skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
SaaS for US customers but located offshore
What are the options for a SaaS firm thats offshore based but targeting US customers in terms of engaging with merchant gateways?

a. Can an international firm signup with the likes of Paypal Merchant, Authorize.net etc and charge recurring US dollars on CC's?
b. If US registration is mandatory, is there an EASY and straightforward way to register a firm in the US to offer SaaS with no US presence?
c. Is there a third country (avoiding the term tax haven!) with lax Tax laws and registration ability that can achieve direct selling with US customers and be completely ligit?

Thanks
Ali
http://www.7vals.com
350k is a steal
I would say first world nations are economically successful because their economies became diverse, i.e. a heavily distributed, highly concurrent and parallel system of systems.

Given our current circumstances, it seems capitalism - i.e the central idea that a capitalist works for profit, etc - is now appearing to create economies which are now centralized around people/institutions which engage in nothing moving capital from one place to another, one industry to another, without the attendant in-betweens of the businessmen. And there's goes the concurrent property.

And I wouldn't knock democracy much. You might hate American politics now, but the Chinese version isn't better by any much.
That's good to hear - we'll submit an application this round. Thanks for the quick response :)
I value my privacy. If I was required to use my real name here, I'd wish HN good luck and move somewhere else.
(Unconfirmed) Rumor has it that's the reason behind apple's "half eaten" logo and original rainbow colors.

That should read "(Pretty thoroughly debunked) Rumor has it...."

For example, http://www.greggore.com/dln021203.htm, or the Wikipedia page you quoted yourself.
The first non-trivial atom circuit: Progress towards an atom SQUID
Are you happy with your life?
So are you?
The GPL says nothing of the sort. Besides which, it's his code. He's not bound by the GPL.
I approach this 'question' differently for myself, it's not so much that I worry about Trojans/malware for my Mac, I know they exist though, it's more like I don't want to be the 'weak' link in the chain. Let's say I pick up some kind of Trojan/malware/virus for a Windows PC, unbeknown to me I send it to someone who uses only Windows PC's, that makes me the bad person because I was thinking I don't need an anti-virus protection ... I'm working with a Mac no? Why do I need any protection? ... I know the other person needs anti-virus protection too, but in case he/she doesn't, I'm not liable, I did what I could to protect my PC/Mac.

So, yeah ... I use a detector, not only for the small(er) chance I get a Mac Trojan/Malware ... But also to protect anybody I do business with ... Well more to protect anybody in general.

Extra benefit, it keeps my system clean(ish) of tracking cookies and other privacy invading nasties.
Japan brings artificial intelligence to rockets
There might be reasons why an IT org. has not installed Xcode, but those might not be good enough reasons for the users. From a users perspective, it might be nice to have a choice.
Great too see an advanced topic covered using Ruby. I went ahead and picked up a hardcopy for leisurely reading.
Carlos Hank Rhon:Bussiness Services
My guess is that geothermal contributes almost nothing. I wouldn't be surprised if the solar radiation via a full moon contributes more than geothermal.
I am confident my Macs are secure. I do run Little Snitch to monitor incoming and outgoing data connections, but other than that I don't worry.

The nice thing about OS X is the simple way it handles installing applications and if they ask for elevated permissions. I know that there are vulnerabilities with Macs, but I really didn't have an issue on Windows either because I paid attention to what I was running and where I was surfing online.
A happy tsunami story after all the sadness: Dog rescued after 3 weeks at sea
How to hack databases/create auto bots for free
I think the question is: What is the principled stance?

The link you referenced would generally be considered the far-left stance, in that there really shouldn't be any property ownership at all (the referenced writings seem to suggest that even real property is a menace).

Personally, I think there should be some reward for truly novel invention. I agree with the referenced writings that a peanut butter and jelly sandwich does not qualify for such protection, despite what the Patent Office may do. This is simply an indication of the level of work being done at the Patent Office, however, amongst other structural problems in the system.

I do think that the patent system serves a purpose. For invention that is truly novel, it is worth the price of temporary monopoly to encourage disclosure. Many of the novel drugs on the market today might not exist without patent protection. It is simply too expensive to create a new drug without the promise of a future upside free from the inevitable copycats, who could underprice because they have no R&D expense. While drug companies are not usually considered the good guy due to over-pricing (because of patent monopolies), I think we are better off having the drugs in the long term and suffering the short term consequences of issuing the patent.
The encrypted “I like ponies” would not match the encrypted “Product X has vulnerability Y”
Free online games to play - Arcadephase.com
Very nice! Would be cool to have an additional setting "resolution" from low, medium to high :)
Not sure what the point of this posting is. The guy says he is rich with a household of 30K and then goes on to say that "richness is in your heart and in your experience." He also lives somewhere in Asia.

I also live in Asia and 30K / year really is rich were I'm located.
It's not hard to launch terminal and type whois <domain>. Just do it and have a much higher likelihood that your new names and business concepts are safe.

Note that you're not guaranteed they're safe because it's trivial for an ISP to sniff all port 43 traffic, but it's a lot better than giving your unregistered name to someone who has a conflict of interest.
Wholesale Android CellPhones China discount Google Android Smart Phones
Wholesale android OS pda smart Phone,China cheap price android cellphones,Buy dropship free shipping android Mobile Phones from China
+1 for your interesting perspective.

Wish I could delete my own comment - I was in a grumpy mood :-/
Come to think of it, maybe upvotes should scale concavely as well.
Karma can also provide a subtle (or not so subtle) incentive to good behavior.

For instance, I've seen many instances of newbies making an "lol" or "wtf?" comment only to be quickly downvoted in to oblivion.

Hopefully it doesn't take much of that for them to get the point.

Also, the downvoting provides a quick and easy way for the community to express displeasure at someone violating the community's norms, without needing to write a long post explaining just why a comment consisting solely of "lol" or "wtf?" isn't appropriate.

On the othe hand, it's clear that karma is not a panacea, that it can be gamed, that it can encourage an echo chamber effect, and that it scales poorly when a site becomes as large as HN.
SQL Slammer’s mysterious disappearance
Not sure if this is off-topic, but have any company ever grown as fast to be as big as Google have? Successfully?
In case anyone else stumbled upon this thread, I've always thought running a VirtualBox VM in Bridged Networking mode still did not allow the VM instance to be externally accessible.

However, then I read this ServerFault thread and realised the bridge is a _new interface_, and hence you must either bind directly to it or bind to all interfaces in order to get your VM to become externally accesible!

http://serverfault.com/questions/206498/virtualbox-bridge-ne...

Fantastic!
There are many varieties of "offshore" for this question. I am not routinely inconvenienced by being an American living in Japan with regards to charging for things. If you're a Nigerian living in Nigeria... things are going to be a wee bit more difficult.

One does not practically or legally need a physical or corporate presence in the US to charge cards. Of the available options, I use Paypal to charge credit cards -- they had the least involved process to get a Paypal account (Paypal Website Payments standard + Paypal premier account) years ago, and I bootstrapped that into their I-can't-believe-its-not-a-merchant-account (Paypal website payments pro + business account) after a few years of doing (relatively) significant volumes through Paypal proper. That has been impressively painless.

Privilege escalation is, by and large, the easiest way to get into the US banking system. As soon as you're in a bank's systems and they have their Know Your Customer checkbox ticked next to your application, your odds of not getting held up by fraud review for the next product you add go up greatly. (This is why the tech incubator I used to work at would set up anyone going to the US with personal checking/investment accounts at US multinational financial firms. As soon as you have a foot in the door, everything else gets easier.)

Understand that businesses do not refuse to do business with foreigners because they enjoy screwing with you -- it is strictly risk-mitigation. There are a variety of things you can do to reduce perceived risk. In general, things which tend to indicate you're a "real" business tend to work. (Tax forms are practically magic spells -- they look official, it is virtually impossible to second-guess their contents, and the IRS will virtually never tell you "Piss off, we don't want your money.")
Epsilon email address megaleak hands customers’ customers to spammers
> Check the "new page" and vote up stories you like. I know very few people do this, because I find good stuff overlooked there all the time.

This is the biggest one IMO.
For every one of these you hear about there are 100 guys driving around in Bentleys that were smart enough to play it just a little bit safer.

There's a relatively small group of people that get to bleed us like leeches because the defense department is run like the dumbest of all big organizations: limitless funds and no consequences for employees when they make bad decisions.

People make fun of the startup founder that sells his nascent company to Google for $20M as if he took advantage of the big dumb company. That guy doesn't hold a candle to even the smallest of the criminals milking the US on a daily basis.
For the non-Bayesians, here's a paper that explains in detail one of the strongest criticisms of null hypothesis testing, by bayesian John Kruschke:

http://www.indiana.edu/~kruschke/articles/Kruschke2011PoPS.p...

To summarize, an experimenter's internal mental state (intentions) can affect the t statistic. That is: not changing the experiment at all, but just thinking something different -- gives a different level of significance.

In Kruschke's words: voo-doo.
Ask HN: Would allowing a down vote on submissions after a comment improve HN?
I don't want to get into the debate about whether HN quality is declining. I just want to explore how to improve the system.

Being the HN noob that I am, I was surprised to find that submissions can't be down voted. I always assumed that you could down vote submissions once you reached a certain karma level.

If the down arrow were hidden until the user posts a comment, it might encourage constructive criticism, partly because their own karma would be on the line (via the comment).
> Actually, L. Peter Deutsch famously left programming in favor of composing.

That's interesting, because I'm actually "leaving" composing in favor of programming.

I've never heard of L. Peter Deutsch but will look him up.

Thanks!
Can you recommend some of the classics to read?

In particular about real-time direct democracy.
I love stories like this. This would make an excellent movie.
Updated visualization of gigantic Apple/Nokia patent war
Very good... as long as my programs count your votes :-)
Really cool, make you feel that's 21st century :) And by the way, his cover of "Just the way you are" buries the original.
The thing with Canadian universities is that the financial aid isn't that great to begin with. Most of the aid comes from the gov't (at least in Ontario through OSAP). Most students do not qualify for it since their parents' income is too high. Unless you get one of the big 50k to 70k scholarships in grade 12, chances are you'll have to pay for uni quite a bit. The advantage is that it is cheaper than the top universities in the states, so your student debt isn't as large. From what i gathered from uWaterloo grads, you usually end up with student debt worth half of the whole tuition costs, so it's not too bad.
Universal Parts
What is Bandwidth and its importance in web hosting?
Bandwidth is the determent of webhosting plan prices. The more bandwidth a website needs, the higher the webhosting plan prices will be. That is why first sometime should be taken to find out how much bandwidth is actually needed for a website.
Obviously, Tim Soo is a capable musician.
I wonder if our descendants will be apologizing for some of our actions once we're all dead? However I suppose that by then the re-definition of what I used to understand by the word 'apology' will be complete.
Great quote in the WSJ comment section:

http://blogs.wsj.com/numbersguy/a-statistical-test-gets-its-...

The agency will bend their statistical significance
requirements when hypothesizing that a treatment has
risks, but almost never does when considering the
efficacy of a treatment.

That is the long and short of it. The FDA makes up the rules as they go along. As for the particular issue at stake, the Supreme Court's ruling in the Zicam case is horrifying:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870371250457623...

It is indeed true that statistical significance is not the be-all and end-all. It is also true that you need some method of determining whether a result could be due to chance or not.

This is particularly true when you have trial lawyers and regulators who smell blood. Dow Corning was sued and had its reputation dragged through the mud because people thought breast implants were causing some kind of disease. Turns out that wasn't true at all:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&re...

Now that statistical significance has been jettisoned as a defense, any group of anecdotal injuries of dubious provenance is in theory grounds for a class action lawsuit. And trial lawyers specialize in turning that particular kind of theory into practice. There's a reason that "mesothelioma" was the #1 Adword for a while -- ambulance chasers bid on it like crazy.

The Supreme Court has just made it a whole lot easier for them.
Yes, it's nothing out of the ordinary. After the shuttle lands personnel in similar suits can be seen with similar sensor wands going over the shuttle.
"... Perlmonks had that as part of the structure from the time I arrived there. ..."

It certainly works. I always go there ready to really think twice before I post & you learn. HN appears to be more OpEd a lot of the times.
Western music theory and programming are similar in that both are systematic concepts and can use numbers or "functions" to express them. The thing is, that description fits many things (even painting, drawing, photography, etc.), so it makes the relationship between programming and music less unique and less noteworthy.
Well it probably won't help you if you bomb the interview, but at the same time, chances of bombing the interview are considerably lowered, since by the end of the degree we would go through 30 if not even more interviews, so you should have a feel for the type of questions they ask.
I remember reading at the beginning of the year that Google wants to change the way they are organized, in order to stop their employees who were frustrated with their bureaucracy from defecting to Facebook and other start-ups. A possible form would be similar to the advertising group/holdings, where each agency has a lot of autonomy.

I think it's feasible to do that at Google if the infrastructure group would be spun off as a stand-alone entity (let's call it Google Ops) that can offer resources and consulting to any product group. When a new product is started, it would be similar to a start-up: 3 people in a room in the Googleplex who could choose to work with Google Ops, Amazon EC2, or something else. And Google would own a majority stake in this "start-up" and it would give them a certain budget (up to $1M - $10M).
335k downloads of Learning Python The Hard Way
In my case, I have a good idea what "comfortable" living is. At the low end, I would need around $2K net/mo (assuming I were to relocate to S. Asia – something that I've given serious thought to doing). If I stayed here in Manhattan, NYC, I would need at least $10K net/mo. If I moved to Japan (another place I've considered), I wouldn't need to pay for housing, so I could live on a few K net/ mo.

At times in my life, I've had enough money to spend a lot. I learned an important lesson: the more you spend, the more stuff you get, the more time you spend worrying about where to put that stuff, the more time you spend maintaining or selling that stuff, etc. Now, I spend my money on travel, food, mortgage, utilities and computers. My wife buys shoes and clothes, but she's one of those naturally stylish women who makes inexpensive stuff look better than overpriced, tacky name-brand junk. We aren't frugal, but we are in a sweet spot for spending that is genuinely the comfort zone for us. I would make a big effort to keep things the same way even if I had a pile of cash in the bank. The only exception might be some real estate projects, because I like to work on renovations as a hobby.
You could make the development process completely transparent, with input from a wide variety of people, checks and balances etc. and not begin implementing it without plenty of debate, examination etc. The bias is that those who are most interested in the process and/or the most vocal could end up being those with the most influence. But there's no reason not to at least start examining the problem from many angles and for as many people as possible to start trying to pick holes in it.
Why productivity fades with age: The crime–genius connection
The article tries to paint the two dealers as "a couple of stoner kids", but in reality Diveroli, the creator of the business, was greatly helped by his family situation:

"Efraim Diveroli, by contrast, knew exactly what he wanted to be: an arms dealer. It was the family business. His father brokered Kevlar jackets and other weapons-related paraphernalia to local police forces, and his uncle B.K. sold Glocks, Colts and Sig Sauers to law enforcement. Kicked out of school in the ninth grade, Diveroli was sent to Los Angeles to work for his uncle. As an apprentice arms dealer, he proved to be a quick study. By the time he was 16, he was traveling the country selling weapons."

In this business, which is all about connections, Diveroli was blessed with a network of contacts through his family. Without these, it is doubtful Diveroli would ever have achieved anything close to what he did.
For Germany it's similar, but add almost all music videos from major labels on youtube.
use http://domai.nr
Used to be that wuxga, 1920x1200, was readily available on sub-17" laptops but it seems everyone is downgrading to so-called "HD". Seems the focus is on entertainment, not business or productivity.
Air France Crash Wreckage Found in Atlantic, Boosting Probe
According to BEA the debris found includes the 2 engines of the Airbus and the debris site is relatively dense so they think they have found the main crash site of the Airbus. The debris site has a measurement of 500 by 300 meters.
Not completely pertinent to where I suspect your line of questioning is going, but Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is an interesting take on computer aided government.
Check out #startups on freenode.
Great, I hope you enjoy it! Happy to discuss it if you have any thoughts/questions, or shoot me an email: jasonb@cleveralgorithms.com

I'm preparing to work on a follow-up book addressing machine learning methods.
I've checked back via the GoDaddy interface, and all twelve domain names are still available (on all the TLDs that GoDaddy sells) at the original price.

This doesn't necessarily mean that GoDaddy doesn't ever take domains - maybe they only do it from high value customers who they think they can extract more money from, rather than people who aren't logged in; maybe I searched for too many domains with too few common substrings so their algorithm classified me as not wanting to seriously buy; maybe I didn't wait long enough because they manually decide which ones to buy; maybe the names I tried are too long to be considered valuable.
Can add woot.com to the list of online retailers who won't ship to Canada.
I think that unless I go to a site online that I should be behind a proxy, or start loading thumbdrives I find on the street I should be ok. That said, I will not upload attachments from emails I don't recognize. Even though I have a Mac, it's not hackproof.
"Wish I could delete my own comment - I was in a grumpy mood :-/"

don't worry about it! ( I am a devoted reader of your blog btw. Great writing)
There is a "flag" option on posts that appears when you get enough karma (I don't know exactly how much, and recall that it's a moving target based on total karma awarded, but it was somewhere round 300-ish points before I saw it first).

Enough "flags" and a submission becomes "dead" and you'll only see it if you've turned on "show dead" in your user prefs.
That's crazy, because the do ship the Kindle to Europe. There too aren't a lot of books available due to rights issues, but still. What's the problem with the Kindle?
Make downvotes worth more against massively-upvoted comments.

The point of downvoting a 1-point comment is usually to let someone know their comment was inappropriate. A downvote against a 60-point comment is supposed to mean "This is not that good. It's just hivemind / good placement."

Taking one point away from a 60-point comment doesn't change its position, however. Maybe downvotes should increase its gravity or maybe they should have a greater push-back, even if it's not 1.1*count(downvotes) but rather (count(downvotes))^1.1.
Indeed, this is pretty easy to notice. When I look at my posts, and see which ones are upvoted, it's mostly the ones that are short and emotive.

The ones in which I really put some effort into explaining something, looking up some information, or explaining my point, usually get only one or two upvotes, if any at all.
So my question is, where does the money go? If they keep it, that sounds like a pretty interesting deal. Multi-millions for 4 years in jail? I'd assume it was confiscated, but then who ends up in the black?
RedSn0wand Pwnage Tool Released to Jailbreak untethered iOS 4.3.1 [Download]
30+ Free Vector Backgrounds
I know designers always need some good vector backgrounds to use in their print projects. Nowadays vector backgrounds also uses as websites background because it can not expand at any canvas. Keeping in mind about these facts today i have featured 30+ free vector backgrounds for you to download.
ستار اكاديمى 8 
ستار اكاديمى 8 ستار اكاديمى 8 ستار اكاديمى 8 ستار اكاديمى 8 ستار اكاديمى 8 ستار اكاديمى 8 ستار اكاديمى 8 ستار اكاديمى 8 ستار اكاديمى 8
http://bgyc.blogspot.com/2011/04/star-academy-8.html
Mintpass Twin touchscreen dualboot tablet
The new tablet with dual screen with Android and Windows 7 is going to released by Mintpass in the early part of 2011. It is a tablet but it can be easily considered as a laptop.