skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
EDIT: oops. I just noticed your price range. The X1 Carbon doesn't fit with that.

I would strongly recommend the last generation Lenovo X1 Carbon, but I would strongly recommend against the current X1 Carbon for a few reasons:

- They merged the trackpoint's buttons into the trackpad's and now it's very difficult find the middle chord or to select text using the trackpoint.

- They merged the function keys with the utility keys (e.g. volume control) into a single, dynamic row, so closing a window (Alt-F4) often requires you to toggle from utility to function key. If this sounds confusing and useless, it is.

- Worst, because of the doubled-up row (fn, utility), Esc and ~ wound up overlaid. So they moved the ~ next to the LOWER RIGHT Alt key. I hit Esc every time I try to reference my home directory...

Other than that, it's a lovely laptop.

Oh and don't get a HighDPI display unless you want to deal with funky application layout issues...
Yeah, I'm partly playing devil's advocate: for my day job I work with node, doing microservice-y stuff; on my own time, I prefer working with a Django or Rails type framework.

I appreciate the benefits of a 'batteries included' approach when, realistically, anything I build on my own is not going to have to horizontally scale across 50 EC2 boxes, although some of Rails's choices in terms of batteries are peculiar to me.
May be you can hack your way into talking to customers. You don't have to think of restaurant workers as people you are trying to sell to understand their pain points. This is one thing I have tried myself. When you go to a restaurant next time try to have a casual conversation with one of the workers. Try to get them talk about their pain points without directly asking them. In most cases they'd be happy to talk to you because you have leverage over them because you being their customer. And once you have understood some point points and developed a solution for them try to generate some demand for your product. You can go to one restaurant and tell them such and such restaurant is using this product and is doing great with it. And then go to another restaurant and tell them there is another restaurant using your product and killing with it. Also, read "The Paypal Wars." This book has a wealth of sales tactics you can use.
We had planned for a mixed-content site, but never got around to it. My collaborators have used content from a number of shows in the classroom.
This sure sounds nice, and I believe Paul when it comes to his perception. But I'd need more convincing that this is objectively and not just something Paul sees because he's good at filtering out the people he doesn't want to work with.

A couple counterexamples come to mind. Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, and the Uber executive team, the Github husband and wife with the Horvath incident. Of course I can't generalize these cases either, but these are prominent companies where the truism doesn't hold.
I am going to break OPs rule: anybody here has linux running on a macbook air? I really wanted to get a light laptop with a long battery and found no alternative as good as MBA
Doesn't it have to exhibit "correctly matching strings return faster ... on a per-character or other tiny chunk basis" in order to work the match towards correctness?
Sorry...just been annoyed at rails lately, was drunk reading through here, and wrongly took out my personal frustrations as a diatribe against the author. I'm an asshole.
You know what Ballmer once said? "Linux is a cancer". If you can't take such an small thing as writing "M$", then you should consider being part of another community.
I would love to believe what pg is saying. However there are strong counter points to his arguments.

Uber and Travis Kalanick don't seem to be failing. They may have some negative publicity, but their growth is strong. Uber is probably worth more than any single yc company including Airbnb.
> Did you find a bug? :)

No, but there may be one already, lying hidden, unless you have a good test suite haha
In addition to the wealth concentration mentioned in the article, systemic changes are happening that destroy the jobs of the 95%. Automation displaces workers that now have nowhere to find work. At some point there just won't be jobs for most people.
Perhaps they are just good at suppressing any inconvenient opinion or thought.
To make the case stronger we now need to move some few prominent "mean" tech figures to "not mean".

Could it be that meanness and failure come in a vicious circle fortifying each other? Put in another way, as people become more successful they become less mean? Hypothetically, the Paul Graham of the failed startup accelerator YC would end up being meaner.

Many homeless people end up appearing mean too. Maybe personal traits aren't innate unchangeable attributes but depend on our current status.
I'm curious to know pg's thoughts on Mahbod Moghadam (although I expect that there are several reasons he'd be unable to make that public anytime soon, if ever). Did he miss the meanness when he funded Rap Genius? Is his behavior something else entirely that "mean" doesn't capture?
Great to see PG trying counter Steve Jobs inspired asshole-dolatry. Certainly I think it accords with my experience: I've stuck around in jobs because of the people when better ones were available. Conversely, meanness in founders creates a mean atmosphere, and people will not be loyal.
http://pcpartpicker.com/
It's interesting (in my mind, disappointing) that Github lists only active staff-- in my mind, humans.txt should document all the people who have ever worked to bring a website to its current state.
Sorry, I didn't read the guidelines before posting.
Serious people playing
I've been using unices for over 20 years now (first was ultrix, then truos, sunos, solaris, hpux, aix, linux, netbsd, freebsd, osx) and I don't believe there is such a thing as a unix philosophy.
The first five comments I read more or less all disagreed with pg's basic premise. Whether or not those people are even right, that's quite depressing in and of itself.
And of course Kevin O'Leary.
I would not say meanness, I would rather consider humility, the ability to be humble, to make abstractions of animal emotions.

There are different kinds of success. There is victory, and there's progress. In victory, you prove you're relatively better than others. In progress, you allow the whole society to lift itself into something that is just better.

That's true that you should not put money on a pedestal, but you should also understand that in order to do a better job, you should adopt a profit model just because you're in a capitalist country.

Of course mean people fail. Mean people don't have any intention or long term goal for what they want to do in their field of work, they lack strategy.

But on the other hand, hell is paved with good intentions.
I just ordered a Thinkpad T540p for $649 (plus tax, no s/h) from the Lenovo site. "Web list price" is $1,413.00. I don't know how long the deal will last. Obviously, I have not tried to run linux on it, but I don't expect problems.

Downsides: It is a heavier machine at 5.5lbs. Battery life is good but not great. The display is decent resolution but not great.

http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/t-series/t540p...

Make sure you pick the best deal. :-)

Processor: 4th Generation Intel Core i5-4300M Processor( 2.60GHz 1600MHz 3MB)

Operating system: Windows 7 Professional 64

Display: 15.6" FHD AntiGlare 1920x1080

Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 4600

Memory: 8.0GB PC3-12800 DDR3L SDRAM 1600 MHz

Hard Drive: 500GB 7200 rpm

Optical Drive: Multi Recorder

Network Card: Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260

Bluetooth: Bluetooth Version 4.0

Warranty: Three year

Pointing device: Clickpad

Battery: 6 Cell Lithium-Cylindrical
And Steve Jobs said he is going to start a thermo-nuclear war against Android because its a stolen product. I agree that writing something like M$ sounds childish, and i think it sounds just as childish as writing Appl€, crApple or Googl€.
This is a very interesting idea. I think this is "becoming more true" rather than "true." Part of the reason why I think this will never completely be the case is that starting a company involves getting lots of people to do "stuff" and there isn't just one method to do so. Being a masterful manipulator of others, right or wrong, has worked many times in the past and I doubt will ever stop working by its very nature. (Now, being an average manipulator just won't cut it...) The bar will be continually raised as long as good people continue to start companies. Hopefully this new culture doesn't fizzle out after the next funding crunch, whenever it may occur.
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.

I think displacing the resident population of SF is pretty mean, as is creating a monoculture there.

Apathy matters.
Someone in class and I both have an Asus N56-series. He runs Fedora, I use Linux Mint. No problems.
I know that the author only means to give advice. But the message can easily be misinterpreted into a generalization, which kind of makes the author seem like a mean person.
Since robots.txt is a list of directives and restrictions on computerized visitors to a site, shouldn't humans.txt basically be a tutorial/code of conduct?

Something like:

"Hello Human,
Welcome to Github. You should use this site to upload a bunch of code that others might find useful, or contribute to code others have written. You can write comments on any code you find, but please don't be a jerk!"
> Increasingly you win not by fighting to get control of a scarce resource, but by having new ideas and building new things.

I don't think the fighting has gone anywhere. It's just changed its form. Any founder/salesperson will tell you it's harder than ever to get a prospect's or consumer's attention.

Being nice has nothing to do with the ageless struggle to stand out and triumph...grit.

Which, if you lack it, is the only trait I believe one can say is a sure shot to failure.
my attempt at a short proof about laplace's demon (they may not necessarily be correct, however..);

laplace's demon is part of the universe.

to simulate the universe, laplace's demon must simulate itself.

assuming P!=NP, this self simulation cannot be more efficient than the "lower level" simulation.

so either the "self-simulation" hole will become increasingly deeper (to infinity), or the resources required to do the simulation at each level will exponentiate away.

proof 2;

the smallest space at which a single bit of information is storable is O(a subatomic particle). but that subatomic particle is defined by more than one bit of information.

therefore to have knowledge of the entire state of the universe at some time requires more matter than exists in the observable universe.
People aren't mean in front of millionare investor. Duh?

Steve jobs, bill gates, uber, dropbox, zygna. I guess those are all exception?
Successful people have no reason and mentality to be mean, hence they are not. They can also afford to be generous.
I saw a clear generational split in my family just this week (thanksgiving dinner).

My parents came to the US with two kids in tow, stuck around, and are enthusiastic US immigrants and boosters.

I came with them, went to high school and university in the US, and though I have moved around a lot, have worked in the US for the majority of my working life. Overall I'd rate it a "meh". Great place to work, not terrible place to live (there are many worse alternatives).

My parents are shocked that their high school aged grandchild doesn't see the point of sticking around the US, possibly not even for university (which would be free, and good, in his mother's country).

For my parents, the US was so much better than their home countries (asian for one, oceania for the other) in terms of work opportunities, racial equality, and quality of life that they can't conceive of wanting to live anywhere else. I know this vividly because I remember it from my own childhood. And their were fewer alternatives in the 60s and 70s and even the 80s.

But nowadays many countries have not only moved faster, but farther, surpassing the US in quality of life and economic prospects. My parents are stuck in an old paradigm.

==

That paradigm isn't just that the "US is the rich land of opportunity" (which was for a long time correct). But moving was a big deal -- you left your friends and family and had to make a new life. But for my kid, he has friends from other countries he's lived in that he still stays in touch with online. They are moving around too, and his Facebook feed is a jumble of posts in multiple languages.

And I think this is key: Moving no longer has to cut you off from your family and friends. And because the internet is so cheap, this is true at most economic levels: I saw a sign in Dubai a couple of years ago advertising a bed in a shared house. The two features on the flyer were "room for a mattress" and "internet".
Your definition of rich isn't really something I can argue with. But I would encourage you to take a look at salaries for various jobs in high paid areas, and use that as the bases for comparison. One source I've used is US News Best Jobs.

The median salary for an application developer in San Jose is 116k. For a registered nurse in San Jose, it is 122K. Dental hygienists in San Francisco earn about 109k a year (median), developers in SF, about 110K. Lawyers and Physicians, of course, earn considerably more.

Devs do alright by standards of skilled workers, but they're not really outliers. The widely held notion that devs are wildly overpaid and privileged workers has to go down as one of the great victories of silicon valley PR.

Now, I will agree that tech has create these salaries on a scale that didn't exist before, which may be part of why the resentment occurs. Dental hygienists at 109k a year simply can't exist in numbers sufficient to cause displacement, because they draw their salaries largely from the local population. That limits the ratio. Tech, on the other hand, sells outside the region, so 100k+ salaried tech workers really aren't limited in number by a local population they serve (and they can remain aloof or detached from that population). Again, I'm not saying this is bad (or good), I'm just suggesting it as one possible explanation for why people resent tech salaries so much more than dental hygienist salaries.
Don't forget Vinod Khosla. From reading HN one could also be forgiven far thinking that every single amazon employee in management outside AWS is devoid of all positive human traits.
the inclusion of professors in the list of people who generally aren't mean people is... questionable. being a professor means playing many zero sum games: limited government grants for research, limited number of jobs in academia. perhaps they're nice to pg, but they're often mean to their grad students and postdocs, and to anyone else who doesn't control a scarce resource and who gets in their way.
This, and I suspect most people are smart enough to know they shouldn't be mean around (and especially) towards him or his wife.
This is really cool. This work, along with the previous work of reverse engineering handwritting recognizers is important for us to better understand what our tools are actually doing. A lot of what happens inside these ML algorithms is not terribly well understood, even by the creators, this work gives us a really good insight into what the mind of a machine is actually thinking. When I was a teacher, I used to try to make sure students understood things going both ways. This is very important work in this respect.

For people struggling to understand, it's a little like having a tool that uses automatically generated regular expressions to find things in text, except you don't know what regex the computer is actually using. For my name it could be as simply as "bane" or something crazy that a human would never think up, say b[a-z]+e. It matches my name, but it's interesting to explore what else it matches: "barserphursnatche" is also perfectly acceptable. Remember, you don't know what the computer is using to recognize things, so you have to simply probe: randomly generate strings, use some kind of genetic algorithm etc.

In the end, you probably won't find b[a-z]+e, but you'll find some expression with a sizable intersection like b[a-y][b-z]*e. Once you have that you can use the expression as a generator and build a list of all the possible names it will match with something like Microsoft's Rex [1]

What we find is that lots of the stuff the computer likely matches are not my name at all, or even look like a name (e.g. "baghuadsoadshasdguoasdughasdgaodsguafdghaufogafuhgafduoe") and it gives us insight into what it's doing.

I think why I like this work is that it makes me think of a sci-fi short story:

- A boy encounters an alien civilization

- The boy befriends a robot from the civilization

- They go off on some adventures together

- During a scene of doubt in their relationship, during a stressful final adventure, the boy asks the robot what he thinks of him. The robot 3d-prints off one of these heads and gives it to the boy.

1 - http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/7f1d87be-f6d9-...
This GoDaddy guy?
There are plenty of counterexamples, also in Silicon Valley. For example, both Mark Zuckerberg and the Winklevoss twins made a lot of money, but depending on which side you believe, at least one of them is mean.

Anyway, the basic message is correct: when it comes to startups, it pays of more to focus on baking a bigger cake, than on fighting for a bigger slice.
I think PG is conflating the personal spite of Internet trolls with the ruthless drive to acquire wealth that marks out investment bankers, warlords and drug dealers. The latter might do some very nasty or underhanded things, but they regard it as "just business", as opposed to the personal bile you get from trolls.

Trollery is certainly not conducive to success because it destroys trust between you and the people you need to work for you. But if you can create a trusting circle of cronies then together you can lead them to do great but terrible things.
Indeed , academia almost pushes people to be mean. In general, wherever there's politics instead of an objective (like an experiment), or semi-objective (like a free market) measure of success, people tend to be mean.
Indeed. And, interestingly, Decimal.format (alone?) is declared with dot notation[0]. Overall coding style feels relatively consistent so there must be some reasoning behind these decisions.

[0] https://github.com/MikeMcl/decimal.js/blob/master/decimal.js...
1) People are usually mean (or meaner) to subordinates -- so not much reason to be mean to PG for most people he meets.

2) Most succesfull people are also good at PR and pretending to be nice to everybody, especially somebody like PG, but in general too. They can still be very mean in covert ways.
Perhaps pg and I have a different understanding of the word mean, but I doubt it as the opposing word he uses to describe the founders is "good people". These are just the ones coming to my head:

Apple, Steve Jobs, widely known for being an asshole. Fucked over early employees.

Facebook, Zuck, completely fucked over his mates when money appeared.

Microsoft, Bill Gates, ruthlessly exterminated opposition and known for bullying staff.

Oracle, Larry Ellison

Zynga, Marcus Pincus, "I Did Every Horrible Thing In The Book Just To Get Revenues".

Uber, acting like complete dicks.

Kim Dotcom, nuff said.

I think once you've been mean/ruthless/evil in business you may come out the other side and do some nice things, but you have to ask, will it ever be enough? Will Bill Gates ever make up for the billions of damage he caused humanity by using underhand tactics to destroy his opposition? Maybe. But while everyone praises him at the moment, I can't help but think he deliberately held the internet back for 6 or 7 years for his own profit. You almost can't start calculating the damage he caused precisely because it is so mind boggling.

Perhaps you don't agree with me, but imho this is the most bizarre essay I've read by pg, and I really don't agree with most of his political leanings, so for me that's saying a lot.

The truly great startup founders have to be nice on the outside but when push comes to shove, complete assholes on the inside. And of course investors are going to see the nice side.

Edit: And it occurs to me, funnily enough pg seems to be one of the major counterexamples, a good founder, as when he setup YC it was a game changer because here was a rich dude taking time out to help a bunch of young people and then put his money where his mouth was when people started asking him "so where do we get this seed funding". It was so remarkable because he actually took the time.

Edit 2: There seems to be some debate on the meaning of "mean". I'd point to pg's own essay on philosophy to dismiss this sophistry. He uses "good" and "benevolent" as the opposites, not "polite" or "diplomatic". I also appreciate BG created trillions of value, so he's definitely an overall net +ve, but he destroyed as well as created.
This essay seems to spend quite a bit of time talking about a term that it never defines. And, assuming there's a definition, does meanness count if it is not made manifest? I think we can probably agree without a more specific definition that a sociopath is mean, but are they only mean if we catch their sociopathy? And if we consider aggression a mean behavior, is aggression universal, or is behavior only aggression in certain contexts?
It hasn't been updated in a while, most changes are now in upstream (unsure about DNSSEC)...
I agree with PG on this trend. In "Reinventing Organizations" by Frederic Laloux you'll get more evidence that lack of meanness leads to success:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcS04BI2sbk

Particularly the example of Buurtzorg, a Dutch healthcare provider, is quite convincing: They went from 0% to 80% market-share by basically being less mean to their employees and clients.

(This Ask-HN discussion is also related to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8662376)
They sound like a nut with a grievance.

The story is inconsistent. Begging and "writing" is morally superior to being "working poor?" And then they cannot find any other job with their degrees because of their grievance with Amazon? And then they like being homeless because they used to work at a camping store?

They cannot accept charity from family but they beg in front of a Whole Foods?

If this is the poster child for the anti-Amazon movement, Amazon has nothing to worry about.
If you like RSnapshot maybe you like ElkarBackup http://github.com/elkarbackup/elkarbackup

It uses RSnapshot and the GUI is an easy-to-use web interface.
This is purely intentional criticism, you don't need a different framework on top of Rails to practice object oriented development.

Enterprise Java hell lives on for many developers in the world.
Interesting. Have you tried it lately? I've never had any problems in the past few months. If you are happy with whatever you are using now, then there is no need to change :).
>Maybe a more accurate title would be "Mean People Fail in Silicon Valley"

Silicon Valley has the same proportion of mean, nasty, ugly people as anywhere else in the world. And some of these people are successful, just like everywhere else in the world.
Conclusion: Being mean doesn't pay, being ruthless does.
Yes, and it will indeed try by all means to exhibit that behavior -- unless if it's some contrived regex designed to counter this.

The key word here is "short cirtuit" the match, and any regex engine worth its salt will try to do that as much as possible, tranforming the regex to the faster FSM it can.
The Gazelle from System 76 is $799. It comes with Ubuntu.