I was shocked to read that Chicago had torn down the Robert Taylor homes as well as the Cabrini Green projects. But, really, they had to go. I worked as an ER/trauma nurse in Chicago in the 90's. The year that I moved there, there were 994 murders within the city limits. That doesn't include the ones that we were able to patch back together. I'm sure that a large percentage of those murders happened within those housing projects. Between tearing the housing projects down, whatever Chicago PD is doing and the changing demographics of the city, the murder rate is half of what it was in the mid 90's.

I'm sure that people can't really understand what those housing projects were like, but to give you a couple of examples--people use to snipe at police men and paramedics from the top of the buildings in the Cabrini Green projects. Cabrini Green was about 2 square miles of 10 story slums, and within those two square miles, there were two full police precincts. Paramedics would not enter the Cabrini Green projects unless they were escorted by one or two police cars.

I worked two ER's within a mile of Cabrini Green. It was an adventure to say the least. One of them was a small 16 bed ER, and we staffed 6 security guards for our department. Every single ER stretcher had restraints to tie patients down, chained to the frame of the stretcher. There were a number of times that I got called out to the entry way to see a car parked, riddled with bullet holes. The driver and passengers usually had couple of holes in them as well that needed to be patched up.

And, the Cabrini Green housing project was about 1 mile away from the "Gold Coast" of Chicago, which was one of the most expensive zip codes in the nation when we lived there. Mayor Daley slated Cabrini Green for removal, and last I heard, they had built a hip new development for the neo-urbanites moving in.

So, they relocated thousands of the cities poorest people. And, they removed a bunch of gangs in the process. The crime rate went down quite a bit after that, but those people took their Section 8 vouchers to the local burbs. Those local burbs just don't have the resources or the tax base to deal with problems. Just Google for images of Gary, Indiana if you want to see what those local burbs are becoming.

But, even back in the 90's, there was a lot of gentrification already occurring. One of the things the article didn't mention was how beneficial to the city it was to have a large gay and lesbian community. Some of the first areas of Chicago to get gentrified were because gay and lesbian couples who didn't have kids and didn't have to worry about the school system. They moved in to neighborhoods in Chicago like the Halstead neighborhood and Andersonville, and really turned them into hip, trendy and safe areas to live.

The sad irony is that I read that title and assumed it was an essay on font choices in development environments.

Yes, they're much more expensive. But I think that saying it's the hardware is to miss the point. People don't really think as much about the mac hardare as much as the mac software.

And let's be honest here, smart and educated software engineers go out of their way to buy macs when they definitely have the skills to install and run linux. They could definitely buy a cheaper Windows PC. Unless you want to be utterly derisive and dismissive, you can't simply say, "It's a fashion item."

People are buying macs because they want Mac OS X. Maybe instead of arguing about how "overpriced the hardware is" or "how people love candy coating" people in charge of competing products/projects should look into the reasons why hen you go to a tech conference you see a sea of glowing Apple logos. People there are not stupid, and if you just dismiss their choice as such you're going to miss out on key information.

Not hacker news.

As much as I prefer discrete graphics, the X3100 is actually quite good. Good enough to be the only video option for the Macbook Air, Macbook, Thinkpad X300 and Thinkpad 61s all well received laptops.

For 820$ you can get a Dell Inspiron 1525 with: Intel Core 2 Duo @2.16GHz, 4GB ram, 15.4 inch display (1680x1050), and a 320GB SATA Hard Drive (5400RPM). (http://www.notebookreview.com/dellCoupon.asp)

What more do you need for heavy everyday work?

The problem is, there might be new comments even if you visited the thread.

But there's a remedy for it and it's simple: the link includes the number of comments in that discussion, so that your browser can change the color if the number of comments has changed since your last visit.

Edit: e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=268389&c=21

You guys in the US & friends probably don't see it as clearly. The US focus on self esteem - justified or not - and the vague post-modern concern with various shallow attributes, like gender, background etc., is actually quite stunning to me. I've grown up in a progressive part of the eastern bloc. The schooling in science and math there has traditionally been focused on tangible results.

From the year 1 onwards. Unannounced in-class tests used to be common. If you solved the math problem you got good marks, if you didn't you get poor marks. There was nothing judgmental about it. And you could not move into higher education if you didn't have good marks.

Let me give you an analogy. Have you met the wacky person on a party who is an awful dancer, but doesn't realise it? You know, like Elaine from Seinfeld. Embarasing, obnoxious and feeling good about it. If it were a child, the US&friends school system would tend to encourage them and telling them how awesome they are, lest their feelings get hurt. An eastern block school would just give them bad marks and let them move on...

(And in soviet russia, the party embarasses you!)

ThinkPad X series are more robust the Macbook from my experience, we use them on the field for on-site data processing. Conditions are harsh, basically the is no care but heat and bumps but the ThinkPads just keep going. I was forced to switch to a Macbook from an X60 but still missing it.

I'm a developer, I've run various OS's over the years, Windows first, Mac OS X after that, and after my iBook's hard drive failed, I now run Linux on a refurbed ThinkPad. Windows was the only environment that I had to get out of. The amount of friction Windows created in my everyday development was enough that I felt it necessary to switch to maintain productivity.

The difference, though, to me, between working on OS X or Linux, though, is negligible. I suspect that most conference goers with glowing Apple laptop lids can be just as productive in Linux as they can in OS X. (I'm not a Mac developer, I imagine that crowd would disagree)

I use a text editor and a browser to get my work done, Macs don't offer me any software advantages in that department.

I worked as a courier for a short while, and I have good memories of that time.

It gives a certain kind of job satisfaction which is very different from what you get from being... well, anything else I've ever been. Your goals are short-term (get this package to that place by this time) and achieving each one gives you a little dose of satisfaction. If you get to the end of the day and you haven't been late, lost a package or been hit by a car, you know you've done your job as well as possible. That's in stark contrast to being, say, a theoretical physicist (or a software developer), where the doses of job satisfaction are (hopefully) much larger but are much further apart, and where you can easily go for days without feeling like you've achieved anything.

1. Bad Search

2. PDF Files for Online Reading

3. Not Changing the Color of Visited Links

4. Non-Scannable Text

5. Fixed Font Size

6. Page Titles With Low Search Engine Visibility

7. Anything That Looks Like an Advertisement

8. Violating Design Conventions

9. Opening New Browser Windows

10. Not Answering Users' Questions

I agree, even if you hate windows, a Linux box is much more cheaper than anything mac has to offer for the same price range.

Admit it guys, mac has done a decent job in polishing the user interface,and overrall experience, but it has done even a better job in marketing.

A good chunk of your money is buying a brand name, and contrubuting to Apple's higher margins. While the PC world is just much more cut-throat.

These are pretty impressive. Definitely closer to a YC batch than a TechStars one.

I could see myself using quite a few of these, especially JamLegend (I hope they'll allow compatibility with a Rock Band drumset).

I'm not sure that's really the point, but I'd say that there is a heavy force in education against science, math, and all other forms of critical inquiry.

One of the biggest reasons people would leave the Mathematics department at my university was because they couldn't deal with being told that their proofs were crap, and that they needed to get the quality of their work up if they wanted to succeed.

It's not that the work was "too hard". It's that students couldn't get coast on extra credit points and pure-opinion essays, like they had gotten used to in high school and junior college. Finishing a complete trip through Math, Engineering, or any of the sciences required actual effort, as well as the ability to handle criticism, a skill that many students lacked after over twelve years of education.

I also had a chance to see the other side of the coin, because my second degree was in a foreign language. My Japanese degree consisted of nearly four years of classes which required almost no effort whatsoever. Loads of extra credit and students handing in work months after the deadline were the rule, not the exception.

Many of my fellow students in the Japanese program were majoring in Asian Studies or Asian History, and complained incessantly about the difficulty of their classes. Even though their major fields were focused heavily on Japan, many of them couldn't even read at the equivalent of a fourth-grade level, after studying the language for four years.

I asked many of them why they chose their majors, versus engineering or mathematics, and the most common responses cited how harsh their previous Math and Science professors had been, by not allowing extra credit, late homework, and so on.

While this does not constitute any sort of proof or rigorous study, it illustrates the point that our schools are far too lenient on students, and lenient schools do not produce graduates who can survive the crucible-like atmosphere of even an undergraduate science program.