skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've got to agree with this. Writing Lexers/Parsers/Interpreters is some of the most fun I've had programming. When your program can run other programs, that's a huge thrill.

Read EoPL, it's awesome (and free) and LiSP is awesome but expensive. In fact almost every Lisp related textbook seems to have several lisp interpreters in it.

edit: As noted below EoPL is apparently not free, and it seems that I've inadvertently pirated it from somewhere.

http://www.cs.indiana.edu/eopl/

http://tinyurl.com/lispinsmallpieces

I'm working on a toy (for now) lisp in javascript at the moment and it's profoundly unimpressive but has been hugely fun and educational for me.
From the blog: "I don’t want to hand-wave and take credit for reaping the benefits of the web’s architecture on multi-core systems; none of these concepts are new – not even to Microsoft. Erlang is a language that has been around for years and has run many large incredibly scalable telco networks efficiently."
Google CEO Says Microblogging Coming to Google Search
He was a good human. I just realized that I have benefited from his works in the past, after watching this video about using RFID tracking for omniscient like marketing metrics:
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/05/08/rfids-on-the-brain.html

Which reminded me of this article on his site (that I found via "reality hacking" on the wikipedia)
http://www.searchlores.org/realicra/slaves.htm

It was so powerful to me then that I recall wondering around campus slightly dazed and confused afterwards.

He will be missed.
Also consider a nice lens. Should be at least half of your budget, but makes the photos.
Pretty good article, covers all the basics. Some key points I cannot stress enough, from the article and me.

* Built in Flash = Badness. Never use this. But if you really must, put a white piece of paper in front to diffuse the flash.

* 50mm f/1.8 or better. It's a must!

* DoF Preview. Use this feature!

* Get optical filters for all your lenses (keep the lens front element from scratching, UV doesn't really make a difference in Digital), specially when travelling and outside. Remove this for night shots (internal reflections more visible due to many point lights).

* Circular Polarizers, they do wonders for sky, water, or various reflections from subject/items.

* Use center AF only and get used to aiming at subject, AF hold, and shoot. Kind of painful, but less painful than having the camera guess the wrong AF point for a great moment.

* Auto (Bad), Tv (Sports, Action, Fast things), Av (still, portraits), Program (Keep on this by default).

* Join a photography forum or community and post photos to be critiqued and people to give you feedback.
Redefining the Entrepreneur
It would be helpful if someone explained this placement thing to us Yankees. We have summer internships, but the notion of a placement strikes me as a fundamentally different beast. (Googling failed me.)

The standard American response would be to work on open source projects and focus on getting good grades in your last year to make yourself attractive to full-time employers upon graduation.
Wow this is embarrassing. I thought Australians were progressive.
Medieval-style 'rack' stretches skin grafts
yeah, 16/20 of the top blogs on tumblr are adult oriented. so I think it is definitely because of the traffic
"Read EoPL, it's awesome (and free)"

EoPL is not free afaik. I agree that it is an awesome book.
That is an interesting take. While I haven't gone to that extreme in my thinking, perhaps I'm being too conservative.

I have definitely thought about a free, time-limited version. Use it for free for two-four weeks and see if it makes your life better.
A side note: The name "scrypt" is no so good in terms of googling. A search for example for "scrypt python" brings up over 7 million hits for Python script. Maybe once more pages about scrypt exists it will stand up, but anyway the name could be more unique.
Oh, heaven forbid that a company might promote something that's adult.

Frankly, I'd LOVE if tumblr did that. More companies should. The internet should not have to be as prudish and restrictive as the rest of, well, everything.
They're all BOFH-style answers.
Just to rephrase (Class of '83 here). You will make less, work harder, and have less opportunities, entirely because of the year you graduated university.
It already exists because we built it. :P

http://tenderapp.com/

Knowledge base, issue management, development ticket tracker integration, auto-replies, templated responses, etc. We had/have a lot of the same issues I know other small businesses have, so we built a tool to fix it.

Feedback welcome, of course. We eat our own dog food, so file anything you find/any suggestions on http://help.tenderapp.com/
success depends on the number of barriers you have met, but is not entirely based on it.
101 Indians qualifying for GSoC 2009 DOES show "progression", as you put it. Racism is completely out of the context and i see no reason why this page should`nt stay here!!!
No matter what, I don't do DRM. Won't do it. If that means in 20 years I'm alone in a cabin with a bunch of old books, so be it.
First, a word of caution: if you are offered a cup of chai at any of the train stations, I'd avoid it. I know at least two immediate contacts who were offered chai at a train stop. The tea put 'em to sleep for a while. And they woke up to find a lot of their stuff missing.

Having said that, it's funny to read this perspective. I lived my first 10 years of my life there and if someone invited me for a cup of tea, I'd be very suspicious. The stories leading to my suspicion are endless and could be recited by most Indians.

And then I read an account like yours and it makes me rethink all those "moments" of suspicion, some probably more valid than others.

Still, be careful! Have lots of fun! And always watch your back:)

In general, living in any kind of large city for a PROLONGED time makes you more cautious of people, I think. I lived in San Francisco for a year and my outlook on random people was very similar to the snap judgments I'd reach about people while growing up in India.
Esther Reed: Esther Reed's fake identities
Actually, my first programming attempts started with extremely simple projects: BMI calculator, recipe generator, mathematics puzzles game, a simple assembly language implementation.

If you want to start with web, start coding a blog or a url shortner. If you want to have something more complex, start with existing web APIs and make a mashup!
Interesting.

Composing a decent poem becomes natural after composing a thousand and throwing all of them to /dev/null. Past that stage, the problem isn't of inspiration, but of distilling the output. Mortals tends to begin attain maturity after 10K.

The cognitive benefit outweighs poegling, since the patterns of neurons firing in your brain aren't restricted to the computer UI calisthenics.
Some universities offer what's known as a sandwich degree. in which at the end of your second year you have the option of spending a year in industry, the idea is that the student gets real world experience (and is able to put this on a CV) and the employer gets a very willing young worker to help with tasks. You find that after graduation a lot of companies re-hire the students they had on placement.
Honestly, and I don't mean to be rude here, but I think you're living in a dream world right now. The chances of getting funded at school age or finding the perfect job given the current economic climate are next to nil.

If you can afford to finish school I'd do that. Otherwise I'd take what you can get job wise and ride out the storm (while obviously keeping your eyes open in case you get really lucky and the perfect job comes along).
How David beats Goliath, by Malcolm Gladwell
Zaid, I'm guessing you're a native Indian, am I right? let me tell you this, what you're describing is a native's caution: people do that everywhere, they're less impressed with where they live.

If this is a cup of chai offered to you in good faith, by someone whose house you stumbled upon, then pretty much drink it and enjoy. Indian Chai will be made fresh and poured hot on front of you. Your host will get himself a cup as well.

Don't drink if the rest aren't drinking; not just out of caution, but also human decency. People in the East are quite hospitable, and the very poor might offer you what little food they have left. If you're given a plate of food or a cup of tea, call the kids over and tell them to dig in, insist, or leave some left on the plate .. it's not rude.
I completely agree, which is why I'm looking for neither. I don't think it's too crazy to be looking for a place where I can learn from other people practising the same craft.
Enlighten a European. Is there some reason you put extra focus on getting good grades the last year, do employers focus mainly on the last year grades?

(On a related note, I have to find a placement of open source nature for my second year as it's my major. :P)
Option 1 is financially viable and probably what I'll end up doing. Looking for entry points from which I could transition upwards is something I will definitely look at after graduation.

Thankyou !
Limited liability is simply a matter of contract between the lender and the owners of the corporate structure. When a bank lends money to an LLC, the contract is that the bank can only seize the assets of the corporate structure, not of the owners. If the bank does not like this deal, they can refuse to make the loan. In fact, many banks will refuse to lend to small LLC's. They will insist that the owner pledge his own assets.

Another way of thinking of it, is that equity holders hold the most junior debt. The idea that senior debt holders could come back and make the junior debt holders pay up more is ridiculous.

Now, I do think that owners (and bond holders) should in some cases be liable for third party torts and criminal activities of the company. I don't know what the actual law is about this issue. If there is never any liability, that's a mistake. But I doubt that's the case.
Here is how the lens flare is implemented

http://dy-verse.blogspot.com/2009/05/facebook-knoami-lens-fl...

You can also add the effect to your sites with a couple of javascript files.
As a rule it's because the years have different weights assigned to them, so as an example first year counts towards about 20% of the final degree classification, second year 35% and third year 45%

EDIT:

Just to help avoid confusion I'll reiterate that this is talking about universities in England
Just take a GUI library, a network library, a regex parser, a mime/XML/html parser, and an audio library; taken into any combination, you will have something that solves an interesting problem. Something as "big" as a web server can be written with just the system calls built into every unix :-)

Great advice; unlike an artist who is burdened with a blank canvas, a programmer does not share this burden. You don't need to start with this blank canvas, instead heed mahmud's words and get your finger-tips dirty with some libraries and modules as a place to start.
I don't know if apple allows demoware like that, but I think that's a great idea. I like to try before I buy, I've seen a lot of software with descriptions and demos that do not match reality.
after making a few API`s using java, after coding in c and cpp for about two years, i moved on to explore the capabilities of various other languages. i took me about 6 months; but it was well worth the time.
I suggest you try out networking projects; maybe a chat client coupled with a file transfer mechanism; or maybe a P2P file sharing project.
i don`t agree with the comment which says "mischief motivated you like none other". it is true that many are interested towards activities like circumventing security systems, but as long as you do not understand the fundamental concepts behind the working of a particular exploit or shellcode; you`ll be wasting your time and will remain a script-kiddie learning little or nothing.
the first two comments mentioned by mahmud are very interesting; real good advice for any programming beginner.
When traveling out of your geo-cultural zone of comfort, eat what the locals eat: their diet will most likely contain the nutrients you need to adapt to the climate and resist prevalent diseases.
I'm happy you are re-thinking your suspicions - India is big and diverse and you can really meet some very nice people if you give them a chance.

Of course you can also meet some really horrible people but I think it's the same anywhere in the world. You have to keep your guard up a bit when dealing with total strangers.
When coding a flash app, keep all interface elements externally as an imagemap(an external png with UI elements in it and an xml which defines the coordinates of ui elements in the png). Then reskinning would require only updating the imagemap rather than recompiling the swf.

By hiding the flash core ,basically they are exposing the flash apis to javascript .This would be helpful for frontend developers who are not comfortable with flash, but want to build a decent mp3 player .Other than the advantage for developers , i dont really think there is any functional advantage for the end user.
You always want to do well, but if you don't do well early, you can at least point to improvement in your later semesters as you "got the hang of" college. This improvement is also helpful for graduate schools, although a magic improvement senior year is not as good as steady improvement over the years.

Traditionally, full-time hiring is complete for good employees (in all disciplines) by the winter break of the fourth (senior) year, where there's some clause that you can't get terrible grades in your last semester.
Ah - it functions the same as a summer internship between junior and senior years here in the States, although it is for a full year.

Question - are your college degrees three years or four years? Ours are generally four, called freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior.
This is not the way it works at any reputable college I've ever heard of here in the States. I've been on many recruiting teams and cumulative GPA is always done as a straight average over credit hours (which are typically evenly distributed over each of the standard four years).
Err, Axum has nothing to do with anything you mentioned. Axum is a programming language for parallel processing.
Excellent advice Mahmud.

Also I'd guess Zaid is an expatriate - simply because I've noticed this tendency to put down India mostly among ex-pats (in the US and UK).

I'm a native and I love India. I've had chai at a dozen houses and shops and I never dreamt of feeling suspicious (and nothing happened to me either).

EDIT: To clarify my last statement - many shopkeepers will offer you tea when you are buying something from them.
Welcome to India Jake Cooper! I hope you have a great time!

EDIT: Whoops! Sorry - my bad! Thanks paraschopra.
Cool:-) Hopefully we can organize an Italian YC.news meetup sometime and listen to Peldi talk about his company.
Ok - I know I may be downmodded for this but wouldn't it just make more sense to switch to an editor that maybe doesn't cause you RSI problems?

All I'm saying is that if you have to go through so much pain and trouble to use a piece of software then just maybe it's not right for you.

Also I'm not suggesting Vi but Emacs has a pretty good Viper-mode that may help with RSI issues. I use EMacs with Viper and I can pretty much work with minor hiccups when I switch from Vim. Just a suggestion.
As far as I'm aware they're almost universally 3 years (unless they include a placement year). I'm basing this on anecdotal evidence such as what I remember from applying to different universities and the fact that most of my friends are graduating a year earlier than myself.

We also don't have nicknames for the years here, though I wouldn't be surprised if we start adopting it, we already have an official event called "freshers week" in the first week of the first year.
I'm sure you can find a startup somewhere in London who will be more than happy to have an extra pair of hands around the place. Find startups and start calling.

This is assuming you're not looking for a paid placement. Paid placements are going to be hard to come by, because companies want to minimise expenditure right now, and a student is a bit of an unknown.

You might be able to claim travel expenses, but I wouldn't count on more than that.
This is not a story about living in a foreign country in the end, but Timo Hannay's talk "The Future is a Foreign Country" is a must read for anyone who has lived in a different country for any length of time. Having lived in three very different countries for significant durations, I can't help but agree.

http://blogs.nature.com/wp/nascent/2008/09/the_future_is_a_f...
If he ever wants to post here he can have his proper username...
I've noticed this tendency to put down India

Cautioning people about some of the very common scams is "putting down India"?

I have a million reasons to love India for! I haven't missed an India cricket game in ages:) But where caution is needed, I will state. Just as you will find tonnes of reasonable people IN India tell you what to avoid; and just like how residents of San Francisco will tell you to avoid the Tenderloin late night.

Stop hating on expats. I bet I could beat you at kabaddi:)
I think I speak for a bunch of us HN readers when I say I'm happy for the guy. These are great problems to have and it's cool he's cataloged his journey/success on his blog.
Green Shoots Now Growing Leaves
"I see millions of patents. I see thousands of govt franchises."

Ah, yes, the vaunted trick of slyly redefining a term out from under the interlocutor. While it is true that a patent is an exclusive right and thus a form of monopoly, this type of monopoly is not what I was talking about and you were well aware of that. If you're so distrustful of your own arguments that you have to resort to rhetorical tricks to try to pull attention away from them, perhaps you should spend some more time thinking about the issue.

"I'm confused why anyone would think that a govt that "busts monopolies" couldn't also support them."

And I never suggested that a government cannot support a monopoly, or that no government has ever done so. This really makes you look desperate, you know? You start by trying the old redefinition trick, and then proceed into stuffing words into my mouth.

"You're forgetting that a cartel or trust can only "regulate" behavior of its members. It can't affect transactions between third parties unless govt steps in."

A cartel cannot enforce any part of its own operating agreements on third parties, true, but that's not necessary to the creation or maintenance of a monopoly and so is no counter-argument. A single large established entity, or a group of such working together, can easily manipulate factors such as supply chains, prices paid by the ultimate customers, etc. to cripple or destroy any competition.

What's more, parts of the history of the US abound with examples of precisely that behavior -- non-governmental entities subverting or disabling the operation of the free market for their own benefit. Do you dispute this?
This player is nothing special.

You can find the original Flash<->JS interface, by Scott Schiller, here: http://www.schillmania.com/projects/soundmanager2/

It's an awesome piece of work, and has been around for years.
Ask HN: Shipping a Computer Cross Country
It's about internship time and that means a temporary move for a lot of us. What's the best way to get a desktop computer a thousand miles or more, assuming that you are flying (rather than driving, walking, etc.)

Bonus Question: Best Netbook-friendly haskell code editor? (Might as well make long flights productive)
The blog post dates back to year 2008
We're looking for a C++ developer to help us develop WebMynd for Internet Explorer. Especially interested if you've had any experience with browser helper objects. We can offer some salary, generous options and travel to San Francisco if things work out.

If you're interested, get in touch using the email address in my profile.
Shouldn't they just buy Twitter?
Fair enough - sorry!

Give me a shout when you're down the next time and I'll put together a team to thrash you at kabaddi! :-)
Good idea for featured members, might make the first page a little nicer looking. Thanks for the feedback!
Your results are skewed because the people coming here are coming here in protest. I didn't vote -- I flagged it. I can imagine a lot of others who feel like I do did the same, given that the post is now dead.

Currently 87 people have up-voted the Chomsky article; there's clearly a lot of interest in what this venerated intellectual has to say on the subject of education. No one is forcing you to read it.
You have no money, no customers, no job, no experience and no degree.

Finish school.
maaf karna yar! you two get a room :-P
1. Living with a positive attitude attracts positive events and outcomes in your life.

2. I can do anything I put my mind to ; unproven till I have done everything :)
It's basically called Co-Op in the U.S.
I tried that and got food poisoning. Not saying one shouldn't do what you're suggesting but caution should be taken. In my case I didn't know what was safe and what wasn't and had to rely on some guidance. Unfortunately, something I ate in a restaurant had me down for all the next day. My party had also eaten the same food but strangely I was the only one to get sick. We guessed the cooks didn't wash all of the vegetables thoroughly.
"Which is a sign of how efficient the educational system has been, and the propaganda system, in simply destroying even our awareness of our own immediate intellectual background."

lord god the sky is falling.

my response to ridiculous statements such as this one is always "where the holy fuck do you live"???

teachers struggle to get 99% of the kids to give a damn about anything beyond sports sex music and games. the few who do give a damn can find and read anything they want.

where is it different?
We are... as an Aussie living overseas I am still amazed by these laws, and the fact that there doesn't seem to be a lot of protests/action against them. Maybe protests have been banned as well?
Reading through the comments, it's clear that you've already gotten some good advice. Instead of answering your question, I thought that this quote might be helpful by providing insight into solving your problem.

"Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."

Don't think that I just dismissed your question and posted some obscure quote (it's actually Steve Jobs from his Stanford commencement speech). I've weighed this carefully because it's clear that you're at a crux; this is an important time and I'd like to impart as much as I can to you.

But, Steve just said it so much better.

Tarks, you really just need to follow your heart. And yeah, that sounds like a trite mantra, but I think that you'll find yourself in a much better position if you take the risk and do what you want—don't live in the dogma of society. Take action and do what you've been telling yourself you want all along. Generally, our heart really knows what we want better than we do. And when we follow what we want, things tend to have a way of working themselves out.

Sure, keep your perspective; understand how the real world works. But just do what you feel is right.

I hope this helps; good luck to you, man.
I hate to be this guy, but why is this on Hacker News? I find it interesting, but it don't see how it fits the HN criteria. Seriously, if travel blogs that talk about one guy walking around a city in India fit the bill, what doesn't belong on Hacker News?