skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wrote Shopify's current US Sales Tax calculation system. Here are a few interesting tidbits:

* There are over 23,000 distinct tax rates in the US. Most of these can be nicely pigeonholed as 'State', 'County', or 'Municipal'. Some can not.

* There are a handful of cities with multiple municipal tax rates. Most of these straddle counties. A small handful of them, perplexingly, don't.

* Most states charge tax based on the three(ish!) rates applicable at the sale's destination. Several charge based on the origin.

* Some states charge tax on shipping. Some states charge tax on shipping and handling. Some both, some neither.

* Three states only charge county and municipal level taxes if the destination is located in a county that the business has a phyiscal presence in. Of these three, one does something subtly different still.

* Figure the 5-digit zip code is sufficient to identify the applicable rates at a given address? Nope. You actually need to geolocate the street address to get it right sometimes.

* There are a nearly-unfathomable depth and breadth of exceptions on a type-of-goods basis (selling clothing in New York? It's exempt if it's under $110, but only from State tax, and additionally county tax if the destination is in one of 14 specific counties, unless it's in the cities of Norwich or Oneida, in which case the County tax applies again.)

This astounds me as a Software Developer and a Canadian (we have vastly simpler Sales Taxes). How they expect Joe Merchant to be able to charge all these taxes correctly without radical simplification (and unification) of tax codes is beyond me. Very far beyond me.

--EDIT--

After reading the full bill, it's not as bad as I previously thought (logistically, ignoring the more-taxes discussion). However, it is still pretty bad.

Salient points:

* One central authority per state means at most ~50 points of contact. This is better than 23,000, but not exactly good.

* Doesn't apply to merchants doing less than $1M/yr in business.

* States are required to provide a database of rates and boundaries. As worded in the bill, it's unclear whether this means zipcodes or bounding coordinates. Geolocation is not a cheap service at scale.

* Each state is required to provide software to calculate rates for a given sale. Given government, this will likely be a desktop Windows app that does not integrate cleanly with any server-side infrastructure, nevermind the fact that there will be 50 likely-distinct pieces of software.

On the other hand, with states actually being encouraged to publish their rates in a freely-available machine-friendly format for once, perhaps we'll see some startups pop up around this problem to ease the pain.
You're right that it matters very little if you can deduce the exact complexity right off the bat. But it DOES matter is if you can tell if an algorithm is closer to n^2 than log n. OR identify that n is low enough that it doesn't matter.

> Besides a O(N log N) algorithm over 10 or 100 items is not going to cause any issues. In the case of your standard CRUD application that's what you are going to be dealing with.

I think you mean n^2. n log n is generally considered pretty decent.

But you're wrong, I know from experience that simple CRUD apps can suffer from grindingly poor performance, caused by, let's say, optimistic assertions of data volumes.
I showed a friend this, and he pointed out the awesome quasi-gonzo http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n03/rebecca-solnit/diary.
Here's the vote on today's bill: (http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_c...)

Boxer: yea

Feinstein: yea

Silicon Valley sucks at politics, even our own senators are selling us out.
Wasted on cops, and fire and teachers and roads.
This cap also has to do with physical limitations of signal propagation times and the limitation of memory as we know it today. Even if external memory wasn't the bottleneck annihilating the purpose of a faster clock, internal registers need a certain time to retain electricity. Silicon is only so speedy! More compact architecture (1nm dies would be nice, right?) could allow for quicker propagation times and thus faster clock speeds.
I kind of like that my 3-year-old laptop doesn't seem like an ancient, sluggish piece of junk compared to the current models...
Much like any conference.

However most conferences are good for networking, not sure about a very specialized dropbox one however...
OpUSA Threatens Banks, Government - 'We Will Wipe You Off the Cyber Map'
Security experts say that OperationUSA, a coordinated online attack against banking and government websites slated for May 7, is a serious threat.
Wikipedia is a good start here.
They don't expect that at all. This bill requires tax code simplification before a state may tax out-of-state sellers. There will only be one taxing entity per state, with one database of tax rates and boundaries, and one nationwide rule for determining the locality of the tax.

It's still going to be complicated (up to 50 returns, 50 possible audits, and in the worst case 50 subtly different definitions of what's taxable), but nothing like what you're describing.
>Eat three meals a day

damn...
What about Udacity.com - there are a few CS courses on there including one on algorithms. It might be a good starting point.
Running on Windows on the developer's workstation, no less...

Let me quickly clarify that I'm not anti-Windows, it was just a double-take to see it used as a workstation for security research like this (though I'm using the word 'research' lightly). Strange article all around, lots of it caught my eye.
It will likely come bundled with the credit card software they're already paying for.
>It really isn't. Unless you have a card without a driver (exceedingly rare, though it's not uncommon to need a recent kernel to use recent hardware) ALSA pretty much Just Works. For complex features like streaming sound over the network you need PulseAudio, which due to its complexity takes more configuration and setup, but that's done out of the box on a fair number of distros.

So, in other words, it really is. All you said was just rephrasing the problem as solved.

For one, what's "exceedingly rare" is not getting any sound at all. That doesn't mean you get to enjoy all the features of your soundcard (from mixing panels to 3D audio and such). Or that it work without tinkering in ALL programs and across desktop environments.

There's also the issue of more professional sound work, which will be a world of pain. Getting any pro, multi-channel soundcards to work and such.

For anything else than basic sound playing, from recording a podcast, to streaming, to using a DAW etc, here be dragons.
What would you guys do with this domain? Anyone got any good ideas
Fair enough, but at the very least, $20 (or even $60) a month sure beats the hell out of paying $2000 in one go, in my opinion.

Or to put it the way Adobe should've thought of it:

Assuming $50 a month (I pay more atm) over the 10 years since I quit school, Adobe could've made 6000 dollars on me.

Instead, they made 0.

(up until they launched creative cloud, that is)
I bet more regulations will fix it.
I can understand and respect that decision. :^)

I actually really love the way that Balanced is finding its own definition for what an open company is. It's so much more powerful than if we always agreed on everything. And I hope you know you can call me privately any time you think I've truly gone too far, and we'll find a solution together.
"You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.

Interestingly, it seems to have pegged me mostly correctly. I've lived all my life in and around Atlanta. Most people notice a Southern accent on me, but I definitely don't have a Classical Southern accent.
""North Central" is what professional linguists call the Minnesota accent. If you saw "Fargo" you probably didn't think the characters sounded very out of the ordinary. Outsiders probably mistake you for a Canadian a lot."

Good, I am Canadian. :)

One minor nit though, I thought Mary and marry sound the same and merry sound different, but there was no option for that, so I chose "all three different".
Apple looking for deeper iOS integration into cars
It was a Thinkpad from around 1999, and my ethernet stopped working after an Ubuntu upgrade, sometime around kernel 2.6.8 if I remember correctly. I'm sure there'd have been a fix if I'd found the right forum or IRC channel, but having lived through Gentoo and Debian installs, by then I had simply stopped caring. Apple was making fully functional Unix desktops, which is all I really cared about, so I went and got one and that was that.
Keep private things private, the rest can be transparent. Anything you say to a reporter should fall into the second category. Answering a TC reporter's questions in an open recording has far more marketing value than just answering questions.
Home cleaning sydney 
home cleaning sydney
home cleaners sydney
cleaning services sydney
I can understand the outrage these displaced people feel. Especially for the hard working lower class.

It is not displacement for a public works project. It is pure class displacement with a rub-it-in-their-face quality about it.
The more funny thing is this one I get : http://pixelstech.net/images/application/user_image/sonic000...
Don't forget that even though en.wikipedia is the most important, each language version is independent. Some of those have distinct characteristics.

Many things are carried off from the largest one, but for example governance can include unique features (e.g. Arbitration Committee, which is rare). Each have their own established practices in deletions. For example En.wikipedia has merit-based deletion, where you suggest support or delete with an argument and it hopefully leads to a consensus. In fi.wikipedia only the numbers in a community-wide vote matter. There are also some optional quality assurance methods (Flagged revisions).

For example De.wikipedia has a very developed, almost professional Wikimedia foundation chapter behind them. They run several development projects and global services on behalf of the whole community. Flagged revisions was piloted there. They also have a distinct look due to strict guidelines on image use. Unlike most, they don't allow fair use pictures.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Flagged_Revisions
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Arbitration_Committee

Tektok @ Economist: "Wikipedia is run by those who have the most time to waste and energy to outlast others." Unfortunately this is not far from the truth.
Microsoft brings Google war to Kansas
"Securitize" was the wrong word for me to use, as no uninvolved third party is coming into the picture.

The difference between owning and renting is already a matter of degrees, particularly once you add rent control, mortgages, condos and HOAs into the mix. The renter already has the right to deprive the owner of the property value increase, this is just creating a legal framework to give it back for cash. I'm imagining it would only be part of the value of increase in rent over the rent-control limit, not all of it.

It would increase market price rents modestly, as you're essentially depriving landlords of the power to shake off bad tenants by finding rent control loopholes or waiting them out, but you could offset that by creating a process for voluntary tenant buyouts.

Buyouts are currently very difficult to carry out legally even if the tenant wants to leave and the landlord would rather replace them with someone paying more, leaving the two parties stuck together in an unhappy marriage as an unintended side effect of the way the laws work.

In response to your edit: Of course you'd pay for them, new rentals are market-priced (then locked into rent control until that tenant leaves), aren't they? It's got one-sided risk like any option but those aren't hard to price. It's in everyone's interest to increase the future value of the rental unit.
I've been using Linux for about 2-3 years now, and in every distribution I've used (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Arch), sound has "just worked".
At a job interview, after shaking hands, say to the interviewer "Before we start, I would like to ask you a question, would that be OK?" If s/he says "no", leave. If "yes", then ask "as part of your interview will you be asking me to solve tricky problems on the spot?" and if they respond "yes", then leave.

You get to decide what to put up with in your life. You should be your biggest advocate.
> Not all features are installed locally and available as a stand-alone.

Yes they are. Obviously online storage/sharing features require network access to function, but otherwise all features are available without network access.

> Downloading the binaries that are installed locally is not zero-cost/zero-time; anyone whose primary access is, say, 3G is going to waste the better part of a month's allotment on installation and upgrades.

I agree they should have a physical purchase option for people without appropriate internet access (Apple had to do the same thing with their last update that was download only at first). Updates would be the same in either case, no matter what version you have currently you don't get mailed DVDs containing new camera profiles when they are released...

> And >180 days disconnected (or only having hyper-expensive satellite access) is not as far-fetched as you might think; many of the fine-art landscape photographers I know pretty much make their livings on that kind of a schedule.

I completely agree and apparently Adobe is willing to work with you if you are off network for long periods of time (by calling customer service). It seems like a pain, but this is the future of software so if this is your work schedule you should prepare for lots of headaches.

The pricing seems off to me for a suite where most people only use a few of the apps (personally a 2-app package would be ideal, I could care less about 90% of Adobe's apps). Despite the name, Adobe doesn't get the "cloud" and I am hoping a competitor who does pops up.
I'm interested to understand your definition of 'bad developer'. It seems, from reading the article, that your definition of a 'bad developer' is someone who cannot get hired (Please correct me if I'm mistaken).

Maybe you could ask yourself what your definition of a 'good developer' is. I'm sure we all have our unique take on what that means. For me, communication and being able to work with others is a key part of being a good developer.

I think it's good to have a better definition of a 'good' and 'bad' developer. I don't mean the dictionary.com definition, just a definition that you are satisfied with.

From reading your article, those terms are not well-defined and the fact that you weren't hired could be reasons other than your technical proficiency.
These aren't left wingers in the liberal left winger sense. Practically everyone in San Francisco is a liberal left winger. These are militant left wingers (the photos of the event seem to suggest this, based on my experiences in the neighborhood). I would not be surprised if there were more than a few violent folks in the crowd.

Keep in mind what happened the last time there was an anti-gentrification protest in the Mission. Ostensibly it's a peaceful gathering to march against gentrification. It turned into smashing windows of local independent businesses and massive vandalism.

Every leftist protest or demonstration in San Francisco seems to have a bad habit of turning violent. This isn't to say that everyone there is violent, or that their cause isn't worthwhile, but rather that if you see these marches or protests, the Black Bloc is always close at hand, so I'd watch right the fuck out.

> "I would be very surprised if the people involved in an open air drug den had much to do with the people attending and organizing this protest."

There's not much of an intersection. The whole open-air drug den thing isn't to associate the protesters with the crackheads of the neighborhood, but rather to say that this isn't like any street corner in San Francisco. This is a street corner that the police effectively have no control over. If you get jumped by a Black Bloc asshole with a bone to pick with Googlers, you are fending for yourself. Though, reading the article, it looks like the cops were on hand for this one, which is a nice change for the corner of 16th and Mission.

All in all, don't be so cavalier with your own safety. While San Francisco isn't ruled by the Khmer Rouge, the Mission is not a safe neighborhood. Don't let the bistros and boutique coffee shops fool you. If you mind your own business you'll be fine. If you go looking for trouble, the Mission has no problem delivering trouble to your face, fast.
Try the HTML5 playground
> Time to put down the Scoble koolaid and do transparency where it counts.

Okay. Where does it count?
This article is says allot, but shows little.

Ok, write lots of logs everywhere, but how and where should those go? Wont all those messages get in the way? Will they obfuscate my code? Most of the codebases I've worked with didn't have judicious logging, so where should I look for examples?

Spring's source code doesn't look too bad. Is that a good standard?

Maybe other languages?
Copied from tl;dr: (Emphases in the original)

> This blog post will show how a fix for XFree86 and linuxthreads ended up causing a major threading regression about 7 years after the fix was created.

> The regression was in `pthread_create`. Thread creation performed very slowly as the number of threads in a process increased. This bug is present on CentOS 5.3 (and earlier) and other linux distros as well.

Actually, while it merits a (fine) blog post, it is far from being the craziest as the original post title suggests. But what I find really important is surely the following paragraph:

> It is also very possible that this bug impacted research done before August 15, 2008 (in the best case because Linux distro releases are slow) on building high performance threaded applications.

Research is hard since you may be affected with every possible cause unknown to you.
Judge Asks IRS, Feds to Investigate Copyright-Trolling Attorneys
5 Alternatives to WordPress
For your ~/.profile (or whatever): curl --connect-timeout 1 http://whatthecommit.com/index.txt
Math is just another word for structured thought. When people say they're not good at math, what they really mean is that they attempted learn something without understanding the underlying principles, and therefore found it difficult.

They're not lazy, they're just ignorant to the process because they were taught incorrectly.
I agree with the other suggestions that this is a noble approach, but I'll also offer a competing viewpoint:

1. You are shooting yourself in the foot, revenue-wise.

2. The cognitive overhead of figuring out this unexpected pricing scheme is going to scare away potential customers.

It smacks of white knight syndrome to me. I understand that your service is trying to help people, but I don't see how this pricing scheme adds additional value. If (and this is a big if) you managed to spin it into some kind of publicity, then it could help. Otherwise I'd guess it's not going to turn out at all well.
My read was that he froze during the interview. Perhaps I was injecting my own experience, which once very literally went like this :

interviewer : "what's the time complexity of blah"

me : "hmm... O(1)"

interviewer : "what's the space complexity?"

me : "fuck, oh, I don't know"

interviewer : "well, think about it. no stress"

me (2 seconds later) : "oh, right, yeah, O(n)... of course"

Not saying I'm proud of not taking the time to think a problem through, but sometimes people act really weird when under the gun.
If your first reaction is to call your kid a liar when he asks you a question you don't understand you have more pressing concerns than lenticular billboards.
>Same goes for the decision to drop CS and continue with only their cloud-based services: they should've done that about 10 years ago. I can't remember for how long I've been saying I'd be willing to pay monthly for their programs if there only was such a subscription.

How is that a substantiated argument?

Tons of people say otherwise -- that they won't go with this new model.

And 10 years ago (when nobody was doing it, so it was even more alien, and internet speeds were lower) a lot more people would have hated it too.
I doubt the op was trying to point fingers (or blame). Easier to generalize and leave at that.
Our Google Search Autocompletes Are So Depressing
To that end it's also a data problem. Getting 100% accurate unique identifiers like UPC, MPN or ISBN for such items can be a challenge for online retailers. Also the notion of smaller retailers who fall under this legislation having to (pay someone to) modify their systems to support these third party services to calculate the collect tax is also kind of a bummer.

These issues are mostly resolvable with time and money. Regardless, the transition is going to be rough, in my view.
Related story :

http://www.forbes.com/sites/markgibbs/2012/07/11/if-you-use-...
Interesting. I haven't actually read the bill yet. I assumed it wouldn't make it this far.

I guess if it actually results in tax code simplification, that's a decent silver lining.
I was going to argue that it makes sense to limit ads to classy advertisements as to not dilute their brand. But then I remembered the ads I normally see and laughed at that point.
WebGL support on mobile is pretty rare. I think only a few browsers like Firefox mobile and Opera mobile support it.
Ask HN: How do I learn to code as a complete beginner?
I want to teach people who know nothing about code to be coders. How do you start? Any books, websites, resources, blogs... Again, this is for complete beginners.
Apple bond offering among biggest ever: reports
The list and the tree don't themselves have time complexity; operations on them do. Finding an element in a list takes O(n) time; in the worst case, you have to check every element of the list. Finding an element in a balanced binary tree takes O(log n) time: at each step, you halve the number nodes you need to check.

The balanced binary tree search operation is an example of something whose cost grows very slowly even as the size of the tree grows rapidly.

There are algorithms that are hard the same way the O(log n) tree is easy: they grow exponentially with the size of input, so very small changes in the input size can drastically increase their cost.
Honestly my product is more of a vitamin that a pain killer. But I am striving to make the it a product that enhances something that they already do. It is mostly built out, but I am finding that this is going to be a great way to find good beta users as well.
How they expect Joe Merchant to be able to charge all these taxes correctly without radical simplification (and unification) of tax codes is beyond me. Very far beyond me.

Amazon's just fine with it. That in itself should tell you which side the legislators' bread is buttered on.
That first sentence really took me by surprise...

Our US State Sales Tax system was written by a Shopify employee?!?!
The money lost to esoteric corporate tax loopholes pale in comparison to the money lost to entitlements.