skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What I don't understand is how they apply this to digital goods, where there are no borders to police? How do they even find out that digital goods are being imported?

Audits of online stores, plus massive penalties (potentially exceeding 100%) on the VAT and other taxes that should have been paid. Tax evasion generally means that the statute of limitations (the period of time for which the tax authority may still go after a taxpayer for back taxes) never ends and they can go after a taxpayer for unpaid taxes from decades prior.

If the seller is located in Assfuckistan, then surely the transaction takes place in Assfuckistan, and unless Assfuckistan has signed a treaty with the EU to collect VAT on their behalf, why would their authorities interfere?

Under international treaties and laws, sales are deemed to occur in the jurisdiction of the buyer, not the seller. However, if the transaction is agreed to/executed in another jurisdiction (i.e., the seller's country or a third country), it could also be subject to tax in that other country.
I thought this book was interesting,
ReThinking a Lot: The Design and Culture of Parking

I enjoyed this blog post, "Car Kill Cities" about parking lots in Atlanta, http://progressivetransit.wordpress.com/2012/01/25/cars-kill...

I've heard good things about "The High Cost of Free Parking" but I haven't read it.

I lived in Freiburg in Breisgau, Germany for a year, and when I got back everything seemed wrong.
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=TempleOSV2
He seems to respond to the questions related to HN, but for this particular question, PG's opinion is not essential.
> I just read where Tesla (an HN favorite) gets tax credits of something like $35k (tradeable to other mfgs) for each car they sell. Forgetting whether that number is right or not (maybe it's less/more who knows) does that mean that they should somehow in ratio reduce the price of their car? Of course not (unless they want to). Even though one could make an argument that it isn't fair that they don't. To me all this is nonsense. But fully understandable if someone has never operated a working business.

To be fair, how you run your business depends greatly on this. Other companies would distribute the profit from this tax credit to shareholders or executives; Tesla is using it to continue with R&D and to fund expansion.
Analysis of 419,000 FlapMMO attempts
* Obsessing over tiny little details is the mark of a great designer. However, that doesn't mean that you should always be doing this. Say that you're launching a startup on a limited budget, for example. If you're spending an inordinate amount of time trying to decide between two slightly different shades of purple, or figuring out whether some border should be 1 or 2 pixels thick, odds are you're misusing your resources. There's a certain time and place to obsess over certain types of details - many startups would be better served obsessing over finding paying customers and refining their business model rather than spending lots of effort on some of this stuff.

* For the record, while this person obviously seems talented, I really dislike how the site jarringly starts shifting the content you're reading over to the side a second after load. If he wants to write about tiny little design details, I'd argue that's one of the most annoying things that he's missed.
I don't understand how "some designers don't handle edge cases" translates into "we shouldn't have designers".
Depending on the modem manufacturer, you can still poison them with your own locally-loaded TFTP configuration file to override the speed configured from your cable provider.

Disclaimer: The FBI was cracking down on people who were doing this.

https://www.google.com/search?q=tftp+hack+cable+modem
In a functioning competitive market, though, prices should trend towards some function of risk-adjusted costs, unless there is a barrier to competition like a patent, legal cap on supply, or other monopoly-type situation. That's supposed to be the whole advantage of capitalism, the invisible hand reallocating resources optimally to meet demand and everything. A large profit margin is just a market inefficiency, and should be rare and fleeting.
Virtually outsourced engineering as well -- a separate "corporate office" and "engineering office" in two different states, with the business people and founders working at the corporate one.
...engineers who feel the same way that he does about product. These exist...

Unless my personal experience has been wildly unrepresentative, software developers tend as a group to be almost obsessive about getting fine details right. We’re the guys who worry about whether our design will be as easy as possible to maintain in the face of arbitrary future requirements or whether using some clever data structure would have given 0.07% better performance. We know, rationally, that sometimes our work is good enough and that we need to move on to other useful things, yet still there is a little voice in the back of our heads telling us we should have done better.

If I were to pick one other group who tend to exhibit the same trait, it would be designers. There ought to be a natural camaraderie here that makes it easy for little details to get done right. If that’s not the default outcome, and probably something that people in management and sales regularly have to balance with pressure to ship, the first question should be why.
Or lobby your local municipality to revoke their franchisee agreement and fund/rollout municipal fiber, provided at a reasonable cost.
To all you twenty and early thirty-somethings concerned over long hours I say this... You'll soon be in your 40's. If working 60+ hours a week enables 30 hour weeks in your 40's, it will be worth it.
Ask HN: What'd you do to get your first 100 users?
I've never done any kind of user acquisition besides posting to Reddit and HN. I realize that this is, needless to say, not a working strategy. What do you people do?
I just had a small panick attack when I realized what a mediocre (not productive) programmer I would be without SO. Then I had bigger panick attack thinking about that small panick attack I just had. What do we do if SO disappears today ? Is there some kind of mirror somewhere on the Internet?
No. Google Docs does the same thing for free, but you could also just store a text file on GoogleDrive or some other shared cloud storage.
I couldn't find a page that looks exactly like the screenshot, but the Google Scholar page is pretty similar: http://scholar.google.ca/scholar?q=search

Then again, this article is from Google Ventures, so maybe they are just using internal design resources.
I don't think Tesla has anything to gain from Apple. The last thing Elon wants is useless execs butting heads with him on critical design decisions. Tesla is a product company, and any interference with the product will kill them instantly.

Furthermore, Tesla's entire software ecosystem is already mature, so there'd be no gain from Apple on that front.

All that's left is cash, which they can get from Wall St. or any other investor on the planet right now.
These things happen when you have a monopoly on internet providers.
Google search + Google cached copy. ;)
What is it that you think I claimed?
Onerous political restrictions, like, giving downstream users the same freedoms you got from the upstream author; the freedoms that the author wanted all users of their code to have?
The combination of postgres's range types[1] and exclusion constraints[2] allow you to do this safely. My 'primary key' constraints look something like:

ALTER TABLE foo ADD CONSTRAINT temporal_pk EXCLUDE USING GIST (
identity_id WITH =,
valid_range WITH &&
);

It'd be nice if temporal foreign keys were supported too, where the existence of contiguous child rows through the valid_range of the parent was enforced, but I've had to use a trigger for that.

[1]: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/rangetypes.html
[2]: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/ddl-constraints.ht...
Unless you don't need any redundancy (cloud has some) that's more likely about 39TB (in RAID50, if controller supports such setup).

If so, that's still less than €8/TB/mo, which is better than most cloud storage providers offers. You also have some spare memory and CPU resources (so you could resell them for others as, for example, memcached instances) and a possibility to get a proper SLA, as a bonus.
I do agree with you that the benefit attenuates with time, but we seem to disagree a great deal about steepness of that attenuation. You're talking about great-grandchildren. I believe that in a hunter-gatherer society the benefit of having parents goes to zero within 20 years after reaching adulthood and there is never any benefit to having gandparents.
Why Bosses Matter
shame its not a weekday, its a legitimate excuse to bunk off (barely).

http://xkcd.com/303/
Million of developers worldwide stopped "writing" code
> Of course people who have never run a business and don't understand the total cost of running a business...

Can you please stop with the flamebait? It's not conducive to productive discussion.

To address your point, not everything should (ethical judgment) be priced based on value. Do you not see the difference between a Tesla and internet service? What about electricity - should PG&E charge based on how much value they provide? Have you ever tried living without power? Because it's certainly worth more than the $50 a month I currently pay. What about medical treatment? What if the ER charged 10% of your lifetime future income for lifesaving treatment? That seems commensurate with the value provided, doesn't it?
I'm really surprised at the negative comments regarding VR. It just seems so obvious to me that VR is going to impact the world in a huge way.

Many of you are caught up in the small technical details. Forget about that and look at the big picture. We are finally going to replicate experiences and our brains will really think we're there.

This will have repercussions on things that may not be so obvious right now. Things such as traveling for meetings or entertainment. Why go through the hassle of getting ready, driving through traffic, looking for parking, etc when you can just put on VR equipment and experience the same thing instantly?

I can't say for sure that VR will be as big as I think it will be, but I'm pretty confident that it's an either/or thing. Either it's going to be the most impactful technology since the internet (perhaps greater), or it's going to be a flop. I don't think there will be a middle ground.
> Business doesn't work that way. You make hay when the sun shines.

The idea of a "fair deal" IS part of business, if customers decide it's part of business. Once you factor in our basic sense of ethics and fair dealing, it's clear that Comcast has none.

The problem here isn't that ethics aren't part of business, but rather, there is no competition. Customers have no choice, therefor, there's no reason for Comcast to behave in a way that better serves their customers.

Aren't you a domain squatter? That would explain a lot about your way of thinking.
One more argument for mapping each job to one person. A-level players don't need to be managed and shouldn't have to ask anyone for approval. The non-designers should trust the designers to worry about the right details. If a designer thinks moving a button 3px to the left is important, then it's important whether or not everyone else understands why.
Not the most secure thing, but a cool idea. Compared to the traditional password/pattern unlock, there's a big security flaw; all I have to do is shake the watch next to the phone to unlock it. I don't even have to be the rightful owner or know the password/pattern, I just have to shake at the same time.
I think the author is right. Good, consistent design with good ergonomics certainly makes work more pleasant and enjoyable.

And Yes. Yes. The difference that the 3px makes is incredible. So do get yourself that extra 26" IPS monitor with extra 1920 x 1200 pixels.

I will kindly warn you though, that I do have some reservations about mentioned 'Apple glossy pixels', as although I'm currently wasting time writing this on a pixel-perfect glossy MacBook Air, nothing frustrates me more as are the reflections on that perfect glossy mirror. Which I can see right now. Or the inconsistent <home>/<end>, <command>, <control>, <fn> keys, when I'm actually working [if you need to spend significant amounts of time jumping between Mac/Linux and working in a command line, you will understand]. Or inability to connect two monitors to a MacBook Pro. Or how slow is the GCC on the virtual machine on that MacBook Pro with puny 16Gb of RAM. So do take the advice of the designer, but also keep in mind that all that glitters is not necessarily gold.
I think a better way to deal with the placebo affect is to only look at accounts where usage is greater than ninety days. As my psychopharmacologist put it, "you can cure just about anything for four weeks with a sugar pill."
So... if my speakers are off (which mine are most of the time) it doesn't work?
The UK Space Agency are going to get a letter from the future.
> The people who avoid the GPL3 do it because they do not share the goals of the GNU project.

Plenty of people share the (publicly stated) goals of the GNU project regarding free software, but disagree with the FSF's approach to realizing those goals, particularly with the GPLv3. (With the GPLv2 I merely thought that the FSF's approach was more restrictive than was necessary, with the GPLv3 and the use-based discrimination in the anti-tivoization clause, I find it actively harmful.)
Did you read the article? It addresses exactly that point and has a graph.

Innovators have been peaking slightly later in life as the 20th century has progressed, in part because today's scientists have more to learn than their predecessors did ...
This links to the wrong fractal tree paper for discussing write-read optimized data structures. The proper one is http://supertech.csail.mit.edu/papers/sbtree.pdf

This makes me wonder how much research this team really did. I'm not ready to claim they haven't done it, but it raises the question. I would like to see the actual data structure published somewhere.
He didn't even call himself a "javaScript ninja". He read a book that has that phrase in the title. Also, why do you assume building websites is mutually exclusive with doing something meaningful? Pretty bold assertion.
What's the chance of somebody losing their phone and their watch at the same time?
To nearly everyone, the user interface is the program.

I would add to that the reason I’m wary of shipping an unpolished product as early as possible with the idea of refining it later: you only get one chance to make a first impression.
I think that this idea of programs and files existing in AR space is going to cause another fundamental shift in the way we interact with computers. The idea's been explored before - but once HMD resolution hits that critical point, all previous implementations will be what PDAs were to the iPhone.
How I TRAINed to learn Rails
ShowHN: Sharing markdown made easy
well that effect is cognitively bookmarked for the next hackathon. Presumably it will work in games if used sparingly.
I've tried various Tasker solutions for this, but it doesn't work well for phones that are encrypted and secured with a password.

The closest thing I could find was a Tasker add-on that was given root permissions and disabled the password, unlocked, and re-enabled the password. At least, that's where my research led me, I could never get that to work.
Buying Tesla at its current insane valuation would be a huge mistake for Apple and completely out of character for them. They didn't get their cash pile by being stupid with money. Following Google and others into the narrative of "acquisitions = innovation" is short sighted and will be seen as stupid once the current cycle is over.
>However, the fact is that the vast majority of our projects don’t have such complicated intra-module dependencies to really justify this.

I feel like this sentence is revealing. The problem isn't with module loaders at all. The problem is with using the wrong tools for the job.

The author clearly simply does not work on the kind of projects for which module loaders are intended. If you are working on small projects with few dependencies, your debugging, loading, and workflow are going to be uglier for adding a module loader.

But the bar for when that situation reverses isn't very high. Even a medium-sized project can quickly reach the point where you have dependencies that are difficult to manage by hand.

And if you opt to do manual script tags in that case, you're in for headaches. Debugging improperly ordered scripts is a pain, understanding the required load order is difficult, and your workflow is bogged down when it comes to adding new libraries. It isn't as simple as adding a new script tag, because you have to figure out where to put it.

On the other hand, pretty much none of the gripes listed in this article matter if you use something like browserify.
Right, because PhotoShop implements, tests, documents, and maintains itself via... magic.
you would need to add a lot more features for me to be willing to pay. kind of a sharepoint knock off with document tracking, links anoucements, wiki, todo list. something like that. I'd probably still offer a free version with limited storage capacity. I might use it with just links if I could access it from my phone and it was free.
What kind of customer are you trying to get?
There is an offline version / dump data you can download and browse.

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/category/cc-wiki-dump/
Losing, or placing them both in the same location while showering/changing at the gym?
Seems to be their network provider: https://mobile.twitter.com/StackStatus/status/43513035754625...
Logged in just to say the same thing. If you're asking this question without even knowing where your target market hang out online, you've already lost.
Advertising. AdWords PPC and banners on relevant sites. You can use tools like http://mixrank.com/ (YC S11) to see where your competitors advertise and what ads they use.
This is a fantastic article.

To people below who say the designer should make the change him or helself -- as a front-end developer, I say a million times, NO NO NO. Does the designer know how to use git and commit properly? Do they know on what branch? Understand the deployment schedule? Perform browser testing? Are they part of code reviews? Do they understand whether that rule is used by just that component, or just that page, or if it will affect code elsewhere?

I think it's great when designers know enough to code the CSS of their own portfolio or blog, and can converse fluently about the concepts. But unless they're true hybrid designer-coders who are participating fully in dev meetings, please DO NOT touch the code. I've seen sites break too many times before, because a designer changed something they didn't understand, and which there was no reason for them to understand anyways. (And to anybody who would say a designer should understand their tools, well it's not like most print designers can operate a printing press either. Design professionals design, and generally other professionals actually implement those designs.)

And to anyone who replies "design has caused real harm to the WWW", sorry buddy, that boat has sailed, and makes as much sense as saying we should expect Rolling Stone magazine to come in a dot-matrix text printout instead of a glossy, attractive magazine. Design is important, period.
Kinda reminds of that other visual effect, where they add circles to a photo and give the illusion of the people in the picture being naked. Won't post the link here cause NSFW, but I can imagine it being a related effect: adding visual markers to change perception.
Interesting question actually - assume I have some code for some specific problem I need to write. Is actually thinking the problem through and writing the code on my own more beneficial, or is it more beneficial to just find code on stackoverflow instead? There are legitimate pros and cons to each way, and I don't know how you tell which is better in some cases.
We made a Venmo vending machine for PennApps Spring 2014
Just search on google, click on the arrow next to link and next Cached. Voilá
Who is your customer? You need to go to where they are. Depending on your customer there will be wildly different marketing strategies.
I've never understood why I should use a module loaders ?

I simply declare my .js files in my main html page and the is it ...
I don't like that they use misleading information to exaggerate the problems of the current Internet:

> One such limitation is the IPv4 protocol. With a 32 bit IP Address, it is only inevitable that the address pool will be exhausted (as it almost has) as the internet keeps on expanding.

This is true, but they completely ignore the advance of IPv6.
Thank you, those are very good. I am always ecstatic to see code samples. Very few people have them from our candidate pool, so those that do stand out.
Show HN: Page Speaker Chrome Extension speaks main web content automatically
But that is how this mesh is supposed to work according to point 3.
Perhaps I am missing something, but color me skeptical... immutable on-disk structures essentially means that you have to perform run-time compactions on every query... unless your in-memory representation is the cache, in which case you have to worry about durability.
Adwords, Forums, facebook groups, blog audiences, commenting, twitter, pinterest.

Go and find out where you customer hangs out online. Who already has your perfect audience on their mailing list? See if you can write something of value for their audience and tap into existing groups.

When you do get users, ask how they found you then double down on promoting in that channel.
PennApps Final Demos Spring 2014
I've got 3 people cold-calling and driving around the country showcasing our product. They started last week. This is the first time I'm trying selling an online service this way, I must say that I am pleasantly surprised by the feedback and the signups.
Excellent point. HashSet<Player> then.
It's also that for a designer that 3px is HUGE.

It's like if you see this in your code:

print 1
print 2
print 3
print 4
print 5
print 6
print 7

Any programmer would refactor that in a heartbeat without thinking too much about the impact or if it really matters.. it's just a plain bad smelly code.

For a designer, unaligned things is just as annoying. It's not that much about if other people can see it. Some will "feel" it, some will clearly see it, some won't see it. But it's just smelly wrong.

Yes you could make a point of not tweaking it, but it's faster anyway to fix it rather than discuss it.
While many people in the Bitcoin community claim that this is limited to Mtgox (due to their withdrawal issues), let's not forget that Mtgox still has the majority of the trading volume. Once Mtgox enables withdrawals their cheap coins will probably drag down the prices on the other exchanges too.
i was hoping this would be most trending here and here we are !
I wasn't saying it couldn't attenuate faster; I was just saying it clearly attenuates. I think that clearly one could conceive of a hunter gatherer existence where the grandparents do provide help to grandchildren - I have vague recollection of something about a modern indigenous society where grandparents watch grandchildren while parents hunt and gather, but it's sufficiently vague that I'm not confident in asserting anything about its reliability beyond mention. Again, though, when discussing evolution we're talking about human-design-space, not specifics about individual human cultures.