skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> This might be slightly off-topic, but am I the only one that thinks that command line tools are archaic with some pretty serious drawbacks? I see and acknowledge the power they can wield in the right hands, but for mere mortals it's a terrible experience.

You've asked the question and answered it yourself ;-)

Using a GUI over the CLI is probably preferred for 90% of the tasks 95% of the users typically perform. I don't agree with all the drawbacks you listed, but I can see where they are coming from. The CLI is simply not so great for typical computer users.

That said, a good CLI is absolutely invaluable for power users, system adminstrators, developers, etc. There's only so much you can conveniently do through a GUI, as soon as you need to compose multiple complex actions into a script or perform advanced data extraction, search operations, automate tasks, etc. there really is no alternative for a good CLI.

The funny thing about a powerful CLI is that it isn't very accessible unless you invest quite a bit of time mastering it, but once you do, you'll find out that you can do many (most?) things more efficiently by typing up commands and composing them into scripts. Once you get proficient using the CLI, you'll find yourself using the CLI for all kinds of things you used to do through a GUI before. For example selecting and copying around files or extracting archives, personally I think CLI tools (in my case unix CLI tools) to be much more flexible and convenient than something like WinZip.

But just like most people will never use their computer to write scripts or computer programs, they will also never invest time in learning the CLI. And usually they don't really need to anyway, just like most people don't need (or want) to learn how to change the oil on their car themselves, no matter how easy it is if you know how to do it. It's not something they enjoy learning about, but that doesn't mean changing oil is useless or difficult.

The lack of a proper CLI in Windows 9x and XP has always bothered me a great deal, as a developer and power user. It was one of the main reasons to switch to Linux and later OS X. Apparently these days Windows has a pretty good CLI with PowerShell, but the Windows train has already departed a long time ago for me. But it's still a good thing Microsoft finally decided they had to provide power tools like a CLI, it's one reason less blocking me from every going back to Windows (a lot of others still remain though ;-)
There currently isn't, beyond the advanced FAQ. This isn't by design -- writing really good detailed architecture papers takes a lot of time, and we were 100% focused on getting the product out. We'll get much better at documenting the internals, but it will take some time.
You could not have gotten these guys more wrong. They are serious technologists who have been working day and night for years to build something that they deeply believe in. Every hacker's heart should be warmed by the fact that they kept at it.

When you have a vision of something great that ought to exist and set about bringing it into the world, you are in an isolated position: other people don't yet see what you see. This leads to a lot of doubt by others and by yourself too. The longer it takes, the more exposed you are. To make it through that you are going to need a deeper source of motivation – an underground spring. Love is a fine word for this, and it makes me happy that Slava put it in his title: it's a clue to this experience that rarely gets mentioned, especially in the land of pivots and MVPs and weekend hacks.
> We ask for a discount on every transaction with a 3rd party our business makes

I'm curious to learn why you do that? On "contact a sales person" type sales I can understand but you use the term 'transaction' which implies you are doing this on self-service purchases.

Most self-service businesses are setup to streamline (ie avoid) human-interactions which would also suggest they are honestly pricing their goods/services. By contacting them for a discount you're already increasing their CAC before you then ask for a discount too.

If you have sticker-shock on the price because it's not offering a return value to you or you cannot afford it then you're probably not a target customer. That's why I don't go into the Ferrari dealership and ask for 10% off.
Amazon unjustly shut down my seller account.
just click on your username on the top right corner when you are logged in.
Detroit: I came to see the end of the world
The "how for do we have to go back" false equivalency is utterly ridiculous. We're not talking about the oppression of the Britons by the Romans here. We're talking about systematic oppression and viscious discrimination that was committed by the still-existing state and federal governments within the lifetime of people still living. Rosa Parks died in 2005. George H. W. Bush, who is still alive and kicking, is about 5 years older than MLK would have been today. Many TV shows I watched on Nick-at-Nite growing up (Dyk Van Dyke, Get Smart) were contemporaneous with violent school desegregation. The young people that were the subject of the showdown at the University of Alabama between the National Guard and Governor Wallace were just 7 years older than my dad.
I really like that map with overlaid discs representing the number of EV for each state. I think it's much clearer than the usual method of distorting the map to make each state's area proportional to its number of EV.
A flock of CSSGulls?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andersonantunes/2011/08/17/zara-...
This is a vast oversimplification of a very complicated problem.

The common public loves to simplify problems, as it makes things easier to comprehend. I think this leads us to this huge partisan gaps in beliefs in this country. Both sides are guilty of boiling down complex problems to a level where people think they "understand" the problem. Unfortunately, there are many more actors, causes, and effect behind the scenes that must be accounted for. It's not a simple cause and effect, Doctors must get paid, argument.
Peter Schiff Warns Of Coming U.S. Economic Collapse 2012
Ask HN: Should I incorporate this early??
My original question is here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4754248 but I left out a lot of details. There were many good details.
Here is the situation:

I work full time and pursuing this at nights and weekends. I have apps on the side that I sell at the App Store. It is only generating small revenue so I never bothered, but now I am pursuing something that if there is a market demand for it, can take off and become a startup.

I am outsourcing the development to US coders via guru and elance. I'm a developer but not in this expertise. I figured someone else can do it faster and better. With regards to freelancers, I want them to build the components and I integrate them.

I am looking for a technical cofounder(s) right now. I'm living in my parents house but they are out of the country (1 year) so I can offer free rooms and we can share food/etc. I can offer some money for fun and allowances. I intend to keep working because I have a great job that allows me to keep doing this at night and pay for expenses. When there is potential, I intend to move to it full time. I'm not doing this to limit risks to myself and put all the risk to cofounders/employees. I get paid quite a bit and have a very flexible schedule. We can minimize cost by working out of the house and I can keep the venture running with my salary. I'm flexible. Let me know your thoughts on this.

In the future, I want to pursue patents even though they are evil. In the future, I want funding and move to wherever makes the venture most conducive to success.

Thanks for all the help and advices! I hope this can help others as well.
That is not what I said... key sentence is "That critical Libertarian slice or whatever you want to call it, of the traditional Republican base, was demoralized over Ron Paul and that resulted in an Obama victory."

Meaning the libertarian section of the Republican base, not meaning the people who necessarily voted for Gary Johnson.
May be he is not thinking about customer's opinion and wants to use haskell but is unsure if it is feasible to develop a real world commercial application with it? How much time it takes? What are the pitfalls? etc. He needs the validation by someone who has done it successfully.
Show HN: I open soured my iPhone app, SquareQuote
Chinese government blocks Google.com, Gmail, Google+, Maps, Docs and more
I'm impressed that you're taking the time to do proper, well-researched benchmarks. They're really tough to get right. It really comes down to your own specific workload that matters anyways.

This feels new and refreshing, I hope things turn out positively for you.
How long did it take? Any idea how much the AP data feed costs?
I might be missing something, but doesn't assortative mating in itself guarantee that certain hereditable characteristics would be more likely to flourish?

Also, I thought it was funny that one of the researchers cited (Simon Baron-Cohen) is a cousin of the Baron-Cohen you've probably heard from before, especially since I've long sensed a whiff of spectrum disorder in the whole Ali G/Borat schtick.
Holy unreadable contrast, Batman!

http://contrastrebellion.com/
How does it know which shards are relevant? I thought that data was sharded by primary key.
Why write a program that gets your job done when you can just as easily write a language that makes writing that program trivial?

(I'm only being partly tongue-in-cheek - that's mentality behind idiomatic Lisp).
It's funny we've thought about doing this in a startup I run in the real estate industry where most of our customers are realtors.

Unfortunately it's not always easy to arbitrarily raise your prices for the difficult customers because they complain even more and ask "where does it say that there will be a charge or fee for this on your website?"

I always thought it would be nice to have an extra line on my pricing page that stated "Difficult Customer Fee: $TBD" :)
You make some good points, let me try to answer.

First, I'm certainly not dismissing it. Yes, I'm frustrated, but I'm also aware that a lot of people much smarter than me swear by this tool, so there's obviously a lot of value there. I'm more dismayed by the learning curve. I come from a sales/marketing/ux/business kind of background so my mindset is different. I like my tools to be beautiful and intuitive. As simple as possible but no simpler as Einstein famously said.

The problem, as I see it, is that the commandline is like a marathon you have to run before you reap any rewards. Learning the commandline involves a whole sleuth of different things. Finding the right tools (I can infer from your post I obviously don't have those :-)), learning how filesystems work, unixy commands, git, cygwin, the list goes on. Seen from my perspective (and this might well be wrong) you basically have to have a good grasp of a whole boatload of ideas, technologies and concepts before a commandline tool is of any use to you. There's no easy way to learn a bit at a time. It's an either/or kind of deal.

I don't see any easy solutions to this, but I think it's a problem.
One use-case I've encountered before is to take your models from your iOS/Mac application and directly reuse them on the web. In my circumstance, it was compiled and run on Linux, though this seems to use Macs which could be useful if you have a Mac-only API that you use.
The Theft of a "no idea" YC s12 Startup
Note that the blog itself has comments where praise not appropriate for HN can be left.
Catchy title, I must say.
Looks very nice, and I had been looking for something like this for a while.

Part of the value proposition to me would be that it is third-party but still controlled by the site owner. By being third-party any verification of external logins you do would be more trusted than the average testimonials page of a very small company. By leaving the site owner in charge, they can know it doesn't look tacky, try to steal traffic, or contain negative reviews.

One feature I've always wished someone would implement would be a way to assure a customer they can easily have their testimonial removed if they end up unhappy with the service later.
I also found the narrative really helpful. We run some similar products around maps, it was interesting to see how they approached this!
Some people like building good, simple things (CSS)
Some people like making these things better (HTML5, CSS3)
Some people like adding extra features and options, disregarding the loss of a bit of simplicity (LESS/SASS)
And some people just like making things more complex for the sake of it (Domo.js)
Is the package up on Ubuntu PPA already ? it seems that the installation instructions use the ppa, but apt-get doesn't find the package.

edit: Indeed, my architecture i386 doesn't match the only available amd64 binaries. Thanks
But most of that money couldn't be put towards a program like ORCA. The one saving grace of Citizen's United is the limitation on PAC-campaign coordination.
How often are you "moving up and down" on the command-line? I usually have a few terminals open to common places that I need to be (or tabs, if that's how you roll) all with command histories applicable to each task.

Instead of 20 letters, just type the first couple, tab complete (z-shell makes this fluid) and hit enter. If some directories have a single sub directory, it's just tab-tab-tab and you're at the base.

To get a "visual cue", type pwd or have a setting for your shell that follows your directory path.

You can also set up aliases or shell variables for common paths. This has the benefit of not being cluttered (like shortcuts on a desktop) while allowing you to "cd essays" instead of "cd documents/writing/essays".

Also, there's the benefit of find/grep. If you can't remember where a file is, but you know generally where it is, cd there, find "part-you-remember" or grep -R "some unique text" and you'll get your answer soon enough. This has the benefit over full desktop search in that you get local results, so you may have to only sift through 3 or 4 "README" files instead of dozens.

Sometimes I use a graphical file browser, but mostly for images. For that, I use nautilus. But I can open nautilus from my current directory. For example, to get to my code, I can just "cd project-name; nautilus ." (having set up a variable) instead of trying to navigate there from /.

I'm not saying GUI tools are bad; I'm saying that for many tasks, the command-line is more efficient, but a GUI tool is just a command away.
You're confusing an excuse your mom didn't like with an actual rationale. A rationale is a reason for someone to do something. It's empirically the reason given for this kind of behavior in many situations.

We may not like that reason or think it's fundamentally the most mature way to behave - but it's still a reason. If you're saying it's illogical, it's not, game theory says that this kind of self-protective behavior is very logical when competing with other actors that are also being self-protective.
which gives us what?
HARDCORE ANALYTICS
wtf are "HARDCORE ANALYTICS"?

they're hardcore man... They use like... numbers and shit.

Is this a tool for business? is this something to help me find new content? If it's for finding content then why do I care if it's got "hardcore analytics"? SHow me pretty pictures I'll see if I sign up. If it's for business then what is it going to do for me?

In short why should I, or anyone else, sign up for this?
API Design Best Practices
Since buying phones mid-air is though, I'd suggest an app that does binaural beats like ambi-science, or one that generates white noise like the sound of a waterfall or a fountain, that would drown the noise and the mind wanders off instead of focusing on the sound.
Err, sorry, my mistake -- pulled an all nighter to push the product out :) You're right, the system will have to scan every shard. (the statement above regarding parallelization is correct, though)
I've come across this same "issue", specially with suits and shirts - for some reason in the US these are more "baggy".
Well, sort of. GNUstep provides a free implementation of (enough of) Cocoa.
That's a great reply!

The problem is that people like me, who are somewhat technically inclined but not fulltime programmers, fall in between two chairs. I need to do some reasonably advanced stuff, but I face a steep learning curve before I can do it, and I'm not sure it's worth it since it's not my main occupation.
I second Geoff Anders being awesome. leverageresearch.org doesn't do Leverage Research (his org) justice, but there's plenty of interest there anyway.
Thanks for the reference to crate, I'd never heard of it. I'd imagine the pushback on ideas like this is much less in homoiconic lanugages like clojure, since when all is said and done everything is an AST.
It seems they want to make an example out of Google: "If you disagree with our censorship, this is what will happen to you, too", and create chilling effects for any other company who's considering being "moral" in China.

I wonder if Obama will do this to China, too:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/11/us-imposes-sancti...
I thought the entire spirit behind applying without an idea was to invest in the team? If that's the case, and the original team is no longer there, wouldn't that team be disqualified?
Yeah, sorry. We have a new visual design waiting in the wings.

https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/66

Hopefully this fraud thing dies down long enough for me to implement it, and/or someone else steps up to the plate.
Nate Silver and others have pointed out that the polls appear to have underestimate democratic performance at the polls

This is what Nate Silver said on election night:

So far, however, Democrats also have an edge in the party identification numbers in the exit polls. In Ohio, 38 percent of voters identified as Democratic in the exit poll as compared with 31 percent of Republicans. And in Virginia, Democrats had a 37-to-33 advantage in party identification. These numbers are similar to what many pre-election polls showed.

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/06/live-blo...

Can you point to where he adjusted this analysis?
I've experienced this both ways. Usually when I'm looking for business products or services they are more likely to want to do an annoying "sales call" but I've also experienced this as a business owner. We try to offer a very simple service where customers can sign up online and find all of the information they need on our website. However we still get customers that will literally email us and ask us to call them (as if they can't call our toll-free number) so that they can literally ask the most basic questions.

The worst is when they ask us to "send them a proposal" or "when you can have a conference call with us?".

We work with clients in the real estate industry, real estate offices, builders, etc... I think certain industries are accustomed to working certain ways or just follow the traditional "corporate attitude" of meetings and conference calls.

If you really want a low-touch, low pain customer base I think the industry you choose is also very important.
Facebook Lobbying Europe On “Unreasonable And Unrealistic” Privacy Law Reform
My points exactly. But there is no way to carry this out due to the current composition of the board. So at the very least, I believe that the ethical outcome is that they do not get the public acknowledgment of being a YC funded startup.
What's striking is that the entire org is designed to listen to customers... aka "Make something people want". Relevant quotes from the article below:

1. STORE OPENINGS

“When we open a market, everyone asks, ‘How many stores will you open?’ ” [Inditex communications director Jesus Echevarría] said. “Honestly, I didn’t know. It depends on the customer and how big the demand is. We must have the dialogue with the customers and learn from them. It’s not us saying you must have this. It’s you saying it.”

2. PRODUCT OFFERINGS

[Store managers] also monitor customers’ reactions, on the basis of what they buy and don’t buy, and what they say to a sales clerk: “I like this scooped collar” or “I hate zippers at the ankles.” Inditex says its sales staff is trained to draw out these sorts of comments from their customers. Every day, store managers report this information to headquarters, where it is then transmitted to a vast team of in-house designers, who quickly develop new designs and send them to factories to be turned into clothes.
According to your religion you should not have sex for pleasure , whoever you have sex with ,or that's called luxury. The only purpose of sex is procreation. So there is no value in sex other than making children , and if you are doing it for pleasure it is a sin. ( i dont mind what you are doing , that's just what the catholic church says ).
The package is up. Which ubuntu version are you using? We support 11.04 and above. Anything less than that is missing some kernel features we use.

EDIT: the main thing missing from earlier ubuntu versions is TCP_USER_TIMEOUT. We can work around it in the server, but we haven't done it yet.
> wingnut ideas that really will never work because they defy human nature / currently known laws of physics / principles of good software design / basic logic

One of these things is not like the others. People defy the principles of good software design and get something that works all the time.
>But asking us to drop our price by 25% or 30% just for kicks is not typically a sign of an outstanding customer.

Disagree completely. Repeatedly asking for a discount over a long period of time for no reason, maybe. But just asking for a discount at the beginning or out of the blue seems to be a wise tactic in financial transactions.

If I ask for a discount the worst they can do is say no, and very often they say yes and I pay less. If I ask and they say no I and I push it and they're firm about not giving a discount, great - I'm paying a fair price that we're both happy about. If I ask and they lower their price, great - they lowered their price and now I'm paying a fair price that we're both happy about. Just seems to be part of the game you play...
Query language and ruby like function-chaining are what I feel the selling factors. I like the ease with which I added a node to the cluster. But naming the version as Rashomon scares me..
I would be very interested in seeing a tutorial detailing how to implement Prolog in Haskell!
Why would you use this over PostgreSQL, especially with pg's new json support?
Nike+ FuelBand: One Big Security Hole For Your Life
"Epsilon-level percentages" isn't really a useful concept. As a sample size grows, phenomena become significant at smaller percentages. The set of all tweets is gigantic, so we can still make significant observations based on a "small" subset.

The point of this article is not to say "look at how many racists there are on Twitter." The point is to say "Let's look at the racist people on Twitter. What is the geographical distribution?"

395 geotagged tweets is absolutely enough to start making some interesting observations. Those observations can only be about relatively broad regions at that sample size, but they are interesting nonetheless.
For a practical version for production usage, I've found husk-scheme (https://github.com/justinethier/husk-scheme) quite good.
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That's what you want my argument to be, because it would be much easier to dismiss. In reality what I'm saying is that I don't think it's right to have a society that puts crazy amounts of pressure on people and simultaneously refuses to acknowledge the negative influence that those pressures have on behavior.
Apple – what’s in the pie?