skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
OS X is more usable: it's got a very wide set of features, and they're each extremely polished and designed to be fast and stay out of your way - unlike many of their Linux counterparts.

Mac developers are regarded as among the best out there. Look at Adium vs. Pidgin: the one is a much better-designed product. Although, of course, iChat's pretty excellent to begin with. That's one example out of hundreds: I've found that whenever I need something done on a Mac, there's an app that does it superbly.

You're allowed to not use a Mac, and nobody here would pressure you into getting one. But don't make statements when you have no clue what you're talking about. I wouldn't profess to make statements about more involved variants of Linux, because I at least know that I know next to nothing.
There's a ctrl key in the top right of the screen rather than on the keyboard.
Actually, it wasn't until I got a Mac that I found Coda, which is the only coding app I've ever truly fallen in love with. I've coded much better on my Macbook than I ever did using an HP desktop.

I wouldn't use that to argue that OS X is necessarily better than other operating systems, but as an individual case to remind you that when you make your OWN case, you're relying not on facts but on arbitrary whims of your own. The rest of us know it: stop pretending like you dictate fact.

And, by the way, your entire post reeked of condescension, a tad ironically.
Yeah. I'd guess there are just as many people using Linux and not getting any coding done. That's a flaw with humanity in general - not in Apple users. Similarly, I'd bet that some people spend all their time using HN and not getting any startups done.
Yes, I guess you're right that the simpler functions are straightforward to APIze.
I am naturally skeptical of unknown people asking for details that belong in the business plan. If you're a potential investor, I don't mind sending you the plan, and without an NDA, but for random sites to ask for such details just seems wrong. Moreover, I think that any business owner who gives in to such requests is either desperate or stupid.

I applied to thefunded.com at some point, and they asked for those kinds of details too. I'm not quite sure what they offer in return for all this confidential information, and actually, the fact that they ask for it and that their members have all given it kind of rules them out as a community worth belonging to, imho - full of "entrepreneurs" who are either desperate or stupid.

Would love for someone to contradict me and let me know what I've missed out on by not sending our business plan to be reviewed by unknown parties at thefunded.com.
Linux.com launches killer exaggeration article.
Does having a lot of money make people harder to upset?
There are already hugely influential Indian businessmen, but they are not in IT. Consider Mittal, a very large steel company. However there is a cultural component to success in software or Internet services - the best thing you could do to encourage Indian success would be to get more Indians connected to broadband.
See, maybe it's where I hail from (New Jersey), but I've never seen the mindset that Apple = creative. Me and other Mac users talk a lot about our Macs because a lot of us are just finding out how to do stuff, and if somebody else brings up the stereotype of artsy-fartsy we jump into character... but I haven't seen anybody walking around with this "I own a Mac" self-importance. There's a lot of "Boy am I glad I have a Mac" mentality, but that's about it.

Actually, the most pretentious lad I know uses a Windows because he's too artsy to use something that's accepted by the artistic majority.
Friendability
Uh, what exactly do you mean by "precisely head on?" The particles are aimed only such that you have one stream going through the same region of space as another stream. They are not taking an individual particle and aiming it marksman-like at another individual particle.

Even if this were the case, ever hear of "Relativity?" The whole point is that there are no special reference frames. A particle hitting another oncoming "head on" is the same as another hitting a "stationary" one. The point being: there is no distinction between the LHC's particle collisions and cosmic rays colliding with matter around our planet.

And as far as "remote chance" goes, given the huge number of collisions that already happen with even greater energies, this chance must be about as remote as a droplet of water being thrown spontaneously from a still glass of water to the ceiling. There is a finite probability, but it's so low, it's practically zero.

http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4109
Of course it isn't. That's why Mac insulters rarely use Macs.

(WAY-oh!)

In all seriousness, though, we do it back to the Linux people. So a lot of this flack is just part of tradition.
If you're not doing anything too intensive and you can afford it, it's easily one of the most enjoyable computers I've ever used. Agreed.
I think of some Twitterers as becoming the poets of blogging. Their form: 140 words. It's not horribly restrictive, but the best can have a sensibility and quiescence not dissimilar to haiku.

After you see that metaphor it just becomes a matter of whether you like poetry or just novels.
In the same spirit, someone should take one of those iPhone "Magic 8-ball" apps and have the app upload a sound recording from the moment the iPhone is tipped around for an answer. Then you could go to a site and listen to an internet radio stream of all the questions people are asking and using the iPhone to scry about.
I like to stumble around in the dark because at least that way the spy cameras can't see me!!!
Vista and IE Security Rendered Useless
By taking advantage of the way that browsers, specifically Internet Explorer, handle active scripting and .NET objects, the pair have been able to load essentially whatever content they want into a location of their choice on a user's machine.
Observations on Atlanta Startup / Funding Environment
Duplicating other conditions would be key. Universities that encourage professors to be involved with industry, like Stanford, would help tremendously.

Also, doing an end-run around broadband might be an even better strategy. How about distributing OpenMoko sets and programming environments?

Another thing to look at -- see what the US is doing wrong and give India an advantage by not duplicating those mistakes.
How to present like Steve Jobs
Olympics- Take The Good With The Bad
The AOL flub has analysts revisiting Google
Seems to me this will generate a few false positives, though it will be fairly good at avoiding false negatives.
Personally, a Macbook Pro. I want a laptop to be fast to boot, reliable and nice to work on. Technically OSX is what does all this, but you asked which laptop you should buy, and you either get a Windows Vista or OSX machine. (not to mention getting a Windows machine and booting some flavor of linux, or creating a hackintosh, if thats what you want to do)

Spec wise, I'm running on a Macbook Pro 2006 model with a Core Duo 1.86Ghz processor and 2GB of ram, and I'm doing great. I'm sure one of the latest models with a C2D 2.4GHz CPU would be a bit faster, but I don't do anything too intensive (light photoshop is probably the limit of my number crunching apps). So pretty much anything you buy today (except the ultra-budget machines, of course) will suit you for your needs. Just make sure you have a nice amount of ram! :)
If the biggest caveat is a wireless card, you can probably replace it.

I have a Thinkpad T41, which has been great except the OpenBSD driver for the included wireless card was incomplete (due to being reverse-engineered). It was only about $15 to replace it with a Ralink card; Ralink happily provided full tech specs to the BSD devs, and the card works quite well.
Wi-Fi's dead; antennas live on
But I'm not responding to the article; I am responding to the parent post, who asked the following question:

"Really, why so many more commands for essentially the same work cycle?"
McCain supporters prefer telegraph.
Some people use Linux and focus on e.g. learning about advanced networking or systems administration stuff over programming. Or because nothing else works on their old hardware, etc. Not everybody uses it because they're a programmer.
Cydia already has a terminal emulator and SSH (and nc if you need it) too.
I see two major flaws with this approach. First, it's invasive. You have to open an additional hole in your network to allow traffic into the app, which makes your network inherently less secure. Second, unless you do an audit of the source, there are no guarantees as to the security of the app itself. This app of unknown reliability would be acting as a 24/7 gatekeeper into your network.

You could hide it behind VPN, I guess, but that kinda defeats the purpose of secure shell.
No quickly accessible tab either from what I can tell.
Wow - great advice. Jason's emails have been awesome so far.

Maybe it's just me, but I don't even understand the purpose of using PowerPoint. To me it just screams: "I'm a suit". If you have any semblance of a working product, why aren't you spending your time showing it off? Also, when I'm talking I want the audience focused on what I'm saying not the slide animations and colors.

I guess I could understand if you don't have any sort of working product or if you just have a few _concisely_ worded slides to reinforce certain points. However, the vast majority of presentations I've seen aren't like that at all.

I think of the ~1000 or so Powerpoint presentations I've been exposed to, only a handful have added significant value to what the speaker is saying (the Nike VP of marketing had the best one I've ever seen - surprise).
This sounds like you could actually use it for work - they've emphasized key combinations and it has X too.

Here's hoping they use a decent sans font rather than the horribly unreadable serif crap that's been floating around most terminal apps.
Anyone else here apply for TC50? We did, although our 10 minutes was with Heather Harde, not Jason.
#2 also applies to a locally installed SSH app.
Pius can you please email us if you're still interested in testing our future API. Email is in my profile. Thanks!
Are Zune buyers motivated by what the device is or by what it isn’t?
Also, you could use CSV, though it's not a great idea (parsing CSV is a nightmare, maybe using the right libraries it stops being a bad thing).
And some people use Apple because they want to write music with GarageBand, or because they're looking for a good way to edit their films, or because they're interested in designing iPhone apps. What I'm trying to say is, don't pigeonhole an OS's users.
Traffic jams are not caused by flaws in road design but by flaws in human nature.
Introduction to Group Theory
It's not that it's wrong, it's just that it clutters up the site. When you see 30 links on a page and that page is relatively static compared to other news sites, one post being 140 characters is a little bit silly.
Wait, it's possible to downmod articles?
Introductory Lectures on String Theory
He made a tool that a million billion people are using, and he managed to go up against a behemoth of a competitor and still win. Facebook is a vast success, regardless of its profits, because nearly everybody in its intended demographic uses it, and most people NOT in that demographic are starting to.
And if you enable inode caching, it's substantially faster. I wonder why this isn't a default -- it seems like it is for hg and git, but people miss the option in mtn and write it off as being slow.
Interestingly, I was wondering the same thing!

I wouldn't call what I'm doing much of a web app (http://scribbleit.net), but I wanted to learn some basic PHP so I decided to create a to-do list app (wow, new idea huh?) because I hate all the alternatives out there.

I had just finished hacking a bunch of PHP scripts to get all the functionality and then a friend of mine said, "Hey, I actually want to use this... if I could make an iPhone app for it!"

Long story even longer (sorry), I've started implementing an API just because I think it's the right thing to do. It's allowing me to understand my application a bit better and proving to be a great learning point for me.

In generality, I can only see an API introduced early as a major advantage. It can give you a direction for your design and future development. Oh, yeah, and the purpose of the API .. it will allow people to interact with your application in ways you possibly didn't imagine; there'll always be someone out there who would be interested in playing about with it!

Just my $0.02. Sorry for rambling.
should users with enough karma to down mod comments explain why they did?

No, it would make the transaction too time consuming.
Good luck, hope it works out :-)
Why just downmodes? Upmodes too, and with a unique post robot on the top.
I couldn't believe there was no way to tab.
Yeah. That's something that I hate about Linux and Firefox: their news teams are wholly unprofessional. When I see a news story that's 9/10ths propaganda, I don't have much faith in the product, even when it looks nifty.

EDIT: Weird, swombat. I was just reading your whole discussion with Paul Graham in another thread. Fancy seeing you here.

EDIT 2: The opposite side of this coin is something that I love about Apple's advertising. It has a lot of glib phrases on their web pages, but after that, the entire advertising is just explaining how their stuff works.
Not really. OpenSSH is a battle-tested ssh server. You can be resonably sure that opening it to the world will not compromise your network. Not so of this ajax ssh app. Basically it's a question of exposure. Am I comfortable exposing OpenSSH? Yes. Ajax ssh app? No way. Not without further testing and widespread acceptance.
Excel actually can do data validation. You can allow input only on certain cells, and allow the input to take values only in a range. Alternatively, you could do the validation in VBA.
Scribd conversion doesn't seem to work with this file.
OSX was based on BSD and people don't mind paying for OSX...
It's always true in any field where success is relative, and one's success is based on being "better" than others. For example in rowing, if you're on the same training program as everyone else then your chance of winning is basically flip-a-coin. Similarly, if you paint in the same style as others then your chances of being recognized as the best painter are basically flip-a-coin as well. Math, however, is different because you work at uncovering the properties of mathematical objects whatever they might be (so success is absolute), and you don't get credit for doing stuff that's already been done. Because of this everyone can do math the same way and still win, because how much stuff you discover is a function of you and what you're working on and not your methods.

If I had to come up with a general law on the spot, I'd say that the pressure to create new methodology is directly proportional to the similarity of recent winning outcomes in the past. I haven't fully tried to break this yet, but I'm guessing I'm pretty close to having found a natural law since it is consistent with evolution running in S-Curves.
If Firefox vs. IE is really generational, this is big news!
"Ask any independent software vendor what he hates most about developing for Linux and he'll tell you that it's having to develop for SUSE and for Red Hat and for Ubuntu and ... you get the idea."

Nope. He lost me right off the bat. Maybe I just don't use strange libraries, but getting things working across the Linuxes has never been a major problem for me, apart from debian/ubuntu's broken menu system, and this app sure won't fix that. And it's certainly not the available libraries that cause problems. The things that bite me are the wider unixes: Sparcs have numlock as mod3 instead of mod2, BSDs don't use GNU make by default, Apples have one mouse button, cygwin can't store much on the stack, etc. And honestly, compatibility issues are maybe 1% of the bugs I fix. This is no silver bullet.

But if I had to say something about the disparity of Linuxes, it would be all the different compiler versions and flags that people use.
Can you have a mortgage for one?
How about Tequila?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0rMkt3uB9c
If you're using MVC or similar framework then adding an api is a simple case of adding some alternate views. Adding these is a handy way to check if you're keeping your code all neatly partitioned.
oh, this site gets trolls all right. and spam, and ads, and all the other effluvia of a popular web site. it's just that pg and the editors are a lot more aggressive about removing them than on most sites.
Japan’s super-advanced mobile web: Too unique to serve as a global blueprint?
Wouldn't the guilty be you? :)
I'm distinguishing between companies that took no investment (truly bootstrapped) and those that merely took no outside investment.
The giveaway is that some of the questions would be impossible to use in valuating a company. For example, how do you know the founders? And describe your product in words...
Yes, what I'm saying is there are far too few of these, there's over a million developers out there. Even many of these strikeiron services are just news, you send a small query and get a simple result, rather than sending a complicated spreadsheet of data and having it transformed and returned.
Patch for Internet Security Hole May Not Do the Job
Apple Reviews NetShare; Permanent Ban Likely
how can you tell they clicked through to the iTunes Store from this site (or any other site besides yours)?
That would make those "opt-in," which would be a good thing to me.
As Program Moves Poor to Suburbs, Tensions Follow
use your own site/publishing space for your own unique takes on a story
"Don’t put so much of your time in these hobby project ..make sure your academic don’t suffer"

Reminds me when we had a job opening and some indian guy applied for it with a fourteen page long resume.

What is it with these people and their obsession for academics and credentials?
"how do you know the founders" Is a very valid question. They are trying to measure your chances of success If you don't get along with the people you have to work with your chances are greatly reduced.

If your co-founder is a child hood friend chances are you know them very well. If you just met them at the WWDC a couple months back chances are they might be an ass.
The Olympics and Social Media in China
Has blogger vs PR gone too far?
An RSS/Atom feed is usually fairly easy to build and can make for a decent read-only API. You can add your own namespace or use microformats for app-specific data.

It might also make sense in your app as the more common "subscribe" use - a user might subscribe to get recommendations for new artists that fit her taste etc.
Just wondering: what kinds of things go on a fourteen-page long resume?
MVP = MBP. Damn iPhone auto-correct ;)
And rightly so -- all the current solutions have ugly, slow interfaces. Telling it when you want to fly in and out is a matter of filling in about six little text boxes, sliders and pop-up menus.

I just tried out the mobissimo "one box" search, and it's a lot better.
Name dropping Derrida in the OC only gets you really weird looks from people, regardless of age.
Erdos was a drug user, not a drug addict. He famously quit drugs for a month just to show that he was not an addict. And though he was technically homeless, he was not what most people imagine when they hear this word. He merely preferred to spend his life traveling, and had many friends everywhere (which comes with the territory if you're eminent).

His most salient characteristics--eccentricity and lack of concern for non-mathematical things--are common to most mathematicians.
More insight for the curious? I don't know much about Rackspace, minus what they do so their IPO intrigues me.
Larry Smith on expert systems - hidden opportunities (video)
Yes, an RSS feed of recommendations is definitely in the works.
Just a sarcastic way to push for the introduction of such a feature. It's long been wished for by many.
"Adding lanes or roads is a short-lived fix. Widen one highway, and drivers from another will defect."

Thereby making both highways have less traffic. The fact that people come when capacity is improved shows that you're lessening the load on other roads!

"Traffic jams are not, by and large, caused by flaws in road design but by flaws in human nature."

Not accounting for human nature is a flaw in road design. Maybe it's just too expensive to account for it, but traffic design is an exercise in understanding driving habits.

Most of the facts in this article are right on and I bet the book is worthwhile, but the writer of the article didn't seem to really think through what he's saying. It's sad when good concepts get ruined by weenie-thinking.
The problem with explaining every down mod is that it causes a whole discussion to occur regarding moderation. To me, that seems like a tremendous waste of time.

In a democracy, not everyone is going to see things in the same light. That's just something that we all have to deal with and move on.
Nope, that's it. Slinkset seems pretty good for what it's meant for. I didn't realize there was a page where the rankings don't degrade.
The obsession with 'degrees' (and less risk taking in general) is an unfortunate byproduct of a highly controlled and regulated economy till 1991. Setting up a business, and earning a decent living for yourself (and your extended family most of the times) was extremely difficult before that time. Doing a 'white collar' job was the safest and the most feasible option and the road to that passed through a person being 'educated' (read have a degree). Hence the strong focus on getting a degree, as it was the way to earn your bread.(literally)

Thankfully, things changed from 1991 onwards, from what we call here as 'economic liberalization' (loosening of government controls and restrictions). Add to that more exposure/integration with the 'west' through media/internet and now the attitudes towards business/learning/other activities are changing.

The change will take time, and it's just my guess that the next generation that really doesn't have to worry about the basic issues of life as much would be far more risk taking, and would be doing more game changing things, relative to what's being done today.

I remember one of PG's essay where he mentioned his reasons of why some of the other places cannot replicate a 'Silicon Valley'. If i remember correctly, his take on Bangalore/India was that inherently since the country is still poor, it would be very difficult for it replicate the valley culture at this point at least. (He used an example of uneven steps on a railway station in that essay). His reasoning is not wide off the mark.

But as i said, we are very optimistic, things are gonna get way better, way sooner.
Isn't the LSB just a bunch of relatively abstract guidelines about where a distro should elect to put particular files? In that case it's more like "either a distro has a particular permutation of file locations out of the hundreds permitted by the LSB or it isn't" and this new tool helps you cope with all the various LSB implementations.
"The stock market at the time was like a giant ATM if you knew how to play it and didn't get too greedy"

Lol. I upvoted before I saw that. You think that because you got lucky. Read Fooled by Randomness.
One good way to get people to enter data the right way is to use conditional formatting to make it change a color when they enter the word that you want. It's very satisfying to turn a line from yellow to green (in progress to complete for instance) and gives feedback as to whether the form is being used correctly.

Which is not to say that a web form isn't a better way to do it.
Everything Everglades: Flamingo Commercial Services Plan Approved
obviously their historical data implies that as long as some people have known each for more than two years the exact number is irrelevant. So it probably doesnt matter if you ve known someone since childhood. This conclusion is derived from the options they give.