skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I went through the same exact process you are going through a few months ago, my manager wanted to replace our laptops with new, Linux-based ones and asked us what to get. I switched to a 15" MBP, being never a Mac person before.

The first week or so was painful. Mac OS wasn't as intuitive as I though it would be and it may be hard to find how to do things as a power Linux user. But after that initial learning curve, god it's good. Just the hardware itself is worth it, the feel, and of course the screen, which is one of the most important parts of a laptop I think. Finding and installing packages is OK with Homebrew (or MacPorts), not as intuitive as apt perhaps, though.

I have friends using a Thinkpad and if you ask me again today, I would definitely repeat my decision to go with the MBP. Maybe you're giving away a wee bit of Ubuntu goodness but you gain tremendously from hardware and being able to use other Mac software, which is very very good.
I agree - I'd think the most common words on the list would be "Confidential", "Private" or a phrase like "Do not copy"
I'm so guilty of #1 haha.
> It is actually quite mindbogglingly that the Marketplace sucks so badly [...] they should just deliver, everything else matters less.

I agree, but I still don't agree with this...

> There has been no indication from Google that they think anything is wrong with the market or that they're planning to fix it.
You can, it's just really hard.

This is basically what Minecraft is doing - the game is entertaining now, but it's also got INSANE potential. So it's absolutely worth plopping $13 down on. Notch made $3 million or whatever (enough to fund game development) on the alpha sales. Of course, he may have trouble making money post-release if he can't charge the people who bought Alpha for the full version and if most of his potential audience buy Alpha or Beta.

Torchlight had the right idea, I think - create a fun initial product, and use the income from that to fund your more expensive V 2.0 that has a subscription model.
And from what I've heard, if you care about your investors you shouldn't either. Supposedly some of the deals have been structured such that only the founders get compensated. Essentially large signing bonuses.
Stack Overflow hit 1,000,000 questions last night
9. Fatigue

Self-help guru Tony Robbins starts every one of his programs covering diet and exercise because he has figured out that if you don't feel well, you probably won't do well.

Of course, I think football coach Vince Lombardi said it best, "Fatigue makes cowards of us all."
I believe that was the point. It is a silly question, thus, silly answers.
My personal feeling as an early-30s who has seen numerous "impossible" projects come and go is that it does help to know what has come before you and to have an idea of why you're going to avoid the way your previous people failed. From what I can see, when people who didn't know "it" is impossible succeed, it isn't because of tenacity or persistence per se, it's because they, in their ignorance of the accepted "right way" to do it, end up trying something new that ends up working.

And of course it should be pointed out that the way it becomes accepted wisdom that "it" is impossible is usually young idealistic people who don't know it is impossible trying it and failing repeatedly. The narrative that you can overcome that sort of problem by sheer persistence is very tempting but also very dangerous; you can lose years, decades, or even entire careers trying to follow it.

As a concrete example, one that comes up a lot and I try to offer a, err, "calming" voice on is the persistent idea that there should be some sort of purely-visual programming language. The advice I offer is not "don't do it"; the advice I offer is go out and look at the immense amounts of work already done, learn why they failed, then explain why you will not suffer from the exact same problems and fail in the exact same way. If you come up with such an explanation, go for it! No sarcasm, no joke, go for it with my blessing. But this particular area has been richly covered and extensively explored already, and especially if you think you want to make money with this idea it behooves you to take advantage of the nearly-free research you can do simply by looking at others.

After all, you might succeed. Tablets were an "impossible" project pretty recently, until Apple succeeded. Times do change, processor power has continued to get cheaper and cheaper (one of the reasons tablets have succeeded now, IMHO, you can still have a decent experience on them), server infrastructure is cheaper than ever, programming languages have continued their slow-but-steady march towards having more power than ever, etc.
i think i might be 8 for 8.
Sounds like he's trying to have his cake and eat it too. Many of these loud obnoxious protesters were probably the same ones who were singing your company's praises early on.
> Al Quieda? Except that's a made up name for an organization that doesn't exist.

Al-Qaeda does exist, but in the same way Athiesm exists as an organization. One doesn't have to attend regular meetings to be considered a "member". Note: I am not comparing the views of either ideas/groups, but the structural nature.

I do agree with your point however. Instead of putting a short leash on this kid, DHS or FBI could have easily interviewed him, probably with his permission, and found out that he is no threat to national security. He's here to attend school, and will occasionally send money to only his family, not some large, decentralized terrorist group. This kid wants everything you and I want, with freedom being high on his priorities.
This seems to me to be ("simply") a failure of marketing. If you can demonstrate value, then you would generally be a deployed solution. But you have to get that message out there, and if your target market is stuck in the stone age SEO isn't really going to be quite as helpful.
If you want to do development in a language other than python/ruby, or even want to use python libraries written in c, avoid the macbook. If you are certain
you will stick to {svn, git, django, python, vim}, you'll be fine. My mac ownership timeline:

Day 1: Ooh, pretty.

2-3 days: I fucking hate iTunes. Luckily ports install mpd works.

1 month: Ooh, the pretty magsafe connector saved me from dropping it when I tripped over the wire.

1.5 months: Arrgh, finally numpy works.

2 months: I miss XMonad.

3 months: Fuck, random C/C++ library (e.g., amqp_lib, boost for a while, quantlib, some Fortran medical imaging libraries) doesn't work. Or maybe it would work if I messed around with it more. Neither do many Haskell libraries (e.g. HFuse). I never managed to get postgres working either, though I've heard others have.

4 months: I want to get work done. Open up virtualbox, boot ubuntu server in a VM.

2 years later: load linux onto a thinkpad. Woohoo!

[edit: I am being a little unfair to the macbook. It has one fantastic feature which I still miss: keynote + LaTeXit + that little remote control. This makes pretty and very effective scientific presentations. OpenOffice Impress is not in the same league. It's less relevant to me now, since I'm no longer an academic mathematician.

Also, I don't mean to be unduly negative on macs. They just didn't satisfy me as a development box.

Lastly, things might have changed recently. I gave away my macbook early this year.]
I loved my T41p. It was so pleasant to use that it became my main workstation. Unfortunately, the battery stopped holding a decent charge and the fan stopped completely. Since Macs were growing in popularity, I needed one for testing, so I made the switch to a 17" MBP. It was rough at first (I really miss the pointing stick, extra trackpad buttons, and the incredible range of the hinge on the T41p), but after three years, I'm still impressed by the design and quality of the MBP. Most other laptops seem old and clunky by comparison. As for Linux development, VMWare or VirtualBox allow you to run multiple distributions and you can back up images for easy restoration. As for common open source tools on the Mac itself, MacPorts has the essentials and more.
Should the Nobel Folks Be Sued for the Financial Crisis?
Increasingly, I feel Gibson is the only futurist I can trust.

This kind of interview normally tends toward breathless, buzzword-laced bluster. There's none of that here; I can barely even envision Gibson uttering the word "crowdsourced" with a straight face.
Let's take the probability distribution of how much money people make with their projects. I think if we take the set of young people then this distribution has extremely big variance. I think that this distribution for experiened people has much smaller variance and I guess it has a bigger expected value.

I can higlight it with a game industry example: for every John Carmack there are thousands of young programmers who start their game engines but fail. And even if John Carmack was quite young when he became successful, he was not inexperienced.

Those thousands who cannot make the extremely big hit become more experienced and try to optimize for bigger expected values. And I think they are right. We have only one life. Taking risks is essential to success, but you can very easily live your life without success if you take only huge risks all your life.

tl;dr: 'Is it possible to do that?' is a bad question. What is the probability to successfully do that? Is better. And experienced folks have much better answers for the latter question than inexperienced folks.
Sure, I was more offended by words being placed in my mouth. Whether it is UNIX or not is irrelevant to me if it does what I need it to do, I don't really get hung up in the dogma.
Currently having the same debate. Will I stick with a MBP, or go with a non-Apple and run Ubuntu?

I currently run VMWare Fusion on 4gigs of ram. The decision points, for me, revolve around:

* battery life - quad cores are 48nm, which is why MBP stuck with i7 32nm presumably.
* price/performance - for $800 I have a 6 core desktop with 8 gigs of ram. For a $2000 budget I can get a desktop and a laptop, and have the VM on an external drive, swap the drive between machines out depending on where I'm working from.
* durability, convenience and stability - can you do what you need to do without things breaking? DRM? Package management. There are a lot of trade-offs in either direction
* job requirements - still need to debug in browsers on mac and windows. running osx in a virtual machine isn't super easy/legal.

Since I've come to terms with most of the issues above, I've been wanting to not get a MBP. I can always keep my old mac, too. I'm not developing ipad/iphone apps...
I think the thing here, would be to grandfather paying customers, as they are already paying you and you can determine their expected value to make an educated choice about them.
When starting the process of getting a green card for my wife, I read on a number of web sites that USCIS agents are allowed to lie to you during the interview-- for example, separating the husband and wife, then coming in to one of them and falsely stating, "Your spouse just admitted this is a fraudulent marriage."

I don't know if it's true, but that, anyway, is conventional wisdom.

Compared to that, "friending" somebody in order to view their social network site seems like small potatoes.

My general sense is that the USCIS mission in these proceedings is to take a skeptical stance from the start. That is, merely applying for a green card (or, by extension, citizenship through marriage) puts you under enough of what EFF calls "suspicion" to warrant an investigation.
"I once had a client who sold a product by direct mail. His order form broke every rule in the book. But it worked better than any other order form he had ever tried."

Seems like he A/B tested to perfection :) (takeaway: try some oddball ideas, you might be surprised!)
I want to work with this guy!
I was asked the "What if Google does it?" question a few times at Seedcamp by some investors - I agree with the previous comment - the question is kinda dumb, but 'seems' reasonable when used with "Google". If I were building some new social network and was asked "but what if Nokia did it?" it would suddenly seem strange... even the (more accurate) question "How would you deal with competition" is still not very useful as having competition is something that should generally be expected and not used as a way to validate or invalidate a good startup idea/product.
Instagram, Chuck Close, Digital Photography, and Social Software
But, that and a nickel gets ya...
Reading that it looks like there will be more lessons to be learned shortly.

If any of you ever does something like this and you make a 'bad' move, revert. Simple. Make a step back and think things over for a long time before changing direction again, assuming that you are not about to go out of business buy yourself some time. It takes a long time to build up a reputation you can lose it in a heartbeat.

Chargify has made a huge step in the right direction by dropping their price to $40 / month but if they had started out with announcing a $0 to $40 increase that would have been just as a big a problem reputation wise. A contract you made should never be broken like this, especially not retro-actively with the people that signed up under the original terms. New terms apply to new customers, especially such dramatic changes.

Of course if you have customers that you can't make any kind of payback on then you will have to do something about them (assuming they're pulling you under). But to change direction 180 degrees from your previous 'pitch' overnight is not good and this new revised plan is still not going to undo the damage.

My plan of action would be:

- stop the influx of new customers at the 'free' plan by
changing the tos: free for 6 months, then pay

- measure the effect of that and if it is good reduce the
'free' period

- if it is free, no support other than the public
documentation + a forum

- if you want support you will have to sign up for the
paid plan

I'm fairly sure that users would overwhelmingly agree that that is a reasonable proposition, and even though in the long run the effect would be much the same the change would be one that you could explain easily.

Disclaimer: I've been operating a freemium website for a long time that went through the free to premium step during the .com crash, we solved it by selling our customers new features that were not in the site before and we made sure that the 'free' users pay us back with content. There always is a way out if you look for it hard enough.
Beyond LinkedIn: 7 Degrees' visual, open social graph as business tool
Samsung releases Froyo update source code for the Galaxy S
The real answer to this question is: If we get money from you, google "doing it" will mean buying us, which in turn means a big payout for you.

That is of course if you aren't in a position to just say: Who cares about what if's? The world is built on what is, not what might be...
Announcing Backbone.js: Models, Collections and Views in 2.4kb
The touchpad drives me nuts on that machine. :-(

Thankfully I have a Thinkpad 410s replacing it tomorrow.
Monster Bits of WCF and Itty Bitty Bits of MVC
I’ve had the pleasure of working with WCF on three specific projects that have brought me to this blog entry. I haven’t used WCF on only three projects, there are just three that have brought me to write this entry. I’ve used WCF a lot, since back when it was a beta. WCF is great when creating SOAP se...
Flight & Expulsion
Found on FlowingData
http://flowingdata.com/2010/10/13/where-refugees-come-from/

Posted for the slick visualization of data
>Al-Qaeda does exist

http://polidics.com/cia/top-ranking-cia-operatives-admit-al-...

The name was made up to use the RICO law to charge people who weren't present in the first WTC bombing. The name never existed before that. Bin Laden probably calls himself this now because he thinks it's a fancy western name for Muslim extremists.

> Instead of putting a short leash on this kid, DHS or FBI could have easily interviewed him, probably with his permission, and found out that he is no threat to national security.

The question is: why was he considered at all? Because he is half Egyptian? Or could it have to do with him pointing out how stupid and fictional the "War on Terror" is?
Some notes on Instagram, aspirational self representation, and homogeneity.
Interesting. Are there cultural differences wrt leaving visible footprints? do you need to feel private? is it ok to stare at other people, until they notice you? it can be very different between cultures.

I recently watched Ozu's "Good Morning" (1959) and was struck by the way people would come to a house, open the door, step in, and then call / announce themselves. Kids, relatives, neighbours, even a traveling salesman. I always assumed a closed house door invited people to knock and wait outside...
I made the switch to a macbook pro a few months ago

Its nice to have a laptop that just works, suspend resume is really awesome. The polish on the whole thing is pretty nice too.

It still isnt a flexible as ubuntu and I dont feel quite as productive in it yet, lots of little nagging issues with installing stuff and hardware support which I havent had with ubuntu for a long time.
Feds Discover 1,000 More Government Data Centers
In addition, there is an enoumous amount of products/applications that Google couldn't do because it would conflict with the way they make money, for example if Google started a super-market chain, they would be treading on a lot of their own customers feet - and e-commerce in general.
iSCSI with Data/Header validation is the main motivation for including CRC32
He probably should have compared one assembler program with another, but CRC computation is so simple that the C program probably generates optimal assembly code.
Treatment for leucoderma
leucoderma is a disease that can cause you real stress and worry. You may go around the world looking for a cure but not find it. We have here for you something that can take care of leucoderma and make you feel much better about yourself. Do not worry about Vitiligo and find the best solution right here with us.
I have ubuntu on a Dell Latitude. Highly recommended. http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/latitude-e6410/pd?refid=la...
How did the authors of the visualization get the checkin data for every venue in SF and NYC? I have been trying to do the same for another project, and it is not supported by foursquare..
Uncanny. I'm also 4 months in and am running Ubuntu in VMWare. That's now where I spend all of my time and I'm wondering why I haven't just dual-booted already or just over-written the OSX partition.
Maybe, but this section and the TechCrunch bitching really have no place in a supposed mea culpa.
You're not the only one who felt that :-)
Officials In 49 States Launch Foreclosure Probe
Yes, and instead of seeming purely apologetic, the post comes off as tool-ish. You can see the attitude that lead them to the gaff shine through their mea culpa!

I wouldn't go with chargify now on the theory that they will continue to do these things in spite of themselves. Their mental model of how people react is flawed, and the underlying love of their audience is missing, which inevitably leads to more mistakes.

As a counterpoint--someone who's got the love, like Peldi of Balsamiq, won't run into these problems continually, and when they do, can recover trust faster.
CarWoo (YC S09) promises car buyers hassle-free quotes, raises $4.2M
It's legally binding, so yes (so far as the letter of the promise goes).
There is nothing wrong with a company charging for their services. They have to make money somehow. If you are going to make a large change like this set it up with information tell customers give them lead time, and let them easily make the choice. Bottom line if you have a product that is worth it, charge for it.
Monthly automatic renewal is a convenience for your subscribers. Annual automatic renewal probably isn't. It can obviously create ill will and doesn't give you as much flexibility to increase subscription rates.

Opt-in for long term subscriptions would appear to be more subscriber friendly and avoid some of the issues mentioned. Offering multi-year subscriptions could provide even more cash upfront without the brand risks associated with automatic annual billing.

Opt-in communications would likely be no more resource intensive than implementing email notices about an automatic annual charge. My gut tells me that, "We hate losing you as a customer" may build more goodwill than "it's in the fine print."

Based on your post, customer service resources are being diverted to former customer service. And there's no money in that. Good luck.
I have a Dell Studio 15 (laptop) and while it's a fairly nice build I'd have to say stay away from Dell if you want to run Linux - when I started using Ubuntu (around 8.04) I had so many driver issues it was silly. 10.04 hasn't been bad though (yet to test out 10.10).
Two years late, Microsoft finally zaps Zeus
How did the world get so old, so fast?
The Inbox?
Ask HN: Is it worth it developing for ipad/iphone/macos?
Dear HN geeks,

I'm a php programmer(1 year of experience) who started java a month ago. I targeted java mostly because it's very broad and I have a variety of choice when it comes to developing.
Now I'm kind of curious about apple development. Iphone and mac os applications mostly.
My question, for the developers: How is life on the apple side? Have you ever considered stopping because of something that bothers you a lot? Ever considered that you made the wrong platform choice? If you could go back, would your choice change?

I'm asking this because I'm a student with no job and(not many opportunities for one either) mac's cost a fortune. I'm not comfortable with used machines, had a really bad experience which cost me money and headaches.

Thank you guys and gals :)

{On a totally unrelated subject, site admins could you please make the textarea wider, it becomes annoying after you type more than a few words}
> I agree that this isn't the RIGHT attitude, but it's not about me learning Lua per say, it's a reality of writing code in the real world for real projects.

Lots of people write robust, real world code in languages they are only casually familiar with. That is how you learn a language well.

The other reality you're facing here is your career. While it is gradually slowing, our field moves quickly. You need to be constantly studying and reading and learning to be any good at it at all. The reality is: grow and keep up or stop and be left behind.

To me, a new language is an opportunity. “What insights do these people have?” “What new design patterns will I learn?” “What can I take from this to my daily coding jobs?” They excite me.
The Japan Syndrome: China's teetering on the verge of its own lost decade
Why do we adulate the young who are too naive to know it can't be done, but demonize the stupid managers who are too stupid to know it can't be done?
Thoughts on Objective-C
ThinkPad X or T series. Booyaka.
> "Google could blow most startups out of the water if they chose to focus on building exactly the same thing."

I'm not sure that's even true - look at buzz and wave. For all the time money and effort they've spent on that area they seem to have little return.

That sort of app isn't something you can win by technology alone, you need to capture users in a way that the users feel comfortable with.

But there is some history here, if I remember right, kiko (YC funded calendar) decided to close and sell on ebay when Google released their own calendar.
Kosara: So what went wrong?

Mulloy: It all points back to this: the CEO was incompetent, or not as on the ball as he could have been. I couldn't have said this easily a year and a half ago, but now with more time between me and what happened, I think it was just a number of mistakes.

This kind of humility and introspection is rare and inspiring. I had never heard of Brian Mulloy but I'll be watching to see what he does next.