How the Maker of TurboTax Fought Free, Simple Tax Filing (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-maker-of-turbotax-fought-free-simple-tax-filing <comment><USER4> I live in New Zealand. I don't have to file taxes if my income is a standard wage my tax payments are automatic. My employer deducts them from my wage and they are sent to the IRD (Our government tax dept). My student loan and super payments are also automatic. If there is anything wrong then at the end of the tax year I can file to correct things.

I also get donations rebates, this is a one page form that lists all my charitable donations. Very easy very quick.

All my details are available to me online. All transactions are there and it's very transparent.

Why would anyone oppose a simple system like this?

<comment><USER5> It's almost that simple in the US if your situation is that simple. What happens in NZ if you make $400 selling vintage cabbage patch dolls on eBay? What if you earned $1k in returns on your investment account? What if you are renting your place out on Airbnb?

If all you have is a simple income in the US, then the 1040ez is a single page and you can file it for free online if you make under a certain amount. You can pay a few dollars to file online if you make more.

Obamacare has added an extra level of complexity now, but that is also very simple if you don't need or want the subsidy.

<comment><USER4> Yes you have to file an IR3 if you make other income.

[http://www.ird.govt.nz/income-tax-individual/end- year/ir3/ii...](http://www.ird.govt.nz/income-tax-individual/end-year/ir3/iit- what-is-ir3.html)

My favourite part of our tax system is the advice to file if you have "income from an illegal enterprise"

EDIT: Just as a reply to the original point. I'm not sure how complicated the US system is. I'm not trying to say it's bad either, it just seems to me that we have a system similar to the one that is getting lobbied against. And I like our system, it works well for me..

<comment><USER6> _I 'm not sure how complicated the US system is_

FYI - At various stages of my life I've filed in New Zealand, Australia, UK, Switzerland and the US (California).

I can't generalize to all persons, but I do have a decent spread of countries in my own experience - and the US was by some serious margin the most complicated.

<comment><USER7> It isn't that bad in the US using turbo tax. Just remember to answer no to receiving payments from the "Ottoman Turkish Empire Settlement". (Actual question).

<comment><USER8> Why should I have to pay $100 to file my taxes?

<comment><USER9> A counter viewpoint - maybe the system has to be complicated to provide all the various incentives that voters want taxes to do, and to patch all the loopholes that would otherwise be open. Maybe such a system is too complicated for a lay person to understand so they delegate the understanding to private enterprises which can compete to provide the cheapest or easiest interface to the complicated system. If it wasn't the taxpayers paying for the complexity directly, it would be the government which would charge everyone via those same taxes to implement their own clunky government computer system that people would hate even more.

Countries with simple tax rules don't get to micromanage their economy so much.

<comment><USER10> The system can be complicated, but all those complications can be handled by the tax agency. For the vast majority of people out there, all the data that you put into your tax return is something that IRS already has, or can easily obtain. And when that is not the case, you should really only need to tell them once (and then update if it ever changes, like the number of kids you have).

Tax filing in US is a huge waste of people's time. I wonder if anyone ever computed the amount of people-hours spent on this malarky, and how much productive output it could generate if used for something else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Intuit certainly does this, but blaming them for our overly complex taxes is wrong. They might move the needle a little bit but they aren't the primary driver. The primary driver is all the constituencies of all the little things in our taxes that add up to make them complicated.

Like ObamaCare? That came with two additional forms. Live in a high tax state and like deducting your state taxes? That makes things more complicated. Big fan of deductions to for education or child care? That comes with complexities. I could go on and on....

Now maybe your answer to all of these questions was "no", but there are a lot of people that say "yes" to a lot of these questions. It's really hard to upset that apple cart. Lobbying doesn't have much to do with it.

<comment><USER12> That's not the point of the article at all, nor of Intuit's lobbying. Even with the current complexity of the tax code, the IRS could easily auto file your taxes for you if your income is below a certain very high level and you do not have any special complications. Such a system would work for 98% of Americans. This has nothing to do with what deductions are available or whatever complexity they introduce into the system. There is simply no reason whatsoever not to implement return-free filing, beyond the large dollar amounts tax industry lobbyists spend on the Hill.

<comment><USER13> > There is simply no reason whatsoever not to implement return-free filing, > beyond the large dollar amounts tax industry lobbyists spend on the Hill.

It's not all Intuit lobbying. Many politicians of a particular faction oppose return free filing because they want to keep tax proxess as painful as possible to make people emotionally susceptible to anti-tax and, more generally, anti-government rhetoric.

<comment><USER14> Government which stays in power based on people's anti-government sentiment, isn't that something.

<comment><USER15> Welcome to the United States! We are governed by people who don't believe in government. :)

<comment><USER16> > We are governed by people who don't believe in government.

This is more true now than ever. An EPA head that doesn't accept climate change, or believe in the EPA at all. A DOE head that wanted to eliminate a specific department that he heads, but can't quite remember what it is; an FCC head that wants to remove most FCC regulations (this is not as bad as the other examples, though), a SoE that doesn't believe in public education...

In a work of fiction, it'd be hilarious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> So, just for a different perspective, Taiwan has a relatively simple tax filing experience, and the government invests significant resources to make as simple as possible (which does result in many people paying their taxes properly, on time).

While their digital tools for filing taxes make the telegraph feel modern, the "in person" experience is full of helpful people and takes about 90 minutes including travel time.

My main criticisms of the filing process:

1\. Tax bureau has a one month timeframe where you can go, in person, to file "on time", but only during business hours. Any 9-5 worker must take time off to go file in person. It's a pretty nice customer experience - The volunteers in the bureau help you file your taxes with highest deductions possible, it gets crosschecked by a government tax clerk, and you're done.

2\. Make the software work better on a modern OS and give it modern usability. It's _really_ crap UI, and I only run it in a VM just in case because the download site is also shady looking.

3\. Locals gaming the system can make your life harder as a working-from-home small business owner. Many landlords don't pay income taxes on their properties, which means tenants cannot register business addresses at their homes, and must "rent" an address for about $100 / month.

4\. Withholdings on foreigners, by default, are artificially high as a "precaution".

5\. Refunds process in August after filing in May. Because they still process every return much by hand.

6\. Double taxation on people like US citizens. The tax clerk has asked friends of mine, while filing, to show their US tax return to make sure there are not more taxes owed. They can ask, but it's not enforceable. So why do it? Because the tax rate on that income earned elsewhere can be as high as 30-40%! The tax clerk gets to decide how bad of an offender you are. GLHF.

7\. If your income goes down compared to the year before as a foreigner, you will probably pay a penalty for "making less money" because they suspect tax evasion. Pay the fine (less than $USD 100) and walk away, or they dig your records hard and you could wind up in a situation like #6 above.

<comment><USER18> > Double taxation on people like US citizens.

That's America that's out of step. Almost all other countries only tax their residents, not their residents plus citizens. It's normal to tax worldwide income.

I told the British tax office that I'd left the country. They sent a refund and final statement a few months later, and we haven't communicated since.

If I had, for example, a house in Britain being rented out, I'd need to declare that income to my new country.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Serious question: Is it possible for society to criminalize rent seeking behaviors like this? It seems clear that there's no benefit to keeping the status quo tax filing system except for the benefit of tax preparers. What's stopping the US from creating a law that says if a company attempts to lobby for something in bad faith (like the tax example), they will face sanction?

<comment><USER20> Fair question and I dislike this sort of thing as much as anyone. And of course such an opening comment means there is a "but..." coming.

What you're asking for is to criminalize certain petitions of government. So how do you choose whom to discriminate against such that they cannot petition their government in regards to law making without, at the same time, simply institutionalizing the viewpoints of the other side? Maybe we shutdown corporate lobbying, but then do you need to shut down other associations of individuals (consumer groups, unions, etc) from lobbying government in order to keep equity, or tacitly assume those other organizations must be right anyway? There are many ways to play that game and the only options are those that simply favor one interest group over another... sure, the winning side probably won't complain about undue influence or insensitivity to the concerns of the losing side... but when has it ever been that way?

If you want a real solution to problem you're talking about without explicitly shutting down the give and take of ideas (good and bad) that are required to make the democratic aspects of our system function, your only solution is to limit what power the government has to influence preferential outcomes for anyone that would lobby it and increase the rights of individuals to act on their own accord or in trade with other, similarly free individuals. Without the power to deeply intrude into the economic lives of people (regardless if employee or shareholder), lobbying government for favors simply wouldn't be a good investment. Indeed, it is ironic that you ask to outlaw this sort of thing... because any time you expand the government power to regulate or influence outcomes you make the lobbying dollars just that much more worthwhile. Going further, you simply are considering a totalitarian systematization of your ideas: something worse than the rent seeking you rightfully decry.

(edited for slightly better use of language)

<comment><USER21> I think "only solution" is far too strong. It seems to me there are two sorts of lobbying: positive sum informing of legislators, and zero/negative sum jockeying for societal advantage. We want to keep the former and minimize the latter.

So my proposal is:

1\. Make all paid lobbying illegal. Make corporate donations to candidates, campaigns, and parties illegal. Eliminate revolving doors. Strongly limit individual donations. (And, while we're at it, maybe add federal funding of elections with spending caps.)

2\. Industry groups, consumer groups, and the like can exist and publish what they want on their websites, but may not have private contact with legislators, their staffs, etc.

3\. Legislators can communicate with outside groups to request information, opinions, and the like, but all requests and responses must be published in a permanently maintained record.

4\. We increase the budget for congressional staffing and for neutral research groups like the CBO, so legislators have the resources necessary to make good law without having to lean on paid lobbyists.

I'm sure there are plenty of other proposals that could be made as well. The flow of ideas isn't the problem. It's the flow of money and power.

<comment><USER20> So questions to your proposal:

1) You make corporate political donations illegal, but that's pretty specific to a single class of interest group. What about those that regularly act in opposition to corporate interests, such as unions, environment groups, consumer groups? Your point 2 seems to imply they would be included, but why are you specific here as to the prohibition? Or do you propose to treat different association of people preferentially and on what basis?

2) Again you're specific to certain kinds of interest groups but this time leave out corporations when granting permissions. Again, do you have favored classes of associations of people?

3) How do you police such a thing? How do police communication through surrogates or the thousand other ways creative individuals seeking rent or hoping for regulatory capture will bypass "communications with the outside"? Isn't this the sort of creative thinking that caused problems with McCain/Feingold and the like? If you accept greater regulatory involvement from the state, the greater the rewards to those that can gain the ear of the regulator. Risk/reward continues to skew to creative evasion.

4) What makes a neutral group neutral, and, in some way, can there ever be such a thing? Don't get me wrong, I don't know of any instances of the CBO outright gaming information, or releases, etc. for clearly political purposes (nor have I studied the question). However, CBO Director is still appointed by the politicians. What if one political interest group captures congress and decides to politicize the CBO since they can't get sufficient outside support for their position under your proposal? Do you politicians like Trump would do such a thing? Even if we put those sort of hand-wavy humans-are-humans arguments aside, elected politicians are ultimately beholden to their constituents regardless of the CBO position; CBO says we spend recklessly on the military (or if then that sort of thing) a big military district politician will very much ignore that advice. I expect your funds for increased staffers results simply in increased "independent" research supporting whatever position a given politician wants to hold for whatever reason.

Unfortunately, I still think I'm on the right track and that just about any solution that doesn't somehow require the political class, their staff, and families to be quarantined into some forced monasterial existence cutoff from the outside world, seems corruptible.

<comment><USER22> If we thought up all the bad things that would happen we wouldn't act at all

<comment><USER20> Uh, ok... so what's your point caller?

Both sides of this thread have suggested actions, albeit competing actions. Rational discussion of competing ideas involves discussing the positives, negatives, motivating ideals, and the validity of the ideas on the table. Not discussing or raising issues evades reality and doesn't do anything to diffuse or give answer to that reality. Simply put, if we're going to do something I rather do it with eyes wide open, understanding the downsides, rather than mimic one of those "hold my beer..." memes.

And... notwithstanding the debate at hand, perhaps we shouldn't act if acting actually makes matters worse or drives bad behavior further underground. Significant thought in the climate change debate and the environmental movements is spent on thinking up all the bad things that will happen if we continue to act as an industrial society. Is your admonishment for them, or do you pick and choose who can argue as is convenient? One might say... that's my problem with the person whose proposal I was responding to... they seemed to want to pick and chose who could say what and when.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> tuna-piano I haven't read a legitimate argument against the IRS calculating taxes automatically, but here it is.

The more invisible taxes are to the individual person, the less they think about that money (and the higher taxes can go without them complaining too much).

Rent feels expensive because every month you write a check for rent. However, for many people, taxes are a much bigger expense than rent. But taxes don't feel as painful, because people don't write a check every month for taxes. Taxes are just invisibly withdrawn from your paycheck.

The easier and more invisible it is to pay taxes, the more you forget about how much money that really is. If you believe in constrained government, there's a good case to be made that we should make tax payments more visible, not less.

<comment><USER23> In 2014 the Obama administration provided a "tax receipt" so you can see how much you paid and what you got for it. Cool idea. [https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/2014-taxreceipt](https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/2014-taxreceipt)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> A tangential issue: It seems almost impossible to me that the systems of tax preparation services, whether cloud-based, local software, or offline, are secure.

The standard of security is, make the target more expensive to breach than it's worth to the attacker. How much would it be worth to have access to the tax returns of large swaths of the population?

I don't know the answer, but I'm guessing it's easily worth billions of dollars. Foreign intelligence services would very much like that information, as well as sophisticated criminals.

I am very doubtful that Intuit or H&R Block, for example, invest in security sufficient to protect themselves against that level of attack.

<comment><USER25> The answer, of course, is "it's not that secure". Now, Turbo Tax and H&R Block aren't being hacked, but breaking into their systems isn't the easy way. And like you said, attackers want to take the easy way. The easy way is to get just enough info from your targets as it takes to extract money from them. And in the past few years, e-filing fraud has skyrocketed. The mantra is "file your taxes before someone else does", because the number of people who are submitting their tax form only to find out it's already been submitted is greater than ever before.

It's really, really hard to attack Intuit. It's much easier to submit fraudulent tax forms and pocket the returns before anyone notices.

<comment><USER26> > The mantra is "file your taxes before someone else does", because the number > of people who are submitting their tax form only to find out it's already > been submitted is greater than ever before.

The IRS is liable for losses due to fraud, so why would I care about fraud? It's up to the IRS to secure their systems.

<comment><USER27> Perhaps because it is a long and painful process to prove it and then get your money.

<comment><USER28> This is absolutely the case. My parents' personal data was dumped when one of the major health providers got hacked a few years ago, and somebody started submitting junk returns with their info. Each season it takes them easily 20+ hours on the phone, and usually the IRS won't believe their identity over the phone (understandable enough) so they need to show up in person at the nearest IRS office (which isn't very near, and requires an appointment - <USER2> 3-4hrs on hold to schedule, and they never take you on time when you get there). It's a nightmare, and if you choose not to resolve it, you're just setting yourself up to get audited.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I have experience as a tax payer in Estonia (employee only) and Australia (employee and business owner). In Estonia I login to my bank with my citizens ID card, click through a few screens ... and my tax return is done. All the financial information supplied by my employer to the government is immediately visible and checkable, not to mention donations made to tax-deductable organisations is also immediately visible. It is incredibly quick and convenient. In Australia it's just easier to leave everything to my accountant as they already have my quarterly business returns information; cost is still pretty reasonable (500AUD or so for the yearly business returns and the personal returns for my wife and I). But ... yeah ... in Estonia it just rocks. The ID-card based functionality for banking, digital signatures, tax ... just awesome.

<comment><USER30> > But ... yeah ... in Estonia it just rocks. The ID-card based functionality > for banking, digital signatures, tax ... just awesome.

That's what happens when your head of state has a computer engineering degree and used to work on databases before going into politics. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> There's a fascinating article linked from this one: [https://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-maker-linked- to-...](https://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-maker-linked-to- grassroots-campaign-against-free-simple-tax-filing)

See the final paragraphs, which I've copied below - it's essentially a version of the Citogenesis effect.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-----

"Dennis Huang, executive director of the L.A.-based Asian Business Association, also told ProPublica he was solicited by a lobbyist to write about return-free filing. When the lobbyist sent him a suggested op-ed last summer and told him the proposal would hurt small businesses, Huang wrote an op-ed in the Asian Journal that claimed Asian-owned businesses would not only spend more time paying taxes, but they'd also get less of a refund each year.

Huang declined to disclose the lobbyist's name, but acknowledged he didn't really do his own research. "There's some homework needed," he said.

Oregon's Martin did some research on return-free filing and now supports it. She also co-published a post about the issue and the PR efforts related to it because, she says, she was alarmed that other nonprofits could easily agree to endorse a position they did not fully understand.

"You get one or two prominent nonprofits to use their name, and busy advocates will extend trust and say sure, us too," Martin said."

</comment><comment><USER32> the deep cynicism here is how people think Turbo tax is doing a pubic service by making taxes easier and cheaper, that's how effective their marketing is. Convince the public there is a problem that only said company can solve.

<comment><USER33> Paying TurboTax $59.99 is cheaper than going to H&R Block and paying a tax preparer $169

<comment><USER34> The IRS already knows what taxes you owe. In most cases they could just send you a bill.

<comment><USER35> Only true if you have a simple standard w-2 job.

With stocks, capital gains, dividends, write-offs, company you need to handle these manually and the government doesn't know your write-offs and all sources of income.

<comment><USER36> Capital gains and dividends get reported to the IRS.

If nothing else, the IRS could say "here's the info we have, feel free to review and add anything we don't know about".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> well, of course. imagine you are a business and the govmt could change a law and put you out of business. wouldn't you put as much money as you could into preventing that change? this is why money in politics causes problems...

<comment><USER38> Same old same old: show me a doctor who doesn't want you to be sick. Show me a lawyer who doesn't want you to get in trouble with law. Show me a priest who doesn't want you to sin.

It just blows my mind up to what degree TurboTax will go with this!

<comment><USER39> Doctors want you to be sick? - no. HMOs? - maybe. Lawyers want you in trouble with the law? - no. Prison Corporations? - definitely.

People are generally good, corporations are evil by design.

<comment><USER40> _HMOs? - maybe._

Why would an HMO want you to be sick? They spend most of their time _not_ covering medical claims. In fact, they'd make more money if you _never_ used your insurance.

And your claim that people are generally good makes no sense. Corporations don't make decisions, people do.

<comment><USER41> False. If people never used insurance, then they'd stop buying it, and the whole industry would collapse. The reason why the industry exists is it helps manage the alternative: fear of eating into savings, going into debt, or going bankrupt, just to get well again. Or worse, just giving up and dying.

The reality is, no insurance company insures known sick people unless compelled to with sufficiently large pools to redistribute wealth and risk. If a pool had only sick people, insurance is no longer insurance, it's a payment plan. What we in effect have now is one part insurance for totally unpredictable things, with one part payment plan for all the predictable doctor visits and scripts that people want to justify a monthly payment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> This is one of the reasons Credit Karma launched a totally free online tax product this year ([https://creditkarma.com/tax](https://creditkarma.com/tax)). (We view this similarly to credit scores a decade ago, when everyone advertising "free" was a bait and switch).

</comment><comment><USER38> I always love reading absurd statements made by otherwise reasonable people who - of course - a salary depends on being unreasonable.

Here:

> Intuit argues that allowing the IRS to act as a tax preparer could result in > taxpayers paying more money.

Majority of work will be done automatically by some free jQuery and PHP scripts (hello Obamacare website) and taxpayers have only shell-out initial cost. Even if TurboTax is $19 per year, I have a hard time believing that 200MM tax payers X $19 will be less than running an enterprise servers for online consumers.

> [...] "STOP IRS TAKEOVER" campaign and a website calling return-free filing > a "massive expansion of the U.S. government through a big government > program."

I honestly laugh at this one. Just exactly which part of information that IRS process is not already in the IRS possession? With that statement -- they really reach out for the dumbest people hearing them out.

> Explaining the company's stance, Intuit spokeswoman Miller told the Los > Angeles Times in 2006 that it was "a fundamental conflict of interest for > the state's tax collector and enforcer to also become people's tax > preparer."

I have to place a call to intuit maybe they will sponsor my idea that I should fill out and asses my own respondibility when it comes to a parking ticket. I mean you cannot trust the government that they will be fair to you - so I should get note "you violated parking zone - fill out this form and return to us with own assessment of your penalty". Gosh imagine wild wild west we would be living in if you stretch it to criminal law.

<comment><USER43> > Majority of work will be done automatically by some free jQuery and PHP > scripts (hello Obamacare website)

Obamacare website was notorious for being completely terrible. And so were many other government-run healthcare sites - I personally tried to find some info on CA site when it was launched and failed for several days until they worked out the kinks.

And tax code is vastly more complex than what healthcare needs. There are literally hundreds of various exceptions, deductions, conditions, etc. Many of them inter-related or conditioned on other things. Did you every try to figure out how to use some of the IRS worksheets? It's no picnic. I recently tried to figure out whether I can deduct the cost of some home improvement I've made - took me several hours and I'm still not 100% sure I got it right. US tax code is insanely complex.

Of course, it may be that IRS has most of it already implemented and it may be that this implementation actually allows to produce pre-filled return (from what I've seen from IRS, it's not that easy, but maybe I'm wrong). Still, the project would probably have very significant cost, and unlike the commercial offerings, it won't be privately financed, and it would inevitably suffer from what many government projects suffer from - cost overruns, bureaucracy, wastefulness, choosing suppliers based on political clout, etc. It's not going to be free, it's going to cost a lot of money.

> Just exactly which part of information that IRS process is not already in > the IRS possession?

Quite a lot of it. E.g. my charity donations aren't. Many of my other deductible expenses aren't. Education expenses probably aren't. A lot of small business income may not be. A lot of deals like selling non-public stock aren't.

I think you might have very narrow view of how complex a tax return can be if you don't have just "one/two salaries, standard deductions" situation - <USER3> btw many preparers offer to handle for free or near free already. That's not where the problem is. It's when it goes out of that simple case where the complications lie.

And yes, currently the simple taxpayers in some measure are subsidizing the more complex ones, by financing the platform that allows handling more complex cases with their money. However, I'd hate if I had to pay $600-$1K for my more complex case (that what it would cost to hire a tax accountant) instead of $60 or so I'm paying now for the software (plus hours of time reading IRS instructions of course).

Maybe Intuit argument is still bad, I don't know, but it's not as laughably bad as you describe it, not even close.

<comment><USER38> > Quite a lot of it. E.g. my charity donations aren't.

I think you missed the point.

IRS will know about your charity donation shall you decide to give this information to TurboTax for TT to lower your tax burden. IF you don't want to lower your burden, don't give it to TT and don't give it to IRS, problem solved.

So at the end of the day it doesn't matter if you provide something to TurboTax and they forward to IRS, or IRS will have it directly from you by adding this information to your online tax form on Gov site.

<comment><USER43> > So at the end of the day it doesn't matter if you provide something to > TurboTax and they forward to IRS, or IRS will have it directly from you by > adding this information to your online tax form on Gov site.

Ah, in this scenario it indeed wouldn't matter - but this scenario means that there's a government-run clone of TurboTax. I doubt the government will do better job and be cheaper than Intuit, which have a lot of experience and knowledge in doing this.

<comment><USER38> > but this scenario means that there's a government-run clone of TurboTax.

No, in this scenario there is no place for companies like TurboTax in the first place.

> which have a lot of experience and knowledge in doing this.

TurboTax has more knowledge and experience in taxes than.. IRS ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> If trump administration actually manages to simplify tax code and kill the stupidity corporations induce via lobbying such that I can file my own taxes. I would have a lot of respect for him.

<comment><USER45> In the first paragraph, "Meanwhile, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren proposed a bill yesterday to allow free government-prepped returns."

<comment><USER46> Note it says "free" and "government prepared". Setting aside that those are mutually exclusive concepts, that says nothing about simplifying taxes - it's just having the government do the complicated stuff instead of you (or your accountant).

<comment><USER22> At least the govt is ostensibly about the public good. Anyone else through self interest is suspect. Which gets back to the title of the original post here for this thread...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> You can do your taxes for free using this: [https://www.freefilefillableforms.com/#/fd](https://www.freefilefillableforms.com/#/fd), but it's a huge pain unless you know what you're doing. I did it last year, but it took 10+ times to submit it correctly and the errors were straight from programming errors (i.e: tax_status is not valid, etc.)

Massachusetts had free tax filing, but got rid of it this year. It was really great and fastest refund I ever received.

</comment><comment><USER48> I'm really happy with how the Canadian Revenue Agency handles things. You file online, there's plenty of free services to do your taxes. They support auto- fill where the CRA can send them the tax info it already knows about you (e.g. from banks and employers), etc. I filed my a few weeks ago and they assessed my returns by the next afternoon. Last week I received a cheque in the mail, but that's only because I forgot to fill out the direct deposit info on the CRA website. The husband of a former colleague used to fill out junk on their tax returns because they knew that the CRA would just fix it all up, and then tell them what they owed (or what they would be refundend) in their notice of assessment.

<comment><USER49> Technically the situation in Canada is the same as in the US. You must use a third party to file your taxes online. There is a donationware system from simpletax.ca and most (all?) of the others will not charge for a sufficiently low yearly income.

That doesn't change the fact that in Canada there is no way for a citizen to file their taxes directly with the government other than by using the paper forms and mailing them in. There used to be a telephone system but that was eliminated some years back.

The relationship between the private tax preparers and the CRA is much closer than is healthy. I suspect that is related to the current situation.

This bothers me enough that I file my taxes on paper as a form of protest. The nice thing is that you can put pretty much any nonsense on there you want. They will just ignore your figures if they disagree which of course shows how silly the current situation is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> A lot of the comments here are conflating two different things:

1\. The complexity of the tax code

2\. The complexity of filing

They are not the same thing.

You have to go through some process to file now. Let the government go through that laborious process.

For those who are not conflating the two, this point does not apply.

</comment><comment><USER51> In Austria, since I think 2016, you also get automatic tax returns as an employee, but these are calculated based on a minimum standard wage and parameters, so you want to do the math on your own anyway, but it's very simple and straight forward, at least once you validated your account, which is a very official procedure but ok for security reasons. There's a simple online form where you basically only have to put 4 sums for each tax category and that's it, the rest is already sent by your employer. Always a nice and welcome surprise and a rewarding experience

</comment><comment><USER52> Many tech companies are members of CCIA and should demand it stop advocating for Intuit's civilization-destroying agenda.

It's been one of their issues for a long time eg [http://www.ccianet.org/2011/09/irs-tax-prep-not-a-budget- sol...](http://www.ccianet.org/2011/09/irs-tax-prep-not-a-budget-solution/) and [http://www.ccianet.org/2002/01/treasury-irs-announce- efforts...](http://www.ccianet.org/2002/01/treasury-irs-announce-efforts-to- expand-tax-e-filing/) ... and it's a major activity of theirs [http://sunlightfoundation.com/2013/04/15/tax-preparers- lobby...](http://sunlightfoundation.com/2013/04/15/tax-preparers-lobby- heavily-against-simple-filing/)

> The Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA), of which Intuit > is a member, represents its members on a wide range of technology issues, > but spends a significant amount of its $6.7 million in lobbying on tax > simplification. As ProPublica's piece points out, the group operates the > website "Stop IRS Takeover" which bashes the idea of pre-filed returns. > Disclosures indicate the CCIA has focused on "issues pertaining to tax > preparation services" and legislation involving simple filing. It lobbied in > support of Rep. Lofgren's bill that would have barred government-filed > returns, and rallied against Sen. Akaka's bill that would have let taxpayers > file directly through the IRS "without the use of an intermediary." The CCIA > is an active political giver as well, doling out over $650,000 over the past > 20 years with 91% going to Democrats. Silicon Valley-based Rep. Lofgren, an > opponent of IRS-prepared returns, has been the biggest beneficiary of CCIA > donation, collecting over $12,000. The group also opposed John Chiang in the > 2006 California controller election, chipping in $50,000 to the Alliance for > California's Tomorrow — the same group that received $1 million from Intuit.

CCIA also gets lots of mentions in [https://www.warren.senate.gov/files/documents/Tax_Maze_Repor...](https://www.warren.senate.gov/files/documents/Tax_Maze_Report.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER53> The fact that taxes are complex is the government's fault.

The fact that companies can manipulate the government into keeping the taxes complex is also the government's fault.

</comment><comment><USER54> While the focus of this discussion here is on the taxes, I think the bigger story is the unethical behaviour of companies like Intuit. And its not only Intuit, but also companies like SAP [1] that engage in such behaviour at the cost of tax payers.

The finanical might takes away so much from the commons and also pushes back adoption of good Open Source software. We constantly under-estimate the damage done by these mega-corps.

[1] [http://blogs.wsj.com/riskandcompliance/2015/08/12/former- sap...](http://blogs.wsj.com/riskandcompliance/2015/08/12/former-sap- executive-pleads-guilty-to-bribery-charge/) [2] [http://www.iafrikan.com/2017/02/21/sap-south-africas- managin...](http://www.iafrikan.com/2017/02/21/sap-south-africas-managing- director-implicated-in-alleged-38-million-sap-licenses-purchasing-and- kickback-scandal/)

</comment><comment><USER55> Reminds me that raw capitalism isn't the answer to every problem.

Kind of like the current healthcare debate in the U.S., where the problem seems to be "how do we allow insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, etc. to make maximum profits while providing healthcare for the maximim number of people at minimum cost?"

</comment><comment><USER56> It's not really a credible idea that an industry accounting for 0.05% of U.S. GDP somehow manages to out-lobby the industries representing the other 99.95% of GDP, so as to keep tax filing complicated when otherwise there would be a critical mass in favor of simplification.

</comment><comment><USER57> I am in India and tax filing here is as simple as 1 2 3. We have the Form16, which has the data to be entered in an excel sheet that you can download from the govt website, punch in the numbers and voilà, they tell you tax you owe! Pay via net banking and you are done.

</comment><comment><USER58> The maker of tax return software doesn't want to lose business? news at 11.

</comment><comment><USER59> Previous discussion on Hacker News: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5443203](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5443203)

</comment><comment><USER60> As strange it may seem, a portion of people/corporations are always pro- privatization and anti-nationalization.

This helps explain why there is an anti-net-neutrality faction. It's not just because people don't understand. And it's not just because people are bought and paid for. There are actually legitimate arguments for privatizing things and then regulating them rather than nationalizing and trusting the government to manage effectively.

</comment><comment><USER61> Interesting, that in all income tax discussions the underlying premise of income tax is not questioned.

For me it's a form of extortion. If I avail of certain services provided by the government, I would expect a bill only for the services I availed. And just like my ISP I should have the option of not opting for the for their services.

<comment><USER62> Whether income tax is generally acceptable is a much broader (and philosophical) topic than the simpler question of whether it should be simpler to handle (obviously yes unless you make money from its complexity).

<comment><USER61> In that case the debate would _never_ end. Even before we get down to tax complexity, how do we decide if 10% of income as tax is good enough, versus 20%? Notice the rabbit hole of arguments that one can get sucked into.

<comment><USER62> > Even before we get down to tax complexity, how do we decide if 10% of income > as tax is good enough,

Why would we have to do that? The reality is that we already have an income tax, and we can definitely simply its filing process without changing its current rates.

So far this sounds like a standard libertarian tactic where you try to turn every debate on political policy specifics into a debate around whether government should be doing anything at all. It's not any different than internet marxists who, given a topic that revolves around business, will always reply "well X should just handled by government anyway FULL COMMUNISM NOW". It's completely unproductive and borderline trolling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> I once contemplated buying NovoNordisk and investing millions to open subsidized donut shops for the wealthy.....

</comment><comment><USER64> Aggregate filing statistics for US tax returns 1990-2014:

[https://apps.axibase.com/chartlab/bbca48dc#fullscreen](https://apps.axibase.com/chartlab/bbca48dc#fullscreen)

Percentage of all reports filed electronically reached 86% in 2014. Big relief for USPS.

</comment><comment><USER65> TIL how I file my taxes (log in and submit a pre-filled web form, or send a text message approving it) was the exception, not the norm.

I would have expected at least most of western Europe to have reached that point.

<comment><USER66> here in NZ most people don't even have to file taxes - we have NO exemptions, if you have one job your boss will have gotten your tax right, your bank will withhold tax on interest at your declared marginal rate - if you have multiple jobs filing a one page web form might get you a refund (with interest!).

less than 5% of us, those with complex financial lives who can likely afford it, have to file a more formal return

<comment><USER65> Same here, but I have to actually confirm that I have seen it and sign it (via text message, online or paper). The stuff I have to manually add to the filing is s.g if I bought or sold a house or did any complicated stock market trades (but then the broker or bank usually lets you take that form pre filled from them at least).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> The problem is not who prepares your taxes. The problem is how complicated taxes are.

</comment><comment><USER68> I have this in France, filling in the taxes takes 20 seconds on Internet.

</comment><comment><USER69> That's really disgusting, and the reason I'm not using TurboTax.

<comment><USER70> I switched to Tax Act [1] a couple years ago and have not been happier. Easier to use and MUCH cheaper. For federal and state the total came to $30

[1] [https://www.taxact.com/](https://www.taxact.com/)

<comment><USER69> Yep, they are pretty good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> I live and work (not self-employed) in Germany, which has one of the most complex tax systems in the world. Normally, a certain amount is deducted from my salary upfront automatically so I pay my most of my taxes through the year. The deducted percentage is defined by so-called "tax class" (1 for singles, 3/5, 4/4 or 5/3 for married or "registered partnership" couples).

When the year is over you MAY file a tax declaration if you had 1 or 4/4 combo - or you MUST file it if you had 3/5 or 5/3 combo (because then you have normally underpayed the taxes through the year as a couple). If you have 1 or 4/4 you have normally overpayed taxes so if you don't file, the goverment is happy.

The tax code in Germany is mindbloggingly complex. And it's not just laws, its' also "common practices", knowing what the Tax Authority (Finanzamt) accepts and what not. It's also knowing the current lawsuit which may be potentially applicable to your declaration. Every year there's a few dozen such tax lawsuits where the results are applicable to large groups of taxpayers.

When I was single I either didn't file the tax declaration or filed it myself with the help of software and a few books. There's a bestselling book "1000 absolutely legal tax tricks" ([https://www.amazon.de/Konz-1000-ganz-legale- Steuertricks/dp/...](https://www.amazon.de/Konz-1000-ganz-legale- Steuertricks/dp/3426788411)) which is a a good starter.

Nowadays with family and kids we must file a tax declaration, but now there are so many special cases we're either subject to or can profit from that it's not realistic to do it on our own. We outsource our tax declaration, it costs us around 300€ a year and is absolutely worth it. Our tax consultant routinely argues with the Finanzamt over two-digit sums, basically fights for every cent.

Honestly I don't think we'd better off if the tax system in Germany would have been simpler. We profit from a number of special cases like "extraorinary burden" because of the disabled child, so I think in the "one size fits all" system we'd probably lose. I'm totally fine with 300€ fee for the tax consultant, she allows us to use the benefits of the system. By the ways, this fee is considered the next year, we get out tax back from the fee.

If I remember correctly, a few years ago politicians discussed a "no-file" option: you declare that you don't file you tax declaration this year and get some bonus back (I think the proposed sum was around €300). The Finanzamt has less work to process declarations, so probably this was worth it. I don't think it was implemented, however.

</comment><comment><USER72> slightly off topic, but... you can file for free using any number of tax prep software if you make less than ~64k a year: [https://www.irs.gov/uac/free- file-do-your-federal-taxes-for-...](https://www.irs.gov/uac/free-file-do-your- federal-taxes-for-free)

<comment><USER73> Or use Credit Karma Tax. Completely free software assistance at any income level. ([https://www.creditkarma.com/tax](https://www.creditkarma.com/tax))

Disclaimer: I work there.

<comment><USER35> I've looked at Credit Karma tax free, but I'm a bit nervous as I own a California LLC (100% sole owner), and also have capital gains, dividends, write-offs.

Is Credit Karma a good choice for more complicated returns? Last year I paid H&R $650 for literally one hour of time which infuriated me.

<comment><USER73> This is our first year, so we don't currently support filing as an LLC (just individual income/loss as a result of a small business): [https://help.creditkarma.com/hc/en- us/articles/216489263-Cre...](https://help.creditkarma.com/hc/en- us/articles/216489263-Credit-Karma-Tax-frequently-asked-questions#q8)

<comment><USER35> I'm 100% owner of the LLC, so all income is mixed with my personal. Just need the ability to do itemized deductions including rent.

<comment><USER74> I just did my taxes with them, and it does have some support for business income and loss, so I think in your case (pass-thru entity) you may be okay- I didn't have to use this section this year as all of my income came from my salaried position this year, so I can't ssay for sure how it works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> Institutions prolong problems to which they themselves are the solution \- Systemantics.

<comment><USER75> Ak, that was actually Clay Shirky. Sorry Clay ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> I have a better idea. Simplify the tax code so anyone can do theirs on an index card. There is absolutely no reason for the gargantuan tax code in a free society.

<comment><USER77> That's what the 1040EZ is. Seriously, take a look at it, it's a single page, only half of which is calculations: [https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-prior/f1040ez --2016.pdf](https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-prior/f1040ez--2016.pdf)

If you object that this isn't sufficient for you or someone else, I'll be happy to argue that whatever behavior would make you 1040EZ-ineligible should either not be permitted in a free society (because it's a tax-avoidance scheme for certain types of rich people with political power) or should be taxed as W-2 income (because otherwise it'd become such a tax-avoidance scheme), but good luck getting the people who benefit from those schemes to allow it.

<comment><USER78> > Use this form if: Your taxable income (line 6) is less than $100,000.

For a lot of the folks on HN, I'd bet that isn't true.

At the end of the day, US taxes are super weird. This may be an overly simplistic view, but I'm definitely of the opinion that we need to drastically simplify taxes. Complex systems generally produce more opportunities for exploitation.

I wonder just how simple a viable tax system could be.

<comment><USER77> I assume that's because it gets vaguely into AMT territory (nothing in the normal 1040 changes at or even near $100K), and the AMT mostly exists because of the complications of tax law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> When I read this, unfortunately I'm thinking "don't hate the player, hate the game". Lobbying is a double-edged sword, and it is a game played very well by the powerful and the rich.

<comment><USER9> Lobbying only works because voters don't care about what they're voting for. You can always vote against the candidates who were lobbied into doing something you don't like, or lobbied at all. But the majority of voters can't do that - they insist on voting for the candidates with the most expensive advertising and forget about where that money comes from.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> It's pretty much the same as the situation with taxi medallion owners now that Uber has come along.

If you ask me, the correct answer is for the government to either give some one-off compensation to Intuit (or buy the company from its existing shareholders), and then shut it down, and reform the system.

Why should the government pay money to a private corporation or shareholders? Because they created this mess ("opportunity") in the first place with a ridiculous tax code. It's just the actual, realized, dollar-value cost of the mess that was created, instead of externalizing the cost onto taxpayers. Once that cost has been paid, the system can be fixed.</comment>


Brainwaves Encode the Grammar of Human Language - <AUTHOR> http://maxplanck.nautil.us/article/341/brainwaves-encode-the-grammar-of-human-language <comment><USER2> "Being able to learn and use grammar is unique to humans."

While we haven't observed grammar in non-human animals yet, whether they can learn and use it is very much still an open question.

"considering the rather limited number of experiments and the difficulty to design experiments that unequivocally demonstrate more complex rule learning, the question of what animals are able to do remains open." [1]

"when we consider how animal vocalizations are analyzed, the types of stimuli and tasks that are used in artificial grammar learning experiments, the limited number of species examined, and the groups to which these belong, I argue that the currently available evidence is insufficient to arrive at firm conclusions concerning the limitations of animal grammatical abilities." [2]

1: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3367684/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3367684/)

2: [https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-016-1091-9](https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-016-1091-9)

<comment><USER3> It's easy to be a skeptic forever. "I think we need more studies." Steven Pinker in his book _The Language Instinct_ states that language is unique to humans. Whatever language animals have, it's like a pebble and the Chrysler Building. My cat can well tell me when he's hungry. But think of the richness of human language, which can express things in front of you and things a million miles away, things now and things past, their color, shape, activity. I can express whether something is, or hypothetically what it would be if, and I can express how I feel about the possibility.

<comment><USER4> We really do need more studies to make any kind of statement about the uniqueness of grammar, given that we cannot communicate in a representative sample of animal languages in order to make this claim strongly and also that grammar can be quite simple, so we cannot infer this claim from the relative difficulty of the task.

<comment><USER5> > animal languages

When I took a Linguistics course at university, both the professor and text book were very emphatic that animals do not have (read: have never been observed using) language, they have communication. They went as far as to say that language was _the_ defining characteristic of humans.

<comment><USER4> What is their definition of language?

Comprehension of sentences by bottlenosed dolphins - [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0010027784...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0010027784900039)

First evidence that birds tweet using grammar - [https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20615-first- evidence-...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20615-first-evidence- that-birds-tweet-using-grammar/)

<comment><USER5> Hmm, that's a very good question. I'm not exactly sure, I don't have access to either right now, so I'll have to guess.

I think it's probably in how sophisticated it is. The bird example seems analogous to something like a handshake. A handshake has a sort of grammar to it, has to learned by observation/instruction, and if you scrambled it, people would be confused. However, I don't think the ceremony of handshaking qualifies as a language.

The dolphin example as well, while more sophisticated, isn't very when compared to what humans nearly universally do without effort. Though that could be a limitation of the study. Given enough time we may discover a dolphin language or teach them one comparable to what we can do.

Take what I said with a grain of salt though, I don't really know what I'm talking about here.

<comment><USER4> >Take what I said with a grain of salt though, I don't really know what I'm talking about here.

I take it all with a lot of salt until we have a wide range of animal languages down. One thing I found interesting is the recent work on dolphins has found entire images of things they have echolocated embedded in their clicks, suggesting a possible pictorial language.

Here's an excerpt from the summary -

>"We discovered transient wave patterns in the water cell that were strikingly similar in shape to the objects being echolocated. To further investigate the shapes in these Cyma Glyphs we converted the images to 3-D models. As far as we know, this the first time such a method has been implemented.

>Transient wave images were found for the cube, cross, flowerpot and a human by examining single still frames, or single frames acquired in bursts, usually where there was high power and dense click trains in the recording. The parameters involved in capturing echolocation images with the CymaScope include careful control of the acoustic energy entering the visualizing cell. Water requires a narrow acceptable "power window" of acoustic energy; too little energy results in no image formation and too much energy results in water being launched from the cell. As a result, many hours of work were involved in capturing the still images of the echolocated objects. The imagery for the human subject was captured in video mode and has been approximately located in time code. The image formed between 19.6 to 20 seconds into the recording and may derive from a set of dense clicks at approximately 20 seconds. The video was shot at 24 frames/second with a possible audio synchronization error of plus or minus 3 frames."

[https://www.omicsonline.org/open-access/a-phenomenon- discove...](https://www.omicsonline.org/open-access/a-phenomenon-discovered- while-imaging-dolphin-echolocation- sounds-2155-9910-1000202.php?aid=76570&view=mobile)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "A key finding of the new study is that these artificial neural networks, when fed example sentences, give off patterns of energy that mimic what the brain does when it processes a sentence."

I wish the article fleshed out more details about the research. It looks like they found a correlation between the output of a specific ANN that seems similar to observed neural oscillations in the brain. The causality claim in the article seems premature.

Also curious if the neural encoding of grammar is consistent across different languages. So many questions about the specifics, but cool research for sure.

<comment><USER7> The research the article is based on is linked at the bottom of the article: [https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...](https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.2000663)

<comment><USER6> Thanks for sharing that link! Totally missed it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This reminds me of an idea I had when I was a freshman in college, in 2004 - 2005. I proposed a research project based on generalizing Markov chat bots to amplitude waves through neuron-like nodes. Basically, instead of discretely recognizing A -> B -> C but not A -> C -> B, the idea is the Markov node (or neuron) structure learned would respond with a sine-wave shaped pulse that initially rises and then goes negative, so that a chain of nodes "A -> B -> C" would still respond to a slightly out-of-order or different sequence, just not as strongly.

Initially my undergraduate CS advisor was excited by my idea, but only, it turned out, in the context of using it in genetic sequencing (because buzzwords). I gave him my honest opinion that adding my contrivance could only perform worse that existing genetic sequencing algorithms; my intent was to propose and investigate a way the brain might reasonably be recognizing language. He was entirely uninterested in this, and I got too busy with college / work and never developed the idea beyond a toy demo. Maybe I should look at it again...

<comment><USER9> It is depressing how many good thesis topics not getting accepted because of some kind of personal preference/agenda of the advisors. Similar story happened to me.

<comment><USER10> I think in this case it was probably more about funding opportunities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The experiment is fascinating. It looks like they developed a model (DORA) for learning relational reasoning. It turns out that model showed similar oscillatory activation patterns to observed cortical signals. As a comparison, they also looked at a fully connected RNN with a which did not produce oscillations. So the key research finding is that time-binding is a requisite to produce oscillations in neural networks.

The paper's conclusions:

"In sum, we remain relatively agnostic about the specific details of the required representational hierarchy because we do not yet know how to link the predicate calculus representations we use to natural language mental and cortical representations. What we are not agnostic about is the need for asynchronous time-based binding in order to produce oscillations in a neural network, as well as the need for representational hierarchy to produce the particular pattern of oscillations observed here and in"

The paper on evaluating if NLP parsers with representational hierarchies reflect what the cortical functionality:

"Our results naturally beg the converse question, as to whether any system with representational hierarchy could produce the oscillatory pattern of activation that [6] and DORA show. For example, could natural language processing (NLP) parsers, which feature representational hierarchy and were developed to specifically parse natural language in a machine, produce oscillations and the pattern seen in [6] and in our simulations? In principle, any system of hierarchy that is (de)compositional has the representational ingredients to encode units that could be fired in a sequence. However, we would argue that any given representational hierarchy could only produce oscillations if it were combined with time-based binding, which, as far as we know, no NLP system features. In DORA, time-based binding is the oscillation of activity throughout the network, which is part of the reason why the RNN did not show oscillatory activity nor the specific pattern from [6]. The representational structure of DORA (a (de)compositional role-filler binding predicate logic) is what makes the oscillations take the form that the data from [6] have. In terms of the specifics of the observed 1-2-4 Hz pattern, both [6] and our simulations are highly shaped by the word presentation rate of 250 ms/4 Hz. But without time-based binding, there is no mechanism to produce oscillations in a network, even in a NLP parser or other system with representational hierarchy."

</comment><comment><USER11> This is a model, a hypothesis, the title of nautilus makes it as it is a proven fact. "A mechanism for the cortical computation of hierarchical linguistic structure" is the original title.

Reminds of another proposed model from Gyuri Buszaki about how natural brain rhythms might be used to encode sentences.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3553572/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3553572/)

</comment><comment><USER12> This article reminded me of the (poorly named) "Feynman Machine":

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.03971](https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.03971)

> Efforts at understanding the computational processes in the brain have met > with limited success, despite their importance and potential uses in > building intelligent machines. We propose a simple new model which draws on > recent findings in Neuroscience and the Applied Mathematics of interacting > Dynamical Systems. The Feynman Machine is a Universal Computer for Dynamical > Systems, analogous to the Turing Machine for symbolic computing, but with > several important differences. We demonstrate that networks and hierarchies > of simple interacting Dynamical Systems, each adaptively learning to > forecast its evolution, are capable of automatically building sensorimotor > models of the external and internal world. We identify such networks in > mammalian neocortex, and show how existing theories of cortical computation > combine with our model to explain the power and flexibility of mammalian > intelligence. These findings lead directly to new architectures for machine > intelligence. A suite of software implementations has been built based on > these principles, and applied to a number of spatiotemporal learning tasks.

YMMV

<comment><USER13> Sounds interesting, but this 2016 paper has only one citation. I'm reading it now and this paragraph from the introduction compares it to traditional Deep Learning networks:

> Our artificial Feynman Machines have several interesting properties which > distinguish them from existing Deep Learning and similar systems. In > particular, due to the much higher density and locality of processing, a > Feynman Machine-based system can perform at least comparably while > dramatically reducing the footprint in computational power, training data > and fine-tuning. Feynman Machines can be arbitrarily split into modules > distributed across clusters and the Internet, and systems running on low > power devices such as phones can be dynamically and robustly augmented using > low-bandwidth connections to larger networks running in the cloud. Models > can be trained on powerful infrastructure and transferred for operation and > further custom learning on smaller devices. Importantly, the same > architecture can be used as a component in unsupervised, semi-supervised, > fully supervised and reinforcement learning contexts. A variant - the Routed > Predictive Hierarchy - is described, which allows a Feynman Machine to > directly control a traditional Deep Learning network by switching it to use > spatiotemporally-selected subnetworks.

This is the abstract of the previous paper that detailed the theoretical basis [0]:

> Reverse engineering the brain is proving difficult, perhaps impossible. > While many believe that this is just a matter of time and effort, a > different approach might help. Here, we describe a very simple idea which > explains the power of the brain as well as its structure, exploiting complex > dynamics rather than abstracting it away. Just as a Turing Machine is a > Universal Digital Computer operating in a world of symbols, we propose that > the brain is a Universal Dynamical Systems Modeller, evolved bottom-up > (itself using nested networks of interconnected, self-organised dynamical > systems) to prosper in a world of dynamical systems. Recent progress in > Applied Mathematics has produced startling evidence of what happens when > abstract Dynamical Systems interact. Key latent information describing > system A can be extracted by system B from very simple signals, and signals > can be used by one system to control and manipulate others. Using these > facts, we show how a region of the neocortex uses its dynamics to > intrinsically "compute" about the external and internal world. Building on > an existing "static" model of cortical computation (Hawkins' Hierarchical > Temporal Memory - HTM), we describe how a region of neocortex can be viewed > as a network of components which together form a Dynamical Systems modelling > module, connected via sensory and motor pathways to the external world, and > forming part of a larger dynamical network in the brain. Empirical modelling > and simulations of Dynamical HTM are possible with simple extensions and > combinations of currently existing open source software. We list a number of > relevant projects.

Edit:

Apparently, the project is called Ogma and they have a youtube channel. Here's their video [1] of a toy car learning to self-drive after a few laps of a person driving it with an xbox controller. It runs on a NanoPi Duo. Not sure if that's noteworthy or not.

[0] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.05245](https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.05245)

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCuadXj9KDc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCuadXj9KDc)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> More like, brainwaves can encode grammatical structure in one particular model.

</comment><comment><USER15> I wonder if the structure of brain waves is a result of a gravity time crystal.

[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1708.05014.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1708.05014.pdf)

<comment><USER16> Do you even know what that means?

<comment><USER17> I think microgravitational brain oscillations related to intermittent contacting of crystal-based planars should be explored more deeply.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is this a real result, or just speculation?

</comment><comment> bra-ket Also see Pulvermuller, The Neuroscience of Language: [https://www.amazon.com/Neuroscience-Language-Brain- Circuits-...](https://www.amazon.com/Neuroscience-Language-Brain-Circuits- Serial/dp/0521793742)

</comment><comment><USER19> Very skeptical of the veracity of any claim that, "what the brain does when it processes a sentence." is at all universal across a wide sample of humans.

What about, for example, differences in languages, culture, personal background, etc.

<comment><USER20> AFAIK there is scientific consensus that much of human language is hardwired. It's how infants can learn it so quickly.</comment></comment>


Heroku Postgres's Crane and Kappa are not running on dedicated server. - <AUTHOR> https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-postgres-production-tier-technical-characterization

<comment><USER2> That's not surprising considering the small amount of RAM. Amazon doesn't have instances that small.</comment>


Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Creates Tech Startup Incubator - <AUTHOR> https://finance.yahoo.com/news/former-yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-010100774.html <comment><USER2> I really like how this appears on the yahoo frontpage (:

<comment><AUTHOR> Yahoo news are not biased!</comment></comment>


FBI Blames North Korea for Sony Hack - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-30555997

<comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8773149](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8773149).</comment>


Fifteen smart ways to be more productive with Duckduckgo – The Four-Week MBA - <AUTHOR> https://fourweekmba.com/more-productive-duckduckgo/#.WfyYWfijDM8.hackernews <comment><USER2> One not mentioned that I see quite a bit: automatic StackOverflow answers.

I like DuckDuckGo very much. I use it mostly for the privacy aspects and the !bang features, but some of the features in this article are also good reasons. Unfortunately Google seems to implement every good feature that the DDG guys come up with.

Also I find that DDG's database just isn't as good as Google's. When I'm searching for a solution to an obscure coding issue, I almost always add a "!g" if I want to find anything. I recall that DDB uses Yahoo's search behind the scenes. I wonder how that will change after Yahoo's demise.

As Google moves from a search company to an AI company, I hope that DDG can continue to grow and eventually be the high bar for web search.</comment>


The Decline of Imgur on Reddit and the Rise of Reddit's Native Image Hosting - <AUTHOR> http://minimaxir.com/2017/06/imgur-decline/ <comment><USER2> Imgur recently started doing something really annoying on their mobile site. If you keep scrolling past the picture you were linked to, it shows a bunch of other pictures that were not posted by the person who posted the first picture. These extra pictures seem to be generally in the same category as the picture that was meant to be linked to, so if the original picture is a slightly risque photo, the photos that follow might be straight up porn. It's very annoying to me.

<comment><USER3> Reddit killed the model that allows them to be financially viable and "not annoying". I suspect the alternative is to shut down.

The bit of community that exists solely within imgur can't be enough to subsidize the bandwidth costs of everyone else, can it?

Thus far every image hosting site has gone the cycle of initially good, annoying attempts at monetizing, then shutting down. Which, of course, leaves a trail of forum posts, comments, etc, with broken images and links.

I wish some entity with deep pockets would just offer it as a public service / loss leader so we could stop the cycle. Google, Amazon, etc.

<comment><USER4> I want to talk about that community, because it genuinely boggles my mind. Their culture is as if they were crafted by /r/circlejerk as some sort of cosmic joke. They repeat the same memes ad nauseam, in _every post_ , seemingly completely unaware. They lack any measure of what I consider healthy internet cynicism - if you post a picture of your face and say "I beat cancer!", you're getting upvotes, and there won't be a single comment in the thread along the lines of "this is a picture of a face." I mean, it's easy to bot upvotes on reddit, but it's trivial on imgur, because of the total lack of self-awareness of the community.

I get that I come off as a total asshole - "why don't they hate the world, as I do?!" But honestly, they seem like the most gullible bunch of back-patters on the internet.

<comment><USER5> The meme problem I see on Reddit and Twitter too - so many sites developing their own meme dialect that's completely incoherent if you're not up to your elbows in it.

<comment><USER6> I have to use [http://knowyourmeme.com/](http://knowyourmeme.com/) more than I care to admit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's just no way to do a free image hosting site without it turning to crap sooner or later. When Imgur started making it hard to copy the direct .jpg links, it was game over.

What's interesting is that Imgur managed to pivot into a full-blown community site, with threads, communities and voting. I don't think they're very dependent on Reddit anymore. From a few cursory glances, they have a relatively large amount of participation, and it's not unusual that an image shared on Reddit has a huge comment section on Imgur, with Imgur users not getting the context (that of course is over on Reddit).

Reddit is doing a smart thing here by hosting the images themselves. They're now at a scale where hosting images is feasible. Being dependent of Imgur (and Imgur not being dependent of Reddit) is a bad thing for Reddit, since most of the popular content on Reddit is images, and so Reddit gives away a huge amount of traffic to Imgur (which is basically a Reddit competitor now), trading that for the expenses of running an image hosting site. I guess Reddit realized it wasn't worth it.

</comment><comment><USER8> Imgur pushing it's own website over direct image links is the exact reason I've stopped using it. I understand they have to make money by but I just want to put a damn picture on the internet and send the link to others. I don't want to have to deal with Imgur's album/site link crap and dumb expansion into being a social network. It's hard now to even find the direct link, nevermind avoid Imgur's annoying messages about downloading its app and using its other features.

<comment><USER9> Why not use Dropbox public links or something similar?

<comment><USER10> There's limits on what you can share. imgur's big benefit is no cap on hosting, so if your meme goes nuclear you're not going to get a "bandwidth exceeded" page.

<comment><USER9> Fair enough, wasn't aware of the bandwidth limits. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Imgur is essentially a parasite upon reddit which exploited and relied upon reddit's lack of native image posts. Imgur's dependency on reddit led to it trying to compete directly with it to ensure its survival without its host (Imgur is now also a place to find and comment on images), but also ensured reddit would eventually drop it, thus paradoxically also hurting its survival.

Ultimately I think Imgur is destined to the same fate as TwitPic.

<comment><USER12> That's some strong words. Imgur wasn't a parasite, it was offering a service that Reddit didn't offer but we needed. Yes Imgur was quite dependent on Reddit at the beginning but now Imgur has its own community and the two are quite different.

If you look at the numbers, after the beta Imgur was starting to grow again. It was a hit yes, but not an exodus.

<comment><USER13> Edit: Whoops! I was definitely wrong here.

It was absolutely a parasite. It would not have survived to grow to the size it did without Reddit. Parasites can offer a beneficial service to the host but cannot live without it.

It has since evolved into something possibly capable of existing on its own but only time will tell.

My guess is it lives for a few more years at best.

<comment><USER12> I don't think we have the same definition of a parasite or we see things differently. For me a parasite is a startup being a copy-cat, eating your market share, stealing your content, and stealing your customers. But Reddit and Imgur are two different websites. If Reddit was that mad about it, they could have done it in a month on S3... If you want a parasite I will say 9gag.

It's true that Imgur has to grow its product now to something bigger. I won't even give them many years if they don't do that for a product that simple and ephemeral. They have challenges here.

<comment><USER11> The characterisation of Imgur as a parasite isn't a value judgement. Imgur isn't doing anything wrong (nor reddit for that matter).

<comment><USER14> You may not want it to be but I'm that case you probably should've chosen a different word...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Why on earth would Reddit want to add a massive expense (image hosting) at a time that they're already hemorrhaging money? Especially since imgur was still a fairly adequate host for the site. Reddit's image hosting seems like burning money for nothing. Not to mention the Reddit image URLs are horrifying. I upload stuff to imgur just for the nice, short URLs.

<comment><USER16> Reddit did the right thing - they realized a majority of their users are on Reddit for the images, which makes it a core competency. Reddit was using Imgur as a free image host, which Imgur was obviously not ok with. I realized this last summer when imgur started redirecting direct image links into its ad-ridden bloated mess of a social image page. It was an obvious attack on reddit. I don't know if imgur ended up undoing this or not, but it made it painfully obvious that reddit and imgur cannot peacefully coexist in the way it used to.

edit: just found this, it looks like they're continuing to move away from being a simple image host for reddit. [https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/6eip2q/imgur...](https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/6eip2q/imgur_is_just_straight_up_redirecting_to_their/)

<comment><USER11> > Reddit was using Imgur as a free image host, which Imgur was obviously not > ok with.

It's funny though, because that's what Imgur was created to be. The problem is it's absolutely unsustainable as a "business model".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Websites like Imgur are able to detect whether the browser is requesting the image as a part of an <img> tag or a separate document by sniffing the Accept header.

So when a direct Imgur image link is opened in its own tab, Imgur can redirect to a webpage if it feels like it. In Firefox, by changing about:config value "image.http.accept" to

      */*

it's possible to avoid this behavior and it will load exactly what you asked for.

I never quite understood why do browsers let a webserver know the context you're loading the requested resource in, for privacy's sake.

<comment><USER18> Thanks for the info: I didn't know about this one. Fortunately `image.http.accept` already defaults to this in Firefox 54.0.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is not really a surprise, this cycle happens from time to time, i.e. Photobucket, ImgShack, etc.

As soon as Imgur took funding the die was cast. They have to show more ads, get more traffic to their pages, and drive engagement.

Imgur was at its best when it was simple to upload and link. Those days are gone.

<comment><USER4> I don't see how you can make money from the following model:

>Upload an image to easily directly link to elsewhere.

From the single ad view of the OP that uploads, they expect to make enough money to fund the thousands of people that will then download the image? Doesn't make sense. I wish it did, because that's a user-friendly world, but _somebody_ is paying to keep that server running.

<comment><USER19> Perhaps but that's how these services get so popular in the first place.

There are mechanisms where free image hosting makes sense. Remember when we used to pay for email? There are always ways to monetize products indirectly, or have value add, when direct monitization doesn't work well.

<comment><USER4> I'm not entirely sure why I _don 't_ have to pay for email. My only guess is that because it's hosted by Google, I am more integrated in the google ecosystem, which seems to be only something like google or yahoo could pull off. I can't really think of any other companies that are "spread" enough to make sense having an "ecosystem."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> You know how I can tell Reddit doesn't have any content creators in upper management who consider these decisions? Because at least one of them would've spoken up:

"Oh, we built many of our communities on sharing Copyright protected content by way of our weasel-cousin IMGUR, so let's go ahead and bring all that DMCA/Safe Harbors liability under our umbrella - you're joking, right?"

At least the Conde Nast lawyers will come out okay in this.

<comment><USER21> I think they did it because the writing was on the wall.

Imgur's current business model was not sustainable. Direct image linking is expensive and can't be monetized. Imgur has been making an effort to lessen direct image linking and may end up blocking it entirely eventually, which would screw over reddit.

And so reddit had to be proactive and create their own alternative.

<comment><USER20> The colloquialism / maxim "Out of the frying pan, into the fire" seems to fit here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Imgur has a pretty different product, and honestly - this might lower their traffic, but increase revenue (like the author mentioned).

I have friends who visit imgur regularly, and it's what I would consider a meme platform. Although, I personally use it to just share photos.

Reddit's natively hosted app, is likely why they need increased investment. Honestly, I see why Reddit wanted their own natively hosted images, but I can't see how this will increase their revenue or help them succeed.

</comment><comment><USER23> To me, Reddits new image handling is a pain in the ass. I liked that I could either look at the image/video _or_ read the commments. Now I have no choice but to receive them both at the same time. Videos even start to autoplay.

Also: Is it new that Reddit allows animated ads? I always had the feeling Reddit was a place where I could peacfully interact with others. Lately I am afraid it turns into a page full of animated, colorful distractions that make me feel uneasy.

<comment><USER24> Can you clarify on the animated ads you're seeing?

<comment><USER25> Mobile App iOS has autoplay video ads. Twitch prime or whatever its called was the first one I saw yesterday.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is why you have be careful when it comes to starting a business or service that's dependent on another to keep going.

Because it's very easy for the 'host' company to take your idea, undercut it and 'force' you out of business. Or to make changes that completely kill your product or service/screw up your marketing strategy.

It's a risk you have to take with a business so dependent on another particular company or site.

<comment><USER27> Seems like a fairly valid business strategy though. Step 1: Provide a solution to a problem that isn't being addressed by an existing service with a large audience. Step 2: Try to convert users of the host service to your own users by offering other valuable features to them that aren't reliant on the host service. Getting any access and visibility to users is the biggest problem. If you can't retain the users after that point, then maybe you just aren't providing enough value outside of what the host service can provide.

<comment><USER28> I don't think the parent was implying it is an invalid business strategy; just that it has a set of risks.

<comment><USER26> Yeah. Nothing says a company like this can't work at all, just that it's risky and can easily fail when times change.

But it can succeed, if either:

1\. The company buys you out and takes you inhouse instead of making a competitor from scratch (this seems to be a common business strategy for startups operating like this)

2\. You can spin off the userbase into separate service (like mentioned by the commenter above).

3\. Somehow you can exploit the situation to build a brand for a completely different business or industry. Kind of like how a lot of fan game developers use their temporary fame to market themselves to the industry or retrofit their work to be more original after the inevitable cease and desist notice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> the decline is completely imgur's doing - they went from a site that promised to be simple, clean and easy to a site that mirrored the problems it started out to solve.

frustrating overlays, slow, intrusive self promotion ... even worse on mobile. anyone remember the annoying cat paw?

</comment><comment><USER30> Imgur copied Reddit's functionality first, to be fair.

Maybe because they identified how easy it would be for them to get nuked by Reddit?

<comment><USER31> ...Imgur was MADE by reddit!

<comment><USER32> According to Wikipedia, it was a "gift to Reddit".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imgur#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imgur#History)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_t...](https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_to_reddit_i_created_an_image_hosting/)

<comment><USER33> I remember a long time ago people pointing out that it was actually posted to Digg first. Imgur's creator says it was posted to multiple services on the same day [1], but that he deleted the original Reddit post. The post saying it was a "gift to Reddit" came a day after the post to Digg failed to gain traction.

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9tlwi/im_the_imgur_gu...](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9tlwi/im_the_imgur_guy_ama/c0edn5u/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> That last graph shows the total number of image submissions has almost doubled? imgur submissions dropped by 250,000 but native uploads increased by almost a million.

</comment><comment><USER35> What is everyone experience of the Reddit hosting vs. Imgur? For me the Reddit hosting seems less responsive then the old Imgur hosting. Reddit has always seemed to have an issue with scaling out for load (my opinion from my experience) and taking on the hosting themselves just seems to have made this worse.

<comment><USER36> Reddit hosting is noticeably slower, and sometimes WAY slower.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Seems apt to link the blog post I wrote when my own image hosting service went under:

[https://drewdevault.com/2014/10/10/The-profitability-of- onli...](https://drewdevault.com/2014/10/10/The-profitability-of-online- services.html)

</comment><comment><USER38> For image hosting I use an s3 bucket with MonoSnap (a free program). You can configure Monosnap to record an area of your screen as a gif/mpeg or capture your screen, or you can drop files onto its tray icon, and it will upload the file to s3, and copy a shortened link to your clipboard. For most images it takes about a second. It's been very helpful for me. ([http://take.ms/BBVGW](http://take.ms/BBVGW))

</comment><comment><USER39> Bandwidth isn't really imgur's problem now.

So long as you have users, you have bandwidth, you have revenue.

The problem is now storage. As users and revenue may decline the bandwidth bill declines too... but the storage bill always increases and never declines.

This is the real problem with image hosting, keeping alive old images and storage costs always growing regardless of current usage and revenue.

<comment><USER40> Imgur has (had?) a policy of deleting images that were not requested within the last six months.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> So now that Reddit is trying to raise money are we going to get a huge increase in Reddit articles on HN? This is a serious question because everytime a company appears to be in "fundraising mode" the "local news" (HN, Tech Crunch, SF Chronicle) seems to be perforated by positive or optimistic articles for the entity in question.

</comment><comment><USER42> Do Reddit support hosting galleries? Optionally with the ability to download them as archives?

</comment><comment><USER43> Imgur used to let you upload a bunch of photos, then "generate multiple links" to output a text block of all the links in Markdown, BBCode, etc. So annoying that they removed the feature.

</comment><comment><USER44> What gets me is loading a gif on Imgur compared with alternatives.

Imgur seems to want show it's loading gif before the actual gif.

Sometimes I can be waiting at least 10 seconds for the gif to actually begin loading.

No thanks.

</comment><comment><USER45> Everyone is hating on Imgur as a community but I personally think that's the best part of it. It's the only "front page" I visit daily apart from HN.

</comment><comment><USER46> The graph seems to indicate that the number of images almost doubles during 2016, but the number of submissions do not?

<comment><USER47> Might count large albums as submissions? Upload a single image and it's one image, one submission. Upload 10 images into one album and it's 10 images, one submission.

Could be wrong but that's my guess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> For every post in this thread:

s/imgur/imageshack s/reddit/somethingawful

<comment><USER49> I remember when waffleimages died...

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> [https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/6ib4n9/what_ive...](https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/6ib4n9/what_ive_learned_hunting_down_shills/)

</comment><comment><USER51> Why doesn't Reddit just buy Imgur?</comment>


Billions of request per day meet Go 1.5 - <AUTHOR> https://firstname.lastname@example.com/billions-of-request-per-day-meet-go-1-5-362bfefa0911

<comment><USER2> Great read, thanks for sharing. I was interested in reading "in-use" 1.5 stories.</comment>


Zombie Processes Are Eating Your Memory - <AUTHOR> https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2018/02/11/zombie-processes-are-eating-your-memory/ <comment><USER2> The author mentions CcmExec.exe a million times without explaining it. A bit of searching reveals that it's part of the Change and Configuration Management system in MS Systems Management Server ([https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jonathanh/2004/05/27/ccmexe...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jonathanh/2004/05/27/ccmexec- exe-and-inventory-exe-what-are-they-and-what-do-they-do/)). That's why he alludes to most folks not seeing it unless they are on a corporate managed machine.

<comment><USER3> Yes, this is part of System Center Configuration Manager. A required client when deploying software, and updates to corporate machines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Synaptics driver leaked memory whenever a process was created

Funny! I found out the same issue last week and ended up just uninstalling the driver (not sure how permanent that is, but I'd like to think it is). I thought I was going crazy - why I was hitting pagefile after 28 days of uptime but only using around 8/32 real GB of memory! I loaded up the ram viewer tool and was aghast - hundreds of thousands of zombie processes! Death by a thousand cuts!

<comment><USER5> I guess that Synaptics driver was triply bad. I could see the memory leak in its process, and I could see the CPU usage it was triggering, but at the time I did not realize it was creating zombies. Wow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thank god, cant wait to try this out! My windows always feels enormously sluggish and memory seems to dissipate soon after reboot. It has been my biggest gripe with my lenovo y700 laptop and at times it has actually frozen for couple minutes after opening from sleepmode(or quickstart, the one that powers off). Really unbearable and been thinking of buying new one(or just using my work MBP even more).

UPDATE: Umm.. After spending some time getting my Visual Studio to build the FindZombieHandles-project (pre-built binary would have been nice) it immediately exists not enabling me to see all the zombie processes. I don't know how to code C# and can't really afford spending time to change the termination based on say pressing Esc-key.

<comment><USER7> The repo has prebuilt binaries now

<comment><USER8> The binaries don't work for me. When I run as a privileged (admin) user I get:

Some process names may be missing. 0 total zombie processes. No zombies found. Maybe all software is working correctly, but I doubt it. More likely the zombie counting process failed for some reason. Please try again. Pass -verbose to get full zombie names.

<comment><USER5> That happens sometimes. I don't know why.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting. On my machine, Razer mouse drivers (RzSDKService.exe) seem to be leaking 2 handles every second.

<comment><USER10> Bad driver, time to remove it.

<comment><USER5> If you could complain to Razer first - maybe on twitter - that would be helpful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Running it on my machine tells me:

> 0 total zombie processes. No zombies found. Maybe all software is working > correctly, but I doubt it. More likely the zombie counting process failed > for some reason. Please try again.

</comment><comment><USER12> Looks like Creative Cloud leaks handles. Two and a half days uptime, no app updates in Creative Cloud and it had ~16,700 open handles.

</comment><comment><USER13> Sounds like a potential DoS. Just create an delete processes never freeing the handle. And the offending process is not easily found by the average user.

</comment><comment><USER14> Has anyone had an iOS device lose battery really fast, only lasting for less than a day, until you reboot and everything is fine again?

<comment><USER15> No, but I've got one that abruptly went from several days of charge to about 4 hours, at the same time that the TouchID sensor failed. Reboot was the first thing I tried. Wipe-and-reload was the next.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16>
      "I don't know why zombie processes consume that much RAM,
       but it's probably because there should never be enough of
       them for that to matter."

Wow, I am surprised the complete breakdown in the logic there. It's almost like saying the cart is in front of the donkey because the donkey doesn't matter. It's easy enough to find out why but the OP author never bothers to. And also the answer is normally covered in any reasonable undergrad operating systems class.

Am I becoming an old curmudgeon or is understanding operating systems just not seen as necessary these days?

<comment><USER17> I think the logic makes sense. Presumably the thinking is that zombie processes take up 64KBytes apiece because there aren't enough of them, in general, to make it worth doing the work to make them take up less.

<comment><USER16> No that is entirely wrong, if the RAM wasn't necessary it would be freed regardless of how much it was. No person who writes production grade kernels just leaves memory hanging around because it's not worth cleaning it up (and certainly not every time a process exits).

The reason the memory is retained is so that it can be reported to the parent process why the process died (e.g. normal exit (error code 0), or failure, or killed by signal, etc), and retain enough information for simple diagnostic purposes. It is for that reason that page table mappings (for the little memory that is retained) and private data (for process exit status etc) is kept.

<comment> radford-neal Sure. It's not that there's NO reason for it. But if the kernel writers thought there'd be lots of them, they would do something to reduce the amount of memory - eg, apply some data compression method to them, at least once they've been around a while (so that there would be no performance impact in typical usage).

<comment><USER16> I have a strong suspicion that the minimum process size on Windows NT is 64kB (between kernel and user pages, for Intel platforms anyway). So if you didn't treat a zombie process as "just another process" for management purposes you'd have to start having all sorts of exceptions in some very base level code (page tables, scheduler, system statistics and reporting, etc etc) just to clean up after other people who can't or won't code properly. I just can't see a kernel engineer agreeing that this was a sane thing to do (I can image how someone with a temperament like Linus would respond!).

<comment> radford-neal Could be. But if it were a really big issue, I'd think that the minimum process size could be reduced, which might be a useful change in any case. After all, on the first Unix system I used, 64K was the MAXIMUM process size...

The point is that there are always tradeoffs, whose resolution is affected by how important an issue is perceived to be.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Pixels Fighting - <AUTHOR> http://pixelsfighting.com/ <comment><USER2> What's the algorithm for this? Is it just Conway's game of life?

<comment><AUTHOR> The JavaScript running it isn't minified or obfuscated.

It's basically a weighted random number, with the weight being determined by the colors of the neighbors.</comment></comment>


Silicon Valley Wake Up Call - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@justinkan/silicon-valley-wake-up-call-eba3dfaa82c3#.3mp0gfos0 <comment><USER2> My view is a SV only wake up call is not enough but a worldly one is needed. Look at how Europe is getting dismantled... Lack of thoughtful technology is not too blame only but failed political systems with their failed politicians who only think about serving themselves as opposed to serve others especially the next generations.</comment>