skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, the tax prep industry is a scam. Luckily, you don't have to use it. In my experience (Minnesota), the state return is super easy. Just print out the form, copy some values from the federal, do a little 5th grade math, and mail it in.

(Personally, I also do my federal taxes manually, with the IRS's Free Fillable Forms. But either way, there's no need to pay for the state forms.)
FTC sues Intuit for its deceptive TurboTax “free” filing campaign ( https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/03/... )
1552 points on March 29, 2022 | 596 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30846071

FTC judge rules Intuit broke law, must stop advertising TurboTax as “free” ( https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/09/ftc-judge-rules-... )
360 points 9 months ago | 89 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37441982
Who is the one actually charging for the state-filing, where is the money going? Is it the state, or the service provider?

This also reminds me of my apartment building, which has an “amenity fee” of $100/month for rooftop+gym usage, on top of the normal advertised rent. In the leasing office, I asked for details about it, and was told it’s a “non-optional” required fee which everybody has to pay. Stuff like that should be illegal - the only reason they would do that is to advertise lower rent.
It's a strange anomaly since most of the current top 100 of US top Fortune 500 based companies have engineers as their CEO [1]. You would have expected that Boeing to be led by engineers due to the scale of engineering involved in the plane constructions but nope.

[1] Top CEOs have this degree:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39680613
That's like failing to mention TempleOS in an article about operating systems.
Workers never were exploited anywhere anytime, and we should all thanks the holly invisible hand for all the peace and harmony it brought to the world thanks to the sacrosanct free market.

Pray with me my friend and soon we might see these evil States and awful laws that stands in the way of infinite unbridled profits come to an end.
I really want this general concept to be true from a “practicality sense” but am having trouble seeing it.

Expressed as a mathematical expression. Given a problem that arrives at timsort with galloping mode as the solution, how would you hear the initial problem, and then express the solution as timsort in order theory?

It feels like it would be awesome to do but also doesn’t feel like the logic of the algorithm would quickly be found simply by knowing order theory.
the Internet has generated vast digital language data in forums and publications, ads and opinion writing.. this is discussed in detail already.. there is concern about training on low-quality thinking and writing, and very much concern about using LLM output to train new LLM.. there is so much content needed for training, no group of humans can review it all. "bias" is the first word they use but really there are endless flaws that are possible.
That's interesting. It kinda reminds me of the AI effect [0] in the sense that the goalpost for mental disorders is moved based on the physical causes we discover, and how we might consider the goalpost will be further shifted (in a good way) as our understanding increases.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
There were two sets of bugs:

* the new sort handled ties differently. They adjusted that, and they could have stopped there.

* the other was that the correct drivers were sensitive to loading order. They handled this and another driver bug, amdtemp. This was masked by the old sort.

If they'd found this years later, even investigating the first set would be a slower process - it wouldn't be fresh in minds, and it likely would then have other code relying on it, so adjusting it would be trickier.
More like a full redo of the copyright system so it couldn't be abused like this.
Schools should teach Lego and such mechanics in particular as mandatory classes. Starting from first year with increasing complexity. Of course alongside classes for graph networks and their applications.
I'm just glad they're taking real steps to make it better on any level. My hope is that the states will follow suit
Works on my 2009 Honda and 2017 Chrysler.
Their definitely needs to be a balance, I gained a lot of weight with my full remote job.
I can't wait to see how all of this will come crashing down. I am old enough to understand that it will be some unique way that no one will see coming. Then there will be a few knuckleheads claiming they saw it all along after the fact.
AMD and Intel publish detailed GPU documentation.
They used to tell us you could stand an egg on its end on the equinox because the Earth was standing straight up and down. It really wasn't part of class, just something people mentioned. I even remember seeing a short news story of kids actually trying it in school. Then at one point one of my teachers pointed out people figured out you could do it any day of the year.
People don't feel like it's going well because they've been getting sticker shock every time they go to the grocery store for the last 2 years. Regardless of GDP numbers, or Wall Street turning record profits, or medium income growing, people aren't used to and don't like seeing a carton of eggs selling for 8 or 9 dollars.
Honestly I don't really care what current LLMs can do, I'm more interested in fundamental limitations of AI and I think the "it's just a file" argument is nonsense and the analogy makes sense in that regard.
Semantically Diverse Language Generation for Uncertainty Estimation in LLMs
> What’s crazy is expecting people with poor mental health to just “fix themselves”. Some may be able to, while others will struggle with it their entire lives without proper support and societal guardrails.

What has helped me is realizing that the only person that can fix me is myself. Nobody is going to do it for you.

I realize that's very sucky advice, though, akin to saying "just don't be depressed"
Some of their other courses that looked interesting to me:

https://www.elementsofai.com/ 2 courses: Intro & Building (apparently mostly math-based, coding is optional)

https://haskell.mooc.fi

TDD w/ javascript https://tdd.mooc.fi

Programming 101 (with Scala) https://plus.cs.aalto.fi/o1/
You can always file your taxes for free - you just get the forms and fill them out. In reality, that's essentially impossible or a waste of time for anyone with even slightly complex tax affairs so you're paying for preparation services - I have 57 pages of tax returns for this year, for example.
This brings me back to young me and my mechanic dad making a hydraulic car with Lego Technic. Isn't Lego just the best, for all ages and all walks of life?
I look forward to when they support filing for a LLC (sole owner) along with a W2.

I've used an accountant the last 2 years for filing because starting my LLC kicked my taxes up a notch into an area that I do not feel comfortable doing myself (via paid products). After I saw it done once for me it looked like it wasn't too bad but still not something I would do without software. Most of the work was just itemizing and categorizing expenses.
I think the standard approach is you sell your house after raising a family and retiring because you don't need the additional space but a young couple starting a family does. Then you and you partner buy/rent a small condo on the beach and enjoy retirement.
Job satisfaction in retail depends heavily on the particular clientele.
The average price for a dozen eggs is $2.86.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000708111
Ease of use?

Like why pay more for AWS when you can host things locallly. People just can't be bothered with the admin
A possible counterpoint here is The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data by Halevy, Norvig and Pereira.

https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...

Say what you will about the merits of this paper, it's hard to deny that it has been influential within the deep learning community.
That is not the algorithm or the black-box: that is using it loosely, intentionally, by humans.

It is another available piece of imposing power that can be used irresponsibly.
I love NetBSD. I used to dual boot it and OpenVMS on an old Alpha Server I rescued from my college IT department’s dumpster. Unfortunately I don’t have that machine anymore but it was a really fun toy.

NetBSD feels the most old school UNIXy and it’s a great way to keep old otherwise unusable machines alive.
Nice. I know that Brazil also built its first computer in 1972,it was called "Patinho Feio" ("ugly duckling"), had 4KB of memory and can be seen in this picture: https://gizmodo.uol.com.br/wp-content/blogs.dir/8/files/2022...

I was not aware about these Mexican computers. The fact that they had computers that could be programmed in LISP, not only in Assembly, is very cool.
Who starts a war is really a matter of perspective though. And often the answer, especially during the war, is that the other side started it and you had no choice.

Russia judtifies the Ukraine exactly the same way. And honestly it's really impossible to dispute, if Russia believed that Ukraine and/or NATO was posing a fundamental risk to Russian sovereignty or the Russian people, was their invasion offensive or defensive?

I have my own opinion to that, and it's the opposite of what Russia would say, but that doesn't mean I'm right and they are wrong.
It’s the service provider. You can file directly (paper forms, some states digital forms) with your state for free, but TurboTax et al charge you for it.
I am in that group you mentioned and this is not even a bad take. They might have been trying to imply ROS but that's also a very much not a well-targeted criticism either. Robotics is not bunch of humanoids moving their attached manipulators.

Next; this article appears in IEEE spectrum not Quanta. I want higher quality from IEEE as was the case for decades and it is not a pop science avenue. Good pop science is hard and other places do it much better.

This is just a mediocre blog article found somehow its way into IEEE which is very concerning about the quality of IEEE spectrum.
Solar panel import tariffs increase US module prices by up to 286%
FoodGuessr - guess the country of origin for some dish (https://www.foodguessr.com/)
Or inhumanity as the case may be. Some of the most egregious things in human history were covered by "just doing my job."
Give Helix a whirl: https://helix-editor.com/

It's a nice modal editor. Kinda feels like a halfway-point between Vim, Emacs and VS-Code.
Ever heard of English humour ? Neither do I. /s
What's the carrying capacity of this region? Without importing fuel, food, building materials, and water, what would the ground Amboy occupies look like?
When is it okay to let infrastructure expire?
How was this land used 500 years ago?

Passing through on a bicycle trip, I slept in the Amboy post office years ago. I appreciate that it was there and the door was unlocked (to give people access to their PO boxes, presumably), but I would have set up my tent otherwise. Amboy was not a destination, just an incidental location along the way, a relic of fossil-fuel culture.
If ML froze for the next ten years, we'd still be integrating everything we'd have today. The current progress of today has already reached a minimum threshold of quality.
Can you share an example on how to use it? For example, start with some example data as the input?
> it is an exhaustible skill to engage with so many “i need comfort not solutions” type stories and conversations.

Very much this. I'm in a similar situation myself, and I noticed at some point I started mentally begging for any of the complaint to be something solvable, because I'm running empty on comfort. It's especially hard when you heard the exact same complaint for like 5 times in the last two weeks; comforting stops feeling sincere just by sheer repetition.
Have you done anything interesting with what the guide has shared? I see people talking about how it's amazing but... where? in what?
FreeTaxUSA is pretty great. I've used it for 2 or 3 years now. Would definitely recommend, and it is getting better each year at making the process easier in my experience.

I tend to pay a little bit extra for services I don't necessarily need but whatever. Like Deluxe. It's way cheaper than what I would pay for a professional to do it, and still less than I'd pay for Turbo Tax or similar. As long as the quality of the app keeps going up and the price gouging stays out, I'll keep using it.
Could one point explain the other? A basically frozen real estate market prevented a lot of people from buying real estate - as a result they spent more money on consumer goods, which boosted salaries of low-income groups? If that's the case then once the real estate market unfreezes and people spend more on their homes rather than consumption we'll see the economy tipping over? Both because house prices stagnate (or even sink), thus making existing home owners feel less rich and because new home owners have less money to spend (because their money is going to the new mortgage).
If corporations can simply augment some generated text with the cheapest human labor available, without audiences noticing or caring so much that it affects their bottom line, they will do so. Corporations exist to optimize for cost/profit, nothing more.
Show HN - I made my own Perlin-like Noise in Google Sheets
Greetings HN!

If you're like me, you enjoy pushing the boundaries of software applications for fun and profit. In an abundance of that enterprising spirit, I've taken a unique approach to procedural generation using Google Sheets.

I created a Perlin-like noise generator, which I’ve named the "tentpole noise algorithm," relying entirely on cell formulas and MOD functions for pseudo RNG with a seeded approach.

Here's a breakdown of how it's structured:

First Layer - Establishing Tentpoles: The initial setup involves defining high and low points using modulus operations to determine peak positions:This mimics the function of tentpoles, setting the maximum and minimum

=IF(MOD(C$5,$C$1) + MOD($A7,$C$1)=0,IF(MD5(CONCATENATE($C$3,C$5,$A7))>"8",((HEX2DEC(RIGHT(MD5(CONCATENATE($C$3,C$5,$A7)),1))-5)*$C$4),0),0)

Second Layer - Canvas Logic: This layer applies logic to smooth the terrain between the tentpoles, simulating the canvas stretched over them

=IF(E9=0,(SUM(IF(D9=0,0,D9),IF(E8=0,0,E8),IF(F9=0,0,F9),IF(E10=0,0,E10))/2+SUM(IF(D8=0,0,D8),IF(F8=0,0,F8),IF(D10=0,0,D10),IF(F10=0,0,F10))/2+SUM(IF(C9=0,0,C9),IF(E7=0,0,E7),IF(G9=0,0,G9),IF(E11=0,0,E11))/4+SUM(IF(C8=0,0,C8),IF(D7=0,0,D7),IF(F7=0,0,F7),IF(G8=0,0,G8),IF(C10=0,0,C10),IF(G10=0,0,G10),IF(D11=0,0,D11),IF(F11=0,0,F11))/8)+5,E9)

Originally designed for terrain generation, this algorithm has been equally effective for simulating environmental attributes like moisture and temperature in my game.

Here’s a link to the spreadsheet in case anyone wants to see it in action. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/172yXQpKp1AeM89RiSsL8...

Once I had this working, I converted the logic to C# and put it into my project, Xyzzya — a platform that merges worldbuilding with advanced AI and procedural generation to create dynamic, living worlds. For more insights into how procedural generation shapes the core of Xyzzya, you can check out our latest blog post here: https://www.xyzzya.com/progress/xyzzya-adventure-mode-recent...

Note: I posted this on reddit over the past weekend, and it was well-received so I am sharing here. Original: https://www.reddit.com/r/proceduralgeneration/comments/1dapw...
Makes sense. Thanks! I like how you explain your algos in your Substack, I've subscribed to the newsletter. I'll send you an email if that's okay?
Kokotajlo is also a frequent poster at LessWrong, the favored watering hole for AI doomers who take Eliezer Yudkowsky seriously. I think that tells you all you need to know about him and why he left OpenAI.
I don't think society should treat "Stupidity Arbitrage" as an acceptable business model. These guys are predators, exactly like scammers that call up elderly people and try to get them to buy gift cards. We should have a clearly defined regulatory framework to get rid of them.
Super-compact internally-rotating combustion engine packs a solid punch
Thats not uncommon

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/build/arm64-windows-ab...
"Exploit" is such a classic motte-and-bailey word.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy
The word 'bot' is increasingly being used as an insult on social media
Yeah, but that's not the model being curious about things that it itself doesn't know, it'd be the model copying a human response (training sample) based on what that human didn't know.

To consider the difference, there might be some domain that the model was trained extensively on, and "knew" a lot about, but in a given context it might still act dumb and "show curiosity" just because it's mimicking a human response in that situation, not basing it's response on what it actually knows!
Astronomers observe giant outburst of a distant X-ray binary
That’s why it’s so useful to predict every possible type of implosion, so inevitably you’ll eventually be right.

A broken clock with 12 hands is right 24 times a day.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jun/09/foss... ("Far-right fossil fuel allies have launched a stunning and unprecedented campaign pressuring the supreme court to shield fossil fuel companies from litigation that could cost them billions of dollars.")

https://www.budget.senate.gov/chairman/newsroom/press/whiteh...

“Our investigation revealed how Exxon, Chevron, Shell, BP, API, and the Chamber worked in concert to mislead the public, policymakers, and investors with public promises to reduce emissions and meaningfully contribute to the transition away from oil and gas, while privately seeking to lock in continued fossil fuel production for decades into the future,” wrote Whitehouse and Raskin. “The investigation also demonstrated that the fossil fuel industry continues to knowingly obfuscate the dangers of natural gas, which they have billed as a clean and green fuel. This evidence, combined with the entities’ failure to comply fully with validly issued congressional subpoenas, suggests that further investigation by the executive branch is warranted.”

“Our investigation into the fossil fuel industry calls to mind the historic congressional investigation into deceptive practices of the tobacco industry and its trade associations, which led to investigations and litigation by several state attorneys general and the Department of Justice (DOJ),” they continued. “DOJ is well situated to pursue further investigation and take any appropriate legal action, as it has in similar cases involving the tobacco and pharmaceutical industries.”

Perhaps we disagree about the definition of the word "significantly"?
Radio signals detected in deep space defy conventional wisdom
A compiler for a toy language is easy. 99% of professional programmers probably could not implement a compiler for C.
> Maybe I should tell them it didn’t work for us.

You need to believe to achieve.
Probably worth noting that homes are owned by old people, and the old people are in control of the government, making policy that is self serving to the grest detriment of younger Americans. For example social security will end in about 10-15 years, after those old people like Mitch McConnel have gone to bed. Meanwhile the youngsters are paying huge sums into the ponzi scheme, and the cost to service US debt remains an unsolved problem. There was a good Ted talk recently by Scott Galloway highlighting just how badly the youth are getting screwed. I disagree with most all of his proferred solutions but he did a great job of describing the issue.
I use whatever comes default with Linux Mint (Xed? Nano?), because it's fast and all I want to do is type plaintext and name & save the file.
Agreed, it's not unlikely. The ideology of the latter typically does not recognise exclusively same-sex attraction. I know many old school gay men and lesbian women who are against it on that basis.
> Sadly, nothing else comes even close to Apple in terms of security and privacy, especially for someone who is not an infosec specialist and doesn't have time to read CVEs all day.

Even for someone that is not an infosec specialist, they should be using something like Graphene for phones and something like Qubes for their OS.

Apple isn't great at all honestly, at least in terms of MacOS security - they mostly benefit from not being worth the time to target.
> As a wise man once said - the good of the many outweigh the needs of the few

AKA, the tyranny of the majority.
All the older people I know still have the same homes they had when their kids left home 20 years ago. Some of them have the retirement home near a beach, but it's in addition to the one they raised their kids in.
Update to this: we've switched over our staging database, and the call to do that couldn't have been. more productive or more pleasant.

I got to talk to someone who was intelligent about Postgres, who answered various questions I had, who offered a few pieces of insight that I wouldn't have thought, etc.

Compared to every single support interaction I've ever had with Heroku for 10 years, and this was light years more friendly, informative, and productive.

I am so happy we're switching. Way to go Crunchy!
The original poster is correct, the majority of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. With no savings (in the personal finance sense).

Example:
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/banking/living-paycheck-to-pa...

What's challenging for you about these numbers? Your original response included mortgages in saving, which is atypical. If you exclude mortgages, which is typical, do the numbers make more sense?

> It is not like you are going to go in like a horribly confused idiot and randomly redefine tillage or something.

Try to remain on topic and avoid ad hominem, please.
Leetcode is not a means to learning best practices or going deep on some topic. It is a means to passing algorithmic interviews. Almost no leetcode "practitioners" will ever encounter the type of problems that require novel algorithm development. That's because these interviews do not resemble real world challenges most companies face. They exist solely to separate those who prep from those who don't. It's an effective measure for the big tech companies who get thousands of resumes per day. For most other companies it's unoriginal cargo culting. But it's also the reality we live in, so Leetcode continues to exist. Learning mathematics gets you further away from the goal of getting a job and is not practical (despite being a technically correct notion).
At the moment, yes. For a short while, it was very hard to find eggs for less than $5-6 a dozen due to a supply issue. Since then, some egg prices have fallen back to normal. Some egg producers, however, have decided that this new price is just fine for them, so you can still see that price on the shelf.
Honestly no reason the majority of this wouldn't apply to "non Apple" arm64. It's sort of like being worried about AMD x86 vs Intel x86. It mostly doesn't matter, except in some cases where it does, but you don't set out to say "I don't want to learn Intel x86, only AMD x86"

You learn arm64, then you can worry about if you need to deal with implementation specific ISA quirks.
> We are all different.

As a Linux user since Slackware 1.1, this is why I love linux. Apple says Think Different, but it's all the same. Linux is what you want it to be.