skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Java is a fine language, but the community suffers from rampant over-engineering and frameworkitis. There's this belief that frameworks save time by saving you from writing code, but in the end the amount of time you have to spend learning and applying the confusing bloated over-engineered framework exceeds the time it would have taken to just write the damn thing yourself.

But, they say, if it's written with frameworks then it's written in a "standard" way. You don't want to sift through a bunch of "cowboy code!"

I have never seen this work in practice. Framework spaghetti is every bit as opaque as badly written uncommented crap code. At least the latter tends to be concentrated in one place, rather than shotgun-scattered all over a bunch of weird .XML configuration files and different projects all over the place.

I routinely find myself asking: "what problem does this solve?"

"But it's enterprise!"

Edit: just remembered the best term for what afflicts the Java community: architecture astronautism.
Anyone doing A/B testing of buttons have a color recommendation?
Wouldn't hitting Google be the sensible option to answer a question that you are pretty sure that other developers are likely to have encountered before?

So you might as well test how well people can Google rather than solving a problem by themselves... :-)
Founders Agreement, Operating Agreement, Restricted Equity Agreement (for vesting).

You should seek counsel. Remember that technically, each of you should seek your own counsel (and so should the entity).
Python 2.5 has any (and all)
Python 2.3 has itertools
so Google App Engine(2.5) should have both of them.
Jquery tips, tricks and strategies
I don't think that particular statistic by itself explains much of it; YC has funded over 200 founders, so if indeed the relevant population were 13% Black, that would imply an expectation of around 25 Black founders. I don't think anyone's asking why there aren't 50% Black founders, by why there aren't closer to 13%. (There may well be good explanations, but they have to be something other than the 13% total population number.)
Learn to code. Even if you aren't able to code well enough to build your own thing, if you have not built an application and launched it, you will never be able to manage a team to do it. Much less be able to do with with an outsource provider.

Why not apply to development companies as a programming intern. Explain you're a business guy, teaching yourself coding, you know you'll never be great, but you need to learn.

At my consulting company, we've got a guy who is quitting his job at a VC and working as an intern with us for three months. We do pair programming, so he'll rotate through projects and be on the development team. We won't bill him out to clients obviously. Our developers get to learn about his business experience, and he learns how to code, and probably run a development team.

I tell clients who have an idea and have never built a website to go get a job at a startup. If you're a not a developer, don't do a startup without having worked in one.
I can't see it being useful enough from a consumer point of view to warrant me paying for it (or using it often enough to be worth showing advertising to). I can see businesses seeing it as something worth paying for if it works.

Unfortunately I can't get it to recognise even direct FB connections at the moment.
Trying to 'cure' gay people and recruit them into a religious organization and culture is not as offensive to me as the practice of a central big-brother type authorizing and deleting programs on a computer that I own.

If we don't fight this sort of thing one day we will wake up and all computers will be like cable TV. you can choose between high-quality stimulating channels, or "paths", but try to do something yourself, and you need millions of dollars to penetrate the red tape and get your application presented to more than a few people.
Asians and those from the Middle East have an even smaller percentage but appear to be well represented in startups.
Why AT&T’s deal for T-Mobile must be blocked
When there's an effective way to take the domains of squatters away from them, I'll be fine with just .com, .net, .org. Or screw the dots and just have "google". (I think that may be where it's going, considering Chrome tries to hide the http and www isn't needed in many cases.)
The Wilderness Downtown
Hashtags make it easier, sometimes people don't provide enough context or use the same words you would for a product or service, if people start using a common hashtag it makes it a lot easier.

An example of this that I used a bit in my thesis (admittedly not product based) was the #ausvotes hashtag for the Australian elections. There were plenty of Tweets that would have been very hard to identify as related to the election without that hashtag because they were mostly thoughts or opinions without context.
Inventor of SecurID Comments on Recent RSA Hack
Great. First they were under fire for censoring apps, now they're taking heat for not censoring apps.
black male founder probably...black female founder probably not
I remember seeing a possible explanation for this behavior on Joel on Software a few years back - Java seems to be particularly popular in environments where the design is handed down to developers as a finished spec, so the only outlet people have for any kind of creative expression is in the structure of the application rather than in what the application is actually doing.

Not that this excuses the mad world of enterprise Java applications....
You don't need it on Amazon's side - plenty of solutions exist that can be installed on the instances themselves. Apache throttling, for example.
Ann Miura-Ko,Floodgate, Women Should Just Play the Entrepreneurial Game
It's interesting how seeing the screenshots (for me specifically, the Atari one and to a lesser extent the c64 one) can instantly trigger a flood of memories and nostalgia. Wish I hung onto my XE, if for no other reason than to mount it on my wall...
How To Install Apache-Solr And Use It With Drupal & ISPConfig (OpenSUSE/Debian)
Richard from DevStructure here. You're right about a lot of your criticism: the setup.sh process is not ideal. I do think it is preferable to pointing someone at packages.devstructure.com and saying, "Good luck!"

We'll be changing shortly to recommend `git clone` for first-time tinkerers and packages.devstructure.com for real use.
It's funny, I totally forgot to bring this up.

Believe it or not, I neglected to put ads on the darn thing when it really blew up, so all in all I'm a couple hundred bucks in the red.

I haven't checked the application status page, but only about 7-8k people have reinstalled the app since the ban was lifted. I'm sure there's been some random Facebook game that launched within the past month and has a couple hundred thousand users. Gettin' noticed ain't easy.
Surprisingly nice layout.

I've started with DreamWeaver in 98 or so. Around 2000 I started to jump from one editor/IDE to the other until I settled with TextMate in 2006 or 2007. 5 months ago I commited to attack Vim's legendary learning curve. Now I'm almost as productive as I was with TextMate and I LOVE Vim.

Lately I've dutifuly downloaded and tested the latest "advanced editors" for Mac (Coda and Espresso) and found them totally useless: less useful features than TextMate (which they aim to replace thanks to the delay of TM2), too much focus on style… Pouah!
Ironically, I believe Tweetie 2 used to, before Twitter bought it. It allowed a lot of advanced customization.
I really don't think YC cares about ethnicity. I also don't quite get the point of this post.
With the news that AT&T is buying T-Mobile, does Sprint move to position itself as a "cool, customer-oriented" mobile service?
We used Campfire at Masterbranch until we discovered Talker.
We're keeping our old account ($6 a month) just because of the private rooms.
Give all of them to a boy or girl to sell them. The money is significant for a kid, and he or she will have fun and learn valuable skills.
As a British Asian (that means Indian-subcontinent Asian for you Americans :) - I'd say race is a total non-issue in the startup community in the UK.

(Off the top of my head of the YC companies I believe Heyzap, Auctomatic, SnapTalent, and Rapportive all had British-Asian co-founders)
You haven't refuted any of my points.

Alex, you really need to speak to any professor outside of the PL department to get an idea just how political this change actually is.

C-naught, as jwatzman said, is not C. Students will not learn pointers, they will not learn arrays. In fact, they'll not learn any of the difficulties of C. We both know the purpose of 213 isn't to teach you C. It's coded in C, but I think I used pointers in exactly 1 lab. The course won't teach you C and you can get by with C0 knowledge. Then when you get to OS, Distributed, etc, you will need to know the intricate details of a language you have no real experience in. At this point, why teach a useless language that gives no benefits to students? It is not any easier to learn than Java, yet much less useful.

Additionally, I never stated that its necessary for Java to be taught. But what I do feel is that some language that a student can use in an interview should be covered in the cirriculum.

>The reality is that CMU never gave a shit about students who barely make it by

The reality actually is, its impossible to make it by some of our systems courses without filling out the proper prerequisites. And currently what's happening is that the prerequisites are being removed from the cirriculum. Thus, unless people have knowledge of C, pointers, asm, people will be focusing on learning C during OS and not OS. We've both taken the course. We both know that a student who doesn't know C has a high probability of failure.

The point is, a student coming out of CMU will now only be required to know 3 languages: SML, OCaml, and C-naught. One of them is utterly useless. I do believe that a focus on functional programming is a good thing. What I don't support is pushing programming languages at the cost of everything else. A systems person or even an algorithms person can't thrive in the new cirriculum. Almost every required course is a PL course, or fundamentally tied to PL in some way.
How many apply? The population norm is irrelevant.

That said, how to correct this? E.g. Stanford University has no quota and doesn't yield on admission standards, but does a good job actively recruiting qualified minority students. Does YC recruit at all?
Easy... (Qadaffi|Khadafy|Qadafi|...)... it's self-documented, maintainable, and assuming your regexp engine is actually a regexp engine, will compile to the same DFA that the obfuscated garbage in the SO solutions will compile to.

Writing compact regular expressions is like using short variable names to speed up a program. It only helps if your compiler is brain-dead.
It would help to know how many black founders apply in the first place.
Once upon a time I was working with a minority programmer. I wrote the majority of all code and he wrote minority of all code. I do remember that his variable names where odd and didn't bond well with mine, hence major problems.
>Trying to 'cure' gay people and recruit them into a religious organization and culture is not as offensive to me as the practice of a central big-brother type authorizing and deleting programs on a computer that I own.

You have some really screwed up priorities.
This highlights the problem with Apple's decision to play the part of the gatekeeper in their app store, and seriously calls into question their claim of not allowing offensive content.

Apple does need to be careful here - the GLBT population tends to skew towards Apple products, at least based on my experience, and I doubt they want to alienate this segment of their user base.
Yep. Goes with the territory. If you assume the role of gatekeeper, everyone, even people who don't like you acting as gatekeeper, can legitimately criticize you for the decisions you make about what does and doesn't go through the gate.
> Last I heard, 3G infrastructure was pretty spotty outside of select areas of Johannesburg

Perhaps a good few years ago. You should get HSDPA in all the major cities in SA. A lot of people actually use mobile broadband in place of fixed-line broadband.
AT&T isn't the only one to do this. So long as it isn't used against citizens in criminal trials/etc I don't really care all that much if it helps make intelligence people more efficient.
Well, here it is pretty irrelevant. CMU wasn't a java school. It was mainly a C school.
Don't work on iOS. In my web app, I display a plain textarea for iPhone and iPad, but it's not an IDE.

Why doesn't @contenteditable work on the iPhone?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/723592/why-doesnt-content...

Is contentEditable not supported by iPad?

http://www.quora.com/Is-contentEditable-not-supported-by-iPa...
How about the icon from the Git website?

---
+++

http://git-scm.com/
I don't think anybody is accusing YC of racism or any other discrimination. The causal relationships are higher order ones than that, but no less important for it.
Actually, if Kucinich and Paul agree on something, it's probably worth listening to.
I just checked Sensorly, and looks like no (unless you count some spots on the border).
Career Counselor: Bill Gates or Steve Jobs?
Hey, three votes so far for ed! (Including mine, that is.)
Not many black programming role models. Sad to say but many black youth still see sports and entertainment and the only way to achieve a high level of success in America. My primary goal in life is to try to change that perception by becoming a successful programmer.
Most likely annoying if you're writing code.
I'm always curious about which (if any) laws this sort of scam breaks.

They seem particularly insidious because they target the uneducated and jobless/desperate.
I wonder if this type of thing has been successful in landing people jobs that require a degree as a check off before an application is looked at and the employer never bothers to properly check the credentials.
It sounds like a reasonable question to me. He's just wondering.
And understandably so. Apple claims that their approval process is supposed to keep out low quality apps and objectionable content, to the extent that they've rejected applications that simply display content easily reachable using their own browser. Now they've approved an application that is clearly offensive to many people - and one that makes claims to do something that medical and psychological experts agree can't be done.
And also, a very interesting extract from Wikipedia's entry on one of the authors of the above book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vassili_Nesterenko

> Because of his activities, he lost his job and got problems with the State Security Agency of Belarus, which threatened him with internment in a psychiatric asylum. Later, however, the Belarusian government tried to soften him proposing him to get back a job in a state institute, "at the condition that he would not work on Chernobyl anymore." He escaped two assassination attempts.[1]

> Nesterenko intervened immediately after news of the accident in the nuclear power plant started to spread. As an expert on the subject and with his experience as a fire fighter, he threw liquid nitrogen containers from a helicopter on the burning reactor core. To do this he had to move into the middle of radioactive smoke. Despite the heavy radioactive contamination of the area, Nesterenko survived. However, of the four passengers of his helicopter, three died from radioactive irradiation and contamination.[1]
Have you explored MapThatPad (www.mapthatpad.com) ? It's not your everyday listing site, but an apartment hunting organizational tool. It takes 2 steps to easily pull in and map as many listings from Craigslist, streeteasy, Oodle, NYtimes and other sites. You can share your maps and invite friends to collaborate on your hunt. Not to mention, that you can see all important nearby amenities such as restaurants, groceries and transit (for NYC and SF).
I don't see the question or the discussion so far as meeting the standard for "An interesting new phenomena." It looks like something that would be better served over on Quora than on HN. It's a reasonable question, but just as many subjects--explicitly including politics--are of interest to HN's readerships but still not HN-worthy, it doesn't appear to meet the standards in the FAQ for the front page.

Discussions of minority participation in technology and entrepreneurship goes on ad nauseaum elsewhere. If it is to come up here out of the blue, we ought to have some interesting angle to YCombinator funding. For example, if we know that YCombinator funds double the proportion of the rest of the industry, that would be interesting and new.

If we have no evidence of anything interesting or new, the question hardly seems like Hacker News. If it's a simple question, an email to Paul Graham would probably obtain a simple answer.
I feel the same. What we would need is a telecommunication company that puts the respect of privacy as one of its core goals (think Zappos), and not just in the boilerplate license agreements. Although entering that arena has high entry costs, it seems like a huge demand for such a service exists.
I'm sure there's a lack of women or blind people or people who can't speak or write English. The thing overly-PC types don't want to address is that certain fields attract certain types. Geeky males in tech, women and gay men in fashion, etc. The lack of population matching demographics isn't proof of racism.

That said, I'd argue that unless you grew up with computers and were interested in programming them early in life you probably aren't the startup type. Your income level affects this, obviously if you can't get your hands on a computer then you're not going to be able to do much. As a geek I never had any "role models" or other things that set me on my path. Nor did my parents encourage tech. Nor did my friends. I was, and in many ways, still am something of a lone geek amongst non-geeks. I believe "role models" to be a meaningless cop-out.
All local photos
All local photos from Twitter
If an attacker manages to MITM your initial browser installation or upgrade download then we're in trouble. We'd then have to resort to verifying the authenticity of our browser install file through some other means. You could use HTTPS for your download though you'd need to be sure that you've done this every time and the original copy was from a trusted source. No doubt this is why open source developers are so keen to exchange GPG keys when they meet in person.

Though at least when you're using some public wifi AP, you're unlikely to be upgrading your browser.
No love for IE9?!
It's not Catalonia, it's Catalan.

Catalan is spoken in these regions:
(spain) Catalonia, Valencia, Mallorca, some of Aragon
in South-Eastern France
a town in Sardinia (Alguer / Alghero)
Andorra (a small country)

For the rest of cultural/linguistic TLDs... have they asked for one?
African Americans make up nearly 13% of the US, but only 6.2% of California. At UC Berkeley about 4% of undergrads are African American. Computer Science may be even less. You could maybe assume that YC alum are between 4-5% black.
This plus the 4G Nexus S is going to make it really hard to hang onto my old T-Mobile/Nexus One combo. No equivalent of my T-Mobile no-contract post-paid service, though.
The bare Java is not very fine as I see after comparing it with more concise languages, like Clojure.

The enterprise Java conventions are even worse, like a convention for mandatory getters/ setter.

Good framework in a good language can save a lot of work even for a big complex application.
> I'm often the ONLY black guy in the room

It's probably my European naiveté talking here, but I seriously wonder if and why that matters to you. Most of us belong to some kind of "minority" in some fashion, sometimes it's visible from the outside, sometimes not. Are things in the USA really so bad that it matters what color your skin is? Isn't tech a business of ideas anyway?
That would be a huge mistake. Doing that kills the value of their product to advertisers. You've just taken away the customers most desirable to advertisers (those willing to spend money). Ad pricing falls off the cliff.
Awesome post.I love reading these stories. Very interested in the technical details followup.
InfoQ: Meet the Goliath of Ruby Application Servers
Princetonian has stories: http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2011/01/07/27306/

Memorial site: http://1000memories.com/billzeller
The tsunami killed more people today than that radiation will ever, because a lot of Japanese older folks had their meds disrupted for a week (some continuing), were hit with hypothermia or close to it, and took massive shock. More people die of those effects every day, and that will continue for months. Lack of meds/medical care was one of the first problems identified with the relief effort and it is the hardest one to address since emergency rations/H2O/heating oil works for everyone but a box of emergency medicine which doesn't contain the drug you need helps you not at all. (You can also imagine the issues with finding the right prescription for a 75 year old man whose doctor is now himself a refugee and whose paperwork is in the ruins of an office under 300 tons of sludge. Now parallelize that problem over about a hundred thousand people.)

Thinking the radiation has future higher expected harm than the tsunami is pretty much solely a problem of cognitive biases.
It'd be interesting to see. African Americans and Latinos* make up about %28 of the US population, but are very under represented in startups. East Asians, South Asians, Arabs and Jews are over represented in tech based on over all population. What's more, most of the black programmers i've worked with at startups were born in Africa or the Caribbean.

I suspect that YC would be wise to try and recruit diversity, having different perspectives, backgrounds and world views among founders at the the dinners and other places, would probably make all the startups stronger.

Latinos or Hispanics are an ethnic group, not racial, there are white, black, native american, and asian latinos.
I can't help thinking that design patterns are often used as an excuse to avoid documenting the API.

Extreme programmers are bad enough, but at least they encourage things like minimal interfaces, test suites, and pair-programming to stop the API becoming unreadable.
Rainbow rose is available with different colour combinations wallpapers 
The rainbow rose is known because of its unique colouring process that gives the individual petals different colours. The rose used is the Rosa Vendela. Rainbow roses can be placed as a bunch in a candle or just as a single rose. The colouring process of the rainbow rose is a natural process where the rose branch absorbs all the different colorants.
There would not be any burning graphite in any case, because those reactors don't have any graphite... That, however, doesn't imply that there won't be any radioactive contamination. It would certainly be a lot less than Chernobyl, though.
So basically you want to say that we should fight against censoring BUT not against gay-hatred?

Man I can't believe your priorities.

First rule should ALWAYS be: human rights.
How to stop spammers from sending spam as me? Short Answer: You can't.
looks like a curvy penis and a pair of balls to me. read into that as you will(y).
Let it be known that there is no doubt that Apple support gay people, just to get that part straight[1][2].

[1]: http://www.macworld.com/article/136372/2008/10/apple_proposi...

[2]: http://thinkprogress.org/2008/10/24/apple-prop-8/
Is AT&T a Monopoly in the Making?