skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Every wonder why "Droid Does"? Because Android code is written in Java, the most popular and most commonly taught programming language in the world. That means every coder and his grandmother can write code for an Android phone, since they already know the language, and they can likely write the majority of their app without even getting the Android developer tools (everything except the graphical components)."

So then wouldn't we expect to find very little code written for iPhone? At the time the iPhone SDK launched, pretty much the only people using Objective-C and Cocoa were Mac programmers. The fast majority of people who went on the produce iPhone apps had to start by learning a new language--one very different from any language they were likely to already know.
OK, I'll take one for the community. My new name:

Edward '); DROP TABLE YouthfulIndiscretions;--

In less than 1 minute, all your worries will be gone :)

(compulsory xkcd reference: http://xkcd.com/327/)

[ASIDE: Normally, I don't post references to jokes, but with Eric Schmidt these days, it's sometimes hard to tell which is the real post and which is the joke.]
I am a 23 year old small software co owner. I have 3 children and am married. My wife just lost her job with servicemagic.com and I have taken on a great deal of a load. One of my web apps we are building www.Registr8.com got put on hold while being ranked in the top 10 of the submissions to David Cohen's TechStars because of the sacrifices I have to make financially to take care of my family. Nothings more beautiful then my family, so I'm not complaining. Although it will not stop me from building my small company and our web applications.

I will put up a wordpress website that advertises giving 10 non-profit organizations a free website. They will need to explain why a website would help and expand their initiatives. We will post the organizations and allow the public to vote on the orgs. The top 10 voted for after 1 month will receive the free websites. :-) I love helping and giving. Sometimes when the load is too heavy, sometimes you have to give a little to lighten it up and move forward. :-)
Really slick UI and wonderful idea. But I think you are filling a hole in Dropbox.
Blaise Pascal: I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter.

(There are several variants on WikiQuotes,)
Less than 7 hours of sleep impacts ability to form strong memories
digggin theeeese fonntttssss
"Stack discipline is not a compiler thing, but an Algol thing."

That's an absurd statement. That's like saying "text" is simply one representation of a program. While technically true, it covers a wide enough portion of the space that its interesting to anyone writing real programs.

Furthermore, I'd say it has more to do with what you're targeting, rather than the source language. In any case, it captures such a wide space, it's naive to think that it's just a detail.

And I'm not sure what compilers you've written, but modern compilers... even less modern compilers, like gcc, use IRs for more than simply that -- unless your definition for binding is exceptionally wide. And even the most primitive compilers use the IR for control flow. Some use it for modeling all possible control flow. Others to capture data flow.

Unless your goal is to write an HP 48S calculator or reimplement Scheme, I think you'll need a fair bit more than SICP.
Did you see the article? Then you saw the font...
For me, it failed to identify either alpha or beta. Not that I care, since I can type the symbols faster than I can take my fingers off the keyboard to mess around with a pointing device.
I remember one of my favorite philosophy professors talking about the various philosophers' ideas of "first philosophy", where first philosophy meant which philosophy is the root of all other philosophy (e.g. for Aristotle it is Metaphysics). Midway through the lecture the professor finally said something along the lines of "...this is nice and all, but what really should be first philosophy is figuring out a way to live in this world such that you can concern yourself with philosophy at all." I agree.
Or how about parents give their children throwaway names that they use until they grow up (whatever age that may be), then switch to their real adult names.
We feel like there are quite a few differentiating factors.
One small example: Miso and Tunerfish are very check-in centric. The interactions on Moki are more focused around deep discussions and posts.
It isn't the corporate size that is the issue, it is the size of the patent portfolio that IBM has. I would not doubt IBM's response to any of your scenarios is to find 10 or so patents key to Oracle's database software and file a patent infringement case.

I don't think we are underestimating Oracle, we are just given IBM their due.
The original was a fake; this followup is grossly unnecessary. http://boingboing.net/2010/08/10/hopa-girl-is-obvious.html
What you're asking is, basically, "How do I continue my CS education?" Consider getting a Master's in CS. If you do it full-time, it will take about two years. Since you know what you'd like to learn, you can check schools to see what kinds of graduate courses they offer. How much prior exposure you need to areas depends on the course itself - not just where you're taking it but who is teaching it.

This is not your only option, and many other commenters have presented alternatives.

Regarding student loans, my understanding is that once you're a full-time student again, payment is again deferred. This might even be true if you're a part time student - I recall a Master's student saying she didn't have to make loan payments even when she enrolled in a community college course, but check to make sure that's correct.
I never really understood why Oracle forked RH into their own distro, but from this now I can see - it was to essentially demonstrate the cessation of their support of RedHat (given that LE was claiming in the FT piece that Oracle was supporting/helping RedHat at the time) by giving them a little kick in nuts.

I think the customers that bought up Oracle Linux were the kind of dumb sheep customers who'll buy anything a vendor pushes them (yes, there are many of those out there).

Informed customers not happy with RHEL licensing and support simply swap out to CentOS.

It's an interesting examination of customer behavior in fact.
Site looks nice. I had start up in this space before. There is a lot more competition now then there was 3 years ago. We were going a bit further with full caption searching, episode finders, reminders, etc. We were trying to raise capital to cover expenses (mostly for hardware do process close captions and for the tv schedule.)

We had a cool product that worked but ran out of cash. We were just starting to gain traction when we had to shut it down. I'm assuming you are going for advertising as the business model?

You can license data from IMDB at a decent cost if you want/need to pull in more data into your own system. You can also link out to them as a poor man's version to make more content available to your users.
It wouldn't be forced information disclosure if it is not forced. This seems like a straightforward, solvable interaction design problem to me.
Having Fun Isn't Always the Point (Game Mechanics)
RIM probably thought there was prior art too.
Thanks. Yeah, we are definitely filling a gap, the same way a Twitter client supplements the Twitter platform or an email program supplements the email protocol. Dropbox has strong potential as a platform player over the next couple of years. It's the best cloud storage system there is, and we're hoping apps like ours and the efforts Dropbox is putting into mobile will make it more useful to more people.
For me, the answer is: I like programming. If I did my own thing, I'd have to do all that other non-programming crap, too. Suddenly I wouldn't be a programmer anymore. Meh.
The USSR had a decisive role not only in defeating Germany and Japan, but also in shaping the very outburst of the war. E.g., Pearl Harbor was arguably a consequence of the battle of Khalkin-Gol:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battles_of_Khalkhin_Gol#Afterma...

And Hitler would have never invaded Poland if it wasn't for the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pact...
with Oracle it's more like bundling free code with very expensive not free code and then supporting the whole package

Sure but that's called a 'solution' (sorry for the enterprise corp dev speak). Most FOSS projects don't solve a customer's problem in their own right and larger customers want to buy into solutions not disparate projects that they then have to put together and maintain.

These customers don't see it as X amount of free code and Y amount of 'very expensive not free code'. They just see the sum of X+Y and a price point.

To use a completely left-field expression for this context: don't hate the player, hate the game.
Tone is not that important. Each dialect of Mandarin has its own set of tones, but they can understand each other most of the time. Most non-natives don't follow tones altogether.

For the Chinese, getting the tones right usually means you are not a country bumpkin, which can sometimes affect your job prospect, but if you are a foreigner they don't care.

Chinese has fairly minimalistic and consistent grammar. If you don't take the tones too seriously, it should be one of the easier spoken languages to learn.

>wouldn't you rather become literate by learning 26-30 symbols than by learning thousands of symbols?

It's 214 radicals, here's the list:

http://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/radicals.php

Native speakers only memorize a few of the simple radicals, most of the rest come to you through osmosis. After learning some characters you begin to see the pattern. Each radical has a specific placement in a character, so you can usually "spell out" a character by listing the radicals.

One important difference between English and Chinese is that English is something everyone expects you to know. Knowing Chinese on the other hand will get you mad street cred if you are a non-native.
Life After YC @ SXSW
genius url localhost://

Real URL : http://blog.wekeroad.com/microsoft/your-compiler-just-isnt-t...
I make my living in corporate IT, but have been trying to get a software product development company off the ground on a moonlighting basis for several years which has been very difficult due to the lack of precious focused time that such a venture requires. With little revenue to speak of from my entrepreneurial side venture, there is no budget for a conference such as Business of Software and I am certain that the subject matter will help me amplify my entrepreneurial plans and productivity; being in the presence of so many kindred software entrepreneurs will undoubtedly inspire me and help me throw off the soul-numbing shackles of corporate life.

If I win this conference pass, I will pay the good deed forward by continuing to provide free technical and online marketing consulting assistance to non-profit organizations, which I currently do thanks to the NPower program (which matches IT volunteers with non-profit organizations).
If the OP hasn't read Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs yet, that would be a great one. It takes you all the way from adding numbers together to writing a compiler for a virtual machine. There's a reason it's a classic. Also, it's online:

http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-4.html
Some initial observations --

Very clean interface. Kudos to that. So far navigation feels great and is intuitive.

I like where you're going witht the medal system, though I would prefer if I could get a glimpse into what is required to earn medals. Some people, like me, will spend extra time with your site if we can see the goal we're trying to achieve.

Browse is pretty overwhelming with the amount of shows on one page. Maybe poll the user to figure out what they like and condense the list down. You may want to divide it into pages as well. Of course you can keep a 'show me everything' button, but I just wouldn't make that the first thing I see.

Briefly describe yourself is 100 characters. I'd like a counter or a visual cue for when I go over. (otherwise it just chops off my text).

It looks like when you 'heart' something, you can't take the heart back. For misclicks sake, I'd allow unhearting.

Like sajithw said, I'd like more information about the show. People in it, pictures, etc. Could scrub wikipedia or imdb for most of this info.

Good job! Keep it up!
But wouldn't it be more fun programming on YOUR terms, not your employer/boss' terms? Even if that meant you had to spend a bit more time managing your business?
It's time for the baked-in Android UI to die
Holy crap, that looks horrible! We'll work on it. Thank you so much for the screenshot.
I don't buy it. I'm sure it played a role in Japan's eventual surrender, but I don't think it was as pivotal as it's being made out to be. The Japanese knew full well the limitations of the Soviet's naval and air capabilities, and they knew that the Soviet's had zero chance of mounting an invasion of their home islands was extremely limited. Whereas they knew first hand the threat the US/UK forces posed through the experience of loss of many territories (including Japanese home territory), air raids, and naval blockades. Faced with the option of losing all their territorial advances in China and Korea and then having to cope with ineffectual air and naval attacks from the Soviets, I think Japan would have been ok with playing that game out as long as possible.

In contrast, the Japanese knew they were almost certainly doomed if the US/UK had the conviction to press home their invasion of the home islands. They thought they could play for time by upping the ante through conscripting the entire population and fighting to the death in the ultimate scorched Earth policy. They thought they could raise the stakes enough to make a negotiated surrender an option, or stretch out the war long enough for some magical degree of luck to fall their way (e.g. Truman, a freshly minted president, making different choices than FDR, or a kamikaze run becoming super lucky and taking out an admiral or two and several key aircraft carriers, that sort of thing). The use of the atomic bombs made it clear that the US was not only willing to slaughter the Japanese as much as was necessary to get an unconditional surrender, but they could do so far more easily and rapidly than they had been doing prior (which was such that it would have brought about the annihilation by bombing of all major cities in Japan and the starvation of the entire population of Japan within the next year or two by mid 1945). Given that, they knew the game was up and let go of their last bit of denial that they could get lucky and eke out anything other than wholesale surrender.

The Soviets may have killed several tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers in Manchuria, but I doubt this weighed more heavily on the Japanese than the routine losses of soldiers and civilians they were taking from the US/UK forces (which amounted to tens of thousands per day, on average) on their doorstep and on their home islands.
Great summary of the pertinent differences for a founder.
If you go in there, don't forget to wear your critical thinking cap, some goggles, and hip-waders. You're going to need them.
Now, where did I read that???
Programs like Y Combinator have garnered much attention in the media. Many of the startups are highlighted and critiqued upon launch, but how do these programs fare over time? What lessons have graduates of Y Combinator learned in a post-Y Combinator world? How do they turn ideas into real businesses? Help vote on this panel to hear answers to these questions!
The corruption I've seen isn't actual corruption as it isn't inhibiting the proper processes, however a lot of the government officials seem to be prone to 'doing favors' in receipt of something. I've seen this in the UK and Canada, but France seems to be more accepting of it.
Masters in Computer Science, an option? 
I recently graduated from university with a degree in economics. In my last year I had the chance to do a couple computer science classes and really enjoyed it. I've heard some programs don't require extensive experience in CPSC prior to the masters program. My undergrad GPA wasn't great just 3.0 first few years, final year was 3.5. Is pursuing a graduate degree is this area even an option?
Memory Corruption Attacks. The (almost) complete history..
"stack layout"

At this point you've already gone off the rails, because you've implicitly accepted that a compiler is "something that emits machine code".

The reason why compilers should be a required course is that people need to realize that compilers that emit machine code are nothing more than a special case of compilers. A very interesting and important one for both practical and historical reasons, but a special case nonetheless. The problem with this definition is that then people think that it's not a big deal that they don't understand compiler theory because it's just for the guys writing gcc and stuff. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. A compiler is a basic tool in the computer science toolchest and I tend to agree that if you don't get them you shouldn't call yourself a Programmer with a capital P. The definition Steve gives is much more accurate.
"No, seriously, a @#$% goldmine! Never in modern history has it been so easy to create something from scratch, with little or no capital and a marketing model that is limited only by your imagination."

ie, high supply. Lots of competition.

It's getting to be like writing novels. Lots of people do it. The barriers to entry are low. But few can make a living at it.
As someone who's trying to sort through the frequently-conflicting information out there on health and diet, I found a lot of this article interesting, though I felt sometimes like the author was trying to sell me something more than he was trying to educate me.

Then this caught my attention:

> Address your emotional challenges. I particularly love the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) for stress management.

Curious about what that was, I googled it and ended up getting an overview from wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_Freedom_Technique):

> Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) is a form of alternative psychotherapy that purports to manipulate the body's energy field by tapping on acupuncture points while a specific traumatic memory is focused on, in order to alleviate a psychological problem.

Further reading makes that technique appear more and more pseudoscientific to me. I realize that advocating pseudoscience in one respect doesn't mean he's advocating it in another, but it does not engender trust.

Edit: more on this author: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Mercola http://www.quackwatch.com/11Ind/mercola.html
Why do you want to lean compiler design (or any of the other topics you mention)? Are they directly related to your job/career path or just hypothetical areas of interest?

I have no college education and no formal CS training and I've done fine in the industry (12 year in it). I learned to program C at 13 from books and I learn what I need that is relevant from the internet and code samples. Stuff like compiler design which would purely be theoretical for me I don't let it bother me.

(I mean, at an abstract level I can work out how my code is converted into machine code/byte code but I couldn't write a paper on it).

Wouldn't it be worth spending the study time on learning the bleeding edge of development instead, like node.js or map-reduce if you are going to self-study?
I don't think that was a conscious decision of the Western Allies, but rather a consequence of the freedom of the press. Gruesome stuff was quickly exposed to public reaction:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_mutilation_of_Japanese...
That's strange, given that a lot of people get out of their steady jobs because they're frustrated with how little time they have to code between meetings, random co-workers interrupting them, etc.

I guess you work in an environment where that's kept to a minimum.
Robots now have emotions
Not just a new processor architecture but also the new software tool chains and operating system ports needed?

I suppose we're faster at doing the latter along with everything else, but it's generally taken quite some time to get the latter in place and solid.
Yeah, I, uh, kinda said exactly that.
>Despite the death toll from the atomic bombings — 140,000 in Hiroshima, 80,000 in Nagasaki the Imperial Military Command believed it could hold out against an Allied invasion if it retained control of Manchuria and Korea, which provided Japan with the resources for war, according to Hasegawa and Terry Charman, a historian of World War II at London's Imperial War Museum.

My understanding is it was not the US's intent to invade mainland Japan. After taking strings of Pacific Islands from the Japanese, ending with the Iwo Jima bloodbath, I thought it was decided to drop nukes on Japan till they surrendered, instead of invading them (one, to spare American lives, and two to scare the Soviets).

I'm sure that the Soviet army pushing the Japanese out of resource-rich Manchuria would have played a key role in Japan's eventual surrender had the atomic bomb never been invented, but saying that "The Soviet entry into the war played a much greater role than the atomic bombs in inducing Japan to surrender" is a bit of a stretch.

The Soviets may have cut off Manchuria, but Japan still had resources from Korea. And the Soviet Army was separated from the Japanese mainland by sea as well, where they would have been particularly vulnerable had they tried to cross and invade. Compared to the US razing entire mainland Japanese cities with a single bomb, at will... Sorry, don't buy it.
This will change the monetization of the web as we know it
For me, the answer is that the large organization I'm working for actually lets me have a larger impact than I could likely have working on my own.

So long as my debit card keeps working and I keep building up savings, the quantity of compensation doesn't matter too much to me. What matters to me is how much I positively impact the world, and on that front improving a mature product with a ton of users has a much bigger bang for the buck than scratching small itches in small niches, no matter how profitable they might end up being.
$50k a year in salary doesnt sound like enough to send your kids to college with their tuition paid for. Being able to do that enables them to not have to worry about student loans and decades of debt after they graduate. IMHO, that is something to strive for.
Slightly OT observation - but nobody uses handles anymore. I feel positively archaic that my email addresses are still handles instead of my real name.
Regarding student loans, my understanding is that once you're a full-time student again, payment is again deferred. This might even be true if you're a part time student

This is correct, at least for Federal student loans in the US (Stafford, Direct, Perkins). So long as you are attending at a half-time basis or more, your loan payments are deferred. Interest does accrue during these deferrals. However, if your undergrad loans were subsidized when they were originally taken out, the government pays the interest while you're back in school so your total indebtedness won't go up.

See the table toward the bottom of this page:

http://studentaid.ed.gov/students/publications/student_guide...
Concur. Those lower corners have serifs on the first two and gaps on the third.
HuffPo bills itself as "the internet newspaper" but it's really an internet tabloid, and their health and living stories doubly so.
This is always a great option, and actually I'm looking to go the other way. I studied a whole lot of computer science during undergrad and feel I missed out on other disciplines.

I'm taking a course in creative writing on my employer's dime this fall, and hoping to try out an intro course in a couple languages over the next few years too.