skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The new MBPs (and MacBooks?) have a two finger touchpad interface that I've found makes a huge difference in its usability - with one finger down already controlling the mouse a second finger essentially works as a mousewheel. I can use my MBP's touchpad fine but can't stand having to use my work dell laptops w/o that feature.
We use Toshiba A200-AH9 laptops running Ubuntu. Intel wifi just works. 9-cell battery. Only downside is the resolution if you don't use an external monitor and no bluetooth.
Whatever you pick, it won't stop you migrating to a more concise name when you can afford it. For example, motleyfool.com -> fool.com or askjeeves.com -> ask.com or altavista.com -> av.com
I use Capistrano too. It is written in ruby but can be used by any non-ruby project.
"a pink page inserted in to the pilots' handbooks"

lol - what a powerful influence that must have had on the heart and mind of every pilot!
from what i know VCs are investors and not donors - they want something in return (always) ... nevertheless you may find few VCs who may want to donate on personal basis. OR you may want to tweak your business/charity model where investors get something, like (90:10 charity:business) model. Also big VCs might have some % of profit spent on charity just to give back to the society, for that you need to contact all big players. The best idea is to get couple of VCs/angels on your management team (or board) - they will raise more funds (just by making couple of phone calls) than you can ever get it by knocking doors for the whole year.

EDIT: the another idea is to put "Donate" button (asking users to donate by credit card) on almost all the web pages - more the people use your service the more the donation coming in. you may also raise some money by putting ads (text and display, related to your service) on the web pages, for example if you're providing online service related to health care then you can get advertisers from health industry (or if u want to keep it simple then use Google's and Yahoo's ad services).
What are your requirements and what is your budget?

If you're purely looking for a cheap machine that will hold up decently well, you're going to be looking at a Dell + warranty.

If you're looking for higher quality (and price point), you're going towards Lenovo/Apple
I use Capistrano and am quite happy with it, but even if you don't go that way, seriously look into some kind of deployment management software. Versioned deployments, simple and automatic rollbacks if something fails, and the ability to easy scale up deployments if you wind up breaking out into multiple servers for app/db/web.

It turns updating your server from a mild headache to one line that you actually enjoy typing in.
Almost anyone that is willing to spend a couple of days adjusting to the ThinkPad's TrackPoint is going to be in for a treat. In particular, in most applications, holding down the center Trackpoint button will make the trackpoint work like a mousewheel (or, you can configure it to work like that all the time using its driver software.)
MS Office to support outside open formats
Honestly, I'd recommend looking for a used Thinkpad -- something from the T41/X41 era will be cheap (<$500), well-built, and extremely well-supported under just about any recent Linux distro.

I used an X41 as a mobile development box for quite a while, and only upgraded to a MacBook Pro when I started shooting a lot of RAW photos with my DSLR and wanted to run Lightroom.
A Legacy Game Never Forgotten | Tech Jaws
Use http://ThePoint.com !
The MBP is not great bang-to-buck. I bought one 4 years ago (PowerBook, then) and it ended up costing about $3,000. The MacBook costs just over 1/3 that. 1 year ago, I bought a MacBook to replace the failing MBP, and the difference was incredible: the regular MacBook well-exceeded everything about the MBP. I could buy a new MacBook every year (if I needed to) and it would cost the same as buying a MBP every 3 years, and that's if we don't factor in resale.

Given that the poster is using the system to learn to program, I doubt he needs the MBP. The MB should more than suit that need.
It's useful, in the way a public bathroom is useful-- you're glad it's there when you need it, but the experience really depends upon the behavior of the last guy to use it before you.

I'll take peer reviewed (or even just professionally edited) content over Wikipedia, anytime. But, it's certainly better than nothing.
Obviously it didn't improve usability enough to stop you posting this three times :)

My MacBook Pro is my second Apple laptop (the first was a G4 powerbook) and it is going to be the last unless things change rapidly before it goes u/s.

- The keyboard is ok, but the metal finish is slippery.

- The large track pad forces typing with wrists at odd angles.

- OS X is horrible (all my applications are Linux native so work oddly on OS X, plus no focus on mouse being my biggest two complaints - the rest are subjective/personal).

- No region crack for the DVD player, which is unacceptable for travel. Doesn't even work with VLC.

On the plus side the build quality is superb, the screen is good, and for it's size/weight the performance is outstanding. I certainly wouldn't trade it for anything other than a Thinkpad or maybe two or three Dells - one a year, for when they break ;)
I wouldn't knock the MacBook too much. Under $1000 if you check Apple's refurb section (store.apple.com, scroll down and look in the left sidebar), and you can run Windows or Linux if you wind up hating Apple gear. Buy the cheap model and swap in your own larger HD and 4GB of RAM and you'll have quite a decent laptop for not a whole lot of money.

If you hate Apple, then I'd go with a ThinkPad personally, but I don't know what's good on that side of things.
I got a refurb macbook from apple for $800 or $900. With a recent Core 2 Duo processor, it's very snappy. Only downside is it came with only 1GB RAM. That's surprisingly tolerable for basic use, but application switching starts getting slow with my ~50 tabs of Firefox and overloaded Eclipse install. Easy to fix for cheap, though, as I will be soon.
This is a well-written article that's a pleasure to read. What a pity that it's so shallow and silly. I mean that literally: it's a pity. When someone from outside the technical ghettos and subcultures, who is obviously cultured and curious, takes enough of an interest in programming to write thoughtfully about it, I'd expect to find that interesting. Alas, this is just a guy making grandiose, ignorant claims about an entire field... why? Because he felt bitchy and frustrated after getting stuck doing something he didn't know how to do with some apparently crappy tools.

What's disappointing is not that he's wrong, but that he's trivially wrong. Every field has its morass of details that must be worked through with patience. To complain about this is a well-known mark of the dilettante.
Maybe you can crowdsource your web-related initiatives.

I believe the christmasfuture.org site was a community effort - they have open sourced their technology:

http://donortrust.rubyforge.org/

Depends what your initiatives are I guess but maybe think outside of the box in terms of how to resource the projects.

Cheers
If you're just starting to learn to program than any laptop you get will be sufficient. If you go Windows, HP's are pretty slick. They're fast, good looking, easy to carry, and have great multimedia features. I personally have a ThinkPad, HP, and Dell. I use the Dell the most but the HP is extremely light and small and great for traveling. If I had to choose one I'd go with the Dell. I got a MBP for work and that's great, but I still prefer Windows/nix. The ThinkPad is old. Haven't used a new one of those since before Lenovo.
Thank god/FSM.
Sorry, I said "PowerBook, then". And in 4 years from now it may hold some other moniker.

My basic point was that if technology continues to change, the best bang for your buck is rarely the higher end. Only buy the high end if you need it and you're milking it for all it's worth.
The True Fiction of Microsoft Live Search
An Introductory Ruby/EventMachine Tutorial
> all my applications are Linux native

I've seen people get OS X and then do nothing but run XP under virtualization because they can't be bothered to figure out the OS X native apps. I wonder what, exactly, you mean by "all my applications?"
I strongly suggest getting a 14.1" ThinkPad T6x series laptop. I have had a T60 for almost two years now and it has worked great. The keyboard is just amazing compared to anything else out there. The TrackPoint (little red mouse pointer thing in the keyboard) is great when you get used to it. Unless you play games, you should get the integrated graphics (great battery life and easier to get working under Linux). The only bad thing about ThinkPads is that they don't run Mac OS X (legally/easily).

If you are on a budget, I recommend getting a slightly older model (slower processor) but with as much memory as you can get. I also recommend that you get a model with the one-year warranty instead of the three-year warranty, to save money. There are so many people selling ThinkPad parts and accessories that there is no reason to pay for a warranty that you will probably never use when you can replace anything that breaks yourself for less money. I just priced one at lenovo.com and it was less than $1,100.

BTW, I strongly considered buying a MacBook but I went and tried them at the Apple store and I found that the keyboard is really horrible for programming. Only Sony VAIO is worse. No dedicated home/end/pageup/pagedown on either?!?!
I write this up because there are zero good Ruby/EventMachine tutorials out there and I had a hell of a time when I was starting out.

Not to mention the documentation is less than stellar.
If you go the wxPython route, then there is wxGlade to make designing the interface easier.
http://wxglade.sourceforge.net/
FYI, I'm working on a Greasemonkey script that will let you keep a personal banned site list on reddit/hacker news.

ETA this evening.
a distinction between programming as art, and programming as plumbing [...] transcending the mundane to imagine the creative

I think this is a common misunderstanding of what art is. Every art has its mechanical, detailed side that must be worked through. The end result may be a lofty and soaring creation but it doesn't follow that the artist lofted and soared their way to get there. On the contrary, what's striking in the lives of great artists is not how they transcended the tough slog but how they did more of it, far more than their peers. The mundane and the creative are closely related, and the idea of the creative without the mundane is an ungrounded fantasy.

I remember reading something about the Beatles (by one of their early girlfriends or wives) that said when they went to parties, Lennon and McCartney would usually end up in a corner going over song ideas. There are countless such anecdotes. A woman walks up to Picasso in a restaurant and asks him to sketch whatever he likes on a napkin and charge her whatever he thinks it's worth. Picasso does so and says, "That will be twenty thousand dollars." "But it only took you thirty seconds to do that!" "Madam, it took me thirty years to do that."
The board composition reminds me of the ArsDigita story: http://waxy.org/random/arsdigita/. Definitely a problem.
If you're going to buy MBP from apple, try buying refurbished ones from apple online store, they're about 15-25% less than the brand new ones. I think the refurbished ones go through extra testing as well, so I think its a pretty good deal.
First Sale Victory in Vernor
As a stopgap, try http://searchdns.netcraft.com/

Combining this functionality with full text search would be useful.
Regardless of your personal thoughts on religion or music, those two messages resonate with almost everyone.

edit:
From Wish you were here:

'We're just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year | Running over the same old ground | What have you found? The same old fears.'
It'd be pretty sweet to allow us to put a list of domains we don't want to see links for in our preferences.
Am I a bad person for upvoting this?
I actually have a commit hook in git that will update a copy of my website when I commit something with the right message. It's kind of crude, but it manages the busywork for me quite nicely.
Tumblr, Why Can't You Embrace Search Engines?
If you're optimizing for the best bang-for-your-buck, then I agree. But if you spend all day working on a computer or depend on using a computer to make your living, I think it is very easy to justify buying highend equipment. $2.5k vs. $1.5k is not a very significant difference if it is amortized over 8 hours per day * 300 days per year.
Who Is This "Licklider" Guy?
I've been using a model n200 from Lenovo's 3000 series(the consumer ones, a grade below Thinkpads) and am relatively pleased. Build quality is lower than a Thinkpad, but I've had no trouble using it daily since last summer, toting it around, scratching it up....it's taken one fall, and the only thing that happened was the battery came loose.

Main caveat: have to baby its airflow so that it doesn't overheat. Vista will throttle on overheating, Linux won't, at least not the kernel I'm using.
This is mind-bending. Good read, thank you!
OLPC 2.0: towards the $75 laptop
I refer to it as the pencil eraser. Once you get used to it, you realize it has the more control than the touchpad. Its main benefit, for me, is that you never have to move your hands out of typing position.
Twitter will get past the tech issues. The community is there and well-cultivated, and any new service will have a difficult time matching it so quickly.

Twitter works for me because (a) Twitterrific is a kick-ass third-party app that automatically disappears without my needing to interact with it, (b) Twitterrific exists because of the decision to make a kick-ass API in the first place, (c) the ways in which one can participate are plentiful, and (d) the constraints and lack of functionality keep it accessible and manageable.

I signed up for friend feed because I do that for lots of new social networks. I like that there is a record that integrates lots of parts of my online life, but honestly I don't want to go to a web site to get the information. I won't spend that much time there, and if I were limited to the Twitter web site for all my interaction with that service I wouldn't use Twitter. They serve different purposes and offer different kinds of barriers to participation.

I like the idea of Twitter Love Day rather than a Twit-Out. This is largely a success based on community involvement, so lets use that collective brainpower to find ways to make the service better. Twitter is doing their part by being so transparent, and trying to be responsive ... even when they want to run away and hide.
Mr. Graham,

Thanks for writing such a questioning essay. I have two young boys and have spent a lot of time thinking about how my wife (an African-American physician) and myself (a European-descended American evolutionary biologist) are going to say to them about sex and drugs and death. My wife and I usually resolve these conversations by saying that we won't have to have "the talk" because our sons will be hearing about birth control from the time of their own birth. So far that's been true. Now that my older son can talk, I'm surprised about the stuff that I feel perfectly comfortable saying in front of him. However, I still feel like there's stuff I'd have trouble being honest about (like explaining why people abuse drugs --- I don't understand it myself). I've particularly thought about the duality of sex that you mention: "Yes, your parents have sex, and if they didn't you wouldn't exist, nor would it be nice to live here, but you shouldn't do it because you don't know what you're doing." Obviously there are certain ways I can be honest, but it ends the conversation a lot faster to just lie.

Another issue, that you mention in your notes, is there are some things that kids just believe, without adults trying to deliberately deceive them. My son probably thinks that Thomas the Tank Engine is somewhere right now being really useful.

My parents could have lied to me about a lot, but they didn't because I have three older brothers and it was hard to keep lying to me when my brothers were finding out they'd been lied to. Also, I think as parents they just tried to be honest about things like sex and death. One of my brothers asked my father what a blow-job was in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner. I wasn't there, but my mom tells me that my father did, in fact, tell him later.
In Founders at Work, Craig Newmark mentioned there were a lot of downsides in running Craigslist as a non-profit. I haven't done much research on why this is but was wondering if you could elaborate on whether the search for funding is limited by your non-profit status? Would it be easier to run your organization as a for-profit group like Google.org?

On another note, it would be helpful if you described your organization's purpose/ mission. Some friends and I are in the very early stages of starting a social venture that would help non-profits, not with financial funding, but with access to smart people to help out in various tasks at the organizations. You can write to me at dskhatri =shift-2= google's email. Good luck!
Heh... 37signals rediscovers the basics of project management :-)

Clear, individual ownership of pieces of work is a cornerstone of effective project management.
For cross-platform development, wxpython is great. It's a nice library and I've used it to make apps which run well on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

I've used pyQT for QT and KDE applications and I enjoy it very much. It's nice to be able to use QT Designer to quickly build windows and application panels and then use pyuic to generate the python code.
Non-profits to me are a lot like businesses, you have to find the point of leverage that you can exploit. I've worked with a couple non-profits to develop for-profit web apps that plays to their strengths and dovetails with their mission statement. It seems like google.org is trying to do this in an even bigger way by working to create self-sustaining non-profits. It's hard work obviously... But a lot of these business people, if you say hey this project has a plan for profitability, then donors will often invest in a project with a higher degree of risk tolerance just because you have a higher mission and its something they can feel good about.

My parents have worked in non-profits for a long time and I know how hard it often is-- props for working on something that isn't totally narcissistic! :o)
Music is art and creative, but you can't ignore what it takes to get there. I forget who said this but upon being asked if he practiced everyday, some famous musician said something along the lines of

If I don't practice for a day, I notice. If I don't practice for two days, the critics notice. If I don't practice for three days, the audience notices.

The point is whether it is programming or music or whatever, there is a craft associated with it, which only makes you better at expressing your creativity. IMO you can be creative without really knowing your craft, but expressing that creativity requires practice and dedication and it doesn't really matter what field you are in and how you define art or creative thinking.

And yes, Reznor is brilliant :)
I didn't forget my dreams.
You might want to check out pythoncard http://pythoncard.sourceforge.net/ at least for prototyping. It uses wxPython as the windowing toolkit. It has its own GUI builder built in pythoncard itself.

pythoncard is like hypercard but it has all the power of python behind it. I have used it to write little desktop apps and been quite happy with the ease of development (particularly when adding new features after some months) and the performance. I never tried making an exe, but it should be possible.
This is why self help books keep selling. Because we keep hearing the same wisdom over and over again, but we just do not _understand_ it. All these simple fortune cookie wisdoms, they mean nothing when you read them casually. But when something big happens to you and you really _understand_ what is meant, then it's like opening a new door and discovering magic behind it.

I finally get it. It may be stupid to everyone else, it may be obvious, but only now do I really really understand what is meant, and only now have I been able to apply what I learnt to make a fair amount of money and be happy while doing it.
Watch out for the cheap laptops. These are really enticing options and I am typing on one now. As a student and planning to run linux on it anyway, I thought it would be a good idea to save my money and get a cheapie. I bought an Acer about a year ago and after a good amount of usage I realized my mistake. After having this thing on for about an hour or so it gets hot. I mean hot lava burn your nuts so you won't have children hot. Not only is this an inconvenience, but the performance goes down as well. I can't watch videos for more than 15 minutes and even youtube can be annoyingly choppy. None the less it does get the job done when it comes to programming, as most laptops out will.

My friend gave me good advice about this once when I was complaining, he said "Why would you try to save money on a tool that will not only be the basis for your profession, but also the device you will spend most of your day on?". He was right. Its like trying to save 150 bucks on a bed that has a huge lump in the middle that makes you wake up with a sore back every morning. Its not worth saving the money. Don't worry so much about bang for the buck, focus on getting that consistent bang to get the job done each day without added stress. A carpenter wouldn't go to work each day with a plastic hammer and a nail file instead of a saw, so approach your purchase with the same logic. Find out your needs, find the tools that meets those needs, and then make your decision from that point. Don't let money be that big of an influence, you will regret it.
I use capistrano for PHP, Python and Ruby applications. Its simple and works.
I strongly recommend emacs with erlang-mode over vi for Erlang editing. I was a 100% vi user before I started with Erlang, and I can tell you that using emacs for editing Erlang is so much more fluid.
StickK.com: Motivation via "anti-charities"
How to Use Social Media for Social Change
Real Programmers Trust Their Instincts
Why can't they embrace comments?
Inkscape, open office, some custom PM software I wrote myself, front ends to eJabberd/mySQL/Apache/Cyrus, emacs, LaTeX and Firefox.

Plus a few things that aren't so important, like xplanet and SuperKaramba.
Perhaps a bit noobish, but I use the web development software Coda (panic.com/coda) and it tracks changes for me; when I publish, it only uploads changed files since my last publishing.
That is bloody brilliant! Love it...
i like the idea of having wealthy people on board - i have personally experienced that this helps a lot ... also this will create awareness amongst the hi-society people, who sometime just for the sake of status give donations to the same cause/organization.
you only use a computer 300 days a year? and only 8 hours a day?
I was in the same boat as you not too long ago. As the others have said, Capistrano really is the way to go. Out of the box, it's meant to work with rails projects, but if you tweak it a bit, it'll work fine with really any language/environment. You can try www.capify.org to get started. Beware though, the majority of documentation floating around is for the 1.x release. By v2, a lot of the configuration specific details were changed though and unfortunately if you are starting now, the 2.x docs are really lacking. There is an effort underway to bring them up to speed, but so far I haven't seen anything. Read the docs from the 1.x release, as enough of it still applies to 2.x.
I think you're approaching it from a wrong standpoint. You should start off by telling us what you're going to program in and what your OS and tools of choice are.