seltzered

yeah, he motivated me to get a thinkpad over a macbook at the time.

That said, i'm getting tired of my T500 already. I don't see myself really needing expresscard as much as I was bent on it.

Overall, I've learned that ergonomics matters at the end of the day no matter what machine you use - meaning I care less about laptop screen size and more about bang for the battery life. I can't convince myself to buy a desktop either, so I'm considering getting a 13-14 inch laptop with the fastest processor, ssd, and gobs of ram instead.

darn, I thought this was going to be a more extreme article about amazing coders that don't own smartphones and the like.

jperla made a blog post about this a few months ago: http://www.jperla.com/blog/post/facebook-is-a-ponzi-scheme

His assertion's that it isn't investment making it a ponzi scheme, it's their customers who purchase advertising on facebook and see minimal returns.

Totally agree, this has made me cry working on any app that has been sustained for years. This is why I think for any "graphical" language approach to be adopted by seasoned programmers should be fully keyboard accessible (think vim, but you can manipulate things across files and objects.

I've been thinking a lot about this, since I have needed to use LabView at my job the past few years. While I hate labview for the sake of writing applications that need to be continuously refactored and scaled, it's immensely useful for non-programmers to create a working program quickly.

So far I've been wondering if a graphical interface a la labview could work if it translated down into say, erlang code. It all depends highly on who the target audience is...a test engineer, or someone wanting an easier way to write scalable distributed applications. If the latter, I'd expect the interface to be a very well thought out interface that lets you effortlessly flow between drilling down into functions and seeing the greater view of all the code in your application.

Is it possible for developers to see this merely as microsoft positioning everything to be more like apple?

I'm seeking some validation if the following is now true:

wpf ~~ cocoa (for mac)

silverlight ~~ cocoa touch

html5 (formerly SL when used as webapps) ~~ html5.

I hope microsoft pitches the above this way, so developers like me that need to use their tech stack can sleep easy at night. It's a simpler way to think about everything. And Flash can still have it's place for RIA and grow to be a premier tools developer for html5 apps.

Remember, apple originally took an opposite direction when the iphone first came out, originally expecting developers to develop mobile html applications for the phone. That idea died quickly, and a year later Cocoa Touch and the App Store came out.

thanks, I noticed user culix already suggested it, so I upvoted his suggestion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=499851

Speaking of this, when will HN allow for HTTPS connections? :P

> Could we say... revenge is a dish best served cold?

...and resolved by acquisitions?

Paypal is owned by eBay if I recall correctly,

and one of WePay's investors is Max Levchin, former CTO of PayPal

streaming version: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/08/mark-shuttleworth-talks-u...

Hope he's using a decent modern filesystem (e.g. zfs)

I just spent a couple weeks comparing Jira, Bugzilla, Fogbugz, and Redmine. I'm at multi-faceted design group doing firmware, desktop software, and silicon design(multiple codebases / documentation), and I wanted a system that will work for everyone, and let me move issues across projects to their root cause. I also wanted it to have email-in support to make sure employees have no excuse to not file an issue.

Fogbugz: likely my favorite from a user-interface standpoint. But I needed project categories, something you can now write a plugin for, but didn't have time to deal with. Their Kiln product looks great, but you may need to check if it's svn/git compatible -- I think it's primarily mercurial.

Redmine: I would've chose this if it was a small group. It's free, open source, lets you create compartmentalize into subprojects probably more than you should. But I had fears of ruby scaling out to a bunch of people. There were also some UI quirks that bugged me (e.g. global search should always be enabled, even in a project), although there's some gorgeous themes coming out for redmine soon.

JIRA: What I ultimately chose. It's definately a "wine of fear", that is an enterprise product with many features thrown in not to offend or lose business. Because of this, you get a fairly boring UI, and can feel bizarrely complex to configure. That said, it works.

As much as I hate advertising everywhere, you bring a fair point. Logos can easily be an indicator of place and time for a recordings.

The above is also why I can't stand how many blogs these days don't put a publish date anywhere, for the sake of minimalism.

I think the real, unwritten reason they're doing this is to serve as an adblock for video content you 'consume' - that is, television shows and movies.

found via slashgear : http://www.slashgear.com/notion-ink-adam-developer-program-o...

doh, I meant a steno pad ~~ ipad. They measure 6" x 9" - pythagorean says this is about a 10.8" screen. Ipad screen size is 9.7".

pic of steno pad: http://content.etilize.com/500/1010042931.jpg

My problem with Microsoft Research is that it seems like you would work in a vacuum. I like making things people can easily decide whether they're good too, not deal with marketing dept. red tape to deliver. When I think Microsoft Research I think amazing things poorly marketed and embraced by microsoft. Example: Making a collage in MS Gallery Live is a "microsoft research" add-on you have to go to a separate website to buy.

There's a video from the former head of Apple's Advanced Technology Group that discusses the problem.

Honestly, for the areas I'm heavily interested in, Notion Ink, or some type of Cradle-2-Cradle focused design/manufacturing company.

I'm a jealous american. How's the surf out there? How much would it cost to go ski in chile for a week?

well, there was this blog post last year: http://blog.awesomezombie.com/2009/12/analyzing-y-combinator...

True, It'd be hard to be motivated on 35k/year to lead a project. But I'd consider it IF I'd be getting great training/materials in cutting-edge skills (ruby, html5, etc.) to make up for the low pay, AND got exposed to a good network of folks outside of just the government.

While we're on the topic, anyone have tips for having a good posture, but packing your setup in a bag? I want to work remotely but not kill my back in the process.

So far the best suggestions seem to be to use a nada-chair and a laptop stand + light external keyboard.

I use a swopper chair at home, and at work I stick a bunch of reams of paper under my monitors to make sure they stay up.

Next on my home list is to buy either a laptop stand or get a good monitor+stand.

is this in USD or EUR? Are you in amsterdam?

you may want to ask daniel bogan of usesthis.com how he managed to interview him: http://why.usesthis.com/

Let's assume the device is focused on creativity - drawing and writing (also assume the device records pen input well and has a retina screen):

10" tablet screen size ~~ display size of a legal pad.

7" tablet screen size ~~ display size of a large todo pad.

I like using a legal pad already for drawing/note-taking, but if the fact that it's electronic let's me express what I want with less screen space, It may be worth getting something smaller.

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I also can't get around the author's idea of carrying an EVO in my pocket. Especially If I plan to use the same device while running/cramming into jeans/etc. It's definately a great purse-able phone for women though.

Possible use case: If I can put a bigger hard drive inside this, it would be a nice personal mini "mozy" backup service for me. No, it wouldn't be terabytes of stuff, but the dedicated connection would be worth it.

question: how does the ubuntu upgrade process work? do you reinstall everything from scratch? or can you just apt-get your way to a new release?

I'm not a UX guy, but I found this to be a good infographic to encapsulate what UX actually means:

http://uxbasis.hellogroup.com/

one use case where I'd hate facebook to be down: when I'm trying to find the party address of a friend I haven't got a number of yet.

As much as I don't like facebook or most addictive 'free' services, there's many friends out there who treat it like the new email.

Yeah, I'll agree to that. For HW Dev, It's still easier to talk myself into buying a laptop with a docking station and a bunch of different ports than to buy a beautiful, clean, yet limited mac.

Thank god Virtual Machines feel fast enough and do usb i/o these days, I'd go nuts if I still had to dual-boot Windows and Linux.