skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Is your non-EU company collecting VAT from EU private customers?
Disclaimer: IANAL.

The EU has determined that non-EU companies providing digital goods/electronic supplied services to EU customers must collect VAT [1]. To do so, the company must register itself under a "special scheme" in one of the EU member states (such as the UK [2]), to which the company must file VAT returns for all it's EU private customers (VAT-registered businessess will handle it on their own on a reverse-charge scheme [3]). The country in which the company is registered is called a "member state of identification", and will be responsible for forwarding the collected tax to the country where the service was consumed [4].

AFAIK, there are still many questions around the fact that if you are not under EU's jurisdiction they can't enforce their rules on you, but things might get complicated when/if you decide it's time to have an office in the EU.

If your company is not based in the EU and is providing services to EU private customers, are you collecting VAT?

[1] http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/taxation/vat/how_vat_works/e-services/index_en.htm

[2] http://customs.hmrc.gov.uk/channelsPortalWebApp/channelsPortalWebApp.portal?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=pageOnlineServices_ShowContent&id=HMCE_CL_001460&propertyType=document

[3] http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/vat/managing/international/imports/importing.htm

[4] http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:32003R1798:en:NOT
Tell HN:  Heroku is Down (update: recovering as of 10PM PST)
10 Worst Book Covers In The History Of Literature
Prepare to be stunned, baffled, confused and probably offended!
> As if VCs were not "subsidizing" failed ventures and only picked winners all the time.

You are confusing risk-pooling with subsidizing. They are completely different.
Why sea steading is important to pursue?
yeah agree to this :) poorly structured and architected code written in any language will not scale..
>In my experience most Java developers don't even do that. They...

It's awesome how, on Hacker News, people whose job require them primarily write code in Java are some sort of stupid luddites ready to be easily generalized as the worst kind of programmer. Way to stay objective, guys.
The Mythical App Month
Are there other cyberpunk books that you have read?
Same here - Los Angeles, on Pico and Sawtelle.
IT's a great exit for the team, but being bought by Microsoft seems like the kiss of death for the actual product
I really enjoyed this video - both information dense, unique, and funny!
Forgot windows password? Reset By Yourself
Here’s guide to reset Windows admin password by yourself.
> [1]: http://www.raspberrypi.org/

If I had not witnessed that, I would never believe that it happened. The Raspberry Pi team fell for something that any kid who can write a python script should have known had the utility of a voodoo incantation? I'm floored.
I always thought status.net is an alternative to this?
http://status.net/
Pinterest, Palantir & harsh reality of San Francisco real estate
The children in question are from what he's said exceedingly small so far; possibly being thrown up on repeatedly and not having any idea which particular pattern of rocking is going to make your child stop crying this time is something he finds far more frustrating than you do - geeks often do feel that way because they want to be able to apply rational approaches to fixing things, whereas with such a small child that doesn't exactly work.

I really like children from about the age of 2.5-3 up, but before that they're ... impossible, not in a sense of "impossible to deal with" but in a sense of "this is so completely unmodelable logically that I am unable to it it into my headspace". I have absolutely no idea how I'm going to deal with this if I eventually decide to attempt to procreate.
Heroku down?
Fabulousjez cabal
Singer of the band Train own music was bad 
Zanger van de band Train eigen muziek was slecht - Na de Amerikaanse pop band Train was in 2001 wereldwijd doorbrak met de hit Drops Of Jupiter, zanger Pat Monahan merkte op dat het schrijven van liedjes het steeds gemakkelijker voor mij.
Yup. For that reason I stick with the WDK 7.1 (and target MSVCRT.DLL by linking with msvcrt_win2000.obj, and this works on XP). Yes this would not work for Python built with VS2008, but it would not require me to carry MSVCRxx.DLLs everywhere.
The AWS status page[1] is showing problems for EC2 East as of a few minutes ago. This <strike>might be</strike> is a more widespread issue.

EDIT: Various non-Heroku EC2-East-based sites (e.g. Quora) seem to be down as well, lending more evidence to this being an EC2/EBS outage.

1: http://status.aws.amazon.com/
Actually, that's how Facebook already is ... with your literal grandmother watching everything you post.
Here's the Heroko status site: https://status.heroku.com/
cloud.engineyard.com isn’t loading either.

edit: I meant literally the EngineYard website at that address. Some EngineYard websites were up and some were down, no doubt based on region.
My apps are down, and so is the heroku.com homepage.
For a lighter weight (and easier to set up) forwarding proxy that can be easily configured as anonymous, try tinyproxy.
Yup. Serving up error messages for me. Let's hope things are resolved a bit quicker than last time.
I agree that the usage in bootstrap is not intuitive. When I built http://jobs.eupathdb.org/ it took me a while to figure out what it did, and I worry that visitors to the site with small browser windows won't notice or understand the icon and thus won't realize there's additional pages they could visit.
Only for the Federal Reserve, who has a mandate to manage for a stable economy--so they are careful with their currency creation.

If every U.S. citizen could create dollars, we would indeed have hyperinflation.
>The code naturally distributed itself from about 10 files to over 100 files when creating ActionScript classes. ... I don’t know why but JavaScript programmers tend to put all of their code into few files.

Good JS programmers don't. Classes and inheritance work fine in JS.

>Just to be clear: You can write bunny-and-toaster code in ActionScript, too.

Right. This rant isn't about a bad language, it's about bad development practices.
Their current status is that they are investigating issues with their infrastructure provider: https://status.heroku.com/
Their uptime percentage is 99.97%, but I'm having a hard time fighting the recency effect that is telling me to get off the platform ASAP.
Just curious, what could shareholders do in a situation like this?
Javascript forces everybody to use the same language, while there are so many people who are religiously fanatical about their own little pet language. So, yes, to whomever it applies, go ahead and cross-compile from whatever you like to Javascript and let's put an end to the problem.
Not sure if it's related, but www.pythonanywhere.com is also down.
One of mine went down, and I'm seeing folks on Twitter saying the same. Definitely something going on.

*edit: Came up 12:42 AM ET.
Yes it is. Again. Damn it.
Cool, that may help create an opening for our startup. :-)
I really like my HD7 simply for the OS. The hardware is actually old and that's the unfortunate state for most of the Windows Phone "selection". The bigger problem is that all of the good phones are on one network.
At this point, the internet may as well be dead to me.
I'm hosted on EngineYard and my app is up and running just fine.
Agreed, sass (and compass) mitigate some of the css pain.
As I point out in the post, I'm not one for needless process... but beyond a certain threshold, I find predictability is needed.
parse.com also down
Manufacturing of tangible goods will become a commodity as 3-D printing becomes mainstream. In addition, many services that were verbally or physically contracted will be handled completely in virtual reality. Think home robots cutting hair, or auto-drive cars.

And as you point out, that's not even touching bio-hacking, which is also converging to digital/created lifeforms.

Call me cynical, but this article struck me as nerd candy. It's a totally-awesome idea: we finally get to really measure and experiment with economies! But in my research several years ago I was already uncovering hundreds of millions of dollars in a virtual goods black-market. People will take a character of yours and spend all of their time leveling him up and getting lots of goodies. Then you log in and take over. You pay them through some back channel. Or you leave an item where somebody else can pick it up, etc. No matter how you design a virtual world, there are plenty of ways to make economic transactions outside the walls. The illusion that you somehow have a god-like view and can see and observe everything of important is just that, an illusion. But I'm willing to wait a few decades for the economists to figure that one out :)

The virtual economy will merge along multiple different lines. I don't think there's any one answer here. There's no reason your WoW character can't be traded for BitCoin and used as a downpayment on a VR piece of real-estate that you then later sell at a profit for options on a futures market in some rare item coming out in a game next year. Thinking in a linear fashion can really handicap the possible solution sets out there.
This isn't Reddit, and that sort of behavior here is actively discouraged.
If you really like kids that young and you're not a parent, then you probably don't have much to worry about. I never understood the nonchalance of parents who had just been puked on. But when I found myself there I understood.
I call it the 'ideq' (pronounced eye-deck), a portmanteau of 'identity equals' because in my scheme background, equivalent (eqv?) is less strict than equal (eq?). The 'identity' part of the name, in programming context, means the address of the item.

So in order of strictness: equivalent < equal < ideq
Good Present For Fathers
They played games with us. We were always the winners, though they were very excellent. They held our small hands, taught us how to talk, how to walk safely. If we fell down, they would console us and encouraged us to have a try again.
I'd like to subscribe to your formula as well if you can tell me how to repeatedly delight customers :-)
Fringe-Seasons-1-3-DVD-Box-Set
The FBI teams up with a formerly-institutionalized scientist - who was performing experiments on the fringe of real science - and his son to investigate weird crimes that are seemingly part of a larger pattern, and may be connected with a global company called Massive Dynamics.Fringe DVD is an American science fiction television series created by J. J. Abrams, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci. The series follows a Federal Bureau of Investigation "Fringe Division" team based in Boston, Massachusetts under the supervision of Homeland Security.
knocked out some other stuff? gothamist/chicagoist/laist/all those other blogs are out.
More Heroku Widespread Outages
http://quora.com is down, too. Seems like an AWS outage.
This is a more widespread EC2/EBS issue: http://status.aws.amazon.com/
42floors.com is down.
I want a credit on my Heroku account. Paying $71/month for shit like this is stupid.
No games on Google+?
Colour me relieved - and this is coming from a game designer!
I would argue that the virtual economy is already eclipsing the material economy, just not in the way you think of it. Compare the trends in value creation and employment between U.S. manufacturing and U.S. financial services.

Modern finance is largely computerized or computer-assisted arbitrage based on asymmetric information...the "objects" being traded are virtual. And over the past 20 years it has greatly outpaced manufacturing in job and value growth.

And this does not even consider the growth in product design and software products and services, which are also virtual.

edit: I a word.
Have you tried asking for one?
A few of my us-east-1d machines are down.
I'm guessing TF2 and Dota 2?
Maybe for the database service, but dynos and workers are paid for by the hour, aren't they?
We have an unreachable instance in us-east-1b but others in that region are reachable
So is Parse.com, they just announced it is AWS related.
Unfortunately I'm a college pre-freshman without a couple grand free :P but I'll look into the Microchip PIC, thanks!
I just got up (it's morning in Israel), and a client of mine in the US with a major, mission-critical application was screaming (rightly so) that things are down.

We're already looking into alternatives -- perhaps not leaving Heroku altogether, but certainly not depending on them 100 percent. There's no way that we can entrust the business to something that can just catastrophically fail at any moment. I've been running my own servers for years, and they've never had such unpredictable issues.

I increasingly have to think that a few servers, on different providers, with the application deployed via Capistrano, will be more fault-tolerant than Heroku. At least, it seems that way right now.
Pocket also tweeted that they are having issues due to Amazon's issues.

https://twitter.com/pocket/status/213481664670732288
Microsoft Is Doing Its Own Tablet. How Do You Like Them Apples?
Investors should scream at stuff like this. There may be a time when they're completely incapable of making a key future acquisition because they overspent on crap like this.

This feels a bit presumptuous to me. Beyond playing into sticker shock, you haven't provided any evidence that they overspent or neglected to investigate other options.
Keep in mind that not everybody sees the same names for the same availability zones - your us-east-1b might be my us-east-1d
I don't have any particular advice for the question asked, but as an aside, checking the domain first is the worst thing to do.

Domain squatting is such a big deal that squatters purchase unresolved domain reports from ISPs, meaning that your phone's carrier is likely selling a list of all the domains that aren't registered that people are searching for. If you hesitate at all on acquisition, the domain might get scooped out from under you.

I buy impulse domains all the time, and recommend that you get a whois app for your phone. Also, check to ensure that the whois provider doesn't sell their vacant search list as well. I know that whois.sc doesn't, so I pretty much use them for everything, but I don't have my phone at hand to see what app I use there.

Lastly, when registering, many of the registrars do the same thing. Name.com doesn't, GoDaddy does, but those are about the only ones I can speak for off-handedly.
G+ has attracted a different audience than FB so I'm not surprised that games aren't catching on.
My AWS instances on us-east are unreachable :(
Seems like someone posted a link to a project that made self-hosting a previously Heroku hosted site simple, but I can't find it now...

...would be cool if there was a Linux package (or distro) that you could boot-up and then just change your git remote to and have your app up-and-running on your own hardware.
I confirm this. Was working on an app prototype and when I reloaded the page it couldn't find it.
Once again proof that "the cloud" isn't always the best solution. I am amazed that a cloud provider like Amazon can still suffer from outages considering the size of their cloud infrastructure and supposedly being decoupled, obviously not decoupled enough. Perhaps it's my lack of understanding of cloud hosting, but when issues like this present themselves it obviously shows that cloud hosting has a long way to go.
I wanted to get one of those, but even used they're still expensive. I think Ubuntu 12.04 or Fedora 17 will run acceptably. For Ubuntu, http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1984236 is the place to get help.
unsophisticated linguistic algorithms + large amounts of data >= sophisticated linguistic algorithms + only a small amount of data.

Or

What you think is sophisticated, isn't.

How would you demonstrate which it is?
It seems to be the elastic load balancers on AWS, can't blame Heroku this time.

My love hate relationship with Heroku continues...
Understanding the European Crisis Now
I couldn't see any red circles indicating an issue with EC2/EBS.
quora.com is down
Prices for non-Valve developed and published games are also determined by the individual publishers.

Unfortunately, that means that the real reason is "Because they can".
That's 99.97 for the last month.

Which is ridiculous, 9s for most services use years as standard. Of course if heroku did that they wouldn't look so good.
It's not just ELB.
are they on us-east-1?
FYI: Your 1b is not the same as other people's 1b: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#How_can_I_make_sure_that_I_a...

Various software used to hardcode 1a, so 1a received disproportionate load. Now, everyone's a-e is randomized among the "true" a-e, meaning that even if everyone hardcodes 1a, the load will still be evenly distributed.
How to Increase Email Conversion Rates
And yet we continue to throw everything on AWS...

You know there are OTHER data centers, right?
#AWSpocalypse
If you explained why you found Snow Crash mediocre, this could be an interesting post. As it is, though, it essentially has no content. If you had posted it on Twitter or Facebook, it would be a little bit better, since your friends could put it in the context of what they know about you and your taste in books. As strangers on the Internet, though, what are we to take away from the fact that you found Snow Crash mediocre? Sorry for the meta post critique, and I hope you don't take this the wrong way.
Half the startup world is offline right now, yet the AWS status page is all greens with one "info" notice about EBS (which I doubt is the issue here). I'm glad to have moved off a fully AWS stack back to my own servers over a year ago. My uptime, bills, and stress level are all much improved.
Oh you have nothing to hide? Well show me your genitals then.

Yeah, that's what I thought.
Look, I like the Atlantic too, but your username looks a bit weird - SEO rubs a lot of people on HN the wrong way.
What's the alternative? Go it alone and run your own infrastructure?
Pricing isn't about fairness, it's about maximising surplus for the seller. Businesses aren't a public service, they're in it to make money.

Valve will have pricing analysts that have studied the demand curve and concluded the higher price point may reduce demand but is nonetheless the point where marginal revenue from that geographical segment approaches some notion of marginal cost, thus maximising returns. With such a varied range of content and the ability to vary pricing dynamically through specials and discounts and bundles, they'll have collected a wealth of data about game price elasticity in different market segments.

As anyone who's studied economics 101 would say, it's all about willingness-to-pay and how that translates into price elasticity.

In a similar vein, it is 80% more expensive to prebook an Avis rental car at Melbourne airport (MEL) if you declare US residence vs EU residence. Yes, really, 80% more, try it.

This is explained by expectation, which translates directly into willingness-to-pay: US visitors are so used to renting a car that they don't explore the alternatives. European visitors on the other hand are astounded that there is no rail link into the city, and renting a car is at the bottom of the alternatives list.

In the game distribution world, it's likely that the US has more volume, more alternatives and more domestic competition, hence greater price elasticity, hence more aggressive pricing. Steam has strong differentiation and provides global access to products not otherwise marketed outside the US, and Valve are typical of a leading oligopolist, exploiting this position in their pricing strategy.
Ask HN: Any interesting problems/ideas to tap into?
Dear HN: I've been recently let go from my work where 70% of time I used to program web apps (mostly HTML5, PHP, jQuery, MySQL, etc). Therefore I have plenty of free time on my hands and would like to keep my hobby (programming) going with some interesting ideas. Can you share/help?

edit: of course ideas that are doable for an average programmer :) and the only thing stopping you from doing those at your own is a lack of time.
It seems like the game would need some sort of non-utopian conflict-driven backdrop to create enough desire for whatever products for there to be an interesting economy.
Thanks for the advice! I'll start downloading and playing around with the software - I'll start with Hello World and keep going up from there. I may end up PMing you later on with more specific questions if that's ok. Thanks again!
EBS is a deep, dark black magic that time has shown doesn't actually work.
I've used it, and it worked well, but I don't really have a need for social video chat in my life that Google Hangouts doesn't already solve.

We use Hangouts for work meetings and such, and while I don't use it for much of anything else, I just didn't see that Airtime offered anything above and beyond, except Facebook integration.

That isn't to disparage Airtime, it's really quite slick, honestly, and looks like a good acquisition for FB if they're trying to get into video.
The circle is green with a little "note" on it.

"8:50 PM PDT We are investigating degraded performance for some volumes in a single AZ in the us-east-1 region."
SSH - A Miniature VPN
Or anything that needed to be run in parallel.
Dont overreact... heroku is using AWS which is down for many other sites right now other than heroku. This is an EBS issue that is occurring.
The author has failed to put any effort into trying to prove his assertion that the language is at fault. I've seen bad code in all sorts of languages. A rewrite will naturally produce cleaner code, so I don't see how this proves anything about the language itself.

Despite this, there is some truth to the assertion that JavaScript projects can be unwieldy. The main issue with large scale JavaScript development is the lack of a built in module system. The naive style of using a global namespace and script tags is prone to resulting in difficult to maintain code. Thankfully there are frameworks that can solve this issue.
It looks like Amazon are worse at reporting their outages than Heroku...
How I made $1000 exploiting a broken market (2008)
Definitely an EBS issue. Our (EBS backed, Heroku hosted) DB was returning queries more and more slowly leading up to the outage.
Powerset had a ton of hype, then they were acquired and then they seemingly died.

Never heard anything about them since.
I know AWS EC2 does support multiple global regions and within each region multiple availability zones. You're supposed to host your application across more than one AZ if you want good fault tolerance. Not sure if Heroku uses this though.
Other datacenters can go down, too. In many cases, the complexity of running an application across different platforms (say, AWS + Rackspace Cloud) might not be worth it.
google searches for "migrating off heroku tutorial" just spiked.
We've distributed our machines between availability zones. We lost a machine with the latest outage. Application impact to our users? None.

No point bemoaning a lack of decoupling, if you don't actually use it.
I wondered this briefly as well, but can assure you that it is not. They resolve almost instantly for me, so I fortunately don't have to spend 10 minutes wondering if something is just noise.
Doesn't look like it, their IP is owned by a German company.
That's odd, because I thought the error occurred in my application. No? You sure? Just look at this error message, "An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served."

Oh, so you mean the error message aren't accurate? That even though the error is actually above Heroku, a much greater failure, that my application will still be blamed, and that's what my users and bosses are going to see?

And you're saying this is going to happen multiple times per month?

Well shit, and here I thought Heroku was an improvement. I guess rapid scalability and beautifully integrated add-ons doesn't make up for compromised stability. I mean, if it's not going to work, who cares?