skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The files are here: http://src.chromium.org/svn/trunk/src/chrome/browser/downloa...

drag_download_file.cc: http://src.chromium.org/svn/trunk/src/chrome/browser/downloa...

drag_download_file.h: http://src.chromium.org/svn/trunk/src/chrome/browser/downloa...

drag_download_util.cc: http://src.chromium.org/svn/trunk/src/chrome/browser/downloa...

drag_download_util.h: ttp://src.chromium.org/svn/trunk/src/chrome/browser/download/drag_download_util.h
It seems like the most fundamental difference between VCs and Super Angels is that VCs have more checks and balances (and overhead) surrounding where they invest their money. With Super Angels, one person makes the final decision. For making $50 million bets, checks and balances seem like a good thing. For making $500,000 bets, perhaps one (very competent) person is the better approach.

Some of the appeal of the VCs and their checks and balances may be for reassuring the LPs investing in the VC fund, rather than with its actual effectiveness in improving investment decisions. As Super Angels invest larger and larger sums, perhaps we'll see to what extent the VC approach is (or is not) needed when large sums of money are involved.
Chitika: Bing Passes Yahoo In Search Market Share
This tutorial walks you through writing a compiler for a tiny subset of scheme (programs consisting entirely of a single integer) and incrementally grows that into a proper language. It's very good, and I highly recommend working your way through it:

http://scheme2006.cs.uchicago.edu/11-ghuloum.pdf
Hmmm. Here's a problem that I'm going to end up building a solution to if someone else doesn't do it first (and by all means, please do it because I am lazy and have enough projects to last me for the foreseeable future):

A CRUD application generator. You go to a page and define all of your models and basic rules. The models get defined in very simple terms - you give each model a name, and then define each field with dropdowns that define what each field is. If it's a foreign key, you select that in the dropdown. You can select validation for each field from a catalog of validations (phone number, email address, string min length of 5 chars, whatever).

Offer addins for commonly needed functionality - for example, I end up using authentication in just about every project and end up having to do a lot of work to get it up and running. So you could have plugins like authentication, private messaging (which would require auth automatically), a ticket system, whatever.

Also offer the ability to choose a theme before generating a project.

So a user can go to a site, define their models, add any addins they want and pick a theme.

Then in the final step, they choose a language and framework they want everything generated in: Python / Django, Ruby on Rails 2.3.x, Ruby on Rails 3.x, Python / Pylons, Scala / Lift, ASP.Net MVC; whatever templates you've gotten built.

When it's done, they get a compressed file (zip or tar.gz) that contains the generated application and some programatically created documentation that explains where everything is, how to change the important parts and how to deploy it.

There are lots of ways to make money with something like this:

* Charge for addins per project

* Charge for premium themes

* Charge a small amount per project (I like this option the least)

* Provide automatic hosting a la Heroku for projects - this would let people with a basic idea but no programming chops get something up in an hour or two instead of trying to find someone to explore the idea with them. For this you'd want to limit it to a subset of frameworks so that you don't have to have a lot of different production environments.

* Use a fremium model where people can generate x number of apps a month for free, but over that limitation charge some amount per month. People will try to get around this by registering with multiple email addresses if the product is good, but that's a great problem to have!

Although it sounds like you're probably somewhat freed from a profit motive while you're building this, which helps significantly. From a dev perspective it would be fun to learn enough about all the major frameworks to generate sites in them.
Make CSS3 buttons that are extremely fancy
Implementation: Engineering A Compiler. Heavily focused on optimizing compilers for register machines.

Theory: Essentials of Programming Languages.

A Good Start: Programming Languages Application and Interpretation (Free online :-)

http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Books/ProgLangs/
I don't know what to tell you other than if you deliberately write clunky code, you'll have trouble understanding and maintaining it. Passing typeglobs around isn't modern Perl; it hasn't been necessary for over a decade (to be specific, it hasn't been necessary since 22 March 2000).

... and I know Steve and I like Steve, but I wouldn't take medical advice from him either for much the same reason.
The Unix Programming Environment by Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike has an excellent introduction to lex and yacc in it. Following along with this gave me an idea of how languages get parsed and turned into code, and you can work though the whole chapter in a day or two.

It's like 90% of the practical knowledge of what a compiler does that I've ever needed to know for day-to-day coding.
From the comma in the title, I thought the article was about recognizing money isn't a guarantee of happiness. As in, "Say, "Fuck you" to money itself. And instead focus on living life (and running a company) that doesn't rely on a purely materialistic metric of success."

Sadly, that's not what the article was about.
I like this idea, but if you use this approach I would be worried about the value diminishing for the person who gets to go. They might get consumed trying to be a short-term reporter and miss out on getting the full experience of the conference. Also, a lot of bootstrappers may not necessarily be as articulate with words and handy with a video camera as you.

However, it would be a different story if the free tickets were going to people that are associated with some sort of media/publishing company (update: meant to say such as austintechgeeks.com). In that case you could get these individuals to do live coverage of the event in exchange for a ticket. Something like a "live blog" that Gizmodo does for big events. These individuals would have the skills needed to effectively cover the event and allow all of us at home to feel like we are a part of the live event. We wouldn't get the benefit of the networking experience, but at least we would maybe get a chance to participate real-time. Also, these individuals would hopefully be talking about it on their own publishing sites and broaden the reach of the conference - making it stronger for the years to come.
$629,483

http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl
1. I most definitely agree and was the approach I took to my professor when I met with him, but he needs a solid idea to start with to make sure that we don't do five half-assed things throughout the semester and end up with nothing to show

2. The Sponsor organization (my team) gets all the rights to the products as is described in the proposal documentation "The sponsoring organization retains the rights to the resulting software. Also, sponsors may require students to sign non-disclosure agreements, as long as the agreements"
If you're interested in improving your skills and you read HN a lot, you're probably saying to yourself: 1. I wish I could improve my Lisp and 2. I wish I knew more about compilers.

Read Norvig's "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming." It proceeds through various early AI problems, which are good motivation. It shows how to solve some of them directly, then moves on to solving them with interpreters for DSLs, and finally shows how to speed up those solutions through compilation. The problem-specific portion of the code gradually gets smaller, more powerful, and faster.
Looks good. I like diagram on the front page explaining things, but change the font for the text. It looks a bit sloppy. Also increase the font size a bit to optimize the size for the boxes.

One thing I don't see is a price list. How do you plan on making a business out of this? Monthly subscription on top of dropbox?
I experience the same.
This talk of swings and home runs leads me to a comparison.

Could it be that we're looking at a Sabermetric/Moneyball shift in thinking? One of the most counter-intuitive parts of the sabermetric approach is to focus on avoiding outs rather than getting hits. A player that gets on base 40% of the time and hits 10 home runs/year is more valuable than one who gets on base 30% of the time and hits 25 home runs/year. In a full season, the second batter will generate ~70 additional outs (enough to fill 2.5 entire games!)

What if a V.C. decided to avoid "outs" at all costs? What if they managed their portfolios not to avoid losing money rather than to swing for the fences? If they could keep their write-offs around 50%, then 3x and 5x returns become money makers and the occasional 10x return becomes a home run.
> Since they were run by engineers, they made their ads text.

As much a I like to think "us engineers" are smarter, that's still a pure business decision. Just a better one.

Neither short-sightedness nor vision are the exclusive domain of suits or engineers.
They call it the "Dragon Book". Compilers by Alfred Aho. It's supposedly THE standard for compiler design.
Readability is subjective. Python code frustrates me because I can't tell when blocks end; for some reason, my mind ignores horizontal whitespace in the same way that other people can't understand sigils.

Python has long had a huge advantage with its REPL; the Perl 5 debugger is clunky and difficult to use and, despite some heroic refactorings, still a mess.

Perl 5 lifted Python's OO model. That's why both languages have an explicit self and why neither language makes a strong distinction between functions and methods. A method is merely a function installed into a namespace and somehow invoked as a method.

As for Perl 6, most of everything good that's happened in Perl 5 over the past several years has roots in Perl 6. I'm not claiming that without Perl 6 these things wouldn't have happened, merely that they did as a direct result of Perl 6. This includes the book Perl Best Practices and the Perl testing renaissance.
There were very few UI designers at the time and almost no usability people on the web at all. The fact that they were doing these studies at all is something to be lauded and helped pave the way for the UX professionals we see today.
Hitchens talking about his life and death on Charlie Rose
Better copyright it!
The Unix-way of compiler construction is convoluted, difficult and verbose. Any Lisp book will teach you more about compiler construction in the first two chapters than you can learn from entire texts on the subject that use Lex and Yacc.

Chapter 8, at a more leisurely pace, and far more in-depth:

http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Books/ProgLangs/
You can make money from free software (according to RMS), you just can't restrict usage and exercise of rights. It amounts to what LE is saying -- sell the support. If Oracle includes GPL software, then they have to make the software that embeds it GPL as well. Apache is different.
I know several people who have made FU money (several millions). From my observations, their lives are not much different from the rest of us.

Who a person marries, how fulfilling the days (work or non-work) are seems to matter more than pure amount of money.

Time is limited and never enough. Money is not.
> ... or else I default into the standard class and must take a project from the industry.

What about if, instead of speculating on a business idea to implement in isolation, you found some of these industry partners, and asked them to describe something they need desperately and would pay for? If you can't do that before your proposal is due, make that research your proposal -- get familiar with the process of gathering needs and learning about a market. Deploy your team on iterating implementations, from paper sketch to running system. If you can get a customer or two to sign a non-binding letter of intent saying they'll buy your product if it does X,Y, and Z, you'll have accomplished something that's beyond most startup-oriented hackers.
I've spent 20 years working on various compilers, yet I still don't think it's a big deal. Undergrads just need to work on any type of large systems project: OS, compilers, distributed systems, DBs, whatever. The problem with the compilers/programming languages field is that every idiot with a computer has an opinion. It's frustrating that popular languages are arguing about features that have been analyzed in depth 20+ years ago, e.g. closures really are the greatest thing ever and should be in any modern language.
Compilers is a huge topic. Think a topic the size of databases, with way less visibility.

The Dragon book is probably the best introductory text. The new version that came out a few years ago actually did improve the original text a fair bit. Although there is a lack of discussion about SSA in the text.

While most compiler books spend most of the text talking about the front-end of the compiler the crazy interesting stuff is in the backend. The new Dragon book greatly improves here over the old one, but I'd also recommend two other texts:

1) Morgan, Building an Optimizing Compiler -- some people love the writing style. Others hate it, but the material is solid.
2) Muchnick, Advanced Compiler Design and Implementation -- Great book. Must read if you're serious about optimizations.
Playfish's Valadares on Intuition Versus Metrics: 'Make Your Own Decisions'
Asus plans Android tablet for March, announces Eee Pad tablet pricing
"wage slave" is a pretty well-known, long-standing term for someone that works for another. It's not intended to be depreciating towards those enslaved, it's attacking the idea of using your labor to enrich someone else's life rather than your own.

Now, you may disagree with that, and that's fine...
Eh, as someone who hacks on compilers (both my own, and JITs in PyPy and Unladen Swallow) I've been reading the dragon book, but I don't really care for it, it's a little too academic IMO.
Awesome app...:):)

Just the one I was looking for...I may not brush my teeth some days but I never fail to use dropbox everyday to send stuff in the shared folder....:)...

Neat UI....Clean and nice overlay....Jus lovin it:)

Just one question, what about the upload rate and the number of servers u are running it on...????
China now world's second biggest economy
Everyone knows their native language best.

If you lay apart the expletives, the poster said that Chinese realize their language is hard to pick up for foreigners. So their strategy seems to be learning English instead of holding their breath for rest of the world learning Mandarin. Do you disagree with this assessment?

If you do, where exactly? Do you suggest that all languages and writing systems are equally easy to learn as a second language? If not, do you consider Mandarin to be easier or as easy to learn as English?

I, for one, find Mandarin damn hard to learn (doing it my first year), and the script is indeed the toughest part. While I find it visually elegant, it is fairly irregular, prompting for massive amount of drill and memorization in learning. (I knew two other foreign languages and two natively before approaching Mandarin, so I have some perspective here). Many people seem to share such experience, i.e. people reliably find Chinese hard.

Oh, and I found where from that reference to the heavenly script stuck in my head: http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
Hulu IPO: Major test for Internet TV business
An augmented reality app for furniture stores. The store would include something like QR codes in their catalog which shoppers can cut out and tape on their wall or place on the floor. Then the app renders 3d versions of the product when viewed through a phone.

It'd be pretty awesome to see how a chair or painting would look in a room by getting a live rendering of the object actually in the room.
Interesting story - but did anyone else find this headline non-sensical? How can corruption generate a percent of GDP?

I'm guessing they meant 50% of GDP is in black markets, or that 50% of business expenses go to bribing people.
I agree that the font sizze may have to be increased....But the font is neat and has a nice appeal...Pls don't change it
I started out there too, but it felt like there was always just one more bug to fix and then everything would be okay. After half a dozen "one more" bugs, I scraped it and started over.

I've been using my redis client in production for a few months with no problems. If you find yourself getting stuck with erldis, give it a try.
The 32-bit problem is going to be solved, and a lot sooner than 2 years from now.
why not hire a salesperson and pay via commission?
That makes sense ... but of course even then, what would the total be? $300, $500, $1,000/mo? None of those numbers are exceptionally large are they? For a company the size of Kellogg's, et al?
Model package management:
It's a dirty kludge. Not documented (last time I've checked), I had to search hard to get it right.

You must edit models/__init__.py such that:

import X from Y

...and then each model must have

class Meta:
app_label = 'foobar'

Without the meta information Django cannot load the models inside the package, it imports only models.py.

May be it should be automated (model loader)?
For instance, the model loader could parse the directory tree and import all necessary info it needs(meta information, optional), all is needed is a function for it :-/

edit: Format, gramer :)

edit2:
Phah! OK. I'm gonna do it. Automatic model loader function, Django extension :) (May be next week...)
IOS 4 purportedly references CDMA iPhone 4, next-gen iPa
If they got paid $2MM that year, they’d want $4MM. Pay them $10MM, and they’d hanker for $50MM.

That's a spurious comparison, because these guys aren't motivated by "buying stuff". Sure they do buy stuff, but for them, money is about keeping score, like who's scored the most goals in a football team.
I think decorators are a bit different than for loops but I get your gist :)

I think this article is fine for HN for a few reasons:

1. Not all python programmers know about decorators and they might not be sufficiently motivated to search them out.

2. Decorators do not have obvious utility after reading python's manual.

3. HN commentary is usually more interesting than the article and the submitter might have wanted to spark some debate on the utility of them.

4. This answer is a good example of a well written(mostly, there were some grammatical errors but overall good) through explanation that was succinct without being too succinct and leaving out important details.
Agree 100% with you and that is exactly what I am doing right now. I am currently developing a prototype and interviewing potential clients to make sure my product will solve some of their problems. I am interested in YC because of all the benefits that offers besides the extra cash, the interaction with other startups, the help incorporating the business, the momentum it can give your startup, etc... Thanks.
Ask HN: What if I missed the good stuff in my undergraduate education?
I was reading Steve Yegge's recent post on learning about compilers, and, as I'm sure is true for many HN visitors, the post resonated with me in a couple of unsettling ways. I have my undergraduate degree already, but my education did not include AI, OS, compilers, distributed computing or algorithm design. (That's what I get for going to a hippy liberal arts college.) It wasn't as bad as what Yegge described as a "Java certification program," since I came out of it knowing a lot of real-world skills like version control and command line use. However, I still consider the lack of things like compiler construction to be unacceptable gaps in my skillset.

Two problems: I have a full-time job and student loans now. I can't really do the undergraduate schooling thing all over again.

What's the best way to pick up these skills post-undergraduate degree? Should I take night classes at a graduate school, or will those curricula assume prior familiarity with the subjects I'm trying to learn? I already purchased "The Unix Programming Environment" since it seems to have some good basic information about lex and yacc, but is just the tip of the iceberg. There's only so much one can learn through years of Googling and reading the odd Hacker News post. What are my options, really?
As an introductory text, it reads more like a summary of journal articles.

However, I would recommend chapter 2, which builds a complete compiler for a very simple language (arithmetic expressions). In the first edition, that did it in C, and it's very simple and clear. In the second edition, they did it in Java, and making it object-oriented makes it much less clear. I therefore recommend the 1st ed (plus, the hand-drawn dragon on the cover looks much better than the purple cgi dragon on the 2nd ed.)
If you're willing to go without Python/Ruby, then a hosted Drupal (and it's trove of modules) is perfect for this. Acquia (which includes Drupal's founder) was founded to fill this space.
Hmm,

A purist might mention that one would like more than bare safety from a platform. If you start using OpenJDK for, say, desktop applications, you wind-up restricted from switching JVMs, adapting a Java JVM for mobile applications and so-forth. IE, you "have less freedom".
The logic Steve uses, while true, fails to appreciate the benefit of selective ignorance.

It's possible to reason effectively about a system without understanding the turtles all the way down, as long as you understand the limitations of the abstraction you are reasoning in, which is possible to do w/o dissecting turtles.

I'd further argue that the "scientist vs engineer" personality distinction is applicable here. The scientist is concerned with solving the primary problem, while the engineer is concerned with optimizing all the turtles.

Take a physicist using Mathematica... does she need to know how compilers work to effectively do cutting edge work with the tool? No. So why is any other programming langage any different (unless you're amused by dissecting turtles).
Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery.
None but ourselves can free our minds.

Bob Marley

EDIT: Based on a speech by Marcus Garvey
Seems like a good, although niche, idea.

Out of curiosity - were the files you needed from clients PDFs that required signatures? That seems to be the primary use case. There are some interesting startups around this area, but I haven't seen someone nail it 100% yet.
I usually leave a terminal window with Devel::REPL up, often with DBIx::Class running (an ORM and yet another Modern Perl module). Excellent for prototyping with a database and great alternative to normal SQL command line interface.
Wow. Thanks for the thread. http://videolectures.net for highly academic content regarding Machine Learning, Statistics and other Computer Science subjects.
Photos of stuff the same distance from the WTC as the “Ground Zero Mosque”
Money is a funny thing.

First you want it so that you could do whatever it is that you really want to do. Then when you have eventually got the money, you're likely to be in a position where money is no longer the priority—but rather the priority is what you really want to do. Sure, you take the money, you have the money, and you value the money's worth but it's not the thing that's driving you.