skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, the whole X + Unity stack is mind-bogglingly complex, and nvidia is a pain. Their driver is proprietary, so you have to use all of their custom configuration tools to make everything work, and whoopdedoo, their configuration tools are crap.

It took me about two hours to set up XMonad, and about an hour to tweak it to my liking. I haven't touched it in a year. AND since its configuration is stored in a file in my home directory like everything else, and not some random keys in gconf, I can link it into my Dropbox, and persist it across reinstalls. I've switched computers twice - it takes me about an hour to set up my whole environment.
I have been really unimpressed with the direction of Mac OS the last few releases. The desktop environment is attractive to look at, but I find it somewhat sluggish and moody (don't you show me that dreaded beachball!). 10.6 is the last release I really enjoyed. The next two have been disappointing. It's obvious that Mac OS is no longer Apple's priority.

I dual-booted Arch for a time on my Macbook and was just blown away at the difference in responsiveness. I also had the familiar ease of maintaining/installing/updating/changing my development tools instead of dealing with brew or Macports and XCode.

The thing that prevented me from running Linux on this MBP full time is the less-than-stellar Mac touchpad gesture support. I do think Mac OS nailed gestures and touchpad interaction.
Based, I think, on Whistler's statement during his libel trial against Ruskin. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Abbott_McNeill_Whistler#R....
I agree with your final paragraph, but disagree that the vast majority of gun owners are worthy of distrust.
Yeah, me too. In a sense, I miss running stock Ubuntu, but it stopped making me happy and Cinnamon was my fix. Unfortunately, last time I checked several months ago, Cinnamon only reliably works as packaged with Mint, and becomes bugtastic when installed on Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.

I don't have major issues with Linux. I've had a few teething problems with new hardware and occasionally there's a surprise, but nothing like the author described. In fact, for me, GNU/Linux is more of a pleasure to run than any other operating system I've used, including OS X. Having said that, I had major issues with Linux when I tried to make it my primary OS for the first time in 2006 and can empathize with the author of this article. I had such a bad experience that I went back to Windows XP and didn't make the full switch until early 2010; I haven't looked back since.

If anything, this article is a call to action to improve desktop Linux. We're all aware of the second class nature of consumer vendor support, and there are a lot of native apps that don't compare to their OS X or Windows counterparts, both in functionality and aesthetics. (GIMP comes to mind. It's ok, but it's nowhere near as capable as the current version of Photoshop.)
A guy with some hardware with closed source drivers complains that it doesn't work in Ubuntu. Instead of learning the lesson and checking for compatibility or just replacing his $10 USB WiFi stick, goes and spends ›$1000 in a Macbook and hails the nice experience of having everything working.
It didn't at all. It carefully explained why the two activities produced entirely different chemical reactions in the brain. If you're too invested in your process to even consider that a test of one thing may not translate into the performance on a totally different task then perhaps you're taking this all a bit too personally.
It's worth pointing out that requests for cappuccino.org are re-directed to cappuccino-project.org.
Lenovo Thinkpads or Ideapads.

Thinkpads have better battery life/build quality, but Ideapads have better specs for the price.
Interestingly, I got "Access Denied" when I click that link in my primary browser. I can copy-paste the link into another browser and load this, so I think they're actually checking my User-Agent and blocking me because it is empty. Our beloved DHS.
I understand your argument, but help me understand, where do you draw the line in the types of "arms" that can be legal today? Would you support private ownership of such "RPGs, mortars and tanks"? How about the anti-aircraft projectiles that the Syrians rebels are so desperate to obtain? All these things would help me immensely when fighting a tyrannical government.
And that's why i love Debian, the interface might look old and it doesn't have that eye candy look Ubuntu does, however i had zero issues with stability & bugs for the past 3-4 years. Its being said again and again but people still do the same fault, being on Ubuntu is being on the bleeding edge, and although its appealing and 'looks good, feels good, you got the latest version in programs and what not' it gonna bite you in the ass sooner or later.

They are some valid points on the article, for example i also used to face some trouble on my old computer when it came to wireless connectivity, or my old Lexmark printer wouldn't work with Debian or any Linux brand no matter what. HOWEVER those issues can't really be blamed on Linux (as the author tries to) but on the hardware vendors. That's why the next time i got a printer i choose a vendor who did support Linux, same goes for the wifi card of my new laptop which worked just fine also.
Always interested to see what domains are available in any old dictionary. I didn't see anything that I cared for, have at it:

chinenual.com

connectorconspiracy.com

doprotocol.com

fenceposterror.com

glasstty.com

hardwarily.com

linestarve.com

munchingsquares.com

pessimizingcompiler.com

realworldthe.com

rightthingthe.com

shiftleftrightlogical.com

smokingclover.com

softwarerot.com

waterbottlesoccer.com

yu-shiangwholefish.com
The Great Shift in Japanese Pop Culture (2011)
Thoughts on Aptitude
I really hope that dev kits for the next gen consoles don't continue to be so expensive. If I own the console, I should be able to develop on it.

I don't think Sony and Microsoft are unaware that small indie developed games have been flooding the App Store. That being said, Apple has sold 410 million iOS devices and has paid developers $5.5B (2012 numbers).

Apple makes an absurd amount of money from hardware, while Microsoft and Sony sell their consoles at losses and need to make money back from software.
> When I’m at a computer, its because I want to get things
> done. Gone are the days where I have time to tinker around
> and spend countless hours Googling for some obscure mail
> archive to find I need to change “bop” to “boop” in
> /etc/something/config.ini.

This was what moved me to the Mac too, and it's important to note that it's something that doesn't negate the years spent doing that investigative work of finding what to change to what. Those were extremely valuable, and they're the reason I can find my way around a Linux server faster than a lot of people. But, the day came when I was less interested in tinkering with the OS and more interested in tinkering with other stuff. It was probably around a point in the learning curve where learning wasn't happening as quickly, so it wasn't as interesting when something went wrong because I was less likely to learn something new and just as likely to be frustrated. So, I switched.
Can't agree more. I'm "pro gun" and I own none. Just because I don't exercise a right doesn't mean I want others to diminish it or take it away. And yes some folks are creepy and kooky and unfortunately they are vocal about their guns so people use the label of kooky/crazy for folks that are vocally pro gun which is some sort of logical flaw.
No. Starting with the 3DS, Nintendo has finally started selling hardware at a loss.

http://www.techradar.com/news/gaming/consoles/nintendo-will-...

http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/26/nintendo-confirms-that-it...

However just like everyone else, this will eventually change once the cost of components starts going down.
"I suppose, because he can, and he's likely more interested in satisfying intellectual curiosity than designing a normal pagination system."

I suspect that PG's approach is something more than peccadillo. The HN software appears to afford a great deal of power for managing the community, and managing the community is much more important than worrying over expired links. I'll add that I've never seen someone quit HN over expired links, but several over community behavior.

Seeing as YC applications require HN accounts, it is unlikely that YC takes HN's functions lightly.
> If you take the time and patience to understand your system and sift through man pages, configuration time will obviously shrink. If it's growing it's because you've never sat down to truly understand the cogs and screws of your system.

I was doing this back in 1994-1999, while I was a single geek guy with lots of free time at the university. Nowadays I have better things to do with my life.

Either a distribution works out of the box in a given hardware or it lands in the dustbin.
I think most of the things mentioned in the post is a good way to go about interviewing. However, I don't really agree with the "no resume - look at open source" part.

I know I am not the target demographic for this company as I am no coder and I don't really have any interest in contributing to open source development, even if I were a coder. Surely there are other/better ways of initially judging potential new recruits?

As far as I can tell the author is an open source advocate so I guess I wouldn't fit into the "culture" but ignoring those who aren't as into open source as the author would exclude a number great of people who might contribute greatly to the company (and a missed opportunity to convert them into open source advocates/fans/contributors).
Touchpad support is the big blocker for me. It does support some of the gestures, but the whole experience is sub-par compared to what we were spoiled with on Mac OS. Movement and acceleration is weird, the ignoring of "accidental" contact doesn't always work well, and some gestures take a few attempts to register.

If they could just nail this down, I'd never boot Mac OS again on my MBP.
I would be interested to see a breakdown. The received wisdom we have over here is that the UK is far safer in terms of violent crime than the US, but perhaps this perception is wrong.
Mac switched to the PC standard in 2005: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%27s_transition_to_Intel_p...

> When I purchased a printer for my computer? Of course Ubuntu had no idea what to do with it.

In 25 years you haven't figured it out that you need to check for compatibility/support before buying hardware?
You said "never". I provided a counter-example which disproves your argument that private gun ownership for self defence is never suggested.

In particular, are you suggesting that this organisation has any sort of substantial following?

I have no idea, but that's hardly the point. If they had even one member, it shows that private gun ownership is, indeed, sometimes suggested.
I think he could have taken the time he wasted Googling for duct-tape solutions and used it to read deeper documentation. Then, he wouldn't be so tired. Nonetheless, he wanted something that just worked, which Ubuntu didn't; so the take-away from all this is that Ubuntu is just not such a "consumer friendly" distribution after all. Linux is Linux... it has its roots in a community of hackers that build for hackers... it's hard to escape that ><
That is all cool and dandy if you don't have anything else to do with your life.
<blockquote>I actually moved my PC onto my desk instead of on the floor because I got sick of bending over to take care of this. </blockquote>
That reminds me something for sure... :-)
This is incredibly good advice, especially if you find yourself in an unexplainable funk with no real source. It's amazing how much of that feeling is drivien by the barrage of negativity pumped through your cable TV.

I stopped watching the news several years ago and have been better off. I recently turned it back on to watch the coverage of Newtown because guns are an important issue to me, and it was a shock - the deafening, negative stupidity blaring out of every conceivable pit was overwhelming after years of only reading news, and doing so selectively.

If you watch a lot of news, especially cable news, give it a try. Just for a month. See if you don't feel better about everything.
This is a boondoggle. Its important to clean it up but the situation has been exploited by lax oversite and sloppy administration. When I first read about the Hanford cleanup plant, saw the expense, and saw how much had been done, I immediately thought "Hmmm, I wonder what program the CIA is funding here."

While I realize it sounds a bit tin-hatish (ok a lot tin hat like) the "standard" way to launder money in the government budget is to create an important but remote project, and pour money into it. Nobody in Congress is going to say "We need to cut funding to cleaning up this site." and also more importantly there really isn't any real penalty for it not getting done. So it becomes a foil for some other "off budget" activities. Local politicians do this too, we had a county supervisor who effectively embezzled money by convincing the county to pay too much for park maintenance. That excess was being funneled back to them as a sort of kickback.

Anyway, the 'simple' plan of building new tanks and moving waste from the old set to the new set isn't being done. And most of what is there isn't being identified anyway so it is hard to say what constraints there are on the solutions. Not well managed at all sadly.
"crash" and "down" go back further than that. I'm looking at my copy of HoToGAMIT ("How to Get Around MIT") from 1972. In the Appendix there is a Lexicon of MIT Words, Phrases, Acronyms. The entry for "crash": "(1) To sleep in a place where one has not paid rent, such as a friend's apartment. (2) To join a party without being invited. (3) To cease functioning, as in a computer system."

And the entry for "down": "(1) Feeling depressed. Said of a person. (2) Non-working, gronked. Said of a machine."

The Lexicon occupies pages 222-232, so it isn't very long, and most of the entries are MIT-specific (such as acronyms for organizations). But there are some entries (like the one for "hack") which occur in the Hacker's Dictionary.

HoToGAMIT was published by the Tech Community Association, and was distributed to incoming freshmen.
The author's calculations are for replacing the entire energy diet of the United States. He uses gross inputs to everything, rather than outputs and usable energy. He neglects any other storage capacity present in the country - no vehicle has any battery, no electrical device has any battery - and tries to calculate how much energy we need to store IF THE ENTIRE ENERGY PRODUCTION CAPACITY OF THE UNITED STATES DISAPPEARS ENTIRELY FOR A WEEK.

It's a nonsense calculation. The U.S. certainly isn't prepared today to go for a week without any electricity generation or even a single drop of fossil fuel burned, and there's no reason to demand that it be prepared to do so in the future.

The "findings" are akin to someone who says "The U.S. is borrowing a dollar a year. If we extend that to infinity, we find that the U.S. debt is infinite. PANIC!". They're nonsense. Have no meaning in the real world.

In the real world, one significant benefit of a widely distributed power generation infrastructure is that it won't all go down at the same time. The solar cells on your roof will keep generating electricity even if it's cloudy the next town over. And that means that the real-world requirements for a several-nines-reliability mostly-renewable energy infrastructure are several orders of magnitude less than what is being calculated here.
Requests is awesome, but this is for urllib2.
I think the ability to fix it is key, yes it should "just work" but what about when it "just doesn't"? Being able to modify the OS, GUI or any part of my system is useful.

I'm more impressed by an OS that can run on any hardware than an OS that needs specific hardware.

I use Mac, Linux and Windows but to me lack of choice in OS or ability to modify anything isn't a good feature or one to boast about.
I admit there are kinks in various distros, but I have also found that once you set it up, it's really hard to mess it up over time. Personal experience of course.

I was a huge Ubuntu fan until 10.10. That's the last one without Unity. After that, I started seeing all sorts of bugs especially display related. Unity killed Ubuntu for me.

I tried out Mint and that did not go down too well with me either. I finally tried out Lubuntu and that's what I use everywhere now.

- Did not need to setup wireless, wired at all. It just worked.

- For multi monitor support I had to install nvidia's drivers from the repo and set up the dual monitor config from their utility. (This is a PITA utility and I blame nvidia)

- For the age-old 'setting up the printer' in linux meme, I went to Brother's website, and followed 3-4 simple steps and I was set up and ready to go.

- Installed Virtual Box, vim, Gnome-Do and that's it.

A lightweight box which does everything I want of it. Waiting for me to customize it the way I want to.

I did this same thing on a $300 netbook (save for the VM, which I did not try). I added 8Gig RAM stick to it and was planning on replacing the 500GB 7.2k HDD with an SSD. An awesome *nix machine for about 350-550 depending on upgrades.

I do understand why people pay for Macs, the choice of spending money over time. To me, the option to move around between distros, the freedom to upgrade hardware and just the ridiculous value for money I get is why I choose Lubuntu.
I'll wait for AntiRez to chime in. It is possible that ZMQ has better performance than Redis, because the Redis server has to parse the request and then act on it, and then there's the marshalling on the client side; with ZMQ, you're just sending a command. I'm not sure if Redis has an efficient binary protocol, but having that may eliminate some of the bottleneck?
I was a Slackware and BSD user from 1994 to ~2007 (with some Libranet and CentOS in between). I knew Slackware and NetBSD inside out[1].

Why would I ever want to give up knowing exactly what buttons to press to make my system behave the way I want it to?

For me, I just did not have the time anymore. I was fed up with getting audio to behave consistently, compiling libdvdcss after every upgrade to be able to play DVDs, the Word and PowerPoint that people sent me and came out misformatted, overhauls of desktop environments, rewritten device management infrastructure (hotplug / devd -> udev), hand-mounting of encrypted disk images because it was broken in the desktop environment again and the list goes on and on.

I decided that my time was worth more than the 499 Euro for a Mac Mini (in 2007) and I never really looked back.

[1] I wrote this book: http://rlworkman.net/howtos/slackbasics.pdf
How long have you been doing this?
During half the year the park must be in darkness at the hours you mention
Microsoft's grinning robots or the Brotherhood of the Mac. Which is worse?
How does paypal's fraud detection compare with other others?
Many people fail to appreciate it which is why there are so many ill behaved dogs and shows like Dog Whisperer. Meanwhile the owner is still socially inept and now they spend all their time with their dog. It's like saying you should have kids so you can socialize with other parents...it doesn't add up.
I've seen the idea that self-driving cars will lead to lower car ownership expressed before, and I'm not convinced by it. If you own your own car, you can leave things in it, whether useful things or mere decorations. You can't leave things in a self-driving taxi.

I'm not sure about self-driving taxis leading to greater ride-sharing either: one reason people buy their own cars is so they don't have to share space with strangers on buses and trains.
I particularly enjoyed the entry on Tail Recursion.
I think thats a very interesting idea. If the market is there, it could be very good for both hackers and the company.
A user is trying to steal from us and I don't mind
It's one sentence, please read it. I'm talking about the evacuation of jews from Germany, not the general war effort, which was gainst countries with armies.
If you really want to read some cool things about Hanford, check out the DOE's cleanup page, and the IEER reports about cleaning up the "canyons".

And remember that they built those now-leaking tanks in the 1940's and '50's. There's also some great accident reports about the "accountability" tanks at Sellafield.

http://www.google.com/search?q=ieer+hanford

http://www.hanford.gov

http://www.wiseinternational.org/node/2558
I guarantee that if twitter sees you trying to get around their limits they will revoke your dev key. The reason they did this was to discourage third party apps in the first place, they wouldn't leave a loop hole allowing people to do this.
When in Germany someone breaks into your house, he will most probably not shoot you or even harm you. He will not even be carrying a gun. You know why? Because he knows that you do not have a gun. Or at least he can be pretty certain about it. Nobody likes to kill people (except a few lunatics), so nobody will kill you unless you give them a very good reason to. Drawing a gun, for example, is such a reason.

By giving guns away to everyone, you actually force criminals to carry weapons. You encourage them to shoot house owners on sight, because if they do not they might be shot themselves.

I do not have a gun license and i don't need a gun. Guns kill people, and nobody wants that.
Agreed. I had heard so many stories of Arch being only for experts, difficult to figure out, having to do everything yourself, etc. Then I discovered the Arch wiki and tried it out for myself. The documentation is incredible. Even my specific brand of laptop has its own page with a few common hardware issues and steps to resolve them.

Ubuntu's supposed to "just work," but when it doesn't, you're screwed. Arch "just works" because a very knowledgeable community has probably been through what you're going through and took the time to write down what worked.
TL;DR: Poorly written shallow analysis.

Really, he should've used a different title, say "JavaScript Rant"

The author complains about the was language is designed, and says "might", "in some cases", "this is wrong" etc. without showing real examples. And he's also dead wrong on a few facts (like JS being a pure functional language).

Looks like "let's bake something in 5 minutes" and post it to HN to get 57 points for nothing.
Are you seriously asking? This is just the first page of Google results:

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Q4.06/D0BC712B-7DBA-46CA-AA...

http://paidcontent.org/2012/04/26/the-ethics-of-astro-turfin...

http://falkvinge.net/2012/03/02/how-microsoft-pays-big-money...

http://paidcontent.org/2011/11/15/419-the-story-behind-shopc...

http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=200...

http://www.angelfire.com/nj2/edcurry/astroturf.html

They started in the 90's and haven't stopped. I'm not aware of any of their competitors doing the same thing, though feel free to point out any instances you know of. Particularly the ones without the market success to back it up (e.g. RIM).