skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It isn't that e-commerce is weak at all. The playing field is skewed in e-commerce's favor because it is often offering a better experience and price.

A lot of mom&pop retailers have figured this out and started selling online. They sell on Amazon and eBay and reach the entire world. Many successful major online retailers started this way.

Also, it is hard to not be upset when you go to the effort I have; I went to Sacramento and met with the politicians. I tried to change the course of this legislation. I stood up for others to try and keep this from happening. I can see the damage this is doing and how it won't gain the state any revenue at all.

I don't blame Amazon and the other retailers for what they have to do. The are faced with a decision where they can be on the hook for something that is specifically designed to muck with them. The legislation forces them to do this, not the other way around. There is a definite fiscal incentive for them to terminate affiliates; and also one for affiliate to leave the state.

In the end, tax revenue is lost by the state and the bill just forces businesses out :-/
Out of 50 million profiles...how many are active? How many haven't logged in in the last 12 months? How many are bots? I was under the impression that Myspace is used about as much as Geocities these days.
I've gone back-and-forth in my mind about this. At the moment I have my real name on the site, but I don't think it's necessary.

When you meet new people in real life, names are only given after a certain amount of trust has already been built.
You can run the examples at http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Views/SiteMap/Default.html with your favourite browser and sneak at the code. Great if you are familiarizing yourself with HTLM5 and CSS3.
Great article. This is a question that's come up before in Mathematics, for example the Four-Color theorem. "Can a proof that's not comprehensible by humans really be called a proof?"

Personally I'm with Norvig. While finding simple patterns is extremely nice and useful, there's no inherent reason why the Universe should follow an easily described set of rules. If it's the difference between an elegant but useless theorem or a useful but incomprehensible pattern, I'll pick the latter every time.
If any of the "Braintreeps" are here, could you comment in more detail on the Blockbuster -> Netflix'esque transformations in the payments industry?

Other than Square and possibly a mobile phone wallet I can't think of many major sea changes that are underway right now.
Mining for Gold on MySpace
I don't understand all the fuss about personalized ads. really. If Im going to see any ads I prefer them to be more relevant to me, not less. And if I do see something interesting and click I don't mind someone getting paying for it.
Chicago has local sales taxes in addition to the state-wide sales taxes. Sales tax is a complicated mess and that's why Amazon doesn't want to get involved. A consistent sales tax across all states (something Amazon is in favor of) would go a long way to make everyone happy (except maybe consumers).
It's not that hard. Amazon runs Target.com... for which it collects sales tax for every state where Target has a physical store. So it's already a solved problem.

Smaller business could easily outsource this determination; even if every address in the country had its own sales tax rate that's still a tiny database by modern standards.

Still, simplification is a good idea, such as your suggestion there be one rate per state for outside retailers. Perhaps having to face the patchwork would motivate online sellers to lobby for that improvement. Right now they're still shooting for "0%" and I think they have to lose that battle before the necessary simplification can occur.
Would moving out of California be an option? Or at least doing the minimum to establish residency somewhere with fairly lax requirements?
Thanks, you're completely right.

I'd still note that every single national retailer manages to do it ok.
Ah I probably hit some abuse number, I like(d) to middle click my way down the submission list on people who just dump their own links here.
Kansas City here - we've got Garmin (C, C++, Java, Python), Cerner, H&R Block, and Sprint headquartered here. We've also got a Samsung R&D office (Android) and an IBM office... The choices aren't exactly limitless, but there are jobs.
Start here: http://www.dslreports.com/faq/wisp/2_How_to_start
I think that's a harsh take on the article. Jason just shared from his personal experience.
Maybe channel your affiliate links through skimlinks?
It sets a precedent that tracking someone's movements is A-OK.

Marco also has a stake in a wholly different idea of what advertising is. Notice "The Deck"s advertisement in his sidebar? He doesn't hate advertisements at all. He wants ad networks that are targeted, instead of being spammed out across every site and requiring invasive tracking to determine who and what product to show.
You do realize twitter is a form of promotion, aka advertising. Also, isnt that comparing Apples to oranges
I guess there is a significant risk of the result being found in the States' favor so that they don't directly challenge the law.

IANAL, but it seems like the Supreme Court would very likely rule in their favor though. Quill v N Dakota is a very similar ruling and when looking through the notes I found this:

"As we noted in Heublein, Inc. v. South Carolina Tax Comm'n, 409 U.S. 275, 280 (1972), in enacting § 381, "Congress attempted to allay the apprehension of businessmen that `mere solicitation' would subject them to state taxation. . . . Section 381 was designed to define clearly a lower limit for the exercise of [the State's power to tax]. Clarity that would remove uncertainty was Congress' primary goal.""
Taking 10%?
Making developers wait for you to cut a check?

I guess it's better than Apple's terms, but still.
Veto the law that will end affiliate programs in California
Government Requests – Google Transparency Report
An Android version is being developed. The reason we went with WP7 before Android, was that a .NET developer friend wanted to try building something for the platform when it was announced. Seemed like a good fit to get in at launch.
They could sign on to the Streamlined Sales Tax Project that Amazon is in favor of (as well as 44 states and D.C.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streamlined_Sales_Tax_Project
I'm not discounting his experience, but half the article was about how he arrived to his new buzzword (or that's what I understood? It was a bit meandering), and the other half was about how he got an idea in a cafe and decided to go with it and launch it.

There's really not much more content than just "try to launch asap".
Why Starving the Beast is Bad for Business
I think they didn't learn from Wave exactly what is frustrating me now. Don't limit my ability to use a communication tool amongst my friends. With Wave, I thought "Hey cool, let me try this out with..." nobody, because it wasn't open to all. I had the same experience going to +1: "hey this is cool let me add my friends..." oh wait...
Yup. Politicians and governments are, by and large, oblivious to the fact that laws induce behavioral changes. Like extending unemployment benefits to 99 weeks, then somehow being surprised when the rate increases of people staying on unemployment rather than finding jobs. Or creating a tax credit for low-income families who have children, then being surprised when the low-income birth rate increases. In the politician's world, if a $100 million business exists and a tax rate of 7% is imposed, that is obviously $7 million in revenue, because no company would ever think to try to work around the tax structure or would lose business to competitors not subject to that tax.
It might be a win for non-Amazon retailers, if the removal of Amazon's affiliate program reduced the total % of internet book-related links that go to Amazon versus other booksellers (keeping that % up is of course one reason Amazon has the program in the first place).
For all the rambling, Google adwords is still more effective, (ergo more lucrative) than Facebook advertising. That's because google knows a lot more than facebook knows about you. We literally tell them what we think every time we search. Facebook will have to devise a mind-reading device to beat that.

And, imho, Google does not feel threatened by facebook. They have done nothing to harm facebook ads. On the contrary, facebook has banned Adsense from 3rd party applications.
It is not Amazon, it is the Constitution; admittedly politicians are already ignoring a lot of other pieces of it...
Web Designer Wall – Design Trends and Tutorials
As an example of how complicated this can get:

Many states and municipalities tax "cookies" differently than other food items. For a long time Fig Newton used "A cookie is just a cookie, but a Newton is fruit and cake" as their most prominent add copy, and while some people have referred to Fig Newtons as cookies, the people who produce them don't. Would you like to be the person in charge of figuring out, for every jurisdiction in the US where its relevant, whether or not a Fig Newton is a cookie based on relevant law and precedent? There isn't a consistent answer that applies everywhere. And that's just one product among the many, many that Amazon sells.
Aren't we using some interferometry techniques to communicate with the Voyager spacecraft?
Mimeo Connect Cloud Print API in C#
What is the limit for spending based on? Like in the Apple iTunes store I have my credit card info registered and can purchase freely. Not sure I understand?
First marketing message received!

"You like data visualizations? Check out my company!"
Isn't Clojure still mostly functional and mostly based on persistent data structures?
Sounds promising, can't wait to see what people use this for
I changed everyone's name to "Spartacus" over at f7u12. Nobody seemed to mind much.
A website for entrepreneurial ideas
But nobody wants to advocate eliminating humans

A way of implementing this, nudging it towards more politically correctness, is birth control. At one extreme is China's One Child policy, which probably led to some economic benefits (yes, and created other social problems).

Here's a thought: which reduces carbon emissions more, population control, or having a few people in a population do more environmental friendly stuff? (not suggesting one or the either, it actually needs some data.... sneaks away before getting stoned...)
UX ripped off skills from different majors and combined them together to form a new job: usability from designers, planning and organizing and wireframing from project managers, testing from QA and test groups, and prototyping from developers.

this leaves managers with traffic between sales/clients, designers, UX bullshitters and developers.
It leaves designers with making the wireframes look better.
It leaves developers with production work.

UX developer: "we should do this and this and this."
Developer: "yes master"

To me UX is a set of skills that designers and developers should learn and earn. That what makes a Designer and a Developer: SENIOR.
What is seniority then? Speed?
CEO: "Yes this is our senior designer. He can design a website in 5 minutes. He's senior because he knows all Photoshop shortcuts and is fast with the tools. By the way, his designs look nice and he follows everything the UX Designer tells him to."
Can I add/posit that, perhaps the reason Amazon is also taking this pretty passively other then just shutting down and waiting to see if the law changes - is that the affiliate marketing programs are perhaps just not that valuable to them any more with their market position?
And yet somehow companies like WalMart and Target manage this terrific feat.

It'd be better if there were a unified system of national sales tax. But for a company Amazon's size, it's a laughable idea that it's somehow impossible to do this magnificent feat of implementing a lookup table.* The hard part is keeping things up to date, but a good faith effort to do the previous would get Amazon pretty far.

*I worked for a company that is a thousandth Amazon's size in revenues, but it managed to do it for the whole state of California. It genuinely can get complicated--zip codes can cross county lines, for instance--but again, far from impossible, and when this becomes widespread third party solutions will pop up a lot more.
Most content has a marginal cost of almost zero (eg, apps, music, etc)… So the only real “risk” is lost sales (ie, people who would have purchased if they weren't able to steal it). But IMO it's unlikely that there are many people who would rather go to the effort of stealing content which they could get for ~$1.

(full disclosure: I'm a friend of the Willet devs)
The Tale of OpenGL vs. Direct3D
Willet works the same way. Spend away until you reach $3 of purchases, then you enter a credit card at this point. We securely store your credit card info in our digital vault. When you reach your limit again, we'll run your credit card and email you a receipt!
> At the interpreter level, as the article mentions, it suffices to lock the structures down

That's a sufficient, but not necessary condition. The idea of STM is to provide just the necessary protection, and nothing more, so that even multiple threads can manipulate the same structure simultaneously, as long as they don't manipulate the same properties/parts of this structure.

Having said that, I don't claim that the way (P|J)ython is written, there is any unnecessary protection going on, furthermore, to fully ensure that just the necessary protection is on, a lot of code may have to be rewritten.
Despite the confusingly worded first paragraph of the email, I don't think they're actually terminating it now (as your headline states). The first paragraph does use a tense that makes it sound like they are, saying that the potential new law "compels us to terminate" the program, rather than that it "would compel us to terminate" it if passed.

But then the third paragraph makes it future conditional: "we will terminate [the program] ... as of the date (if any) that the California law becomes effective".
Imagined Org Charts of AAPL, GOOG, MSFT, etc
Thanks, I forgot about that. It should be at 37signals! :)

I agree with you on Groupon as much as I disagree on Facebook. Groupon has a nice gimmick that's easy to copy and has been fueled by novelty and unsustainable incentives – and in my personal experience, even some outright corporate dishonesty.

Facebook has strong lock-in effects and unique targeting capabilities. On any screen in any net cafe worldwide, you're likely to see many people using Facebook. It was worth more then $30B last year when you dismissed that valuation based on a 3% investment, it has a good chance of being worth more than the $70B suggested by multiple small private transactions today.
(Spoiler) Because Twitter is DOOMED!
The concept of common carrier status had been around for a very long time when it was first used to apply to telecommunication services. These days, phone companies and many kinds of physical transport services are common carriers, while ISPs have only the benefits of common carrier status, and none of the limitations.
Interesting -- so not only does mixing good news with bad like this anger the recipients and cast doubt on the leader, it doesn't even accomplish anything.

And thanks for reminding me that I need to read that book.
Not true! Amazon already has all of that obscenely complex logic coded up!

Amazon allows third party vendors to sell through Amazon. Amazon knows for each vendor of what states they are resident in, and properly collects sales tax in that company's behalf where that is required.
Looks good guys! Congratulations to founders on going live with the site!

I'd love to try this out, but a facebook login wall is preventing me from doing so. I personally don't have an account, but I can see others not wanting to connect their facebook accounts with their businesses.
Tools for Collaboration and Conflict Resolution – Powernoodle Review
Something like this is already established practice. In some states you need a lawyer involved with every real estate transaction, because it's considered "practicing law."

In some other states, like Colorado, a lawyer does not have to be involved in a real estate transaction. In these states real estate agents have been granted the right to practice this very limited segment of law. They don't take the bar, they just go through real estate school (easy and minimal), take a test (easy), and keep up minimal continuing education.

So that's a very narrow slice of law, practiced by non-lawyer specialists.

In these states you can, if you want, still involve a lawyer, and in some cases it's probably a really good idea. In most suburban lot/block transactions it's probably not necessary, but IANAL.
What powers do you think Google is abusing?
At least animated GIFs are easy to disable and doing so tends to have less undesired effects than disabling Javascript.

And since this is really replacing it with Javscript...
Why is The Deck targeting one specific market fine but Google's larger scale targetting attempts spammy and invasive?
It isnt truly a case of everyone wins, consumers still need to pay ridiculous reconnection fees (these are typically £100 - £300, despite the fact there was an active line before you moved in)

As well as being forced to pay line rental (£8-£15pm) for a bt phone line despite no intention of ever making any calls.

BT definitely won out of it, not sure anyone else did.
An approach for this kind of problem: suppose you have a very simple language composed of simple, verifiable instructions, like: block read, block write, read-offset, write-offset, simple arithmetic, simple branching; you could compose programs for various file-system operations and pass them over to the kernel for execution en masse, rather than needing a chatty interface.

This basic idea is something I've applied to a file format that stored objects, but where the costs of serializing and deserializing a whole object graph was prohibitive for a request/response round-trip. For any given object path, foo.bar[3].baz, a "program" could be compiled that could be interpreted over the file contents and the answer retrieved. All object paths were available for compilation ahead of time (it was a custom language, long story), so this approach could be far more efficient than any serialization story.
Citation needed

To the best of my knowledge Amazon has no distribution centers in any states that collect sales tax explicitly because it doesn't want to be forced to collect sales taxes.
JavaScript’s native map reduce and filter are wrong
> Source: Green Onion News Network

Combined with the fact that no state was mentioned, i think this is a work of parody.
Please be sure to mark spam as spam
You Vote What You Eat: How Liberals and Conservatives Eat Differently
We're considering allowing users to have a Willet account (ie. new user name and pw). Aren't people sick of having so many logins these days? That was part of the incentive to use FB - keep things simple!
I wish he would do javascript, would be uber cool if he suddenly had a fascination with Node.js
Regarding your final point, I agree. I plan on marketing to a specific segment (at least at one time.) At this point I've just been asking different business owners for feedback. The product is a turn-key (no config, no maintenance) customer relationship product with measurable marketing metrics. I'll have a demo available in a week.

Restaurants are actually my ideal customers, and were my original use case, but I have the impression that they are a difficult sell so I'm keeping my eyes open.

I'm really trying to imagine my way through the sales process now to help inform the product design.
But if Google does its job, ads do offer value to the user. I hate bad ads as much as anything in the world, but the whole point of Google is to create good ads. And I think that is a noble goal.
The current situtation is sustained by Congress, which is where it should be fixed/addressed. As a bonus, this would seem to clearly be 'inter-state' commerce so no arguments about an expansive commerce clause interpretation if Congress does act.

Here is an effort to reign in the insanity of thousands of different tax rates: <http://www.streamlinedsalestax.org/>;
I do not believe News Corp made any money from MySpace. If they did they would not be selling it. The google myspace deal was worth less than a billion dollars, and rumors are that Google actually paid less than that even because MySpace did not meet their traffic goals.

Also MySpace cost a lot of money to run. I actually looked at the News Corp financials and their digital properties division was losing hundreds of millions per year.
Yeah, most people don't see 'spare change' as 'real money', funnily enough.
Have a source for that information? Facebook's own API documentation page says: "There is a strong inverse correlation between the number of permissions your site requests and the number of users that will allow those permissions. The greater the number of permissions you ask for, the lower the number of users that will grant them; so we recommend that you only request the permissions you absolutely need for your site."

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/guides/web/#login
Also see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2711202 (Veto the law that will end affiliate programs in California)
It's a bit amusing to see Linus, all these years after his famous dispute with Tanenbaum, still fighting microkernels. Personally, I think that the Minix source code shows that microkernels are quite viable, and that Linus's disdain is misguided.
Both national retailers and Amazon probably have the capabilities to do this, but equal protection clause states that you can't single out a single entity with a law. Would you have computing this be a barrier to entry for anyone who wants to sell over the internet? Especially as services and digital goods might also be considered taxable under certain jurisdictions.
I'm beginning to suspect that people report cases of Linus insulting people regardless of whether the discussion was interesting or not.

Linus insults someone on a forum -> first page on HN !!

Just a thought.
Maybe I'm missing something, but what on earth would you compare notes about?

"Slept a bit rough last night, think I was a bit stressed out after that deadline."

"Woke up hot and worn out, maybe I should get an A/C unit."

"Fit as a fiddle this morning, must be that cheese I ate before bed I guess!"

I don't get it. People are different. Some sleep well and are able to adjust to regular schedules, some are the opposite; there's no magic bullet, and any specific trick will not necessarily work on a different person.

If you ask people who sleep well what the trick is, I suspect you will invariably discover that they went to bed early, before they got really tired, that they avoided coffeine drinks, stress, exercise, TV etc. in the hours before bedtime, and have learned to eliminate as many external (eg., lighting) or internal (sleep apnea) sources of discomfort as possible.

All pretty obvious stuff, and nothing, I think, that a good GP wouldn't be able to steer you towards.
Echoprint, a free and open source music fingerprint and identification service