skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd personnaly show him a bit of python and start him with small games. Sorry, but I don't think scheme is the way to start for a kid.
I recently had a kid that wanted to program as well. He's about 12. Wanted to program games, but didn't get very far in a directX book.

I had a couple choices for him, due to some requirements:
1) Something easy to install or didn't have lots of things to install
2) Something with a all-in-one gaming library
3) Something with some sort of community around it.
4) It'd be nice if there was a book for it.

So with those there, there was:
Ruby and HacketyHack. http://hacketyhack.heroku.com/ It also has a app framework called shoes that you can use to build both games and apps. However, since _why left, all this requires a lot of hand hold to set up.

Lua and Love. http://love2d.org/
Lua is an easy language to pick up as it's pretty minimal, and love's 2D engine is pretty fantastic. I've used it before and it's pretty easy to get started with, and plenty of examples, as well as a vibrant community.

Python and Pygame. http://www.pygame.org/news.html
Pygame has all of the above, and for me, the final winner, since there was a book that walks the kid along from basic text games to the graphics part. http://inventwithpython.com/
"Of the pages indexed in Google that are of this type of spam in nature, Mahalo accounts for less than .1%"

Huh? I'm not sure which way I stand on this whole mess, but the fact that he makes up a tiny portion of the "spam" doesn't seem relevant? Is a petty thief less bad because he accounts for less than .00001% of theft in the world?
I will argue Flash is far from dead.

Just this week I used Flash.

A Client wanted to flip through photos, have words fade in over a period of time, and at the end, the logo was to fly in, glow, and then blend into the background.

This was a perfect place to use Flash.

Would I have done this in HTML and Javascript? No. Would I have created it in some other software and exported it as a video? No. It came to a few Kb in size when all finished and looked fantastic.

I look at it this way:

Aftereffects is to Video as Flash is to a Web Page.

Your goal is to create something awesome, but if you suck at the program, you'll end up with crap.

If you think that throwing out Flash will take the annoying ads and bad user interfaces of the world with it you are dreaming.

Flash is a nice system for creating some great animations and UI's and I don't see any reason for it to die.
After the Event Insurance
Guardian Legal Services specialise in ATE Insurance solutions for Law Firms. Find out more about our ATE Insurance solutions.
Indeed, they could write that check twice without debt financing.
It's quite a stretch to paint him as a victim here. If he'd needed the money, that would be one thing. But he took unnecessary loans to do speculative, risky investing. Sure, the "system" should have known better, but so should he.

I was also an Econ major. At no time did I become so out of touch with reality as to actually believe that people behave rationally when it comes to economic decisions. Calling that information dangerous is just disingenuous.

The banks failed at risk management, that we know. But there is individual responsibility as well. Every person who got a mortgage with a payment that was more than their take home pay is equally culpable in the subprime crisis. And people like this guy are even more to blame. I know people are bad at probability and statistics, but we shouldn't give them a pass on basic arithmetic.
diveintopython3.org + pygame

11 might be a little young (not for programming, but for what I've recommended above).
HTML and Javascript worked for me.

Basic(4th grade) -> HTML(5th grade) -> Javascript hacking(using view source)(8th grade) -> Visual Basic(8th grade) -> ASP(9th grade) -> PHP(11th grade) -> Python(uni)

My personal learning route between ages 10 - 20.If I could change...

1. I wish I had hopped onto PHP earlier.

2. Also wish I didn't waste a huge chunk of time in middle school struggling with Java.
Where are the Android developers?
Has anyone here written an application available on the Android Market?
In-depth, scientific debunking (with references):
http://www.aquaticape.org/
He's in love with the idea of writing a game. He might not actually like programming.

So, you need to start with something simple that will get him immediate results. Which really means HTML these days as everything else needs umpteen objects before you can see any results.

If he takes to it, you can then move to CSS and javascript. And if you get this far then the leap to actionscript or python or whatever isn't that big and you'll know that you have a good student,
Solution = Emoticon with rolling eyes = &_&
The Little Schemer: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/BTLS/

That's all you need.
This advice is good or bad depending on the style of your nephew. If he is really exciting about programming, then he most likely has in his head this idea of hacking away at physical lines of code rather than Alice/Squeak/Scratch.

I'd suggest BlitzBasic in companion to the fantastic book Game Programming for Teens (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1598635182/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp...). Blitz is cross platform, extremely easy to dive into, and has a great graphics library. Or, if you want to start him out pure, I'd suggest python/pygame.
I suggest checking out this talk at Nashville's Barcamp '09.

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/2370164

Christopher did a good job talking about his approach to teaching a group of kids how to game. Syntax isn't as important at first - if you get them hooked on something simple like processing (http://processing.org/), then they will learn syntax later. Most kids just want to see results as quickly as possible.
You sound like my grandfather telling me how he learned to swim. :-)
Have to agree, this is a non-response. That only validates that a real response would not be a good thing for the company.
I'm always surprised how phenomenally hard it is to get people to test alphas and release candidates - it isn't until the actual major release hits the floor that a ton of input starts to roll in. Every release I think it'll be different but I have yet to be proven right.

That being said, 1.4.1 is effectively "it" for a while (at least a month or so). It's shipping in Visual Studio and Drupal 7 so it doesn't matter what bug fixes come in after this, a lot of people will be using this version of jQuery.
Yeah the lattice method was pretty cool, I don't recall seeing that before. I can't see any value teaching this to a 3rd grader unless they're absolutely sailing along in math and curious to learn more. Even then, I'm not really sure of the point, how does it reveal anything about multiplication?
Definitely does. Whether I'm switching from 9 to 10 or 7 to 10, there's a border. from 0 to 17 in base 8, half of the numbers still begin with 1.
I guess since Google is (that) profitable there's little benefit in seeking an income by detection of copyright violations.
Soccer Wall Stickers for Child’s Room: Design Ideas and Printing Tips
Why not? Lisp's grammer is much simpler than just about anything else. And there's literally decades worth of material on it.
I second Javascript. It is widely and immediately available (even gui comes for free), allows using and learning different styles of programming, can be used to immediately write useful little programs, and scales up to moderately sized projects.

Python is good too. Not always immediately available, but easy to install. Other than gui (which would need to be learned), shares many advantages of Javascript.
"The problem with Flash is that it's really, really slow."

if you program a simple particle generator with say a 400x300 display, flash is a TON faster than canvas\javascript.
Caponia - an in memory, full text search system in clojure
What are the advantages/differences of using Factor compared to Forth?
Ruby also has Jemini for making games: http://jemini.kenai.com/

http://www.logustus.com/2009/10/gauntaga-jemini-game-in-1-ho...
its not zip api, its zi papi :) the ze russians :)
one wonders how this works then, if Hg branches are so sub-optimal:
http://hg-git.github.com/

you can re-write history in mercurial too - with the same obvious implications for both.

one thing that did go away with Hg was the need to merge unfamiliar code because someone upstream did a git-rebase.
It shouldn't be possible for it to lock up the computer, though. It doesn't install drivers. No matter how you slice it, that is Apple's fault.
Something with immediate results.

Mine were HTML, TI-83 Basic, and Visual Basic. All of these could get something visible and interactive relatively quickly.

These days, I would say things like Javascript/Ruby/Python, while more simple than C/C++/Java, still don't have a direct pipeline to results that matter (for a learner).

Pygame would be my choice if ¥ou had to go the scripting route.
Do you mean 30.1% of prices end with 9?
Probably not but the birthday problem is always a crowd pleaser

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem
I was using JRuby + Rails for some exploratory development very recently. It was pretty nice, the only complaint I had was the startup time when doing script/server... but really that wasn't all that bad either.

If you've done much with Java, then it's really worth looking into JRuby. Also, Charles Nutter and the rest of the JRuby community are awesome.
Apple reports first quarter results.
so if you track project state with branches (for say versions) and you need to apply 'new feature' to all this n branches, does that mean n merges for your team? not for ours.

in all fairness, there is stacked git. go crazy.
He might like Robocode http://robocode.sourceforge.net/

Teaches basic programming as a side-effect of trying to make your take kill the other tank.

I haven't tried it, but what I've seen of it looks pretty interesting.
Lisp is clean and the grammar is simple, that is true. But many kids want to see results as soon as possible, and there are languages (or rather systems based on certain languages) where this can be achieved faster and easier. Perhaps a lisp (scheme, specifically) may be a good first choice for a mathematically inclined kid, or more likely a teenager. I think that most kids would struggle with lisp.
As an aside, I'll tell about my experience in Asia for lower end prostitutes salaries...

A friend of mine in China was the boyfriend of a massage salon madame (she started out as a prostitute, saved money and opened her own salon later on). In this salon, it was mostly handjobs, the price was 70RMB + tip (so usually around 120RMB -> 17$) ... out of this the salon took 40RMB and 30RMB if the girl was requested directly (in the case of a return customer). The best girls get about 4-5 customers/day. To compare, at the time I paid my cleaning lady 10RMB/hour and the official minimum wage in shanghai is 680RMB (but in practice a girl working as a waitress fulltime is paid 1000-1200RMB/month). Those are prices from 3 years ago. So a successful girl could earn at least 7000RMB/month and the most successful girls would move over to higher end salons where they could get more money (higher end salons would charge 2x/3x as much for the same service). That's higher than the starting salary of someone who graduated from a good university like jiatong daxue.

Another element of comparison, where I used to live in japan, there was a soapland next to my house that was hiring new girls and showed the salaries... The salaries were around 6000-8000$/month...

So outside of high end and street workers, I think there's quite a few number of not college educated girls who make a very decent living of the trade much better than if they did normal jobs (one chinese girl I met in japan was doing this kind of job to pay for her studies).
Teacher anxieties may subtract from girls’ math scores
As an aside, is there a gentle introduction to prolog?
It's not sexy, but I've had great results with "The Memory Book":

http://www.amazon.com/Memory-Book-Classic-Improving-School/d...

If you want to start working on it right now, then you should definitely read through the Mentat Wiki:

http://www.ludism.org/mentat/
Understanding E = mc2
of course, it's just I can see how it works out for Google too
Wow, this guy epitomizes the concept of defeating your enemy by becoming them. He's just as nasty as the collection agencies. The fact that he's attacking them, instead of a defaulter is a mere technicality.
I should clarify: We do get a ton of feedback during the alpha/release candidate phases - it's just that there always seems to be a few things that end up slipping through in the end, one way or the other, hence the soon-after .1 release.
I totally understand you
What gets me about sub-standard equipment is not so much that they can't do basically the same thing as more pricier stuff (though sometimes that is true), it's the little annoyances that, over time, make me want to chuck shit into the garbage.

For example, an MP3 player has only a few core behaviors. But it gets tiresome if boot time is slow, or it freezes at boo every 20th time, or the screen is hard to read, or there's a pop or click in between every track, or you can't resume playing where you left off, and so on.

Often what makes take a long time in picking what brand of device to buy isn't so much the core qualities but what feature set versus known flaws will make me happiest over some period of time.
I've been in figuring out how to encode content using the tools the brain has "at hand", for a while now.

Originally, I thought similarly, but then: The less interesting part might be to decode information from the brain but to it.
What do you do for people like me who browse with plugins disabled but Javascript allowed?
Startup in 7 Days | Day six (SMS gateway)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1076534
I doubt he understood that he was doing speculative, risky investing.

Mid-bubble, I can't count how many people told me that the market can only go up, or who looked at me like I was insane when I said I was watching month-over-month sales to try to avoid getting creamed when the bubble inevitably burst.
If for some reason google collapses, a modeling career awaits him at Victoria's Secret.
definately python over javascript!

-interactive shell

-easy to debug

-lot of great simple graphics libraries too

-making 3d shapes is funner than div containers

For 3d shapes, http://vpython.org is a good simple library. He will be able to figure out how to get balls rolling around in no time.

For a media library with sound for making 2d games, definately go with SFML (simple fast multimedia library) over pygame: http://www.sfml-dev.org/

It's faster and also has versions for C, C++, .Net, D, and ruby, so if he wants to learn one of those languages later he can try to port his game.
Its interesting to see an article one year after it being published; and see how things turn out. Flash still seems to be pretty pervasive even today.
Sorry John, I didn't intend that to come off as negative. I know it's challenging to get people to test. I'm a big jQuery proponent and I don't even test until after the release (sorry). I'm happy to see the release and to know this is the Visual Studio version.
Ruby and Shoes are a great pair to introduce people to code. Quick and elegant results.
This is an excellent series of blog posts about a father trying to teach his 6 year old son to program a simple game. Maybe you can draw some inspiration from it.

http://davidbau.com/archives/2005/07/27/a_programming_questi...
And livejournal.

I haven't been to China, but a friend of mine taught English at a university there for 2 years. She used a proxy server, but none of her students had even heard of them. (She was subverting the gov't by gently encouraging them to use them.)

It's irrelevant how easy it is to get around the censorship for Bill Gates. What's relevant is how effective the censorship is for Chinese people- and it is.
I wish someone had handed me Smalltalk at that age instead of telling me that all real programming was done in C. I think one of the most important things is being able to see results quickly to give it a hands-on feel.
Facebook Application and Game Dashboards Start to Go Live
Yeah I had the same ideas when I was in school, but life consistently gets in the way. I took a year off to be with my GF who was going to school on the other side of the country. The job market was an utter wasteland. Nobody was hiring. At one point I resorted to going through the phone book. After 3 months of job hunting, I had two options: stock boy at Meijers (if you're not familiar, it's like Walmart) or software engineer at a small software company with a crappy boss working on software that didn't matter to anyone. By that point I had to choose one of those jobs, I could not afford (literally, monetarily) to be picky.

I took the programming job, and although it sucked, I got a lot of experience out of that job and am a better programmer today because of it. As horrible as it was, it probably sucked less than stocking shelves at Meijer would have, and I certainly got a lot more value out of it.
For scalability use SenSage (http://www.sensage.com/customers). Their some of their customers gather 200GB-500GB of log data daily and at least one customer has a petabyte of historical log data under management. Query performance over long time ranges is important ... when you discover a new exploit in use, how can you tell how long it's been employed unless you can look at history?
les.net
I think Flash is going to suffer because a lot of people just don't want to develop with it any more, for all sorts of reasons, not least the ones that have been popping up on HN lately (Apple products like the iPhone, non-OSS, etc.) There are tons of developers who would jump at the chance to switch to an alternative, and there are probably lots of developers who are reluctant to learn Flash for these reasons, but still want to be able to program nicely performing animations, interfaces and games.

I fall into the latter category: Flash programming appeals to me because of what you can do with it, but I'm not interested in making a substantial investment of time into a platform that I would rather see replaced by OSS alternatives. (For similar reasons, I'm not planning on learning Obj-C to develop for the iPhone - I'd prefer to get good at developing mobile web applications using web technologies).

The gradual shift in developer attention away from Flash over to alternatives is going to chip away at Flash over time, but I agree that it's going to take quite a long time.

Ultimately I still find it hard to believe how far behind web browsers are when it comes to graphics. The stuff I was running on my 386 back in the day pretty much destroys anything you can do in a web browser. It's kind of sad when everybody gets super pumped that you can run a tiny, glitchy version of Wolfenstein 3D in a web browser. It's great that it runs. But shouldn't we be at full-screen Quake levels by now?
Or you can use a tool that has already scaled for ages and has been in production since 2002. SenSage ... http://www.sensage.com/customers.
Ishqiya Movie Reviews, Wallpapers, Story, Photos
I thought Web 2.0 is old news :p
I honestly believe the structure of Lisp is easier to pick up than other languages. You always know where a construct begins and ends in a Lisp.
The practical thing is that when you submit as a blog post, other people might link to you. Noone is going to link to a post they read on HN.

But a blog post? Oh yeah.

Remember my rant a few weeks ago about how the Crunchies were the kid's choice awards of the web? That got picked up by LA Times and they linked to my post in one of their stories. I doubt that'd happen if I posted the same exact thing as a "Tell HN" post.
This has been around for years, through RSSpect (http://www.rsspect.com/) by the wonderful Ryan North.
In order to accelerate learning, I believe it is best to try to learn one concept at a time. That's why I like to introduce people to the LOGO programming language if it's their very first programming language. It introduces many basic concepts that we programmers take for granted, for example:

* the fact that a computer will take everything you do literally and can't read your mind

* commands

* sequential iteration of commands

* loops

* conditionals

It's also easy to get quick results which keeps an early learner from getting discouraged. Once the learner is bored with LOGO, then you take them to a more powerful language. Ruby is nice because--even though it can get complex--you can start off very simple.

I would recommend this book for learning Ruby as a first language: http://www.amazon.com/Learn-Program-Second-Facets-Ruby/dp/19...
Oh, I'm not bothered by other people giving reviews on Amazon. But I wouldn't do it myself unless Amazon paid me.
I've briefly considered writing a bot to just submit everything from reddit to HN.

And then I realized that would make y'all cry.
Corporate Backing for Research? Get Over It
A press release from adobe is not a very good citation for flash adoption. :) They wont exactly tell you about all the places flash isn't going to be.
Hindrances to free software: DVDs, MP3s, and YouTube
It's interesting though, there is a very large population of extremely bright and creative people who tend to score poorly on standardized tests as well.

That was the point I was trying to make. At 18 years old Steve Jobs was only just beginning to develop that intelligence of his we see so often today.
I would have thought this was obvious.
It's very awesome.

One thing that would be very cool... is regex support? :D

But barring that, a "contains" box. I.e. if I don't care if the website starts with cat or ends with cat, as long as cat is in there somewhere.
In the Next Industrial Revolution, Atoms Are the New Bits
I don't think the existing evidence trends towards lisp being easier to understand for the aggregate first-time programmer.
Why not just wrap Lucene? It's in Java, provenly awesome over the course of a decade and supports in-memory, file-backed, whatever. Probably a lot easier than writing your own tokenizers and indexing algorithms.
It isn't with the first one, but it is with all subsequent submissions.
Agreed. This is by far the most enriching interview I've seen on mixergy. And theres been some excellent ones.
Ranking of World Universities in Computer Science
if you have topic branches in hg you can also strip them provided you didn't push them to a public repo.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1076119
I would not recommend Scheme as a first language. The syntax is too far from what we normally use, so it provides a barrier to learning.

Ruby:

a = 7 * 8 + 10

Scheme:

(let ((a (+ (10 (* 7 8)))))

Ruby:

print "you are big" if height > 80

Scheme:

(if (> height 80) (display "you are big"))