skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Couple of notes.

1) The IRS itself gets most of the tax advice wrong that it gives out to taxpayers

2) Paying taxes is one of the few transactional relationships you have with your government. If you ask me, a government representative should come to your office and you should pay him in cash, not hide and automate taxes so that they disappear.

3) There is a difference between a simple tax system and a tax system that is simple to operate. Taxpayers deserve a simple tax system. Continuing to automate the byzantine monster we already have is a terrible, terrible idea. How would reform ever take place?

4) Think for a minute what this implies: that a government agency that is responsible for collecting money should also be the sole source for computing how much money is owed. Where else would you allow such a conflict of interest? Should the police come by your house to determine what crimes might have been committed? Would you want inspections by the local health department of your private cookout? Right now we have administrative courts and such, but the principle is fairly clear: reporting by the citizen, oversight and acceptance of reporting by the government, and the court system to sort out problems. You don't start putting everything in one bag under the name of ease-of-operation. That's whacked.

5) I do not believe these candidates campaigned on this. What I believe they said (or meant) was that the system should be simple enough to eliminate the burden on the taxpayer, not that compliance with a bad system should be automated.

As a side note, have any of these people ever created software or worked for a project inside the IRS? The guys I know that have could tell you horror stories. Testing alone should give anybody who knows programming and the IRS nightmares. This is a tremendously bad idea, both from an execution and a structural standpoint. When something doesn't work, the answer isn't to just do it harder or throw computers at it.

Having said all of that, having the IRS give you the information that's already been entered once so you don't ever have to re-enter things? Excellent idea.

ADD: Completing taxes is not hard because we don't have technology applied in the correct manner. It's hard because the tax code is a complex, unintelligible POS. The only people benefitting from continuing to hide the POS that the tax code is are those folks who made it complex in the first place (And will continue to add to its complexity the more that we ignore it)
Yes, but penalties do so there is a big incentive to maximize income from penalties. I was hit by this recently, by not filing a no-income return, and not certified mailing another return that was lost, but I wasn't alerted until 2 years later when they levied $4k in late fees. It used to be easy to get out of these penalties, but there are several accounts from uppers at the IRS that they have been sitting in meetings discussing cracking down on fee collection, no longer waiving fees etc.
What? This post criticized corporations (Jackson-Hewitt in particular). The point was that people need to take individual responsibility for their tax liability.
Stop telling people about that DMV branch in city hall! It's one of the best kept secrets in St Louis.
I think there are some cases when storing passwords in clear text is valid. One example:

A website has educational content. Teachers can sign up students in their classrooms. The teacher's password is stored securely, the student's password is not. The student password is shorter and automatically generated. The goal is to make the password just hard enough to not be guessed by other students, but not so hard that the student can't remember it. It is stored in clear text so that the teacher can look it up for the student, or print out the password to pass out to the student, etc. The student account is only given access to the content. The worst thing that happens if a student's password is guessed is that another student can mess up their progress tracking.

Is there a reason the student passwords should be encrypted in the database?
Windows 8 tip - manually update apps yourself
We will soon have these ad networks to enforce us with laws that prohibit adblocks all together by calling the act of blocking ad as "piracy" and "theft" since we are not "paying" for the content provided. We can't let that happen, these networks must be put down as fast as possible till while they can't influence the government. Oh, wait, it's too late...
I work in a Chinese popular site (douban.com) and I have to say that you are wrong.

You're under radar and they haven't needed to knock on your door yet, so far. When they do let us know...if you can.
No one pays penalties for simple mistakes. That's what FOX news tells you, but it's not true. We've made five-figure goofs on taxes in the past and a simple letter explaining the mistake (assuming it's an explainable mistake and you didn't get caught in actual attempted fraud) is enough to get the penalty waved.
A mass of dissatisfied citizens can become quite influential all on their own.
Sweden already has a form of this. There is a black box many retailers need to install which submits all of their daily transactions to the government.
Very succinct. If a company can afford to let a position go empty for six months because they "need someone who can hit the ground running," then they don't really need someone who can hit the ground running.
Could do with some smoothing and polishing. Jerks all over the place.

Also, what is with this new fashion of declaring functions as anonymous methods?

var recalculateLimits = function () {
/* snip */
};
var update = function () { recalculateLimits(); onScroll(); };

Have I missed a memo?

EDIT: I forgot to say apart from my moaning, does the job, good code, good job! And it's only jerky when you use the scroll button on a mouse.
I used to ask what a company's email quota was. Not a big deal at my last two employers, but previous jobs (banking and state government) had very low quotas, something like 20-50MB. At levels that low you can't just archive your email, you've got to decide what stays and what goes and carefully file away any attachments you might want to retrieve in the future. Not only a waste of time, but it adds unnecessary cognitive overhead to the simple act of checking your email.
Another article about the tech-industry entitlement culture.

[edit] It's quite fascinating that I get heavily down-voted every time I mention the entitlement-culture phenomenon. It really makes me cringe to read things like this, when less fortunate (but equally skillful) professionals have a hard time just getting an interview. The pendulum will swing back sooner or later, and we'll look back on this as the golden era of being a Software Engineer.
Every now and again, if I feel I need more money, I take a look at http://www.globalrichlist.com/ and plop in my current salary. Though the numbers are probably a bit dated by now, it's quite sobering.
> Once we have a tax code that's simple enough and a government that's competent enough to get think right

How do you foresee this happening if we -- the government and the public -- maintain a status quo in which feasible optimizations are never pursued because hey, we have a private alternative that doesn't charge too much to do it?

For the government to become more competent, the people have to demand reform. For people to demand reform, they have to be aware of how much better things could be. Private competition helps spur that reform, but this doesn't mean that the government shouldn't itself be expected to optimize things. This is not an either-or zero sum game
In your examples there, am I not having to create a new type per case? So a Reply<String> and a Reply<Customer> will require me to create two classes?

In the second example no, in the first example, if you want two types to conform to an interface, you need two types - Go interfaces require an implementation.

In real code this is not really a limitation - types require minimal boilerplate in Go, and the complete definition can be one line (e.g. type StringReply string). You can create them very easily, and wrap standard types in them (see the error type example NegativeSqrtError). I'm not too familiar with C# generics I'm afraid so am guessing as to what you want to do. Go already has support for generic maps and lists which can take any type or interface (as in your dictionary example), so that's not really a problem. Maybe someone else who knows both better will jump in.

If you wanted to treat two types (string and Customer) in Go as the same sort of thing (a Reply), you can do this with an interface. Then you can work with anything which conforms to that interface. Let's say you have this reply interface:

type Reply interface {
Reply() string
}

That requires a Reply method returning a string. You want to pass around both a string and a Customer (using say its name) as a reply? Define what each does when it replies - this is required so that the compiler knows you are passing the right sort of type, and so that you can actually use them as replies (NB you can't add to built-ins, so you have to add a new StringReply type):

type Customer struct {Name string}
func (c *Customer) Reply() string {
return fmt.Sprintf("%s",c.Name)
}

type StringReply string
func (s StringReply) Reply() string {
return string(s)
}

http://play.golang.org/p/uLgSpbTx24

so you could have a list []Reply or a map[string]Reply, or some custom collection type which can only have Replies added to it and nothing else.

If you want to reuse code between types, you can have helper methods or embedded types (NB only reusing code, not data, this is not inheritance).

Code above is trivial of course, and if you see code repeated in other examples it'll be because of these are little toy examples - you can use composition of types or helpers which act on interfaces to avoid repeating yourself. In real code you tend not to have quite such simple interfaces or types. If you feel we're not getting at what you want, posting a C# example of something you think would be impossible in Go would be helpful, otherwise you can assume that what most of what you can do in C# etc can easily be handled in Go as well even if the concepts don't map 1-1.
As someone who's relatively comfortable with VS ('08-'12) and who has licenses, I'm curious to know what the limitations (if any) are to using VS for development with Python.

Do you (or does anyone) know of any quick-start guides or tutorials to working with Python (or any other non-.NET languages) in Visual Studio?
That's interesting, and I suppose my resume shows that, although there are ups and downs, i.e. a very demanding job followed by one not so demanding.

What I do is to express a narrative in each job, showing how I did stuff that made a difference. I'm most proud of this ending to a sentence in my resume: "[my work] provided half of company revenues and enabled
another quarter (out of $5 million for FY92)" (it did go along with some demanding work, technically, and human factor for GUI/workflow).
Basic features on it only of course, but that's probably all they will use anyway.

That's a rather self-fulfilling attitude, and I hope that we as an industry try harder really soon.

My parents are in their late 60s, and are quite good with computers. I'm working on a side project with a woman in her eighties who started programming during the Eisenhower administration. And I know a number of tech folks in their 40s or 50s who have one form or another of muscular or nervous problem. None of them should have to compromise on features just because they want a more accessible device.
At the moment (before today's Demo Day starts), 30 of 47 are public.
What is HLS?
Indeed it is the definition.

The parent of your comment is exactly the other prong of the faux meritocracy argument. One side is this story about the 15 year old kid who "made it". That's the carrot. The other side is, "yeah, if you don't make it, its your own fault. Just work harder, smarter, etc." That's the stick.

So, the implication is that we are living in a meritocracy. If you happen to be astute enough to point out how ridiculous that is on its face, then the response is that you're whining and you should be able to overcome anyway. Nothing needs to be addressed in the system and nevermind that the game is rigged. You just need to be less of a loser.
Top-tier this (2011)
Yes I too find the Language Shootout a very interesting benchmark (while knowing full and well it's shortcomings) and it shows (imo) that Go has alot of work to do in the optimization department, something one can confirm by compiling cpu intensive go code using gccgo which will often yield great performance improvements.

Not surprising though, as GCC's optimization backend is very strong and has been developed for a long time, meanwhile Go's compiler toolchain is very young.

As for Scala vs Go, Scala compiles into Java bytecode and then makes use of Java's excellent and very mature JIT compiler so I'm not surprised Go loses out to it for the same reasons mentioned above.

Also note that the Go version used on the 'Language Shootout' is the 1.03 version, not the upcoming 1.1 version, it will be interesting to see what improvements in performance have been made.

AFAIK the 32-bit version of Go (which is what you compared with in your link) has not been given as much love in the optimization department as the 64-bit version, which I guess would do slightly better atleast.
It's nice to see they support Python now :)

It is already really nice for Scala apps.
How many people make < $100,000 (required for the 1040EZ), withhold the "default," and get a $10,000 refund?

(And re: "default", I've looked and looked, and can't find such a thing. How do you determine a "default" withholding from a W-4 other than just taking your expected income tax for the year and dividing by pay days? If you do that, you shouldn't have a $10,000 refund...)

For what it's worth, in 2012 I made less than $100,000 in AGI, withheld the W-4 default for my filing status (Single, Independent), and my refund was $650. More or less right on the mark.

Edit: Aha! Found it[0]. $100k biweekly is $1923/week of gross pay; let's ignore medicare and social security, etc. For Single/HoH, that's $344.20 + 28% of 1923-1732 = $397.68 weekly or $20679.36 / year[1]. Since our expected total tax is $18,500, we get back $2,100 in refund. Big-ish, but not $10,000. And only 2% of $100k.

[0]: http://smallbusiness.chron.com/calculate-employer-federal-wi...

[1]: page 44 of http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p15.pdf
Total compensation or salary? I'm pretty sure mechanics are paid a base + commission of the sale. The less time they spend fixing the car the more commission they can make (as they move on to the next car). It's an incentive to work. If the labor takes more than the estimate, then the shop and the employee are losing money.
Everyone seems to have missed the most natural form for us Brits:

would_you_mind {
// Code here
} im_afraid_so (Exception £e) {
// Politely move on
cheerio('Message');
}
Re "people really want to put Android on PC's" I think you can generalize to say people want Android in form-factors Google hasn't got the time to provide.

Or look at it this way: Google TV could have been an "Android PC" OS but Google TV isn't developed in the open. Initially, it didn't even have install-able apps.

This seems like one of those cases where more openness would be to Google's benefit.
At the very least in the animal kingdom, monkeys have a concept of fairness: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1292337...

So not entirely manmade.
This [0] is the only difference I am aware of. But I would love to hear someone talk about performance differences (if any).

[0]: http://stackoverflow.com/a/336868/712889
I have an acquaintance who works in the Gulf of Mexico anchoring platforms to the sea floor. They rate their anchors by the size of the storms they're engineered to withstand - a 10 year storm, a 100 year storm, etc. It's more difficult and correspondingly more expensive to place a "100 year storm" anchor. It's hard to argue with the reality that not all jobs require "100 year storm" anchors.

Arguing that software engineering is different is a result of inexperience. Not everything we build needs a "Rolls Royce" level of polish or a "Golden Gate Bridge" level of reliability nor is it a sustainable approach. Economic realities will drag your architecture astronauts back to Earth.

Spend time understanding the needs of your critical infrastructure and design for that.
DUO - DIY, Kickstarted 3D Motion Sensor
I'm pretty sure that emacs and vi(m) fit into this category, as do a number of unix command line tools (wc, cat, grep). Outside of that... heh... I hope most of the drek out there is replaced.
The difference is being able to specify a containing element, so the pinned part gets unpinned once you scroll past the bottom of the container.

We first developed the plugin for the Webpop gallery page (http://www.webpop.com/gallery) to make the description next to each screenshot stick to the top while you were viewing that gallery entry.

Later we also used it for the pinned navigation in our documentation section to make sure it didn't stay fixed and overlapped the footer once you scroll down to the bottom of the page. As far as I know Bootstrap's affix doesn't really help you there.
Keep in mind that this quote is from a stand-up comedian, so is almost certainly not serious.
Though IIRC, part of "paying" for PPACA (really, just to get the CBO numbers to work out) involved increasing the IRS enforcement budget on the premise that with more money they could bring in enough additional tax revenue to produce a negative net cost.
I completely agree. We can argue all day long about whether or not things like software patents are good. But I think the very minimum bar to file a patent should be "we actually made a prototype of this that does what we're claiming."
Scraping Just Got a lot More Dangerous
The "damage control tools" are pretty far-reaching. If you post something on Weibo with a politically sensitive keyword in it, it will either be blocked or get deleted within minutes, and you will get a PM scolding you for it. It's extremely creepy. People get around it by making up new code words and using metaphorical and allegorical references, but the fact is that international social media allows freedom of speech and Chinese social media crushes it.
Testing does not mean "writing tests". It means ensuring that the program performs its intended function correctly.
In quite a few countries "." is the thousand separator, and the "," is the decimal point...
How mobile screen size affects data consumption
What you've described is what cultural fit should be, I suppose. It is just that I've seen it too often degenerate into how the company can control your non-work hours. But yes, it is certainly important that the work environment be compatible with the way you like to work. In that regard, cultural fit makes a lot of sense.
Many thanks for all the subsequent up votes on this. Not sure my answer really deserves it but thanks :)

For those that don't know... Perl development is on a fixed annual release schedule. Every April the release candidate for next version of Perl arrives (no not delivered by the Easter Bunny!).

So 5.18-RC0 is due next month and if all goes well then 5.18 final will be released the following month (at which point 5.14 will be moved to its final year of security only patches).

ref: https://metacpan.org/module/CORION/perl-5.17.10/Porting/rele...
Not only is this not possible right now it's also a dumb idea.

So now instead of having one device that's easily portable to anywhere you want to go, you have the device plus a base station that you have to carry around. Oh boy! What an improvement!
CSS does Math
While you're right in that the person doing the shooting is far more important than the weapon, it's pretty clear that some weapons, like fully-automatic shotguns, are designed for specific use cases. You wouldn't use a .50 Barret to hunt deer, and you wouldn't take a micro Uzi to the practical range.

Drawing a line between civilian and military use suitability is difficult, but that doesn't mean there is no difference. That's why there is no assault rifle law in the US, but rather some features of weapons have been banned from private use.
Sometimes it's not that they are smarter it's just that they aren't constrained by current thinking, maybe even the pragmatism that comes from experience.
Solid Article
Summly has no real history to speak of, but Yahoo clearly has a long, sad, sorry history of overpaying for little nascent startups, failing to capitalize on them and then eventually letting them fall apart while missing out on larger trends.

At first it seems that whether or not this deal makes sense to you depends on whether or not you're a shareholder of Yahoo or a shareholder of Summly. But keep in mind that if Yahoo didn't make a similar deal with ViaWeb a decade ago there may not be a YC or any of the companies they helped start.
Cartoon - Weather & Spring
I use Sublime all the time, as well, but mostly for small projects. For instance, on one of my current projects we have a 600+ line models.py - then you really start to appreciate the CMD+click jump to definition ;)

I will be looking forward to your blog post. Considered Salt as well, but didn't get a chance to take a proper look yet. We use puppet for now, also with Vagrant.
The bell curve is a harsh mistress.
> The solution is not more government nanny-state ideas.

> How about requiring every person who receives 10% or more of their yearly salary back in a refund to attend classes on how to maximize their tax benefits?

How are you not contradicting yourself there? Less nanny-state, but forced classes...

> If you're too dumb or unaware of your surroundings to know that you can file your taxes for free with a little bit of effort, you need education.

I think you're being extremely unfair; this is like saying "only an idiot would pay for webhosting, with a little bit of effort you can host your own site for free".

I'm well educated, good with math, and generally observant....and yet I would still be up shit-creek if I had to do my taxes all on my own. I wouldn't know where to start, other than just searching around the 'net. I could figure it out eventually I'm sure, but it'd be a no-frills return that would probably rank very high on the "audit me!" list, and inevitably I'd end up spending more money, and taking around 10x's longer, than if I just settled for an online service (free or otherwise).

Just because I see spending a smallish amount ($25-50) to save several hours (if not 12+ hrs) of time, with the a decreased chance of audit, doesn't make me dumb nor unaware of my surroundings.
Show HN: Unlock Real Life Achievments
Well, it does work with urxvt. Since you provided nothing about your configuration, I can't tell you what's the problem.
My guess is that the base station will power many devices and be located such as routers are now. So, for instance, an office may have a base station that powers its employees' devices as they wander from room to room.
> If someone wants to keep 5 houses and leave 4 of them empty at any given time, as a status symbol, shouldn't they be taxed punitively?

No.
I agree about switch/case/break, in all semi-seriousness. what_about/perhaps/splendid is actually more readable.