skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's no real reason for you to stress about this point because if your taking in 100% of the ad revenue and then remitting 70% of it to your publishers then you're only keep 30% as gross profit.

Ex:
Ad Rev/Sales = $100
Cost of Sales= $70
Gross Profit = $30

So, the IRS is only going to see that you earned the 30% either way. The only real important issue you may want to consider is whether you want your gross sales to be so high. Have a large amount of gross sales could exclude you from a number of small-business tax saving options such as the S-Corp election and it would make you have to file much more complicated tax returns. If you have a large amount of sales (millions) then you'd have to file reconciling schedules between accrual accounting per your books and records to your tax records.

Honestly, there's an unlimited number of possible problems when you start making lots of money. Mo money, mo problems. But, lets worry about making that first buck and take it step by step.

Conclusion, dont worry about it until you get there because you're fine so far.
I'm not sure how well these are worded but assume current entrepreneurship as an underlying condition when not specified explicitly.
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

~ Hanlon's Razor
Ah yes, I learned to do this as well with certain professors. I always found the ME professors were impressed after the first lecture and could tell I was paying attention. But with some others, it was a different story.
Big Think, NYC or remote

http://bigthink.com/job

Email jonah at bigthink.com

Big Think is an online forum where experts at the top of their fields engage with the public about the critical questions of our time. Over the past two years, we've published interviews with 1,500 luminaries from Ted Kennedy and Ricky Gervais to Stephen Hawking and Jason Fried. Now, we're overhauling our web site, introducing new kinds of content, and expanding to TV and mobile devices. We're searching for a top-notch programmer to help make this evolution possible.

As part of a small, fast-moving, and experienced team, you'll conceive and create features across Big Think, from our web and mobile front-ends to the search system to a back-end that connects to an array of services. You may be called upon to improve the load-balancer; support the production team with a script; or design and implement a significant new feature-set. The ideal candidate will possess the flexibility and broad technical knowledge to fill all these roles plus deep proficiency in Ruby, JavaScript, HTML, object-oriented design, and web-scale architecture.

The job is initially part-time, but we hope to find someone with interest in joining us as a full-time employee in the future. You may work at our office near Union Square in Manhattan or in your own space—in New York or elsewhere.

In a recent interview, Mark Zuckerberg said he couldn't think of another company where each engineer is responsible for 1,000,000 unique users. Big Think is such a company. When you join us, you'll not only have fun building great products; you'll also have a tremendous impact on the world.
While not strictly (and not just) a to-do system, I am quite satisfied -so far- with the Pomodoro Technique. It enhanced my productivity considerably, and it is also an apparently sustainable todo system.
Well, I had no idea Shereef would post this. But I'm very grateful. I think it's a very pay-it-forward sort of mentality that sits well with everyone in the HN community, everyone who believes information should be free and wants to see others with great ideas do really well. Honestly, if you check out BetterMeans.com, you'll want to help them out, too - without question.
I use a hosts file of ad site domains aliased to localhost. A web server on my machine redirects the default page at localhost to my to-do list on http://rememberthemilk.com. In addition, I use OpenDNS to block distracting sites, and redirect block.opendns.com to localhost, which is then redirected to my to-do list.
it is generally understood that something posted online where everyone can see it was posted with the intent of letting everyone see it

Yes, but it seems fair to add "in the absence of evidence to the contrary". I think a clearly written prohibition would constitute such evidence.

whereas accepting the click-though agreement at least indicates acknowledgment that those rules are there

I think this is probably right, but I'd love a better legal opinion. This also leaves open the question of whether a simple Javascript popup would satisfy the same requirement: "Clicking OK signifies that you agree to read only one page without payment." My guess is that it wouldn't, but I'm not sure how a submit button gains a different legal status.
Same. It's ridiculous that someone with 20-20 vision and good enough vocabulary to ace the verbal SAT fails roughly the first 3 or 4 tries at many CAPTCHAs these days. Some are just damn near impossible to decipher, and some I could have sworn I got right and checked multiple times b/f hitting submit, but failed anyway.

I'm so sick of them now that I only do the ones on really consequential websites, like ones handling my money. Any that I can just skip, I do.

Once or twice I've gotten a truly bizarre word I suspected doesn't even exist, and looked it up on dictionary.com to find it's not even in there. I don't bother expanding the search to the Oxford English dictionary for those, since I'm already annoyed with the wasted time.

It seems CAPTCHAs are one are where the tech is getting worse, not better.
Email me at that address and I'll connect you, he's amazing, best designer I've EVER worked with.

If you're interested in seeing the backend check: http://collectivejam.com/Backend%20Pages/
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Ask HN: Do you ever feel guilty about what you have?
I mean in comparison to people who have much less than you. You know, the old chestnut of: "I am so privileged and have so much, and yet there are people out there who don't even know if they're going to eat again this week."

I'm not pointing fingers, I'm just curious as I often struggle with the issue of reconciling all my privileges (and wants) with the fact that billions of people live in poverty.
This seems likely to be a common situtation so I'll keep it out in the open for other people to read.

I'm based in New Zealand and do my accounts here. I rent virtual machines in the US which run websites etc. NZ and US have some kind of dual tax agreement.

What do I need to know about US tax?

Thanks for the offer and any advice given!
To sum up a needlessly long piece: manufactured candy became an institution in the 1970s amid fears of homemade sweets being unsafe.

In Romania we have a night for carolers in early December. It's a similar idea to trick-or-trearing on Halloween. I'm not sure what it's like now, but nuts, fruit and coins were still common when I was growing up there in the late 80s.
I like this person a lot more than the other one.

Yes, there are some danger signs in the above, but they don't sound as fatal as the ones spewed by that other guy.
All this shows is that Digg was well on its way down before the new rollout.
OK. half is an exaggeration.

But try:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/?url=index%3Dblended&fie...
and http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/?url=index%3Dblended&fie...

I'm not saying that it's unheard of to use startup in the sense that you do just that there it is also commonly used in another sense - enough to trigger annoying semantic nitpicking.

{added to last sentence)
I just downloaded the non-commercial version and tried it out. The interface does not seem to have changed very much over the years, but it has always been nice.

I bought Linux, Windows, and Mac LispWorks professional licenses about 8 or 9 years ago. One very nice thing about LispWorks is that the utility to make standalone applications has a "tree shaker" to toss unused code so executables can be reasonably small (compared to SBCL where a standalone app is about 30 MB minimm or Clozure CL where a standalone app is around 20MB minimum).

I always thought that the tree shaker was the really big win for LispWorks.

Now, when I want to use a Lisp to create small standalone applications I use Gambit-C Scheme.

BTW, about 10 years ago, I was paid a fee to work on the LispWorks documentation - but that does not bias my opinion.
Just out of curiosity, where did you pull the "unrealistic expectations" from? I thought I made it pretty clear when I said "There is no scientific basis" that I recognized the Higgs wasn't going to give those things.

It is responses like this that lead people to believe that the community of scientists are very arrogant and to not want to have anything to do with them.

Remember, those projects are funded "people like us" (whoever that is, but it is obviously not somebody as smart as you). When you make comments that denigrate "people like us", you are ultimately hurting the opportunities for future work.

Given how immensely expensive it is to do experiments at this level, I would think that would be the last thing you'd want to do.

EDIT: Decided not to lump the response below in with this response.
Can I do email instead of phone?

What with timezones and night owls, it may be hard to reach someone by phone. Plus not everyone has a dedicated business line.

Anon-forward email would be great. Just for the initial connection, after that you are correct, it's all phone.

So maybe a form to let the client enter a phone number and a best time to call (including timezone), and send that to the freelancer?

(I would love to list myself, except I'm booked right now.)
What the hell is this?

I think we should seriously think this web thing over.
LispWorks and Franz are both expensive because they offer very good support and have some very talented staff that need to get paid.

The free SBCL and Clozure CL systems are very good also, and free support from the developers can be good: one customer project using SBCL 4 years ago hit a snag running on a 64 GB server and one of the developers sent me a patch in a few hours. Excellent!
About faking the deadlines - this has never worked for me. Honestly, how do you expect to fool yourself? I've tried to find a bunch of reasons to convince myself that keeping the fake deadline is important but the other half of me just knows that it isn't. How do you convince yourself?
In Response to The Digg Blog Post
Related link for the Haml/Sass ones among us:
http://github.com/himmel/html5-boilerplate

And also for the Compass users:
http://github.com/sporkd/compass-html5-boilerplate

Great resources, though be aware they're still not up to date with todays release. Well worth it in any case.
Good tip. Thank you for pointing this out.
how do you plan to innovate over craiglist in cater to people who have projects to post?
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You might want to read up on what XSS is.
just to clarify: we aren't planning to compete with YC on our program (in fact we've invested in 8 YC companies out of the recent batch, and think Paul & team are doing awesome job there).

to differentiate a bit: 500 startups is a little more focused on design/ux issues, also platform distribution opportunities.

not that YC doesn't also cover some of these topics, but we might be a little more downstream from where YC starts working with companies, and we are also doing seed and some series A deals that are likely after YC gets involved.

Regardless we have a ton of respect for what YC does to help startups, and we aim to be complementary more than competitive... you might check with some of our companies that are both YC and 500 for more perspectives.
I believe that many (maybe even all) scientists working on these kinds of projects feel this way. The people who ultimately fund the projects do not. It would be wise to remember that.

The people who fund them do not expect a wormhole generator to fall out of them (gads, do people not have a sense of humor?). There is an implicit expectation that the knowledge for the sake of knowledge will have the potential to provide real, tangible benefits for the people who are really paying for these experiments. If that expectation wasn't there, scientists wouldn't bother justifying the expense[1].

Again, with no scientific basis, I am still hopeful that these experiments and the knowledge gained from them will result in a leap, perhaps in a way similar to the classical-to-quantum knowledge caused us to leap forward.

http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2008-09/defense-lhc
I'd like to hear your opinion on the tax implications of selling an ecommerce website. In my case, it was a website that sold a single digital product. I sold the website code, the product code/copyright, the customer database and mailing list, advertising copy and 60 days of support for a single price. I operated this website for over a year before selling it. I am in PA, USA and the buyer is in Australia, and we did not break down what part of the purchase price corresponded with any individual element of the sale.

I talked to several accountants and 3/4 said I can claim it as a long term capital gain. 1/4 was unsure since part of the value is the software copyright. Am I safe to claim this as a LTCG at 15%?
Yep. If there's a risk, there's an opportunity.

The biggest problem I see is that the only people who buy insurance will be the ones who are most at risk of needing it...
Crows go to "tool-school"
How does this educate users, who don't have the option of using SSL to begin with? It's the website operators that need the education. This just embarrasses users due to no fault of their own.
Simple questions that are suddenly (more) important because we have just become cash flow positive and now have non-trivial revenues.

1) Do we need to charge sales tax on software as a service? Our customers are large organizations spread all over the country. Whatever research I did suggests that as a service, this should not entail sales tax.

2) Other than payroll taxes, income taxes and 1099s for contractors, are there any other taxes I should be aware of?

3) So far our accounting has been me noting expenses and revenues in a spreadsheet and making sure I have all the receipts. Do we need to start maintaining formal accounts per law? (Even if not, I have already retained a part time accountant to do this..)

Thank you!
What a Rotten World It Can Be: Report Says Three-Fourths of World Is Corrupt
I feel it all the time. Especially in India where high standard living goes hand to hand with super-poor living.
I Buy and Sell Domain Names AMA

What does AMA mean?
One wonderful thing about Firebug:

When editing a CSS property, pressing UP and DOWN will iterate through all of the possible values of that property. For example, editing "display: none", you can quickly find out what values "display: " can take.

I really miss that in the chrome debugger :(
Thanks for your comment. I understand where you're coming from, but that's an assumption. There's no actual assurance that someone's core business means that they may be more secure. As for the issue regarding sniffers, in the UK if the VPN termination is in the UK and they're providing a service, then under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers bill they may be considered an ISP, and would therefore be required to keep traffic logs. In other countries YMMV.

Likewise, if the endpoint is being used for malicious activity targeted against the critical national infrastructure of country foo, the provider is not necessarily going to have the option to become aware of the interception of their exit traffic.

With your own server it may or may not be more secure, and may or may not be intercepted at the endpoint, but providing you can reasonably configure it the only person that would attract state-level interception (over and above other local connections) would be you.
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Or a well known time-travelling movie is being rereleased and needs some PR.
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Power of Minimilasm in Fashion Photography
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Digg users appear to be a thin-skinned, shrill bunch to be honest. Perhaps it's just a vocal minority.
What's a simple tax tip you give individual small business owners (sole proprietors or disregarded single-member LLCs) to reduce their tax burden, beyond simply claiming all business expenses? Once past the phase-out point for most tax credits, any easy tips to reduce taxes further -- perhaps a good place to invest savings without low income limits or an often overlooked deduction?

I usually end up paying taxes on the full amount of my business's profit, and I don't really know what else I can be doing. I was once told to get a Roth IRA but the income limits are too low.
Congrats on the release. I'm excited to finish reading the book. I just thought you should know, however, that there's a minor mistake (I think) in some of the walkthrough stuff in the pdf. On page 56:

> (defun pudding-eater (person)
(cond ((eq person 'henry) (setf *arch-enemy* 'stupid-lisp-alien) '(curse you lisp alien – you ate my pudding))
((eq person 'johnny) (setf *arch-enemy* 'useless-old-johnny) '(i hope you choked on my pudding johnny))
(t '(why you eat my pudding stranger ?))))

> (pudding-eater 'johnny)
(I HOPE YOU CHOKED ON MY PUDDING JOHNNY)

> *arch-enemy*
JOHNNY

arch-enemy at this time should hold the value 'useless-old-johnny, not 'johnny
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I think the person you're responding to felt that Unix command should describe what you're telling the computer to do: "ls" makes the computer list files, "find" makes the computer find things, "echo" makes the computer echo what you give it, etc.

"watch" does not make the computer watch anything (at least in its default mode of operation); it makes the computer run a command repeatedly and the user watches it. "repeat" or "refresh" might have been more consistent names.
Yeah, eventually we'll add email. For now we'd like to focus on phone so we can cater to clients with more urgent needs.

Good point about best time to call. Will add that field. In future we'll let you customize what hours to accept calls. If someone calls you off-hours, it'll tell them to try again between your hours.

Thanks for the feedback!
What do you do about that feeling? What would you like to see done? Anything the online tech space/startup scene can provide?
sometimes the simplest solutions are the best

vi todo.txt

(or TextMate, emacs, etc.)

add dates or category or project names, as desired, etc.
I'll write it if you promise to buy it :P
Seems like we should come up with a different, more specific term for what we mean by startup. Like tech startup. Or perhaps IT startup.
Ouch. I never particularly liked Digg, but I feel sorry for all those people who are suddenly out of a job.
Unsure at the moment for clients who'd like to explicitly post their projects.

I'm hoping the clients will do a search for "php" if they need a php developer and call up a few devs.

We'll see how that goes.
Please check your email at your convenience.
I've taken a 3min gander at the dual tax agreement and it sounds like your standard foreign tax credit situation. Whatever tax you pay to the US will be a tax credit for NZ and vice versa.

So, you'd basically run the company in the US according to the same rules as everyone else it seems.

International tax is not my specialty so I'm not going to pretend to be a pro. If I had more time, I could probably give you a better answer. Sorry!
Sales tax is collected by the state, so you need to ask an accountant familiar with the state(s) you have a nexus in. A lot of other taxes you may be subject to are specific to your state and even county and township. I pay 3 types of state taxes and 3 types of local taxes for my business. It'd be different in another state.
Here's something else that might be of some interest to you. Slightly off topic -- video chat implemented in HTML5.

https://labs.ericsson.com/developer-community/blog/beyond-ht...
+1 on nice hardware, -1 on durability. My n900 had to have warranty service so I used the free nexus one I got from google at a conference. Using the nexus one, which has no keyboard and an extremely oversensitive touch screen, was extremely painful. I am thankful to have my keyboard and keyboard shortcuts again and I hope nokia fixed the design issues they had with the usb connector.
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'Obscene' is an overstatement. FF vs Chrome:

http://imgur.com/P5Mw6.png
Firstly, congratulations on completing the book.

Will this book be available for Kindle by any chance?
Tech World Welcomes Digg Refugees With Open Arms
I've tried a number of methods (mostly for work-related todos) and nothing really worked perfectly. I find that I go through phases of needing a list versus doing what is on my mind. Each phase can last a week or a month.

My solution is to use a spreadsheet like Excel (or your choice of GoogleDocs, OpenOffice or other equivalent). I put a cross next to items as I complete them. When I lose interest in my list it tends to atrophy, but at least my tasks and accomplishments are still recorded.

If I come back to my spreadsheet after an extended break and it has atrophied substantially (as in I've completed many tasks without marking them off, priorities have moved away from uncompleted tasks to new unrecorded tasks etc), I simply create a new page and copy across old tasks that I still need to do.

It seems to work quite well for me; it keeps a record of what I've been up to and what I need to do (when I need it to), and works somewhat like agile development iterations without me worrying too much about whether I'm doing it 'correctly'.
Not to mention, the slugs are a free source of protein!

Growing your own lettuce is great advice, and with the early fall rains in the bay area this year, this is the perfect time to get started. Carrots and radishes are other easy veggies to grow yourself this time of year.
Having been audited by the IRS before, and running a similar ad brokerage service before, the IRS will want to see substantiation (receipts/checks/other evidence) for every payment you made to publishers. That's how you prove the 70% you claim in expenses. Don't forget to 1099 every publisher you pay over $600 during the year, and send the copies to the IRS!
Isn't it commonly recognized that it's cheaper to run your own hardware than to pay a cloud provider? It just requires more capital outlay and maintenance.
FF must be optimized for Linux or something, b/c on my Ubuntu 10.04 workstation it runs roughly the same as Chrome and Chromium do, in fact it's even more stable for me with tons of tabs open (though I haven't used Chrome in several months so maybe that's changed?).
for example, tonight i want to hire someone to write a simple php/mysql webapp (with a super basic login system) that interfaces with twilio (but maybe the twilio could be .rb or .py). you don't make it super easy for me to find a person who'd be interested in that project.

(email's in profile).