It is not the same traffic pattern, Uber sees a regular stream of request keeping their caches warm, Yes they might see 2X or 3X spikes every now and them but in proportion these are smaller than the spikes that the IRS will see today.
This is a bit of a disaster. Not surprising, though. Lots of US government electronic services have gone unmaintained under the Trump admin. The website for servicing defaulted student loans has also been completely broken for months: https://myeddebt.ed.gov/borrower/
US government electronic services have gone unmaintained for decades; I don't think it's fair to blame it on the administration who happens to be in power when things go sideways (see: OPM hack, etc).
I'm not sure the root cause, but there seems to be a long-standing, fundamental distaste for infrastructure maintenance by the US government.
What will be interesting to see is if Trump holds to his campaign promises and improves this type of infrastructure. I wouldn't be surprised if he is only referring to physical infrastructure and not software.
It's been 15 months, that's enough time to see results from poor decisions. Sure, he would need to be unusually competent to prevent such issues, but arguably that's a reasonable expectation for a president.
(I say this as a government contractor.) As to root cause for Gov IT issues, the real issue seems to be the government outsourcing so much. It makes many people rich, but outsourcing ends up being both extremely expensive and error prone. This is not purely an issue with the government most private companies face issues when outsourcing IT as it's difficult to get right.
Putting aside the external politics, its hard for govt employees to take on these sort of tasks. The reason I say this is because of how promotions work for govies. Its much easier to get promoted if you deliver a new system than if you were just doing ops & maintenance on a system you didn't have a hand in building. Sure, there are going to be some that will do the work but its definitely an institutional priorities issue.
I don't think this problem of promotion is unique to government - this applies everywhere in modern sales and image-oriented business cultures rather than longevity and loyalty. Maintenance hardly gets any innovation in general compared to new products and lines of business itself due to the obsession with growth in a lot of business (maintaining systems gets thrown to lower tiers of talent and under-funded once the parade is over - this applies across just software too). It's impossible for me to get the recognition compared to engineers pushing out flashy demos that attract new dollars but when I optimize infrastructure systems and systems to squeeze out 50%+ more transactions / second without paying more hardly anyone seems to care even in engineering.
Not saying it's unique to government, I'm just saying this is the reality as well in government as it is in the private sector. The thing I'd like to point out is the morale issue and dwindling compensation for doing this work as opposed to walking out the door and going to the private sector is the crux of the promotion issue. I've worked in both the private sector & government and I've gotta say government work is a real shit show with the arcane rules and regs you have to follow to do the simplest of tasks. I'm going to stop short of going into a full rant, but I hope you see what I mean.
I’ve been a govie and contractor both and have done private sector work in companies of varying sizes, I get you. I was mostly speaking not necessarily to you but for others that may have certain perceptions of government work that are inaccurate or unfair comparisons. There’s plenty of inane rules in any large enterprise. The difference is that a truly inefficient large enterprise has a non-zero chance of winding down while government agencies themselves rarely start greenfield nor wind down (projects, of course, are stopped all the time).
One of the fundamental reasons is that tech is an in-demand industry, and you can make a lot more money working for a private company than you can for the government. Not so much at the developer level, but senior management is bereft of anyone with a clue.
How do you design a system that is barely used most of the year and then experiences one huge spike only one day? Do they have tons of capacity sitting around most of the year?
Well they could have a sophisticated auto-scaling system that only pays for capacity as needed. Or they could have some lone IT person turn on a bunch of servers, configure a load balancer, then cross their fingers, the morning of.
Does it really need to auto scale for a well known and understood usage? If dominos can do it for the super bowl surely the irs can provision for annual fillings
Yeah, the first peak around Feb 1 is almost a mirror image of tax day. You could load up for first peak, ramp down for the trough, then load back up again for the “deadline” (not actually a deadline). But you’re taking about 100s of times more scale, not 10s.
I ask the same question when I look out at parking lots. Yet there they are; wasting resources, destroying habitats, soaking up heat, and suppressing carbon absorption.
At least computing resources can be repurposed more easily. That can be done with parking lots (park-and-rides, carnivals, etc.) but the physical proximity makes that much harder.
But, you're going from maybe 10k * X requests a day, to several million. Any system is vulnerable in that kind of very aggressive scaling situation - see every single game launch with a multiplayer component since the dawn of time.
Obviously you can scale systems ahead of time if you know, but you still run into issues because you probably haven't scaled the entire system and don't know the likely bottlenecks since it's hard to generate that kind of traffic in a QA environment.
Think of the scale of facebook, and then realize most of their payloads are <1k json/protobuf. It's not the size of the payload, it's the delta in quantity.
But they also know roughly when the load is going to hit, and how many requests they'll receive. It's not a one-time event like a game launch. They've also been using the same system for decades and ought to be pretty familiar with the various bottlenecks.
This is the archetypal use case for cloud services - most retailers (now at least, they didn't use to), have some kind of autoscaling switched on and I'd imagine this is the same.
I have never dealt with cloud services autoscaling. Does it really work seamlessly or will it take time to scale up? Let's say I have a system that has 10 users/day and suddenly I have 10 million for some reason. Does AWS handle this (as long as my credit card can handle it) or will there be outages while AWS is scaling up?
I always figured the real reason, the dark truth, for why we have all these reliable queuing services was to feed these old battle axe batch systems, throttled to a rate they can handle.
The Cloud wants you to answer this a different way today, but there’s a stupid simple trick that some medium sized companies and MMOs have used.
Schedule your hardware upgrade cycle and lower priority workloads around the event so that you can get your hands on several times more hardware for a month or two.
With recent concern about malicious entities in the press, I'll pose this question: "On its own, or was it 'helped'?"
Separately, it's worth noting the following quoted bit of the article. These cuts have included investigators; at the same time, statistics indicate that each additional investigator brings in 10x the cost of their job, in increased "recovered" revenue, i.e. collection of taxes owed.
The IRS isn't "just incompetent". It's been under political and funding attack, for years, now.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) noted the agency’s budget has been repeatedly cut in recent years, which he said he believes could have contributed to the problems.
“While we don’t yet know what has caused this systems failure, the lack of Republican funding for the IRS to serve taxpayers will only compound the issue. Americans should not be punished for being unable to file their tax returns or pay their tax bills today,” said Wyden, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, which oversees the IRS.
The IRS has faced steady budget cuts for nearly a decade, with its staff size falling by about 18,000 employees from 2010 to 2017 and a recent report showing it can answer only about 60 percent of calls from tax filers.
Nope (AFAIK). Their best bet is either using a 3rd party filing service (which appear to be working) or getting it in the mail in time for a postmark today.
> “If we can’t solve it today, we’ll figure out a solution,” Kautter said. “Taxpayers would not be penalized because of a technical problem the IRS is having.”
Why does the IRS not distribute the tax-filing workload across the whole year? Having everyone trying to complete their taxes on the same day seems wildly inefficient and wasteful.
The point is that the "last day" is x/365 instead of x/1 (in the case that your taxes must be filed by your birth day for the given year, for example). You're right that there will ALWAYS be people waiting until the last minute, what he's proposing is that there are different "last minutes" for different people throughout the year so it's not an absurd number at one time.
We don’t do that because it doesn’t make sense. How would that even work? Use the 2017 tax year as an example. You obviously can’t compute 2017’s taxes until the year is over. So how do you stagger? Is my deadline in January? That’s not really fair to me if someone else has a deadline in May.
Well you wouldn't have the same tax year for everyone, because you'd have to give everyone the same amount of time to file to be fair.
So, you could give everyone a different tax year. The forms already allow you to have a different tax year, though few people make use of that (I have no idea what qualifies people to have a different fiscal year, it might just be for companies, I don't know).
Of course, this would be a giant mess because all the other entities that are tied to the standard tax year, namely everyone who communicates info to the IRS about you and files 1099-xyz forms about you and sends copies to you: your employer, your bank, your IRA/401k company, etc. I don't see how it'd be workable at all.
Here's what would work much better: simplify the tax code (eliminating a lot of deductions), and make filing automatic for regular W-2 wage-earners, like they do in western European nations, where they just send you a pre-filled form, you make any corrections to it (to account for income they didn't know about), and then send it back if there's changes (otherwise they just go with what they already know about you). We don't do this in the US because we're corrupt: the tax-filing companies have bought off the politicians so they won't let the IRS do this.
> The forms already allow you to have a different tax year, though few people make use of that (I have no idea what qualifies people to have a different fiscal year, it might just be for companies, I don't know)
It's mostly for businesses (which includes individual tax payers as sole proprietorships), and the things looked to for non-automatic approvals are things like what your actual cycle of business is like. (For individual tax payers, the only automatically allowed changes are, IIRC, change back to a calendar year as tax yesr and changes to align with a spouses tax year with certain conditions.)
How do you determine when an entity—person or company—needs to file? If the filing date is based on employer, what happens if I work for multiple employers or change jobs? If the filing is date is based on the filing entity, every employer now needs to keep track of my filing date. I got married. Do I need a new filing date, or does my household now need two returns instead of one?
Sure, computers could solve this problem, but the human cost—changing accounting systems, communicating new dates, etc.—is not negligible. A simpler (and probably cheaper) solution might be to update the IRS systems to scale better for the week before and after tax day.
Problem extends beyond mailing forms. Everything linked to the tax year is now broken in this world. FSAs, employer-provided insurance, even general budgeting all have to change. Such changes will have an effect on the economy at the $100M scale, if not $1B. Why? Because the government couldn’t rent more server space? Buying a new data center would probably be cheaper than moving away from a single tax day. The proposed treatment is far worse than the disease.
Individuals can already change their tax year if they specifically request to do so, though it's contingent on IRS approval. I have no idea how likely the IRS is to grant approval, but clearly there are existing rules to handle non-calendar years.
How does this work if you get something like a W2, which is issued for the calendar year? Let's say your "personal" tax year starts and ends July 1 of each year. Are you supposed to split your W2 in half and count each for each year?
Sounds quite complex. I'm surprised they permit it.
> Why does the IRS not distribute the tax-filing workload across the whole year?
Because IRS doesn't write the law, that’s Congress's job, and the tax filing deadlines (and the other deadlines that are coordinated relative to them, like the deadline for filing and supplying to taxpayers W-2s, 1099s, etc.) are set in law.
As to why Congress doesn't do it, well, the fact that their are coordinated deadlines for multiple linked processes that different parties have to comply with would produce chaos if 1/12 of taxpayers had a tax deadline each month, and all the linked forms for those taxpayers, and the applicable tax years, had similarly staggered dates. OTOH, if you just gave some taxpayers longer after the availability of forms and end of the (single, consistent) tax year to file, there would be substantial fairness issues.
Companies can pick their own fiscal year, which helps spread out accountant “traffic” across the year.
But be careful what you wish for. The IRS could decide you have to pay your taxes by midnight on your birthday (because it’s easy for you to remember) and then where would you be?
Because that's an overly complex solution. Why not just fix the server capacity problem (or whatever is causing the outage)? Seems much simpler and they've been able to handle this in past years.
This is one of several reasons why I file on paper.
I caught a glimpse of how the sausages were made once, thanks to family connections. That was enough. It's completely reasonable to assume that the IRS is operating on technology that is at least 5 years out of date, and possibly as much as 40. They have just barely enough resources to serve their overall departmental mandate.
This is only partially on the IRS itself, and also on the politically motivated processes that intentionally underfund it, especially with regard to taxpayer assistance, guidance, or convenience. If not this year, next year, and if not then, call the office of the nearest archdiocese to investigate out who was responsible for the miracle of the unborked servers, and the miracle of the balancing of the surge traffic.
Yes, the IRS has outdated tech', but that within itself isn't really an argument for why you needed to switch to filing on paper after you learned "how the sausages were made." Plus aren't paper filings just typed in by hand, and turned into eFilings anyway? Both go through the same pipeline after a point.
Paper filings are converted to electronic records, but they are also scanned, and the images retained for some amount of time before being destroyed. They might also do as much OCR as they are able, and ask a human to verify or correct, rather than do all the data entry by hand.
If the internal digitization system goes down, well, the envelope still has a dated postmark on it. That makes it not my problem. Securing the pipeline between employee workstation and database server is likewise not my problem.
I don't want to explain further, because I don't want to discourage other people from e-filing, and it would contain some assumptions that I cannot verify. And it also contains the personal assumption that I will almost always wait until the last weekend before the filing deadline to even look at a form, because of a procrastination habit.
You need to postmark your forms by the due date, not have it in the hands of the IRS. If it takes a few days to get in the mail, a few days (weeks?) for it to be scanned and OCR...that's less days left to audit you. That is one of my understanding why someone may file by paper.
I filed early, this is the first time I've ever done it electronically. It took my forms and send me a success update within 15 minutes (did about a week ago since I owed a small Kia). The even nicer part was scheduling my payment to auto debit today (17th). Instead of worrying about an enormous check floating out there in the Postal Mail realm.
I filed my state the old school way since they don't allow free electronic submissions. To my surprise they cashed the check in 2 days. Although, it's Oklahoma so they're more broke than I am :-)
I file on paper, as I always have, because a) I absolutely refuse to pay money to file my taxes, and b) I especially refuse to pay money to companies that lobby for taxes to be more complicated.
There are free e-filing solutions, but not for my income range, and also last I checked (this might be a year or two out of date now) the various state-level agencies do not play well with the free e-filing.
And the paper forms are so easy! The hard part is sometimes figuring out whether you qualify for a particular thing or what a particular piece of income counts as, but that's more or less just as difficult even with software. Actually filling out the paperwork? Almost restful by comparison.
Oh, great. I'm trying to file today online, though I need to look for a free service and redo all the paperwork because I'm broke and can't afford the filing fee. And now this.
Can't they just announce an extension and give everyone extra time? That wouldn't solve all my problems, but it would take some pressure off.
This is stupid. Just tell people the deadline is extended.
If you’re unable to afford the filing fee, I’d assume you’re not submitting a very complicated form, so while taxes are due today, why should the deadline be extended? It’s not as if today was also the first day available for file. Your poor planning does not constitute an emergency on the IRS’s part, right?
the deadline should be extended because the valid time window for submitting has been shrunk due to the outage. they have altered the deal, so to speak.
I'm medically handicapped and I fell in December and hurt myself and basically spent three months in bed, not doing paid work, though I was working on other things to try to raise my income. I'm a woman, so I am barred from the old boys network. I appear to be the only woman to have ever made the leaderboard of Hacker News. No, this does not gain me entree to the old boys club. I still have essentially no professional connections here, though that may be painfully slowly changing.
I have cystic fibrosis. So does my oldest son. Both my sons are ASD. So, there's a whole lot on my plate.
I also am getting well when doctor's claim that cannot be done and that gets me called a lunatic and teller of tall tales. It doesn't lead to anything good.
I was gifted membership to Metafilter by a kind soul. That forum is full of people who like to imagine they are good people making the world a better place. They did nothing but crap on me. They were unwilling to help me figure out how to increase my income.
I've done everything in my power to solve what are supposed to be unsolvable problems and I mostly get kicked in the teeth for it.
But, hey, thanks for taking the time to make swipes at me. Really nice of you to add to my troubles while I sit here with $2 to my name trying to figure out how the hell I will eat for the rest of the month and also dealing with the IRS sword of Damocles today just to add to the fun.
I'm not trying to pile onto you, and it does sound like you have a lot to deal with, but... we've all known the deadline for a full year (give or take a couple days), and there's no real reason to wait until the very last day, hours before they're due. If they grant an extension, will you have them filed tonight anyway, or will you wait until the extension deadline?
I waited until just last night... so I was in a similar boat, but if for some reason I hadn't gotten them turned it, it would be on me - nobody else. You have to own your decisions, and take charge of your life - otherwise it'll just feel like a sequence of random unfortunate events... impossible to get out from under. Upon reflection, I certainly could have spent the 3 hours it took me to file my taxes back in February if I had set aside the time.
Also:
> I'm broke and can't afford the filing fee
This is for electronic filing, if you mailed them in (postmarked by today), it would cost you a postage stamp, unless you're referring to a tax software purchase (ie. HR Block, etc).
As stated previously, I fell and hurt myself and was incapacitated for some months. I file electronically because I am medically handicapped and papers make me ill.
I don't have money to mail them either.
And I do everything in my power to take responsibility for my life. That's how I am getting well when it is not supposed to be possible. That gets me nothing but grief from other people. It isn't respected. It isn't supported. I'm literally called crazy for doing that.
You're missing the point. OP is referring to you filing taxes on the last day. Your post history shows you spent every day the last months on HackerNews, you could have filed before today. E-file went live on January 29, 2018.
Please give it a rest. This is an absurd line of criticism.
If a deadline is advertised and an assurance given that electronic filing will be available, it's reasonable for anyone to assume that they can file electronically at any time before the deadline. Clearly the IRS agrees as they've extended the deadline.
Everyone has their own reasons for conducting their affairs as they do, and you're welcome to your opinion, but it's not OK to finger-wag at someone when they're operating within the official timeframes and filing channels.
Sorry to hear all of that has happened to you, but from your post it kind of seems like your victim mindset is also working against you.
Nothing you wrote precludes the ability to file your taxes earlier. If you can work on some things, you could have spent a bit of time figuring out your taxes - I'm sure there were 10 hours this year so far that you could have put to better use. Seems like lack of planning is at least partially to blame.
I hope you can reflect on how you could have acted differently to avoid this problem: if you view all of your problems as external and outside your locus of control it makes you feel powerless in your ability to solve them. I'm sure you are a fundamentally smart and capable person.
Cystic Fibrosis is a genetic disorder. It is classified as a dread disease because what it does to you is horrifying. Life expectancy when I was diagnosed at age 35 was 36 years old. Wikipedia tells me it is up between 42 and 50 these days in developed countries.
It accounts for about a third of all lung transplants for adults in the US and half of all pediatric lung transplants. It fosters the development of antibiotic resistant infections.
And I don't really want to harp on it, because it's clear that you and most people here aren't in the least bit sympathetic, which is why I have gotten so many replies telling me I am just not trying hard enough, etc.
Sometimes, people feel like victims because something has gone terribly wrong with their life and not because they are into pity parties. It aggravates me to be accused of having a victim mentality instead of having actual problems, in part because I have gotten off multiple prescription drugs, the hole in my left lung has closed and I manage my condition with diet and lifestyle. I wouldn't have achieved that without a lot of competence, psychological resilience and a can do attitude. But I get zero credit for what I have accomplished. I get nothing but crapped on any time I talk about getting myself healthier.
So I get zero sympathy for a very serious problem that is supposed to be incurable. I also get zero credit or respect for doing what is supposed to be impossible and getting healthier.
The only thing I have consistently asked on HN and elsewhere is some assistance in figuring out how to make adequate money online so my job won't keep me sick and I get shit for that too. Never mind how many other people on HN make their money online or aspire to and get their aspirations taken seriously. I get told I'm basically deluded for wanting that. And it's like hello? Lots of people are doing exactly that. Why on earth shouldn't I be able to do the same? Why can't I get sincere constructive feedback aimed at helping me do exactly that, in spite of my handicap?
I have 6 years of college. I had a Fortune 500 job for over 5 years. I appear to be the only woman to have ever made the leaderboard of HN. When men here make a lot of karma, they get told they must be smart and competent. When I say I appear to be the only woman to have ever made the leaderboard, I get all kinds of crap about how that doesn't actually mean anything. It is never taken to mean what I am trying to say -- that the evidence is that I'm not incompetent here. In fact, when you account for the apparent handicapping effect of my gender, it seems to me that the conclusion should be I'm far more competent than it looks.
I'm having an especially bad day today, but it isn't like any of my days are ever good. I was personally attacked by the first reply to me, a violation of HN guidelines. Then you and other people piled on to add to it. Exactly one reply tried to actually be helpful.
And then I get downvoted and lectured for getting upset at how I get treated. That's all kinds of messed up.
I just want my life to work. I have pulled miracles out my butt for a lot of years to try to make it work. But it is never enough because no matter what I do, I am not taken seriously.
Having a dread disease fails to be reason for anyone to have real compassion and having the competence to get well in the face of an incurable disease fails to get any respect or positive interest.
It's probably a mistake to reply. I live in fear of being banned for pointing out that I am failing to get the help I need.
It isn't because I'm not trying. I posted a Show HN this morning and it has been ignored. Most of my efforts to do something constructive get largely ignored, especially anything aimed at making a few bucks. From my end, it feels like the entire world finds it offensive for me to try to support myself, then finds it equally offensive for me to be frustrated and upset at being unable to escape poverty. Then persona...
- You recently spent time making an (essentially) empty github profile and adding it your HN bio. Not sure having a github does much for a writer. Great that you are learning and trying new things... but perhaps you could have used this time to file your taxes instead. On that note, you probably could have filed your taxes in the time you spent writing me this wall of text.
- I gave you sympathy, but you say "I get zero sympathy" - perhaps you're ignoring the sympathy you are getting?
- Making money as a writer online is hard. Most people who try fail and find other work: fewer jobs available than people who'd like them.
- HN leaderboard isn't a big thing. I had never seen or heard of it before you discussed it. I don't think you should expect it to get you a job.
- Have you been applying to normal jobs recently? From your description you sound qualified. Self employment has a high failure rate and lots of risk: most people who try never make money. If you need cash, may be time to go back to a bigger company with a stable salary.
- Calling 'not having your taxes done before the day it is due' 'poor planning' is not a personal attack, its an accurate description of your situation. Again, victim mentality.
- ShowHN's are hard to get traction with. Typically you either need to: 1. be doing something novel and cool with computer science or 2. be a ycombinator alumnus. Most of the 'boys club' effect on HN you are referring to I suspect is actually the "YC alums club". I've posted programming projects and gotten no traction. HN has a computer science focus, perhaps your content isn't landing because it is a bit off-topic. Your ShowHN post was essentially just a classified ad - I'm not sure why you'd expect people to be interested in it here.
- I really do hope you solve your problems, but tweets like this make me want to help you less. You seem to be holding on to a lot of negativity, perhaps speaking with a therapist could help.
https://twitter.com/doreen_michele/status/986358399221710848
It's astonishing to me that people seem so determined to finger-wag at someone who is clearly in great difficulty and distress, and yet has conducted themselves perfectly within the IRS's stated requirements.
For what it's worth, I know what it's like to be in in a chronic state of desperation trying to figure out how to overcome a debilitating illness for which mainstream medicine offers little help, while simultaneously trying to generate sufficient income to survive day-to-day.
I can assure you that doing your taxes are not a high priority when you're not sure how you're going to pay for food or rent the next month/week/day.
But even still that's beside the point. Michelle has sought to play by the IRS's rules and work within their systems, and that should be the end of the discussion.
Please give it a rest.
By the way, I'm very familiar with the concept of the victim mentality and, speaking for myself only, I'm well aware of the ways in which it kept me in a state of poor health and poverty. But to hound somebody for having a victim mentality when they're clearly in a profound state of distress and doing the best they can to play by what they can understand are society's expectations of them, is nothing more than cruel bullying.
Geez, I was trying to help. Get off your high horse.
You may think shielding her histrionic behavior from criticism is helpful, but I'd argue its harmfully reinforcing it. I worry for the kids who are exposed to this mentality daily and whether there is any munchausen by proxy occurring.
I'm sympathetic to the merits of tough love; I've often been the most willing to step forward and impart it. But I've spent enough time in the company of people in desperate need that I know when it can do more harm than good. I can accept that you were trying to help, but if I might direct some tough love at you, the best of intentions can lead to very bad outcomes if they're not accompanied by a sincere effort to understand the entire circumstances of the person you're trying to help.
I will note that my very first comment was an incredibly prosaic "Ugh, taxes!" remark. Had multiple people not piled on to tell me I was not justified in being stressed out about the IRS outage occurring on the final filing day, a day when 5 million Americans file from what I gather, and I just need to be more responsible, etc, there would have been no so called histrionics.
The HN guidelines indicate personal attacks are out of line. Most of my "bad behavior" on HN occurs after being attacked, often repeatedly and by multiple people.
I do what I can to figure out how to handle such things better, but those attacks should not be occurring to begin with. If they stopped, it would be vastly easier for me to maintain my composure and not get bent out of shape.
> I appear to be the only woman to have ever made the leaderboard of Hacker News. No, this does not gain me entree to the old boys club. I still have essentially no professional connections here, though that may be painfully slowly changing.
I think you might think Hacker News is something that it isn't. The leaderboard isn't something anyone really looks at and this is definitely not a good place to make or manage professional connections.
There are plenty of people who are successfully using HN to make professional connections or otherwise make money. So I get rather tired of hearing that I am deluded about that.
Show HN
Who's Hiring
Freelancer Seeking Freelancer
Patio11 and tptacek, both members of the leaderboard, were business partners for a time, though one lives in Japan and the other in Chicago.
> I appear to be the only woman to have ever made the leaderboard of Hacker News. No, this does not gain me entree to the old boys club. I still have essentially no professional connections here, though that may be painfully slowly changing.
The leaderboard, inasmuch as it correlates with any elite group, probably does so more because people who are already in that group are more likely to get onto the leaderboard for a variety of reasons, not because the leaderboard offers entry to that group (whether generally or for men specifically.)
I don't think I'm at all unique in being a man who has been in the leaderboard without ever having any professional connections through HN.
There is definitely a group with professional connections that overlaps with the HN community, including the leaderboard, and there is certainly no small amount of networking that is facilitated by HN contacts with similar interests, but, even before coming considering any potential gender dynamics issues, getting into the leaderboard just isn't a ticket into anything of substance.
Your profile has nothing in it. You appear to have no interest in using HN to make those kinds of connections. So no surprise that you don't have that if it isn't a goal of yours.
It is a goal of mine. And when I do the same things the men do, it doesn't get the same results. When men want to pursue something professionally, they routinely say "Email in profile." When I invite someone to take it to email, the most common outcome is they hit on me.
One guy spent some weeks talking to me and pretending to be my friend before mentioning that he was married and needed a shoulder to cry on because his marriage was in the toilet and he was hoping I would be said shoulder to cry on. I gave him about 3 more days of my time to cry on my shoulder, at which point he resumed sleeping with his wife while talking at me like we were lovers, never mind that I told him up front I was not going to be the Other Woman. I cut him loose at that point. The more I think about how he intentionally withheld his marital status, the madder and more used and lied to I feel.
There's a whole lot more backstory here that I am unwilling to comment on here. Suffice it say, I have good reason to believe that if I were male, I would have professional connections here of meaningful value.
If you don't want to use HN to make such connections, cool. But it's aggravating to be constantly told that this is an unrealistic expectation of mine when other people clearly pull it off and then also get told that my gender isn't the problem. If it's not, what is?
> When men want to pursue something professionally, they routinely say "Email in profile." When I invite someone to take it to email, the most common outcome is they hit on me.
I don't doubt at all that you get people feigning professional interest that turn things that way, and I do think that your gender and the fact that there are sexist, and more particularly sexually exploitive, men here plays a significant role in that.
You absolutely should not have to deal with this, and you have every reason to be upset about it. I suspect—and I want to be clear that I say this by way of explaining a pattern I've observed with this kind of targeted behavior eslewhere and how it tends to be targeted, but not at all to imply any blame on you—that the fact that you tend to be very open about circumstances of intense and urgent financial need and your hopes for professional connections on HN to alleviate that contributes to people who are inclined to they type of exploitation seeing you as a likely target.
I want to emphasize again that this is a problem with the people acting this way toward you, not with your writing.
> But it's aggravating to be constantly told that this is an unrealistic expectation of mine when other people clearly pull it off and then also get told that my gender isn't the problem. If it's not, what is?
While I think your expectations as to the general level of success at that here is too high, if I were to take as given the assumption that you are underperforming in that regard based on what would be expexted your leaderboard position and other indicia of prominence in the discussion community, and had to come up with an explanation, my first suspicion would be the fact that your professional focus seems to primarily be neither/technical nor financial nor in a hot application domain for technology, combined with the fact that you don't have a lot of money. Much of the networking at HN seems to center, as one might expect given it's connection to a tech heavy startup accelerator, to connecting people with certain professional focuses with each other and with people with money. (I don't think the attitude you've projected in the community about the issue since you got the impression that your failure to acheive what you expected was due to gender and personal animus helps, either, and there may be a bit of a vicious cycle there.)
But you could really be getting significantly disadvantaged in networking in HN because of your gender. I don't see evidence that would lead me to conclude that, true, but I think I've made the mistake of being insufficiently clear in my reaction against what has seemed to be your repeated implicit argument that your leaderboard position alone combined with your lack of success in that regard was sufficient evidence of exclusion on the basis of gender and that I've given the impression that I am dismissing the possibility that you've been disadvantaged in networking here based on gender. To the extent thst that is the case, it is my error, and I apologize.
your repeated implicit argument that your leaderboard position alone
I am clearly miscommunicating something because my point is not that my (former) position on the leaderboard alone should open doors. My point is that my (former) position on the leaderboard should stand as proxy for community esteem and since I appear to be the highest ranked woman here, why can I not achieve what I am trying to achieve similar to what men at the top of the leaderboard are achieving? The top three people on the leaderboard have very clearly established professional connections here. Why is the top ranked woman so unable to establish the same?
It is also intended in a nutshell to suggest that it looks to me like sexism is a very large factor, because if the seemingly highest ranked female member here can't get a toehold, surely no woman is getting much out of the forum professionally on par with what men are able to achieve if they so desire and set it as a goal.
I apologize if this seems argumentative. In the good news column, I did get my taxes filed for free last night and using different software that asked different questions, I am due a refund instead of owing money. However, that isn't money in hand at the moment, so I am still having a larger than usual crisis.
But I very much appreciate your comment. It is one of the meatiest comments genuinely addressing my issues in this forum that I have ever seen and I expect to find it useful.
I owe a few hundred thanks to the ACA. I have done the paperwork on H&R Block. I spent part of the morning on that in a familiar UI to try to get the figures straight.
I feel like this is a nothingburger hyped up to induce panic. I filled out my return today, on the last day as always, clicked some buttons, and shat out a return into the ether. The IRS doesn't seem to want it, but HR Block has it and will give it to them eventually. My work here is done, it's time for happy hour.
102 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 138 ms ] threadI can't imagine the government system has more load than Uber.
I'm not sure the root cause, but there seems to be a long-standing, fundamental distaste for infrastructure maintenance by the US government.
(I say this as a government contractor.) As to root cause for Gov IT issues, the real issue seems to be the government outsourcing so much. It makes many people rich, but outsourcing ends up being both extremely expensive and error prone. This is not purely an issue with the government most private companies face issues when outsourcing IT as it's difficult to get right.
</tangent>
How big is a tax return? Some XML 10k/100k in size?
What do you need to do: save the file, maybe do some basic sanity checking and store the SSN of a person on a db.
It is complicated, but not impossible.
Obviously you can scale systems ahead of time if you know, but you still run into issues because you probably haven't scaled the entire system and don't know the likely bottlenecks since it's hard to generate that kind of traffic in a QA environment.
Think of the scale of facebook, and then realize most of their payloads are <1k json/protobuf. It's not the size of the payload, it's the delta in quantity.
Note: just about every online store must do the same type of thing around specific holidays.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modeling_and_simulation
[0] - https://federalnewsradio.com/tom-temin-commentary/2018/01/ir...
Schedule your hardware upgrade cycle and lower priority workloads around the event so that you can get your hands on several times more hardware for a month or two.
Separately, it's worth noting the following quoted bit of the article. These cuts have included investigators; at the same time, statistics indicate that each additional investigator brings in 10x the cost of their job, in increased "recovered" revenue, i.e. collection of taxes owed.
The IRS isn't "just incompetent". It's been under political and funding attack, for years, now.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) noted the agency’s budget has been repeatedly cut in recent years, which he said he believes could have contributed to the problems.
“While we don’t yet know what has caused this systems failure, the lack of Republican funding for the IRS to serve taxpayers will only compound the issue. Americans should not be punished for being unable to file their tax returns or pay their tax bills today,” said Wyden, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, which oversees the IRS.
The IRS has faced steady budget cuts for nearly a decade, with its staff size falling by about 18,000 employees from 2010 to 2017 and a recent report showing it can answer only about 60 percent of calls from tax filers.
> “If we can’t solve it today, we’ll figure out a solution,” Kautter said. “Taxpayers would not be penalized because of a technical problem the IRS is having.”
So, you could give everyone a different tax year. The forms already allow you to have a different tax year, though few people make use of that (I have no idea what qualifies people to have a different fiscal year, it might just be for companies, I don't know).
Of course, this would be a giant mess because all the other entities that are tied to the standard tax year, namely everyone who communicates info to the IRS about you and files 1099-xyz forms about you and sends copies to you: your employer, your bank, your IRA/401k company, etc. I don't see how it'd be workable at all.
Here's what would work much better: simplify the tax code (eliminating a lot of deductions), and make filing automatic for regular W-2 wage-earners, like they do in western European nations, where they just send you a pre-filled form, you make any corrections to it (to account for income they didn't know about), and then send it back if there's changes (otherwise they just go with what they already know about you). We don't do this in the US because we're corrupt: the tax-filing companies have bought off the politicians so they won't let the IRS do this.
It's mostly for businesses (which includes individual tax payers as sole proprietorships), and the things looked to for non-automatic approvals are things like what your actual cycle of business is like. (For individual tax payers, the only automatically allowed changes are, IIRC, change back to a calendar year as tax yesr and changes to align with a spouses tax year with certain conditions.)
https://turbotax.intuit.com/tax-tips/small-business-taxes/s-...
Sure, computers could solve this problem, but the human cost—changing accounting systems, communicating new dates, etc.—is not negligible. A simpler (and probably cheaper) solution might be to update the IRS systems to scale better for the week before and after tax day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiscal_year#Tax_year
Sounds quite complex. I'm surprised they permit it.
Because IRS doesn't write the law, that’s Congress's job, and the tax filing deadlines (and the other deadlines that are coordinated relative to them, like the deadline for filing and supplying to taxpayers W-2s, 1099s, etc.) are set in law.
As to why Congress doesn't do it, well, the fact that their are coordinated deadlines for multiple linked processes that different parties have to comply with would produce chaos if 1/12 of taxpayers had a tax deadline each month, and all the linked forms for those taxpayers, and the applicable tax years, had similarly staggered dates. OTOH, if you just gave some taxpayers longer after the availability of forms and end of the (single, consistent) tax year to file, there would be substantial fairness issues.
But be careful what you wish for. The IRS could decide you have to pay your taxes by midnight on your birthday (because it’s easy for you to remember) and then where would you be?
That’s right. Drunk and filing your taxes.
I caught a glimpse of how the sausages were made once, thanks to family connections. That was enough. It's completely reasonable to assume that the IRS is operating on technology that is at least 5 years out of date, and possibly as much as 40. They have just barely enough resources to serve their overall departmental mandate.
This is only partially on the IRS itself, and also on the politically motivated processes that intentionally underfund it, especially with regard to taxpayer assistance, guidance, or convenience. If not this year, next year, and if not then, call the office of the nearest archdiocese to investigate out who was responsible for the miracle of the unborked servers, and the miracle of the balancing of the surge traffic.
Yes, the IRS has outdated tech', but that within itself isn't really an argument for why you needed to switch to filing on paper after you learned "how the sausages were made." Plus aren't paper filings just typed in by hand, and turned into eFilings anyway? Both go through the same pipeline after a point.
Paper filings are converted to electronic records, but they are also scanned, and the images retained for some amount of time before being destroyed. They might also do as much OCR as they are able, and ask a human to verify or correct, rather than do all the data entry by hand.
If the internal digitization system goes down, well, the envelope still has a dated postmark on it. That makes it not my problem. Securing the pipeline between employee workstation and database server is likewise not my problem.
I don't want to explain further, because I don't want to discourage other people from e-filing, and it would contain some assumptions that I cannot verify. And it also contains the personal assumption that I will almost always wait until the last weekend before the filing deadline to even look at a form, because of a procrastination habit.
I filed my state the old school way since they don't allow free electronic submissions. To my surprise they cashed the check in 2 days. Although, it's Oklahoma so they're more broke than I am :-)
There are free e-filing solutions, but not for my income range, and also last I checked (this might be a year or two out of date now) the various state-level agencies do not play well with the free e-filing.
And the paper forms are so easy! The hard part is sometimes figuring out whether you qualify for a particular thing or what a particular piece of income counts as, but that's more or less just as difficult even with software. Actually filling out the paperwork? Almost restful by comparison.
Can't they just announce an extension and give everyone extra time? That wouldn't solve all my problems, but it would take some pressure off.
This is stupid. Just tell people the deadline is extended.
But they aren't likely to do that.
-- Darth Vader
I'm medically handicapped and I fell in December and hurt myself and basically spent three months in bed, not doing paid work, though I was working on other things to try to raise my income. I'm a woman, so I am barred from the old boys network. I appear to be the only woman to have ever made the leaderboard of Hacker News. No, this does not gain me entree to the old boys club. I still have essentially no professional connections here, though that may be painfully slowly changing.
I have cystic fibrosis. So does my oldest son. Both my sons are ASD. So, there's a whole lot on my plate.
I also am getting well when doctor's claim that cannot be done and that gets me called a lunatic and teller of tall tales. It doesn't lead to anything good.
I was gifted membership to Metafilter by a kind soul. That forum is full of people who like to imagine they are good people making the world a better place. They did nothing but crap on me. They were unwilling to help me figure out how to increase my income.
I've done everything in my power to solve what are supposed to be unsolvable problems and I mostly get kicked in the teeth for it.
But, hey, thanks for taking the time to make swipes at me. Really nice of you to add to my troubles while I sit here with $2 to my name trying to figure out how the hell I will eat for the rest of the month and also dealing with the IRS sword of Damocles today just to add to the fun.
I waited until just last night... so I was in a similar boat, but if for some reason I hadn't gotten them turned it, it would be on me - nobody else. You have to own your decisions, and take charge of your life - otherwise it'll just feel like a sequence of random unfortunate events... impossible to get out from under. Upon reflection, I certainly could have spent the 3 hours it took me to file my taxes back in February if I had set aside the time.
Also:
> I'm broke and can't afford the filing fee
This is for electronic filing, if you mailed them in (postmarked by today), it would cost you a postage stamp, unless you're referring to a tax software purchase (ie. HR Block, etc).
I don't have money to mail them either.
And I do everything in my power to take responsibility for my life. That's how I am getting well when it is not supposed to be possible. That gets me nothing but grief from other people. It isn't respected. It isn't supported. I'm literally called crazy for doing that.
It's seriously a no win situation here.
If a deadline is advertised and an assurance given that electronic filing will be available, it's reasonable for anyone to assume that they can file electronically at any time before the deadline. Clearly the IRS agrees as they've extended the deadline.
Everyone has their own reasons for conducting their affairs as they do, and you're welcome to your opinion, but it's not OK to finger-wag at someone when they're operating within the official timeframes and filing channels.
Nothing you wrote precludes the ability to file your taxes earlier. If you can work on some things, you could have spent a bit of time figuring out your taxes - I'm sure there were 10 hours this year so far that you could have put to better use. Seems like lack of planning is at least partially to blame.
I hope you can reflect on how you could have acted differently to avoid this problem: if you view all of your problems as external and outside your locus of control it makes you feel powerless in your ability to solve them. I'm sure you are a fundamentally smart and capable person.
It accounts for about a third of all lung transplants for adults in the US and half of all pediatric lung transplants. It fosters the development of antibiotic resistant infections.
And I don't really want to harp on it, because it's clear that you and most people here aren't in the least bit sympathetic, which is why I have gotten so many replies telling me I am just not trying hard enough, etc.
Sometimes, people feel like victims because something has gone terribly wrong with their life and not because they are into pity parties. It aggravates me to be accused of having a victim mentality instead of having actual problems, in part because I have gotten off multiple prescription drugs, the hole in my left lung has closed and I manage my condition with diet and lifestyle. I wouldn't have achieved that without a lot of competence, psychological resilience and a can do attitude. But I get zero credit for what I have accomplished. I get nothing but crapped on any time I talk about getting myself healthier.
So I get zero sympathy for a very serious problem that is supposed to be incurable. I also get zero credit or respect for doing what is supposed to be impossible and getting healthier.
The only thing I have consistently asked on HN and elsewhere is some assistance in figuring out how to make adequate money online so my job won't keep me sick and I get shit for that too. Never mind how many other people on HN make their money online or aspire to and get their aspirations taken seriously. I get told I'm basically deluded for wanting that. And it's like hello? Lots of people are doing exactly that. Why on earth shouldn't I be able to do the same? Why can't I get sincere constructive feedback aimed at helping me do exactly that, in spite of my handicap?
I have 6 years of college. I had a Fortune 500 job for over 5 years. I appear to be the only woman to have ever made the leaderboard of HN. When men here make a lot of karma, they get told they must be smart and competent. When I say I appear to be the only woman to have ever made the leaderboard, I get all kinds of crap about how that doesn't actually mean anything. It is never taken to mean what I am trying to say -- that the evidence is that I'm not incompetent here. In fact, when you account for the apparent handicapping effect of my gender, it seems to me that the conclusion should be I'm far more competent than it looks.
I'm having an especially bad day today, but it isn't like any of my days are ever good. I was personally attacked by the first reply to me, a violation of HN guidelines. Then you and other people piled on to add to it. Exactly one reply tried to actually be helpful.
And then I get downvoted and lectured for getting upset at how I get treated. That's all kinds of messed up.
I just want my life to work. I have pulled miracles out my butt for a lot of years to try to make it work. But it is never enough because no matter what I do, I am not taken seriously.
Having a dread disease fails to be reason for anyone to have real compassion and having the competence to get well in the face of an incurable disease fails to get any respect or positive interest.
It's probably a mistake to reply. I live in fear of being banned for pointing out that I am failing to get the help I need.
It isn't because I'm not trying. I posted a Show HN this morning and it has been ignored. Most of my efforts to do something constructive get largely ignored, especially anything aimed at making a few bucks. From my end, it feels like the entire world finds it offensive for me to try to support myself, then finds it equally offensive for me to be frustrated and upset at being unable to escape poverty. Then persona...
- I gave you sympathy, but you say "I get zero sympathy" - perhaps you're ignoring the sympathy you are getting?
- Making money as a writer online is hard. Most people who try fail and find other work: fewer jobs available than people who'd like them.
- HN leaderboard isn't a big thing. I had never seen or heard of it before you discussed it. I don't think you should expect it to get you a job.
- Have you been applying to normal jobs recently? From your description you sound qualified. Self employment has a high failure rate and lots of risk: most people who try never make money. If you need cash, may be time to go back to a bigger company with a stable salary.
- Calling 'not having your taxes done before the day it is due' 'poor planning' is not a personal attack, its an accurate description of your situation. Again, victim mentality.
- ShowHN's are hard to get traction with. Typically you either need to: 1. be doing something novel and cool with computer science or 2. be a ycombinator alumnus. Most of the 'boys club' effect on HN you are referring to I suspect is actually the "YC alums club". I've posted programming projects and gotten no traction. HN has a computer science focus, perhaps your content isn't landing because it is a bit off-topic. Your ShowHN post was essentially just a classified ad - I'm not sure why you'd expect people to be interested in it here.
- I really do hope you solve your problems, but tweets like this make me want to help you less. You seem to be holding on to a lot of negativity, perhaps speaking with a therapist could help. https://twitter.com/doreen_michele/status/986358399221710848
For what it's worth, I know what it's like to be in in a chronic state of desperation trying to figure out how to overcome a debilitating illness for which mainstream medicine offers little help, while simultaneously trying to generate sufficient income to survive day-to-day.
I can assure you that doing your taxes are not a high priority when you're not sure how you're going to pay for food or rent the next month/week/day.
But even still that's beside the point. Michelle has sought to play by the IRS's rules and work within their systems, and that should be the end of the discussion.
Please give it a rest.
By the way, I'm very familiar with the concept of the victim mentality and, speaking for myself only, I'm well aware of the ways in which it kept me in a state of poor health and poverty. But to hound somebody for having a victim mentality when they're clearly in a profound state of distress and doing the best they can to play by what they can understand are society's expectations of them, is nothing more than cruel bullying.
You may think shielding her histrionic behavior from criticism is helpful, but I'd argue its harmfully reinforcing it. I worry for the kids who are exposed to this mentality daily and whether there is any munchausen by proxy occurring.
The HN guidelines indicate personal attacks are out of line. Most of my "bad behavior" on HN occurs after being attacked, often repeatedly and by multiple people.
I do what I can to figure out how to handle such things better, but those attacks should not be occurring to begin with. If they stopped, it would be vastly easier for me to maintain my composure and not get bent out of shape.
I think you might think Hacker News is something that it isn't. The leaderboard isn't something anyone really looks at and this is definitely not a good place to make or manage professional connections.
Show HN
Who's Hiring
Freelancer Seeking Freelancer
Patio11 and tptacek, both members of the leaderboard, were business partners for a time, though one lives in Japan and the other in Chicago.
Etc. As Nauseum.
But they all seem to be men.
The leaderboard, inasmuch as it correlates with any elite group, probably does so more because people who are already in that group are more likely to get onto the leaderboard for a variety of reasons, not because the leaderboard offers entry to that group (whether generally or for men specifically.)
I don't think I'm at all unique in being a man who has been in the leaderboard without ever having any professional connections through HN.
There is definitely a group with professional connections that overlaps with the HN community, including the leaderboard, and there is certainly no small amount of networking that is facilitated by HN contacts with similar interests, but, even before coming considering any potential gender dynamics issues, getting into the leaderboard just isn't a ticket into anything of substance.
It is a goal of mine. And when I do the same things the men do, it doesn't get the same results. When men want to pursue something professionally, they routinely say "Email in profile." When I invite someone to take it to email, the most common outcome is they hit on me.
One guy spent some weeks talking to me and pretending to be my friend before mentioning that he was married and needed a shoulder to cry on because his marriage was in the toilet and he was hoping I would be said shoulder to cry on. I gave him about 3 more days of my time to cry on my shoulder, at which point he resumed sleeping with his wife while talking at me like we were lovers, never mind that I told him up front I was not going to be the Other Woman. I cut him loose at that point. The more I think about how he intentionally withheld his marital status, the madder and more used and lied to I feel.
There's a whole lot more backstory here that I am unwilling to comment on here. Suffice it say, I have good reason to believe that if I were male, I would have professional connections here of meaningful value.
If you don't want to use HN to make such connections, cool. But it's aggravating to be constantly told that this is an unrealistic expectation of mine when other people clearly pull it off and then also get told that my gender isn't the problem. If it's not, what is?
I don't doubt at all that you get people feigning professional interest that turn things that way, and I do think that your gender and the fact that there are sexist, and more particularly sexually exploitive, men here plays a significant role in that.
You absolutely should not have to deal with this, and you have every reason to be upset about it. I suspect—and I want to be clear that I say this by way of explaining a pattern I've observed with this kind of targeted behavior eslewhere and how it tends to be targeted, but not at all to imply any blame on you—that the fact that you tend to be very open about circumstances of intense and urgent financial need and your hopes for professional connections on HN to alleviate that contributes to people who are inclined to they type of exploitation seeing you as a likely target.
I want to emphasize again that this is a problem with the people acting this way toward you, not with your writing.
> But it's aggravating to be constantly told that this is an unrealistic expectation of mine when other people clearly pull it off and then also get told that my gender isn't the problem. If it's not, what is?
While I think your expectations as to the general level of success at that here is too high, if I were to take as given the assumption that you are underperforming in that regard based on what would be expexted your leaderboard position and other indicia of prominence in the discussion community, and had to come up with an explanation, my first suspicion would be the fact that your professional focus seems to primarily be neither/technical nor financial nor in a hot application domain for technology, combined with the fact that you don't have a lot of money. Much of the networking at HN seems to center, as one might expect given it's connection to a tech heavy startup accelerator, to connecting people with certain professional focuses with each other and with people with money. (I don't think the attitude you've projected in the community about the issue since you got the impression that your failure to acheive what you expected was due to gender and personal animus helps, either, and there may be a bit of a vicious cycle there.)
But you could really be getting significantly disadvantaged in networking in HN because of your gender. I don't see evidence that would lead me to conclude that, true, but I think I've made the mistake of being insufficiently clear in my reaction against what has seemed to be your repeated implicit argument that your leaderboard position alone combined with your lack of success in that regard was sufficient evidence of exclusion on the basis of gender and that I've given the impression that I am dismissing the possibility that you've been disadvantaged in networking here based on gender. To the extent thst that is the case, it is my error, and I apologize.
your repeated implicit argument that your leaderboard position alone
I am clearly miscommunicating something because my point is not that my (former) position on the leaderboard alone should open doors. My point is that my (former) position on the leaderboard should stand as proxy for community esteem and since I appear to be the highest ranked woman here, why can I not achieve what I am trying to achieve similar to what men at the top of the leaderboard are achieving? The top three people on the leaderboard have very clearly established professional connections here. Why is the top ranked woman so unable to establish the same?
It is also intended in a nutshell to suggest that it looks to me like sexism is a very large factor, because if the seemingly highest ranked female member here can't get a toehold, surely no woman is getting much out of the forum professionally on par with what men are able to achieve if they so desire and set it as a goal.
I apologize if this seems argumentative. In the good news column, I did get my taxes filed for free last night and using different software that asked different questions, I am due a refund instead of owing money. However, that isn't money in hand at the moment, so I am still having a larger than usual crisis.
But I very much appreciate your comment. It is one of the meatiest comments genuinely addressing my issues in this forum that I have ever seen and I expect to find it useful.
But I also wanted to point out that I'm in the top 50 by karma and I also have made zero connections here.
In my case that's entirely my own fault.
But I can see how it would be worse if I was a woman.
https://www.irs.gov/filing/free-file-everyone-can-file-an-ex...
I used Tax Slayer to file an extension, even though my income is above $66k. The UI is clunky. You'll need to estimate your taxes, though.
But thanks. I will look at it.
So, tomorrow, for anyone who is wondering. That's actually meaningful to me. I managed to pull all my records together this morning, so progress.