skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can entirely understand why Stripe doesn't deal with taxes. They're insane. I was involved in implementing a site that sold off-site discount parking reservations near airports and dealing with taxes was certainly no fun. And this was restricted just to the US. There is a national consortium of states that makes getting state sales tax slightly easy.... but all the services that offer the ability to look up tax rates didn't cover the service we were offering, parking reservation. So we had to investigate the rates ourselves... and it's a good thing we did. Some counties or municipalities have created special taxes to apply specifically to this kind of service in order to make things more expensive so that parking at the airport isn't such a terrible deal.... oh and those laws don't stay static, of course. You have to keep on top of them, and modify your code/data/whatever when new laws take effect or old laws are repealed.

The most fun was when an area in Texas passed one of these laws taxing parking near airports (even if that parking is offered by a hotel or some other established business... if it has shuttle service to the airport, it must be taxed) but all the various people offering parking through our site didn't want to comply with the law, so they wanted us to not charge the tax to customers! Worse, the business types wanted to actually cater to these scofflaws. I refused to implement it though, because that's just stupid. We'll collect the tax, if the clients don't want to actually pay the municipality, that's their business... but we do have to keep track of who charges it, how much, when those rates change, etc... it's a a bit of a pain, and even the services dedicated to tracking this kind of stuff are not comprehensive.
There are limits to what you can accomplish by putting anything in and over your ears. It's about 37NRR. That's because even if you completely block your ears, the bones of your head still transmit a lot of sound. To make it really quiet you need a helmet.

I'd try good earplugs first, earplugs and your headphones next, earplugs and noise protection ear muffs next.

A simple $25 test is to get Laser Lite foamies and Leightning L3 earmufs. That's the best you can do without a helmet in actually blocking noise. If that's good enough you can optimize for comfort/size/style from there. If not, then try tricking yourself by pumping white noise through headphones on top of earplugs.

Personally, on planes I use http://www.howardleight.com/earplugs/laser-lite foam earplugs. 32 NRR. Any drug store or Amazon in bulk. You can still hear people, but even crying infants don't bother you much. And they get rid of engine noise. Most comfortable earplugs I've found. You need to learn how to put them in properly. Good enough NRR that when you open your mouth it gets noticeably louder.

When shooting I double up and wear MSA Sordin Supreme Pro-X upgraded with gel seals over earplugs. Get the neckband version. http://www.srstactical.com/communications/electronic-ambient... Sordins are 20 NRR by themselves. Probably 35NRR over earplugs.

For indoor handgun shooting I like Howard Leight Leightning L3. http://www.amazon.com/Howard-Leight-R-03318-Leightning-Shoot... 30NRR and extremely comfortable. Probably 37NRR over earplugs. They are big enough to cover a lot of area around your ears. When doubled-up you can't understand other people and can barely tell they are talking.
> official OS updates (which Samsung is pretty good at on their major phones)

On what planet? The Galaxy S II was certainly a major phone (just one short generation older than current) and yet it's still officially on 2.x. The only good thing to say about Samsung's OS updates is that the CyanogenMod community behind their phones is diligent.
Romney's flip-flopping was only one reason for his loss. Obama's ground game played a much bigger role, IMO. Rather than trying to woo mercurial independents, Obama simply used the changing demographics to his advantage to turn out a lot of new voters who simply hadn't voted in previous elections. Romney's ground game was much weaker because Obama had been developing his over the last 4 years and didn't have to waste time and money on a long primary campaign.

In swing states like FA and CO, he got many US-born Hispanics who hadn't previously voted (many of whom recently became adults) registered and got them to vote for him by telling them that Romney would deport their foreign-born family members who are in the country illegally. As explained by the NYT[0]:

> In Chicago, the campaign recruited a team of behavioral scientists to build an extraordinarily sophisticated database packed with names of millions of undecided voters and potential supporters. The ever-expanding list let the campaign find and register new voters who fit the demographic pattern of Obama backers and methodically track their views through thousands of telephone calls every night.

> That allowed the Obama campaign not only to alter the very nature of the electorate, making it younger and less white, but also to create a portrait of shifting voter allegiances. The power of this operation stunned Mr. Romney’s aides on election night, as they saw voters they never even knew existed turn out in places like Osceola County, Fla.

In Ohio and Pennsylvania, Obama partially relied on the black vote. These are people who are guaranteed to vote for him, so the main issue was getting them to vote in the first place. He set up neighborhood election stations in black community gathering places like barbershops and beauty salons, getting people to register their friends and family and encourage them to go to the polling stations on the day of the election. In fact, the voting rate among blacks was higher than among whites in Ohio - an amazing coup.

Another key constituency in Ohio and PA was the auto workers and other blue collar voters, mostly whites. This one was pretty easy - Obama bombarded the airwaves with TV ads portraying Romney as a corporate asset-stripper who cackled merrily all the way to the bank as he shipped blue collar jobs to Mexico and China. Obama also reminded them about the auto bailout he engineered, which saved many blue collar jobs in those parts of the country.

In Ohio and PA, as well as places with low minority populations, like Wisconsin and Iowa, Obama relied on the female vote. He associated Romney with Senate candidates like Richard Mourdock and Todd Akin, who made controversial remarks about abortion and rape. I believe Paul Ryan made some similar comments as well. He played up the angle that Republicans want to tell women what they can and can't do with their bodies.

0: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/08/us/politics/obama-campaign...
the "kid" seems to be on windows, which ha a crappy cli in a non posix env , which makes it even more difficult to use with a cli...
maybe YOU need to stop bitching...
I've found that dealing with certain situations/people is not worth any price that a person might pay.

There are people who are just unbelievably unreasonable, mistrusting, and impossible to satisfy. These types can take you off course, reduce morale, harm your reputation, and generally almost "break" your company. As a small boot-strapped, but profitable company, I would rather expend our efforts on finding and supporting good lower-paying customers who are happy with our service and with whom there is a mutually beneficial relationship.

As they say, "money isn't everything", but even to the extent that one focuses solely on money, it's not always more profitable longer-term, even with a customer who's willing to pay an outsized price.
I'm confused by the assertion that Hive was "much slower than using MySQL with the same dataset." The author makes this claim, and then provides a table that shows Hive performing ~50% better than MySQL on a variety of datasets (none of which really flex the muscle of Hadoop in operating on data sets going beyond single digit GB).

Regardless, Impala sounds like it could be pretty sweet!
Never thought of it that way! I was watching on the news and wondering where the hell those places were though. I've never even sniffed a legitimate line when I've voted. I have always voted in highly Democratic areas.
Romney wasn't conservative enough for them

I hear this a lot, usually from social conservatives trying to salvage their seat in the Big Tent after costing the party the Presidency in what should have been a slam-dunk election. It doesn't make any sense. Obama has governed as a centrist, not the wild-eyed leftist that he's been portayed as. People who voted Republican in this election did so because they shared the personal goal of getting rid of Obama by any means necessary.

More conservatism in Romney's platform could not possibly have helped.
We want everyone who has a reason to use the product to be able to get it and use it for free (as in beer and speech). As companies grow and operations become more important, we'll be there to provide paid support. It's actually a great business model because you don't have to hire a really expensive enterprise sales team (you still need a sales team, but it mostly has to handle inbound requests).

We're also looking into launching services, which is a great revenue stream for people who prefer to pay for convenience of not having to deal with operations at all.
People build self-service businesses because they don't want to build a sales team and/or be able to keep their price point competitive.

If everyone emailed in wanting pre-sales and discounts the price would go up because there would need to be a sales team to service the requests.

I'm telling you that as someone who runs such a business that has both self-service and sales-led products that are priced differently (partly) for that reason. (that business is hosting the OP site as it happens)
Please stop using json as a data model. I have no idea how to represent dates, or timestamps, or colors, or any other unsupported data type.
What's wrong with trying to build a Twitter?

Twitter was instrumental to communication during the Arab Spring. In general, it has served as a very nimble and functional communication medium that has, in some cases, surpassed the speed and breath of news networks for covering events in real time.

Open and powerful platforms like Facebook and Twitter aren't just outlets for wasting your time, but can be used in meaningful and impactful ways. The game is far from over - we still need people to build products like Twitter .
New capture-the-flag AI competition from aigamedev.com
He said as much in an interview. I'm pretty sure it was when he was on the Daily Show, but I could be misremembering.

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-november-7-2012/nate-s...
Quality hilarity aside, how hard is it to email a marketing team and ask for a version that isn't fuzzy? I'd be pretty bothered if I worked at one of these companies and this is how I was represented.
Thanks for the reply Jed, yeah I understand your decisions and some of the advantages of going with CoffeeScript. I will definitely keep an eye on the project going forward. Just a quick thought:

- Maybe better syntax highlighting of the core elements on the website might help with new potential users.
Android sales are strong in China but that might change as despite Android being open-source, over-the-air updates are a potential risk.

Thus it's quite likely that home-grown solutions will be encouraged to grow market share, at the expense of Google. Just recently, Acer started selling a phone based on Aliyun, a fork of Android backed by Alibaba.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliyun_OS
No use for CSS? CSS not powerful enough to express styling? Huh?

You want to get rid of CSS for styling and replace it with something else for styling? Wha?

The processors you speak of output CSS. They do nothing that cannot already be done with CSS, they just make it easier. Plus, when using javascript to apply styles you are still using CSS, you are just applying it in a different way.
Best Free Online Photo Editors
They even took down the country specific access points - including Google.com.HK. Have they ever done that in the past?
> But scale does funny things to good intentions.

This is great feedback, thanks! You really nailed the ways that fraud burns both good people and good companies. What's the right thing to do, then?

In publishing a detailed report about this incident, I hope to establish a pattern of adjudicating these things in public:

https://www.gittip.com/about/fraud/2012-11-05.html

Everyone who was affected by this incident is listed right there on that page. If someone wants to make the case that they're a false positive, they are free to do so, and we can all decide the case together.

I think that's different than PayPal.

> You will wind up with insufficient funds to staff an adequate support desk.

Gittip is a community-managed resource, not a closed product. Right now I'm the support desk. As we scale, the support desk will be staffed by members of the community, chosen by the community, as the community has need.

> You will wind up with bogus users trying to do shady things with your service, and they will be very convincing and make you want to help them.

If they ask for help they'll be doing so in public, and I'll have you to help me spot them. Many eyeballs, etc. For example, here's a brand new GitHub account asking for details of Gittip's anti-fraud measures and making recommendations:

https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/364#issueco...

https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/357#issueco...

https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/347#issueco...

https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/357#issueco...

Waddya think? Fraudster? :^)

> And you will wind up with legitimate users who love your service and want to use it the way you've designed it but end up tripping your heuristic.

This has already happened. Half the accounts I originally suspended last week, I ended up reinstating with an apology:

https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/329#issueco...

Again, that was done in public, as is the matter of recovering stolen money that was passed off on innocent bystanders:

https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/371

> if you do that to the wrong user it will quantitatively affect your business and the public perception of your organization.

Again, Gittip is a community-managed resource, not a business. The wrong user can say very little that I wouldn't welcome them to say publicly.
Analysis of Facebook's interaction between the PTAT value and Organic Reach
US Air Force cancels Reusable Booster System
http://www.usatoday.com/election-2012/results/

Broken here. Chrome and FF.
Responsive design: 4 News Sites Weighed Pros/Cons, and went for it.
Here's that article:

http://www.inc.com/magazine/201206/jason-fried/huge-accounts...
For most of Microsoft's lifetime, I've wondered why MS didn't just build a unix-style command line into Windows, providing a major upgrade to the ridiculous DOS. As a Windows dev, I always downloaded unix utilities for DOS and the first thing I put on any new Windows box is Cygwin. After decades of the same ol' DOS, it's obvious that MS just doesn't care about the command line.

One reason I switched to Mac for Web dev is the tightly integrated unix command line. I love it, but I don't think Apple does. I don't think the integrated unix CLI is any emblem of enlightenment on Apple's part; it's a historical accident. A company that believes that even granting users a "files and folders" view is giving them too much power (iOS) is no stalwart defender of the command line interface. As we make the Windows -> Metro, Mac -> iOS shift, the time may come when any command line access to a commercial OS is part of a "developer tools" package available only to "registered" developers who have "signed zee papers."

I've only used Linux servers for years. I wonder if I'll end up a few short years from now with some sort of hackers' Android laptop, built with Apple-quality hardware/software integration by somebody like Samsung for the niche of people who want real computers instead of media purchasing appliances.
Yup. In my experience, designers don't want to explore proportions beyond that of the standard fit model. So if you don't have a "normal" (not necessarily average) body as determined by the designer, you're outta luck. And if you're plus size, you have to be the right kind of plus size.
Absolutely. Even the StreamLined Sales Tax Governing Board rules are not comprehensive. They have many different product categories, but they do not have them all. They pay various companies to provide sales tax data to Internet businesses, but the companies I've dealt with basically do the minimum possible and aren't terribly interested in improving. The bottom line is that if you want to be safe around taxes, you have to hire a lawyer and have them investigate the tax situation with your particular category of product in all the different areas it's going to be offered. Really, that's not something I envision anyone doing for free. It's not something you could just do once. Podunk, UT might have a city council meeting next week decreeing a 27% tax on your product/service with penalty of death if you do not charge the tax to your customers.
Because it's a signal to all these debtors that there's a significant segment of the population that doesn't want to play by the old rules. It shows that they can count on their fellow citizens to help them out when they are down on their luck, the very definition of social capital.
The Supreme Court of Canada is extremely well respected by a majority of Canadians and this ruling is a very good example of the reason why it is so well respected.
Third-Round Report of the SHA-3 Cryptographic Hash Algorithm Competition
MIT Kerberos GSS-API with CyaSSL Now Available for Android
The author should consider the following people: Grace Hopper, Sandy Lerner, and many others. But the main question is: WWtWD? (What Would the Woz Do?)
I have used something similar since 2007 ( http://amix.dk/blog/post/19199 ), I only use it on client side to generate DOM elements and generally it's a nice approach (I like this much better than constructing HTML via innerHTML). The general idea for this is from MochiKit and I think they were inspired by stan (that ships with Nevow framework - - which seems to be dead now).
This is wonderful. The main challenge for this project will be not techical, but indeed getting the message accross. Wish you all the best.
That's the composition of the board of that (rogue?) company. But YC partners decide who presents at YC demo day and who doesn't, so it's not a decision for the board to make.
Speech Recognition Breakthrough for the Spoken, Translated Word
Can I provide an intelligent sharding algorithm in place of a naive partition by primary key? I always get into trouble encoding things into primary keys eventually.
Yes, but they came out of bankruptcy and are profitable again.

See https://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NYSE:GM.

For the nine months ending in September they increased their cash position by 7.2 billion if I'm looking at their financials correctly. Their net income for the last quarter was 1.8 billion.
Transcend goes after Eye-Fi releases Wi-Fi memory card
Don't forget to require them to pay in advance.
The author is not suggesting that Stripe handle taxes, he is suggesting that Stripe have an option within plans to handle different tax rates, rather than having to create a separate plan for each district that has a different tax rate, and the ability to have that calculated in to the total charge.
If the Chinese want to block a US software company from doing business in China by blocking access to them, then the US should impose tarifs on any software outsourcing to China with stiff penalties for any companies trying to circumvent it.
JSON support in Postgres is currently limited to a validated plain text field, it doesn't let you efficiently query inside the json object.
Straightforward advice, just copy and paste into the right place.

And a good reminder that hooks can be used for lots of things. I like using "say" to read a joke or something after I cap deploy
It can also be written like that, but the Google Japanese IME, which orders options according to the frequency with which they occur in the pages they index, gives 「わかり」 as the first option.

One common mistake made by over-eager foreign learners of Japanese is to try to write everything they can in kanji. In actuality, a lot of stuff is left in kana.
Asus offers early Nexus 7 buyers £25
Worth mentioning the patent was set to expire in Canada in ~18 months anyways. The US patent was set to expire in early 2012 but coverage appears to have been extended to 2019. The bigger resulting effect here might be from the establishment of a precedent of the wording that the court is expecting in patent filings. In the full ruling below, the main missing disclosure I can see is:

"Only sildenafil, the subject of Claim 7 and the active compound in Viagra, had been shown to be effective in treating ED at the time of the patent application. Although the patent includes the statement that “one of the especially preferred compounds induces penile erection in impotent males”, the patent application does not disclose that the compound that works is sildenafil, that it is found in Claim 7, or that the remaining compounds had not been found to be effective in treating ED."

The full ruling is here http://www.canlii.org/en/ca/scc/doc/2012/2012scc60/2012scc60...
> In your example, a range get on the primary key, the query would touch one copy of each shard of the table.

But shouldn't it be fewer than "each shard"?

Let's say the range is 3 < PK < 7. If all PKs in that range only lives in 2 shards (out of a total of say 10 shards) then the query should only be run in those 2 shards, no? Or will all 10 shards still be touched by the query?
That was a great talk, and well worth listening to. I think it also highlights why we find your blog posts interesting -- because you are an engaging speaker with that mysterious "charm" quality.

I feel that the HN post title is missing much needed air-quotes around "That'll Never Work" since the talk is all about ignoring the internal voice that tells you to give up.

While I've only done much less impossible things, I have found that the act beating the impossible helps give confidence for future tasks. You realize that things aren't as impossible as they seem at first glance.
We're already working on something in this direction.

alex @ rethinkdb
> Despite Android being open-source, over-the-air updates are a potential risk.

If Verizon can control OTA updates, then no doubt the Chinese government can.

From the Chinese govt's POV, Android is preferable to iOS, where they have no control.
I enjoyed using Sage for my linear algebra/probability class. Has all the light weight math functions built in, but you still have to write enough code to actually understand the problem you're solving.
As callmevlad said, demo day itself would be a slightly different situation than whether the money is returned. My guess is that since if the money is not returned, YC remain active (if reluctant) investors, and the $150k convertible note offer was made with the tacit understanding that demo day would happen, they will be allowed to participate.
I'm a fan of ConEmu[1]. I've only been using it for a month or so now but it's pretty good.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/
If YC strongly suggested that the company be dissolved, why would they invite them to participate in their demo day in March?
Google China holdings?
Maybe it's time to let it go... 7 years ago is the dark ages in browser time. You are clearly the Adrian Monk of web users :)
Interesting, but correlation does not imply causation. Yet, unfortunately, that is the first response many will have to reading this.
Qualcomm overtakes Intel in market capitalization
It's not about explanatory power, it's about patterns of thinking. Americans call each other "silly" all the time, but I'm guessing German's don't. Even though it's possible, it takes more effort, and doesn't come to mind as readily.