skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This kind of take is only true if you haven't given the tax system any thought at all and just want to dunk on the IRS to get upvotes

The govt only has an idea of what you might owe from "official" information (W2s), Since we don't live in a totalitarian society where the govt knows everything about you.

Filing taxes is the govt telling you to make sure to report anything they do not know about.

Also you do not go to jail for getting your taxes wrong, you go to jail if you fail to fix them after being audited or fraud.
It is not a crime to make a mistake. Who the hell is telling you this?
Yeah. I think the tax prep companies try to spread the image of the IRS as some giant evil fiend who will steal all your money and/or apply the death penalty to you if you file your taxes wrong. But no, they just want what they're owed, no more and no less. Some years back, I accidentally used the "single filers" tax table instead of the "married filing jointly" tax table, and the IRS actually mailed me a check returning my overpayment amount out of the blue some weeks later.
A buddy of mine started me on a similar habit that I find obnoxious but impossible to kick.

It started when we were in a meeting with an executive (who was a wonderful man) who -- due to nerves -- used the filler phrase "ya know" about twice a sentence -- like someone who's nervous might use the filler word "um" or "uh."

When the meeting was over, I'd joked that he'd said "ya know" three times in the same sentence and without missing a beat he said "541, I counted"[0]. He went on to explain that when someone repeats a word/phrase, especially if it's a word that's used "to sound intelligent", he can't help but count.

Incidentally, despite having no reason to be suspicious[1], I didn't believe him and being in an IT department with its share of folks with social anxiety and various forms of autism[2], it took all of a day before we were in another meeting with someone who, I think, pronounced "infeasible" as "in-THESE-able." A minor mistake, but he repeated it a solid thirty times and liked to really push that emphasis on the second syllable. We got out of the meeting and I asked for his number. "37"[0] he said. I was one off. It ended up becoming a weird sort of corporate meeting game that we did a few times a month over 17 years. It's a ridiculously easy habit to pick up, it turns out. I've been out of that job for years and I still do it. No real reason, any longer. I don't think less of people who don't have a solid command of public speaking -- as in, I'm not doing it for the purpose of feeling superior or being a d!ck and pointing it out to them. The only people that know I do this (other than readers of my comments on HN) are my kids and the guy who got me hooked.

[0] The exact number escapes me but it was a suspiciously random sounding number

[1] This guy marched to the beat of a different drummer. I have so many stories of outlandish claims he made that turned out to be absolutely true by this point that I should have taken him at his word. By this point he'd shown me a receipt indicating his bill was less than a dime for what must have been two carts worth of groceries (early 2000s), and it was only a dime because he bought something from the register to avoid a negative balance (a problem he's navigated in the past).

[2] Myself and (I suspect) my friend are diagnosed ASD as well.
I don't know how anybody can read a story and think giving these jokesters (the IRS) MORE money is going to fix anything and not just pile it deeper and higher. These people terrorize the lives of law-abiding and tax-paying citizens.

Something is so fundamentally wrong at that organization. Whatever DOGE is doing I doubt it's going far enough.
>Nitpicking? Minor quibble? It was the major point that the user brought up.

Not really. The major point the user brought up: "I would not say anyone is ‘automatically’ questioning Trump’s character or intelligence. There is plenty of evidence he has neither." That's like reading comprehension 101.

>First sentence, right here. It's complete dishonest framing to make what Trump said seem as bad as possible. Which just goes back to the parent user's comment:

Not really.

>> Everyone on both sides automatically thinks the worst about everyone on the other side these days, usually just to score some internet points.

Exactly what you did to the other poster. The other poster was clearly saying there is great reason to not assume the best about Trump. Your response? Ignore that and bicker about a minor detail.
We could do that in the US as the IRS has everything they need. The reason we don't is that there are people in Congress who believe that taxes should be a big pain so people resent the IRS and want to gut it. And companies like Intuit want it to be a pain so they can keep making money essentially rent seeking.
Towards the end of this article, the author recommends and links to another article about doing your own taxes[1]. I think this is a good suggestion. I've been doing my own taxes for years. In my experience, it is about the same level of effort as using the tax software. Instead of typing your numbers into tax software, you type the same numbers directly into the IRS's forms[2] and maybe use a calculator a couple of times. While there are some nooks & crannies that may take some time to figure out the first time you do them, the general approach is always the same: add up your incomes, subtract your deductions, apply tax to the difference, subtract your contributions. Done. Keep that algorithm in mind and it's quite easy to just follow the directions and see how each step is accomplishing each part of the algorithm. The first time you do it yourself, you can compare your final return against what the tax prep software did for you last year to sanity check your results.

If I was running my own business or something, I'd probably hire an accountant, but for individuals who only have some W-2s and 1099s and stuff, it's just an hour or two of simple math and you're done.

[1] Sadly has more AI generated slop at the top, but what're you gonna do. https://www.mikekasberg.com/blog/2024/03/15/i-did-my-own-tax...

[2] https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/free-file-fillable-form...
> The trusted and valued employee yesterday can turn on a dime and become malicious when they feel they have been wronged regardless of whether that is independently true.

On the flip side, treating them like a crook seems more likely to inspire that kind of revenge instinct. Most people would understand removing privileged access immediately but giving them a dignified exit seems more likely to prevent problems.
It's not really possible to have nice uncontested stats about this because the definitions of the rounds aren't fully neat, there are potentially generational effects, and how you divide up industries isn't fully neat either.

In a typical year, a double-digit number of tech companies IPO (there was a big jump in 2021 and then a crash in 2022/2023, with 2024 seemingly back in the double-digit range). https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-four-decades-of-u-s...

Let's be really clear, though: there's "getting good value for options" and then there's "getting some value for options." It is straightforwardly true that in general big public companies have better comp than pre-IPO companies: the guaranteed value of equity in your Metas or Googles or even lower-tier public companies is generally higher than the expected value of pre-IPO equity, even if you are relatively risk-insensitive.

That is importantly different from "the value of pre-IPO equity is zero," or "it is a one-in-a-million event to get value from pre-IPO equity."
I recently did something similar with a iMac G3. It was pretty fun to relieve some of my childhood past. We didn't have an iMac at home but we did at our school computer lab and the bright colors made the computer feel not only approachable but also fun. There's still a pretty active PPC community out there by the way.
Which one of those options was the default for command+L? I also find it’s always auto applying changes despite those options being off…just seems a lot less smart suddenly.
> The government should make all this easier. The US is one of the only countries in the world where people have to report their own income to the government every year (and a big reason for that is the companies like TurboTax that make so much money from it). In almost all cases, the government already knows how much tax you owe before you tell them anything. If fixing this was a priority for our politicians, none of us would have to file taxes ever again!

The conclusion makes a lot of sense. So many people wasting so much time is extremely expensive for the USA. And all of that waste is created because a couple of corporations bribe politicians to make public services worse. (And probably because the goverment can say that they "saved" money by not spending what is required to make it less wasteful).
Pretty flawed also really.

Basically, anyone that paints knows that the more colours are mixed, the more they tend to brown. Yet because of that misunderstanding in the 1960s in Caltech, in CS more colors = white.

Crazy stuff. A great example of technical debt in systems design where we have all this jazz like sRGB, HSL, HSV, etc, trying to reset that basic mistake in physics from 60 years ago.
(I can't tell if you are serious or making a joke ... but ...) You can ask here - https://superuser.com/ - and someone will tell you how to do it.
In the past I’ve been happy with the irs. One year I had to sell a domain to Sony because they trademarked it and so I could no longer use it for my initial purpose. I got a decent amount of money and included it as income. A few years later I got a letter from the irs saying it should have been classified in some other manner and here is your refund.

But lately they’ve been terrible. With every correspondence i send I get a letter months later saying they got my letter/form/etc but haven’t had time to review it yet. This goes on for over a year before it’s resolved. They’re sitting on lots of refunds for me…
I worked at a company with a US division and a German division.

It was stark, the difference in process between the two countries. Leadership was openly complaining about how they couldn't close out shuttering the company because it was going to take six months to handle legal compliance in Germany.

This was during an all-hands, and one delightfully brave soul who knew it didn't matter much what he said since we were all exiting anyway commented in the public channel "Because of those laws, the American employees also get a six-month heads up instead of a locked door when they drive in in the morning, so today, we're all very grateful to Germany and our German peers."
Now you're living life large with jetbrains and making the big bucks !
The Secret Update of Super Mario Bros. 3 – Behind the Code: Version Control [video]
The Venn diagram of people who are sophisticated enough to make these kinds of investments with better odds than gambling and people for whom $10k is hard to scrape together is indistinguishable from two circles. I'm sure there are some in the intersection but it's such a small piece of the pie we can effectively call it zero.

If you want to gamble that's your right I'm sure there is a roulette table somewhere near you. But the social harm caused by allowing dentists and grandmothers to invest in seed stage startups greatly outweighs any social good caused by letting that near-zero overlap get rich a little easier.
You know how it worked for you. What you described is not a legal requirement and many other people have had different experiences.
because EU and US are less and less "allies"
> The use of @fieldParentPtr here [...]

the *hypothetical* use here...

This simple example as written is actually correct, and not actually unchecked illegal behavior. But this is just a bit of pedantry, because it would be unchecked illegal if you use this in a more complicated example.

I mention it because it's important to note, it can be done correctly, as you obviously just did it correctly, by accident. That said, I still agree, there're no guardrails on this pattern.
I personally don't distrust doctors, I'm just depressed at the complete lack of support I've received from them. I've been on a waiting list to have a first appointment about being trans for like 2 years now, I gave up and started sourcing my own medication nearly a year ago now
If you gut the IRS are taxes abolished too? How does that work?
I think there's more nuance than that to it. I've made mistakes on my taxes, not been charged with a crime.

Small oops mistakes, I've never heard of someone being charged criminally.

BIG "yeah that was intentional" kinda obvious under-reporting of income, that turns into charges at times.

I actually had a big misunderstanding in terms of amounts once where the IRS thought I cashed out a large 401k. They simply sent me a letter and we mailed back and forth and I showed them that in fact I didn't cash it out and it just moved and it was all good.
At least in public companies there are enough safeguards where I think a reasonable person could be fine with it.
That's actually very routine with TurboTax. This year when I filed through them they had duplicated a mortgage and also some charitable donations because I did the form and then they asked me again anyway as I clicked back through their interface.
The greatest border in the world, headed down the commode.
Sell the liscense
Liberals' trust in authority figures has soared since 2016. It's not just doctors, but also the FBI, CIA, and the Pentagon. Anything that seems critical of Trump, even in a symbolic way, is trusted.

I think incidences of injustices and abuse of trust from institutions actually strengthens movement liberal support of them. I think they see corrupt institutions as the most vulnerable to Trump attacks, and therefore the most in need of defense.
It is following the Fundamental theorem of software engineering, another level of indirection.
This is true, but progress is being made.

https://directfile.irs.gov/ is the IRS' direct file service, for those interested. It is supported in concert with 25 states from a tax filing perspective, and is free. From their email newsletter, improvements are rolling out month by month (continual expansion of tax scenarios supported).

https://www.irs.gov/filing/irs-direct-file-for-free
I actually meant it as a good thing! Our industry plays very loose with terms like "developer" and "engineer". We never really defined them well and its always felt more like gate keeping.

IMO if someone uses what tools they have, whether thats an LLM or vim, and is able to ship software they're a developer in my book.
I’m exactly in your target market. Some feedback:

1. The UI is not very usable on mobile. The date selector is not intuitive and it’s not clear if the budget is per night or overall.

2. What do you mean what kind of traveler am I? This is for a digital nomad, I’m going to be mostly working. None of the options that you showed made any sense. Also, why would I need to choose all of these before showing me the options? Just show them on the map and color code them according to the traveler type, if that is so important.

I went through like 3 screens and then gave up. Didn’t get a listing.
Darwin Awards

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_Awards
You do not go to prison. This is a lie the tax prep lobby wants you to perpetuate. The IRS sends you a letter letting you know what you did wrong. If you agree, you either pay them the difference or cash the check they sent you. If you disagree, you file a dispute and there's a whole system for handling that.

Yes, it's stupid that we do it this way, but there's no need to propagate the tax prep lobby's fear mongering.
same here, one year after i got a similar letter, nothing occurred, it's really slow.
I'm not dismissing LLMs, but there's a reason that the current crop of LLMs aren't writing hit scripts for TV shows, books, etc. The suggestion to use a "magical effect" is the equivalent of asking an LLM, "How can I break into this password protected computer?", and it responds, "You should use an exploit.".
The findings in TFA are much more politically neutral than the knee jerk HN "republicans bad" commenters seen to believe. Which is something many of you should pause and reflect on.

braces for the downvotes
> Like what?

Like drug companies spending millions wining and dining doctors for them to recommend their products.
That, too, has been a factor of my thinking as of late. There was a time where I would have left a job (or manager) if I didn't like it that much or if I just had something I wanted to do where the job got in the way of it. I've quit my job to work on an app, and another time I quit both because I hated the job and so I could work on a hardware-based project. I knew I could just get a job again when I need one, and luckily I did both times. Today, I wouldn't do that... or at least not unless the level of intellectual pain caused by a job were just that severe. Not only had the software industry desperately needed an adjustment for quite some time, but the job market is kinda bad all-around, and I do think that many are in denial about how AI will probably suck up a lot of the programmer jobs that subgeniuses such as myself are capable of. My current manager isn't that bad but, if they were as bad as the worst manager I've had, I would just maintain the mindset of coasting and not letting the stupidity get to me.
I wonder if the pulling motion helps with less tearing too. From my limited understanding of drafting and painting, humans are able to exhibit much better control when pulling a pencil/brush toward them than when pushing away.

I’ve only ever used a western-style push planet, but intuitively I think I’d have more control with one designed for pulling.
Why Import Tariffs Are Identical to Export Taxes
Solve real life problems from work. It's easy to solve problems, so practice being a problem spotter.
I really dont' care about the names, but given this massive valuation and the value of asset from security perspective, I can see some similarities. Of course 1.2 bn in 2013 is not 36bn in 2025... but still seems (to me at least) a massive over-valuation if you consider the workforce size, or the fact this company sells nothing (explicitly at least), but only collects data.

So I guess this data was either super useful, or it was a way to take some money out from the corpo in a very convenient way. But I can tell you there are hundreds of map companies which crowdsource one way or another, and dozens if not more navigation companies, and none was similarly valued in 2013.

MapBox is valued at 1.2b in 2023, though it's much more influential than WAZ for the whole GIS market (which is 0.8 in 2013 money perhaps). Carto is valued at roughly $350m, TomTom, a market leader is at $500m iin 2025, so you tell my how Waze is 1.2bn at time of acquisition in 2013, having had zero technical or other innovative contribution for the geomatics or gis or web cartography? It was created to avoid road closures in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv?

I mean - let's put this in perspective for a moment, and somebody tell me why was Waze priced at 1.2bn if not for its founders and its very useful crowdsourced data.
Most nations I lived in, I got a bill or refund for taxes. In general it is "here is your bill/refund. If you disagree you have to prove you are right and we are wrong" - the government-prepared tax return model.

It is not this "we know how much you supposed to pay, but you tell us first, then we will charge you interest and penalty if you guess wrong, and you have to prove you are right and we are wrong" - the self-assessment model.

The government-prepared tax return model does work well for most simple returns. As soon as it gets a bit more complex it becomes an issue. there is also a concern with separation of duties, missing deductions, and the fight to get correction remains. Finally, government math is about as safe as bathing with piranhas with a bloody nose.

Maybe a hybrid solution?
Elephant in Cairo (Byte Magazine, 1989)
Nice design. Does it work with side loaded books for the highlights?
D’oh! It completely flew over my head. Thanks. I’ve heard people who are really into trains bill rail travel as being worth it purely for the experience, so it sounded plausible that they were arguing it seriously
Can you explain why? Last time I checked we're still in NATO and my country stil hosts a US nuclear deterrent(against Russia). What part of that has changed?

Temporary internal economic disputes (these happen all the time, especially between EU members) have little to do with military alliances against external threats.
This is a total tangent, but we can't have 100% safe knives because one of the uses for a knife is to cut meat. (Sawstop the company famously uses hot dogs to simulate human fingers in their demos.)
They don't really know how much you owe.

And that only works if you have one income, and if you only have one income filing your taxes is that easy
I worry that practical tips to deal with an unjust system, and success stories that demonstrate their use, undermine the will to fix the unjust system.
Nope. Neovim. And even there some of the "distros" got on my nerves. I guess at one point I'll just learn Neovim's API and make my own blend like everyone else.

NOT looking forward to it. But I suppose there's no other way.

I still view Neovim as a huge improvement over Emacs though.
They're abolished as long as you can afford the lawyers to fight an underfunded government agency indefinitely.
Only if you don't examine that proposition at all.

You still have to review AI generated code, and with a higher level of attention than you do most code reviews for your peer developers. That requires someone who understands programming, software design, etc.

You still have to test the code. Even if AI generates perfect code, you still need some kind of QA shop.

Basically you're paying for the same people to do similar work to what they do now, but now you also paying for an enterprise license to your LLM provider of choice.