skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Overall, there really isn't one specific pain point in particular that I have with Windows. However, OS X seems to offer some enhanced functionality for web development (e.g. UNIX underpinnings, MAC-only development tools). There also seems to be a lot of momentum for web development on the Mac these days, but I didn't want to switch systems based on that alone. I'm looking for gains in productivity.

My Dell Dimension system is about 4 years old (Pentium 4/3.2Ghz running Windows XP) and has required a new power supply, RAM and the HD seems to be next. The power supply failed at around 14 months (I only had a one year warranty -- bad move in hindsight) and Dell support sent me around in circles for a month to get a replacement. I ended up finding one on eBay. If I ever purchase another Dell, it would be from their business division (OptiPlex or Precision) which seems to offer much better support and use standard parts.
Agreed. I mostly browse HN when I'm at work where it's Windows XP. Otherwise I'm on a mac at home.
I think delivery is important. If you are showing enthusiasm while explaining the different concepts and possibilities it's often infectious. If you can do a demo-- awesome!

When dealing with money-focused people it helps to reassure them that you can support yourself by consulting when needed.

Some people are very fearful and often think everything will always go wrong. Those are the most difficult people to reach. I often give up once I detect someone has that characteristic. Just sort of change subjects and find common ground somewhere else that does not involve talking about risk, success and failure.
Mac OS X for my home machine (MBP)
Linux for servers (Debian or CentOS usually)
> If you want to use Linux, run it in a VM on Windows; or use Cygwin for basic apps.

Strike that. Reverse it!
I find Vista to be a huge step backwards.

I know it's a bit of a sport to bash Vista, but there are loads of things that I don't like... In particular eyecandy that has zero functional purpose.

Admittedly, XP was reaching a good level of maturity.
Then there's a guy who started doing the SICP problems in Arc:

http://sam.bluwiki.com/blog/2008/05/working-through-sicp-in-...

And, here's a page of translations of the problem-solutions into a whole bunch of other computer languages:

http://www.codepoetics.com/wiki/index.php?title=Topics:SICP_...

(via http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1826)
Are you running Linux in a VM or dual-boot?
I didn't think it was that bad; most of it could have come from The Pragmatic Programmer. Certainly, nearly everyone mentioned netbeans, but it was usually in the context of a generic point such "learn to use your tools really well; for example in netbeans...".
The percentage of people who have the necessary talents isn't huge, but it's on the 1-10% order of magnitude, and there are plenty of capable people-- small-business CEOs, public-sector executives-- who would do a stellar job of it, given the opportunity.

If this was true, don't you think some business somewhere would have figured it out? It' naive to think businesses and their stock holders don't do what's in their best interest.

As for small business owners - I know a few that pull down million-dollar a year profit. I think small businesses are often more profitable for the individual than being an executive at a big business. I think being an owner of a successful small business is infinitely more desirable than an executive manager at a large company from a personal perspective. I think it's comparing apples and oranges.

"CEO talent" is not some rare natural gift that very people have.

I markedly disagree. It's difficult job. Emotionally, physically, mentally. As the size of the company increases so does the demand on your time. Every moment of your time is taken up and you almost exclusively deal with difficult problems and marginal decisions. Likely these problems and decisions will require broad understanding of many technologies and meta knowledge about unions and politics. When making most of these decisions you will know partial information (which is in contrast to hacking where you likely can know all information available and understand it completely in many cases). On top of this you are setting the focus for the company both internally and externally and are responsible for all P & L goals set for the market. You are telling me 1-10% of capable people can do that? Or would want to do that for less than a million dollars a year? I haven't even gotten around to family, friends, social events, volunteering, vacation, etc. It's not like a moment of time passes where you aren't the CEO of a large company.
I would consider adding top-rated recipes to the front page.
The Power of The Functional or: I’ll bet you can’t do this in Java
I'm a student,and I found it interesting so I submitted it. I wasn't trying to push any corporate agenda. For the record, I do prefer Eclipse over NetBeans... .
The crux of your reason is half of why "I reboot servers." The other half is because I really don't expect to have an interesting conversation about it and don't want to explain it to people.

Maybe my family and in-laws aren't cool enough to ask for a web application, but my current description has been geeky enough to fend everyone off. I guess the time is coming when I should be concerned about that and move on to something niche-sounding.
"Oh, you make webpages!"
Great objective advice. Perhaps, I should also give Linux another try as well -- it's been almost 3 years since my last Linux desktop experiment.
I used to say "I draw things." Now it is "I make things."
Google Book Search's magazine archive: incredible, incredibly frustrating
Obligatory Penny Arcade (third panel):

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2003/12/31/
The software is open (Android), but the hardware is not, or at least no more open than any other GSM phone with a SIM card. There is a big difference: consumer G1's still require Google/T-Mobile signed system images to boot up, meaning you can't reflash it with your own images, unless you want to risk bricking it by hacking the bootloader...
CouchDB is different from a relational DB in so many ways its almost silly to be doing the comparison. However, many people use and understand SQL, so we must show them what differences to expect.

Your argument about normalization being more realistic has its place. CouchDB models documents, which by necessity are somewhat complete, even when taken from their original context. Document modeling is radically different from relational modeling.

In document modeling, more emphasis is placed on the document life-cycle as opposed to inter-record normalization (relations). And in document modeling the client has a greater responsibility for saving data that is useful to the user, rather than asking the relational store to reconstruct the objects.

I think there are a lot of uses for CouchDB alongside relational DBs, but I'm especially excited to see what kinds of crazy things people figure out how to do with p2p offline replication.
You can run it locally if it is on your local webserver (http://localhost) instead of just filesystem (file://).

That's how I work on it (XAMPP).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xampp
oops, commented when I meant to reply. Here goes:

CouchDB is different from a relational DB in so many ways its almost silly to be doing the comparison. However, many people use and understand SQL, so we must show them what differences to expect.

Your argument about normalization being more realistic has its place. CouchDB models documents, which by necessity are somewhat complete, even when taken from their original context. Document modeling is radically different from relational modeling.

In document modeling, more emphasis is placed on the document life-cycle as opposed to inter-record normalization (relations). And in document modeling the client has a greater responsibility for saving data that is useful to the user, rather than asking the relational store to reconstruct the objects.

I think there are a lot of uses for CouchDB alongside relational DBs, but I'm especially excited to see what kinds of crazy things people figure out how to do with p2p offline replication.
A developer G1 may allow you to flash any Android image you want onto the phone, but the hardware is still not "open" or "free", in that the drivers are not (afaik) open sourced in any method. However, it is still a step forward, yes, but it's still not as big of a step as the phones on offer from Openmoko, for example.
"I make computers go fast."

(I'm a PhD student in high performance systems.)
> And above all I can run 90% of all the apps in the world

Does that matter, though? At least 90% of the apps in the world suck. I care about the ones that don't.

As staunch said, I'd reverse it. I have two Windows VMs so I can put up with IE6 and IE7 when I have to (woo-freaking-hoo) - other than that I use them for nothing.
Mac Mini for writing code for my rented Linux and Solaris boxes while I'm not playing games on my old PC.
Just had this happen to me over Thanksgiving and it went something like this...

Grandma: What the heck is a TicketStumbler? Are you still just playing at the computer all day?

Me: Oh, have you been to our site Grandma?

Grandma: No.

Me: Well Grandma, have you ever heard of Expedia, Kayak or Orbitz?

Grandma: No.

Me: What about Bizrate or Pricegrabber?

Grandma: No.

Me: Hmm...well essentially what we do is take sports & concert tickets from all over the internet and put them on one website. So instead of going to multiple websites you can just go to one. You know how you put all your recipe cards in one place? Well we do that, but with tickets.

Grandma: Oh I see. Well, that's nice dear; would you like a beer while you work? Or how about some more candy?

Me: I love you Grandma.
Now we just need "someone" to implement a real GA algorithm with a real pool of possibilities and real crossover of some kind, and you can get a visual sense of which is faster.

"Someone."
I thought the Vista bashing was just "It's different and I don't like it!" kind of bashing that all new versions of software get...until I tried it. I built an HTPC with Vista Ultimate (which includes all the Media Center stuff), and I've been simply stunned by how bad the OS is. Simply horrible design decisions abound.

For example, while watching a movie (using MS' own player, even...though their player doesn't support Blue Ray, you have to have a separate piece of software for that) any notifications in the bar will popup and interrupt the movie. Given that notifications have become a constant feature of the OS in the past few years (really, does a mouse driver need to have a popup to notify you of updates?!?!? apparently so...likewise Java, likewise Windows updates, even Steam, which I want to like, is a nuisance). Notifications are happening all the time, and they'll interrupt anything else you're doing. I've never liked the notification bar in Windows, and I've always hated how many pieces of software think they're important enough to be allowed to nag me constantly while using the machine (it's one of the reasons I would never used Windows on my desktop), but Vista seems to take it to a new and astonishingly horrible level.

In the same vein, screensaver and power saving do not know when you're watching a movie...so, you pretty much have to turn them off, if the machine is for watching movies.

In a different direction, the audio, network, and video drivers keep breaking. Not sure why or how, but every few boots I have to reinstall one or more of the drivers from the original disks (installing via Windows automatic detection and installation installs drivers that don't work), or from the manufacturers website.

Also on that subject, audio will not work after changing the input on the TV--it uses HDMI for the audio connection, and some types of "off" events can never be recovered from (while others can...actually turning off the TV and turning it back on works fine...but switching inputs and then switching back breaks it).

Shutting down is broken. How can that be? I have no clue. But, sometimes when the box is shut down, it reboots immediately after. Not always...but about 40% of the time. Sometimes it goes into a state where it can't be shutdown properly, and a hard power off is the only solution.

While I have lots of other complaints about Windows, even when it's working exactly as intended, these things are just bone-headed and irritating, and can't possibly be considered right by anyone sane.

I keep thinking the next Windows Update will solve one or more of these problems...but, so far, they're all still present. The audio thing was fixed for a while, but then it broken again. I hate mysterious behavior in computers perhaps even more than wrong behavior, so this just served to piss me off more.
From what I found out in this typing course I took if you're pressing Ctrl + C you're meant to use the pinky on your RIGHT hand and hit C with the LEFT (middle finger).

The same applies to Q, E, W, and all other keys on the right side of the board. Switch it the other way around (pinky on the left Ctrl) if you're hitting P, O, K or any other keys on the right side.

That's the "proper" way of typing, but it's not always easy to remember, especially when you're holding the mouse on the other hand and copy/pasting on the fly.

Also, I'm not sure how this properly translates on a mac (i have a mac at home but i'm on my work PC right now ...)
Move away from home to the bay area.
If anyone is interested, here are the stats for Rails Forum -- which is predictably pretty Mac heavy given how great Rails development is on a Mac.

Windows: 47.84% /
Mac: 32.76% /
Linux: 18.95% /
FreeBSD: 0.07%

(iPhone is actually ahead of FreeBSD at 0.11% -- even though the site is not iPhone optimized at all)
Downvoting has always been used to express disagreement.
NYCTech - A Directory Of Local Tech Resources
Has anyone every gotten an outside image to work? I've linked to several different images to no avail.
You can get the kernel source and much more here: http://developer.apple.com/opensource/index.html

> its stunning that there are morons buying the new macbooks for $2k!!!...i mean, you have to be braindead.

Do you have a car? By your logic - if you drive anything above a Geo Metro you must be braindead. If you don't, do you pay for the bus? You could walk - you must be braindead. Do everything yourself, pay for nothing! Don't put money into making yourself happy with the things you use most of your waking life! What a weakling!
If this was true, don't you think some business somewhere would have figured it out? It' naive to think businesses and their stock holders don't do what's in their best interest.

The board sets the CEO salary-- not the mom-and-pop value investors, and not the traders who are shareholders one hour and short the company the next. Who's on the board? The CEO's friends, many of whom are CEOs in other companies, in which the aforesaid CEO a board member. So, invariably, they vote up each others' compensation. They get away with this because, although the CEO salaries don't need to be that high, it's not especially relevant to the company's success or failure whether it pays the CEO $500k or $5M per year. From a large company's perspective, that's chump change.

It's difficult job. Emotionally, physically, mentally.

Sure it is. So are a lot of jobs.

When making most of these decisions you will know partial information (which is in contrast to hacking where you likely can know all information available and understand it completely in many cases).

If you're doing anything interesting in technology, partial information is a permanent state. APIs and languages change, new libraries are built, and it's impossible to keep an intimate knowledge of everything that might be useful to the next project.

You are telling me 1-10% of capable people can do that? Or would want to do that for less than a million dollars a year.

Yes, and yes.
I have to agree with this. I do a lot of java development zmimon is correct in saying that eclipse is less stable, particularly with the UI, which looks terribly out of place on a mac (you'll see a lot of blogs criticizing this) because it is essentially a windows application ported across.

MochaCode [http://syntori.com/mochacode/] is good but nowhere near the level of eclipse, but then again I haven't used it in many months.
Sarin considers Yahoo option
This is a tough one to be honest, my parents are more impressed by the kid down the street who repairs ipods etc... than me working as an sw engineer. Most if they're anything like my family won't understand what they can't see... that is until it makes the 'print media', where at least it's tangible.
Yes, but it's hit and miss. Sometimes it counts but does nothing sometimes I can see the shapes flickering, but it never picks any as "best", and sometimes it looks like it's still working on the mona lisa or on a different size canvas.

None that I've found on Flickr have worked.

I googled for "200x200" and found the Firefox logo in that size, and it's evolving that... fitness has just crossed under 1,000,000 after about 15 minutes, but it isn't recognisable yet...
I don't do anything smart. These are just brute force mutations, always the same.

The only parameter tuning I did was to try several numbers of vertices per polygon for about 15 minutes and from there on I just used the one (6 vertices) that produced image I liked the most.

10 vertices produced too much noise, 4 vertices was kind of rough.

I started coding with possible variable number of vertices (that seems to be the case in the original algorithm), but it was just too slow in JavaScript.

Anyway, optimization can eventually collapse vertices, so basically I just hardcoded an upper bound.

And mutations are kind of soft, always just one element (R,G,B,A,X,Y).

I guess there is some place for improvement, for example by using HSV comparision for fitness. Though this may be slow. Raw canvas image data are RGBA.

Ah yes, I remember also that at the beginning it didn't want to converge at all when starting with random colors. It works when it can gradually build up from a blank slate.
My favorite quote from Dan's Grandma:

Dan: Where'd all the Margaritas go, Grandma?

Grandma: I drank 'em all up!
the solution to convoluted monkeypatching might be monkeypatching itself

Yes, the very same thought occurred to me. Set a monkey to catch a monkey!

I didn't suggest it myself, because I've been away from Ruby just long enough that I didn't remember whether one could accomplish this in pure Ruby, or if one would have to ascend up a level and do it in the interpreter.
Somewhat frustrating, they only accept very specific terms, where synonyms are quite frequent.
I've basically given up trying to really explain it. I just say I own a business that operates "on the Internet" and hope they stop asking questions after that. My favorite quotes:

Dad: When you told me you were quitting school and moving to Boston to start some Internet company I thought it was just a pipe dream. But, you made me really proud.

Grandma 2: I heard your business is doing well. Of course I don't understand what it is you do, but I'm proud of you!

No good quotes from my other Grandma; she can barely remember who I am anymore :(
I would suggest that 10 is WAY too many.

For me, the purpose of Values is that they can act as a filter for actions and decision making - remembering and applying ten values (especially when some are phrases) is beyond just about anybody.

When I run a values exercise with clients, 3 is the number I suggest. For my organisation, our values are Open, Honest, and Fair, which is pretty easy to remember and apply.

That aside, the purpose of the article was the importance of having values, and I think that's great.
I tell them I am in "Income Redistribution" - Gambling related software.
I think the real answer depends on the role you play.

For work I use character terminals, remote screen sessions and web browsers for everything that matters which leaves me free to use just about any laptop/desktop/os combination I want. Although in theory I'm free to go with whatever I like, I find in practice that using the same working environment as my co-workers helps everyone on the team be more productive because everyone quickly learns how to help each other solve unanticipated problems. As a consequence I did the dual-boot windows/linux thing for several years and later switched to OSX because that's what my fellow developers were doing at the time.

At home where my role is different (I'm pretty much the sole source of technical support for my family), we all have Mac laptops running OSX because our time is important to us and I've found keeping several OSX laptops working properly is trivial compared to other operating systems.
I'm not really suggesting this, but as soon as i got office space people's opinions of my work increased 10 fold. Even saying I was making money didn't phase people.

Of course, when i started working at home again, they were still asking me "how's your office doing?" As if, that is where I kept all my work, in folders, at an office, with desks.

Of course you could just say, we just opened an office downtown, and people will get excited for you.
I think the word "entrepreneur" has so many negative connotations because it's overused (at least in the States). Jobs are called entrepreneurial, employers are looking for entrepreneurs and MLMs like Cutco & Mary Kay consider their sales people entrepreneurs. It's sad.

I really like & use the titles cofounder or founder.
Wait, what? Where does it say we're an alternative to relational databases, or MySQL?
In 1999, Kasparov played chess against 50000 people.
Much more information in Further Reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kasparov_versus_The_World#Further_reading
Being involved somewhat in DTN, I'm here to tell you that the RFC 5050 bundle protocol is a steaming pile of crap. It desperately needs updating to stop trading off minuscule numbers of bytes saved in transmission for ridiculous pain in actually parsing and storing bundles. Oh, and the security drafts. Don't get me started on the security drafts. DTN is nowhere near a mature and well formed technology yet.
I can't even use that excuse as I've got this Psychology/Pre-med background. I decided not to go the med school route right before taking the MCATs, so for me, it's usally, "So what medical school are you going to?"

I try to explain that I'm doing something I am much more passionate about but most people (other than my parents, thankfully) can't seem to understand that logic. Living in a "brown" community doesn't help either, where every other parent is a doctor.
The ones that bother are me are things like the transparency on the window borders.

It's transparent, but it blurs the background.

It serves no purpose - if it was transparent and you could see though, I could guess there might be some practical application.

OS X has a lot of eyecandy, some of which is totally useless, but a lot of it does have practical value (e.g. expose looks good and I use it all the time).
Upvote this thread on the feature-requests perma-article:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=229095
http://wiki.apache.org/couchdb/CouchDB_in_the_wild
I tell them what I hope to be the truth - I write software which helps businesses run their business better.
Ask HN: What are your best and worst-received comments?
You can find your comments sorted by karma score at:
http://searchyc.com/user/<your-id-here>

Once there, you can sort by ascending or descending score to see your best- and worst-rated comments.
I'm bothered about things being open because I prefer the idea of a future where improvements can be built upon all previous knowledge, rather than a future where everybody has to start from scratch implementing their own basic proprietary versions of everything.
Hmm, not working on Firefox / Ubuntu 8.10 -- Simply shows a blank content pane (I see the header/footer) and the scroll bar goes kind of whacky -- Any ideas?