skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's cool to see this sort of technology in a web browser, although for the iPhone/iPad I think some of the pre-existing generative art apps are currently better: Art of Glow, SpawnHD, Little Uzu, etc. I'm sure this is still a work on progress, but just make sure you keep an eye on what's already out there.
Any chance of Canadian locations? You only allow zip codes to be put in for future locations.
I like the idea implicitly communicated that there's almost a shopping list of assignments, and each one carries an XP value; if you're not doing so well, then with that kind of a system you can correct that by working harder to learn the subject matter. Obviously, there's problems, such as enabling a brute force strategy for getting good grades, but I'd be interested to see how well a quest list approach to grading would work in comparison to a sequential assignment style.
as much as everyone likes to call it a failure.. I think google is awesome at releasing technology and seeing if theres anything there that people will like to iterate upon or pivot. Like the article states.. the wave technology I can see being used in a lot of their future products for real time.. possibly their social offering.
Why Music Makes You Happy
Programmers go bananas
This is awesome.

Making it so users can download the silks they make would be nice. Using your silk as my background is cool, but using my own is even better :)
It's not a strawman. At UoM, the point system was designed so that being a racial or ethnic minority was worth the same number of points as a full grade point (i.e. a white student with a high school 4.0 was equivalent point-wise to a black student with a high school 3.0.) For athletes, I remember it was about 1/5 of that amount of points, but I could be wrong on that score.

Having taught at UoM, I can say that unfortunately this translated to their performance on exams as well...
Please don't feel bad about it... --I can't remember which one is my right side. ;)

> such as “dodging” (whitening a portion of the image through intentional overexposure)

Your corrected version is still incorrect. Dodging is "underexposing" to lighten the print image.

Printing from film negatives is by far the oldest and hence most common interpretation. It's what most people have learned in photography lab classes because it is the easiest (and cheapest) process.

When you are dodging, you are blocking light from reaching the photographic print paper and thereby making a portion of the print lighter. When you are burning, you are allowing more light to reach the photographic print paper by blocking everything except for the part you want darker.

Dodging == make lighter (and/or less saturated)

Burning == make darker (and/or more saturated)

The irony is, when you are printing from film positives (think slide film) or to positive print paper (extremely rare), the definitions you originally posted are technically correct in practice but incorrect in common usage.

Sorry for the nit-picking. For what it's worth, I still think it's a great post on a great blog.
Mr. Klabnik goes in depth into the argument that literate programming has to be tangled and weaved into a different order, in order to be considered "true" literate programming.

Respectfully, I have to disagree.

It may have been the case that a macro source-code rewriter was necessary before the advent of the subroutine, but in this day and age you can factor out functions as you see fit. Moving around source code with macros is an unnecessary obfuscation between the code you read, and the code as it runs. At any point where you're tempted to pull out a block of code and interpolate it later, just make it a function with a descriptive name, and hey presto.

Edit: Steve wrote it.
I was the first employee and lead developer for a startup in boom #1. It fell down, went boom.

What went wrong:
- Timing -- We were either ahead of our market, so we had
significant head wind making people realize that there was
something there. Also, we hit the tail end of the boom, so
round #2 of money was at a really bad time.
- Focus -- We had three projects, we should have had only
one. Plus assorted other revenue generating consulting.
- Technical -- We made some unfortunate technical
decisions, and because of that wound up duplicating a lot
more infrastructure type code than we'd do today. We also
wound up with version 2 looking just like version 1, but
with a much better data store. The 9 months that that took
would have been better spent making the user side better
- Personnel -- Single founder, one under-experienced lead developer, and two other devs from completely different
software cultures who never meshed well. Any better team
members would have realized that this was mildly disguised
anarchy and beat someone into shape. I know I probably
should have been first in line.
- Sales and Marketing -- We were selling to non-profits. The sales cycle was long, sometimes approaching a year. If
you have lead times like that, you need to be well funded
and in for the long haul, not trying to piece stuff
together and sell individual features for dollars.

Next time:
- Fringe platforms should be looked upon with suspicion. I'm not saying that you should avoid them, but had we even started with LAMP (or linux/apache/postgres/p-language), we might have had a fighting chance. Initial time to market was great, but I'd say that within 3-6 months, it was a drag.
- One founder is tough. He was way too split between fundraising, selling, and direction. Also, I mocked some of his code when I found holes in it, so he didn't really trust his technical ability as much after that.
- Developer compatibility is important. Mixing a MS alum, a debian developer, and someone who grew up on a fringe commercial platform is a recipe for disaster.
- Money -- Make it easy for people to pay you for stuff. Long billing cycles are awful. Long sales cycles are awful. One of my metrics for if a business has its shit together is if they can get invoices out fast and correct.
- Know when to quit. -- I hung on too long, because it looked like there was the littlest bit of hope, and I could deal with missing a paycheck here and there. Now, I'd probably have called it off a lot faster and gotten on with the next thing.

What now? I did consulting for a while till I found a job with the current company. I'm working for a small company, different set of issues. Technically, we're in a ton better shape. Financially, too.

I'd do it again, but I'm not 100% on that, since I've got kids that are really my startup project right now.
NASA: The Frontier (fan vid frustrated with NASA's communication skills)
If you taught at U of M, I'd imagine you're at least passingly familiar with Gratz v. Bollinger, in which the Supreme Court explicitly made what you're talking about illegal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratz_v._Bollinger

So yes, it's a strawman ... no schools do that anymore. Lots of schools never did it. And the schools that were doing so, were doing so with a fundamental misunderstanding of and in non-compliance with both the spirit and letter of the law.
I see the same thing - sometimes the ice is fractured and has voids, and there are irregular pillars/pyramids of ice sticking up!
4 Steps to the Ephiphany by Steve Blank. Rip out each action page, tack it to your wall, and follow it verbatim for the specified length of time it recommends you spend on said action.
The update popup for extensions is still annoying though - even on linux.
Games are the most popular paid applications in Windows Phone Marketplace
Yeah.. sorry for the zip code only thing. I'm certainly interested in expanding as much as possible. For now my focus is on establishing some traction in one place and finding a business/marketing co-founder.
Set of colors that is unambiguous both to colorblinds and non-colorblinds
Actually, this one is by me. Getting some author tags are on the feature list for Timeless. ;)

You'll have to take that argument up with Knuth, and not with me, though. Also, while you may be thinking of some languages, many others don't make it easy to re-arrange code. C code, for example, pretty much has to be in order. Unless you write a CPP macro. Which is basically the same as a documentation macro.

(ps: oh, and this doesn't mean I don't <3 Docco. Part of writing this post was so that I could stop blathering about it to all of my friends.)
[Groupon Employee Speaking]

Bingo. It's hard to put into words how fast the business is moving. One of the things mentioned in the press release is investing in technology. We have trouble keeping up with the traffic we have, and we're expecting [redacted]00% growth over the next year.

We're in the middle of two big projects now:
1) rearchitecting to handle the aforementioned growth
2) hiring 100 developers or more by September.

That kind of stuff costs money - #1 involves a couple dozen developers for 3-6 months, and #2 means ~doubling the size of the dev team.

(shameless plug: Groupon is an awesome place to be a dev - highly appreciated, crucial to the company, exciting new projects, etc. Email peterc@groupon.com or go to http://groupon.com/jobs . Chicago or Palo Alto.)
In my admittedly limited experience with mongo, it felt like they were designing the ultimate database for the web. Not in a "web-scale" sort of way, more in a swiss army database for the web dev way. This came to me when I wanted to do location queries on a db. Most people using standard DBs do this with PostGIS for postgres, which is incredibly powerful and accurate. But mongoDB supports the "find shit near me with good enough accuracy" query that 90% of people want to run right now.

I was able to make a simple test page that told you the IP of the previous visitor who was closest to you. It took me thirty minutes from "hey mongo has some sort of geo support" to that (and I'm not a web dev and was using ATT 3G to read doc). PostGIS took me longer to figure out how to set a lat,long pair in the DB.

I'm not saying raw speed of development is the best measure of a database, but if your #1 priority is the ability to rapidly prototype, I'd imagine mongo is a good fit in your toolbelt.
The methodology has changed. Now they use humans instead of a point system. The result is identical. Entering "minorities" and athletes enter with lower GPAs and SATs. It's a fact, not a strawman.
Larry Page's $60m Superyacht
This doesn't work with GNU Screen.
Well at the very least maybe you can finally admit that you're expressing a view about minority students. Quitting your denial of that would be a great first step.

Entering "minorities" and athletes enter with lower GPAs and SATs.

So? Surprise, surprise: when you start adding factors besides pre-college test scores to your admissions criteria you see ... variation in pre-college scores.

The methodology has changed. Now they use humans instead of a point system.

So you're unhappy that non SAT/GPA factors are taken into account. I'm curious if you've got the intellectual consistency to be in favor of simply ranking all students by their high school GPAs and SAT scores in descending order and taking the first N students. Maybe we don't actually need admissions committees or essays at all ...
In case anyone is keeping track, stuff like this is why it's still worthwhile to go to college, IF you can get into a good one. Not saying that there's no benefit to a middle-tier college, but you'd be hard-pressed to argue that you can replace an experience like the one posted above with a stack of textbooks and an account on a Blackboard site.
Subtraction.com: Blu-Ray Blues
In my experience, using CouchDB for prototyping is not fun. With SQL and (from what I gather) MongoDB, you can create ad-hoc queries as you go. Creating views in CouchDB requires thought and time -- usually lots of time -- to generate the views, unless you're working with a very small amount of data. Changing your mind is painful. You end up using weird hacks to get around rebuilding your views all the time.

Maybe I was doing it wrong, but it seems like if your app has more than a little data and you plan on changing your mind about how best to present it, you will experience discomfort.
I like the approach for that class, although it looks like a terrible experience curve for a game; you have to grind for weeks to reach Level 2, but then most of the subsequent levels are achieved relatively rapidly. Also you could hit a ceiling where it's no longer possible to achieve Level 12 because you missed out on XP earlier.
Fun, but the metaphor doesn't fit quite well enough for me.
One idea about design I take from pg is that it's difficult to "even talk about good or bad design except with reference to some intended user." [1]

Now, I'm relatively new to literate programming, and perhaps the answer to my question(s) will be obvious to someone more experienced with it. What I wonder though every time I read about it is, who is the intended audience of all this extensive documentation? More specifically, how much knowledge of the programming language and problem space do we presume that the reader has?

There is something elegant about presuming the audience has expertise in both areas. That way you only have to worry about documenting one thing, the program, rather than three things: the program, the programming language and the problem space. Readers lacking sufficient understanding of the lang or problem space can refer to the more robust documentation about either one individually to get themselves up to speed. But I'm not sure Docco users are taking this approach.

---

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/desres.html
Why did HN go down at 5.40 pm ET?
If I were looking for this kind of person, I'd want them to know that different people see tasks differently. Some people see simple design stuff as "bullshit work" while others see having to parse through server logs as "bullshit work."

This isn't an all-glamorous job. To portray it as such would be deceitful and would attract a different kind of individual, who would ultimately be let down.
Well, Google does make some noise about releases. I forget which version (proving your point) of Chrome brought the Store, but at the time it was touted by version number, despite the silent update. Probably something we'll see more of as companies move to the cloud and mobile.
Redline Smalltalk: Smalltalk in ‘small talks’ – Message in a bottle – Part 2
I teach computer science at the high school level. Inspired by Dr. Sheldon, I switched my classes to use points instead of traditional grades, but I went further than he has.

I'm only halfway through the year, but so far things are very positive. Students seem to be learning more and covering more material on average. (I'll write up a blog post about the experience this summer.)
If I could download the images with a transparent background, I would probably use them as a design element on pages I need to spruce up.
Web Censorship by Country (map)
oh wow...this looks great! Do you know how the keybindings are? One of the nice things about the TI calculators is the custom keyboard...
I love how this is all JS (no Flash!). Impressive. BTW this reminds me a bit to my friend's project http://glowdoodle.com
I restarted the server.
I wish someone have told me that 999 days ago when I joined ycombinator....
The advantages of free software
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20050314.html

Pretending these low-literacy users — 43% of the US adult population! — don't exist, or can't be discussed frankly, is less respectful than seeking to understand them.

It's quite likely that these people are late adopters of web search, and thus their proportion of Google users is still rising. Consider, also, that there is evidence that lower-income, lower-education users are more likely to click on ads.

I've been perplexed when discussing content mills with Googlers how they quickly assert (often in similar phrasing, suggesting a party line passed along in internal or official communications) that reasonable arguments (or very subtly, internal studies) imply many users appreciate the content mills' writing.

Perhaps it's the low-literacy users who are happy to land on a mill site. Either they can't tell the difference from a quality, authoritative treatment — or maybe even the plodding, keyword-stuffed, repetitive writeups are actually reassuring for slower readers.

There has to be a logical reason, other than Google venality, that such awful spamglish writing decked in AdSense ranks so highly.
1. You can still buy this book in Chinese online book stores

http://www.51eng.com/cn/bookdetail.asp?id=602871

http://www.51eng.com/cn/bookdetail.asp?id=602870

2. As a Chinese myself, I can confirm Bayesian is not taught in high school statistics, but defintely taught in college statistics course. It's called 贝叶斯概率 in Chinese.
I woke up from a dream the other morning and could still see a mini-map of my house in the upper right corner of my vision. There were little blue exclamation points for all my daily quests. Brush teeth, take shower, make breakfast, etc. I was curious who gives out the quests, what kind of rep I'm farming and what the full quest text said, but then I was fully awake and it was gone. It's good to see that a college course can be similarly rewritten.
$100K in 4 months: A niche app's path to App Store success
Like I said, you can disable that.
You might mean "it's somewhat rare of them to sell the product you've built and are are actually selling", but having a sales-y person go out and say "sure we do that" and then coming back and saying "new urgent feature" is totally par for the course.
It is only a matter of time before the first powerleveling services become available for this class.
I've been thinking about this idea a lot lately - I think gamifying a single course could produce a modest boost in performance, but it seems like this particular implementation, as endtime pointed out, simply changes some names.

I think this would be a way cool system around which you could base secondary education. But instead of the generic game parallels, you could treat the four years of high school as a sort of mash of character creation and early game exploration. If you had 5 lines of progression (Math, Science, Social Sciences, Art, Language) that went from level 1-10, each requiring passing exams, preparing presentations, or completing projects, you could allow students to naturally find the work that pushes them personally.

The one big thing I think is necessary to really see the benefit of a game-like system in education is the ability to try stuff multiple times.

Consider an alternate version of angry birds. In this alternate version, there are 150 levels, many of which mirror the fun and challenging levels we know and love in the original. The 150 levels are in 15 worlds, each with 5 practice levels and 5 "test" levels. After playing the 5 practice levels as much as you want, you can play the 5 test levels all in a row, precisely once. However you do, that's how you did. That's your score.

Not a whole lot of replayability there. While it can be necessary (especially at the university level) to distinguish between those who are and are not competant in a given field, I think game mechanics can teach us a whole lot more about how to make people want to achieve.

Additional thoughts:

- Unlockables could be really exciting i.e. you have silent study hall until you hit level 4 in any subject, at which point you gain access to the study lounge; if you're level 10 in at least 1 area, you can apply for off-campus lunch

- Incentives for tutoring would be cool. (Think "Prestige Levels")

- DATA! Tracking these things would give unprecedented amounts of data that could provide a lot of insight into the way students are progressing through the material.

- For this to really work, you would have to develop a new system for scheduling courses in high school that more resembled a college. This is not a bad thing. I think giving high school kids a bit more autonomy in deciding how and what they go about learning with their time will produce more well-adjusted, mature adults.

- The specifics of how to implement a lot of these systems are less difficult than you think.
Crazy.

Glad to hear that you were able to give back to a very needy community in need on your vacation. As opposed to say, buying a car and naming it after yourself.

Can you provide any numbers or statistics on conversion from free to paid? Given there are people on both sides of the fence, do you think it's better to start as paid versions only, or is it better to absorb the cost of the free users and hope they later convert to premium?
I consider it the "Chuck Close" startup model. When Close started his portraiture, it was considered trite and boring, and there wasn't any competition in it. Same reason Paul Sahre got famous off of gig posters and why they're passe today. Finding a dirty corner to turn into a thriving business is generally the best way to do anything, because it's simply against human nature to go against the grain in such a fundamental way.

If you're really talented, there's less competition. And if you're not, a lower bar.
I don't--I just googled "TI92 Emulator" or something to that effect, and this was the first result--and surprisingly nonspammed.
The type is the same, but the implementation is wildly different these days.

Save points in particular are far more numerous and well-placed in today's games. Notably, challenges are now intentionally separated by save points, so that a single skill-type is in focus during each unit.

That way someone who has trouble with, say, a vehicle section won't fail and be faced with five to ten minutes of run-and-gun before they can even attempt (and thus practice) the vehicle portion again.

Essentially, that's precisely what the OP's approach to education is: adding more save points and breaking up the challenges better by type: solo vs group, oral presentation vs written proposal, etc.

Further, failure penalties are only really used in games where the player has an open-ended amount of time to defeat the challenge, precisely to encourage learning and/or mastering of a technique or skill. In a setting where the player has a time limit (such as in education) it would be unnecessary and inappropriate to additionally penalize failure as "repetition + luck" wouldn't be a valid strategy in the first place.
Because single server durability is a myth when hardware can fail at any time.
I agree entirely.

My point is just that in any modern language at a reasonable level of granularity, the order in which you write the code is 99% independent from the order in which you execute it.

To port tangle/weave for a modern language would be to cargo cult a feature that can't possibly help matters, in my opinion.

That said, I'd love to see an example (in a modern language) where a woven bit of literate code was more readable than the well-factored equivalent.
They are abstract in the sense that it is not immediately clear what makes them go up or down.

Does the presence of a sports team make students feel more school pride, increasing student performance? How much does commute times factor in? What about whether there's political activist students that successfully negotiate better benefits for TAs?

If you look at metrics alone, you lose the woods for the trees. It looks like CalTech have their head on straight, at least according to some comments here, about potential and passion, not about numbers. This is what the blog post advocates, and that I think is a very short-sighted position to take.
You'd be surprised:

http://mirror.wikileaks.info/wiki/Category:China

(link not working FTM)

And just for the record, Assange didn't leak anything, users submit them or it was collected via Tor exit and wikileaks just publishes it.
My C/C++ compiler will give a warning on 'if (foo=3)'.

Python will throw a SyntaxError on 'if foo = 3:'.