skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Things are more like they are today than they have ever been before."

There are only two considerations, really: do you (or the end user you are helping) prefer OS X or Windows, and are your skills/available time competitive with the Apple hardware premium?

The 'debate' consists of large numbers of people insisting that their answers to the foregoing questions are somehow 'objective'. They're not. If I won the lotto tomorrow I'd buy the most expensive G5 and install Windows 7 on it.
Google Ventures' Ronny Conway Joins Andreessen Horowitz
Online Payment Wars Continue: PayPal Officially Announces Flexible API
I don't think for a second that Linux/Open Source is an emerging threat to OS X, sorry.
Why are those "factors"? Do you have examples demonstrating the these are indeed cause-effect relationships and not just your opinion? e.g. "getting grade inflation under control would reduce self-confidence" - For every student? According to who? What do school test marks have to do with starting a business?
Learn a foreign language, e.g., japanesepod101.com.
Huh? I'm waiting until I can replace the 500GB 2.5" external drive I carry around with me with a 512MB thumb drive. Then I don't have to worry about it getting banged up in transport.

Things like this thumbdrive are all about small size for ease of transport and usage (even a 2.5" external drive is awkward to hook up and use when you're in an airport/on a place/on a bus/etc). You would obviously want to use some sort of drive encryption (TrueCrypt/PGP/etc) and do regular backups if the data was important enough to not want to lose.

As far as what you would use it for?
my music collection: ~89GB
my photos: ~35GB (this only starts in 2005, I haven't scanned in older photos)
$HOME backup: ~20GB (which includes some photos not counted above)
custom bootable ubuntu 'live' partition: ~5GB
cpan offline mirror: ~1.7GB

The list of things goes on... This is not even including ripping some movies to it for watching 'on the go'.

[EDIT]: That said, the prices will have to come down. Currently, the 128GB thumbdrives on NewEgg are in the ~$350 price range which is too expensive for my tastes... (even the 64GB thumbdrives are in the $120-$150 price range)
That's probably never going to happen though.

Another big reason why Apple fans pay a premium is for the seamless integration experience that doesn't make you think. Since Apple controls 100% of the hardware it can ensure that there are never any problems like x drivers that crash randomly and take your system down.

Linux will always be oriented towards the hobbyist type that, when things break down, opens up the box and tinkers inside. Linux can't control the hardware it's deployed on so it'll always be at a massive disadvantage.
Nonsense. The mega-rich likely do not, but people with $1-10 million still do. My boss's wife still does.
Yes, it's a real pain to see that (for now, for a lot of uses) Firebug's broken.

But it sure speaks well of FF that they have the issues boldly presented on their site.
Klavierlack is "piano lacquer". You see that in some high-end automotive advertising.. "black piano lacquer wood trim".
Really!? I wonder how often I've done this by accident and never knew figuring the conversation ended.
Not only that, but Wave is going to change life as we know it! Cure disease! Stop war! Prolong life! I can hardly wait!

As soon as it's stable enough to be released!
The easiest way to read regexs is to learn the syntax!
It's not so bad as long as you don't push any untested changes. If I do something freaky with the index, I usually stash the leftovers and test the last commit. Like this:

git add -i
git commit
git stash
./some_tests # ...shoot, forgot something
git add . # whatever I forgot
git commit --amend
./some_tests # now we're good
git stash apply
git stash clear
git push

On the hg side, you can use mq and record to get yourself in and out of the same kind of trouble, as someone else mentioned. I think these are essential but dangerous features that any good DVCS should have.

A better safety mechanism (than deleting the feature) is a pre-push hook that runs the test suite on every commit since the remote head. Not everyone needs that level of strictness, though.
I had to revert back to FF 3.0 so I could use the older version of Firebug. I rely on it for work (both javascript and css), and the new version simply doesn't work. Really quite disappointing... I guess they wanted to get it 'out the door' so people could start using it with FF 3.5, but they rolled in a bunch of UI changes with it... small increments, people! :)
There's a lot of interesting stuff with hemisphere seperation. Also check out that TED lecture of the lady having a stroke.
I'm glad to see they at least mentioned Tesla at the end of the article. It's only been 100 years since he was doing this stuff and we're just now catching up to his work.
I used a Windows XP laptop for the first time in ages yesterday, it struck me just how cumbersome that is compared to Linux. This is the process I saw:

I inserted a USB thumb drive, it asked me if I want to install something or other, giving some warning that Microsoft hadn't approved it or something. Then I plugged in a mouse - it did the same thing. Then I started Office and again with something about installing and then asked my name. Even that process is simplified since someone had already installed/bought Office which doesn't normally come with as full version on most machines nowadays.

To do the same on a fresh install of Ubuntu I just plug in the USB stick and double click - I never get asked anything.

I would say Ubuntu is already better than Windows XP.
I disagree. Netbooks are a fad that will not last over a few years. For one thing, the margins on netbooks are even slimmer than the cheapo laptops Dell was making before the "netbook revolution", and manufacturers are getting murdered left and right by this.

It's the Wal-Mart effect - you flood a market suddenly with cheap, shoddy product and people will jump for it, but it's not sustainable as your vendors and suppliers start dying off.

Profit margins are disappearing for the likes of Asus, Dell, and HP, and they're skating on thinner ice than ever before. Would you rather be selling $300 computers at a $5 profit each, or $1200 computers at a $100 profit each?

People got on Sony's back early on when they claimed that the introduction of a netbook will do nothing but start a "race to the bottom". They were attacked for being out of touch with reality and trying to peddle overpriced ultra-portable notebooks. But they were right.
I guess that wasn't really my experience. It took me about 5 minutes to set up an event so as an administrator of an event, it was extremely easy and the UI was fine. What they kind of sucked at is the options to display an event. Templates were limited and I'm feeling our event is a bit cookie cutter at the moment. Perhaps that's a differentiating factor to focus on too.
http://pitaru.com/ < creator's website includes many other innovative projects
2889: Working with very large linksets in Opensim
Microsoft's Linux Kernel Code Drop Result of GPL Violation
I (personally) like the UI changes. I was using the 1.5 alpha versions in combination with the 3.5 beta since June and was quite happy with the combo. However, in the last 5-10 releases of the 1.5 alpha, the performance has severely regressed. Often the inspector doesn't update the console with html selections and the console becomes unresponsive overall. I was having to close and reopen the tab of the site I was working on to get the inspector working again. I just switched back to the latest version of 1.4 with 3.5.1 and it seems to be working quite well.
Open Question to HN:
How would you go about making a cellphone company that could both make a good network and not treat its customers terribly?
It's great to see the Internet on fire in Canada. Most people don't realize that we have had some amazing Web companies come out of Canada, like Flickr and iStockPhoto and StumbleUpon and ClubPenguin, and it looks like we'll have a bunch more over the next few years. Congrats to all the winners!

Disclosure: I work at FreshBooks (and am very excited!)
False dichotomy. Forcing people to take classes does not make them educated. Yet if they are free to participate in the activities they choose, they will educate themselves.
The story behind Microsoft Patches for Linux
Does anyone know if this will require PayPal logos and/or PayPal accounts for end users or is a completely transparent API like Authorize.net? The Amazon account requirement for FPS makes it a non-starter for me.
HootSuite is one of only 3 listed that I'd heard of (HootSuite, FreshBooks, NowPublic), and I'd heard of it in a business context where people would pay -- a technical team at a Major Company sharing responsibility for a support Twitter account. So the dismissiveness is unwarranted.
Apple also happens to be the only major manufacturer still willing to treat customers with some measure of respect. I've owned a Toshiba before, and have dealt with Dell also with regards to warranty service; they are terrible. Long wait times (upwards of three hours!), clueless reps, and an iron-clad resistance to making any repairs whatsoever.

Dell eventually acquiesces if you press them. Toshiba never did fix the defective laptop they sold me.

Now Apple. I bought a MacBook Pro some time back in '06. It bit the dust this past Christmas (Dec '08), and I called Apple up; the below is what happened, embellishment-free:

- Waited less than 2 minutes for the first representative to answer. I told her about the problem, she called up my file and noticed I had done previous repairs for the laptop, and immediately offered a full replacement (as opposed to a repair attempt).

- She transferred me to a level-2 tech, I was on hold for less than 2 minutes again, and when the L2 tech got on the line the first representative relayed all the relevant information to him, in my presence, and asked me to confirm that this is correct.

- They never once argued about the validity of any of my claims, nor did they ask for proof that my motherboard was truly shot.

- I told them that I needed to do work over the holiday break (this was Dec. 20th-ish), and asked them to expedite the process. I had my new computer by Christmas eve.
- They upgraded me to a unibody MacBook Pro for free, without me asking for one.

Try getting THAT kind of service from any other PC manufacturer on the market today.
There's a chance Ubuntu is better than the years-old operating system. I've had Ubuntu driver issues with all three of my attempted installs, but if I hadn't had those issues I might prefer it to Windows XP for some things.

That said, Windows 7 (and even most of Windows Vista) is more polished than Ubuntu in its current state, and its plug-and-play is much better.
The recommended and near-universally used Ruby hash keys are immutable. Symbols are used most frequently, but even if you pass a string as a hash key it gets automatically copied and frozen. freeze is also a method on Object and can be used anywhere to make an object immutable.
Ultimately, improving high school education should to lead to smarter, more imaginative students, who focus less on grades and more on their aspirations. I don't see how this couldn't lead to even more entrepreneurship.

* Getting grade inflation under control will help demonstrate to students that results come from work, not from handouts. Entrepreneurs have probably the best grasp of this idea.

* The average founder probably has a much better grasp of probability than the average high school graduate. This doesn't seem to stop them now.

* A more competitive high school environment will encourage kids to do amazing things. Sure, some will get caught up in the grades game, but an ideal education system wouldn't have kids idolizing grades as is done today, and students will be allowed to focus on the things that matter to them (be it arts, entrepreneurship, or a million other mentally stimulating activities whose end results mean more than grades).
TechCrunch Tries To Editorialize The Simplest Feature Additions, But Fails
Anthropomorphic Shower
From some standpoints, yes. The design and build quality of machines like the MacBook Pro certainly trumps anything available from commodity PC makers.
Live mice from skin stem cells
Pretty good... Looks like it makes it easy to put together wire models, where each wire is composed by drawing curves in the view plane.

I still have a soft spot for Teddy, though, which is a solid modeler with a great gestural interface:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2H35SlLmUA

http://www-ui.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~takeo/teddy/teddy.htm
Clojure has a page specifically stating it doesn't take the traditional object-oriented approach - the Java/C++/C# one people are most familiar with: http://clojure.org/multimethods
OO is not about methods, it's about the data. Single-dispatch OO is just a special case of multimethod-based-OO, anyway.

(Remember the whole "sending a message to an object" thing? You do that with both variants. In the single-dispatch case, the method is a structure in the metaclass instance. In the multiple-dispatch case, some other helper object finds the right method. Same idea, though.)
WD-40 Populizer Dies, Never patented ingredients
The Five Facial Expressions of Comic-Con
50% of software downloaded off the web is never installed?
If Windows 7 is as good as people say that it's self would take a cut into Apple's products.
Hardware in terms of ram, graphics card, hard disk: Not in a distinguishable way.

Hardware in terms of firm design, usability, compactness, and aesthetic: I can't think of anything that comes close to Apple's design. I can barely think of computers that come close to looking as good, and those are ones that don't feel good when you're actually using them.
"...that’s why Microsoft’s recent Laptop Hunter commercials really never made a lot of sense. ... people who are shopping for computers where price is the key factor, were never going to buy Macs anyway..."

It perplexes me that Apple products sell as well as they do. I find Apple's value proposition to be questionable. For example, compare an iPod to just about any comparable media player, or a Mac to a comparable PC (in terms of HW power).

I think Microsoft is very smart to point this out, as I do not think this perception has reached the general public. Also, there's a line in the commercial like, "I guess I'm not cool enough to be a Mac person." A clever way for Microsoft to imply that Mac owners are paying extra for the Apple image. This is also an idea that I do not think has really reached the general public.
It certainly trumps something that sells for $600, but is the build quality all that much better than a comparably priced ThinkPad or one of Dell's new high-end machines?

The only real hardware advantage that I can find which isn't available elsewhere is the nice, fully internal battery that the Pros come with now. You can get one that performs similarly from Lenovo, but it doesn't look as elegant.
Why are the students exceptionally motivated to fulfill this assignment:

- They have nowhere else to go. They have to sit in that class room. More or less, it's their job.

- They are being asked to create something from their own imagination, which is in stark contrast to the usual method of schooling: memorizing established facts from textbooks.

Motivation is a powerful force that schools do not harness enough.

However, large organizations will always be political in nature, so driving behaviour with intrinsic motivation is probably NOT something that will be practiced generally.
Got an email? I've got a few questions about FreshBooks...
Linux can't control the hardware it's deployed on so it'll always be at a massive disadvantage.

What do you mean?

Any vendor can take Linux and tailor it to their hardware (e.g. Tivo) and make it a seamless experience for the enduser. You might not recognize it as Linux at that point, but it still is Linux and that is one of its design potentials (if not goals).
http://whattimeisit.com/ - very useful!
Do you realize single-dispatching methods in class-based OOPLs are nothing but constrained generic functions? they're curried on one argument and nailed flat to the ground with a staple gun.

I don't know about Clojure, but Common Lisp's "multimethods" are OOP on steroids; you could layout your code vertically in a parent/child class heirarchy and it would look no different than a "normal" class-based inheritance tree; all you have to do is visualize the method call in prefix mode:

object.method (arguments) = method (object arguments)

In essence, you could model Java and similar languages with a fixed and constrained Common Lisp. You just have to take its wheels off and lay it flat on bricks.

Interested parties can go and learn CLOS for the full story. Spoiler, though: not long after, Lisp will start to hover! you just can't hold somethings down. If you thought of objects in terms of a vertical class heirarchy, or a side-ways call chain or what have you; CLOS will make your visualization planes intersect and show you new dimensions you never imagined..
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After clicking on it a few times, it should say "did you mean 'stack overflow'?
That's not to say someone couldn't come along and do with Linux what Apple did with Mach/BSD/NeXT. A focused Linux-based OS with a seamless new UI and app suite (and good APIs) could be great. In fact, that's one of the things that I like about the Chrome OS idea, no matter how silly it might seem to just throw Chrome on a "bag of drivers."

The problem, of course, is the effort. Software is hard.
Sony makes decent high-end hardware... and then cripples it with loads of pre-installed crapware.
Could you be more specific about what you mean? What exactly is a processing grid and which parts of the brain do you mean?

Not questioning you, just really desperate right now for inspiration.
Ah! the advantages of being a democracy.
Manage Your Time As You Manage Your Money
It wasn't the hardware the convinced me to buy a mac, it was OS X. A company I interned at lent me a powerbook, and after about a week of using it I had basically stopped using my thinkpad altogether. The user experience of windows XP always felt super clunky and glued together after that.

Also, OS X was my first real exposure to working in a unix based environment. Some people may disagree, but I discovered a definite preference for working in unix/linux. I eventually replaced the OS on my old desktop with Ubuntu, which is nice, but it's still hard for me to imagine a non-technical person like my girlfriend using Ubuntu. However, my girlfriend has switched over to OS X as well, and is much happier than when she was on windows xp. I guess I see OS X as basically being a linux distro with an excellent user experience.

Of course, your mileage may differ.
It's still OO, it's just not the style most people are familiar with. One can implement multimethhods in Java and C++, it's just cumbersome. (In fact, Stroustrup has said he wanted C++ to be able to do multiple dispatch at the language level, but he never found an expression and implementation that satisfied him in terms of performance and the type system.)

CLOS has had multimethods for years, and that is indeed OO.
Nanoscale Actuators Needed
That was really well-written. I liked this line:

> The Lambda Calculus is innocent of the notion of mutability
How is DNA not an array? Correct me if I'm wrong, but Lisp lists are linked lists, so elements don't have to be next to each other in memory. On the other hand, DNA is stored and processed from one molecule to the next one physically.
It never crossed my mind that he was the only one, however it was still interesting to read and a good example of what teachers would be like in a perfect world.
VP/Engineering (if you're an execution player) or VP/Product Management (if you're a vision player). Both of those titles are close to the revenue. In a small, focused startup, don't discount "lead developer with a board seat"; also a strong role.

If you're the tech founder in this scenario, the last thing you want to do is put yourself in the architecture ghetto. What will happen is that your company will then hire a VP/Eng and a VP/PM. You are in a very crappy place to compete for mindshare against Eng and PM from a CTO's desk.
It is also pretty clear that if you want to play high end games on your computer, you buy a PC. I'm not sure it will be this way forever- if Mac continues to gain popularity more games will probably be released for Mac- but as it stands Mac isn't even an option for gamers like me (or any other non windows OS).
I just don't get it. I promise I'm not flaming Apple anymore, for Christ's sake, I've never seen so many people whine and cry in my life just for saying a harsh word or two(or not even so harsh, really) about Apple. But all bullshit aside, I just don't understand. I can see the Porche-Camry analogy if the Mac was a better performing computer. The Porche is a sportscar, it has a nicer interior, its faster, has a high-end motor, and just generally a bunch of things that make it cost more. Where is all of that in a Mac? Line up a PC and a Mac with COMPARABLE hardware specs, and a Mac is no different/better (performance wise, here) than the PC, and often times the PC actually outperforms the Mac. Please someone explain this to me. This is no 'high-end' market here. You act like the Mac has twice the RAM, twice the cores, and twice the clock speed, and it simply doesn't. How about for me, the consumer - am I paying $400-500 more because the Mac 'looks' better (In which my opinion it doesn't, but then again who cares what the damn things look like - its a computer) ? I've gotten a ton of responses saying that 'the case/shell is stronger and more durable'. Ok, maybe so, but that justifies me shelling out another $500? Or 'it's made out of higher quality parts' - what parts? It was my understanding that Mac's have either Intel processors or PowerPC's. Intel is the most commonly used in PCs..so no 'better parts' there. Basically all hardware in both are compatible and can be used in both, and if not, they're very similar/comparable. Once again, I am NOT flaming Apple here - so don't start whining again. I seriously want someone to tell me why spending the extra money is worth it. How is the Mac a 'higher-end' computer? I don't want to hear differences in MacOS vs. Windows/Linux because you're never going to convince me there. You probably won't gain much ground with a software argument either, because most of that is made for both platforms and there is a crapload more free software available for the PC. I'm talking about performance wise, PC vs Mac with comparable hardware. What is my extra money going for? Why is it worth it?Why are people calling Apple's Mac a 'higher end' computer? Thanks.
P.S. - My theory? The Mac is being labeled as a 'higher-end' computer simply because the price tag is higher :-) Seriously, that's all I can think of.
"Adium is classier than any of the all-in-one clients on Windows (including Pidgin)."

Adium and Pidgin both use libpurple, the same IM backend. If you want to talk about design aesthetic differences between open source and the Mac ecosystem, it's probably the definitive example.
And there is also ShapeShop:

http://www.shapeshop3d.com
they may be fine as a stand alone business, but not as a top 10 business for an entire country
I like to use Flowroute and write my apps with FreeSWITCH. It allows you to write quite advanced applications that do lots of cool, geeky, useful things.