skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'll play devil's advocate.

First, governments consistently think of the economy as a static model. So you add up how many online sales you have, add in a percentage tax, and expect to make that money.

Second, Amazon pulling out or not is simply a short-term obstacle. The long term strategy is to put a stake in the ground, then continue to lobby and work at the national level. This sets precedent, even if it doesn't work.

Third, there's a lot of ignorance. You don't have to pass an economics test to become a legislator. I think sometimes in any group that deals with another group there's an "us versus them" mentality that takes over. In some folks' mind, if you're making money, they should get a share of it to spread around. Trying to adapt and configure your business model to optimize -- or simply just to survive -- is a sign of selfish, unethical behavior. Both sides of tax debates engage in a lot of emotional over the top rhetoric. It's easy to lose track of priorities and principles.
How does your psychopathy affect your relationships? How do you know you are a psychopath?

Also, I think that having a fine-tuned sense of how your actions will affect other's opinions of you, is to some extent what empathy really is.
With the widespread adoption of the Google Content network for advertising I am wondering if affiliate links are needed because they can just show up in the Google ad and the advertiser gets paid for clicks. The previous affiliate can still make a page about a product but let Google figure out the links to show.
Bitcoin equals World of Warcraft without the fun and how to fix it
I can see where some folks would need an explanation of password length vs security, though relying on Steve Gibson for so much of the article tends to cause a little bit of /facepalm here.
The "naughty OR" operator, and placing syntax error nodes in the syntax tree, are awesome ideas. I hope someone steals them and adds them to Parsec :)
You don't have to stand ALL the time. I walk around every 15-20 minutes or so. I sit from time to time.
Reviewing your comment history, where you clearly express emotion and some empathy, and acknowledge consequences, you don't fit the bill as a psychopath. You may share certain attributes with psychopathy, or fancy yourself being one, but all indications are that you are not one.

The second indicator that you are not a psychopath is that you disagree with Robert Lamb's description of psychopathy, which are not insults -- they are the qualifying traits of a psychopath.
Not _info_ transfer but it allows instantaneous collapse of the entangled state into known states after the measurement is done on a entangled system.

Here is how I remember it (and I am just a comp sci nerd, not a physicist so please correct me):

* you have 2 qubits Q1 and Q2. You entangle them. Now you have an entangled system Q1Q2.

* You separate Q1 and Q2 in space. Let's say you put Q2 on a spaceship and blast it into space, but leave Q1 in the lab on earth.

* After some time you measure Q1 to get its value. At that point the entanglement of Q1Q2 collapses. You now know the value of Q1 that you just measured and at the same time Q2 is forced to a known value too.

* At _appears_ as if you could send information this way but you cannot. Think about it. You don't know what value you'll measure in the lab for Q1. So you can't force Q2 to be a certain value either.

* Let's think about it another way -- suppose you tell the spaceship operator that if Q2 collapses to |0> then they should turn the spaceship immediately around and head back home and if it collapses to |1> they should arm their weapons and prepare for an alien attack. Now you are on earth in control of Q1, and you want to force Q2 to be measured to |1> because you know the aliens are coming. There is nothing you can do to Q1 to force Q2 to be measured as |1>.
Hey dude. About the job - email me at joseph at coursekit dot com.
Remember, there are five states that do not charge sales tax, so they have no incentive to fight Amazon. There are another five states where Amazon already collects sales tax. So, that's 10 states that have no reason to pass similar laws.

And of course, affiliates that make a sizable amount of money will probably not move, but will instead simply incorporate in one of those states (one of which happens to be Delaware).
There is one job at which psychopaths are, in all aspects, better performers (more effective, less likely to quit) than anyone else: torturing

And also sales. But I guess that's just a subset of torturing, if popups, Flash-ads, and background music on ad pages is any indication.
Probably not.

But one thing I'd think is true is that no person that is primarily nice and sociable has ever done anything that has significantly advanced the state of anything worthwile.
My reading is that Amazon would have had to charge sales tax on the full price of the item if the buyer and the referer were both in Connecticut. It doesn't take an ecommerce expert to figure out that sort of model is not sustainable.

Edit: on reread it appears that the law was written such that amazon would have to collect sales tax on all sales to CT buyers because the affiliates counted as a "local presence".
TL;DR: Use bcrypt.
Except the whole argument comes down to physical presence.

Now, if Barnes and Noble had a caravan of mobile RV bookstores registered in a different state that came into CT to sell books, B&N would have a better argument.
Can someone summarize what PEG is? I read through the Wikipedia page but can't make heads or tails of it. What is this used for?
Great idea, but... ungoogleable name choice. Definitely look forward to hearing more about this though.
That was my thought initially but steered away because of the large combination. In the sites current state I have a little [?] located next to things that may need to be explained. Upon clicking you get a nice dialog box that explains things. When the dialog box shows up, it grays everything else out, so do you think throwing both text and video in there would be alright? I want to avoid making it look like too much and turning the user away.
ex-NSA employee, Thomas A. Drake, takes plea deal
Interesting, I haven't looked at disco for quite awhile. How does disco compare to hadoop streaming these days? (I'm highly biased, so I reach for bigcouch most of the time now)
If people were rationel beings maybe you'd be right - but they aren't. A famous Harvard Business Review study actually showed that only economiste and pshychopaths (!) could be shown to be consistently rational. Normal people second-guess everyone and everything all the time, no matter how much information they have.

Bubbles, panics, and all that stuff shouldn't happen but it does because people aren't rational. They're driven by emootions such as love, hate and in this case fear. You can be certain that if documents were released tomorrow showing that the IMF were preparing a Greek default there would be widespread panic.
The part I have a hard time comprehending in these situations is that many legislators have legal backgrounds being attorneys, yet seem to completely forget about the constitution.
A corporation cannot be communist, because it has no rule of law over its users. Product platforms are not governments, they're not countries, and there is no expectation of public access. The "communist" argument is completely irrelevant.

Think of iOS hardware and software as a giant amusement park. I'm going with Disney World, because it's familiar.

Disney allows plenty of third-party corporations inside its parks. Various rides are "sponsored by" third-party corporations, and those corporations are heavily involved in the process of making these rides happen. However, Disney corporation has final say on what goes. End of story.

Apple views the iOS ecosystem like an amusement park in which they are the curator. They open the doors and allow third-parties in, but they hold unilateral decision making power over the user's experience while at the park.

Maybe you're not in to amusement parks. I certainly get that, but there are other options. No one is forcing anyone to sign up for the Appleland trip. It just so happens that consumers really like the curated experience, so if you want in on the action, you have to understand what you're getting in to on the way in the door.
The funny thing is that alpha builds of Win8 itself have already been leaked, and people have been deciphering the various new DLLs. There's apparently a new native UI framework that's based on, but not the same as, Silverlight (similar to how Silverlight is based on WPF)
Ask HN: Best Windows CMS?
I work on a Joomla CMS installation at work and have worked with Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress for a few years.

I'm comfortable with Apache/PHP/MySQL but don't have much experience with asp.net/IIS or indeed a Windows platform CMS.

Who should I look at first? Umbraco looks interesting.
United colors of the blogosphere
I'm guessing next week's Security Now will dedicate quite a large portion of it to facepalming.
I assume it's a static site?
How to mod gamerscore without getting reset - XPG
Why don't you sysadmins just write scripts?
I've seen that explanation over and over, but I don't see why there's a problem with something arriving at B before B sees it leave A. We have the same situation with faster-than-sound travel, but it doesn't appear to be impossible.

Granted, it's not impossible by that proof because we have faster means of communication (you can detect something before its sound reaches you) (or maybe because it's slower than light), but that's not a problem with faster-than-light communication either. By hypothetically accepting that there's a FTL communication method, didn't you just accept that there's something faster than light?

Wouldn't that imply there's something we don't know about time dilation (if FTL comm is achieved), given that it defines such a thing as impossible? It's a circular argument, it's impossible by this proof because this proof relies on it being impossible. So arguing a hypothesis which rejects that requirement with this proof is ignoring the hypothetical universe that was constructed, and it's not a proof at all.
Am I the only person who doesn't have a problem with this? Am I the only person who removes dock (and MagSafe) connectors by pulling on the plug, not the cable?

Heck, I'm not even OCD. I'm pretty lazy and I still do it this way.

Apple headphones on the other hand, I go through 2-3 pairs a year (due to rain and the rigors of running). Fortunately, the Apple Store just sends me replacements without much hassle at all.
Think of what happens when all US states legalize medicinal marijuana?

It is still illegal at the federal level.

How much money can a state afford to spend on federal litigation against a team of Amazon's lawyers?
What reasoning am I arguing?

I'm making two comments in the comment you're responding to:

1. The article headline is a bit misleading, and should've said something like: Amazon pulls out of CT due to a tax-law change. Even, Terrible CT Tax-Law Change Drives Amazon Out, or something. As it's written, I thought that CT had banned affiliate programs; in a rush to editorialize, the headline author sacrificed clarity about agency. Of course, maybe everyone reading is already following the saga, so I was the only briefly confused person, but nonetheless it seemed like an easy problem to avoid.

2. Amazon is probably pulling out in part due to, as you say, a feeling that this would set a negative precedent for their business, not solely due to the CT case taken in isolation.

Your slavery example seems off the mark; Amazon is not taking action due to moral opposition to CT's tax policy, but because it's bad for their business. They happily do business in states with all sorts of unethical laws without complaining about them, as long as those laws don't impact their profits.
Ssshh; Portland is already overrun with people who are online marketing experts... don't bring more of them.
Nope. Try again, bro. The host mentioned was in the original thread that this blog post was a response to.
The justification for these actions is simple: every state has spent the last many years spending themselves into a great deal of debt, now they are desperately grasping for revenue and amazon has big pockets.
The best part of this article was the hypothetical film pitch for "COOL RUNNINGS meets BLADE RUNNER".
> I'm fairly certain that a contingency plan exists if Greece defaults. I'm also fairly certain that there's a report somewhere in the IMF stating that the chances of a Greek bankruptcy are greater than 30 or 40%. If these plans were to be made public Greece would default within a week, and wreak as much if not more havoc on the world economy than Lehmann brothers.

The markets are no longer involved in financing the spending of the Greek state. Therefore, whether or not such information is made public would make no difference to the solvency of the Greek state.

Note, however, that such information can obviously affect the price of Greek bonds on secondary markets, and there are certainly major private players involved that are very interested in manipulating those prices. But democracy should not cater to such private interests.

The truth is that Greece will become bankrupt if and only if the EU does not decide to support the Greek government financially or Greek decides to exit the Euro. Without prolonged EU support, there is no way Greece can dig itself out of the hole that it was pushed into - austerity does not work, but without exiting the Euro or EU support, that is the only option available to them.

Whether Greece will go into bankruptcy or not is an entirely political decision, and a decision that is highly influenced by the IMF (although it is ultimately up to EU governments). So if the IMF were to compute odds for an event that they themselves pretty much directly influence, that would be pretty dishonest (or would demonstrate that somebody at the IMF does not understand the fundamental nature of the situation).
The only logical stance is that they're going to kill Silverlight and don't want to say anything until they have all their ducks in a row.

However, Microsoft isn't necessarily logical. They may simply have not expected people would read this from their Win8 demo and nobody in the company is willing to speak up about Silverlight's roll in Win8.

Either way, this is bad PR for Microsoft.
How Shoemoney's ads convert better than all the bonehead marketers
"The reasonable man bends himself to suit the world. The unreasonable man bends the world to suit himself. Without the unreasonable man, there can be no progress."

Now, I agree with other here who claim you can be slightly narcissistic, unreasonable etc without being a psychopath. But there's something in the theory - and especially in that quote, which I love and whose source I will now try to track down - that applies to my goals in life, and probably to many startups.

Edit: George Bernard Shaw: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
PEG parsers get rid of the dangling else problem with recursive descent parsers where it's unclear in the following statement whether

if e then s1 else if e then s2 else s3

the else s3 should be with the first if or the second if - usually you have to code special rules into your parser. It also allows for a worst-case linear time parse, and there are some language rules you can express with a PEG parser that you can't with a recursive descent parser.
Which tech companies will be still around in 100 years?
TL,DR: light backgrounds are in majority over dark backgrounds and most popular colors are based on orange and blue.
I didn't say it was hard. I said it was tedious.

Also, I'm working on a script to handle the DNS zones for me.

Yeah, we worked on one of those, too. We called it Webmin (literally, Webmin began as a simple tool for managing and delegating management of DNS records about 14 years ago). And, then we worked on a script to manage virtual hosts, mailboxes, databases, web applications, LDAP, DNS slaves, SVN and git, awstats and Webalizer, resource usage data collection and reporting, user management and delegation to untrusted users, virus and AV scanning, Greylisting, SPF record management, DKIM key management, automated backup and restoration of virtual hosts and all associated data, etc. We called that script (or huge pile of scripts as the case may be) Virtualmin.

Again, I encourage you to work in whatever way you are most comfortable and productive. I manage a few dozen websites, and find having tools to automate much of that process is valuable for me. Millions of users seem to agree that Webmin and/or Virtualmin removes tedium for them, as well. And, I'm sure the same can be said of cPanel users.

Incompetence is not the only reason someone would do something differently than you. Different requirements breed different solutions.
Magnetic fields?
It wasn't just Amazon, but also sites owned by Amazon, including Audible. Amazon and Audible were my two sources of revenue for my site thestartupdaily.com

Yesterday both accounts were closed with no advanced notice and my business model is effectively broken. While I support Amazon for taking a stand, I'm angry at Amazon for not giving some sort of warning to affiliates. It also seems like they wasted a good opportunity to get people who are most passionate about the issue to make some noise for them. The could have sent emails to affiliates as the issue was unfolding, and instead of the short and rather unfriendly letter to affiliates saying "your contract has been terminated". They should have used that notice to give people more information and phone numbers and other contact details about who is behind this.

Seems to me like big chain stores buying protectionist legislation and selling it to voters as "protecting small business", while in reality they are protecting yesterday's dinosaurs and screwing forward thinking Internet based businesses.
responding to each point.
1) expecting to "make that money" when no other state has is idiocy.
2) the "stake in the ground" is just symbolic. Do they really think that helps at all?
3) like I said, I can see both sides of tax debate, I just find it wildly irresponsible to nuke the revenue for a bunch of your constituents because you've lost track of priorities.
We do. We called our scripts "Webmin", "Virtualmin", "Cloudmin", and "Usermin". Pretty catchy name for them, I think.

And, then we shared them, so that others wouldn't have to reinvent the wheel and write the same scripts over and over again.
Yep, basically just a status update based on news sources.
just because God strikes heretics with lightning doesn't mean that it is possible to artificially create and route electrical current
But... it hasn't worked at all, producing not even one penny for any of the states that have tried it. Isn't that the proverbial definition of insanity?
*correlation results in causation
I do see your point, but I think the little more time setting things up manually is worth it in the end rather than using more memory (or needing a higher tier VPS)
I'm fairly sure you're not alone, but that you're definitely in the minority. So the options are: make the experience significantly better for the majority of users and annoy the minority of users like yourself; or make the experience slightly less annoying for the minority of users (who could have just added the site to a cookie clearing list) and weaken the experience for the majority of users.
Exactly. There are plenty of choices of jurisdiction for the bigger affiliates that matter to Amazon. This is really just a "nuke the mom and pop blogger" effect.
iWoz
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Hackers
The Great Gatsby
Thanks, that's the argument exactly, specifically the second part.

Regarding the static model, it's not so much that it's a static model as that for the overwhelming majority of online purchases, it's displacing a local purchase. It's actually a more capitalist economy from a certain point of view to make online and local purchasing compete on the same ground, especially when the market distortion (which yes stems from sales taxes' existence in the first place, coupled with the commerce clause) discriminates against your voters.
You've had years of notice. Amazon did exactly the same thing with Illinois, Colorado, Hawaii, North Carolina... Amazon has publicly said it would do the same thing in Connecticut for months.
RE: 1), you'll notice a lot of big market states have all jumped at the same time. That makes the jump look a lot more appealing to me if I'm a state legislator. Eventually Amazon won't want to forfeit affiliate business in every big state economy except Texas and Delaware. Or that's the gamble, at least.
From Google Chrome after following the link on GitHub:

"The website at languagejs.com has been reported as a “phishing” site. Phishing sites trick users into disclosing personal or financial information, often by pretending to represent trusted institutions, such as banks."
Seems that the collateral damage to affiliates from this law is specifically because those legislators understand the commerce clause of the constitution.
Ask HN: do people see me as a soft target?
Long story short: people often contact me with ideas for websites/software that they want me to build in exchange for a small amount of money (hundreds of dollars) or small share of equity in the next 'Facebook killer' (typically around 25%). Their contribution can effectivly be summarised as "I'll be the ideas guy".

I'm not the most assertive person in the world and I wonder if people get in touch because they think I'm someone they could easily exploit or because they're just clueless about how much work actually goes into launching a software product or service.

Has anyone else been faced with this situation and how do you handle it?
PEG is a different way of specifying grammars and an different process for parsing them. If you're used to Bison/Yacc or LALR parsers modeled on Yacc (like Racc), the big things you notice with any PEG parser are:

* You automatically get "EBNF"-style operators like "zero-or-more" or "one-or-more" instead of having to specify recursive nonterminals and epsilons.

* You typically don't need a separate lexer; PEG parser productions resemble regular expressions.

* PEGs use prioritized choice to deal with ambiguities such as dangling-else. PEG grammars are unambiguous.

PEG parsers are much easier to build and work with than Yacc-style parsers. The learning curve on PEG is also way, way shorter than for shift-reduce parsers. You should probably be using PEG parsers whenever possible now.
The BIG assumption is that there is only one user per computer per site.
It pleases me to hear that I give the impression of empathy.

My impression of the (recent) literature on the matter was that absence of empathy, in addition to the criteria for ASPD, is necessary and sufficient for one to be considered a psychopath. One could easily have both of these things without also being unreliable, impulsive, or dishonest.
What Is The Best a Team service In The Core Competency?
He meant 2011 science festival, right?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2644349
Most states were actually doing great as of 2000, and have been cutting relative to their cost inflation for the last decade or so.

10-15% healthcare cost inflation has been spending states into debt.
...or something just in between?

I didn't even read the article and I don't plan to either.
webmin uses more ram than nginx (my webserver) does on my VPS.
Silverlight is irrelevant, has always been, will always be. Maybe it won't completely "go away", but anyone who is betting a farm on it is an idiot that deserves what is coming at him (yes, him, women wouldn't be that stupid).
Slow progress on automated car conveys
Actually, it only goes as far as if you're making money, they should get a share of it. Pork barrels aren't just Federal.