skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"There is a well-worn path for beginners in PHP, with baby steps and encouragement all along the way."

Down that path lies madness. I've seen the newbie-focused tutorials for PHP, and it explains a lot of the garbage that passes for software in the PHP world. It is entirely possible to write good software in PHP (I'm reasonably impressed by the Dokuwiki and Flyspray code, for example), but you have to learn the language at least twice to get to that point. You learn it as a newbie, and learn horrible practices from the vast collection of misguided "help" in the Internet. You produce lots of code with those horrible practices...like no DB abstraction, inappropriate or no use of objects and encapsulation, and "gradually mix PHP into your HTML" design. And then you realize you've built an unmaintainable mess and start rewriting it with all of the better practices that have since been bolted on to PHP.

Of course, despite all of that I still recommend PHP for a large classes of application because it is pervasive, hard to make pathologically slow (whereas Ruby and Python can be made pathologically slow even by really good developers--see Plone for an example), and has a pretty large selection of libraries (some are so bad as to be counter-productive, but many are good). But as a newbie language it's rather toxic.
I see, good work then.

You're right, I forgot about the API limit.
The Harlem Project
http://www.teach-scheme.org/Materials/
Wow. Batshit crazy. Who knew?
I would go with Ruby, Python, JavaScript. You might want to even look at some Lisp dialects, maybe you are one of those people who sees things more like Church than Turing.

They are all comfortable, require a pretty small platform, and provide some instant gratification...the excitement of seeing your code come to life as you type! I think if you simply want to interact with developers, understanding the thrill of creation is more important than knowing what to create.
If you are a non-programmer, give this free book a try: "How to Think Like a Computer Scientist" ( http://www.ibiblio.org/obp/thinkCSpy/ ). As it explains in the Preface ( http://www.ibiblio.org/obp/thinkCSpy/preface.html#auto2 ), Python makes things easy to learn.
C is rigid?
Um... we do. It's called Daylight Savings Time.
Seems to me that part of being a hacker is the ability to create despite restrictions. Embracing obstacles, and in doing so overcoming them. Maybe by remove the pre-existing boundaries, you remove part of what makes a hack so great.

By simply removing the obstacle (traditional schooling in this case), doesn't that cheapen the creation? Put another way, if hacking is the status-quo, is it still hacking?
If everyone's standard of living is raised by 10%, then it's still a higher standard of living. If students can create 30% more value than what they do now, it's still value creation.

I know what you mean though, and to a certain extent that might be true. But it doesn't seem like subjecting kids to current public school conditions is a good way of doing things.
How programmers get rich (Article from 1982)
Removing the periodic data would be nice. Making a trend from every Monday, for example, would be clearer.

You should post the actual numbers somewhere and let any bored readers on this site play with visualizations.
Plus, there are Ruby on Rails packages that don't even require apache! You just download the package, install it, then you can run a built-in development webserver by typing "script/server". What could be easier?

(OK, I know of one stealth mode startup that's going to make it even easier, but that's beside the point.)
In Soviet Russia...

No really, I remember learning about things like x + 2 = 5; solve for x in 2nd grade in Soviet Union. After immigrating to US, I recalled the level of math education we got in USSR. One teacher remarked that according to the development theories he was taught, it shouldn't even be possible for such young children to grasp such abstract ideas as variables. Good thing nobody told the Russians this fact.
We have talked a lot about this before..
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40208
I don't think that a K-12 school for hackers would work especially well. That said, it would be nice if schools stopped practices that almost seem to deliberately extinguish hacking and startups. Schools teach you that you need to ask permission to do things. It isn't until you get to college that you don't have to ask permission anymore.

Hackers and entrepreneurs become who they are by realizing that they don't have to ask anyone's permission.

I remember learning violin when I was a kid. If I played something that wasn't on my "to-do" list, my parents would call upstairs "are you practicing, or just messing around?"

I read that Andre 3000 used the three chords in "Hey Ya" because, well, he'd just recently picked up the guitar and those were the three chords he knew. Didn't ask any permission, just started composing.

Recently, I saw a dude in a coffee shop with a guitar, and he was technically awesome. It was fun to stop and listen for a few minutes, but I wouldn't have been able to tell you what he was playing five minutes later.

Schools don't really teach creativity, and I don't think they can. But they might do a better job getting out of the way.
Designing a Reddit Media Website
They're very similar. The difference is that I like our interface better and we provide unlimited scrolling of the results. If people like the site and want to use it, I'm also planning on adding other search engines.

For the most part, it's been an experiment on my part to have a public site that people use. I've built quite a few sites, but this is the first with AJAX and some other technologies, so it's been a learning project for me as well.
Because of the upstart of two articles on education, this article may be a relevant means to help stop the systematic failure of education for the poor.
Combine it with Amazon's EC2 and things look really interesting...

Right, just being open source is not enough, you still need the bandwidth and infrastructure to make it work.

A free version of EC2 would really change the game.
Build Your Own Social News Site With Free Tools
Chavez is starting to sound like the crazy dictator in Woody Allen's film "Bananas" (http://imdb.com/title/tt0066808/):

From this day on, the official language of San Marcos will be Swedish. Silence! In addition to that, all citizens will be required to change their underwear every half-hour. Underwear will be worn on the outside so we can check. Furthermore, all children under 16 years old are now... 16 years old!
Agreed. A simple moving average would show the growth trend more cleanly.
They solved a hardware problem (the centralized crossbar), but it's not clear what progress they have made on software scalability. BTW, I thought the Ars article was better.
I totally agree with you, chaostheory. IQ completely ignores social skills (aka Emotional Intelligence), which is extremely important.

I brought up IQ simply because the previous commenter mentioned it.
Jeez.. Take a look at http://beta.reddit.com/

I guess this is why you don't significantly change the process. In this case, Reddit changed the process of submitting comments (It's now Ajax so that it doesn't refresh the page) and now everyone is going absolutely nuts trying out the new feature.

They only saved themselves by having the beta be in a separate subreddit. Could you imagine if this was rolled out to the main page?
Teller (of Penn and Teller) gives a definition of magic that I really like: "The theatrical linking of a cause with an effect that has no basis in physical reality, but that -- in our hearts -- ought to."
The principle behind making millions is pretty simple: create something which is valuable to many people. Then there are three main ways of getting rich: 1) Enough people are willing to pay for your service/product; 2) Your service/product can be an asset for a bigger company, and they are willing to acquire you; 3) Your service/product creates such a large audience that you can leverage this by "selling" this audience to those who are looking for one. This can be advertisers (e.g. ads on your site) or a bigger company willing to buy this audience (e.g. Newscorps with MySpace). Why aren't we all getting rich? Because you need a decent idea for something that creates value, and excellent execution and marketing because competition, especially on the Web, is fierce. It's easy to know that you need to create value - a solution to a problem or need - but it's much less common to come up with a company which can readily do that.
See also: http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/cpr-20n1-1.html
Big names sign up to iTunes rival
WoW Virtual Epidemic Provides Real World Insights
Your argument is synonymous with the original post -- unless you claim that schools are supposed to teach something of no value.
If only: http://szabo.best.vwh.net/contractlanguage.html
A Formal Language for Analyzing Contracts
From the comments to Guy's post:

"And my favorite tip for sorting through resumes: Throw out half. That way you won't hire anyone who is unlucky!"

Now thats an amusing way of getting things done.
I build a fairly sophisticated project last year on top of TBNL (now Hunchentoot) and some other libraries (CL-WHO and CLSQL being the main ones). I don't think this set of libraries quite counts as a framework in the Rails/Pylons tradition - it's more like web.py[0]. It's worth noting that reddit used the same tool set before they rewrote it in Python. I can recommend it without hesitation, if you're looking for tools that stay out of your way.

[0]I have a strong suspicion that web.py was influenced by TBNL.
>and he recently bought himself a new $18,000 Datsun Turbo 280-ZX sports car.

lol
Microsoft launches Tafiti - Search and Silverlight experiment
eBuddy Adds MySpace Instant Messaging
It seems like K-8 is pretty much reserved for core skills - math, sci, language etc. Where I could see a lot of value in this approach is at the high school level (9-12). This type of program could be piloted at a few public, private and charter schools as an adjunct academy for students.

Also it would have to really be multidisciplinary and the main focus would need to be on fostering creativity and transferring creative skills into the "real world", not just programming and a few art classes.

There is a really interesting "entrepreneurial" program at Everett Community College (http://www.everettcc.edu/programs/bat/sbd/), that could possible be reverse engineered into the type of program described above.
Monster attack steals user data
People with a McJob don't need to calculate change: that's the cash register software's job. And many people avoid calculating their wage or budget -- their spouse does that kind of thing.

Perhaps you will reply they at least need to be able to count to 4 to hand back the right number of each coin. And need to be able to read numbers to answer questions like, "What does the Super Mushroom Burger cost?"

But the blatant usefulness of a skill is no argument in favor of required education of it -- won't people want to learn it voluntarily? And those who disagree, why can't you leave them alone?
There isn't a formal process leading to creation or innovation; and doubtless, there is not a formal process to train creators or innovators. Mentorship is the way to go -- put your computer away and work with a child.
One in four read no books last year
Brain cells work differently than we thought: Axons process information
For those literate in neuroscience, original is here:
http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nn195...

Is the analysis correct, and what are the implications for people pondering the "AI problem"?
For those literate in neuroscience, original paper is here:
http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nn195...

Is the analysis correct, and what are the implications for people pondering the "AI problem"?
Despite the big list of names, I'm not convinced that those aren't all done by the same illustrator. Definitely not inspiring.
Most of that is terrible.

"It seems strange to have to emphasize simplicity. You'd think simple would be the default. Ornate is more work. But something seems to come over people when they try to be creative. Beginning writers adopt a pompous tone that doesn't sound anything like the way they speak. Designers trying to be artistic resort to swooshes and curlicues. Painters discover that they're expressionists. It's all evasion. Underneath the long words or the "expressive" brush strokes, there is not much going on, and that's frightening."

http://paulgraham.com/taste.html
A few, by 18? I was looking for people to make the argument that most could, well before 10. I'm not talking about the skills that come with decades of experience, but just a conceptual understanding of the unique functions of the languages - functional and syntactic abstraction - closures, lisp macros, etc.
The thing about low-cost web hosting is that it is impossible to stop your web host--or their contractors--from getting the data. Even if you use TLS (SSL), the web host and their associates have full access to your private key. For most hosting solutions, the best that you can do is colocating your own physically-locked server, and use TLS to encrypt everything.

Without using TLS, you cannot prevent the user's ISP from recording--and even reselling--your user's search histories. Similarly, your hosting providers could be doing the same thing. Keep in mind that hosting and bandwidth is a multi-level value chain--your host is probably renting space and bandwidth from somebody else, who is renting from somebody else, who is renting from somebody else. Any one of those companies and/or their rogue employees can collect, re-transmit, prevent, and/or redirect (e.g. man-in-the-middle) your user's queries without your knowledge.
How marvelous, nonetheless. My favorite part:

If a Wizard is given complete technical control over a project (which is usually the smartest thing to do, but companies are rarely very smart), the Wizard will typically write in one of the super-succinct "folding languages" they've developed on campus, usually a Lisp or Haskell derivative. They call them Folding Languages because they write code that writes code that writes code... Wizards swear by it, and there's no question that they can produce amazingly compact, fast, clean-looking code.

lol!
The dumb ones are.

I'm not saying they're dumb because they're using Ruby. I'm saying they're dumb for hiring based on one language on the resume. I'd hire a great Python/Perl/Java/Lisp programmer to work on a Ruby app before I'd hire a mediocre Ruby programmer. In my own experience, I've seen a great Java developer become an amazing Python developer in the span of a couple of weeks...while a mediocre Python developer could remain a mediocre Python developer for the rest of his days, even though he may have years of Python experience. Being a good developer knows no language boundary (within reason), and the same is true of mediocrity.

When I saw the Auctomatic guys at demo day, they were talking about how easily a Ruby guy they'd just brought on board picked up Smalltalk (obviously the Ruby to Smalltalk gap is smaller than most languages, but the point still stands). Hire good developers, not good X developers, where X is the trendy language of the moment. The language(s) will take care of themselves.
I just found that article here:
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/MIT-startup-raise...

Software scalability is a huge problem.
The massive comment-spam is because it's a beta. There are several main forces at work:

1) People know it's gonna get wiped anyway, so they aren't shy about commenting.

2) Their job is to find bugs, not to discuss things. They're being diligent.

3.) For a while, there was a bug where every time you edited a comment it would post a reply instead. A bunch of us were testing Markdown and various XSS exploits; each time we edited, a new comment was added.

4.) Another prominent bug had to do with receiving messages and comment notifications. In order to exercise that, people had to comment.

5.) Folks are testing unicode. There's a lot that can go wrong with Unicode.
There is a related discussion here:
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2007/08/back_to_school.h...

I think there has been a significant and artificial extension of childhood, and it is a bad idea. Expecting more from kids and giving them power and responsibility is a good idea.

From that blog (which quotes these paragraphs from Kay Hymowitz):
"
Teen paid employment is at an all-time low; about 35% of teenagers are working at some point in the year, compared with close to half at the post-World War II peak in 1979. That's because for kids these days, summer is no different from the rest of the year; it's always time for education, or, more precisely, resume-building.

In the junior-high and early high-school years, middle-class strivers spend summers at soccer, hockey, swim, diving or baseball camp to sharpen their athletic skills; they go to science, computer and arts camp to pump up their academic records. In their junior or senior year they jet off to exotic destinations to fill in the international travel/community service credential, building huts in Guatemala, supervising nursery-schoolers in South Africa or, as one company offers, reforesting fruit trees in Fiji. And then, finally, for many older teens, it's an internship, a part-time, usually unpaid, job-lite at an office in a business or nonprofit organization.
"
Okay. I thought it was like all other betas, where people use the product the way they normally use it and report bugs, instead of consciously trying to stress it to its limits, especially with social software.
You can come with visitor visa, but if you want to work in US, you need to start with H1B visa, which is now kind of a "lottery" (the annual limit is too small and no guarantee if you can get one).
I can see where you're coming from, however, at Sudbury Valley, there is no curriculum whatsoever. Plenty of hackers and serial entrepreneurs emerge from SVS, but there's no pressure to study anything at all there.

The main problem I have with the Hacker School idea is that compared to the Sudbury Model (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_model), it is stifling and pushy. I'm a Sudbury Valley alumnus, and I doubt the time I spent there glued to computers all day would have been as fulfilling as it was, if I were doing so under coercion (and I bet even the real deal hackers I know from there, as opposed to mere computerphiles, like me, would agree). Also, I got somewhat bored with computers for a while, and I'm glad nobody forced me to stick with them, so I could return to them later with greater intensity fueled by nothing but pure desire.

My criticism of this idea is similar to Paul Graham's criticism of "incubators."

Here are the Grahamster's words on the subject I'm referring to (http://www.paulgraham.com/sfp.html):

I've heard Y Combinator described as an "incubator." Actually we're the opposite: incubators exert more control than ordinary VCs, and we make a point of exerting less. Among other things, incubators usually make you work in their office-- that's where the word "incubator" comes from. That seems the wrong model. If investors get too involved, they smother one of the most powerful forces in a startup: the feeling that it's your own company.

Incubators were conspicuous failures during the Bubble. There's still debate about whether this was because of the Bubble, or because they're a bad idea. My vote is they're a bad idea. I think they fail because they select for the wrong people. When we were starting a startup, we would never have taken funding from an "incubator." We can find office space, thanks; just give us the money. And people with that attitude are the ones likely to succeed in startups.

Indeed, one quality all the founders shared this summer was a spirit of independence.

He said "if investors get too involved, they smother one of the most powerful forces in a startup: the feeling that it's your own company." Allow me to slightly modify this quote to illustrate my point:

If teachers get too involved, they smother one of the most powerful forces in an independent person: the feeling that you're in charge of your own destiny.

In other words, give someone genuine independence, and he'll go for it if he's got the stuff.
it's been awhile since I took psychology so I can't reference any good specific studies from the top of my head, but here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iq#Criticism

The book EQ: Emotional Quotient is probably another good place to start...

I think most business "luck" is different from lottery luck
We use ucw for http://paragent.com (click on "DEMO" to see our app in action live). We actually use the older _dev branch of ucw, as we started over a year ago before the _ajax branch had really settled down. In fact, we've ended up removing much of the AJAX from the site for design reasons, and gone to a simpler page model with the latest site update. ucw has been pretty reliable. OTOH, we don't get hammered on the front end that much, so we may not be really stressing it. Most of our heavy-lifting is all on the back-end connections to the agents, where we have to maintain thousands of ssl connections. We have been very happy with our decision to go with Lisp.
8 Free Tips to Improve Customer Support
I have been fed up with customer support for ages, just like many other people. I am amazed by the amount of companies that claim to have the best call centers, but when you call them they are just as sad as any others. I have been thinking for a while about what can be done and I have come up with 8 free and fairly commonsense ideas that will make any call center a lot better. Here they are in no particular order.
Glad I'm not the only one to think that the idea of an IQ or how it's tested needs to change - Good thing you reminded me of that book too hehe
Wizard School
It doesn't sound any worse than what Bush says. It's just that our media presents Chavez like he's an insane dictator and doesn't present Bush like he's an insane totalitarian.
Nanotech boosts solar cell performance in the UV spectrum by 60%
HackrTrackr: 3 Days, 300 Users Who Want a Forum = Dilemma
3 Days ago I launched hackertrackr and since that time 300 y combinator readers have submitted their information in order for other readers to find them. The problem now is how do those readers communicate with each other in a public forum? Since I launched I have received quite a few emails asking for a forums or comments feature where users can post meeting times, etc. The dilemma is how do I verify the user posting the comment is indeed the y combinator user they say they are. I see only one possible solution, but am hoping you all might be able to come up with more. If everyone would post their email address in some form of standardized format on their y combinator user info page, then I could write a script to send a password to that email address. They could then sign in to the forum section (yet to be built) on hackrtrackr with a their y combinator user name and the password provided and then switch the password to whatever they want.

Any other ideas?

Having some type of system like this would also be helpful for other people who have ideas for third party apps that are targeted toward y combinator readers.
great way to get turned off to programming

Not that it really matters (this is pure religion after all) but the sheer numbers of Java programmers suggest the exact opposite.