skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
the shipment is stopped at customs

This is not always the case. As far as I can tell, they stop some random % of shipments.

The customer must then pay VAT (plus an importation tax) on the value of the goods

VAT is not applicable to low-value shipments. When I lived in the UK, that threshold was 18 pounds, which is just under US$30. (The tax authorities could, in theory, group separate shipments from the same vendor to the same customer in, e.g. the same month, but I've never heard of this happening.)

Import duty is only applicable to some classes of items, not on everything.

how they apply this to digital goods

It's important to understand that VAT and import duties are not even applied consistently to physical goods which are imported by individuals for their own use (e.g. by ordering from overseas web sites). It's another leap to expect consistent treatment for things which, as you suggest, are hard to detect.
Yeah, like how amazon uses their dominance in "SHOPPING" to sell kindle fires?

*edit for clarity
Flappy Bird had zero Facebook features
Just a friendly reminder that when you make things people like, a viral crawl will naturally happen without a need to slather Facebook buttons everywhere.
I don't have access to the academic papers, but a Google of things like VR and human factors will get you to a whole subfield of research.
I had to do a double-take. Kitchener, Ontario making the front page of HN? Obviously, this was not to be :)
Of course - most thing I wrote about happened before Thatcher, too (German social welfare in 1883: That the UK went down a different path back then isn't Thatcher's responsibility unless we're talking time machines).

But first, according to some circles, when it's about social policy in the UK, Thatcher is always to blame. I just couldn't resist :-)

Second, I suppose Thatcher would have implemented a different policy given a different history in that area. The union/employer feedback loop influenced policy (and still does), and that includes Thatcher's for sure. Which makes that snarky first sentence a reversal of cause and effect.
I might be wrong, but I don't think there exists and flyby worm/virus/rootkit for Linux where clicking a link will automatically get you infected, without any user input.
I think the cognitive dissonance is kinda the point.
I didn't downvote, but your tone is all wrong. You sound like a know it all, while also not making a strong argument against grids.
I realize I can do some digging. I was just hoping for pointers to make that process easier and more fruitful - otherwise I will probably not bother myself to be honest. I imagined you would have something more relevant to share about this topic, compared to a search, since you say it bothers you that there is no discussion about this. I'm inviting you to start some discussion.
My point is that you don't need Bootstrap to use media queries. Nor to manage quirks when there are way simpler solutions available on GitHub.

These quirks are becoming less and less over time as well, as new browsers and devices start to follow the same standards, and major players are dropping support for old browsers (ie. Google is no longer supporting old versions of IE).
I'm of the opinion that so long as they clearly mark that it's 'Google' shopping or flight results there is nothing wrong with the practise, it makes clear business sense and most companies would try the same. In terms of Google shopping, its a damn aggregation of other stores, presumably they get a small cut of sales via some affiliate program, but really they're in the position to do this more efficiently by directly handling people who use Google, rather than shuffling them to a 3rd party site, which would deteriorate the user experience.

No one complains when they manipulate search results to drop companies (e.g. rapgenius.com) in search results. So where must the line be drawn for 'unbiased' search results?
I hear about rdiff-backup, but I think its two main drawbacks are:

* on the webpage, there is no new release since 2009.

* has no de-duplication.

I was considering moving my 5+ years old rdiff-backup system to any of those new, promising programs:

* obnam [http://liw.fi/obnam/]

* attic [https://pythonhosted.org/Attic/]

They both do automatic de-duplication, old backup deletion and remote encryption.
You should at least be able to find the Abstracts. You are worried about supposed problems that came from 10+ year old tech. I think if you wanted to show concern you could point people towards real problems when you make claims like that.
They're about as easy to make as for Windows. It's just that Windows targeting is more profitable for mass malware, and the technical user base leads to shorter half life.
>> "it makes clear business sense and most companies would try the same"

True, that's why there are regulators. If you're the clear market leader in one thing using that power to promote your other products to people at the expense of competitors is wrong. It's similar to MS with IE. They were the leading OS manufacturer and they used that power to promote their own browser.

>> No one complains when they manipulate search results to drop companies (e.g. rapgenius.com) in search results. So where must the line be drawn for 'unbiased' search results?

This was a punishment BECAUSE RG manipulated rankings. Perfectly justified in my opinion.
As a developer, I prefer to use BS for many reasons.
- Familiar class names. I don't have to create and memorize new class names on every new project.

- Responsiveness.

- Cross browsers.
There's a reason for that. Certain content providers (HSN, for instance) pay Comcast on a per customer basis. Comcast makes more money when you have the lowest tier TV package and it doesn't cost them anything.
> What's wrong with starting from scratch?

As a developer who's not great at design, I've seen the clear difference between a site I start from scratch and a site I start from a Bootstrap foundation. It makes a world of difference for me.
(Disclaimer: IANAL and this is not advice.)

- If you're selling to customers within your own country or within the EU, you should charge the same rate of VAT as you would for selling software to people in your home country.

- If you're selling to customers outside the EU, you don't need to charge Dutch VAT

(I am assuming your business is registered for VAT, either because you wanted it to, or because it had to by virtue of exceeding a turnover threshold.)

If you sell an app for 4.99 to an EU customer, then this implicitly includes 21% VAT. So your sale price is 4.12, plus 0.87 VAT. That's what you would show on your VAT return.

Does Google ask you about your VAT status? Do you pay them 30% of the gross (4.99) either way?
then do the same for every applicable tax in every country

They don't need to do it in every EU country where they have sales. They can just pick one EU country (ideally one with a low VAT rate, like Luxembourg):

As regards business to private consumers (so-called B2C) sales, the single place of registration introduced under the new Directive will provide the non-EU traders with the option of discharging all VAT obligations through a single administration.[0]

[0] http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/taxation/vat/traders/e-...
Booting from an unchangeable image is the Joyent SmartOS approach, IIRC.
Boy, it is really early days with this stuff.

Over the holidays, my brother-in-law brought over a set of the current Oculus. The 720p ones.

The experience reminded me a lot of the early days of 3D, i.e. the difficulty alone of setting up a 3D daughter card properly. You needed the right version of this driver, the right version of that app. The Oculus took about 45 minutes to set up properly - and I am a gamer with a gamer PC. We needed a particular game from Steam that had a development feature that you could turn on, etc. We had to fool around with the Windows video settings. You name it. This will obviously get better when they release a real version, but it was pretty bad.

Then I actually tried them. All of Jeff's observations are spot on. The current resolution sucks. The problem is that your eyes are so, so close to the screen. I thought that I was going to have problems as a user of reading glasses, but that turned out to not be a problem. I have no idea why, but I didn't need them, so that was good.

The other big issue is maybe health related. These things can make you (or at least some people) sick as a dog without a good deal of practice. I'm not sure if it's the lag, or whether it is a fundamental property of having your brain yanked from the visual environment that it evolved in for the last 100+ million years. It was really bad. Of course, the game we were playing, which was some sort of flight simulator, didn't help. I did not try another game. I didn't feel like I was going to be able to walk after 10 minutes of VR.

One other thing. These goggles invite new gameplay experiences that probably haven't been invented yet. And by that, I mean that just strapping these things on does not suddenly make current mediocre games great. Mediocre games still suck. In fact, they are worse, because you can see every flaw, due to the closeness of the screen. So there will need to be games that are made just for this device. Which, I guess means that you should not buy these hoping that your current set of games will now become "walk thru" or whatever.

It is going to take a compelling combination of hardware and software in order to make this device really shine.

I wish them the best. I am really on the fence as to whether or not this is a revolution at all. Time will tell. I hope it is and that they can overcome all of the hurdles, many of which seem kinda big.
(Former New York City public school teacher here.)

Farina is right about hot lunches, but that doesn't necessarily make her right about school closures. In many low income neighborhoods, public schools provide the important social service of providing hot meals to students who would not otherwise have access.

That said, providing hot food is not inextricably linked to a full school day. New York City public schools also offer breakfast and lunch during the summer as well.

Part of what makes this a hard problem to solve is that the city's school system is made up of a diverse group of adults and children. On one hand, you have the parents who can't take off from work because they risk losing their job. On the other hand, you have special needs students that are bussed around the the city with their safety put at risk.

Many—but certainly not all—students attend school in their neighborhoods. My wife used to work at a school that was literally in the center of the housing project where the majority of the students lived. In this case, there is no reason they couldn't make it to school.

But to keep a school open, you need teachers. Many teachers do not live in the communities that they teach in. Some don't live in within city limits. Hoboken and Jersey City (two neighboring cities that are closer to Manhattan than most of Brooklyn and Queens) were closed. What do those teachers do with their children? I've worked at schools with teachers commuting from as far as central New Jersey to get to work every day.

A small subset of teachers will call out, but there is a lot of social pressure from the school administration not to do this. This is mostly because snowy days where schools are open tend to be absolute pandemonium.

To be honest, little to know learning happens on these days. It's a mess of combined classes, substitute teachers, modified schedules, and usually a movie in the auditorium as administrators scramble to figure out how bussing is going to work at dismissal.

There needs to be some options between fully-operational and fully-closed that better serves the needs of students and teachers based on the conditions outside. Hot lunches for nearby students in need does not necessarily mean that we need to buses full of students traveling across the city on icy streets.

Part of the solution is for parents to keep their children home. I'm not sure I understand the vitriol Farina and De Blasio received from parents. Just because schools are open, doesn't mean that you have to send your kids. If you feel that it's dangerous out, keep them home. As I said, little to no learning is going to happen anyway. If you have to go to work, schools are open. I think the bigger issue of school closures is how it affects teachers, custodians, administrators, school safety, kitchen staff, etc.
Thanks to Hacker News for helping us debug our site
SlickLogin joins Google
Why virtual reality is hard (and where it might be going) [2013]
> Eventually we'll just jack our devices directly into our visual cortex

This comes somewhere on the tech tree after "practical flying cars" and "solving world hunger." But eventually, sure, why not.

> That said, could you be more specific about the problems caused with our current VR technology, and the reason they happen?

The most common and superficial health issue with VR (and AR) would be simulator sickness. The visual cues don't match what the brain expects via other sense data, so you get sick. It happens to some people much more easily than others.

More direct hazards:

Safety issues, e.g. tripping on stuff you can't see while operating a VR headset, or being distracted due to virtual stimuli.

Vision impairment, primarily in children younger than 6-10 years, but potentially also in older users with compromised vision systems.

Temporary visual impairment, typically after sessions longer than 20 minutes. Pronounced eyestrain due to unnatural focal behavior, object tracking, display quality, and optical alignment.

Nice papers to read:

Costello, "Health and Safety Issues associated with
Virtual Reality - A Review of Current Literature" http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.6.3...

Viire, "Health and safety issues for VR". It gets cited around lots even though it's over 10 years old now, but I couldn't find a free copy. Look it up on ACM if you have access. You can preview the first page at the following URL. http://www.deepdyve.com/lp/association-for-computing-machine...

Stanney, "Realizing the full potential of virtual reality: human factors issues that could stand in the way." Starts on page 39 of the following PDF. http://www.researchgate.net/publication/232654060_Pen-based_...

You'll note that these are all late 90s. VR research was much better funded then. You can find more recent stuff though, at least with appropriate database access. More work did get done, but shoehorned under different keywords since "virtual reality" stopped being trendy.

> You are worried about supposed problems that came from 10+ year old tech. (from sibling's child)

Nope. The main difference between 10 year old VR headsets and the ones you can buy today is that the use of bulky CRT eyepieces vs. LED-based eyepieces. The middle ground being LEDs with gradually improving dot pitch.

The human issues remain more or less the same, seeing as nobody has re-engineered the human body in the last 10 years.

My grad advisor had been involved in VR & AR research going back - I forget, 20 or 30 years. So I did a fair amount of reading on the topic. You can make slightly better headsets today, particularly if money is no object - but the core limitations are really the human factors, and the timing constraints necessary to accommodate human senses and rate of motion.
I'll take that with a grain of salt. For stronger arguments, see my other posts.
not so much of a question, more a comment:
there's no information on your site with regards of what it is you do and / or provide.

with that in mind, all your site is, is a button to sign up for something and even the signup form does not provide enough insight into what you're signing up for to make you actually want you to sign up.

in short; you might want to add a bit of content to your site, even the short description you've given here is better than nothing at all
Also, see "resource curse". Norway is one of the few countries to escape it wrt oil.
This might be a good starting point:

http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/taxation/vat/how_vat_wo...

* non-EU suppliers ... register with a single VAT authority in a Member State of their choice ... will be offered a set of procedures ... streamlined set of obligations that can be easily completed online without the need for a fiscal representative or for any physical presence.*

EDIT: Also see here: http://www.kpmg.com/Global/en/IssuesAndInsights/ArticlesPubl...

and here: http://www.guichet.public.lu/entreprises/en/fiscalite/tva/de...
E? €?
"Linux is only free if your time has no value" - Jamie Zawisnki

This statement may have some applicability here. If you find it fun and interesting to fix your own gadgets, then by all means, go for it. But go into it with the understanding that the value of the time spent on such DIY repairs will likely far exceed any financial savings.
Thanks for the valuable insight. See you at Low End.
> Better to watch Game of Thrones or read the books? Purely subjective, there is no superior choice.

I think it can be argued that one is a more intellectually stimulating option, while also being entertaining. The fact that people prefer the more easily digested option might be partially due to the effect of advertising and what makes the wheels of capitalism spin.
Fallacy of a just world
The various SO answers combined sum it up.

- Single inheritance means it's unnatural to inherit from the player list which is just one aspect of a team.

- It's a leak of implementation detail. Tomorrow you may want the team to contain a sorted collection, or a set, or a sorted set.

- It gives an unnatural syntax to team.count vs team.players.count. Again, composition wins in clarity

- You can still expose any part of a collection interface in your Team class, e.g. team.Add(player). The details of what this does should be hidden. Adding an interface like IEnumerable<Player> to the team gives a nice syntax like "foreach(Player p in team)" without breaking encapsulation.

- A list is a simple data structure, a team is not. Extending something to completely change what it is usually means you have an unnatural inheritance. A special list (sorted, cirular...) can extend list in a natural way, a business object should probably "have a" rather than "be a" list.
And just wave away, via cognitive dissonance, the fact that the kids you produce are likely to be badly fucked over by climate change and an overpopulated world in their lifetime?
A Case for Upserts
Correct link: http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/31/5363990/how-putins-cronies...

(trailing slash breaks it)
We had that at one point, but got rid of it, in exchange for promises from the telcos that they then proceeded to not keep.
> If you're selling to customers within your own country or within the EU, you should charge the same rate of VAT as you would for selling software to people in your home country.

The thing is: when I'm selling through an international platform like the Play Store, do I even know where my customers live? Well, maybe I do, but I'd much rather do my business with Google and have them handle the second half of the transaction for me.

I'm registered for VAT simply because I have a business that's not in health care. As far as I know, I have to register for VAT even if I'm below the threshold where I'd have to _pay_ the VAT.

> Does Google ask you about your VAT status? Do you pay them 30% of the gross (4.99) either way?

No idea, but it's an interesting question. Do I have to pay VAT over their share of my revenue, with it coming out of my share of the revenue? That would be odd. Yet another reason why Google should be handling this.
Thanks for the link, it was a good read.

I understand where you are coming from now. Can you suggest a good article for reading up on "gridless" responsive design?

I've just been looking at http://thatcoolguy.github.io/gridless-boilerplate/

It would be good to learn more about this philosophy.
Their website is not usable with my 1024 pixels wide browser window.
The original rdiff-backup author went on to create duplicity. Maybe a big part of the rdiff-backup community has followed him?

I'm using obnam now.
Timeline of the Universe made by parsing Wikipedia
It's an LD_PRELOAD so it's likely either:
1. a environmental variable for the user, in which case you just need to clear their rc files.
2. In /etc for all users. In which case you'll just have to remove the file. To get around hiding you can use debugfs point to block device (/dev/sda1?). Navigate to find the offending file and mv it.

As someone else points out, all statically linked binaries are immune to this technique since they don't load preloads.

Another warning is don't muck around with /etc/ld.so.preload unless you know what you're doing. It's possible to get in a state that everything you executes segfaults.
No plans for any integrations at the moment. We're not opposed to the idea, and it's probably coming if enough people request it.

Anders, Co-founder / Developer
It's not really that hard. I only know the situation when selling from Germany, but it should be similar in other countries.

Basically, you don't have to pay taxes in other countries, you only pay taxes in the country your company resides in (of course there are some exceptions, you should get a lawyer etc., but this is what I've heard in a couple of cases).

If you make less then a certain amount, I believe 17500 € / year, you count as a "small entrepreneur" and are not treated like a business, but as a private person. You can sell and buy what you like and don't pay additional sales tax to the state. You implicitly pay 7-19% sales tax when buying goods just like any other customer.

If you are a "real" business, you don't have to pay the sales tax when buying stuff (raw material). In practice, you can deduct it from your taxes. You have to pay sales tax directly to the state for things you create and sell. This is why it's also called value added tax, because its a tax on the value your company added to the "material". In practice, if you are a software company, you'll just have to pay a certain percentage of your income in taxes, it's not really complicated.

The interesting part is when you do business with abroad. It is really complicated to do the customs procedures for all the different countries, but it is much easier when you only sell digital goods, and/or sell directly to customers.

In most cases, you just pay the 19% tax to the German government, and sell your product to the customer, and youre fine. There are ways to avoid the sales tax when selling to other countries, but AFAIK you have to pay some customs fees and it starts getting complicated.

I only know the case when importing things to Germany, in that case someone has to pay an additional import sales tax, besides the customs, but the taxes in the country of origin can usually be waived. In case something goes wrong here, usually the selling company isn't held liable, but the goods are stuck in customs and the customer has to pay the import tax. This is frequently a problem for american companies trying to sell stuff to Germany, e.g. Pebble and Ouya had that problem. It's a nuisance, but the customs agencies are generally very cooperative and will tell you exactly what they want you to pay :-).
No, the US government spends more on health care per capia than almost all other countries.
yep, this is particularly important since for so many people "to google" is a verb meaning to search the web, and thus if something is not found on google, it doesn't exist on the web\
(well, that's just another way to say "dominant position")
Thanks for writing this up and all your work in the area! I was struggling with getting FreeBSD running on a cloud server last year when I came across your original EC2 defenestration post. I ended up using Rackspace once they added FreeBSD support, but they do not support 10.0 yet. I will have to play around with building my own image on EC2 using your provided code!