skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I'd certainly rather be an unemployed engineer than a fully employed minimum-wage day laborer. And, if that were the choice, engineering schools would all be full of people. But what we're trying to explain is why young people choose to pursue legal or medical [2] or business education instead of engineering.

You've hit on a truly glaring omission from almost every hand wringing article about the dearth of US citizens in graduate science and engineering programs. It happens over and over (an interview with the Dean of the engineering school at Princeton comes to mind, but these articles appear once every month or two in a major publication).

As you've pointed out, they compare the salaries and working conditions for engineers with graduate degrees against a national average for all workers, and then wonder why the best and brightest Americans aren't lining up for graduate degrees in the Engineering school. But I have never, not even once, seen the author of one of these articles ask they question you just posed: why would a young person choose to pursue a PhD in computer science or mechanical engineering instead of getting an MBA and shooting for investment banking, getting a JD with an eye toward patent law, or getting an MD and applying to cardiology residencies? These programs certainly have demanding admissions requirements and turn a lot of people away, but nobody seems to lament a lack of interest among young Americans in these fields.

So why these and not engineering? There may indeed be some wonderful reasons to choose engineering or science, but this is the question that would lead to real, honest discussion instead of this "engineering is so wonderful, we just need to make it cool crap".
I find that most numbers treated as specs became less relevant, say 2-3 years ago. Today, I want a computer that will be a pleasure to use and agree with what I think constitutes a well-designed laptop.

Today, where even the cheapest boxes have enough horsepower to do everything I do and more, how good I feel while using the machine became more important to me.

Those cheap PC laptops are generally more gaudy designed, feature cheaper materials and make me feel like I'm being treated like a child. Just like you don't pick the person you date as a simple list of pros and cons, you don't pick a laptop via purely a tally of features.
Oddly enough I have approached a publisher of a table-top RPG in a similar situation. Nothing was built, but the idea was concrete. The publisher was very receptive and helpful, and even gave us some pointers on community figures that could be of assistance in testing.
Another vote for the ThinkPads. X60-series models are dirt cheap right now, and pretty much impossible to beat on the combo of cost, performance, portability, and ruggedness.

My recent-model MacBook Pro has a wonderful display panel, good discrete GPU, and a decent-enough keyboard, but it's big, heavy, throws off tons of heat, and lasts at best four hours on a battery. My old ThinkPad X41, on the other hand, despite being almost five years old, beats it in basically every category other than screen size/brightness and raw CPU/GPU power.

T-series units are even sturdier and definitely keep up in CPU/GPU specs, but there's just something about a 3-pound laptop that pretty much removes the excuse to not have it with you all the time. (That may or may not be a good thing for your lifestyle, of course.)
If you want a computer that makes you "feel good" and think PC's are 'treating you like a child' (which is somehow possible with enclosure design), then you should probably stick with your shiny overpriced MAC and leave the bargains (and cheap horsepower) to us PC/Linux guys.
FIDO.NET was a peer-sponsored network over phone lines, and commercial transactions were not allowed around network membership. It was, however, custom to buy beer for your uplink. Fun times.
Thank video games and the gay community for making cities safe again.
If you can't afford to go, you probably shouldn't. However, if you can earn a few bucks between now and then and find a way to keep the cost as low as possible(sharing a hotel, getting a student discount, staying with a friend or a friend's friend), then go for it.

If you go, sign up customers. Even if you don't have the product done yet you can still take email addresses. Then you will be more motivated to build the product once you know you'll have some customers. If you can't get any customers or strong prospects, reconsider your idea before you build it.
30 Essential PDF Documents Every Designer Should Download
Follow Up to my M Combinator Post
Your completely fair election seems to involve making sure the electorate doesn't know anything about the candidates, which I suppose is fair in that we'd have to vote at random
And China seems to appear out of nowhere in 1984. Was that their first year participating?
Tom, are you using your own site? If you are interested in working with large volumes of data, then you are not struggling with the real issue - which involves all the different ways people interact with the site and how it solves different needs.

This is the reason open source software so often sucks - because people want to solve the difficult technical problems (to prove themselves or why, I don't know), and they are not solving the most important problem - which is knowing all the different ways users want to use your site and making sure each and every way is so smooth it's sweet.

That's a core of passion - you create a little baby, and you want that baby to be perfect, so you do the little things - smooth out the icons here, make sure that the window pops up just right, test it 30 different times to see if the flow is smooth and obvious, you ask people what they think of it, and how exactly it can be made better.

It's like when you finish a painting, then you take a step back, look at it to see how a stranger would look at it. Then you squint your eyes to see how the colors look on their own. Then you go up close to see how the shadow on the little corner box looks, then you think what color of frame would properly offset the color on the inside....

That's passion.
I bought a $600 Dell Inspiron laptop ($350 rebate) and upgraded the memory, and battery to about $800 and have used it for everyday, heavy-at-times work (web design/development) for over a year now. Sure I could have spent $400-$600 more on something with a nicer case (XPS) but just because something is cheap, doesn't mean it can't be used to 'work' (and I didn't need to buy OSX just because I'm a 'designer')

Also, I spend the most money on machines for 'play', like my new Inspiron 1720.
A Coder in Courierland
I agree, even if you hate windows, a Linux box is much more cheaper than anything mac has to offer for the same price range.

Admit it guys, mac has done a decent job in polishing the user interface,and overrall experience, but it has done even a better job in marketing.

A good chunk of your money is buying a brand name, and contrubuting to Apple's higher margins. While the PC world is just much more cut-throat.
Yeah, sign up customers. If you need to do market research (and who doesn't) do it there, you have all sorts of potential customers in front of you. Ask them everything you need to know, refine your idea, rethink some of your older assumptions.

Just because you don't have a product doesn't mean you can't advance your business. So if you're going to go, make it worth it.
Visiting Grothendieck, the mysterious mathematician
1993 - went to an "Internet demonstration" in downtown Wellington, New Zealand. Mostly Gopher and Usenet how-tos. Didn't get what the fuss was about, went back to BBSes for the next 2 years.
There's something moderately worthwhile about being the first person to build a home-made replica of the Apollo landing computer.

But I see nothing remotely worthwhile about being the second, using the plans put together by the first.
Good resource, although location search can definitely be improved.(i.e. at least let people search by distance). Also wouldn't hurt to be able to search by the stage they prefer to invest in, and which industries they focus on
How To Save Microsoft, and Other Valuable Insights from Blist
I always found it annoying that campaign finance laws are so inconsistent: why do they seriously restrict people with lots of extra money, but not those with lots of extra time or influence?
Gasoline is $8.52/gallon in the UK, yet Americans pay $200 more for gas per year
I bought a Dell M1330. It is:

* Lighter than the Macbook (but there's not much in it)

* Same screen resolution (1280x800)

* Slot-loading disc drive, but with a DVD Writer

* Nvidia 8400M compared to Intel X1300 graphics

* Had 1gb more memory

* Had 40gb bigger hard disk drive

It does, however, lack 802.11n, and the Macbook is marginally prettier. The kicker is that the M1330 was £130+ cheaper than the Macbook equivalent even after factoring in the educational discount.

There really is no way of spinning it - Apple's hardware is, and always has been, comparatively expensive, and in exchange you get Mac OS X. Apple has never competed on price. If one day I can afford to spend £700+ on a laptop I'd certainly consider buying a Mac but until that point I'm happy with my mid-spec PCs.
A second possibility is that he is a genius or was inspired enough to be a genius for that duration.
<disclaimer>I am not a Mac fanboy.</disclaimer>

The argument in the article is flawed for two reasons:

1. Windows Vista needs more hardware to accomplish the same thing as Mac OS X. For example, I can get a along fine with 2 gigs of memory on a MacBook while it would be excruciating to run Vista with anything less than 4 gigs.

2. Generally what you are paying for when you buy a Mac is the experience. The fact that a growing number of consumers are still willing to buy Macs given the price difference reinforces this. Macs have always been a great demonstration of the synergy between hardware and software.

The article would have more merit if the author discussed the cost, in time and money, of performing a task (ex. create a document) on a PC or Mac.
"Are you sure it probably won't be a robot I know?"

"Definitely probably not."
I think the article was a good reminder of the value of insight, and how stepping back and looking at a problem from a different angle can lead to better decisions on how to tackle it.
A good chunk of your money is buying a brand name, and contributing to Apple's higher margins.

Ah, but the question is: Which chunk? How much of the money buys the brand, and how much buys the OS?

The answer is that we aren't allowed to know. So the question doesn't really come into play.

It's clear that if you could save money by buying a box without Apple's brand, or their industrial design, but with the Mac OS a lot of people would be interested. Probably including me. But that's not Apple's game plan, for good reasons that were explored back in the Mac clone era, a time when (probably not by coincidence) the company nearly went out of business.

As it is, you're stuck with the whole package. So the question is: How much is the Mac OS worth to you? Given that even if I accept all of this guy's arguments the price difference is of order $600 to $800 -- less than 10 hours of my time -- the Mac OS doesn't have to save me much time or pain at all over the lifetime of the machine to justify the higher cost.

The real lesson here is that both PC and Mac hardware are cheap. Compared to many people's time, hardware is cheap. Compared to a developer's time it is really, really cheap. The Mac-PC pricing flame war is obsolete; it's a relic from the Elder Days when Macs cost $3000 to $5000 and didn't even run Unix.
Teaching people that getting the answer wrong results in negative consequences isn’t the best way to help them understand a subject. Schools should encourage “fail early, fail often,” and emphasize learning from mistakes, rather than merely penalizing them.
Before I bought a Mac, a year and a bit ago, I used Linux on a variety of laptops. Most brands (Sony,IBM,Toshiba,Dell etc). I spent a sizable chunk of time fighting with hardware, drivers, whatever sweeping changes the linux devs decided to implement that broke everything...

Since owning a mac, I have the power of linux, but it just works. It's known fixed hardware. Of course it's going to work properly.

I remember spending a day fixing the crap the linux devs piled on me when they decided to replace /dev with the udev system or something. Then there was some update to libc which broke everything on my system. Those days aren't fun days.
I remember spending ages trying to get wifi adapters to work properly under linux.
For some, this may be enjoyable, productive work. Definitely if you're into hardware, or trying to learn linux, but I can't imagine the advantage of having linux on the desktop over OSX.

Obviously I have Ubuntu within parallels on my MacBook just incase I want to have an exact server environment or something...
Mac is the first computer maker that has succeeded in making computers a fashion item. They get to charge extra for being the in name-brand.
I disagree. I actually have less of a problem with the 99 cent gutenberg book guys (at least they're paying the royalties). I don't have a problem with TripLog/1040 the application as much as I do with the developer who felt the need to ignore advice and mockups from other developers/designers instead of having an actual discussion that doesn't reek of his "I have $x years of experience: I'm right" attitude.

And well, if you read the reviews and ignore the ones talking about how it's a shitty UI and the developer is charging too much, people who seem to be actual customers have a thing or two to say about the UI and how they'd like some changes.

The dev at least attempted to make some changes (like that cyan eyesore of a background color). For that maybe he redeemed himself a bit.

I have been in a position like his before and had a design of mine crucified. I didn't go all "screw you you're wrong" at the people who told me so. I tried to approach it without being offended too much that they were ripping apart my work, and I asked about what kind of changes I should make. And I made some of them, and it came out better in the end.

Lastly, I might note that one of Apple's criteria for getting accepted to the App Store was HIG compliance. This guy was far from it and still is. I guess they're just ignoring that right now.
Offsets are fine in principle, there are huge numbers of ways to sequester carbon verifiably. The problem is chaos in the market which makes it difficult to see who is doing the verification and how, combined with (in some cases) legitimate uncertainty in the science as to how much carbon is being stored by the technique.

Planting forests is by far the cheapest trick, but the hardest to pin down as to numeric effects. Add to that uncertainty as to what the guarantees are on land use (i.e. how sure are we it won't be logged and cleared for cropland in 100 years) and the whole area is a huge mess. It's why I haven't purchased any offsets for myself yet.

So yeah, the "jury is still out" I guess. But the idea is sound, as are most of the techniques. The problems are technical and bureaucratic, not fundamental. Carbon offsets will get there. It's just a maturing field of business.
Actually, we're pretty serious about this. Connecting a large number of people in the startup industry -is- a big opportunity in itself (and we've already gotten a high level of traction on that front). However, we've found enough evidence to suggest that data can be used to significantly improve decision-making within it also, which is even more valuable.
So basically, you're saying you don't care about the linked article. Congrats. :)

Why bother posting that? More to the point, who is upvoting this, and why?
i hate to say it, but I left reddit to get away from the constant politics.

Interesting article, but would prefer to see more coding / hacking news :)
Most attack sites do. Appear to be perfectly safe, that is.

For anyone who wants to read the article, this works. (I put in URL_HERE as a placeholder because HN truncates the URL):

lynx --dump URL_HERE > output.txt

Ironic that to read the article, I used a technique that solves the problem the article is talking about solving. In a much easier way, I might add!
thats a fairly silly comparison, imo.

as the first few comments point out, the whole of the UK is a large island about the size of oregon state.

its more of a testament to the structure of cities and land usage in the US than the gas/car usage. i don't want to use my car, but i use my car because i have to. my city is a sprawling bike-unfriendly city with few centralized urban areas and crappy public transit. and i live in a capital city. compared to an average european city, my city's transportation options are a joke. and most US cities are just like mine.

just my $0.02.
But it doesn't run MacOS X which means you can't run all the Mac apps.
For 820$ you can get a Dell Inspiron 1525 with:
Intel Core 2 Duo @2.16GHz, 4GB ram, 15.4 inch display (1680x1050), and a 320GB SATA Hard Drive (5400RPM). (http://www.notebookreview.com/dellCoupon.asp)

What more do you need for heavy everyday work?
Worthless, $1000 "I Am Rich" iPhone App Disappears
I flagged the article and downvoted everyone who has made a comment because Mac vs. PC flamewar at #1 on Hacker News is sad.
Yes, they're much more expensive. But I think that saying it's the hardware is to miss the point. People don't really think as much about the mac hardare as much as the mac software.

And let's be honest here, smart and educated software engineers go out of their way to buy macs when they definitely have the skills to install and run linux. They could definitely buy a cheaper Windows PC. Unless you want to be utterly derisive and dismissive, you can't simply say, "It's a fashion item."

People are buying macs because they want Mac OS X. Maybe instead of arguing about how "overpriced the hardware is" or "how people love candy coating" people in charge of competing products/projects should look into the reasons why hen you go to a tech conference you see a sea of glowing Apple logos. People there are not stupid, and if you just dismiss their choice as such you're going to miss out on key information.
"Phenomenal Cosmic Power! Itty-bitty Living Space."

"Where is John Galt?", indeed.
From what I read, ~2.5hrs vs. ~3-3.5hrs - not altogether unexpected considering the significantly more power hungry graphics card on the Dell.
I don't agree with the first statement. My mom's laptop has 1 GB of RAM is performs just fine, even when I had to use it. Granted, she doesn't do much but play a few very low demanding games (Zuma), browse the internet, and chat on Skype.
On why I'm going back to Windows
Obviously you were never a schoolboy in England in the 1980s. Sinclair, Acorn, Commodore, these brands were more hotly contested by the nerds than football teams or pop bands ever were by the cool kids...
Mloovi translates RSS feeds into 24 languages
If you read, I did actually say that.

FWIW, I intend to install some flavour of Linux (likely Ubuntu) when I get around to it. All the applications I use tend to be multiplatform these days so I'm OS neutral - there's honestly no application on any platform that I'm reliant on and I like it this way.
Not anytime soon. Still a great read ;)
Because it's much harder to translate the product of crime into influence or time.
Why not just use the same slight-fading that's used for submission titles?

(Also: simply changing the link URL would mean users could make a change in their local stylesheets, even if there's no styling change at News.YC.)
This has to be a hoax, right? Let's bury an unattended box of hyper-toxic radioactive material in a box "transportable by truck" in every neighborhood where you can get to it just by digging. Yeah, that's a good idea..

...

Never mind. It's a hoax. Dig out your old Battletech stuff and check the about page.
Is the guy aware that disney stock went down after his so called insight?
I hope no software/web design people see analogies to creative web work and think that if they didn't get hired by Google at age 15 or they haven't been doing this stuff since 1994 that they have no chance of doing quality work.

In my experience the single greatest determinant of the quality of my work is the level of involvement/effort/passion I invest in it. I definitely subscribe to the 1% inspiration 99% perspiration school.
Why don't engineering deans talk honestly about the problem? Well, partly because no (e.g.) aerospace engineering professor is crazy enough to stand up and say "The reason nobody wants to major in my field is that aerospace engineering has been in near-stasis for decades. Very few new civilian aircraft are being designed or built, especially in the USA, and military and NASA designs are judged less by their airworthiness and more by their ability to generously disburse taxpayer dollars to contractors in all fifty states." [1]

Nobody gets tenure by saying things like that.

Obviously engineering professors could help to improve working conditions for their graduates, if they know how. Many of them don't, though. You don't necessarily learn how to run a successful engineering business by teaching engineering in school.

But a big reason is that deans have little real incentive to change the system. The number of undergraduate majors in a major-university engineering department is poorly correlated with its reputation or its wealth. The real money in academic engineering departments is in research grants, and undergrads are a net hindrance to research. You need a lot of talented grad students, but it doesn't really matter if they're all from overseas.

The folks who are in pain from lack of domestically-trained undergraduate engineers are the companies trying to hire them in the USA, not the universities. A college would rather have you pay full tuition to major in English than in EE. Teaching English is one hell of a lot cheaper, because adjunct English professors are desperate to eat.

[1] Note: Argument exaggerated for effect. Author actually has no idea what aerospace engineering is like these days.
Repetitiveness aside, this pattern really illustrates the importance of having a mentor as a guide.
The key to dealing with the press is to call them yourself. If the big press is ignoring you, then go smaller, until you can talk to someone + get them to write about you.

Press people sometimes have to dig for news, so if you send them as much pre-written stuff as possible, it can make their job a lot easier. Especially if they hit a slow day.

I would hire a good press relations company who is familier with your market before a marketing person. You can turn them off if cash get's low, and they should already know all the right press people in your industry.

Often times the Press people are not all that technically savvy. I've spent hours on the phone educating them about my industry, what makes us unique, and why people buy our product. They often appreciate this and we will get more coverage.

But don't be annoying. As with anyone you are selling to, always ask when you could call back if they are busy. i.e. "sounds interesting, but we're really busy right now"
"I understand. Would you mind if I contact you at the end of the month? We're coming out with a new version + I'll update you on that".

They will appreciate you giving them control of how often you bother them. Personal contact from the founder/inventor will always be more effective than some PR service.
You can't add in a decent video card (the integrated X3100 is garbage), for one thing.