skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I switch between Macbook and Thinkpad/Ubuntu almost daily. Why? Because I get bored on either of them fairly quickly :-)

I love both of them, but my vote goes towards Ubuntu/Linux (and I mainly code on ThinkPad) for three reasons:

1. Most hackers' software is native on Linux, although nearly all of it exists for OS X. But nothing beats Debian/Ubuntu's aptitude: nearly everything imaginable is a few keystrokes away: can installed and pre-configured in seconds. And guaranteed to "just work".

2. Apple's hardware is no match to IBM's. UltraNav combo kicks ass, and I feel crippled and slowed down when using a touchpad of other laptops, including Apple's.

3. Linux is more flexible. It's not the "sysadmin carp" that some people from the 90s complain about, it's genuine flexibility that comes with choice. There are many more different terminal apps, different ways to manage workspaces, various window management plug-ins, screensavers even! OS X is more commercialized.

Besides, I dislike some of Apple's software. iTunes is number one on my hate-list. :-)
mac programs avoid using right-click context menus as a primary interface approach. so what do you need it for?

for gaming you need to plug in a mouse anyway. otherwise occasional ctrl-clicking isn't hard, nor is the 2 finger thing.
I run Arch Linux on my Macbook Pro. I don't like the hardware at all, it feels cheap in comparison to the Thinkpad it replaced.
I got one of the first mac plus machines. A full 1MB of RAM.

People said, "you'll never run out of memory!"

Great machine, though. Hacked some assembly for the 86000.
Well what a total surprise. I would never have guessed it.
>A similar spec'ed Dell comes roughly at the same price.

I believe that Macs are awesome. I want one! But the same price argument doesn't fly. When I bought a new laptop about a year ago, I ended up with a Dell 'cause the same spec'd MBP was double the price, and I couldn't justify the expense. Having a quick look on the respective web sites, that is still roughly the case today. That makes for a pretty expensive OS.
This article made me laugh out loud. My first startup was a bootstrap with $20k in the bank. We were eating hotdogs for lunch and drinking tap water, trying to make our money last. If somebody had given me startup advice that included "buy the inexpensive automatic espresso machine," I would have kicked them in the nuts.

It was a year before we could afford a coffee pot. (The inexpensive coffee pot, mind you.) The article should be entitled "17 Ways For a Reasonably Well Funded Startup to Save Money".
Ask YC: Money, power, freedom, and open source.
I've always thought it would be cool to put my code online for others to mess with. But every time I think about it, I end up being inhibited by the question 'What if I want to make money off of this?' or I think 'By releasing this, I'll be wasting my competitive advantage.' Then I get all conflicted thinking big general thoughts about capitalism vs. er... anti-capitalism (socialism? idealism? whatever you call it).

I'm currently 23 and being supported by my parents, which is nice because it offers me freedom, but lame for obvious reasons. What I really want is the freedom to work on my ideas and the power to make them real. I don't care much about money and am not very interested in going the VC -> IPO route, but I also realize that turning big ideas into reality may take a lot of money. So part of this is me figuring out what trajectory to set my life on. I guess I'll probably end up doing some combination of open / closed stuff, but I'm having trouble deciding where to draw the line.

I guess this is just the classic tension between open source vs. closed source playing out in my head. Stallman vs. Gates. I'm curious to see what YCers think of the issue.
Digg: Seriously, We're Not Selling - Yet
Sure. Two problems with it:

1. Still fairly bad video hardware support. I spent two hours helping a buddy set up a mid-range ATI card recently, and we couldn't get full acceleration to work. The configuration just plain sucked.

2. Fonts in the X environment are so ugly that I can't stare at an editor window full of code. Good fonts are rarely open-source.

Ubuntu is nice, but it doesn't come close to the experience of opening a box, pushing the "on" button, and being able to start working right away.
Just today I was talking to a team lead here about abstracting away from a truly terribly proprietary template language for a CMS. His first thought was "that's a good idea, but we'd have to make sure it would be easy to move that code to a different CMS in the future." There's just no way to make that happen, so the idea probably won't get off the ground because management wants things future-proof.

I see where they are coming from, but it means everybody suffers instead of just enjoying improvements in the present.
MIT to be tuition-free for families earning less than $75,000 a year
The Electric Company.

Spider-Man!

Nobody knows who you are!
Happy with the air? I really considered getting one and a powerful desktop...but decided to wait.
Yes, this advice reads like a naive tale from the dot.com boom.

I thought the first suggestion to buy Macintosh-only (to eliminate the need for office IT) was leading into a satire.
I obviously need to work on my Powerpoint skills.
eval `my username`@$GOOGLE_MAIL
Agreed, but the comment I was responding to was talking about the lowest American salary vs. German welfare; not about people making just above the lowest American salary.
Investing in (great) employees is the best investment you'll ever make. To this day, Google still provides free food to tens of thousands of employees.
dude...too many little pieces. If you can make these things assemble themselves, then that would be cool.
Microsoft Struts Its Latest Research Innovations at TechFest
Not everything Joel posts is "Hacker news". This article is a glorified job posting.
1. fair enough. i can see how that could be a deal breaker. You probably know about the sad state of affairs with those vendors, and I guess reasons don't matter much if it doesn't work. all i can say is that it is improving.

2. it's not the fonts. check this out: http://ubuntutips.net/node/10.

in a nutshell, just put
<match target="font">
<edit name="hintstyle"> <const>hintslight</const> </edit>
<edit name="autohint"> <bool>true</bool></edit>
<edit name="rgba"> <const>rgb</const></edit>
<edit mode="assign" name="hinting"> <bool>true</bool> </edit>
<edit mode="assign" name="antialias"> <bool>true</bool> </edit>
</match>

in your ~/.fonts.conf file.

you won't believe your eyes. try it. :)
How to Kill a Successful Business:  The Slow-Motion Death of VeggieTales
The creator of VeggieTales outlines how he plodded towards the death of his company, Big Idea Productions.

It all seems to have been painfully avoidable, and I find this story a reminder that even successful businesses can be brought to failure if one isn't vigilant.
well there you go. although i don't know how much fun anyone can have recompiling kernels ;)

cheers.
Taco Bell is the same as Chipotle
Sorry... conventional wisdom seems to be right here. No early optimisations is best.

If a software grows like a tree, then only some branches, no, some leaves will require optimisation. You never know from the start the route to those leaves because of the complexity of the software. Trying to optimise early is either like taking all possible routes but stopping after a short while on each.
What I'm trying to say is optimisation is always a matter of _depth_, not of breadth. Finding the right direction and going all the way gives order of magnitudes better results then following best practices throughout the software.
don't drink the cool aid and save your money. the last straw for me was a bsd socket problem that used to cause crashes on clisp (if you google it you'll find it. circa 2005) -- went back to debian, and i don't even know whatever became of that problem.

your dell is fine.
Once you have started working with a trackpoint, you will never want to go back to a touchpad. It feels like making a step backwards.
The Power of Grit and Tenacity
Opp YC: AWS hacker in midwest
we are getting antsy to sign up a few paying customers and we are trying to get past a catch 22 moment, where local investors want customers, and customers want a working beta.

our front end is good and very attractive the companies we have talked to. they also seem to be on board with price, but what we need is a back-end that works.

the guy that is working on the backend now can put in 8-16 hours worth of work a week, and has about 80 hrs worth of work to do on it. he did it in .Net, and if we were to do it again, we would probably do it in PHP on an ec2 instance.

I would like to talk to any hackers out there that know AWS 1st and foremost. We know c#, php and as3, but are open to any just get it done technologies out there.

do any of you have an idea of how i can find some help.

we are open to equity or some mix of pay.
unless your using gentoo, you no longer have to do that much "sysadmin crap". as if OSX machines were free of "sysadmin crap". i used to use acquamacs on it, and it will constantly break after the monthly updates. from my experience, ubuntu is less work.
(this advise is mostly for this crowd. i wouldn't push an ubuntu machine on gradnma. not yet at any rate)
Cypress Semiconductor CEO discusses SV, politics and solar
Feel free to take this at face value, but this somewhat concerns me. I attended community college for one semester before transferring to a state uni where tuition was almost 20,000 dollars more and in my experience the characteristic and personal motivation was much different. At the community college (where students often did not have to pay tuition at all because of the low cost bundled with state provided financial support) students seemed apathetic about attending class, and personal success whereas the students at the state uni (who faced the prospect of having to pay thousands in student loans) this was the complete opposite.

Students had a higher degree of personal commitment, and motivation to succeed at the uni level. Who knows if this will be the case at MIT, but this is just what I happened to experience when the disparity of income became as overt as it did
"Concetrating on having millions of users"

I never said that.

I said to structure your data AS IF you had billions of records.

Are you going to normalize your data? How much? Are you going to index it? How? How are you going to structure your iterations, branches, and internal data structures? Put any thought into any of it?

With rare exceptions, what works well for billions of records also works well for hundreds of records. The converse, unfortunately, is painfully untrue. Think ahead and you won't have to worry about dealing with it.
More generally, I think all other things being equal, the fan factor is inversely proportional to the size of the "fanbase".

If tomorrow nothing changed (let's say!) except that macs had 80% market share, would mac fans be just as fanatic?
is this too old to still be considered valid?

http://www.techworld.com/security/news/index.cfm?newsid=1798
Honestly I wasn't really impressed with this. Though I am glad that the code is open. Perhaps there'll be some interesting tidbits there.
I really don't think that-s very surprising - the people who buy Macs, instead of just going with the rest and buying PC's, are generally the type of people that would care more about technology (computer as well as 'green' and other) and the type that are closer to power users (so they end up knowing what they're buying, and liking it.)

Or maybe I'm just making all the wrong assumptions, who knows.
Aqua looks nicer than any windows manager has to offer. I run Ubuntu for my work desktop, and Debian for servers, but at home I have a macbook and a mac mini running 10.5. Before that I had a powerbook for 4 years. They are all awesome machines. I didn't have to spend time tweaking config settings to try to get the sound card working, or deal with updating and breaking everything. On OS X I've never had to fix something after an update, and sound always works. I'm not dissing any linux distros, but they are truly for hackers that want to spend time tweaking on things getting them to work and dealing with problems. OS X allows me to get more work done because I'm not dealing with those hassles yet I still have vim/emacs/whatever other unix app I want to install. The only complaint I have is that the packaging doesn't seem to be as good as Debian/FreeBSD/Gentoo. Maybe this has changed in the last couple years, but Macports and fink never really worked out all that well for me.
I find that it can be useful to just be in the same room when working on dependent, if separate tasks. It's often necessary to nail down details as you're thinking through every possible different situation, which really only occurs once you're coding every possible situation.
Hopefully no one will ever make a song as horrible as "Convoy" about social networks.
Well, damn. Had this existed in the mid-90s, it would have changed were I went to school.
Quick Intro to RDF: "represent[ing] knowledge in a distributed world."
students seemed apathetic about attending class and personal success

For what it's worth, students like this get weeded out of MIT rather quickly.
Yahoo Launches Fire Eagle: a platform for sharing your location online
Calacanis Fires People Who Have A Life
It's not even glorified. It's just 3 job postings for the price of 1.
11 Year Old Hacks The Iphone
"Anyone else have startup money saving tips?"

Yes. If the first word of your "startup money saving tip" is "Buy", then it may not be a very good tip.
Career Golddigging: The Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For, Sorted by Stock Price Appreciation
I think a good rule of thumb would be:

If it's at the core of your business, default is not to open-source.
If it's tangential to your business, default is to open-source.

For example, while doing my first big web project, I'm making a pretty good (I think) web framework. I'm thinking of open-sourcing part of it at some point. But the specific project I'm working on, that will be completely closed-source.
My friends and I used to drink cold beer while the kernel recompiled in the background. Happy times. Almost 10 years ago! (Kingfisher (Indian beer))
Aye, I don't know how they work things there but that's at least good to know. It's more beneficial to the organization to weed them out and let them find success than to not care and bring everyone around them down.

Thanks for that tidbit.
Building Professional Financial Projections
With my first startup company, we only had about 2 weeks to prepare for our first VC presentation. I needed a quick way to build a professional-looking spreadsheet with projections. John L. Hesheim, author of High Tech Startup, sells a spreadsheet template for $25 on his website. I entered our numbers and specifics into the spreadsheet and it did the trick. I highly recommend it to anybody building a business plan.
Why is it good for kids to be motivated by the fact that they're paying a lot of money? People should be in school if they're motivated by their desire to learn, or they should just get out and stop diluting the experience for everyone else.

Our society doesn't do a good job of serving kids who just want job training and don't have an academic bent. Right now we lump together the people who want vocational training and a certificate of competency with the people who are passionate and want to learn. This leads to a mixed weird situation where too much irrelevant stuff is "taught"[1] from the perspective of the vocational students, and the course work is largely busy work from the perspective of those who want to learn.

That "Mathematician's Lament" that appeared on here recently is a great exposition on this problem. http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf

1. I use the word "taught" loosely here to refer to the process of memorization and regurgitation that is standard in the formal education system.
With my first startup company, we only had about 2 weeks to prepare for our first VC presentation. I needed a quick way to build a professional-looking spreadsheet with projections. John L. Hesheim, author of High Tech Startup, sells a spreadsheet template for $25 on his website. I entered our numbers and specifics into the spreadsheet and it did the trick. I highly recommend it to anybody building a business plan.
63,000 fewer potential customers.
Von Neuman Probes and Berserkers
63,000 people with more time to go shopping

edit: or even better for a web company. poor, bored people can spend plenty of time online
Just a note, Java has split and replace for Strings, too...
This just in! The sky is blue! Details at 11!
Ten Tech Trends to Ignore--According to BusinessWeek
Thanks a lot for your interesting reply, I was very curious about it.
I clicked on that for the sole purpose of reassuring myself that it was in face satire. I was disappointed.
I use a MBP at home, because there's nothing within a light-year of Lightroom (or Aperture, which is pretty much an equivalent package) for RAW photo workflow. If it weren't for that single piece of software, I could switch to Ubuntu/Debian full-time and be quite happy.

When I'm at work writing code, it's 98% Linux, with occasional compatibility testing on a Mac or Windows system. Apache, Vim, Ruby, and PostgreSQL all run just as well on Debian as they do on a Mac, and a lot of other packages work much, much better -- plus, they're just an 'apt-get' away.
Becauthe they're thabulouth.
Computer scientist talks up "Science 2.0"
OLPC Project looks for CEO to make it "more like Microsoft"
Most of these are insane. Ignore OSS, Apple, and Vitrual servers? I'm sorry but "it doesn't run quicken multi user mode" is not a reason for me to not buy anything Apple. Right now I'm using an open source browser, running on an open source operating system. The software that serves our webpages is open source, as is the MTA, email client, editor, IRC client, and instant messaging client. Virtual servers make sense now in a lot of cases.
Possible benefits from starting an open source project include name recognition, social status in the hacker tribe, a portfolio to show prospective employers, meeting other hackers, more competition for software companies, and the moral benefits of giving away useful tools to others.

If you're not committed to it and don't want the trouble of managing a mailing list and dealing with feature requests, you can still open-source it and wait for someone else fork it.

Keeping your software secret is good for practice and competitive advantage. It's a good strategy if you don't need much help from others and you're working on something difficult and non-obvious that could be useful in a future startup. But good problems like this are rare, so I suspect open-sourcing is the better choice for most projects.
I wonder if it applies to Canadians or other foreign students. I had a friend who ditched MIT for Waterloo because the latter gave him full scholarship.
The article is about startups that have employees, not just co-founders. Did you actually hire anyone out of your $20k?

Once you start hiring people you need to think about what kind of conditions you are providing for them.
Poll: Should people asking for advice from News.YC be obliged to share some relevant details?
e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=130205
yes, nobody ever really needs to be in stealth mode
yes, it's the only reasonable thing to do, since it provides needed context
no, there are cases where sharing relevant details would actually cause harm
no, nobody owes us anything
Every OS has its own version of 'sysadmin crap' to deal with... While I noted that OS X is easier to get up and running optimally, Ubuntu's package management definitely has it beat as far as maintenance goes. Automated software installation / configuration / upgrades goes a long way.
The first advice is actually a good one. Buy everyone computers that just work, so they can focus on getting their job done not having to remove spyware from their Windows box (or alternatively put up with draconian restrictions from your IT department).
Acid 3 is out! IE 5.5 beats IE 7?
Lessons Learned Scaling the Audiogalaxy Search Engine
Mark Pesce: Power to the networked public
"3. Linux is more flexible. It's not the "sysadmin carp" that some people from the 90s complain about, it's genuine flexibility that comes with choice. There are many more different terminal apps, different ways to manage workspaces, various window management plug-ins, screensavers even! OS X is more commercialized."

Agreed. It'd be nice if there's an up-to-date binary repo of MacPorts packages. Flint has apt-get for binary packages, but a lot of them are pretty outdated.
'display tags' 500's (with the rails default 500 message, no less)

Edit: actually EVERY OTHER REQUEST 500's. Reload, ok, reload, 500, reload ok.
It might actually be pretty good advice. I once worked for a company that didn't have a supply room (with markers, pens, etc) because they were afraid too much of it went to waste. So if you needed a marker you needed to make a request, get it approved and then someone would get you a marker.

Having your $150/hr consultant have to run around and figure out what they need to do to get a marker does NOT save you money. Often times there is a trade off between money you spend to buy things and time your employees otherwise need to spend to compensate. EMPLOYEES ARE NOT CHEAP.

Outsource the parts that are not core to your business, and buy the things you can afford to buy so you can focus your time (and the time of your employees) on actually creating value for your users (and company).
People who pay way more for something than everyone else usually do so mainly because it makes them feel superior.
Points:

1. If you are a startup, you don't have an IT department to worry about.

2. If your "hackers" can't keep their windows boxes free from spyware, they shouldn't be working for you.

Mac's are good, but you can live with windows if need be.
BBC iPlayer On iPhone: sans SDK
strange, I get it now. Thanks for pointing that out.

I updated the 404, didn't think I'd be sending a 500 every other request.
Ask YC: How to ensure the rights to a side project are retained when working a full time job?
I am planning to start a site with a few friends while working full time at another job. The site we're building is unrelated to the field I work in during the day. I want to be certain I retain all rights to the site and it's content, but I have heard that when holding a full time job your employer may have rights to your work, even when done on your own equipment during evenings and weekends. Does anyone have a recommendation for how to go about ensuring you retain all rights to work done on your own time? Thanks.
http://www.macports.org

I'm not saying the mac doesn't need any administration -- I'm saying that it's a lot less, and it's less annoying. I haven't ever had to recompile my darwin kernel nor sit around tweaking DMA and PIO settings.
No! You get people the computers that they work best on. Cramming a Mac down the throat of a developer or designer that's used to Windows will slow 'em down and piss 'em off. Ditto the Linux hackers that are out there.

My primary workstation is a Windows 2K Pro machine. Works great. No problems with spyware, etc. -- I know how to use it.
Wow, this is worse than the start-up money saving tips. They're right about social-farceware though.
+1 for both of the no's

though in nsx2's case, I think sharing his idea would have helped
I dunno. That point hit home for me, actually. I recently got some help in the form of somebody that's enthusiastic as long as I'm within four feet of him. Beyond that, he doesn't get anything done, and I certainly don't have the time right now to constantly watch over him.

I'm usually a nice-guy manager, but I think there are certain stages in a business where you really need to keep it trimmed down to the folks that are really willing to get in and work for you.