skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> An issue that appears to be overlooked

It wasn't overlooked in the article, you overlooked it in your reading:

> Meanwhile, the size of the U.S. may be a red herring. Most of the region between Boston and Washington is as densely populated as most of Europe and the UK. So is the California coast between San Francisco and San Diego. And so is the region of the Midwest centered on Chicago. Those areas are home to about a quarter of all Americans. In other words, we live in a big country, but a lot of it is relatively empty space.

> The argument that the U.S. is too spread out is nonsense, according to Herman Wagter, one of the Netherlands' most prominent evangelists for next-generation broadband. He thinks there's something else going on in Verizon's and AT&T's opposition to competition at home: They're afraid of it.
Actually, there are microkernels running in a vast amount of mobile phones nowadays. They typically don't run on the main CPU, though, but on various controller chips.

Microkernels are practical -- they just have different trade-offs. Microkernels are preferable if (a) the whole Linux kernel would be too large, or (b) you consider security more important than performance. It's probably also easier to provide realtime services with Microkernels, but I don't know much about Linux' realtime API to know if Microkernels would be much better here.
Unless you roll a thousand 6's.
AT&T Announces the 'HTC Status' Facebook Phone
Amazon and Target are parting ways in the next couple of months. Perhaps the timing of this bill is related, albeit unlikely.
Is there any public statement or other public source for that statement? In particular, it would be very interesting to read about the concrete reasons which lead him to this conclusion.
So if an amazon customer living in California buys an item that is fulfilled from Arizona, why should a California sales tax be involved? Why are we suddenly redefining the meaning of local sales tax? Are we now to the point where every state with a local sales tax will also impose tariffs on out-of-state goods? That seems to be the argument here.
Justin Timberlake took a stake in MySpace...
http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/29/hes-bringing-myspace-back-j...
Kind of funny for reasons mentioned in the article
Turned on everything it said would reduce consumption.
> Amazon (or more accurately, the purchaser) should be paying all sales taxes in the state where the purchaser lives, period. Seems cut and dried to me. If the corner store has to run sales tax, Amazon should too.

Actually, the "corner store" doesn't have to collect sales tax. The "corner store" collects sales tax for the jurisdiction it is in. (Car dealers are an exception because of licensing.)

CA says that its residents owe sales tax on anything that they use within the state. For example, if a CA resident walks into a store in Nevada, buys something, and takes said something back to CA, CA thinks that it is owed sales tax.

I've never seen a Nevada store collect CA sales tax for sales to CA residents. I've never even seen someone suggest that said store has an obligation to collect CA sales tax. Why is Amazon different?

And yes, most Nevada stores will ship.
44 Miles a day for 60 straight days to make a difference
It's not really clear. Their new user sign-ups are certainly declining, but "new user signups" cannot possibly be negative.

Based on this article: http://news.oneindia.in/2011/06/13/tech-facebook-growth-rate...

If I am reading it right they are saying there is negative growth rate is the US and Canada, but still positive growth rate in emerging markets resulting in an overall positive but declining growth rate.
Does anyone know how much money myspace is currently losing per quarter / year / whatever?
Yes very much so...and then some.
Reading "Go the F**k to Sleep" May Lead to Child Abuse and Racism
You don't need government to do anything to end up with monopolies, especially in activities with very high cost-of-entry such as utilities or telecommunications.

Ma Bell became a natural monopoly all on its own, and barring an extremely disruptive entry into the market (which is, again, extremely difficult in high-entry-cost markets since the rate of new entry is so low) it will consolidate over time as the current incumbents reach the limits of possible organic growth.
So, after only 3 answers it went from girls to hardcore geek; damn.
Google Makes It Easier for Small Businesses To Create Mobile Websites
Will there be integration with current email servers? What happens if someone sends a "long" email or attachment from their gmail address to shortmail?
you misunderstand me. I have a working solution, using fuse. if he thinks that's bad, it's on him to provide a correct in-kernel solution, then show me it's faster
UPDATE

Brown just signed the budget trailer bills, including the affiliate nexus tax. I just went into effect immediately.

That's that I guess.
I've actually been wondering what the hell facebook has been doing with all of these engineers. Most of the changes I've seen on facebook have been pretty minor, no significant feature launches in the past couple years. I guess they do only have 1/10th as many employees as Google does, but it still doesn't make any sense to have a couple thousand engineers and no visible progress; I feel like they must have a lot going on internally that is unannounced. If we don't see any big moves by facebook in the next year (especially if Circles manages to have a successful public launch in the immediate future) I would be really surprised.
When it comes to great screencast videos for Python (+ software engineering), I think Software Carpentry (http://software-carpentry.org/) is really nice. and funny.

This might be a different from Khan Academy and thenewboston, which seem to aim for a different level/audience. But for what it is and does, I feel like SWC is one of those hidden gems that I wish would get discovered a little more...
I submit this because of a similar effort that I have been working on for a few months at Infostripe. SO far I think we stack up pretty well against this new offering from Google. You can check out what we are doing at Infostripe here http://infostripe.com or a new network view we are working on at http://infostripe.net.
> If it was natural, why was a government sanction necessary?

Govt likes monopolies and companies like to have govt keep out competition, which is what the govt did for AT&T.

Interestingly enough, AT&T had been a govt monopoly well before 1936 and then lost that and regained it again in 1936.

AT&T loved being a monopoly.
Hey, question: What's a convincing use case for a union filesystem?

Also, what I don't think union filesystems are a valid argument. They're not real filesystems in the way NTFS/FAT/extfs/reiserfs or whatever are — there's a lot less work to be done, and I could see the falling under the "toy" category that Linus was talking about...
The potency of the population density argument is seriously diminished by the fact that rural municipal broadband initiatives frequently provide much higher performance than available commercial offerings.

Blaming the government is reasonable. Before the FCC shut it down, I had a 6mbit up/160kbit down wireless cable modem from Sprint Broadband Direct in a rural area in 2000, connecting to a tower 30 miles away.
I think it's a really interesting and underrepresented topic around here. There must be some killer "how I got screwed out of my own company" stories out there that would be awesome to learn from, and to balance out the built/raised/sold success stories we lap up cause we all want to read/learn from what went right.
If the author of the root comment wants something like "OTR for Facebook" they probably wouldn't like the guarantees that PGP gives.

But Facebook and privacy don't mix anyway.
Anyone know what the slides were?
Because it was purchased by a Californian from California? I don't get how Arizona's involved at all, Best Buy prob has distribution centers there too, it's not a part of Best Buy's point of sale tax calculations.

Again, it's not a tarriff on out-of-state goods, it's assessing the same tax on out-of-state as you do on in-state goods.

A non-reverse-tarriff, if you will. Level playing field is all I'm arguing for here, don't see how that message keeps getting lost.
sshfs isn't a toy
Update

Governor Brown just signed the aforementioned affiliate nexus taxes into law minutes ago. They took effect instantly.
In the gutts of Google+ - Games and Gifts and Questions and stuff
The Slow Life Movement
Better yet, raising cattle and feeding them people :)
Legal issues aside, this is such an interesting engineering project. I hope the people behind will be open about their process because it would seem that there are many learning opportunities here; this knowledge could some day be useful in non-tourism contexts.
>Uh, who brought in residents of different states?

That's the whole point of this issue. It involves parties in different states.

You're argument is that if someone from state A does business in state B, then it is the responsbility of the business in state B to collect the sales tax required by state A.

How can you not understand why this is a terrible argument? It means that every business would have to know and calculate the sales tax for all 49 other states and that every purchase would require proof of residence to verify which sales tax needed to be charged. Then the business would have to deal with filing taxes in 50 separate states.

Ugh...I can't even imagine how this makes any sense to anyone.
I'm not a huge fan of the overlay, but it's obvious that the advantage to it is not during the time that you are actually looking at the photos, the advantage is when you finish looking at the photos you are back on the page that you started on.

I suspect they noticed a lot of people look at a profile, say "oh look an album", start clicking through and then decide they were done and go back to their feed. This design makes it more likely you will return to where you left off (without having to push back a million times) to finish reading the profile that you were already looking at.
Never knew about that. Thank you. I should also mention http://codeschool.org/ as another video-format series of lectures on topics in CS.
Has there been a formal announcement from Microsoft on what the IE release schedule will be going forward? It seems the competition from the likes of Firefox and Chrome has accelerated IE's roadmap.
I just had a look at the Slate.com site on my iPad and I really like it. Nice work. The "View Desktop Version" button should help those who prefer the native site.
Union mount functionality is not something that needs to be done in userspace, Plan 9 has union mounts, but that is one of the few things it does in kernel, for details see: http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/2/bind

The key thing is to have simple, clean and well defined semantics, this is much harder when your VFS is polluted by stuff like symlinks and other weird kinds of pseudofiles.

I know Al Viro has wanted to have proper union mounts in Linux for many years, but getting proper private namespaces was hard enough, and now nobody uses them, which is sad (but more the fault of the suid-centric userspace environment than of the kernel, if you have to be root to create a new namespace, it is rather pointless).
IE's rate of adopting new features seems to be catching up with the other browsers. For technical details, see their Guide for Developers [1].

The interesting bits since the 1st preview (for me, a web developer) are:

More CSS gradients
Async script tags
Form validation
Web workers
Drag and drop and File API

Things I'd really like to see in IE10 before its released (and are hopefully realistic):

More HTML5 form stuff
CSS3 text shadow
CSS3 animations and transitions
History API

As I'm wishing away, I'll add: support for XP, WebM/Ogg video support and a friendly public bugtracker.

[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/gg192966.aspx
Amazon's different because they're bigger than a rounding error, basically.

The principle is "same amount of taxes for everyone". I don't live in California but if I did, I wouldn't be huge on the idea of tax-disadvantaging local businesses against out of state businesses.
I wonder what this means for other Fox Interactive products? Photobucket was tied at the hip to myspace for instance. Anyone have any idea what's going on there?
They need to recreate Downtown LA, with all the graffiti.
Biz Stone On Twitter's Cozy Relationship With the State Department
Now that someone mentions it, I'm surprised that Chrome OS doesn't already do this.
Snarky as this sentence might be, it is also my biggest takeaway from the thread, his relentless emphasis on practicality and not on ideas might be one of the reason he gets things done. I wish I was this practical.
Except for food, couldn't you get most of the other things via Amazon?
So what about actual Amazon employees, like Lab126 in Cupertino? Are they hiding Amazon affiliation through fancy corporate footwork and shell companies?
Here's the issue I see.

A small business like a restaurant best manages relationships face to face not using a computer.

The sorts of targets you are talking about live and breath personal service - nobody wants their bartender entering contact data instead of pouring their beer.

If you walk in and they take care of you, then you come back. If the waitress shares her a bad mood with you then maybe you don't. When you go into your favorite local restaurant and are greeted by name as you walk in the door, that's the mark of a good customer relationship and what really matters for small local businesses. You can't get there with email.
It's cool that everyone has a JavaScript environment on their machines, but I think that if you want to learn programming downloading Python is not a problem.

JavaScript is great for me when friends ask me: "Hey you know programming right? Show me something on my computer" but if they want to learn programming, I'd just ask them to download Python or Ruby.
It's a matter of scale.

There was a pig (and other animals) farmer who used to have a really good blog. One of the practices he used was to get free discarded milk and by-products from a local dairy to feed his pigs. Instead of the dairy having to pay to discard about-to-spoil whey, for example, he would just accept a few tons of it and feed it to his animals. But that only goes so far, and the supply has to be local or it becomes too expensive to truck in.
You can feed your cows on grass, but the animal density has to be much lower, or the grass will be under so much pressure that it will die out from overgrazing.

Likewise, you can pasture-raise chickens and the eggs/meat are tastier for it, but the number of chickens/sq yd of pasture is much less than you can squeeze into an indoors "battery operation."

If you are concerned with animal welfare -- and I firmly believe that you should be -- these things are difficult problems. On the one hand you want to raise animals in a sustainable manner that allows them a good, if short, life, but on the other, your customers need to be able to afford the food you provide. And it's that final point that is stopping many farmers from doing it.
I like that you can swap avatars based on mood. Reminds me of the good ol' days of LiveJournal.
I really enjoyed this but as a writer, my favorite part was in the first P.S.:
"...but that’s the great thing about words. The reader is an equal author of the meaning."
This is rumor. This doesn't belong here.
Sorry, I got that from private communication with Thomas Bushnell, who was the principle architect on the project for a long time. His claim is that they had two choices, go with the microkernel, or start with the BSD code that was legally in the clear and rewrite the parts that were under a legal cloud at the time.

Thomas preferred the latter, Stallman the former. As events proved, the BSD approach would have been fine (particularly since the legal issues eventually got cleared up), while the microkernel approach ran into much larger unexpected roadblocks than anticipated.
Oh, I remember back in the good-ole days when it'd be hitting the front page of Slashdot. Not a terribly new phenomena.
That's not really true though. When you buy things on walmart.com, you can pick them up at the store. The same thing with the sears catalogue. In theory, because they are already submitting sales tax to the state, it's no additional burden to submit more sales tax for things coming from online sales. The reason it hasn't been the case for other things, is that it's an excessive burden of the mail-order retailers to figure out the amounts, and submit different forms for every state, even though they are only located in one.
I love the South Park reference!
> Politicians are some of the smartest people in the society.

[citation needed]

Not that I necessarily disagree, mind you; nor do I want to drag the whole social vs. whatever we call it now intelligence.
This sounds like a terrible idea from a technology standpoint as each county and city seemingly has different sales tax rates. To comply with taxation, every out of state company will now need to pull the active sales tax rates for the shipping destination and then apply this to the order.

What happens if the rate isn't kept up to date?

Are states like California actually ready to supply this data in a form that is easily consumable as a web service rather than a PDF file, to avoid hindering interstate commerce?

Personally I don't think Amazon is completely the victim in this situation. Their attorneys spend quite a bit of time and money figuring out how to avoid paying tax. I interviewed once for an Amazon.com company who's "primary" development offices were in California, yet their checks came from their "legal" headquarters in Nevada. Shady at best... for example: http://www.lab126.com
Funny, I recall billing one of my last clients significantly more than almost zero to develop an app for them. Apps cost real money to build, and real money to maintain.
Read the whole thread (or even just the immediate parent email, from Andrew Morton). Linus wasn't saying "don't use fuse for this", he was pushing back against a suggestion that the existence of the fuse implementation was a reason not to merge a kernel implementation.
I'm going to try this on my mom :)
One of the big recent changes I'm aware of is that users can now host their own page and merely post to a payment service, without being PCI compliant. Before the payment service had to host the page, which meant an iframe or a PayPal style redirect.
Meet Our New Special Advisor, Larry Summers
I don't know. If a historical account gives the details it knows correctly but leaves a bunch of details out is it still accurate?

There's actually a great book written about the creation of Direct3D called Renegades of the Empire (http://tinyurl.com/3n4jnru).

Having read that book I can tell you this account, while accurate in its technical details, misses a lot of other issues that were going on. For Instance...

1. The team pursuing OpenGL was part of the Windows NT group (back when NT and '95 were two different products). The Direct3D team was part of the consumer Windows group. So Microsoft's support (or lack thereof) for OpenGL games was largely based on an internal issue. With Microsoft dragging its feet on implementation in consumer Windows it forced a lot of developers to move.

2. On that note Microsoft's Consumer Windows group was all about moving developers to Windows and making Windows the defacto game standard (and as a result killing off other platforms like Mac, OS/2, etc...). Both the Mac and OS/2 supported OpenGL while they couldn't support Direct3D

3. Direct3D benefited from other parts of the DirectX API. DirectSound, for example, made it very easy for developers to support Aureal's 3d sound technology while still being backwards compatible. DirectInput made it easy to support things like ForceFeedback joysticks. And so on...

4. Microsoft bribed Developers (They did, read the book)

So while the technical analysis is correct here OpenGL's fall was due more to a powerful company doing everything it could to kill the technology off.
I guess no thread on Microkernels is complete without bringing up Hurd :P

There are at least a few microkernel implementations beside Minix that are in use/more or less stable/shows some viability. (E.g. QNX, L4 family and to some extent EROS family)

They have received nowhere as much attention as something like Linux. So the usability is not really up there.
Amazon offers store fronts for third party sellers. The most likely possibility is that that purchase is from such a seller, in which case fulfillment starts from their facilities, not Amazon's.

If you are in California, then Amazon should have also collected sales tax on that purchase.
I had this on my mind for some time, and this seems a good time to ask: why wouldn't python have an "unsafe" mode. If the internals were threadsafe, why couldn't we have a version of python that will explode on threading mistakes and it's up to the user to make sure the proper places are locked? Basically, the same level of guarantee that C provides. I'd be happy to use that version in places where it's needed. Same version of threading was possible in Perl (use if what you're doing is threadsafe, expect coredumps otherwise).
CSS text-shadow examples
Justin Timberlake To Take Ownership Stake in MySpace
The reason for Amazon to continue running an affiliate program isn't to drive awareness of the site but to provide the massive number of deep product links that push Amazon results to the top of search results. Amazon's search traffic is in part dependent on the affiliate program.
Get Quality “Add to Cart” buttons now
I will definitely keep this link handy the next time I have to explain myself :P

I have found a degree in Computer Science, and the skill set of a developer, to be more of a handicap than a blessing when looking for the right jobs. Outside of the startup world, people tend to think that if you can code, you are best put away in a murky corner and left alone while other people determine the direction of the product. Interaction and User Experience design is then left to people with a background in graphics design.

Just because you cannot code, does not mean that I cannot design.

In the end it is more about skills than about roles though. I think having some passion about design and your user makes you a better developer and having some years of programming experience under your belt makes you a better designer.
You may be buying from a merchant located in NY state. Does the item you're looking at say "sold by XXX"? XXX is probably located in NY.

Amazon collects sales tax on behalf of merchants who do have a physical presence in the state.
Also look for "option_file" which is the default name for an option file in mysql...... Ugh.
Silver pen allows electrical circuits to be handwritten on paper
Designing with JavaScript by Nick Heinle was one of my first book purchases. I studied the crap out of it in middle school.

Javascript is great as intro. Kids are naturally drawn to shiny things and you can create plenty of shiny stuff with Javascript with minimal setup.

Once you hit the natural limit("how do I save the scores!"), you can move on to PHP/python etc.
squashfs plus unionmount

commonly used for livecds, I compress /usr, saves me about 5GB and some I/O and therefore some battery
I'm not sure there really was any good news in that email. Just bad news with lipstick.
I didn't read the parent, thanks.