skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
High DPI, lightweight (I can always plug it into an external monitor if I need the real estate, so 13" monitor at most), large disk (for portability of all my files - I have a fileserver at home and use offline files), long battery life.

If you want to code, don't get an Eee PC.

For general hacking, processor speed these days doesn't seem to be an issue...
Yep, good way of describing the difference.
Sometimes it's tough to tell the difference too - but once you have, you can move forward and get on with bringin the customer a solution that'll make you both happy :)
That's very true. My article was written with the service-industry in mind. That being said, the person I was talking to was also talking with the service industry in mind ;)

Still - you're quite correct that perhaps when creating "things" you may need a different appraoch - as I've never really worked in the "things" industry I can't comment. Anyone have any experience that would care to share their viewpoint?
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Well if i can get cygwin to work properly i get a UNIX++(an octopus made by...). As for linux, the only hardware problems I've had was with my printer, and since the only non-windows drivers were 2 RPM's i doubt that mac OS X would magically solve that problem.

And here is my really awesome opinion, i understand all the hype around OS X, its new, its cool, and it gets you laid(well, that youtube video said so, so it must be true). Lets just forget about the company logo that stays on you laptop. Is their really any real advantage that macs have to linux? One would say better graphic design. My KDE desktop looks pretty enough, i've spent years in xp, so KDE looks great to me. Next is usability. Well, after i tweak my KDE desktop a little i get all the usability i need, i do all the things that i want to do. OK what else does OS X have that linux doesn't? It has better apps. OK, that might be true. I don't know how many apps OS X has, but if they are close to 16000, how do you expect them all to be as good, as the best. windows has the same problem, too many apps, when OS X gets popular enough we will see a big amount of bad apps. So, what do we see? I don't need a mac, linux is good enough. OK, is this the blub OS paradox?
Gee with that virtual keyboard, looks awesome, where do I sign up?

/sarcasm
this is why i love my macbook air so much..
Everyone should just install Ad Block
At the 'height of the boom', I was working on an internet startup...in Indiana...and the startup was, uh, concrete-related.

Needless to say, I served as a punchline for all of my friends that had moved to the Valley to make their fortunes.

Until they needed to borrow money because their options were underwater.

Boring FTW!
wat abt celeron m processor can it run visual studio?
"... I was finishing my undergraduate degree (end of 2000), computing the quadrillionth bit of Pi (it's a zero) ..."

Going after the Chudnovsky brothers hey ~ http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1992/03/02/1992_03_02_036_T... In the New Yorker article, "The Mountains of Pi", David Chudnovsky reckoned he needed a trillion to see if there was some sort of rule Pi. Did you see any patterns at this point? Is the average digit in Pi 4.5, slightly under?
I meant very much like it in terms of compared to other frameworks, not in the mono->.Net kind of way, more like the java and c++ being very much alike because they support object oriented programming with built-in features.

You're totally right, though and I would like to recant my previous posts. Oh well, it is too late. My apologies.
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if it's 1.5Ghz or more then you'll have no problems. Unless you are doing a lot at once you can probably get away with 1Ghz and maybe less. Ram is killer and remember this is mobile not your primary coding box.
well duh most of his supporters are much younger.
Purchased an Eee 1000H and got it up and running today.

Blew away the default XP install for Heron. Had to fidget with some packages and the kernel a little to get it all going smoothly. Not too bad.

What sold me on it was the ergonomics (keyboard's perfectly usable, 10.2" screen) and the portability (5 hours of battery with continuous use; I let it sleep when I wasn't using it and went all day on a single charge).

The goal was to have the laptop on me at all times so I can get work done anywhere.
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I was being facetious. I meant to say what my sibling comment wrote. Confirmation bias.
I was in high school, writing Windows freeware and selling it to Winzip.
"And if something is not hard to do, why try at all." - Paras Chopra
I found this interesting not because of 'obama' but just the inversed statistic... which may give us a cue that IE is going to continue losing market share. What I'd really like to know is what percentage of those were on ff3.
Long battery life, light weight, and most important: fast wakeup and sleep when I close the lid! This is the most important feature to me. I want to open it up, quick jot something down or check something and then close it again. If it locks up or churns for 10 minutes before I can use it, its a non starter. This has so far kept me on Macs.
An Apple logo.

(Joking aside, I refuse to work on anything else any more, life's too short to fight your OS)
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Me neither. I live in New Delhi. Who is Derrida?

I only know PG. ;-)
Not putting the bug in in the first place is the least expensive way to ship bug-free
I had a rather amusing conversation with my coworker today about this. I think that companies should not collect that kind of data, despite the benefit in terms of improved products (personalized search, ads that don't suck, whatever), whereas his basic attitude was "I'm not doing anything illegal, they're not doing anything illegal, so why not?"

While I would not mind being shown ads I care about, I worry about the cost. I don't want companies to be able to share detailed click trails and be able to produce in depth biographies because of the potential for abuse, be it governmental, corporate or "hm I wonder what I can find out about that girl I met yesterday".

PS: as an addendum, I know people with Google log access, and while it's less scary than it sounds, I know there are "tons" of people with such access... and counterparts at other companies. I don't know if I can trust all those people with knowing when I get funny rashes or whatever.
I use a 15.4" Dell Latitude D830 @ 1920x1200 and wouldn't trade it for any other laptop made. I'd say 1920x1200 is about my limit for a 15" LCD, but if anyone makes a 17" laptop that goes higher I'll be first in line. It's amazed me for years how under appreciated the value of high resolution is.
I think it'd be nice if wikipedia made it more obvious when something had been last updated, or some sort of micro-info-graphic representing freshness. Or something.
Are you talking about http://www.strikeiron.com/?
It really comes down to the features you actually need or desire.

Take a hard look at your workflow and usage scenarios:

Do you plan on running a lot of stuff at once? Visual Studio or Eclipse use a lot of resources, you'll probably want to spend a bit on a better CPU and more RAM.

If you don't tax computers very heavily, you might be better served spending on a faster disk and skipping the extra RAM. I had a computer with 1G of RAM that I upgraded to 2G. I actually preferred it with 1G because I rarely use 512MB, and I suspend/resume all of the time. Double the RAM doubled my suspend time, and that's kind of annoying.

Consider your budget. Is this a short term discretionary spend or a long term investment for you? I believe that it's better to buy current generation, mid-high grade parts for some key pieces, electing to forego trendy cutting-edge features, if you're planning on holding on to this for a while. If this is a cheap impulse buy, skip the specs and buy the one with the neat bells and buzzers.

How hard are you on your equipment? If you have peers with laptops, especially some older or more used ones, look at the build quality and the things that are going wrong with them. Some laptop manufacturers (HP/Compaq) do stupid things like making the power cable connector L shaped, which makes the cord into a lever when the cable is kicked. This lever prys on the connector's soldering to the motherboard and trashes the computer. Some manufacturers (Dell) make computers that creak and crack and sag as they age. Some manufacturers (Toshiba) make the laptop lid position switch cheap and unreliable, which makes the LCD flicker when the screen is open. Some manufacturers (IBM / Lenovo) make computers that are tough and reliable but are so ugly you wish they'd die so you can get something else. Some manufacturers (Apple) make computers with such fiddly fit and finish that any service, even by a trained professional, will cause the seams and gaps to not be perfect anymore, which will annoy you because you paid a premium for all of that fit and finish.

For myself I prefer full processors (no Celerons), discrete graphics cards (perhaps passing on the current nVidias that are all failing right now), sufficient (but not more than that) RAM, the fastest hard drives I can afford, and the highest resolution screens available (1900x1200, particularly in a 15", is what I prefer). With this formula you generally have decent parts for things you don't normally upgrade (CPU), and you don't blow your budget on things that can be upgraded later for less (max RAM, larger capacity HD).
Thanks -- I forgot to mention RAM. I use anything with less than 2gb now, 3gb preferred.
After reading the post and thread. I have a sudden urge to write a crawler. Obviously not on YC ;)
What are the pain points with mailman for you?
I was in the tenth grade and breaking all my personal weight records by gaining 5kg/month.
I really like that quote. Probably one of the more insightful quotes i've read recently. If more people created things that were a fan of the scene in which they made something would only improve. On the flip side, you have to acknowledge the quality of the creations, which can only improve with the number of creative contributions.
Just What-the-Heck is a "wait-free" algorithm?
Why not to use Excel for Data Gathering
Great Quote: "This kind of project is a knock-off for a web-developer. It’s a career for a scripter."
To be honest I can't take it seriously when a company that makes billions from crawling other people's sites makes a rule that you're not allowed to crawl theirs.

Google has a lot of conflicts with media companies and it always starts out with google ignoring some "rules" expecting to either win in court or settle at some point.

So I think breaking these rules is part of the process of how sensible rules are established in the first place. Yes it's recursive, but HN readers should be smart enough to understand that ;-)
A MacBook Pro :)
If you work much, you want a high display resolution. However, the laptop still has to be small, so there will be a compromise. Personally, I would go for something like 1280*768 on 13", which is both small and possible to work with.

The other thing you really want is silence. And battery life.

Even if you code a lot, CPU speed is rather irrelevant. Any Core2Duo will do (dual core and 64Bit are great to have). But RAM, you can't have enough -- and since it is cheap at the moment, don't bother and directly upgrade to 4G.

For me, this is a MacBook, but there are plenty of alternatives. For example, the FSC Lifebook series is really great.
If possible, look for those business-offerings. They tend to use a little older but more reliable hardware, which can really save your day and will most certainly enable you to run linux.
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My friend Steve does a lot with short posts. Have a look:

http://dekorte.com/blog/blog.cgi
- Don't bother wiring coax and cat5 into places you're not sure you'll need it. What you really want is Smurf Tube ( http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=901909 ) dropped to places where you think you might want something someday but don't know how much of what you'll actually use. This is probably less extravagant now than it was before copper went sky-high

- The real reason you want cat-5 in every room is so that you can have PoE VoIP phones instead of crappy analog handsets. This is particularly useful if you install a linux host running the Asterisk PBX. Don't want your mother in law calling before 10AM on weekends? Filter her caller ID to voicemail while you sleep -- Asterisk is a huge geek enabling technology.

- I'd probably smurf tube the doorbell location and consider putting a door phone there - a speaker and mic with a button. Sometimes you don't know who it is, and you don't know if you want to answer or not. This is particularly valuable for people in the household who aren't the alpha male and might not have the ability to stop someone from entering the house if the door was unlocked. You can also tie it into your asterisk host and have it call your cell phone, telling the delivery man to leave the packages at the door or telling the unsolicited guest during the day that you _are_ home, you're _not_ interested, and they should find someone else to rob.

- I'd skip the whole house smart lighting thing. Having your home lighting at the mercy of something that will fail when lightning strikes it is a non-starter to me. I'd consider hand-rolling a DMX system for any media rooms, but you can do this on the low-4-figure cheap, instead of mid 5s.

- Speaking of lightning, there are whole house surge surpressors, and they're a good idea in my opinion.

- In my next home I intend to install a generator. To enable this I'd ideally have at least two breaker panels -- one with the non-critical services (dryer), one with the critical services (refrigerator, house lights) that is connected to the generator transfer switch, and possibly a third with super-critical services that is fed off of a generator panel circuit and through a UPS.

- A while back I saw some kind of inductive AC current sensing devices that could be installed around Romex. This, combined with a server doing other stuff would be a neat way to track key (or all) circuits in your house to watch power consumption.

- Security: there's open source camera server software out now that is pretty cool. If you run cat5 to the corners of your house you can elect to install cameras with IR blasters, and track people and things coming and going. Makes the video doorbell thing seem kind of silly.

This is all I can think of at the moment. I love this topic and could geek about it for hours... :)
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I had one of those screens, and I thought I would love it, but it ended up causing too much eye strain. Major headaches! Now I prefer small screens with moderate DPI on the go, and using a large external LCD when possible.

Right now I'm using a 37" 1080P LCD as my home monitor and an X60 as my laptop. I use the LCD to keep various communication tools open and the large LCD for coding/reading.
I can't get past the checkerboard because for some reason the numpad's diagonal keys doesn't work and the letters are completely unusable from a dvorak perspective. This really needs a key customizing feature, no matter how crude.
Sorry about that, I guess I thought my tool could help you, but in your case I made a bad call.

I wish there was a convention in Twitter to flag tweets as advertisements (similar to @ and #). I would gladly use it.
I hate to point out the painfully obvious, but the discussion in this article isn't about why one should use a DVCS, but about the respective pros and cons of Git and Mercurial.

Your comment is a little like saying "man, a visual text editor sure beats using ex on a teletype!" in the middle of a vi/emacs war.
Especially when you can just install a free ajax version on your own server, and access that from the iphones browser.
"This is the most important feature to me."

I agree with this, with the caveat that actually more important is reliability. Our company bought a few Lenovo T60Ps - with how great the T43P had performed, we thought it would be T43P++. Unfortunately the wireless cards were VERY flaky. :(

So, I want: reliability so I don't have to futz with wireless and other functionality - and then instant on and off. "Elastic laptop"
First mover doesn't necessarily mean absolutely first. "Early mover" is probably a better term. Either way, it tends to apply to the first (or one of the first) to cross a certain hurdle.
If it were me I wouldn't go with a Celeron; for performance and cache reasons the Pentium M is the wiser decision. Maybe if you're preferring wattage and battery versus overall performance you'd go with Celeron. I run IDE's, profiling and debuggers galore so I need what the Centrino offers.

All great points mentioned here. Lightweight; you can get real light these days without being a DR. I love widescreen ever since I bought my new Thinkpad T61p and the poor displays on the Thinkpads are a thing of the past. I highly disagree that Thinkpads are ugly - they're made for efficiency and professionalism, not for show. Linux; my machine came with SLED of which I partitioned for my love of Ubuntu - gotta have Linux for kernel hacking and that obsessive need for ultimate control of your OS.

All that said, I'm a power user and by that I literally mean I handle my laptop ruggedly(and I'm sincerely not a klutz). For this reason I need a Thinkpad for always on the go and durable performance. They take a beating and their customer service(warranty related) is the best in the business. Had many other brands that crapped out after six to eight months on average - Thinkpads last on average three years before I call in for warranty service(high resale value). My T61p is both lightweight, high performance, widescreen, and allows up to 4 GB of RAM, rugged and goes with me everywhere while taking bumps and bruises along the way. Need a new keyboard because your hackin skillz have worn away the home row, space bar and number row? Call in a service ticket and get a keyboard shipped out and arrived to your door in less than two days(Bigtime priority).

Once you go Thinkpad, you never go back, at least for me anyways.
For me, the killer feature is battery life. I used to have a macbook pro, but I'd get ~3 hours batter life at best (and only 2 hours, when doing heavy work).

I sold it, and bought a thinkpad x60, and get over 6 hours of battery life (4-5 hours under heavy load). I love that I can basically use it all day without worrying about battery.

Pretty much any machine has a fast enough cpu for the kind of work I do - ram seems to be the big bottleneck now. (virtualization + firefox + emacs + python + sbcl + ... all take their toll).
Light as you can get AND linux friendly: that's exactly what I was looking for.
I am now the very happy owner of a sub-2 pounds, Ubuntu certified, 12.1" laptop for 6 month, and that the best notebook choice I ever made.
Right choice for me, but I am only on the road 5 to 6 days a month, so your mileage may vary if you are really a nomad worker.
Doesn't bootstrapping also imply operating on founders' credit?
Yet most demos include too many slides and too much focus on the future and not enough on the present etc...

Sometimes seemingly common sense advice is necessary.
It's a tough market right now. I think they look pretty good, overall. To me they pass the "would you buy from them?" test that you hear about occasionally. I think this means that we don't have to hear "A second quarter with no IPOs!" in September, so that's great.

A comment at the bottom of the article was saying that the cloud/utility computing thing could be working against them because they'll be competing with the likes of "Google, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and to a lesser extent salesforce". I'd say that as a company with a core business of operating a large herd of machines critical to other peoples businesses, they are probably as well off as any of those other companies. I would certainly give a hosting/ISP type company a shot at running my cloud/utility computing setup if I were to ever need one.
>> Long battery life
>> Light weight
>> Fast wakeup and sleep

Only thing I'd add is "small". The market may be tilting towards larger computers, but I wouldn't get anything larger than a 13.3 inch computer at this point. 13-inches hits the sweet spot in terms of size and usability. Anything small doesn't feel like a real computer. Anything larger is awkward to use in contained spaces like on airline seats.
I appreciate the distinction (& the modesty) but I think that YC is exceptionally sold. It seems to be a pretty good machine for getting people to do what you want them too.
Does YC convince people to start companies? ..move cities? ..change game plan in a way that is as significant or more significant (to them) then signing a deal is to a VC?

But I get what you mean. That knack for projecting momentum is rare.
Teaching high school.
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I'm using the same laptop + external monitor setup, but I'd actually like to use two external monitors. For me, screen space and RAM are the two important factors.
I used to think so... and I was (like you) thinking that my (6.77 pounds) T61 was "lightweight".
I finaly replaced it by a Portégé R500 (my first non-Thinkpad laptop in years). Less screen real estate (12"1), obviously not as rugged and sturdy, but I could pack no less than four of those R500 in my bag, and it would still be lighter than my old Thinkpad!
Get used to it: Thinkpads (most of them anyway) are really heavy by today standards.
this is pretty much the most awesome iphone app ever! bringing native iphone apis into a web page is frickin amazing!
I've heard probabilities between 10^-19 and 10^-25.

Better yet, if black holes start to form that take a little too long to evaporate it's probably quite likely they'll be detected before one capable of destroying the earth.

This was on HN earlier today: http://cosmicvariance.com/2008/08/04/what-will-the-lhc-find/
Seeing people's reasons for up/down modding on a page other than the main item?id=xxx page might be ok but I don't think such comments belong on that page for the same reason pg gives - they simply don't make for interesting reading.
Either it's running too fast on my computer, or this game is nearly impossible. I have a feeling it's a little bit of both. For example, I have to save the game every time I'm about to approach an enemy, as it will invariably take half my life about 90% of the time, so I have to replay it over and over in order to have any chance of getting through a room.
Of course, the real question is how you managed to not check HN for almost all of Wednesday!
eBay was not in the first 10. First/Early mover is a very mixed bag with most of the example of "first/early" turning out to be "one that we remember now." Some other counter-examples: Palm (something like 47th PDA, well after the Newton for example), iPhone, MP3 player (iPod), Google, Microsoft (e.g. Excel, IE, Word, Powerpoint,...). See also NSF study http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf04305/pdf/tab11a.pdf (hat tip to http://particletree.com/notebook/first-mover-advantage/ )
I think PG has said this before. There is incompatability between:
A. VCs are 'funds' (IE they need to invest a big amounts)
B. Partners only invest 1-2 times per year
C. Startups are (or can be) cheap

One of them has to give. Seems like its C.
Eh, that might not be a good idea...