skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Highcharts is a chart library, not a graphics library. I think Highcharts was Flash-based a few months ago, when I decided to write my own lib, and we didn't want a Flash solution. I tried hard to find something else that would work for us, but I couldn't - every lib was either Flash-based, or didn't support VML (Protovis), or missing a chart type we wanted and had no docs and so adding it seemed daunting, and didn't generalize something the way I wanted it to, or had some other flaw. Writing my own was a fun project - it gave me an excuse to learn CoffeeScript.
The trouble is, most of the time (i.e. almost all the time), it's more efficient to assume that the common wisdom is correct. If you don't accept this wisdom, you'll end up making noob mistakes long after you "should know better".

It also doesn't help that society almost colludes in this. People are more forgiving of youngsters making mistakes; they are far more likely to dismiss the same when the person is older, as they infer that since that person hasn't learned by now, they're clearly not very bright / good at what they do / whatever.
For linux just avoid anything with an ATI graphics card and go with nvidia. ESPECIALLY if you want to attempt triple booting MacOSX\iATKOS on it.

I've gotten good mileage out of a Dell XPS Studio 16 w/ubuntu but can't recommend it due to driver issues with wireless (avoid intel5100) and graphics (radeon hd3760).

If I was buying a new laptop I would search the hackintosh and iATKOS forums to find models that can install OSX out of the box and triple boot it.

After that, figure out exactly what resolution\size pixels per inch you want the display. I like 1600x900 for laptops myself. That should narrow it down to only a couple models.
What do you use for video editing? Just curious, since I have ports installed just to build kdenlive. I haven't had good luck with iMovie (crashing, poor MTS support, bloated AVHDC files, and choppy transcoding). I'm too cheap to buy Final Cut Pro, but would be interested in other options.
The perfect time to submit to Hacker News
I tried an experiment this morning with my story "How to hack the media". I thought it was likely a winner on Hacker News and I submitted it about an hour before the time I've predicted is ideal for story submission (around 1300 in the UK which is 0700 on the US East Coast).

The story did not reach the front page. Of course, this is only one data point, but I'm pretty sure that there's an ideal moment for submission. Has anyone done any research into this?
What ultima is being created? I recently have been dreaming of ultima online being created for the browser.. Seems like it could be possible now, no?
Haha thanks for the feedback on the pitch. Maybe I'll run through it again once I get some more coffee :)
All of that + an box to transcribe the audio, maybe some people are deaf or maybe some people can't really understand accents.
Interestingly, most of these tips could apply to dating, as well.
If I install Ubuntu on it, does pretty much everything work? I don't care too much about suspend/resume, but I do need the wireless to work.
I'd go appcelerator titanium if the api handles what you're trying to do.
Pretty cool, but I'm a fan of the more macro version of the idea, as based on census data: http://www.xoxosoma.com/singles/ (also a really awesome design)
I'm not sure if they're a startup or not but these guy's have a very big one:

http://www.gaiaonline.com/
This is interesting for its definition of "simple". While it is built from only simple building blocks, it is written in a way that I find very hard to read. It's easy to follow with the comments, but without them, would you be able to quickly find out what the code does and whether it is correct?
I think actually using abstractions (like functions, arrays (which are used in v2)) would make this even simpler, or at least easier to understand. Nobody would argue that a Tic Tac Toe game made only from NAND gates would be simple (to make or to understand).
pg's response to "what if google does it?" -

That's one of the canonical dumb investor questions. We try not to ask those. Google could blow most startups out of the water if they chose to focus on building exactly the same thing. What protects startups is that in practice big competitors can only focus on a limited number of things at once.

User indifference is a much, much greater danger for startups than competitors, big or small. So we advise startups to focus on that. What's going to kill you is the Back button, not Google.
The best Android apps for business
Suspend/resume works flawlessly on my E6500. Wireless too.
Yup. Its been done:
http://blog.itlater.com/whats-the-best-time-to-post-to-hacke...
Actually, even if no one dies, we can still all have children without creating infinite population, as long as we have, on average, less than 2 per couple (1 per person).

For example, if we have 1 billion people who suddenly all become immortal, and each couple has, on average 1.8 children, we asymptote towards a world with 10 billion immortals. Everyone could have offspring, though the actual number of young people would be continuously decreasing...

If $p0$ is the starting population, and $a$ is the number of children per person (number per couple divided by two), we have

p = p0 * sum_{i=0...inf} a^i = p0 / (1-a)
Submitter: account 23 hours old. Two commenters, super-generic comments, both accounts 2 hours old, comments posted within minutes of account creation. Smells fishy to me. All flagged.
You cannot go wrong with a Thinkpad, but you can do better, IMHO.

I enjoyed my last Thinkpad (t40) a lot. Still have and use it after 6 years. But especially with linux, battery life wasn't very good (now the battery is completely dead of course). The fan never stopped.

To answer the question of the OP: yes, it is totally worth to learn Mac OS. First, the effort is small. Second, you will save a lot of admin time. Third, backup is easy, reliable and bootable. This alone recommends Macs as developer notebooks.
Multimap sold out to MS for $50 million, so I'm not sure they cared too much about Google.
After ~8 years with Linux as my desktop OS I moved to OSX in '06 and have been very happy. My unibody MBP is by far the nicest laptop I've ever owned or used... I do web development with Django for a living, so it sounds like you'd use the same tools.

But, to each their own...
Nitpick: The first edition of the PiL Book covers Lua 5.0 which is very similar to 5.1.

The most noticeable changes are the vararg handling, the module system (as you said, but it will be phased out in v5.2), and some library changes.

The differences are listed here: http://www.lua.org/manual/5.1/manual.html#7

That said, I purchased the second edition to understand the module system, only to decide not to use it anyway :-). I don't like the way the `module` function pollutes the global namespace.
I've seen quite a bit of this - and even put considered developing a similar service (justseen.at - domain for sale).

The first problem is one of being perceived as invading privacy. This creates all sorts of follow-on problems - Apple won't allow you in the Appstore, Google Maps will likely withdraw your permission to use that (as I think happened to Gawker). There are ways around these, but it makes it a murky business and complicates bringing in revenue.

In the UK (where celebrity magazines are huge), Papture have been doing all they can on this. There's not much hope of an exit - mainstream celebrity magazines would probably worry about stepping over the line in acquiring something so intrusive.

Potential revenue sources that I saw were paid-for SMS alerts whenever a particular celebrity is spotted (imagine the number of teenies following Justin Bieber). And perhaps paid for accounts allowing real-time access, while everything else is delayed by 2 hours (for safety reasons).

In the end I decided it wasn't something I wanted to be involved with from a reputational standpoint.
Seconded. I had a Dell, admittedly a low-end one, and it was dreadful. Crummy build, large pixel size, a ton of bloatware (not that that's relevant if you're going to put linux on it). And the wi-fi under Ubuntu was extremely flaky.
I should add this is in relation to Chargify's recent pricing change. Can only do so much with an 80 character title.
tibbon, check this out: http://bit.ly/ciKymu
Where Realtime Worlds went wrong
It's my favourite ad-hoc in-terminal editor too. Keyboard shortcuts are in the style of the old Borland text IDEs.
Well yes quite - so where's the mechanism to exclude "my boss" or "managers in my company" from such updates?
Milo got he interface right? Paaaalease....
I had a macbook but found I preferred my Linux desktop. I ended up giving the macbook to my wife. I'm thinking about getting another mac for iPad development, but I still expect to do everything else on my Ubuntu machine.
Over the past year, we discovered that the customer that never paid had the highest support load. Once we made the announcement about the price change, the same applied to complaining about Chargify across multiple public channels. Those customers that were working on a hobby business, or just something they were not investing in significantly, seemed to have the time to tweet all day long, post multiple negative comments on every possible channel available, and shout the loudest.

This is exactly what I mean when I talk about pathological customers. You will get to deal with them, too, if you try to be the cheap option in your market.
I can recommend System76 if you go the Ubuntu route. My desktop at home is a System76 Leopard Extreme that I dual boot Ubuntu / Windows, and prior to getting my MBP I was using a Pangolin Performance laptop.

Since getting a MBP I can say that I do prefer OSX to Ubuntu, but I'm a Ruby/Rails dev surrounded by other Apple guys using Textmate so it's the path of least resistance for me for sure.
Pragmatic Podcast returns: Interview with Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin
I didn't become jaded. I learnt my lessons -- and promised myself not to let others grab the rewards of my own creativity and efforts. I started and run my own company.

Prometheus won't succeed unless he chooses to unbind himself.
I might just be a hippy dippy technology wonk but I have a gut belief that most societal change results from technological development.

If country A wanted country B to do X then it's ability to make it happen through violence will be limited by the willingness of citizens of country A to let it happen.

That willingness will be affected by by the degree of how "alien" people in country B are to people in country A. TV, internet, increased population movement through technological change[1] and so on will decrease that alienness.

[1] I mean both in terms of technology enabling physical travel of people from A->B and technology making a person's origin less important in where they can live during their lifetimes (for example, a programmer can go to work anywhere there is work - they are not confined by location other than by arbitrary things like visas)
yeah, and this idea has been tried for more than a decade in various forms. To make it work, having a twitter-like approach, with location included, and having stores actually using it, that would take off (potentially). The diff now from 1999 is tech is cheaper, more pervasive, and mobile.
NOKIA SECRET CODES
I would be even more interested in tools that generate Raphael Js code. I didn't have as much success as I hoped turning svg to Raphael.
I'm sure if Google did it, it would refresh in less than 10 seconds. For a straightforward "pick a random quote" site, this is just plain appalling!
I don't know about the enterprise area, but when this happens in the gamedev industry (and it happens a lot), it's extra depressing because 90%+ of the people working on it will have poured their life and soul into it and really care. We're not talking individuals in a sea of office drones.

Part of the problem is that "release early, release often" is hard to do when it comes to entertainment products. MMOs & social games are starting to change that, but nothing close to the sort of pivoting you can do with, say, a productivity web app.
Am I the only one who is using a Lenovo machine (X200) and hating it and would do nearly everything to go back to a MBP?

(X200 feels cheap, plastic breaks, lcd dies, battery replaced twice, hibernation does not work all the time, sound problems, logos flew off, ....)

I was using a small Dell laptop at my last job and the quality was much much better than the X200.

Essentially after IBM sold them the quality tanked.
Study: 82% Of U.S. Consumers Bail On Brands After Bad Customer Service
I think it's largely an issue of who has the imagination, and how they weigh the cost benefit. As you get older, that profile shifts radically, so not only are they less available, they are, rightly, more risk averse. But if they have the right idea, and if they see the value as paying off then you get an incredible mix.
I faced the same question a year ago. My solution was a MBP with Parallels running Ubuntu. I couldn't be happier. I'm still working more in Ubuntu than MacOS, but it's nice to have the fall back of the host operating system.
The amount of things that need to be known is infinite. Everyday you learn new things, but 1 + 1 is as far from infinity as 1 is. You've all read what Paul Graham has written about blub programmers? (http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html). To some extent, we are all blub programmers, all the time. In Graham's example, there is a programmer who does not know of a powerful programming language that could help them, but if you happen to know the most powerful and perfect programming language in the world, there is still an infinite realm of things you do not know that would be helpful to running a business - facts about accounting, changes in the tax codes in all the different countries where you'd like to operate, the languages spoken by humans in those countries, the culture of those countries, and the changing behaviors among young people, old people, and those in the middle, facts about the law, torts, libel, what is and is not allowed in advertising, facts about management and human relations, dealing with diverse work forces, integrating cross functional teams, the right way to motivate, facts about sales and the psychology that prompts people to buy or not buy, how to close, facts about large organizations, navigating their hierarchy, discovering the right person to contact, facts about personal motivation, avoiding burn out in yourself and in your employees, balancing the changing needs our bodies and minds present us with, facts about larger trends in our industries, facts about whatever chemistry or physics underlies the work we do, and possibly impacts it... I could go on forever, because the list is pretty much infinite.

My point is, we are all infinitely ignorant and therefore we fall into the category of "didn't know that I couldn't do it". I think what matters is ambition. Motivation counts more than knowledge or lack of knowledge. One figures out what one needs to along the way.
I personally find long-term use of X annoying and clunky, so the Mac interface wins out there. (Please don't try to convince me I'm wrong about X. If you don't have a problem with it, that's cool.)

If you're just doing basic run-of-the-mill web development, and it looks like you are, then a MBP will work just fine. If you're in Vim and Bash all day long, there isn't really much for you to learn. Some things are a little quirky, off the top of my head I think Apache2 is installed in a weird location, and command line app X may not be installed by default, but it's probably no more obscure than switching to a BSD or Solaris.
The first thing I install on every new FreeBSD machine ;-)
The Dell Outlet can provide substantial savings if you are a bit patient or lucky.

http://www.dell.com/us/en/dfb/notebooks/ct.aspx?refid=notebo...
(Oops... I've managed to lose my initial comment.) Shortly, after writing about the NoSQL space for over 10 months, I've realized that putting together some good reference, structured materials about NoSQL databases and their case studies would be possible only with community's help.
Should USCIS have an official badge on social sites and be required to use an account bearing the badge when linking up with petitioners/beneficiaries?
Yup. You're the guy.
Wow man, so you already have the version 1 of a product you yourself use in a pretty good size market that you are privy to. Do you know most people on HN would kill to be in that position???

Honestly, stop holding those cards close to the chest and start selling to anyone and everyone who will listen.

Put up a simple one-page website (use http://unbounce.com to get going) and post the link on HN. Oh and get some advice from patio11 (if anyone, he understands non-web-savvy people).

Good luck and I hope to see your site soon!
Oh hell yes. I ran Despammed.com for years (free spam filtering) and never charged anything for it, not having figured out the ???-profit part. The majority of people were very supportive, and even provided donations that paid my mortgage more than once - but there were enough that were psychos demanding that I take them off my spam mailing list (???) or they'd never pay me again. Seriously. There are a lot of really stupid/weird people out in the world.
I think education, wealth, urbanization, the pill, the boob tube, condoms, all the reasons for below replacement fertility can be seen as a virus which attack the reproductive system.

A few people are partially or fully immune. (You don't have to be Mormon to be well off, educated and absolutely need to have 4+ kids) and over time their numbers will come to dominate.

I hope we've colonized space by then.
"Too Young to Know It Can’t be Done"

I think more common than this is that young people don't understand that just because you have a good product doesn't mean you have a good business. So they'll build a bunch of crazy stuff with no business model, or start a business with 10% margins, and 99% of them will fail but occasionally one of them will work out.
I am not disagreeing with your claim and am using OFX, for now.

My initial goal was to provide a simple and cheap API that one can get started with in minutes vs. having to gather a server list, maintain it, read through the OFX docs, etc. In my testing, I have never had a problem with stale data, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. Going forward, I am not opposed to scraping if there's a demand for it.
I liked the article's heading and thought it had been done using image replacement.

Turns out it is a font imported from Google's font directory called "IM Fell DW Pica".

Nice font especially for headings.
I'm in total awe of the MBP from a hardware point of view, yet just cannot get myself to spend that much money. I've ran 9.04, 9.10 & 10.04 with little to no problems on a Lenovo Y650 "consumer grade" laptop and have been very happy. 2.53GHz dual core Intel, 4GB RAM, HDMI, wifi, etc, all the same specs as last years MBP, but I paid ~$700 for what was normally a $1300 laptop. Lenovo had $500 off & 12% discount on top of that... for no reason (except to make me happy)

The only upgrade I made was an Intel X25-M 80GB SSD. It screams. Get one, or whatever SSD in that bracket or above that suits your pocketbook.

Last thing: I'm working on a brand new iMac at my current gig and I don't like it. I'm not a fan of OSX. I've tried several times but I just prefer Linux. Debian based systems with apt are so easy. Ports & Fink for OSX suck, so if you do go with a MBP, look into http://j.mp/mxcl-homebrew.
Dell's older laptops used to be pretty horrible, but they've made significant improvements and their latest line of higher end business laptops are pretty darn nice.
Jeff Strain formulated it like this: "the team that is best poised to deliver a successful game that is an evolution of WoW is... well, the WoW team".

http://www.guildwars.com/events/tradeshows/gc2007/gcspeech.p...

It will be interesting to see how much of his own advice he managed to follow.
The battery part is actually true, but I thought it was only me because I use older TP models.

My girlfriend's HP gets at least half a day. I don't think she even bothers to charge it during the day.

But hers is a crap laptop with lousy, fragile keys; short screen (WTF IS THAT?) that's twice as wide than it's tall, and sucks for everything but listening to music.
Text Voting, Text Message polling, SMS voting and polling
In Order to set up sms voting, simply you decide question and the answers to your questions. Enter the answer to our text voting software system; you can put up to ten answers to your single question. These answers are what a voter will text to your question. The number of votes you can receive is according to pricing plans what you have to switch for. Users votes to you using their phone number to your short code and responses are calculated in real time, either in PowerPoint presentation or on website.
I think this is essentially true, we made this decision early when we came out of beta to not offer a free plan for exactly this reason. Non-paying customers end up taking up the lions share of your companies resources.
I feel like Steve Blank is talking more about how much time people have been in an industry than how old they are. He writes:

"Knowing that “it can’t be done” because you can recount each of the failed attempts in the last 20 years to solve the problem can be a boat anchor on insight and imagination."

This wouldn't really apply to people like me who switch careers when they hit 30. The tech industry was all bright and shiny and new to me when I first took an interest in it at age 31. Steve Blank is conflating age and time spent in an industry.
5.0, not 4.0 - you're right, thanks. Missed the edit window. :/

And yes, the 5.2 environment handling sounds like an improvement to me as well.
Heh, I'm not a suit but I do appreciate being able to connect to a projector. Since the X201 doesn't have a CD-ROM, a docking station is basically a prerequisite IMHO.

I love my X201. It's very light but has a full size keyboard. I tend to have problems with RSS so this was a major consideration.

I went for the SSD option which I think was completely worth it. Boot of a standard Linux distribution is extremely quick (around 10s).
So MacOS is Unix anyway, you say?

I don't recall saying that it is or is not in my post above. Please don't put words in my mouth.

but it is not nearly as good a platform for developers as Ubuntu by any means

you are painting a pretty broad stroke there.

I do web and mobile development, both require application like Photoshop, professional video editing tools while web specifically Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera and IE, Flash and a few others. For me Linux is not a superior development platform because getting some of these running is just as hacky as getting libs to work correctly on OSX. I use Netbeans as my development IDE which is available on OSX and I have to run a virtual for IE so for me OSX offers a happy middle-ground because I get iOS development while only having to trade running IE in a virtual. So while Ubuntu may be a superior development platform for what you do, it may not be for other developers. The original poster specifically highlighted web development tools. And for web development OSX offers a good value proposition. It has its frustrations just as other OS's do.
A round of shots after each round of boxing?

I think it could also be livened up by making the event simultaneous: Attempting to avoid falling behind by more than 2 shots or letting your clock run out on the chess game (presumably on a large, sturdy touch screen to let you designate moves while wearing gloves) while dodging punches.
01010100 00111101

The end.
Yes, they all use Adler32 instead because it's faster.
There's also Kepler (http://www.keplerproject.org/), which I haven't used, and WSAPI (http://keplerproject.github.com/wsapi/), which is roughly like Rack or WSGI. It's not a "web framework", but using WSAPI with FastCGI works well for CGI-ish stuff.