This may be a silly question, but does this sales tax also apply to SaaS products that you might sell? Or is this only for physical products a la Amazon?

It depends on the state. Some states tax services (eg Ohio), while most states only tax physical goods.

So it would depend on the state that your SaaS company is located in, or where your customer is accessing it from?

The latter. If you are a SaaS business in a state that taxes services, you only have to collect sales tax for customers in your state today. Under the new legislation, all SaaS businesses in the US would have to collect sales tax for any jurisdiction that taxes services.

The simplest way around this would be to set up your SaaS business in Canada.

I really had wayyyy too much fun playing this, for how "simple" it is. I'm very impressed with what was possible in just two nights. Thanks a lot for sharing!

Glad you enjoyed it, thanks for the kind words! :)

I find myself constantly trying to fight the urge to be lazy with JQuery, since I tend to forget the performance hit it entails.

For some concrete numbers, I updated a JSPerf that I found to include a raw JS implemention.

http://jsperf.com/creating-dom-elements/8

I was caught off-guard by the results - it appears that (even after multiple runs) the raw JS implementation is ~100 times (times, not %) faster. Definitely surprised at the drastic difference, although someone please correct me if I missed something in these simple test cases.

This was with Chrome on Windows, by the way.

Version 10 of your test is really surprising. The raw JS append function just came out 250 times faster than the jquery direct append example, and 750 times faster than jquery append variable. This is on chrome for iOS.

Wow, yeah. Document fragments seem to be even faster than my original createElement. I'm really going to have to re-evaluate how I'm creating new DOM elements.

This is the kind of thing I was hoping to inspire. Sure, use jQuery, but use it wisely. That said, literally never make DOM in it, for so many reasons...

I got different results on Windows XP (don't ask). Using both Firefox 19 and Chrome 25, Direct append came in the fastest with modestly slower performance (around 5-10%) from the other methods.

That sounds way more realistic - I'm not sure what's going on when I'm testing, but I may try later to repeat.

I second this - I've had great success using just Cloud9 for development and pushing to GitHub/Heroku

Soooort of off-topic, but I've actually had a lot of success using Cloud9 IDE (https://c9.io/) as an in-browser editor. It really closely mirrors Sublime Text 2 as far as default functionality and appearance goes. Of course, I'm coming from a Visual Studio IDE background rather than a Vim/Emacs background, so I can't vouch for its usefulness for users more accustomed to that type of work environment.

Note: not affiliated with Cloud 9

Another mystery of how a story can stay on the front page for hours with one comment while others drop off more quickly with active discussion happening. I know it's been discussed before, but sometimes I'm very confused about the ranking of stories.

Number of comments is not important at all, just number of upvotes.

Stories drop of quickly if they get flagged. It also depends on the amount of competition.

This is actually a little more in-depth than some of these types of lists get into. I really liked some of the metrics tracking that they suggest adding in. It's unfortunate that this is getting posted to HN, though, before their actual site is live so that could check it out.

The term "Heroku" doesn't even appear in the post at all, so I think this is definitely one example where it does make sense to match the HN title to the blog article title.

It sounds like a pretty sweet deal, but I kept looking up and down the page trying to find the catch. Is it purely a promotional thing for the companies to which you get credit? If so, I think it could use some emphasis that you are getting this in exchange for nothing at all.

I know it says "free", but that doesn't necessarily mean they don't expect something non-monetary in return.

Think of it as an extension of the freemium model. The premise is to get startups hooked on valuable services that they will subsequently pay for as they grow.

It's no different to all the "free" services associated with the major accelerator programs.

Like a dealer handing out samples of crack to grade-schoolers.

There is no catch. Just a non-profit side project that I really like!

This. I really hope they're able to get that integrated soon. That would be awesome.