skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Until recently, I also never thought loneliness was something that applied to me. I'm someone who experiences relatively long periods of isolation, whether its hacking on a project, reading, or as others have mentioned just interacting with co-workers or people you feel somewhat required to meet up with... because they're someone you knew from college, someone from your professional network, or a friend of friend, yet you don't really quite connect with them. I went on like this for years, but I never felt bad about it, or felt any sense of lack or nonfulfillment on a deeper level. FYI, mid 20's here.

But then I got a girlfriend, and soon after she moved in with me. She lived with me for an entire year. Every day I'd wake up with the same person and go to sleep with the same person. Anytime I wanted to go out and do something where you wouldn't want to do it alone, like people watching at parks, the beach, movies, new restaurants, road trips, new bars, etc., she was there and we would do it. I took up some new hobbies. We vibed really well for the most part, so lots of good and spontaneous interactions on a daily basis.

Then a couple months ago we broke up and she moved far away. Now I actually experience loneliness. I can't just go back to the old way, and isolate myself for a week at a time for some project or to learn a new technology. Viscerally, my body can't put up with it. I used to sleep incredibly when she was there. I could easily crawl into bed way before midnight or take naps during the day. Now I'm up late reading stuff or working on something every night, and I don't feel that great about it, physically. I have lost the desire to continue any of the hobbies. I feel a constant subtle pressure like something is wrong and I need to do something to fix it. It's not because I'm butt-hurt about the breakup (it was welcome at the time), it's just not having a person like that in your life anymore.

I think the only reason I was able to go on the way I did prior to the cohabitation, was because I'd simply never experienced such raw, intimate human connection before, like the kind that comes with living in the same one bedroom apartment with an SO for a year. It felt like it awakened a truly human need that perhaps had been long suppressed or I had rationalized a way to keep a distance from.

At any rate, the experience will hopefully make it easier for me to find another gal out there, now that I recognize, or rather "feel", the importance of deeper human connections.
I really liked the overall point of the article—that one can get a lot done with a relatively old / under-spec'ed machine—but this: "system that was designed for the casual computer user, with little thought given to power users" is outright idiotic, and I very rarely use terms like "outright idiotic."

And while Ostrega is right that a new MacBook costs more than $1000, it's probably not uncommon to use one for years. How big a deal is it for many people to pay $1 a day for a computer versus ten cents a day? For anyone who is employed or doing technical consulting, the difference is probably negligible, especially compared to the value of time.

About time: having more screen real estate is apparently helpful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403565; there was also recently an article about a guy who was teaching his girlfriend how to code and found using a 27" iMac useful simply because so much information could be displayed at once. The HN discussion pointed out (correctly) that one can learn to code with much smaller monitors, but the counterpoint tended to be (also correctly) that something that can be done doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to make it easier. If having modern equipment and large screens helps someone learn or do even 5% faster, and that person is worth at least $10 / hour, the rate at which things like large screens pay themselves back is very rapid.
There's a pretty extensive (if unrealistic) online alternative history around this incident: http://althistory.wikia.com/wiki/1983:_Doomsday
Why is it so hard for the Chrome team to realize how harmful it is to see passwords in clear text without any effort on the part of the intruder.

Baffling to me really, especially coming from Google.

They are going to turn around on this, I am certain of it, but why it's taking them so long is beyond me.
I've often thought that it was strange that these passwords were stored in plain text. Although. At least with the version of Firefox my old workplace had on their machines, I was able to view all the passwords stored in it as well. Not sure if this has been fixed, but at least it's not always been just Chrome guilty of this.
Until they're killed, as I predict will happen here. (And, that's a reasonable online-community-tending policy, because meta/governance-complaints often spin topics and morale in unwanted directions.)
> I can't use CTRL-s to freeze the terminal?

This works just fine in Mountain Lion.
This article leaves out a key factor of why I've never committed to Linux full time, and why I wouldn't buy an $80 laptop to run linux.

I have 1 laptop, and I don't just use it for development. I've tried over and over to use Linux as my primary OS, but every time the sheer jaggedness of the GUI experience, when I'm doing non-development (I guess normal consumer) things, bugs me non-stop until I switch back. It's like switching from Ruby to C++. C++ is amazingly powerful and has great uses, but ultimately Ruby is a lot more enjoyable to use.

I think it's just a personality difference. If you're comfortable in the nitty gritty of linux, more power to you! But you're not going to convince me linux is better because you're can change the window system or [insert some other component I wouldn't care to change]. And you're not even going to convince me you're much more efficient. The arguments of efficiency and customization are always about low level details that I don't need to care about, and that play no part in good software engineering. [This is about the scope of web development, I love linux in different fields such as embedded systems. Again though, it comes up frustratingly, excruciatingly short as a general use OS]
Effects of caffeine on persuasion and attitude change (2006)
Here's one I wrote in Dart:
http://skybrian.github.io/dart-synth-demo/synth.html
https://github.com/skybrian/dart-synth-demo

Which was based on this one in JavaScript:
https://github.com/skybrian/midiplayer
You're probably thinking of contrast based autofocus, no? The reason I say it's been cracked is that there are now sensors with integrated phase-detection on the sensor itself, so you don't need to split the optical path into a separate sensor. Canon has even announced a sensor where every pixel phase detects. That's even more impressive as you're not limited to a few autofocus points.

The other reason that mirrorless has it easier for autofocus is that the sensors can be always on, unlike a traditional SLR where the mirror is up for the exposure and the autofocus is literally in the dark. Sony's SLT system already solves this by splitting the optical path continuously. Removing the mirror entirely is just the next step. That together with the more precise but slower contrast detection should make autofocus systems much better.
It seems to me it is like most short quick comments, there might be some valuable insight if you apply it right but sure you can easily mis-apply the ideas.

I think it is pretty obvious no advice from a list can really be used to guide your decision. But it can make you think, "founder is the head of sales" - am I really making a good decision hiring a head of sales so quickly? Yes, the founder is wonderful but a lousy sales person. Similar to the no hiring a CEO idea. Avoid doing so is the advice, if you want to question that impulse but if there are good reasons to, well you have to decide based on the actually situation you face.

I generally find such lists of general advice close to worthless. I actually find this one worthwhile, but sure it has plenty of advice I don't agree with. What I really care about is if it provides some insight and sparks what seems like useful thought.
I love it! Same approach I take, but even cheaper!

I use a Lenovo T410, which you can readily acquire on Craigslist used/refurbished for ~$250. Comes with an i5 processor, 4 GB of RAM, and the HD can easily be upgraded. (I threw a cheap SSD in there for local DB issues.)

I'd love to use an even older Thinkpad, but since I do some local testing of machine learning / CPU-bound processes, an i5-series processor is probably the floor given the complexity of the models I run.

Regardless, I still love a huge PC battlestation at home (incredibly cheap for the power) and a cheap laptop that is no-frills but gets plenty of processing power for 99.9% of applications. Never really caught on to the Mac craze, even when I got free Macbook Pro Retinas from my last employer when they were first out - a sticker price of ~$4,000! Jeez!
Looks like they've changed the title and apologized.
The answer to this type of question is typically "because Apple said so."
What do you want to call Hollywood? Disney has revenues of $19 billion on TV and $13 billion on their parks, while they only make about $6 billion on movies. The movies have a profit of $722 million, TV $6.6 billion.

I guess I wouldn't be terribly surprised if Disney were making more money from ESPN than from producing movies (I didn't look real hard if they break out their various cable property revenues and such).

Perhaps that only weakens your point, but it seems like Google is maybe a better business than making movies.

(This comment expanded after I finished writing it, I had accidentally clicked submit...)
If you host a site that needs five nines or whatever in only one availability zone, it's your own darn fault.
>Can you give me an example? I'm genuinely curious...

Try getting connectors to MSSQL working properly (in various languages) on either OS. It's annoying as hell on Linux, damn near impossible on OSX (without cheating using ODBC instead of native drivers).
I used to disagree with this assessment, but I have been using Linux and Windows these last few years (and trying to make them work and look as similar as possible), and nowadays I tend to agree. The worst thing I can say about Windows is that it lacks a Unix commandline and package manager, but on any decently powerful, modern machine, you can use (VirtualBox+Ubuntu|ElementaryOS)|Cygwin to remedy that for free.

The iPhone is still my favorite phone. But I wouldn't take a Mac OS X box over a Linux box for professional development. That said, my opinion on these things changes constantly, so who knows how I'll feel in a year.
Jobs, robots, capitalism, inequality and you
I feel like I did my best work when I got up from the keyboard and walked around the office, maybe got some cookies, and thought of the big simplifying idea. And sure, I have no problem banging good ideas into a commodity PC running Linux. That is my preference, actually. They are simple and easily replaceable.

Addendum - adding it up, I think I spent about 15 or 20 thousand USD on various Macs from 1984 to 2000. Part of my experience might be "premium fatigue."
I'm not sure you grasped the real point of the author's post.

It doesn't matter if you think the movies are crap - the "art of narrative storytelling" isn't mutually exclusive with shallow film making. It's a technical expertise with developing a story/dialogue/scene sequence. The literal story can be shallow and unappealing, but the story's visuals, acting, etc. are all highly tuned.

I also don't agree that "works of art" are what keep Hollywood profitable. You just said most movies are terrible and formulaic. Those are the biggest money makers, unless you call those more artistic than the indie films everybody loves.

You go on to compare Hollywood to the typewriter. The typewriter is an extremely poor analogy. It was literally eclipsed by superior technology and made obsolete.

You cannot make Hollywood "obsolete" - there is a worship culture to celebrities, a direct product of Hollywood (as the author describes). Hollywood survived the television being put into homes, which would arguably be more of a technology progression. You can't just beat a cult of personality with technology is the author's point - Silicon Valley isn't going to remove something so deeply embedded in America just by getting "smarter" about it. It's vastly more complex than that, and it's not going away just because a startup comes out with something that attempts to make Hollywood "obsolete."

I'm not saying it can't be done, just that your argument doesn't work.
Having a very affordable Linux laptop that only works well for development could be seen as an advantage: you use one machine for work, and the other one for play and personal stuff.
That's fine, and you'll be able to mount it to a NEX/m43 mirrorless camera with full digital link using an adapter (it already exists). We're close to being able to open this market wide open and be able to mount any lens on any body. That's not good news for Canon/Nikon that often rely on making gear that's good enough that people with an investment in the system won't make the switch.
It is Unix with no driver problems. It is unix with both all free software and all proprietary software (except games). It is unix with a consistent pretty unobtrusive desktop environment that is easy to use and has sane defaults. It is unix with an accelerated window compositor that's always responsive and has no bugs.

Anyway, that was what it was in 10.6. Nowadays Ubuntu does all those things too to a certain extent, and it works without painful maintenance on a desktop machine. (I ran OSX on my desktop for a few years, it was very painful to upgrade, and apparently not in accordance with the EULA)

Still a great laptop OS though. And it runs rather well on macbook pros, which are the superior hardware choice in the laptop market, in my opinion.
Most unsolicited redesigns probably wouldn't work in the real world because the designer doesn't know much about the business's goals, internal stats, resources, internal politics, and other constraints.

But you know, they're still usually a lot of fun to check out. If all they do is entertain a few people and get people thinking, I think they're worth it.
That's fascinating...but I can't find a citation online. How did you come across this? Is e.g. ABC owned by Universal?
The comments were better than the article.
GitLab 6.0 Released
It's popular to hate on Ubuntu, but I personally love it and its UI. I've used Ubuntu since 11.04 and run 13.04 on my personal laptop (for development and day-to-day stuff). I'm a sucker for pretty things like translucent title bars and snapping windows to full-screen, but I also love how easy it is to develop with Linux (as opposed to Windows). Everything is usually a single command away on the command line (sudo apt-get install blank) so it's easy to install new libraries or programs for development.

It may not be for everyone, but it definitely is possible to use Linux without having to install and fiddle with new window managers or file explorers or all the nuts and bolts. I've never even really had driver issues on my laptop now that Ubuntu has become this mature.
The trackpoint is like Vim. At first you find it inconvenient and you try to avoid it.
Once you learn it and start being proficient in using the trackpoint you start noticing how efficient it becomes, no need to move you hands of the keyboard in order to quickly navigate the cursor, after which you quickly return to typing.
Now you have gotten used to the trackpoint and using another machine without a trackpoint gives you that 'I want to navigate the red cap' feeling, which is the same as being in a non Vim text editor and stopping yourself from using the hjkl keys from navigating.
ODBC doesn't seems like cheating to me.

I can understand why you'd use Windows if you're using a Microsoft stack. At that point, there's no saving you.
I don't know where you get that idea. Both Fuji and Sony (with and without Zeiss) make great lenses. Panasonic also has at least 1 or 2 gems in the m43 system.

Canon and Nikon make some good stuff but they also make some pretty pedestrian lenses. These days with automated design, lens are much less of a black art and it's much harder to have an edge. From what I read Sigma has been churning out some really good ones lately for example.
Show HN: AdminJS, the Backend-Agnostic Administration Framework
How is the statement idiotic? I'm a Mac user, and ever since Snow Leopard, Apple has been continually removing features for power users such as true two-dimensional workspaces support and excellent window management in favor of a Frankensteinian nightmare called Mission Control. Changing the OS' appearance requires hacking and reverse-engineering, and Apple has continued to put in consumer-friendly features that are useless for a power user. Launchpad is ridiculous. The iOS apps ported over are unnecessary bloat. The removal of Save As in favor of automatic versioning for those who don't know how to use Command-S drives many mad. The removal of scrollbars as default should be heresy.

Most of these things can be solved with preferences and a bunch of "defaults write"s, but it just solidifies the reasoning behind that statement.

Let's not even start with the hardware. Apple's decision to remove antiglare and high-res, 1:1 pixel panels (non-Retina) is egregious. The removal of upgradeability for the sake of 2mm in thickness has to be one of the most short-sighted and absurd decisions I've ever seen a company make.

So, he's right. With Mavericks, the trend seems to be changing, and I hope it does, but for now, I'll reserve my judgment until it releases officially.

What's also more depressing is that in an attempt to chase consumers, pro manufacturers are making the same awful hardware decisions Apple made, while alienating their true markets.

Don't believe me? Search Lenovo T440s. I won't bother calling it a ThinkPad, because it isn't one.
Im gonna go out on a limb and assume most of us,know that never sleeping and powerpoints arent going to progress the global economy, long term. ymmv.
It seems to me that the differential between those who know what a bookmarklet is and those who know that you can see everything in the settings menu is very small. So you're not talking about a huge effect here.
Splitting an AWS account
I agree the hardcore linux folk all seem to hate on Ubuntu, but it does just work.
Though I agree with the idea of your post, in case you weren't aware, pressing Shift while clicking the maximize button causes a Windows-style maximize that fills the screen.
I disagree, coming from the perspective that loneliness and it's negative side effects revolve around quality of connections, not just being around people. I don't have deeper, quality connections with my co-workers and don't think I ever will, given my particular company. And not for lack of trying. Some companies can incubate the right culture and make the right hires, but I think most cannot.

WFH can be isolating, but I much prefer it to the obligatory, often superficial conversations with coworkers or managers, as well as not to mention the myriad other distractions that keep you from getting your work done.
Using an employer-issued laptop makes it murkier who owns the code you might hack up on nights and weekends.
I had a big personal battle over this idea, but decided it would be silly to physically switch between two laptops based on what I was doing. Sometimes the activities are mixed together too: I'll finish a class and decide to check email or some other program for a couple minutes, then get back to development.
Servo's name is fitting, then.
To me the most important factor for developing on a laptop mentioned in the article is the use of a tiling window manager.

For me an incredibly common task in web development is to have a web browser and 1 or more terminal windows tiled horizontally, side by side, in an [ A | B ] or [ A | [ B | C ]] configuration, where A is a web browser, and B and C are terminals.

In order for this to work for me on a screen resolution <= 1920x1080, the ratio ( width of A ) / ( width of screen ) should be dynamically adjustable using a single key combo, without causing window overlapping. If this ratio is fixed, and cannot be dynamically adjusted by the window manager, I experience one or more of the following problems at any given moment:

1. the web browser window is too narrow, causing wide documents to be clipped and a horizontal scroll bar to appear.

2. A terminal window is wider than 80 characters, causing unnecessary screen area to be consumed which could be better allocated toward the web browser.

3. A terminal window is less than 80 characters in width, preventing the entire line of code from being displayed.

To me Linux is the ideal laptop OS because it's the easiest OS to install a tiling window manager on, and a tiling window manager is what maximizes the platform's primary constraint: small screen area.
Come on, we can do better than that. This is not to besmirch Apple or any silliness like that, my comment here is about this view point.

The "de facto standard?" This view is probably common among programming hipsters but its hard to take seriously. There is a world out there besides Apple and RoR that is not just enterprise slog ...

As far as the $80 machine ... I mean ok ... If you are on a serious budget but ... If you are a technologist, I don't see the point. But it is cool to note that for those of us that need it, there are good machines at economical prices.

But if we all want to be serious programmers, can we move on from this hipster phase? The funny thing is the Apple is 100% not in line with supposed precepts taken as "de facto" in the hipster community (open source, over preoccupation with github, standards, open, portable, etc)
> while literally not having an "up one level" button

kind of. it has the path button, does the same thing, though with two clicks :(
idk about the T42, but sometime between the T22 and the T60, things definitely went downhill. So between that and anything newer only having a shortscreen, I recently opted to upgrade to a T61 that I should be able to keep going for quite some time.
I think the more likely reason is in case you start to drown in the bath.
What you just said only applies to trading. Not IBD, HF, PE, which are more team oriented.
does not work for me (Finder; 10.8.4). shift+green-button is the same as just the green button. do you have a plugin or something?
Cool... I've never heard of hosts (not a Windows user) but I use AdSuck from Conformal. It's a DNS server that spoofs blacklisted addresses and forwards all other queries, and is useful for blocking ads.
I like AdSuck because things like Ad Block Plus don't really block connections the way AdSuck does.

https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/adsuck
I guess it because, quite many people can rely on Mac or Windows for their daily work. All required things have pretty polished interface where as Linux distros have getting better, but there are still lot of unpolished, or missing interfaces.

With Windows there is too much and ugly chrome around everything, slow and buggy views.

Apple's view on the maximize button is that it should maximize the window to the width of the available content, and not to the screen. Today lot of the widescreen resolutions and screensizes are much bigger, so doesn't necessarily make sense to maximize every app. It's designed that way, even you might disagree.
The text of the page mentions comet ISON arriving in November.
Ha, Sorry, thanks for that.

Say hello to David/Michael, he does a great job!
It depends on the app. It doesn't work on Finder, but does on Chrome, Sparrow etc