Ask HN: A cheap netbook for development? - <AUTHOR>

I have been wanting something inexpensive, lightweight, and not bulky to carry around the house and around town that I can develop on. I know most netbooks are fairly underpowered for development, but I thought I could focus on developing with vim or something lightweight and could build/test on a server. I'm also interested in Android development, but I'm not sure about the value of running Android on a netbook for testing vs. a mobile device. I would be the first to tell someone that they should just use a mac pro if they had the money and wanted to be mobile, but I just think of it as too bulky, and I really like the idea of a netbook. I know my fingers might be a little cramped, but maybe I'd get used to it.<p>Have you done any development on a netbook, and if so, what do you think of it? Any recommendations? <comment><USER3> I'll echo most everyone else - a netbook, for development, is not an ideal choice. However, there _are_ advantages - very portable, ridiculous battery life.

My main choice (and the one I ended up buying) was the Asus 1005PR : <http://commercial.asus.com/product/detail/69>

Here are the reasons: 1\. Ultraportable. 10" screen means it fits anyway, and is light enough to carry around by hand. It's lightweight and comes with the standard EEEpc addons, making the boot-up time, especially to the mini-os, very good. This means quick note-taking and response if you think of something cool on the fly.

2\. Absurd battery life - sometimes you don't want to drag around the power cable. Sure, 6 hours is enough for most people, but in honestly most other netbooks I've tried only hit 3-4 hours. I can easily crank out 6-7 in a single Starbucks dev session. This netbook will get you there, and the bus/train ride home.

3\. Adequate screen size - Sure, it's 10", but its got a 1366x768 screen. Vertical space is an issue, but horizontal is very good - widescreen makes it pretty sexy for Ubuntu Unity (though I don't really like Unity). I will say that it 100% better than a 1024x600.

4\. Fast - a Broadcom chip means you've got 720p on youtube with no hiccups. 2gb of ram with a decent Pinetrail processor. Not ridiculously fast, but with any netbook you're really not going to get more than 2Gb and a decent processor, but this _does_ do the video part at least. Slap on a 64GB solid- state and you're flying.

5\. Cheap? Really, all netbooks are cheap. This is towards the upper spectrum.

6\. It fits the bill - it fits the specs you posted. It's not underpowered, and it's _extremely_ portable and fast (bootup especially). Good for monitoring uptime/fixing quick bugs/ developing for long periods of time (with proper adjustments to your dev environment).

Hope this helps!

</comment><comment><USER4> I own an Acer Aspire One (1.6Ghz Atom, 1GB RAM, 160GB hard drive). While the battery life isn't bad (5 hours), performance is poor and the whole thing is too small to do much work on. I've also had constant problems with audio, video, and wifi in Ubuntu. Windows XP works alright, but it's not useful for much more than browsing the web.

 _I have been wanting something inexpensive-_

I used to think this way. Now I realize that it's not worth skimping on something you spend a significant fraction of your life using. Instead of the up-front cost, think of the amount you'll be paying per hour for the life of the machine.

I'm going to use numbers that favor cheaper computers. Say you use it 4 hours a day and upgrade in 2 years. If you spend $500, you're paying about 17 cents per hour. $1500 is 50 cents per hour. If you're actually using the machine for development, you'll create many times that in value each hour, let's say $5. If you can improve your efficiency by 10% (50 cents/hour) by buying the $1500 machine, then it's worth buying.

I've followed my own advice and bought a maxed-out 11" Macbook Air. I love it enough that I'm using it as my main development machine.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've been doing some work on my eee 1000he lately. Eclipse is runnable but noticeably slow. When I'm at home, I tend to use it as an x terminal for the desktop upstairs. I love the battery life, the keyboard is good enough for several hours with only a slightly cramped feel.

This is not my primary development machine and I think you aren't looking for that either. It's not just about the initial cost outlay. When I carry around a $300 machine, I don't worry about leaving it in the car, or spilling coffee on it, or so on. I don't worry about some absurdly padded bulky bag.

If I were in the market right now, I would go for an 11" timeline or similar intel ULV. The boost to 13??x768 is about 50% gain over the 1000he's 1024x600, and the CPU is probably 2-3x my atom.

<comment><USER6> I was using an Acer Aspire One until 2 days ago, when I bought by new HP Probook 4420s (ya I love this new machine).

My tricks to run heavy stuff to run stuff efficiently on an Aspire One were:

1.) Use XFCE (lightweight) or Lxde (super-lightweight) as your desktop environment. Made it possible to run Eclipse pretty fast. Use the version of eclipse from the OS repo. I had problems with the overflowed UI elements being hidden in the original version from the eclipse site.

2.) I used Synergy to share my desktop keyboard and mouse when I'm at home.

3.) Use Chrome instead of Firefox whenever possible. Chrome's startup is faster. Don't suspend with too many tabs open in Chrome. Chrome hangs your netbook and crashes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Rather than a netbook, get a 11.6inch machine like the Acer 1830T (or many others). More screen resolution, better keyboards, more CPU horsepower and only slightly more expensive (can be had starting around $375-400) and weight is still only around 1.5kg/3.3 pounds.

<comment><USER3> Agreed 100% here.

After a long time of using a Netbook for computing, I'm realizing soo much how the 'battery life and portability' is really not an issue.

Every year, more and more laptops come out that are lighter, faster, and just as cheap. And in all honesty, weight shouldn't be a deciding factor anyway - you can't operate the damn keyboard in mid-air, so you're going to be setting down your laptop a lot. If you're running a dedicated environment, you're also probably walking around with a backpack or messenger bag - my preference here, both for easier access and just plain looking cooler : )

But the issues of screen size and better keyboards are huge. Between the common need of many for running VNC and remote servers, and just the fact that an increase in pixels up to somewhere around 3000x1000 leads _directly_ to increased productivity, the drawbacks of a 4-5 hour battery and an extra pound or two quickly fade away. Most people that are serious about the portability either bring a charger or an extended battery - I prefer the latter, since I often find myself in places without outlets or power strips (like the subway, or a conference auditorium ).

Think about it this way : What's the difference between a bag that contains the following:

3-lb "Workhorse" laptop; power cable; spare laptop battery; notebook; pens;

And one that has a 1-lb netbook?

Nothing.

Except for the fact that the netbook is slower and smaller, and only marginally cheaper.

As I write this, I begin to regret my own purchase :P

<comment><USER8> Portability is important to me, and when on the move you can't find too many electrical outlets. And bringing an extra battery adds weight to my already overcrowded bag, not to mention changing it is disrupting my work.

Also, when a device consumes less, it also generates less heat. This summer got really painful to hold my Dell in my lap.

I also like to travel with public transport, but it is not fun to carry 6 lb with you especially on a crowded day.

<comment><USER3> I totally understand this, and it's why I switched to a netbook.

But looking back, I realize that all these are really becoming non-issues. Two years ago, maybe - back when netbooks had (on average) 8-9" screens and were significantly lighter and more sustainable for long periods of time.

But nowadays - take a 13" Macbook Pro vs. my recommended Asus 1005PR EEEpc: 13" screen vs 10.1"; Significantly faster processor; 4GB RAM vs 2GB, supports 8GB, higher FSB; Larger keyboard.

What does it trade off? 6hrs vs 8hr of battery life, and it is 4.5lbs to the PR's 2.8lbs. Oh, and it's larger by about 3 inches.

Not even a contest. More screen space, better memory, a bigger keyboard, and comparable battery life is _waaay_ more important than a few extra pounds. And while I understand the heat issues (which, really, depends on the model more than a specific type of laptop. Heat will be directly proportional to load and venting, so heat on one vs. the other will depend on the venting, because what you are developing will be the same), this is also starting to be less of an issue - I don't know what to say if you're putting something that generates heat on your lap _during the summer_. As far as weight - it won't be 6lbs difference, and even if it was, I would argue that this is worth it. With a proper laptop/messenger bag, this issue also goes away.

Edit: Oh, and yes, the Macbook does cost more. $700 more for these extra specs? Maybe not worth it...

But then again - craigslist one for $700 total, probably with a RAM upgrade. $400 for a good netbook vs $700 for a complete beast is an easy choice for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've got an Asus Eee 1000 HG which I use for Windows development, bought as a reconditioned ex-demo machine for about half retail. It's obviously slower than my main machine, but (by and large) quite fast enough for my day-to-day development usage with Visual Studio 2010 and SQL Server. VS2010 is particularly useful for netbook development, having a lovely scalable default programming font and a zoom feature.

The one time I remember it being particularly slow for development was when I was doing some odd SQL Server testing and needed to return a couple of hundred results sets. The query wasn't very slow to run, opening that many results set in quick succession was. It's also not really fast enough for raw photo processing but then I'm not entirely surprised about that and it is usable in an emergency :-)

I know what others mean about inexpensive - for me this was as much testing the theory as anything, a dearer machine wouldn't have been bought on a whim. I can live with the limitations inherent in such a cheap machine, they don't cause me major issues.

The machine has about 4.5 hours battery life - that's good but it's taught me that with a small machine like this because it just lives in bags most of the time, the more battery life the better - it doesn't get automatically plugged in to use every night, so more battery life is better.

A better screen - higher pixel and colour resolution - would be appreciated but the existing one is perfectly usable.

I wouldn't have taken the punt on a dearer, higher spec machine when I already had a perfectly good main laptop, and I'm still getting significant added value from this cheap little thing from places I wouldn't / couldn't take the big main machine. If you can get a good deal, I'd recommend one to anyone - even at full retail if you've got a solid use case and are happy with the spec you've found.

The one time I remember it being particularly slow for development was when I was doing some odd SQL Server testing and needed to return a couple of hundred results sets. The query wasn't very slow to run, opening that many results set in quick succession was. It's also not really fast enough for raw photo processing but then I'm not entirely surprised about that and it is usable in an emergency :-)

I know what others mean about inexpensive - for me this was as much testing the theory as anything, a dearer machine wouldn't have been bought on a whim. I can live with the limitations inherent in such a cheap machine, they don't cause me major issues.

The machine has about 4.5 hours battery life - that's good but it's taught me that with a small machine like this because it just lives in bags most of the time, the more battery life the better - it doesn't get automatically plugged in to use every night, so more battery life is better.

A better screen - higher pixel and colour resolution - would be appreciated but the existing one is perfectly usable.

I wouldn't have taken the punt on a dearer, higher spec machine when I already had a perfectly good main laptop, and I'm still getting significant added value from this cheap little thing from places I wouldn't / couldn't take the big main machine. If you can get a good deal, I'd recommend one to anyone - even at full retail if you've got a solid use case and are happy with the spec you've found.

</comment><comment><USER10> I have developed on a netbook, it is really not worth the experience. If you want cheap, buy a desktop, a dell, or the 999 mac.

<comment><USER11> Ditto !

Bought an Asus and ended up using it as a portable note taking device. I too was using Vim to edit programs - and that worked well. As for Java development compiling was excruitiatingly slow and Java apps were very slow to load. Having big fingers I never really adopted to the keyboard. For note taking, I ended up using only one hand to type across the whole keyboard. Looks strange but rather quick.

Have since upgraded to a MacBookPro with 4G RAM - much nicer experience.

<comment><USER10> I was doing terminal based development on vim over the network....the small keyboard, unusably small modifier keys, and unconventional keyboard layouts made it just plain painful.

I wasn't even compiling on device and it sucked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Thinkpad X100e. It's got an 11.6" screen with a 1366x768 panel. Nice keyboard and runs Ubuntu well. Should set you back about $500.

<comment><USER13> Upvote for you. I have a Dual Core one with an AMD Neo. It works pretty well for a small machine. Probably going to install a smallish SSD in it soon. It also runs Ubuntu quite well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I use an older Asus Eee PC. It works pretty well, but has resolution issues like others mentioned.

I do a lot of graphical work on it (I created <http://productplaceme.com> on it) and it actually works really well. I'm even doing digital paintings on it after setting up my tablet.

Resolution is an issue, like others mentioned. On the other hand, it does keep you focused. You definitely have to work on one thing at a time. This might be a bigger issue for people who do a lot of coding-- I can't really comment on that.

It is nice having one machine to bring everywhere. If you're flying, you don't have to transfer everything to your netbook. It's all already there. The portability also makes it so you can comfortably use it anywhere (like on the couch, where I am now). On the other hand, the _least_ comfortable place you can possibly use it is a desk.

If you do get an Eee PC, download and install EasyPeasy. The default Xandros was pretty terrible, and EasyPeasy is pretty great.

EDIT: I also wanted to add that I'm doing digital painting on a 250-dollar machine, with a 45-dollar tablet, using free, open source software. In other words, I'm doing Photoshop-level work on hardware that costs half as much as Photoshop. Not a bad deal.

<comment><USER15> I hack on my older Asus Eee PC 1000HE. Replace the default Windows with Ubuntu UNR (10.04 edition, not 10.10 imho) or some other Linux, upgrade the RAM to the highest amount possible, and it's as snappy as a desktop workstation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> There is a particular Eee PC with 1366x768 resolution (same as 11.6" MacBook Air, but it's only $400 or so). I forgot the model number but it should be easy to find on amazon. I want to say the model number ends in "PR"

edit: [http://www.amazon.com/Seashell-1005PR-PU17-BK-10-1-Inch- Netb...](http://www.amazon.com/Seashell-1005PR-PU17-BK-10-1-Inch-Netbook- Battery/dp/B003FZC1K4)

<comment><USER17> My wife picked up a similar "subnotebook" for her classes (12.1" screen, though), and I've ended up taking a liking to it: an MSI Wind12 U230-040. They keyboard doesn't suffer from as much of the braindamage that some of the other devices in this form factor seem to sport (two fingers required for some common keys like insert, delete, page up/down, etc), and the 1366x768 resolution is quite usable. Video performance is respectable, you can stuff 4GB of RAM in it with a 64-bit OS, and I'd expect it to fly with an SSD.

There's a few different versions of it; the -040 has a dual-core Neo X2, while the newer -087 models have a single core. MSI is notoriously lousy about making minor adjustments to the model numbers/names, but making substantial changes to the underlying hardware.

Coming down the road (MSI is also notoriously late on delivering new models, apparently) is the U250, and there's a few specific spec updates on the roadmap for it (DDR3, processor and video updates) should make for a very capable small-form-factor computing device.

My more general recommendation for any of these smaller gadgets, though, is to go into a store and handle them yourself. Use the keyboard, fire up notepad and write a little bit of code if that's what you were planning to do with it. The keyboards on a lot of these units are absolutely vile; they're all a compromise between key size and layout, and you'll want to spend some time with them to see if you can live with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Use the only Richard Stallman approved computer, which also happens to be a netbook! [http://www.lemote.com/en/products/Notebook/2010/0310/112.htm...](http://www.lemote.com/en/products/Notebook/2010/0310/112.html)

See: <http://richard.stallman.usesthis.com/>

</comment><comment><USER19> There was a thread about this a while ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1287909>

The blog post that thread links to is worth a read.

I personally do some Django development on a netbook and have found it excellent, especially while commuting. I have not had a problem with being under powered (I don't know how Android development would compare) and the only downside has been the lack of screen realestate. Thankfully I bought a netbook with a reasonable keyboard size (Asus Eee PC S101).

</comment><comment><USER20> Using IDEs with netbook is not really good experience: screen area is just too small for having all components on screen same time and you cannot help noticing that modern IDEs do need way too much resources to be smooth on such tiny machine. Netbooks cannot really be used like normal laptops: usually there is no other option than programs fullscreen, which in practise means you need virtual desktops. This effectively throws windows to the bin, but if that is not problem for you.. go ahead and get one. Just make sure you test it beforehand, many netbooks still have horrible keyboards!

Lately I have been doing most of my developing on netbook using vim and must say I love it. There is no performance problems with any scripting languages, not even while having mysql + rails/cakephp on. Only problem is compiling bigger projects when doing c/c++, but that isn't problem if you have access to box with more power like you suggested.

My own machine is Samsung n140, although my config is not the most usual one: stripped down arch + xmonad. Battery life while using wlan is from 10 to 14 hours. The reason why I ended to this particular machine is combination of awesome battery life + really nice keyboard, one of the best I have found from any laptop. Minus side is kinda low quality HDD which blew up quite fast, but I use this machine only on battery power with agressive spindowning and load count jumps into sky fast which can explain.

</comment><comment><USER21> I have used a netbook for development. It is not very fun. The main problem is the screen resolution - 1024x600. This ensures that a modern IDE will not fit on the screen without hiding the most useful parts. For example, when you compile code, you will not have enough room on the screen to view your errors and code simultaneously. (Or rather, you _can_ , but it is frustratingly very cramped).

So, I use Notepad++, auto-hide the Windows taskbar, hide all of the toolbars, and reduce the font size. Now it is usable ... oh wait, no it isn't ... the screen resolution is still a big problem. What about when I want to ... view a help file? Compile/run my code in another window? View a website? First, there is almost no room on the screen to put two windows side-by-side. (It can be done, but they have frustratingly small widths.) So, you have to manually switch between applications all the time. And you soon find that it gets old fast, especially since the taskbar is necessarily auto-hidden.

Another item (at least from my 1-yr old netbook): Netbooks are staggeringly slow at playing web video - high-res video on youtube is not watchable.

So, I do not recommend a netbook for development. For basic web browsing, a netbook is awesome. But not for development.

EDIT: These are based on my experiences with a 1024x600, no HD-enhanced netbook. There are new models out now :)

<comment><USER22> I used emacs, git, and (soon-to-be)xmonad. The size is not an issue for me, but my problem was mostly with the linux distribution I used.

Eventually, I got rid of ubuntu and settle for archlinux.

I think netbook are great for web application development, especially if you used exotic tools like emacs and xmonad.

I never used an IDE, or heavy duty debugging tools(I find manual debugging to be a great and useful tool), and the rest of tools that need a pretty GUI.

<comment><USER23> I use xmonad since a few months on my netbook and it's indeed the perfect choice for this!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I recommend an X series thinkpad. x40 although X60 and up would be ideal. It'll be in the $300-600 range used, and lightyears better than what any netbook would offer

<comment><USER25> The X40/X41 might be cheap, but it is limited to a proprietary 1.8" drive and 1.5GB RAM. It'll be a slow drive around 40GB 4200rpm or you can spend money for a SSD.

I suggest the X61. It'll support up to 8GB RAM and takes regular laptop drive. On ebay, I've seen it slip out for $300.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I have an EeePC 901with 2Gb RAM and Ubuntu netbook edition installed - <USER2> works pretty well for development and web dev type stuff - I even wrote a book with it. About the only thing that I wouldn't use it for is anything requiring a large screen (eg. layout and design) or something requiring large amounts of processing power (eg. Running Eclipse or compiling lots of stuff). Other than that, it's great.

<comment><USER3> Definitely true - I do want to say, however, that newer netbooks will be able to handle all but the largest projects in Eclipse/Netbeans with ease, so this part is less of a consideration. Your main bottleneck will really be memory, which should still be adequate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The MacBook Air looks pretty good (SSD standard!), but it s not as cheap (in either sense) than the typical netbook.

I run XCode on a Dell Mini 9 with Mac OS X. It has the expected tradeoffs: the keyboard is tiny, resolution too. But it's amazing how fast it feels die to the SSD. I simultaneously hate the keyboard for putting the quote key elsewhere, and am impressed that I can mostly adapt to this.

<comment><USER28> I bought a small netbook Acer one, but couldn't really do anything with it because typing suffered on the too small keyboard, so I gave it to my daughter. Really looking forward to getting a 11" macbook air to have as the computer to bring when going away for weekends or travelling. Hate lugging the 15" MBP everywhere, it takes too much space and is heavy (although it's a pretty powerful machine).

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I have a HP mini 5102, and spend 3 hours a day on it doing web dev - I find it awesome. Resolution is 1366x768 so you don't get too squashed in. It has 3G built in as well and the battery life is safe for probably 5 hours (meant to be 8 maybe) The keyboard is almost natural size, and it has enough grunt to keep a few things open (lets not kid ourselves, but it does better than I expected).

</comment><comment><USER30> I have used nothing but some Dell Mini 9's for programming and everything else for over a year. It took some getting used to, and some significant customisation of my window manager, but I feel as productive with it as with anything previous.

The low specs rarely bother me. I have upgraded the SSD, that was the only stock component that was annoyingly slow (and small).

I wrote up the approaches I use for very task-specific, low resolution workspace layouts here: [http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/xmonad_layouts_for_netbo...](http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/xmonad_layouts_for_netbooks/) Should be applicable to non-xmonad users too, just perhaps harder to do.

</comment><comment><USER31> I use an older 9 inch Eee PC. For $170 off of woot, it's been real good. I actually liked it enough that I got rid of my desktop and this is my sole computer now. I do tons of development on it. I installed a lightweight Linux distro (Arch) and am running a lightweight, minimalistic DE (stumpwm). I found that the default KDE3 was too heavy, but with my customizations I have almost no lags in development (all of my development is for web apps written in Chicken Scheme). I like to work out in the sticks (in areas you can't get to by car) so this works out real good.

If you need to use development environments heavier than emacs/vim, than you may need something more powerful.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm currently doing full-time development work on a netbook. It's not ideal but it is manageable. It's an MSI Wind running Ubuntu 10.10. Admittedly it's hooked up to an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse. And I upgraded it to 2GB of RAM and a 300GB hard drive. At any given time I'll have gvim, chrome, apache, mysql, and memcache running.

I'd like to get a beefier laptop but this will do for the time being. Funds are tight.

EDIT: If you decide to get a netbook, try out a few and see what keyboard layout you like. The hardware inside will be pretty similar, but the keyboards are all crummy in slightly different ways.

<comment><USER33> I just bought the latest asus netbook, its an intel duo core, they have just been released two months ago(i think). It has 250gb and 1gb ram. I run a dual partition ubuntu/windows 7 and i run netbeans to do some programming. I really love it and forget to log onto my home laptop when i get home, also the 1 gig ram seems fine so far but i will upgrade it this week to 2gigs. I actually debated between an ipad and a netbook and after playing around with a friends ipad i chose this netbook for $350.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I use an Asus Eee PC 1005HA, it's inexpensive and very lightweight, perfect for working from anywhere. Great autonomy too!

With a resolution of 1024x600 the screen is not very big but I use xmonad (a tiling window manager written in Haskell) which maximize the available surface. I also only use command line apps and it makes everything extremely fast.

xmonad + vim make me very productive and if I want more power I just log on another computer by ssh and it's completely transparent!

</comment><comment><USER34> I've always wanted to go on the road and still do dev work, i was considering this setup as a dev environment, iPad + bluetooth keyboard for coding on and while i could easily switch between code editor and browser i'd probably use my HTC Desire HD as the web browser to view what i'm coding.

In theory it would work but i've yet to test it as i dont have a bluetooth keyboard yet.

</comment><comment><USER35> I'd recommend the Toshiba R700 series .. I have the one from BestBuy in addition to my MBP.. 13 inch machine with Core i3, 4 GB RAM, 500 GB HDD, 720p display, 5-6 hours of stock battery life (not playing video though), eSATA port for 750$ .. Did I say 3 lbs and doesn't heat up as much as MBP?

the crappy part : Intel Display adapter and very bad speakers .. almost tin can like

</comment><comment><USER36> Other than my work machine, I've been using an Asus EeePC as my primary machine since March. I have a desktop at home, but I haven't touched it other than moving it to another room.

I use the EeePC as a dev machine and have to say, they keyboard sucks for special characters <>/\\[], but the convenience is nice. Guess it's about trade offs. I love the netbook.

<comment><USER36> I should add: my dev environment consists of Google Chrome and a screen session with vim running in PuTTY. Pretty minimalist as-is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I have a MSI Wind. The keyboard is a pain to do dev work with. if you're doing Android development with a netbook get a real device to test - the emulator is practically unusable.

Agree with the rest of the comments here, a regular cheap notebook with a better processor will fill the role much better.

</comment><comment><USER38> I had a Dell Mini 9 and used it for months, but the keyboard and form factor got me down so I swapped it for a Macbook Air. Granted that's not a netbook, but it's far better for work.

I do a lot of objective-c though so I might be more enthusiastic about the Air than you.

</comment><comment><USER39> Although it might not fit with your requirement of being inexpensive, if you want something with a real CPU, light weight, small form-factor, and great battery life, I have the Asus UL20A-A1 (~$575) and love it.

</comment><comment><USER40> Asus 1001P has served me well, wireless drivers are finicky with linux, it has the best size to usefulness of keyboard ratio I have yet to encounter. Cost me about 400$

<comment><USER22> Wireless drivers and screen display are the most common problem I experienced with Asus 1001P. My major annoyance is the mousepad. It has caused me to dislocate my emacs pointer and start doing weird crap to the codebase.

I received my Asus 1001P for free.

<comment><USER40> it does that to me too, :'( but only on linux, so I think it might be more then just the hardware.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I like my Thinkpad X61. It's not a netbook per se, but it has good battery life and isn't too bulky.

</comment><comment><USER42> Why not just find a T61 on eBay for the same price and get a bulletproof, fast machine?

</comment><comment><USER43> LG X120, it's really basic. But it runs super quick, I do some light development on it.</comment>


Go version 1 is released - <AUTHOR> http://blog.golang.org/2012/03/go-version-1-is-released.html <comment><USER2> "We're announcing Go version 1, or Go 1 for short"

I foresee the next version being considered harmful.

<comment><USER3> Ahem. Beat you by a mile (or 173 days):

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3085082>

<comment><USER4> In case anyone is wondering: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_harmful>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Congrats to the Go team! I've been looking forward to this release for a while. Go makes it easy to do some very complex things, and much of this can be attributed to the wonderfully built standard library.

For those interested, you can run Go apps on Heroku using this buildpack: <https://github.com/kr/heroku-buildpack-go>

_Note: you may need to use the #rc branch until its changes are merged in master_

</comment><comment><USER6> I've been using Go for 2 years now. It's been a lot of fun. It certainly brought fun back into programming for me. Very happy to see the 1.0 release hitting the public. Congratulations to the Go team and contributors for a job very well done!

<comment><USER7> My god. Go is _so_ much fun to program. Apart from it's technical pedigree this is its most remarkable feature.

<comment><USER8> Essential question: what makes it fun?

<comment><USER7> For me it is probably this.

It works - easy as pie. No problems building, linking or worrying about dependencies. (it should be noted that this is a common property of hobby projects)

It's fast, which is nice for the small boy (or girl) in all of us. It is gratifying to make software that can run like blazes.

I get the control over memory layout that I really want. By day I am a Java dev, by night I used to hack Erlang. Neither of these allows me to lay out an array of structs contiguously in memory. I did this for a quad-tree implementation and got 2X speed up on read operations. This means that all the stuff I am reading about CPU architecture, cache-lines and latency etc. can be experimented with in an easy to use environment. That's just pure fun and gratification.

Comprehension. In Java I recently wrote a SOAP server (I know, lame) and it took me an hour of XML fiddling before a more informed person told me that we do that with annotations now.

"Which annotations? These magical ones. Ah thanks"

That is a server in Java. At the end I was as ignorant as when I began. But I had the annotations and I had a server. This is bullshit. Programming without learning is like eating without tasting anything. In Go I am learning as I code - this is ecstasy. When I am confused I can jump straight into the library source code, ever tried that in a JEE server? It is painful.

Websockets are fun. Go supports websockets in the easiest way I can imagine.

Errors. Explicit errors in Go are just great. Verbose, yes. But, the clarity of this approach surprised me. All the networking code I have written in Java seemed mysterious. I would hack away and end up with a block of code that would fail from 'somewhere' inside. Errors have taught me a great deal about the different ways my networking code can fail. This is possibly my favourite part of Go (which makes me sound a bit boring).

Green threads are great. I'm sure plenty has been said about this. And message passing too. I won't say more about that.

Closures are marvellous. I have to say that I had a lot of reservations about closures in an imperative language. But if you are careful they are as safe as anything else (in that soup of mutable state). And so much fun.

It should be noted that a lot of my complaints about Java can be remedied. I can read a book about the latest JEE annotations (I did start reading one). I could study the Java networking code better and learn about things that way. But the crucial point is that Go allows me to do all of this while I do what I like best. Hacking. I can build systems and learn at the same time.

<comment><USER9> I too like Go. But I disagree with some of your analysis.

Java annotations aren't magical; at least no more magical than functions/methods. They're part of packages/libraries and should be documented. You can even write your own annotations.

I'm still not convinced that the lack of exceptions is a benefit of Go. The verbosity of error handling is problematic and seems indicative of a need for a better abstraction. And with respect to your issue of Java exceptions -- I don't know what you mean by "somewhere inside". Did you examine the stack trace?

[Edited: added "of error handling"]

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Anyone care to share their experience writing something in go? I've toyed with it but not built anything in production.

FWIW, the go dashboard (<https://godashboard.appspot.com/>) has a number of interesting projects.

<comment><USER11> I have written a bit of Go. It strikes me as sort of the Unix of programming languages. It's very opinionated, takes some overarching concepts, mostly channels and interfaces, then proceeds to thoroughly not care what you think about it: refuses to have generics, lambdas and tail-call recursion like a pro. The polar opposite of design by committee. It even enforces a True Brace Style to keep the parser simple!

Technically, it looks good to me. The toolchain is excellent. It looks ready for production. Programming in it is fun. It fixes most issues of compiled languages. Go has mostly replaced Haskell, for me.

<comment><USER12> Why would you move from Haskell to Go? There's a night-and-day difference between them. I don't understand why you'd switch to a language because of the features it's lacking, unless you think those features are a bad thing (and I have yet to see a reason why generics and TCO are a bad thing).

<comment><USER11> Of course they are not a bad thing. It's just that Go has character. It doesn't have generics or C++-style classes just because every other language has them. I respect that.

<comment><USER12> Go has C++-style classes. Anonymous fields are just C++ multiple inheritance with a different name (and without virtual functions or downcasts).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Well, they got (at least) one thing exactly right: Doing away with the "toolchain". Having one command that can figure out how to build your code, including downloading external dependencies, is really nice.

Pity about the whole "not having generics" thing though.

<comment><USER14> With interfaces, it's pretty simple to replicate patterns like a Container<Comparable> or Channel<Reader>, to borrow common Java syntax. Personally, I like how it forces you to think about parametricity whenever you want polymorphism, like most functional languages.

<comment><USER13> But, unless I'm missing something, it's missing the supporting bits you get in a nice functional language, like algebraic datatypes and pattern matching, which make that style much more pleasant.

Of course, most of the functional language DO have generics, and full type inference to boot, also.

<comment><USER15> The ML language family does, other functional languages (the LISP family, Erlang) don't.

<comment><USER13> Arguably lisp doesn't NEED generics since unless you go around setting lots of type pragmas, the typing system generally doesn't intrude.

So, in other words, Lisp doesn't have generics in the same way Python doesn't have generics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Been playing with the weekly versions of Go for a couple weeks now. Highly enjoying it, my biggest pet peeve was that every library had a master and "weekly" branch which required me to manually pull down the weekly. Shouldn't be long and I can move to master!

<comment><USER17> Doesn't go tool handles that automatically (i.e. checks out the most recent tag compatible with the current Go version)?

<comment><USER16> Not sure, I am very much new to the new "go" command and how it works. Everytime I did a go get on a repo it would get the wrong version. I'd just cd into the 3rdparty dir and then pull/checkout the weekly branch and be ok.

I figured their had to be a better way but I was pretty focused on getting projects done.

And to be specific this was on non-standard libraries the standard libraries provided by go worked out of the box.

<comment><USER18> The go command will use the right version but only if the person writing the library has bothered to tag the version to use. Many people don't. Part of the point of Go 1 is to stabilize the language. We're committing to slowing down the rate of churn and to not changing the APIs in backwards incompatible ways for the lifetime of Go 1 (1.1, 1.2, and so on), so now there should be much less problem with just using tip/HEAD/whatever in the repositories without tags.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm still wishing that we could embed Go into a multithreaded c application, just like we can with the JVM and Mono. I would like to use Go as a "scripting" language. I have seen a thread in the mailing list that someone was working on it on a personal basis, but I can't find it anymore. It doesn't seem to be in high demand.

<comment><USER20> Why not just write all of it in Go?

<comment><USER19> I have working, tested, high performance software in C. Throwing all that away and taking the risk of having Go underperform or be buggier than my previous solution is just not acceptable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> If anyone from the Go team reads this, <http://golang.org/doc/go_tutorial.html> linked to from the blog gives a file not found error.

<comment><USER10> The Go tour (<http://tour.golang.org/>) is a pretty good introduction to the language.

It provides an interactive in-browser panel to try out the language while presenting its features.

<comment><USER22> The "install go" link on the "Go offline" page gives "file not found: /go/install".

<comment><USER23> You do realize that telling HN is not an appropriate way to have that bug fixed, right?

I know lots of Googlers hang out here, but your comment is buried pretty deep.

<comment><USER24> They responded.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> How good is go compare to c/c++ ? ( in terms of speed especially ? )

Can we now say that Google Chrome can be written in Go and it will be faster and/or stable ? ( not saying it is not already. ).

Congrats to the team, just started using go yesterday and loving it.

<comment><USER26> The day Androïd will be written in go, we will see a significant performance boost and battery lifetime extension. I don't program for Androïd just because I can't bare eclipse. An IDE as simple and efficient as QtCreator would generate a conversion tsunami.

<comment><USER12> Nonsense. You would hate Android written in Go, because of the GC pauses. Dalvik has a concurrent garbage collector; Go has a stop-the-world one.

<comment><USER27> Only because that's all that's been implemented. They're well aware of GC and compiler optimizations being a target for future versions of Go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Hitting 1.0 should convince more people to use it in production. However, getting any new language in an organization is always a struggle. Is there a list of organizations that currently use it in production?

[Update]

A few high-tech companies were listed. I was hoping more for big pharma or finance? There are some super convervative firms out there. Even Google, for example, will only allow a few languages in their firm.

<comment><AUTHOR> Google, Canonical, and Heroku to name a few.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is great news. The best part of it for me is that now my more conservative colleagues might dip their toes in the water. Combine that with the Vitess project and Go is not just a great language. It's viable.

<comment><AUTHOR> For the curious, Vitess is an open source project to scale MySQL installations. It was written by the YouTube team in Go.

<http://code.google.com/p/vitess/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Is there any SEO trick for googling about "go"? It's really hard to look for "go" related material;

For example, I tried searching for how to use Go on Android. But "go android" returns all kinds of unrelated stuff.

<comment><USER30> I use golang

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> So is golang a semi-official name for this? I don't want it to be as hard to find as the board game!

<comment><USER16> Yep, if you are googling it use golang, much easier to find things this way.

<comment><USER32> There is also a custom search engine: <http://go-lang.cat-v.org/go-search>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> "Initial reactions to Go 1 have been overwhelmingly positive, particularly (and not surprisingly) on community sites like Hacker News, a Y Combinator-run reddit clone populated by self-acknowledged hipster hackers." Hah: [http://webdev360.com/google-releases-go-1-to-rave- reviews-41...](http://webdev360.com/google-releases-go-1-to-rave- reviews-41730.html)

</comment><comment><USER34> I used Go to write a concurrent ZX Spectrum emulator (<https://github.com/remogatto/gospeccy>). The language perfectly fits for this kind of task too.

</comment><comment><USER35> Does Go support Win32 development?

<comment><USER36> yes: <http://code.google.com/p/go/downloads/list>

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> There's something intangibly nice about the main golang.org website. It feels more like a consistent self-contained unit than a lot of such sites do.

Well done to whoever does the design and content.

<comment><USER38> And it's self-contained in the sense that when you code you may simply launch it locally :

        godoc -http=:6060

Of course this will be less needed now that the API are stable but that what really useful those last months, when my go weekly was almost never exactly like the one described at golang.org nor tip.golang.org. I'll still use it in planes and trains though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> They seem to have removed their page detailing ARM support. The debian ARM repo still has an older version, I wonder if they've stopped support?

</comment><comment><USER40> Free Go Language eBook: <http://www.heronote.com/files/Go.htm>

</comment><comment><USER41> Has anyone had any experience with GO and Windows API/win32?

<comment><USER32> I haven't tried it, but you might want to look into WALK(Windows Application Library Kit):

<https://github.com/lxn/walk>

Is designed to provide a Go-ish interface for win32.

<comment><USER42> Actually, that's mainly a UI toolkit interface. Not Win32 core . (Though a tiny bit of core stuff is included)

<comment><USER32> Sorry, I'm not familiar with Windows stuff. This library might be more what you have in mind then:

<https://github.com/AllenDang/w32>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Congratulations to everyone involved.

</comment><comment><USER44> What happened to the ebnf package?

<comment><USER45> It's still around as "exp/ebnf" ([http://code.google.com/p/go/source/browse#hg%2Fsrc%2Fpkg%2Fe...](http://code.google.com/p/go/source/browse#hg%2Fsrc%2Fpkg%2Fexp%2Febnf)), but the exp/ tree is not considered part of the official Go 1 API, so it may change in backward-incompatible ways.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> anyone know what the time complexity of the append function is?

<comment><USER18> It is amortized O(1). When the append needs to grow the slice, it does so by a multiplicative factor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> next version will be named Go Laprofonda

</comment><comment><USER48> G#... any day now, any day.

</comment><comment><USER49> countdown until:

GO IS AWESOME

GO IS A FUCKING WASTE OF TIME

HOW DO I MAKE JAVASCRIPT TALK TO GO?

</comment><comment><USER50> its nice

</comment><comment><USER51> Gogrammers, unite!

<comment><USER52> "gopher" is the preferred demonym.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Mad Props!

Propsed Theme Song: I got my Go, Go, Go, Go (gadget flow) ... Lupe Fiasco (<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCf-ffDzopc>)

</comment><comment><USER54> I'm disappointed that after starting from scratch they created a "modern" language that requires a module import just to print (and corresponding extra syntax for that namespace when making the call).

How could this not have seemed incredibly clunky after using it for just a little while? It's the same frustration one feels when simple print-outs fail in C++ because you forgot to "#include <iostream>". Sometimes you just want to print stuff no matter what file you're in. Languages should make it almost impossible to fail at _extremely common tasks_. It's these little things that make Python and Perl enjoyable to program in, and these little things that every new language should begin with!

<comment><AUTHOR> One of the design goals of Go is that the language is small. There's nothing so special about string formatting that it should be part of the language proper, and it would add a lot of complexity to the spec if it were.

With that said, there are built-in print and println functions that write to stderr, which are useful for debugging. That would seem to address your complaint. The fmt package is a lot more fully-featured than the built-ins though.

<http://golang.org/pkg/fmt/>

<comment><USER54> Thanks for pointing it out. I wish they used that in their "hello, world" example because 'println("hello, world")' leaves a much better first impression of simplicity.

I generally like to see things kept simple. But formatting is a _common_ need and they've actually made things _less_ simple by providing both fmt.Println() and println(). It means the same program will inevitably contain both, depending on who did the editing. There are times when a feature is so basic that it really should have _exactly_ one way to do it, and I think printing is in that category.

<comment><AUTHOR> Your position is not very pragmatic, and taking such a hard line is rarely productive.

The fmt package does a lot of stuff. Check out the link I provided above. To put all that stuff into the language spec - and then foist responsibility of writing and maintaining that code onto every implementation of the language - would be crazy. So it seems a good idea that the fmt package should exist and that it should be written in Go.

On the other hand, it's nice to be able to print when working on low-level libraries where fmt is not available (syscall, os, etc). The print and println functions service this need, and that's really all they're used for apart from temporary debugging prints.

It would be a mistake to use the built-in println in the hello world example because it would demonstrate precisely the wrong use of the built-in functions. Hello world should print to standard output and it should use the standard means of formatting strings. In Go, that is fmt.

There are a few of such compromises in Go (not many, though). Sometimes you need to put your ideals to the side in the name of simplicity and pragmatism.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


13-Year-Old Scientist's Research Shows Hand Dryers Can Hurt Kids' Ears - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2019/07/09/739783918/hand-dryers-harm-childrens-hearing-canadian-study-shows <comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20282837](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20282837)

</comment><comment><USER3> Relevant thread on the same subject from two weeks ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20282837](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20282837)

</comment><comment><USER4> Hand dryers need to die.

Their primary benefit is lower cost of operation for the facility, but other than that, their environmental impact is at best marginally better than paper towels, and worst is their hygienic aspect.

Various studies have found up to a two-fold increase in bacteria count on users' hands, as well as a risk of contaminating the surrounding area with bacteria blown off of the user's skin:

"In 2009 a published study was conducted by the University of Westminster to compare the levels of hygiene offered by paper towels, warm air hand dryers and the more modern jet-air hand dryers. It found that after washing and drying hands with the warm air dryer, the total number of bacteria was found to increase on average on the finger pads by 194% and on the palms by 254%; drying with the jet air dryer resulted in an increase on average of the total number of bacteria on the finger pads by 42% and on the palms by 15%; and after washing and drying hands with a paper towel, the total number of bacteria was reduced on average on the finger pads by up to 76% and on the palms by up to 77%." [1]

The noise aspect discussed in this article is yet another reason air dryers need to die. I hadn't even considered the effect they might have on kid's ears, and I'd imagine most adults probably haven't thought about it either. I find them positively annoying, but having your ears at the same height as these monstrosities must be horrible.

Kudos to Miss Keegan for her wonderful research!

1: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand_dryer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand_dryer)

<comment><USER5> Regardless of the research, I think what's not discussed is how the choices around these devices are typically made by a single owner of a business. As the population continues to increase, and people generally become more educated and these types of experiences have more value, how could we come up with either solutions to the core issue, or solutions to give more funds to a business owner who would gladly install a better solution if those funds were available?

Taking a sample of a hundred random people, especially in a larger city, their values (however ranked) are wildly different, yet one person likely made the decision on the dryer, dependent still on the strengths of the local paper (janitorial supplies) company's salesperson.

Currently, there isn't a micro donation or registry (wedding registry) type framework where people can influence these decisions. Something similar could be in store?

Even Kickstarter, while it allows popular ideas to move forward, doesn't allow these types of decisions to be influenced.

<comment><USER6> Micro donations? I think this is implemented by the legislature in the building code. If you'd like to run a restaurant, you must have restrooms with N urinals and M stalls per space of occupancy. Each restroom must contain K sinks per facility. You must provide drying apparatus.

Once the towel-squeezers were legal; now they're not. Dyson next.

<comment><USER5> I agree with you. That's why I mentioned solving it at the core first or creating a new type of framework that enabled influencing these decisions at a local level, if the former (your point) fails.

I'd also like to point out that the hostility on choice and applicable laws still fallback to a single Jill or Jack, when 100k people may end up using their bathroom. It's the current reality, laws don't exist at this detail, except for extremes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > In response to these results, Dyson confirmed to NPR in an email that an > acoustics engineer would be meeting with Nora to discuss her research.

You _go_ girl. Rock on! No matter what happens, what an awesome response from Dyson to look at this girl's well thought out research and go, "Huh. Yeah, we should probably give that a second pass."

<comment><USER8> It can be made into a positive thing: e.g. hand dryers with attention paid towards being comfortable for childrens' ears, marketed especially toward early education institutions and the like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't understand why they have to be so loud.

I recently bought a Miele vacuum cleaner, and compared to other cheap vacuums I've had before. It's significantly quieter whilst still having effective suction.

Is it cost cutting or is this the best kind of motors possible for hand dryers?

As a side note: I wonder what the testing conditions are like for these dryers. Like there's one of the Xcellerator driers at my local bouldering place's toilet.

It's a very small tilled room. I went once and the sound caused my ears to ring for hours.

I don't go in without my noise cancelling headphones now haha.

But I imagine if the room was a lot bigger that would not be an issue.

<comment><USER10> Wild speculation: I wonder whether loudness is actually a design goal, to make the dryer appear more powerful. A sizable number of people are skeptical of electric vehicles, because they perceive an earth-shaking _vroooom_ to be an essential part of the driving experience. Could someone with industry experience chime in?

<comment><USER11> There are car makers who now use DSPs to process exhaust noise to play INTO the interior of the car to make people feel like they're driving! I drive a turboed car, turbos are naturally sound dampening, I'm totally fine with it being quieter as long as its actually faster.

To the speed point though, I'd probably drive a P100D because they're ridiculously fast...

<comment><USER12> VW even did this mechanically before switching to an electronic version. At least that means it's easier to shut it up: [https://www.carworklog.com/2016/07/02/guide-disableturn- down...](https://www.carworklog.com/2016/07/02/guide-disableturn-down-the- soundaktor-with-vcds-fake-engine-sound/)

<comment><USER11> I didn't know about the tube, I def would've plugged that. I have a MKIIV Golf-R and you can absolutely hear the "Soundaktor in action, its so goofy...

This, frankly, is my favorite sound mod -> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_owsz8Za_Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_owsz8Za_Y)

<comment><USER12> Same here, it's a beast. I've done a slew of other VCDS mods if you're interested. 5 brake lights instead of 3, tighter lane keep (tesla-like), power windows after door open engine off, enable menus while driving, rest-of-world dynamic headlights, brighter blind spot indicators, hazards on skid, no seatbelt chime, the list goes on and on. And open that center console if it doesn't open!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I read the previous post on this that appeared on HN a couple of weeks back. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20282837](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20282837)

My 3 year old used to close her ears anyways when near any of these hand dryers but now i warn her when one is about to turn on.

</comment><comment><USER14> "In response to these results, Dyson confirmed to NPR in an email that an acoustics engineer would be meeting with Nora to discuss her research. "

Good for them. And good for her. My son (4) hates these things. He dries his hands on his shirt instead.

<comment><USER15> My 4.5 year old son will _not_ let me use them. He'll throw an absolute fit if I try. I have a lot more sympathy for that now!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've been suspicious of this for years. These things are incredibly loud and they're right at ear level for kids.

<comment><USER17> My 11yr old son has been complaining about them being way to loud for him for years as well... I think I own him an apology for not taking the complaint more seriously.

<comment><USER18> The modern world is full of loud noises that damage our hearing prematurely.

Probably the worst culprits are headphones with the volume too high, and overly amplified concerts.

<comment><USER9> Everyone should be using musician style earplugs at concerts. They're designed to as best uniformly attenuate the volume to safe levels.

And in my opinion, a good pair always makes the music sound better.

And I never leave with ringing in my ears Because it's no longer just a wall of noise.

<comment><USER19> Do you have any purchase advice/recommendations?

<comment><USER9> I've used two primarily:

Alpine MusicSafe Pro

Etymotic Research ER20

I'd say both are comparable. Though the Alpines come with three filters allowing you to select the level of attenuation.

The Etymotics are bit longer so stick out your ear a bit funny looking, but they're more cone shaped and are easier to put into your ear.

The Alpines come with a little tool that helps inserting it into your ear.

To be honest they're both quite cheap so try both and not break the bank.

If you want to go higher end you can get ones where you can get a custom mold to your ear canal. But I don't have a recommendation there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I mean, these things hurt MY ears too and I'm 30. I will frequently just dry my hands on my pants. She did a great job!

</comment><comment><USER21> Some air dryers start with a motion detector and and it was impossible to get most of the kids to even enter the toilet because they were afraid that it would start the dryer accidentally. I myself was confused why their reaction was so extreme but didn't think that the noise is much louder at their height and that their ears are more sensitive to loud noise too.

Interesting that it needs a kid scientist to take this on them because adults with their height bias didn't measure at those spots.

</comment><comment><USER22> I wonder how sanitary they are, considering that they are basically using a bunch of bathroom air blasted at your previously-clean hands, too.

I would hate those things even if they were silent.

<comment><USER23> You're also breathing bathroom air though?

<comment><USER22> Sure, but blasting a large volume of it at my wet hands I imagine would concentrate a lot more of the contents of the air on the surface of my hands than I am breathing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> My 3 year old covers his ears in any public bathroom regardless of whether anyone is even in there.

Hand dryers are one item but there are some toilets that are also excessively loud as well.

</comment><comment><USER11> I honestly hate hand dryers, half the time I end up drying my hands on the sides of my pants if I'm wearing jeans... My kid hates the sound of them too so it totally makes sense that they're actually bad.

</comment><comment><USER25> I have never understood hand dryers. I mean how lazy one can be that they need a machine to blow hot air instead of wiping their hands.

<comment><USER26> They're not for the benefit of people who use them. They're supposedly cheaper than paper towels for the owner, and there may be some environmental benefit. I haven't seen research into either claim though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Kudos to the author!

My toddler son is always scared by the hand dryers. He refused and tried to escape from bathrooms with hand dryers.

</comment><comment><USER28> Just wipe your hands on your pants after shaking them in the air for a bit.</comment>


TechCrunch Teardown: Etsy, It's Crafty - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/11/tc-teardown-etsy/

<comment><USER2> Check out our tech blog:

<http://codeascraft.etsy.com>

We post fairly often in detail about the technical challenges we've had to overcome while growing the marketplace.

<comment><USER3> In reading through the blog, there's an article on the technical challenges of resizing the 135 million + images as you reorganized the site.

Perhaps this is a dumb question, but if you've already got a resize script that resizes images into 6 different sizes when the seller uploads it.

What was the reason you didn't just re-point that script at the filesystem instead of an uploaded file object? It may have taken slightly longer to process, but my hunch is that it may have compensated for man-hours you spent in building something new. What was the limiting factor there?

<comment><USER4> Excellent question. Check out the comments. A few members of the community have questioned why they chose this elaborate process, which actually ended up with the new images actually having noticeably lower quality. This was noticed by the artists themselves, too, as Etsy's customers labor for a long time to get the highest quality photos possible. Etsy's response when this was brought up in the member forums was that they 'learned from this' and would take note for the future... a more satisfying response would be "we acknowledge that the images are inadequate and we'll re-do them".

Why Etsy thought they had to seek new image algorithms rather than just using the ones they already used is the sort of question they very rarely answer. My analysis is that it is related to the fact that they did the processing on an Amazon server. To save bandwidth, transfer time and processing time, they sent over the medium sized images rather than the original, full size image. Of course, that doesn't explain why they decided to do it in 'the cloud' at all rather than, as you say, just operate directly on the file system, in house.

They claim to have gone through an elaborate comparison process, apparently with the visual quality comparison being done by engineers - not people specializing in the non-technical side of photography or graphics. They seem to have entirely missed the quality issue, though it was apparent enough to customers that at least a hundred of them brought it up in the forums once the switch to the new image sizes was made.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My fiance and I are purchasing our wedding rings from an Etsy jeweler. It's the largest online purchase I've made, and it's a testament to how well Etsy manages its reputation.

Also speaks to how irritating going into local jewelry shops was though.

<comment><USER4> There are definitely some excellent craftspeople with shops on Etsy. Etsy has done a good job of managing their appearance, to where they clearly appear more upscale than eBay or other marketplaces. There are some issues with that but there's no reason to get into it here... if anyone is interested, the juicy action is always on their forums, when it hasn't been suppressed yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great story, but I definitely dislike seeing financial projections with such unnatural jumps - August to September 2010 has a $500K+ jump in monthly revenue, which would appear to be the largest month-to-month increase in revenue (as an absolute and I'd say as a percentage too).

Not saying it's impossible (maybe the September numbers so far support this), but the jump from ~2.1 million to ~3.7 million in 4 months feels a bit unnatural given the historical data.</comment>


CVE-2018-9411: Critical vulnerability in multiple privileged Android services - <AUTHOR> https://blog.zimperium.com/cve-2018-9411-new-critical-vulnerability-multiple-high-privileged-android-services/ <comment><USER2> It's Nov 1 2018 in some parts of the world. Samsung has several tablets available on via it's web site that are shipping with android 4.4 kitkat.

([https://www.samsung.com/us/mobile/tablets/all-other- tablets/...](https://www.samsung.com/us/mobile/tablets/all-other- tablets/s/_/n-10+11+hv1rq+zq1xm/) )

There are also several shipping with 5.1 and 5.1.1

Would it be safe to say that these will be vulnerable to the posted vulnerability noted in this article, and will likely never get patched to fix this, and who knows how many other publicly posted exploits?

If so, at what point do we say this is negligent, faulty equipment?

(I am sure there are many other manufacturers and web sites doing the same. I am only pointing out this example because I was looking there the other day for new tablet purchase considerations and the 4.4 kitkat jumped out at me)

</comment><comment><USER3> This failure to update 32bit code to 64bit is one of the most common mistakes nowadays still. even more than the occasional off by one error or overflow.

I had to fix perl5 at about 20 places, and most fixes are still not applied upstream.</comment>