skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually, before you worry about the other resources in this comment - start with _Let's Build a Compiler_ (http://compilers.iecc.com/crenshaw/) - it'll make compilers seem much less intimidating. Follow along in Python, Ruby, Lua, whatever.

Earlier today, somebody asked about parsing. There's much overlap with my answer to that (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1820858), though I would doubly recommend getting one of the Appel books.

I'm Not A Fan of the old Dragon book. I haven't read the new one or _Engineering a Compiler_ (yet), though.

I highly recommend _Essentials of Programming Languages_, though it focuses on interpreters rather than compilers. There's a chapter at the end of the first printing (they cut it from the second and third editions, le sigh) about taking a CPS-based interpreter and turning it into a compiler, too. Very cool.

_Lisp in Small Pieces_ has good content about compiling "dynamic" languages (with a Lisp-y flavor, of course). The Rabbit and Orbit papers at http://library.readscheme.org/page8.html are good, too.

Also, since you seem to have the same quirky, self-taught background I do - I found tinkering with low-level implementations of Forth to be very helpful in understanding virtual machines. Read the source to jonesforth (http://www.annexia.org/forth) and/or write a Forth in C, it will teach you quite a bit. Also, read about Lua's virtual machine - it's small, clean, and very well engineered.
The Twitter Effect
Any particular way of bringing aggregate costs down to the individual level is arbitrary. I chose a method which illustrates the cost in simple human terms. The fact is, a $10k/year subsidy for college (note: this is roughly the subsidy for Rutgers, which I chose since I attended) is expensive. To give that subsidy to one person, a median worker must work 2500 hours.

As for earning a degree by partying for 4 years, I stand by that claim. College isn't that hard and plenty of idiots pass while learning very little. Believe me, I passed quite a few.

The fix: end subsidies for college. I don't care if you waste your money on a worthless degree, I only care if you waste mine.
Achieve.ly. I had a few people interested in using it but I took a contracting position and had to stop working on it. I have a few people waiting to use it too. I'm probably just going to open it up publicly to let the handful of people use it.

I'm also working on some client/server stuff for automated web deployments.
Sounds pretty bad ass to me. Damn, nice work.

I think it boils down to this: Do you tolerate bullshit or do you proactively stack the deck for personal advantage?

In this case you leveraged the hell out of a unique personal quirk and created an opportunity for yourself that wouldn't otherwise exist. To use a poker analogy (Thanks, Tony Hsieh), you picked the table where you knew you could win. You knew you'd do better at the college level and you exploited information asymmetry with both the college administrator and your college-level peers.

This is the very essence of how successful people and businesses work. You also showed some moxy and cunning with someone much older and more powerful than you, which is unusual at that age.

You thought many moves ahead and won, reaping huge upside. That's 98th percentile at least, man.
http://ductmail.com

Email reminder system. Dead simple. Has an mobile-client that's also easy to use. I use it all the time. It works.
I wouldn't call it horrible... I'd say it has a lot of warts.

There are some very solid bits of code out there in PHP - Wordpress and Drupal being the foremost ones I've used.

You can generally survive with the base library, which tends to have nearly everything you'd want in it - compare to Perl or others which you'll be running to modules the first time you need to process XML, do graphics manipulation, or connect to a database, and often have to bug your sysadmin to do this...

PHP is a station wagon - not sexy, but gets the job done.
Someone should double check me on this because I actually couldn't get the account to correctly activate but I think there's a POST CSRF vulnerability on the "new group" button in the profile page.
There are no jobs in this field unfortunately, especially not these days. I have 15 yrs experience in SW dev, and can't find a job now that I am suddenly unemployed. Sad truth.
Too bad I didn't see this sooner - it would have made a nice simple way to keep track of the various municipal elections happening across the country at the moment.

If this could be customized for the user's location (or per account) so that the local Toronto/Calgary/Durham/Ottawa/etc election was covered this could gain huge traction.

This is great - maybe you can push it further for the next federal election?
" I have found myself more and more dismayed by the bad behaviour of the largest corporations and their influence on the government."

Me too. That's not the issue. The issue is why anyone would suggest jail. There is a large range of actions that could be pursued to modify the incentives that lead people to make reckless gambles with credit. Why not pursue those other actions first? Why not change the financial incentives? Why resort to jail?
Hi Charlie --

Thanks for your note, very reasoned and thoughtful. I was the strategic lead from the JESS3 team and we did in fact talk with Places; hope to do something in the future, but they aren't set up to handle larger initiatives... yet :)

Don't hesitate to shoot me an email with anything further: lesliebradshaw@JESS3.com
A lot of horseshit is talked about how quickly you can type.

Fundamentally, I assert it's really pretty unlikely that your throughput at the keyboard is a limiting factor to your productivity when writing code. It certainly is limiting if you're transcribing speech to text. To code: it's doubtfully reliable as a measure unless you're Rainman or worst case "headbanger" coders who substitute knowledge of what they write for knowledge of the result of what they execute.

Remember, you could always see someone post about how lines of code produced does not equal productivity. There's a recurring post about the guy who considered productive being reducing the size of his code.

Don't get me wrong, typing is a useful skill and good on those who master it at a high level. However it's no substitute for 'working smart' for e.g. :

Writing scripts when you need to.

Knowing your editor inside out.

Knowing your SCM (of choice) well.

etc.

At best I suspect the 'don't type fast' thing just seems to be indicative of the duffers in the industry who are just sucking a paycheck out of your company. Don't let it fool you that it's a definitive metric of software competency though.
Demand payment and release the book one paragraph at a time.
I didn't suggest jail. I only suggested a stick. That stick could be in the form of fines or other financial sanctions.
Apple is not interested in advancing "Free Software", so this has nothing to do with that.
A really simple web app that lets you create and take multiple-choice quizzes:

http://koalaquiz.appspot.com/

Some friends were talking about making such a thing, and I'm tired of discussions of "hey we could do this cool thing" that ultimately go nowhere, so I just jumped in and did it.
Sure, but how many people that have money, put their money into something useful, actually?
Thank you Noel for the kind words. We had a great team and collaboration, really thankful for the opportunity.

Feel free to reach out any time: lesliebradshaw@JESS3.com
There are some very solid bits of code out there in PHP - Wordpress

Uh-oh...cue the hordes of people whining about Wordpress's security.
Unfortunate :-|

Move to a safer area.
This is true. Instead of "one machine == one person" we could adopt "one virtual machine == one person" or even "one virtual machine == one app". It's too much to ask mainstream users to understand how to do this but it's not too much to ask operating system designers to support it in a way that's deeply integrated into the OS (not something layered on top in the way we do it today) so it's transparent to the user.
Security: depending on the framework PHP makes it easier to do the wrong thing. Your web development language and framework should make it much harder to be insecure than to be secure. For netsec the other day I was writing a deliberately insecure page so my students could practice session stealing and I actually caught myself almost creating a SQL injection vulnerability.

No one is perfect but some are better than others.
http://drunsen.com (instant search), http://dealhill.com (daily deals), http://audiothink.com (narration), http://videothink.com (video editing)
Lets flip this around.

We can all agree that if we knew in 2003 - 2009 that the gory details of the occupation would come out, many of the abuses would not have happened?

So now that we know that sites like WikiLeaks will leak such information, maybe (just maybe) current and future abuses will be reduced? Isn't that a positive thing from these leaks?
More of a pain than with physical books? I've lost books I've lent... real bummer but it happens.
"Stigletz isn't suggested we should punish failure with prison."

We are talking about failure. If the gambles on derivatives had all come up 500% profitable, I think the conversation would be heading in a different direction. But the reckless financial gambles of the last few decades have ended in disaster. That is why we are now talking about jail.

For my part, I want to live in a country where people can recklessly trip into disaster, and not face any jail time. I want to live in a country that is forgiving of stupidity and failure and screwups. Tolerance of failure is essential to a dynamic economy.
On the submit page, have a way to enter the URL and see if it has already been submitted, without having to devise a clever title. Once you are satisfied it is new, you then think about a title.
>to a device he owns

that small detail is easily correctable. Like in the recent court case about reselling of Adobe software, it looks more and more like "licensed to own". Even if you still own hardware, the software inside it, like BIOS flash may happened to be just "licensed" to you.
Hey, drop me an email at zaid.farooqui at gmail and I will let you know soon as we are love!

Edit: or add yourself here: http://tekbob.wufoo.com/forms/notify-me-when-tekbobs-live/
An Android MMORPG Maker (sort of).

Blog: http://developingthedream.blogspot.com/

Temp Website: http://diastrofunk.com/
(Test credentials: mytest/mytest)

Currently working on the area editor, maybe someday it'll be good.
I bet chains like Walmart are somehow behind this if you look behind the curtains.
You may not want to believe it because your mind is made up, but: WikiLeaks did offer the US DOD the option to censor names in the documents. The fact that the DOD chose not to tells me that it is the DOD who doesn't care, and not WikiLeaks.
great catch thanks:)
Jeff Darcy on Stonebreaker and CAP
Are you saying mathematics teachers shouldn't require a degree in math in teach high school mathematics? That a student who have recently graduated is qualified enough to teach the year below him? That a business analyst would do a better job without a major in statistics? Community college adjuncts who teach math don't need anything beyond high school math classes? If not then I think you were beside the point.

University is definitely useful for at least some subset of the population.
Free Diwali Ragoli Wallpapers, 2010 Diwali Rangoli Pictures, Designs, Images
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http://bulletxt.com - take notes/outlines easily (collapse indented text).
I think you're getting it confused with "planned obsolescence". The economic term actually is artificial scarcity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_scarcity

Although the acronym Cracked uses is most definitely not the scientific one.
http://bit.ly/callbreak and http://fishinmyhead.com:3000 . It's a popular card game in Nepal, similar to Spades here. One is a rails app another Seaside.
Everything wikileaks does is not Hacker News. This is just "news."
http://digestly.com

A way for people overwhelmed by Twitter to ensure they don't miss tweets from a special someone. I use it to follow my wife.

A way for people underwhelmed by Twitter to follow someone without creating an account. My mother uses it to follow me.
> A middle class family paying a thousand dollars for one complete stranger to go to school is ridiculous sum of money, which is exactly why nobody pays that much money.

> However, the fact remains that middle class families do pay for part of the tuition of certain people (people who go to public school, and those who get federal loans). It is important to question why from time to time, so I will address your argument, and I will assume a number more realistic (I don't know what a more realistic number would be, and I'm not going to do your work for you).

So you clearly don't know what a realistic figure is, which means you obviously have no clue as to what an unrealistic figure is, yet you're highly critical of his ballpark analogy yet you can't even guesstimate to a figure within the city that the ballpark is in!

Perhaps you should ask where the original commenter is from. I grew up in the UK, the government paid for around 800GBP worth of education in night classes I took. I'm not even sure what the price tag on my 2-year certification course was but I'm sure it was a little more than a weekly Psychology and Sociology course.

As I've said before here, what pays my bills is using a hammer. At one point I was coding in HTML and PHP while I was 14 in high school, and I was pushed by every faculty member into going to university (I'm assuming to justify their own existence). I would have loved to go to university, I would have loved to have the opportunity to study psychology or ancient history, or some such... there's books for curiosity.

I use a hammer, and metal shears, and a drill. These are the basic of the basic, the most mundane objects in existence and I see dozens of intelligent, well educated people walk into a job and quit or get fired because they struggle to use them because of shitty education.

I have my woodwork and metalwork teachers to thank for a good education, one that anywhere in the world is guaranteed to pay my bills. Why is our education system set out to target self-actualization when it doesn't even teach us how to achieve our physiological needs.

First and foremost we should be teaching our children how to make money; how to work a job. Second, we should be teaching our children how to spend money; avoiding reliance on credit cards and debt traps. The aim is to improve peoples happiness, but without even teaching the basic steps on the hierarchy, it's a fruitless effort.

If more money out of my pocket would mean better education for the next generation, I'm happy to do it. I would actually love to see a generation of children told "you know it's okay to want to do carpentry, or to become a mechanic". If bashing the frivolity of higher education will get that, then I'll be happy to bash away to get a decent economy and a decent citizenry.
Yep, I'm listening. The price has been $24 for a while and I just lowered it last week. Apparently you just hit the wrong side of that timing.

If it makes you feel better I can raise it back, or for that matter drop a fiver in the mail for you :-)
I don't think the time-warp is so much the clever kid, as the fact that this is a 1970s vulnerability: an exploitable buffer overflow in a print statement. You'd think we would have solved that problem by now!
Did Facebook Just Move to Kill Off Orkut?
This is pretty much my experience of learning Python but I had had drastically less coding experience than Eric Raymond did when he learnt.
Biological weapons are easy to make. Remember Aum Shinrikyo in Japan in the 90s? Or Jonestown?
It would be a fair assumption that half the world's militaries have some sort of biological weapons. Granted, many of them won't be able to put them on missiles and launch them.

So claiming that the presence of bio-weapons in Iraq is some sort of a justification for invasion is just plain silly. If this was all that was needed, we would have invaded half the countries on this planet; many of them continue to be far worse than Iraq ever was.
http://www.squarechat.com

This is just a room so you can see others on and not just yourself
http://squarechat.com/hackernews
While true, the superuser/peon distinction falls to pieces in most family use scenarios.

The article should have been called the "Minicomputer security model" BTW, because that is what we are mostly stuck with.
Claycloud: Sharing and Executing Python Scripts in the Browser

http://claycloud.appspot.com/about
The cost of printing the book is low, and I want to encourage people to buy the paperback version if they are on the fence.

The paperback also requires an additional $3 postage, so it's actually $22 instead of $19.
http://www.SpellingThing.com/

Improve your spelling through daily practice.
Agreed. If there were no MBP there's a good chance I'd use a Vaio Z.
http://rapidsocialresponse.com - An automated response system for Twitter @mentions (not canned responses). That is, you preset a response to a specific @mention to you. I'm using Django + Python AIML at the back-end, so there's some NLP involved (although that knowledge is not needed on the for end-users).

The name is from Jeremiah Owyang's post here: http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2010/03/05/altimeter-repo...
I'm torn on the price display there, given the format unless you attract a very high quality buyer invariably the price is going to be a factor. But then if you don't have it makes it harder for the buyer.
Not sure we're talking about the same thing. Don't hardware buttons require design too?

I was probably unclear, but I meant design of the user experience, not interface chrome.
>>then I figured it was pretty cheap anyway

That's the idea. If you can't afford a $19 book you're going to have a hard time starting a software business...even a one-person operation.
Scores high on chutzpah, obviously, but it lacks the element of self-interest that I think was part of what Sam Altman was going for.
Agreed that PHP isn't terrible. Typically, it's the programmer's fault before it's the language's. Also, I agree that PHP isn't the right solution for every problem, but if you're set on using PHP for the wrong problems and need to bitch about it, see the previous sentence.

A nice discussion on why PHP DOESN'T suck: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/309300/defend-php-convinc...
How Starbucks Can Become the Barnes & Noble of E-books
Hey thanks for the feedback! What browser/OS are you on?
Should have nuked them - it worked for Japan.
this is fast becoming a myth. a lot of hosting companies are moving up. godaddy already offers php 5.3 shared hosting.
http://www.triviathing.com - Trivia game inspired by IRC trivia bots.

Very early, still needs a TON of questions, and a handful of bugfixes. But it's semi-functional, and I've played it with my friends and family for a smashing good time (until we start getting duplicates).
A First Look at Google TV: Some Sites Blocked, Some Optimized
http://cahuma.com

Get a page for your community with events, jobs, groups, members and filter everything right on the map to see what's near you. It also has live chat using websocket (done in two days with 3 other guys for railsrumble). It also integrates with facebook, twitter, gmail, linkedin and more.
On Chrome/Linux it seems that when I make the luminosity go to 0 (that is, solid black), I lose all readability half of the text...
http://www.playlookit.com === A daily scavenger hunt you play with your cell phone camera.
I don't know where this fits, but I used to hunt and peck at over 80 wpm* . I touch-type on dvorak now, I don't care about the speed (roughly same, clearly fast enough), but it feels much better than hunt-and-peck or qwerty touch typing.

* Hey, I taught myself to type as a kid, playing text adventure games and typing in BASIC programs from library books.
How is placing the blame on the wrong tool understanding the problem?
China Unveils Its Own Version of Google Earth
Corporations can be charged with crimes, anywhere. What this is suggesting is that the CEO's actually be held accountable.

Yes incorporation protects you from the fiscal results of your actions - the loss of your company should be enough of a punishment for 99% of business owners who fuck up through negligence or greed. However, when you're purposefully embezzling, tax evading and outright breaking moral, ethical and legal codes, then there should be a nice concrete cell waiting for you.

If you think fiscal immunity equates to legal and moral immunity, then you have a very distorted view of the world.

You'll go away for years for a non-violent mugging, but when you embezzle millions into offshore accounts you're given a slap on the wrist and allowed to leave the country to live in the Bahamas and not even attempt to pay your debt to the people you robbed blind.
Only vastly different programming language paradigms are comparable to different languages. PHP, Ruby and Python are all relatively the same the only real issue is being part of the 'community' of each language, if you are you understand what to use, where things are going and what not to use otherwise time is spent researching.
If you can't touch type, try switching to Dvorak or one of the keyboard layouts. You will of course have to learn the new layout, but you won't have to learn to touch type. It's so rewarding that part will happen naturally. There's no reason for your fingers to leave the home row, so they won't. It's that simple.

Note I'm not saying this because it's just that much more awesome or whatever, this is a real concrete change I experienced. I wasn't "hunt and peck" but I was all over the board and thought stodgy typing rules were silly. Right opinion, wrong reason; the rules are nonsense on a QWERTY board, but make sense with sane layouts.

Whether proficient QWERTY touch typists should switch, I don't know, but the value proposition for someone who isn't really proficient is a lot more compelling. Hunt and peck typist's brains are simply correctly reacting to the lack of utility of using the home row correctly, and if you fix that problem the rest will just flow.
Might want to note the byline:

Ray Piodasoll no longer works for NORAD in Colorado Springs, but occasionally writes articles intended to be published in April, toward the beginning of the month.
Interop returns 16 million IPv4 addresses to ARIN
Virgin Galactic eyes NASA commercial space work
To be fair, the author attended the NYC YC Q&A. I imagine that there is a dearth of programmers relative to the number of people who want to start projects over there.
Heh, just take a look at my github repos: http://github.com/samsonjs

Highlights:

* http://github.com/samsonjs/Mojo.Ext

* http://github.com/samsonjs/compiler

* http://github.com/samsonjs/elisp.js

* http://github.com/samsonjs/elschemo
I find myself wondering if there are "cheap" membranes and "better" membranes. My wife's netbook keyboard is terrible and mushy, not that it matters to her, but my Dell Studio 17's keyboard is relatively snappy and I like it. It feels like the Apple keyboards, though it doesn't have the visible separation between the keys. I mean, I suppose it could be better but it would be an awfully incremental improvement.