skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thank you, that's exactly how I think, it's even this way with Windows. On other systems I would waste days after days of my life to set things up 'just the way I want' only to find that it's never gonna be quite that way. Macs just let me accept the things as they are and get back to work. Very often, I'd get to see after a while, why things work the way they work (say, Window management).

Anyway, this has been almost 100% true up from 10.3 through 10.6.x. Recent developments both on Apple's as well as on MS's side have closed the gap between the two systems quite a bit. I still prefer OSX but it's gotten close. The real reason I continue to buy macs nowadays is the hardware quality.
It's telling that these are the 20 most upvoted "controversial" opinions. I don't think they should have taken the 20 most controversial (according to the voting system), or the 20 most downvoted, but the system chosen does have obvious consequences. Looking at the results, they break down a few ways - Reactions to corporate processes and "things management likes", old and unpopular things are no good, programmers should be more free to express themselves and so on.

The reason people think these things are "controversial" is that the sources of information these programmers are getting are often limited to their immediate environment, their university profs, and what they read online. That naturally excludes the bulk of competent programmers who don't blog or speak in conferences[1]. It's impossible to constantly remember to account for the biases in the media you consume, so people are naturally (and gradually) led to believe that the trendy ideas of yesterday and today are ubiquitous. They forget about the masses of programmers doing heads-down development on non-web, non-mobile platforms because the web and mobile guys are trendy and they all have blogs.

1: http://prog21.dadgum.com/143.html
Wow, the Hollywood-ness implied by this article about the tech world... this... is it really like this out there now? Is this nauseous feeling I have right now the way serious but small filmmakers feel about the entertainment industry?
Cmd W closes the document without quitting TextEdit. just tested on lion.

Mac is document-based instead of application-based so closing document doesn't quit the app. it only does if multiple documents doesn't make sense to the application like System Preferences.
Listen, this just proves that TC is a gossip rag, but, you're going to defend someone who is literally Photoshopping themselves into photos with celebrities and claiming that they're real?

Uhh.
You think? Math don't lie: 20B nickels x 7 grams a piece = 140,000 metric tons. I'd hate to see the UPS bill for that.
This is unusually straw-mannish of you pg.

From the article: "What matters is: Are you profitable? Are you building something great? Are you taking care of your people? Are you treating your customers well?"

All of those questions can be answered without needing access to a companies ledger. Jason answers those questions himself in the article.

I think his point was that stories about those questions don't get as much readership per unit of reporter effort, hence they aren't being written.

Posting 37signals' revenue numbers would have zero impact on that.
http://gawker.com/5938904/notorious-silicon-valley-fraud-shi...
Why on Earth would he go touch marijuana legalization with a 10-foot pole?

Well, if its good enough for TED, why not Reddit?

http://whohastimeforthis.blogspot.com/2012/03/best-of-ted-20...

Hands down, the best [TED] talk this year was from Bryan Stevenson on injustice in the US criminal legal system. For example, the number of prisoners in the last 40 years has grown from 300,000 to 2.3 million (primarily, I believe, due to non-violent drug infractions). One third of young African American men are in prison, on probation or on parole. Ours is the only country in the world that gives life sentences to 13 year olds. As for the death penalty, one out of nine defendants sentenced to death have been exonerated. in California a billion dollars will be spent defending and executing the death penalty in the next 5 years, although a referendum is on its way to re-direct those funds to police enforcement budgets.

What made the talk great was Stevenson's ability to weave in his personal stories, recounting memories of what it was like to grow up among activists like Rosa Parks. There was so much enthusiasm for Stevenson and his cause that TED Curator Chris Andersen jumped on the occasion to solicit donations for Stevenson's private foundation. Right there many of us stood up and, in aggregate, pledged close to a million dollars!
Who says it's Craigslist's data? Last I checked the general public generates this data without compensation from Craigslist. Both legally and morally, it is their data.

This would be like the USPS claiming my mail is actually theirs. They provide a value-added service, but that grants neither legal nor moral claim over my information.

> " In fact, it seems pretty justified in this case."

Encourage third-party developers to scrape the site and use your data, claiming that your company is only concerned about undue server load.

Wait until third-party developer develops something that might actually be worth something. Allow third-party developer to gain traction and evangelize this product concept to the world.

Use legal force to shut down third-party developer and re-implement his product yourself.

... What part of that strikes you sas "pretty justified"?
I would think that creating articles, or blog posts, talking about situations of how they specifically treat customers well, how and why they are building something great, how they take care of their people, etc.. would solve this more than posting revenues. Though that might come across too strongly as stroking your own ego.. Obviously being profitable allows you more benefits to how you treat people, the time you give or allow.
I thought the same thing when reading that article. Here was someone I've never heard of - and I'm pretty active at getting around the startup world; someone who seems to have got herself into a web of lies which probably started off with some exaggerations.

Let's stipulate to the fact that it's not okay to lie about yourself to get a gig, even if you think it's harmless and you'll make up for it in work. I thought it was right that the Yahoo! CEO was fired for that stuff. I've never lied on a resume, never would.

But what we have here is a nobody, who's probably got a bit of a problem. That problem is exacerbated by the bullshit celebrity culture TechCrunch tries to build around our industry. It's the bullshit attitude displayed by a ton of the current incubator ducklings, who follow their angels around in awe like momma duck, while convincing themselves they're starring the fantasy version of Silicon Valley they saw in the Social Network. TechCrunch is among the worst offenders creating this problem.

If we're going to be honest about it, there are plenty of folks - and we don't need to get ugly and name names but if you're around the industry you bump into these people - who call themselves Tech Journalists who are little more than exaggerators, fabricators and bullshit artists who have NEVER CREATED ANYTHING OF VALUE themselves, never created a job, never taken the risk. Just the role of the critic. Never the man in the arena. So it's a bit rich them all ganging up on this unfortunate person who tied herself up in knots and exaggerations leading to great embarrassment.

(Try going to any event full of tech journalists from these blogs and wait till they get a bit drunk and listen to the boasts and stories and thoroughly inappropriate behavior.)

But I have NO sympathy for any startup that works with someone without doing the most basic of background checks which would immediately expose lies and exaggerations. The valley is full of people who overstate things and word gets around pretty quickly. You can often see the smoke and smell the charcoal from burning bridges from a long distance, and way after the fact. No public interest is served by tarring and feathering a nobody for entertainment purposes under the guise of investigative journalism.

The way this story is written you'd think they'd uncovered Carlos the Jackal, cracked a terrorist ring, discovered the whereabouts of Nazi war criminals. It is pathetic and mean spirited.

I keep hoping TechCrunch will recapture what once made it a must-read, but I'm increasingly saddened by the reality that it won't happen. As I've posted elsewhere, it's a serious thing that we do here in Silicon Valley, building companies, taking risks. We often spend large sums of other people's money. We commit our lives and those of our loved ones to the endeavor. Sure we can have fun. But we cannot run the industry like a school yard and we deserve more from our media outlets than mean-spirited gossip.
The article does seem a little bullying. I mean, what harm has she really done other than lie (which every business person has done since the beginning time). I could see if she caused some startup to go under or cost some company millions of dollars but to quote the author, "Shirley Hornstein has never done anything bad to me. Except, y’know, lie."

It really seems like a bunch of people got together one night and came to the conclusion that they don't like this woman and one those people said "Hey, I'm a TC writer. I can write an article about all this Silicon Valley phoney and we can all have a laugh about it tomorrow!"
Do I agree Shirley Hornstein told some blatant lies? Yes. Do I think that these falsehoods deserve a front page article? No.

Besides, "Everyone lies" -House
11. "Your job is to put yourself out of work"

... by selling your company and pocketing enough to retire indefinitely.

What you do after that point you may still call "work" but you will be doing it for the fun or satisfaction of it, not necessarily a paycheck.
Let immigrants spark growth
I know your comment was sarcastic, but it touches on the recent debate about whether the US government deserves any credit in the development of the Internet. And it at least gives me hope that the next generation of policymakers will appreciate the power of the open web to facilitate speech, culture, and economic development.
Maybe it's just having participated in too many programming contests in college, but when I saw this:

Given that Pi can be estimated using the function [...], write a function that calculates Pi to an accuracy of 5 decimal places.

...my first inclination was:

public double answer() {
return 3.14159;
}

It passes the stated requirements.
IPO has been verbed for at least 15 years in Silicon Valley. Probably longer.

Your statement is both pedantic and incorrect.
I think you'd be quite surprised if you ever found out just how much of the world, including your very own existence, depends heavily on platforms and systems that you consider to be "dead".
Most malware does not seek to just nuke user files; it seeks to set up a permanent hidden presence in the machine.

I don't know whether "most" is true, but sure, a lot of malware does that. But that's not why it's dangerous. If you manage to install something that changes my wallpaper to a cute cat picture every few days, it's probably going to be mildly irritating after a while, but I'm not going to lose any sleep over it.

Chrome is more secure than IE

Again, I feel the need to point out the irony of your example: Chrome actively circumvents the more recent Windows access control mechanisms by not installing itself properly so that it can do the silent auto-updates without any further UAC-style prompting.

But I would challenge you to find a computer security professional who thinks XP is as secure as Windows 7.

Well, now you're moving the goalposts. But as a guy who spent this afternoon working on security code that's going to be run by the likes of banks and government institutions, I prefer to make my judgements based on evidence rather than hear'say, and so do they. Incidentally, many of those clients are still running Windows 2000 and IE6, obviously along with many other security measures, and installing Chrome in some of those places would probably get you formally disciplined.
They didn't "get" Obama at all. He has so far answered a total of 10 questions, all of them canned, standard set pieces from his campaign that you could have just as easily read off his website. And he wasn't even the one interacting with the community; it's questionable if he was involved with this AMA at all. This was essentially a complete abuse of the AMA system but no one's calling him on it because he's the POTUS.
The Linux desktop is not killed and will be more prosperous with Windows 8 and secureboot shit.
Well, I tweeted the question to @MattCutts let's see what he says :)

https://twitter.com/iamdchuk/status/240989741246455810

Regardless of our disagreement here, thanks for the discussion!
Also, TC (and others) have a huge following from startup community. For early stage companies, funding and hiring have big impact, perhaps next only to customer acquisition (and that is usually not shared). So i wonder if they are only serving their big target segment well by reporting on these.
Diaspora: New Beginning or Cautionary Tale?
As a desktop OS, tried it again 3 weeks ago. Fairly standard setup, Asus motherboard, core i7 3770, 32GB of ram, one dell display@ 2560x1440 one at 1920x1200 in portrait, base AMD 7xxx series gpu, newest ubuntu with AMD binary drivers. First the graphics driver locked up on rotating a screen, that required reboot, even switching to a non graphical tty didn't work, then it took but z-sync was completely disabled on the portrait display and by completely i mean it was unusable with 2-3 inch tears on moving content. This of course is a known issue with Xorg being archaic.

I'm sure you'll blame this on AMD's drivers or shoot out some other random technical reason. While i understand the technical issues, I just don't care, I have far better things to do than care about this shit. It flat out doesn't work and I don't care why.
It's not "offsite development" that's prohibited so much as not allowing source code to be stored locally on laptop HDD's (even with full-disk encryption). You can develop remotely over SSH, NX, NFS, SSHfs, etc., you just can't have the source (or compilation artifacts) on an easily-stolen device.
What am I missing? What do you know that you're not saying? I can't find anything in the original TC article that said "she blatantly lied many times about many things to high profile people".

Who did she lie to? What was the lie? Was it a lie or just an exaggeration?

The TC article mentions Founders Fund a bunch, and not much else.
Ruby Association Certified Ruby Programmer
The Hyper-Exploitative App Economy
"What a disappointing AMA. He answers stupid questions about his favorite basketball player and the white house beer recipe, but completely ignores the important ones about decriminalization of marijuana."

This.

Do not vote.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy:_The_God_That_Failed

http://mises.org/document/1092/Myth-of-National-Defense-The-...
I have come to love Arch Linux. Pacman and AUR are much simpler and efficient than APT and DPKG.
Puppet is also used to manage the large fleet of Mac laptops (and desktops): http://redmonk.com/cote/2008/06/11/puppet-at-google-redmonk-...
Couldn't agree more. This kind of thing happens all the time and is handled easily by companies doing basic due-diligence on people they work with, and resultant embarrassment teaching the individuals a necessary lesson. Many come back from it chastened but better for it. This hounding of a nobody is disproportionate. Clearly this person pissed off one or more of the TechCrunch team so they decided it was appropriate to get them back in this way.

But someone photoshopping themselves into pics with celebs probably has some psychological issues (at the very least self-esteem issues). They're not a threat to anyone. A few stern words from the right people could nip this sort of thing in the bud.

Such a disappointing article from TC - and there have been many in recent months.
Are you your job? I'm sure you're more things than that.
"There's something a bit... I don't know quite how to put it."

Let me help you. But first I have to get my shovel. Because that's the typical shit that is heaved by the "haves" on the "have not's" try and make them seem humble and not anything special. Take Oprah. She just loves to talk about how this and that are so expensive as if she's just an ordinary person like the rest of us. He laid it on a little to thick with the cleaning lady spiel.

Particularly this part about the cleaning lady:

"she’s just respectful and nice and awesome. Why can’t more people be like that? "

Well for one thing he could start and figure out why in particular DHH is such a, well, asshole:

From wikipedia:

"Hansson is an outspoken character known for the crude and brutal way he expresses his opinions, both online and in real life. Hansson and his company have been accused of arrogance,[7][8][9], which he does not deny"

And of course I can't believe the example of why restaurants last 30 years (the ones that do that is) and tech companies don't last or whatever the point he was making.

Why not just compare cars which change every year vs. a burberry coat which is essentially the same?
The thing about the Unix shell is that not only is it extremely power and flexible, it is designed to work with pure ascii so it can used on many remote, bare bones machines and it really is there running on many remote, bare bones machines. And given all this there are many people with strong skills in that shell and a strong attachment to that shell (for rational and irrational reasons imho). With all this, it would be hard to replace this shell even with something that's better. That actually makes me sad since actually dislike using it since for all its power, much of it is annoying and bass-ackwards imho again.
relevant (and funny cause it's true): http://xkcd.com/963/
Is this comment a performative critique of the low-value political jabs one commonly finds on Reddit?
Not if they use OpenSPARC. That's GPL'd.
No, from that we can only learn to plan your AMA better. His PR people sucked, that’s all.
1/3 inch Sony CCD 48PCS IR LEDs Sensor 420TVL 30m IR View Distance
I really haven't found that that be the case at all with package management on OS X. Homebrew is almost always a joy to use, and on the few occasions I've had build errors using it I've found the Homebrew community connected to the official GitHub repo issues page to be one of the most responsive, friendly, and genuinely helpful open-source communities I've ever encountered. I agree things were a lot rockier back when the only package management choices were MacPorts or Fink, but Homebrew's a monumental step forward.

I can't say I've really touched Python at all, but as a relative newcomer to the Ruby world I found getting RVM set up and functioning properly on my Mac to be a complete non-issue.
Amazon Jobs Posts Show Future of Cloud
WinX YouTube Downloader Preview 
This is a YouTube video guide telling you how to download YouTube video for free. Both Windows and Mac users are able to use the freeware WinX YouTube Downloader to download your favorite video.
Honestly, the improvements in HTML5/CSS3 (including font-face) make translating graphical mockups into coded web designs much easier. There's a lot less image slicing and a lot more logical markup.

I love Fireworks, but I find myself using it less and less often. Usually I can look at a design straight from a designer who went wild in Photoshop and Illustrator, and make it look extremely close using nothing but HTML and CSS and images only where you'd expect image content.

As much as we like to complain, the web landscape has improved considerably.
Yehuda is one of the active users: https://lobste.rs/u/wycats

Update: The site is also open source: https://github.com/jcs/lobsters

Last shameless update: Would love an invite. Email in my profile.
A provocative title.

The issue really starts with the American culture (of litigation), not American law, per se.

And of course the encouragement of litigation, the acceptance of it as a way of life and a way of doing business, and the high amount of ensuing court activity breeds a rather large body of case law, a complex legal landscape, which gives way to a sort of feedback loop leading to more litigation.

"Can we sue our way to prosperity?"

This was a title of a Congressional study a year or two ago.

I think it captures the essence of the problem. Wealth is increasingly being created _only_ through litigation. (Reminder: IP rights are often nothing more than rights to sue alleged infringers.) Is that toxic? Is it sustainable? I don't know. I don't think Congress knows either.
Here's a an older but still accurate article:

http://www.armscollectors.com/darra/darra.htm

and a more recent one:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/5066860.stm
The char *apple[] Argument Vector
Heaven (our deployment tool) does deploy GitHub.com directly from the file servers. But, most of our infrastructure directly relies on GitHub too (such as the Merge API from the blog post, service hooks, and a bunch of OAuth minapps).
We do use Rollout (https://github.com/jamesgolick/rollout) once in awhile. Most of the time, we like having the history of flipped feature flags in the Git code though.
" So if Jason really believes this is a terrible problem and wants to set things on the right course"

Well you know that's not going to happen especially since he made this statement below:

"We have 35 employees at 37signals. We could have hundreds of employees if we wanted to--our revenues and profits support that--but I think we’d be worse off."

So he isn't simply saying that he feels he could expand his business and have "hundreds of employees". He is saying that his "revenues and profits" would support "hundreds of employees".

Think for a second how much profit you need to support "hundreds of employees".

I'll give him the benefit of the doubt that he was misquoted on that. If not, he's simply full of shit. This is BS to challenge Donald Trump.
Oh, sorry, I didn't note that.
Raganwald on Optimism
Wow this whole exchange depresses the hell out of me. Can't we just build cool shit and leave this kind of lame drama for other industries?
Interesting to see this and the "Death of the Linux Desktop" posts both on the front page. Are there heated opinions on the issue here?
That's my thought. I have no time for people who bullshit and lie. I've been burned before. But that's my fault for not doing due diligence. I just don't think that a TC article was really called for for a nobody. Not unless you're going to provide more context than was in the story. I mean it's hard to care either way, but I certainly felt rubbed the wrong way by the tone of the TC article and the subject matter - attacking an individual publicly when as far as I can see no serious harm was done. She needs help, I'll agree to that, but I doubt this kind of thing will prod her to get it.
So, photoshopping yourself into pictures with several different people is "an exaggeration" to you?
I felt like it would make me responsible for monitoring it for abuse.

It could be something as innocent as a cheapskate neighbor using enough bandwidth to run afoul of my cap, or someone using it for nefarious purposes either on a continuous or drive-by basis.
About Lobsters: https://lobste.rs/s/bkeYe9/about_lobsters

This isn't linked anywhere obvious on the site itself.
:D

if(twitter)
R&D ? profit | break
else
print "one more round, people"
Huh. I did not know that. I've never understood why I had that -20 karma stuff. I'm no troll and I read probably about 20% of the articles posted here. I'm addicted to Hacker News. No wonder I've been unable to participate in anything. That just sort of ruined my day, actually. Is there nothing I can do, other than set up another account?

I just don't know why I would have been banned.