skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
budget + starting to learn => don't underestimate the second hand market

despite lusting for a MPB I recently acquired a hp nc4400 second hand which rocks when I am away from the desktop it runs Hardy and all the soft I need for my coding (and I am not starting to learn :P)

... and you get the feeling that your are doing something for the environment in the process (not that I'm a hardcore green or anything ;)
I use an HP/Compaq NC6000, $300 on eBay. Make sure you get the widescreen (1440w) version with integrated Bluetooth, and expand it to 1GB RAM. It runs everything I need for interactive development, including hogs like Photoshop, Flash, and the Eclipse-based Flex Builder 3; the Bluetooth means I can get internet access through my smartphone; it's fairly light and has a real-world battery life of three hours under steady use; its battery is swappable, so you can carry a spare; and you can afford to lose it, which is a very distinct possibility if you're carrying it around a bustling city all day. (I live in Manhattan.)

Even the best backup plan and warranty won't cover the "oh FUCK ME" moment when you realize your $3000 laptop just got lost, dropped, or stolen.
i have been happy with the toshiba r205 s209

originally retailed for $2200 but i've seen them lately for around $800.

Spend an extra $100 and load up the RAM to 1.25GB. It runs linux like a charm and gets great battery life.

Best of all, it's got a titanium case and doesn't flex and groan the way mac laptops do. It's light and rock solid.

For $800 it's by far the best deal you'll find today.

If you like games, don't buy it however b/c it has a slow graphics card for 3d stuff (I don't play games)...
The URL Is Dead, Long Live Search
Uh, most ultra portable laptops have keyboards that are 95% the size of a normal keyboard. I don't get where the small hand thing comes from. Maybe if you have huge hands the 5% makes a difference, but for 99% of people it's not even noticeable.
Rifflet, A Home for Unfinished Songs
I'm not modding you but I strongly disagree.

> Children can learn Windows, which is a de-facto standard in corporate world, so they will be prepared better for their professional future.

Teaching a seven year child how to use XP is of no benefit because XP will be obsolete before the child leaves school. The de-facto argument is circular and isn't in the best interests of the child.
Bad parallel. Coding up a CSS/HTML web page full of embedded PHP and Javascript and trying to get it pixel-perfect is worlds away from writing an internally consistent program for a single run target using a single sane language and APIs. You can't say "it's all music."
Fair enough.

I think Tumblrs just want their fair share of search voice but we have yet to find a way to do so.
We need a word for "being a jerk to people here and then being smug about it" online. I think it's basically the same kind of problem as trolling. It doesn't help the signal to noise ratio of a site by generating another bit of rude noise, no matter how emotionally satisfying you think it is at the time.
After I'm done editing my pages, I save them to a 5.25" floppy and mail it via USPS to GoDaddy in Arizona with the instructions to place on my webserver.
Ask HN: What Linux-distro to learn about Linux?
I want to learn about Linux. I am a fairly experienced programmer that can program in Python, Java, C/C++, a little LISP an Ruby and very minor experience in other languages(for example Pascal!).

anyway i want to try out Linux, maybe program a little and surfing but mainly test out the OS.

so what distro is small and easy to play with?
and free as in gratis.

and about installing. is there a good guide that takes you through everyhting from partition the harddrive to installing Linux to basic stuff you can do?
Well, those were just madeup numbers. If you use a computer more often, the case for getting good equipment is more compelling, of course.
This is what I have set up. A Git repository on the server. I push all my code to the repo via ssh.

On the server there are Dev, Staging, and Production environments. Dev and Staging are bare checkouts from the git repo. I have deploy shell scripts that automate deploying to both (checking out from source control and running database migrations). The process should be that code is deployed to Dev, then Staging and finally to Production.

The Production environment is NOT a checkout from source control. It is an exact mirror of the Staging environment. And the deploy script to production does the following:

- tags source control with the new release number

- creates a tar.gz backup of the production directories

- does a database backup dump

- then uses rsync to copy files from the staging web directories to the production directories.

- lastly runs migration scripts on the prod database
Almost every Linux distro is free as in gratis and libre.

Start with something easy to install and maintain like Ubuntu and go from there.
High-school girls who consider themselves attractive are more likely to be targets for bullying
How is this different from Slashdot? (Other than the submission part)
I have that problem most when I am dreading the next morning. If someone is engrossed in a problem, it will still be there when you wake up.
Ask YC: using PEO for a startup, good or bad? (HR hack)
We are considering using PEO for our company. Anybody has any experience, positive of negative with this setup?

PEO basically employs everybody in your organization, and leases them back to your company. That way the employees get larger group insurance, payroll, etc. It sounds good in principle, but who knows how it actually works.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_employer_organization

The most well marketed one is Administaff
You could also try Novell's NetDrive. They don't offer it for download from their site, but I believe it's free.

http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/qna/999.html
Generate enough word-of-mouth on blogs, and you won't need a memorable URL; your search ranking will take care of (most) users trying to get to your site.

See "Silverback" as an example. I vaguely remembered that it was at silverbackapp.com but wasn't sure. I typed "silverback" into Google and it was the second result.

While we're on the subject though, what are some common domain suffixes/prefixes? It would be helpful to have a handy list for whenever I'm trying domains. :)
Steve Yegge: Systems should never reboot
Don't forget about all the available TLDs. Perhaps one of them can make your URL even better. Just be careful about leaving vowels out to look cool.
Don't forget thefacebook.com.
It's not easy. As the founder of a 4-year-old non-profit tech company, I can tell you that it's not easy and your best bet is to make it your number 1 short-term goal to become self-sustaining. By borrowing money, asking the right people, getting donations, etc. you can get off the ground and get started. Form there, focus on finding steady income source (ads are a good way) even if it's not a lot of money.

Finally, don't underestimate end-users willingness to donate. Paypal buttons don't work because everyone assumes everyone else has donated money. We started using "donation trackers" by ChipIn (chipin.com) and they've been quite effective. Make sure you set a "goal" because people love to feel they're helping you work towards a particular amount. (For instance, we always get our most donations at the beginning and end of each month, when people send the donations percentage to 5% and to 100%).

Best money-saving tip: find a webhost to donate a dedicated server; it's the most important way to save money and keep afloat.
I got a chumby (chumby.com) as a gift for this new years and it does a great job at keeping me up to date with the weather, news, stock quotes, facebook and other random data while I'm barely getting out of bed.

I save a lot of time now that I am not tempted to turn on my computer in the morning.
The concept is cool but there still needs to be a point of reference. List the items under the main feed but perhaps lower their opacity. The user needs a feeling of progression, right now you get lost quite easily.

My 2 cents
-app
-hq
-place
-spot
get-
the-
my-
-ster
-aholic
-dev
-lab
-matic
-space
Well, it seems to me that it would be irresponsible for you not to reveal the chat transcripts, precisely for the reason that you have given.

By revealing your chat transcripts, real life researchers might read it and say "I would have done it differently" and when a real transhuman intelligence emerges, the researchers can now proceed forewarned by the result from your experiments.
Trying to find a list of blog sites
Hi...

I'm trying to find out how to obtain a list of bloggers/blog sites for a survey we'd like to create. We're interested in talking to the "long tail" of the blog sites to try to get a feel for exactly what kinds of revenue is being generated for the sites for the various ad approaches.

We're willing to share the data we compile, if we can figure out how to obtain a list, of who/where these guys are. We figured we'd post here and maybe someone would have insight into this!

Thanks

-Bruce
bedouglas@earthlink.net
About 18 months ago, I bought a Dell laptop (dual core, 2 gigs RAM, etc.) and it has worked really well for me through short (day) and long (to Australia) trips. As a contractor, it has made me a lot of money because I can show customers their software at their site, and I can make adjustments as needed on site. A quick turnaround time for changes is essential to happy customers.
I agree wholeheartedly. Unless you need to do serious 3D work, the Pro is overkill. For everyday use, the plain-Jane MacBook is quite adequate. True, the hardware isn't quite a nice as ThinkPads of yore, and I loathe the glossy screen, but these are really my only complaints.
On the contrary, I'm saying that music "isn't all music" either. Whatever your craft, before you reach beauty, you need to deal with technical details.
Greasemonkey + HN Blacklist = far better HN

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039
Depending on exactly what your non-profit does, but another thing you most likely would run into: most funders/donors, especially the up-and-coming, really want to know your non-profit's effectiveness before sending you any money.

Most non-profits have no resources to do this well and/or they simply don't think this way.

Here's my benevolent startup: http://www.goalshift.com .

We offer an online tool to help non-profits measure their client goal progress and correlating with the programs/activities they serve. Visual charts clearly show progress.

It's entirely free for small organizations or small programs.
I can't help you but I thought I'd offer some advice. Telling us you want a "list of bloggers/blog sites" is useless - Google can do that. Asking us a more useful, thought-out question would likely provide you w/ better results.
15% off Code: USPSAVEMORENOW

http://www.techbargains.com/vendor_detail.cfm/96/lenovo-coup...

Lenovo ThinkPad R61 Intel Core 2 Duo T7250 14.1 inch Notebook PC $552.07 Free Shipping, May. 22 8 AM

lenovo has the Lenovo ThinkPad R61 Intel Core 2 Duo T7250 14" Widescreen Notebook PC for a low $649.50 - 15% off Coupon Code: USPSAVEMORENOW (Exp 5/26) = $552.07 Free Shipping. Tax in most states.

5.2lbs; 14.1"; Intel Core 2 Duo T7250 @ 2.0GHz; 1GB RAM; 80GB HDD; DVD-ROM/CDRW Combo; 802.11a/b/g; Linux; 1yr warranty
Consulting sucks, but thanks for the work
It is working; the variable "number" is local to the generator expression and can't be used in the print statement. It works if you print something else instead (e.g. "Success!" in the article).

If you just want to print the numbers less than 10, it's easier to do:

print [number for number in numbers if number < 10]

or

print '\n'.join(str(number) for number in numbers if number < 10)

if you want the same formatting.
Oh stop it. None of you read that post to the end anyway.

td;dr
??? It's just a rewrite of the FAQ/help section on LinkedIn.
Adsense now accepts third party ads
The secret history of Star Wars [4.6 MB PDF]
yea, it is hard to stop finger gazing and bask in the moonlight.

it is also very hard to give up the belief in the Great Reward (Tao of Pooh fans?)
Is Web 2.0 Nuts? Or Just Like Hollywood?
I just bought a Lenovo T61p (ThinkPad mobile workstation), but it was very nearly a coin-flip decision vs a Dell XPS M1530. www.notebookreview.com
I completely agree - the new way of looking at issues pushes things to the extreme sometimes, but always makes me reevaluate.
Another way to put it from the extended conversation on FriendFeed:

"That's a very big reason why I decided to launch my first blog on Tumblr. It was easy, no-fills posting. "Great," I thought. But I started to notice that Tumblr was living in its own universe: folks went lived in the Dashboard and never really escaped. Post titles and dates were never really correct. It gets frustrating when you spend time to write (and not merely bookmarklet sites) and then it vanishes into thin air."
> Paypal buttons don't work because everyone assumes everyone else has donated money. We started using "donation trackers" by ChipIn (chipin.com) and they've been quite effective.

Thanks for this tip. I helped a non-prof with their website but they get very few donations through their PayPal link. I'll suggest this change. It's always the little things that can drastically increase conversion rates.
the eee is extra tiny. the macbook keyboard is a good size. And that new HP eee competitor has a good sized keyboard, but the eee is frustrating.
The entry I submitted to the last YC round is related to non-profit fundraising. Still looking for an Angel, but that should be resolved soon.
The Jump to Linux, easier with Ubuntu
The standard's Larry Borsato makes the switch to Linux, finding it easier than he presumed.
Some people make a living off being consultants and would be thankful for any job that they could get! Although your point is valid - there are pros and cons to any business model.
Yeah, you can get a great Dell for really cheap. They now come preinstalled with Ubuntu (http://dell.com/ubuntu), so you don't have to pay for Windoze.
Think about a MMO with 100 users in 1 room, the number of relationstips in that room is (n-1)^2. Add 100 more users walking around and you now need to send 4x as many location updates. You will quickly run out of bandwidth long before storing that much information is a problem.

Now consider a voting system you have 1,000 items and 1,000 users and you want to show how much people like them like each item? How well does that work when there are 100,000 users and 100,000 items?
I had asked for something similar a while back.
Macbook. They're updating them soon, so you might want to wait for that to happen, and then either buy an old one for less, or a new one with new features.
Avoid any TLD besides .com. I can't think of a single site that I visit regularly that doesn't end in .com.
Most of the PC laptop touchpads that I have used will scroll the focused control if you run your finger up and down along the rightmost edge (or bottommost for horizontal motion). If yours doesn't, check your control panel settings to see if it can be enabled.

It's not quite the same as a scroll wheel in that there are some programs where one scrolling technique (wheel or trackpad) will work while the other won't, but it's similar enough to handle most cases.
Except the universe is probably nothing like we imagine. This story is the modern-day equivalent of tales of sea monsters and sailing to the edge of the flat world. What is the probability that evolution would result in a "life form" anything like us? And by anything like us, I mean anything which can understand any of the concepts we understand? That includes all of the theories of mathematics we impress ourselves so with.
I believe the word you are searching for is Clit Mouse.
Only Lenovo (Think Pad) and Dell (D620?) have them.
I don't quite follow. What do you mean by items under the main feed?

The idea here is one has this as their home page, or jumps on it frequently. The latest story shows automatically. Occasionally, one might go back to to the other feeds (or down in one of the feeds).
In classical approaches to beauty, the thinking was that Beauty was the result of strict adherence to rules. From wikipedia on aesthetics:

<quote>
Greek philosophers initially felt that aesthetically appealing objects were beautiful in and of themselves. Plato felt that beautiful objects incorporated proportion, harmony, and unity among their parts. Similarly, in the Metaphysics, Aristotle found that the universal elements of beauty were order, symmetry, and definiteness.
</quote>

but yea. a classical foundation in a trade and rigorous pursuit of <latin>ars</latin> enables the craftsmen to do excellent things, or failing that, at least be competent in routine.
But you remembered "Silverback" - that's why "memorable" is important. It's just as important in a URL otherwise people wouldn't pay so much for them or value them so highly.
I've been using Tortoise SVN - really easy to use,

http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/
news [at] okdork.com is the best way to reach me.

i honestly don't think i cheated the system. i didn't realize it was illegal to ask people who read yc to upvote my articles. i should read the small print next time:) plus my article was on the homepage for about 5 seconds which isn't useful to the readers or myself.

i guess next time i will just have a few votes to get on the homepage and if it sucks then it won't go anywhere.
One of the big differences is that some people can sit down at / pick up a new instrument and in a few minutes be improvising a song they heard once, a week ago. with programming, the interface is not kinesthetic so at least for me, the internalization of APIs takes longer (getting down new lexicons seems to have more cognitive load for me than adjusting physical interface -- not that i can play instruments like that or learn music by ear. yet.)
I think they chose not to include comments as a feature, and to use 'rebloging' instead. The trouble is to reblog you have to also be a tumblr user. At least you can easily add disqus comments.
> His obsession with free software is far beyond the bounds of reason.

He's far-sighted and he defends rights before they become important to the mainstream. He has taken what some people view as an extreme position because if he was more moderate then those rights would be more easily eroded.

When the Lispers at the MIT AI Lab split into two proprietary factions ( http://www.freemedialibrary.com/index.php/Chapter_7:_A_Stark... ), Richard Stallman stayed behind and wrote an open source version of their developments. You may have a descendant of this code installed on your desktop.

When Richard Stallman's story called The Right To Read appeared in the Feb 1997 issue of The Communications Of The ACM ( http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html ), people thought this was an unlikely dystopian future. However, 11 years later, DRM is a real and present situation which affects anyone who uses a DVD player, a Tivo, an iPod, an iPhone, a Kindle and Windows Media Player - and many more who don't.
No Schedules, No Meetings - Enter Best Buy's Rowe
I've been a part of enough opt-in lists to know that, at "least 1-2x a year, the company sends out an email akin to:

Dearest user,

In an effort to serve you better, we have reset your subscription preferences. We have create many new widgets, have a 0% balance transfer option, and would love for you to call us with your home mortgage refi questions.

Thank you -

ACME Corporation."

No doubt MSFT will find a way to lose/reset your opt-in preferences at least 1x a year...
Consulting does NOT need to be a tradeoff when starting a software startup.

Why not?

If you pick your customers carefully enough, they can be the R & D department for your startup. They don't even realize it and they pay you for the privilege!

You are going to need tons of feedback for your software. One strategy is the well-known "release early and often". Another, just as effective, is "find out from your own customers before you develop". You will still need to release early and often, just not as early and not as often.

I estimate that more than half of the ideas for features in my software came from existing consulting customers. Things I would have never thought of, and now I know they're necessary. Without them I would have been releasing alot more often and early, and may have never received the same valuable input.

OP know this and mentions it, albeit only is passing:

"3. Learn from the work"

I spend less time consulting than many entrepreneurs spend fund raising. I like to think of my customers as "angels whose money I get to keep".
Random thoughts: the MacbookPro and thinkpads, besides everything said here, have the highest resale value, for sure. But i would definitely avoid the early MBPs, lots of heat issues, bulging batteries and keyboards. The recent ones, including mine, still seem to not sleep/hibernate properly.

Buy used from Craigslist. Make sure you get original purchase receipt, O/S install DVD's. Or from Costco. 90 day return policy.
Get a Dell. I've had one for 4 years now and it has held up pretty well. It did cost me around $2000 but it has been worth it. If you really want a 'cheap' laptop get a refurbished one.
That's the monthly singularity discussion chat; not the Gatekeeper chat.
I bought a MacBook. Bought 4GB ram and 320 GB hard drive and replace the factory one. Total cost without warranty and before tax: $1099 (MacBook) + $139 (disk) + $98 (4GB).

I need to add $79 for VMWare Fusion to run different VMs for FreeBSD, Linux and another $150 for Windows XP pro. But this laptop will have all client system that I need to use.

I guess you can do the same thing on Lenovo ThinkPads with similar cost or maybe cheaper. If you don't need to write stuffs for OS X/iPhone, you just need to use Safari Windows to check your web sites.

Since your are beginner to learn programming. I guess a ThinkPad with Linux and you can start to learn python right away.
Craiglist isn't a nonprofit and never really has been to my knowledge, so I don't know what you're talking about.
I got one of those, and have really liked it. It's not going to ever get lots of looks, but I use it for programming, not showing off.

Also, in the one occasion when I needed customer service, it was really good. I bought it in the US, but called up the support line in Germany, and had a new hard drive here in Innsbruck, Austria the next day. I was pleasantly surprised: I thought I would get hassled because of the change of country, or they would be slow, or see that I had bought it with Ubuntu and give me grief for that, but they really didn't ask any questions, just sent a guy over with a new drive.
Did you see Ryan's post on Disqus?

http://ryanspoon.com/blog/2008/05/15/disqus-after-5-days-on-...

I agree with him.
Man - I'm low class apparently as I'm apparently the only one who uses Filezilla or just a plain FTP client. I support about 30 domains and this route helps me. I do have some internally-written apps that will upload files to a lot of different domains at once.
Even if the stories have stayed the same, comments like this make me think news.yc is declining. "Apparently you struggle with basic maths" - this kind of condescension is ridiculous and not what I come here for.
Twitter At Scale: Will It Work?
It would be nice in cases like this to include a warning in your title about the file size, e.g., "The secret history of Star Wars [4.4MB PDF]."
It's very simple to continue your eye movement a couple more centimeters so as to skip the xkcd entries. It's also very easy to restrain yourself from upvoting it or clicking through. It's also very easy to not get worked up over it as xkcd entries only make it to the front page every once in a while.

You don't need an article to spark interesting discussion. A comic can do the same, and from what I've seen in this thread, there's some interesting discussion.
Tunny, Colossus and Ada: Keeping an Open Mind
MeshU: One day developer mini conference that rocked