ARM wrestles for control of Chinese joint venture - <AUTHOR> https://www.ft.com/content/0aafbbce-97d1-48b2-9af9-f792f67a0859 <comment><USER2> Paywalled. Text below. TLDR: ARM may have lost its IP to China.

 _"Arm, the UK chip designer owned by SoftBank, is fighting a boardroom battle with its Chinese joint venture after it tried to oust its chief executive.

In a series of statements on Wednesday, the UK group said Arm China's board of directors had voted on June 4 to replace Allen Wu as chairman and chief executive, and appointed a pair of co-CEOs on an interim basis.

But Arm China has rejected the claim, with a statement on its official account on the social media platform Weibo saying that Mr Wu "continues to serve as its CEO".

It noted that Arm China is "an independent legal entity registered in China according to the law" and that it is "currently operating normally and its support and services to Chinese customers [ . . . ] continues as always."

Mr Wu continues legally to be in charge of Arm China and three of its subsidiaries, Chinese corporate records show.

After the initial flurry between the two sides, Arm then said, in a joint statement with Hopu Investments, the Chinese private equity firm that is a major shareholder in Arm China, that Mr Wu had been investigated after complaints of "serious irregularities" from a whistleblower and several other current and former employees.

Concerns around Mr Wu appear to have centred on his potential business interests outside Arm, according to one person familiar with the situation in China. Mr Wu was initially asked to resign but refused, the person added, adding that the situation quickly became muddied by legal complications.

The statement said that Mr Wu had failed "to disclose conflicts of interest" and had violated the employee handbook. "The board believes that removing Mr Wu is the most ethical and responsible decision to ensure Arm China's long- term stability and business prospects."

Arm Holdings headquarters in Cambridge, UK UK based-Arm said, in a joint statement with Hopu Investments, that Arm China chief Allen Wu had been investigated after complaints of 'serious irregularities' from a whistleblower and several other current and former employees © Bloomberg The person familiar with the situation said that mistrust over Mr Wu's leadership had grown over the past few years both in Cambridge and China, resulting in a joint decision to get rid of him.

Mr Wu, a US citizen, has led Arm's China business since 2014 and became the head of the Arm China joint venture when it was set up in 2018, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Mr Wu did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The boardroom fight has placed a fresh spotlight on Arm's business in China, which has been dogged by concerns of technology transfer after the UK group sold a 51 per cent interest in its Chinese subsidiary to a consortium of local financial investors and Arm partners in 2018.

Arm then formed a JV with the group, which is led by Hou An Innovation Fund, a vehicle co-managed by the UK company and Hopu.

Arm China has grown rapidly with bases in Shenzhen, Beijing and Shanghai and now employs almost 600 people. Arm China acts as a licensing channel between the UK group and Chinese companies and counts Huawei as a key customer.

It was caught in the crosshairs of a US export control on companies working with Huawei last year, and has not been able to circumvent the ban, according to one person with direct knowledge of the situation.

Executives at Arm have repeatedly played down the risks of technology transfer and denied its expansion in China was driven by SoftBank.

SoftBank bought Arm for £24.3bn in 2016 but it subsequently sold a 25 per cent interest to the Vision Fund, the Saudi-backed $100bn investment vehicle.

Analysts expect the Japanese group to further sell its stake in Arm or relist the UK group as part of a $41bn asset sale programme to fund a giant share buyback and reduce its debt._"</comment>


Ask (any) Attorneys on HN: Why do you need to do this? - <AUTHOR>

Reference bfe profile:
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bfe
Which says:
"views expressed are my own and don't necessarily reflect those of my law firm or clients | views expressed are not legal advice; if you need legal advice, retain an attorney in your jurisdiction"
Why exactly is it necessary to do this? Is there an actual risk that someone can take something that you write in an online comment?
Are there cases where an attorney has been held liable and does this actually carry an actual risk? <comment><USER2> Short answer to your question is 'yes', there are cases where an attorney has been held liable. You can search online the "Togstad" case, cited as 291 N.W.2d 686 , showing that the lines between a legal consultation, and actual legal services can be a very thin.

Basically, the wife of a medical malpractice victim told her husband's story- no fees, letters, evidence, etc. were exchanged- to a lawyer. The lawyer responded that "he did not think we had a case". By the time the wife consulted with another attorney, the statute of limitations had run, and sued the first lawyer. The court found that the wife "relied on legal advice" of the first lawyer, and his firm had to pay for his negligent advice since there was clearly a case.

So, when there is some ambiguity between a consultation and 'legal advice' , lawyers will make it clear they have not entered into an attorney-client with you simply based on a discussion of some legal issue.

<comment><USER3> What are the odds of being found liable in that case?

If the odds are comparable with odds of winning Powerball Jackpot then such disclaimers are simply way to expensive (extra cognitive load in emails, unneeded distraction for prospective clients).

<comment><USER2> Well, the case went up to the Minnesota Supreme Court and they affirmed the ruling- so, those lawyers had to pay. A lot of other states follow the MN court's reasoning, and since in the US case precedent heavily influences subsequent rulings, it is much greater than a powerball's chance for other lawyers to face similar consequences.

I agree with you that those disclaimers are 'expensive'. It seems the ABA wants to control the market structure of legal advice, so as to control compensation for attorneys.

The legal establishment has historically been against technological improvements which can more easily disseminate legal knowledge. Even from the popular nationally syndicated radio call-in shows of the 1930s which were eventually shut down, to 'legal form' websites of today, it seemed to provole some powerful interests.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> IANAL, and TINLA: Lawyers are well positioned to know exactly how much trouble they can get into by casually giving someone legal advice for free, and how much trouble someone who isn't a lawyer can get into for the same reason.

Which may mean that those who are in other regulated professions such as CPAs or MDs should be doing the same...

<comment><AUTHOR> Noting of course that "grellas" has no such disclaimer though.

Would think there potentially might even be exposure for someone who does put disclaimers but then doesn't in all circumstances (in other words reverse default of typical behavior).

For example if you have an amusement ride and you put a sign in front of 20 rides "be careful dangerous ride" but don't put the same sign in 10 other rides doesn't that imply those rides aren't dangerous by one way of thinking?

Noting also that the particular HN commenter doesn't put a disclaimer on his twitter account.

<comment><USER2> I think- not 100% sure because I can't recall any case law- but if you are referring to Grellas' website, it would qualify as 'general information' and not 'legal advice' because it is not an answer to someone's specific question on a legal issue.

For example, Grellas has info on the best practices for company entity formation, financing, etc. It would be different if Grellas was at a party and he answered a question of "oh your a lawyer... I'm trying to convince my brother-in-law the engineer to work on this medical prototype idea I have on nights and weekends. Is a C-corp, or an LLC the best way to go for tax purposes?"</comment></comment></comment>


Foam – A Roam Research alternative with VSCode, Markdown and GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/foambubble/foam <comment><USER2> A lot of comments in this thread makes me wonder if Roam has successfully become an actual cult. Personal opinion, but it seems like Roam's core features are hard-to-invent (though all of those existed in different apps in different contexts) but easy-to-implement. Many early adopters are very unhappy seeing multiple alternatives pop up (some arguably offering better features) which subverts the 'my-notetaking-app-is-unique-and-better-than- yours' sense of superiority. I'm seeing people defending every aspect of Roam at a level that usually comes from cognitive dissonances.

<comment><USER3> Could you name a few better alternatives? I've been fishing..

<comment><USER4> Obsidian - [https://obsidian.md](https://obsidian.md) 2\. Stroll - Open source - [https://giffmex.org/experiments/strol...]https://giffmex.org...](https://giffmex.org/experiments/strol...\]https://giffmex.org/experiments/stroll.experiment.html) 3\. RemNote - [https://www.remnote.io/homepage](https://www.remnote.io/homepage) 4\. Amplenote - [https://www.amplenote.com/](https://www.amplenote.com/)

<comment><USER5> None of these alternatives (or others, AFAIK) have automatic references, which for me is the biggest Roam feature.

<comment><USER2> By automatic referencing do you mean backlinking?

<comment><USER6> I think the parent is referring to unlinked references: [https://www.roamtips.com/home/roam-unlinked- references](https://www.roamtips.com/home/roam-unlinked-references)

<comment><USER5> Yup, that's it :)

<comment><USER2> Org-roam supports unlinked references. In any case, that's super easy to implement (it's just plain search for the current document title in all other titles) and I expect others to soon offer this feature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As a researcher I always appreciate to see new opportunities to organize my work and improve my routines. This system does seem interesting.

To this day though I've found that Zotero is unbeaten to keep everything organized. I collect all my notes and documents in the Zotero library, and I sync it on multiple devices by placing the Zotero files in a Dropbox folder.

In this way I can use whatever app I want to write the actual notes (MD, txt, docx, whatever). I organize the notes in Zotero "folders" and the documents of each note are stored in "sub-folders". The best thing is that these are not actual folders, so the same document, if relevant for multiple researches, can be placed in two or more folders/sub-folders etc.

This setup has worked for me for nearly 8 years, with over 50 publications and over 5000 documents in my Zotero library. And best of all, the only thing I'm actually paying for is Dropbox, which I would anyway and, IMHO, is totally worth it. But that's another story. And more importantly, to get things started one can rely on the free tier of Dropbox, so even that's free.

So as a researcher (which translates to little money to spare and high volumes of documents to manage), I find that to this date I still have to find a solution that beats my configuration. I would love though to discover new opportunities!

<comment><USER8> Dropbox (or any of the other syncing apps) as a syncing mechanism for other stuff is underrated IMO. I personally have notes, password manager database and a budget app database synced between devices and the amount of value I've derived from having everything automatically sync between devices is huge.

I wish more apps would take the wide availability of "magic syncing folders" into account when designing their data storage. (I know many VC funded apps would prefer to keep the data in house so it can be monetized, but there is less excuse for open source tools)

<comment><USER9> I agree but there's no great cross-platform syncing solution yet, to my knowledge. Dropbox dropped all linux support except ext4, which is limiting. GDrive and OneDrive don't have a Linux Client. Nextcloud is neat, but still not very well supported (eg, by android apps).

The result is I'm using a mishmash of all those, and keep forgetting what is synced where.

<comment><USER10> For Google Drive there is a solution for Linux [0]. I actually really like it, it's not automatic, but that's not really a problem, because you can make it automatic with some bash and crontab.

[0] [https://github.com/odeke-em/drive](https://github.com/odeke-em/drive)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Little bit off topic, but I generated a zettelkasten from C2 Wiki. There is a zip file that you can download that has all the wiki entries from 2015[0] in html format. Used pandoc to convert to markdown and then did some sed scripting to fix the links and remove some boilerplate. I can open it on Obsidian and see that OnceAndOnlyOnce wiki entry has 1,470 backlinks. It's little bit slow and I can't open the Graph view, but otherwise it usable. Tried to open the folder with VSCode and then expanded backlinks sidebar. It resulted in "EMFILE: Too many open files". Is Foam using some custom logic for linking files together. I saw in inbox.md some auto-generated text for dealing with markdown links.

What I learned is that one folder with 36000 files is not a good idea.

0 - [https://archive.org/details/c2.com- wiki_201501](https://archive.org/details/c2.com-wiki_201501)

<comment><USER12> I use zimwriterfs to pack offline wiki into single file. Works great, thanks for the hint

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> One more interesting tool for managing Zettlekasten-like notes is Neuron ([https://github.com/srid/neuron](https://github.com/srid/neuron)). Static websites it generates show relations between viewed notes (scroll to top of [https://neuron.zettel.page/2011506.html](https://neuron.zettel.page/2011506.html)), support both "branching" and "non-branching" links, where the former provide structure for auto-generated index of zettels ([https://neuron.zettel.page/2011504.html](https://neuron.zettel.page/2011504.html)), plus they have integrated search and the whole app is pretty easy to set up using Nix. I really like the nicely polished interface and fact that it tries to have minimal effect on note format.

<comment><USER13> This page ([https://neuron.zettel.page/6f0f0bcc.html](https://neuron.zettel.page/6f0f0bcc.html)) seems to sum up it's goals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> What do Mind-mapping, Zettelkasten, Bullet Journaling, Getting Things Done, etc. all have in common?

They impose a taxonomy on thought and rely heavily on "best practices".

Even the simplest organizational schemes require a great deal of _discipline_ to be successful with, and nothing is a "one size fits all" solution.

I'm looking forward to the day when I can dump interesting thoughts (or links to articles, videos, whatever) into a "knowledge base" and it finds connections and labels things for me while I sleep.

Who's building _this_?

<comment><USER15> The key thing is not discipline. It's to make it yours. It's easy to make a software that would link your thoughts or weblinks together one way or another, but it's impossible to make it just like you would.

There is no software that would piece different ideas together to come up with a new one. That is called AI and we are not there yet.

What you want is get the results without doing any actual work yourself. This is not a problem that any software could fix.

<comment><USER16> Concur, to rephrase it, it's not the software that must make connections while you sleep, but rather you must make connections and then transfer them to software. From there you can do spaced repetition or whatever to map those connections to a mental model. There are two friction points here: realizing what connections are made and then externally documenting the connections.

<comment><USER17> Why do you need to document the connections externally? Isn't it enough to reference one node from another and provide some context?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I always feel like "creating relationships" in a tool misses the point in a way. Those relationships need to be _in your head_ in order to be useful, not in some tool, or else you're spending too much time and energy on maintaining the graph, and derive little to no value from having it.

<comment><USER19> Things can have a lot of relationships - databases for instance, it's good to have something remember it for you, and to show other people.

<comment><USER18> Databases operate at a much lower semantic level though, so it's not a good analogy IMO.

<comment><USER19> There are many examples:

Biochemical pathways: [https://www.roche.com/sustainability/philanthropy/science_ed...](https://www.roche.com/sustainability/philanthropy/science_education/pathways.htm)

Financial market trades

Suppliers for the parts of a car

Electrical networks

Data networks

Neural networks

Metabolic networks [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metabolic_network](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metabolic_network)

Electronic components

Fields of mathematics

History of mathematics / politics

etc

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The trouble I see with this sort of approach (not Foam itself, but a general take on Obsidian, Zettelkasten, etc.) is that you quickly end up with a single folder with thousands of files, which makes it hard to manage, share, etc. Especially if you have diagrams or media associated with your entries.

It's the same issue with static sites: you get a posts folder, dump everything in it, and then you dump all the images in an images folder and lose association between them.

I would much prefer if these tools took front matter metadata (or a pathname) to link to each other and had a note-per-folder approach (my own site does that, and I store images for each post in the same folder as "index.md"—the pathname becomes the final URL).

<comment><USER21> Foam author here! I am very open to all suggestions in this area. Foam is a new project I built solely to my own requirements, but I'm actively seeking feedback on how to make it more broadly applicable as per our principles: [https://foambubble.github.io/foam/principles](https://foambubble.github.io/foam/principles)

FWIW, subdirectory linking support is not far away. Work is being tracked on GitHub at the issue below, and I already have a WIP PR in the works: [https://github.com/foambubble/foam- vscode/issues/8](https://github.com/foambubble/foam-vscode/issues/8)

If you have any more suggestions and ideas on how to improve Foam, feel free to open issues on GitHub!

<comment><AUTHOR> So far I'm loving your project. Will be closely following it as I move my notes into foam bubbles

<comment><USER21> Amazing! Please let me know in GitHub issues or Twitter DMs how you get along. This is a very early alpha release, keen to hear feedback at all levels!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This really feels like an overcomplicated step in the wrong direction compared to VimWiki: [https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki](https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki)

<comment><USER23> Does vimwiki support the graph? That's the secret sauce really, I found [https://obsidian.md](https://obsidian.md) a few days ago and have been obsessed with graph based knowledge storage since.

<comment><USER24> I'm looking for a graph based solution, too. For my master thesis I used diagrams.net, but it's not a long term solution. I need something with markdown support, git, offline mode and hopefully for free.

<comment><USER25> Obsidian has a graph view, yes. But Zettlr is a much more stable note taking app than Obsidian. Zettlr is also open source. I would recommend you checkout Zettlr.com if possible. It has great set of tools and is stable unlike Obsidian (beta) which is proprietary.

Currently Zettlr doesn't have graph view, But the PR for a graph view is up and soon will come (power of open source?). If cool with it, I would recommend Open Source Software like Zettlr. :)

PR for graph view in Zettlr - [https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/921](https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/921)

<comment><USER26> You keep saying Zettlr is stable, unlike Obsidian? Why? Obsidian is quite stable in my experience, despite being in beta. Do you simply mean the feature set is built out and mostly solidified? Otherwise, I don't see the rationale behind your comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Glad to see that this exists and is under such promising development -- the tool looks like a perfect fit for my needs! I like working in the VSCode environment and I've been looking for the right tool for my Zettelkasten. Will definitely give this a shot once the subfolder linking gets added, that's a must for me given the structure of my Zettelkasten.

</comment><comment><USER28> I tried this with VSCodium, but it doesn't work. The recommended extensions are not in open-vsx marketplace. I installed the foam extension from the VSIX file, and it asks to reload VSCodium but I don't see it in my installed extensions after.

I would love to help to get it working for VSCodium if it doesn't depend on anything VSCode specific.

<comment><USER21> Foam author here! I'm not personally familiar with VSCodium, but contributions in this area would be extremely welcome as long as they don't prevent any of our Roadmap features working on VS Code!

Check out the contribution guide here: [https://foambubble.github.io/foam/contribution- guide](https://foambubble.github.io/foam/contribution-guide)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm in the slow process of migrating my personal wiki from Google Sites to Markdown + Jekyll/GitHub Pages. I love that everything is in plain text and version controlled and I feel like I can organize it however I like. I also use VSCode to edit and create the Markdown files but without any special plugins.

</comment><comment><USER30> Can I use this without a Github account? Specifically, I wonder if I can't transfer this over to a machine that never touches the internet and have it still be useful.

<comment><USER31> You certainly don't have to use git, though I'd at least get the template to start with. Git is just the sync method being used by default.

<comment><USER30> I want to use Git, I have that on my offline machine. But offline means github isn't an option. However, this indirectly answers my question, so thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The title is click bait. It seems all note taking applications now need to be Roam Research alternatives. And then you get the entourage of other mentions (Hi, Obsidian.)

The Readme for the linked repo mentions this note taking system was inspired by Roam Research. That doesn't mean it's a Roam Research alternative.

Personally, I like VSC but I find it quickly gets cluttered and I'm trying to pare back the things I use it for.

I also often find myself struggling with the VSC UI for file handling. I don't know why. I often find myself opening another editor / file manager to use along with VSC. It seems error prone to me.

<comment><USER33> It implements Roam-style syntax, backlinks and graph view, in what way is it not a Roam alternative?

<comment><USER32> * Quick entry in a workflowy-like interface (blocks) * Bidirectional links * Block linking * No need for file creation / management

Roam is just getting started with a dedicated team and a sustainable business model. At this point, I'm guessing they have built a lot of runway for development even if they lose a lot of users from their pricing.

Development with a dedicated team will move quicker than open source efforts. In this context, we're talking about a "Roam alternative" because the alternative is implementing ideas from Roam. Unless the team is all out of ideas, the future of alternatives will be to continue copying Roam.

The graph seems to be one of the least useful features. It doesn't take long before it becomes useless.

<comment><USER34> And the competition will check the pricing. Roam is the only block game in town, for now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I don't think or note about anything important or complicated enough to need a tool like this, but I love this approach for those who want it.

Notes are really just text to edit, so why not use a text editor for notes, especially if it's something you already have open?

For my much more simple notes, mostly lists for things like todos and music to check out, I switched to using a folder of text files in a separate VS Code window, and I couldn't be happier. I used to use Notational Velocity on Mac and then Zim on Linux, but I realized I might as well have a full editor for things like sorting, (un)capitalizing and block selections. I find rich text features and even markdown distracting for my notes, but I could use the latter if I ever wanted. Line folding is great for decluttering, and it lets me stick to under ten topical files. I thought I wanted wiki linking, but really just clickable web links plus multi-file search. Finally, autosave of existing _and new, unnamed files_ is what let me to ditch a notes-specific app.

<comment><USER36> Org mode in emacs seems to fit your description pretty well (for Emacs users, at least)

<comment><USER35> I've thought about it, but it seems overkill for what I'd really use, and I have Mac/Gnome keybindings burned into my fingers, so Emacs feels really alien. (I know about CUA-mode and other options, but it feels like fighting against the current to change _everything_ from Emacs defaults style keys.)

<comment><USER36> I use Mac and emacs keybinding all the time. C-a, C-e, C-k, C-y.. not sure what you mean.

<comment><USER35> To choose one of your examples, when I want to paste, my fingers know C{md/trl}-v, so C-y is not familiar. But it's not just copy and paste, I want keys for things like find, find again and replace to work about the same in all the apps I use, notably browsers, where I spend more than half of my time. Keys like these are used by most Mac, Linux and cross-platform apps. I know the Emacs commands aren't exactly the same — they're often more powerful, with more options for different types of find — but editors like VS Code and Sublime Text also have more powerful find than a browser, for example, but their keybindings are much more similar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Seems like a lot of people are unhappy with their new pricing model! [https://www.reddit.com/r/RoamResearch/comments/hf2fiq/i_love...](https://www.reddit.com/r/RoamResearch/comments/hf2fiq/i_love_roam_but_15_is_simply_too_much_for_me_on_a/)

<comment><USER32> What model? A monthly fee?

As opposed to what? Free? Getting investors who will pay for development while the service monetizes the users? It's unfortunate that this is what users have come to expect. That we feel should be getting free usage of a service when the developers have bills to pay just like everyone else, in addition to the cloud usage costs.

The people complaining about monthly fee in that three are target users for nobody but Facebook, Twitter, etc.

<comment><USER38> I'm all for a premium, but $15/month is a bit too much. Almost all their competitors are half the price. Here's the pricing of their competitors I can think of on top of my head:

Evernote: €7/month

Notion: $4/month

Ulysses: $5.49/month

Standard Notes: $9.99/month

OneNote (+ the entire Office 365): $9.99/month

Inkdrop: $4.99/month

Bear: $1.49/month ($14.99 per year!)

<comment><USER39> You're not the type of user they want:

> We don't want fuckin tire kickers who don't take thinking tools seriously.

> You don't think it's worth the money, that's cool - gtfo.

> You're actually poor -- we'll help you out.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/RoamResearch/comments/ep2vy6/how_mu...](https://www.reddit.com/r/RoamResearch/comments/ep2vy6/how_much_will_roam_cost/fowvc8f/)

That thread on Reddit really soured me on Roam. I'm glad to see alternatives like Foam pop up because there are some interesting ideas there.

<comment><USER40> Their big mistake was so abrasively describing their product development strategy.

Their core strategy is sound - to develop, at an early stage, for a passionate group of users (even if the group is small).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> There will be many people migrating to other services once Roam stops being free. This seems like a promising alternative.

<comment><USER32> It has already stopped being free.

If there really were alternatives to Roam then why would we even be talking about Roam? Why aren't we talking about Notepad? Nobody talks about Notepad because it's not interesting. It's not interesting because there's nothing special about it.

There's loads of projects on Github we could propose as alternatives to Roam. If they are really alternatives, then (again) why are we talking about Roam? Why is Roam in the title?

Why aren't you talking about Foam, which is the subject of this HN entry? Why does the title name Roam and "A Roam Research alternative."

Let's all repeat together.

Room: The editor has a name. The editor's name is Foam.

A bicycle isn't an alternative to a car. A bicycle might be another viable option for transportation, but it's not a car alternative. If you believe a bicycle is an alternative to a car then you're simply not using (or have no feed) of the benefits a car can provide over a bicycle.

There is no alternative to Roam (unless you're trying to sell something, apparently.) Once people stop talking about Roam, then there will be an alternative, because it's no longer interesting.

So, have you tried Notepad?

<comment><USER42> I'm not sure what your point is. Your comment is overly complicated. Are you saying notepad is a good alternative to roam?

<comment><USER32> If you only need the features that Notepad provides, then it's an alternative to Roam. That's what these "Roam Research alternative" discussions sound like to me anyways.

Foam isn't an alternative to Roam unless you don't need key characteristics which differentiate the two services.

I also feel that Roam is being used as click-bait to attract eyeballs to other note taking apps.

This reminds me of the "I can't believe it's not butter!" marketing campaign. Logically, you could apply that tagline to any product. I can't believe this celery isn't butter! No, margarine isn't butter. They are using butter to sell their own products.

Just the same, any note taking app could be an alternative to Roam. I would bet this discussion thread wouldn't have been this long if Roam wasn't in the title.

<comment><USER43> So, for you, an "alternative" would have to be a 1:1 replacement offering?

I'm glad that's not the common understanding of the word.

<comment><USER32> Not 1:1 but it wouldn't be an alternative if it isn't offering the same key characteristics which make the service unique.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Seems nice but a bit fiddly and lacking backlinks, after trying numerous clones of Roam Research this finally convinced me to just commit to Roam and stop trying these things out, maybe one of these solutions will eventually be just frictionless enough to work for me but not at the moment.

I'm glad Roam offers decent exporting though.

<comment><USER17> What kind of friction do you encounter when using Roam? I'm asking, because I'm interested in this kind of tools in general and I might offer a general solution based on Tiddlywiki.

<comment><USER44> No, that's the thing Roam is pretty frictionless. It's web-based, no setup needed and isn't Roam-lite, or Roam-ish with some caveats around UI or functionality.

<comment><USER17> Oh, ok.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> All of the links in square brackets for recommended extensions, recipes, etc, 404 when you click from the README.

<comment><USER21> Hi! Foam author here. We generate markdown references to bridge [[wiki-link]]s to work with Markdown tools. For the time being this is optimised for a) the editing experience in VS Code and b) the GitHub pages publishing pipeline, so it's more convenient to generate markdown links without the `.md` suffix.

See bottom of the file here for example: [https://raw.githubusercontent.com/foambubble/foam/master/rea...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/foambubble/foam/master/readme.md)

This means that for the time being links are broken in the GitHub markdown preview.

I'll look into getting this fixed, but not sure what the best way forward is.

<comment><USER46> I think the problem is that you're including these links in the README. New visitors expect all the links there to work, but they are broken.

If the README only included basic information and a link to the github pages, it would be easier to follow.

P.S. since I'm already typing, have you considered supporting semantic links, in addition to the regular ones? It will make the relationships between the pages clearer at a glance, and allow for better automation in the future. It might also help in visualization, for example you could toggle only specific relationships, to get a simpler graph of the information you care about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Love the idea, but I don't like the dependency on jekyll. Would love to see a clean Gatsby plugin that does the same thing. You could even generate the note-links graph for the static page that way.

<comment><USER21> Foam author here! I also don't like dependency on Jekyll, and over time I want to build a bespoke static site generator for Foam (possibly based on Gatsby) that's able to create a richer browsing experience.

Thanks for the idea! I have quite a few on the Roadmap already, and would love to hear more in GitHub issues

[https://foambubble.github.io/foam/roadmap](https://foambubble.github.io/foam/roadmap)

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Super excited to try this out since it maps strongly to my existing notetaking workflow (markdown, vscode, custom extensions, and so on). I hope the author (or a contributor) can come up with a clever way to input drafts via a mobile device. I've considered and rejected many workflows and continue to use a gesture on my phone mapped to the "create a new card" action in trello and manually move it over later.

</comment><comment><USER49> I'm definitely interested in a few Roam features in my VSCode (for note while working)

Foam Back links aren't working. That's one of the essential features of Roam.

I think that's a feature that any of the Markdown Link packages could offer. But then again I would keep the link graph in a separate data store and just show back links in a separate panel—not by editing the document itself.

</comment><comment><USER50> Is there a simple file-system-like project out there that has git-like capabilities but basically commits and pushes on any save. I'd like to just keep notes in markdown and sync notes among my devices. I don't even mind dealing with merge conflicts. I want the git-like capabilities for file history.

<comment><USER51> You could use a cronjob to add and commit all files at midnight.

<comment><USER52> That assumes you're using a device that is powered on at midnight, or at any particular time of day really.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> For those of you who have done this for a while, with links and backlinks, don't you just end up with a big snarl? It seems that unless other controls are introduced, every arrow/edge just means "A reminds of B somehow", no matter how tangentially.

</comment><comment><USER54> On the naming. There is a popular Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) package called OpenFOAM [0]. It was originally called FOAM.

[0] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenFOAM](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenFOAM)

</comment><comment><USER55> Backlinks aren't enough. They don't actually tell you anything.

We need to be able to define relationships between data. There needs to be a piece of metadata that describes the type of link like "influenced_by" or "influenced" or "evolved_from" etc.

<comment><USER56> In Knowfox, I associate a type with bidirectional links, e.g. [https://www.evernote.com/l/AAEeqhDgvTZLrozLtt0zMg1JvLol4xRmD...](https://www.evernote.com/l/AAEeqhDgvTZLrozLtt0zMg1JvLol4xRmDKQ)

<comment><USER55> It looks awesome, thanks!

Bad thing is that the website has almost nothing on it. I don't know if it's a service, a downloadable app, a self-hosted web app, or anything.

And the text on the website is light grey on a white background so it's very difficult to read.

I found more information on the github, but it still needs screenshots and information on how to actually use it (download? self-host on server?)

[https://github.com/oschettler/knowfox](https://github.com/oschettler/knowfox)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> I think roams queries will be the last feature most clones won't have

</comment><comment><USER58> Mind maps are still quite good for this kind of thing. Quicker than a wiki. WYSIWYG. Use two dimensions of the screen. Very quick to refactor structure. But they are a bit 90s I suppose.

<comment><USER33> I mean, outliners are literally 60s/70s tech and they're just now getting their heyday (in the form of Roam and others). Give mindmaps time :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> I will keep using a single text file with little structure thanks.

</comment><comment> the-peter Can Foam store the data in files in a local folder using a file sharing tool like Dropbox, SyncThing or Resilien? I don't want private notes going on Github.

<comment><USER21> Foam author here. Yes it can. GitHub support is purely optional. I've improved the Getting Started guide to reflect this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> How is different from normal note taking apps? I see a relation graph and back links. Are these two the only difference?

<comment><USER61> Yes, that's about it. Also the infinite nesting best exemplified in Workflowy. People who are into Roam seem to believe that once you start building a graph of these relationships that you can quickly click through, the result is surprisingly useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Roam/Foam is way different with Zotero.

More competition is always good to see.

</comment><comment><USER63> This is cool. Going to start playing with it.

</comment><comment><USER64> Seriously this has to stop, all you need is Zotero, Zim and Freemind. Formal research, desktop note taking and file organisation, mind mapping. These tools are reputable, well supported, play well with any file sync service and will be around for many years. They are the desktop productivity tools of choice. Don't waste time on cloud services that will shut down or be acquired, taking your data with them.

<comment><USER65> Freemind seems to be a dead project.</comment></comment>


Repeatable hang within 5 minutes using stress-ng and sleep and USB mouse - <AUTHOR> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg-server/+bug/1862281 <comment><USER2> Classified as an xorg-server bug</comment>


An Idea-Evaluation Framework - <AUTHOR> http://kristiandupont.com/blog/2010/09/an-idea-evaluation-framework-2/

<comment><USER2> I'd like to see customer involvement much earlier. You could start out solving a specific problem for a customer who will pay you to do it. If that particular problem seems to be relevant for other customers, you can make it into a product. This only requires that your initial contract with the first paying customer allows you to do this, but if you allow the price to go down this should not be a major obstacle. You should probably still go through the intuition and market analysis phases, but the benefit with this model is that the idea will have passed the testing phase already.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I started writing this as an ask HN post, but it became so long that I decided to write a blog post instead. Still, what I am really after is feedback from you guys :-)</comment>


Cuckoo++ – High-Performance Hash Tables for Networking Applications (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.09624 <comment><USER2> It would be interesting to see this benchmarked against absl::flat_hash_map[1] and folly::f14:F14FastMap[2].

[1] [https://abseil.io/about/design/swisstables](https://abseil.io/about/design/swisstables)

[2] [https://github.com/facebook/folly/blob/master/folly/containe...](https://github.com/facebook/folly/blob/master/folly/container/F14.md)

<comment><USER3> The point of cuckoo++ is to handle timers and expiry efficiently so neither of those hash tables is comparable. It would have to be "swisstables + heap" or "\+ timer wheel" or some other timer management algorithm.

<comment><USER2> Interesting, thanks for pointing that out - it wasn't obvious to me from skimming the paper.

In their "Conclusion" section, they write:

"We thus propose Cuckoo++ which adds a bloom filter in the primary bucket, allowing to prune unnecessary accesses to the secondary bucket without requiring expensive computation. Cuckoo++ hash tables have a uniformly good performance when compared to both pessimistic and optimistic implementation, and an improved performance over DPDK and Horton tables for all cases.

We also describe a variant of Cuckoo++ that integrate support for entry expiration directly in the hash table, avoiding the need for external management of timers and the associated overheads. This relies on a new memory layout more compact than DPDK's original one, and on the use of 16-bit timestamp."

That seems to imply that the timer/expiration feature is an optional added bonus, rather than a core feature of Cuckoo++.

<comment><USER3> So yeah, you're right, comparison would be possible if you subtract all the timer stuff. But as I recall of the offered implementation there wasn't actually an easy way to do that...

<comment><USER2> Their graphs include "Cuckoo++" and "Cuckoo++ w/ timers".

From their GitHub repo[1] it looks like the timer feature isn't built-in by default: BLOOM is just Cuckoo++, while LAZY_BLOOM is Cuckoo++ with timers.

[1] [https://github.com/technicolor- research/cuckoopp#benckmarkin...](https://github.com/technicolor- research/cuckoopp#benckmarking)

<comment><USER3> You can see that when TIMER macro is undefined in that benchmark code then no timer management is performed at all.

What's shown in the paper that bucketized cukoo + bloom compares well to he other hash tables they looked at (DPDK is probably a bit of a red-herring since it supports, and is optimized for, concurrent operations - but that's by the by). And here, a comparison with a fast robin-hood-ish hash like swiss or bytell would be interesting.

But also in the same benchmarks, cuckoo++ with timers is being compared directly against benchmark runs where no timer management is performed at all. The results show that it to be comparable. So presumably, when compared against traditional timer management like heaps/wheels it would be significantly ahead. But the explicit comparison hasn't been done anywhere as far as I know.

That's more what I was getting at in previous comments. Of course, you can look at it the other way around and you can rip out the timer stuff and compare bucketized cuckoo + bloom as just a hash table in its own right too.

The other comparison might also be interesting, can you do similar timer stuff with a robin-hood hash? You'd probably have to give up the SIMD, or come up with a new scheme to make SIMD usable, since that's what bucketized cuckoo enables you to do easily and that robin hood doesn't.

Edit: thanks for the correction btw!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The submitted link is a pre-publication draft of this conference paper published at the 2018 Symposium on Architectures for Networking and Communication Systems (ANCS): [https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3230718.3232629](https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3230718.3232629)

</comment><comment><USER5> A neat interactive visualization [http://www.lkozma.net/cuckoo_hashing_visualization/](http://www.lkozma.net/cuckoo_hashing_visualization/)

Edit: as child comment points out, this is a visualization of normal cuckoo hashing, not cuckoo++ that this paper describes.

<comment><USER6> Just to be clear, the paper is about an extension to Cuckoo hashing, while the link to the visualization is about standard Cuckoo hashing.

From the paper: "we describe algorithmical changes to cuckoo hash tables allowing a more efficient implementation. More precisely, our hash table adds a bloom filter in each bucket that allows to prune unnecessary lookups to the secondary bucket."

<comment><USER3> Also, when the paper says "cuckoo hashing" they mean "bucketized cuckoo hashing" which is different enough from the academic description of cuckoo hashing, which is what is described in GP's link, as to be a bit confusing!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The size of a cache line must be fixed in the preprint. He assumes a cacheline is 64 bit, whilst it is 64 byte, 8 words not just one. This affects the timestamp chapter mostly.

</comment><comment><USER8> so is that thread-safe ?

<comment><USER3> It's for networking apps where scaling is typically achieved by shared-nothing multi-threading making use of the receive-side-scaling feature of NICs.

Incoming packets are hashed by their 5-tuple and divided among CPUs and a thread is capturing traffic on each CPU and works independently of the others.

Edit: so the answer is that the question if thread safety isn't addressed, since it doesn't arise in the intended use-case. But I'm sure it could be added with per-bucket locking since it is based on cuckoo hash.

<comment><AUTHOR> Specifically, here's the system the hash table was developed for:

[https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc18/presentation/andre](https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc18/presentation/andre)

So yes, very much a system architecture with no locking or sharing.</comment></comment></comment>


School Contractor in Texas Denied Work Over Pro-Israel Loyalty Oath - <AUTHOR> https://theintercept.com/2018/12/17/israel-texas-anti-bds-law/ <comment><USER2> Isn't that obvious that the oath is against the 1st amendment? Can't believe this.

<comment><USER3> It probably _isn 't_ constitutional, but the process is that things don't get actually declared unconstitutional until someone with standing (this woman who lost her job) sues and the courts decide the question.

And that's exactly what she's doing. The lawsuit names the 1st and 14th Amendments in its cause of action, says that political speech is important, and that there's Supreme Court precedent that boycotts count as political speech.

Then it asks the judge to declare the law unconstitutional and unenforceable. As well as some other stuff like declaring void such provisions in existing contracts, issuing an injunction against including the provision in future contracts, etc.

<comment><USER4> > until someone with standing...

Unfortunately that isn't proven in this case, because proving that a person has standing can be an entire legal fight unto itself.

First, arguably she's a contractor because she's signed a contract with the state of Texas. So she has to argue that protections of the first and fourteenth amendments extend to contractors. That's not necessarily a given.

Second, it's a state issue, not necessarily a federal issue. IOW, she has to prove the federal constitution amendments are applicable to a state contract.

Third, it must be that she was not hired due to the pro-israel loyalty language, and not for any other reason.

That's just the standing.

Then she has to prove that the language actually violates the first and fourteenth amendment, and it's unclear that it does.

<comment><USER5> I don't find your other arguments particularly compelling, but this one is definitely wrong:

> Third, it must be that she was not hired due to the pro-israel loyalty > language, and not for any other reason.

She had already been hired, and worked for several years. The loyalty clause was then added, and she lost her job due to being unwilling to sign that clause. She has plenty of evidence that it was due to not signing (ie, her boss tried to get around her having to sign it, but was forced to conclude that it was unavoidable).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Weird, in the article there's an image of the affirmation in Texas code. The second section has definitions, and the second definition starts:

> 2\. "Company" means a ...

But the word "company" isn't used elsewhere in that image, so why are they defining it?

Maybe the affirmation image is clipped in such a way to remove the use of that word. Or maybe the law was really that shoddily written.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's from the Intercept. While I like Glenn Greenwald's reporting on many things, when it comes to Israel he has quite a bee in his bonnet, so to speak. I would take this with a grain of salt until it is verified by another source.

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.texastribune.org/2018/12/17/Bahia-Amawi- pflugerv...](https://www.texastribune.org/2018/12/17/Bahia-Amawi-pflugerville- israel-texas/)

[https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us- politic...](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us- politics/texas-speech-pathologist-fired-sign-israel-palestine-pledge-anti-bds- intercept-a8688031.html)

[https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/texas-speech-pathologist- fir...](https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/texas-speech-pathologist-fired-for- refusing-to-pledge-not-to-boycott-israel-1.6750517)

[https://www.thedailybeast.com/texas-elementary-school- speech...](https://www.thedailybeast.com/texas-elementary-school-speech- pathologist-lost-her-job-for-refusing-to-sign-pro-israel-oath)

[https://www.timesofisrael.com/kentucky-bars-state- contractor...](https://www.timesofisrael.com/kentucky-bars-state-contractors- from-involvement-in-israel-boycotts/)

[https://unitedwithisrael.org/kentucky-becomes-26th-us- state-...](https://unitedwithisrael.org/kentucky-becomes-26th-us-state-to- pass-anti-bds-law/)

[https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/anti-bds- legislation](https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/anti-bds-legislation)

Will these do?

<comment><USER7> Indeed! Yes. Thank you.

Also: [https://arcdigital.media/is-texas-willing-to-violate-the- con...](https://arcdigital.media/is-texas-willing-to-violate-the-constitution- in-order-to-support-israel-2c4178be89f1?sk=e5007f66f3e57057349355071e1ba4a0)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Asking to affirm you are not boycotting and will not boycott Israel is a far cry from a "Pro-Israel Loyalty Oath".

<comment><USER9> Companies that do business with Texas have to sign an agreement that includes that statement about Israel. It's part of Texas's standard agreement with vendors...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> So sad, but how is it related to HN?

</comment><comment><USER11> How could this possibly be Constitutional? I can understand how Conservatives in those state are co-opted by Right Wing Religious groups.

Reading this article made me physically ill.

<comment><USER12> How have so many states, including my own, pass something so obviously unconstitutional as well.

<comment><USER13> Lack of accountability pops into my mind. I'm not American but I'm absolutely shocked that this happened over there. Although as time goes on, that shock is becoming less common unfourtanetly.</comment></comment></comment>


CA Amazon Tax Signed Into Law - <AUTHOR> http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/california-politics/2011/06/jerry-brown-signs-laws-redevelopment-agencies-taxes-online-retailers.html

<comment><USER2> Amazon's doing the right thing here.

California has no way of charging them sales tax, nor should they, without a nexus. Imagine if you, living in CA, ordered something from a brick-and-mortar store in New York. If that store had to charge you sales tax and remit it to California, they'd simply say "no thanks" to your business. It's just not worth it for them to have to do all that work so you can get a $10 item (and so California can get their 82.5 cents).

Amazon shouldn't be treated any differently simply because they do a lot of business in the state. California knows this, so they come up with (well, Illinois came up with it) the idea that if some third party runs ads on their website for products on Amazon, that third party (an "affiliate") is actually an agent of Amazon. That's preposterous.

Amazon doesn't really have a choice, though. If they sue and lose, the entire affiliate program goes away. So they instead just drop the affiliates. They have to -- they're paying affiliates 6% of all qualified sales _and_ paying the state 8.25%. And they are then open to audits and other nonsense from the state. It's just not worth the leads any more.

<comment><USER3> You can't be serious. It's not really the affiliates that make the difference here -- it's all of Amazon's operations in CA.

We're all futurists here except when that means losing affiliate revenue and/or no longer having a tax dodge. It's just a matter of time before there's uniformity between the online and brick and mortar worlds, and Amazon is simply seeking delay. Per Sinclair "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

<comment><USER4> What operations in CA? (Almost) Everything I purchase from Amazon comes from Nevada.

And no, Lab126/A9/their other affiliates don't count, as they are not the company selling you the product.

<comment><USER3> No, you're right, they're the shell companies designed to avoid asking customers to pay CA sales tax. Virtual presence is fun until it means you have to start competing on a level playing field.

The affiliate program might be the strongest legal argument for in-state presence, but it's far from the only one. Apart from the subsidiaries, there's also the more than $3 billion they get from CA residents.

I think everyone here should have to disclose competing interests on this topic:

full disclosure: I work for a company (part time) that makes most of its money from Amazon affiliate revenue (but I personally am not taking Amazon's threats very seriously).

<comment><USER5> They can't be compared to shell companies which in general are fully owned. You can probably compare them to advertising agencies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder what authority CA claims over entities with no physical presence in the state. What I mean by that is this: if Amazon wants to ignore this, and still ships to CA residents, what recourse will the state have? If anything, wouldn't this all fall under the interstate commerce powers of the Federal government?

<comment><USER7> It is likely interstate commerce, since the affiliates don't work for Amazon, but it would also likely land Amazon in court in a large court battle. That battle may eventually get to the US Supreme Court, but I don't think Amazon wants the distraction.

I do wonder at what point loss of sales from affiliates will cost more than collecting taxes. Apparently, Amazon thinks it's a long way out given how readily they cut ties.

<comment><USER8> I have doubts that there is any point where loss of sales from affiliates would cost more than taxes. The main reason for Amazon to have an affiliate program is not awareness but SEO. The tens of thousands of people placing links directly to Amazon product pages are what keep Amazon at the top of search results for hundreds of thousands of product names, in turn driving much of their search traffic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Damn. There goes my $300-$400 a month passive income... And I already report my use-tax to begin with. Guess it's time to start calling up friends out-of- state for their mailing address.

<comment><USER10> And CA won't be collecting income tax on your $300-400 per month (since Amazon has canceled affiliates in CA), so their tax income is actually less.

<comment><USER9> And if I have to start filing tax returns with every state and county my small business happens to do business with (~$1000 / year business), I'll probably shut that down entirely for not being worth the bother as well.

<comment><USER11> Almost sounds inspired by crazy European Union VAT laws! American companies are technically required to register to collect EU VAT if their sales to any EU territory are over a certain amount. Thankfully, most smaller ones don't.

<comment><USER12> The level above which you have to register to collect the VAT is there precisely to protect the smaller companies which make a few small sales to the EU. If you are making enough sales to be over the threshold you should be able to afford to abide by the law.

<comment><USER11> Except it's a bizarre law because those US companies are not necessarily in the EU themselves. It'd be like California demanding a business in Poland should charge local California sales taxes for any exports to that state.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> this is very anti-entrepreneurial. all the small business, affiliates (large and small) will now relocate to other states that are more friendly to their business.

All that this is business is going to accomplish is that it will collect less tax dollars, drive jobs and businesses out of state. Thank you to big box retailers like Best Buy and Staples for driving to have this bill passed.

Too bad California :(

<comment><USER14> "this is very anti-entrepreneurial."

This is the end result of the "pro-business" crowd pushing society's tax burden into regressive taxes like sales. Sooner or later those taxes have to go where the money is.

"all the small business, affiliates (large and small) will now relocate to other states that are more friendly to their business."

No, _all of them_ won't. Many have physical locations in their state which they earn more from then they do from Amazon.

"Too bad California :("

Maybe you missed it but it's also too bad for Amazon. Affiliates add value, 40% of their sales. Now some will relocate and some will fold but the majority will keep selling their stuff and trying to chip customers away from Amazon.

<comment><USER15> No, this is the end result of a government spending more money than its citizens are willing to pay for. California needs to seriously get its spending under control including the unfunded liabilities (e.g. public employee pensions).

Of course they will threaten to cut fire and police to force the issue, when they have plenty of other budget expenses that can be cut first. Using fear to keep their donors in cash seems to be the current state tactic.

At some point, states needs to their expense, assign use tax (e.g. gas tax) to repair the infrastructure it is fixing and increase those taxes if they don't cover the infrastructure (or quit raiding them if they have a surplus).

PS: Depending on what the sales tax is actually taxing - it is not that bad on the poor. Going with that, "progressive" taxes aren't fair either.

PPS: I still want to know why sales tax doesn't apply from the state the item is being sold from.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Here is the law, marked up:

[http://leginfo.ca.gov/pub/11-12/bill/asm/ab_0001-0050/abx1_2...](http://leginfo.ca.gov/pub/11-12/bill/asm/ab_0001-0050/abx1_28_bill_20110615_amended_sen_v97.html)

I read parts of this and noticed the following exception for small retailers (<$10,000 annually), which may or may not be applicable to Amazon Affiliates (could be interpreted either way, because "retailer" includes "an entity affiliated with a retailer within the meaning of Section 1504 of the Internal Revenue Code."):

"This bill would include in the definition of a retailer engaged in business in this state any retailer entering into agreements under which a person or persons in this state, for a commission or other consideration, directly or indirectly refer potential purchasers, whether by an Internet-based link or an Internet Web site, or otherwise, to the retailer, provided the total cumulative sales price from all sales by the retailer to purchasers in this state that are referred pursuant to these agreements is in excess of $10,000 within the preceding 12 months, and provided further that the retailer has cumulative sales of tangible personal property to purchasers in this state of over $500,000, within the preceding 12 months, except as specified. This bill would also provide that a retailer entering into specified agreements to purchase advertising is not a retailer engaged in business in this state and would define a retailer to include an entity affiliated with a retailer under federal income tax law, as specified. This bill would further provide that these provisions would not apply if the retailer can demonstrate that the referrals wold not satisfy specified United States constitutional requirements,as provided."

</comment><comment><USER17> The battle over similar issues in Texas has also been fun:

• Amazon has a distribution center in Irving, Texas but argued its clever legal structure freed it from having to pay sales taxes.

• The Republican Comptroller Susan Combs insisted on payment of a past tax bill, based on these operations.

• Amazon said it'd thus need to close the facility, and Republican Governor Rick Perry announced his opposition to the Comptroller's decision.

• The Republican-dominated legislature then passed a bill, similar to this California bill, further establishing Amazon's sales tax obligations, for not just the distribution center but the affiliates.

• Perry vetoed it.

• Amazon's hometown newspaper, the Seattle Times, then editorialized that it should stop dodging state sales taxes nationwide.

• The Texas legislature started working on a veto-proof way to obligate Amazon, perhaps by attaching the obligation to a larger budget bill.

• Amazon offered the legislature a bigger new distribution center, with 5000 (and then 6000) new jobs, in return for a full legislative exemption from sales taxes for the next few years.

The part-time legislature, which usually only meets every other year and (with no state income tax) takes sales taxes very seriously, has so far declined Amazon's offers.

Some of the coverage:

[http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2011/02/texas-governor- back...](http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2011/02/texas-governor-backs-amazon- seattle.html)

[http://www.statesman.com/news/texas-politics/amazon- sweetens...](http://www.statesman.com/news/texas-politics/amazon-sweetens-job- offer-texas-lawmakers-dont-bite-1558831.html)

<comment><USER18> Good for Texas.

Elsewhere on HN, I've read Amazon's claim that they would be happy to pay sales taxes, but that dealing with all the local taxing authorities would be a nightmare. If this is true, it makes me quite sympathetic to their position.

But if I understood you right, it looks like Amazon outright attempted to bribe the legislature for special treatment which other retailers in the state don't get. I realize this kind of shit happens all the time, but that doesn't make it right.

And the Texas legislature refused to play ball. If I lived in Texas I would be standing in line to re-elect these people.

<comment><USER19> why? i'd rather keep the money than give it to the state. why vote for people who want to tax you more? i realize it's nice to believe in integrity but i don't think this is an example of it

<comment><USER20> Do you drive on a road? Does the USDA inspect your meat? Did you or any of your kids attend a public school?

This demagoguing of taxes is getting a bit old. Reagan, Ike, and Nixon would all be chased out of the party at this point. Taxes are the price we pay for living in a society.

Edit for clarification: Obviously not _all_ taxes are good, similarly not all taxes are bad. That is my point. Life is rarely black and white. I also think tax laws should apply equally and Amazon shouldn't be given any breaks that others aren't.

<comment><USER21> I, like most other working, educated people, pay every year more in taxes than I pay for food, clothing, vacations, gas and entertainment-- all combined. That's a big price to pay for driving on roads and inspecting my meat. You know why? B/c gov doesn't give a crap about efficiency or saving my money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'd be interested in buying anyone's amazon affiliate store. If you are interested, contact me privately.

</comment><comment><USER23> Does anyone know why Amazon doesn't already have to charge sales tax, by virtue of their California offices (e.g IMDB, A9 & Alexa)?

<comment> brown9-2 IIRC Amazon has a pretty complicated legal structure where each of those companies - IMDB, A9, etc - are wholly owned subsidiaries of Amazon (or some other legal entity) and not considered the same entity as Amazon.com.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This sucks for a lot of people who support their podcasts through Amazon's affiliate program.

</comment><comment><USER25> The core problem, from an outsiders' perspective, appears to be jurisdictional fragmentation. Amazon, not unreasonably, want to be able to regard the USA as a single market, yet this gives them 50 different sets of legislation and 50 tax codes under which to operate.

However politically unpopular this idea might be (it's certainly not popular in Britain with the EU, which itself started as a common market and legislation / regulation area) the most business friendly idea seems to be centralisation. Remove competency for this sort of issue from the individual states, create common legal frameworks, allow a one-size-fits-all management model rather than having to individually cater for the requirements of Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North and South Dakota, Delaware and Montana. Seven jurisdictions, seven legal codes, seven sets of tax law. Yet only one has enough population that it would even qualify for the top ten _cities_ by population and even combined they would only be twenty-second in population ranking. They're not major markets and a legal framework designed like this is unduly expensive.

<comment><USER26> Way more than 50 different tax codes (Amazon could probably deal with that), many counties and municipalities have their own laws regarding sales tax too.

<comment><USER27> On top of that how would Amazon identify if I live inside Omaha 7% (state+local) sales tax, or just outside Omaha 5.5% (state only) sales tax? Nothing changed about my address between when I lived in an un-annexed suburb and after I was annexed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Hrm if all the states start to outlaw this will we see a tax haven somewhere being put up to absorb all of these retailers?

<comment><USER29> Well 5 states have no sales tax -- including Oregon and Delaware. And another 5 states already collect sales tax from Amazon -- including New York and Washington. So there's really no need to get fancy -- there are plenty of good options for places to locate your company.

<comment><USER30> _And another 5 states already collect sales tax from Amazon -- including New York and Washington._

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=4...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=468512#which) verifies this. The other three are Kansas, Kentucky, and North Dakota.

<comment><USER31> Yup, I live in Kentucky and have to pay the sales tax.

On the plus side, my orders often ship from the very city I live in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm curious, how is Amazon selling things online different from software companies offering software and services online ? Does this law pave way in future to tax these kind of services too ? Or is it that software companies already pay a sales tax for Software...

</comment><comment><USER32> Frankly, I wish Amazon would just give up the fight and go ahead and charge sales tax for all 50 states. They're the only retailer that I do any business with that doesn't charge sales tax and, because it's a PITA to remember to save every single receipt from them for tax purposes I don't do so and, therefore, I end up paying stupid use taxes which probably end up costing me more than what it would've cost me if Amazon had just collected the sales tax in the first place.

<comment><USER33> How do you end up paying more in taxes? A majority of my spending this year was made on Amazon and in my tax return I didn't enter a single one of those purchases as "Out of State Untaxed Purchase" so I didn't get taxed, which I think was illegal but apparently I'm not the only one who neglects to do this. In any case, all Amazon receipts can be viewed in your account history.

<comment><USER32> How do I end up paying more in taxes? Because I'm aware that I undoubtedly bought _something_ from Amazon in the past fiscal year and, therefore, in compliance with my state's laws, I check "yes" in the box and pay the flat fee for use tax. That flat fee is set at a level that reflects what the state thinks an average taxpayer owes for their "out of state untaxed" purchases, but the "average" taxpayer in their model buys more stuff than what I would ever actually buy and, thus, they charge me more in use taxes than what it would have cost me if I had just been charged sales tax in the first place. I guess it just plain never occurred to me to look up my account history and compute an exact value instead.

<comment><USER34> That's what I do. Being the overly honest person that I am, I go through and total up all my Amazon purchases for the year. They should really have a way to compute the total automatically. It always takes me a while to do it by hand. But at least that way, you're paying the right amount.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Amazon has it's search engine A9 based in Palo Alto, CA. Amazon refers to A9 as "our search engine" in its own documentation: <http://www.amazon.com/gp/xs/sharethepi.html>

How can it then claim that it has no offices in California?

<comment><USER36> it is a subsidiary. Ie. Amazon pays A9 for the technology, but A9 is a separate legal entity.

I worked developing for the Kindle, which is designed/engineering in Cupertino, by a company called Lab126, which is a subsidiary of Amazon. (basically Amazon pays Lab126 for technology transfer on the books, but really, internally amazon controls everything). The Parent company/legal entity of the CA subsidiaries is called A2Z.

We were instructed not to travel around, we couldn't attract recruits by saying we were working for Amazon, etc. etc. But internally Amazon was controlling pretty much everything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Can someone explain the redevelopment issue?

<comment><USER38> apparently the state allowed you to spend property taxes owned into building renewal if the building area qualified.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Why does legislation have to be some confusing. So I get that certain parts of the law have been signed, but what about the affiliate tax? Is that now the law. The article says

"Brown announced signing eight separate pieces of that package Wednesday, though not the main spending plan itself.

The online sales tax law, AB 28 1x, would seek to force online retailers who have no physical presence in California, such as Amazon.com, to collect the same levies as bricks-and-mortar stores."

The use of "would seek to force" seems to suggest this part hasn't passed yet. So the real question is did it pass or not?

</comment><comment><USER40> It's amazing how 90% of the people here are so incredibly ignorant that they don't know that states don't have jurisdiction over the activities of their residents and non residents in other states. This community is not very smart.

</comment><comment><USER41> That's pretty much the end of all affiliate programs for people in CA, no?</comment>