skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know if this is the right time to be introducing clojure to beginners yet. The language is still undergoing some basic fundamental changes. If you look at 1.3 there is so much that is different and breaks stuff from 1.2 and before. Right now the main strength of clojure is that the only people using it are the people who are good enough at shipping real software to understand why it's worth the trouble. I would hate for it to become the next fashionable "me too" language like Ruby and get punished by being stuck with supporting too many newbies.

Ruby got stuck at 1.8.6 for so long because it was really difficult to introduce code breaking changes in new versions, due to the number of people who were already using it. It would be better to evangelize clojure after the clojure/core team is closer to finalizing the language design and has shifted focus to performance and growing the ecosystem.
"That's like saying you should do a microkernel - it may sound nice on paper, but it's a damn stupid idea for people who care more about some idea than they care about reality."

He just had to sneak in a dig at Tanenbaum.
Do grass fed cattle produce more methane?
I'm going to quote myself:

"It sets a precedent that tracking someone's movements is A-OK."

Anything that large will require metrics and user tracking to understand what to show. It matches the ads to the user, not to the site, by invading the user's privacy to understand exactly what to show.
This ignores the critique that the "better experience and price" online retail offers comes about because Amazon doesn't have to pay sales tax. This makes everything Amazon sells 10% cheaper in California, which means that even a totally equivalent experience offered by WalMart would be seriously disadvantaged.

That said, this is a very sub-optimal solution--it's lose-lose-lose. It comes down to the fact, though, that one of Amazon's key competitive advantages is being able to avoid sales tax, and no solution which is (a) genuinely achievable and (b) levels the playing field will be supported by Amazon.
LA Tech Sucks
Many states are now acting on this same issue, so the number of places a start-up could flee to is rapidly dropping.

New York, Texas, North Carolina, Colorado, and Illinois are definitely out. And Amazon already collects sales taxes for North Dakota, Kansas, Kentucky, and Washington.

So if your start-up is so sensitive to affiliate revenues you'll avoid all those states, have fun wherever you wind up. I suppose Portland remains a nice spot – no Oregon sales tax at all.
I see this sentiment everywhere. Processes don't solve every problem, nor do threads, and nor do fibers. They're each useful in different places.

Despite the GIL, threads are still useful in Python for handling asynchronous operations. One or more threads pull items off a work queue, process them, and then put the results somewhere else. The GIL is a problem only when operations are CPU-bound, but Python is pretty damn slow at that anyway. Alternatively, you can sidestep the GIL by creating a thread in a C extension that does the heavy-lifting, then calls back into Python with the result.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is nothing new. We've known about these limitations on FUSE for quite some time, haven't we?
The average American eats twice as many kilograms of meat than the next nationality (last time I checked it was the British). As the article states, beef is by far the most environmentally draining; it turns out in terms of protein and calories, pork is nearly the same as beef with a much smaller amount of energy required to produce that meat. If the US had a better food culture [I'm not counting fast food here], we might be able to actually change the mindsets of the public that they dont need a meat entre with every meal.
Beautifully said. However, now Amazon needs to give California a reason to terminate this law while saving face.
Interesting, when I type "chrome" into Google I see ads for Google from Google and my email address (also from Google) in the top corner. I also frequently receive ads from Google regarding getting an AdWords account.
Anecdotally, a project I worked on involved evaluating some encrypted file systems on linux and encFS (on FUSE) was at an order of magnitude worse performance than kernel solutions.

Not to say it could never happen, but the tradeoff on performance is just no where near worth it right now.
There are plenty of people who make lots of money from Amazon
Here's the way it works:

You have a startup and part of the way you monetize is by having affiliate links on your site or in your product.

Affiliate links are given to you when you join an affiliate program. The merchant you work with agrees to pay you a percentage of every sale or a fee for some action. When someone clicks on one of the links on your site and buys something, you get paid a commission.

The US constitution commerce clause basically says that the merchant is not obligated to collect sales tax if they do not have a physical presence in the state (otherwise known as a nexus). That means that if you live in Utah and sell to a customer in California, and you don't have any physical offices or presence in California, you don't have to collect sales tax.

The responsibility of reporting sales tax for online transactions falls to the citizen of California who is obligated to report it on their tax return. They seldom do.

The law about to be passed in California would designate any affiliates as a nexus for out-of-state retailers, requiring sales tax to be collected. This violates the commerce clause as it is not specifically included (in short violates the spirit of the law and is not defined clearly in the letter of the law).

This impacts startups and businesses in California that make revenue from any of these affiliate programs. Two high profile startups I know of are TheFind.com and Shopobot. A big affiliate (I went with one of the founders to lobby to help kill these bills) is Ebates.com. Each of these has offices in California and would be hurt by this bill. Apparently Shopobot is headed out of state (someone from there posted today about it), as is Ebates (to my knowledge). There are about 25,000 businesses that are going to be really harmed by this legislation and they really have no choice but to leave.

I believe this bill will qualify even if your company is registered in Delaware but you have an office in California. I'm still getting legal advice on this, but it doesn't look good.

The general result of bills like these is that the affiliates or businesses leave the state to protect their income and the state loses out on the tax revenue. Net effect is typically a dive in the tens to hundres of millions in tax revenue. Illinois is a great example where several companies with hundreds of employees left the state.

Hope this helps you get a clearer idea :)
I think it would be fair to split it origin/destination 50/50.
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I think you're wrong, reasoning in the wrong direction. I think that green threads / fibers / lightweight threads are going to replace threads. Haskell uses them, for example. They are much more lightweight, you can get additional correctness guarantees from them (1: bind the "runner" threads to specific CPUs, you have to worry about memory fences less, 2: if other fibers that use the same resources run on the same "runner" thread, you can "lock" shared data simply by preventing a (lightweight) context switch), the only problem is that they are hard to implement in C(++) (you need stack switching if you want to be reasonably fast), so not many compilers/interpreters implement them.
Yep, streamlined sales tax is the way to go. Everyone wants it - Amazon, Overstock and pretty much every online retailer.
I'm not an OS expert, so perhaps I'm just being an idiot, but doesn't that argument go both ways (and probably more to Linux)? I mean, couldn't one say that the Linux source code proves that microkernels aren't really necessary?
We aggregate small payments (5c - $3) without any upfront or monthly fees and no invasive signup process. Its a much better deal than you can get from virtual currencies because the tab makes converting users much easier!

Waiting for a check is the norm because there are (unfortunately) costs involved in sending money. $100 is not too difficult to make for even a small app.
Colorado is in the process of repealing the law - a bit of good news there :)
Something's better than nothing right? As it stands your earnings from Amazon would go to zero.
I don't care what he says, I'm still waiting for an inclusion of some kind of union mount functionality in mainline. I don't need anything fancy, just one ro dir and one rw dir. If he can't even get me that in-kernel, I'll stick with unionfs in fuse, thank you very much.

Don't tell me about aufs, UnionMount, or overlayfs: aufs isn't up to date because it's not mainlined (for no good reason I can find), and UnionMount and overlayfs are too far out of mainline and too much in development to find reasonable packages.

Linus: when you can back up your claims with working code, I'll start listening. ;-)
The actual link that the above "minified" link goes to:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/804904/cropper/google_plus.png
Why does this need to have anything to do with affiliate marketers? "Associates" need not count as "subsidiaries" or "distribution centers" whatsoever.

According to http://www.amazon.com/Locations-Careers/b?ie=UTF8&node=2... Amazon has subsidiaries in: Cupertino, Lake Forest, San Francisco, San Luis Obispo, Palo Alto, and San Francisco.

I also regularly get deliveries that seem to originate within CA, even if Amazon does nor report any fulfillment centers in CA.

Let's be honest: Amazon has an unfair advantage over local retailers by not charging sales tax and it's using the loud online voice that its Amazon Associates have to keep things this way.
we've been offering "prototype in a week" for years at http://astrails.com/

Didn't get much demand for it. Its rare a customer will agree to the minimal enough feature-set for it to be viable.
I moved from the Bay area to Manhattan last year. I feel poorer now than when I was a grad student.

Those taxi fares add up. I've heard many people say NYC has a great public transit system ... that hasn't been my personal experience. Specifically, getting cross-town (and please don't suggest the bus ... getting a root canal is better than enduring those).

Other costs I didn't think about carefully before moving:
- Laundry ... in-suite washers and dryers are considered a luxury in Manhattan.
- City taxes ... ouch!
- Groceries: Not having a car in the city means that you are far more price inelastic.

There is a great quip I've heard: Manhattan is designed for one purpose. To part you with your money :-p

I must admit, I was pleasantly surprised at the vibrant startup/tech scene in NYC. There are a lot of true craftsmen in the city ... you just have to be prepared for a serious reduction in quality of life in SOME aspects in return for betterment of others.
I suspect Amazon secretly wish they could just get rid of their entire affiliate program. If it was so profitable, they wouldn't be getting rid of affiliates left and right. If you think about it, most people who buy thru an Amazon affiliate link probably would've bought it from Amazon anyway (due to its huge brand recognition, dominance in Google, etc).

So, when an affiliate refers a sale, sometimes they're losing money, not making money.
> I'm at work and my company's network blocks Social Networking sites. Is this a joke?

For a second, I thought you were asking if your company's policy was a joke.

Spoiler alert: yes, but it's not funny.
Git Cheat Sheet by the makers of Towre
If that's true, I for one will support them, even if it's just out of spite for Paypal. Paypal has the worst customer service I've ever seen in my life.
this reply is a bit more sane - http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-fsdevel/msg46080.html

glad i don't work with torvlads.
It is one interpretation of Constitutional language, that hasn't been construed to say states can't tax these same purchases via a Use Tax. Only that states can't require an entity with no local presence to collect the Sales Tax.

Subsidiaries and affiliates are reasonably a local presence.

Congress should act; it definitely has the Constitutional power over interstate commerce and has been derelict on this issue.
> That is completely wrong.

I agree with you but my first reading of the OP lead me to believe that she/he meant that Google and Facebook are advertising firms.
I agree, it is a sub-optimal solution. However, Amazon does support the streamlined sales tax which would achieve both points. There needs to be some federal solution to make reporting easier and the streamline seems to be the best way put forth so far.
That reminds me of Singularity OS, an experimental OS from Microsoft Research, which has no distinction between kernel and user space, thanks to writing everything in a variant of .NET bytecode.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_(operating_system)
Context: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum%E2%80%93Torvalds_deba...

And the original thread circa 1992: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.minix/browse_thread/t...
There's been a couple stories lately about them having negative growth rate of users. It's not really clear if that translates into a negative growth rate in pageviews or whether their pageview-per-user is still increasing..
Thanks everyone! I called and talked to all of their offices. If you do the same please remember to be as nice and honest as possible. It doesn't help our case if we're rude. (The staff who took my calls were very nice, btw).
The problem isn't that it can't compete on a level price playing field, but a level tax-reporting playing field. When you live in Sacramento, and go to San Francisco and buy a sandwich, you pay the local sales tax. A store has a physical presence in one location. It collects sales taxes for once district: namely, the one it's in. Presumably at least one person works at the physical location, and can total the receipts at the end of the month, and send a cheque and associated paperwork to the state and/or county and/or city.

The problem is that California wants amazon to collect sales taxes from customers who live in California, even though they have no physical presence. This bill is saying that they do have a physical presence (i.e. someone that can send in the cheque and associated paperwork) because someone puts up a banner ad on their website and happen to live in California. It would be like Sacramento wanting the shop in San Francisco to collect additional Sacramento city sales tax because I'm from there.

Keep in mind that I'm not a CPA, and these analogies probably suck.
Is there a dedicated graphics processor or switchable graphics in this notebook?
This might explain the rather big difference in battery time since many Linux graphics drivers are not power-optimized and switchable graphics does not work. [1]

Anecdotally, my rather old notebook (Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Pro V3205) runs cooler, quiter and longer when using Linux compared to Windows Vista. I still get slightly more than 2 hours out of my battery (3000mAh left). Maybe this is less of a problem with older, well supported hardware.

[1] But people are working on it, see e.g. https://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee
I personally don't mind creating an account for a service I find valuable. Especially if it's going to be dealing with money. In that case, I would rather create a dedicated account than rely on some external party.

I think when you're talking about a payment integration system, having to create an account is not what will stop "sellers", as you call them, from signing up. It's probably different for end users though.
They have local managers for every region and sub-region. Amazon doesn't have a manager assigned to Sonoma County to make sure that everything's on the up and up regarding Sonoma County tax laws. Amazon's actually much better equipped to handle the problem because of their size. It would be a real nightmare for a small site that can't afford even a single full time accountant.
Is there a website or book with the collected ideas/opinions of Linus and the design of linux?

"that's like saying you should do a microkernel - it may sound nice on paper, but it's a damn stupid idea for people who care more about some idea than they care about reality."

So I look up this microkernel thing and find this old debate: http://www.dina.dk/~abraham/Linus_vs_Tanenbaum.html

It would be great to have a resource that explains the what and the why behind the linux architecture. Also arguments, errr I mean debates, between high caliber smart people would be cool.

There is a book "Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary" that I ordered, but I have a feeling it doesn't go into the technical depth I would like. I could be wrong, just ordered it, will find out.
Google+...More Like Google-
Veritable - Bayesian Statistical Inference for Everyone
I thought they announced that they were going to launch a paid Translate api?
YYZ is horrible. I've had to stop going back to Canada unless I really need to :(
I hear Hurd is making some progress...
I think Google are really dropping the ball here.

You get one shot where each user will try your product, and decide to stick with it a while, or write it off.

If I get a Google+ account, if my friends aren't on it after a few days, then I think its crap because its got no content, and I go back to facebook. When my friend of now tries Google+, I'm not there to talk to; and the launch fails.

Its great to seed your product launch with influential early adopters.
But these early adopters don't form a sufficiently dense social network to make the product worthwhile, on their own.

The adoption of a social product spreads like an epidemic. The frontier is either pushing out through the network, or its dying out.

I believe they should have stayed completely silent with Google+ until they were ready to throw it open to everyone.

A small company like Facebook was can launch a product in niche areas, and grow it out, building hype slowly.

Google cannot do that, because everyone knows who they are, and cares about what they do next - I think, for them, launching a network effect product (e.g. not gmail, as while e-mail depends on network effects, g-mail doesnt) has to be all or nothing.

They need to open it ASAP, to capitalise on the coverage they are now getting, and get dense enough social graphs for the service to persist.
An upside to more precisely targeted advertising is that it lowers the cost of advertising, by way of reducing the number of eyeballs on an ad. A website with 1 million uniques can sell the space for $X to a big national business to whom it will be relevant to 30% of the userbase. Or, it could be divvied up between 20 local businesses from each user's location, selling the space to each for $0.1X, and being relevant to 50% of users. The website gets twice as much ad money, smaller businesses can afford to advertise, and users get slightly better ads.

Is this really a bad thing?
Looks like I'm doing things right :)
Is there something preventing Amazon from doing so?
Who uses email?

22 year olds who were 21 last year, but graduated and have jobs this year.
Erlang's syntax is terrifying to users only experienced with more mainstream languages, and hard to work with for users not specifically experienced with it. LFE or Reia may solve some of those problems, though I don't have experience with them.
Tim O'Reilly tweeted it as if it weren't: https://twitter.com/#!/timoreilly/status/86171985373179905

I was taken in at first too—which means it's well-written satire, if it's not true. But either way, the point is this: learning to look things up is not at all the same thing as learning to learn.
Google+ Designed by Former Apple Engineer
they can be if they're on the same college LAN
Analyst: Apple to Offer iPhone 3GS for Free
You can currently set your Google profile to not be publicly indexed by search engines under "search visibility" on the edit page, but don't know if it will carry over once + goes public.
Fair enough. I'll bump this to the front of the feature queue!
That's not what he means. Hes talking about making a new friend at a mutual friends party, lets call him Joe. You look at Joe's profile, and all you see on Joe's profile are photos of him drinking.

Meanwhile, Joe has been sharing a ton of geocaching and hiking posts with his "hiking" circle, but you don't even see it since he didn't know that you liked hiking, he only knows you from a party. His alternate interests are hidden from you because you weren't in the right circle on his end, completely out of your control.
Hard-nosed Thoughts on Apple, Closed & Open Systems
I see your point that this could be a problem, but it's also a problem that brick-and-mortar shops have to pay tax while Amazon doesn't, no? Equal protection (or competitiveness) goes both ways.
$65 billion valuation for myspace...
How does the Minix source code prove this? Minix has existed long before Linux and yet Linux made enormous gains in popularity while Minix is still minor and very rarely used.

Has the Minix kernel shown significant performance results? (I am not being sarcastic btw, I am honestly asking.)

I know OSX uses something like a micro-kernel and it is a perfectly fine desktop OS, but performance suffers once you get to thousands of threads.
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It was never news, for just about any definition of 'news'.
Adam Carolla's Podcast gets a good source of it's income from Amazon's affiliate program.
Note that brick and mortar retailers only have to know the taxes which apply to each of their locations. While this is a lot of different locations for a big chain, it's far less than knowing the taxes for the location of every single customer.

To put it more concretely, Best Buy has to manage sales tax for ~1000 stores, but Amazon has to manage sales tax for ~100 million customers.
So... if I understand correctly, if I am a resident of California and I buy books from Amazon, I pay no sales tax (isn't that the same as VAT)? Does this mean that Amazon books in Washington are more expensive (because I Amazon must collect the taxes, because the state can force it to, because it has a physical presence there)?
Correct title should have been: Why I would have left twitter if I were Biz Stone.

The article has no sources, only mentions Biz by name twice in the content, and uses "he" (as a reference to Biz) only twice in the closing paragraph.

The most benefit I got from this article was knowing that Biz left at all.
And, intended or not, at Stallman
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I always thought a UX designer was the one who worried about how the interface functioned.

Like in iOS, for example, when it does that little bounce thing when you reach the end of a scroll view. That is something a UX designer would design. As opposed to a visual designer who would make it look pretty.

As a designer and developer, I boggles my mind that not all programmers can do design work. Likewise, it seems strange that visual designers can't also do interaction design. However, in the real world most people in this space seem to be more specialized. A visual designer cannot necessarily make a good functioning interface, hence the need for someone else to fill that gap.

I don't know what the middle-man between designers and developers is all about. We can communicate just fine and wouldn't be the job of a user experience person, by my definition, anyway.