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forteson Escape rooms are big business

Was just there about 10 days ago with my team! Good times, we solved it in about 45 minutes :)

forteson Number of babies born in Japan is the lowest since records began

Also lots of immigration from former colonies

forteson Ask HN: Do you use a Chromebook or Pixelbook as your primary machine?

I transitioned from a Macbook Air to the Pixel 2 and got the following at the time:

+ 16GB of RAM instead of 8GB

+ Touch screen

+ Retina display

+ USB-C charger which is the same as my phone now, having a single charger is a convenience I probably overvalue.

+ Very fast startup time

- Slightly more weight

- Severe restrictions on software used

I'm an odd duck in some of my choices though, so I wouldn't recommend my setup blindly.

forteson Ask HN: Do you use a Chromebook or Pixelbook as your primary machine?

Design work done mostly done in browser via Figma: http://www.figma.com/

Debian is strictly via CLI, I don't do any GUI apps via crouton, felt too janky and I didn't really need the overhead.

forteson Ask HN: Do you use a Chromebook or Pixelbook as your primary machine?

How did you setup ssh-agent?

forteson Ask HN: Do you use a Chromebook or Pixelbook as your primary machine?

Yes, been using it as my primary development machine for the last two years. I work on a large Node / React codebase, and occasionally do design work.

My setup:

* Chromebook Pixel 2 in dev mode

* Crouton (https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton/) running CLI-only Debian stretch

* Google's SSH app (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/secure-shell/pnhec...)

* Tmux running with NeoVim, cmus for music

My dotfiles and setup scripts are all here: https://github.com/fortes/dotfiles

Overall, I like this better than the old mac setup I have. Being in dev mode (and having to enter crouton chroot once per boot) aren't ideal, but I've gotten used to it. I'm hoping that maybe we'll get first class support soon though ( https://www.reddit.com/r/chromeos/comments/742f8j/how_chrome... )

forteson The fifty shades of Latin

As a native Portuguese speaker, it's fun to look at the dialectic continuum you can construct as you go across the Iberian peninsula.

It's imperfect, but you can travel with a very soft "language gradient": Extremaduran -> Portuguese -> Galician -> Asturian -> Castillian (Spanish) -> Valencian -> Catalan -> Aragones -> Occitan -> French ...

Each individual step is pretty easy, but it adds up to a huge difference.

Unfortunately, there isn't a great analogue for English. You can kinda construct a small jump by looking at Scots, but it ends quickly and is (at least to my ears) a jump on par with Portuguese to Galician.

forteson The Shame of Palo Alto: An Interview with Kate Downing on Affordable Housing

$5k / month definitely does not get you a nice 4 bedroom in Palo Alto. Maybe in East Palo Alto, but that is a very different place in terms of quality of life, safety, and schools.

Edit: I decided to check, and there is one place in Palo Alto right now with 4 bedrooms at that price https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/pen/apa?nh=83&max_price=...

From personal experience, as someone who was priced out of Palo Alto this year, it is rare to see a place at that price point in Palo Alto proper, and they tend to be quite run down. The one place available right now is actually in a good location and doesn't look too bad inside, so that's not a bad deal for the location.

On the other hand, you can get a great place in Seattle with views for over $1000 cheaper: https://seattle.craigslist.org/see/apa/5723972635.html

forteson Trying to interview Larry Page

+1. New Yorker is great.

forteson Silicon Valley and Black Coders: Howard University fights to join the tech boom

I disagree completely, I think that type of attitude leads to the notion of "Real" Americans. Keeping the ethnic identity is the opposite of the melting pot.

In Brazil, you're just Brazilian, regardless of color.

forteson Silicon Valley and Black Coders: Howard University fights to join the tech boom

> America is undisputedly the best country at assimililating immigrants. > It comes from doing it for centuries. We are one of the only countries with complete mixed ethnicities > and a strong nationality.

I'll dispute that. In my experience, Brazil is a better melting pot.

Anecdotal example: In Brazil, you don't see people claiming they are Irish when their families have lived in the US for generations.

forteson A New Instapaper Parser

I used to work at Flipboard, and we invested a lot in this issue. It is not easy, and requires constant (constant!) maintenance.

Getting to 80% quality isn't hard. 90% is tricky. 95% incredibly costly.

forteson Link rot and redirect madness

Been looking for something like this for a while, thanks!

forteson The Post-YC Slump

Agreed, it's like expecting someone to run a marathon at a sprinter's pace.

forteson Flipboard releases React Canvas

Congrats on the release Charles!

forteson The long and ugly tradition of treating Africa as a dirty, diseased place

A reasonable theory would be that the best, most productive areas were colonized first. The productivity / potential of those lands can have nothing to do with colonization and just be inherent to the land.

forteson Ask HN: What project would you work on if you had half a year of free time?

Interesting. Don't love the HW piece, but definitely relevant for what I want.

forteson Ask HN: What project would you work on if you had half a year of free time?

I would learn Go and help build out Bazil: http://bazil.org/

Solves a problem I've had for a long time.

forteson Beets – Command-line music manager and auto-tagger

Would LOVE a beets for books!

forteson Beets – Command-line music manager and auto-tagger

Beets is fantastic, really automates a ton of really annoying work. The author is pretty responsive with issues, and there's a growing community of contributors.

Feel free to crib off of my config file: https://github.com/fortes/dotfiles/blob/master/.config/beets...

forteson Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2014)

Yes. Mail me and I'll put you in touch with the right folks.

forteson Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2014)

Flipboard: Palo Alto primarily, but NYC, Seattle, and Vancouver are options for the right candidate. We're hiring across the board, see a partial list here: https://flipboard.com/careers/

Company is about 4 years old now, and we've raised a serious amount of capital to transform the media space.

I run our publishing platform ( https://flipboard.com/publishers/ ), which we're investing in heavily this year in order to scale from hundreds of publishers to thousands and beyond.

Our stack is a mix of Python, Java, and Node.js (with some Go, C++, and Scala here and there as well).

One of our big challenges in this space is ingesting content from all over the Internet and normalizing it into something sane that can be displayed beautifully across all devices via algorithmic design. We use APIs, RSS, screen scraping, and midichlorians to get articles, images, videos, you name it. If you've dabbled in this space before, you know that it's a tough problem to get right. I'd argue we're best in class right now, but there's tons of room for improvement and we've only just begun.

If any of this sounds interesting, get in touch with me: My user name @ Flipboard

forteson Yes, the Wealthy Can Be Deserving

Sigh, why do these articles always conveniently ignore payroll taxes?

forteson Help me bring Black Girls Code to Brooklyn - I'm matching the first $5K

Also, there are plenty of non-black people who were born in Africa.

forteson Behind The Scenes At Homejoy, A Cleaning Startup That's Really A Tech Company

I really wanted to like Homejoy, as they're much more affordable than Exec cleaning. I used them once and had a good experience. However, my wife booked w/ them three times, and each time Homejoy was a no-show.

Hopefully they work out the kinks.

forteson Tom Preston-Werner: Development of Jekyll to be revived in 2013

Well, it looks like Jekyll finally supports fenced code blocks (added in RedCarpet 2) ... my wait is over: https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll/commit/098da3d3fa5b2946afc...

forteson Tom Preston-Werner: Development of Jekyll to be revived in 2013

This is fantastic news. I use Jekyll for many things, but was getting sick of it not supporting fenced code blocks in Markdown.

So I made the classic mistake and built a Node.js Jekyll clone -- there are a few other static site generators in Node, but none used the exact same file structure as Jekyll (unless I missed some, which is entirely possible).

It now handles most Jekyll sites I've tested, including Mojombo's:

https://github.com/fortes/enfield

`npm install -g enfield`

Supports plugins as well. Patches welcome!

forteson Steven Sinofsky to Leave Microsoft

Forstall and Sinofsky were both running the OS for Apple and MSFT, respectively. Andy Rubin runs Android at Google.

forteson Can Technology Redefine Detroit?

Out of curiosity -- what makes Detroit special (aside from cost)? Why would Detroit be a better choice for Tech than other 2nd tier centers?

forteson Facebook acquires Karma

Some other coverage:

http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/18/facebook-acquires-karma/

http://gigaom.com/2012/05/18/facebook-buys-karma-app/

http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2012/05/18/facebook-not-busy-enou...