skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"It's not your primary PC"

Based on my observation, most netbook buyers are buying them for precisely this purpose.

Most lay, non-technical-lifestyled people are not interested in owning multiple computers for the sake of mobility/convenience, etc.

The problem with the netbook is that laptop manufacturers have been cannibalizing sales from "real" laptops, and are hurting real bad. Content producers are also now tied up in terms of what they can do - owing to the pathetically anemic performance (as well as screen size) of these netbooks.
I'm not sure meaningful comparisons of programming languages are even possible. It's a bit like asking if English is better than Spanish.

What you can do is compare experiences using a given language. E.g. "Our project using language N went quite well", or "I had a good time in Mexico".

Debating the syntax of for-comprehensions, or the value of the subjunctive, may be fun, but it never really leads anywhere.
What about tiling window managers?
I doubt the GP wanted to insult your intelligence, he just noted that your opinion was in line with your employer's position ("Linux is a cancer" a few years ago, iirc?).

If it was just a consumer choice that Linux died on the netbooks, then I should be able to at least order a new (not used) one with Linux from Amazon.co.uk. I had problems finding one a few weeks ago.

Edit: It was in 2001 Linux was named a cancer.

Edit 2: The last few years, articles/blogs have been discussing pressure on netbook manufacturers to not ship Linux.

A random Google: http://blogs.computerworld.com/microsoft_strikes_back_at_lin...

>> ... PC World, Britain's self-professed largest specialist chain of computing superstores, announced that, regardless of what was coming with Linux netbooks, it would only be selling Windows netbooks.
Not to get into a prescriptivism debate but "Price gouging" has a specific meaning, not just "charging a lot of money"

That's my point, actually.

Price gouging is a term for a seller pricing much higher than is considered reasonable or fair.

I'm only interested in the non-value-judgement related meaning. "Reasonable" and "fair" are meaningless.

What other people are saying is "you can't use that word because it's loaded with value judgement." I'm saying "OK, give me an alternative that captures the meaning without the value judgement. And is concise, clear, expressive, and widely understood."

pricing above the market price when no alternative retailer is available

This, also, is meaningless.
I bought my laptop for $90 from Free Geek (50% off for volunteering there) and use it much the same way you're using your netbook, albeit with a larger screen and (more importantly IMHO) a larger keyboard.
Thought experiment: if gas prices doubled overnight would anyone get upset at gas station owners? Exactly. That's why it's not price gouging.

Something's not price gouging when people get upset? Or maybe you weren't paying any attention to sentiment when gas prices were soaring a few years back? People hated gas station owners, and there certainly were accusations of "gouging".
tl;dr: author without much python experience writes a tedious article in Clojure's favor.
If it's Dec 1-12, hanging out is likely but building something big is implausible.
Invites have been sent accordingly
I love this game! I got this as part of the MacHeist bundle (I know I know, but the bundle was too exquisite) and it is seriously one of the most fun games out there!

Would totally buy it again, and possibly will now, just to pat them in the back!
Please send an invite to rmason@acd.net
If Sir Tim Berners-Lee had his time again he'd probably leave // out.
Are Hirst's paintings good? They're not worth looking at. But he is famous.
I think that it is not like 'is english better than spanish', I think it can be:

Is English or Spanish a better language to communicate in for a specific purpose, just like is Python or Clojure a better language to achieve a certain goal in.

So, without the context of that goal a comparison is meaningless.

But, let's say we create a certain application (let's say an accounting program, or a spreadheet) in both clojure and python, feature-for-feature identical, user interface identical and so on, then a comparison becomes possible.

How long did it take to complete the project ?

How easy is it to change the program to conform to some new specification ?

How fast does it execute ?

And so on. It all boils down to the old benchmark problem, a benchmark in a vacuum is meaningless, you have to test using real applications.
Armand Morin Big Seminar 13
Armand Morin Big Seminar 13 is a completely unique public speaking training system the will show you the secret to selling from the stage.
MacLeod’s “Loser” layer had me puzzled for a long time, because I was interpreting it in cultural terms: the kind of person you call a “loser.” While some may be losers in that sense too, they are primarily losers in the economic sense: those who have, for various reasons, made (or been forced to make) a bad economic bargain: they’ve given up some potential for long-term economic liberty (as capitalists) for short-term economic stability[....]The good news is that losers have two ways out, which we’ll get to later: turning sociopath or turning into bare-minimum performers.

That makes all kinds of crazy sense.
Netbooks rule on airplanes. That's why I got mine.
Tell me about it :) Three lines, 5 bugs I think is my record to date.
Haha! I got it - don't worry.

I saw your post a few days ago - moving stuff. Hope you're getting better as each day passes.
Exit Early - Exit Often
HD video of Basil Peters' Keynote at CapitalConnects! 2009 SE Reg ACA
I've actually adapted pretty well to the keyboard. I'll be honest, I hated the computer for the first 3 months, but now I've found a lot of uses for it that I'd never use a larger, more expensive laptop for.

Tethered to, my treo I've got a really trouble free and reliable internet connection at the drop of a hat anywhere in the country which is also pretty great, but I guess you could really do that with any laptop.
I like my netbook and didn't encounter the issues you are describing. Battery life is 4.5 hours, which is quite ok-ish, and the new EEE netbooks have 8+ hours.

The cpu speed is also ok, although i don't play games or process very large files. And, Atom dual core is comming...

Regarding the screen real estate, 1024x600 on 10" is enough for me. I did some customizations in apps, for example in Firefox I use Tiny Menu extension, so all my navigation buttons, menu, and URL box is nicely placed in just one toolbar, and statusbar is switched off. Or in Microsoft Word (my second most used program), I usually write in full-screen mode. So you are right, no ribon for netbooks. ;-)

I think it comes down to personal preference. I've been a "desktop guy" and never owned "normal" laptop...I just consider it too heavy to carry. I also don't own a smartphone, since I don't find it necessary. The combo powerfull desktop + netbook does it for me.
PHP Techniques & Tutorials
He has also said he'd leave out the colon.

I thought the whole point was to distinguish the protocol from the path. I can't believe the BBC article completely misses that forward slashes are used for paths in Unix (and acceptable in most other OSes instead of back slashes).

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_%28computing%29
'Gouging' is an epithet used by those who abhor the practice; that's the source of the confusion. It means more than "more than usual" or "temporarily more than MSRP"; it specifically means unfair. 'Gouging' is even a legal term, for a practice illegal in some circumstances and jurisdictions.

So by using the term, you've added confusion, including the need for your extra verbiage, to the effect of "...not that there's anything wrong with it!"

(I also think you're giving way too much weight to MSRP. Actual prices to the consumer always vary, even without a bid/ask 'market'. The MSRP -- as a coordination mechanism among producers and retailers used to loosely enforce pricing discipline -- is arguably a more-unfair practice than this market-clearing 'gouging'. So you're using a mildly-disapproving term, 'gouging', for the praiseworthy practice of maintaining a sellable inventory, and an mildly-approving term, 'standard', for a potentially-unfair collusive practice. The connotations of your chosen language are backwards!)
Oh, but the lack of neutron output was the most interesting part! If there had been neutrons, people would have assumed there was an obscure sort of inertial confinement fusion going on at some particular kind of defect in the crystal structure, perhaps a microscopic Farnsworth Fusor. Such an effect would be intriguing if it existed, but not very fundamental and probably not that useful.

Cold Fusion was important because it raised the possibility of a previously unknown mass/energy conversion mechanism, or at least a manifestation of a poorly understood one like neutrino emission or absorption.

Neutrinos are a good lesson in how much we actually understand the world. The neutrino flux from the sun is thought to be 10^12 particles per square meter per second, yet its mass is "Unknown, probably nonzero" [Wikipedia]. They don't seem to interact with ordinary matter much, but we can't rule out them interacting strongly with particular molecular structures in Palladium-Deuterium alloys. Nor can we rule out the presence of particles that interact even more weakly than neutrinos. The 1995 Nobel was awarded for finding evidence of neutrinos that are now thought to have been antineutrinos. Particle physics is not a solved problem.
Awesome!

This seems to be a common scenario - people hear about or see the site, go to it, get excited, then forget about it. I think I'm losing out because my message is confused or not consistent enough to stick. Maybe I don't have a clear message at all?
This is a pretty amazing analysis.

I think a lot of really talented engineers in Silicon Valley fit into a kind of hybrid category I might call 'loser with sociopathic tendencies' (gotta love these terms--hey, I didn't invent them, I'm just following the article). Although they deliberately choose to remain at the 'loser' level in terms of the org chart, they have a
'sociopathic' level of awareness of how the business operates (maybe from being an early employee or founder of previous startups). They're never truly comfortable at the 'loser' level, but maybe not willing or capable of making a move to the 'sociopath' level, and consciously avoid the 'clueless' level (which I think they eventually enter anyway, even if they avoid becoming managers, by entering some kind of 'emeritus' engineering position).

The article suggests that Toby might be in this category, which I didn't think fit at first, but maybe it does--this type of person seemed to me to generally be laconic, cultivated a high degree of irony about the nature of the organization and their role within it, and usually carried an 'escape plan' as a prominent part of their mental outlook (based on either past actual or future fantasized stock option earnings) --all quite similar to the Toby character.

I also think there's a type of person who views anyone at the 'sociopath' level as being inherently morally corrupt, and therefore preemptively excludes him/herself from ever reaching that level, even if they'd otherwise be capable of it. I don't think this is a correct view; the 'sociopath' type may just be the type of person who is more willing to face the full reality of how the business is run and make tough decisions that involve firing and so on. For example, even in the show I don't think the David Wallace character is portrayed as being particularly corrupt. Ryan, on the other hand, is purely selfish and greedy for power--but this actually causes him to fail at the higher levels (which I think often happens in real life as well).

(By the way, in case it's not obvious, I'm trying to use these terms in the sense they're defined in the article--I don't mean them to be truly pejorative to anyone operating at any of these levels.)
Thread-Weaver : multi-threaded unit tests in Java
I do that all the time! Any site whose domain name I can't remember totally, or rather, any site I'm visiting by putting in the domain name, I use google.

That way, I get an extra layer of protection of scams and what-nots. Well worth the extra click or two.
I don't know where Calacanis got the nerve to call these guys out. He can claim what he wants all day, yet he is doing the same exact thing with the demopit at TC50 .

There is absolutely no problem with angels charging to hear your pitch. There maybe a problem with a perfectly capable group of founders to actually pay. People charge for air guitar concerts. I don't see the value of it, I don't see the value of that 2k they spend on demopit as well neither, but that's me.
First of all, congratulations on reaching ramen profitability. That's
not an easy task on the web and mobile markets.

Now about going beyond ramen... I agree with dkokelley, you may already
have squeezed all the money there is to be squeezed from hiking Internet
and mobile applications.

Some ideas:

1) Do you have a "Everything Else" section in your hiking forum? What
non-hiking activities do people talk about most often in the forum?
There may be some leads there.

2) You are located in Truckee, near Lake Tahoe (lucky!). Can you branch
out with some app/forum/whatever for skiers or snowboarders?

Finally, I have to say that the "making money from the thing I love"
bit set off some alarms. My gut feeling is that there may not be enough
"muck" in the hiking market. It looks a lot like the music-making apps
market.

I used to read the Kvraudio website and there were always these
horror stories of developers crashing and burning -- guys that start out
with a love of music and computers and get the idea of "turning their hobby
into a business." Then they spend untold hours creating their programs,
but the buying market is just not there. So, they get almost no sales,
get their software cracked, etc etc.

So, my recomendation number 3 would be:

3) Try to make money from something you hate.

Obligatory PG reference: http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html

Hope this helps... Best of luck!
BlackBerry, Upgraded, Aims to Suit Every User
I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted - you bring up valid points.

This is similar to price discrimination. You can initially offer your product at $20 and sell to whoever is willing to pay at that time. Then you lower it to $10 and sell to whoever is willing to pay at that time. And so forth. The major difference is that the customer is determining the price they are willing to pay rather than the manufacturer. If the customers act honestly and do pay exactly what they would pay if the manufacturer had set the prices, the manufacturer would actually be better of.
But how does the print revenue compare to the online revenue?

You have to wonder if the WSJ pay-wall is keeping more of their readership in the dead-tree world vs something like the NYT.
I have never read a more apt description of large organizations or a better deconstruction of a tv show. The author should turn his incisive intellect onto startups next (although I don't know of any "The Office" like shows to aid his analysis)
Public waves will need some heavy hitting filtering tools to be handy, you are right about that.

Tangential note: I've noticed your comment and a few other comments being downvoted out of disagreement lately - as per the guidelines and for the sake of rich discussions, if you disagree with a comment it would be great if you could reply to it rather than just downvote it - that we we all get the benefit of your particular viewpoint and it contributes to the discussion.
I haven't actually been to technorati.com in ages! Maybe I'm just out of the blogging circle...
This bot attacked Texas Hold'em. Presumably most of the others do as well, given that it is far and away the most commonly played game online (disclaimer: complete assumption).

What about attacking 7-card stud, stud8, omaha, and o8? These games have more information to analyze than hold'em because more cards are visible. It seems to me that would provide more of an edge to a computer, which could calculate drawing odds faster and more accurately than a person.
and there certainly were accusations of "gouging"

That was a bad example. But those accusations were obviously made by idiots.

My point was that if the manufacturer doubles the price no one gets mad at the retailer. Except idiots.
Monday is the 19th, but otherwise, yes
What bugs me about this article is that the solutions he takes for project euler are taken from a website which tries to make Python into a functional language and are needlessly verbose. For instance, the normal way to solve PE#1 is:

print sum([x for x in range(1001) if x%3==0 and x%5==0)]

Quite a bit shorter than the clojure solution.

Further, their "isPalindrome" function involves a "digits_from_num" call, and is almost 10 lines in total. You could shorten that to one if you check pal == pal[::-1].

Essentially, the guy copied code from a website which wasn't really trying to show off how succinct python could be.
Hey, what do you use these for? I ask because we have used a lot of census geo-data for TrailBehind.com.
Though the comments here so far seem positive, there has also been a lot of negative backlash, primarily out of privacy concerns.

Elliot Murphy posted a comment on LWN clarifying his message (comment here: http://lwn.net/Articles/356947/ attached to parent http://lwn.net/Articles/356911/). The most relevant part is this: "It seems I was overenthusiastic when sending that email to the couchdb dev list, and left out an important word: 'can' be replicated :)"

In other words, this is an optional service that you can choose to use -- no default install is going to send your info to Canonical.
I agree that the title of this is completely wrong. Still this is excellent marketing. Imagine if more companies would give away their older products like this. It would be received very well from the gamers.

*I do NOT mean DRM-infested things like Steam.
The internet has basically, and correct me please if I go overboard, become a massive cultural melting-pot. It's like a single country above all these borders in the real world, and that I think appeals to a lot of the people today.
An array of these things could create a pretty crazy regular-sized imaging sensor. I can see a ton of applications if they can manufacture these cheaply.
I downloaded a copy back then and decided it was not my kind of game pretty soon. Later I found out that I just played as much as the demo would have gotten me. So I recommend trying the demo instead of blindly warezio0ring if you just want to check it out. It should be enough.
Working link:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/sns-ap-us-wall-street...
You could also argue that engineers derive a meaning from their work that isn't in terms of money or power (they do work that they enjoy).
not Steam but what gog.com is doing is brilliant...
Yes, although I'd disagree that it's objectively a "bad bargain". You won't get rich quick, but if you have a basic understanding of finances and a moderate amount of self-discipline you can get rich slowly. If you don't want to go into management, I'd say that's a good bargain.
This is true, but it is also what we call "looking a gift horse in the mouth".
> Why am I posting this on HN?

Beats me.

> An active member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a disciple of Jesus Christ.

Ah, now I get it.
Travel Tips for Entrepreneurs
Over the past year or so I have been traveling quite a bit, both for business and leisure. Through these experiences I have mastered the art of getting in and out of airports stress-free. Here are a few tips I have found to be especially useful when traveling.
And by Albert Einstein, I assume you mean "anonymous clever guy." This appears to be another modern attribution, although not entirely out of character.
Another useful resource might be the 20 part lecture series on Machine Learning by Professor Andrew Ng for CS 229 in the Stanford Computer Science department. Youtube playlist URL - http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=A89DCFA6ADACE599
patientslikeme.com is doing crowdsourced "scientific discovery." I use quotes because of the obvious difficulties in having proper scientific procedures in crowdsourced efforts, but nevertheless I think it's useful.
The Return of the Vector Processor
Right, it is subjective, but requiring indentation imposes a higher baseline level of readability: what you see is what you get.

This is important when you're working with more than just your own code. It's like a forced style guideline, and it gets even better when everyone conforms to Python's other optional style guidelines. It reduces friction.
Don't forget that the immune system doesn't just fight the flu, it also fights cancer.
This is just the most amazingly accurate description of working in a corporation that I have ever read. This is mindblowing. Simply amazing.
The one thing that I think he may have missed is that people do go from clueless-loser to checked-out loser.
Amazing amazing amazing.

I've been aware of this for a long time as I do work in a BigCorp but I've never seen it written down so well.
Amazing.
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Discover which people interact the most and what they're talking about.
Ask HN: I want to build my own Android phone. Where do I start?
I want to build my own phone at home. As a kid, I remember building my own PC from a kit (or going to Fry's). Where do I even start if I want to build a phone? Forget about form factor, it won't be sleek or tiny. Where do I get drivers and silicon? Has anyone seen any good books or manuals on the topic?
sorry, is it me or is there no demo on the site?

edit: I guess its the big red 3d cube with the white writing. But it says to play/spin/shade/slice.. I don't see those controls anywhere.. would be good if I could play with it immediately without downloading and installing.
It doesn't matter how big a game dev gets: Facebook makes it possible; appdevs are wondering when the "tax" will start. Well, a de facto tax has already has started, and forcing devs to use less viral channels is when it started. The "tax" is for devs to pay in advertising to ensure their apps continue to grow and competitors don't overtake them. Zynga understands this, perhaps better than anyone.

I predict that later, facebook will add more "taxes" by squeezing out the offerpals and superrewards of their world with Credits (and charging more than them for "added value"), and, as the bar for quality gets raised for games (by the big three), they will even become a broker for in-game advertising.

And thats how the platform cookie crumbles. Its just one piece to facebook's overall puzzle though.
Hoover failed to innovate for decades, then Dyson came along, and Hoover just started copying them.

I'd rather have the original than an imitation personally. (Original being the co. that invented the stuff, patented it etc).
I would argue it already has. I, for one, would have gone to college had I not been able to use the internet to access the information I needed in order to learn the skills I needed for my chosen career. True, lots of skills can be learned by reading books, talking to people, going out and learning by doing, etc but the internet makes most of that process much more efficient, which changes the cost/benefit ratio of higher education significantly already.
Yes! But sadly for US americans only. Plus I do not like to be bound to an account, I want to be more anonymous when I shop online.
Wave sounds like a classic case of a solution searching for a problem.
Even more predictions on the future...

ATT's You Will http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZb0avfQme8

MCI's No More There http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJhRPBJPoO0