skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You understand that if it drives the business out of state, there is no benefit, no upside. There is no money to go towards STEM, and if the states general economy goes down over it -- it is a net-negative on STEM.
It only applies if your company has a physical presence in Massachusetts (shop or office). State taxation is the same reason Amazon avoid putting warehouses in certain states, since it means they have to start collecting sales tax on everyone in that state. As long as they stay out of the state and do all their dealing across borders, they're don't have to collect the sales tax.
Why do so many people want to work in hedge funds?
It's not an income tax, it doesn't apply to hosted services, and it doesn't apply to companies not doing any business in Massachusetts.

The people this impacts are those currently consulting for MA clients in a capacity that was not considered software sales previously, but now might be. For example, if you sold an analytics package in boxed software, that was always clearly a "sale" and is unchanged. But if your business is based around, for example, having a free SaaS analytics service, along with an offer that enterprise clients can pay you to get a self-hosted version installed on their own servers, that has typically been treated as consulting in MA, but is being reclassified as selling software. The theory is that you are basically selling software (a copy of the analytics package), not really consulting, and the fact that you didn't put it in a box with a bar code is irrelevant. The complaints are largely based around the vagueness of the definitions and the short notice of implementation.
It's not an issue of turning completeness. CSS was never designed to be hardware accelerated. So many implementations run faster in software. Here's a good example:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10014461/why-does-enablin...
Elementary OS Luna out of beta
It only applies to you, the seller, if you are located or have an office in Massachusetts.
Java SE 8: Lambda Quick Start
I don't know of anything else for FF, but it's [open source](https://github.com/Xodarap/Paranoid-Browsing) and in Javascript, so I assume a port wouldn't be too hard for anyone who knows the FF add-on model.
Oracle Java Technology Evangelist Simon Ritter discusses Lambdas,Raspberry Pi
I lived in China when Google announced that they were refusing to comply with government censorship. Shortly after the announcement Google was blocked by the great firewall. When big sites like Wikipedia, Facebook, and Google are blocked, it drives the general population to alternatives like Tor and VPNs, making censorship less effective.

http://gizmodo.com/5446712/google-refuses-to-continue-censor...
Surprised no one has mentioned Yahoo!'s smushit.com service yet. It even works nearly identically (minus the API).

Kraken seems to do a tad better in the handful of images I handed it (all PNG sprites), but not remarkably so.

The Google PageSpeed extension for Chrome will also give you optimized images as one of the steps, if it thinks there is room for improvement.
At least we have the answer for the old question. Nobody watches the watchers.
Government doesn't have to care about risk or tangible profit, and they have a longer time horizon than most business can afford. Look at the space race, for example; the potential gains were purely political and the project certainly stood no chance of ever recouping its costs directly. But the technological by-products are things we now take for granted and which have spawned whole new industries.
Hello, Terminal developer here.

sudo apt-get install dconf-editor
dconf-editor

Go on org>pantheon>terminal>settings and you'll find plenty to configure. Feel free to report any bug on bugs.launchpad.net/pantheon-terminal.

We just don't have a GUI for the settings, but they're there.
I always thought the publisher was the person who organised actually making and distributing the media (book in this case). I don't think they have to pay for it to be made.
I don't understand how they singled out software developers. Why not lawyers or landscapers or pool service.

Why not tax something that no one likes that can't move out of state - TV and radio ads?
MA resident. The biggest problem with this is the timing: tell us in July that it goes into effect on January 1, we can deal. Tell us it goes into effect in a week? Hah.
For Jeff Bezos, a new frontier
Unifying Recursion Schemes will be part of the ICFP 2013 papers (http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/jeremy.gibbons/publications/ur...) which is tangentially related to the penultimate entry using recursion, as we have another way of reasoning about them now.
I was just pointing out: if they had no choice, then apply it towards growth instead of some sinkhole project.

But yes, it is a net negative....I just don't understand why they would do this. They should be offering incentives to stay there. This is a self-invoked brain drain.
If you're already willing to sacrifice privacy for convenience, they already have you.

If you're using OSX or that wacky hybrid kernel system from Redmond, WA, You're basically screwed anyway because your endpoints are compromised from day one.

Here's the thing, if you jump at every convenience then blame people working on the vast and complex software required to support privacy, absolutely nobody will come to your defense.

I set my bar very low, if I can obscure the source location of my IRC and email traffic, then I'm all good; All other channels are secondary, and are not worth bursting my basic network node anonymity over if there's no other option.
Unfortunately Mass. has unfunded pension liabilities exceeding $20 billion (not including municipalities), and unfunded health care liabilities exceeding $45 billion (including municipalities. At the same time, states will have to deal with the new normal, which is lower economic growth indefinitely and lower returns on invested assets.

As a result, states will ratchet up taxes to cover their increasingly untenable budgets, as we've seen in Illinois (which recently almost doubled its state income tax) and Mass.

My guess is that this process will accelerate the internal migratory trends that are already in place. E.g. Nebraska, which banned defined-benefit pensions in the 1960's is sitting pretty with $43 of unfunded liabilities per person. Relevant to tech, the following states have big research universities (and thus a supply of educated workers) and also relatively manageable unfunded liabilities: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Texas, and North Carolina: http://www.nasra.org/resources/Moodys1101.pdf.
SaaS was certainly not "free of tax" before this - businesses pay state income tax and developers who created the service pay state income tax. Now any Massachusetts based SaaS is at a 6.25% price disadvantage to an out of state business.
Tax politicians, they are completely useless.
I know it was added to deb-multimedia some days ago and it is also in the gentoo-multimedia overlay and on AUR.

I think many distributions would consider mpv a duplicate of mplayer, so for one to be packaged officially the other would have to be removed. Realistically that's not going to happen anytime soon.
He was doing Linguistics at UC Berkeley, too.
Bull there will be a huge benefit - the lost business will no longer have to suffer under the idiocities of the Mass. government.
As others have mentioned. One-time pads are unbreakable:

"While he was at Bell Labs, Shannon proved that the cryptographic one-time pad is unbreakable in his classified research that was later published in October 1949" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon

They can also be made to decrypt to any plaintext string

http://16s.us/FreeOTP/nsa/

However, OTP does not scale to more than two or three people, they don't work at all on very large messages as the key has to be as large as the message and they have authentication issues. For two people sending small messages, one-time pads are ideal and if the pads are created, used and destroyed correctly, the encryption is, indeed, unbreakable.
Avoiding writes to the DOM is a good tip for beginners. As a desktop developer, you're going to realize quickly that DOM is decent model for documents, but a terrible paradigm for interactive applications.

Overall performance is terrible and varies widely between browsers. We either need a new standard or a DOM browser battle like what happened with JavaScript, bringing it from 100x to 3x of native.
Your comment is the perfect antidote to the pathetically pessimistic comments elsewhere on this thread. Thank you!
More so that non Chinese people can act against China with out risk of arrest, extradition or rendition. China is an easy target.

It is very easy to take a stand against China, and get props for it, when what one is doing is risk free and frankly irrelevant. I cant see the Chinese government crying at night that they cant get wikipedia. I cant see the Chinese rising in revolt because they cant easily get wikipedia. There is no consequence for Wales and co.

I say big deal. Try being Snowden. Try publishing information that breaks US law. Try circumventing US internet security.

Frankly Im tired of China being a whipping boy for westerners who want to show how right on and freedom loving they are they are. It is as useless as signing an online petition.

Don't get me wrong, think wikipedia is one of the best resources on the internet, I use the site a hell of a lot. I would like the Chinese people to have access to it. I fully appreciated the stand against SOPA. I very much respect the guys who set wikipedia up and all the contributors to it. But really, this "stand" amounts to not a lot, except some easy publicity.

Oh, and he has complied with censorship. He had a choice: censor, or withdraw everything. Both from a Chinese POV, both achieve the exact same thing. The info they don't want their people accessing is not officially available. The Chinese people still lose out.

Lastly, I understand that the Chinese people can get round the firewall in various ways and still get wikipedia in full, and that people out side China help greatly in that. Now, imagine that this was the US we were talking about. Imagine that some one helped Americans get information the US government didn't want Americans to see. Can we speculate on how far the American government might go to stop it and deal with the people involved?

China is an easy, risk free target.

Yeah yeah, I know I know. China "evil", m'kay? So, fine to abuse their laws and customs. But just one thing, its hardly going to speed them up in to the arms of the oh so free west. Attacking them just makes them more defensive, and it slows up their journey towards us.
Today is Wallpaper Sunday | Techjav
This is the Neil Degrasse Tyson argument. Though I like it, I kind of really prefer the Bill Gates argument on healthcare and education, and think its the more important one, that everyone can come together on...not just the nerds.

And I am not as doubtful. Our collective nature resulted in the internet. It is only as imperfect as we are. But it also represents collaboration between people on a scale never see before. And that is a cause for hope.

Virality on our social networks can be used, and I am sure it will be used, for more than just getting Psy to the top of the charts or Obama elected.
Its just a matter of time.
The support is done through libquvi, so the distro only needs to update libquvi-scripts to make it behave.
Yeah have been working on it see https://github.com/justincormack/ljsyscall/
I'm sorry you didn't like the post. Perhaps you can provide a little more feedback? :)
> newsworthiness of the article and related HN post.

This is far more worth of HN than you give it credit for. In fact, it's exactly the type of post that should be featured here.

Edit: This is far more worthwhile than yet another article on Snowden, that's for damn sure.

> that does not make me a troll and I find the accusation highly offensive.

Maybe you weren't trolling, but what did you think was going to happen when you posted what amounted to an anti-hacker comment on "Hacker News?"

From your previous post:

> is it really cool when anyone can do it

Yes. In fact, it's much cooler when anyone can do it. That is practically one of the central tenets of the hacker culture.
Amazing Images From Neuroscience’s “Hubble Deep Field”
Not to nitpick infinitely on this question, but not only was it possible politically for Obama to refuse the Nobel Prize, it would have been the Constitutional thing to do

http://blog.heritage.org/2009/12/10/does-obama%E2%80%99s-nob...
Are those sites really that big in China? I'd think Baidu and Sina Weibo are far more relevant to the general population.
It doesn't look like most of HN is in the R&D field, but from the inside it's obvious why we need government funded blue sky research. Once you get into the research and science field you realize how many old ideas you are using, ideas which were just developed because of scientists were advancing the state of the art their chosen fields.

The fact is, it takes decades to realize the implications of fundamental breakthroughs in math, physics and chemistry. The long time horizon and inability to judge the worth of these endeavors at the time means a patronage model is basically the best bet. It's kind of sucks but we just have to pour money into research hoping for a better future.
Surprised if the feature is that wanted (I would be turning it off if it was on by default, to be honest), that no one has written a third party tool to do it.
Responsible for: paying* + coordinating the people who get produce the product (this includes the author herself, the designers providing art, the person doing the layout, the editor, and the printer - down to helping the authors choose paper stock); distributing the product - we do direct sales, as well as have the contract with PGW, a distributor, that lets us get into bookstores (sad but true, we had to get one before Barnes and Noble would stock xkcd: volume 0); we have a warehouse in Austin (Hi Amplifier!) that handles all the fulfillment for kickstarter rewards, we manage that relationship to make sure every address-change is accounted for and everyone gets their perks; in the case of this kickstarter, we're also the ones coordinating with manufacturers to make everything from bookmarks to plushie-skulls; we do a wee bit of promotion, but that's how we can afford to give authors (75%+) of the profits -- they already bring their fans with them.

This is a bit old, but still pretty accurate -- I published a step-by-step guide to do what breadpig does, so anyone can replicate it, because that's how we roll.

http://breadpig.com/blogs/news/5863073-reasons-to-self-publi...
http://breadpig.com/blogs/news/5863065-step-by-step-guide-on...

Sorry for the mega post but I know how much work Christina (runs breadpig ops) put into pulling this off and I feel like an article that doesn't even mention that isn't doing it justice. Obviously the story here is Ryan, which made this amazing thing possible, and he deserves 99.9% of the credit for the product and campaign, but it's not quite as simple as "self-published."

*We paid for printing up-front with xkcd's book and a couple of SMBC's, but thankfully kickstarter came along and we've since adapted the business because we now have the pre-order dollars from backers.
I don't disagree with the macro point, but if you don't like this particular tax, Texas would be a poor choice of alternatives, because it already applies sales tax to an even broader class of software services than MA is now doing. For example, even hosted services like SaaS are covered under the Texas taxable-services definition, in cases where Texas has sales-tax jurisdiction (e.g. your business has an Austin office, and you have clients in Houston).

See section Data Processing Services here: http://www.window.state.tx.us/taxinfo/taxpubs/tx96_259.pdf

Examples of data processing include ... web hosting, web site creation and maintenance; data storage, including offsite backup of electronic files; conversion of data from one type of medium to another... . Data processing services providers include sellers of software as a service and application service providers.

That would, for example, mean that a service like Tarsnap or Heroku would be subject to Texas sales tax, if they had a Texas nexus for sales-tax purposes, which isn't the case in Massachusetts even under the new law.
Employees did, but having spent time with Ryan, I can assure you he's as zany as you'd imagine. But even taller. And a wonderful person.
It misses the math Haskell programmer using the closed form expression: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci_number#Closed-form_ex...

What is the best way to implement it in Haskell since Phi and Psi are real numbers?

Edit: as the user tome told me.... It was about the factorial function not about fibonacci. I blindly see fibonacci.
> Anyone working in the IT industry who sells software or related services to any business that has any office in Massachusetts.

So no, it applies if your client is located in the state.
Before it was censored, Google had about 1/3 of the browser market. People with education always used it for english or foreign searches but generally prefered Baido for Chinese.

I lived in Shenzhen which borders Hong Kong. Facebook is huge in HK, so there was a demand for access in SZ. Surprisingly many people asked me for my facebook and I saw many coworkers using it too. When I was in Beijing and Shanghai, I didn't see it used as much except with the young, wealthy international crowd.

For wikipedia, the engineers loved to use it. I even introduced a few of them to Tor when they asked me how they could use it outside of the office.
And the data is just a warrantless request away from a government demand, so, bonus.
It's used for some configuration/ scripting in NetBSD, after Marc Balmer pushed the idea a few years back.

Some links:

- The Lunatik GSoC project - http://netbsd-soc.sourceforge.net/projects/luakern

- Marc Balmer's FOSDEM'13 paper - http://www.netbsd.org/~mbalmer/lua/lua_config.pdf

I gather that the principal virtues of Lua for this purpose are:

1. Lua tables have a nice syntax

2. Lua's load function is very fast

3. Lua has a small, well-tested trusted code base

4. It has a sane semantics for dynamic loading
And it's under copyright, so we have to call them Adventures-of-your-own-choosing ;)

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/weiner/trial-of-the-clon...

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/weiner/trial-of-the-clon...
Which would account for a much tinier proportion. Sounds like your problem is more moral than based on any real-world impact on your take-home pay :)

In reality very few people will actually choose to sit around on the dole, particularly as they grow up a bit. I can't prove it of course but it does bring to mind the old theory that the welfare system unwittingly seeded R+D for the UK's creative industry (up through the 80's at least), and which has turned out to become a major UK export.
Photos, Texts And Emails Show The Alleged Betrayal At The Heart Of Snapchat
That's exactly how Ryan North rolls, that magical Canadian....
I don't believe I have ever seen a switch like that (UK) so your comment isn't universal.
Without actually checking redirects, not breaking a few edge cases is much better than a few submissions being duplicated.
This is insane. Either add a sales tax (fixed %) to all B2B transactions (like UK VAT, which you're exempt from if you're tiny) or just don't.

This minefield of regulations about what's taxable and what isn't will just make it much more expensive to sell things, as people pay for lawyers/accountants to figure out what "tax" to add to every outgoing invoice. Since this will decrease consumption, it will reduce other tax revenues, as well as making this pot smaller.

Mad. Stark Raving.
Free PDFs of textbooks for inquiry-based math courses by Michael Starbird
Yes, 3, 4, what ever they want we already offer
I think the UI could be improved but kudos for shipping. What stack is it? I was thinking about building a Django based feedback service as I think there's demand for such a service.
I ran a consulting business in Ontario Canada from 1999-2004
Today the provincial sales tax is included (harmonized) with the federal sales tax as the HST (8% + 5% = 13%) but
back then they were charge separately as PST and GST. Each tax act treated software and software services differently.

When we started we were compatriots with many such contractors in the city. They said, confirmed by our accountant, that our services were not PST eligible so we collected and submitted only the federal GST. This we did for 5 years without any incident; like an audit from the province.

In 2004 our business failed and we were in the process of closing up shop when the feds audited our GST history and found that
in 2001-2004 our GST submissions were off and we owed about 30k incl interest and files. We made arrangements to pay the bill.
Painful but under control.

But, the federal audit triggered a provincial audit and that's when we discovered that the rules for PST regarding software/it services had changed during our run, making the work we did subject to the 8% PST. The rules for that are eerily similar to those described in the OP.

The provincial government determined that the changes to The Act were retroactive and covered all the business we ever did and that with interest and penalties we owed over 700k payable by the end of that week or they would take action.
The company was broke so he action we were threatened with was that, as officers of the company, we were personally liable for the amount and that if not paid by the end of the week, our personal bank accounts would be frozen. This was not good.

Further we found out that at that time, these rules were only enforced when a PST audit occurred. So, when we told the many contractor pals in town that this could be a problem for them. a) they didn't believe it, and b) AFIK none of them changed their practice of collecting only the GST.

Anyways, there was a loophole where a customer could assume the liability for the PST by giving us a waiver form. Luckily the majority of our work was with one customer, a huge corp, who agreed to do this and we were off the hook.

It was a very stressful week.

PS. I have not done any consulting since 2004 so I am not aware of any subsequent changes to The Act. AFIK, none of the contractors I know were dinged the way we were. I figure that harmonization of the taxes means they are collecting tax for both govt entities now.
Weibo and Weixin are incredibly popular. But middle class intellectuals who want to prove their western credentials will generally have a facebook account. VPNs and proxies are fairly common, so access isn't really a problem, its just a hassle.
http://docs.tsuru.io/en/latest/overview.html#scaling
I think the problem is the title - it sets up high expectations. When it turns out that an ordinary store-bought racing bike would have worked just as well, and the high speed is reached not by the bike being special, but by drafting behind a car, then the disappointment sets in.

If the story had been "Guy builds racing bike from scratch, goes drafting with it just to see what it can do", then it would have been the cool inspiring story of the hacker spirit. But now it wasn't - it was framed.
Or it could check for a 3xx HTTP status.
I wonder whether you can just 'give away' the free upgrades and the like and charge a standard consulting fee with the operation that folds the price into it.
Why you shouldn’t work set hours
It is quite interesting how much of the really foundational technology that exists was either funded by the government, by the research labs of monopolies like AT&T or NTT, or by the research labs of companies that had near-monopolies in a particular sector (Xerox, at the time, Microsoft, Google). The things that people hate: governments and monopolies.

In retrospect it's obvious why: R&D takes money, and there is no money in competitive industries, since competition drives profits towards zero.