skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I bought a used T430s earlier this year for GBP £350 (~USD 550).

I've kept the SSD as the boot drive and replaced the optical drive with a 1TB 'SSHD' (Seagate's SSD/HD hybrid).

I've also upgraded the RAM to 16GB.

Disk/RAM upgrades are possible to do 'free' if you already have parts. I 'downgraded' from an X1 Carbon just so I could do this, in fact!

Keyboard: Great for most dev work, though I preferred the layout on the X300 I had before.

Pointing device: I get on well with the Trackpoint and turn off the touchpad.

Screen: Okay. 1600x900 is acceptable as a resolution (though I'd like a high DPI screen next time I buy a laptop). It's readable enough but isn't beautiful.

Battery life: Awful. Probably not helped by the slightly used battery or the 16GB RAM. The second drive tends to be spun down (it's for occasionally-used / bulk storage only) and I tend not to be working the CPU hard. I just plug in.

Linux support: About as good as you'll get, which means that it almost works flawlessly, but will still annoy you.

I've tried Linux in a VM too. Still some problems there. I seem to remember I couldn't just suspend/resume Windows, because Linux would lose its network connection and not get it back without a reboot.

To be honest, I can run everything I want to in Windows, so it's actually easier to do dev work in an OS where everything on the laptop works, and just ssh to Linux elsewhere when necessary.

EDIT: Removed mentions of OS X and Macs!
I completely agree, and that casts a lot of the rest of the piece into question. I've worked in academia for years and I laughed out loud (and bitterly, I might add) at that.
I was also considering SP3 -- how does it fare with Linux? Have you encountered any particular difficulties?
Note that with statements kill performance, at least in V8. https://github.com/petkaantonov/bluebird/wiki/Optimization-k...
Yes, it was considered bad style because of separation of concerns etc, but nothing necessitated JSP, you could just use servlets and any of tons of template libraries.

And for a hello world, a servlet would do just fine.
If Mahbod is anything like Tom Lehman, they probably just struck pg as a bunch of smug young dudes who think/know they're hot shit.

Also didn't Mahbod try and excuse his behavior with a brain tumor or something? That's actually reasonable...
I do, running Ubuntu 14.04 on a 2013 model. It mostly works.

There was an issue with it waking up when the lid was closed that I fixed with a simple service that just runs "echo XHC1 > /proc/acpi/wakeup" at startup.

Also, the webcam isn't a USB webcam: it's a PCI device made by Broadcom that doesn't have any drivers. And the 128GB SSD is a bit small and 4GB RAM isn't enough, as I use VMs sometimes.

On the plus side, the hardware is really nice and the trackpad is great. Still, I might have to get something a little more high-powered for myself and give this to my wife :)
one more nice to have is a backlit keyboard on the laptop. I find that it makes a world of difference as I try to hack away in the dark...
>There's also a tendency for people to think they're good people and not realize how they're being mean. Criminals are good at this.

"Criminals" are also good at being mistaken as mean people when they are really good.
Well, if you want to be really minimal, `reduce` obviates the need for `map`, `filter`, and `forEach`. (Then I guess if you want to be all new school with it, you could use tranducers, but that's another story.) What I don't get is why Javascript libraries are so `flatMap` averse. Sure, it's a little harder to explain, but especially with the Promise-like convention, I think it's a quite generalization of `map` in most cases.
What about the best laptop that's not tied to any particular OS? Also, is there something that's fanless and doesn't break the bank?
Haha. Thanks for the link. This sums it up well.

I especially love the closing sentence.

Finally, I’d especially like to thank all the people who wrote “considered harmful” essays over the last few years. Without the degree of annoyance you collectively created, I might never have bothered to write this essay.
How high of a fever will you run before calling in sick?
I note that this is on the front page at the same time as a story entitled 'Being homeless is better than working for Amazon'

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8673726
I believe you can find quite a few "mean" people who is just working in the Silicon Valley as happy as ever. The correct rephrasal would be "Mean People Fail More".

It would be naive to think that getting along with people well, while being a remarkable trait, isn't the only thing that leads to success. There are a lot of variables controlling that. It's just common sense that if you are good with people, you are more likely to be successful.

Lastly, I believe a lot of people will be spraying this thread with counterexamples as you did, but the greatest example of PG's argument is the one of the people who gave the world the Silicon Valley [1]. He could have been one of the most cherished person of the past century, he could have all the wealth he wanted, but instead he practically died alone, leaving many people with hatred towards him. Because he was "mean".

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley
I've been running Ubuntu 14.04 on an ASUS i3-- a real bargain, and no headaches (other than a weird thing where the hardware switch for wireless is automatically disabled on reboot).
How was Dropbox mean?
Yikes this is clearly wildly inaccurate wishful thinking. If history has shown us anything, it is that the worst usually rise to the top. Nice sentiment by pg, but simply horribly untrue.
The humans.txt project has a slightly different goal for the endpoint vs. robots.txt:

http://humanstxt.org/
Sadly the one thing that dissapears in this debate is that systemd has long since gone beyond being a init.

For me the whole thing came to a head when i learned that consolekit (a bothersome thing on its own) was depreciated in favor of logind. And logind is tied to the hip of systemd.

There are also issues like journald that you need to have running even if your primary logging facility is syslogd etc.

At this point in time, systemd as init is just a minor part of the issue in my opinion.
I always find these essays interesting, not necessarily because I agree with them, but rather because Paul has a very special way of looking at things.

[...] being mean makes you stupid.

Linus Torvalds is definitely not stupid, but I would not hesitate to call him mean [1]. But you can't deny that he's successful and certainly he's not stupid [2].

Business and open source seem to both center around the same things: creating something people want [3] and surrounding yourself with other smart people. I would imagine that the latter is hard if you're mean - but not impossible. Take Linus or Steve Jobs, none of whom are very nice.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PmHRSeA2c8#t=883

[2] http://www.wincent.com/a/about/wincent/weblog/archives/2007/...

[3] http://paulgraham.com/good.html
This whole "framework fatigue" thing is going reductio ad absurdum. Convenience is not bad. _Too_ much convenience traded for opacity is bad.

As someone with a Phoenix app running in production, I can tell you that this framework hits the sweet spot of providing lots of value without requiring the user to learn too much. The abstractions it provides, especially the router and rendering layers, are very welcome. And I'm saying this from the perspective of someone who has built a few smaller vanilla plug applications.

Let's not throw the baby out with the bath water here just because rails went a little too far with the magic.
You're being a bit irresponsible, people are not really the same after embracing Emacs. First you try to understand what's the deal with all these parens and year later you frown at almost everything that isn't Lisp.
I don't disagree with this. Organized crime actually serves a legitimate community function in its early stages usually. They always get their hands dirty.

Is that really someone that you'd want to emulate though?

You could make the case that Freeway Rick Ross is a really nice guy because he never had to use violence, but he still sold crack to people.
I think Rails is great for API-only backends too.

I'd say it's quite common to have clients in JS/iOS/Android, and still use a Rails-backend.
This seems apropos from what I remember of it:

- http://www.amazon.com/The-Psychopath-Test-Journey-Industry/d...

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYemnKEKx0c
Probably he doesn't mean only JavaScript SPAs. The term was introduced around 2010, but the concept is older. Flex is from ~2004 and is typically used for SPAs which behave like the modern JavaScript applications - they just target the Flash platform instead.
Yes please explain that one?
The browser is becoming more of a platform to deploy to like Android or iOS, instead of a document viewer. I think it is still the wild wild west on the client side for now, but once winners emerge there will be a much larger group of developers creating SPA's. It seems Angular 2.0, Ember 2.0, and React 1.0 are all headed in similar directions with their emphasis on components, so a winning concept might emerge some time soon. That said, development trends on the web slowly play out over years. I expect Rails and Django to have a massive user base for 5+ years at least.
The problem with this argument is that a person's identity is more complex than the manifestation of a single personality trait. You may judge character at its worst, but those mean people on the internet are also loving in other, more meaningful contexts.

If you're going to ask whether meanness and success are "inversely correlated"—a phrase peculiar to statistics—then you should present actual data to support that argument.
Unfortunately driver support for some proprietary hardware is not very well in Linux so asking for advice is senseful. The most common problem is WiFi problems. I do not have a problem with last 2 of my laptops but an older Dell laptop needed manual care for its WiFi.
Just use shift+F10 instead. It works in OS/2, Windows, GNOME, KDE... and worked before the redundant menu button existed.
>I can't help but think he deliberately held the internet back for 6 or 7 years for his own profit.

First, the degree to which he "held back" the internet, when contrasted with what Microsoft did positively for home computing and the internet, is debatable.

Second, if Bill Gates can't be construed as a good person doing good things in the world-- as "not mean"-- then this debate is mostly pointless.
GP was complimenting M$. As for "growing up", it seems that the younger fanbois are more sensitive to a fairly innocuous shorthand than those of us who remember computing in the '90s.
Yeah, I've had some professors who were quite mean to students (A small amount though, maybe 2-3, most seem to care about their students, at least at my university). I think what PG sees instead is that the people he interacts with aren't mean to him because he has power over them, so he assumes they treat everyone the same way.
>So instead of having only two options, or a third invisible option, there is only one real option and the demon cannot be wrong or it cannot be right.

This third neither right nor wrong option reminds me of 'Mu' found in eastern philosophy and highlighted in Hofstadter's GEB and it forms another crucial part of self-reference and recursion as mentioned earlier in your comment.
Voxelstein 3d
Decoupling Apps from Config with ConfigR
I think LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner said it best regarding this topic: "being an asshole was way easier than putting in the work and showing the compassion required to be a good leader."
I've thought about this topic quite a bit, and I don't think the root emotion in many "mean" people is, well...meanness. I think it is a strong desire to control. This desire stems from the importance of managing execution.

To be quite honest, if Steve Jobs wasn't dominating, maybe the iPod Nano would have been much thicker. Maybe the Facebook experience would have sucked. Maybe Tesla would have filed bankruptcy. There is a long list of "Maybes" which could go here. From a societal standpoint, it's interesting. Ask someone in 1991 if Jobs in an asshole, the resounding answer is likely to be "yes". Ask someone today, and it's almost always pardoned with a "but he was a genius".

I had this very internal debate with myself throughout undergrad, particularly when you are placed in a group where you care the most for what ever project. The one who cares the most tends to have the most complete vision, and thus will strongly desire the pieces to fall a certain way.

I'd like to believe that not everyone is mean, but I can't help but wonder how possible it is to avoid "meanness" when the success of your organization hinges on your ability to execute a vision no one else can realize.
"It didn’t take long for me to realize that I was living a fantasy, thinking that a student of the humanities would be tolerated, and paid decently, in the corporate world of the modern university"

"I’ve worked for places to live in Oregon, mostly cooking and feeding families. It was a kind of Maoist re-education program– a little too much like slavery for my comfort."

The author's sense of self-entitlement is nauseating.

Seriously, slavery? You'd think a humanities student would have at least some basic perspective of the world.
It's interesting to see how certain jobs are thought of over the years.

Working in an Amazon warehouse is a pretty average blue-collar job these days. You're a slave to the time clock, you're on your feet all day, walking miles and miles, but other than that there's no real extremes. In every job you're expected to get a # of parts out per hours or ship so many package.

But the good thing about an Amazon warehouse, is you're not standing next to a heat-treating oven, sweating your bag off. You're not mixing dangerous chemicals that could poison you and requires you to wear an uncomfortable ventilation system or suit.

There are no fiberglass matting slivers to get in your arms or eyes. There are no 20 ton presses that will crush you in the blink of an eye. You're not outside in the freezing cold. You're not standing around in a meat freezer hacking away at a side of beef with a giant knife.

Is it the greatest job in the world? No, but there are a limited supply of those and competition for them is very high. Is it worst job? Far from it. And 30 years ago it would have been considered pretty cushy.
The previous XPS 13 can be had in this price range on eBay, at least refurb, and there is very little difference between the current and previous CPU:

http://ark.intel.com/compare/81015,72054

I have the early '13 model with the i7-3537U processor and run Ubuntu 14.04 on it without a problem (the wireless was somewhat flaky on 13.04, but it seems better since the upgrade - unscientifically).

I had a very bad experience with a Thinkpad W series laptop (and the Lenovo RMA process). That said, I still pine for an X1 Carbon every time I see one, and the new Yoga looks reasonably well-built (the previous one was flimsy garbage).
Sadly it drags the whole debate into an argument over semantics. Yes, it is not monolithic in the sense of one binary running everything. But at the same time everything ties back to systemd running as init.

This in effect makes everything under the systemd umbrella tightly coupled. Can i run journald on its own, or logind, or resolved, networkd? As long as the answer is no, they mays well be one big blob.

And it is presented as such as well from a source point of view.

http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/

There is no separate tarball for udev, journald, logind, or any of the other *d's that make up the systemd project.
What makes you think Mahbod is mean? He seems like a goofball, inappropriate, no brain-mouth-filter kind of dude. But doesn't strike me as mean.
Can you expand on why you think Tom Preston-Werner is mean? From all I've seen he appears to be a good person.

GitHub reached 150 employees without having anyone quit, which hardly seems likely if the Founder and CEO is mean.

https://twitter.com/holman/status/303576839132164097
It was my understanding that it was supposed to – kind of like the credits at the end of a movie. It's not a list of people who work with the production company when you see the movie, just when it was made. Add people whenever you want, but taking people out just makes it another, less readable "About Us" page.
I've been waiting approximately 180 days for this fork.
it's been over a year since the General Resolution where systemd got voted on.

the fork, for some of us, has been necessary since we saw how toxic the debian constitution was in practice.
I don't think you read the article very far. Yes, he started with an averaged face (which then matched nothing, by the way). Then he added (I'll simplify for you) random dots to it until it matches something. Thus it is a reverse lookup from the way facial recognition is usually used. Usually you give it a face and see if it has a match. In this case you basically feed it random face-like data until you trigger it, then you have some insight into what it is looking for.

The fact that the results look very little like human faces do provide insight most people don't have into how the algorithms work. The algorithms basically work by measuring distances between dots in the end anyway, distance between eyes, etc., and that's very unlike how humans recognize faces which has more depth to it.
Just wondering, why do you put Kim Dot Com in there? I don't know anything about his "asshole-ness"
Sun, Vinod Khosla.
I bought an X230 Thinkpad a year ago, and I'm quite pleased with it.

I wanted an SSD, but I found it was cheaper to select the cheapest hard drive they had and then buy an SSD from Newegg than to get the SSD from Lenovo. Replacing the drive was quite easy, not like a tablet or cell phone. It goes without saying, but you should do the same for RAM.

A month or so after I bought it, the fan stopped working. Their customer service was quite good. They sent me a box so I could return my laptop, and they fixed the fan and shipped it back at no cost to me.
I'm very happy with Ubuntu 14.04 on my Asus UX31 laptop
What a strange and weak word to build an essay around. Especially since counterexamples are so easy to find.

I've certainly found that when I'm in a position of power people are kinder than when I'm not. And I've met a lot of "mean" people that I can disarm in a few seconds once I determine where that energy is coming from. (Are they scared? Overwhelmed? Defensive due to another, more buried issue?) Works online and off, in tech and the arts. Sometimes even while driving.

This essay offers no insights into the human condition -- and the detour into aggression/fighting is particularly weak and unsupported.

People have lots of reasons for being mean (or an asshole) in certain situations. And I'm certain pg, like all of us, has exhibited those behaviors at times.
I wonder what the backup is for when the power fails while several cars are in one shaft.
I think, crucially, the point is that he wasn't 'not mean' when he was actually in charge of things at MS. He was actively horrible from the beginning; there've even been suspicions for years that MS-BASIC, the very thing the company started on, was stolen.
Ask HN: Confused software developer
I am desperate for help but not sure whom to ask. I do not have any senior software developer friend who I can ask for advice. So, I hope somebody out here can help me.
I am 30yr old software developer with 2 yrs experience as a ASP.net C# developer. I have been jobless for 6 months. During my tenure as a developer, I did not do anything great. Just converted some existing HTML(static) sites to dynamic(developed a simple & crude cms like interface to edit the content on the website). I also made some simple web services. But I felt it was more like doing something and praying real hard that it should work. I cannot say honestly that I know webservice. Once I lost my job, I was having trouble finding .net openings as everyone wanted experienced people and no one wanted a junior. I decided to leave .net and look else where, I was also fed up with windows and visual studio. I tried Java but it was tough learning it based on the online resources. I struggled for a long time with Maven and still i am not sure if I know it properly. I did play around with Python, I really liked the syntax formating(well indented structure as it made it more readable). I am a windows 7 user, but now I am getting used to Linux mint since 3 months.
Now my problem is, I do not have experience due to which I cannot find a job and I cannot get a Job as I lack experience. Its like a dead-lock situation. Plus I have not achieved at 30 what I aimed to do when was 25. I am not sure which language to choose as I am trying to move away from .NET.
I am currently trying to develop an app for android in hopes to be self-employed or atleast gain a skill as a mobile app developer. But I am not very sure how successful I will be as I still struggling to find was way around Java.
May be I am just looking at all this in a wrong way. I am not sure, but I think its time for a complete shake up.
Depending on what you intend to use Linux for, a fairly recent Chromebook (I use the Acer C720) plus Crouton may be ideal. That won't be the case if your main activity is Gimp/Inkscape/etc., but it definitely could be if you spend most of your time coding in vim. While I do like Inkscape, I've personally never fallen in love with the office-type Linux desktop apps, so using google equivalents is fine.
Searchnod.es – code search for npm
Being on the Internet just means you get to be honest, brutally honest, no polite formalities. It's a wonderful thing, really.

OTOH, working with people face to face means you must keep appearances, and you almost always cannot be brutally honest. Even if you claim your company has a culture where you can be honest about things, no one is actually going to be totally honest, that would be a mistake. And you can never know whether someone who seems 100% authentic and kind isn't going to go online and rip apart things he thinks are dumb/ act "mean."

I think his essay is really more about how successful people just know how to be diplomatic and hold back honest opinions.

I would however be interested for PG to write about whether he thinks selfish and overly narcissistic founders are successful or not. I haven't meant any "mean" people working professionally (with engineers at least), but selfish to the point where you feel like punching them I most certainly have met in the startup world.
While there's certainly an issue around working conditions at Amazon and more broadly with the US social safety net this story doesn't feel "real".

A quick google reveals the authors bio "I taught ESL in South Korea for more than two years, traveled Asia, been around the Caribbean and zig-zagged the U.S. I worked at the Chicago Board Options Exchange and the Chicago Brauhau." - she also has a degree in Journalism with a focus on news editorial

It seems hard to believe someone with that background would be unable to figure out things like food stamps.
> I don't know how long the deal will last.

Forever, really. Lenovo site always has "deals" like that.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-26987980

I moved to self hosted owncloud as a result.
More correctly, you can't just use networkd as your dhcp client unless you have systemd as init. You could however use dhcpcd on top of systemd (tho the latter would likely make a lot of noise about "missing functionality").

And that is the insidious nature of it all. the *d's panders developer laziness. What do you do when some production critical piece of code demands networkd, logind, or any of the systemd sub-daemons? Do you look to replace it, or do you roll over and replace whatever already functioning init you have with systemd?
How Arizona (yes, Arizona) is becoming a hotbed for tech startups