves a large part of our senses. Is that better? Not for me.

A better way would probably something that would not depend on the eyes that much, and would provide the same/better control than a mouse can give. Not only this would use more senses, but also would actually improve the quality of life of all people with severe vision deficiences. Currently we all put everything related to IT to the eyes; and if our eyes fail, then we're f*cked. And technology should be there to support and protect us.
Yes, but the translation model in the “Attention is All You Need” was trained on parallel sentences (input: English sentence, output: French). LLMs such as Claude are not trained on any labeled data. Yet, they still surpass the special-case models.
There is a simulation. The simulation was even loaded to a robot that then behaved disturbingly like a worm.

What does 'unsolved' mean in this context?
If you try to translate anything more than a single sentence with Google Translate you get looks of confusion. It's too literal.

GPT-4 is much more natural.
L’aerOnde: Another Way to Fly
Venezuela to accelerate cryptocurrency shift as oil sanctions return
And the key takeaway of the T5 paper was also how "instructions" could vary massively.

But the main instructions were two types - summarise x, and translate y to z.

Translation in many ways was the root of seeing that multiple tasks/instructions could fit a model and not just in the context of multiple training loss methods, like NSP vs Gap filling(a modus of training difference, not actual task itself).

And the special tokens for BERT etc trace their origins back to enabling the task above and positional embeddings(and encodings). Which largely trace their origin to translation work.
Can confirm for Slovenian too, Google Translate is so bad it doesn't even compare.
Translation is the reason transformer models exist.

Every other use case is basically an accidental feature
Two SEC lawyers resign after agency censured for abuse of power in crypto case
Problem: the Norks actually are starving, have a poor but fairly large standing army, and are sitting on China's border, and are not estranged from South Korea, on a personal level. China would prefer not to have a humanitarian catastrophe on it's borders, starving people looking for food, causing mayhem. Gunning the starvies down antagonizes the South, needlessly, and of course, having an unstable state actor as a loose ally is not the worst thing in the world. Iran has Hezbollah. China has the Norks. America... spends a lot of time vetoing UN resolutions against allies in the Levant, do they not?
Not only that, but it also beats all the Grammarly et al, and on top of that it understands all my commands - "make it less stiff", "please make it less casual", "be ironic" etc.

ChatGPT is still better due to it being less castrated and less likely to actually refuse my commands, but Claude works very well with text, when it works.
It is a really really really bad sign that these companies feel the obsessive need to lie and distort around what are safety-critical incidents. Where is the safety culture? If this is how it's going to be, why on earth should we trust them to deploy them on public streets?
Google Translate is just terrible anyway. The other day I was using it to read some difficult Kanji and found that it didn't recognize は as being "wa" in certain places, which is something you learn in like your second or third Japanese lesson. And of course it was useless for the Kanji too.
Here are some other potential posts that could be written in the same style:

Using a Space Shuttle to Go Grocery Shopping

Employing a Symphony Orchestra to Play Happy Birthday

Using a Chainsaw to Cut Birthday Cake

Driving a Formula 1 Car on a School Run

Booking a Five-Star Hotel for a Nap
Well consider a system built on the assumption of conservation of energy. Then a few product iterations the system might start leaking energy into the environment. Maybe it's the neodymium magnet in some unrelated component leading to eddy current braking?
It sounds like you have simply not experienced the problems that loosy goosy types cause. They tend to be biggest when you're working on large projects and on other people's code.

If you've only done small projects or projects where you are the primary author then you may not run into the issues. You essentially end up doing what Typescript does but in your head without writing anything down.

The problems it solves are:

* Bugs! It catches lots of bugs.

* Navigating code efficiently. You can just click stuff to go to its definition or uses.

* Refactoring code reliably. You can now rename variables without making mistakes.

* Reading code. It can be extremely difficult to understand code without static types because you don't know what anything is or where anything goes unless you run it (which can be very difficult).

Not Typescript, but as an example I was trying to understand some code in Gitlab like `auto_cancel_from_rules.merge(auto_cancel_from_config)`. "what does `merge` do?" I wondered.

Literally could not find it. You can't search for `merge`, way too many results. I don't know what the types of the variables are so I can't look it up. I spent about 15 minutes looking around and eventually gave up.

With static types you can literally just click it and it will take you to the definition.
Orders of magnitude more energy necessary though.
So, the background story is that CSSWG DevRels from browser vendors are debating how to formally include the Masonry layout into CSS, at least since 2020, when Firefox first proposed it.

The news here is that people at WebKit decided to push the debate to the public, inviting designers and developers to take some action (“post to social media, write blog posts”), in order to get past this.

While it may look just like a formality, I think this will make an important precedent. The real underling debate here is either to treat every layout option as a part of the CSS Grid, or keeping adding new CSS Display proprieties as necessary.

The first option will make even more complex the (already convulsed, IMHO) CSS Grid specs, the latter will bloat the CSS specs with a load of new proprieties (and related sub-proprieties).

Either way, it's not as easy as it looks.
In my opinion, JavaScript's main advantage is that it can be run in browsers in addition to other (i.e. server) environments.

If you're building something simple, and the type/shape of function parameters is either very obvious or very well-guarded, TypeScript's returns diminish.

However:

As a reviewer of complex code, I want to see annotations so that I can better understand what I'm reviewing.

As an author of complex code, I want to clearly communicate the intent of functions I write, so that they are not misused by other developers.

As someone who supports the use of my software, I want to reduce errors by guaranteeing the correct types/shapes of function arguments.

...and I'm just getting started. These are all very compelling needs in my experience.
If that's your point then it is simply wrong. Final does not allow the compiler to devirtualize calls through a base pointer, it only eliminates the virtualness for calls through pointers to the (final) derived type. The compiler can devirtualize calls through base pointers in others ways (by deducing the possible derived types via whole program optimization or PGO) but final does not help with that.
I just am old school because I will ALWAYS prefer printed material over digital. I dread the day that physical goods finally vanish.
I'd be surprised to hear anybody with intimate knowledge of CSS claiming to understand CSS.
Yes, that's fair.

Sure, today we have grid and vanilla CSS is sane and useable by anyone who takes the time to learn the modern way of doing things.

But let's not forget what a long and tortured road CSS has taken to become what it is today. CSS was a total dumpster fire up until around when flexbox came out. It was SO HARD to make it do what you want for SO LONG.

The MOST BASIC NOTION of layout, putting things in a freaking grid, was missing from CSS for almost two decades. Yet, the grid concept has been around in application layout since the 1980's. I can't explain why it took CSS such a long time, and the explanations I've heard don't seem plausible to me.

It's understandable that folks who were around in the bad days of CSS are still kind of bitter. I was, and if I didn't take the time to see the new ways of using it, I would still be incredulous about CSS.