skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Can't blame them at all. It's a simple cost benefit analysis. They surely can easily estimate whether or not the cost of charging sales tax on items to Colorado residents (presumably in lost sales) is greater than the amount they lose from Colorado affiliates. You'd assume that because they haven't done the same thing in other states with similar laws.

I do Facebook development and I'm always cognizant of the fact that my continued success depends on their good will. Everything I do is with that in mind, both in terms of making sure my interests align with theirs and in building up a fallback plan.
Ok, maybe I should be more careful, what I wrote could definitely be misconstrued as that. Obviously I'm not saying to do anything illegal.

But - telling your employer in advance that you're working on your own project? Really? What's the advantage in it? What you do in your off time is 100% yours [unless you signed something that says it's not], and letting your employer know about it will not bring you any additional benefits. On the other hand, the disadvantages are huge - everybody will start mistrusting you, knowing that you're looking for a way out, you'll never get promoted, etc.

And that's just one point.. Not doing business phone calls in the day hours? C'mon, how realistic is that? How is anybody going to take you seriously if you don't pick up your phone during the day? Instead, you should FIND time during the day for important business-related phone calls. When I was employed, I always ate lunch at my desk in about ten minutes. At lunch hour, I found a nice quiet place in a plaza 2 minutes from the office, brought a notebook to take notes, and made 2-5 business calls.

My point is, while you should definitely not do anything illegal, if your #1 goal is to quit your job and make your business your primary source of income, you should find creative ways to reach that goal, and stop at NOTHING before you do that.
JetBlue asks for rule waiver, plans to keep passengers on tarmac for 3+ hours
The platform is open source, so there's no reason it can't survive the demise of the company.
Hey, if you can take on a challenge under circumstances with the odds clearly stacked against you, no guarantees, no end in sight, and wake up every day with a conquer the world mentality, over a course of years regardless of failures and adversity more power to you. I think that's rare rather than common, and people like that have a high chance of eventual success IMO.
And in a panic situation, you're not going to be able to reliably turn the key only one click counterclockwise to the off position instead of two clicks to the lock position.

As I stated originally, if you are incapable of handling a vehicle in an emergency situation then you should be relieved of the responsibility.

For the record I have performed this "complex" operation under these conditions (and on a motorcycle as well) and I've met more than one other person who has done the same.
Thanks, this is something we're definitely working on.

To just get an idea of the problems Vagrant solves, I recommend the "Why Vagrant?" page: http://vagrantup.com/docs/getting-started/why.html
Hire a third party (or set up a machine) to kill you if you don't drink the poison. If i were about to enter a marriage, i would indeed consider committing to it in this way.
The Vagrant code is modular enough that puppet support should be fairly straightforward to add.

For a quick hack, you'd primarily change this file http://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/blob/master/lib/vagrant/... to perform the necessary commands for a puppet setup. You'd need to add support for puppet configuration as well at http://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/blob/master/lib/vagrant/...
Google Summer of Code: Applications Now Open for Mentoring Organizations
The treacherous thing about these precautions is that they don't matter to most startups, because most startups don't succeed. It's only when what you're doing actually matters that it starts to make a difference whether, in year 1 of the company, there are phone records of you fielding tech support calls from your cube.
"After a transition period of about 10 years, this release disables SSH protocol 1 by default."

I'm sad that this hadn't happened sooner, but I guess as they say, better late than never.
Federal pay ahead of private industry
I believe when the singularity hits, it won't be in the idea of a smarter machine making smarter machines.

It will be in decreasing communication lag-time and interoperability between /people/ asymptotically to nil.

We will still be individuals, but we will be tied inexorably to not only each other, but the vast amount of data stored on the internet.

What makes us /think/ better, however, is speed and utility of communication. What helps us /remember/ better is the speed and utility of information retrieval.

The latter has been increasing faster than the former. We need fundamentally gigantic changes in human-computer-human communication to affect the former. The first of these was the internet, of course. What we've been doing with it since its inception are comparative baby-steps - someday, perhaps soon, there will be a leap just as big as the Internet is.

And it will be fundamentally destabilizing to everything we know as society today.
Context: I employ people. I have 22 employees, and the last three hires were because I saw someone that impressed me and put them on, even though neither of us knew what they would do. I knew they would be of value.

I'm not hiring at the moment, but here are some thoughts about your resume:

When I read a resume I want to know what value you will bring to my company. I want to know what you can do, and then I want to see the evidence to support your claims. I want to know why you are going to bring in more money than you cost. Your CV on your web site has to be generic, I know, but I can't easily see from it what you can do.

There are some impressive things there (teaching in Ghana, running your company, etc.) and they will lend support to your claims, but first, what will you do for me?

Secondly, I know it's unusual for a senior director of two companies (yes, I run another company as well) but I don't use Word. Yes, most people who will read your CV will, but it would be nice to have a plain text version, and a PDF version, and an HTML version. Make some effort to make it easy for people to see what you have to offer.

Finally, one of my colleagues just read this and my other comment and said - "Harsh." Yes, agreed. But still, these are things I believe to be true, and I offer them in the hope that they are of value. They might not be, feel free to ignore them, but perhaps they will help. They are offered in that spirit.

And I wish you good luck.
Did you have to manually cull results from Mahalo, or did your algorithm discard them automatically?
Cell-Phone Tech Uses Accelerometer to Spy on Employees
The main goal John and I had initially was to get Vagrant working and released so others could benefit from it. Since we mostly use Chef, thats what we went with first.

Making the provisioning system modular is definitely on the radar, but keyist is absolutely correct in the above response.
One of the videos shows a QWERTY layout, the other two - alphabetically ordered letters: history is repeating itself.
Some Pretty Cool Free Social Media Icon Sets
Should that say "There are no documents to send around" instead of "There's no documents to send around"? Not trying to be pedantic, trying to be helpful.
NEW Second Iron Man 2 Trailer In HD - The BriefCase Suit + More of Sam Rockwell
Hey, I hear ya. There's a lot of self help nonsense going around (mixed in with a bit of erlang and adblocking). I'm just as sick of it :-). Determination though is a really important part of doing a startup, so I felt this would be useful to everyone here. Though content is important, the comments are really what make HN the place that it is. Maybe you could go about saying the same thing in such a way that isn't so smug please? Not for the sake of my post. I could care less. Moreso for the sake of this place. That I care about.
Just How Profitable Are Healthcare Insurers?
The hospital where my wife gave birth had "moisturizing hand sanitizer".
"It's one thing to be fired for something you did (hey doofus, don't cause a heap of MPAA infringement notices to land on Amazon's desk because you were running the new Pirate Bay on EC2) but it's entirely another to be fired for something outside your control."

If your own state government is something you happily and comfortably state is "outside your control", getting fired by Amazon is the least of your problems.
Ask HN: "Basic SEO"?
I see this phrase thrown around like a magic spell from time to time, a la "Put up a site about a profitable niche, do some basic SEO, and bam! presto! Instant $50/month!"

But what is "Basic SEO" to you? Blogging? Adwords? Paying dudes via MechTurk to write articles for you?

Googling "Basic SEO" brings you a few good articles, but a LOT of "buy our ebook" articles too. I just feel that if it were so basic, it'd be more common to find.

So what do you consider to be "Basic SEO", HN?
I took "primitive" to mean not only language syntax, but built-in functions which are so fundamental to programming in a given language that it's difficult to escape them. For, say, Haskell, that's quite true of folds.
Single anonymous blogger claims that advertising is fundamentally broken, and, thus, that all the parties collectively investing billions of dollars into it each year are fools, who do no ROI calculations on their dollars spent.

Yeah right.
Good point.

It's just that Dropbox becomes a little like Mozy then. The whole charm of Dropbox for me is interacting natively with the file system instead of having to log into a website and click around..
Analyze performances of digital cameras and compare models
Nonsolicit is a very common contract provision. As "fascist" as it sounds, my experience has been that it favors small shops.

They're apparently hard to enforce. That's totally irrelevant to you; just taking you to court is enough to kill your startup.
US EIA: "alternative vehicles" won't top 50% market share in 2035
Can I Afford It with Suze Orman and Mark Z.
The future of Windows, and why Microsoft should make PCs
This i exactly why my Kindle has become a godsend. The primary way I use it is to load long articles on it that I find on the web for reading later.

This is also why I consider the Kindle's lack of any usable web/Internet to be a feature rather than a drawback.
I like the spirit of this. Rather than argue about the ethics of ad-blockers and ad-blocker-blockers, why not focus on the implicit challenge: Can more publishers find ways to make money from ad-free content?

Adblock is like Napster. People want content; the vast majority of publishers only have one business model; a lot of consumers decide to take the content without bearing the cost imposed by that model.

Some people won't pay no matter what - music filesharing is still around, of course. But a lot of people did start buying music again when Amazon and Apple and eMusic changed the price structure to something they were willing to pay.

There are a few sites like Ars and LiveJournal and MetaFilter that have ad-free options for paid users. Maybe this is a small niche and will never be big business. But maybe there's some way to get more people to pay directly in exchange for ad-free content.
If people say "I can do that easy," they draw out the "easy."
I agree, that sucks. Hopefully they'll change that soon.

iPhone App store didn't have web sites for the longest time, but I think they changed it recently. Although it is still hard to find - I have seen web links to apps, but have been unable to create them myself.

Btw another silly trap with the Android Marketplace: apparently they only show you the comments in the language of your phone settings. A friend of mine has created a German language app, but his phone is set to English. It was only a couple of weeks later that he discovered there already were several comments for his app.
You pointed to a previous discussion, about a point on which there was disagreement, and then said, "tl;dr - the side of that argument that I was on is right."

That's not a good summary of what you linked to.
Ignoring the ethical complexities here, which are inherently subjective, and the legal issues, which I have no authority so speak on, let me just say this: writing code for your side project on your work computer is really fucking stupid.

It's not a gray area; there is precedent and you will lose.

Once in my life (first job out of school) I was in a job where I'd been relegated to menial grunt work that wouldn't teach me anything or advance my career, so I've been in the career sand trap. What I did: I taught myself Python and a few APIs I needed for the side project (which was actually a research project, not a startup) during slow periods. I did a bit of research into AI algorithms (on Wikipedia) as well. But I never wrote code for the project at work.

If you must steal ("liberate") time, be very careful not to write any code that you'll need when at work. I'd say 3 rules apply.

1. Generally, a company can own what you do, not what you learn. If you're going to steal time, use it to do research and exploratory code (that is thrown away) but keep your product code 100% on your own resources. I'm not saying this strategy is right, nor that it's a fool-proof legal defense, but it beats the alternative (of writing side code at work) which is generally considered both wrong and illegal. As far as I know, there's no legal distinction between reading AI articles on work time and the million other kinds of goofing off that 90% of corporate denizens spend most of their days on.

2. Companies want you to work 9-5 because those are your best hours. If you're serious about a side project, then the first thing to do is to figure out if you're a morning or a night person (which is mostly genetic). If morning, start waking up at 4 and use 4-8 for the project. If night, your side project should be done in the evenings. You can only give the side 33% of your work time, but you can give it 80% of your energy by aligning your most energetic hours with your side project time. If you're not serious enough about a side project to make these adjustments, you're not cut out for it.

3. If you get a creative "spark" at work and must get an idea down, have a legal pad and pen that you own (i.e. not with the company's name on it). Write down your design and implement it later. Poets may lose it if they don't get it down at once, but you're a programmer, not a poet. So get your ideas and maybe some pseudocode on paper, but no code goes into any machine until you're home and it's your machine.
Having lived for large amounts of time in both the UK and the US, I would say the level of political discourse in the UK is generally higher than in the US (I attribute this mostly to a very strong and reasonably independent media in the UK that's really not afraid to hold feet to the fire and ask intelligent questions, and usually doesn't "dumb things down").
Very interesting; I'm much more interested in building graphs similar to this (and animate them), albeit in 2D, though: http://tulip.labri.fr/TulipDrupal/sites/default/files/upload...
Well, hang on, you're saying that rather than a temporary tax cut, you'd have preferred the more substantive policy changes? Let's say Obama said "Hey, I thought about doing a temporary tax cut, but I'd rather concentrate on policy changes to help our bottom line" -- how do you think that would have gone over with the right side of the aisle?

PS Regarding policy changes to help the bottom line... you've seen those projected deficit numbers right? Two questions:

1) Do you think those projected deficits are the result of Obama administration policy (about 3 months old at the time I first saw the chart), or because of underlying fundamentals?

2) If you had to guess at the fastest rising cost in government spending, would you guess healthcare?

3) Ok fine, one more but I can't resist, if Obama said "I'm not pursuing a tax cut, I'm prioritizing healthcare reform because it will save the government a ton of money", how do you think the conservative reaction would go? :)
Amazon cuts off affiliates in Colorado over new sales tax law
Ahh, I love announcements about future annoucements.
I don't think it's true in Haskell at all. A fold is just walking a list with an accumulator. That's not weird or low-level; it's as common for Haskell programmers as loops and variables for C programmers. It actually took me a while (when first learning SML and Scheme) to realize I could use the built-in reduce functions more, instead of writing loops "by hand" all the time.

It's also very common in Haskell to implement your own fold for various reasons. For example, in a simple 50-line text processing script[1], I defined a fold for a list-of-trees data structure without calling any builtin fold function[2].

[1]: http://github.com/mbrubeck/outline-grep

[2]: http://github.com/mbrubeck/outline-grep/blob/master/OutlineG...

P.S. I like your blog, and huge thanks for Django!
"You clone your code repository with 'hg clone'. Now you can clone your development environment with 'vagrant up'."

(Do I have the right idea?)
When you eventually incorporate, you can set your vesting start time to whatever you want. If you exaggerate (and claim to be fully vested fr instance), any future investor or partner will request that you fix it.

So be fair, and when you incorporate, start your vesting to the date you started really going full speed on your startup. No one will object to that.
"Amazon Tax" Laws May Worsen Short-Term Budget Problems
I am going to agree with that. If you want to do a startup right you have to devote all of your time to it. But working on the side may be ok in the beginning just to see a proof of concept, or determine if a business idea is viable.
Best Flat Tummy Exercises for Great Female Abs...
An 1892 Easter Egg
I am not convinced

(.^) = (.) . (.)

is supposed to be more readable than

(.^) f g x y = f (g x y)

?

I don't know Haskell, but even so. I think there might be exercises with a better benefit.
Our world balances on a sea of debt
They are built in flash, so they won't work on the iphone, but the same thing can be done in Canvas. But I don't have an iPhone, so maybe canvas doesn't work there either.

What does work on the iphone? Raphael?
Language isn't proper or improper, it is either precise or it isn't. it is precise when it effectively conveys the information that the originator intended to send. breaking grammatical rules can in certain circumstances assist with this. but the vast majority of the time improper grammar impedes understanding. the fact that this misunderstanding is often minor enough and the type of mistake common enough that the reader can figure out what you mean isn't a valid excuse.
Marriage and Decision Makiong
Google has made revenue negative banning decisions in the past. They have demonstrated that they recognize that the long-term quality of their index is more important than short term profits.
On a related note that is my approach on Twitter as well. I try to follow interesting people and if they are talking about a common topic or link it is probably worth reading.

Sorry for the plug but that is what we try to do with Cadmus (http://thecadmus.com). You give us your Twitter, RSS Feeds, FriendFeed and we will find the top articles your friends are talking about.
0. The zeroth rule of SEO is get your site listed for a search for your site. If your site is bobsfishingtips.com, make sure if someone searches for Bob's Fishing Tips, you get found. This means simply getting at least one real site to link the name of your site to you, or maybe a couple sites if you have some common word like Yelp.

1. After that, make sure people link to you with proper anchor text for other keywords. If you want people to search for "fishing tips" and find you, then several people will need to link you something like this:

This site has great <a href=http://www.mysite.com>fishing tips</a>.

2. The more authority these links have, the better you will do. If you get a very high PageRank site to link "fishing tips" to you, you might be immediately first for that query in Google. Or, 2-3 medium links might do it.

3. The words you want people to search for need to be used several times on your site. You should have the words "fishing tips" on several pages and you should link to your best page on "fishing tips" by putting that phrase in your own links to your own pages.

4. Also make sure you put the keywords you want searches for in the title of your page, and enclose them in H1 tags or other bold/header tags. This won't help very much, but it's probably worth doing.

5. Links don't really help you unless they are from a real domain - a link from someblog.blogspot.com will not help your PageRank much at all. Also, the domain needs to exist for a while to help you - something like a year.

6. Good places to get links are from your college and high school newspapers, local newspapers, and anyone else who has a website that would appropriately cover you.

7. Some sites have way more PageRank than you might expect. www.cmu.edu is an anchor site for the link graph, and a link from this site will do wonders for your PageRank.

8. Here are some excellent pages on SEO:

http://www.localseoguide.com/yelp-seo-analysis-part-one/

http://www.localseoguide.com/yelp-seo-analysis-part-two/

You should also check out Mahalo.com. That site is SEOed within an inch of its existence on Google, so take some tips from them but tread carefully.

9. In the end, it really boils down to having authoritative links with the right anchor text linking to you. The rest matters very little.
Ask yourself this question:
"If I was looking for X and landed on this page, what would I want to see (information, layout)?" X being what you want to rank for.
Edit: Then get people online to talk about X and link to your page.
Heroku (YC W08) Casts: Queue Depth & New Relic
finally! this was the post on the ad blocking topic i was waiting for.
I sympathize with this view, but how exactly are advertisers supposed to come up with more "creative" and "compelling" concepts that somehow will work when users fundamentally don't want the thing they make - ads?

In a broader sense, it's very questionable to say "Gee, content sites should be profitable!" and cheerfully avoid explaining just how, especially right after you've finished explaining how every known method of monetizing content just won't work.
1. Pick your target keywords (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal)

2. Make sure those keywords are on your page and maybe urls also.

3. Get links. More the better. Not from spammers.
The Global Debt Crisis
Button Board - Turns any touchscreen into a keyboard.
It looks good. I couldn't find though any link to printing either the agenda or the minutes. Trial period of 14 days is too short to hook anyone.

We do lots of meetings in my line of work and most minutes will have an action by and deadline.
Maybe we should stop writing long articles on our computer also.

(Disclaimer: Instapaper rules... except at hacker news comments.)
Don't forget titles for links and alts for images! Also, if your site may potentially produce duplicate content, due to parameters in URLs etc, look into canonical urls:

http://www.seomoz.org/knowledge/duplicate-content
Ad blocks are an obnoxious business condition, but they're one that can push savvy media companies into not only doing right by their readers

Or, they may push savvy and not-so-savvy media companies into serving up advertising content that's more difficult to block. Like ad content embedded directly in the content.

It's an arms race, and the escalation isn't going to be pretty.
Power of Little UI Changes: Facebook iPhone Usage +20% from UI Tweak