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Showing posts from June, 2022

New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: Calculator for US individual income tax, from 1970-present

Show HN: Calculator for US individual income tax, from 1970-present 467 by tmm1 | 146 comments on Hacker News. I wanted to share a simple web app I created recently, which lets you estimate income taxes owed in the US: https://taxsim.app All the calculations occur directly in the browser, and are powered by a Fortran program that has been converted to WASM using emscripten. This calculator was originally developed in the 1970s [1] by the non-profit National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER has been maintaining this F77 codebase for the last 50 years, and uses it primarily for academic research on tax policy. The Fortran source code itself is over 1MB of text, because it codifies both federal and all 50 states' tax laws for each of the last 62 years. I first learned about NBER TAXSIM [2] a few months ago via an interesting paper they published "Automatic Tax Filing: Simulating a Pre-Populated Form 1040" [3]. The Fortran code itself is not open-source, but is available
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New best story on Hacker News: Ask HN: GPT-3 reveals my full name – can I do anything?

Ask HN: GPT-3 reveals my full name – can I do anything? 614 by BoppreH | 284 comments on Hacker News. Alternatively: What's the current status of Personally Identifying Information and language models? I try to hide my real name whenever possible, out of an abundance of caution. You can still find it if you search carefully, but in today's hostile internet I see this kind of soft pseudonymity as my digital personal space, and expect to have it respected. When playing around in GPT-3 I tried making sentences with my username. Imagine my surprise when I see it spitting out my (globally unique, unusual) full name! Looking around, I found a paper that says language models spitting out personal information is a problem[1], a Google blog post that says there's not much that can be done[2], and an article that says OpenAI might automatically replace phone numbers in the future but other types of PII are harder to remove[3]. But nothing on what is actually being done. If I had f
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New best story on Hacker News: Tell HN: Brother printers now locking out non-OEM paraphernalia

Tell HN: Brother printers now locking out non-OEM paraphernalia 441 by bbarnett | 257 comments on Hacker News. I recently bought a Brother colour laser printer, with the understanding that OEM toner was not chip-locked. Wanting to update the firmware, and being on Linux, I started to look at ways to do it manually. After finding a few guides to do so manually: https://ift.tt/T9XwmYA https://ift.tt/Hz9T2nM I decided to poll my printer. I then noticed an OSS/python project to just handle it via a package. However, I noticed this issue: https://ift.tt/sXM1JAF Startled, I Googled... and the printer listed is an inkjet. For a second I was relieved, but then started to search for other issues, and found this: https://ift.tt/xhogEft Not only is the above, post-sale firwmware update a change of what I understood to be Brother's historical policy, the method is beyond evil. Brother seems to be apparently accepting the ink, but then purposefully making the print quality poorer. I literall
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New best story on Hacker News: Tell HN: Triplebyte is, yet again, making user profiles public without consent?

Tell HN: Triplebyte is, yet again, making user profiles public without consent? 552 by teraflop | 108 comments on Hacker News. Triplebyte (YC S15) is a tech recruiting company that operates by getting developers to take skill tests, and then using the results to match them with employers. Back in 2020, they got in a lot of hot water by suddenly announcing that user profiles -- which had been collected with assurances that the data wouldn't be shared without consent -- would be made public, unless you opted out within a week[1]. This provoked a lot of backlash, especially since the CEO seemed totally oblivious to the privacy concerns[2]. After a lot of angry comments, he publicly apologized and reversed course[3]. Then in 2021, some users started once again being notified that their profiles were automatically being made public[4]. This time, it was explained away as an "oversight" related to the fact that previously, opt-outs weren't permanent but had a hidden expi
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New best story on Hacker News: Tell HN: Banned from LinkedIn for Reporting Wickr Drug Spam

Tell HN: Banned from LinkedIn for Reporting Wickr Drug Spam 499 by silent_speech | 151 comments on Hacker News. It made the news recently that Wickr (Amazon owned E2EE chat app) is full of illegal imagery. I read about this on my LinkedIn feed then decided to search for "Wickr" there to see who else was talking about this. The search returned dozens of spam messages offering drugs in Asia and the US with information to contact on Wickr for price. I reported these drug spam posts to LinkedIn - which is supposedly an anonymous report. Next day I got a flood of reports on my own comments (nothing to do with that topic), so many I didn't bother to appeal as I had other things to do. Few hours later my account was down. Seems that for retaliation the drug network decided to find me out and use their accounts to subvert LinkedIn's policy and ensure I can't stop their spam. They have new spam up now while my account is gone. No good deed goes unpunished I guess.
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New best story on Hacker News: Thank HN: Five months ago, I was feeling like a loser, now I am opposite

Thank HN: Five months ago, I was feeling like a loser, now I am opposite 529 by ac2022 | 212 comments on Hacker News. I posted this a few months ago: https://ift.tt/7e5Z0S3 I thought I hated programming and was ready to quit or even divorce my wife. I was not able to have a normal conversation with anyone. I was burned out but I thought I was having midlife crisis. My wife wanted to buy a big house and I kept blaming her for the stress. My job was easy and I had a lot of control over my time, work location, etc. I didn't think it could be the job that was causing me feel depressed. What I didn't realize while my work gave me freedom on work schedule, it didn't give me any real freedom to make important decisions. We were checkmark driven company. I was forced to do a lot of compliance and security related tasks which added zero benefit to our service. After my post, I decided that I either move into management at my last company or get a new job. I worked longer hours an
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New best story on Hacker News: Tell HN: I'm Afraid We're Shutting Down

Tell HN: I'm Afraid We're Shutting Down 636 by RBBronson123 | 126 comments on Hacker News. So it’s with deep professional and personal sadness that I must announce my plans to shut down 70 Million Resources, Inc., the parent company of 70 Million Jobs (the 1st national, for-profit employment platform for people with criminal records) and Commissary Club (the first mobile social network for this population). When I launched 70MR in 2016, I was motivated to build a company that could short circuit the pernicious cycles of recidivism in this country--cycles that destroy lives, tear apart families and decimate communities. I sought to disrupt the sleepy reentry industry by applying technology, focusing on data, employing an aggressive, accountable team, and moving with some urgency. And for the first time, approaching the challenge as a national, for-profit venture. This approach, which I named “RaaS,” (Reentry as a Service), turned out to be wildly effective, and by the beginni
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New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: A friend and I spent 6 years making a simulation game, finally released

Show HN: A friend and I spent 6 years making a simulation game, finally released 621 by iliketrains | 170 comments on Hacker News. I've seen some interests in (simulation) video games here on HN so I thought I'd share a short version of our story. More than 6 years ago, me and my friend from university were playing around with an idea of making a game we always wanted to play. We worked on it on weekends but the progress was quite slow, especially due to so many dead ends and wasted effort. Eventually however, we solidified our direction and decided to take the risk to resign from our well paid SWE jobs and work on it full time. It took more than a year but yesterday we have finally released it on Steam: https://ift.tt/1reJjlB... I am still not sure if this was a good decision financially, but unlike in a corporate environment, I am so much happier working on a product that I can put my love into and see people enjoy it, see my direct impact, and be able to make big decision
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