I'm always amazed, when the-tax-system-sucks posts come up on HN, how quickly most commenters are to trash the author and/or lecture the complainer on how wrong they are.

There is a impedance mismatch at work in our system of governance that's not going away any time soon. The government makes laws by sticking people into little boxes and making rules for those boxes. This system of boxes and rules -- the tax code -- is becoming more and more removed from reality by the day.

You make 10K a year selling things at yard sale, nobody is the wiser. You make 10K selling pot, nobody is the wiser. You make 10K by putting little bits on a server somewhere, you're a business. Why? Because Google can report you, that's why.

You buy socks from Amazon from a house in one state, you have to pay taxes. Buy the same socks from another state, pay no taxes. Order overseas, no taxes no matter which state you are in.

In fact all of these are businesses -- or none of them are. It's like arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. We have this word "business" which has some kind of vague meaning, so we attach a bunch of rules to the abstraction.

We have a 1900s view of how things work that we are desperately trying to take a hammer and pound into a 21st century reality.

In point of fact, the economy works because people are constantly adapting to new circumstances, trying to do the best they can. As the rules get more and more complex, more and more people will end up being quite surprised at the situation they end up in.

Personally I think the system is broken beyond repair -- too many politicians are architecture astronauts -- but however it turns out, I have immense sympathy for the author of this article.

My father was in on way academic. With no qualifications to his name he spent most of his life as a manual labourer and slowly worked his way up to be a Head Green Keeper at a municipal golf course via grave digger and truck driver.

While at the golf course he hired a PHd Physicist to cut grass and do odd jobs. It wasn't his choice. As a state enterprise he was obliged to hire a certain number of 'disabled' people.

Over a few years this wretched physicist slowly revealed how he was pushed through school and university early and was woo'ed to the city of london to do financial modelling and how by the age of 25 with mountains of cash his brain literally shut down.

He was rebooted in hospital diagnosed with depression and put on to the incapacity benefit list and a charity helped him into work via the local authorities.

He told my father that his greatest pleasure was seeing the stripes on the golf course after he'd freshly cut the fairway. He envied my father because he had worked his way from nothing to something where as he had the whole world at his feet, there was nothing to work for, it just came.

After two years at the golf course he stopped turning up for work, he stopped turning up for anything, he'd committed suicide.

This greatly effected me as a child who achieved academic success with (seemingly) little or no effort. A little bit of struggle makes any prize more valuable.

My ever pragmatic Dad said "he cut the grass straight and didn't piss in the tractor cab, he was a good man".

I wish I had the means to do what he's doing. But the problem for me, and for many other people I'd imagine, is that when I'm at an airport, chances are I've paid a very large amount of money to be at a certain place at a certain time for what is probably an important reason. Risking losing that much money and the possibility of not getting to where I need to be, even for the noble goal of civil disobedience to protest a ridiculous and screwed-up system, is just too daunting for me. All it takes is one TSA officer having a bad day and misinterpreting something I've said to send me and my bags home--and even if they're in the wrong, the only thing that can decide that is an expensive court case, and I'll still have missed my flight.

I applaud people like this who remind the system that it works for us and not the other way around. I sadly can't take the risk of doing it myself.

It wasn't entirely clear from this article, but it looks like he was paying normal income tax on the money coming in, but failed to pay self-employment taxes. I have talked to more than a few iPhone developers whom this happened to as well -- forgetting about that extra 15.3% can really hurt.

But, did he remember to track and deduct all of his expenses? The flipside to that income is that the server costs are all deducted from it. If he really was "just barely covering costs" with his Google ads income, it should be 15.3% of nearly zero dollars. He may even be owed a refund if he was paying full income tax on the ad revenue without deducting server costs.

I am not an accountant, but I've dealt with SE tax and had a few "conversations" with the IRS in the past. For all the worries about them being biased, I've found them to be fair, as long as you have precise documentation.

Perhaps compared to HN. But I would characterize Reddit (as characterized by what's voted up into default visibility) as fairly open-minded, even compulsively contrarian. While a large proportion of the up/down-voting is from petty agreement, there is still a strong enough core of "productive discussion" voting to overcome it. Especially with knee-jerk outrage stories, there's as much skepticism as I've seen in any online community (and more apparent reservation in judgment than I see in many fairly reasonable people I know personally). There's a lot of good research that gets done (when possible), and it's usually voted above the froth very quickly. Sensationalism will almost always get called out hard.

I really can't conceive of any way a forum (online or afk) with sufficient mass (with the accompanying noise, groupthink and trolling that any community of people will pick up) to accomplish the things that Reddit has/may yet could turn out any more reasonable.

Am I the only person who found Reddit generally quite unpleasant?

It really is heart-warming to hear of all the good that those on Reddit have done. But I can't help feel that it's the exact same mob mentality which made me want to leave Reddit in the first place — discussions got extremely polarised very quickly and there seemed to be very little room for reasoned dialogue.

The article makes it sound like a good thing that "comments are generally downvoted by dozens or even hundreds of people with remarkable speed, pushing their noxious posts down into obscurity within minutes". But, since everyone can downvote — hell, I have even see non-controversial statements get downvoted heavily — the quality of dialogue often ends up being at the level of the lowest common denominator.

Good for him. Civil disobedience in defense of our liberties isn't just a good idea, it's a moral obligation.