mitsche

Bought it on impulse because I love the aesthetics of it (both sound and imagery).

I think this comes down to personal preference. I am on a 24 inch screen with 1080 lines and I still prefer reading text in OS X to Windows on it. On my shabby laptop, not so much.

I know ben0x539 can speak for himself, but you seem to accuse him of some form of rabid fundamentalism in order to get a half-baked point across. He didn't make any demands, he just voiced an opinion, which is totally fine, and your attempt of framing him as a dimwit devoid of a sense for irony offends me on his behalf.

Personally, I am not affected much by the use of rape in a joke, except that in general I find it cheap and unoriginal, therefore boring. If someone like Louis CK uses rape in one of his bits, it's funny because he is a comedic genius. Otherwise it's just thoughtless, or stupid even, and possibly brings up hurtful feelings in some people for the gain of nothing.

The first two points (waking up early, exercising daily) make me happy, too. Compared to not doing those things, the difference is enormous. I would have thrown 'eating clean' in there as well.

The other points I agree with, too. But in my experience the first two points organically lead to the later ones.

On a side note: I'm an atheist and raised as such. I don't think guilt, dogmatic thinking, and the fear(!) of an afterlife would be conducive to my happiness. The intersection between The Christian Way Of Life and the OP's original points is so random and incomplete, you could just as well draw a connection to Scientology and be more spot-on (and still–for all practical purposes–not be spot-on at all).

A lot of things "work" with women. But creeps act like they do because they're horny losers, not because they're having so much success with it.

Anyway, the whole alpha male debate is besides the point. Also, I think you're confusing aggressiveness with not being a complete wimp. I often see women being attracted to dominant, strong, self-confident guys. Aggressive ones? Not so much.

"It's almost as if when the girl is attracted to the guy, it's flirting, but when she isn't, it's creepy/sexual harassment."

Almost? Oh really?

I used to be really into mechanical keyboards, but have since developed a preference for low profile scissor switch keyboards after using them at work.

I think the perfect keyboard for me would be a low profile, high quality scissor-switch keyboard with a slight split angle and the numpad on the left side.

Let it go man. The distinction makes sense for a lot of people and you're just being a stickler and a contrarian at this point.

I don't think the OP meant it that way.

To me part of being a grown up includes the ability to act with reason and tact under great distress. I've managed to do this once in my life when I was attacked by a good friend in a very harsh way because of complex reasons, and our friendship might have ended right at that point if I had let my emotions get the best of me.

I once had a boss who had an emotional breakdown almost every day at the office because things weren't going as he expected them to. He did not inspire me to do good work. He just instilled a fear in me that syphoned energy away and kept me from fully focusing on my work.

It was depressing, really. I will never know what Steve Jobs was like to work with, but I don't think I would have liked working for him, although he obviously got some good stuff out of his people.

As someone who has never taken LSD and is curious about the experience I have a question:

Have you personally ever taken LSD and actually suffered flashbacks? If yes, how bad were they?

This is a very personal question, so of course feel free to ignore it.

There's a variant of this riddle where the solution is using a big brush and painting over the dots in one stroke.

I think all of these solutions are interesting and creative.

Indeed. Everyone being brilliant would of course foster diversity, as well as overall cultural capital. I might be wrong, but it seems obvious to me.

To me the original quote seems to spring from an elitist mindset and akin to saying there's no diversity in painting anymore because everyone uses rectangular canvases. It's not the brilliance that makes you diverse, but rather what springs from it.

This. And flakey drivers.

I think this is a big step for Linux on the Desktop. I look forward to the day I can ditch OS X and Windows and replace it with a Unix that has a nice UI, stability, and is open.

I think our tastes are very much alike. I feel what you're saying about the oppressiveness, and I wouldn't want to live in Vienna for the rest of my life either. I just think it's a bit much to call the city of Vienna horrid, especially when so many people say so many nice things about it in general.

You've actually made me want to check out LA sometime soon.

I agree with everything you wrote. I recently moved back to Mattersburg because my dad passed away and I took over the house. And I really enjoy living in the open again.

But the things you describe are something that many big cities have in common. It makes me wonder if you've ever been to a city with a somewhat dense population that you enjoyed being in.

I'm European and I am certain that this is wrong, unethical, and bad for society as a whole. I'm not surprised that "death from overwork" is an isolated cause of death and has its own term in Japan (Karōshi).

As an employee in Japan I wouldn't want to survive.

Agree with mobthink and Austro-fascism. I would add lack of enthusiasm and closed-mindedness. Don't know what your problem with the city is, though. Even after having lived in Vienna for more than a year I'm still stunned how beautiful it is and how easy it is to meet interesting people.

If you're in a circle of cool people, Vienna is probably one of the nicer capitols to live in. And as a country-bumpkin I find it a lot less mentally taxing than let's say London or Berlin.

In Austria we get 14 Salaries per year. We pay less tax on the 13th and 14th one. I got my 13th just now for July and will get my 14th in December.

We have 25 days of paid vacation. You can work while at home or on vacation, but your co-workers might not appreciate it. Taking leave for doctor visits, weddings, relocations, funerals, etc. does not count towards that.

Also, our stores are closed on Sundays, which encourages spending time with friends and family.

I don't love Austria, but a few things here I find allright.

AFAIK there is no way in Windows to control hinting, which in my opinion is the thing that makes Windows' font-rendering unbearable, especially on displays with a high PPI count.

There's hacks out there, but they're exactly that: hacks. And they don't always work that well.

I doubt this quote is to be taken literally. I rather think he means that good chess players are very, very good at deciding which moves to think deeper about based on intuition, hence reducing the need to visualize.

He's being witty, is all.

I don’t think the majority of people here condone piracy. It’s the practice of criminalizing people who don’t acquire stuff legally because they either can’t (e.g. the content not being available in their country) or won’t (because the distribution model puts the consumer in a unfavorable position) that rubs people the wrong way.

Quoting out of context is in there as well.

While I didn’t like Jeff Atwood’s post, I didn’t take the title literally. To me it seems obvious that it can also be read as "Please don't >learn to code<", meaning that we (people who understand and write code) might be wrong in assuming that it’s a skill on par with algebra or cooking in importance and are therefore in no position to lure people into learning programming as if it were the one big roadblock separating them from enlightenment. Or something like that.

Natural languages are ambiguous. One of the reasons why they’re more fun than programming languages.

You seem to be a bit disconnected from reality. If I told any one of my friends who are not programmers by trade to look for code samples, they would either not understand what I'm talking about, or simply not know where to look.

Most people don't even have the slightest idea what kind of problems software can solve. Jeff Atwood seems to interpret "learn to code" as "learn to set the DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH variable". Others—myself included—think that having at least a bit of exposure to programming provides you with a better overall understanding of how computers operate.

I don't think it's necessary to have that understanding. But neither is speaking a second natural language. Apart from acquiring the skills themselves, learning any of those will teach you meaningful things about yourself and your environment, which seems to be worthwhile.

The guidelines on what to submit on HN are open to interpretation. I posted this in the hopes that other HN members might find it interesting, since it might lead to a better insight into the broad effects of war on society.

Frankly, I didn’t expect it to end up on the front page, but it did. HN more or less regulates itself, so I’m not too worried about submitting an article that bears little or no relation to the IT field, as long as I myself find it to be valuable.

Okay, I agree.

Although I think this has a lot more weight when you talk exclusively about laptops, with which I indeed have had so many problems in the past that I would recommend a MacBook to any fellow musician asking me for advice, especially if he is going to go on tour with it.

The two DAWs I've assembled myself in the last 12 years were both super stable and performed really well. I don't think I would have gained anything by using a Mac.

In fact I'm on a machine that I recently built which dual boots into Windows 7 and Snow Leopard. Maybe I will benchmark Reaper in both of them and come to a surprising conclusion. If I do, I'll post it on Hacker News.

How is Mac a better plattform for audio? This is not a rhetorical question. I keep hearing this, and some say it's because of CoreAudio. But so far I haven't been able to find a thorough explanation that's not based on biased assumptions.

The Variety Of Sound stuff is what I'm missing on OS X. I use those a lot.

See my answer to jaylevitt's posting.

I just stopped using the monitor after half an hour of using OS X on it and gave it to my roommate, since I'm hardly ever home anyway. Now it's back on my desk again.

It bugs me that I thought I needed a better screen instead of instantly seeing what's the issue. Especially since I used to play around a lot with the Freetype settings in Ubuntu and should have known what makes the fonts look the way they do.

But then again I trusted Apple to not let this kind of stuff happen.

Graphic design: not many. Just little things, like the great desktop zoom, the nifty screenshot shortcuts, simple access to special characters. Nothing that Windows couldn't do without some modifications, just maybe not as nicely. Also, I spend most of my time in OS X anyway, and I don't want to boot into Windows just for quickly creating or editing a file in Illustrator or Photoshop.

Browsing the web: font rendering. I don't like Windows' aggressive hinting and the one dimensional anti-aliasing. Some non-standard fonts I find not only ugly, but unreadable on Windows.

Webdev: Unix underpinnings, Rails. Text rendering, again. And I feel like I'm a lot faster at switching apps and searching for stuff on OS X. But that's probably just habits I've built over time.

Overall, OS X gets in my way the least. That's why I would choose it if I had to choose just one OS. But I don't, so …

I use Reaper by Cockos. I make rock music. I have previously used Cubase and Sonar.

Regarding ASIO vs. CoreAudio performance: http://www.dawbench.com/win7-v-osx-1.htm

There are a few freeware plug-ins I use that are Windows only. If I could afford to buy Altiverb 7 right now, which is OS X only, I'd probably switch to OS X (at least till Altiverb came out for Windows).