June 2022
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June 30, 2022
Show HN: Calculator for US individual income tax, from 1970-present
466 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 on request for research purposes. I reached out to NBER and proposed compiling it to WASM, so it could be run directly in a browser. With relatively little effort I was able to create a js/wasm version [4], thanks in huge part to previous open-source work [5]. This WASM build now powers https://taxsim.app , which is my attempt to create an interactive UI to allow for easier exploration of the US tax code. Specific tax scenarios can also be shared easily, by simply copying the browser URL. The code for this webapp is also open-source [6]. This was my first time experimenting with WASM, and I am already a huge fan. Not only was I able to take a 60 year old codebase and get it working on every modern browser and device, this work is also now benefiting the academic community. For example, the js/wasm can be run directly in V8, which means it can also now be run locally within R using libv8 [7]. Previously most researchers were uploading their tax scenarios to NBER's servers via ftp/ssh/http. [1] https://ift.tt/HhwZeDo [2] https://ift.tt/ABbNmuI [3] https://ift.tt/RuhBjwg [4] https://ift.tt/ADLrcb3 [5] https://ift.tt/QmNnos8 [6] https://ift.tt/5TVANtD [7] https://ift.tt/ac1OfJX

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June 26, 2022
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 found my personal information on Google search results, or Facebook, I could ask the information to be removed, but GPT-3 seems to have no such support. Are we supposed to accept that large language models may reveal private information, with no recourse? I don't care much about my name being public, but I don't know what else it might have memorized (political affiliations? Sexual preferences? Posts from 13-year old me?). In the age of GDPR this feels like an enormous regression in privacy. EDIT: a small thank you for everybody commenting so far for not directly linking to specific results or actually writing my name, however easy it might be. If my request for pseudonymity sounds strange given my lax infosec: - I'm more worried about the consequences of language models in general than my own case, and - people have done a lot more for a lot less name information[4]. [1]: https://ift.tt/OEicJdk [2]: https://ift.tt/lfyqOtr... [3]: https://ift.tt/WV61uzK [4]: https://ift.tt/Lj9Yiwp...

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June 24, 2022
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/6DMPhy5 https://ift.tt/ciT7f3V 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/SfHc4e5 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/MnquRxW 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 literally cannot think of something, product wise, more evil. It's one thing to say "We refuse to use 3rd party toner", and another to accept the toner, and then just purposefully print like garbage. I was a happy HP customer for years, and only switched to Brother (which, by all accounts, is a much smaller / less renowned company) for the sole reason to not be vendor locked. I will likely return this printer, but thought HN should know what Brother seems to be up to.

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June 16, 2022
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 expiration time. Triplebyte once again apologized and promised that it wouldn't happen again, and many people seemed satisfied with the "transparency and candidness" of their response. Now it's 2022, and yesterday I got a recruiting email from a company that found me via the Triplebyte account I created back in 2019. When I logged in to check, sure enough, my profile was set to "publicly visible" and "open to new opportunities". I was pretty sure I had never made those changes, but just in case I was misremembering, I contacted Triplebyte support to find out what was going on. Today I got this response: "I was able to do some digging on to why this must have happened, It looks like before we did our last update to the platform you did not have the profile visibility set to indefinitely so the profile was turned on. Since then we have made a privacy chance once you set the profile to off there is not reset time frame it will remain off until you turn it on." (Unlike the user in [4], I never got any kind of notification that this automatic change was being made.) So despite their explicit promises, Triplebyte did not actually go back and fix the privacy settings for users who had them silently changed by the previous "dark pattern". This is a heads-up to anyone else who has a Triplebyte account and might be affected by the same issue. [1]: https://ift.tt/LcxtFpI [2]: https://ift.tt/0IQyN9e [3]: https://ift.tt/ZSABipu [4]: https://ift.tt/0U5lQFA

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