skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am almost 40. I have been in the IT world actively since 1984 here in Berkeley/San Francisco/Silicon Valley. I have worked in big corporate, nationally and internationally.

I have worked with fewer than 10 black men and women in a technical role in my entire career; spanning hundreds of teams and nearly a hundred customers and employers.

It matters because opportunity and outcomes aren't equal. The problem isn't purely the IT scene, but one of the greatest challenges the United States faces.
After using Akka and Scala I cringe at the thought of going back to use Java, even for simple dimple projects.

As one commenter already put it, so much of Java frameworks are overly engineered. Which begs the question as to why do so many implementations at so many corp situations I've been in have developers under engineering usage...

I take it business probably sees over engineered goods as "less work" for developers to code. This perhaps allows the hiring of "lesser qualified" engineers...hm...
Show HN: My weekend project IsThisInAGirlTalkSong.com
If you're going to abuse Wikipedia that way, you should be referring to him as Jimbo.
It definitely matters in Europe, possibly moreso than in the USA, at least in the circles I've been in (I'm white myself, so this is mostly from observation and friends). In Denmark at least, there is a lot of awkwardness around race, and it certainly isn't the case that non-white people generally feel comfortable in groups where they're the only non-white person (even worse if everyone else is not only white, but specifically of Scandinavian ethnic heritage, which emphasizes the not-like-me-ness even more). I'm not sure of the exact reasons, or how much is actual racism, but there is definitely a vague sense of weirdness/discomfort.
I wouldn't say Java is full or wrappers but the java ecosystem/community is full of them. Everybody has freakN something with a little twist. It's too much!

Agree on the Quartz though. Oracle uses it for all the scheduling within it's all the applications. It has some jdbc connection leakage that Oracle wouldn't fix and it will require restart of your app almost every week.
I went and looked this up on the App Store. The title of the app is "Exodus International." The categories in the bottom menu are "Home", "Latest News", "Events", "Video", and "More." The "More" section includes links to Twitter, Facebook, testimonials, podcasts, a blog, FAQs, some kind of question-answer page, a fact sheet, and "featured resources."

Presumably somewhere in there is the video or text that talks about curing homosexuality, but this app appears to fall into the category of restating whatever happens to be available on the publisher's website...kind of like ESPN or my bank. It's not a single-purpose issue app like the Manhattan Declaration app that was rejected.
The Risks and Rewards of Delighting Users (or Attempting To)
Interesting. I've been working on http://tiemonster.com/ for 2 months now which is similar, but focuses solely on ties.
"An interesting new phenomenon" is used an exception to the rule that politics (and so forth) shouldn't be posted. In the paragraph right before that quote, we find:

Anything that good hackers would find interesting. [...] anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

I was at PyCon as well, and observed the exact same anecdote that the OP describes. At my company's booth, the only minorities I can think of who talked to us were more than likely visiting from Europe, Asia, or South America. Therefore, I'm curious, and I'm interested to see the response; not from accusing Y Combinator of racism, as some seem to suggest, but merely to get some data on minority penetration into our field.

There is no "standard" for the front page. We're all smart people, and we can be trusted to make judgments.
I would like to speak with you. ^ is something we can solve together.
A Co Founder of Addmired Inc. (YC W08) is black. So at least one.
Joe's Good Governance is Bob's Bad Governance. People fundamentally differ on what the government should do; there's no "right answer" that everyone could agree on if only they'd sit down and discuss it reasonably.
It really doesn't matter to me. I just wish more blacks would realize the power of programming and the opportunities it could potentially provide.
Yep, there goes my PDAnet tethering. There goes the unsubsidized phone pricing for those of us who buy our own phones. There goes the $49 data-only plan. There goes the HSPA+ roll out since AT&T will probably stop this and just move to LTE.

Here comes added congestion from iphone users. Here comes a price increase (customers end up paying for most mergers in the end), etc. Hopefully by the time the deal goes through Verizon will have a full LTE roll-out and decent Android-based phones to take advantage of it.

I'm a little surprised this move is going to even take place. In markets with only a few providers, cell phone prices and caps are terrible. Take Canada for an example. Now the US will follow in Canada's footsteps.

I think the industry is set on killing competitive pricing. The dream of the mobile providers is to convince everyone that a $100-$150 monthly bill with 2+ year lock-ins is normal. Mobile data should be a commodity, not a premium service.
What kind of app was this? I'm curious how you handled the massive traffic to the site.
Freedom of expression is a human right.
Great work!
We were also busy to come up with something last week.
http://tsunami-homes.woisy.com wants to crowdsource private resources for aiding people affected by the tsunami.
> "are things in the USA really so bad that it matters what color your skin is

Gees, do you really believe race does not matter in europe?
I just realized I'm not asian, but rather white. :/

"In the US Census, people who originate from the original peoples of the East Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia are classified as part of the Asian race; while peoples from Siberia, Central Asia, and Western Asia are classified as "White".

Thanks for the link, though.
Twitter celebrates its fifth birthday
The missing curly-braces in the Atari font made ports of C compilers a little awkward. In '82, trigraphs hadn't made the scene yet, and my roommate used $( .. $), but it was pretty ugly. In my opinion it was still way less ugly than trigraphs, when they arrived ....
The population percentages of race have absolutely no correlation to the percentages of startup founders accepted by YC or that would potentially be accepted by YC. With YC only funding 200 or so startups, that sample is too low to quantify any conclusions.
22 Creative Landing Page Designs – A Showcase and Optimization Discussion
Actually, there is a standard for the front page, and "We're all smart people, and we can be trusted to make judgements" isn't it.

If it were, there would be no need for moderation. We would never need to flag posts or have moderators kill them, because the voting by the smart people making judgments would drive unworthy posts off the front page without any discussion or intervention.

There are a lot of reasons why moderation needs to trump voting, but that's probably even more OT. For now, I hope you accept that we should be smart, we should exercise our judgment, AND we should sometimes kill a discussion even if it's popular.

p.s. Of course, an argument that moderation trumps voting isn't an argument that this post needs moderation. It gratifies your intellectual curiosity, I get that. So far it doesn't gratify mine, but it could be that I have read an awful lot about this topic over the years and I would like to see an HN discussion have more to say than what I've already read on Reddit over the years, on UseNet, in editorials, and so forth.
How about a 2 bit font:

▀▄▀ █▄█ █▀█▀█ █▀█▀█ ▀▄▀
Don't know why you're getting downvoted ... actually, that isn't true, I DO know why you're getting downvoted, but it's wrong, so I got you back to a positive number.

For those downvoting who disagree -- particularly those claiming his priorities are screwed up, the obvious question to you is whether or not disagreeing with somebody is cause for downvotes.
Sorry, guys. We have SSH key pairs pregenerated for speed reasons and we've just run out of them today. Now everything should be OK.
Privacy seems more like a cultural thing... that doesn't mean that being deprived of it can't be effective as a punishment. In any case, we'd better hope it's a cultural need and not a human need, since it's essentially going away, and I can't think of anything short of the collapse of civilization that could prevent that.
Living in Australia, I can tell you the main reason caching is so important is because our main telco decided to charge by megabytes of usage. Back in the days when most of us were stuck on dialup, they were charging $0.18 a megabyte. At least the slow speeds limited the damage, though downloading a 600MB would still have cost a ridiculous $108. Meanwhile the rest of the world hadn't even though of charing such tariffs for internet usage. Of course once you have one company setting the standard then their competitors all follow suite.

While things have improved tremendously since then, broadband plans are still based around download and sometimes even upload usage. At least now you're looking at something more reasonable like $50/month for 50 gigabytes a month of included download usage. So originally caching would actually save you serious money (unfortunately ISPs rarely passed on these savings to customers if they used their proxy server). Though nowadays it's less important as long as the websites you visit are responsive. Granted you're always going to have some kind of client side cache.
Where do I get in line to be an early customer? Is there a "let me know when you go live" sign up page?

And actually, I LOVE to shop. I just have no taste for clothes. I wouldn't know how to define my style. I need help.
AT&T: T-Mobile 3G phones will need to be replaced
> Are things in the USA really so bad that it matters what color your skin is? Isn't tech a business of ideas anyway?

Yes, things are so bad.

And it must be more than "European" naiveté if you don't believe that people naturally discriminate for people who look like them, or believe the same things as they do.

Its the nature of the human beast to not be rational.

> Isn't tech a business of ideas anyway?

Ah, but now that you mention it... most of us are hiding our faces (and ethnicities) behind our websites copy. So even a B2C company on the internet doesn't have to worry about stereotypes harming their first impressions.

Look at Justin.tv, just how many of Michael Seibel's[1] customers and clients do you think know that he is black?

[1] http://www.blackenterprise.com/2010/08/28/40-next-michael-se...
Farmer’s agent sued for allegedly doubling cop’s homeowner’s insurance
Officer Ricky D. Ford alleges that as a result of his pulling over Tennessee Farmer’s Insurance Company (dba Campbell County Farm Bureau) employee James Daniel “Danny” Arnold on September 25, 2010 for doing 60 mph in a 40 zone (to which Arnold pled guilty to in court and paid his fine), Arnold threatened to discontinue his homeowner’s policy in retaliation.
I know how you feel. I was one of 2 black students in my graduating CS class at CMU. It has never been a source of pressure/anxiety for me, but I do understand how it may affect other black students to feel like you are on your own.

As far as investors go, I doubt that they have any aversion to supporting entrepreneurs of any background. This is one industry that I would presume is more of a meritocracy than society at large. As I said on my tumblr a while back (http://bit.ly/g7jCAF) investors can see the green inside all of us :-)

There are many discussions going on about women in technology startups. The greater question is not why there aren't more founders, but why there arent more minority/female students in academia. Most of your founders are going to be a subset of those in academia anyway, so why not look at the problem closer to the source?
When crisis hits
I am a sprint subscriber and had switched my voice mail handling to google voice for a couple of months while using my existing number. I found that it was not as reliable as sprint's visual voice mail, with notifications sometimes coming in hours after the call. Also though gv rates for international dialing are great the quality of the connection is lacking compared to using sprint's long distance service.
Ask HN: Motivation to do entrepreneurship? 
I thought about quitting my job and start entrepreneurship. Presently trying to do it in part time - moonlighting. Reality - Iam not able to work satisfactorily in part time doing both.

My idea involves Software but it is not pure play web application.It is more of a platform where software/webapp is one component. I am passionate about the idea to be present in the real world.

So I have a dilemma

- Is Entrepreneurship all about creating what the world want now by pivoting your ideas and making a business model around it. (In that case it is not about the motivation behind your idea but more about serving the people,running the show by yourself and making money eventually.

or

- Is Entrepreneurship all about creating something which is not existing in the real world. Doing it no matter what it takes and finally realizing it in true form what you envisaged - In this case it is about the idea which acted as a motivation to start and less about the money/leverage or the immediate low hanging fruits.

Sub question :

What is the best way to test your idea while on the job before getting in full time? Or it is best to attempt by doing it in full time ?
I'd take government by a diverse group of wingnuts who enact the laws they all agree on, over government by a homogeneous group of centrists any day.
My ImpromptuDo reddit ad by the numbers
I'm black as well. Went to Harvard and when I graduated I worked at the Kauffman Foundation. During that summer I pitched the idea to lawyers for deferred payment on corp formation and found a technical cofounder in August.

We wound up building a pretty miz alpha because I had no clue what I actually wanted to create to solve the problem I had in mind. Got very minimal traction, worked at a quant hedge fund to bootstrap. Learned to program (LAMP + JS) during the nights and weekends, launched a beta, got basic ("this could be interesting") level traction. Pitched angels, got funded, now working on an html5 based mobile website to capture the function our users find most interesting.

In general, I haven't experienced any discrimination or racial issues as yet. To be quite frank, the most helpful people have not been my color. This surprised me quite a bit because in the finance world where I interned all throughout school there's a strong "cultural networking" focus where you are connected with multiple career mentors, some of whom were "diversity" mentors.

With regard to my venture, I took the "open" approach and told everyone my idea in hopes of bouncing it around and making it better. In so doing, I met a lot of really interesting people of all colors who have served as advisors/friends/partners to this day. The startup community seems to be very much merit based and quantitative. If you have skills, traction, etc. you'll get looks but you wont get a handout for any reason unless you hustle for it.

(You should check out black web 2.0, http://blackweb20.com they have an interesting community of people in tech.)
Wow. Time to pull my socks up and submit some of the ideas I've had and prototyped. Any other SA entrepreneurs who need a tech co-founder? I'm a good programmer in need of a business co-founder. Let me know.
Courtland Allen, co-founder of Taskforce (YC W11)

And he is the technical guy of the pair.
The point of the post? Being able to smile from ear to ear when I found out about Michael Seibel.
Guys don't hate to shop, we just go to the store already knowing what we're there to get.
Sadly, it's more a case of opportunity. With the states being such a wide spectrum of financial statuses, employment rates and educational opportunities, there are wide disconnects on areas where the chance of being properly introduced and educated with technology exist. It really comes down to where you are growing up and the way that local government and community are perceived - and sadly most of the time so called minority groups are not extended the same chances as other groups.

That does not mean there aren't black developers (I've worked with and known quite a few) - but the counts are a lot lower than other races.
I remember meeting black hackers in the early 90s while it was still mostly underground.
I just got my 2011 15" - opened it up to put a new SSD in it and found that the heatsink/fan combo off to the back corner was missing all the screws that would have secured it. I bet this doesn't help. I have yet to run into any issues but haven't done anything to stressful with it.

Anyone else with issues going to pop theirs open?
I was reading someones comments recently on Reddit who used a fake degree to teach English in Korea and a few other countries quite successfully. There's also been a number of stories in the news of people in high ranking positions being ousted for fake degrees.
I think there's "shopping" (going in to a store to purchase something) then there's "shopping" (browsing, learning, touching, comparing, deciding, etc).

I don't know many guys who like to shop (the second meaning) for clothing, but don't mind purchasing them (going in to a store, finding the item, paying for it, then leaving).
Reminds me of Monaco.
Pretty sure Seibel joined after it got funding.
undoubtedly a good advice, but notice that this may be _really_ frustrating for your partner, when he/she would be able to express in your language but is forced to go through the painful motions of using ten different words, paraphrasing and then mimicing until you finally get that she/he just wanted you to go get the sugar.

On the other hand,you may pick up some bad habits: depending on your situation, you may realize too late that your better half swears a lot and you are not supposed to talk like that to their parents, or end up using baby talk with your boss.

It's a great way to get funny stories though :)
I agree with your points on frameworks. I deplore the over-use and reliance on huge swathes of code to accomplish what is a simple task in vanilla code (want to select a div in js? use jquery - come on!) But this is not an affliction limited to Java.
That's interesting. I'm from Germany myself, and I'm convinced it's the most unfriendly "western" country ever. There is certainly a lot of racism here, but it generally happens in socially and economically compromised regions with low unemployment, and then it's usually directed toward the Turks (because "they took our jooooooobs"). Not that there are many black people in Germany to begin with, but I worked with a lot of people from different ethnicities over the years and I always got the impression that we're all being treated equally (shitty).
Dropbox Could Generate $100 Million in Revenue this Year
Startup Exercise: What can’t be solved with money?
Why is this offensive content? I'm all for gay rights and know a few men and women with homosexual inclinations (and I'm not bothered by it one bit), BUT freedom of expression is as much a right as the ability to choose your own religion or sexual inclination. This app probably provides valuable content to someone out there, and as such should be permitted to do so.

I'd be more worried of an Apple that blocks all apps that deal with content they don't agree with than an Apple that allows apps that might might strike the activist nerve in the sector of the population that loves to throw rocks and close streets to protest whatever they perceive to be a threat against affirmative action.
This is an interesting move, of course -- most of the carriers seem to hate the un-monitorable things, like Google Voice, that we like so much.

Conversely, there's an interesting opportunity for Sprint here to catch all the AT&T haters that will be leaving T-Mobile as they get acquired. I personally haven't had much luck with either AT&T or Sprint in the DC area, so I guess I'm Verizon-bound, but there is, perhaps, an opportunity for someone to catch some chum.
It's probably a great way of signalling your lack of standards.
Wow - congrats, that is awesome!
Race is a difficult subject to address, but it doesn't have to be. Increased openness in the discussion is always better. In the context of relationships, you'll often hear someone say that a person is "guarded". This usually means that they don't open themselves to being hurt by averting feelings of affection from others. In other words, if they never become "close" with another person, they can't feel the pain of loss.

With regard to racism, if we avoid the discussion altogether, we are simply avoid the pain of being reminded that it exists. The appropriate response is not to shy away from the conversation, but to open yourself to it. Answer the question based on the facts, but address the question of "why" separately. There may very well be good reasons why. There may not. We should strive to understand the difference.

I try to fight the urge to set up defenses to conversations I think may be going a certain direction. By putting up our defenses early, we only strengthen the divide rather than break it down.
Did they misspell Lorentz, or did they mean another Lorenz?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hendrik_Lorentz
You've got to remember that "at&t" (the current one) is not AT&T, the remains of The Bell System resulting from the 1983 divestiture.

SBC, which started out as a Regional Bell Operating Company named "Southwestern Bell", bought the old AT&T at firesale prices back in 2005 and assumed its corporate livery.

SBC and Southwestern Bell before it, never made a secret of thinking that the 1983 Bell System breakup was a mistake, and has spent the last 28 years trying to put the Bell System monopoly back into place.

So, yes, AT&T is a monopoly in the making.
"I know people who work in retail, and suck people exist. "

I'm assuming you meant "such people exist", but if so, that's probably the most accurate typo ever :)
and why not?
I'd love to be able to deploy ASP.NET stuff on Ubuntu using Mono, but this article doesn't inspire much confidence. Why is it that something that appears to be the #1 desired use case for Mono takes so many steps to configure? The author is clearly very into this stuff and his writeup makes it sound like he just barely managed to pull it off.

If I was on the Mono team, I'd make it a priority to put together a simple one-step way to get your server up and running to the point where you could xcopy an existing ASP.NET project across and expect it to run.
It actually still does, for now. I wonder if the #dickbar shows up on third-party timelines...
The Importance of the choosing Interesting Research Paper Topics
Writing a research paper requires students to be able to adhere to a few elements. If these elements are adhered to they will be able to submit a research paper worthy of a good grade. One of these elements is the selection of an interesting research paper topic.
Not sure what your point is, here. I listened to it, and it was very interesting, but the speaker has actually implemented encrypted communications on Android, so he clearly isn't too worried about it being poisoned.
Maybe "extreme over-architectured OOP" should be the new Goto.
First of all.. wonderful idea!

I tried logging in twice and this is what Hachi showed me

Warning (2): Invalid argument supplied for foreach() [APP/services/users_service.php, line 255]
Warning (2): Invalid argument supplied for foreach() [APP/services/users_service.php, line 264]
Warning (2): Invalid argument supplied for foreach() [APP/services/users_service.php, line 303]
Warning (2): Invalid argument supplied for foreach() [APP/services/users_service.php, line 333]
Warning (2): Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/hachilabs/hachilabs.com/cake/libs/debugger.php:673) [CORE/cake/libs/controller/controller.php, line 742]