skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many of them already do, e.g. local booksellers. They might not be price-competitive, but if Amazon provides the linker with no incentive to link Amazon versus linking some other bookstore (say, their favorite local bookstore), some percentage of linkers will (I would guess) defect from choosing to link Amazon.

For example, I have a site with some book reviews which currently links the Amazon page for all the books, because they pay me. If Amazon terminates its affiliate program in my state, why would I continue to link Amazon, rather than someone else? I would first look into alternate affiliate programs, like AbeBooks. If I couldn't find any worth using, I'd probably change it to just link the official publisher page for each book. Or maybe to a local-bookstore aggregator like indiebound.org. Or the Wikipedia article, when one exists.
Wow, didn't realize this many people were concerned about carbon footprints. I'm curious how this breaks down, at least in the US, in the east vs the west.

I'm a vegetarian, so I obviously can't eat less meat, but I do enjoy buying locally when I can, mostly because I can be assured to have fresh ingredients, and I can see where the food came from.
Sears-Roebuck even sold houses.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears_Catalog_Home]
Facebook and Google both do their own targeting (obviously.) Google allows access to some data for 3rd-party firms via RTB. Neither pass on PII (or really any non-aggregate) data to advertisers, AFAIK, I'd be surprised if Specific did either.

Google and Facebook both have a consumer-facing presence so you think of them as being more accountable, but they're both advertising businesses, no doubt.
Are you sure it starts in CA?

I just looked through http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon.com#Fulfillment_and_ware... and there is no California location listed.

I live in California, and I've received lots of packages from Nevada.
Re your comments document orientation. This is a very good point and one that I have given a bit of thought. Contracts do indeed consist of business data and should be treated as such. To create such data in Microsoft Word and keep it in Word documents is as criminal. But the problem is worse than that. Contracts are also business logic manifest in a completely useless format called human language. If you are interested you should check these links out: http://contracts.scheming.org/ http://www.stefansen.dk/presentations/isola-contracts.pdf
Sorry, answer to 2 is "YES". There's a chat bar, and you can select an entire Circle to chat with.
You do realize twitter is a form of promotion, aka advertising.

You meant 'marketing', right?
A walk through or screen shots of the product on the home page, would help. I wouldn't give my twitter handle to an app that I have no clue of what it does.
Minor correction: Congressional authority for taxation derives from the "Welfare Clause", Article I, § 8.
What's this "Amazon doesn't collect sales tax" thing? I'm in NYC and I pay sales tax on items purchased from Amazon.com.

Total Before Tax:	$47.99
Estimated Tax To Be Collected:	$4.26

If that's not NY sales tax, it sure looks a helluva lot like it.
How would you prove to yourself that Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming exists to the same degree of certainty that you could have that atoms exist? I'd like to know so that I can independently run the same experiment.

Also, the history of environmental scientists making false apocalyptic predictions is lamentable. It should take some extraordinary evidence for a rational person to believe a fresh one.
I agree. Amazon loved their affiliate program while they were growing. Now that they're the biggest in town, and don't need the affiliates; they looking for any excuse to drop them.
6 Things Google+ Can Do That Facebook Can't
The changes in 1.3 (which honestly should have been called 2.0) have caused a lot of upheval to people using the alpha releases. Even things as basic as ring-devel were broken. But new users should have enough sense to stick with the stable releases. Now that 1.3 has entered beta the number of libraries that remain unpatched are few and far between. It's the folks who are using git master in the middle of the release cycle who are feeling the pain, not the newbies.
Ie don't do the less meat thing for carbon footprint reasons, but just because it's ... nice, I guess, for lack of a better word.
I have it on good authority that Stallman now agrees that going with a microkernel was a mistake.
thenewboston[1] has owned this space for a little while now and has been doing really awesome vids on things like Python, C++, Java, Obj-C, iPhone dev, PHP, gamedev, Cocos2d, and Adobe CS software.

It's funny because he's coming from the opposite end now, since he's been doing mainly programming and technical content vids and has recently started making series on things like Biology and mathematics, the forte of khanacademy. Pretty awesome to see it all play out.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/user/thenewboston#g/p
I wonder how many Silicon Valley startups use amazon affiliate program? How many generate a substantial (I use this term to mean it would make a noticeable income on the bottom line) amount from it?
I know Andy from folklore.org stories - that was great.
We'd love to go into more detail on our thoughts about the future of payments, but we'd like to take adequate time to articulate them well. Maybe we'll do a blog post about this soon.
My Word
Streaming live: HTML5 Multimedia with Bruce Lawson - June 30, 2011
www.streamerapp.com is a large scale, real life node.js app now on Private beta.
Not only is Javascript possible, but its the simplest for average kid to start with. No download required. I love Eloquent JS for further study. Just browse the web and have an interactive tutorial that goes into pretty good depth.

And as someone noted, with Resig there, this is just a matter of time.
It's got nothing to do with being viral. Viral is when it asks you to enter your email address + password and invite your friends from a list.

If something happens to you in a social network, you get an email about it. It's a must for any successful social network of any kind. If you don't have this feature, your social product is most likely going to fail. As a developer, you cannot be afraid to send these types of emails.

As long as you give the option to turn off email notifications from your friends or opt out of the service altogether by deleting the account, then all is well.

It's not about being viral, it's about user re-engagement. Facebook knows this, and that's why you get an email notification when any little action happens to you. This is what allows them to have 200m+ users logging in EVERY SINGLE DAY. I find it completely acceptable.

If you want to launch a social product without this feature, good luck not tanking.
Machiavelli's point was if you have to infringe on your peoples rights, and do something negative --- then do them all at once. This way, time erodes the negative memories - and since they are all focused in point in time, then the series of positives that follow will move to the forefront of people's memories of your time 'ruling'.
> Yup. Politicians and governments are, by and large, oblivious to the fact that laws induce behavioral changes.

Come on. Politicians are some of the smartest people in the society. Do you really think they are oblivious or do you think they're just looking out for #1?
You always can come to countries like Spain, with badly paid professors and poor equipment but almost free education. It will cost you less than 1k dollars per year :-)
We Fab Braintree Payments
Google + (-Me)
Nothing different from what LinkedIn (annoyingly) does, really, or Facebook, or any service that offers to slurp in your contacts from Gmail. But in this case it's one less step between the spammer and the address book; Google is both.
When I set my location to "New York City, NY, USA" I think that should auto-trigger overlaps like

- I live in New York City
- I live in New York State
- I live in the United States
Tell me how it could indent this correctly:

<?if(bool):?>
<TABLE class="foo">
<?else:?>
<TABLE class="bar">
<?endif;?>
<TR><TD></TD></TR>
</TABLE>

If you only look at the HTML it looks like a doubly nested table.

If you only look at the PHP the inner elements of the table will not be indented correctly.

And this is a very simple example. Real code can be far more complex - for example the table tag could be generated by a function, and not even visible in this file.

If you took my indenting, and converted it into some kind of graphical display that might be cool. But automatic detection? Good luck.
Isn't it down to you to prove him wrong rather than vice versa?
There's no reason to quibble carbon when there are other clear resource differences between food sources.

It takes a very large quantity of grain to produce the same mass of beef, as so much energy goes to powering the cow itself while it's alive. Same for water usage. Large animal farms are also reponsible for a great deal of run off pollution now not just from sewage and nitrates, but also antibiotic residue.

There's no question that raising animals for food is inefficient compared to agriculture.
This is probably the most accurate view of the history of OpenGL vs. Direct3D I've seen on the internet. It goes into the actual implementation details of why OpenGL or D3D have been more or less popular for games\graphics programming over the years. Also follows my personal adoption of the APIs for projects pretty closely. Most other comparisons are too political or anti-MS, and are often written by people that have limited (if any) experience with Direct3D.
Why open data is not enough
Wow, the site design has come a long way since the last time I took a look.

Really nice guys, I'm digging the new UX.
GNU HURD was hamstrung mainly by politics, not so much by technical issues. There was a ton of code written, but it kept getting ripped up and thrown out because someone didn't like it.
This article surprises me. I'm Dutch and I always thought that in the US, everybody had super awesome broadband for nearly no money.

Not sure why, though.
Pardon me but it only makes sense to do this if you are making mounds of cash. Otherwise the cost for compliance will easily eat up any excess profit. Even very profitable companies don't do this, so you should ask yourself why.
How has your experience biased you with regard to high end universities? You say yourself you attended an inexpensive school, thus we can assume it wasn't a top tier school. I am not sure I would fully discount the name-brand value. More doors open because of brand value.

As a whole, I found this post was rather bland and didn't offer much real insight.
Minix is still just a toy. It doesn't implement virtual memory, which is one of the hardest things modern operating systems do.
In most tax jurisdictions they call this a "Use Tax". In theory here in Washington you're supposed to file that with the state annually/quarterly/monthly/whatever interval they set for you, but in practice no individual actually does. Businesses that remit sales tax to the state do have a field on the form to include their own use tax as well.
The Federal USF Surcharge is what, US$1 per residential line per month? That's the only nationwide subsidy program I know of. Even if it's more - $5/month? $20/month? - that's nowhere near enough to account for the disparity in network performance in the Northeast seaboard states compared to, say Sweden.

I'm an American living in Sweden. I'm in a city and can get 200Mbit/s for US$80/month. Checking Comcast for Boston and I don't see any option above 105Mbit and that costs US$105/month. That's not a simple difference in subsidies.

In any case, Sweden is not a densely packed country. It's about 54 people/sq. mile and the US is 83 people/sq. mile. Massachusetts is 830 people/sq. mile.

Why doesn't Boston have better internet service than here? It can't be subsidies for universal access for a far-flung population since the surcharge isn't that high. It can't be population density since otherwise Boston or any other large US city would have better connectivity than here.

The point of the survey is to analyze those reason, and you drew your conclusion after only reading a summary of it.

The objections you raise come up every time there's a cross-national comparison of internet access. They are accounted for, and the US is still behind, and falling further behind.
I'm not arguing if it's noble or not. But how often does an ad on Google add value to you as a user? I'm genuinely curious.
On real-world hardware, a buggy driver can take down your entire system regardless of whether you're using a microkernel or not. Program a bad DMA, blit, or scatter/gather and Minix won't save you.

I agree with your last sentence though.
Isn't a sphere with it's centre of gravity shifted from it's geometrical center a gömlöck ?
> 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%.

From the wikipedia article that you cited: "Most steel engines have a thermodynamic limit of 37%. Even when aided with turbochargers and stock efficiency aids, most engines retain an average efficiency of about 18%-20%."

I wrote that IC engines are running about 50% of the thermodynamic limits because 18/37 is around 50%.

18x2 is about 37, so there's no way for wave engines to be more than 2x as efficient as current engines unless they run at much higher temperatures. Since the relevant temperature is determined by the fuel....

Getting close to the thermodynamic limit is really hard.

You didn't read the wiki article very carefully

The 18-20% is of the total energy in the fuel. Heat engines, which includes both wave and piston engines, are subject to thermodynamic limits. The thermodynamic limits tell us the maximum efficiency, which is about 40% for the temperature at which ther
.. if performance is your only criterion. Some people (probably a minority) might prefer software that is highly resilient, even if that means it's 10-20% slower.
I can totally understand why Amazon doesn't want to have to collect municipal sales tax. Every city in my state has a different potential tax rate, with a percentage determined by the state, by the county, by whether the city participates in mass transit, etc. Same zip codes have different taxes.

Trying to manage that across the country is an ugly proposition! At least the EU has chosen a single VAT (even if it is outrageous! :).
Adesto ramps CBRAM, low power, high performance non-volatile memory
I'm actually submitting this because, as shown in the comments section, I don't really agree with much of what this writer says about open data being in any way intrinsically dangerous/destructive.

Curious as to how others feel about the premise of this piece. I do on the other hand, agree that for open data to have broad, empowering impact, it needs to be made not just available, but accessible/easy-to-use for more people.
Yes, if the discussion has some fascinating relevance for the general HN readership, I can't figure it out. Linus doesn't come off very well, trying to settle a discussion with common sense and sarcasm while the other people on the thread use facts and examples to paint a more complicated picture.

People who think that userspace filesystems are realistic for anything but toys are just misguided.

I use sshfs all the time. Much of the software I use every day only needs to meet "toy" standards to be useful to me. What is Linus on about here?
Uh, who brought in residents of different states?

California residents should be paying the California sales tax on things they buy, and the state has a right to make that happen. Nobody's talking about forcing Colorado residents to do anything.

I agree that they should find a way to make it a reasonable burden for Amazon to collect that information, but if local retailers have to collect and Amazon doesn't, that seems unfair and noncompetitive.
With your legal address in Wyoming wouldn't you need a personal address to which Amazon would need to send correspondence?

Or if you open a bank account for this legal enttity, wouldn't the bank want an address they can actually correspond to?
If you like eSports, I enjoyed watching BoxeR's wings. Best documentary of a professional esports player (also the most famous one in the world). It's about his return to the pro scene and playing starcraft 2 and trying to compete as an older player who has finished his military service (required in korea, often quitting point for top pros).

Part 1: http://gosu.com/2011/06/boxers-wings-part-1/
Yet another variant on the idea was the AS 400. It had no memory protection and didn't need it, since there was no way to address anything that you weren't supposed to.

Given the impressive stability and security record of the AS 400, they had a point.
Looks great! Really looking forward to see how it's used.
I'll get to put this to the test in another month or so as I move from DC to NYC.

It helps that DC is almost as expensive, everything I've seen so far apartment-wise looks like I'll be paying the same amount of money for a 2 bedroom that I'm currently paying for a 1 bedroom (albeit smaller overall square footage).

I'll also have an extra 200 a month from not having a car (insurance and parking), and most other costs seem to be about the same.

If I were moving from somewhere cheaper, maybe I'd feel differently.
> Masklinn, If my first point was not correct, then why is there so much lobbying effort and dollars being spent on the 'net neutrality' issue?

Net neutrality has nothing whatsoever to do with quotas.

> Also, just out of curiosity, want to know why the 'No' for the two barriers

The first one simply does not make sense, the second one is at best irrelevant and at worst counter-productive (countries using quotas are historically the worst ones in terms of penetration and improvements over time, they're solely a way for carriers to fuck with above-average customers)

> and if you identified something different that would change the landscape.

Bundled line sharing (mandated at acceptable prices by regulations), they let new isps start out as purely virtual and ramp up their operation by building their physical network over time (DSLAMs and local loop unbundling) instead of having to front these, and affordable local loop unbundling.

Those are what triggered internet access improvements in european countries with a former telco monopoly (just about all of them). As well as policy and explicit political drive for increased competition in the sector.
The current status of this seems to be summed up in this LWN article:
https://lwn.net/Articles/447650/
This story (biz leaving CA) is all too common these days.
You could eat negative meat, by raising cattle and not letting anybody eat them. ;-)
Agree.. one hundred per cent! The 'tweet link'? makes life so-o-o much easier: keep on poaching the good stuff to pass on Tristan. Now if one could only comment WITHOUT having to create an account!! ...Sue
I've been thinking about this recently, and I'm not sure if the initial gold-rush of users wouldn't be just as bad. The risk there as I see it is everyone joining en-masse, kicking the tyres, and leaving again -- accompanied by a slew of articles saying "users leaving droves".

I'm honestly not sure how you do successfully gain traction in something with this much level of (unavoidable) publicity. One thought I had was that something like video chat might attract people just to use that, and then perhaps organically discover other features that make them spend more time there.
If reliability is your concern, then Microkernels are the way to go because a buggy driver (which will exist no matter how careful you are) can't take down your entire system.

If reliability is that much of a concern, why isn't the system being designed in a way that makes the distinction irrelevant?

about as meaningful as comparing a phillips screwdriver with a flathead. They're used for different purposes.

Is this just that they work with different kinds of screws, or are there cases where it's actually preferable to use a flathead screw+screwdriver instead of Phillips (or Robertson, which for some reason we don't have around here)?
Busted. I didn't read the whole article. I should have qualified my statement to say 'big name' law firm.
You didn't know that if you accept venture capital there's a 60% chance you will be gone from the company within a year?

Despite the fact there's no conclusive evidence that a company is better off with the founder gone. For every Cisco example you can cite there's an Apple one to counter it.

I'd be very curious how many YC companies had one or both founders leave within a year after raising VC money. I suspect your survival chances are much better as a YC alumnus but lack the verification.
Yes, when you have typed pointers at the hardware level, it can be even better than page protection.
It sounds interesting but I never looked at email and thought that there is a problem with people writing to much, that attachments are a problem or that I don't need folders to organize my email. Also, I use Gmail and its spam detection is superb: nothing gets passed it.

I'm curious to know if and how the product team market tested the idea.
I've only ever worked in a SMB contracting environment, so i can't speak for buying really large volumes, but in my experience it's not windows itself that is the big cost. it's the cost of man-hours to get everybody transferred over, the cost of training people on a new OS, and the cost of upgrading all the ancient tertiary systems that were built for 95 and somebody hacked into being compatible with XP.
Naturally, lots of people are pissed off at this turn of events. For good reason, too--everyone's losing here, including the State, Amazon, consumers, and various developers and start ups. Even the shadowy backers of the legislation (WalMart, Target, etc.) don't win an even playing field, because Amazon still isn't going to pay sales tax.

Since many people's livelihoods are very threatened by this frack-up, it's not too surprising that there'll be some itchy fingers.
KDE's future plans, intends to become more available to Qt community
Prototypical OO in JavaScript
Did anyone really expect them NOT to sell this data for ad purposes?

Services like Google, Myspace and facebook are free. Don't kid yourself, they are doing this for money. If you pay - demand privacy. If it's free - come on, you did put all the personal data voluntarily, didn't you?

All they use is statistical data. Be fair - no one really cares about your individual private data, unless you're rich and/or famous. But then you will be much more cautious about sharing personal data on the web. You will, won't you?
I'd suspected performance might not be the primary purpose when I came across the Python packages for implementing filesystems.

Still, it seems like a lot of the interesting filesystem ideas have to do with non-root users authenticating to something else over some network connection. This type of thing is simply a more natural fit for user space.

Keeping the high-level stateful protocol stuff out of the kernel is usually a good idea except when performance is all that matters (i.e. there will be full-time developers tuning it and cleaning up the inevitable security and crash bugs).
That's a fair point. The main problem with that is that most vendors want platform lock in so they implement their own verified loaders (if it's for a phone).

If we had OpenBoot on ARM, things would rock.
Just went through my email logs of Amazon purchases. One thing I bought from Amazon looks like it started in "City of Commerce", but this was a few days after I purchased it -- perhaps they fulfilled elsewhere and flew it over to be picked up by FedEx in CA?
Death By Regulation: FaceCash Is Shutting Down in California