skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Do people get a business license for their evening projects in the US?
So back where I am from (not US) if your business has two or fewer employees and makes under a certain threshold then you don't need a business licence at all, and instead can just file any profit you make as "income." It does of course not grant you any legal immunity like a limited company would but it is a great way for a very small business to start out.

I was just reading the thread about people's side businesses that make sometimes a couple of hundred to several thousand dollars a year. And while I want to try a few ideas I have, after looking at the fees my state/city/etc charge it could easily cost several hundred all the way up to $500 just for me alone to legally make any kind of profit.

Plus the complexity of the entire process is extremely high. They're clearly using the same process if you're self-employed, a small business, or even a medium sized enterprise. It may take me weeks to get it all done (and still might make large mistakes).

So do people that make little apps that cost 99c or websites that just generate tens of dollars in ad revenue REALLY go through all of this? Seems like it will take ten years just to break even financially.

PS - Just to be clear, I absolutely would like to pay tax. I just want to pay tax as if it was my personal income, rather than file personal AND businesses taxes.
And several of them have been caught spying on European politicians.
import Control.Concurrent.STM
import Control.Monad
import Data.Vector

type VecInts = Vector (TVar Int)

newVecInts :: Int -> STM (VecInts)
newVecInts s = generateM s (\_ -> newTVar 0)

modifyVI :: VecInts -> Int -> Int -> STM ()
modifyVI vi pos val = do
writeTVar (vi ! pos) val

waitUntilEqual :: VecInts -> Int -> Int -> STM ()
waitUntilEqual vi p1 p2 = do
a <- readTVar (vi ! p1)
b <- readTVar (vi ! p2)
when (a /= b) retry
I'd be happy with an HTML5 video player for now. Is that planned as well? Actually, I think I even preferred that over an app.

Edit: Oh, there already is a request for that.
Sad day for developers: SCOTUS denies Google's appeal on APIs
If you sold something on E-Bay to someone in China then, yes, you might just use FedEx. If you are exporting a container-load of apples that need to be refrigerated and arrive within two weeks, then there are a lot of "logistics" to figure out. FedEx may be able to do it – perhaps part of the equation – but there's likely faster and cheaper methods available. Figuring that out is logistics.
You can either collect and store energy where it's abundant but intermittent (solar, wind), or generate it reasonably close to the consumers.

The problem is that the sources like solar have both power density and availability problems in higher latitudes, and power density required to e.g. power a major factory may be a problem even in a sunny place.

I'm also not sure about price per kW of installed generating power; it looks like solar power is still way behind atomic power in this regard.

In general, everyone would love breakthroughs both in electricity generation, transmission, and accumulation. Looking at the amounts of coal still mined for burning, generation should not be overlooked.
I thought the biggest hurdle with nuclear energy was waste management? As in, we've nowhere to put the toxic dump that's produced that will radiate a few tens of thousands of years? Unless that's been solved, in which case consumer education would be a next step
Yes, I do genuinely think that. Didn't Assange have a show on Russian state-sponsored TV? Did I miss the part where Wikileaks refuted the allegation, which ran in several mainstream media outlets, that representatives of Wikileaks funneled unpublished leaked information from the Manning dump to the dictator of Belarus?

I don't like the NSA, but, impolitic as it may be to admit it here: I like Belarus a lot less.
A good part of the reason that they spend that money is because they've been discouraged and hamstrung from developing those expertise in-house.
No, pay him out, but just don't let anyone bets that way continue betting. Betting that rapidly has to be a huge flag for even the dimmest of sys admins.
> return (long)ulong.Parse(s);

Why on earth would you do this instead of just letting the underlying library call throw? Note that it will still throw for strings that parse to a value that cant fit into a long/unsigned long.
I honestly can't tell if this is sarcastic or not. Are you saying that you believe ethical practices are so vastly different across arbitrary distinctions like state borders?
30+ INFLUENCER MARKETING Tools / Services. Sweet List
Microsoft Said to Exit Display Ad Business, Cut 1,200 Jobs
Observe that in this case, the difference between a non-tail call and a tail-call is a single '-'! If the compiler does tail-call optimisation, then the function can consume an unbounded amount of leading spaces, yet a large amount of leading '-' would overflow the stack. If it doesn't, then lots of leading spaces will also overflow. This is not what I'd consider obvious and intuitive behaviour if you were black-box testing this function.

There is a reason why high-reliability coding standards forbid or severely restrict recursion. It's difficult to reason about the resource usage of recursive code, and it also leads to non-obvious failure modes like this.
ReaderT 101
In our research of proper statistical measurements for testing launch times of applications, we found that 95th percentile worked reasonably well for regression detection and noise reduction, in many circumstances.
It's interesting; I hadn't known the word 'prolepsis' but recently encountered it in another context, in which it was defined quite differently as "the representation or assumption of a future act or development as if presently existing or accomplished" (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/prolepsis). Is one of these references in error, or is the same word used to describe two very different rhetorical devices?
The codes aren’t meaningless or arbitrary. Think about how many different types of “office visits” there are. Forget about any services performed DURING the office visit, think about just the office visit itself. Walking into a room, talking with a medical professional, and leaving. It could be a 10 minute followup visit. You could be a new patient and they are establishing your history for their record, maybe that’s a 45 minute visit. You could be walking in to get a new prescription written. You could be talking to doctor to get a second opinion. You get the idea. My point is that these have varying levels of time spent and doctor-involvement, in which they would have different charges for. A 5 minute visit shouldn’t cost the same amount as a 60 minute visit, right? Each one has their own code, and even modifier codes on top of them (to indicate things like ‘left’ or ‘right’, when a particular procedure is performed on multiple areas) The codes allow them to record the service and bill as accurately as possible. Without them, instead of seeing a bunch of codes and wondering how that equals a thousand bucks, you would get a piece of paper that said “services performed: medical stuff” and a bill for a thousand bucks instead.
Hmm, major reversals of conflict-of-interest policy? (ie. now chairman of two YC companies and personally investing in them)

Large claims with no hard data comparisons? (eg. atomic power has major cost, density, and predictability advantages)

This(?):

>There will only be one cheapest source of energy

Really? There can't be two sources at or near equilibrium?

These systems are not deployed in isolated, designer environments, but instead are deployed in complex environments. Transportation and project logistics will prefer some sources over others.

The lack of any real metric for cost or "cheapness" is a red flag. Is cost being measured in nominal dollars? Will such a thing even exist in the 22nd century?
Basically would be the key word in your description of their actions. As they do not mention actually telling the user to stop playing. They only mention "demanding" their bitcoins back. Demanding something you are at that point probably not entitled to from a user of your service, and informing them that you have decided to refuse future service to them may appear basically the same, but they are in fact not.

"We reached out to Hufflepuff via his bitcointalk forum account and demanded the return of the coins, however this backfired unbelievably hard. "
Not a rust programmer so forgive me if this is a dumb question.

Sometimes in C one might initialize a variable by passing a pointer to it to an init function:

void f( void )
{
int i;
bool success;

success = init( &i );

if ( success )
do_stuff( i );
}

That "init" function might be located in a separate .c file, so there's no way for the compiler to know whether or not the memory whose address is passed to init is initialized or not. So how can Rust "solve" the problem? Does Rust simply not allow taking addresses of variables? Or does it not use .o files, compile all codefiles at once and actually analyze globally for uninitialized variables?
You're correct, of course, but the "Simple" in SMTP is describing the "Protocol" (though I suspect you know that).
Windows 7 Professional Product Key for 64/32 Bit Download
Well, GIMPs UI at least is totally unusable. I ended up using Krita instead, which actually has a UI that makes sense. Additionally, even Krita supports a lot more stuff than GIMP – from proper animations, keyframes to all kinds of color spaces. (Yes, 32-bit floats for CMYK color spaces are possible in Krita)
TDDbin
"Bicycles can kill pedestrians..."

I tried to look up the injury code and didn't really get any statistics on people killed by bicyclists. Do you have any further information?

Bicyclists running red lights never kill anybody (other than maybe the cyclist).
Bicyclists going too fast and too close to pedestrians (red lights or not) can injure pedestrians, but that has nothing to do with "obeying the law", rather it just tells that those people don't consider other people (and we can be lucky they were on a bike and not in car, right?).

I mean really, a cyclist running a red light in an empty crossing (after stopping and seeing that the crossing is clear) is some kind of danger to anybody? Suddenly getting to fast enough speeds after take off to kill someone??
Requirements traceability. Linking your SRS, code, tests, metrics together into an organized information tree.

Also, find a way to generate passive income for FOSS developers and crowdsource FOSS projects and turn them into decent products (proper doc, saas api, maintenance/support etc.) .
Their point is still valid regardless of which group of people engaging in something that is now deemed immoral and illegal but which was legally tolerated back then. The 'it isn't illegal' defense isn't worth much to anyone who uses a moral system not dependent upon the law.
Don't forget the mechanism by which government spends money - it issues a bond, which gets converted to dollars. The bond comes with interest, and the interest payments go to rich people (banks).
15 motivational quotes to keep you going
> China plays by these rules, it about time that everyone else wisen up to this.

Are you aware that this story is about the US, right?
What really has not been highlighted to even remotely an adequate level is the huge damage to the trust and confidence in the USA as the stalwart and upstanding sentinel image that we have cultivated to exquisitely over decades now.

If there had only been some really good alternatives for the global focus to orient itself by, the USA would have been side-lined and crushed economically by now due to the direct and deliberate self-sabotage by our intelligence community.

Will we see the USA recover from all the damage, abuse, and devastation it has caused to its relationships and self-destruction it has wrecked upon itself? I don't know, but I can tell you that if the European Union rightfully moves against American companies as a justified threat to their national security, it will cost our economy billions. Facebook's market cap is currently $245 billion, how many billions do you think would be shaved off if the EU and / or other countries acted against that facade of USA global surveillance domination? How about Google? How about Cisco? Apple ... even though at least in terms of impression, I think Apple is playing a smart card by siding with encryption of their devices. Personally, though, I think the lies by the NSA to our own government and the revealed actions prove one thing, that you can't trust anything that comes from our government and you really can't trust anyone that is affiliated, either voluntarily or compulsory, and Apple has been working with the government and intel agencies. Can they be trusted? Are their efforts to secure and encrypt their devices really genuine or just lip service and smoke and mirrors? Who knows. The trust is permanently destroyed, really!
I particularly like the part where the assets^Whuman resources^W^Wemployees are bundled off with the tech.

Hopefully they got some kind of decent compensation?
Slightly off-topic, but going to UPower's site shows nothing but a somewhat sparse wintery forest. Perhaps I've too much sci-fi on the brain, but it made me think of a nuclear winter.
Understanding the critical rendering path
Off the back of a napkin - the key should never be stored anywhere first of all. In the absence of keyring/keychain/etc., it'd be trivial to introduce a masterpassword implementation in the browser client which is XOR'd with secret credentials and stored as such.

Obviously not a 'secure' system by any stretch of the imagination but it's an order of magnitude better than storing in plaintext.
> Shouldn't they inform the local authorities and let them
> handle the case?

In which jurisdiction? The one containing the VPN IP addresses? Or the internet police?

An open letter to the internet asking for help ends up sounding about 1000x more effective than phoning this in to the "authorities".
This is sort of the same line of reasoning that people use to justify wearing jeans and a t-shirt to a job interview. The "should I be my everyday self" vs. "should I be a slightly-better (better dressed, more diplomatic, etc) version of my everyday self" has probably been around since the first formal job interview.

I tend to err on the side of "be slightly better, because they'll assume I'm doing that anyway, and what will they assume if I'm just my everyday self?" but whatever works for you :)
Sorry you didnt have a good experience. :/ Did you have problems with your stream quality? Normally our setting should be enough to have a good quality stream and if you have trouble you can get some help from our support team on skype to make sure your screen is clear and readable.
Batteries are great when you need a relatively compact and lightweight source without moving parts and noise. That is, cars, helicopter drones, phones, etc. Batteries still lack the high energy density of fuels like kerosene; you cannot fly a jet plane or rocket on batteries.

Electric power can probably be used to synthesize traditional fuels from carbon dioxide and water, to stay carbon-neutral. Plants can do that but in a quite inefficient manner. A (bio)chemistry breakthrough is badly wanted on this front.
I think a reasonable mission statement would be "To exploit foreign signals intelligence for the benefit of the USA".

(Push to shove on my opinion about NSA, which is pretty fuzzy: I think the NSA does important work, but that the organization is probably corrupt, and that it should be reorganized and much of its career leadership removed).
They don't actually say they asked him to stop playing, they say they demanded their coins back.
because the virginal cubicle denizens of Silicon Valley daren't ask the question themselves.
Hi guys,

I'm the author of Tilengine, what a surprise to find a discussion about it here :) I'd like to answer all your comments so far
The point was to show, where you get the idea is well-intentioned. Citing a text from probably from the nsa.gov website is no argument for showing the NSA is well-intentioned. Besides that, your citation show in my opinion the NSA is not well-intentioned because it uses terms like "under all circumstances". Do you think that when somebody tells you he would do SIGINT under all circumstances is well-intentioned?

"Indeed, can you nominate anyone who has actually been harmed by NSA surveillance?"

In the end we are all harmed by NSA surveillance or surveillance by other secret services, because we have to waste or life time to protect our rights.

Concrete individual example are the German chancellor and French presidents. The people of the Country are indirectly affected by such operations because it attacks the integrity of the state.

But I emphasize that we should not look on the people on the top of the state but on the common population. We are the victims of spying. Using the Internet is for most people a tool to develop their personality. If your process of developing your personality is under enduring surveillance (and you know it), it is no free development of your personality. And we have a right to develop our personality freely.

Besides indivdual effect surveillance has social effects like the chilling effect, which is subverting freedom.

It's not only about surveillance but also about other operations like PSYOPS, which has the aim to manipulate the public. Of course it's bullshit to think it is well-intentioned because there is no legitimate reason to take such influence on the public opinion.

Here are information about PSYOPS programs:
http://boingboing.net/2014/02/25/nsa-and-gchqs-dirty-trickin...

We are also indirectly harmed because they are attacking protests groups which we support.

What do you want to tell? That the NSA doesn't kill anybody?
Asides from the fact, that NSA's collected data is used for killing people without court proceedings: Why should rogue powers kill people if they can reach their goals with other (harmful) means?
A Doom-like engine on the Raspberry Pi – 9800 lines of bare metal assembly
What's the conversion factor between Wolfram's and nanodijkstras[1]?

This would be a great question to answer using Wolfram Alpha, since it does have nanodijkstras[2] and Wolfram[3]. Alas, the conversion is beyond it[4].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xoyw8LHGtzk

[2]: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=nanodijkstra

[3]: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=wolfram

[4]: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=wolfram+to+nanodijkstra
I'm very happy to see independent fusion efforts raising money, given that government R&D has decided to put nearly all its eggs in the tokamak basket.
Gramercy Point – A Premium Shopify Theme
Many (most?) important computer systems use UTC precisely to avoid time changes like the DST transition. Just one example that comes to mind is that DST can cause important cron jobs to repeat, or not occur at all.
Hardcore History is the best podcast in the world.
I posted this because of Sam's piece on Energy came on the heals of me listening to the organizer of the Survivor Library [1] on NPR this weekend. If the world experienced another solar flare on level with the Carrington Event [2], we'd be screwed.

In the US, bills introduced to spend the ~$3B to shield the power grid have died in committee several times. I'm not a survivalist / bunker builder, but it does seem like a relatively cheap insurance policy to guard against catastrophe.

[1] http://www.survivorlibrary.com/?page_id=1014

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859
> The people who do are continental philosophers who tend to get laughed out of the room

And for good reason. For example, philosophers (Zizek included) raved about Badiou's Number and Numbers. It is a nice history of the approaches to formalizing the concept of number, but there is no philosophy there. As soon as Badiou or Derrida or any other continental philosophers try to do anything else with mathematics it just becomes a grossly inappropriate and confusing analogy.
Count me in three? HN Twilight Struggle FTW! Email's in my profile.

//edit actually I confused Twilight Imperium for Twilight Struggle. Still, either would be great.
The two are not mutually exclusive. That could well be the official above-board reason. I was simply pointing out the absolutely immense opportunity for unchecked corruption that's inherent in programs like this. They're classified, therefore they get little to no external oversight.

Corruption need not be top-down. If Snowden could walk out with so much data without discovery, what could a more 'entrepreneurial' insider do?
Fission: Nuclear power stations have relatively low capacity factors (a measurement of how much of time they're actually connected to the grid and producing power). This is typically 70% over the last few decades for Western countries (i.e. a third of the time, a nuclear power station is not producing anything). As well as unintended maintenance shut down periods, most reactor designs require a multi-month shut down to refuel.
In recent years some countries have managed closer to 90%.

Fusion: By '24/7' you mean the 0.5 s sustained burn at JET in the 90s. Humanity has not yet managed to sustain fusion for a full second on the Earth, let alone get any useful power out of it.
ITER (the next generation Tokamak test reactor) isn't built yet. The intent is for it to achieve 1000 s of fusion burn time. Its over budget and behind time, and they've just had a management reshuffle to try and deal with this.

* Edited & extended to try and incorporate nbouscal's feedback from below
Won't argue that doesn't happen, but it's overstated. People from industry go into government for the same reason people join the digital service: because they think that the skills and knowledge they gained in industry can let them do the job better than the government can without them.[1] And these appointments are temporary for the same reason digital service appointments are temporary: people are only so willing to sign on for salary-capped government positions for so long.

The only difference is the intent and motivation you're ascribing to the respective actors.

[1] I think very few people would disagree with the assertion that a Googler knows tech better than anyone in government. The fact is that pretty much everyone in every industry feels the same way. Everyone thinks that the public interest would be served if only the government folks in charge were people who "get it" like they do.
Why are so many of the streamer profile field's required? Some of the fields contribute little to the streamer's channel and yet are required.

E.g. "Languages I want to learn" and "Favorite Line of code"
On Ryanair it would be.

The cheapest fare advertised on their homepage is £7.99, London Stansted to Strasbourg (15 August, debit card payment, carry-on luggage only).

A bag of nuts, according to the menu in their FAQ section, is €2.
From Chaos to Managed Chaos
"First, there is reading an uninitialized variable (i.e. something which does not necessarily have a memory location); that should always be a compile error. Period."

You cannot implement that efficiently without rejecting valid programs. Consider code like this:

int x;
if( f()) x = 1;
if( g()) h(x);

For sufficiently complex functions f and g, there's no reasonable way to decide at compile time whether x will be set whenever g() returns true. For example, f() might always return false because Fermat's last theorem is true.

And that 'reasonable' likely isn't a necessary part of that statement.