Anyone who has tried car/van camping in public should be familiar with this feeling. While sleeping in my van I've had plenty of nightmares where the nearest neighborhood forms an angry mob to have my vehicle towed away.
You can thank Grover Norquist[1] for that. The Taxpayer Protection Pledge [2] that he promulgates to US republican lawmakers is the primary mechanism though which those legislators justify blocking simplification and streamlining of tax filing. If it's easier for people to pay taxes the government will probably ask for more cash if we implement those systems, right? Therefore it must be blocked according to the pledge! The logic is airtight!
Ironically in reality this is actually pretty much the opposite of taxpayer protection and amounts to additional tax paid to private corporations on TOP of our existing taxes.
Theoretically, the ideas he's talking about make sense. If say, you're a single person w/ no dependents who doesn't itemize making the process much simpler is attractive.
However - as Ted Cruz showed everyone - being able to do your taxes on something the size of a postcard is only possible if just about every specific deduction is cut out.
Once people saw that, it was DoA.
Also, while I'm here, can someone explain what was supposed to replace the IRS in Cruz's plan? (State Governments?) I mean, somebody has to administer and manage this process, however simple it might be.
Even then 90% of the 1040-EZ is instructions on how to actually use the form. If you cut all that out and just have the boxes to fill with labels it's not much bigger than the post card it's just needlessly hard to file.
I recall seeing recently (somewhere in Europe, I think) the idea that because the government tracks this information anyway as people get paid throughout the year, all that is required is basically you (the taxpayer) attesting that the information being submitted is correct.
At that point, you just sign the form and send it back.
Yeah, the only place it really breaks down is where you're on the line between the standard deduction and any itemized deductions and finding out requires going through the whole process with itemized to see if you come out better. I've been right on that line since buying a house and it's annoying every year.
It's also unlikely to happen because a dedicated faction in the GOP specifically want taxes to be as annoying as possible to make people resent it more.
> Also, while I'm here, can someone explain what was supposed to replace the IRS in Cruz's plan?
It wasn't meant to be good government, or even tenable government. It was an idea designed to appeal to stupid people. That is all.
(The failure of such a stupid idea to actually work or be implementable could be spun politically. The spin wouldn't have to be especially plausible, either, because, you know... stupid people)
I assumed PUN was referring to the parts of Norquist's ideas that should actually be taken seriously - spoiler, there are few - as opposed to those which are grounded in antigovernment paranoia and veiled xenophobia.
"It might be possible to embed a C compiler into a PDF by compiling it to JS with Emscripten, for example, but then your C compiler has to take input through a plain-text form field and spit its output back through a form field."
Even just basic text is... interesting in PDFs. A few years back, I created a PDF which displayed its own MD5 hash by making every single letter a separate chain of sub-documents and using MD5 collisions to change which sub-document each pointed to without changing the hash. Pretty much every PDF reader managed to interpret this cleanly as ordinary, copy-and-pasteable text because it wasn't any worse than they could expect to encounter in an ordinary PDF, and they all had robust heuristics for dealing with these kinds of shenanigans. (The exception I found was PDF.js, possibly due to the fact it was rendering the whole thing to HTML.) The only real issue was that every PDF reader had a slightly different idea of what characters I could safely use in the names of those nested documents.
Now that's an intriguing concept. "A file format for declaratively specifying a physical data-communication artefact, abstractly-defined by the interactions it supports."
• Just showing the user text? Compiles to plaintext.
• Get the user to give some input? Compiles to a styled form, as PostScript.
• Add radio buttons? Compiles to a physical form but with a 3D-printed notched slider glued to it.
• Require validation for freeform-text form fields? Compiles to a 3D-print + VLSI + pick-and-place specification for a tablet embedded-device that displays the form and does the validation.
Now imagine a "printer" that takes such abstract documents as input, and can print any of these... :)
Maybe if you bury the page deep within a forest, so the compiler could hook into the distreebuted CPU cluster in order to facilitate more effective computation.
I don't think the example had any practical use, really. I understood it more as an illustration of how weird Chrome's scripting support is: On the one hand, it lets you put programs as complex as a working C compiler in there - but on the other hand, interaction with the outside world is limited to putting stuff into text fields...
> also, is the "input" and "output" of this compiler just code and executables?
Mostly yes. I'm not sure how much of a typical build chain he was trying to convert to JS here, but the compiler itself typically takes a bunch of files with C code and outputs a number of "object files", which are really chunks of machine code. In an actual build process, you'd then use a linker to glue those object files together in the right way and make an executable.
I guess, what you could do if you wanted was to include the whole build chain (including linker) into the PDF, encode the executable as Base64 and fill some form field of the PDF with it. Then your workflow would be as follows:
1) Write some C code
2) Copy the C code into form field #1 if the PDF.
3) Hit a "compile" button or something. Form field #2 fills with what looks like an enormous amount of random gibberish (really the Base64-encoded binary)
5) Copy all the text from form field #2, use a program of your choice to decode the Base64 and save the decoded binary on your hard drive.
6) Run the binary on your hard drive and watch your C code execute. Hooray!
Eval() is part of the js language so you obviously do. But regardless you could make your own interpreter if neccessary. You could compile to x86 and then run it in your own VM if you felt like it.
> it doesn't actually execute code, right? Then what's the power of having a compiler in a PDF? you can output the executable, but can you run it?
Depends what you mean by "run", really. You can write a full-on X86 emulator, and execute a compiled binary there. But given that it's an emulator running in a nested series of sandboxes, it won't be terribly useful -- for example, it still won't have I/O capabilities.
"Passengers were not allowed to leave the airplane because the Goose Bay Airport did not have a customs officer on duty during the overnight hours. Saturday bled into Sunday, and still the flight remained grounded."
Somewhat, especially since 2009 (https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna34510274) when the regulations changed to force airlines to return to a gate after waiting for takeoff for three hours.
Has anyone considered that people periodically pointing out places where HN is being Reddit-like is part of what contributes to keeping this perception an illusion?
Look at their product lines--Spot and Handle are the furthest things from humanoid. They've also done some static robot arms.
Atlas is their only active humanoid platform, which they've stated is mainly a research platform just for the sake of advancing robotics and pushing the limits.
