skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask her! First, figure out what exactly she wants to do/make/play with—then pick the best tool for the job.

If she just wants to make web pages, set her up with some webspace and then, after she's gotten HTML and CSS down, show her that she can "make things happen" using PHP and Javascript.

If she wants to make a game, I would personally recommend starting off not with any raw-coding environment at all. Why? Kids don't generally like designing game mechanics—and that's what they're tasked with if they have to turn a general-purpose programming environment—or even a multimedia environment like Flash—into a game engine. If they say they want to make a game, chances are what they want to do is just to re-use ideas they've seen in games they've already played, but with different content assets and "individual-asset mechanics" (i.e. new power-ups, weapons, etc.)

My own recommendation, then, is RPG Maker, partly because it's where I got my own start in logical systems-based thinking, but also because it has a nice, gradually-sloped learning curve, beginning with pure level design, and then transitioning into scripting as the need arises, before finally peaking with the limited ability to rewrite the game engine in the scripting language itself (with just enough chafing to make them crave a better tool.) The only catch is that it isn't free—RMXP is $60USD, as far as I'm aware.
The PeopleRank (or Whuffie or Karma or Facebook Points or eBay rating or whatever) is coming, no doubt.

This is one of those major shifts to society that one day will just be there and change everything.

Are you ready for it?

Are we?
I think Microsoft has always done a great job on providing excellent development tools and I've always used Microsoft tools and languages with great pleasure in the past.

However, to me, developing with Microsoft tools is really limiting my choices. This is one of the reasons I really like the Java platform, because of the choices. I can choose to run Java on Windows, Linux, OSX or what ever operating system. I can choose if I want to use Tomcat, Jetty, JBoss, Geronimo or what ever server best suites my needs. I can choose my language; Java, Jython, JRuby, Groovy, Scala, Clojure etc. All these languages run on the JVM.

If I was still building desktop apps, like I did in the 90's, I'd probably still be using Microsoft tools. But since I'm primarily a web developer these days, somehow to me, Microsoft tools just don't cut it for me.
Back in the 90's I used 4DOS on MS-DOS, which had a similar concept of 'jumping' to a directory by just typing the last part of a directory path. You had to pre-index your directory structure with 'CDD /S', though. And it didn't remember your favourite directories to give them priority.
To add some more data points to what you said

Literacy changed from 12% to 66 % from 1947 to 2007 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_India

Life expectancy changed from 32 years to 65 years (47 to 07)
http://www.google.co.in/search?rlz=1C1GPCK_enIN371IN372&...

Gdp changed from 93 Bil to 1.22 Trillion
http://www.google.co.in/search?hl=en&rlz=1C1GPCK_enIN371... (1950-2007)
Dupe. This is a "printable" version of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1222483.

But this version has no images, very longer text lines and a smaller font.
Easier if you think in base 10 I guess. Computers, and many programmers, don't though.
1. The Onion… is satire.
2. What's wrong with people spending their money on things that they like, exactly?
The jets of Enceladus
Disney's Copy Paste
In Denmark there is also Startup Bootcamp: http://startupbootcamp.dk/
Philosopher: Why we should ditch religion - CNN.com
I couldn't agree more! '"We should be talking about real problems, like nuclear proliferation and genocide and poverty and the crisis in education," Harris said in a recent interview at the TED Conference in Long Beach, California. TED is a nonprofit group dedicated to "ideas worth spreading."'
> So easily demolish them. I'm here for discussion, if I made a mistake, let me know. I said I wanted to hear and address opposing points of view, and I'm clarifying and trying to answer all the questions and feedback I get.
....
> India? Much further along than Pakistan and its non-British governed neighbors. Serious decline in prosperity, freedom, and safety; massive increase in religious violence and resurgence of the caste system after the British pulled out.

1. Pakistan was British governed.
2. Almost all neighbours of India were British governed

> So was it serfdom under the British Empire? Was it bad? You tell me - would you rather be under British governed Burma, or Burmese governed Burma? British Egypt or Egyptian Egypt? British Hong Kong or PRC Hong Kong? British India or Indian India?

To compare British and Indian India, some points which I also added to Pinkplonk's comment.

Literacy changed from 12% to 66 % from 1947 to 2007 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_India

Life expectancy changed from 32 years to 65 years (47 to 07)
http://www.google.co.in/search?rlz=1C1GPCK_enIN371IN372&...

Gdp changed from 93 Bil to 1.22 Trillion
http://www.google.co.in/search?hl=en&rlz=1C1GPCK_enIN371... (1950-2007)

In fact I am willing to wager that there is not only no indicator of progress where India made significant progress post independence, but also that on all it made progress at a rate fater than the worldwide average.

> They just ignore the responses and pick a single sentence or two that they can quote out of context and nitpick with. But I'm trying to address and answer them all in good faith - if someone takes the time to write an intelligent response to me, I'll try take the time to cite clarifying and supporting information.

Since I am from India, and only know its history post independence, I can only provide data from that context.
The user experience is mistakenly targetted at mid experience users. Which is fine; but utterly useless for the majority of average joe users.

It is very hard to understand how to pander to such people - but Windows is, unfortunately, a good starting point....

There are lots of problems with the ux on ubuntu that makes it problematic for a lot of people.
Shadow puppet http://github.com/railsmachine/shadow_puppet is a Ruby DLS for Puppet. it allows you to have the best of both worlds. you still 'declare' your resources but you can imperatively build those declarations.
matthijs, really interesting post, and very much liked your product as well. Amazingly simple. But I couldn't see any new message indicator when I tried it out in Chrome. Has it already been put in production?
Use something where you actually have to program by typing.

I would perhaps use DrScheme.
I don't even think it is that huge a shift from what we already accept, although it will be a quantum leap in effectiveness.

I think a small team of folks with CS backgrounds plus an insurance company's claim data (or a bank's loss data) for a year plus a Hadoop cluster would make FICO obsolete, at least until they were regulated out of existence for being too darned efficient at what they do. (The basic theory is "Birds of a feather flock together": if most of your friends are losers, it is probably net-beneficial to the business to assume you are a loser, if most of our friends are solid debt-paying responsible citizens, it is probably net-beneficial to the business to assume you are a solid debt-paying responsible citizen.)

I think this would be so effective (prices risk appropriately, far cheaper to maintain than the current reporting infrastructure since folks helpfully update the social graph for you) you'd almost have to illegalize it. (Let me hum a few bars: "disparate impact".)
The most interesting part is a link to http://tomgabob.blogspot.com/2009/11/as3-memory-management.h... that has an explanation of the problem with this garbage collector. I think you should submit it.
Surely this won't actually effect you when you want to do a script. If you want the size of a file, 'ls' (and most commands I think) gives you it in bytes, not KiB or KB or whatever...
I take the opposite view; this is the return of reputation. The internet ends the anonymity of urban living. Are you a chronic liar, a drunken slut, a responsible employee or a good parent? Soon the world will know so act accordingly.
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Why We Haven't Met Any Aliens (2006)
I think 90% of users no longer need to know how large their files are, and the other 10% are not far off. (For that matter, I think 90% of users don't need to know that "files" exist.)
Question: British contributed in the Iraq War. What was the result? Roads, schools, hospitals? No, but hundred of thousands of deaths under the US and British army, more violence than ever and a corrupt political system.

The result has been the only free country in the Arab world, the recent election of a secular leader, and a dramatically higher standard of living.

but hundred of thousands of deaths under the US and British army,

http://www.iraqbodycount.org/ estimates about 100,000 civilian deaths from ALL sources, including things like grudges, etc. This is vastly lower than what Saddam did, and unlike him, the Brits and Americans were trying to kill innocent people. Odd how all the people who claim to be so concerned about the deaths of innocents never set up body count websites before the war, when there were far more bodies.
Ruby. I don't think you could get any less verbose, it's simple to understand and to the point, great for a first language. :)
Come on, PHP is a horrible mess. Sorry to be so blunt, but that's the way it is. Don't start with PHP. I usually leave PHP devs to their own world, but since you suggest spoiling the children, I had to jump in...

As for hosting, you could easily host a Ruby/Sinatra app on Heroku to show off for friends.
The author writes on his homepage he is no longer maintaining it and hasn't been following the GIMP API changes. He is also looking for someone to take over:

http://www.logarithmic.net/pfh/resynthesizer.

(I forgot where I read about the "since 2.4" part.)
Book mixing math and crochet wins UK 'odd' prize
If she's interested in games may Kodu would be a good starting point: http://fuse.microsoft.com/kodu/

It's a visual programming language for creating games, it's very simple to create fun and playable games. It would certainly would as a good introduction to modelling and sequencing, which would lead on to "real" programming well.
When you are just 20, you don't think a lot about ethics

What planet is this guy from? I understood it was wrong to lie, cheat and steal when I was 5. If someone had explained to me what malware in 2010 looked like and how people made money from it, I would have understood that was wrong.

I'd be a lot more understanding of an explanation like "I couldn't find legitimate work", but the idea that 20 is too young to understand or care about ethics is absurd.
Well, what you describe is all but the very definition of prejudice. It would discriminate directly against whole social classes of people irrespective of their individual behaviour, on the basis of group behaviour. From what you describe, in a private education system built around loans it would have kicked me out at 15 or so.

On the other hand, such an inefficient classification mechanism ought to create sufficient surplus for profit for those specialized enough to look for it. But there are other systemic inefficiencies that might prevent those niches from being profitable enough.
At first glance one may assume "laziness" in the sense of decreasing production costs, but Disney has a history of being much, much more calculated.

My hunch is a psychological affect/effect on the viewer and I would love to investigate the implication further. Anyone have any ideas?
Hm. Is it just me, or does it feel like describing a path with plain ol' tab completion isn't really bothersome, impractical or "a lot of keystrokes"? And since when weren't aliases good enough? I definitely see the use for this under Windows, but in a real nix shell? -shrug-
My friend Rupa's 'z' utility - http://wiki.github.com/rupa/z/ - does this pretty nicely, too.

Discussed on reddit here: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7y4ap/where_the...
Am I missing the punchline or coy brilliance here?
Or morality will get caught up in a panic and more draconian laws will take effect. The village of squinting windows, where everybody knows everybody's business, is no paragon of tolerance, and I speak as someone who grew up in such a village.

It's a cliche that it's the anonymity of cities that "loosened morals", e.g. gay meccas are usually pretty densely populated urban areas. People in the countryside live in fear of the opprobrium of their neighbours.
The massacre of 1,526 unarmed men, women and children gathered at Jallianwala Bagh (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jallianwala_Bagh_massacre)
The proprietary ones. And yes, I'm getting the screen corruption and occasional crashes with them. Sure, it's after a very long time logged in, but still is extremely annoying. I'm guessing it's a video memory management problem, but who knows, they're proprietary after all.

Yeah, the open source ones aren't very good, but useful for getting things up and running, and when I'm hacking around in the kernel, and keeping on rebuilding the closed source drivers is too annoying. VESA drivers really aren't a good replacement at all.
I started learning how to program with Logo when I was in 4th grade. Perhaps it's a bit out of date now (haven't looked at it in over 20 years), but I did end up becoming a programmer.
Hmm. These days I don't use the 3D acceleration for anything but window compositing. I got the impression that for that the AMD drivers are pretty stable? Might see if I can borrow an AMD card from someone and test it out before I spend money.

Re: nouveau - it seems to be an extremely moving target right now; I'll have to build my own kernel, X.org, etc. I basically don't have the time for that, this is my main workstation.
I've been using autojump for 6 mos. now; it's one of my fave utilities.
What Happens When Apple Passes Microsoft In Value? Yes, When.
I am not an iPad or WoW fan... but this almost sounds fun.
It strikes me that your choice should reflect her knowledge of math and basic logic. If she has a good grasp of these, then perhaps a "typed" language might be a good idea, otherwise, something like Alice (as suggested below) might be better because it introduces those concepts in a visual way.
The Force is strong in this one.
Make sure she has an interest in programming first. If she does, do NOT start her out on a graphical programming language like squeak/scratch. Future compsci kids have romantic visions of hackers frantically typing into a green/black terminal to break into the government mainframe. They will be turned off instantly when they see themselves just dragging and dropping blocks onto a white screen.
I think it might even become creepy to not have any indiscretions. Might look robotic.
The questions from people that have obviously never used Lisp haven't changed in 50 years.. "Why all the parenthesis" "Lisp is too arcane" etc. I can't be too hard on them, I used to think the same thing. But once you make a commitment to actually learn the language (just like any other language), you find a beautiful language that allows you to write very compact code with a minimum of boilerplate.

I'm constantly amazed at how many ideas that Lisp came up with years ago that are just now starting to gain wider acceptance in more mainstream languages. It's unfortunate that superficial complaints about syntax prevent so many developers from giving this language a chance.
Yes, it is a dupe, but reading it a second time I decided this was possibly the most underrated line for thought:

"Closing the show, I'd say, "I'd like to thank each and every one of you for coming here tonight." Then I would walk into the audience and, in fast motion, thank everyone individually."

I'm not going to delve deep and explain here why this is so powerful and taint your own conclusion(s), but I hope you see it and agree.
Exactly. After you have been programming for a while, numbers like 256 or 1024 appear as perfectly round numbers.
processing. it's simple to make visual stuff, no boilerplate and "IDE" has only like 3 buttons (play, stop and ..)
I think it should work on OS X, don't hesitate to contact me if you run into any problems.
The blog post he links makes me wonder... Is AS3 garbage collector a compacting one? He wants to make his memory usage to be flat, not a saw shape, but if the GC is not compacting, I wouldn't expect that to make a difference. Especially that in most GC designs, by using object pools you'd be trading the time it takes to update free area lists for the time GC spends going through the tree (you've got more objects used on average, all referenced in a pool).

Am I missing something here?
I think that will pretty much mean that I'll be a Fedora user in the future. I understand that many people prefer base 10 file sizes for various reasons, I don't however so that change would drive me mad really quickly.
I've only encountered "magic" with memory in AVM2 a few times - primarily, where API allocations and object allocations interact. I usually blame myself for it, but it's a problem rife throughout the Flash API that you'll try something and it won't work because you did it before Flash was "ready," so you have to go back and do some voodoo and defer things to run in just the right order to get it to work. These quirky behaviors are left undefined in the specs and docs.

I also don't use the fancy features of AS3 - Dictionary and weak references - because I work from haXe and would rather write for portability most of the time. And I minimize my use of the event listeners and display list for the same reason. I think I've avoided a lot of grief because of that.
z was inspired by autojump. It has a slightly different philosophy than autojump: while autojump is designed to be so simple that you forget about it after a while, z has more features and is slightly more complex. Using one or the other is mostly a matter of taste :)
I guess it all depends on the usage you make of the command line. I work with a lot of data in directories that do not have nice names (spaces, long sequences of numbers...), so autojump is very useful for me.

In any case I'd recommend to try it for a bit, I've seen quite a lot of people changing their minds after using it for a couple days. Sure, you can emulate the functionality with aliases and so on, but this is fully automatic, and after a few days, you might very well be thinking, "why didn't I use this all along?" :)
New Journalism, Part Curation Part Content Creation
Someone that has relatively many friends that play football is probably someone that likes, and plays, football. Categorizing him as such is neither prejudiced nor discriminatory: it's a reasonable extrapolation. The same holds for more sensitive facts about someone: someone with many gay friends is more likely than average to be gay.

There already are insurance companies that only insure people with a university degree. Their rates are lower than those of other companies. They aren't prejudiced and they do not discriminate: they estimate risk based on solid information about a person and the mere fact that they can stay in business suggests there is indeed a good correlation between their estimates risk and the actual risk.

If they could determine who has many university educated friends, then they would perhaps want to extend their service to those people, because they have determined that those people share the characteristics of university educated people that cause the insured risks to be smaller. (Assuming these reasons that are independent of the reasons for not doing/finishing a university education, etc.)
Not if it is anonymous. Chronic liars will be less queasy about making their competition look bad. Heck, I bet that if it catches on, you'll be able to buy "reputation".
Look at storytelling Alice. It's a PhD thesis mod of Alice, designed to help kids (especially girls) get into programming.

http://www.alice.org/kelleher/storytelling/
Here's some background:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYt9UmastGo&feature=relat...

Seems like the explanation is rather simple: the animator (Wolfgang Reitherman) enjoyed reusing animations from old Disney movies and was known for it.
As weird as it might sound but I recommend Basic. With line numberings.

It will make her need to think about the whole program beforehand.That taught me analytical structural thinking so well. Also at some point I realised I could put more lines in between 10 and 20, 9 more lines!
I Love Linux Mint
NYC 'Consultants' getting $722M from doomed project
No, he's a spammer (see the age of his user account).
Scratch is a great choice. Worked well with my daughter. I think she was 8 at the time. She quickly grasped ideas like looping, variables, message sending between objects, coordinates...

It's a fun environment for them to experiment and mess around with, which helps learning a lot.
"every action has an equal and opposite reaction"

I don't see anything earth-shattering with this report and it makes absolute sense, but for some reason the "every action has an equal and opposite reaction" kept coming to mind and seemed to hold absolute truth with their findings.

Specifically, they find that it is true that if purchases turn out well, then the purchase of experience has the greatest happiness benefit and material goods the lesser.

Conversely, they find the opposite is equally true when it comes to purchases that don't turn out well: "Purchases that decrease happiness are less damaging when they are material purchases than when they are experiential purchases," or people will be least happy when a purchase doesn't turn out well if it is an experience vs a material good.

Maybe I wasn't clear at first which warranted the down vote on the comment.
I would definitely recommend scratch. My nephew has been experimenting and making simple games with it for a while. There is a certain pride that an uncle feels when asked to explain the "abs" function to a child.
I'm pretty sure the secret here is to refer to a secret in the title of an article in order to build interest and incoming links, and then just provide a few statistics that, though mildly interesting, are hardly useful in the way that "insider secrets" are expected to be.
Google unveils glimpse at future
What happens? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Windows Phone 7 development: reading RSS feeds
I have a motherboard with onboard ATI HD4200 graphics and run the latest KDE4, and the open source AMD drivers are plenty fine to manage all kinds of shiny effects. They even manage some simpler 3D stuff without problem. I've never had any problems with the stability of the drivers either.
Finding Cheap Concert Tickets
Your favorite artist or band is finally in town. You’ve watched and waited for this day. Only once you get to the ticking website your heart falls fast. The tickets are way out of your price range. It’s heartbreaking, frustrating and infuriating. Not to worry, there are ways you can find cheap concert tickets. Read on!
Nice find, though whether intentional or not I am still curious as to what kind of influence this can have on the viewer.

While this study is directly related http://pom.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/15/2/187 to what I am trying to find, it does offer enough insight to draw a new hypothesis to test.

"Familiarity was a function of chart performance but likeability was not. Hence repetition increases familiarity but has little effect on likeability."

So, is it then possible that when he "copied" a classic animation and reused it in a new one that it possibly served as a function of how well the new animation performed? Remember, although in the study I found, familiarity had to do with the exact same song and performance, the copy of the animations very well are picked up subconsciously to the repeat Disney consumers and very well could have influenced its theatrical (ticket sales, home video sales) performance.
Are these things possibly more due to the march of time than to Indian self-governance?