skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As far as punishment goes, there's something really simple: the kid gets kicked out (and goes [back?] to public school). This won't be the first resort, of course, but the fear will be enough to keep the kids in line.

Also, you could do trial runs during the summer, and if both the parents and kid like it enough, they get to stay.
Minus web.py
It doesn't seem like it's best to resort to keeping kids afraid. They have to feel bad.. They need a conscience. They need a reputation that's tarnished.
Can you use a SHA-2 hash instead? Those variants are considerably more difficult to break.

A problem I see with your service compared to an anonymizing proxy like Tor is that you are still a single point of failure(please correct me if I'm wrong though). If you were legally forced to turn over search records (as the govt was attempting with google a while back), then the requests could be traced directly back to the user.

You mention clearing the database daily which is a good idea. But again if it was compromised and a snap shot could be taken, then a brute force crack of your SHA-1 hashes would be possible. Basically, everyone is trusting the security of your database. A misdirection service which telescopes the request through interconnected proxies will not have this single point of failure issue.

Not criticizing your implementation, just making some observations. I think this is a great idea. Mainly your site is so easy for people to use, not needing to install a client application.
How to Make Your Millions
Any economist would say "Marginally."

A more useful answer: not enough to be worth caring about. Unless you're a specialist in interest rates, there is no point at which the money you'll make from an hour of pondering the Fed will exceed the amount you'd make from an hour calling customers or something. And keep in mind that experts don't do very well at predictions -- their main function is to help people hedge. In other words, even the people who care the most about such problems spend all of their time helping everyone else care less.
How to Get a Job on Craigslist
Most 6th-graders act like idiots even when there aren't adults around to treat them like idiots, so standards for admission would need to be pretty tight in order to create the proper culture. It can certainly be done, though. Canada/USA Mathcamp (http://mathcamp.org) is one incredible success at creating an environment where kids act like adults.
Pylons

<ducking>
I found the graph of applicants per day interesting (although not terribly surprising). Craig's list certainly maintains a captive audience of people looking to apply for jobs. Makes me wonder how many responses news.yc job postings get.
This wouldn't work for the same reasons it wouldn't work to have a k-12 school for theoretical physicists: (a) no one smart enough to understand the subject would want to work full-time teaching third graders, and (b) only a small fraction of people are suited by ability and temperament for this kind of work, and you can't select them at age 5.

It might work to have a specialized HS for hacking (hacking, not founding startups), but even there you'd face problem (a). Probably the best bet is for HS students interested in hacking to take courses at their local college-- which they do already.
Local college wasn't, for me, a good place to learn hacking (They taught C++, and at the fourth week we were still on 'Hello World'. I was asleep at that point :) ) This would be an accelerated course. Instead of teaching C, Hacker School could teach a higher level language like Lisp or Ruby/Python.

Would it work if the focus was actually founding startups, though? Four years of intensive programming training followed by the chance to found a startup (or co-found one) when you've graduated. Class projects could even be to actually launch startups, as a class.

We can do better.. We can at least try to do better than what's offered out there. I didn't have a place to be creative in high school. That happened after school, during the night. I know thousands of other kids are in the exact same place as I was.. Could we somehow give them a little hope?
I hope you do too. Can I RSVP right now?
Hi, first post for me.

This is feasible up to a point. The all out "charter school" idea would have the most government and beaurecratic hangups. There would still have to be standards and accountability (read: testing) that would have to go along in order to comply with this.

However, there could be some smaller, scalable, proof of concept models that you could deploy to both public and private schools. For instance, you could create that whole idea into a subject (Design, Hack, 'trep 101), or you could make it completely elective like during lunch or after school.

Another way to approach it is create it through a vocational program. These programs exist for other trades, mainly blue collar, in which they get paid a little and learn to be an electrician, car mechanic, etc. Around my area, there is a vocational school that pulls from all the high schools in the area, and they take the second half of the school block to attend. Transferring that sort of model over into "Hacker School" would seem like a nice first step to see whether it would succeed.
Interesting points. So if someone was able to get my php code, they could find the salt, dump the database, generate the lookup tables by hashing every IP address possible plus the salt, and then they would be able to figure out every IP that has used the site since midnight. But, they would still only have your IP as I do not record any of the search results. This frame of events also shows that the hash algorithm I use really doesn't matter. It's protecting the salt and the database that matter most. Anyone have thoughts on that?

Also, another feature I was thinking of adding was an ssl option so you could securely access the site. However, as I don't make any money from the site, it becomes more difficult to justify additional expenses.
I agree that a 'WebOS' is slightly silly, but I believe it to be a marketing name for a much stronger concept - the 'InternetOS'. Today's OSes were largely built for a disconnected world - the 'my machine is an island' scenario - which isn't necessarily the case today.

The pertinent question is: where do today's systems fail us in an always or often-connected world? Maybe you'd work on the networking stack, providing services that made transferring between connections as seamless as possible (hopping from public wi-fi to 3G to WiMax, and prioritizing traffic based on network bandwidth and costs). Maybe we change filesystems to better support synchronization - for example, build in better change tracking so that we can synchronize using the minimum amount of bandwidth. Maybe you'd look for ways to be able to transfer the state of your applications, so you can work on one machine, and then continue working on your phone, then on your hotel TV, then back to the original machine. What about collaboration and communication? How can we build applications that seamlessly combine web information with local information (maybe even blurring the difference)? Not everything belongs in the OS, but the supporting functionality certainly does.

None of these ideas are particularly new, but today's software stack is in need of some pretty serious evolution to get the most out of the promise of a connected world. Javascript based desktops are an interesting prototype - maybe Javascript & HTML would be a good technology for portable applications. I'm not going to dismiss the bigger need because today's 'WebOS' systems are little more than toys...
You can attract smart people to teaching if you can promise them that the people they get to teach will be sufficiently smart. It's probably impossible to make that guarantee for 3rd graders, but it's possible for 8th.
Have you heard of the IMACS program (http://www.imacs.org/)? I never attended it myself, but I have a hacker friend who used be an instructor there and really enjoyed his work.
I've been using UCW with my own framework (lisp-on-lines) built on top. If you are going to be doing a lot of 'ajax', the UCW Ajax branch has already done most of the work for you.

That said, the learning curve is steep and there is no documentation beyond the examples + source code.
(a) no one smart enough to understand the subject would want to work full-time teaching third graders

That's an awfully broad statement. I'm sure there can be found someone very smart that would be interested in contributing back to children... Woz comes to mind, as does Will Wright...

(b) only a small fraction of people are suited by ability and temperament for this kind of work, and you can't select them at age 5.

I think you're thinking along different lines than the poster. He doesn't look at this as starting a venture capital firm, but as a replacement for the broken public school system. The funding doesn't have to come from equity, but the general hypothesis smells right:

A good early schooling would allow those currently going to public school to create (on average) more wealth in the future. One could use a fraction of that (future) wealth to actually fund the school. From the little I understand, a lot of private Universities work this way - where a good chunk of their budgets comes from alumni donations.

Why can't this system work before college?
There is significant evidence to show that for the vast majority of the time, there are no "smart" or "dumb" kids if you consider children young. It isn't impossible to create a school where the vast majority are geniuses...
JavaScript probably fails miserably on the "easiest to write simple programs" count.

The development environment is easy to find, obviously...any browser and any plain text editor. But user interaction is hard, and gets all mixed up with nasty DOM and browser incompatibilities in short order. You also have to have additional tools (like Firebug) to get anything resembling useful errors from JavaScript.

A good modern learning language probably ought to have an interactive shell. Ruby, Python, Scheme, and Smalltalk are probably all good choices. JavaScript can have an interactive shell in the form of FireBug...but again, it's scary when you get to doing anything that interacts with the user and very few tutorials of JavaScript cover interacting with JavaScript interactively. Having the knobs do something immediately when you twiddle them is almost certain to speed up the learning process. The human mind is pretty good at abstract reasoning: "flipping this light switch causes the light to come on over there". But the more you separate things out temporally and the more variables involved the less they stick: "flipping this light switch starts a timer, which depending on the current state of the light, will cause it to turn on or off in three minutes".

Merely being a non-compiled language is still a slower iterative process than direct interaction (which is the primary disqualifying point against Perl as a learning language in my opinion...corrected in Perl 6, of course, but that's still a few months out). The shorter the "try, debug, try again" cycle is the faster one picks things up, I think. I found Ruby very fast to learn, to some degree, for that reason. Python was almost as discoverable, though I found it less intuitive, where "intuitive" is probably defined as "kinda like what I'm used to". PLT Scheme was a pretty cool learning experience, but it became less interesting as soon as I wanted to build something useful with it--so few libraries (of course, as a Perl user, I feel that way about every language other than Perl...CPAN spoils you for all other languages when it comes to "just get it working" prototyping).
But maybe school should be about education, rather than training? Broadening minds, rather than turning out cookie-cutter programmers. Teach someone how to think for themselves, start them in some (foreign) languages, introduce them to history and literature, give them the basics of mathematics and science, and they can easily learn programming and will have the broad base to come up with great ideas.

Hot-house them on 'how to launch a startup' and 'coding in Fortran' and you'll probably turn out legions of people very good at passing exams in 'structure of business plans (in the year 1999)' and 'syntax of Fortran', but when the world moves on they won't be able to adapt.

That said, I think your idea is sound, though your methods are wrong. A school should encourage creativity and intellectual development - that's how to produce your future YCombinators, journalists etc.

I think we're seeing the failure of the training model in India, where they do turn out legions of capable developers, but comparatively few capable entrepreneurs.

I guess I think that the best way to achieve your goal is actually closer to the current educational systems than one so directly and narrowly orientated towards the goal: education is more of a journey than a race.
This idea reminds me somewhat of the [Sudbury Valley School](http://www.sudval.org/), but with more of a focus on math and computer science.
I heard of a program in Seattle in which smart kids finished High School in 8th grade, and took classes at a local university from 9-12. That is, they got their undergrad degree out of the way by the time others were done with high school.

Having a whole class do this makes sense. First, not everyone does it, only the smartest. I wouldn't expect everyone to be better off in such an accelerated program. Also, rather than enterprising individuals losing out on the social aspect of High School, I'd expect this group of kids to be much more mature for their age.

A vocational senior project may as well be a startup for some in the group.
There is also significant evidence to show the opposite. Nature vs. nurture isn't going to be decided by posts on news.YC.

Yes, better education produces "smarter" kids, sometimes dramatically so, by some definitions of "smart", but "where the vast majority are geniuses" is stretching it beyond credulity.
I don't think the qualities that liberal educations attempt to teach can actually be taught be directly. Rather, I think they're just things that people with good attitudes pick up by osmosis when you let them work on non-bogus projects.
This isn't about training students to be cookie-cutter programmers. The concept is to provide the students with education on how to CREATE things. That is the opposite of cookie-cutter.
.... and they call Lisp programmers "Smug Weenies"?

That said, there are two options if the OP _really_ wanted to use Pylons in Common Lisp.

One could attempt to run Pylons under cl-python[1], which is "a fairly complete implementation of Python written in Common Lisp". Cl-python is currently Allegro-only, and likely will not run Pylons without modification.

Alternately, there is Python-on-lisp, which is a FFI to an embedded python interpreter AFAICT. While it will likely be trivial to get Pylons running this way, the interface between the languages seems very low-level, and there does not seem to be any source translation from a sexp syntax to python.

I don't think either way is a good option honestly. If the OP wanted a python framework, they probably would have asked for one, and you could hold your head high rather than ducking ;).
Unfortunately, the current public system fails to educate very well, and a lot of private schools are based on the public model. With that said, I know there are excellent private schools. This would be in addition to those.

It seems like the best compromise will present itself when real-world tests are done. The whole school won't be devoted to training, but there will be a certain percentage of training. The fact that there is a single focus (Your startup at the end of the road) will be the motivating force for students. I would've given anything to know that there was light at the end of the tunnel besides "go to college".

I totally agree with you. Education is a wonderful journey, not a race. Students would be able to find out what they like and a specific idea that motivates them, then get access to resources that would help them create value relating to that idea.
What are your thoughts on combining the programming subreddit and this site?
Palish isn't the first one to get this idea:

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/07/wizard-school.html
I remember having this argument with my Math Reasoning professor: how old should a child be before learning simple math logic?

More appropriate here, let me ask: how old does an average child have to be to comprehend all of the features of Lisp or Haskell?
I have to agree. Kids almost certainly shouldn't be set on a path to tech entrepreneurship from birth. It takes a unique set of skills to be a good entrepreneur and/or hacker, and almost none of them are technical or trainable via a particular curriculum. Creativity comes from being given the right to create freely from an early age with honest criticism and encouragement. Self-esteem comes from being given the opportunity to succeed (and fail) at interesting problems over and over again. And I'm not sure how one teaches ambition, but it's another vital component. I don't think it matters a bit whether these are taught in a "hacker" curriculum or a traditional curriculum.

As justinsb points out, there are schools in India teaching this model as we speak...and while the startup culture in India has been exploding, I believe the success rate is even lower than in the US (maybe there's many other factors involved...maybe in ten years or twenty, India will be a startup machine, and all because they've built this programmer training culture within major universities). Certainly a strong math and science education can't hurt anyone, whether they want to be an entrepreneur or not.
> Nature vs. nurture isn't going to be decided by posts on news.YC.

Touche :)
It's not like the USA doesn't do the same thing...
Zyb, The Mobile Social Network
Jason Pontin's Facebook fallacy
Children can solve puzzles from a very early age.. If learning to program is a puzzle, it isn't unreasonable to assume that a few could have an excellent command of programming by 18.
I've played with Nutch, and looked at Hadoop, and it's pretty cool stuff. It's also a great foundation for building Google-style solutions to embarrassingly parallel applications. Combine it with Amazon's EC2 and things look really interesting...

I'm glad to see Yahoo supporting/contributing to the community in this way. I think it's stretching the point to call it a 'challenge to Google' - more Yahoo seeking to level the playing field a little.
Scheme worked wonderfully for me on this criteria. Even if it looks scary, as a newbie, I felt I knew what the interpreter was doing. This built my confidence much more than putting a lot of power in my hands that I didn't understand, like some other languages I tried first.
I seem to have only a few questions...

How does a 6th grader know that she wants to be a startup-founder?

Are you attempting to replace an admittedly broken schooling system with another one?

Are you attempting to increase creative space? If so, can creativity be decoupled from freedom? Are you going to force them to be creative?

Finally, at a risk of sounding a tad off. What good will this do anyone? What pain are you fixing? Is there a pain big enough? Why hasn't it fixed itself yet?
You mentioned that you keep timestamp info for each inbound connection, is that a requirement? I only ask b/c this could be used to match up a request on the search engines servers (with your servers IP as the source) with the connection on your server to pinpoint the user in the event your database was compromised.

One thing you could do which should be easy is send chaff. Randomly send out connection requests to some of search engines from your server even though a user is not requesting the data. It makes tying back connections to the users more difficult because you dont know which request is real and which is fake.

SSL would eventually be important because it would protect against man-in-the-middle attacks. Someone could hijack connections to your server claiming to be you and then get all of the requests. Users could potentially be putting in very sensitive information so this could be a big deal. There will also be protection from someone sniffing inbound requests that come into your server as the channel is encrypted.

I understand the expenses thing, so I wouldnt worry too much about that. I'd prefer your service be free and not use SSL than to charge for usage. Although I wouldnt mind some ads, you could monetize a bit on that if you wanted..
That sounds insane, but I can't find any mention of it anywhere else... is it fictional?
It's true that timestamps are probably no longer important. I initially had them in there to monitor usage while the test group was fairly limited. I will remove them in the next day or two as the site gets going (or dies...).

The idea of a chaff is interesting and It wouldn't be too difficult to implement. Thanks for the idea.
Relative Efficency of Programming Languages vs. Legal Language (by Jeremy Zawodny)
Hiya :)

Any given 6th grader doesn't, but it seems like if enough children get a chance, some will succeed. The nice thing about this system is there's no penalty for failure. Students can work for other startups or go to college.

This sort of system could be an alternative for people actively seeking one. Maybe parents who realize the current model might not be the best for their child, or a student not satisfied with the rate of teaching.

The school would be an increase in creativity.. It's focus would be on creation. Of course the school wouldn't force anyone to do anything. It's simply an alternate path, one that would probably be fun for everyone involved.

I was actually trying to fix my own pain, and this seemed a reasonable way to do it. You see, I'm nineteen. At seventeen I dropped out of public high school to work for a videogame company because I couldn't stand it one second longer. I felt caged, mentally beaten up, and I felt extraordinarily hopeless. Running off to pursue a creative endeavor like writing video games at a game company solved all that. It was simply the best choice for me.

But wait a minute, if I was so miserable, there must be other children who are, too. Creative ones who can accomplish great things if only society deems that they could follow their dreams. And why couldn't they actually work on their dreams in the best place for it, in an environment with creative people? Yeah, they need a certain level of maturity, but that can be supplemented by having mature people around to go to for advice.

So, in short, it would be great to offer the hopeless some hope, something other than "Just wait 'til you get to college, everything will be wonderful then".
Cheers guys. When I googled it before, Weblocks popped up. Does anyone have any experience with this?
Up-modded for good knowledge of Python-Lisp interfaces, surely something very cool.
It's a nice initiative. You have probably heard of Scroogle (http://www.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/scraper.htl). How different is your thing from their thing?
The Science of Magic
MIT Startup claims to have solved the fundamental challenges with multicore scalability