Hacker News Reader

It took me a while to accept that the law is not a consistent system with hierarchical top-down rules that can be used to determine legality in an unambiguous way.

If you're a software engineer and you're knee-deep in analyzing court cases to find out how to file some tax correctly, you're definitely overthinking it. The CPA was exactly correct.

View on HN

Yeah but now I just switch my perspective from thinking of it as a formal deductive system to thinking of it as an optimization problem.

Chances are your CPA was not correct. CPAs routinely violate the law as a regular course of duty and the IRS is fine with it, even encourages it, because it gives them more revenue. If you are looking to go down a multi-year rabbit hole on this, then try to find the law that imposes any tax on __your__ domestic income.

(Hint* You can't)

Yes, that's right. It's a Bayesian Game and you are attempting to reduce risk to an acceptable level (not under paying) while minimizing loss (not over paying tax) with only partial information (what the results of a lawsuit would determine).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com