skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm interested, but I'm not moving to SF until October. I'll message you my email in case you get a late start or want to try to meet around then.

I took a compilers course in college but I was too busy to get as much out of it as I wanted. I've always wanted to go back over that stuff and I've been wanting to learn more about the innards of Python, so I was hoping to combine the two.
Last few novels I've read, in reverse chronological order:

- Past Imperative, Present Tense, and Future Imperfect by Dave Duncan. (Trilogy.)

- Foreigner, Invader, Inheritor, by C.J. Cherryh. (First three books of an ongoing series; rereads.)

- Babylon Babies, by Maurice Dantec. This doesn't really count, since I gave up halfway through--the translation is horrible.

I'm currently reading Vellum, by Hal Duncan.

I have, I think, about 5-6 more books on my to-read pile at the moment, and I could triple that with a visit to the bookstore. (I'm avoiding visiting the bookstore because my budget would not appreciate the experience.)

As you can see, I mostly read SF. This list is a bit unusual, in that it includes a number of books from the same series; I usually mix things up more than this.

It's true that I read books that many wouldn't take the time to read. I don't think that's because those books are less interesting; I think it's because most people have much less interest in reading than I do, and therefore are satisfied with fewer books.

It seems to me that you're formulating an argument where I have lower standards than people who read less--that people who read few books stick to the cream of the crop, while people like myself who read more are willing to read inferior works as well. As a counterargument, I submit Dan Brown, an author who produces (from my perspective) works of such execrable quality that only a person with little awareness of how good books can be would waste their time on him.

To shift arenas: Consider two people. One of them eats nothing but steak and potatoes. The other is Anthony Bourdain, the host of the Travel channel's "No Reservations". Would it be correct to say that the reason the former eats such a smaller variety of food is that there's a lack of truly good food that lives up to the standards of the almighty steak and potatoes?

Of course not. We'd say that Mr. Steak & Potatoes just doesn't like food as much as Bourdain. (In general; he likes his steak just fine, and there's nothing wrong with that.)

Or to take myself as an example: I don't watch much television. Is the problem that there's just a lack of really good television out there, and I'd watch more if someone started producing more good shows like The Wire? Well, no. The problem is that I just don't like television all that much, and would rather spend my leisure time on other activities like books, video games, and programming. There are already plenty of TV shows that I'm certain I'd enjoy...if I had time to watch them.

So, no, I don't think that people in general would read more if only there were more good novels being written. There are plenty of good novels out there.
I'm not sure if you're attempting to imply that I'm an uninvolved father, but I do appreciate you snipping the context for the quote you chose.
That is such a disaster for free / ad supported apps.
What kind of posts would you like to read instead?
Man, I hate traveling. I can understand the appeal of a spartan lifestyle, but I can't understand the appeal of not knowing where your head is going to rest tonight.
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It took the longest time to get the iTunes store in New Zealand.

I imagine once they had it set up for music, video, etc, adding in support for paid apps was relatively simple.
"But that's _everything_ worth doing"

Emphatically, NO!, it isn't. If the only thing worth being in your worldview is the equivalent of Jimi Hendrix, you are setting yourself up for disappointment, and you have a small view of your fellow man.

There are thousands of ways to make a living that are not as competitive or as risky as entrepreneurship--and far less zero-sum too.

The global impact of a job well-done is but one measure. Perhaps an even more important one is the attitude with which you approach your work and the meaning you make for yourself.
Shuttleworth definitely blogs about some compelling ubuntu stuff - but seriously needs to add some visuals.
When a company is that big, people can push their own richard stallman mini projects through like that.
Quirky.com - the Threadless of product design
This is the real issue. There are two reasons why I don't think there are many target customers:

1. Most computationally intensive tasks require a bunch of supporting software/data. There are few tasks that can be easily reduced to a few KB of JS running on someone's computer.

2. Privacy. Most people that need lots of computation want to use it to work on their own data (drug companies, financial trading algorithms, NSA/CIA, etc), and they're not going to want some random person seeing even a limited set of their data.
We're definitely considering that once we're satisfied with how the current flow works.
Guidebooks, smartphone map search, a prepaid cellphone & SIM and planning a day or two ahead solves all of that! Also staying more than one day. A few of these people aren't long term nomads although, they're more freeloaders or bums. The first guy has an apartment!
Doesn't Google already have a way to remit money to adsense partners across the world?
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10072682-94.html

quote

"One difference the mobile phone industry might well find appealing: Apple keeps the remaining revenue, but Google gives it to wireless service carriers, minus billing settlement fees."
To your second point, in some circumstances you can force someone with bipolar disorder to take a drug (Washington v. Harper) and you can force someone with a mental illness to take medication to make them competent to stand trial (Sell v. US).
I can see a market for "anonymous data". Stuff you want to crunch, but not necessarily quickly, but cheaply. I could see uses for spam filters, research, search engines like Google. It might work and is at least likely to be profitable if bootstrapped tightly. Not sold on it being a game changer yet however.
I haven't found any Android apps worth buying. I look through the paid apps section now and again and it seems to be very utility-centirc. I'm not going to pay for a backup tool, file manager, ROM manager, over-clocking utility, task manager, etc. Of course you don't have to. The free versions of these apps are good enough. Then you have an assortment of weather apps, alarm clocks, etc. Again stuff that just doesn't justify even 99 cents to me. I don't keep up on exchange rates so I generally won't buy anything that's listed in Euros because I'm not sure if it's worth it or not. For games the #1 game, Robo Defense, doesn't even have a screenshot so there's absolutely no chance I will buy it. 2 of the other apps in the top 5 are emulators that will require me to go find ROMs. The Android market just kind of feels like a bad Windows shareware site to me. It's lacking instant gratification.
"Even more importantly, it's hard to imagine the US matching the degree of Japanese, German and Soviet atrocities against POW's and occupied territories during the war. Souvenir taking against policy is one thing--deliberate plundering, torture, murder, and rape as policy is quite another."

Care to point out any instance of any order to do any of the things listed issued in any branch of the military in any of the countries you mention? I mean I know most Americans view everyone else as drooling, barbaric apes, but you seem to be an expert on the US media in WWII (https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intellig...), so I assume you can point out some specifics of why they are drooling, barbaric apes.
This is an excellent article, from a researcher who knows what he's talking about (Thurston is a Fields medalist). Section 6 begins on the page numbered 173.
Berkeley has a pretty good programming-languages program; a friend of mine has been working on parallelizing CSS rendering: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~lmeyerov/#activities
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Twitter's front-end is still Rails.
lol, sadly it's an actual screenshot from my phone. I'm lucky to get a bar or two.
Unfortunately if I counted my time I would be in the hole about 4-6k right now.
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My point was, why bother, when you can use a language that doesn't need to be fixed in the first place?

Because I'd rather have to add on Moose (something I can fix while remaining compatible with other libraries) than use a language in which variables automagically spring into existence (which I can't fix).

Worse than that, while I'm sure that new Python 2 classes and metaclasses allow someone to write a better object system for Python, no one would ever use it.

Thus my main non-syntactic gripe with Python is that the things I most want fixed either I can't fix and still have Python or no one in the Python community would ever support, because of the peer pressure to hew to one obvious way to do things.
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Yes, but not only is the performance art version funnier, but I might get a pencil out of it.

Of course, knowing me I will promptly break the pencil and then I'll be heartbroken.

What I need to do is go into business selling inert-gas-filled hand-blown glass ampules to store your artisanally-sharpened pencil in, so that it retains its sharpness until long after you are dead. I am an authentic solid state physicist with an authentic lab coat and goggles, after all, so I have ample qualifications in scientific pencil preservation.
The US tapped an undersea Soviet cable in the 1970s:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells
Reading the comments on the blog it becomes clear that people's opinions are most likely generated by their jobs. If they create stuff (engineer or designer) they value others who also create stuff. If they are a money person (business or sales) they seem to value others with the same skill set. I suppose the ultimate is to see the value in each skill set.
Author:

>To achieve these effects, I needed a small truckload of CSS

You:

>Once the standards go final and the browsers get compliant implementations, the vendor prefixes will go away.

So the implementation is excessively long, temporary, and to be changed to something more standards compliant at a later date. Seems like the definition of "ugly hack" to me.

And I'm not talking about supporting an outdated browser like IE6 here. I'm talking about a browser whose public releases support more "pure CSS3" than both Gecko and WebKit.
Thanks for that, do you remember where you read it?

Feels a bit strange to ask you to remember a book/article about memory but sounds like a great read.
No one said "everything is a compiler"; jerf and I listed particular applications, by name. That's hardly "everything".

And no one if offering you hangman as an example either.

I think you're exactly the type of people I was referring to as those who mystify compilation, in your case for the sake of unspecified native code generation ideal.

If you're solving a data processing and translation problem, and find your solution fitting a parse, validate, translate model. Using well known compilation techniques. I would say you're writing a compiler. Regardless of whether the output is native code, assembly, C, XML, byte-code, display transformations, or in-memory side-effects.
"Then you can create a file, write to it, and close it, all in one line. The closing is implicit, of course; it happens right away as soon as there are no more references to the file. Because, obviously, nothing else would make sense."

This behavior isn't even guaranteed in CPython (and never has been as far as I know). There's a problem with deterministic destructors and refcounting: if there's a reference cycle, which destructor gets called first?

import weakref
import gc

class Something(object):
def __init__(self, other):
self.other = other

def __del__(self):
print '__del__ called!'

s1 = Something(None)
s2 = Something(s1)
s1.other = s2
del s1
del s2
gc.collect()
print gc.garbage

Even the cyclic garbage collector won't pick this up. These kinds of issues come up more and more if you rely on python's __del__ methods (aka destructors). The solution? Quit complaining and just use a with block. It isn't that bad.
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If you and a friend exchange certificates, TLS protects you from most governments, including US domestic law enforcement.

If you and a friend set it up, tcpcrypt protects you from people who don't know to MITM TCP connections.
> This is why your bank doesn't let you make withdrawals from your account on port 80.

It doesn't matter that my bank doesn't allow withdrawals on port 80 as long as a MitM allows that, and you can't guard against that unless you train users to expect CA-signed SSL sites for things like that.

> You need to keep re-reading [...]

I've already read that and replied to it at: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1609818

> The HTTP connection isn't lying to you about how secure it is.

A non-CA HTTPS connection isn't lying to me, it's purely a matter of implementation how you treat that sort of thing. You seem to think that certification and encryption are inseparable, they aren't.

You can have SSL encryption presuming that you're talking to a known-good party, while also having the ability to initiate connections to CA-signed parties.

> [...] There is collateral damage.

Yes, but there's no need for it. Browers can decide how they present SSL, if they consistently present a big "You're secure" banner when talking to CA+SSL sites and users get used to that when transferring money they'll spot that something's up when it's missing.
Thanks, we're looking into it.
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That's true, there are quite a few dice rolling apps out there. This was my first time coding in objective-c so I wanted to keep the app concept simple yet still related to D&D.

I've started looking into the magazine ads and related websites recently although the minimum spend might require me to wait for a month or two since I want to try and keep this business completely self-funded.
I was a full-time programmer. The job I was in was draining my energy and programming became really boring. While I had the job, I worked on the side developing websites. I also had a bunch of pet-projects for fun - hopefully people will use them and I can earn more money. But fast forward a few years, programming wasn't fun anymore. I was too tired to finish my projects.

So, I quit my job and moved to a non-programming job. The pay as of now, is not that high, but I am happier. The job is fairly easy on the brain. That means less stress and I have more time to think while I am at home coding my personal project.

Maybe my programming job sucked or it was something else. I could go on like this until I finish my personal project.
Well, actually, I think startup founders actually need this kind of slight delusion. In my more rational moments, I think my ideas suck, my plans are hollow and I'm going to be a wage slave for the rest of my life because of my obligations. I look at the mountain of obstacles ahead and think, "No way that can ever be moved. Learn to be content. Life is such." But the other voice inside me always chimes in later with, "But you're different. You can move mountains. That isn't even a mountain anyway. Put your will to it, and it will shatter. KEEP GOING."

I am sure that there are people out there who can look at a mountain, see a molehill, and stomp it flat. I'm just not sure I am one of them. But I do think that if you want to start a business, you need the arrogance to at least act like you believe you are, because conventional wisdom says, to borrow your analogy, that you will lose at that lottery. So I think it does take some arrogance and self-delusion to believe that somehow you will beat that lottery and emerge a winner. If you don't, why the hell are you playing?
On Github there's a version of the Zerb buttons that's pure CSS. I haven't tried it in IE, but it looks good on Safari and Firefox: http://github.com/gr2m/awesome-buttons.
Actually the exchange rates are quite good.

But many (not all!) banks will charge a fee (1- 3%) on top of that.
I think it is fair to say that our definition of compilers and even languages is different.

I think we also disagree about the point of definitions. I think they're to make communication clearer. Not to motivate people to do something. I think there are better ways of doing that than to obfuscate definitions, which generally have well understood industry and academic meaning.

But I think these are things we'll just have to agree to disagree about... I just hope your definition of "agree" and "disagree" are the same as mine. :-)
Well, you wouldn't be able to find them anyway, thanks to the Great Barrier Firewall. :(
While i was on my long term trip I found it quite unproductive trying to find that stable internet connection, and a new place to explore provided much more of a distraction than home. Do find travelling decreases your productivity?
Another point worths mentioning is the recurring, bogus argument about GC, non-determinism and comparison with malloc. If you think malloc is any more deterministic than gc, you are kidding yourself: think about what happens when malloc gives you a block that contains pages which will be pulled from disk when you access them. When you want to program something which has low, guaranteed latency, you locks your pages in memory, and you never calls malloc in that thread.
Thanks for the helpful suggestions, I'm looking into them now. The 0.99 sale sound like a good idea to test the waters. I tried to price it on the low end compared to most of the competition.
No, not really. In fairness, a lot of old Wired articles were also really bad.
don't we need to be concerned about the quality of the javascript running in the users browser?
It seems it doesn't take much for most browsers to get bogged down, so is selling cycles processed with javascript seems less than ideal.
Vaccines are not an entirely personal choice. Many children can't be vaccinated due to an allergic reaction, and some vaccines require a series of injections before immunity is acquired. What saves them is herd immunity. Enough people have chosen not to vaccinate that herd immunity is being lost and these kids are at risk. What about their right to life?
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http://www.freetechbooks.com/compiler-design-and-constructio... contains links to a bunch of open source books on the topic of compilers. Enjoy.
"Forum traffic, unless it's very targeted to a specific niche, does NOT convert well. You won't get a good CPM no matter what."

No, I'm talking about informational and news/blog sites that have hundreds or thousands of subtopics. They can get excellent CPMs with Adsense.

"That said, you will still do better with ad sales people even if you're selling general, untargeted inventory, especially if you're selling to brand advertisers."

No that's not true, unless you have a big enough company to support a lot of salespeople and really high untargeted traffic -- which is not most startups. (That's why I mentioned in my original reply that it partly depends on your traffic.)

"you're wrong about how banner buys work"

No I'm not wrong. First, I'm not interested in developing an app to sell low CPM banners. Low CPM means you are untargeted--I'm targeted. Second, the vast majorty of people on this site and doing startup do not have boatloads (100s of thousands of pageviews per day) to justify the type of ad buying your are recommending. They don't have the time nor overhead capacity to hire a staff of salespeople. Nor, do they need the headache of managing them.

They would be better of with Adsense.

"As for Demand Media, you're wrong about how banner buys work."

Actually Demand Media does both -- they are using Google Adsense, its lower on the page often integrated into the articles.
It's an evolution of the post web 2.0/37 signals design era. Or as I call it the 1-3-1 design style. I can't believe people are already forgetting this and the youngsters are growing up without knowing it.

And don't waste our time with the old "A/B tested: BS. Not many startups actually do A/B testing. They just read a few articles written by other famous startup founders who did do the real work and/or tech bloggers who report on said work and apply the findings to their own sites.

My advice; look beyond the (now aging and classic) 1-3-1 and develop your own style. Of course this would require having a real designer involved at your startup which some founders miss when looking for engineering staff.
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I just think that compilers generate programs or program fragments. Nothing mistifying about it. I really do think my definition is the mainstream.

I just draw a distinction between using techniques common in compilers vs actual compilers. I agree those things that Jerf listed may use techniques common in compilers, call them compilation techniques, but I still don't think they're compilers. I dont' think that makes them bad programs, but they're not compilers. And frankly, I think even those who the community deems as expert would say the same thing. They may use some compilation technologies, but they're not compilers.
Is that the reason why Braid is such a fantastic game? Unfortunately, we'll never know.
Sounds like the ubiquitous opportunistic encryption that was a goal of FreeS/WAN.

http://www.freeswan.org/ 2004/03/01

FreeS/WAN is no longer in active development. Although we've created a solid IPsec implentation widely used to construct Virtual Private Networks, the project's major goal, ubiquitous Opportunistic Encryption, is unlikely to be reached given its current level of community support.
I thought this blog was going to elucidate on "fuck you, money" but it just reverted down to "fuck you money." The comma makes all the difference in the world. Really, disappointing.
Oh bloody hell, this isn't a problem with the Apple or Google app stores, it's a problem with the ridiculous censorship regime itself.
Java was an innovative language when it came out. But future proofing byte-code put a very tight lid on innovation (resulting in generics hampered by type erasure, for example) and the language has very much stagnated at the same time many other languages have innovated like crazy.
I have a feeling that must have been some kind of product placement. I've rarely seen anybody in Korea not on Daum or Naver.
"You're a chef, so why don't you start your own restaurant?"

"You're a mechanic, so why don't you start your own garage?"

"You're a retail manager, so why don't you start your own store?"

Ad absurdum. But yes, add "entrepreneurial" to any of those and they become perfectly valid questions.

But then it really just comes down to "You're entrepreneurially inclined, so why don't you start your own business?"