skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your requirements are obviously different than mine. And I'm not sure where you got yours, but my Thinkpad runs at about 5-5.5 lbs... far from close to seven. By your response, it appears you misread my requirements. I agree it's not the lightest, but maybe I should have said it is a dream compared to my previous T43 which feels more like a weighted brick. But emphasis in my post was on ruggedness... which I'll take any day over weight. In that bag of four Portege's or one Protege and whatever else, I'm more concerned with picking up that laptop where I left off - in top condition, which is tough to say when you got a bag stuffed and who knows what could happen to it in transit. Thinkpads have good investment and therefore resale value and I'm not looking for laptops that are fancy on the shell, not coming close to the levels in durability that a Thinkpad does.
Search, and thus Google, obviously has different economics than something like eBay: it's very easy to switch to a new search engine, and there aren't really demand-side economies of scale like there are with auctions.

eBay may not have been the first auction site, but it was the first to hit a critical size, beyond which the advantage was all theirs.
Excellent point. Lucky for me, I haven't ended up with a flaky mac yet so its not on my radar, but I'd certainly have to say that ultra reliable networking, keyboard, pointer and USB would be a must.

It doesn't matter how fast your computer wakes up from sleep if it takes 10 minutes of fiddling to get it back on the network.
go and multiply
Erm why?
https, password protected interface to an ssh webapp?
An insecurity in OpenID, not many dead
The little arrows to me mean

Up: Thanks for adding that. I appreciated it.

Down: I wish this weren't here. It doesn't add anything at all and just clutters the discussion.

If none of those two options presents, I don't touch it.

I really like the touch that as things are modded down, they fade (and sometimes really do vanish!)
Google makes money from selling ads. Advertisers want to place ads on the largest search engine sites (or one that can deliver a target audience at an effective price). It may be easy for a user to switch (although letting users know that you exist can be hard/expensive), it's less clear that advertisers will switch to a search engine with few users. Google's customers are the advertisers.
> - Being incoherent, in jest or in seriousness (examples: "mahler called, he wants his symphony back")

Brilliant, sir.

I think a lot of people go beyond that--I haven't paid much attention here, but I know on reddit people will downmod anything they don't agree with like crazy.

[edit] just saw that someone else wrote the exact same thing; my bad.
Agency sues to stop Defcon speakers from revealing gaping holes
They have the money and the code doesn't appear to have another use. I would be careful about thinking "I have the power." In misunderstandings like this, there are typically mistakes and misunderstandings enough on both sides.
Most people I give PC buying advice to really don't think like I do -- either they want a $400 computer, or they want some $2500 thing with some gimmick feature set (custom color lid? who cares? lightscribe blu-ray burner? do that at home! Vista turbo-memory? Why?). For this reason I sometimes over-discount my own opinions about them when I'm advising others.

I personally agree about Thinkpads not being ugly (when I made that comment I was referring to my wife's perception of them initially -- now she's a T61p WUXGA convert as well).

I also agree about Thinkpad reliability, but I know the plural of anecdote isn't data, and everyone's mileage varies.

I disagree about the T series weight. The T grew to fill the void left by the discontinued ~7 pound A series. Yes it's lighter but I feel sorry for any floor it might land on... but the computer will most likely survive.

I fancy myself a power / heavy professional user as well: I have a very low tolerance for hardware related BS. I run minimalist installs of the OS of my choice (XP at the moment). I expect to be able to throw my computer around (while off -- I'm not a sadist) and not scuff or break anything. I disable or order machines without gimmick features (Bluetooth is disabled on my T60p, I got one without the fingerprint reader), and I don't use the full (software-integrated) versions of drivers for anything I don't have to.

With this recipe, my Thinkpads have been very faithful to me over the last ~10 years, and Lenovo's going to have to really screw it up to lose me as a customer.

Depending on what you're looking for I'd say that IBM/Lenovo is ahead of even Apple on build quality. In my opinion Apple pushes too hard on fine design (fine lines and edges, thin case designs) where the Thinkpad team designs their machines to take abuse first and foremost.

If you're the type of person who values these properties I believe a Thinkpad should be on your short list.
Ask HN: When to do an API for my web app?
As a programmer, I really appreciate sites that provide APIs.

I'm building a music recommendation web app and I've just started creating an API (http://theperceptron.com/api) for it. However, is this too early? The very core of my app is there, but there is plenty on my todo list (I'm only a week into development). What priority should I give the API?
My preference here is to not have the machine sleep at all when it's closed. I do more sysadmin type work than local development type work, and having TCP (SSH) sessions end every time you close the lid would drive me bananas. I would have ruined several laptops in the last few months as our 90 pound great dane puppy has run at me while I was sitting in my chair hacking away.

MacBooks (and MBPs) don't make this easy, which (unfortunately) has kept me on PCs. I've mitigated the ten minutes of BS thing by keeping my machines clean, with an agressive attitude toward junkware, and setting the power button to suspend the computer to disk.

I've made the "i'm using you" / "i'm done using you, good night" command an explicit step this way, but after adapting it's actually kind of nice (even faster than mac sleep/wake) and lets you keep your music and remote terminals alive, which can be convenient at times.
Reading a well written blog is interesting.
I don't like soundbites/marketing slogan type things like this tweet. They overly simplify something so that it 'feels' right to the masses, when in actual fact it may not be.

Going for a popularist vote rather than forming a cohesive argument.
Maybe working out the API will allow you a good second angle into how your app should interface with the world (next to the user interface, obviously)?
Sorry, but the macbook is a piece of crap. Flimsy as hell, and it's keyboard is unusable.
I know this, b/c I was shoping for a mac a couple of months ago.

You have to go for MCB Pro in order to get anything usable with macs, for which you have to shell at least 2k. Or go the iMac route. Either way, it is much more expensive than you can get out of pc.
It can lead to embarrassing moments when your mates are over and see ads for the newest Britney Spears CD and toy ponies...
It's true of painters, but not mathematicians.

I'm not sure about that. The words "homeless drug addict" don't exactly bring "mathematician" to mind, but thats' exactly what Erdos was, and he certainly qualified as one of the best mathematicians of the 20th century.

EDIT: Oops, it wasn't methamphetamine; it was dl-amphetamine and methylphenidate. Somehow my brain squished those two together.
That's not bad. I'd wait for that.

And it will only take a few hours to update later.
I suspend my desktop nightly (which saves about $100/year).

I have SSH sessions to 6 machines: they just run while:; do ssh -t hostname screen -dR. After a resume, a "killall ssh" kills the broken connections and starts a new one which will bring up exactly the same terminal as before, due to screen.

Depending on how long you suspend for the SSH sessions might still work (assuming you get the same IP address, and there's no NAT with short timeouts, and there's no SSH timeout configured).
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It was methylphenidate. There is a world of difference between methylphenidate and methamphetamine.
This is an excellent point. Thinking about the API has led to several ideas for more community-driven features.
I don't know if you are trying to be funny, but downmod'ing a comment because you disagree with it is not acceptable.

Modding should only be used to improve a discussion, and in a discussion it is very common that people have different ideas. So when you downmod a comment, you are actually trying to remove it from the discussion and therefore damaging the discussion.

Only downmod comments that hurts the discussion
The comments could appear on the users homepage. It is only useful for the user who got down modded
hey good question, good comments so far, i keep thinking asap... aren't we all in the platform creation business now?
I think it's way too early for an API, and here's why:

- API's are generally only interesting if there are already some users, accounts, etc. to interact with.

- API's are not a main feature of the site (I could be wrong here of course) and are quite a way down the list. Fix the obvious problems first. I searched for Dire Straits and got no results.

- API's aren't used by a lot of people.

Basically what I'm saying is that you should get your priorities straight: An API has no value before the rest of your site works well, and has a lot of users.
I agree. I do most of my work with my desktop anyway, so if I'm going to buy a new laptop I will make sure that it is portable

I once bought a 15.4" heavy Dell laptop, but I ended up not using it because I couldn't be bothered to drag it around. Now the laptop is 100% stationary since it given to my mother to browse the web.
I can't agree with this. What should be important is what one says, not where one happens to say it. If what one has to say can be expressed effectively in 140 characters, what's wrong with using Twitter publish it?
So PG, you read 800 applications and invite 100 for interview. Then you invest in only 1 or 2?

I hope this is not the case with other VCs.
Can Indian Society produce Gates/Larry/Zuckerberg?
Stumbles Submission
I wrote software, sold it and made money.
My main point was that the ruggedness and superior build quality of Thinkpads used to have limited drawbacks: they were at worst 10 to 20% heavier than alternatives (and sometimes even lighter, like the 560 around 1995).
Not so anymore, especially in the smaller and lighter models: the X200 (and X300) are 120% (and 70%) heavier than a R500. That's why I finally reassessed my longstanding commitments to Thinkpads. But you are right to point that it may be less of an issue for the T series than for the X series: I would probably have stuck to Thinkpads had I been looking for a 15+ inches screen.
Funny, I assumed Larry = Ellison, not Page. Either way, can't believe Zuckerberg is being compared to those guys... Let's at least wait until Facebook IPO's or makes a billion dollars.
There are a ton of those out there, http://www.gobignetwork.com/ is one another is http://www.fundingpost.com/.

There are too many people out there trying to do the "start up" thing trying to get attention from too few people.

To put the number of "start ups" out there in perspective, 900 signed up for the Techcrunch 50 conference (http://www.techcrunch50.com/2008/blog/) and in order to sign up you cannot be launched yet and you must be able to launch on the conference date. So that means that 900 start ups signed up, each ready to start on a single day.
Just because someone provides an initial round for <10% equity and mimics the YC model, doesn't make them one.

1. Their application form is doc not a web based one
2. They ask for Lines of Code
You have a great domain name appspot.com.
How To Write Song
Yep, I see what you mean that most usefulness to the most people is most important.

However, I'm not really too worried about artists missing from the index. I am building up the list of included artists very slowly because I only use information sources that I think provide useful recommendations. Thus, the artists that are pulled into the index is somewhat random. The comprehensiveness will grow over time.
Oops, I mentally squished methylphenidate and dl-amphatamine together (Erdos took both) into methamphetamine. You're right, Erdos didn't take methamphetamine.
I'm building an app and found that thinking about the API from the get go made me design the app better. Why? Because the interface I'm building is just one example of how to interact with the API. The API is better and I understand my app better.
Most important: minimum 30 day return policy, no restocking fee if poss. You need to take the laptop to coffee shops, office, home, train, see what's annoying, like glossy screens may make you crazy. So i recommend Amazon, Costco, Target.com for returns policy

things that can render a laptop unusable:

- poor display, keyboard, or wireless card; excess fan noise or heat.

nice to have: fast Core 2 Duo, minimum 2G RAM, if you're doing lots of compiles, spidering (DOM tree extraction), database indexing, anyting that pegs CPU's for more than a couple minutes.

like everybody else, my first choices would be macbook or Macbook pro/ Vmware fusion/ Windows XP and ubuntu, or thinkpad with XP/grub/ubuntu (i don't think you can buy them with XP pre-loaded anymore). Toshiba, Dell, HP still sell XP pre-loaded (the "downgrade option") Macbook is only model < $1800 that has DVI out, which makes a big difference

Toshiba satellites aren't bad, mine's been reliable for 3 years. Read the amazon reviews.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=268438

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=197182
I'm very happy with it, the quality is generally good and I daily scan it for interesting articles in areas I'm currently keen on such as Erlang, etc.. As a programmer it's a valuable source and often I will read entire comment threads. That's rare nowadays as the signal to noise ratios are pretty bad at most sites.
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"How do you lock an HTML template"

Does Subversion give you an help? I don't know the ins and outs so maybe someone here could offer help. What if you checked the template out indefinitely (or for whatever time you need)? Then they couldn't check it out...
Here's a very important question: what do you bring to the table other than the idea?

This is important for many reasons. (1) You have to open up and tell some people about the idea if you expect to hire/attract someone to build it, and (2) what's to prevent them from taking the idea and building it without you? NDAs/Non-competes are one route but you might find a very difficult time getting good coders to sign them. So what makes you think that, if you told the idea to a technical person, they still need you around?
I agree. Ideally, the API you end up exposing should be something that you're already using to build services on top of yours (plus or minus a few modifications).

Also, check out Joshua Bloch's excellent presentation on how to design a good API: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3733345136856180693. One interesting point he makes is that you should avoid exposing a public API until you've successfully built three clients for it.
Live At Leeds
One idea that I haven't seen on here going forward is to request a deposit of 50% for upfront after deliverables have been agreed and 50% payable on delivery. Works great for sub-$2000 projects IMO.
I think the message wasn't "write concise blogs", it was create rather than critique. Yegge could be accused of doing both copiously.
First/Early mover, is (I think) a more useful concept from the market perceptive then the technology perspective.

eBay was the winner that emerged from the first tussle and as said above it was the first to hit a certain size. You might not want to call it a first mover but that is a semantic discussion. From the perspective of the market, it was.

The iphone certainly is a late entrant any way you slice the market. Late mover doesn't necessarily mean loser though.

Palm was a late entrant. I think what you get in that case is that the market had a few false starts. In that case, moving early would have been a mistake as the market didn't take off.

You could argue that the ipod was a first mover from a marketing perspective. The idea is that the product (in the minds of users) is so different that it is essentially a different market. grey area

But some areas definitely favour early movers. Interestingly, I don't think viaweb was one of them. You have a very large choice of online shop building software these days. There is not too much advantage in choosing the same software as everyone else. But I guess that wouldn't have been obvious at that point.
Things could have rolled out differently though 'Web malls' could have happened. In that case, being in early would have been a big deal.

Cheers for the link. Is there analysis that goes with it?
"Google's customers are the advertisers."

Technically. They do a great job of monetising search traffic but that's not the bottleneck.

Search engines win by attracting their customers' customers, users. Advertisers will follow the users.
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I'm fairly new here but I am pretty impressed by the tone.

The thing that I find interesting is the level you really notice how restrained people are. It's not more civil then a very relaxed in-person discussion. But when it's online, it seems extremely restrained.

I had almost written off online discussion if a forum over a certain size (such as comments on a blog). As an experiment, I think it's very impressive. Shows it can be done.
Linux Foundation launches killer development tool
Many thanks everybody - I'll be back with updates.
Tough Call.
But on the whole I think a bad idea.
Brocade and Foundry Revisited
How about Radware, indeed
Building your app on your on API or at least having your API always on your mind while planning your app is not a bad idea. It will definitely help you to get a well structured app. Might be difficult to squeeze it into you app afterwards.
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I've been here just a few months and tend to be far more of a reader than a contributor, but I've noticed lately that there are more stories here that I've already read.

I'm guessing most of us have the likes of Techcrunch and El Reg in our RSS readers, yet seemingly every other post from the former and quite a lot from the latter races to the top of the rankings here. One of the things I enjoy here is seeing articles on sites I've never been to before and might be interested in reading further.
unusable? I have a mb, and Mbp. I much prefer the mb keyboard. MVP is a bit squidgy although backlight makes up a little.
Knowing _why, if he expanded it out into a full article it would involve cartoon weasels, a grayscale cardboard-cutout version of Lee Iacocca and a smoked ham.
Yup, works great. You can buy one at http://apple.com/iphone/

/nosarcasm
Reading old threads like that (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35015) is actually very interesting as there is so much great insight in them, especially for newcomers. It is even better given we now have hindsight to aid us.

Even the YC flame-wars and trainwrecks are on another level compared to the rest of the internet in general.
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If your application is something for whom an API is useful, then encapsulate the application behind your API. This will allow you deal with the application at a somewhat abstract level, which will lead to better programming practises. So, write your tentative API first, program for the API, test with rough mock-ups, then write the front end.
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Those aren't our numbers. Those are David Hornik's. We accept a much higher proportion.
Ok, fixed both, thanks.
YouNoodle Is A Terrible Idea
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I think I agree with the people saying it can be good to develop your API in tandem with your app. However, I think that developing the API first leaves one in danger of being perfectionist and stops one adhering to ancient proverb, "Just fucking ship."
How did the moon get into orbit?
There are a bunch of (mostly primitive) ways to watch what's going on. I didn't notice it all that quickly, though.
Nah. Let's say you want to retrieve an artist from a query string.

First, define your API for this:

external->getArtist(string)

Now program the getArtist function. Then make a gui that uses this function, deploy it and you have already shipped your first version with a single API function.
When you have confidence (in other words, if you are really good and you know it), the incentive to look good goes down. You have a track record. Smart people know who you are.

Your casual remarks impress those that haven't thought things through as much as you have.

You can be yourself, using the same vocabulary and tone of voice you would use at home. On the other hand, people that are insecure or down on the status ladder have a huge incentive to impress others. Some of them will work hard to improve their situation; others will work hard to improve their looks--eventually becoming phony and disbertesque (but only the really good will be able to tell them apart; average people may be blind to it).

The mere tone of voice and choice of words tells it all. If you cannot believe they use these words and tone of voice at home, that's a good sign they're striving for the stereotype.

The other day I was interviewing this guy. He looks straight to me and talks as if we're equals (even though he's climbing that darn status ladder). His tone of voice and choice of words are informal, smoothly flowing. Finally, he brings up a thing or two I haven't thought. That's impressive; a sign that the guy _is really_ good, not posing.

He's on the team now. And poor me, for I have to keep it up to keep him on.
I am not sure I see the point of this. Either a distro is LSB or it isn't. This won't tell you anything you don't already know. And it exists to address a problem that only exists on Linux in the first place; none of the other major Unixes (OpenSolaris, FreeBSD, OSX etc) even have a need for something like this.
Django has a much different culture in regards to releases. It just takes a little getting used to. In Django-land, sticking with the .96 release is what's plain scary.

They release, bugfix and update very frequently. They just don't bother to make a big deal about packaging individual releases. From what I understand, most production web sites are using Django's latest trunk svn release, not some "random trunk revision". Almost all of the documentation reflects the changes in the latest svn release.
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