skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From the perspective of the people making money off the players? Yes.

When I'm actually playing a game myself, though, and recognizing that these two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, I prefer fun over addictive.
I wanted to engage with my friends and family spread throughout the world through this soccer games and so I started a little prediction contest for each game. We would all put down our predictions and then tally points. It became fun and connected us all in a totally unexpected way.
> Back in the day, cheese usually had those big holes in it

Uh that depends on the cheese, a camembert or a maroilles with "big holes" in it is not normal.
This is a decent summary of some of the high points of the talk.

http://blog.ezyang.com/2010/06/static-analysis-mozilla/
[from the other thread] There's LOGO if you want to go old school with turtle graphics:

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/logo.html
I think this is pretty much identical to the subject being discussed here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1426211

There's a lot of discussion there already, and it might be worth reading it before commenting here and repeating all the arguments.

ADDED IN EDIT: Having gone and taken my own advice (for a change 8-) I prefer the other article because the diagrams are larger and in-line.
Top numbers between 1 and 11
Kids(and anyone without the preexisting motivation to try the harder problems of programming, which would include most adults too) will want something with a lot of immediate responsiveness and simple failure modes. This rules out languages needing "build systems" of any kind, languages that require hooking up a "foobar library" to do anything but console output, and languages with obscure error messages and ample means of shooting oneself in the foot.

HTML/CSS mixed with a little bit of JS is roughly equivalent to learning BASIC these days - you can throw something on the screen quickly, and add bits of functionality from there. Since errors throw exceptions, they're pretty easy to understand, and with the newer HTML features there's tons of room to grow into different domains. Plus there's a zillion resources for JS coding out there.

A good alternative, if the kids in question are not old enough to care about the prestige factor of "real" languages yet(an issue as you get near the teen years), is Scratch: http://scratch.mit.edu/ It reduces syntax to drag-and-drop while retaining some key concepts that bridge the gap into more powerful languages(conditional branches, named variables, and list manipulation)
How a B student landed an A+ job in the toy industry
The best Tetris version I've played is the one on my HP48GX. I like it so much that I think I've spend more time playing Tetris on my calculator than doing other things with it ;-)
The Pub is great, North Oakland here.
Her other venture was Yaari.com, which was a scammy dating site aimed at Indians. It was big with some Indian VC's here in Bangalore but eventually got shut down.
Well, that's not really true. Any two people, remember can hold any ceremony they want in front of their friends, call themselves whatever they want, live together, have kids, whatever.

Marriage however is very specifically a contract between two individuals and the State. You get a marriage license and you file the paperwork at City Hall. The State's interest is obvious: it wants new, well-adjusted citizens. So the contract says, we'll give you these privileges (in tax, immigration, etc) and you do your bit. Part of that is, all property becomes the property of the new entity. So yeah, the only difference between "getting married" and doing it yourself is the contract.
Fill in content, make regular updates with content - and if the content is well curated, people linked to the discussion threads will stay.

So you'll have to do the work of many at first.
Yeah, you'd think that, wouldn't you? The more users you get though, the more conservative you become. "But if this drops conversion by 0.1%, that will cost us $100k/week." Gets old fast and stifles change.
It's not that hard to support 2.4-3.1 with the same code base. It's been done, and documented by a bunch of projects now.
Have a look at http://news.squeak.org/2008/10/28/squeak-learn-programming-w...
Weekly Roundup – Best of BlogSphere
Its a prime responsibility on a blogger to keep updating the blog every day or every alternate day it is equally important to brush up knowledge by reading blogs in his niche to know whats happening around, the third important aspact of blogging is to be atcive on social media sites like facebook and Twitter. Well thats a huge task for a part time blogger but somehow these are the prime requirement if you really want to do
Alice[1] may interest them. It teaches the very basics of programming without having to put them through the boring initial "Hello world!" experience right off the bat.

[1] http://www.alice.org/
iPads and Smart Phones May Change People's Minds About the Free Internet

Ah. Another one of these. I'm sure ABC will have an original take on the topic.
I think that's only true in the sense that people always give more cred to products that they, personally, use. It's the same reason that Google = sexy while enterprise software = not sexy. Almost everybody uses Google, but very few people use any given enterprise software package (and when they do, they usually hate it).

If it were just a male/female thing, you'd expect games like SimCity and Civilization to not get geek cred, since their appeal straddles gender lines.
My understanding is quite limited, but I've believed this to be truth. Anyone know anything about this?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elitzur%E2%80%93Vaidman_bomb-te...
sounds like a neat hack..
A Green Pattern Language
@chipsy Agreed completely as far as HTML/CSS. That's what I started with when I was 9. It's a great, easy, and extremely useful foundation to build on later when they want to write more involved scripts.
SmallBasic by Microsoft. It is intended to provide a foundational understanding of programming. Comes with a nice kid friendly IDE

http://smallbasic.com/
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/beginner/ff384126.aspx
I don't know what exactly is going on there, whether it's a bankruptcy or something else, but whatever it is is not being particularly well handled. Shambles, really.
Do you work there? Just curious.
If I were 25 years younger I'd like to be introduced to Processing (http://processing.org/). I say that because my interest in programming developed because I wanted to know how how to draw interesting patterns on a screen; and I liked the mathematical aspects of that sort of program.

I think the answer in your case will similarly depend on the interest of the kids. Is the question for a general school class or for a few kids with particular interests?
Being that written works can only be copywritten, not patented, this would have no real effect. In theory, this could give you a leg to stand on with respect to proving prior art, but it's highly doubtful.
Meanwhile, over in Europe, we're all scratching our heads and wondering why you would need lawyers to setup a prenup or handle the divorce.
Weird Modes of Transportation
Let see some great and very useful idea for transportation.
This is certainly a cool hack, but pretty common. When I first met with my startup's IP lawyer, this was one of the first things he told us to do; it's cheap, easy, and holds up well.
I'd recommend Microsoft Small Basic
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-ca/beginner/ff384126.aspx

It has a GUI which children will expect, runs out of the box on Windows which most kids will have, and allows them to easily interact with the GUI.

The other really nice thing is that as they progress they can use the full .NET runtime library so there is a lot of room to grow with out having to switch languages.

The only real downside is having a kid grow up like this:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xdwn4e_java-4ever-microsoft... [.NET vs. Java trailer]
youtube took it down :(
I would say, for kids who would not otherwise learn programming. This language should get their interest and get them hooked.
I totally agree. This is what processing is for. Even though I program as a job, a few hours with processing put a smile on my face; this is really what it used to be like. It's fun.
Wait, what? Instantaneously?
You've listed a bunch of problems but nowhere do I see any creative solutions. Wasn't that the main point of the article?
That's hardly the reason as The Sims which is also played by many women get's lots of cred.

The reason seems more to be that it's not blazing fast OpenGL 3D supernaturalistic advanced strategy/fps type of game.
At 9 I learned Basic.

At 10 or so I learned Pascal.

My programming finally took off around 12 when I learned C and Assembler.

I think it's important to point out that no programming language is "too hardcore" (well, maybe assembler) for a generic 12-year-old. They can learn anything.

With that, I would suggest a combination of HTML/CSS/Javascript for the quick results and Ruby for the fun and elegance. Then let them learn whatever they feel like. If they don't feel an impulse to go learn this stuff by themselves after learning 1 or 2 languages, they're probably not interested anyway.
I've been working on a distributed scalable social web 2.0 AJAX HTML5 iPhone database in the cloud...it's going to be awesome.
I'd say the holy grail is to improve people's lives, potentially even make the world a better place.
Database Drama
No, marriage is fine. The question to ask is why should couples get tax benefits just by being a couple? The state wishes to have a stable or growing population, but marriage is no longer a prerequisite for that, nor is it a "booster".

So why should unmarried couples pay more taxes than married couples? Why should singles?
A lot of people (including me) criticize WoW for being repetitive and mind numbing (grinding), too. I don't think it has anything to do with gender. Also there seem to be actually a lot of women who play WoW?
A while ago they were involved in a scandal, when it became clear that most of their money came from ads for scams. Don't have a link for you, but should be easy to find. (Edit: "Scamville" might be a good keyword to try).
This idea is called "Poor Man's Copyright" and is discussed by Snopes here:

http://www.snopes.com/legal/postmark.asp

tl;dr Don't do that.
>> "Some people choose to eat artificially-produced cheese substitute,"

It's the same in restaurants, burger joints, etc etc.

I've only been over to the bay area, but I know what I taste :) OTOH, Things that are better there include Pizza, Burgers, Shakes, Smoothies, etc

It does seem absolutely impossible to find good chocolate, bacon, etc.
That was an odd comment to make, since it was unrelated to the content of the article and even somewhat runs contrary to what the article was about.

So I read through your comment history, and understood that you're just grinding an axe. It would be nice if you didn't do that.

Creativity doesn't require someone to buy it. The article did a pretty neat job of describing creativity, defining it, understanding it, and coming up with ways to improve it.
I have to agree, probably the only kid who cut grass to buy a C compiler (Turbo C FTW!). I think I was 14 when I started writing C.

I was pissed later that summer when I installed FreeBSD only to find out these things were free.

Most of learning to program is motivation and patience in my estimation.
I totally agree with Javascript. Consider:

- Dynamic language, fairly concise, relatively natural syntax, lets you make simple things with no fuss.

- Powerful enough for anything.

- Extremely practical for making actual useful things.

- Huge amount of examples to look at; unless it's obfuscated, you can just click "view source."

- No assembly required -- user is already reading this post in a Javascript interpreter.
I have two responses to this.

First of all, it is getting absurdly easy to find useful feedback. For every topic you might discuss, for every skill you might learn, there's at least one discussion forum, and in each of those forums there are intense, even competitive practitioners of the involved art who will tear you apart if you aren't working up to standard. Sometimes this is done in bad faith, but on the whole, that part of the "creative loop" is the best it's ever been. The main factor that holds people back from any creative endeavor is motivation. When hanging out with friends the motivation problem becomes a major factor; our likelihood of engagement and satisfaction is a lot higher when we get together to _create_ rather than to _consume_. But we have to get ourselves pumped up to do something creative, and engagement is difficult because everyone involved has to pierce through the BS and fragile esteem that turns arbitrary activities into "hard work" or "way over my head."

My second point is that by losing the work environments in the "heavy" industries, the USA will be deprived of creatives in those fields - but that doesn't necessarily mean we lose out on creatives. Look at Richard Florida's books on the "Creative Class" - one of the points he argues is that our major cities are getting increasingly "peaky" as the creative people in each industry pool together more and more closely. We already have some creative powerhouses(NY, LA, SV to name a few), and there is no reason for them to decline anytime soon. Where we still have industries involving physical goods and high capital requirements, intense pressure exists to take a high-tech approach and automate everything rather than battle to get cheap labor. For example, think of what Amazon is doing with shipping. That stuff requires a lot of creative know-how, and in the coming years we're probably going to see similar approaches taken in a lot of industries that are traditionally "people services."
I can only say that of the cheese I've eaten in restaurants, Frys, Safeway, etc it's been universally horrible.

Yes, perhaps if you go to a niche speciality cheese corner shop, you can find good cheese in the US. But that's not much use.
She did not do it alone, she did it with her partner, now her husband.

She may not have done it if on her own, unfortunately.
In my opinion Google is all over the place, everywhere at the same time which could lead to overextension of resources and finances. This could ruin Google at some point in the future, they are losing focus.
Digital content and services are no different than real world content and services. You do not walk into a grocery store expecting everything to be free. Why would you expect all digital content to be free? Likewise, you have to pay for a copy of the New York Times at a newsstand, so why would you be surprised to find that you have to pay for the digital version of the same thing? The internet is not some strange medium that is outside the realm of profit-seeking capitalism; among other things, it is a convenient way to provide services and content, sometimes requiring payment, and I see no problem with that.
Marriage used to be about survival. Two people together making more (food, shelter, money, whatever material) than two people separately, thus increasing the chances of surviving.

However, no later than maybe the 60's or 70's marriage seems to represent the need for a person to grow in life, personally and psychologically. It's about two people being together not because they couldn't survive alone but because they want to learn about life together and through each other.

That is, loving the other person by showing them their weaknesses and being loved by letting the other do the same. Rather than physical survival, the process of growing in life won't necessarily benefit for a life-time commitment.

This is reflected in the divorce rates.

People tolerate each other to the extent they are willing to grow. There's no other reason for marriage any more than to artificially keep the people together a bit longer, should one or both of them decide that they just met their extent sooner than they thought.

* * *

Disclaimer: I'm married. For me, it's good, I want to be married rather than just in a long-term relationship. We have a prenuptial agreement (for the case of a divorce only) to dissociate our marriage from our individual and financial lives. Most of our current spending and money is joint while we live together, which hopefully is a long time.
I had actually intended to take the train from Moscow to Beijing as part of an overland round-the-world trip that I started in South Africa in 2003, but I didn't have a Russian Visa before I left and you can only get one in your country of residence.

So I flew home from Germany, worked a 3 month contract, then flew one-way to Bangkok and started attacking the problem from the other end. Bussed, trained and ferried my way as far as Norway before dropping down into Europe and thinking about heading home.

It was still pretty cool going the other direction, and I got a week in Mongolia out of the deal (because c'mon, how often are you in Mongolia? You gotta stop.) The only downside is that I unwrapped my round-the-world "string" by doing the second lap east to west, leaving me with a net zero circumnavigations.

http://www.blogabond.com/CommentView.aspx?CommentID=177
This reminds me a lot about a blog post I wrote some weeks ago:
http://blog.opportunitycloud.com/2010/05/07/the-cloud-or-the...
The cloud or the ladder, it's two different ways to view your career or even your life. I think most people on HN are clouders.
Ask Paul The Psychic Octopus Now Available In SMS,Facebook & Twitter.
Look who's come to visit us from Oberhausen. Paul, the octopus is giving Innoz a short visit and he wants to interact with his fans.
Users seeking his prediction can try paul on SMS,Facebook & Twitter.

You can take a look at his official website at http://www.innoz.in/paulpredicts

On SMS, The format to send queries is GYAN PAUL <your query> to 56161.

Eg: GYAN PAUL Will Spain win the worldcup? and paul will reply you back.

Innoz also launched a Facebook application named Octopus Paul which will also predict the result.
http://apps.facebook.com/paulpredicts/

On Twitter you can send him a query to @paulpredicts and he will reply you back.

About Paul the Octopus

Paul, who lives at the Sea Life Aquarium in Oberhausen, Germany, has become the most unlikely celebrity of this international soccer tournament by correctly forecasting the outcome of every match his home team played. He's 6-for-6 after picking Spain to beat Germany in the semifinals. A German TV news channel ran live coverage of him choosing to eat a mussel from a clear box marked with Spain's flag instead of the box with the German flag. That's how the psychic cephalopod rolls.

AOL News contributor Ed Mazza picked up on the story of the World Cup octopus early in the tournament, when Paul was just 2-for-2.

"If Paul gets any better at this, he could have an incredible career as a telephone psychic -- able to handle eight lines at once," Mazza marveled.

Imagine all the other ways Paul's predictive powers might be harnessed for the good of a world that craves certainty.

Will i get married this year? Ask Paul.

Will i ever be happy? Paul knows.

Will India get qualified for worldcup? This would be the true test of Paul's wisdom. Instead of choosing the yes or no box, he would have to climb out of the tank as fast as his eight legs can move him -- because there is no right answer to that question.

Paul has the answers. Only a sucker would bet against this octopus.
Scheme. Here's a good article on this very subject, and the benefits of Scheme as a learning language:

http://www.trollope.org/scheme.html

Linked from Paul Graham's essay Beating the Averages:

http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

In a nutshell, the advantage to Scheme is that there is almost no syntax for kids to get hung up on, they can jump straight into learning computing and solving problems.

And depending on how far they go with it, they'll learn some of the more powerful programming techniques like recursion and continuations.

The book referenced in the article is The Schemer's Guide:

http://www.schemers.com/tsg.html

Two other good learning books for children are probably The Little Schemer and The Seasoned Schemer.

Racket is an easy, free, open source environment to get started in:

http://racket-lang.org

or install the package 'plt-scheme' from whatever Linux distro you're using.
You want to teach children to be creative, you teach them to be the active builders of their own intellectual structure to quote Piagat and Seymoure Papert.

Papert is the inventor of Logo and his book Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas inspired the name of Lego Mindstorms.

That book shows how education should be taught.
Why not focus on the underlying cause of bad research and fix those? Filtering it will only make the spammers more crafty.
This part of the article jumped out at me:

"When UGA’s Runco was driving through California one day with his family, his son asked why Sacramento was the state’s capital - why not San Francisco or Los Angeles? Runco turned the question back on him, encouraging him to come up with as many explanations as he could think of."

This seems like a great way to teach children to be creative, and just generally intelligent.
> But we have to get ourselves pumped up to do something creative, and engagement is difficult because everyone involved has to pierce through the BS and fragile esteem that turns arbitrary activities into "hard work" or "way over my head."

...and plain ol' laziness. I wrestle with this all the time -- it's quite hard to force myself to work on a project, or read a book, or pick up a pencil and try drawing again for the first time in decades, when I can instead pick up my laptop and browse HN for a while.

This problem is compounded by living vicariously: I can read about other people being creative, and that's fun.

Eventually I get to a point -- usually at the end of the day -- where I feel compelled to make, fix, or build something, but I should have been doing that all day anyway (and waiting until the end of the day is not optimal).

I've not yet figured out how to fix this.
Shambles? At this point the site is up, and it seems like they're working on building a solid base in Iceland, starting with pretty good political and legal support.

All things considered, as long as one year from now they're still in business I'd say it's an impressive achievement.
New Systems of Nanoparticle Drug Delivery Developed
See Dijkstra's second rule:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1504402
Same here. Really liked the article!
It's a tactic that goes back as far as Socrates at least ("Socratic dialogue"), and it's very effective. Unfortunately it also requires a great depth of knowledge and patience on the part of the teacher, so it would be hard to get this to take off in U.S. schools at the moment.
It really depends on the kid's interest level.
If the kid is highly interested in learning how to program, most languages should be fine as long as you are there to help guide them.

If the kid doesn't really care, you might be able to spark interest with some sort of novelty, but they would probably get more out of it if you waited until they were older.

I was about 8 when I asked my dad to teach me how to program. Since I was interested and motivated, all he had to do was show me how to get started, and give me his old college textbooks. If I had lacked motivation, I imagine some more prodding on his part would have been effective, but if I had lacked interest, I don't think I would have learned much at all.
I really like Carlin. But what has always struck me in his attitude is that he claimed he didn't see and didn't want to find any solutions to the problems he was talking about. Maybe it has something to do with the age differences. People in their 20th are more likely to think of changing the world while those at their 60s are more likely just to criticize. While I respect it, I can't understand this attitude. Maybe I will someday. Although this episode is still funny. What was so nice about George is that he was never afraid to take the side.
Since when does "HTML" include "Office?"