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Interesting discussion. I had to buy a laptop recently and as much as I like the look of Mac's Air it didn't have a right Control key. That just frustrated me as I use Emacs and I rely on a working right Control key so much. I know that there are tools to remap keys. Tried various ones, but at the end of the day I was trying to make Mac act as X Windows and it just wasn not smooth. So I bought Samsung's 900 3XA. Just as light, has the right Control key and all of the hardware components are supported with the latest FreeBSD 9.
There are many in the other extreme, who, like me, only read comments!
I'm glad there are companies that try to compete with Apple. I think it isn't healthy for anyone when there is a dominating presence. But I see no reason not to deride products which are clones of other companies' products with no improvements (or that are in fact worse).

Put it another way, I don't see a reason to automatically grant extra lenience or extra credit to anyone that produces a clone of an Apple product. This isn't golf and there are no handicaps. Either make a better product, or be ridiculed.

It's also worth remembering that all our deriding, ridiculing and arguing counts for little in the real world. As Jobs nicely put it in an interview (paraphrased): if we build something people want then they buy it and we get to come to work another day.
Ubuntu make a proper hardware device and use it to challenge the Mac hegemony? I'm so buying that. Seriously. I've been trying for a decade to get off the Apple crack, and as soon as someone delivers an Ubuntu laptop with as much style and functional design goodness as my Macbook Pro, I'm there.
I don't think so. It's a rip off when they copy everything, and copy it badly.

For instance, the keyboard design on the Mac has "separated" keys because it's needed to give better structural support to the unibody frame. It's not just a "cool design thing". Jony Ive talks about it here: http://youtu.be/t0fe800C2CU?t=2m46s

Watching other companies copy this keyboard design in many ways resembles the first people trying to fly by flapping their cloth covered wings. "It looks exactly the same as what the bird does, dammit, why isn't it working?!"

Now, imagine how many different, _better_ products one could have if only more companies had someone as obsessed with product design as Ive, and gave him some authority.

What if some laptop manufacturer made a thinner, more sturdy ultraportable design that for some reason didn't need this keyboard design? It wouldn't have to look anything like the MBA, and it wouldn't be accused of being a rip-off.
No doubt apple (read steve jobs) has taken inspiration from a lot of products and features. But apple is more onto tweaking and making it better with even effort on design and user friendliness. Everyone knew touch but apple made it useable. Take an idea or inspiration and tweak it to perfection so it becomes revolutionary and apple become genius! Think you can do it?
"Tweaking a button and seeing conversions increase 8-fold is a beautiful thing. Seeing an hour of work turn into 120k visits is magical."

If you are a starter at HN, then do not get misguided by the quote above. If you are aiming for using blog writing as SEO for product marketing and reaching out to new customers then it is good effort. But if you are looking to get eyeballs for adv revenue then stop right there. There are better things you can do with your time.
Well, hardly regardless of language--using the Maybe monad is more elegant in Haskell, for example. The beauty there is that your functions don't need to ever worry about getting null input (pronounced Nothing in Haskell), and you can trivially compose functions that possibly return Nothing with functions that don't.

Also, I'm not really sure how a pattern like this would work in Java, although this could just be because my Java is (thankfully) going rusty.
The trackpad on a Windows Air-style laptop could be a big win. As amazing as the Macbook trackpad is on OS X, it's still incredibly flaky on Windows.
Not saying they use that phrase. Just trying to give a shorthand way to express how other people routinely seem to view me. And one thing that seems to happen is that things I do for perfectly logical reasons (like sit up front because I don't see well) gets routinely interpreted as evidence of some kind of negative/socially unacceptable personality trait.

I don't think I am the only person people do this to. In fact, I think such erroneous attributions are the norm, not the exception. In my case, it frequently seems to get framed as "feminazi" or "dragon lady" or something along those lines -- ie some form of accusation that I am a woman who is aggressive to a socially unacceptable degree for a woman. I strongly suspect that many of the things I do which get negative reactions and chalked up to "ego" would be viewed as perfectly acceptable -- or even humble and self-effacing -- in a man.
"I seriously considered getting an Air as my new laptop recently--and have found their recent laptop designs a little garish. There is a gigantic, light-up logo in the back!"

That's not a recent design. Apple notebooks have had a lit logo on the back of the lid for the last 13 years[1], starting with the PowerBook G3 Wall Street.

In any case, this 'problem' is easily remedied by covering it up with a sticker. That's what production companies do[2] when they want to use a notebook in a TV show or motion picture that doesn't have 'promotional considerations'[3].

"if I could, I'd get an all matte black laptop with no labels at all"

Apple's black MacBook[4] and Google's copy[5], the CR48, came close. Matte black, barely any labels.

[1] http://denniswever.dyndns.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/0...

[2] http://www.geeksugar.com/TV-Shows-Cover-Up-Apple-Logo-Mac-La...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_placement

[4] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fa/MacBook.j...

[5] http://news.cnet.com/8301-31021_3-20025349-260.html
What exactly do you mean by "companies like WB"?

Companies pursuing aggressive strategies against copyright infringement?

Companies with multi-million-dollar budgets funding expensive projects like movies or records?
> What to Submit

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Could anyone explain why this is on the front page? The only piece of information in this rant is that there is some new Asus notebook that looks like a MB Air.

Apparently at least 75 people's intellectual curiosity is very easily satisfied...
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> Russia's ability to safely ferry US astronauts into space over the next few years

Nothing to do with each other. The Russian success rate with low to mid earth orbit[1] is much, much better than NASA's[2]. Soyuz is the most reliable, and probably the cheapest, way to get a payload or people into earth orbit[3].

The shuttle was a disaster. Over-engineered, too expensive and not safe. The Russian technology (both capsule and boosters) which was a decade older proved in the long term to be more practical in every way.

And NASA has also had its share of problems with missions to Mars.

[1] only Soyuz 11 failed, cabin depressurization on return, since 1967, out of 112. 40+ years now since the last failure.

[2] 135 launches, two failures, too many delays and other problems to count

[3] http://www.esa.int/esaMI/Delta_Mission/SEM8XK57ESD_0.html
Steve Jobs infamously sold all bout $1 of his initial stake in Apple, depriving him of untold riches. Pincus has been adamant about retaining as large a stake personally as possible and dictatorial control over the board.
This really depends on what you mean by "modern statically typed language". If you mean something like Haskell, I agree with you but there are too many other differences to make Haskell and Ruby comparable. If you mean Java, then I'm not sure it prevents that many problems, but it does make developers less productive. If you mean something else (C#? Scala? F#? C++?) then I don't have enough experience to comment.
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The problem is not "offering [...] competition to Apple", it's building an inferior copy to their lines. Note the part about it being inferior, because that is the issue.

If this laptop was better than the Air, or significantly cheaper, it would not get panned. But it's not, and it's not.

> Why we (or this class of person) have chosen to deride it I don't understand.

Because it's garbage?
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As a seasoned armchair holiday-maker, I love this. Maybe a 'you may also like...' function to widen horizons?
Great work!

Could you talk more about your room concierge service? Are you automating the request procedure or does the room concierge team contact the hotels?

I'm curious what the process looks like from the hotel perspective.
I actually call it Terra. And Sol. And Lua. But that's because I'm Portuguese. :)
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I think the point is that Array(h) destroys the Hash, whereas [h].flatten will leave it intact, adding another unexpected gotcha to Array().

Array's terrible friend Integer() implicitly crashed my app in production before, so found that interesting to know; not necessarily related to your talk though. :)
The best non-mac laptops are Panasonic's Toughbook C1 (inheritor of the T series). They double up as weaponry, too.
Sure you can say that, but you can't say that all governments suppress dissent equally.
When the iPhone was released I thought it would be the end of hover. I know that's what I think about when I see something like a menu which only works on hover.
Comparing Flash, HTML and Unity's future prospects.
When is the last time someone earned a lot of money from blog? Maybe five years ago. These days blogs are only used to get traffic, either directly or via SEO, to pages where you sell the real product to the customer.
I think records are only "expensive" to make when using creative accounting to screw over artists...
DVDs didn't have to struggle to become as good as VHS. They started out better.
Ask HN: Backend/Frontend : Work Distribution Dilemma
Two of us are looking to build a web application. We are both CS majors (still in college) and have basic programming experience. This is our first programming project beyond the curriculum.
We were looking to use:
1. Ruby on Rails
2. HTML, CSS and jQuery

The dilemma is this:
Since we are a two man team, and we are looking to build a web app targeting a few hundred users at launch, how should we split the work?
Should we both learn all the technologies and work together every step of the way? Or should we split the work in the backend+frontend (1+2)? Why?

Note 1: We have never used the languages mentioned above. We would prefer to stick to these languages unless there is a strong case for otherwise.
Note 2: We have five odd months to get a prototype ready.
I disagree about the point this presentation starts from. It's a bad code that's refactored in a way that I'm not sure is more clear, but definitely makes it longer... Why not split the work to make the process clearer instead of trying to flatten what's already there? Some concerns I'd have:

Making sure message is an array even if it's X instead. Why do that at all? Why is there an "else" in the first place? It's not like you can support every possible type, so why not say - either it's an array, or you pass a wrong type?

Why is the code for obtaining message in that function? Why is a similar code for destination there? Why is EPIPE being treated the same as normal response from the process?

How about starting with this instead:

messages = normalise_messages(message)
command = construct_command(options)
output = get_results(messages, command)
@logger.info("Wrote to #{destination_description(options[:out])}")
output

The rest is implementation details...
Usability vs cool UI is always a tough one. The ones who can do both at the same time are geniuses. That's why Apple is always on top.
You are disrupting the disrupt word.
It is generally not true that nothing exists at 127.0.0.2. For example I have a local Apache server running.

If you are using the hosts file to block the resolution of domains, you can use 0.0.0.0 which is really false. The blocked domain will not be resolved, because the operating system will recognize 0.0.0.0 as false, and a local webserver running on port 80 will not see the requests.

The hosts file is not optimized for large amounts of data, so if this is used to block an excessive number of domains and subdomains, the whole process of name resolution will be slowed down.

The good thing is that a block via the hosts file applies to the whole system and all browsers.

Another bad thing is that the hosts file does not support something like wildcards or regular expressions, each domain or subdomain has to be blocked individually.
Interesting read.

BTW, Java seems rather poor choice for a blog post about threading performance issues. It goes to great length trying to optimize stuff but it seems to me that switching programming language would be much more efficient and less time consuming.
If the startup is struggling or making a pivot, it might need to lay off employees who are performing fine.

Then you make those positions redundant (or in british english terminology, you 'let them go'). It's perfectly legal (in EU which doesn't have this at-will stuff) to say "We no longer need a Django programmer, since we're moving to Ruby on Rails now, we know you're a great django programmer, but we're letting you go". You don't need 'at-will employment' to have this advantage. There are some limitations, like you actually have to make the position redundent, you can't hire your brother as a django developer the next day. But that's the point, it balances out the power.
Always surprises me that developers let platform makers dictate what they can use and what they can't.

If developers chose to use stuff on the basis of what they as developers think should be used - and if that meant iphone users couldn't use them - guess who would ultimately win that battle? Not Apple.

IE would have died years ago if developers had adopted that culture en masse.
We finally killed Flash and now we get this.
I'm not sure. For any given subject, the society has a majority of people largely ignorant of that subject.

Here, since BigContent managed to call some types of state-granted monopolies "Intellectual Property" and "Protection", the vast majority of people tend to agree with them by default (at least on principle, before they actually download something). Property and protection sound like good things, right?

Now if you meant "society" to exclude people who are totally ignorant of the subject (which would be reasonable if we found a fair, reliable way to exclude people from voting on subjects they don't know enough about), then of course I agree with you.
I disagree. A MacBook Air with an unusable trackpad is emphatically not okay- it's absolutely worthless, ruined by one component. (At least if you don't fall into the USB-mouse-on-a-laptop camp.)

The MacBook Air was never about specs, where the Zenbook might be okay (except for weight and height).
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That would be right if this was about platforms but it's not, it's about interaction. If you can't hover then why depend on it?

Also, it's easy to add a touch event to do the same as the hover event, it's up to developers to do it. I was just thinking about the dependency of hover which need to go.
Back in my high school robotics days, I did use a Toughbook and it was actually very good. The ergonomics are not compromised on too much, and I suspect there are tools that are less durable than Toughbooks.

However, in my current incarnation as a dainty EECS major, the closest I get to a machine shop is the CS building beside it, so a Toughbook--while indubitably awesome--would be a bit of overkill.

Also, the tacit assumption that macs are the best laptop is, I think, flawed--there's no question that they're good, but there are plenty of cases where there are better options...
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Cool to see memcached evolving, a few days ago I had a problem in Redis that was reported to be slow with setting big values in the order of 1 MB, what I did was to profile both memcached (that performed well with the 1 MB payload) and Redis with the same work load, checking with osx Instruments what was the difference in the trace, and this allowed me to easily fix a few problems in Redis (now merged into unstable).

I'll surely check the changes in 1.4.10 as well to see if there is some good idea I can reuse for Redis. The memcached code base is very nice to read.
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Touchscreen issues notwithstanding, hover effects like this are awful for usability. The hover overlay completely obscures the original image, making it impossible to read the snippet and enjoy the image at the same time.

The animation effect is more garish than anything, but this is a probably a personal quibble. It takes 200 ms for the hover effects to finish loading. I'd rather have the hover transition instantly, so I can spend less of my life watching text fade in.

The Chrome Web Store uses this to excess, with sliding panes flying everywhere. It looks great, but it's really painful to use.
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Ouch. Hope you have better luck next time. Don't give up.
Interesting, I wasn't aware that Google hired Mr.doob
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I've read that there a quite a lot of handicapped people that are against these signs, and separation.
Completely agreed.

If you don't have a product, the benefits are more along the lines of finding your voice, learning what resonates with the people you care about, and getting comfortable putting content out where people will see it.

I mentioned the numbers in the sense that I used to think traffic and on-site behaviour was a magical thing that "happened". It was more about having that "aha moment" of how it all works than about doing anything particularly profitable.

Given all that, I think new & future founders would do well to try blogging for a while, reaching out to whoever your future customers would be. It lays a bunch of strong foundational skills that are tough to internalize through reading case studies.
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how can u share something with someone if they are not on google plus?

The fact that adding them would result in an invite seemed like basic logical deduction to me. They could always be clearer, but where does it end...
Or if you fall into the power-user camp that uses the keyboard almost exclusively like I do (this is both with a nice touchpad and even on desktops with a physical mouse).

The newer touchpads like the ones on my laptop and Macs are okay, but constantly switching between that and the keyboard is ultimately slower than just using the keyboard. Once you get used to navigating around with the keyboard as much as possible--assuming your OS supports it well--the quality of a touchpad stops mattering.

I am now consistently annoyed by web apps and programs that force me to use the mouse unless I really have to.

Ultimately though, my point wasn't really so much about the laptop as about the tone of the article, which your post doesn't seem to address. Even if the Asus deserves derision, and antagonistic response is still not necessary, and still generates more views and comments.

The worst bit is that--by virtue of replying here and commenting on the thread--I've shown that his tactics are successful.
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It's not wrong to have a reaction to words - they have connotations and power (particularly expletives), and people often use words carefully to manipulate their audience (for good or bad).

There's no suggestion that the cringe is an unhealthy personal reaction - quite the opposite, it's an observational cringe, and the implication seems to be that Zach would do better without swearing, since he already has good arguments and an attentive audience.

Sometimes personal therapy is a good idea - and sometimes it's a good idea to call people out on their manipulative tendencies (I think you're pulling this thread off-topic, for example).
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Exactly right.

The thing I don't like about hover is that at core, it's a leap of faith -- you're asking your user to mouse around blindly (like Myst, anyone remember that frustration?) until the page rewards their fumbling with some sort of UI treat. It's a symptom of inefficient and poor design.

(Having said that, these are lovely animations.)
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Aren't the emerging two groups each others control group?
What could you gain from your proposed control experiment?
Working at a different startup every Friday for a year...