skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is no "affiliate tax".

When people buy things in the US, they are generally supposed to pay sales tax. To make it easy on purchasers, states require businesses to collect the tax. Because of quirks of American law, states can't force out-of-state companies to participate. The tax is still owed; purchasers are just supposed to pay it themselves.

The law recently changed so that having affiliates in California means that you have to collect the CA sales tax like any other CA business.
I agree completely. I'm always in the minority telling people not to get AppleCare unless having to replace their Mac would be financially disastrous. (In which case they probably shouldn't be buying it in the first place).
Here's a lawsuit about it, with some statistics:

http://www.aclu.org/free-speech-technology-and-liberty/group...
Which was my point ;-)
sex has more social implications than other body functions.

e.g., someone notices their partner logs sexual activity shortly after "meeting with friends from work" every thursday.

there are less dramatic examples any adult should be able to imagine.

actually, i suspect you just jumped at the opportunity to parade how "progressive" you are.
Intellectual property at least makes a certain sense, since it is something you create yourself out of thin air, and therefore can decide to make available to others under certain conditions if both parties agree. If you don't make it available, nobody suffers, and if you do, you have created value without depriving others, so it is only fair to receive compensation.

Owning land, on the other hand is clearly immoral. You didn't create the land, so how could you own it? Oh, you bought it from someone else. Well they didn't own it either. Someone stole it from the community a long time ago. Owning land is theft exactly because it is a limited resource.
Think about the benchmark for a while. What kind of benchmark would it be? How would you score? How could you tell if someone was cheating?
He didn't think there was a natural right to ideas. He didn't say that they shouldn't be protected--just that whether to do so or not was up to society which could weigh the benefits vs. the harms.
Len Sassaman has passed away
I'm hearing rumors/reports that Len Sassaman has passed away. If anyone has news then I'd appreciate more concrete details.

Thanks.
I think this particular facet of human nature was well explained by Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it."
I have a GS2 for the three weeks now and havent seen this issue.In fact, I think the battery life is a lot better then my last phone which was a IPhone 3GS. Is this a common bug?
This is what the 'Disable Reshares' option is for.
lord knows they need revenue

Or they need to cut spending.
> Technically, "monopoly" is a misnomer when applied to IP

Whatever the technical rectitude of non-monopoly assertions, they really ought to sound fairly shady when one considers the very intent and mechanism of IP: to increase profits of the producer, by raising prices through restricting supply. IP is certainly supposed to quack like a duck.
Well, with the amount of email I get I suspect either my school sells my email address or companies get people to just download the entire directory. There's at least 4 companies that I get regular email from and I've never interacted with them before. Maybe they plan on mass emailing students about this new service.

While it sounds like I'm being critical of this service, I would have liked to see this before I graduated. I know a few people who joined startups but it's because they knew someone who knew about the startup to even apply. My school has an entire building for technology startups but there's no listing of who's hiring, or at least if there is one it's not very well known.
> Owning land is theft exactly because it is a limited resource.

Would you say the same is true of gold?
"If one is prepared to argue (as you apparently are), that Tolkien had no moral right to the proceeds of the sale of his books [...]"

It is possible to believe that he had the moral right to the proceeds but only on the basis of the copyright policy that existed at the time he wrote the books. This doesn't mean you cannot at the same time argue that such policy should be abolished.

In other words the Tolkien case is a red herring here.
Durham, NC - Senior Software Eng @ Argyle Social

We are looking for another A-player to help us continue to grow out our Social Media publishing, management, and engagement solution.

Are you interested in:
• Deep integrations with twitter, facebook, google+, wordpress, etc.
• Working with lots of social, click, and conversion data
• Going from idea, to mockup, to production in a few weeks
• Taking the lead on projects that excite you
• Flexible work schedule, free snacks & drinks
• Web apps, built in php that provide users easy-to-use and effective marketing tools

If that sounds good, then check us out. We are small and efficient team, using agile 2.5 week sprints. We also have an amazing designer who will make everything you build look hot ;)

More details at:
http://argylesocial.com/jobs/durham-nc-software-engineering-...
How Google+ Shows That Google Still Doesn't Understand Social
Hells yes. Applecare is ridiculous. Somehow their sales people are so good though that they make me feel like it's a good idea (and just a couple hundred more dollars when I'm already spending thousands!) until I snap myself out of it. It's mathematically impossible for it to be a good idea to buy this!
Note the cited MIT Fab Lab link:

http://fabfi.fablab.af/index.html
Another Fake Groupon? Company Website and Groupon show the same price
His home page is here: https://securehomes.esat.kuleuven.be/~lsassama/

WikiPedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Len_Sassaman

Reported by Rob Bird (@conduit242) and Bram Cohen (@bramcohen)

* https://twitter.com/conduit242

* https://twitter.com/bramcohen
When I said "quite a bit more setup", I had SDL in mind. :) Yes, you can get a raw pointer to a graphics buffer via SDL, but in addition to the extra setup to get a window, you have to make extra calls (such as SDL_Flip or SDL_UpdateRect) to make your changes visible.
Google actually overhauled much of their mobile web apps on the launch day for G+, as Gizmodo documented: http://gizmodo.com/5817102/googles-looking-real-nice-right-n...
I would suggest the same, maybe type your username into the text box and have a button for each category, you have plenty of screen real-estate anyway.
Used for engineering at leading university's:
S. Ross, A first course in probability, 8th Edition, Pearson Prentice Hall 2010.

Suggested by prof as being good for learning:
Introduction to probability, D. P. Bertsekas and J. N. Tsitsiklis, Athena Scientific , 2002. ISBN 1-886529-40-X. This is an excellent book for further reading and understanding some of the material.
Well said! Very badly written.
Maybie with the generational shift things will change. For USA's sakes, let's hope it won't be too late.
'If you can't remember the name, then it's not clever.' Agreed 100%. Now it's likely too late but wouldn't batchsetup.com be easier and not so generic (edit:available for registration as time of posting)?
It's a guidance, not an absolute measure.
For example I find that queries with more than 5 keywords are fat better in Google than in other search engines. In this case you can take some web sites with high web ranking and try searches with many keywords against them.
Ask HN: Once you have the skills, how do you start getting freelance jobs?
Hi all,
First a little background: I started teaching myself CSS, HTML, and JQuery 8 months ago, and after a lot of hard work I feel I'm at a point where I can confidently deliver great work for a client (UI/design/build).
But how do I start getting jobs? It seems like many of you here do freelance work full-time. When you were starting out, how did you find your first jobs?
It seems like once you're started, referrals lead to referrals and it gets easier. I just can't figure out how to get the momentum started.
Thanks in advance!
Dan
I think what the poster means by "started from zero" is that Google wasn't in the space. Then it was.

The means by which they entered the space (building on open source, acquisition, wish from genie) doesn't matter.
This also introduces the Ear Full of Cider Principle, as articulated by Marlon Brando's character in "Guys and Dolls":

One of these days in your travels a guy is going to show
you a brand-new deck of cards, on which the seal is not yet
broken. Then this guy is going to offer to bet you that he
can make the jack of spades jump out of this brand-new deck
of cards and squirt cider in your ear. But, son, you do not
accept this bet. Because as sure as you stand there you’re
going to wind up with an ear full of cider.

(Economists call this the no-trade theorem.)

And to quote from the article:

What does it have to do with insurance? Buying insurance is, quite literally, accepting a wager with the insurance company. You’re betting that you will crash your car and the insurance company is betting that you won’t. The ratio of your premiums to the payout for the possible claim establishes the odds that the insurance company is giving you. They wouldn’t offer you those odds unless the bet was a savvy one for them.

Which makes you the sucker.
See also: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zL2FOrx41N0 "Lessons from Fashions Free Culture."
You are trusting the server, you are trusting the quality of every line of code on the server that has a hand in generating the page content (since any DOM corruption flaw will let you trivially backdoor the encryption), and you're trusting every third party server from which HTML or JS content is sourced.

It's a terrible, terrible idea.
EEVblog #183 – Soldering Tutorial Part 2
... which, implementing JS crypto, you should never do.
CaaB: Cloud as a Bank
California spends 70% more (per capita) than Texas and achieves poorer results.

http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/show/287.html

I can't see how California's inability to raise taxes further is the problem.

The author is proposing a fix: move to Texas and avoid creating a nexus in California.
Places like New York City and San Francisco will always have a strong startup culture regardless of how oppressive the tax culture is. Why? People want to live there. Not all people, of course, but there's a huge number of people who would still live in New York City even if the tax rate of the highest income bracket were twice what it is now. It's New Effin' York.

Incidentally, I'm kind of curious how the California/Amazon thing will play out, given that Amazon is currently collecting sales tax in New York. When New York passed their affiliate nexus tax law in 2008, Amazon went the route of collecting the taxes and suing New York to have the law repealed; they are still collecting sales tax in New York 3 years later. I'm guessing their experience in New York has lead them to try the more extreme route in California, of starving the state of more revenue in an attempt to force them to change the law. If California holds firm the way New York has, will Amazon give in?
Skwo.ru - Рисованные приколы 28.06
It's worse than that. Among many other things, it's possible for any attacker with an XSS bug in any component of the DOM of that page (cached or fetched fresh) to steal keys. Modern browsers provide no way to verify the whole JS runtime to ensure that no function that your crypto depends on has been backdoored, but every JS implementation allows functions to be overridden.

It's the worst possible environment to implement crypto in, and you should never do it.
I think the design overall needs to be changed (More polished look)

I really like the concept.
Seriously: who cares?

If I'd had the exhibitionist inclination to publish my jogging and TV watching habits, I would not mind having the duration of my sexual activity published as well. Who cares? It's not like having sex is something top secret nobody else does.

But since I would not want to publish all my questionable efforts to stay in shape, it would probably be a good idea to make the public/private setting a little more obvious.
Be careful: if you are using a javascript library to encrypt data, you get protection from eavesdroppers, but not from man-in-the-middle attacks. If I can alter data that you send/receive over the wire, I can simply modify your aes function calls to xor the data with a predictable sequence that I generate. The only way to prevent this that I have thought of is to store the site (which has presumably already been acquired over a secure channel) locally on the client's machine, and make AJAX calls over the encrypted channel for fresh content.
We are thinking about how an anchor may look in this context, the problem at the moment is that only really allows very flat data structures to be sent. What if you want to share an activity-stream object.... saying that, I do like the proposed syntax.

Intent choosing will be left in most likelhood up to the UA to define, they could favourite items. The main reasons for the intent tag is 1) it is a new platform feature and shouldn't be hacked in; a tag gives us the benefit of future enhancements, and 2) we and others could index this data and provide it as an option for the user to pick applications to use.
Relevant: http://rdist.root.org/2010/11/29/final-post-on-javascript-cr...

The killer for me has always been #7 on Nate Lawson's list: Auditability. How do you tell that your browser is using the right copy of the code to do the crypto?
As an outsider dealing with CA taxes... due to a previous CA employee, I find CA intrusive and expensive to deal with. More paperwork and fees, and hassles than anything in my own business tax state of Colorado. And, like I've said in other posts, I'm still dealing with CA... 2 years after I let my CA employee go. Don't believe me? Try calling up the Franchise Tax Board... 2 hours of waiting, if you can get thru their automated phone system that is. Yes, there are much better business friendly states... CA is at the bottom of the barrel.
Of course having an external hard drive works... as long as you're confident enough to lie well.

Hopefully you paid cash, otherwise, they'll know when you bought it. That means no NewEgg. Damn.

Then, you just need to be comfortable saying that you bought a 1TB hard drive, encrypted the whole thing (despite the obvious speed hit it'll take, which you know if you're smart enough to use TC), just to throw a few gigs of porn on it. Hopefully you have a wife or significant other, since no single guy is going to encrypt his porn. Not sure how women treat their porn stashes; it just has to be believable. Also, make sure you don't load the porn on all at once - that'll be very, very suspicious. It'll have to look like an organically-grown stash.

Given all that, if you can lie well, you might be able to convince an investigator that you (as a suspect in something) have an innocent hard drive on your hands. And you should practice, because if the cops aren't convinced and can't force you to hand over the password (due to plausible deniability), you'll probably need to convince a jury.
The first implementation was also before twitters (see webintents.com)
Agreed. The more interesting question is: how will the others respond?

I see Google's attacks (especially +) as a big win for Microsoft. Only determined competition could cause the other players to look for partnerships with them. Ie: Nokia in mobile, Facebook in social (Skype just the beginning). Google is making Microsoft relevent again.
We will be setting up discussions soon. This is just the shim (and will evolve) for browsers that don't support the final full implementation.
> The best teachers I ever had were the ones who were unafraid to tell me exactly what I was doing wrong.

doesn't contradict with

> But as soon as someone says a software project is “retarded”, unfollow them.

anyway, the teacher should first earn the right to teach. if maradona tells me i am retarded at football, i'll listen. if a random jerk tells that, i'm gonna ask why and say go to hell if i dont like the answer
One of my all-time favorite mcsweeneys: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/e-mail-addresses-it-would...
Twitter could be called under140.com

My point you don't have to restrict yourself to money as the scale.

-site for videos under 10 minutes.
-site for pitches under 10 seconds (this has HUGE potential).
-site exclusively for shoes under size 10.
-github for music/ringtones (all under 10 seconds). allow editing/merging/mashing
-groupon type site where 9 people buy something and tenth one gets it for free.
None, if possible.
Galaxy S II, Samsung Breaks Record, Sells 3 Million 55 Days
Dashes in code variables seems pretty rare. Disallowed even in Python.
Klatwat...The search engine with curves
Ask HN: What is the best backend framework for working with js-heavy frontends?
So, I'm currently making my first app using backbone.js, and I love the experience! So far, I've only used mock data and done everything client side. Soon I'll have to choose a backend framework, and I know and love Django, but it doesn't seem like a great fit for a single-web-page backbone app. Does a specialized framework for such js-heavy apps even exist? If not, are there any that are better at it than others? Basically all I want to do is shuffle json data to and from the frontend, and store it.
Yes, this is how digital information works. If you give one person a copy, they can then give other people more copies.

The UI fluff will never change that.
"They wouldn’t offer you the insurance if you could, in expectation, come out ahead from it."

Agreed in principle, but maybe its not that simple:
1) there may be enough small claims to look linear, but large claims (the ones that cause lawsuits over medical fees) probably aren't linear
2) regulation gives the market friction and makes it non-ideal

competition and regulation has squeezed this industry to the point of competing solely on price. unlikely that margins are high, and quite likely that some of the small, cheaper players are to price even closer to expectation, won't be able to absorb a few non-linear events in a really unlucky timespan, but drives down market prices to below profitable anyway.

edit: he actually acknowledges this in the article: "...market efficiency suggests that their profits not be too obscene overall, which means the effective odds you’re offered shouldn’t be too skewed.... buying insurance may only be slightly stupid, not ear-full-of-cider stupid."
10 General Programming Tips for Programmers
Every now and then, i tend to listen quite a few tips from my Managers, colleagues, and friends. These tips not a bit general but it does relate to the programming.

...
Top Rebounding U.K. Stocks (Jul 4, 2011)
Is this also true for Samsung Google Nexus S? I intend to buy Samsung Google Nexus S in near future.
Right, I was referring to zero market share.
IP is a catch-all term for a variety of legal situations (patents, copyright, trade secrets, even non-compete). Your comment is a very nice legal theory, but I don't know if the courts decide things this way in every case.
It doesn't tell a complete picture to compare the absolute per capita costs without adjusting for buying power. For instance, looking up the cost of living between e.g. Houston and LA shows that cost of living is 60% higher in LA. Without some statewide adjustment added into the mix - I don't how one might conclude one state gov't is more efficient than another.
Good point.Can add Yahoo to the list too.
Google+ Now Open To Everyone
You haven't explained how they are different, what is the difference between a co-worker stealing your idea for personal gain and someone else in society doing the same?

In IP it's essentially about someone lying to society about the source of the idea.

The only difference I see is the organizational entities scope, but the ethic is the same.

IP is basically contractualized attribution.

Owning an idea as property is simply a societal contract that guarantee's you attribution for your idea.
I don't see the problem of this. It's something you decided to share.

Your example is pretty odd. Why would you log entries of your sexual activities which are not considered ok in your relationship?

Sure, it can have social implications but I don't feel going overprotective on this. You should know where you log stuff which you consider sensitive.
Or nobody sells your book at all. You give it away for free on the Internet, and you make money off speaking appearances.
6th? So that's probably a click through rate of 2% for people who search for that term. That's kinda crap.
Amazon won't give in in California because it has no reason to. California can only demand Amazon collect state sales tax if Amazon has a physical presence in California. Once there are no affiliates there isn't anything the state can do.

I suspect the reason they're collecting taxes in New York is they have a physical presence there and they don't want to give it up.
It might be that you could make a thorium reactor much safer than current light-water reactors for cheaper, but the laws regulating our nuclear power were written under the assumption that all reactors were light-water reactors - so in practice you would end up with all the fancy 100% reliable control systems needed to keep the positive feedback loops in a traditional reactor from blowing themselves up as well as the special metallurgy needed by Thorium reactors.
Because I stipulated that the contract was exclusive and time-limited. In other words, the assumption that every copy the pirate sold would have been sold by my current publisher is accurate-- hence the simplicity of the hypothetical.
We have built and OCR service that includes pretty cool image pre-processing feature to ensure high performance OCR. The actual OCR is done using corporate level software from ABBYY. We did this for an android app we are working on but have built the service in such a way that it could be run by another piece of software easily.

We will probably offer it out via a simple API but interested to know if we could also offer it via "Web Intents" - would it make sense? How could we do it?
Weight and bmi are information about you. Sex and other activies are information of your activies. It's simply grouped as it should be.
I'm not sure I understand point 1, about non-linearity. Is there any conceivable way that could cause the odds to shift in your favor?

Point 2 I think could only make the odds worse for you if it involves increased overhead for the insurance company.

Your last point is a good one, though. There's a bit at the end of the article about this:

Of course, “sucker” might be hyperbolic. After all, insurance
is ostensibly a competitive industry so market efficiency
suggests that their profits not be too obscene overall, which
means the effective odds you’re offered shouldn’t be too
skewed. Fundamentally, it’s an empirical question though,
hinging on claims paid vs. premiums collected. I could well
be proved wrong: buying insurance may only be *slightly*
stupid, not ear-full-of-cider stupid.
Don't joke- when I was at Startup Weekend NYC an MTV producer was there scoping out the concept as a reality show.

I'm pretty sure he found out that it wasn't as interesting and exciting as he'd imagined, though. Not enough Visual Basic GUIs.
I did read the article -- there isn't enough information to make a specific call... but given that the article is specifically about how Hemingway wasn't paranoid, I think we should assume he was right.

This isn't 4chan, read comments before replying :p
He isn't hiring 8th graders. What is the Texas equivalent of UC Berkeley, Stanford, CalTech, and UCLA?
This reminds me of when I was about 13 and the web was just starting to get noticed. I was saving all my bookmarks, categorizing them, and I put them on a free hosting account provided by my dialup ISP and shared the page with friends and family so they could easily find all the great stuff I came across on the new web.

Then Yahoo showed up...