skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Everyone is piling on the "stop trying to feature-creep Stripe!" wagon but there is at least one reasonable suggestion in this post: A per-user fee tacked onto an existing plan.

> In total there are 4 different tax rates and then no taxes for international customers, for a total of 5 different tax levels. We currently have 3 monthly plans, and their 3 yearly equivalents. This means that we had to create (3 + 3) x 5 = 30 plans within Stripe.

This is definitely not ideal.

Agreed with everyone that asking Stripe to take care of figuring out the tax rates is far too much, but being able to say "Subscribe customer X to plan Y," which already exists, "and in addition add a Z fee to each charge." Z could be a percentage or an absolute value.

Maybe Z is tax. Maybe Z is shipping for a monthly package subscription.

Now Understoodit can keep their 3 + 3 plans. +1 to this.
My position depends on "free" being a broadly-applicable concept. If I'd said "Crockford's license is not DFSG-compatible" then the response would (quite rightly) have been "well, who cares, the DFSG is just Debian's set of arbitrary rules". The reason the line between free and non-free matters so much from a pragmatic perspective is that there is this consensus, the criteria for being included in Debian are (more-or-less) the same as those for getting free hosting on sourceforge, or for being able to use the OSI trademark, or...
Great idea, cool website, good luck with the project! Looking forward to being able to use my N64 again without expletives due to the brittle controllers!
Very generous offer, but I would argue that HN's slow performance is a feature, not a bug. The average drive-by person, that is attracted to sensationalist articles and titles, simply doesn't have the patience for the slow load times of every page. The user that is seeking intelligent conversation, however, is more than willing to have 5+ second wait times if they know that they will be getting valuable content. Couple that with page load times having consistent slow load times, rather than surges of performance, and I wouldn't put past PG to build a delay into page loads to act as a sort of filter. Even if it's unintentional, I would still argue that is still useful in driving out some riff-raff
For what it's worth, it's very, very buggy on Windows 8 x64. I couldn't get tab completion working, and after the first dir command, everything went downhill. It began behaving like a text editor. When I typed or backspaced, it backspaced over the prompt and everything else. The kickstarter video was pretty promising, though.

Might I suggest you compiled x64, too? x64 seems to be more commonly sold over x86 these days -- at least in the US.
Headaches? That's glib, and it can certainly be worthwhile, but it's amazing how fast things get ugly when the data cannot be stored on one machine and held in memory. I'm still sad that Incanter didn't really turn out to be the tool I hoped it would be.
The Groupon Disgrace: The Shares Fall By Another 20%
Somebody never watched Dune.
Supreme Court of Canada Voids Viagra Patent for Insufficient Disclosure
FTC Guidelines for Marketing Your Mobile App
This reminds me a lot of fab. I dig it.

Other comments on this page so far show predictable HN-style "Hate anything new" bias. The page is pretty easy to understand what's going on, and all of the objections don't make any sense. Good work. Ignore the bozos.
Hello there, author here.

I'm still working on how to get the message across, but the idea is this:

We all know CSS. We all know HTML. Most of us agree that neither is powerful enough to build modern web apps, hence the explosion of CSS-preprocessors and templating engines.

If we're going to build tools to improve browser technologies like CSS and HTML, let's build them using another browser technology: JavaScript. Instead of adding incompatible extensions to CSS and HTML, let's first port them as-is to JavaScript syntax and then do the extending there, where at least the tools we build will interoperate.

Instead of learning increasingly arcane/proprietary/underpowered syntax for looping or doing arithmetic or writing functions, let's just use the tools we already have. Not to mention this gives us a streamlined development process and lower cognitive overhead for free.

Feedback welcome.
The durable ball potentially changes the economics of building community organizations based upon sports. Organized sport may be used as a less belligerent means of expressing community solidarity and a relatively healthy outlet for rivalries between communities.

While this may be marketed on the basis of "Do it for the children," sport specifically and play in general are important mechanisms of adult social interaction. Futbol is no more a child's game than dominoes.
What are the implications for Free Zone users, Google, the carriers, advertisers, websites, and phone OEM’s?

1. Free Zone users can access their favorite Google communication tool (G+ / Gmail) and search.
2. Google gets to serve its ads on all these properties, apart from valuable usage data and improving its products (the more people search on Google, the better its results, etc).
3. Carriers have two obvious benefits – acquisition and/or retention of price sensitive users seeking free access to G+/Gmail/Google Search and acquiring users for data plans. Another benefit could be revenue sharing for lead generation via Google’s ads. The wild card with the carriers is to launch sponsored browsing as a product – where anyone could sponsor access to one/more web services.
4. Advertisers have a compelling incentive to allocate budgets for Google’s Ad Words product.
5. SEO wars will be taken to a new level.
6. The days of feature phones with no internet access could be numbered. In the optimistic (for Google) scenario, Free Zone will increase demand for low end internet enabled phones. And OEM’s will gleefully comply.

Note - Extracted from my blog: http://u2697.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/sponsored-browsing-and...
haha the text is faded to BG color, not alpha 0%... not sure why this possibility didn't occur to me. Thanks!
Thanks for the input. I haven't tested on Windows 8, so I'm not too surprised. Maybe I'll make separate installers if there is a lot of interest.
The Power of Guessing
Right. This entire page could've been rendered on the server. The point is that you can choose the best tradeoff for your app.
I love the Arduino, but the boards are expensive when compared to other platforms. I recently started using the TI MSP430 Launchpad which is $4.50 shipped! It's also very flexible and uses very little power. If you want the simplicity of the Arduino IDE, there's a port of it called Energia. The Raspberry Pi is much more powerful than the Arduino and it's around the same price. I know the RPi isn't an apples-to-apples comparison.
You're ignoring what I'm saying about biology. Imagine a scenario where an action benefits one person to the exclusion of all others: one man survives as King of the Universe, and the rest of humanity shuffles off this mortal coil more or less willingly.

Can this situation be considered "good"?

If not, why not?

My argument is that ultimate good and evil are predicated on the survival of the species. If you can rate individual rights as being the ultimate good, then you are saying that the survival of the species is less good.

If you do not think that individual rights are the ultimate good, then we are just arguing about a matter of degree, not primacy. Also, from there any topic that I can relate to being necessary to the collective survival is an automatic win, but don't let that worry you overly.
Convert a GitHub Issue Into a Pull Request
Well then uniform voting laws needs to be enforced on all the states.

Anyone with a mobility problem should be voting by mail.

And no-one should have to wait seven hours in line to vote, that's literally a crime being perpetrated on them.
> If you're on windows and don't feel like using the commandline

Just install gow ( https://github.com/bmatzelle/gow ) and you'll be able to run all of those examples as intended. The command line becomes very pleasant on Windows after that one little install. It's very lightweight and well designed.
What does Pinterest secret boards mean for marketers?
Yeah, that's a little unwieldy.
Ormr - An image editor that can adjust any action you’ve performed in the past
My priors would be: if it's an ATI card it's their fault, otherwise probably firefox.
This is pretty usual when government and software development are mixed together. All of the bad developers I met at college are now working for the government or are contracted by the government. Most hackers I know wouldn't go anywhere close to such a contract.

My guess as to why it happens this way is that they check your scores rather than your actual skills and anyone without a diploma is automatically disqualified. Their culture is the opposite of hacker culture.
Less narrative, I guess, but I think that's just a different preference of meaning for "how."
'Up' adventurer plans flight across Atlantic with 365 balloons
Remember that voting is not mandatory in the US and in fact voter turnouts are relatively small compared to the rest of the world, at less then 50% (IIRC). Their objective was not trying to flip democratic or undecided voters - it was trying to remind known republican voters to get out of their house to actually vote.
Ok, well if there's anything specific, I'm happy to post some gists.
I think this is the right philosophy and it is going to do some amazing things in the near future. Here's my interpretation:

http://aakilfernandes.com/uiji.html

I think the emphasis on callbacks has been the weakest point, domo looks promising.
Nate Silver predicted a range of outcomes including closer losses and victories for Romney. Republican "Get Out The Vote" outperforming history was probably a necessary condition of that 10% shot at winning. Instead it looks like the Romney campaign dropped the ball on it. No conspiracy theory needed.
My hunch is that this project was started way too late. At the start of the Republican primary in 2011, Romney's fundraising wasn't aggressive, and it's unlikely his team prioritized a "Big Data" initiative from day 1. In the ensuing primary slugfest, Romney probably needed to put a ton of resources into advertising to win. He also had a very large campaign payroll: his people were well compensated, but that didn't leave a lot money left-over for things like Orca.

Based on this conjecture, Orca probably got started sometime in the Spring, essentially giving the campaign 5-7 months to ship a bullet-proof GotV app.... alongside all the other stuff the team had to build (Tons of miscellaneous internal tools, the public mobile apps, etc). A lack of time and resources probably doomed it.

Moral of the story? Software is hard. Don't take it lightly.
Childhood Autism and Assortative Mating
Two things to consider before immediately going to the "yay Nate Silver" default:

1. GOP had a consistent polling advantage on voter engagement, even going as far back as August. The Romney campaign placed a lot of stock on this. (see here: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0812/79665.html) The polls might break for Obama, but the Romney campaign was banking on something else...

2. Polls attempt to account for the simple error that people are more likely to say that they'll vote than will actually vote. (see here: http://www.gallup.com/poll/111268/how-gallups-likely-voter-m...) The Romney campaign was predicated on the idea that GOP voters were likely to get out and vote, while Obama voters would say they were going to vote but then drop out on Election Day. That is a polling blind side that Nate Silver couldn't account for.

The Romney campaign didn't accurately test their engagement assertion. They relied on journalist polling, but engagement didn't turn into votes. The Obama campaign did the opposite: they targeted voters who might be disengaged and directly went after those with their GOTV efforts.

There is a HUGE debate that always goes on around election time with politicos around who matters more. Is it more important to try to sway independents (i.e., go after the middle), or is it more important to fire up your base? Romney won independents but Obama got the base turnout, indicating that a GOTV effort targeted at the base might have worked, had it been used effectively. (see here: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/exit-polls-obama-loses-i...)
Except it drew that conclusion from an article which made no such claim. The headline is blogspam.

The preblogspam article is titled "The Unmitigated Disaster Known As Project ORCA."

It is found here: http://ace.mu.nu/archives/334783.php
Romney never played the game to win, but to show there are even worse alternatives than the black Bush.
I can add -I parameter to these. It sends a HEAD request, which only returns headers, works better when you don't need the response body as in -i.
The features sound nice, they could use a bit more slick design ;) Why not make it for the Metro UI? Might rock..

If you suggested you would dive into the WinAPI and use your C++ skills to write a new console _engine_ I would gladly pledge 50 bucks or more.

I'm afraid many people will pledge thinking this will bring a usable console emulator to Windows, instead of just another Console2 like hack around the severely limited windows api.

I think 5 years of .Net experience won't cut it for that ..
Dronestagram on Instagram
The government wasn't involved at all. The Republican Party (like the Democratic Party) is just a large dumb organization.
I am sorry, but I have to ask. Why ship bulky non-de-flatable balls from their manufacturing in China (presumably) or North America all the way to Sudan or Rwanda? All this is being run with donations anyway, right? Why not setup a ball-manufacturing unit somewhere in Africa? Something that uses the bare minimum of automation that still results in a decent product? Employ a few dozen/hundred locals, aid the economy, more or less solve the shipping problem. Its probably not easy, given political situation, but I am sure some location can be found out there? Won't that help even more?

I understand that something like the iPhone or a Tesla S cannot be manufactured out there. Supply chain issues, profitability concerns, reliability of production, etc etc. But these balls are anyway meant for Africa, they are meant to be given away, and they are supposed to be in a charitable cause. The complexity of production is (presumably) much much lower than manufacturing an iphone, there isn't much of a concern for profit, labour would be as cheap in Africa as it is in China, if not cheaper, and periodic disruptions in production won't affect the stock price of any large corporation.

So why not?
China Telecom Prepares for Apple's iPhone 5
Yeah, maybe should've gone with an enum. I end up doing "is_suspicious IS NOT null" etc.
I think this is an intriguing idea, and I know this is a silly nitpick, but the all caps function names make me feel like I'm reading HTML from 1995.
Bull. The license agreement is an overt part of their pricing scheme. If you don't like, don't buy the service and encourage your friends to do the same. This isn't a 50-page document you have to accept before you can get back to using your software. What was suggested above is on par with pirating music and then complaining about DRM. Sure it's ridiculous and unethical, but are you any better if you don't pay the asked price and take it anyway?
Hrm, are you a non-profit or have you considered that?

It seems odd to pay an unknown entity (you) and then perform a service (write code) all for a very high level idea alone (the good).

I feel for this to work there must be some sort of 'meet in the middle', like a non-profit, where you can actually track what the $500 expense is going to be used for.
The idea of a phonetic alphabet is that anyone can understand something you are saying over voice.

I myself never heard of "Zoopla", "Yell"

And this would be worst if im talking with an airline, or my grandfather.

Completely dumb.
Google Chrome Tips for Web Developers
TL;DR: entrepreneur invents always-inflated, indestructible ball made of Crocs' foam, finds an investor (Sting) who sees a business opportunity selling to charities who cater to third world children. Now they're making ~$1M/month from customers such as GM and Unicef.
The Necessity of Remote Data Monitoring
FWIW the same thing happened to Obama in 2008, at least in the key swing state of Virginia. I did some campaigning there for Obama the weekend before the election and the system that managed their get-out-the-vote efforts had crashed statewide. The precinct captains were handing volunteers old printouts of where to knock on doors and then using a highlighter to mark your route on a Google Maps printout. Given the limitations it was still an effective system for organizing a lot of volunteers.
cURL is worth learning in my experience because it is bulletproof, ubiquitous, fast, highly-configurable, and comprehensive. No other option listed in here are all of those things, though they are all easier to use. But start talking about SOCKS5 proxies or FTPS and all of a sudden you have to start monkey patching your (pretty) tool or, you know, learning curl.

Seriously how often are you guys performing PUTs and DELETEs manually from the command line? `man` up and write a wrapper.
"Are we really to believe this is plausible?"

To the degree we find any blogspam title plausible, yes.

In other words, no.

The original article was titled "The Unmitigated Disaster Known As Project ORCA" and merely pointed out what a custerfuck it was. It made no claim that it turned the election.

http://ace.mu.nu/archives/334783.php
Windows is a dead OS walking. My humble advice is instead of learning Wish, get a Linux VM and start moving your skillset, aps, ets.
How to Detect a Toxic Customer (2010)
Since when is Mitt Romney's campaign part of the government? And even if we give you that leap, Obama's campaign was fantastic on this particular front.
Man, this sounds like the best thing ever happened to cmd.exe, I will give it a try and back it on Kickstarter. But I think such a project should be developed under an open source license and maybe licenses can still be sold like Textmate.
Loader.io: Load Testing for your API
Thanks! :^)

Gittip lets you set up small anonymous weekly gifts between $1 and $24 to people who do good work. It ticks over every Thursday. Gittip is funded on Gittip and is trying to be an "open company:"

http://blog.gittip.com/post/26350459746/the-first-open-compa...
LifeTopix 5.1 Guided Tour
> But then you talk about a poor white person and compare him to a poor black person saying they're not in the same boat. What does this poor white person have to do with your successful white family? That whole story is not relevant to this person as an individual.

My point is that, but for the actions of our society in the 1930's an 1940's, there would be many more black Americans who could tell the same story as me. But systematic denial of privilege is passed down from generation to generation just as privilege is passed down from generation to generation, and that denial is the inheritance of every black American who can trace his ancestry back to those times.

Your attempt to create equivalencies between poor blacks and poor whites misses one crucial fact: our government did not systematically oppress and deny opportunity to the ancestors of poor whites. If the government burns down my house, then my neighborhood suffers flooding because of a hurricane, I am not made whole by the government addressing the flood damage. I am not satisfied with the government's attempts to "forget the past" and treat my case as no more important than that of every other person affected by the flooding. That makes no sense.
I love the idea and I'd love to contribute, but English is not my first language and my pronounciation is terrible.

I would consider creating no-sound video lectures with annotations on the side, if someone else with a clean pronounciation would then do the voiceovers and mix their recorded voice into the videos.

Have you considered such a scenario?
Newbie Here: Why would I like to develop my app in objective-C?. Why not python, java etc?
An inside look behind Romney's loss: Bill Clinton
(I can only speak as a user when it comes to native apps, so what I'm getting at may not align with your point of view or context. Please take my tone not as derision, but pragmatism as a paying customer and interested reader.)

You say "Of course your app should be useful", yet your post opened with "Chances are, someone has already thought of your app idea". So to me your post communicates, "Since your app is just another knockoff, polish it up real nice and hope for a media/celebrity mention or a front page link on HN/Reddit."

My tendency would be to say, "Of course your app should have a decent UI" but having owned a few Android devices and an iPhone, my experience is that utility trumps all. It's not unusual for very useful apps to exhibit truly shameful user experience. They may have a high utility factor and even have a polished interface, but be terrible to actually use. (We're going to assume through all of this that we're not even talking about minimal bugs or smooth, consistent performance, those should also be a given.)

Plus half of your first point was really your second point -- in essence, "Getting People to Use Your App" boils down to "Figure out a strategy to get popular."

Look, all I'm trying to say is that surely, with your background, you have more insight to offer than "...make your app high quality. Hike up production value. Make it really good."

Liiike??
New Dead drop techniques used by Security Agencies
It is probably very similar to how a lot of local restaurants don't have a great website. They simply don't need to put down the money for a great website because that's not how their business primarily operates.
Mark Suster: Some Quick Thoughts on Exits for Technology Startups
Superhuman Powers through the means of ADHD meds?
General Poll:

Who uses Adderall, Vyvanse, Ritalin, Ect. to push through their heavy days? Either on the regular or just here and there for an added dose of productivity... if so, what are your feelings on its/your overall success rate based upon what you manage to achieve?
Sometimes I wish there was a little bit more political diversity to HN...
Nice work!

I played with it for a bit and one thing I noticed was that the "Home" key took me to the beginning of the line/prompt instead of the start of my input. Also if I backspace far enough it will start to kill my prompt.

One thing that would make this awesome for me is emacs keybindings.

Overall though, I think this has nice potential to be a super useful tool. Thanks for sharing!
Thanks. We will think about simplyfying the first few sentences.
When I work on windows, I just use cygwin with the mintty shell to get productive with a familiar look&feel. What am I missing with this setup that Wish fills?
Better hope Zuckerberg doesn't catch wind of this, he'll crush us all!
I (the author) agree. It's not for nostalgia's sake, but to avoid namespace collisions on the global object.