coryfklein

> The IRS already prepares your taxes for you. There is simply no way around this: they have to prepare them to check the numbers they get from personal filings

I'd be interested to hear that I'm wrong, but I believe this is not true. The IRS almost certainly does not calculate on their end what your taxes should be, but rather uses some much cheaper heuristic which they compare to your return and if it's "close enough" then the amount they stand to recover from auditing you is less than the cost to audit, and the IRS simply accepts the difference.

Why downvote this person! The parent post left plenty of ambiguity in their comment. Are they saying that an actual MITM attack is happening? That the fingerprints shared are actually the wrong ones?

Generally speaking, one would not consider an internet comment directing folks to GitHub's actual SSH fingerprints a "man in the middle" as the phrase in this context usually has a negative implication, where in this case defanor is in fact simply mirroring the actual information that GitHub has officially posted in a way that is much more helpful than yetanotherjosh's "double check it is the expected value". For most of us idiots, we don't know what the expected value is!

So thank you defanor for sharing, and thank you darthrupert for asking for clarification. Y'all contributed to educating myself and others and now we know more because of it.

Why would anyone trust that the content labeled "not by AI" is in fact not written by AI?

Money quote:

> Regulators then heard the numbers, did a bit of modeling in Excel, and then went into wartime execution mode. Regulators have, of course, not declared this war, because it is a war on the public’s perception of reality, and to declare war is to surrender.

SO MUCH of this drama is really a war on perception more than anything else. Banks being "underwater" on 10 year treasuries is only a problem *if everyone thinks its a problem* and if everyone just goes about their daily business ignoring this story, then after 10 years all the bonds mature and nobody is the wiser.

> But it's bogus because the exponential growth of Moore's law involves an exponential growth of inputs

A continuing Moore's law is only one factor in the emergence of AGI. It's possible the current progress of GPUs today is sufficient to run AGI given advancements in software.

> unlikely to get a 100% kill

I don't take much comfort in 99% of the human race dying, and the remaining 1% living in constant fear of being next. (Substitute 99:1 ratio with whichever you please.)

> it will die if we die

Why would you think this? Certainly an AGI that is 10x more intelligent than homo sapiens would be able to leapfrog Boston Dynamics's technology level by decades or perhaps centuries.

> could not do it without an extended program of experimentation and development

We're in that extended program period now. But when the AI can write its successors better and faster than we can, we should expect the iteration cycle to shorten exponentially upon each iteration, hence the short time to liftoff.

> why this effect is more observable for girls than for boys

I'll take a stab at it:

1. During most of homo sapiens evolution as hunter gatherers, women were more likely to congregate in centralized groups while men hunted in small groups. It is documented that gossip is an integral activity among the women of a tribe moreso than their male counterparts. Without the inhibitions produced by in-person interaction, women gossiping on social media are more likely to produce negative interactions than their male counterparts who have a much lessened propensity to gossip.

2. From an evolutionary standpoint, a woman's reproductive fertility is closely associated with their appearance. Men are hardwired to pay close attention to a woman's looks whereas women are hardwired to care more about a man's ability to "protect and provide". Since social media promotes visibility of the most attractive women, this has the effect of reducing feelings of self-worth for the female users moreso than the male users.

Perhaps some folks care very much that it was the US that executed the plan instead of Sweden or the UK or some other country, but for me you could swap out all the names of entities in the reporting and it would still be very interesting reading. For me, I take the story as, "this is a plausible explanation for how a modern nation state plans and executes targeted subterfuge as part of a web of global politics".

It's not entirely fiction such as, "And then Biden sacrificed a peahen, waved his magic wand, and spoke the incantation and the pipeline exploded!" The events, organizations, equipment, and strategy described in the document is all real-life stuff!

Why is the title of this submission in quotes?

:facepalm: Ah yes, thank you for the correction, I definitely misread that. I also don't know Gitlab's specific financial situation, so perhaps the general point still stands haha.

Some of these were true perhaps 6 months ago.

> Record high credit card balances

Nope, it's back to normal. [0]

> record low personal savings

Well perhaps. If you take a hyper-zoomed-in-view of this chart [1] then I can see how you'd have this takeaway. But contextually this is in the period right after a 1-2 year period where rates were consistently 3-5x above the average. Consumers drawing down on personal savings right now is a natural release from all the savings during covid, and in fact is a positive economic indicator because it injects a lot of cash into markets and that goes straight to corporate balance sheets. Probably a good time to be hiring, not laying off.

> 40 year high inflation

1. This is often good for companies and businesses, because it means that they get a free pass to essentially lower pay across the board for every single employee. While on the revenue side, since "everyone is raising prices" they get a free pass to adjust pricing UP to account for inflation, and then some! So in the end businesses are probably pretty happy with how inflation has played out this last year, particularly because...

2. The actual pain experienced from inflation is more connected to the area under the curve. If we had sustained 40-yr high inflation for several years, then yes that is truly disruptive to an economy. But an inverted "V" like peak (which is clearly what we have the last year [2]) means a single shock, but after that everything resettles. We're clearly in the resettling period, as current inflation as of December is only 6.5% and dropping quickly. That may feel painfully high for millenials accustomed to decades of near zero inflation, but merely newsworthy for another time and place.

> rising interest rates and no sign of the fed stopping

As I said in another comment, perhaps this is a reason for a small startup with a short runway and highly dependent on investor cash and bank credit to layoff employees, but Microsoft and Google? They're flush with cash and are not dependent on credit markets to survive. These layoffs are clearly about "showing fiscal responsibility" and "trimming fat", and not at all about a mathematical response to economic conditions.

As it is, there are plenty of signs that the fed will be stopping soon. Already rate hikes have dropped from 50p to 25p, and markets are indicating a complete end to rate hikes some time later this year.

> Housing affordability at its lowest point

One would think that raising interest rates would mean the housing market would totally seize up, right? In fact nearly the opposite has happened. Construction, housing starts, and housing completions are an a contradictorily high point right now, particularly in one of the most affordable segments: multi-unit housing! These giant real estate companies are not worried at all about interest rates and are instead plowing ahead adding tons of supply to the market.

Lenders are getting creative about how to get around high interest rates. Sellers often buy-down the buyer's interest rates. Adjustable rate mortgages actually make sense for once and are getting more popular. California is finally solving the NIMBY housing crisis and zoning high-density. Outlook in housing in general is pretty good right now.

[0] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/consumer-credit

[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/personal-savings

[2] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-cpi

The sharply rising interest rates are a problem if you have a short runway that makes you reliant on debt or investor money, in which case yes you very well may need to cut costs just to keep the lights on.

But if you're Microsoft or Google? You're profitable. You're bringing in money hand over fist. Technically the high interest rates might benefit you because now you have more options of what to do with that giant pile of cash: you can lend it out and get a decent return!

So high interest rates maybe do justify layoffs in some cases. And even perhaps for GitHub specifically, though I'm not sure I understand the complex dynamics of how it generates value for Microsoft anyway...

It certainly has downstream chilling effects. The lingo around how to describe minority groups is fraught with landmines that often lead to avoiding discussion in general. Growing up in the 90's I remember trying to learn the correct terms for Native Americans, people of color, etc, and for many years I believed mistakenly that some terms were taboo when they weren't (I thought it was rude to refer to someone as "Mexican", for example) and to this day I am still hesitant on some things; is using "Black" as a caucasian offensive in some contexts, wait what's the correct term for the indigenous peoples of the arctic North America, etc.

So when time comes that we might discuss a subject that touches on these groups, I generally tend to avoid it. I think I know the right term, but on the 5% chance I say something offensive then it's a huge negative outcome for me. No I'm not going to accidentally say the n-word, but sometimes it's easier to avoid conversation on the topic if I'm in a context where I may stick my foot in my mouth.

Wait how is this even controversial. We have decades, perhaps centuries, of precedent in liberal democracy of writing under pseudonyms. Since nearly your entire presence online is via your writing, I don’t see how it could possibly be ethically wrong to write online under a pseudonym. If having a fake image in addition to your name bothers you then just use a blank avatar or something.

The whole point of pseudonyms has been that a) your work should stand for itself and not be impacted by your identity and b) to protect individuals.

Can someone use pseudonyms to perform unethical or fraudulent activity, of course. But the pseudonym itself is not unethical.

> it just gets wasted by flaring it at the well

There's actually some companies that are making use of this "waste"! For example, you can take geo-agnostic computation (like crypto mining) with small bandwidth requirements and move it to literally be on-site. Then you power it with generators that are fed the natural gas instead of flaring it.

This can partially displace computation that otherwise would have used up higher-cost energy.

See [0] for the best example of this that I'm aware of. Section titled "How Bitcoin Uses Otherwise-Wasted Energy".

[0] https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/

One thing I do like about Google products is they all seem to consistently have great support for keyboard shortcuts. I usually use Vimium [0] to make the web navigable via keyboard, but I generally disable it in Gmail, YouTube, Drive, etc.

[0] https://github.com/philc/vimium

> No product moved, no labor performed, no service provided.

That's a bit of a myopic view. Apple has invested billions in building a platform and user base, and that is what Google is buying.

I love the commentary about investment in operations. They hire a finance-oriented CEO who doesn't invest in building out tooling and infrastructure. This was the key paragraph for me:

> But as time went on the operation began to deteriorate. There was little investment in upgrading technology (after all, how do you measure the return on investing in infrastructure?) or the tools we needed to operate efficiently and consistently. As the frontline employees began to see the deterioration in our operation we began to warn our leadership. We educated them, we informed them and we made suggestions to them. But to no avail. The focus was on finances not operations. As we saw more and more deterioration in our operation our asks turned to pleas. Our pleas turned to dire warnings. But they went unheeded. After all, the stock price was up so what could be wrong?

I see this in tech all the time. It is indeed very hard to measure the return on investment for tooling and infrastructure in tech! Any infra work, whether it's splitting up your monolith into components, improved developer tooling, or fixing flaky builds has a vague and hand-wavy return on investment and has to compete with "Well customer FooBar will sign a $10M contract in Q2 if we build feature BashBaz instead," and now good luck as an engineer explaining how and when exactly your investment in developer tooling is going to make the company $10M in Q2.

But if you never invest in these, then the machine comes to a grinding halt and everyone's hair is on fire, and there is no quick fix because the solution was to invest in the problem proactively starting 2 years earlier, and now that you're so late it's going to take 4 years to solve the problem because you have to first deal with all the debt you accrued.

This is a place where leadership really can have 100x impact by establishing a dual-route for evaluating projects. The first route is the traditional "how much money will this make us", but the second is based on principle ignoring $$$ returns, "what is the most impactful operational improvement that our front-of-the-line staff is recommending?" You have to simultaneously run both strategies!

I'd probably worry less about getting fired. If the manager is truly concerned about how quickly the product will be delivered then – unless they are truly idiotic – they will realize that firing the engineers on the project only works cross to their purpose.

This is basically Severance in a nutshell! Written and created for TV and executed perfectly. A must-watch from this year.

I appreciate this advice.

What a sad world we live it. My first time even looking at an ElonJet post on Facebook this morning and the first comment I see is:

> I can't wait to hear of his sudden death due to a plane crash. Now we're talking a merry fucking Christmas!

This, on a social media site billed to "bring us together", on a page whose goal seems to be publicly stalking an individual who I don't know personally but everyone here seems to hate him and revel in any possible hurt that can come to him.

I can already hear the, "well he's a douchebag and he deserves it." Sure, I guess. It's just that my last social interaction was getting together with my parents, siblings, neices, and nephews to celebrate Christmas and everything was so warm and bright and kind. So it's quite a stark change to walk onto the internet this morning and remember that it's a battleground of hate, criticism, and unkindness. I think I'll go somewhere else today.

Amazing how something so simple could result in such polarizing responses here in the comments!

The site has the apparent function of a sort of Rorschach test for individuals. Do you feel upset and bothered when asked gently to describe your emotions in an in-depth manner? Did you spend 7 minutes reflecting on your emotion and then feel like it was a waste of time? Or did the process reveal something positive about yourself you didn't realize?

At all times, HN comments serve as a mirror reflecting individuals views on a topic; but when the topic is your own emotional self the result is quite stunning.

> Its a lot closer to us than a lot of blazars typically are

And the article says:

> The source is also the farthest TDE ever detected, at some 8.5 billion lights years away—more than halfway across the universe.

So this is the farthest TDE, but most Blazars are even further away than "halfway across the universe"?

Wow this is still happening? I actually wrote about a similar phenomenon of replacing iPhones with clay back in 2016 and apparently Amazon still hasn't figured out a way to stop this.

This poor customer is actually paying the price of a scam played by someone earlier. You buy an expensive product, Amazon ships it noting the weight, then you replace the product with clay and "return" it back to Amazon who is none the wiser.

Then when this customer cries foul, Amazon has no way of knowing for certain whether this customer is the scammer, or whether it was a prior individual! So many crazy downstream implications of their "free" return policy, and of course it's usually the customer that foots the bill in the end.

[0] http://coryklein.com/2016/06/20/scammers-replacing-iphones-w...

Eh, I'd say it is quite a stretch to call that color "pink".

But I guess in comparison to other traditional martial colors? But show that photo to a person on the street and ask what color it is... you're unlikely to get "pink" in response.

What exactly is the state of "volcano tourism"? I remember being entranced as a kid by footage of lava flows; the heat, the glowing, and the viscosity of it all just seemed so alien and exciting.

Do there exist – in Hawaii or elsewhere – experienced tour guides that can safely bring you to see such sights in person? Obviously I'm not saying I want to see the next Mount Saint Helens up close, but clearly camera men are able to get up close and personal, so there must be times and places where the risk is acceptable enough right?

> If you look carefully around early morning or late evening, you may see a few thermal areas emitting steam.

You don't say!

You never know when text on your website is going to suddenly become outdated haha.

This argument about whether Xi is a dictator or not actually plays out with fair regularity on his Talk page[0] on Wikipedia. The general consensus – whether astroturfed by CCP I cannot tell – usually ends that he is not.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Xi_Jinping/Archive_1

So interesting, because I had the opposite response. Sure if I donate my body to "science" and it's critical in some sort of medical discovery that would be great, but reading the OP and seeing the author's fascination, learning, and engagement with the cadaver I thought, "Gosh, what a gift!"

I'd certainly be very happy knowing that my body brought such an experience to another individual, I certainly won't be using my body anymore at that point.

I wonder if, when signing up for donation, you can specify what kinds of "science" or interactions you prefer your body to be used for after dying.

As a backend engineer with no frontend experience, why do folks care so much when something is done "only with CSS"?

Is it because there is some technical advantage, or is it more of a "code golf" thing like, "Look at this rainbow quine I wrote that renders itself in assembly ascii art!"