skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Not surprisingly, the opaqueness of these books has led to the myth that compilers are hard to write.

Opaqueness of the books is not what makes everyone think compilers are hard to write. What makes compilers hard to write, for someone who has never done it before, is the scope of the problem you're trying to solve. Writing a compiler, to spec, for a non-trivial language takes a lot of WORK.

Regexes and grammars can be tricky to grok and walking abstract syntax trees can be hard as well. A hundred-pass compiler may make that part easier, but it almost certainly doesn't reduce the overall amount of work required to go from scratch to a working compiler, and that's where the "compilers are hard" reputation comes from.

(Incidentally, that doesn't mean the two sources mentioned aren't worth reading. Scanning both of them, they look excellent.)
I guess most of the reasons people mention here can be summed up as platform maturity. People might hate Flash, but when it comes to game development, it's a lot more mature than Canvas+JS.

Here's another example of that maturity: on Flash platform, you have three big game engines -- PushButton Engine, FlashPunk and Flixel Perhaps there are more, but these three are pretty damn good. When I google for "javascript game engine", the top two (distinct) results are Crafty and gameQuery. Crafty looks decent, but not quite up to PushButton's level. The second engine, gameQuery is pretty much inferior to all three Flash engines I mentioned: the API is very limited and the performance of the demo is abysmal.

Mind, this isn't a 100% fair review, it's not an in-depth comparison or anything like that. It is, however, the "first glance evaluation" you'll probably get from any Flash game developer who's wondering whether they should switch to HTML5+JS.

I'm not saying we should just give up and use Flash forever and ever. I'm trying to explain why HTML5+JS is not a mature game development platform yet.
Abuja attack: Car bomb hits Nigeria UN building
This just in: PNG used on more websites than Flash!

... They aren't competing.

jQuery is used for many things, only a small subset of which is handled by Flash.

Flash is used for many things, only a small subset of which is handled by jQuery.

Sure, where they overlap, I'd love to see jQuery win... But regular old Javascript and HTML5 is a better competitor for Flash than jQuery is.
Except for testing most this advice is awful. jQuery is 31KB not 86KB. CSS3 is or has plans to be hardware accelerated on all major platforms.

Also what exactly is your claim on how size is greatly affecting performance? That Android takes a long time to deflate a large zipped javascript file or that it takes a long time to parse a large javascript file or the large javascript libraries are ineffecient? Do you have any evidence on these things?
I wonder how many of those sites use both Flash and jQuery.
Why Clojure doesn't need invokedynamic
Adobe WEM's Clickstream Cloud
This is a fairly common practice, I think. Linking back to recognize major donors is quite old, and people donating solely for the linkback is newer but still not that new. For example, if you look at NetBSD's donor list, some are quite clearly unrelated to technology, and are donating just for the link: http://www.netbsd.org/donations/2011.html
If I read every 'must read' book I'd never have any time to actually do the thing in question!
I'm curious: Does anyone here expect that a 1 petabyte device will be a commodity consumer device in 30 years?
Totally jealous of all these 3 to 5 letter domain names for start ups. Path? Color? Jig? NOT FAIR! :)
I really thought this was satire before reading the article.
Yes. I've read them both, they're worth your time. The thing with most compiler texts is that they bog you down with a lot of stuff upfront about automata, parsing algorithms, etc., and by the time they get to the good stuff, it's hard to see how it all fits together. Crenshaw dives right in, and you quickly get a simple compiler running. You can look into all the alternative parsing algorithms, etc. later.

Also, run-don't-walk to Ghuloum's "An Incremental Approach to Compiler Construction" (http://scheme2006.cs.uchicago.edu/11-ghuloum.pdf). I'd suggest that before the Nanopass paper, really.

After those, I recommend Niklaus Wirth's _Compiler Construction_ (http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/books/CompilerConstruc...) and Andrew Appel's _Modern Compiler Implementation in ML_ for follow-up, in that order. Wirth's book is a quick read, about on par with Crenshaw's. Appel's is more in-depth.

Another comment, linking several HN compiler threads: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1922002
The emotional rollercoaster of entrepreneurship
If you wouldn't pay for my app, your pricing advice is worthless
I learned more about modern compilation by reading and implementing "From System F to Typed Assembly Language" than I did from the compilers course I took.

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~dpw/papers/tal-toplas.pdf
I was in the same dorm room from my sophomore year onward. Unfortunately we were required to clear everything out during the summer months, including any similar customizations we had made, otherwise I might have gone all out like this too. It's a great way to make a small room feel like home. Looks very efficiently laid out as well.
Link dead for me. Found the list republished here: http://thenextbigtechthing.com/10-books-every-entrepreneur-s...

"The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Business Law" --
LLC vs C-corp vs S-Corp? Founder’s vesting? Liquidation Preferences? Equity vs Debt financing? This book will educate you enough to be able to answer these and many other important questions.

"Bootstrapping Your Business" --
From the founder of RightNow. The amazing story of how a geographically-challenged (Montana) entrepreneur built a world class business.

"Purple Cow" --
Dead simple premise, the key to marketing is to build something remarkable.

"The Art of the Start" --
The Art of Pitching, Marketing and Funding your Startup.

"The Innovator’s Dilemma" --
If your startup beats all the odds and becomes hugely successful prepare yourself for the innovator’s dilemma, cannibalize your product before someone else does.

"The E-Myth Revisited" --
How-to create a business not a job.

"Permission Marketing" --
The greatest marketing asset your startup can build is the permission to market to your customers and prospects.

"Growing a Business" --
Sincere advice for creating a company culture that your team and customers will love.

"The Cluetrain Manifesto" --
Successful marketing is a conversation.

"Bottom-up Marketing" --
Pure bottoms-up execution. Marketing tactics to grow your business.
I find funny the related post in forbes.com

Repelling Mosquitos After The Hurricane: DEET vs. Dengue Fever
The Astounding Curta Mechanical Calculator [video]
I don't want to develop iOS apps, that's kind of my point.
If you are correct, and 1/2 of Apple's success is execution, then what about the vision half?
The same strategy is used by Varnish.
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."

Could we crop the title please?
I'd guess that most people who are completely new to compilers don't know how to read denotational semantics, either. Handing that paper to them would just reinforce the "compilers are perceived to be magical artifacts" view that Crenshaw is trying to dispel.

He intentionally avoid Greek letters, let alone denotational semantics. I don't doubt that it's a good paper, but the people Crenshaw is addressing probably wouldn't be able to read it (yet).
From http://dmv.ca.gov/pubs/brochures/fast_facts/ffvr07.htm :

"You may qualify for a DPplacard or DPplates if you have impaired mobility due to having lost use of one or more lower extremities, or both hands, or have a diagnosed disease that substantially impairs or interferes with mobility, or one who is severely disabled to be unable to move without the aid of an assistive devise."

So yes, illnesses can cause one to become disabled.
"I got a press release yesterday that said jquery was now more common than flash across the top websites. the 'flash is everywhere' argument is a bit 2004 and isn't true anymore . javascript is everywhere"

That's not the same, though. Of course JavaScript is everywhere- it always has been, because it comes with browsers. The point is that Flash is also everywhere, because everyone has it installed.
Depending on your OS and browser, sometimes all you have to do is mouseover it to lose all focus, both keyboard and mouse. This used to happen to me a year or two ago, with Firefox and Linux I think.
Slightly related: does anyone know how they found all the domains that were hosted on that IP? I've tried a couple of online tools, entering '119.70.119.30', and none seem to return anything.
Seven ways to get unfollowed on Twitter
It makes me try and mentally tally how many I played video games in college (and I wasn't even that big of a gamer).
It also annoys me to see jQuery promoted above plenty of other, perfectly capable frameworks. Why not "JS frameworks used on more websites that Flash"? Never mind that (as wccrawford points out) the comparison is stupid anyway...
Groupon has "never been stonger", says CEO
Arial is "bad" because it's a clone of Helvetica. When MS created Windows, they didnt want to pay to license Helvetica so they made their own copy of it. Yeah, I know, under-handed move, but fonts are really expensive. $800 for the entire typeface--you have to buy italic and bold separately because they're technically different fonts. In the design world, typeface piracy is as big as Photoshop piracy.

Apple, OTOH, properly licenses Helvetica.
I hadn’t ever encountered this idea (bug bounties) before and I think it’s great. Only thing that bothers me is that, if you were to run the scheme for long enough it might start to become a victim of its own success: wary of the bug hunters your programmers would be so much more careful (think especially about the harmless and stylistic stuff) that there wouldn’t be any small things available to find any more and bug hunters would get bored and give up.

To resolve this you could only conduct the bounties periodically so there’s always enough of a backlog of bugs to be found.
A faster and easier way to get an RSA fob belonging to a person with access to Lockheed? It's not just about getting a generic RSA fob (afaik), it was about accessing the specific data of a client. Additionally, if the person was targeting other RSA clients, a seat inside the organization would become exponentially more valuable.

It seems more safe to attack RSA from a distance over the internet and get the data you want than to try the old-fashioned physical infiltration method, into either the data center or to an individual's home where a fob could be found.

Please correct me if I'm misunderstanding something.
I don't think literacy tests should be required before voting. But I would support a required test in probability theory and cognitive bias recognition.
Thought and still think that(the reason) HN has small fonts, unreadable URLs etc(is) to not lower the bar for not-hackers. True?
I don't believe for a second that Jobs had the iPad in mind in 2000.

Bill Gates certainly had something like it in mind in 2000. I have an example of such a device in my living room. (tc1100 - Mine dates from 2001) The "raw" functionality (for a technically savvy person like me) far exceeds the typical use of the iPad. It even has the same screen resolution. Still, I don't do anything on the iPad that I didn't do on the tc1100, and do everything on the iPad -- the whole gestalt is just more pleasurable to use.
It's a good question. I'd bet maybe not production code but I'm sure they write some utilities and things for themselves.
Center of Jupiter is supposedly made of diamond, according to Clark.
Whoa! This is either absurdly misinformed or just a troll. It's not WikiPEDIA (the encyclopedia) selling LINKS it's WikiMEDIA, the parent organisation selling corporate SPONORSHIPS (which happen to include a link, as one would expect.)

Sheesh.

Flagged
Safari with the native PDF renderer still steals the two finger swipe that does the "back" function from browser navigation. The must be a "good reason" as this irritant persists into Lion.
WordPress Creating custom styles drop down in TinyMCE
I should point out that the things provided by Flex engines like FlashPunk are builtin in HTML5's DOM, for the most part. The boilerplate of an engine isn't really required.
>The authors promote using dozens or hundreds of compiler passes, each being as simple as possible. Don't combine transformations; keep them separate.

Actually, this way you will get an inferior compiler (optimizer).

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2387

The thesis referenced above argues (and provides examples) that you cannot overcome important problems by separating transformations. You need to combine them.
Torchwood Season 4 Episode 8
Based on data from AppData, registry services traffic from the network, has not been a week since its launch on Facebook in the form of beta, The Sims Social been played by 4.6 million players every day of Facebook users around the world
I saw an interesting stat the other day:

According to this "built with" site, use of SWFObject (which is pretty much what 99% of flash devs use to detect + embed their swfs) is starting to decline among the "top sites":

http://trends.builtwith.com/javascript/SWFObject

I'm the original creator of SWFObject, so I've looked at that chart a bit, and I've never seen the usage go down in the few years since that site's been tracking js usage.
I was thinking the same thing, which in turn reminded me of the ultimate productivity blog (linked from Coding Horror):

http://productiveblog.tumblr.com/
Wikipedia is the flagship project of Wikimedia. I think you're nitpicking if you think there is much of a distinction on where the links are appearing.
I worry that all this start-up cheerleading is going to attract the wrong kind of crowd. It will also attract more of the right kind of crowd, but it will also be time to start watching out (a little more carefully) for clueless wannabes and hucksters.

I guess anyone who was working in IT in the 90s will know that already though.

Note, I don't think it's really a bubble (though if things keep growing there will be). There's more money coming in from consumers, and less opportunities elsewhere, so software is hot. But like any successful ecosystem, it will attract predators and scavengers eventually (though hopefully things are still OK).
I'll bet the Flash you made 10 years ago still works, and I'll bet the JS game you made doesn't.

I'll wager the Flash you make today will still work in 10 years, and I'll wager the HTML5 won't.
The nanopass paper uses so many passes for pedagogy, not efficiency. Of course it's inefficient, that's not the point. They're still easier to teach in isolation.
The language is almost trivial; what matters are the frameworks that go with it.

Again, it's the execution! There are certainly better languages out there. However, Apple manages the Objective-C "ecosystem" in much the same way that it manages the iTunes "ecosystem" -- with a relatively high level of quality and usability. (Yes, programmers bitch about stuff in iOS, but we always do in any language/ecosystem. What matters is how wisely the maintainers respond.)
Google Reader + Disqus would be a better Google+ than Google+
The other extreme is people who can never see technical entrepreneurs as anything other than coders.

A week ago I was having coffee with the new VP of Marketing for a company I consult to. Despite my background: MBA 8 years ago, founder of web startup that was acquired, several years in product management prior to that, the veep asked me why I didn't wan to be a programmer. What?

I still code, but I find it annoying when people perceive me as coder first, as though that invalidates my business credentials.

Maybe I'm putting out the wrong vibe, but I'd like to chalk this up to them being threatened by the idea that someone with a skillset they will never have can do all the same stuff they can.
Cheap New York Knicks jerseys
This is still against Google's spam guidelines, though. If they are to be consistent, I think they have to take action.
The title of the post is "Want to Write a Compiler? Just Read These Two Papers." I upped the ante by proposing they just read one better paper.

I think if you had actually bothered to read the paper rather than make assumptions you would find the word "denotation" doesn't even appear in the paper.
What do I need to research & understand to negotiate equity?
Contrary to the advice I've seen on HN many times, I took a position at a startup with a compensation much lower than I could have gotten elsewhere, with the understanding that I would get some kind of payoff when we make it big.

Now the company is finally incorporating, so we're going to have the chance to make that official. The problem is, I really don't know all the issues involved in how shares/options work.

-Is it simply saying I'd like x% or I'd like y shares, or is there more to it?

-Is it worth using vesting as part of the negotiation?

-Are there things to negotiate other than amount and vesting?

-I know this last question is a big 'it depends', and not useful for the majority of people reading, but I have no idea how much it's appropriate to ask for; any suggestion would be useful. Some insight into my negotiation position follows. We have several engineers, but there are two that would _really_ hurt if either left. One of those is myself. They would of course get along, but it would be very costly for them. The other engineer is a founding member. I love the company, the people, and the work I do. However, I love my family more, and I have to make long-term plans, so I am willing to leave if we can't come to an agreement.
I think the future is in the cloud. I just recently got a new laptop with a 750GB HD and I thought to myself "How am I ever going to fill this thing?" Other than my music collection pretty much everything else that I do is or can be web-based.

Maybe Larry Ellison was right about thin clients/NCs, just way too early.
Skip over the anecdotes, then most self-help business books are about 50 pages of text…
Interesting topic! I am just now completing a college degree at 39. I've been a software & database developer for 16 years with very little formal education. I did three correspondence workbooks through NRI (paper) that showed me a do/while, if/then, etc. Nowdays, you can get that sort of information by googling. There were only bulletin boards back then.

I exited the Military after 5 years of service as an MP (did NOT want to continue in that career) so did construction work. Asked around about which language I should learn, bought FoxPro 2.6 and read the book about three times before it sunk in. I poked around looking for interesting projects at businesses for free, not asking for money. Six months later I was hired. I explored some fascinating concepts in linked lists, or hierarchies if you prefer, while at my first job... working with bills of materials, assemblies and subassemblies. I did a lot of interesting things. From there I moved again, and have since learned Delphi, VB, .net, html, javascript and SQL. I write software for offices in the US, UK and NZ. I started getting BORED & frustrated. Instead of divorcing my wife and family of 20+ years (we got married and dropped out of high school), I sought fulfillment through the sense of self-worth you get when you reach out and help other people. The world seems a lot brighter.

Whadya know... I'm now finishing an absolutely fascinating pursuit of a bachelor of science in human resource development with a 4.0. I'm doing an intervention at Kiwanis, plan on becoming a MCT to help teach at the local community college, and will even be doing some ESL instructing next year. Yes, I already make as much money as my professors, but it's been an unusual ride. Instead of worrying about being able to provide for my family, I have a lot more flexibility, choices, and a brighter outlook. Now... do I want my kids to finish college? Of course!
I think the real take home point which seems to have been missed elsewhere the last couple of days is:

Jeepers, the essential point about business is that you never know how the story’s going to end.

I really don’t know how it’s going to play out. But then, neither does anyone else. I really hope they go on making great computers for me to use, and great mobile devices to compete against.

I really couldn't agree with this point more. I've actually got quite annoyed reading all the articles the last few days with various people looking into the crystal ball predicting the future. Not even Steve knows how the story is going to end.
And they just sent me a deal for today... So I guess my city (Orlando) isn't 'coming soon' after all. How silly.
Yeah, I agree it doesn't look too good. That NetBSD page is only really different from a "send me $100 and I'll post your link on my links page" thing (which Google prohibits) by the fact that NetBSD is a nonprofit and therefore it's a "donor list".
I stopped reading Slashdot as much because the curated nature of the site meant that stories showed up and were discussed on Digg and Reddit DAYS before they showed up on Slashdot. So Slashdot content felt old.

However, I find the discussion better on Slashdot due to their complex rating system, which is why I still visit Slashdot. Up and down votes are too simplistic and you get a lot of bad comments bubbling up or being buried for seemling no good reason. That's why I stopped reading Digg and Reddit. Interesting, informative, off-topic, flamebait, etc... More sites need to adopt Slashdot's rating system.
I'm sure RSA does defense related work, but I wouldn't call them a "defense contractor."
"90s database technology" in the sense that it's hard to work with and the support costs are unnecessarily high. The protocol is hard to work with - which makes debugging less appealing and thus most people avoid trying - and no server I've seen with the arguable exception ActiveDirectory has well-designed logging for typical sysadmin needs.

Beyond that everyone other than Microsoft uses the OpenLDAP code, which has a number of basic errors and rough-edges. slapd has numerous deadlock conditions and the only backend which doesn't have a low risk of corrupting your data (MySQL) is discouraged. The client libraries had basic design failures for aeons - the most glaring being the assumption that the network is perfect and will never drop or delay packets (timeouts are checked after blocking operations return, which takes several days due to retries at multiple levels). This means that OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, etc. clients will become unusable if your LDAP server is less than perfect - and since slapd deadlocks under normal use, this will occur sporadically. The developers were largely in denial about this - my patch to set SO_RCVTIMEO / SO_SNDTIMEO was ignored with unproven claims that this would magically work in the bleeding-edge trunk version (untrue then, could have changed now) but the libpam-ldap maintain is more conscientious so the similar patch there was accepted a couple years ago so at least Linux clients actually attempt to failover.
Canadian Startups Needs a Paul Graham Tech
I love logic.

However, when dealing with optimizations, actual experimentation is a lot more convincing. I've seen far too many times when things 'should have been' better a certain way, but weren't... For various reasons.
Made internally: Congrats go to Ida.
Tools amplify an individual's power. No one needs anything except air, gravity... Shunning powerful tools is hacker-mental-masturbation i.e. "I'm so smart I can write everything in assembler".