skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Part II: http://designtheatre.net/2010/04/11/go-it-alone-how-to-make-...

Part III: http://designtheatre.net/2010/05/01/going-it-alone-part-iii-...

The author was also on a panel at TC Dirupt NY called 'getting it built' - which you can find here:

http://disrupt.techcrunch.com/2010-nyc/agenda/#built

Liam Casey was also on that panel - he is a good guy and a great contact to have in Shenzen (if any HN'ers are looking to build hardware - email him)
I am sure he can and not denying that. I just wanted to outline that I don't believe web apps to be superior to desktop apps. In many cases they are not and I think this is one of those instances.
Here is another case study where a single headline change had a big impact: Using A/B Split testing to refine your startup’s positioning: 90% increase in conversion rate http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/using-a...

In case any one is interested, here is the complete A/B testing case study library of VWO http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/case-studies.php (Just realized we are releasing one new case study per week! Five more are in the pipeline.)
Be sure to check this HN thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1824563 (Ask HN: anyone using the new MacBook Air as your main development machine?)
Two Lines CSS Framework
Lithium-ion batteries start to take on the big stuff
I will refer to my earlier comment on these machines, they are only worth it if you have to be, or want to be, in OS X land.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1812730

Outside of Apple PCs you can get a far better quality machine, and for my purposes a far better operating system in the form of Ubuntu. Quicksilver/Gnome-do, Safari/Chrome, Flash/Flash, nice fonts/nice fonts it's all even or Ubuntu with a slight edge until you get to apt-get which just slaughters OS X. Then there is freedom to tinker, the price difference and matching deployment/server OS. The reason apt-get is so far ahead of OS X is that OS X only has a tiny community, and for good reason considering how they have often treated it and that many of them are more focused on "striking gold" with an iPhone app. Nothing wrong with that necessarily, but it's a sub-standard system with loads of tinkering instead of the "just works" experience of Linux. Good luck finding blogs/documentation/help when something goes wrong with OS X too. Perhaps Textmate/Ruby-on-Rails has first class support as a stack, but in so many other areas it's a wasteland.

I suppose I am saying that yes fair enough it's a good machine, but just because you haven't used an SSD before and/or are attached to OS X for money don't try to imply, as is usually done, that Apple is lightyears ahead. It's behind in many areas and hardly worth the hype that is attached to the release.
if you want to experience it now on your desktop do the following:

$ sudo apt-add-repository ppa:canonical-dx-team/une
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install unity

Log Off, and then choose the Unity session before logging in.

I did it in the past and did not like it much. But perhaps it is far better now, and would be even better in the future release
I call myself a Ruby programmer, a Java programmer, a Python programmer and a Scala programmer because I like to programme things in Ruby, Java, Python and Scala.

And it is a convenient way to, you know, help people understand that I can't programme in C# or COBOL or Perl or Objective-C or Prolog or Scheme (yet), but I could certainly give it the old college try.
I thoroughly dislike optical drives, regardless of the platform, and see their demise as a good thing. In laptops, they add weight and draw excessive power. Elsewhere, only commercial manufacturing provides reliable storage, but even this is extremely vulnerable to wear and tear from heavy use. At the consumer level, I've had better luck archiving data on floppy disks than any optical media (I've yet to see a CD-RW allow reuse without data corruption). As far as I'm concerned, USB ports make built-in optical drives obsolete.
Women's MBT Voi,MBT Voi,Women's MBT
From what to what? Over what timeframe? What would have been the projected increase in conversion rate if the headline would've been untouched?

A lot of marketing, not enough proper statistics.
So what if they did. The Digg frontpage could use a serious makeover.
It's really great the thing you and many other folks in HN are doing for this community. It makes me really happy to see where HN is going, I really hope to offer something similar in the near future.
Cloud9 IDE and Mozilla Skywriter team up.
I also agree with a few others. The fact that I clicked 'start reading' and then got a login / sign up window appear - I instantly just shut the page down.
It really needs some form of demo for me to see what I will experience before signing up.

An even better model would be to allow anyone to read, but limit only registered users to be able to comment or rate. Allowing any visitor to browse and read pages.

Although ultimately to get initial traction / users perhaps remove the need to login at all unless you are submitting your work.

You speak of monetization and I would imagine the obvious routes would be through affiliate schemes with the eventual book publishers or 'premium' services for book publishers that want their book to get 'tested' by the most people / essentially top of the list.

With both of those options there is no requirement for a typical 'visitor' who is reading / ranking books to have to register or login at all.
Wasn't tcc able to do the same[1] quite a while ago?

[1]: http://bellard.org/tcc/
They're also competitors. They'd have to get this approved too.
Well I say that and I just placed an order for the new MacBook Air!
> the "just works" experience of Linux

I am sorry to say that, but I never had such an experience (and i had to use Linux quite a lot in the past).
Would you care to point to "far better quality machine" out there? I haven't seen one...
I would hardly call BluRay a well established standard. It's the lone HD physical media for consumers at this point but most people are still using DVD.
Ask HN:  Is Bill Gates smart?
A colleague of mine is meeting Bill Gates in the near future and is pretty nervous about the interaction (a lot of money is at stake). As such, my co-workers and I have been discussing whether or not Bill Gates is extremely smart? Just lucky? Both? Is it pure drive/ambition? Has anyone out there interacted with him enough to know if he's smarter than your average really-smart-person or if it's just some combination of right-place-at-the-right-time and reasonable intelligence. Opinions?

Would you be more/less nervous to meet him than other extremely successful CEOs (e.g. Jobs, Brin, Zuckerberg, etc)?
Think You Know How To Study? Think Again
The article is either extreme fanboyism or trolling taken to a new level. Either way why, oh why, do we keep giving this guy clicks?
Usually companies don't let us reveal the actual conversion rates (due to obvious reasons -- valid fear of competition sniffing that info). Projected increase in conversion rate is irrelevant here because this is an A/B test where half traffic saw original headline and half traffic saw new headline. So any natural increase of conversion rate in untouched headline would automatically decrease the improvement of new version.
Longreads: The Perfect Content Companion For iPad + Instapaper
> until you get to apt-get which just slaughters OS X

So what's wrong with macports?
Were you alive in the pre-Beatles, pre-drug, pre-Me 1960s?
Ewww, CDE :-) fvwm was nice, and of course is still available.
McAfee reveals the riskiest domains on the web
I have been using fugitive.vim for integration with git, I don't know about svn or cvs as I don't use them.

The thing is vim needs to be (but can be!) tailored to your needs.
Someone wondered why Apple is suddenly favoring Vimeo in its iPad ads. I think Apple needs a YouTube competitor, but should it be Vimeo? [typo edit]
Broadly speaking, I disagree somewhat.

I don't think there's anything I own without a working understanding of how it functions, or at the very least the ability and willingness to attain that understanding if required. If I owned a car, I might not learn how to strip and rebuild the engine, but I would learn how to check and replace any sensibly serviceable parts, and how frequently I needed to do things like an oil change - which I would do for myself.

This generalises into other skills - if it's useful to my life, I'd much rather learn to do it to a passable level rather than get somebody else to do it (unless there's a significant risk attached). The only reason I'd be happy to be completely ignorant of something is if it holds absolutely no interest to me at all - which clearly isn't the case for anything I'm actually trying to do.

I'm not claiming that this makes me a better person, and I'm not claiming I'm infinitely adaptable as you put it, but I do feel that there's a very real difference that goes well beyond simply having a different area of specialisation.
What, you mean use don't use QWERTZ? You must be a Dvoraq user then...
Boston tops America's smartest cities
nginx has a SSL module[1], so you could do that. Just redirect all traffic coming to port 80 to https[2]. But he might have had a good reason to handle it in Mongrel.

[1] http://wiki.nginx.org/NginxHttpSslModule

[2] Add this to your config:
server {
listen 80;
server_name example.com;
rewrite ^/(.*) https://example.com/$1 permanent;
}
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You gave an example that cost's more 1150 vs 999, and weighs more. Clearly the air is not the best of all possible worlds but if your going to knock a product you might want to consider you are not the target audience. After all cost and weight are at the top of many peoples lists when it comes to laptops.
the recently released Google TV is the main thing though
Paul Graham?

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg

http://www.paulgraham.com

pg @ yc...
Haven't tried Core Animation or Clutter, but one thing that is absolutely awesome with Qt Quick is that it runs on Windows, Mac OS, Linux, and Nokia smartphones...
I've been carrying around laptop machines since just after the Osborne 1 and in more modern times I've had a succession of Thinkpads running DOS/Windows etc., other laptops running Linux (starting with SuSE and later using Ubuntu) and now I have a variety of MacBooks.

The overall experience on laptops with Linux was horrid. Constant problems with drivers, upgrades and miscellaneous crap. The only truly good experience has been on the Mac with OS X.

I have no trouble using all my familiar unixy tools and installing packages, but I do not spend my time with time wasting activities (oh, why doesn't the network driver work right now?(1)) and spend more on development.

Overall, the Macs have been the most efficient machines I've used.

Here's the thing: I'm not an Apple fan boy, I'm an effectiveness fan boy. The Macs win. Just last night I was programming a GSM/GPS module connected to my MacBook Pro via USB emulating a serial port. Module had to be programmed in Python and communicated with using AT commands. No problem at all using EMACS, Python, Tcl/Expect, make, etc. to get things working.

(1) The usual response to that criticism is that its the hardware manufacturer's fault if there aren't open drivers for their device. As a user who needs to get stuff done, I simply don't care. The machine needs to work. Macs do.
Reinventing the Axle (or A Modest Proposal for Dynamic Language Bindings)
He is so fixated and focused on Apple that off course they are responsible for everything. No other tech company exists, or is worthy, in his mind.

He demonstrates ignorance in that article, by first mistaking his personal experience with technology for the experience of everybody else in the world.

And second by mistaking his own ability to pay $200 more for an Air over a Macbook for the ability of everybody else in the world to afford the extra money.

(It reminds me of the Reagan "If I listen to Dukakis long enough" quote - except it is "If I read MG long enough, I would be convinced that Apple..")
without numbers is difficult to take any conclusion from here
Homebrew in my mind blows away both of these "products." Dominates macports and blows away apt-get
The linked comments points out the Thinkpad X200. I have no opinion on that laptop, but he did point out another machine.
+1 and I've used Linux for about 5 years (as my main OS until when I switched to OSX last year)
That's the default German setup.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout#QWERTZ
thanks for the comments. I will improve the letter size.
What advantages does Arc have over Clojure?

It has nothing to do with Oracle's Java and vice versa.

If that doesn't seem like much of an advantage to you, you're probably right, and it isn't, and godspeed. There is no pressing need to learn Arc today. (I haven't yet, myself, though not for lack of ambition.) Arc will still be there, still unconnected to anything Java, in five years; we'll see how it feels then.
I used to have problems in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but then I did what Apple does with OS X and paid a little attention to the hardware and all the problems went away. Most Linux problems are people fighting against hardware, if you just pick your chipsets sensibly it all works out of the box. Beyond hardware I was simply staggered at how quickly I was up and running with a fresh install of Ubuntu 10.10. Everything was in the repository, Flash, Chrome, Gnome-do, codecs... I'd have been running around for an hour or two extra trying to get the same stuff for OS X. And then on the server-side you go to just about any software project and they have the recommended ways to install "sudo apt-get install oursoftware" there, as are copious post-install setup guides. Can't say I found the same experience on OS X (10.4) when I used it for a year and a bit, it was always a clunky struggle to get things installed.
If the ports are really good and functional, it will be good for developpers because they'll choose to write their app with Qt Quick and have them run on Android, iPhone, and Nokia smartphones. That's why the article claim they will "win the developpers battle".

It doesn't mean that it will be good for their smartphones directly (like, it will not boost Nokia smartphones sales).
As others already asked, please point to a better quality machine.

Also, I have never experienced this just works experience on Linux, Ubuntu included.
yes, but you still loose the top to that menu bar
I got a bit further to be fair. Infact to here:

"My i7 iMac with 8 GB of RAM takes something like 2 minutes. My i7 MacBook Pro takes at least 30-45 seconds, and it has an SSD drive."

and then realised that anything further on was a waste of my time.

Summary: man who spends more on upgrading to latest macs than I can afford to spend on IT equipment in 10 years think the Air is awesome.
"results in ugly, buggy weirdness" <--- care to elaborate?

I've happily been removing the top bar in Gnome for many consecutive Ubuntu releases without problems?
i meant standard in the sense that it's fully specified as a technology, and is the only large capacity optical disk in the mainstream consumer market. yes, DVD is much more prevalent.
The promise of "write once, run anywhere". Where have I heard that before?

Somehow I doubt Nokia would be particularly motivated to maintain any Android/iOS/WebOS versions of Qt - assuming they bother to write them at all.
The no Blu-ray is supposedly because they see Blu-ray as the mini-disc of video - that essentially most people will happily go from DVD to download without the interim step.
Why does my {wife, girlfriend, ex girlfriend)

http://www.technomancy.org/google-suggest-venn/#start=why+do...
Absolutely agree with you. After spending time with both my Macbook Pro and my Lenovo T400s (running Ubuntu), it's the Lenovo I couldn't live without. Ubuntu is simply more developer-friendly. The only thing that OS X ever beats Ubuntu in is plugin support, and one could argue that's really not the fault of Ubuntu/Linux.
I have been using Ubuntu in a standard VM, VirtualBox and I have to strongly disagree with the simply works statement. At first I attempted to install Ubuntu on VirtualPC and it failed thanks to a keyboard driver issue, that had been first reported 6 months before and still wasn't fixed.

I switched to VirtualBox and ever since, I have been struggling to maintain a resolution of 1650x1080 on Ubuntu, fighting with xrandr, cvt and xorg.conf all the time. Applying any kind of upgrade implies a strong possibility that my screen resolution will be set back to 800x600.

I will admit that with the latest set of patches this month, I was able to fix my resolution back from 800x600 to 1650X1080 relatively painlessly , cvt, xrandr new, xrandr add, unlike previous occasions. However, the mouse integration with th host OS broke for some reason. I might need to re-install the drivers.

A VirtualBox VM is fairly standard piece of virtual hardware and if Ubuntu can't deliver a decent experience on such a standard piece of hardware, it is hard to take statements like "it just works" seriously.

Having said that the hassle free upgrade from version to version and the ease of use of apt-get is certainly unmatched on any other platform.
I love the new Air but fall into this spot as well. I have an original Uni 17 (replaced optical drive)...what Jan 09 and I adore the heft, and weight of it. Then again, I am young and if I don't need anything of power I tote along the iPad.

I love the Air but need a better reason, than current to pick one up, which is quite difficult every time I find myself playing with them in the Apple store.
Notes from porting C# code to PHP
zmq isn't an MPI library, it's a generic messaging library

they refer to it as sockets on steroids
And the Osborne 1 predates the DG-1 by 3 years, although it was a CP/M machine (remember THAT?)
Does HN run on a single machine??
It also has a worse battery life which is a factor for most laptop users.
Iranian Cyber Army moves into botnets
same here, I was excited to see the extra amount of anti Apple folks drinking haterade but, Disqus is robbing me at the very moment.
"But for pretty much everything I’ve done this past week — basically, my regular work and play habits"

browsing Twitter and writing blog posts?
I am thankful the world has wikileaks
> just because you haven't used an SSD before

The article actually mentions that his MacBook Pro (which he's comparing it to) does have an SSD so this isn't really a valid criticism of the article.
Simple sw-only 3D benchmark with Javascript
He said that in 2002.
In the book a boa constrictor swallows an elephant. The silhouette of the boa then becomes an elephant curve.

That doesn't actually happens in the book. The image is just creative drawing by the narrator but most people thinks of it as a hat. Only the Little Prince recognized it immediately as a elephant inside a boa constrictor.
Of course I remember them. However, an Osborne one is a laptop if you can use it on your lap.

The Epson HX-20 laptop also ran CP/M (as an option, AFAIK).
OpenOffice.org Council members resign
I disagree. I've been (and still am) a hard core Linux user for over 10 years, installing it on almost every piece of hardware that's come my way. When it comes to laptops, Apple's offerings in the last few years have been well ahead of the pack and a joy to use. They're worth it for the hardware alone. The Air pushes the envelope further.

As for OS X, it also "just works" and has a strong community, with plenty of high-quality documentation available from multiple sources. Apt-get is brilliant, but Apple's Software Update is also outstanding, and MacPorts can rival apt-get when it comes to managing FLOSS packages.
I can't believe it, I just booted my VM and the mouse driver fixed itself, but the resolution fell back to 800x600 yet again! And I hadn't even applied any patches!
Microsoft shields Russia's refuseniks from police harassment
Sublime Text:Gorgeous text editor for Windows
The ThinkPad X200 looks like an absolutely marvelous machine and I’m sure that it is built like a tank as are all other ThinkPad laptops. (My first laptop was a ≈2003 15" ThinkPad and I liked it very much.)

I will probably not buy a ThinkPad or a comparable other non-Apple laptop in the next few years, though. Many people seem often puzzled by that. Isn’t the ThinkPad cheaper? Sure! Doesn’t it have comparable or better specs? Of course! Why would you …? Because I like the way a MacBook looks and feels!

While that might be a perfectly valid reason for buying the 300€ more expensive coffee table that doesn’t seem to work with computers and I honestly don’t know why. I would have no second thoughts about buying the otherwise identical but 300€ more expensive laptop just because I like how sleek it is.

This comment is in no way intended to refute anything of what you said. I can understand that some people prefer to only look at the specs and they should probably not buy any computer from Apple. I’m like that with some other things, too. It’s just to provide an additional perspective and to explain why I personally (and maybe other people) buy laptops from Apple even though competitors offer cheaper alternatives with better specs.
Can you put a date on your Thinkpads? Have you used one with Linux in the last 5 or even 10 years? I am comparing my last OS X experience 10.4/2007 macbook to a X200 Thinkpad with Ubuntu 10.10 (along with the Ubuntu desktop versions for the last 5 or so years... pretty simple to just pick a motherboard with supported chipsets), it's like night and day on the software side and the hardware specs are amazing compared to what you can buy with the same cash in Apple's walled garden.

edit: You don't say anything about a thinkpad in your reply, so I guess you haven't used Linux on a quality laptop in some time. Even at 5 years, that's still quite a way out. I am open to criticism that things have changed since my 2007 experience too, please point anything out.
I know. But companies keep exact traffic and conversion numbers as confidential as they would keep their revenue.
With SubmitEdge, technically you are paying someone to submit the links to free directories. You aren't paying the actual sites for the links. SubmitEdge gives you the list of directories and I checked a few out and I was able to manually submit links to them as well, so it seems legit. Anyway, the backlinks showed up in Google Webmaster Tools and the site still has a PR 2 and 3230 pages indexed so it clearly wasn't penalized.
I recommend dropping the Momentus XT. Mine died after 3 months.

I moved to a Sandforce based SSD. Night and day difference.
Even better, it could compile and boot Linux directly from its source code: http://bellard.org/tcc/tccboot.html
Gemalto Files Patent Infringement Lawsuit Over Android
Some of the bundling of stuff with Linux is nice as a time saver on initial install. Having recently spent two days rebuilding a Windows machine (of which a large chunk was just tedious fetching and installing chrome, flash, shockwave, air, acrobat type stuff) this sort of thing is significant. I've never found OS X to be problematic for installs but the basic act of gathering stuff up to put on the machine is basically dead time.

But the comment "if you pick your chipsets sensibly" - frankly most people don't want to have to do that sort of research. There are enough variables in the basic specification / vendor decisions without having to drop down to this level.
This will always be old news: people flock to the same place until local resources can't match. Smarter people work around the problem (in this case: by telecommuting) or seek greener pastures; other people keep complaining.