skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>You could make the case that Freeway Rick Ross is a really nice guy

Good point. Is he "mean" or not? More curiously, is he "successful" or not?
Intel-powered Chromebooks are great for running Linux and you can get them for $150-$300

The best part is you don't have to run it inside ChromeOS, you can simply remove ChromeOS, enable the legacy boot loader, and use a regular old Ubuntu USB installer.

Of course, the models with more RAM are ideal, as well as being able to upgrade the M.2 SSD, but even a 2GB RAM/16GB SSD model will run pretty good, especially if most of your work is remote or on the cloud. Ubuntu 14.04 takes up about 7GB of storage.

I love older Thinkpads but these are cheaper, slimmer, and have more battery life.
Active Jobs, at least how implemented in 4.2 is not its own background processor. Its just a common api for using the background processor of your choice (Sidekiq, Resque, Delayed job etc).
Kindness is it's own reward.
Just some more info:

Speakers: Awful. I don't care too much.
Fingerprint reader: Really handy when you're often closing/opening the laptop, but haven't tried it in Linux.

Windows 8.1 runs perfectly and seems really fast and smooth, but if you run Linux (I've used a couple of dists, both with KDE), you see how much snappier the Linux desktop feels. Apps seem to open before you've clicked their icon!
I'd like to see a comparison with other countries.

(Another problem is that what people say is not always what people do, but it´s more difficult to measure.)
That is pretty mind blowing.
Is this stack something you'd consider documenting? Coming from Rails, but increasingly moving towards SPAs with Rails as the API (hard to give up all the OOTB niceties), this sounds intriguing.
I've read most of pg's essays and he seems to contradict himself a lot:

From this one:

"There is also a complementary force at work: if you want to build great things, it helps to be driven by a spirit of benevolence. The startup founders who end up richest are not the ones driven by money. The ones driven by money take the big acquisition offer that nearly every successful startup gets en route. [1] The ones who keep going are driven by something else. They may not say so explicitly, but they're usually trying to improve the world. Which means people with a desire to improve the world have a natural advantage. [2]"

From "Why there aren't more Googles":

"Umair Haque wrote recently that the reason there aren't more Googles is that most startups get bought before they can change the world.

Google, despite serious interest from Microsoft and Yahoo—what must have seemed like lucrative interest at the time—didn't sell out. Google might simply have been nothing but Yahoo's or MSN's search box.

Why isn't it? Because Google had a deeply felt sense of purpose: a conviction to change the world for the better.
This has a nice sound to it, but it isn't true. Google's founders were willing to sell early on. They just wanted more than acquirers were willing to pay.

It was the same with Facebook. They would have sold, but Yahoo blew it by offering too little.

Tip for acquirers: when a startup turns you down, consider raising your offer, because there's a good chance the outrageous price they want will later seem a bargain. [1]"

Though, I guess when you're that rich you can't help but think that anything that comes out of your mouth is a golden gospel, even if it is at odds with your previous statements. It sure is easy to play the whole holier-than-thou "I don't care about money I care about changing the world" game when you're already loaded.
Tom's reputation was ruined because he was sexist or something (https://gigaom.com/2014/04/21/githubs-tom-preston-werner-res...)
From my life experience suffering and overcoming obstacles builds not only character, but more specifically empathy. People that have experienced success too quickly or inherited it don't have the correct vantage point to understand their success or the struggle of others.

I love that right now in silicon valley there is an abundant amount of successful good willed people. But if those lessons are not correctly passed down to their children, and this period of mobility stops (as it has in every other industry) the successful will be overpopulated once again by disconnected self important inherited wealth elites.
That is the interface between the systemd sub-daemons and third party code.

There is no such promise about the interfaces between said sub-daemons and systemd-init.
It used to be called Ria,"rich internet applications".Then ajax apps before...nothing new here.
It's not an Air experience, but in the OP's rule-breaking department I can report happily that I've been running Linux on a MBPR15"/2014, and its a very nice setup indeed .. only issue so far has been the trackpad button-taps not quite working right for my hands, but okay .. external mouse works, but .. to be honest, I'm actually also able to mount my Linux partition in VMWare, and use OSX as the host environment; in such a configuration its also a very viable Linux development rig. If I ever need to do kernel work though, I praise the holy reFind lords, if I need to .. don't quite know where I'd be without that:

http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/

I'd love for a Linux-lovin' hardware vendor to pry my Macbook away from my Apple-ate'd brain and give me a hardware platform that is 100% open source, and yet .. sexy as all hell. Alas, the sexy part is Apple's plaything, it seems. I literally do not understand why nobody else is making hardware in the same league, design-wise (I know there are technologically far superior systems; its all about the haptic experience here, ok?) ..
While I think successful folks do a fair share of "rewriting history" especially about spots in their timeline which could be considered "mean", I would much prefer PG's optimistic view. It keeps me more hopeful and that I could make the harder choice to be a good person for long-term success than to be a bad one for instant gratified returns. There's no problem in being hopeful and I welcome such positive "opinions".
> If you can't trust your provider not to read your unencrypted some of the time data, you're using the wrong provider, and making backups much harder than they need to be.

This could just be me acting like a post-Snowden jaded American, but the providers themselves aren't whom I'm skeptical of anymore. When the author wrote that a company's "cloud" could be spread out between "five data centers, three continents, three hosting providers, and two storage providers," they seemed to be implying that there are a lot of opportunities for a company other than yours to hire someone just shady enough to do some damage.

What I first thought of, though, was that were sooo many companies for a government to confront, demand access, and then threaten to ruin them if they told anybody.
Maybe because Angular is a client-side framework and doesnt come with its own server.
Your examples hardly show that Gauss was mean. He disagreed with his children about the path they should take in life. Most parents do. Gauss probably had a realistic appreciation of his sons' abilities. And why should parents be expected unconditionally to pay for their childrens' extravagances. Maybe the money was needed for something more important?
> These days, for technical topics anyway, the "e-" prefix is just as optional for "book" as "mail".

No, it's not. If you sell me a book, and it turns out to be an ebook, that's a scam, and I'm getting my money back. Technical topics or not.
When you say "Ember seems to do too much", can you give me an example? I'm interested in understanding why it has this reputation of being bloated.
Linus Torvalds is rude, not mean.
All the source code is available, and the previous work is cited, so how is this a violation of the license?
Some of the professors I know are basically mobsters. They threaten to have people fired if they don't walk the walk the prof. wants them to walk, they operate in rigged peer-reviewing committees, when sitting on grant review committees they fund their friends even when their grant proposals are bad; and give bad scores to proposals from folks they don't like.

The more I stay in academia, the more I find out this is normal. Especially on the top, especially in elite universities.

This is disheartening particularly to me because I used to work in corporate, and I used to think then "boy, my work is not being fulfilled here". Now I come here and find out it's backstabbing all the way. I find out that the only way for me to get ahead is by taking sides, being a suck-up, and doing the dirty work the professors want me to do. The professors who've gotten ahead, they know this and basically orchestrate the game.
Working with Physiotherapy and the Hamstring
While I love my X230 running Fedora, I hear really bad things about the newer X line-up, mainly about the touchpad which is apparently unusable (even under Windows), but also that they've reduced the max RAM from 16GB (X230) to 8GB. Maybe the lesson in that is to buy a second hand X230 ...
From the guidelines:

> Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation.

> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.

I think that disagreeing comments are not discouraged, if they are civil and if possible have a strong technical argument.

[Note: I upvote the submission, and a few of the disagreeing comments, because I think the article is in the right direction but too optimistic.]
Yep well, it's the landscape of OSS and software development in general extending into the hackathon. Not something that should be policed IMO but many people would like a different landscape.
>and don't hesitate to re-implement functionality (like logging) if it makes is easier to interoperate with their other code.

And in the process makes old mistakes.

http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2014/q4/592

What is the saying again? Those that don't learn from history is doomed to repeat it?
Specifically the last sentence: It took many years for Eugene's success to counteract his reputation among Gauss's friends and colleagues.

As a parent, you just don't do that to your children. Apparently Gauss badmouthed him regularly, to the point where he acquired a reputation outside of the family.

I think part of the general confusion is that "mean" and "fail" are both hard to define.
I was wondering about pg's use of the word ruthless in this context - wouldn't one equate 'ruthless' to the extremity of meanness? There was a link here to The Loneliest Genius [1] about Newton - The servants celebrated his parting, not because they were happy for him, but because he had always treated them harshly. His personality was, they declared, fit for nothing but the university... Didn't the eccentricity of many intellectuals manifest itself as cruelty or meanness?

[1] http://nautil.us/issue/19/illusions/the-loneliest-genius (paywall)
He's a career criminal:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Dotcom#Criminal_investigati...

And he sold out a bunch of his colleagues:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/04/17/where-k...

The controversy around House of Coolness went beyond selling
access to a site that largely hosted other people's intellectual
property. Around 1993, House of Coolness was targeted by Günter
Freiherr von Gravenreuth, a German lawyer who made a career of
suing copyright infringers. But rather than face legal attacks
from Gravenreuth, associates of Schmitz tell me he instead began
supplying Gravenreuth with names of other figures in the bulletin
board scene involved with pirated content. According to the journalist
Lars Sobiraj of the German tech news site Gulli.com, Schmitz was
allegedly paid for every pirate bust he helped to facilitate. His
cooperation with Gravenreuth was also mentioned in a 1997 lecture at
a conference of the German hacker Chaos Computer Club by the group’s
former spokesperson Andy Muhler-Maguhn, who labelled him an "agent
provocateur" not to be trusted.
I honestly don't see why. It's easy enough to install pecl extensions.
I can't help it, as a European I'm always shocked how these things can happen in a rich country like the US. Is it inability to navigate the system (a problem by itself) or is the US social system really that non-existant? I know at least some of the arguments, it just never fails to shock me. (Issues with the behaviour of the writer aside.)
> Newer code that is easier to maintain.

It also brings "new" bugs.

http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2014/q4/592
How to make a bar chart in R (code and explanation)
A lot of people haven't heard of them, but Clevo is a major laptop OEM that makes both rock-solid business platforms and gaming platforms. Sager, System76, FalconNW, and most other boutique laptop builders use rebadged/modified Clevo systems. Clevo doesn't sell direct to customers, but there are plenty of sites where you can buy customized or barebones systems for very reasonable prices.

This summer I bought a W670SZQ from AVADirect, with an i5 and SSD it was just under $900. For a full size 17" laptop the weight is very reasonable, and it's a great system that Xubuntu and Mint worked fine on with zero tweaking.
I'm sure Amazon is already thinking about how to replace "pickers" with robots.
Is it worst job? Far from it. And 30 years ago it would have been considered pretty cushy.

Just for our information: did you work in an Amazon warehouse?
The X230 takes an mSATA drive (that's in addition to the regular hard drive). I fitted one in mine. It's somewhat fiddly to install because you have to completely remove the keyboard, but possible with basic tools and a bit of patience. Now I have:

NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE
sda 8:0 0 298.1G 0 disk
├─sda1 8:1 0 500M 0 part
└─sda2 8:2 0 297.6G 0 part
[...]
sdb 8:16 0 119.2G 0 disk
└─sdb1 8:17 0 119.2G 0 part
A typical hackernews marie antoinettes' answer. Here plebs, be grateful that you do not inhale asbestos and shut up. How did Silicon Valley get so far removed from reality? Is it what working with inanimate technology does to a human being?
>it is a cathedral that is getting erected right in the middle of their bazaar.

That is a beautiful mental image.
> Working in an Amazon warehouse is a pretty average blue-collar job these days.

Eek, I hope not. That doesn't bode well for blue-collar work in America. Working at an amazon warehouse will net you roughly $13/hr according to Glassdoor, which will put you roughly $10k above the poverty line.

Unfortunately, outside of skilled trades, blue-collar work in America is slowly disappearing and being replaced with jobs like this. I had a really rough time surviving on $13/hr in college (granted I wasn't working full time), raising a family on that seems damn near impossible.
No, saying snarky things about crypto is my hobby, not my career. My career is actually breaking these stupid systems.
The Demon for the "radio/TV" problem just has to predict whichever option is more likely to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Not sure if this has changed with more recent models, but I've had rather bad experiences with UX31.

Although the model number was the same, most of the European variants had a different, extraordinarily bad SSD, which slowed down to <1 MB/s if the file system was something like >70% full.

Other indicators of bad quality:

- keycap texts disappeared for the most used keyboard buttons after just a month's use

- crashed once every three days on average (hardware issues?)

- The fan makes a buzzing sound as it scrapes the bottom of the laptop casing

- The screen died after about a year of use (booting up makes the screen gradually turn completely white within 5 or 10 seconds)
Internet as a  luxury for low income americans
What advantage is there to form objects?
Between Harz IV and European retailers, the difference is unfortunately not that large in some parts of Europe:

http://www.thelocal.de/20140427/saab-fighter-jet-deal-up-in-...
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/17/us-amazon-germany-...
I agree with some of the others on here saying this might be a case of confirmation bias. I have found that people are "nice" to me when they can get something out of it. It's only when I catch them treating (or talking about) someone else in a certain way that their true colors reveal themselves.

I have exceptionally poor skills at judging a person's true intentions and moral character. Hence, I trust almost no one. That's not to say that there aren't any trustworthy people -- I'm sure there are plenty. It's just to say that I've had some bad experiences that have led me to lose complete confidence in my ability to judge which people are really kind and nice people, and which are essentially faking it (it's one reason I'm scared to get married).

And with someone like PG, most startup founders want something from him (capital, networking, etc.) and so you could argue that he isn't going to notice the ones who have successfully faked being a "nice" person toward him.

> Jessica and I have always worked hard to teach our kids not to be mean.

I really like this. It makes me happy to see someone else state it. If I ever have children, the one thing I want them to be more than anything else is kind people.
Samuel Delany reviews the first Star Wars movie (1977)
This Man Was Supposed to Become Steve Jobs 2.0 – Here’s What Happened Instead
I've seen a few startup developers who are mean toward other members of their team. In the cases I've seen these were insecure guys (based on other behavior) who felt very threatened by some junior members of the team who were smarter and more technically skilled.

The worst part was that the senior management had the impression that "good developers are mean" and so the situation wasn't dealt with.

It's one thing to be blunt and honest, but some people get mean when their own skill level isn't sufficient to make a convincing technical argument.
The idiom "nice guys finish last" isn't an idiom for no reason, Paul. Just because you're good at picking out people who you want to give money and support to doesn't mean that their niceness has any correlation with the hundreds of other founders who you don't, much less the business world in general.
This is a really big deal. I have several times sourced handymen through Angie's List only to get very odd and sometimes bad service. This despite those contractors having mainly good reviews. I applaud Amazon for being one of the few who don't doctor their reviews which allows me to actually rely on them.
Happy Meal VR: A Google Cardboard Hack
"I became a capitalist. I flew a sign to escape harrowing conditions in Oregon and I arrived in Seattle with nothing. When I landed I saw green. I created carefully crafted signs with cardboard and a Sharpie and, just like that, I was making money again."

That's a really curious statement. I suppose that she is succeeding in a form of marketing, and the value she's producing is an emotional salve on those that are wealthier than her and wish to help out or assuage their own guilt?
Well, an internship in the software industry here is not really an internship. More like a summer job for CS students: intern just means you're temporary and lowest on the totem pole.

I certainly was given jobs that were considered semi-important but that the full-time staff had more important things to do.(They aren't going to pay an intern to do useless work) I still learned a lot, even when I wasn't coding because I was required to learn good practice.
30 years ago, factory jobs were on a fixed workweek with known job securities and benefits (and were often unionized too). The important part of this article is that it points out that all of these floor workers are temps, where each day they could be out of getting paid on a day-to-day basis: "if there was not any work, they would send us home early without pay. "
Similarly, "Why we did ___", "How we did ___" or "How I did ___ in ___ time" formula blog titles are starting to get on my nerves seeing how popular they are here on HN.
In my experience business owners are very open to cold email introductions. Somewhere it became legend that nobody responds to sales emails but if you rethink your pitch as an earnest attempt to either listen to their problems or provide them a solution, they will respond. Just write as a person in an honest tone about the solution and ask for a few minutes to discuss on the phone or in person. Send ten of these personally written letters and I can almost guarantee that you will get at least 3-4 meetings. From those you will learn more than any salesperson could teach you in two years.
Thanks for setting it right :)
Reading McLuhan has had definite returns for me. The most bang for the buck is _Understanding_Media_.

People complain about its difficulty, its seriousness, etc. It's not that hard. He does use a few jargon terms, like "hot" and "cold." And their meanings do change, but don't forget, the media have changed.

For example, Web 2.0 and search engines shifted the web medium to hot, from cold.

In cool media, you have to fill in details yourself and "run it" yourself. It's there with you in the same room, but it's not actively seizing your attention. In hot media, every square inch and second is filled in.

I will say, though, that sometimes his writing reveals too much. When you realize just how utterly different our world is now from the pre-print-era, it can be overwhelming. Most of us are just barely clinging to a piece of stability in its whirlpool, but if we step off that platform for a moment and observe the complexity of the world, we realize just how much we depend on our complex media.

Step off the main drag in a foreign country and you'll see just how isolated and disconnected we are from everything else.

Anyway, I'm still not sure just how McLuhan relates to start-ups at this time... I'd have to ponder it more, but for example, we can see that the superfluidity of web media is shaking up ways of doing business and breaking up some of the large companies and creating more temporary work and less pensioned and union-protected work. The unions and pensions were dependent on stable media. It will be some years, 10-20, before current media are stable enough.
Thomas Edison is perhaps the best counterexample, especially as compared to Tesla. Edison won exactly because he was willing to be very mean.

http://www.amazon.com/Topsy-Startling-Crooked-Elephant-Ameri...
This guy curses too much in his post. Lame.
It seems like many of the commenters here are confusing corporate strategy/tactics with individual mean-ness. I'm not saying its good when a corporation takes action to derive profit at the expense of the public interest or that of one of their competitors - however, it's not nearly the same as an individual being malicious or petty when given power over others (such as a founder routinely has).
It would be nice if he had more data in this essay. His findings don't match my own. As a software engineer, all the nice people tend to just hand wave and OK and write kind of crappy, worthless features and implementation that don't do their job very well - they aren't good for the users or even the business. You end up with things like the Google IO conference app stuck with a couple different events and called a new product.

Mean people on the other hand are willing to say, hey, doing work on the UI thread and giving the user a bad, unresponsive user experience is bad and it needs to be done right. It's mean and it sucks, but you have to throw all this out and rewrite it better. Hey, just shoving new data in a complex data browsing framework doesn't give the user what they want when they want big pictures and easy to flick through options, etc..

Sure it is nice to let crappy ideas and implementations and whatnot through and just be nice to the person you are dealing with or working with, but it doesn't produce good results. In my experience it usually just produces me working weekends to fix their broken shit while they go around thinking they do a good job.