skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.

As long as Amazon didn't know you were a California resident, you'd probably get away with it. However you'd be opening Amazon up to the possibility of a lawsuit from California. If they figure that out, they will not be happy with you.
How many affiliates are they willing to terminate? All of them (besides the 5 states it already collects for http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=4...) ?
I like the simplicity of this. Here's your biggest problem I think: I just filled in a bunch of overlaps (which was kind of fun), but that's probably all i'm going to do right now & I'll likely forget all about overlap.me by tomorrow.

Somehow you need to get back in front of me--say next week--with some reason I'd want to return.
Yes and no. In some places, certainly. In lots of urban California, not at all. Not a Wal-mart in sight, but lots of local shops and plenty of Amazon customers. As a rational shopper, your best course of action for anything over $100 that you don't need today is to check it out in the local store and then buy it from Amazon. Kinda sucks for the folks stuck maintaining storefront and inventory to have to do so with an almost 10% handicap.
I think one of the most interesting aspects of the article is the concerns over Zynga's dependency on facebook, especially with the recent unveiling of Google Plus. Could the demise of facebook be in the not too distant future? Probably not, but it is interesting to think about. I am really looking forward to seeing Zynga's S-1 which is rumored to come out after markets close tonight. I just don't see how these valuations can be justified, but that doesn't really matter to investors as long as they are seeing returns off of these IPOs (and they are). I am really fearing the tech industry might be building its own "ponzi scheme" with these valuations only to see another 1999 bust.
Because of the whole «pleasing advertisers becoming more important than pleasing customers» thing, and the fact that tech pundits don't have to worry about having enough money budgeted for something.
Can someone explain this for people who are not familiar with the way these affiliate programs work? Were people not paying taxes on affiliate revenue and would now have to start? Or is this a tax on the end customer buying from Amazon (which would be forced to collect CA sales tax)? How do either of these impact startups in CA? Does this impact businesses registered in DE that have an office in CA?
As the author wrote at the end of the article, instead of removing the GIL once and for all, they will rather add an option to use STM instead of the GIL as compile-time option or maybe even at runtime, as it would not only effect power consumption but obviously the speed as well.

That way the user can decide whether he needs multi-core scalability or simply speed.
Well, they could also join without being invited. In fact, most of the communication happening on IRC is between people who've spontaneously joined without being invited.
In context, I think he meant that they don't use wireless energy in the same way as other radios.
I think as long as your business has a presence in CA (like your office or home office) you still have to pay taxes. Of course, you could register your business in a state that doesn't disclose stakeholder info, like Nevada or those Wyoming shell companies.

Edit: definitely not a lawyer
Slides here: http://www.slideshare.net/joestump/starting-your-startup
Clojure is designed for the user level and offers some unique advantages over Haskell's STM [1]:

* MVCC snapshot avoiding transactions restarts
on read invalidation.
* Ensure references on read-writes provides a
kind of manual control over resource acquisition order.
* Has explicit commute which reduces retries on
commutative writes.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4560605/how-does-clojure-...

EDIT: I didn't read the OP closely enough. Yes grafting fine-grained STM onto a imperative language hasn't born much fruit.
Doesn't look like it, but perhaps a closer analysis would show some. One thing it shows for sure is a change, early on, in GMail's algorithm for deleting old mails left in the Spam folder - that's where it goes from jagged to smoother. And it confirms the article's "spam at its lowest" story.
'With Node and a framework like Express, you can understand things at the level of "let me look at this HTTP request and decide how to respond to it."'

Sure, but roughly the same kind of thing is available in most other serverside languages. Python has Flask, Ruby has Sinatra, and PHP also has several mini-frameworks.
yes, all of them.
Hey look, an interesting article.

As a software engineer you’re very privileged. You will always a job in any city, state or country. Even if you suck, there will always be someone to hire you because the market of software engineers is hot and the numbers play in your favor.

Oh, it's satire.

EDIT: Okay, wow, apparently it's not satire. In that case, i have no idea how the author got this idea but i don't think he could be more far off.
I think I am going to take Wufoo out of the picture as its $30/month for the payment integration forms. Chargify has some decent payment pages that will fit our needs.
One suggestion posted, somewhere, was to cross reference the GMail contact list with people who requested an invite. Then send invites to people on both lists earlier in the process.

It may not be the best approach but it would help bring people into the system with something in common.
50 jurisdictions, actually. Less considering that some states don't have sales tax and still more aren't going this route.
Exactly! Furthermore, you can charge small amounts. Look at all of the success of the mobile app stores and in-app payments. YOU CAN DO THIS ONLINE NOW!
That's what we're aiming to do!
Now they'll know what we were into 5 years ago!
... but they still force you to make your profile public http://j.mp/jQJ0LE ... its like they learned nothing after all
They probably don't make enough from affiliate traffic to make up for the lost sales if they have to collect the tax.
Startup Quote x Women 2.0: Kathy Sierra, co-creator, Head First Series
SEO Software Startup Story: How BuzzStream Link & Social CRM Came Into Being
Why shouldn't the sales tax be paid in the state the item was sold from? I am still wondering how the destination owns the merchant.
In many cases, the more you try to compete, the less competitive you actually are.

- Kathy Sierra

http://startupquote.com/post/7054601574
Likewise, we're a new, funded Santa Monica based startup still looking for top web, mobile & backend engineers. Email aaron@projectwbs.com or find me at @jaaronfarr.
I love it when everyone works together to make a lose/lose/lose situation happen.
Knowing someone who was a contractor a few months ago at MySpace, I can tell you that the people that were there before the last major layoffs genuinely thought they were doing something awesome. When the first round of layoffs happened, during which the person I know was laid off, everyone knew it was only a matter of time before the rest of the axe fell. So this should hardly be a surprise to the people at MySpace, who are still there only for the money, I suppose. This is hardly surprising, shocking, or scandalous, as MySpace was on a death march since News Corp acquired it.

Mike Jones sounds like he is probably going to lose his job too. What would anyone else say in his shoes? Probably the same thing.
10 Rules to Reverse the Email Spiral
In all fairness, Friendfeed was really different. I have been on a lot of different forums and sites online in my time, and I've never seen as robust a realtime discussion forum that aggregates your online identity like Friendfeed. Awesome discussions and groups from its heyday. Really active "rooms" and threads were amazing to participate in without hitting F5. Friendfeed was really something special. I'm surprised more people aren't using it as an intelligence and research/exploratory tool -- it's great for that sort of thing. Cool tools like Tornado were also built at Friendfeed.
There's an open letter on Votizen opposing the Amazon tax and requesting a veto:

https://www.votizen.com/letters/27/

You can sign it yourself as a California voter, or simply tweet out a link and ask for retweets to get more signatures.
Also submitted here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2707858

and here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2710082
Great article. Scientific analysis is solid.

Understanding of American capitalism is flawed, however.

>> As companies keep discovering, it really helps to run the numbers. As I've written about before, Pepsi discovered...

>> Smart, knowledgeable execs are consistently surprised when good lifecycle data trumps seemingly solid assumptions.

[emphases mine]

That is naive. Pepsi is running a tight ship; they have all the numbers in front of them, all of the time; and they pay a lot of engineers a lot of money to not fall prey to "seemingly solid assumptions". Regardless of when the relevant analyses (like the Tropicana gas-vs-fuel analysis) are performed, companies will announce the "discovery" of such nuances precisely when it becomes good publicity to do so.

In related reading on ignoring surrounding factors when introducing green technology, windmills destroy the environment: http://www.savewesternny.org/environment.html
Yes, terrible article. I am sure you would have written a better one. Somebody's gotta slap the author upside down. ugh!
I guess it depends on why you consider Michael Moore to be a bad film maker. Quite a few of Michael Moore's critics dislike his films because of his political positions, not because of his film making techniques. If you believe his political positions have no merit, one will disagree with the presentation of them.

Adam Curtis does have political opinions about society. If opinionated films bother you, and particularly ones that lean left or are not decidedly right leaning, it may be worth skipping Adam Curtis' work.
Wouldn't creating a Delaware corp for all of this be massive overkill? Anything purchased through the corporation for an employee's (your) use would then be taxed, too, right? This sounds like a pretty significant hassle, and really only a good idea for someone who makes a lot of money from their Affiliate stuff.
The parallel between Google and Wal-Mart is how they both appeal to the lowest common denominator. And how their customers are oblivious (or knowingly apathetic) to the negative impact these conglomerates are perpetuating.

As for Microsoft, they were the dominant conglomerate of yesteryear. Today it's Google. Both companies wield different powers, and both have been abusing them in different ways.
> I'd rather see everyone start with 1 or 2 invites, and let things expand organically for a while, then add more invites to everyone when the capacity is there.

No, no, no. This is the problem I have with Diaspora. They gave me 5 invites. I used my first since I got mine as part of an invite chain. I have no clue how to best utilise the other four so as to maximise the usefulness of Diaspora (i.e. grow my own social network maximally). End result, I haven't used any of my other 4 invites due to analysis paralysis and my social network is basically dead.

Google+ seems to be off to a pretty good start so far. I'm not exactly sure how the invite structure works, but somehow a significant portion of my social network seems to already be involved. I'm assuming this just means I know a lot of connected people (most of my network is from college and we all know people who do or have worked at Google), but it means that, even within the first 24 hours, activity has been pretty decent.
I don't think it's at all unreasonable for states to want to enforce the tax that's already on the books and supposed to be already reported/collected, as you state.

The problem is the hangup with the commerce clause. Catalog companies didn't threaten to make a significant % of all sales into postal sales, the internet does. I'd hope that we could find a way to straighten things out where the state can still assess the sales tax the way it's written legally without bringing all of these other issues about affiliates into it.

I don't really see where states can go on this, the current strategy seems to be "try and force congressional or SC action", good luck with that. Maybe they just fold on sales tax altogether and shift that burden to income tax.
50% sounded like a lot to me so I checked wikipedia, according to which, most internal combustion engines have an average efficiency of 18-20%. So I guess it could be true if the Wave Disk Generator lives up to those promises.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_combustion_engine#Ener...
This is exactly what I wanted to post. My links cover all the spectrum of tests employed, not just tests that are favorable to Flash. GuiMark3, for example, found that HTML5 rendering of video in high resolutions on mobile devices tend to be faster than Flash video too, depending on version. I'm a defender of pragmatism, not of Flash, and it drives me mad to see people saying things that are just not true, like the previous poster.

My point is that if one analyzes the data, one will find that Flash tend to win over HTML5/canvas performance more often than not. The canvas and visual performance tests are very telling.

As a side note, there's definitely a gap in code execution - that's the link you posted - but it's just one of the factors, as Adobe is well aware of that and is addressing it on the next release. The AS3 VM was much faster than JS when introduced, then they spent a lot of time not doing any optimization at all. From what I've seen from their presentations, they're ready to take that back. Time will tell.
Developer - How application will work?

Designer - How application will look?

UX - How application will feel?
There isn't a transcript of this, is there?
It was probably downvoted because it seems like, if you'll excuse the bluntness of the term, pointless pedantry. The reversed word order doesn't make any obvious major difference to the phrase's meaning, so whether it was done intentionally or by accident comes across as pretty academic.

(I hope this doesn't come across as overly hostile. I don't mean it as an attack. I'm just explaining my guess since I hate mystery downvotes.)
I think Google+ made it so Myspace had to sell now--they've been bleeding money and users for a while now, and with one more challenger in the pit, they would have just bled out. I'm interested in seeing what the buyer actually has in mind for this company now though--It seems totally over, but inventive people always surprise me.
I think the message is that you can a have group electronic communication with a select social circle, without each person having to already be a member of the service to receive it.

It would be you spamming those people, not google or its service. You added them to the "distribution list" as it were.
Perceptually, ads don't offer value to the users experience, quite the contrary. This sums it up nicely:

Another salient difference: Google: Thanks for looking at 100s of ads you hate. Apple: Thanks for buying 100s of dollars of stuff you love.

https://twitter.com/#!/hotdogsladies/status/8101850288606412...
As one of the employees brought on in the iLike acquisition, the price makes me laugh. And think, "Called it!" I could not get out of there fast enough.
Well, I have to disagree. From that first link:

> Let’s take a look at an app that has done this well. Here we have Read it Later:

Look at Read it Later's page on a real phone and it's fairly terrible: the text is way too small and you can't zoom in, and again, it makes it more difficult to see what the app actually looks like, which is an important part of my buying decision. (There are screenshots within the "screenshots", but they are also rather small.)

For an easy comparison, Read It Later Free's page has only real screenshots, and I find it nicer.
"productivity is equally as important"

Node has a lot of good features, but programmer productivity isn't one of them currently. There are close to zero full-featured frameworks with "the works" (Geddy comes close, but is no longer maintained, and Express is essentially no more than a mini-framework). You simply have to write a lot of code yourself to do stuff that in other frameworks such as Django is included by default. Add to that the fact that deploying a Node site isn't nearly as easy and fast as deploying a PHP site, and you've got a setup that isn't ideal in terms of productivity.
actually there are far more than 50, as many counties and municipalities have their own sales tax rates on top of their state's rate. not only that, but it is far more complex than just one fixnum per jurisdiction as each is able to establish rules on what is taxed and what is not. the prime example is food, where the local laws on what counts as non-taxed food always seem a bit byzantine.
While it seems logical, it's not completely true.

If your great game gets lost down the charts before it's seen, then your success relies on people finding it using App Store search and your keywords. From my experience nobody does this, except for Utilities.

Having a really good app helps it stay on the top, but not necessarily get to the top at all. We've seen pretty poor games get to the top (and usually falling down quickly) and great apps never making the top (due to ie. poor shots or description).

It's not that simple.
Sal Khan has started videos about Python
Bravo. It could be either a browser extension that pops up every other day and ask me if I like A, B or C. Or it could be an email reminder.
That's a very unfortunate development. I remember the several download options and now there's not even an RSS feed anymore.
Urorbit Framework 1.2
Currently, in my area, there are at least four different choices: FiOS, Comcast, DirecTV, DISH Network. At yet all four offer similar programming packages (big blocks of channels). This seems to be evidence against your hypothesis.
More than 50 since many counties and cities impose their own sales taxes, on top of whatever the state levy is.

There's also the complication of what items are taxable where. Clothing, for example, has seen a recent trend of exemption from sales tax in some jurisdictions. There's also sales tax holidays, where a state or county suspends its sales tax on some categories for a week or whatever to spur consumer spending. Finally, there will be weird corner cases like what happens if an item is bought, then returned at a later date after a change in the sales tax levy?

It all becomes very complicated to track and implement for an online system. An entity the scale of Amazon could certainly do it if they want, but it may not be cost-effective.
exactly - Specific Media - an ad targeting firm - now owns 50 million user profiles - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2710838
Roku? revolutionize is a strong word, but they've had a lot of impact.

I'd throw makerbot out there as revolutionary, but that's still a very young market. - not stealthy though.

Tesla motors?
Ask HN:  Flag option disappeared?
I've been pretty zealous about flagging stuff, especially dupes and accounts that just spam some website.

Now I have no flag option at all ...
Yeah I guess it's just a little disorienting when

1) Your temperature reading is much finer in scale than the target temperature can be, so it looks like the error is much larger than it is.

2) You're cooling, not heating, so temperatures can float upward on their own and cooling is what is bringing the temperature reading down.

I'd be curious to see the actual on/off time of your A/C versus the input reading. Are you using PID control at all or is this too large a system to control like that?
A big challenge is simply having enough users to give you the sense that when you're bored or lonely, you could rely on Overlap.me to help you find connection.

I figure "small wins" -- like the initial fun of joining your first overlaps -- are a step towards building this critical mass. They don't encapsulate a long-term value proposition, but they get the site part-way there.

Some of the early testers found the service quite addicting and were returning every day to see who had joined the overlaps they've created. So another opportunity might lie in building more of an experience around this sense of belonging/community.
Other videos he has uploaded:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwO_25S_eWE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WT-gS-8p7KA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiR6cf8Towc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dn9XjHz33O8
What if there was something like a git deploy command? Basically, when you don't actually care about git functionality on the remote (production/staging) end, that would actually change the remote files. (Yes, I know it can be done with a hook, but that's more of a power user solution, and it's still extra work to setup)
Hi Max,
Think of Willet as a built-in freemium model. A users first couple of purchases are on credit. If they enjoy what they are buying, they'll have to pay.

Willet promises better conversion rates because it only takes a couple of clicks to get started. The Willet tab is shared across all websites that use Willet. As well, we promote your app / service to other Willet users to speed up the time to reaching their tab limit.
It depends a lot on the context and purpose of the talk, but I disagree with one of the suggested points.

I think it's valuable to create a roadmap for your listeners, and saying "I'll come to that in a minute" and otherwise foreshadowing things is a great way to give them a reason to be listening.

This seems to have been dismissed as "editorializing," and that's wrong. Creating and maintaining a sense of structure and purpose is important. Talking about where you're going is part of that.
This isn't just a question of emotional insensitivity. Machiavelli's "The Prince" specifically warns against trying to mix bad news with good. Send the bad news out and put as much bad news as possible in one message. Then dole out the good news in dribbles.

So you start by saying almost everyone will be fired and the pension plan is bankrupt. Let that sink in. Then an email goes out saying that the executive team has discovered some funds and saved the pension plan. A day letter, good news, the TPS report Writing Team are keeping their jobs. And so forth.

There's only so much bad news people can take and then they just put it down as a bad news email whether there's goo dnews in there or not. Good news in that email is entirely wasted.
Nope. I can still flag.
Crowdsourced location-based realtime photo news collected from Twitter.
Sales tax tends to be 5-10%, affiliate kickbacks tend to be less than that, which means that the increased revenue from affiliate links is in the same ballpark. It would be bad enough if these laws forced amazon to pay sales tax on purchases where the affiliate lived in the same state as the purchaser. Instead these laws force amazon to pay sales tax on all sales where the purchaser lives in a state where there is a significant number of affiliates. The former would not make business sense (raising prices for a much less significant benefit to affiliates) the latter makes even less sense economically.

This isn't Amazon trying to skirt paying sales tax, it's merely amazon making a level headed business decision in the face of irrational and grasping legislation.
I think psychologically people like to pay small amounts, kinda like SAAS but on a micro scale, taken to the extreme.
The rule seems to apply to Amazon principally because it has distribution centers in CA.
It happened to me as well, I believe if they think you are abusing it [whether that's true or not] they will take it away.