skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the answer isn't just the employment and supporting of people already excelling in the system, it is in changing the distribution of opportunity prior to formal education.

We intend to do this by operating a program within our company, starting with community computer and science lab, promoting to a group work day with interactive collaboration, then eventually fitting a child's interest in a role with a second-seat internship at each employee's desk.

This is all early stage of process, but 20 years of thinking and experimentation. If I'm able to build my current venture out, my next will be promoting these early programs to help expand young people's thinking (and hopefully help them make themselves their own role model) about science and technology.
Yes. So it's even more funny. It allows us to laugh about those mono-lingual English speakers.
Agreed, this is something that might be good to address through something like http://www.nfte.com which has a large group of entrepreneurial young minorities who are all sharp but looking for help/mentorship.

They focus mostly on the basic tenets of entrepreneurship but I would love to see more minority programmers coming out of underprivileged schools and situations.
There's a startup in France doing that : http://dress-me.fr/beta
They are polishing the beta, but the app is pretty solid.
On wider range, social shopping and social fashion have been really hot lately, and over the past 2 years.

I've worked on http://styyler.com for some time (never finalized it), and we were inspired by the fashism.com, polyvore.com ($8M funding), chictopia.com, lookbook.nu, weardrobe.com (acquired by Like.com), chicisimo.com, ...
Great points, but I differ on a few:

>You don't need a website.

I may be the exception, but I would be extremely reluctant to hire a contract web developer who did not have a website.

>You don't need a detailed contract.

Agreed in the sense that you don't need 30 pages of "...heretofore referred to as The Client...", but you do need to explicitly spell out a project timeline and payment schedule. I also strongly suggest requiring a 50% deposit up-front.
Don't Steal Computers From People Who Know Computers
Startup Whiz Kid Mark Bao catches the thief who stole his laptop uploading pics and video of himself. Now he has the thief's facebook and is planning some LULZ!
I was thinking the same thing. If degree is a meaningless checkbox for most jobs then someone will serve the market for meaningless degrees.

There really should be some kind of free on-line federal school for the underprivileged that would be like these online schools but with a decent curriculum and ethical testing and is accredited.

The whole thing would probably cost annually what the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq cost in a few days. I'd rather talk to someone with a degree from the "US Federal Online" and know that he/she at least learned something than some random on-line diploma mill. Especially, if they put in two years at a community college.
Can't help you with the 4G or Google Voice but Future Shop is taking preorders for the Nexus S beginning today.

http://newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/March2011/17/c3741.ht...
I'm willing to bet that any anti-trust issues that are brought up will be quietly squashed in the name of (A) campaign contributions and (B) increasing the size of the AT&T dragnet.
Ditto this. A curse of being a nerdy comparative shopper and having little sense of clothing style makes this a got-to-have service.
I'm one of those hate-shopping because I don't really understand style. It's just not part of my mental domain.

To "figure out what their style is" is really the missing link for me, and I'd probably pay for this alone. However, I at least have some interest in it, just because my brother is a complete 180 from me and is very into style/clothing.

One cautionary note, the target has to recognize the need for the service, which might make it a harder sell. Look at how hard it is to get people to do something about finances! It's simply a blind spot for many, in the same way style is. Those hate to shop folks don't see why we should care about it. What's the benefit?

If I was at all style conscious I'd be more inclined to focus on the opinions and suggestions feature, even though it seems like an afterthought to your feature set. People who 'get' style and the clueless would both benefit (and frankly, the in style people are going to be more passionate about it).
"LINQ to Objects" (i.e. the set of standard query operators, basically map/filter/fold and sundries) is hugely beneficial and ubiquitous in the recent codebases I've worked on. LINQ to SQL and similar IQueryable providers can be useful and are used, but unfortunately still suffer from the fact that querying is just one part of an ORM solution, and the state of ORMs in general and Microsoft's in particular is still kind of a mess. I haven't seen huge resistance to adopting them though - using some kind of LINQ-based ORM is pretty standard in ASP.NET MVC projects.
That's the same distinction that I make;

a) Fundamental technical or scientific books, that will keep their value at least a few years, preferably longer.

b) Books about a certain version of a program or technology.

I do buy books in the (a) category, even hardcopy. But for (b) I first look for a free online alternative, and otherwise an ebook. I've also made that mistake of buying Java 1.2 doorstops back in the time ;) The world of IT moves too fast for print.

Fiction books I usually buy as ebook, because my bookshelves are already over-full and most I'll only read once anyway.
I downvoted him because I found the content of his post to be non-informative and boderline trollbaitish.

His priorities don't seem to be as in tune with reality as what I would normally expect here, but that wasn't the explicit reason for my downvote.
Steven Levy on the Great Facebook Reset
Get legal help. If you are college students there may be low cost legal help available through your school. I regretted not getting legal advice for a company i founded 7 years ago, lawyers are good at foreseeing problems that you are unlikely to. Figure out vesting, what to do when a founder leaves, what to do for new hire stock options, and how it will go when you raise or borrow money.
And i forgot http://coolspotters.com , in the distant area
It's not an AT&T thing... all big guys would want it, especially the market share. I am not liking the news of AT&T buying T-Mobile. There so many things fed up about it. AT&T data usage is not "truly" unlimited. AT&T's customer service sucks big time. When I missed to read the detail of my bill one month, the support rep told me I need to grow up and pay attention to my bill every month. True, I accept it but that also means AT&T cannot be trusted to accurately report on our billing, auto withdrawal, etc. They are bunch of a*holes. They do this to us while we have other carriers and other options. Imagine how they would treat us if they were the only guys.
Your liberties and freedoms, especially as they relate to the digital medium and AT&T in particular is very relevant for everyone, including hackers, designers and entrepreneurs.
I'm not sure about this... do you really believe that programmers need role models for success?

We have people that we idolize but its not because of common-place programming ability or merely their job but because of what they've achieved----Bill Gates with Microsoft, Linus Torvalds with Linux, etc.

Programmers seem to usually be self-described 'geeks' and thus like programming for its own sake.
I agree .. it doesn't matter what color your skin is, or whatever minority group you are from, what matters are your choices, specifically how you spend your precious, precious time.

I'm gay, and am bootstrapping my own startup. I have never wondered how many other startup founders are gay .. because that's not what it's about!

Focus man
In light of all the news on the Japanese nuclear power plants, I found this (below) radiation dose chart (from xcd) helpful. It does not seem like there's too much to be concerned about regarding radiation. They unfortunately have bigger issues to deal with.

http://xkcd.com/radiation/
As a Hispanic developer living in Copenhagen, I feel neglected in some IT meetings and job interviews.
Amazon Kindle with Android? Tablet or eReader?
no one needs anything to succeed in Africa...
Clearly (1) not all Hacker News questions are in reference to "an interesting new phenomena" and (2) this question isn't a generic discussion of "minority participation" but a YCombinator specific question, which is why it's germane to this forum.

I respect you a great deal and that's why I'm disappointed in this comment. It's not only because it's uncharacteristically obtuse, but because it smacks of a disturbing syndrome I've seen in some fellow black people who've "made it."

In situations where race comes up, people with this issue go out of their way to let their non-black peers know that they are not interested in discussing race ... unlike all those other blacks they may have heard about. It's no different from a woman trying to fit in with male colleagues by going out of her way to slam any female colleague who files a sexual harassment complaint. It's sad, unnecessary, and adds nothing substantive to the discussion. Let's not look down our noses at other people to make ourselves looks bigger.

The question of whether a black person has ever been picked for YCombinator is interesting and at the very least certainly shouldn't be verboten.
How many hackers are reading the YC applications?
After we submitted our application to YC, one portion of our application included a reference to an old site that has never had one user sign up. Now the site has multiple "spam" user signups within 12 hours of application submission.

Any ideas or is this part of the "test"?
LTE (4G) cellular networks are actually full-IP networks. However they support "voice"-devices due to transition issues.
> However, as soon as I go outside of Sweden, which is a small country (9M people), I have to pay roaming charges.

This can be problematic for those always on the move (the US has an all-round advantage on domestic market size), but in addition to the 2007 and 2010 roaming regs, the EU is apparently looking at forcing more reasonable data roaming charges across the board.
I'm in Atlanta, black, a programmer and and I casually take notice and see that most of the faces that surround me aren't those that look like me. I tend to wonder the same questions at times. It's a question of is the game we play skewed towards a certain outcome. If it is how do we play?
Adding JSONP support to your Rails app
because there are very few women in tech, and that number goes down even further if you just consider those that are black.
You've set up a false dilemma between "build what the customer wants" and "build what I want to build". Entrepreneurship can be both those things and more. It depends on the business, the team, the customers, the market, and luck.

As to your sub question, it's really hard to start a company part time, but people still do it. Like all things in business and in life, the answer is "it depends."
You can only believe AT&T is a monopoly if you believe the future of voice and data is through cell towers. My guess is, it's probably not.
Startups, Check Your Budget For Viral Marketing
What is the deployment and debugging experience like on Android or iOS? I was impressed with the Visual Studio integration when I played with WP7 development a bit - you can just hit F5 and your app starts up on the phone in debug mode in, like, two seconds, and you can then step through it in Visual Studio, set breakpoints, hover over variables to see their values, and even evaluate expressions in the immediate window.

I was vaguely expecting some cumbersome deployment process, but it feels no heavier than running something on the PC. But I've never developed for other mobile platforms, so maybe this is just standard?
> people naturally discriminate for people who look like them

Do they really, naturally? I don't think that many people are walking around, constantly repeating an inner mantra like "I'm a middle-aged white male", always comparing everyone against what they themselves look like in the mirror? Who does that?

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

It's my experience that most humans only think like "beasts" if they have been conditioned to do so. It's not like we have to force ourselves to be rational all the time, is it? Being somewhat rational, friendly and compassionate should be the default position.

> Ah, but now that you mention it... most of us are hiding our faces (and ethnicities) behind our websites copy.

That's true, and I'm happy about this option. I certainly wouldn't have such a great time on the net if people could actually hear or see me. But being black is not the same as being ugly.

> just how many of Michael Seibel's[1] customers and clients do you think know that he is black

How many care?
Let's see it with "9 > 8"

;)
No early manager's education is complete in my opinion without reading Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman's "First Break All The Rules".

Do yourself a favor, order a bunch of used copies for your staff to read. I've probably bought 200 or more copies of this book new and used and no other single book published in the micro-computing era has shaped my thinking more about running an organization.

I will add that starting from a good base of effective working culture, then working on culture as a theme will yield significant benefit.
Someone get to work on creating an app to cure people of their heterosexuality through the use of pics of hot guys and alcohol.
> assuming your regexp engine is actually a regexp engine

There is no guarantee that two regex that match the same corpus will compile to the same DFA or even compile to a DFA at all. Do not confuse regex with a regular expression.

The answer isn't to turn against any of these variation of regex by deriding them as "compact" but instead test to see if this is a bottle neck, and try out a non-self documenting variation if it is.
I would love to use it :)
He didn't ask for conversion rates. He asked a total and I didn't get the impression that his question was accusing anyone of anything.
Not always, I must have spent at least 30 seconds choosing a new shirt at lunchtime.
The Pros and Cons of Art-Directed Blogs
Art-directed blogs (sometimes also referred to as “blogazines”) are making strides in the blogosphere. Looking at them, it can be tempting to jump on the bandwagon and start creating your own art-directed posts. But it’s not that straightforward. There are a lot of pros and cons to designing each and every post on your blog.
Maybe there's an economic barrier to that realization? Adults who realize the power of programming were likely children with access to a computer growing up.

In Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers" he tells the story of Bill Gates and Bill Joy - two prolific programmers. The key similarity between them was their unfettered access to a computer growing up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_United... Indicates that US Blacks earn less on average. Perhaps a good number of black kids don't have a computer to spend the required time needed to realize the power.

Perhaps donating your old computer to inner-city and after school programs would help a kid realize that. Wishing won't do anything, but if you've got computers "lying around" that you were going to get rid of, there are programs that distribute them to people who could use them.

Google turned up: http://www.computerswithcauses.org/
Left to an open market, it won't be, but if AT&T has its way, it will be. They will buy up or buy control over everything if they can.

Wireless data is not something you want locked up by one company.
The API might make HNers cringe but quartz is a tried and tested scheduler that we've used in production for six years without any issues.

Relaible software that you don't have to maintain is really valuable.
There's a different between being a poor service and being offensive.
A bit further north, the prices for phones are exactly the same whether over a contract or paid up front; I'm not sure if it's law or just convention. The monthly plan is really just used to lure in customers (and by customers in lieu of a more traditional loan to buy the phone).
Amazing that a monopoly could eventually go bankrupt. People get paid millions a year to run companies like that into the ground. Charlie Sheen could do no worse.
Game server admins defend hosting play on workplace equipment
What's really the most interesting thing is that I don't think but a few people have mentioned anything other than the name in their comments resulting in a meaningless discussion about what could be something quite interesting.
It really isn't. Can we please stop the 'superhero' meme?

I'm not a superhero. I'm just a person who knows a few programming languages and can hack things together. It's not a great feat: it's just typing bits of logic into a computer. If you can think logically and with a reasonable degree of abstraction, you can do it too!

We should be shouting from the rooftop that it's fun and easy and giving children lessons in Python or whatever, not turning ourselves in to a priesthood just to boost our own egos.

The best sort of superheros are modest and work quietly in the background rather than shouting about how awesome they are. Can we try that?
That page has the assignments, lecture notes, and source code from the lecture demos. The lecture videos are hosted on iTunesU.
Art of finishing up well.
Yes totally agree with that but what if I can tell you the link of the person on Facebook.I know this is going to be difficult to implement but it would be awesome to have it
Running multiple tests on buttons right now - and I've read/been given advice that a) orange is good and b) you want the color of your button to be different than the general colors on your sight to draw attention to it.

I think language matters equally as much - especially if you have primary and secondary text in the button - but these are all hunches, hence the testing. Found a ~80% uplift with 99% confidence just by flipping the primary and secondary text of a button on our homepage (not our primary landing pages) last week. Testing color variations on the improved text now.

source: http://www.formstack.com/the-anatomy-of-a-perfect-landing-pa... (note I don't agree with all of this but there is a good color breakdown). also had some real world advice given to me from a convo with a 500 startups founder a few months back related to orange.
For sure. When can I sign up?
Nissan: It's Electric
I stopped reading at 'XML'.
I see culture as a hygeine factor, meaning that as long as it meets minimum standards for my ability to get work done, I don't particularly care. Make sure I get paid on time, make sure I have something worthwhile to do and don't screw with my benefits or my ability to have a life outside of work and I'm fine.

I don't particularly care, for example, for places that have free beer on Fridays (I don't drink). Company parties and other events seem like a waste of time that I could spend with my real friends or my family. I enjoy a company that espouses employee autonomy where I can get it (think Southwest's customer service), but that's just because it makes it easier for me to get work done. Basically, I come to work to do something I find interesting and get paid for it. If I meet interesting people while there, that's icing on the cake, but I want to introduce them to my non-work life on my own terms and not in the name of "company culture."
Now, here is a plan to Kill Google
was just wondering if anyone that looks like ME has EVER made it

Assuming that there might be something "unattractive" about being black -- a big assumption but one I'm willing to play along with for purposes of this thread -- how about fat people? Old people? People who don't live in cities? People who didn't go to an ivory league college? Conservatives? People who have physical defects?

On a few occasions, it's been stated that basically you need to look "cute", "serious", or various other quasi-bullshit phrases. It's a logical follow-up question to start asking about exactly which attributes people find attractive.

But I'm not sure what difference it makes. If your startup depends on YC, they probably don't want you. It's like the old thing about only asking for a loan when you don't need the money.

While you can count up various attributes and report on them, that's a long way from a causal relationship. Maybe no black people applied. Maybe there were only 2 black people that applied, but they were both joke applications. There's simply no useful information you can gather from a count. At least not that I can see. Perhaps you can develop a suspicion that the odds are stacked against you, but if you're looking for reasons to think the odds are stacked against you, hell, just go look at the stats for startups in general. No need to add anything else in there.

I guess I just don't understand your point. It doesn't seem very productive, no matter what the answer is.
The excuse I've heard is it "let's people who are specialists do the 'hard' stuff." you know, like reading a configuration file...

There are some cases this makes sense for (scientific computing, machine learning, etc), but I think nirvana in the community is being able to write an app via XML configuration files.
Add a dickbar to any site
"I think there's "shopping" (going in to a store to purchase something) then there's "shopping" (browsing, learning, touching, comparing, deciding, etc)."

Shopping vs. Browsing, then would be more fitting?
Perhaps, maybe on par with seeing some home-made keyboard on screen. IMHO.
Sprint Urges Regulators to Look Hard at AT&T's Proposed T-Mobile Deal
Google AI Challenge 2011 (Ants)
Here's an "Interesting new phenomena" for you to chew on: How dare you suggest that I'm Black? My father is Scottish-Canadian. I went to St. Andrews, a Scottish-themed boarding school. I grew up listening to Rush. I play hockey. I listen to Jazz music. I ride a mountain bike. I'm told I speak with a standard North American accent. What is this "Black" thing you speak of?

Now before you answer, let me tell you that I consider that a very interesting question. And the ramifications are extremely interesting to me. I love discussing the question of "Is raganwald actually black?" But is it Hacker News? No. So there you have an example of an issue around "blackness" or "race" that is of great interest to me, but that I do not consider Hacker News.

So I say to you that you are mistaken in conflating my suggestion that this question is not Hacker News with some allegations around being disinterested in discussing race. I am interested, I just don't want to discuss it here. I accept that you consider the original question interesting. However, I reject your personal suggestions about my motivations.
Don't need specifically black role models but it would help. Just proof positive that being a programmer can be interesting and lucrative. Coming from a social anthropology background and having experienced it in grade school myself, there is an issue of "talking and acting white." Programming falls directly under that umbrella unfortunately.

Is it complete BS, absolutely. But at the core of it, we're talking about people delineating groups based on sameness and otherness which is a practice as old as there have been social structures.

It helps kids to identify with a mentor whose shoes they can envision being in directly. More important than "looking like" though is feeling a sense of kinship that comes from similar background. I'm a firm believer that we should focus on the level of privilege not color. There are all types of people coming from a disadvantaged background that need help, how do we make programming/startups attainable and "sexy?" Silicon Valley's got that down but NYC is still a "banking city"
Howrey - post mortem on a Big Law firm's death spiral