skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In less than 3 years my sister's 1700$ dell lost 5 keys (she was typing on the rubber under the keys) and 15% of the screen stopped working (thin lines from top to bottom). She replaced it a few months ago with a 2400$ apple laptop. She did not need more speed, or memory just something that would survive constant use.

PS: She did not have the free time to mail it back to be fixed, and waited for a break so she could migrate to the next machine. I suggested a new Dell every 18 months, but that was not worth the hassle. And worst case she can show up at the apple store and get it fixed while she waits.
I feel the opposite way. I often see hunks like:

sub foo {
+ warn "made it here";
actual code;
}

This stuff, I never want to commit. Sure, I haven't tested
the code without it, but I'm sure it works.

Subversion-style committing sucks hard; worst idea ever. (And besides, svn still lets you do this; svn commit one-file. Untested tree committed, with no possibility of ever backing out the change. Not good.)
I usually use "mark as spam" as a "never show me anything like this again, please" button, so I do not really care if the message is really a spam.

What bugs me is that some legit mailing lists are prone to receiving spam once in a while.
The problem (with UI) is not that Windows developers don't care about it, its that the barrier to entry is very low, and the potential rewards are very high when working with Windows. Because of the market share Windows has, when someone decides "You know, I'm going to make an App that does X", they're usually going to write it for Windows, simply because that's where the market is.

Not only that, but the people using Macs are largely using Macs because of the UI, so there is a much higher standard set for developers. In general, it seems, people using Macs have a much higher expectation for their Software, which means that the general crap that Windows developers put out would never fly on a Mac.
Talk Nerdy To Me
Yes, I think a big company like amazon should be notified that its emails are being received as spam. I don't recall asking to hear about "new" books that do not interest me (for example), and rather like the fact that gmail's filter has learned that those messages are really spam, as far as I am concerned.

I really like pg's definition of spam.
Is anyone ever going to fix the Facebook Connect login setup? Is there anywhere to report bugs where they are actually see or do we just rely on someone finding it here?
You put it much better than I did; facts without rhetoric :-)
Open up a Mac Pro, then open up a Dell. You don't need to be an electrical engineer to appreciate the difference.
Except that as far as mobile phones go, the iPhone isn't particularly low-end pricewise.
Smart has been a huge money pit for Daimler. They lost billions, cancelled most of their unreleased vehicles, and had to be absorbed back into Daimler.
Yes, I do think it's better. I've got a ThinkPad T400, a white MacBook right here (and my wife has a Pro).

The T400 has five buttons around the trackpad... and Apple accomplishes the same functionality with one trackpad and one button (and no button on the new models).

The T400 has a lit keyboard toggled by a key. The light is actually just an LED pointing down from the lid. I can see the PCB it's attached to. Compare that to Apple's ambient light sensing backlit keys.

There is a key on the T400 to zoom the screen, but it just changes the resolution! Compare that to control+two-finger-drag on the MacBook, which smoothly zooms in on any region of the screen.

The T400 has a physical switch on a corner of the case to turn off the wireless hardware. The MacBook provides it through a menu.

The T400 for some reason still has a plain old full-sized VGA connector with screw posts, compared to mini-DVI.

It's a holistic thing, I guess. A design is either "together" or not. Lenovo doesn't have it.
That'd be quite the trick, since the G5 was a PowerPC box that hasn't been sold for years, and Windows 7 only runs on x86.
I completely agree. If you notice, on basically any T.V. show you watch today, anyone with a computer on the show, the computer will be an Apple (mostly laptops). Same in movies as well. Somehow, Apple Mac's got branded as 'cool', and I guess 'cool' will cost you an extra $500+.
For sure! sunir splat freshbooks dot comm
What a disappointing article!

Only four piece of software mentioned. Of the four, only Audacity and
Blender are really about working with Video and Audio. The rest are a
format transcoder (Simple Theora Encoder) and a general purpose media
player and broadcaster (VLC)

So in summary, none none of them are really about editing video.

The article even failed to mention you can almost do that with Blender, but learning a complete and thus quite complicated 3d suite to edit your vacations' videos is a bit "much."
Wasn't Premiere actually developed by SuperMac and purchased by Adobe?
*its, not it's. :-)

Windows 7 isn't mindblowing. I actually dislike a lot about it. Microsoft doesn't have a clue regarding their design.

That said, when you plug in a mouse it works without complaining. My point was that the specific gripe ("Windows XP has a lot of noise") was taken care of in Vista and is now fairly polished for Windows 7.
Well, what was all that junk about liquidation preferences? That seemed to be insinuating the cash out deal could have been bad.

But the bigger point is that stuff isn't VCs hating entrepreneurs. If that rumor is true, it's just them doing exactly what Tony expected them to (or at least realized they would strongly consider) when he took the money.

You could similarly say Tony hates VCs because he didn't want to sell and give Sequoia a huge 5-10x, but that would be equally untrue.
Taking a photo of your keychain is supposed to be kind of a bad idea since someone could easily cut a key from a decent quality photo. Of course I'm sure there are easier ways to break into your house but still.
I think you are thinking that the term "startup" applies only to a particular size company. Can a 100-person company still be a startup? I think a lot of people would say, "Yes." And you often don't get to be a 100-person company if somewhere along the way you didn't have some really bright person performing that function. Your founders aren't always genius tech guys and, TBH, you can't always pry great tech talent away from other great companies without fancy title "upgrades"...
I think the author spun his article with the concept that a Mac is 'better'. In my opinion the real point of the article should have been that Apple is branding their products as 'premium'. Just like anything in life just because someone has branded themselves as 'premium' certainly does not preclude the possibility there is something better out there. In fact I think Lenovo markets their laptops in a similar way by catering to the business user. It isn't to say Dell/HP don't make a products that can easily compete with a ThinkPad, it's just that when you think of a 'business' laptop Lenovo wants you to think of a ThinkPad.

Having said that I own a ThinkPad W500 and a Macbook and think both have strong/weak points, but given a choice of only having one I would probably stick with the Macbook, simply because I can do anything I need to with it (a la bootcamp).
The most interesting thing about this article to me is that the author has linked to another site using a visible bit.ly link -- literally "One blogger (http://bit.ly/gHkES) calculated...". It suggests some disconnect between the NYTimes journalist and the technology he's using.
Being Asian myself, I concur that we tend to have questionable tastes. It probably has something to do with the cultures going through an identity crisis.

This is most pronounced in car designs. Japanese and Korean cars designs generally look like they are "trying too hard", especially in the recent years in their high-end models. Maybe they are going for the funky-factor of the ricers, I don't know. British, Italian, and French cars usually look the least desperate. German and American cars are somewhere in the middle. Just my opinion.
20 Lines or Less #26
From what I've gleaned from the direction of many recent discussions on haskell-cafe, the good FFI support is a huge reason that Haskell is starting to fail to avoid success.
It is also pretty clear that if you do play high end games you end up spending a lot on hardware upgrades.

I doubt that the Mac can really compete in the market for high end games since most of the machines it sells are not very upgradeable.
You prick!

You got me. Nice one.
iPhone Apps That Use Facebook Connect
I don't want to wade into the "startup semantics" thing, which is almost as bad as "hacker/cracker". We're a startup, except we're not, because we're profitable and we've been around for 4 years. Etc, etc.

I'm saying the CTO title is bad for two reasons:

* It's a deceptively bad title to assume, because to a lot of people, it denotes someone who has stepped away both from coding and from actively managing MRDs and roadmaps. There are smart people with CTO titles, but, like it or not, there are a lot of dumb people with CTO titles too.

* The role itself is weak compared to the VP/E, who owns the dev schedule, and the VP/PM, who owns the roadmap and the customer contacts. Both those roles can win arguments with appeals to authority that the "CTO" can't counter.

It's not that marketable. It's a vulnerable and (often) superfluous role. It's a net lose. Avoid it!
I know I'm being shameless here, but we're #6 on the list.
What health care's future could be: "Medical Home"
I are l33t hax0r.

Seriously, silly me - I meant the top-end Mac Pro with the dual quads etc. I was thinking of the beautifully engineered case and internals, which I still associate with the g5.
Ask HN: Big Screen Lower Quality or Small Screen High Quality?
Which do you prefer?
The point of having "Unsubscribe" would be to act like a macro: "Please Gmail, take care of telling that marketer that I'm not interested anymore and delete this email as well".

The supplied link isn't always a one-step thing. (I am very annoyed when I'm asked to fill out my email address on the unsubscribe form since they know it!)

The way it is set up right now, it looks like the point is mostly to reduce the number of emails received. If you report something as spam, you won't see it in your inbox anyway, so the unsubscribe part can only help Google reducing the overall number of emails.
Behind Ning's Gina Bianchini's $750M Play
Hackers, hackers, hackers, why does every thread have a post about how hackers are so great? Can we stop the big circle jerk?
Apple basically started from scratch in 2002. A big company with a strong consumer brand, proven track record and lots of cash could do it. Google is such a company. Especially coupled with a paradine shift to web apps and a clear revenue model as a result. I wrote about this here: http://blog.richardcunningham.co.uk/2009/07/what-googles-chr...
Hardware is not what defines “high-end” any more.

Go into Best Buy and you’ll see RAM, CPU speed and hard disk sizes listed on the features tags. Those specs are increasingly meaningless for most consumers as any computer in the store will do what they need.

The more they focus on these specs, the more PC makers allow their product to become a commodity.

Design, usability, buying experience and after-sales service are what really differentiate computers. If any computer is sufficient to do my daily tasks, I’m going to look for the cheapest one available. But I’ll pay more if you can sell me on those intangible benefits. That’s the high-end of the market.
"The T400 for some reason still has a plain old full-sized VGA connector with screw posts, compared to mini-DVI."

Why would you want mini-DVI? Mini-DVI is a proprietary Apple-only connector that forces you to buy an adapter so that you can connect all other hardware to it. By the way, the T400s has DisplayPort, which, OTOH, is an open standard.
Wow, never heard of Twilio before. Good to know something like this exists. Thank you.
Make a (Luddite) Billionaire Jealous... with an iPhone app
Seen a few, even thought about getting one, but for 2K more I got a used 3 year old car that has a bigger trunk, back seats, much better gear box (manual 6-speed) and is overall much nicer.
You know, the $2000/sec figure didn't sound that impressive until I did the math. Paypal seriously processes $63 billion a year in payments? That kind of surprises me.

Also, the chained payments feature sounds like exactly what I have been looking for on one project. Last I checked, you couldn't do this with FPS. The closest you could get was authorizing multiple receivers at the same time, but they would show up as individual charges on the bill. (If that has changed, feel free to point it out to me.)
Open-Source Backers March on Washington
As someone who has tried cutting keys that way, its a little harder than it sounds. Doing it by hand, from a picture, is rather difficult (took around an hour to make an even close to working key), and while it should be possible to make an automatic cutting device fromt he picture, someone in the position to do that is probably very unlikely to break into your house (especially considering the effort to find out which key it is, then track you down and figure out which house is yours, then figure out when you won't be home).

As far as the site goes, the idea is interesting, but it seems rather bland to me. When I read it I thought it might be interesting to try, but by the time I got to the site I didn't want to do their missions any more.
That's my point precisely - Adium doesn't do anything that Pidgin cannot, but the UI between the two apps is worlds apart. IMHO it's the classic example of the failing of open source - too much functionality, no way for the layman to get to them.
Review: T-Mobile myTouch 3G with Google
Did you hear about Dutch insurance companies warning people not to post to Twitter and social networks that they are going on a vacation? Burglars are online too apparently... :-)
UK men pirate more than women; everyone confused over rights
Privacy Policies of the "Big Boys" - Analyzed by NYC Common Data Project
African-Americans ahead of other groups in accessing Internet from cell phone
Zappos' Quest for World Customer Satisfaction? Tony H., next CEO of Amazon?
Yeah, I'm not really the paranoid type, I just think it's funny how people will do stuff like that without a second thought. 95% of locks can probably be circumvented with a bump key.
This just shifts the burden; GMail now becomes a spam reflector to an arbitrary target of your choosing.

I understand the goal but the implementation is a problem.
That's like saying Washington DC is completely missing from the list. Ottawa city is bit of a boring town.
Ok, you are quite the optimist to truly believe that every kid will learn enough math by their own choice. No matter how much encouragement and good environment and teachers, there will be kids who just don't want to learn statistics, or compound interest.

So you're left with either forcing them to go, where they at least learn something exists, or letting them do their own things, and never learn anything about math at all.

Many people commenting here have this idealized view of education as "if only... xyz... then every kid would spend 12 hours a day teaching themselves!". That's absurd, and any realistic look at education has to realize that sometimes we need to teach kids skills that are useful, but not interesting.
People who want to purchase Macs don't have a choice but to spend over $1,000. People who are willing to purchase PCs have that choice, and most elect to spend less. Is this stat really something to be proud of? It has more to do with the fact that Apple doesn't sell computers cheaper than $1,000 than anything.
I'll repeat my reply here, because I prefer the discussion participants ;)

After 4+ years with Rails, it was very refreshing to read this insightful post. All the spinning plates is the reason the Rails Way is larger than most of my Java books, and about equal in size to my Spring in Action (2 ed) book. Rails has simply baked too much magic in, and keeping track of it is a nightmare. It might be helped somewhat if the docs were better (and the guides are making this much better), but it’s still painful. Combine that with an inconsistent API and a codebase that takes advantage of virtually every magic trick ruby has to offer, and you have a framework that excites you at first but wears you down over time. I’ve developed very large systems with Rails and it’s served me well, but it’s also made me very weary.

This is the reason both Python in a Nutshell and the Definitive Guide to Django now sit open on my desk. I come seeking clarity, explicitness, and productivity. I’ve shied away from Python for years because of some awful inconsistencies in the language and lack of closures (I <3 closures), but if it keeps things straightforward and clean, I’ll overlook them.

I’ll probably always prefer Ruby as a language in general…as a tool with which to perform magical displays of power and light…but I’m very close to giving up on it for day-to-day real work.
This story points out that matter must not be infinitely divisible. The paired story, The Arrow, shows that a universe of finite, indivisible pieces is also impossible. Thus, Zeno's paradox.

Actually, neither story proves either claim, which is apparent since there are rigorously defined and perfectly self consistent mathematical theories for each case. Philosophers just don't like them because they involve actual mathematical definitions, so they hide their heads in the sand and pretend they don't exist.

From that Wikipedia article, a quote from Russell: Georg Cantor invented a theory of continuity and a theory of infinity which did away with all the old paradoxes upon which philosophers had battened. ... Philosophers met the situation by not reading the authors concerned.

In other words, it's very easy to argue that infinite processes, continuous space, or motion in space don't make any sense if you can't be bothered to learn how they're rigorously defined in the mathematical theory you're arguing about.

And FWIW, philosophy may have been attempting to describe the nature of the universe, but I can't come up with a single example of an actual physical result that's come from the field. You may argue that math and physics sprung from philosophy, but realize that those two disciplines provide most of philosophy's harshest detractors these days.

And as far as retroactive claims that if people had listened to Zeno we might have stumbled upon special relativity earlier? (from the second link) Flat out bull poopy. The "inconsistencies" that special relativity resolves have nothing to do with classical mechanics at all, they have to do with E+M, and without a well tested and reliable E+M theory and the Michelson-Morley experiment to directly show us that the speed of light is constant regardless of motion we would have dismissed relativity theory as far too strange to be true (which, amusingly enough and in spite of massive evidence to the contrary, is a claim I've heard straight from the mouth of a tenured philosophy professor at an Ivy League school). An infinite speed of light would lead to a perfectly valid classical mechanics, albeit one that we could (now) prove is wrong, and there's nothing more logically consistent about either relativity or quantum mechanics that would have led us to either one without strenuous experimentation and Real Science.
iPhone Apps that are favourites of Five Geek Rock Stars
Joel Spolsky: The Day My Industry Died
Incidentally, Safari (for mac or windows) comes with decent Firebug-like debugging functionality built-in
Subsidizing public transport isn't necessarily bad - if there were no buses how much sales tax would it cost to build enough bridges/freeways/parking-lots etc so that everybody could drive into downtown. What about in Manhattan?

The point was that it is one of those areas were making cuts to save money gets counter productive very fast.
Hot Chicks Get Tech? (Or: Is "The IT Chicks" Sexist?)
Adobe Flash Vulnerability Affects Flash Player and Other Adobe Products
Are there any collaborative text editing plugins for vim?

Or, I guess more generally, are there any collaborative text editing servers for which vim has a plugin available?
The age of PC gaming being a driving force behind sales is coming to an end though. It's just too expensive and too much of a hassle, both for developers and end-users, which is why console games are bringing in over twice as much revenue than PC games these days.

A market for enthusiast PC gamers who value the customisability they get will, of course, persist, but the mainstream is going elsewhere and moving into gaming appliances like consoles. And if somebody's got an XBox 360 or PS3 for their gaming needs, does it really matter to them how well their computer plays games?

The trend in gaming right now is working in Apple's favour, not against it and the fact that Apple does not have a place in its line-up for a customisable gaming machine is becoming increasingly irrelevant.
It's always fun to actually compare the specs of comparable products:

(An HP) http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-det...

http://store.apple.com/us_smb_78313/configure/MB871LL/A?mco=...

Very, very similar. The apple's CPU is about 200 dollars more, and its video card about 100 dollars more. But the difference in the computers' prices is about 1500 dollars. To me, it's a pretty big ripoff, but I guess that's the value of branding. BMW and Lexus are also ripoffs by any objective standard.
Thanks for the clarification. Both of your replies have been more productive than your original comment.
Works fine for me; I just installed Fx 3.5.1 this morning and am running version 1.4.0 of firebug. . . on Linux.
The list is supposed to be the top 20 web 2.0 businesses, not all businesses or even all tech businesses.
Holy shit -was just doing some research on it,

was lead to www.x.com - how much did they pay for that domain name? wow - Just read the first 4 posts (and only posts so far) it doesn't answer your question..
It's pretty impressive/scary what can be achieved by application of machine vision (reconstructing shape, dimensions and correcting for angle etc.) to the problem:

http://www.jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news/news_releases/release....
So, what if you're in a start-up doing a CTO's job, VP/E and VP/PM. What job title should you have in your opinion?
It's also my understanding VP/E and VP/PM report to CTO usually.
I don't think the Times would have dared post such a "story" by a male writer. "Sexist"? Well, maybe "sexploitationist"...

It all seems like marketing to the LCD to me: combine "hot new tech issues" with "hot young females" -- and continue the shallow entertainment that (hopes to) bring in the viewers who can't be bothered with clever dialogue or challenging story lines.

[/rant] Sorry. I really shouldn't feed the trolls here by paying them any attention.
But the teachers are right, you know. Professional mathematicians doing research will practically jump at the chance to tell you that their work is meant to be beautiful, not practical. I think that's the message we should be imparting to students: math doesn't have to be useful for you to study it, just as poetry doesn't have to be useful for you to read it.
I like a few of the changes, but they seemed to disable the functionality to disable firebug on a per domain basis, which kinda screws me with gmail.

every single release of firefox and firebug have seemed to have this period of breaking everything, usually by the next release its sorted, but its still an inconvenience
This also works in Linux's favor too - I have a Wii.
Staying Motivated and Creative
Ottawa has generally had a lot of tech and software (Corel, for example), so I do think it is surprising they aren't on the list. Shopify, for example, is based in Ottawa.
Typographical Tech: 'Used as Read' Electronics Make IDing Gadgets Easy
It's called "Hacker News" for a reason.