skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Windows can be a good platform for developing software, as long as you're using IDEs to develop applications targeted at Windows machines. For example, Visual Studio + SQL Server is just fine for building .Net applications that run on Windows.

For everything else - and "everything else" includes large swaths of lucrative, profitable programming activities, including something like two-thirds of the internet - Windows is simply excruciating. I'm not exaggerating; after spending the past year or so developing on Ubuntu, I don't know how I managed to get anything done before.

The Windows command line is minimally usable (I have to right-click on the window frame to pull up a context menu that provides select/copy/paste functionality? Really?) and its language is minimally powerful (I understand powershell improves significantly on this).

Unless you're moving files around a Windows network, in which you can map drives in Explorer, such basic network things as FTP/SFTP require clumsy third-party GUI applications and your choice of FOSS options is severely limited. SSH requires a clunky third-party tool like PuTTY or a Posix emulator like Cygwin.

Native support for open source database servers like MySQL, Postgres, and SQLite is dodgy at best and requires bolted-on interfaces. More exotic, innovative database systems are generally out of the question altogether.

Some programming languages, like Python, are reasonably cross-platform (though in the case of Python you're still stuck with a choice between using the crappy Windows command line or the slightly-less-crappy IDLE IDE built in non-native Tkinter), while others are much harder to get working.

Java is fully cross-platform and has IDEs that work as well on Windows as any platform, but there's no particular reason to develop Java on Windows rather than another OS.

It's true that installing Cygwin makes a lot of the deficiencies of Windows go away - but that's by emulating a Posix environment such as you'd find natively on Linux or OSX, which is kind of the point about Posix being generally a much better platform for programming than Windows.
iPad (Keyboard) dock and/or Bluetooth Keyboard? If you're in to minimalism, a good ssh client and/or editor are all that are needed. Coda on the iPad would make my day.
theoretically, but go ahead and try that. ;)
Crusher:CMU's military Unmanned Ground Vehicle
Not sure if this is an option for you, but you could run OpenOffice in headless mode and script it to convert pdf files to html.
Some games (Civ Revolutions for one) will ask you if you want to keep playing your own music or if you want Civ to play it's music.

Some games just stop the iPod app's music :(
Depending on your use... my ipad is going to and from work with me now instead of my laptop. I've got the iPad Keyboard dock in both places. It's a lot to carry on the road but for normal day to day, with a good ssh client and editor, I'd have even less use for my much loved MBP.
I am using it primarily to shorten links back to http://alanhogan.com, and since I run both domains, I intend to keep both of them running as long as possible -- and when one goes down, the other becomes pretty much useless.

But yes, I agree that it is important to intend to run these services forever.
Segway RMP-400
You obviously know more about this than I do. That's a very interesting case.
It's an attention grab. I think it's funny that 34 people "like" it when they don't even know what it is or does.
It takes a steady hand.

I just did some looking up, and confirmed that Gauss's tombstone does NOT have the 17-gon on it,

http://sunsite.utk.edu/math_archives/.http/hypermail/histori...

although a monument to him is said to have one, which I can't find in one of the better available online photos.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/Braunschw...

http://www.jimloy.com/geometry/17-gon.htm

http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/Classes/MATH198/whubbard/GR...

http://www.mathpages.com/home/kmath487.htm
Ruby certainly can do SQLite3 on Windows, quite well under 1.8.6 and 1.8.7, but as the article's author notes, it's just troublesome under 1.9. (But enough other stuff doesn't work quite right in 1.9 yet either anyway.)

The setup for dev on Windows is pretty simple as you can see from

http://napcs.com/howto/rails/windows/

As it stands now, with the latest installer for Windows, Rails development is quite possible. Msysgit works fine, SQLIte, Rails, all of it works great, it's just slower.

In fact, I've been using Windows for Rails dev for nearly 5 years - I'm even crazy enough to have deployed production apps on Windows servers. (out of necessity, not out of choice, but it's a neat skillset to have, and I was able to contribute a chapter on Rails + Windows to http://pragprog.com/titles/fr_deploy/deploying-rails-applica... which, oddly enough, is still relevant.)

HOWEVER, I will state that if you're looking to truly leverage Ruby, nix is the way to go. A VM like this works great, but I also recommend two pieces:

Putty to act as your console
* SAMBA on the VM so you can have a share.

I used a setup like this for a while for LAMP development before I started doing Rails.
Make: Online : Math Monday: Magnet constructions
If you have the spare RAM, I'd say a VM is the way to go. I've tried the dual-boot approach, and found that the annoyance of having to reboot to switch between environments was high enough that it usually deterred me from doing it at all.
Sexism != reacting to the sexes differently. Men and women are not the same, and therefore they evoke different responses and reactions. This is not sexism.
>Okay, my mother worked as a child sweatshop laborer in Taiwan in the 60s, before the country bootstrapped itself out of abject, agrarian poverty, and I take issue with this. It's a straw man; her family was extremely poor, but not in danger of starvation. Without sweatshop labor she wouldn't have starved to death, but she also wouldn't have been able to go to school, get educated, get employed in a white collar job, and eventually move abroad.
Anecdotes do not data make, but knee-jerk emotional reactions and weasel words don't help anyone.

Well thats leaps and bounds from what the article is portraying, in China university costs are around 15000 RMB / year minimum, a person working in such a factory would have to work for a whole year and save everything just to be able to afford one year in university. Furthermore, you would have to pass the national university entrance exam, which is very competitive. Finding jobs a white collar job as a university grad is now hard, as grads are a dime a dozen. And to go abroad you will have to be a top notch student, or have substantial capital - an even more preposterous proposition.
One note on this -- I just took a look and there are only five layers between an present day Excel PM and Steve Ballmer, rather than the 11 or 12 layers he posits.
Heroku needs to bring back its cloud-based code editor, stat.
I read this book a few years ago. It is seriously the real thing and I highly recommend it. Particularly astonishing is how recognizable the techniques he pioneered are in the internet age. For example, he A/B tested everything. It's also remarkable how many of the brands Hopkins created remain household names nearly a century later (Goodyear, Palmolive).
It saddens me that so few PC manufacturers feel like challenging Apple on battery life.
I have no idea what emotions inspired their actions after I quit.
Oh shit, I just read the article and bought Phone Halo and then came in here and saw this. Sucks to be me. :(

Ah, was able to cancel it! Sweet. :)
Damn, the original comment was deleted.

One minute while I retrieve it from LibCong…
Honestly I think there are many benefits to Linux especially if your plan is to work on Python or Ruby development. If you're looking to do C# stuff, Windows is gonna be better. When it comes to a lot of open-source languages, Windows is kind of an afterthought, and while it often works, the non-Windows solutions end up being faster, and more likely what you see when you deploy your apps. It can help greatly if your dev platform mimicks your production platform, but it's not necessary.

I just taught a day long Ruby / Rails class in Feb and we had Windows users mostly, with some Mac and Linux folks too, but we all deployed to Heroku.com without issues.

My advice is to use what makes you productive now. Learn many things, but learn them one at a time or you'll frustrate yourself. Switch from Windows to Linux when Windows starts slowing you down if that makes you more comfortable.

Programming should be fun. :)
I firmly believe in using the right tool for the job.

I worked at Microsoft on the Visual Studio team for four years. I love Visual Studio. Visual Studio is awesome. That doesn't change the fact that I (and lots of other people) firmly believe that writing Rails applications on Windows is a miserable experience.
I would agree with this, but also, snapshots are great. If you goof up your VM, just revert :) Great when learning how Linux works, and much faster than a wipe and rebuild.
"This suggests a way to predict areas where Apple will be weak: things Steve Jobs doesn't use. E.g. I doubt he is much into gaming."

I'd agree with that given the initial insistence that native apps were unnecessary. Every sufficiently popular platform devolves into a vehicle for delivering games eventually. If he were a gamer, he would have known that.
The only apps that I've had financial success with are ones that I personally enjoy using. Also, I'm young: 22.
We have a very similar situation and here are my experiences.

- Command line will give you the most bang for your buck every single time. Learn one small thing at a time and build upon it, you will be amazed at how much more productive and quick you will become from understanding simple commands.

- Start using Vim/Emacs. Doesn't really matter which one, the gains from using a powerful editor will (in the long run) pay for them selves.

These editors combined with the command line have shown the greatest gains in my productivity.

Now that said learning the editor will be up hill for a good chunk of the time until it clicks, so it may make sense to use something like geddit in the mean time.

There is no magic bullet with any sort of Development. Using unix like systems isn't going to make your website better or you more productive if you don't actually take some time and learn it. If you come over to Ubuntu but only use the GUI you will likely loose productivity.

Besides who cares what you write your site in as long as you -write- it.
On a related note, somebody once explained to me why India develops satellites, missiles, rockets, fighter planes, nuclear reactors etc which are sometimes half-assed at great expense over many decades when they can probably buy the same things ("comparative advantage" and all that jazz).

The reason is to force sellers to sell their highest-end goods, or to negotiate on price. Because India has it own reactor tech, it has a stronger hand when negotiating with GE/France/Russia to buy reactors. For instance, they can ask for technology transfer and license to manufacture too instead of just a reactor.

So Ogg Theora wins even if it dies, because it kept the Free video codec idea alive until a big backer such as Google emerged for the idea.

Thanks for all the work, Ogg!
Easy Magic and Hard Magic
"You have a product so revolutionary, you'll have no problem selling it. The question is, are people going to be allowed to use it?"

Are we talking about the Segway, or the iPad?
The text could use some shortening.
India is also making their own nuclear reactors because they have a lot more thorium than uranium, and in order to use it, they need reactors which support thorium fuel. </nitpick>
Facebook.com is beating Yahoo.com now, but whats more fun is Google...
Nice, good to see more people coming to Node.js. These things are like the modern "Hello, World!".

Here's one I hacked up in 10 minutes. It's 40 LOC.
http://gist.github.com/366590

The big problem with this is that it's just one server. I'm working on something called "NodeRed" (har har) that lets one scale out the frontend using Redis for communication. It's generic enough to do PUBSUB, chat, games, etc.

Here's an overview.
http://fictorial.com/NodeRed.png

I developed the/a Node.js client for Redis if you care to dive into this stuff:
http://github.com/fictorial/redis-node-client
I'm glad you had the chance to try it and find it not to your liking.
This makes a ton of sense and finding an organic idea is often what I tell people to do when they're thinking about a startup. Few reasons:

- Doing a startup is like an iron man competition. When there's something you want to see built, there's that extra incentive to keep going. If you don't finish, you don't get the thing that you wanted. Steve Jobs said it best in his interview at D5 with BillG. Any sane person would give up, but if you really want to see what you're building exist in the world, you'll keep going.

- Usually the organic idea stems from some kind of domain expertise ie- If you used to work in the fashion sector, you recognize severely broken things that are amazingly obvious from spending so much time there. If you didn't work in the Fashion industry you would have no clue these things exist.

- You'll be able to find co-founders more easily. If you've spent time in a certain sector with a problem you're trying to solve, odds are a) you know people in that space really well b) they therefore know that vertical well c) they will recognize the problem as well.

Don't make something people want, but make something you want. Odds are there will be a good amount of other people like you out there. My first startup was a non organic idea. We were trying to make SaaS for PR professionals because it seemed like a good opportunity. Honest truth? I was never a PR professional and didn't really give two shits if PR professionals had good software. I could live if that itch wasn't scratched. Ironically, this failure spawned what is an Organic startup that i'm currently working on with Cloudomatic by helping SaaS developers get distribution. Life works in funny ways.
Twitter Confirms It Will Launch Its Own Link Shortener
I doubt the authenticity of this quote. Or maybe it was taken out of context.

For one, the agreement prohibits transmission of data to third parties, not to the developer himself.

Another thing is that the new agreement is part of new SDK 4.0 and it is not yet in effect - Apple does not accept 4.0 apps for app store distribution, and so could not have reject an app on these grounds.

EDIT: apparently, it's the device data that I talk about above. User data is governed under "need to know" rule: "All use of User Data collected or obtained through an Application must be limited to the same purpose as necessary to provide services or functionality for such Application.". Not as clear-cut as I thought... my second point still stands though.
But search engine technology, with a few caveats, generally works across different languages and markets without too much work. It isn't really possible for NYT or CNN to just translate themselves into a 20 popular languages easily.
Sure. But the gist of the rant is that he keeps doing the same repetitive, mundane tasks over and over again, merely to shuffle data from one part of the system to another and convert between representations on the way.

Like when you have a database, a server application and an AJAX web page, you may have four to five different representations of the same data (DB table, server language object, JSON, Javascript object and finally HTML) and need a whole bunch of code just to move data from A to B and convert between representations.

It's not just a language problem. It's just as much a problem of impedance mismatch between different systems, protocols and data formats. Various frameworks attempt to reduce the tediousness, but tend to come with issues of their own.

PG has something on this too:

"Of course the ultimate in brevity is to have the program already written for you, and merely to call it. And this brings us to what I think will be an increasingly important feature of programming languages: library functions."

"I think a lot of the advances that happen in programming languages in the next fifty years will have to do with library functions. I think future programming languages will have libraries that are as carefully designed as the core language."

http://www.paulgraham.com/popular.html

Whether the common case is made simple by the language, libraries, frameworks or standardization (we may need all of them) ultimately does not matter much to the developer, only that you can handle conceptually trivial everyday tasks with the minimum of fuss.

We have a long way to go before this becomes a reality.
The obvious? I side with pg. "Too lazy to walk, ya fuckin homo?"

http://www.paulgraham.com/segway.html
Investors On The Evolving Twitter Ecosystem: There Are Still Opportunities
Read everything by our own patio11: http://www.kalzumeus.com/ specifically this post: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/03/20/running-a-software-busin...

I'd also suggesting reading Getting Real (or Rework, if you want to pay, I think it's worth it) by 37signals: http://gettingreal.37signals.com/
Booted out of Bootup Labs
It was very strange reading that article next to a pair of Flash-based Google ads.
Mysterious radio waves emitted from nearby galaxy
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This makes a lot of sense, but for a lot of developers they might think of developer tools, since they're developers and developers use and like tools, which is an area that seems hard to sell in.
if you are into the java ee scene you can look into icepdf by the icefaces people. I've never personally used it but is is OSS now so it might work out for you.

http://www.icepdf.org/
The awesome power of static electricity
> I gather Google's phone OS have something similar

Android apps are written in Java. So the standard approach for doing this is to use Java's weak & soft references which basically tell the GC that, "hey, I've used this memory but if you really need it back, you can have it!".

http://developer.android.com/reference/java/lang/ref/SoftRef...
This from you: "Any sane person would give up, but if you really want to see what you're building exist in the world, you'll keep going"

and this from pg: "There's nothing more valuable than an unmet need that is just becoming fixable"

are, in my experience, both true in science as well, and are useful heuristics for what to work on.
Interesting to read that the focus for good ideas should be more towards organic ideas. But I would add in order to have a real impact the solution offered does need to solve a real problem where people are willing to pay for or do use the solution.
40%

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Taxes/Advice/YourRealTa...
Ask HN: iPhone/iPad online app-development 
I don't own a Mac, but would like to get started iPhone/iPad development using Objective-C.

Is there any online tools which lets me submit code in Obj-C and which compiles and displays the app on a simulator?

Please do share if you have any other suggestions on the easiest way to get started.
And they need to keep reactors that are not under IAEA oversight in order to build more nuclear weapons.
I think you mean "It's not like a [software] startup now where it's mostly software." There are still hardware startups where people are populating boards and assembling products. The goal is to quickly get through that stage, but in the beginning, not everyone can afford the large order requirements for outsourced manufacturing.
> In bigger cities where people can't go home, people find convenient places for the nap

I often wonder why napping is not easily permitted in U.S. offices. The benefits of napping last way beyond where it is practiced in Kindergarten.
pet peeve alert: "penultimate" means "next to last." no, really. look it up.
Is the continuations library confirmed to be in there? (I guess I could just download it and see...) I have the beta and that package was not present.
Hrm, that's true. I should add a caveat that it's hard to compete directly with open source software. You can build things for developers (e.g. Heroku), just so long as there's something you can charge for.

Edit: did.
When I saw this title, my immediate thought was "hmm, I wonder if this is about Bootup Labs?"

I've met the people behind Bootup Labs, and I like them. They're smart. They're enthusiastic about what they're doing. But I was never really convinced that they were able to make things work financially. I've seen enough startups that I can usually tell when a startup is running on fumes and spending all their energy on trying to raise more funding... and that's the vibe I've been getting from Bootup Labs for a while. Not really a good vibe to have coming from a group with the raison d'etre of providing funding.

On behalf of Canadians in general and Vancouverites especially: We're really sorry about this. Nobody should have to go through what happened to you. We hope you'll come back some day under better circumstances.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/13/world/asia/13exam.html

Basically, not scoring high enough on the most important test almost automatically slots you into not going to university and having to work in a factory. The U.S. is different because post-secondary or college education is almost accessible for everyone.
Of course, his major problem is the one he left out: the unknown knowns. The things "known" that really aren't so.
You can get a Mac Mini for $599, hook it to your network, and access it using logmein.com or some other remote access method. That's what I did to get started, and it's worked very well.
Suprised he didn't bring up Google Books.
Why this has not been bumped up more I have no idea... Fuck man... that is fucking horrible. When I first got into DreamIt Ventures, all of my attorneys and family and friends said the same thing... are you sure? What is the paperwork like?

The Paperwork was 2 PAGES! I was in law school at the time, I was looking at paper work of contracts that were a minimum of 26 pages!!! And 2 get 2 pages?! Unreal... and quite scary. We took a gamble... we signed the documents.

Left MORE questions thn answers... by far. Fortunately, my god, I never realized how lucky we were.

I'll keep my eye out for something that will pay.

Do you have any contracts from them? I'd like to see. Post them on DocStoc.

I do not know Canadian Law, but I know someone who might. Not that I could represent... but I'm curious to see if you might have some legal action!

Embarrassed or not - that is bull shit.

-P
Why would they foster such a strong ecosystem of applications only to stab them in the back? I think purchasing existing third party apps to fill these holes would make more sense both in terms of fostering less ill will the community and getting better apps than they can likely build internall.

Edit: other posts* state that Twitter has not yet decided if it will use an existing URL shorter or build out its own.

* http://thenextweb.com/apps/2010/04/15/twitter-launch-link-sh...
Wow that story really sucks.
Bad news for bit.ly, but it was pretty surprising that they held out for more money than what either Google or Twitter offered them.
Serious question:

I've been using Quantcast to do these types of comparisons. Is there an advantage to Google Trends over Quantcast?
They didn't miss the obvious. I think in your quote they're talking about legal obstacles to widespread adoption.
Then the next paragraph, Jobs and Bezos make your point:

Jobs said he lived seven minutes from a grocery and wasn't sure he would use Ginger to get there. Bezos agreed.
They definitely do, and once I have > 9-24 dollars a month in cash flow I very well will consider paying for their service. :-)