skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Keep in mind that each of the 70 startups on this list paid $18,000 to get on stage"

Are these the only two conventions around that promote start-ups in this manner? $18k isn't completely absurd but it still seems pretty steep for a few people working out of a garage to pull together. It seems to me that while this set-up might help out some start-ups that it mostly helps out the people that organize it. I would imagine that the VC firms have to pay some kind of attendance fee as well.

Seems to me like someone should set up a similar conference that offers a much lower entrance fee for start-ups, or maybe even eliminate the fee all together.
He forgot to mention the Acer Extreme has an AMD Sempron Processor and the Macbook has an Intel Core 2 Duo, which probably reduces the price of the Acer by a lot.
Scala overview deck
What we need boils down to:

* Rotate in 3D with middle mouse button (MMB)

* Pan in 3D with shift+MMB

* Zoom with scroll wheel

* Print object's name on mouse over.

On top of this, built whatever later, for the above cover most visualization needs.
Vim, GNU screen, ruby irb or other REPL
Add me to the list of people who had previously used a deluge of printf()s.

I've always wanted to be a gdb guru but it just seemed a little mystical and unnecessary. But this tutorial seems like it gets to the point so I'll start reading it tonight. Thanks for the link.
One strong reason is to stay upwind—with the Mac, you can also run XP and Ubuntu, but not vice-versa.

The other major reasons for me, anyway, include Spotlight, Time Machine, Textmate, and Terminal. The first two might not seem all that important, but once you have them, you won't want to live without them.

And, if for some reason you hate OS X, which is uncommon but, I suppose possible, you can consistently boot into XP / Ubuntu.
Disruption-free videos
I got a mac HATE IT, there are 2 programs that I cant use so end up spending 95% of time in VMWARE.

Also tried to install bootcamp, but MAC os says can't move files and I need to backup entire hd and then restore it. (MAC OS doesn't have defrag)
I find that whatever environment you're most comfortable with is the best way to go. I find that XP/Ubuntu are more comfortable for me than other environments. I can use a Mac, but I find myself working against it (probably due to experience) in times when I really need things to be straightforward. It's a bit like learning Emacs for me, I can see that there's some power behind it but I find it too different to vi to bother. In this case, my vi would be Linux or Cygwin.

I'm not keen on Vista at all and would much rather use XP or even 2000. I suspect I'll avoid it till Windows 8 comes out.

I also don't think that the price difference between a Mac and PC laptop is justifiable, but different strokes for different folks I guess.
Desperate housewives season four sizzling secrets edition
No wonder people have called “Desperate Housewives” “Sex and the Suburbs.” Like HBO’s once-popular “Sex and the City,” this sexually tamer but equally smart ABC show features a group of female friends who experience life at its quirkiest and frequently ge
Yes you can run Mac OS X on a machin, I installed it on my Dell and it worked very good. Its just not easy to install, but than it is as good as a Mac.
Friday Ritual: Silver State is 11th failed bank
Book Review - 'Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men'
I don't think a mac is for everyone. It's important to use what ever tools are best suited for you or your work.
An Alternative to the Glut of Opinions Online
I'd be interested in learning what computations they do that "require up to TEN MapReduce jobs to execute in sequence". As a point of comparison, the Goolge MapReduce paper from 2004 says that their production web search indexing system "runs as a sequence of five to ten MapReduce operations." [labs.google.com/papers/mapreduce-osdi04.pdf]
Shinmun, a small and beautiful blog engine
It's illegal and also you don't have full hardware support.
tbqh, the problem resides squarely in over expansion. in the last few years the apple user base has swelled by millions. probably triple digit expansion in a very short time. this cause all sorts of quality issues to crop up. first nipping at the edges and then making its way to the core.

i passed on the first gen iphone and my sister and i picked up the 3g on a family plan. all in all it is functional but not by much. the problem with the iphone is that its a computer that also makes phone calls. cause , uh, thats what apple knows how to do. its not a nokia or some such that is a phone that also does some computing.

as a loyalist im willing to give apple the benefit of the doubt. but now permanently. they need to up their game and be more communicative. also, the quality on the macbooks/imacs is degrading. hard drive failures and all sorts of blow outs. they need to get their manufacturers in check.

i really hope apple takes their sweet time with snow leopard and doesnt deliver it half baked.
You mean like the competing free TechCrunch conference?

http://www.techcrunch50.com/2008/index.php

Which is incidentally mentioned in the article you are commenting on.
Ask HN: Launching a new site next week, what do you suggest to promote it?
Hi,

I'm launching a site this Tuesday and was wondering if there was anyone from the HN crowd who'd like to share their experiences and advice. I followed some of the advice on the balsamiq blog (http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/?p=198). My projected ramp up is as follows:

1. Set up a beta test with about 30 users. This has started to die off a little so I'm going to try to get users motivated with number 3.
2. Contacted bloggers in the niche I'm targeting (Information Security) and the people hosting the platform I'm using to promote the site on launch.
3. Set up a competition for beta testers with £100 for the first to reach 100 posts/comments.

Is there anything else others would recommend? Have any HN users had any similar experiences, if so what would you do?
Interesting thoughts about the PHP comments store. Perhaps some sort of comment service integration would keep things lightweight?
Then you've got other problems.
Yeah, you're right. A Civic with an Integra Type-R engine isn't an Integra Type-R, although it may go just as fast. There's more than just power metrics.

The 'Mac aura' is a big part in why Apple has been so successful. I've never understood why people tend to downplay the 'aura.' Most of us find meaning in design and aesthetics. I know I do. I made the switch to Mac after 18 years of using Windows, and every extra penny spent was well worth it; and I can speak for another 20 I know that have done and feel the same.

I've seen many comments here that express the same sentiment in the article. And it's funny, you'd think those that are trying to build a strong user base by providing their users with the best product experience possible (mostly UI focused) would see that there's great importance to be found in aesthetics.

By dismissing the 'aura' and being 'hip' you neglect a big part of what makes us humans. We all want to be cool, and we all want others to admire our design choices, at least most of us do -- a majority not accurately represented by this community. And from a purely business standpoint, positioning your product to appeal to this part of the human psyche can reap huge rewards. If you can fulfill those wants, people will pay.
can somebody say why this is necessary? what would happen if the gov. wouldn't have taken over?

would the fed. gov bail out general motors, boeing or google if those are in the verge of bankrupting?
If were buying a laptop today, it would likely be a Thinkpad + Ubuntu combo.

You get a nice, productive OS and reasonably priced, elegant and sturdy hardware. What's not to like?
Meanwhile uber SGI/Netscape genius Jim Clark is dating Australian supermodel Kristy Hinze.
Energy Ball - A Cheap And Efficient Wind Turbine
It's more about maintaining separation of concerns, back in the late '90s I dealt with a web app that was written as one massive perl CGI that was called from the webserver and from the web users .forward; it was ugly, buggy and if you added the right headers to your email you could do sql injections.

Run the mailreader as a separate user, have it talk to the data layer on it's own, basic informational hygiene.
Feel The Difference With Samsung Steel
It proffers a unique feature of downloading the ringtones of your own choice, which can be played in two different formats of MP3 and Polyphony over 72 channels.Its MP3/AAC/eACC+/WMA music player is especially fabricated to sway up your whole ambience over its foot-tapping rhythmic beats.
Did you not know that two of your main programs weren't available for OS X? Guessing by your use of MAC you didn't research much. Same for the defrag, there are several utilities that can do that for you (or you can just copy back and forth from a backup drive). iDefrag is a popular one, but I've never used any as I have plenty of free space and fragmentation's not an issue for me.
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1...

http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1...

An extremely oversimplified answer is that it would hurt confidence in the dollar, which would further damage its status as the foreign federal reserve currency, which would cause further inflation in the US.
> If you are a good Linux/Windows user, you'll find that Mac OS X is a loss of time

I don't doubt this is true for you, but I fail to see your logic. Mac OS X offers the power of Linux with vastly better user experience. OS X lets you do all the powerful *nix stuff but at the same time saves you from having to hunt for drivers and do tons of configuration. There's definitely something to be said for Linux, but time savings isn't one of those things.
Good catch - I count 7: http://100.s3.amazonaws.com/camo.jpg
How did you handle the autoincrement id problem with distributed databases? Did you replace them with hashes?
Funniest Thing On PhrazIt - MILK??
I noticed that too when I was in the market for a new laptop. I ended up getting the MacBook because I was fond of OS X (legally...and hackintoshes are a pain) and because the thing just looked better.

Maybe it's just me, but if I were spending any significant amount of time with something I would like it if it looked good. Thinkpads were merely functional and no more.
We had the bank account example so many times at University that I started to question that if they let any of us design a banking system, we'd just install a backdoor.
They don't teach you the sorts in CS because you'll ever need to do them. It's merely a means to teach you Big-O by example. Being able to tell what's O(n) and what's O(n^2) is a very valuable real-life skill for a programmer.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Both groups had board appointees from the government. The market basically assumed they were "too big to fail", meaning if trouble happened, the government would take over.

When a company isn't run by it's shareholders and beholden to the market, bad things happen. Many of the choices made by both groups wouldn't have made it had there been better oversight.

Government involvement was the problem here, not capitalism.
Pigeonholing commenters is kind of patronizing, isn't it? Those general arguments, in the right context and with the right facts, can all be reasonably made.
There is some confusion about just how illegal it is in the US. The EULA does not permit it, but that isn't the same thing as it being against the law - especially since the EULA is presented post-purchase. (This assumes you bought your copy, of course.)

Still, until judgement in Apple vs Pystar (which is slightly broader) it would be better not to assume anything. Common law systems can produce some funny results and special cases. Just because you can drop a Ford engine into a Toyota without fear of legal action doesn't mean it carries across directly to software.

Being able to use software you buy however you wish with very little fear of inciting legal action is a great argument for adopting Linux, of course :)
The article recommends pkgutil.simplegeneric (1), but that's not documented anywhere. PEAK's dispatch module (2) is a better choice although there may be others out there. You can even use it to implement a familiar multimethods API (3).

1: http://svn.python.org/projects/python/trunk/Lib/pkgutil.py

2: http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/CombiningResults

3: http://bob.pythonmac.org/archives/2005/03/30/five-minute-mul...
That I like fiddling with my laptop, and so hours spent on it are leisure time (valued at $0) rather than work (valued at $lots).

For most people your point is valid, but this is a hacker site, no?

(I was a actually a bit disapointed with I installed Ubuntu 8.04 - previously it had been great fun as I had to mess with all sorts of thigns to get it to work perfectly. This time it was all a bit too easy, even wireless and 3D were no-configuration installs. One opportunity to learn new things gone.)
"The right context" is over a bottle of good wine, an offer open to anyone who happens by the same corner of the world I happen to be in. I didn't mean to be patronizing; there are smart people I respect that take those views, merely to 'head them off at the pass'.
I had been using a Linux laptop for over 6 years until it died last fall. Now I'm using a MacBook and I'm absolutely loving it. Why?

- Power management. Suspend and resume just works. The battery life is great. Linux has catching up to do in terms of power management. (I know ACPI docs are bad/non-existent, and that it's not the kernel hacker's fault, and that lot's of things are improving. But my Mac does a better job right now when I need it, and I didn't have to configure anything.)

- Keynote. I need to give good presentations as part of my job, I need to communicate ideas. Every minute I don't spend fighting my presentation tool is an extra minute that I can spend on content and delivery. OpenOffice Impress and MS PowerPoint drive me nuts. Keynote is so ... simple. It just works. It has a decent interface. Well done animations are suddenly worth the effort (and nothing explains a technical process as good as a well-done animation).

- Presenting works. How many times have I seen people fail to get X11 to talk nicely to a projector? Even (Linux) kernel hackers had that happen to them. If they can't figure out X11, I sure don't want to risk to look unprofessional in front of an important audience. With my MacBook, I just show up, connect my Laptop, and it works. Every time.

- It's still a real UNIX (unlike Cygwin). I've got Emacs, I've got bash, and most of development work doesn't feel any different from what I did with Linux.

- It's got MacPorts. I thought I was going to miss Linux package management tools, but MacPorts is just as good (if you don't mind waiting for the compile to complete).

- Time machine. Yes, I do know rsync. I do know cron. I do know all kinds of tools. Did I use them regularly? No, I was too lazy, as I suspect most people are. Have I lost data because of that? Yes, and it hurt. Now, I do a backup every night when I come home, because it happens automatically. If I break my MacBook, all I have to do to restore my old system (including all installed programs and settings) is to hook up a new Mac to my backup drive. OS X will do the rest, which is great since I bet that my hardware will fail just before an important deadline...

So is all that worth several hundred dollars? For me, it is. Buying a MacBook has taken away one more thing to worry about. I rely on it to just work, and so far it has not let me down.
I routinely run composite jobs of thousands of map-reduces. Imagine an iterative machine learning algorithm where each epoch is a map-reduce job. Imagine a meta-job that runs dozens of these. It's not to bad with Hadoop's job control system. Where cascading really would shine (haven't tried it) is when these jobs require data joins.

Edit: This could be a case of map-reduce fail(tm). But I don't think so. I imagine Google's PageRank computation takes more than ten iterations to converge, and each iteration is a map-reduce job.
The Mac Dev tools kick ass, but if you want to stay cross platform (e.g. Python or Java for example), then you are probably as well on Ubuntu as anything else.

Certainly, if I had the same requirements, I might want a TP running Ubuntu.

If you like the Mac hardware (shiny, vents at the back, beautiful underneath) get a Mac laptop, since you can run Ubuntu or Windows easily on it.

I'm really a Mac guy, but I run Ubuntu on my remaining non-Apple hardware, and it works great. It always seems a tad smoother than OS X for mainstream Unix dev, e.g. No faffing with Fink or Ports etc.
Mac vs. Acer, IBM, Dell, etc.: The Debate is Over
They are done on Fridays so that stockholders have time to calm down and get some perspective before trading restarts on a Monday morning.
Yeah, except if you want to actually install various open source software/libraries.

Then you spend hours trying to see which of the various competing mac package-management systems have some (out-of-date) version of the software. Or, you give up and try compiling from source, to find that nothing compiles cleanly with out all sorts of various problems.

I've gone through this process so many times for even mainstream software, and it's never worked without a lot of fiddling on mac (and sometimes even not then). With Ubuntu, all the software I need is either in the standard repository, or it can be easily compiled (with no twiddling of configuration).

Of course, YMMV, but I tend to use a lot of libraries and FOSS packages for my work, and it's definitely significantly easier to manage on Ubuntu.

Hardware can definitely be an issue on linux, but if you do some research beforehand to see what will work, you're in the clear.
import (ImageMagick) + hg (mercurial)
The p2p bit at the end makes no sense to me.
"The biggest problem I see is network latency and rendering appears slower while HTML loads progressively."

This isn't so much of a problem for the types of applications Cappuccino is intended for: long running applications, rather than transient web pages.

In fact, in some cases 280 Slides launches faster than PowerPoint or Keynote. Uncached I often see load times of about 3 seconds. Cached is about half that.
do i have to be the only one to say that i like my MBP because it looks good? jeez, i have to look at this thing sitting in my lounge every single day, as well as the hours i spend on it. seriously, i go to my friends houses and they pull out these ugly chunks of plastic - i don't care what it runs, whatever floats your boat, but why choose something ugly? begone with your specs bean counter - i yearn for style.
Can we please stop doing this?

These simplistic one sentence summaries can be applied to almost any piece.

Summary of the Constitution:
"We are entitled to various rights, and there are a bunch of laws that help us protect them."
With a very carefully pruned dictionary. Glad you dig it!
yet for holding shoes, they seem almost scarily well designed... [when you've spent ages building a hammer...]
In Search of Excellence (the classic of this genre) had the same problem. Being profiled in a pop-business book should be considered a huge red flag.
We did that video for fun really, eventually we want to have a screencast of how to use
Scrumy is cheaper, and thanks to dkordik, looks much better too :)
The Ultimate List of Custom Ubiquity Verbs
Summary: stop doing things I don't like.

:p

More seriously, his post states the cost and some specifications of a macbook, and a low-cost windows laptop and that people might consider price and "mac aura" before buying. He doesn't make any useful, interesting or funny observations, conclusions, assertions or explanations. That's his entire post.

Not, "here's why I think the mac is more expensive" or "what will happen to the mac as cheap windows laptops get more powerful" or "if the mac aura is the main reason for the cost then it means XYZ", or "in previous economic downturns, mac prices changed like XYZ" or "Based on this, I predict the next device from apple will be an XYZ" or "I've built a mac price predictor" or anything. Not even as simple as "The mac is $750 more and I think that's too much".

"makes you wonder." - makes him wonder what?
"at first glance it seems like a great deal" - what about at second and further glances?
"I know it's apples and oranges, they're different" - how about discussing the differences in detail?
"saving $750 at a time of economic uncertainly could resonate with many consumers." - discuss. Explain. Reveal insight. Predict.

No, none of that. Just "two products exist with different specifications and prices".

It's a simplistic one sentence summary for a simplistic too-many-sentence blog post.

Where's the hacking? the news? the opinion? Where's the content?

You love your macbook? fine, make it a four word blog post. That would be better. A passionate outburst for a product so unusually, distinctively good that you can't resist being happy that it simply exists!
Why people insist on macs is beyond me...get a kickass laptop for $1000, load up ubuntu or fedora or mint or openSUSE, and call it a day.

Oh well, install wireless drivers and graphics drivers, and THEN call it a day. Still, as far as I care, beats buying into the Mac rich-boy fandom.

News for you: LINUX ISNT THAT HARD
I love Ubuntu. 3 Years, no hitches after the first months. Only switched to windows when it came free with my new laptop. Still dual boot Ubuntu, though.
The Halo Effect, by Phil Rosenzweig, does a good job describing many of the problems with popular business books like Good to Great and In Search of Excellence. It's worth reading.

http://www.amazon.com/Halo-Effect-Business-Delusions-Manager...
It's like doing a back flip -- go half way and you get hurt.
Very similar article to what was posted yesterday:
http://www.inhabitat.com/2008/09/03/energy-ball-by-home-ener...
Interview with Scott McCloud about the Google Chrome comic book
Actually, the government agreed to guarantee some of Chrysler's debt in 1979, and to buy large quantities of Chrysler vehicles:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler#Government_loan_guaran...
Chrome's JavaScript challenge to Silverlight
Does their blog have rss? I can't seem to find the feed link.
Haha really? And I thought I was being unique, not doing a blog! Darn! Hah.
Freakonomics author Steve Levitt noted this:

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/28/from-good-t...
I intentionally picked the boxster because it is by no means a supercar. It's a reasonably priced sports car (<50k) from a well respected brand.

The analogy works for any class of car, or any consumer product. That's the argument, really -- that this is a pervasive phenomenon, but we only seem hear about it in regards to laptops.
Right! If our economy relies so much on housing to the point that it is a threat to the entire economy, then it shows that we didn't have a solid economy in the first place.

We are seriously compromising the well-being of future generations of this country in order to bail-out over-consuming house-owners and fat-cats in Wall Street. Absolutely outrageous.
To me, sports cars are about appreciating the bleeding edge in engineering/design (I don't have one either.. haha). And I think anytime a product is priced at 100x it's functional equivalents it's about connoisseurship.

Now I'm not saying that macs are a work of art (though OSX is in many ways the cutting edge of UI design), but they also aren't 100x the cost, maybe just +50%.
Google Planning Offshore Data Centers on Ships
Just launch. Don't promote at first, except to those 30 users. When you stop getting useful complaints from the 30, start expanding it. Eventually you'll have to think about promotion, but not yet.