The Setup – what people use to get stuff done | Hacker News Reader

The Setup – what people use to get stuff done

usesthis.com

18 pointsyulaow16 comments

Yay! xmonad! ;)

OTOH, the "interview character" is difficult to parse, even with all the highlights. Personally, I'd prefer the data extracted as a list (with the interview additionally or optional comments on the choice).

I've got a light-weight "API" for each interview - just append /json to an interview URL.

Very nicely made but may give the impression that you need a specific setup/computer to be sucessfull / get things done (forget it, I won't say what it is!).

So, for me, the only insighful interviews are the ones w/ "strange" or "forever unsatisfied" people.

I'm always open to suggestions, if you have 'em!

It's not your fault, its just that people w/ Macs care more about their setups than everyone else, so they appear more.

(But I've gone back to your site dozens of times to check on people I admire.. say jrockway or rich hickey etc. So thanks a lot for building it)

Glad you enjoyed it!

s/jrockway/technomancy

I've been following The Setup for years (it's a dream of mine to eventually be interviewd) and I—if I correctly understand what your getting at—respectfully disagree. Daniel is really good about featuring a wide range of people from a number of disciplines on a bunch of different platforms.

But careful readers will notice a trend. There are a number of accomplished artists/developers/makers that are really happy with their current setup as their "dream setup." In addition, many of them are using 3-4 year old hardware (controlling for time).

The moral is that we can all probably accomplish our dreams (cliché) with the hardware we've got—and that's my biggest takeaway from The Setup.

Some I like:

http://richard.stallman.usesthis.com/ http://mike.fogus.usesthis.com/ http://phil.hagelberg.usesthis.com/

Nothing you can do as a user these days really taxes CPU. Just get 8GB of RAM and a SSD... And just about all mainstream software runs on anything. It comes down to just a matter of portability / monitor size / OS / preference.

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=usesthis#!/story/sort_by_date/0/us...

I was going there to read about all this high end PC setup, but the interesting thing is how many just have simple, older PCs. Makes my 7 yr old PC feel much more adequate.

Great website. But compared with hardware and software, I am more interested in what "tools" they use to help them work better, like their ways of thinking.

John McAfee’s is hilariously good.

http://john.mcafee.usesthis.com/

just look at all those mac nazis! did apple pay for this ad?

http://usesthis.com/interviews/windows

http://usesthis.com/interviews/linux/

http://usesthis.com/interviews/bsd/

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