skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I switched from Windows to a macbook pro about 9 months ago and have mostly been happy. I'm irritated by the behavior of cut and paste regarding subfolders and files, and the different hotkeys slow me down. On the plus side, Terminal and shell scripting make the dos prompt look like a cheap toy. The hardware itself is beautifully done. There are far fewer instances where OS X annoys me, and I've yet to have a virus or spyware issue on OS X, and I haven't had to pay the antivirus "tax" of speed and money.

Overall, I prefer it to Windows, but I'm still thinking of switching to Ubuntu.
The Rise & Fall of An American Entrepreneurial Icon
Agreed, I hate Cygwin. Having to convert between Windows and Unix paths is incredibly annoying, among other things. It just doesn't feel nearly as seemless as OS X.
Yes it's worth it to switch. Took me about a month to get completely comfortable, but a lot of it is trial and error. It's like learning to drive on the opposite side of the road.

The keyboard commands aren't hard to master but by default, a lot of the keyboard options are turned off in OS X. System Settings > (Full Keyboard Access) [x] All controls

I can't live without Quicksilver, but the learning curve for it is pretty steep (more advanced commands).

http://osx.iusethis.com/ <- Good site to browse to discover OS X apps.

Hey if you have specific questions, email me and I'll be happy to answer them. I've helped a lot of people switch. Lots of times, you just need some tips to feel comfortable.
They should take his approach with Sharepoint. After all, that's kind-of a glorified CMS running on the MS Development Stack.
And by that I hope you mean "Anyone still using the abbreviation 'M$' for 'Microsoft'" and not "Anyone still using Microsoft products"
I actually feel like the pay is pretty fair. Its a pretty easy way to make enough money to live on. Obviously, we teach math, so we are pretty uniquely qualified, but we don't exactly generate a lot of "revenue" for the university, so I understand being paid a small amount.

However paying tuition brings up a whole new set of problems. As masters students, we take 2-3 upper level graduate classes, which are very challenging and demanding. We also take up a lot of the faculty's time with these courses. I am receiving something of value, that I probably should pay for. However, as graduate students, we are practically researchers for the faculty, so at some point we transition from pure consumers to net zero or net producers as we become more experienced. Perhaps by teaching one of the universities courses, I should receive the education and a small stipend in return? Its all about expectations.
Except some stuff like proper java 1.6 I am very happy with my Mac. Switching from windows to mac is a good choice. If you would have been a Linux user, I'd say maybe stick with it :)

Eclipse works like a charm on OS X.

Instead of VmWare you might consider http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallels,_Inc. ... or well, actually you don't need any virtualization at all for what you are using?
Demanding benefits or high pay isn't the only thing they've extracted. The GM Job Bank is one of the most dehumanizing things I've ever heard of. The UAW is only considering dropping it now. (http://www.detnews.com/2005/autosinsider/0510/17/A01-351179....)
This argument is totally spurious. You can find terrible, brain-bending libraries in every language. Why is ruby a write-off because of ActiveRecord?

Seems like the implicit argument is that Root-Object modifications are unmaintainable. But the reality is that assertion really isn't backed up anywhere.

There are lots of valid complaints against Ruby. This is not one of them.
If you want to go native, this list of Mac counterparts might help you:

Eclipse - There is a Mac version.
UltraEdit - Coda or Textmate.
SQLYog - Sequel Pro.
WinSCP - Cyberduck, YummyFTP. Tons of clients. Check out ExpanDrive for some real fun.
TortoiseSVN - Syncro SVN.
Adobe CS3 - There is a Mac version.
Camtasia Studio - Screenflow.
MS Office - There is a Mac version.
WAMP - There is a similar MAMP. Then again, you are running on a platform
that has all those goodies pre-installed and ready-to-go!

Anyone have some additional suggestions?

PS: Virtualization has a cost associated with it. I only fire mine up for testing. Make sure you max out the RAM you get on the machine.
Thoughts About Thoughts About Autotraders
And AIR Linux 64-bit can't use the keyring properly. If only I could get one of the shoes twitter clients to work out of the box.
Just in case anyone's still confused, yes, fruit, vegetables and animals are living organisms ;-)
I recently made the switch and my #1 objection to doing it: the keyboard shortcuts. I've actually mastered most of the shortcuts in about 1-2 days.

The main reason I made the switch is because I am going to do iPhone app development and that's pretty difficult on a PC.

So far it's been pleasant. I am pretty impressed by OSX, definitely some advantages over XP and this is pretty much understood and repeated, but Apple goes out of their way to make everything work nicely. My freakin' keyboard lights up when the room gets dark. That's pretty cool.
"Can't" is very different from "can, but is very ugly."

Most of the "problems" with Ruby that are often quoted are the result of bad programming and management decisions. Ruby puts a lot of power into the hands of the programmer (not as much as IO [the langauge]) and with great power comes...flexible re-factoring! Thankfully, it should be easy to re-factor the offending code, send a note to the programmer about what you changed and why and chalk it up to a learning experience.

Sufficiently typed languages make re-factoring very easy.

If you are having a hard time debugging your Ruby, you are doing it wrong.

As for ActiveSupport's littering of Object, meh. Rails really changes Ruby. If you stick to the Rails way, then it shouldn't cause a problem in Rails projects, and it isn't a problem outside of rails projects. Don't like it? Well, there are plenty of good Ruby alternatives for the web (Sinatra!!! Also, merrrrrrrrrrrrb,) and you don't have to have everything in one app.
"You've probably heard it a thousand times, but the best code is the code that you don't have to write."

I think this guy is a chump. Writing things yourself is a luxury. If you have the time to spend on writing it yourself, you have more of a chance understand what is going on. Also some software is still written for a specific task (as in, not to be everything to everyone). If this is the case, and you have the luxury to write everything yourself you will know how your software works, AND you can optimize for a specific task, rather than being general enough to be used elsewhere.

It is also my opinion that it is good to know as much as possible about what you work with. So to take on libraries just so you can skimp out makes you a tad ignorant.

"Refuse to buy them more than one monitor."

I have coded entire projects on an Everex Cloudbook, with a single 7" screen. If lack of dual monitors kills your productivity then you probably suck at coding. ;)

"Buy cheap hardware."

Again, entire projects, Cloudbook, $300. This guy is just a winy chump haha!
A better test of if QB scouts are doing well is if the #1 QB pick turns out to be the best QB in the draft.

In most of those years you listed, there was a better qb left on the table after the first qb pick.
Yea, it is fairly trivial to enable logging every time a method is overridden or added to any class in ruby. Dynamic code inspection like in JavaScript would be pretty cool, too.
"... Is TechCrunch a leading VC/Startup news source? ..."

I'm not saying TC is a good news source, simply noting that it's consistently lists high on posters & voters minds. TC is closer to 'The register' than I'd like.
Sending SMS using Andriod Intents
Seriously, seriously. This isn't Reddit. This is Y!Hack. These kinds of comments aren't necessary. I'm tempted to flag this.
Interview with Legendary Illustrator Christoph Niemann
While I'm not a fan of Gladwell's analysis (I agree that he has a tendency to pick data that supports his point, while ignoring evidence that contradicts it), I did like the message of this piece.

I.e., we should let more people try their hand at teaching, with the idea that most will probably not be good at it.

This assumes, of course, that none of the failures are allowed to be tenured, and that teaching can be made an attractive career choice.
I recently switched from linux to mac, and I would not pay the apple tax again. I force myself to use the fisher price os they call osx, to justify the apple tax i payed for the hardware. But being a windows to mac user may be a better transition. For those that say use Vmware.. why not just buy the cheaper hardware and run windows. The hardware is all commodity, and you are not getting any benefits from the hardware, compared to x86 vs ppc days. Mainly is a software point of view. From what I've found in ubuntu repository any software I ever wanted or needed I could find for free. To make osx usable for me, I've had to pay for quite a bit of software. I find it much less productive.. my best example is .. on standard keyboard layout .. press ctrl + c , and notice how your hand is shaped. Its already in an extended position for the next key. Now on mac to copy its command key (apple or win key) + c ... you hand is curled into like a ball.. and no matter how long you use it, its still awkward, and not as natural when typing. For me I wanted the *nix environment + the stability, and osx does deliver, but the price is your computing freedom.
I'd go with one step, dragging the app over to applications, (I admit it's a bit wonkey) over the 5 separate windows AIR manages to spawn.
You do know that you can have a role in the negotiations?
If you start attending the union meetings you will find out very quickly whether you think the unions position is reasonable or not.

If you decide to break the strike, the right thing to do is to withdraw from the union first. Although, I would point out that a strike like this is only one step in a long drawn out negotiation, it would not be happening if the negotiating team thought they had a better alternative.
Pay the obese to lose weight, says study
Rock drummers 'are top athletes'
I'd like to hold the opposite view: There is randomness but the world is still deterministic. Just imagine there was a big one-time table of random numbers generated with the world. Whenever a random bit is needed, it's gets taken from the table.
Space elevator trips could be agonisingly slow
Be an individual and do what you think is most rational.

No chance in hell I'd let a mob of idiots influence my decision making process.
I don't want to request things that are unsustainable

It's not your job to keep your own salary down. Don't negotiate against yourself.

Do universities voluntarily avoid raising tuition because high tuitions are becoming "unsustainable"? Why, no. They do not.

Did the independent contractors who built the university's new athletic complex voluntarily lower their bids to allow the university to use some of its big endowment to pay you a better wage instead? Why, no. They did not.

The proper way to negotiate is to ask for more than you expect to settle for. Smart union organizers understand this. Let the university wail about how "unsustainable" their budget is: That's their problem, not yours. Indeed, it's particularly hilarious for you to care about the state of the university's budget or profit margin, because in a handful of years you will be gone, one way or another. It's not like the university is offering you a long-term career path. So turn 'em upside down and shake 'em.

You don't have to go out on strike. You could always just continue to be screwed, like all the rest of us who went to grad schools where organizing was not an option.
Hm, isn't it only relevant because Apple forces people to use it? If there was a public vote for the programming language for the iPhone, would people really vote for Objective-C?
Once upon a time I bought a large can of piracetam powder from a random Internet site, wondering why the pills were so much more expensive than the powder. I found out with my first drink -- dear god, the bitterness! I drank a few gulps, gave up, and haven't tried it since.
What Are Your Startup's Core Values?
You can creative a competitive advantage by having and promoting strong Core Values - A Map For The Ethical Bumps In The Startup Road.
When it comes to programming, I found Xcode to be a much nicer IDE over Visual Studio. On the downside, I can't find many games for the Mac at my local stores (*I don't want a dual boot or VM).
Fun CS Quiz
It's not really a hacker quiz - it's more academic CS terms. But it's fun.
I liked it, here I was slurping my Irish breakfast tea and it struck an immediate cord ;)

I second the affiliate wisdom.

All teas are not created equally, so one of things that is important to me as a tea drinker is sourcing good teas, as part of the recipe's would be great if I could identify and get high quality components or teas based on recommendations.

To me at least, bags of tea doesn't really sound appealing and isn't specific enough to make these, eg do I use earl grey, irish breakfast, scottish breakfast, ... I would characterise these as flavoured teas, but there's also tea recipe's using components, eg 1 part assam to 2 parts kenyan (or a strong black) with lemon rind for example which is kind of the level of detail I'd be looking for.

Searching for ingredients with assam currently doesn't find anything, so could be a tad smarter maybe, eg find all recipes with black tea in this case. Also brewing etc is really important so I'd be interested in things like brewing techniques as well as recipe's etc.
Yes, you can pin the noncompetitiveness of the US auto industry on its labor arrangements.

A major reason the Japanese run more efficient factories in the US, with US workers, is that they aren't constrained by the same inflexible union hiring/firing/workplace rules.

And US companies do have significantly higher costs per similar car for pay and benefits (including health and retirement), due to misguided levels set in fat-year collective bargaining.

A 'bailout' plan: adopt for factories in the rust belt the exact same contracts, rules, and pay rates that work for profitable factories in the southern US.
Review my startup: Snaplog.com
Hi, Snaplog is a Photo Blogging app. Works as an iPhone app or just as a standalone webapp. The motivation behind it was to make a site that is all about the photos. Simple. And no, I haven't heard of Flickr. ;)

I would love to get anyone's feedback.
Out of the 9 years listed it really only happened 3 times that a better QB was left - 2000 (Tom Brady), 2002 (David Garrard - debatable, but he's starting and Carr isn't), and 2005 (Aaron Rodgers). So 6 times out of 9 the best one was taken first - that seems pretty good.

If you go back even further I'd imagine this trend would continue - even Gladwell's main example (Ryan Leaf) was taken second to the best QB playing today (Manning).
Very nice website. If you could add coffee, you could count me as a lifetime member. Oh. I would change the color scheme. Maybe adding some brown would not hurt or making the green more minty.
The OS X UNIX backend is definitely compelling as all of my web apps are hosted on Linux. I was thinking about just switching to Linux, but the Linux desktop just doesn't seem as polished as Mac or Windows. Although, I will be switching my old Dell into a Linux test server running CentOS.
5% of the children had one or more credit reports using their social security number.
no, you are just trading an "uncool" closed platform that bends you over for an apparently "cool" one. their hardware is unimpressive commodity stuff, and i don't even think osx is interesting. if you can't figure out ubuntu, maybe developing software isn't for you. the day is coming when people will reject steve jobs psyco-level control freak pointless upgrade cycle and macs will be uncool again...just get out ahead of the trend now and look that much hipper later.
arent higher insurance cost (eg due to higher chances of heart diseases) better incentives?
Yeah, Garrard/Carr is debatable. Garrard wouldn't be starting over Eli Manning either. So it may be 7/9.
Facebook is such a noticeable absence. It'll be nice when they are open. Not that I'm holding my breath.
The closest thing I have seen to what you are describing is Amazon's new iPhone app. Users take a picture of any item, then the pictures are routed to Mechanical Turk where a real person tries to match the product in the picture with the same or similar product in Amazon's inventory. It works for Amazon because they have a large, low cost workforce in Mechanical Turk workers and a massive inventory.

A service like you are describing would likely have to be people powered in the same way as Amazon's iPhone App. I could imagine the revenue model working as either a revenue share on sold good the way Amazon does or as a marketplace for furniture shoppers and interior decorators/designers (i.e. you post some photos and a budget and decorators/designers bid to get the business of helping you find the right furniture, etc). Not sure how lucrative either of these models would be.
I knew switzerland had personal certificates, but not spain; is it common in Europe?

I would be curious to know more.
Treasury Bills Trade at Negative Rates as Haven Demand Surges
I found equivalent apps for everything except TortoiseSVN (Versions or SCPlugin seems like a fit). I would only use the VM for testing on IE and a few Windows-only apps.

Keyboard shortcuts are one of my big concerns -- I'm a big Ctrl key user on Windows.
I had a great question in a job interview yesterday

For what it's worth, this has recently become a 'standard' interview question for developers. I predict that people will start game it by having a canned response, thereby rendering it virtually useless---just like all other standard interview questions.
4 Easy-to-Use Microformat Tools to Beef Up Your Site
yeah its amazing that apple touts themselves as pro-user but their external keyboards are without a doubt the most craptastic worthless keyboards on the market. they look cool but are utterly useless for prolonged use

and yes apple takes your freedom and will slowly turn you into an idiot. we're software developers damnit, we're supposed to be interested in how the computer works under the hood, not looking to put a gramma-friendly interface on everything. i don't understand developers who look for "just works" at the expense of "show me the code"
I recently (<1 month) switched to Mac from Debian. As others have suggested, the initial comfort period might be lil difficult to cope with, but it wont feel like a curve. Things are pretty the same (Eclipse, dir structure, shell etc.), but I havent regretted the "change" yet.. plus the community is good, with nice treatment for apps as in Ubuntu..
CPaul - you beat me to the punch. I was just about to post this.

I like this entry - all too often the Core Values in books are from big companies and are not applicable to most startups.

Nice to see 'real' Core Values that have impacted a real startup.
As it happens, I advised him on template choice; I recommended both Jinja2 and Mako, and he ended up choosing Mako because it supports embedded arbitrary Python blocks, and Jinja2 does not.
not to turn this into sports news but:

2003: romo
2004: roethlisburger
2006: cutler
2007/2008: way too early

Historically speaking: steve young, montana, marino, and I could go on were not thought of highly by scouts

I thought it was commonly accepted that scouting QBs is a guessing game.
Global demand for oil to plummet
How about the linux to mac switch? Has anyone tried that before?
Any mention of Apple sure gets your dander up, doesn't it?
yet another front end to amazon's cloud. when will it stop?
I switched from Linux to OS X several years ago. I tend to live on the command line so my experience is a bit different.

First, I installed Fink which brings dselect and friends to MacOS X. Fink let me install all the packages from Linux that I use. For giggles, I installed the Apple X server and ran KDE from Fink. It worked but felt sluggish. I also realized this was very pointless and stopped doing it after 5 minutes. Running X apps with the Apple Window Manager in rootless mode feels fast.

I have Virtual PC on my G4 Powerbook. It isn't fast but lets me test stuff in Windows when I have to. I used to work off a Macbook Pro in an old job and found VMWare Fusion and Parallels were fantastic when I needed to do work in another OS.

Overall I like it because its a UNIX I don't have to spend time administering.

I notice your usage patterns/programs are different than mine. Hopefully the perspective helps at least. Good luck!
is it april 1 already? TEA RECIPES????
Hmmm, who's cherrypicking data? ;)

2000: Chad Pennington, Pick 18, Career Rating: 89.7; Marc Bulger, pick 168, Career Rating: 85.7, Tom Brady, Pick 199, Career Rating: 92.9

2001: Mike Vick, Pick 1, Career Rating: 75.7; Drew Brees, Pick 32, Career Rating: 89.1

2002: David Carr, Pick 1, Career Rating: 74.6; David Garrard, Pick 108, Career Rating: 85.4

2003: Carson Palmer, Pick 1, Career Rating: 88.9; Tony Romo, undrafted, Career Rating: 96.6

2004: Eli Manning, Pick 1, Career Rating: 76.4; Big Ben, Pick 11, Career Rating: 89.9; JP Losman, Pick 22, Career Rating: 76.9

2005: Alex Smith - Noted; Aaron Rodgers, Pick 24, Career Rating, 89.8; Jason Campbell, Pick 25, Career Rating: 80.5; Matt Cassell, Pick 230, Career Rating 84.2

2006: Vince Young, Pick 3, Career Rating: 68.6; Jay Cutler, Pick 11, Career Rating: 88.6

2007: JaMarcus Russell, Pick 1, Career Rating: 67.5 - uhhh, "top" QB

2008: Matt Ryan, Pick 3, Career Rating: 92.0 - very good - so far

So, of the last nine years, the top QB taken has turned out to be the best QB of that year, maybe once. Russell just isn't good. He won't be starting for long. And Ryan, it's too soon to really tell. Meanwhile, QBs taken, sometimes very, later have often been as good, if not better, than the top QB's in 6 of the last nine drafts you cite. There are just as many guys like Brady, Bulger, Garrard, Romo, and Cassell (picked well behind "names") as there are top picks that have panned out.

EDIT: Forgot Romo.
One more data point. I switched and found it very painful to internalize keyboard commands while still having to do Windows work (i.e. switching back & forth). Once I went "mac-only", it got much easier, but now I suck at using Windows again.

Was it worth it? No. You can be fully productive in which ever platform you choose: Windows, Mac, or Linux. Each platform is fully mature. Productivity comes from your commitment to learning your tools and practicing.

There is an advantage to Linux as it allows you to truly learn (freedom). But you do loose time tweaking and yak shaving.
I'll give you 2003, not 2004, and I'd lump 2006 into too early to say for sure though you're probably right.
I drink coffee too, but are there really enough different coffee recipes to have a social network around them? (I'm much more into tea than coffee, and have just in the past month started on coffee so this is a serious question for you). I like the idea of having maybe different categories, tea, coffee, but would there be enough variations of coffee to do that type of thing?
Here's Paul Graham on the switch to Mac:

http://www.paulgraham.com/mac.html
Your layout gets broken when increasing the font size (Ctrl +).

Other than that, a great website!