skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aBo8...
OTOH, he doesn't say he wants to be a very good programmer. He wants to be able to communicate better with other programmers. SICP helps if he wants to talk with the right programmers. :) Otherwise, it may not be the most cost-effective investment.
I saw this picture and I had to do it. Hopefully you have a good sense of humor :-)

http://img248.imageshack.us/img248/4862/xobanyqj1.jpg
What is uncomfortable about Python objects? If it's the explicit self in methods, that will only bother you if you come from a language that implicitly pollutes the local method namespace with that of the object.
> current browser is not very suitable for running multiple web apps

We can put different page ('apps') in different tabs and windows, which is perfect for running multiple apps.
Which ever language you pick, try and pick up a book which shows you how to do functional programming in it. Try and do this before you start writing imperative programs.

It's easier to go from functional to imperative than to go from imperative to functional.

Do you have a friend who is a programmer who will be able to help you setup an environment so that you can write hello world? Then choose the language that she knows.

Like learning anything new, I want to pick a safe first choice where you can spend time building confidence. As soon as you have a bit of a foundation then explore other choices.

Personally I would recommend scheme. The little schemer is an exceptional book for a newbie and I think it's not hard to get scheme setup.
Yeah it didn't look very extravagant at all. It just seem strange to me given the context. T-shirts that say "I'm excited to be here"?. It reinforced my previous image of some guys enjoying "the startup life" more than anything else. Maybe I'm not supposed to make comments like this though. I really do wish them well, I'm just skeptical.
Why do you think that Berkeley grad students live cheaply? They live in the same expensive places everyone else in Berkeley and San Francisco live, they just pay for it with student loans.

What everyone does is share a place. Usually you will pay $750-$1000 per room, depending on location.

Commuting a long way to save on rent doesn't make sense. Gas is expensive, car maintenance is expensive, parking is expensive, time is expensive.
The charter schools (mentioned at the last part of the show) are the equivalent of start-ups, while the big public school districts are like the big corporations. I think a mixed environment of (competing) charter and public schools is the way to go.
Code Complete is not a theory book, and of course no book has all the info on how to be a good programmer.

That book doesn't teach you to program. It is a survey of 'best practices' that may help someone who already has some proficiency.
You really need to have a problem in your mind that you want to solve. That makes the task a lot easier. As you can see progress.

Test out that understanding. I bet you know more than you think you know. The purpose of a book like PCL is to be a reference. Scan it properly and go back to it when you need to find something. Intially it will take sometime, then your brain will learn and you won't be looking up so often.
Anyone who was around for the dot-com boom knows that the better the parties, the less likely the startup will succeed.

The xobni party looked so lame that the company is almost guaranteed to be very successful.
The concrete language is important because there are languages that are more/less suited to be put in the background.
Most educational software is towards students, but I think there is a huge need to empower educators, so they can create their own tech solutions for students.

Another area is parent involvement. Unfortunately the 20/20 show did not touch this subject, but I would bet that the underperforming schools also lack parent involvement.
Six-month anniversary of YC News, six-day anniversary of Hacker News.
> The Internet gives little people the power, confidence, and anonymity they need to abuse anyone they want without any fear of retribution.

So obviously the solution to anyone hurting your fragile ego is to make it easier to lash out at them. Or if you disagree with them on any subject, make them pay.
Alright, you heard the man. The Internet has been solved. You can all go home now. Thanks for playing, bye.
1) "Best" is subjective. What you consider best for your kid most probably will not fulfill the needs of all kids.

2) IQ has absolutely nothing to do with being rich or poor.
> what would a startup that is disruptive to our education system look like?

Parents taking responsibility for educating their own children. I would never leave that up to government indoctrination school.

People have been brainwashed for far too long into spending all day working for someone else, while turning over their children to yet another third party -- composed of complete strangers -- at the same time. It's bizarre.

"Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity." -- George Bernard Shaw
Agreed - I don't use Perl any more, having grown disillusioned with its messiness a long time ago, but it's certainly much more of a serious language than PHP.
I'm teaching my 14 year old nephew programming, and I chose Python. Why? Because it's interpreted, so you get the instant gratification of writing command line programs. You also get IDLE bundled with the .exe (on windows) which shaves a bit off the text editor learning curve a bit.

Also, I think that Python's beginner documentation is better than Ruby's. The beginner books for Python are a bit easier to follow than the Pickaxe book. Sure, Why's Poignant Guide is fun, but unless you understand programming already, you'll probably be lost.

Ruby does have HacketyHack, which is fun and the tutorials are really well written, but it's still a little buggy. Some of the code examples in the tutorial are broken, causing a lot of frustration for a young noob. In another 6 months or a year, I'd suggest Ruby and HacketyHack, not right now, though.
If you're absolutely new to web programming then the first thing you must learn is HTML. Some may think thats a given, but I think it's important to point out. If you can't get your head around HTML, you're not going to be building websites.
that's not a startup
Ask Sequoia for ten million and try it as a charter high school?
G.HO.ST has improved
Yes they save cookies, give you 3 GB and its free
http://www.irintech.com/x1/blogarchive.php?id=1439
Sure it is -- two co-founders, creating something new, and seeing it through from a nascent stage to maturity.
I wonder if Haskell is as hard for first-time programmers as for experienced ones, though. There are high school kids in #haskell that know way more and probably have an easier time learning than I did. They don't have any bad habits to unlearn.

Also, many "tricky" Haskell concepts (algebraic data types, lexical closures, first-class functions, programming without state) are actually quite logical if you've never been exposed to the C/Java way of programming.
I'm modding it down to save anyone from being misled into PHP.
I'll give your parents $1,000 for a 5% share of you. Do you have an exit strategy?
Declined -- already got a better valuation. Yeah:

Five to one, baby,
one in five
No one here gets
out alive
Javascript was the language I learnt with more or less. I think it's quite a good choice, but it is very easy to write "bad" Javascript, especially when it comes things like eval(). It seemed wonderful when I first discovered it, but not until some time later did I discover the kind of mess it can cause.

I was also introduced to OO (of sorts) through JS... I perhaps wouldn't recommend this so much, it was incredibly confusing for me at first. I didn't have any real grounding in OO principles before I started though, so perhaps that would have helped.
att, hp, ibm, sun, siemens, tek, nec, adobe, unisys, apple, prime, ncr, sco, wyse but no Microsoft
I mean really what made you say such things about PHP? not being a serious language like Perl? This is not an attack mind you, but I'm curious to know what Yahoo, Flickr, Wikipedia, and perhaps to some extent Facebook seemed to have missed when they decided to use PHP for server side stuff. What's with all the PHP hate here in YC anyways?
That may have been the PHP of old and sadly it is still practiced up to this day. But I'm telling you man PHP5 and it's implementations will blow alot of criticisms out of the water.
Are startups still fighting for Ruby programmers in the Bay Area?
What about symfony-project.com (symfony) PHP framework for creating webapps similar to Ruby on Rails?
Zoho Goes Offline (in a good way)
Time Travel Machine Outlined
Is Microsoft Trying To Be Social or Candid?
Funny you ask.

I happened to listen to a talk Marc Andreessen did called , "2005: A Web Odyssey" <http://osc.gigavox.com/shows/detail994.html>; where Andreessen talks about commodity hardware and how it effects programming language choice.

"... programming has moved from being machine dependent and complicated to become a dynamic and easy-to-learn process ..."

Andreessen talks about how languages are moving up the ladder from machine languages to "high level, dynamic languages" by looking at increasingly comoditised, powerful hardware. He notes that Java should now be thought of as a system language. JS in browsers was created in '95 to bridge the gap b/w HTML & Java. Java was deemed too complicated for HTML users. The original idea was JS to be server side. But it never took off due to lack of effort by Netscape to create an Open source version and the tool problems.

"PHP is to 2005 what Java is to 1995"

A lot of the talk he talks about how "PHP is to 2005 what Java is to 1995" The talk was done in 2005. So for Andressen PHP or PHP like languages (Ruby, Python etc) are what he suggests. But right near the end of the talk he talks about Sajax and JPSpan where server side PHP (python,perl) transparently talks to higher level JS code in the browser.

You can find more about Sajax and JPSpan following:

- Sajax http://www.modernmethod.com/sajax

- JPSpan http://sourceforge.net/projects/jpspan
The reason I can't stand it is because I've had to deal with so much of it that sucks. Also, it just doesn't feel like what I want in a language.

The real double edged sword for PHP is that it made it very easy to do web programming. The good side of that is that it let a lot of people write web stuff who otherwise might not have been able to. The bad side of that is that a lot of those people write really bad code that is no fun to clean up.
I don't agree that exposure has anything to do with it. Its like saying being a viola player makes it harder to pick up the guitar (as you are tranposing strings/notes in your head). Yeah for about the first day it may be a bit strange but once you get past that it is not a problem.

Miranda was the first language I ever learnt. I am the only person who I know who learned a strict functional language from the get go. And yes, it scared and confused the heck out of me :( I am not sure if it helps, but at least I (only now) have a appreciation for the mathematical side of functions/functional programming (has taken me 10 years to get here though).
Work vs. Value
Skype give a more detailed explanation of what happened
3 Rules for Naming Your Startup
Hear hear! This is the best approach, IMHO.
The objective of school is for students to gain knowledge and grow their minds. It's not to see how much value you can produce. Everyone maxes their brain out at a certain point, the goal is to get everyone maxed out so they have to get smarter. Feynman's teacher gave him a college level book just so in his boredom he wouldn't distract the rest of the class.

Most schools suck at handling people who are different than average. Thanks to the internet it's easier than ever to learn by yourself. It's an autodidact revolution!
Value in the case of school meant how well you mastered the course objectives: that's how much value you produce in a class (so I think we agree there). Learning more is preferable to learning less, but it depends on what the opportunity cost is. It's entirely possible that you have learned enough in that area, and time spent learning in a different area would be better invested.
To me it seems the post wants to be titled "Work vs. Ability".

I remember in high school (and perhaps college, but that was a blur) some classes gave "attendance points". That always bothered me.

If the class itself had value, attending class would naturally produce, on average, better test scores. If classes don't add value, anyone with sincere interest in the subject could pull more value out of reading books and reading code than sitting through lecture.
The only reason I wouldn't recommend it is because the vast majority or books / tutorials available don't teach how you can really use it. Douglas Crockford and a handful of others have been beating the drum about Javascript being a functional language, but I don't think it's at critical mass yet.

I think most people starting out with Javascript would learn how to do stuff in a browser but not how to "program".
But are you making something people want? That's the hope...
It would probably fail for all but the brightest :).

I suppose it doesn't matter as much for the rest. To better actualize the potential of the top 5% would be a wonderful change.

High school kids wouldn't even need the $15K. Just give em 2 year old laptops, a hosting platform, and let the parents provide for the basic needs.
There's at least two aspects to learning: depth and pace. Most schools don't let you go much deeper or faster than the class average. An optimal teaching environment would move both of the goal posts ahead of you, so you're never being artificially slowed down. This is exactly why learning by yourself works so well. It's like running by yourself. You can go however far and however fast you want.
Wow...I had no idea this site was so new. I've been registered here for about 4 months and I thought I was a newbie
East Coast is De Best!
There are no requirements, it's all design
Here's a good starting place for understanding concepts:

http://www.htdp.org/
Will Work For Food: Why I Left Microsoft for a Startup
've been asked by many of my friends and family why I decided to leave my position at Microsoft, where I was appreciated and rewarded, for more work, more responsibility, and more stress. Well, the decision was mainly a result of three factors. First, someday I may start my own company, and transitioning from a startup makes that much easier. Second, I didn't agree with many of Microsoft's decisions and direction. Third, I wanted to build a product that would really cater to consumers and could stand on its own.
I agree with this. I also think that the REPL of Lisp, Ruby's irb, and Python's IDLE are very valuable for the new programmer. I knew a few languages when I hit graduate school, but I ended up doing most of my "programming" in Matlab because of the interactive shell. When I first picked up Python and later Ruby and Lisp, I was delighted by the interactivity. The instant feedback, even when it's negative, just feels more forgiving than compiler errors, and the whole process of trying things out at a prompt feels more like learning than code/compile/run.
Just my feeling:)
1. It's better to run web application with more screen space, not every app need menu bar, toolbar, etc brought by every instance of browser.
2. For browsing, tab is excellent. For web application, tab is not enough. For example, I can't implement an "always on top" thing using tab, I can't let browser remember every application's location and size. These features are good for productivity.

Current browsers are designed for maximum surfing productivity and not dedicated to provide a perfect web application container.
Simplicity and Start-up Alchemy: An Interview with WordPress Creator, Matt Mullenweg
I don't know how to code. I should, but I need to get my Indonesian and Arabic fix before I can tackle Python and Ruby on Rails and Sugar-Coated Sugar Bombs.

That is part of the reason that I love WordPress, the blogging platform this blog runs on.
This reminds me of the "Working Harder" section of pg's essay:

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

Working harder does mean something, but only in the context of delivering value.
FCC to 700MHz Spectrum Bidders: You Better Have Bank
gBox: Give The Gift Of DRM-Free Music
Python. It's elegant and easy to learn. Especially you have no programming experience before, you can think python way more quickly before other language pollute your head:)
How exactly did PHP ever make it "very easy" to do web programming? Was that when register_globals was on? Was it that there was plenty of example code to cut and paste?

I hear this "easy" term applied to PHP by many people, but when I look at the language itself, I don't see it. PHP is easy for me because I did C for 12 years, but I look at the comp.lang.php newsgroup and see newbies tripping over all sorts of things.
If you are serious about learning to program, Im gonna have to recommend C or C++. Many people may recommend that you start out by learning a scripting langauge, but these languages have many weaknesses. I'll use python as an example. Python is an easy language to learn, but it is also a softened and simplified language aimed for ease of reading and writing efficiency, not performance. Python runs about as slow as Java (which is quite slow), making it hard to run complex and especially recursive algorithms. The OO in python seems very fake and inflexible, and as they say, it feels "tagged on".

At first, learning a fully-fledged programming language may seem difficult, as there are all the blocks that you have to simultaneously put in at the right place. But after the first few steps, you will be surprised at the power of the computer at your command. C/C++ also forces you do develop good programming standards and habits, both of which play an integral role in your working efficiency.

I myself learned C++ as my first language. Yes, it was hard at first. But the payoff now obviously outweigh the initial difficulties.
My hope is that more people would choose stressful productivity over an errant sedentary lifestyle.
"2) IQ has absolutely nothing to do with being rich or poor."

But being rich or poor can at least be correlated with IQ, right?

My intuition is that IQ is a greatly imperfect measure, but the correlation of high IQ to positive things and low IQ to negative things is just too strong to ignore.

Perhaps you've seen this figure:
http://woodrow.typepad.com/the_ponderings_of_woodrow/images/...
This is counterintuitive to me. I thought VCs did not want uniformity of business models among the startups they fund.
How does VC behavior change when interest rates are cut?
I was an intern at a fixed wireless broadband start-up when the dot-com bubble burst and I witnessed how all of the excitement for the start-up vanished when investors were afraid to give out money. It came down to bad timing for this start-up -- if they had only started a year earlier.

How will the speculation that interest rates will be cut further affect the investment activities of angels, private equity, and VCs? This may affect when a lot entrepreneurs may launch their companies, right?
What's not to hate? It's not very powerful (lacks first-class functions, for example), it's messy (just look through the function reference), it's weakly typed (try performing multiplication on a string), it's fairly insecure by default and it's simply ugly. It may be convenient to be able to start by inserting a few blocks of PHP in to an existing web page, but you can do the same thing just as easily using Ruby and RHTML.
Compare to mod_perl circa 1997/8/9, any of the Java stuff... Python didn't have anything that great. ASP was probably fairly easy, but limited to Microsoft. The Tcl guys could have competed, but screwed things up and didn't release much as open source until after I created mod_dtcl, which turned out to be too little, too late.

With PHP, it was and is very easy to get started. I wrote about it here some:

http://www.welton.it/articles/scalable_systems.html
And if you want to understand how computation works, Scheme.
Because his posts are plagiarized.

In future if anyone wants to ask about something like this, please do it by email, not by posting the question as a story on News.YC.
I wonder how many people that recommend SICP have actually learned to program from it or even read it. I did way back as in undergrad (with severe MIT envy) and I would not recommend it as a first book for beginner programmers. Also, I wouldn't recommend Lisp or Scheme as first languages to use for beginners wanting a taste of the practice (despite how much better off the world would be if we all programmed in Lisp :). Unless the questioner is a math (or idiot) savant, I would only recommend these as first programming languages to someone if I wanted to scare them out of the profession or didn't really like them.

Today, I would probably recommend JavaScript with the browser DOM.
The Dark Side of Startups: 5 Corrosive Co-Founder Conflicts
From gbox.com home page (local machine : osx firefox 2):

"Hey, you need to be on a Windows machine and use Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, or Firefox 2.0 to get the full gBox experience. We are working hard to support Mac and Linux users, but it will take some time. Big apologies for the inconvenience."
I think the author is referring to the OS role of controlling applications centrally, the way the f8 platform controls facebook apps. Something that a lot of decentralized web apps run on is not the kind of OS the author is talking about.
An American in Shanghai - Found+READ
comScore Upgrades Search Measurement
Mailplane--5 Invites (GMail on the Mac)
If you've got a Mac and you have multiple GMail accounts (including Google Apps for Domains) then this is pretty cool. I'm using it now with my three GMail accounts.
How Ads Affect Our Memory
I think teacher recommendations follow a similar trap. Which people get the best rec letters? The ones who ask for help all the time (and get lots of face time). If you understand the material, what are you supposed to do - waste the teacher's time by asking questions you can answer yourself?
IMO, equal shares and consensus decision making go a long way in avoidance of a whole host of potentially fatal startup conflicts. And having a policy to openly discuss everything, which goes hand in hand with consensus decision making, creates a healthy forum to resolve conflicts before they blow up into unresolvable or annoying-to-resolve situations.
There is a well-worn path for beginners in PHP, with baby steps and encouragement all along the way. You can gradually mix PHP into your HTML site, line by line and file by file, and make your site better with each step. (Look, I've got the date in my Web page and it actually updates!)

There's a tradition of building simple CRUD apps in PHP - a handful of database tables, and a PHP file for each URL that acts as a thin glue layer between raw SQL and HTML presentation. These are some of the easiest Web apps to understand - which is not to say that they are actually easy - and they are a good place to start.

By contrast, learning something like Rails requires a big up-front investment. There are objects. There's a database and an ORM. There's an MVC framework. There's an abstract mapping between URLs and the methods of your controller objects. All of this makes great sense once you can see the big picture, but to a brand-new programmer PHP must look a lot less intimidating.
If it's for the web only, nothing beats PHP right now in terms of speed and deployment (especially if you're on a budget and need to scale). I'll probably get a lot of flack for this, oh well - but PHP isn't as bad as people say it is provided you take advantage of OOP and separate your logic from presentation.
BBC Worldwide Launches Social Network
He quit his job. It was a letter to some of the employees at work. His last effort to inspire them.
My Facebook Word Association Prediction Game (feedback appreciated, 2 more users needed for submission)