snackematician

I use Free File Fillable Forms together with excel1040.com. First I fill in the numbers in Excel, then into Free File Fillable Forms, and check that they get the same answers. It works well for me.

> I worked on tax software and have seen these kind of efforts. Noble, yes. Short lived, yes.

I've been using excel1040.com for several years now (2017 iirc), and I think it's been around for awhile before that as well -- so I don't think it's fair to call it short lived.

It's pretty amazing how thorough it is. Not perfect, but I found it much more comprehensive and flexible than the free/cheap version of Turbotax.

That said, it is maintained by one crazy guy in Kansas. I doubt the project will survive after he stops working on it.

I really hope other GNU projects, in particular Emacs, follow suit, though I doubt it will happen.

In my experience it is a massive hassle to get the copyright disclaimer from my employers. I'm currently on hold from contributing to Emacs because my paperwork is working its way through the legal bureuacracy of my new employer. Also, I have former coworkers from previous companies who were enthusiastic about Emacs, but unwilling to go through the trouble of getting the paperwork to contribute.

I think getting this paperwork through is probably more difficult in my industry, than in others -- I do R&D at a large pharmaceutical.

Still, I think the copyright disclaimer is one of the biggest factors that is limiting the number and diversity of Emacs contributors. I also think it's unnecessary, as Linux does not have this requirement, and it has successfully enforced the GPL, for example on router manufacturers.

`emacsclient -nw` in the terminal will open a terminal emacs that works with the same daemon.

This is yet another attack against immigrant students as noted in sibling comments.

But it is also an attempt to force universities to open in the Fall despite the dangers of doing so. Many universities depend on the tuition from foreign students. The timing shows this (right after Harvard announced plans to go online), as well as Trump's tweets that schools must open in Fall.

Emacs does this too -- I think it was the pioneer for this sort of functionality.

One thing I'm jealous of VSCode (as an Emacs user), is the Google Docs-style collaborative editing. Seems particularly useful for pair programming in the covid-work-from-home era.

Counterpoint: Twitter is the preferred social media among scientists, and a good place to keep up with the latest papers and developments. The quality of discussion on science twitter can be pretty good too, despite the character limit.

> My suggestion is to prepare for the possibility of major disruption starting 2 to 6 months from now.

This is too optimistic. We're currently in the exponential growth phase of this outbreak. Things can change rapidly, much sooner than 2-6 months.

Self-interest aside, it's a moral imperative to do what we can to slow the spread of this outbreak. The mortality rate for COVID19 is highly correlated with overburdening of the healthcare system. I fear the US healthcare system is woefully unprepared.

> This is with the figures known so far and before there is a vaccine around 2-3%.

There's still a lot of uncertainty around the fatality rate here. For cases outside China, the fatality rate so far is about .2%, compared to about .1% for seasonal influenza. By contrast, in Hubei the reported fatality rate is around 4-5%. (Numbers are as of last week so might be slightly outdated now).

My guess is that the 2-3% estimate is too high. In Hubei there is probably a reporting bias towards counting the more sick cases -- mild or asymptomatic COVID cases are probably being reported less often.

Another complaint I have with jupyter notebooks is that they don't play nice with git. For this (and other reasons), I much prefer Emacs org-mode, or even running Python in Rmarkdown+Rstudio+reticulate.

Does anyone know if this will affect the desktop client as well, or just the browser interface?

Personally I prefer the browser interface because I find the Desktop notifications and the Angry Red notification icon very distracting. But it sucks to lose markdown.