skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's good to know that there have been more black folks than just the one lone guy PG mentioned. I was worried for a minute.

Every black person is an individual obviously, but I think it's safe to say that most of us don't have the luxury of thinking of ourselves as "just another person", as much as we may like to. You tend to notice when you're the only black person in a mostly non-black room (just as the average white person would probably feel out of place in a mostly black event). That's been my experience in the vast majority of my life, and even though many of the most important people in my life are not black, the feeling of being the lone black representative in these situations is never really far away. All this to say that "colorblindness" sounds great in theory, but in reality, it's a privilege that not everyone has.

I think you're right that there are practical issues of when and how to collect voluntary ethnic information...but seriously, how awkward is that discussion between founders really, compared to things like equity split and job titles? It could just as well be left to the individual team members to identify or not.

But my overall point is that even if YC decides it shouldn't actively do anything about its minority imbalance (if it, in fact, exists), it would be nice to do some from an informed position, rather than a blind assumption that meritocracy is working as hoped.
Merry Christmas from built.io: Announcing our StackMob Migration Tool
I've found a couple of previous submissions of this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6964342

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6966589

I'm pretty sure there were more.
How long till the guy (your co-founder) found out about this post?
I second you on LC. It profoundly impacted my brain. Mostly for the reason you mentioned, Closures, Church Encoding[1], Y, Combinators. It's almost vacuous yet it works. I love to rewatch talks about LC in ruby or javascript (well named 'programming with nothing').

[1] I like the fact that CE'd numbers are structural, a CE 2 will apply twice another function, instead of the usual stored symbol to be read/interpreted in most systems. Reminds me of 2.times(<fun>) in ruby IIRC.
Fascinating, thanks!

We (Factual) recently moved offices but stayed in Century City because we like the locale so much. But our employees are distributed all around LA and it is a relatively central location for them. Most drive but several are switching to (dangerous) bicycling and taking the bus.
There Is A Giant Wind Farm Hiding Inside This Supertall Skyscraper
The first step (which many don't realize oddly enough) is that design is merely thoughtful solution to a problem. You're already a designer if you're a competent engineer.

The next step is identifying the tools you wish to solve problems with (of which there are several when people think ‘Designer’):

- Graphic/Visual Design: Key concepts to learn are the Layout Principles, Art Principles (Shape/Color/Contrast/Proportion), The Gestalt Principles (Continuation, Proximity, Similarity), Color theory. All of these aid a viewer/customer/user in navigation or action. DO NOT CONFUSE WITH GRAPHIC ART.

- Interaction Design: Key concepts are Goal-oriented design, personas, basic cognition etc. All of this can help you design a better transaction between a user and your project, or make a more learnable system through action. This is a pretty broad field with deep reaching repercussions if used effectively.

- User Experience Design: Very much related to the prior subjects and relies on them heavily, focuses more on the final results of the transaction and less on it’s construction/execution. Ultimately should satisfy the question, “Was the experience positive, and will they return?”

Another very important thing to realize is that each of these areas have principles, systems, tools, and patterns much like the things an engineer may already know. This is not a discipline of fluff and touchy-feely ‘creativity’ where answers are plucked from the ether or some magic hat. I feel that making that clear when I’m teaching someone new to the discipline makes the entire thing less daunting since it’s a rational process and not a talent based pursuit…

I hope this helps!
If I can program the feature from scratch in less than a day with only a simple explanation of the feature, I don't really think it should be patentable...
2014 is the year smartphones hit $20
You're replying to a throwaway account, so I doubt the poster is going to put an email address on it.

Make yourself contactable instead (e.g., an email or something similar in your profile text), and cross your fingers.
Prediction Method
data understanding -> algorithm development -> prediction
I recommend posting this thread to the kickstarter comments. It should serve to buoy the artists spirit, if nothing else.

It also looks like tolmasky has landed on an excellent compromise solution.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6968241

If he opts to do the above, ill gladly shell out for the limited edition run.
> Either you have manipulated the dev/ops team to work unreasonable hours to meet a promise to a major client that will net you alone a 20k benefit at the end of the month or ... you are going to be "just" the sales guy.

That is a failure on the dev/ops teamlead though, in my book. Outside of a technical emergency, teams shouldn't do overtime and their leads should make that happen.

If the work is too much, additional people are required. Otherwise or if no other people are acquired, the work gets done as fast as it gets done and that's apparently sufficient.

(And yes, I am aware of the abhorrent 'culture' of startups that engineers and workers are hired for N hours and expected to work for 2*N hours at least to be 'loyal' to the company)
FedoraCoin, a Dogecoin alternative
I'm learning Meteor and building a recipe site with it. So far basic features are covered and I'll continue working on UI and more advanced features in the following days.
I found most retrospectives on Alan Turing in the wake of the pardon to be dissatisfying; but not this one. This one was wonderful.
It's for two factor auth. When I log into gmail it texts me a number to type in before it lets me in. That way I can use any computer and as long as I log out no one else can log in even if they stole my password. You should use two factor auth if it's available, especially if the email account has business or financial stuff in it.
Except for the socially progressive part...
I'm fairly certain that Google in their 15+ year existence has already done what you mentioned in first paragraph.
HackDesign (https://hackdesign.org/) is an awesome resource for the developer to designer transition. They have hacker-friendly tutorials by professional designers.
They are pages with different url's pointing to the same page, without doing an actual redirect. Since url's are a big component of the keywords Google considers, doing that has been an SEO no-no for years.
Things you might have missed in 2013:

The Gates Foundation's Hypocritical Investments

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/12/gates-foundat...
Fastest way to compute the greatest common divisor
I'll reiterate what others have said here, keep notes and keep it all about the company. It isn't about how effective or overrated your co-founder is, it isn't about your relative "worth" to the company, it is all about making the company successful. Stay laser focused on that issue.

Don't talk to board about firing the co-founder, talk to the board about making the company successful. If that requires replacing the co-founder they are perfectly capable of figuring that out.
"He actually threatens the company's success if I ever try to "sneak a move" on him when in reality his contributions are near 0 for product development as well as S&M."

1) S&M? Sales and Marketing?
At some point in the comments you mentioned that he's the financial guy in your team. I assume because you're writing this on hacker news you're the product guy. So I assume you're comparing his tasks with what you do day in day out.

I started a company with three other founders 6 years ago in Berlin. We had depressing times, but also great times. I left the company a year ago to join one of our VC and after 5 years I was the first to leave.

During those 5 years, I had moments were my co-founders didn't live up to my expectations. And the other way around with me. In retrospect I even think that two of us had a burn-out during the time (which results in exactly the behavior, described in the article you've mentioned) and because we had constantly re-invent our jobs.

And during the time were we re-invent our jobs, we're not that productive - or appear not productive - for some time. Give him that time, you'll need it at some point too.

2) You've started that company with him and you've raised funds. Congratulations, because at least your investors are thinking that you are a strong team - otherwise they wouldn't have invested in the first place.

From your ask and comments it sounds like your relation with your co-founder seams to be already hostile. For the sake of your company, you have to put aside feelings and put the interest of the company in front of everything. Which means your _ego_.

get some consultancy and figure out how to communicate on a professional level.

Someone mentioned to put up goals. I assume you have some, so try to reach them. If you don't need them then there is always the option to get another co-founder - maybe a more senior person - into your company.

Good luck.
who exactly did you contact? I know that sometimes the 'Contact Us' forms can go to a CS team member, then just added to the dev queue...but if you send it directly to the CEO or to the board (if they have one) then it will be fixed very quickly.
You are correct, that is the maximum.

Here is the minimum for Aggravated Robbery (a first degree felony):

"Sec. 12.32. FIRST DEGREE FELONY PUNISHMENT. (a) An individual adjudged guilty of a felony of the first degree shall be punished by imprisonment in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice for life or for any term of not more than 99 years or less than 5 years.
(b) In addition to imprisonment, an individual adjudged guilty of a felony of the first degree may be punished by a fine not to exceed $10,000.

Acts 1973, 63rd Leg., p. 883, ch. 399, Sec. 1, eff. Jan. 1, 1974. Renumbered from Penal Code Sec. 12.31 by Acts 1973, 63rd Leg., p. 1124, ch. 426, art. 2, Sec. 2, eff. Jan. 1, 1974. Amended by Acts 1979, 66th Leg., p. 1058, ch. 488, Sec. 1, eff. Sept. 1, 1979; Acts 1993, 73rd Leg., ch. 900, Sec. 1.01, eff. Sept. 1, 1994.
Amended by:
Acts 2009, 81st Leg., R.S., Ch. 87, Sec. 25.146, eff. September 1, 2009."

I don't know about you, but 5 years seems like a pretty ridiculous risk if 6 months was on the table. That is their game. Prosecutors do not like to go to trial because juries are unpredictable. However, they have the overwhelmingly stronger bargaining position of being able to lock you up and throw away the key.

http://www.statutes.legis.state.tx.us/Docs/PE/htm/PE.12.htm
Ah, but they are -- they're on display to a person standing behind you, out of your field of vision (and thus with yet another advantage).
Not on this list is the deadly sin of disabling pinch-zoom (using the viewport meta tag). Drives me crazy, and so many popular sites still do it.
I reckon the flaw is that your bijection between N and your set of "constructable" numbers is not itself "constructable". In fact your argument can probably turned into a proof that there is no such "constructable" bijection.
Lego Fallingwater. Slowly. It's a great break from computing.

http://architecture.lego.com/en-us/products/architect/fallin...
FYI we are also working on a similar project

see: http://samsaffron.com/archive/2013/12/11/call-to-action-long...
and http://community.miniprofiler.com/t/is-ruby-fast-yet/197
Refracting and merging raindrops on glass in Javascript
I will add that the lesson that I learned from that is always get a lawyer, no matter how small the crime.
I wish he were to post something similar regarding climate change and energy developments.
AFAIK, Google IME also sends user phases to their index of popular words, but they do allow you to turn it off.
Seems like the Gates Foundation is mostly a front for a profit-seeking venture.
Oh for fuck's sake. How do you think a double-digit-billion endowment gets managed? By Bill Gates sitting around with a copy of the Wall Street Journal and a cup of coffee, picking stocks?

No. The money manager roles for the Gates Foundation are extremely serious, and extremely high-status. The guy who runs money management for the Gates Foundation was the former CFO of Merck. Presumably, managing the endowment for an organization with goals like "eradicate polio from the face of the earth in the name of Bill and Melinda Gates" is a job done with at least as much deadly seriousness as your average pension fund or university endowment, both of which are organizations that handle their money the same way.

"Hypocritical investments in Wal Mart". Sheesh.
Beyond Silicon Valley: Growing Entrepreneurship in Transitioning Economies
Yeah, Bill Gates has sure pulled the wool over all our eyes on this one.
Where did the word 'spy' come in? You criticized the labeling of Snowden as a "CIA agent". "Spy" is a different word with different meanings, not used by the article you criticized.
Eighth deadly sin: over pagination. Some particularly bad sites will break content into a ridiculous number of pages (eg page 1/12) with around a paragraph of text on each.

I'm having a hard time finding an example -- IIRC, some CBS news property used to do it -- perhaps they fixed it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6964342

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6966589

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6967225
Yep. That was a pretty conspicuous omission from his list.

That and coordinated approaches to significant problems, whether at the national or international level. I'm seeing less rather than more success at both scopes.
Load Screens
Mmmh, I'm trying really hard not to be contrarian for the sake of it but "a living saint" seems a little too strong an expression.

I mean, of course what he does is awesome and I'll probably never be in a position to do anything remotely that significant in my life but I feel it's easier to do that kind of stuff when you're that insanely rich.

That being said he could probably as easily not do it, so props to him for that. He seems like a good man, saint or not. Humans are rarely all black or all white, that's what makes us interesting.
Not a carefully-written article. When you buy stock in a public company, that company is not getting your money -- the seller of the stock is! So if you buy a Pepsi stock or a Shell stock, you are investing in that stock, but not investing in the company in a traditional sense (in which they get money from you and expect to pay out more money later, with the surplus coming from their activities).

[There is the small factor that the company usually owns some of the stock and demand for the stock usually pushes the price up slightly, the company's stock assets do benefit slightly in a case like this, but this doesn't matter unless they sell, which is a rare activity compared to general volume of investment.]

Since the article does not differentiate between stocks, bonds, and loans, it is essentially useless. I guess they didn't care enough to differentiate, and just wanted to say bad stuff about the foundation; or, maybe they just don't understand finance much at all, and didn't think about it.
I put your idea into consideration. See Image#3 at http://garyyauchan.com/sharepoint-for-emails/ . I definitely see the need only if this new Important-Email-Inbox on my app becomes very abundant with content. Then the need to filter becomes important.

There are two things I want to stay away from at that moment.

1) Calling this app I am developing as a "New Inbox", I think it would give the idea there is another source for their incoming mails. The idea is you hashtag ONLY IMPORTANT EMAILS to set yourself as a reminder, etc...

2) I would also like to avoid the Search / Filtering feature - which leads back down to the road of Gmail's Search. One of the cases for developing this app is because Search is not intelligent enough when there is a massive volume of emails.

Also I am going to re-think the idea of Flipboard as the new UI medium to become the differentiator to other email apps. Great feedback btw!
Long year with family, losses and bad news abound. For my 'celebration', I spent the last two days at a deserted lake in the desert. Was windy & cold the whole time, but it was solitude. A pair of bald eagles fished the shore by me for three hours. A coyote got bit by a heron he was sneaking up on. The ravens tried & failed to steal something... anything. I read half of "The Fractalist".

Best Xmas Ever!
Please explain what sense it would make for a gargantuan liquid fund not to try to invest profitably?
‘Tim’s Vermeer’ Trailer
"a set of Aleph-0 points can completely cover a line"

Aleph_0 is the cardinality of the integers. I don't think that'll cover a line. For that, you need the cardinality of the reals, C, which may or may not be Aleph_1.
"Tim’s Vermeer tells the story of one man’s obsession to accomplish the near impossible, and paint a Vermeer with almost no art skills what-so-ever. Along the way he may prove that one of the greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age could have used unforeseen technology advances to create some of the greatest regarded paintings of all time. And while the film is about one man’s journey, it is also an exploration of the intersection of art and technology — If Vermeer invented and used advanced technology to help create his art, was he 'cheating'? Is the art somehow less incredible knowing the process?"
I'm no fan of the idea.

The parsed source is outdated and probably will be forever because it's crowd-sourced and can't keep up with changing exhibitions and lendings of paintings, which is a common thing.

The use case where I check my phone to find a painting or an artist near me also seems far fetched. A better scenario would be to have a map with museums near me and up-to-date information what they currently exhibit. You would need better sources for that.

On the technical side it's quite slow at the moment but the blown up thumbnails (where the Athenaeum also had thumbnails for fair use reasons but in a better quality) were not nice. I would keep them in their original ratio.

I assume that this was probably more an excercise to test-drive some new tech.
Yes, that sounds reasonable. I don't know very much about the practical uses of union and intersection in SQL, though.
this is a majot fail

how to start reading a book series promisse that delivers a jpeg with a graph with some 10 entry points.

title might have been "reduce your doubts from 30 to 10 on where to start reading"

...its probably an inside joke for people that already read the books
Maybe, a 'factory' hen that eats nothing but grain might do 1/4 pound of grain. But these hens will also produce very close to 1 egg a day, or about 9 eggs for every 10 days or so.
Show HN: Weekend project, Sotokit
Coming soon to Google Glass, no doubt.
> Isn't Simeji a brand of Baidu?

Simeji was originally created by an indie dev, but then Baidu bought the app.
I wish someone was working as hard on climate change as Gates is on preventable disease in the developing works. But I do not wish that Gates worked any less diligently on the problems he's chosen. Global poverty and disease in the developing world are, particularly in the way they stifle the potential of a huge fraction of the world's people, root causes of most of our other big problems.
New MTV Artists - Bloody Heels (glam-rock)
If you read the tax return, you'll see that your statement is literally not true.
Sounds pretty harsh all round. I'm assuming this is in the US, correct?
It is the other way around. If you are doing effective altruism, you want to make sure you have money coming in that you can be altruistic with.

The bit about Walmart was especially badly done. If the author of this article thinks Walmart employees are poor on the same scale as the poor that the foundation targets, he really has no clue about world poverty. If the minimum standard of living throughout the world were equal to that of a typical Walmart employee, the world would be tremendously better off.
Eh, all of the forum spam I get is from "users" who have actually created accounts and sometimes posted halfway legit comments (it's a music theory forum, and they obviously don't know anything about theory, but post something that tries to fake it) before starting to post spam.

The best solution is removing the incentive (though I've had rel="nofollow" auto-added to all links since it was first proposed, to no avail...).
Both fair points. I guess fb just offers enough value for me that I don't mind the tracking stuff. I definitely agree it is a scumbag move to track people without their knowledge but I think it is just too easy to educate yourself about the tracking that some of the blame (at some point) should shift to the user and not the company.

Just my opinion, I'm not arguing or anything. I can definitely see why people don't like it.
There is good evidence that size is most things if not everything. We have big brains, hence we have more intelligence than chimps. We cook our food, so we don't spend all day feeding our big brains.
But, there are many wealthy people who do not give their time and money over to philanthropy.

Conversely, there are many who are not wealthy who also do lots of charity work (could be something as small as volunteering in a soup kitchen on Christmas or Thanksgiving, helping out at the local hospital, spending time at a nursing or retirement home, etc.). I know many people who fall into this category.
I don't think he's a saint. I think a lot of people on HN, given the same resources Gates has, would do substantially similar things with their lives. It seems like incredibly rewarding and important work.

I'm just really glad he chose to do it.
It's hard to invest in poverty or only in businesses with very high moral standards. I think none of the listed companies is particularly evil and they just happen to give the best return.

Discarding what Gates does just because he still thinks and invests like a businessman is a little unfair. There are plenty of charities that fail to deliver just because they are too concerned with being perfect in every little step they take. It's not like you can take all the money donated, go to Africa and "help". You need to invest, do marketing, rent offices and so on. The better it is executed, the more impact per $ donated you get.
I was once enlisted to help with an illusion a vegas magician was working on.

Everyone I talked to about it (without knowing about my role) would take a minute to think about the problem, propose a solution, and be satisfied that they had discovered the method used. In reality that method was discarded because of a dozen or so complications that made it unworkable that nobody would have thought of.

I would highly recommend that anyone interested watch the Penn and Teller british series "Fool Us." The show basically centers around magicians trying to fool seasoned professionals with new and novel methods.
I'm tempted by emacs/evil as well, but everytime I try to make the switch I run into two problems:

1) intial emacs setup: it feels really tricky to just get basic editor sanity configured (auto-indent, syntax highlighting, etc.)

2) I worry that by using evil mode, I lose out on a lot of the goodness of emacs major and minor mode's. Do you remap everything to be more vi-ish for each mode that you use? I guess that is fine but the transition just seems daunting.
I was building these days ngDialog.js - http://likeastore.github.io/ngDialog/ provider and directive for easy modal dialogs for Angular.js applications! No jQuery or any dependency needed, check it out!
Ignore the denigrations to conform. Be generous and thankful all year long and skip the retail holidays.
I'm going to assume that this is sarcastic.