A few years ago I looked at an early draft of an essay to see which text made it into the final version. I never published it at the time, because it seemed presumptuous to think anyone else would be interested. But since you ask,

http://paulgraham.com/laundry.html

Question: "Even though the value was comparable [cans of sodas and a dollar] --and thus the situations were supposed to be equivalent--people responded in opposite ways. Why is that?"

Answer: Sane people leave six packs of sodas in refrigerators so the sodas get cold and in case those with access to the refrigerator get thirsty. The old idiom applies: treat others as you would want to be treated.

Dollar bills generally do not belong in refrigerators. Thus there is no social norm reasonably explaining the purpose of the dollars in the refrigerator. The researcher needs to provide an explanation as to why the situations are supposed to be equivalent.

I had two of them running side-by-side for several months now: I've been struggling to make a decision between MBP+OSX vs Thinkpad+Ubuntu and ended up with both.

Over time I find myself glued to Linux more and more: the software I like tends to be native on Linux and somewhat foreign on OS X, and yes - I know about Macports and I don't like it: too limited and too awkward compared to apt. All in all, OS X just isn't particularly hacker friendly: it always took me longer to do something on a Mac, the recent case was Python/Pylons stack with some libs: I was done under a minute on Ubuntu while Mac took some googling and IRC'ing to accomplish the same task.

Moreover, I keep hitting OSX limitations on less exotic stuff all the time: the terminal is retarded by default, Finder doesn't really do FTP properly (in 2008! WTF??), windows are resizable only by bottom-right corner, font rendering is worse than Ubuntu is capable of, Mac "spaces" are dumbed down version of Gnome workspaces - the list goes on and on. The only area where OSX destroys competition is their window management: I find myself Alt-tabbing a lot less on the Mac.

Also OSX is too commercialized: people are selling freaking screensavers for god's sake... So I am on Ubuntu most of the time now, the only thing that I am envious of is nearly instant ruspend/resume on my macbook and, as mentioned above, Macs window management.

But hardware plays an important role too. MBP+OSX wins head down against an average disposable Dell/HP/Whatever, even Ubuntu powers can't help that junk, so Thinkpads rule.

I'd say "Mr. Senator, congratulations on getting seated as chairman of the science, technology, and transportation committee. Before you start making laws, maybe I should teach you a couple things..." and then after an agonizing few minutes, I'd say "Forget all that...you know how the pipes in your toilet work..."

Don't judge Lucas Carlson too harshly for something he wrote almost three years ago, in the throes of dealing with his own YC rejection. Take a look at his credits at http://rufy.com/ and I think it's clear he's an accomplished developer, author of multiple Ruby gems and the Ruby Cookbook (O'Reilly, July 2006). I don't know Lucas, so I can't speak from experience, but anyone with his hacking credits (and a physics degree from Reed College to boot) has to fall into the "smart and gets things done" category.

It is definitely sometimes the answer. You wouldn't like News.YC if spam submissions weren't "censored," for example.

Though in fact I do have a new plan for dealing with cases like Valleywag (suggested by Nick Grandy of Wundrbar): instead of simply banning linkbait sites, I'm going to try semi-banning them by requiring them to get more points to make it onto the frontpage. That sounds right: they're semi-spam, so semi-ban them.

Well said. Similarly, if I found 6 dollars in a parking lot with nobody around, I'd probably pick it up. But if I found a 6 pack of soda in the parking lot, there's no way I'm picking it up, except perchance to throw it away.

does anyone else get the feeling in that all these back&forth articles with TC, Valleywag, SAI and the like putting mirrors facing each other ...

To give you a switch in the other direction story: I was a long time linux user, always very happy and quick to defend it. However, I found myself being ground down by hardware support and the pain it took to get basic things to work. I migrated from redhat to debian to gentoo and was always ultimately frustrated by the effort it took to get anything working. (Sound was always a big source of fun.)

So a friend got a mac, purely on the grounds it was less hassle than a linux pc, and frankly, after looking at all the amazing things he could do (wow, he can plug in a vga cable and have the monitor work without restarting X) I was seriously feeling won over. I finally bought a powerbook and was instantly chuffed by the fact I could do real work and not waste time mucking about with hardware. Honestly, my productivity increased by an order of magnitude. I realised how much it was really my ego vs the machine when it came to getting things working.

These days I don't faff about with macports or fink (they just don't work well enough) but instead I run ubuntu in a vmware instance. To top it off, my vmware ubuntu with 512MB of RAM runs faster than my dual core, 4GB ubuntu desktop. Go figure.

Putting aside hardware support, it's the software I love. Mac software authors have a wonderful sense of design and detail, which I always find lacking on linux or windows.

I develop using python and deploy on a combination of redhat, debian and windows boxes and the only real platform related pain I've experienced is the repeated stupidities redhat enterprise inflicts upon people. (You know it's enterprisey when they only give you five packages, forcing you to use random, untested rpm repositories around the world.)

Ok, maybe the hardware support is the biggest reason after all, just this week my linux co-workers were high-fiving over undocking their laptops without having to reboot them. Most of the time.

This is from 2005. I posted it to show the crazy things people used to write about YC in the past.

I found that section confusing too. I think it's just the result of a bit of bad writing though. After rereading it, I'd guess they had subjects list books or commandments and then take the addition test.

Don't plates of food carry implicit permission? One person wouldn't bring a plate full of brownies if she intended it only for herself.

And if she did she would make a note saying so.

Would you want people reading your half-baked essays? I know "I'd be embarrassed to let anyone see this as it is right now" is the most common reason I have for not making code open source -- I wouldn't be surprised at all if PG, for exactly the same reason, didn't want to publish early drafts of his essays.

Package management is so poorly grasped by folks who've never spent some time with the real thing, that they often think that what they're used to (an absolute lack of the capability--Mac OS X has, effectively, no package management, merely package installation, by a very loose definition of "package" and "installation") is superior in every way.

But the problem is still the same. The statement that "people have an irrational sense of logic because they would take food from a roommate, but not money" is still incorrect.

Of the 15 or so roommates I've had in my life, 13 or 14 would have almost always answered "yes" to the question "hey, can I take XXX from the fridge and eat it." Whereas fewer of them would have answered the same if I had asked for money. Therefore, the decision to take something from another person is heavily influenced by the anticipated response of that person (and therefore not as illogical as the researcher is concluding).