skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't claim that this is the only way to learn how to write compilers, it's just one surprisingly effective way.

And I actually think skill in generalised, simple, macro-type compilers is more useful, generally, than knowing the ins and outs of optimizing compilers, but that's just me.

For the sake of discussion, what are some of the important things for optimizing compilers that you can't do with this approach? I'm having trouble finding any -- both in a literal sense of possibility, and from a practical standpoint.
This is absolutely not true. A lot of great work has been done in the past decade on interpreters and speeding them up. Modern interpreters are just compilers where you use the code immediately (most are direct threaded byte-code interpreters), so all that work counts.

It is strange that modern software engineering en masse took such a huge step backwards in the C++ era of the late 80's and early 90's, with tools falling back to primitive levels and languages becoming much less forgiving. It's only now that we're finally returning to the state of the art from 20 years ago.

Of course, some people bucked the trend and used these somewhat neglected technologies despite a lack of public popularity. Paul Graham is one of them, and he ended up doing pretty well for himself. :)
This example will make a good lead-in for any argument to abolish the FCC or other regulators. When encountering passages like, "Within a few years of the FCC's Carterfone decision, America had become a motley world of funny receivers, slick switch boxes, and rickety answering machines," always my question is "What would the world be like now if we had gotten a few years head start on such development?"
Yes, Linux is monolithic. MacOS X is a micro-kernel, but I believe the BSD stuff runs in kernel space, so it's effectively a monolithic kernel with a nice layered design. I think NT is somewhere between OS X and Linux. The article was terrible.
Why don't you make it free and make $ on the affiliate revenue?
While I think what you're proposing is the ideal, the question becomes, what are the tasks that can be reasonably done in e.g. a week? Would the average "good" employee finish them in 20 hours? 30? 40? That's why I think there should be a guideline in the number of hours.
I'm sorry, but I strongly disagree. Lisp's problems are not technical, they're social. We have a commercial-grade open-source lisp compiler. It's SBCL. And we have really excellent models for tools. If someone would extract SLIME from emacs and into an editor with less history behind it and more popular appeal, you'd have most of the tools you need.

Lisp is suffering because its community is fragmented and it has no leaders. Name a popular language that doesn't have an iconic corporation or person behind it, rallying and focusing the community? That condition is actually quite rare.
NSA Red Team Hacks Network Security
they all have more than one child
Everything you said is true by my experience being involved in open source projects.

Another reason to do open source: it gives you a better chance of being able to work on something you enjoy because it connects you with like-minded people in the industry.

I think every programmer should be involved in some open source project. In most cases, a resume doesn't tell you much about someone's coding skills and real contributions, and technical interviews have many flaws in determining someone's qualifications. Only by looking at someone's code can you actually get a sense of their abilities.

It's much more interesting to interview someone who has done open source projects. You don't need to waste time figuring out if he or she can reverse a linked list. You can dive straight into more advanced topics.

I'm not sure about finding a cofounder though. I wouldn't feel comfortable partnering with someone if I hadn't gotten to know them by working closely with them.
There are deep difference with fundamentalist Islam, which is a relatively small minority of all Muslims in the West. In the US, we have the same deep differences with fundamentalist Christians. It the "fundamentalism" that is the problem, but it comes and goes in history.
I've sometimes wondered how I would have turned out if I had gone to a typical American highschool - my HS experience was so different I have trouble relating to this essay, tv shows with high schools etc.

My high school was uber-immigrant (I'd estimate about 5-10% of the kids were born in Canada, everyone else being a first-gen immigrant), and groups were divided primarily by grade, then by ethnicity, religion and regionality, then by activity (drama, music, sport, math etc) so it was almost impossible to form cliques, judge cross-group popularity etc. But it wasn't that bad either, it was actually pretty easy to move within groups - got to know people through playing music, through volleyball, hanging out with the other eastern europeans etc.
It's time for the camouflage to get updated.
The reason why there is so much Emacs/vi debate is because both editors are quite powerful! From what I have seen, both are very good editors. If you already know vim really well, then you won't benefit editor-wise from learning Emacs. If you want a portable operating system/programming environment within an OS, then Emacs offers a lot more than vi does.
"I think nearly everything that's wrong in schools can be explained by the lack of any external force pushing them to be good. They don't compete with one another, except in sports (at which they do become good)."

~70% of kids quit sports entirely before entering HS, and the vast majority of HS teams aren't even remotely good. Even on the best teams in the country, the ones that consistently get athletes recruited by top colleges and send guys to the jr. national team, the majority of the guys on the roster will still be mediocre at best.

All of the evidence (c.f. Alfie Kohn) seems to suggest that competition would only make education worse. But even if you wanted to reinterpret the data, looking to athletics as a model of success would be a mistake.
China is run by what seems to me to be effectively a 'board of directors', these men are too old to have been affected by those policies.
When I say old, I'm talking OLD too. We think John McCain is old.
By Chinese standards he would be just getting to the point where they MIGHT let him have a say in who the next president is.
Seriously, these guys are so old it is RIDICULOUS.
Their presidential elections work something like this:

-Small number of, seriously old, think in the 90 year old range, guys get together and decide they've had it with the 70 year old president.
China's economy is only growing at 10% a year, or something ridiculous like that.
Their stock exchanges only offer up surges in the 40-50% range per year, and GOSH DARNIT!!
'How long can the shareholders be reasonably expected to tolerate such pitiful returns?' They lament.
'China's future is at stake!!!'
'That means our CHILDREN are at stake!!!'
'Why they may even have to clean their own toilets!!!'
'Won't someone think of the CHILDREN!!!'

-To address this crisis in the portfolios of the Chinese people . . .
er . . . I mean . . .
crisis in the leadership of the Chinese people.
They have found some spritely, dynamic, new young blood, by young I mean 60, and they say he is the new guy in charge.

-All the leaders of the communist party, being obedient mentees of these old guys, sing the new guy's praises, elect him president, and the old guy goes home.
(Only not really . . . see he'll BE one of those old guys now, so he'll ALWAYS have some influence)

Bit of an oversimplification, but not much.
When I first studied this I thought, 'man this sounds JUST like the process of a board of directors'.
But if the rest of the world wants to call it a political system, who am I to question?
Fine, it's a political system.

An interesting test might be to try to get China to do what we want another way.
Let's forget about armies, and navies, and Taiwan, and democracy, and demonstrations.
Let's try causing a blip in their quarterly results.
I'd imagine the speed with which change would come would make our heads spin.
That's just my theory though.
Ah. I got the impression that people were complaining that the rest of us can't leverage existing tools.

Git's simplicity and pile-of-tools approach, along with daily use of the tool and prodigious debug output, strike me as exactly the sorts of things that minimize the need for bug tracking. If there's a bug in my own statistical code, for example, I usually know about it from the debug output. If that works for the Git developers, fucking awesome.

However, just because Linus doesn't use a bug tracker, doesn't mean that the big shops (RedHat for example) don't pick up the slack. I think Linus is a flawed example ;-)
"They're controlled by the local school board, which consists of car dealers who were high school football players, instead of some national Ministry of Education run by PhDs."

You know what those PhDs look like Paul? They remind people of the "Nerds" that had trouble settling in. They remind people of misfits. They also remind people of the "guy who know it all but can't make a good decision".

My Business professor told me once: "The Business school taught students how to make decisions". That is something that separates business students and science students. Science students argue (too much) based on science in which sometime not applicable or whatnot while Business students make a decision.

PS: I'm from CS background.
Let's see how they fare in the coming cool-down eh?

I have an OpenTable account and they are nice even if you don't regularly reserve tables through the service -- you can get a very good idea of how ridiculously inaccessible a 'hot' restaurant in Los Angeles is, for example. (1 month out? 1 week out? 1 day out?)
SBCL: is it as good as Allegro? I haven't seen an IDE as beautiful and comfortable to work with as Allegro (although I'm barely a Lisp hacker, just a fan).
You're probably right, it's probably more about intelligence than consciousness (I haven't read it for a long time).

Anyway, it's certainly not about machine translation.
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And Tanjansu can cook! Modules are available for 16 varieties of Chinese, Japanese and McDonald's cuisine.

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I may be underestimating macros but I can't imagine any optimization technique that can be done with them when generating low-level output, be it native or virtual machine code. Can you demonstrate (just theoretically, of course) copy propagation, removing loop invariants, automatic inlining of functions, to name a few?
I am not sure if you have ever flown over the United States... it is mostly empty land. It is not depleted. I happen to live in San Diego, we happen to have thousands of new people moving in every day from Mexico. So if you are not going to use it, it looks like others will.
Remember though that the human brain came to exist through the processes of random mutation and natural selection.

You _could_ make an airplane by taking a car, making random changes and selecting those that fly the best, but I doubt anyone would have the patience to be successful at this method. You'd probably be better off hiring some engineers.
NDAs are unnecessary because ideas are worthless
At my high school, the first Friday the 13th is the unofficial Freshman Day where they pick on the Freshman. As a new Freshman, I was even more scrawny and way less confident back then but when I walked past the cafeteria, I overheard a bunch of jocks/seniors hanging out (behind me) say "C'mon. He's got to be a freshman" - I walked past with my head up confidently and didn't look back. I didn't get picked on that day - other people I knew who were of my build were thrown in trash cans, etc.

High school sucks. But then you graduate. High school is a geographic coincidence.
Disgusting. Imagine how much better off we'd be if there wasn't a need to spend that kind of money to preemptively ward off lawsuits from patent leeches. If the big boys are this worried about the current patent situation, how many smaller companies never even get off the ground due to it?

Is the possibility of a patent lawsuit a factor in the decision of which startups to extend YC offers to?
Or, one possible way to prepare for some big future war is to facilitate a surplus of young single men.
And that should apply equally well to different kinds of "hot" and "cold" war.
The essay doesn't need to hit all the points on the popularity-nerdiness curve to be true overall. A lot of people do relate to this essay, even if you didn't have that sort of experience. Maybe you just weren't "nerdy enough". There's plenty of non-nerdy smart people.

I stopped being picked on by the end of middle school, and even had a neutral or positive reputation in HS, but I can still totally relate to Paul's essay. I hated high school and middle school. People think I'm joking when I describe it as a "jail". But HS wasn't so bad socially for me -- my group of friends were more "outsiders" and not "unpopular", and we did things like publishing an underground newspaper and pulling pranks. My friends and my computer were the only reason HS was bearable.

EDIT: Paul addresses your objection in the "I knew smart kids who weren't nerds" section of http://paulgraham.com/renerds.html
I was reading the comments on PG's original essay a week ago and was struck by how a lot of the comments show that PG is reaching a wide audience of high schoolers who know nothing about HN but stumbled across his essay and identify with it.

http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
Most employers say they require a degree in the job description. It's a lie. I've yet to see any employer turn down a qualified candidate because he/she didn't have a college degree.

And while parents probably aren't capable of homeschooling their kids through college, unless said kids end up at one of the few top colleges for their field in the country, they might be better off learning the material on their own and using the extra time and money to socialize with other interesting individuals.
amazing. You made my morning
I'm not sure that's true. Right now I am working on GNU CLISP with bindings to Oracle and a GUI (via Ltk). Sure it's not trivial, but it's not impossible either.
To be truly smart, you need to develop both sides, both skill sets.

There is something in what you say, but I think this goes too far. Think about some of the people you're claiming aren't truly smart.
In the words of a dot-com-bubble-bursting-era letter from a teacher in response to a dot-commer saying he'd just get a job teaching (as a fall-back): "Good luck!". Teaching is hard and it's keeping qualified teachers teaching that is a problem.

I remember reading an article in Time magazine "Why Teachers Hate Parents" (2005). I was fairly shocked back then to read why teachers hate their job: Parents. The article was helpfully blog-copied; it is a good read, even though it probably uses more extreme examples of "helicopter parents"

"Ask teachers about the best part of their job, and most will say how much they love working with kids. Ask them about the most demanding part, and they will say dealing with parents. In fact, a new study finds that of all the challenges they face, new teachers rank handling parents at the top. According to preliminary results from the MetLife Survey of the American Teacher, made available exclusively to TIME, parent management was a bigger struggle than finding enough funding or maintaining discipline or enduring the toils of testing. It's one reason, say the Consortium for Policy Research in Education and the Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy, that 40% to 50% of new teachers leave the profession within five years. Even master teachers who love their work, says Harvard education professor Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, call this "the most treacherous part of their jobs."

"At the most disturbing extreme are the parents who like to talk about values but routinely undermine them. "You get savvier children who know how to get out of things," says a second-grade teacher in Murfreesboro, Tenn. "Their parents actually teach them to lie to dodge their responsibilities." Didn't get your homework done? That's O.K. Mom will take the fall. Late for class? Blame it on Dad."

http://forums.atozteacherstuff.com/showthread.php?t=8834&...
The formula appears to be to put shows on networks during time slots where their target audience already is and where it doesn't have to compete with unrelated content. Who knew?

The other half of the formula is to put random crap on at times when people feel like watching TV. I think most people watch TV because it's there, and flip around until something looks interesting.

If you actually had to seek out a specific program, I don't think new ones would have much chance of becoming mainstream. (Of course the geek community would find the good shows, because we tend to read reviews and make our own decisions instead of being told what to like. But most people just watch whatever the networks tell them to watch.)
This Word, "Scaling"
I think the reason why that is not likely to catch on is that most Lisp hackers enjoy using an editor that can itself be hacked in Lisp. Also, emacs is one of the most stable pieces of software in history. It will probably live forever and continue to evolve.

Also, I think that Lisp isn't really suffering. As far as I can tell there has been increasing interest in Lisp. Even without that trend continuing, Lisp is such a masterpiece (and it continues to develop with new innovations), that it is almost definitely here to stay, regardless of whether it becomes a trendy language to use again. The advantages in performance (say SBCL's for example) and expressiveness over other dynamic languages like Ruby and Python afford Lisp developers an actual advantage, as opposed to a merely perceived one.
I don't know who are the 10 most powerful ones. But considering the policy was introduced in 1979. So for any politicians who were married before 1979 and started to have a family then, they may have more than 1.

At the same time. I read frequently from Chinese news that government officials under 60s charged with corruptions. Most of them have several mistresses and had a child with each of them. I don't think that will be counted officially since in China such non martial relationships are not legal.
Emacs and Vi debates go on and on but usually have two categories. Some people like total control over their environment (emacs) and some people usually find enough power to get most things done fast (vi).

Often, people who use vi don't realize they're actually emacs people and versa vice. Considering that control over your editor is the source of your productivity it's worth it to check both out. Then get busy!
this story has absolutely nothing to do with ISP throttling. If people continue using subjects that are just trying to be attention grabbers, HN will end up like digg.

To sum up the actual story, researchers used Bayesian learning filters to identify the type of encrypted tunnels that are going through your ssh server within 90-99% accuracy. Has absolutely nothing to do with ISP throttling p2p.
Companies join forces to promote Macs in Enterprise
Yeah. In the end, P2P protocols will just end up looking like HTTP requests and responses, with encrypted data steganographically encoded in what looks like your online bank. (Maybe incoming HTTP requests to a home DSL line would look suspicious, so let's make it XMPP or something.)

You can't filter the Internet. You can't break encryption. These are the realities of the Internet, so the ISPs had better start turning on their dark fiber. Sparing a nuclear war, Internet use is never going to decrease. Stop fighting entropy and "roll with it."
Glad to hear it. ;-)
Everything you might want to know about BigTable
dupe:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=231411

and my version only got three votes. people preferred the "rewrite from scratch" title, perhaps?
they are not unrelated in the sense that the NT series includes a lot of APIs from earlier Windows versions, which increases the cruft level.
Are you saying that the more complex the system, the better chance it has to be designed by an intelligent designer versus evolution? ;)

Edit: The whole point in evolution is that the process is automatic. As for why the human brain may just use Bayesian statistics, see http://videolectures.net/icml07_tenenbaum_bmhi/
And how do you feel about they service? Do you think it can be improved?

I've been tinkering with the idea of building something similar for the European market, with some improvements (if the reservation fails recommend available time-frames, or other restaurants in the neighborhood or similar restaurants...), recommendation or new restaurants (think of netflix for restaurants), CRM features for the restaurants and made the system "open" so anyone can integrate the service in whatever channel they use (web, SMS, phone, the-next-big-thing...) sharing the commission.

By the way, I'm open to talk... My mail address is on my profile :)
Tongue Drive system lets persons with disabilities operate powered wheelchairs, computers
Salk researchers reprogram adult stem cells in their natural environment
It is not so scary in history of China. Chinese waged wars/feuds against each other in 90% of the recorded history. China always have surplus male population to be wasted.

But wars before were contained in regional provinces or mainland. Considering now China owns nuclear war heads and ICBMs. Then any one who is crazy enough will be a threat to U.S.A. and neighbors of China. Especially U.S.A. was considered as a potential enemy by them.

It is the same thing like U.S.A didn't need to care who those Wahhabi jihadists before. But now they project their anger on U.S. and have means to create collateral damage in U.S.A. Then it becomes nuisances to U.S.

(P.S. I am a half Chinese and half Taiwanese in U.S.A.)
There ought to be a little-guy version. Like this:

Anyone can signup for nominal fee ($100), every member donates all their patents to the pool and gets rights to the pool. Once you have rights to the pool you can force a cross-licensing agreement with any other real company (won't work with patent trolls though). Those who don't want to donate their stuff can pay really big money to get stuff from it, which will go towards maintaining the organization.

This may not work well on small scale, but if it were to reach large scale it will become very attractive to join and will put an end to the patent system, for good.
Firefox 3 supports pre-wrap, which I think would stop pre text from forcing horizontal scrolling.

http://ejohn.org/blog/new-css-in-firefox-3/
Be careful, it's easy to get lost wandering around in your right brain too long
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_defeat
> "If it books 80 percent through its restaurant partner sites, that means it charges 25 cents on about 2.4 million seated, and then charges $1 on the remaining 20 percent, or 600,000 seated, through its own site. So OpenTable is making $2.4 million a month...."

0.25 * 2.4 million + 1 * 0.6 million = $1.2 million /mo.

Still serious money, but off by a multiple of 2.