https://github.com/IRS-Public/direct-file <- Direct File's web app source code is public-domain and published on GitHub!

Obviously the 2025 version will be out of date for the 2026 filing season, though public code means it can always be revived by anyone else.

(previous HN threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44182356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44131901 )

I'm on Silverblue rather than Bazzite (although I'm only an `rpm-ostree rebase` away from it!) and I genuinely think this is becoming best OS family out there for most people. Super-stable, lots of software support, lots of "base" options (which are easy to switch between) - no snooping, no adverts, no "forced packages" (looking at you, Apple Music, which I keep inexplicably managing to open whenever I connect my headphones..).

I have no illusions that it will work for everyone but there are some really appealing reasons to switch to Linux nowadays, and Fedora Atomic is a really appealing option for those who want to try it out.

It continues to work until eventually the debt is so high the company implodes.

See: general electric, RCA, Xerox, GM

I cannot overstate the performance improvement of deploying onto bare metal. We typically see a doubling of performance, as well as extremely predictable baseline performance.

This is down to several things:

- Latency - having your own local network, rather than sharing some larger datacenter network fabric, gives around of order of magnitude reduced latency

- Caches – right-sizing a deployment for the underlying hardware, and so actually allowing a modern CPU to do its job, makes a huge difference

- Disk IO – Dedicated NVMe access is _fast_.

And with it comes a whole bunch of other benefits:

- Auto-scalers becomes less important, partly because you have 10x the hardware for the same price, partly because everything runs 2x the speed anyway, and partly because you have a fixed pool of hardware. This makes the whole system more stable and easier to reason about.

- No more sweating the S3 costs. Put a 15TB NVMe drive in each server and run your own MinIO/Garage cluster (alongside your other workloads). We're doing about 20GiB/s sustained on a 10 node cluster, 50k API calls per second (on S3 that is $20-$250 _per second_ on API calls!).

- You get the same bill every month.

- UPDATE: more benefits - cheap fast storage, run huge Postgresql instances at minimal cost, less engineering time spend working around hardware limitations and cloud vagaries.

And, if chose to invest in the above, it all costs 10x less than AWS.

Pitch: If you don't want to do this yourself, then we'll do it for you for half the price of AWS (and we'll be your DevOps team too):

https://lithus.eu

Email: adam@ above domain

What would change if you wanted to do something like this but for an EV? You already have a large battery, you can make decisions like "I need to be full for my road trip tomorrow, so fill from the grid", but you can just trickle charge from some fixed solar panels throughout the day most of the time. I think amperage can even be negotiated via the standard EV charge cable.