skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If they are going into mobile they better have unique take on it and not just be doing it to say they can. If it looks and works like W8, iOS, or Android then they should not spend he resources.
There are a billion Lisp parsers in a few lines of Python, C, Lisp, etc. Any Pascal ones like that?

Edit; not meant sarcastic, I would really like to see such a simple parser as was implied.
...and the original VisiCalc executable [1], at 27520 bytes, is smaller than the _app icons_ in a modern iOS app bundle!

VisiCalc was, essentially, _the_ killer app of the early PC era.

The march of progress. ;-)

[1] http://www.danbricklin.com/history/vcexecutable.htm
Michael Heller on property rights and the anti-commons
I was thinking more in terms of get caught by neighbouring country's police and pray they're not paid either...
The world has always been like this: unfair, often without justice, dangerous. One option is to invest more of your time, money and energy on personal security. Of course knowledge is the best way to stay safe -- knowing which people and places to avoid.
After learning a large number of programming languages, if I was going to start someone fresh with learning to program, I would pick either a scheme ( in particular racket ) or a smalltalk.

Scheme is a little bit on the 'toolkit-y' side and slightly less accessible than smalltalk for someone just starting out but, both have what I consider most important:

a minimum of rules and syntax. anyone learning to programming in either would be primarily focused on how to
solve the problem in front of them rather than solving the language.

This all said, I haven't tried this out in any scientific fashion so it is mostly just intuition.
There definitively better ways then others. Having seen full classes of people learning C++ as a their intro to programming I can say there definitively bad ways to teach programming (My wife was one such student, it really turn her off to the whole experience and I'm trying my best to get her to try it again with something better)

Ruby is a very good choice for sure. Between the two(CL or Ruby) I don't know which one I'd pick. I guess ruby has a little more practical aspects to it. Lisp has some advanced features that could be used for more advanced students.
> If there was though, it'd be Ruby. ;)

I know you're being tongue-in-cheek with that, but I think there are three distinct use cases for learning to program.

For people who want to learn CS from a ground-up, theoretical foundation, Lisp is a nice choice. It is very easy to teach functional programming while simultaneously teaching the fundamentals of theoretical computer science, so you get the best of both.

For people who want a bit more 'traditional' approach, and also want to learn about computer science from a low-level perspective, C is a good choice. It teaches memory management and gives an insight into computer hardware & systems that higher-level scripting languages don't. (This latter part is where Java fails - how can you appreciate references and garbage collection until you've mucked around with pointers and malloc() in C?)

For people who just want to dabble in programming, or for people without a mathematical background, or for people who just want to prototype small projects quickly... then yes, scripting languages like Ruby (or Python) would be the 'best' way.

As you said, languages are like tools, but I think these three categories of tools cover the majority of use-cases nowadays for the beginning programmer.
Engineering The 10,000-Year Clock - Paid for by Jeff Bezos
Maybe these will seem obvious, but maybe one of them will stick:

- Go to meetups, get there early for the networking/pizza stuff that happens before the main talk, stay after and see if people go out for drinks

- If you have a few people you know that might be a good fit, set up a mastermind group; I haven't done this myself but it seems like a low pressure way to get people together and build off the positive peer pressure
The author doesn't even touch on what I find (potentially) most odious: that big companies could use Klout data to discriminate for/against certain customers.

def process_complaint
if self.user.klout > 40
self.user.send_gift_certificate(100.00)
else
self.destroy
end
end

def answer_phone
if caller_id.user.klout > 50
self.move_to_front_of_queue
end
end
I've got to disagree here. For one, Klout is a step in the direction of creating a metric to help brand marketers determine who are the most valuable people to target (i.e. "influencers"). It's not perfect but it's better than nothing from a marketing perspective.

On the other hand, if people just happen to get wrapped up in what their Klout is because they are ego-driven, then so be it.
Interesting, I didn't know this but Turbo Pascal was written by Anders Hejlsberg (of Delphi and C# fame).
Thanks, but I have already graduated. And although my thoughts about the education I received at university are not really positive for I still believe in the beauty of knowledge. That's why I am asking for suggestions on topics to dive into.
Good stuff. I've added the window's title to the email's subject field:

javascript:(function(){var%20url=%22mailto:example@example.com?subject=%22+document.title+%22&body=%22+document.URL;window.open(url);})();
Nostalgia :-)
I have my cell phone's voicemail use Google Voice and it's a huge improvement over T-Mobile's voicemail.

I also give out my Google Voice number and it rings both my cell phone and my always-open Gmail window at the same time.

If I'm at my computer with headphones on, which is most of the time, then I can make/receive calls for free inside of my web browser. I know people want to use GV for more mobile things, but I'm extremely happy with the way I'm currently using it through Gmail.
git diff/merge on xml files would be really great. will think this over.
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The plus side is that Klout is so bad at measuring anything approximating influence that it's more of a scam than a real problem in the sense that this post fears (at least currently). It's a really lazily computed metric that's not validated against anything at all. Given an hour, HN users could probably come up with a dozen still-imperfect but less stupid metrics, and maybe some sort of start at a validation approach. But in the world of clueless social-media-marketing execs, they're able to sell it to people who are even more clueless than themselves. I hope that continues for now at least. =]
Create timelines, share them on the web
whenintime is a web application that enables users to create, view, explore and contribute to interactive digital timelines on the topic of their choice
Not content with merely understanding the universe, we are now intent on literally destroying it. Go science.
+1 Thanks, that was easy.
I'm not saying there isn't value being created for marketers (though others might), I'm merely saying Klout as the go-to source for reputation on the web could have negative societal implications.
This is a really beautiful piece of writing; it’s quite a gift that Mona Simpson would deign to share such a personal eulogy with the world. The Jobs family certainly didn’t owe any of us insight into his final time on earth.

From all popular accounts, Jobs was an intensely private man about his personal and family life; something refreshing in an age when celebrity is conflated with talent and young people like Mark Zuckerberg opine that privacy is an anachronistic social norm. Love him or loath him -- and there is certainly enough evidence to support both reactions -- the conversation is almost always about the work and Steve Jobs as a professional. As one who still values the notion of personal privacy, I’ve always been grateful for that.

Yet what makes this piece so potent is that Simpson reflects primarily on Steve Jobs as a person: a brother, father, and husband, not a boss, or showman. In so many ways, her eulogy could be applied to any person who has lived fully and loved their family deeply.

There’s quite a sublimity in that contrast, something I suspect was not lost on Jobs and his family in the creation and dissemination of this eulogy and the Isaacson biography to the public.

And perhaps on that point, it’s wonderfully surprising that Steve Jobs, widely considered an arbiter of taste and design curation, wasn’t yet familiar with Mark Rothko -- one of the premier painters of the 20th century -- until the final year of his life.
I would recommend using newgem from DrNic. It's gem template generator that comes with nice defaults.

http://newgem.rubyforge.org/
Ruby 1.9.3-rc1 (and presumably -p0) fixed all manner of memory leak issues I was experiencing in Rails apps (Ruby 1.9.2-p290 + Rails 3.1 + Passenger 3.0.9 + Nginx). This was on top of the loading slowness of Ruby 1.9.2 with Rails.

Went from leaking MBs per request to no leakage for days.
I don't think those tests work very well? I scored 49 and I am introverted. I find people easy to read and befriend, but I don't actually want their company. Isn't that the definition of an introvert?

It's like these tests assume people are introverted because they lack social skills. I find that a little insulting.
The author cites Williams. Is it plagiarism to discuss someone else's work? The blogosphere would look pretty empty.

"There are at least four key principles of visual design that have an important impact on usability. These four principles — contrast, repetition, alignment and proximity — were originally given the engaging acronym CRAP by Robin Williams (the visual designer, not the comedian). You can exploit these four principles to make user interfaces both more attractive and easier to use.

Let’s look at each one in turn."
That's not what I would teach first. I'd start with a simple assembly language, like 8080A. After that C, and then lisp. The problem with starting students on lisp is they have a hard time grasping what's going on under the hood.
"which is why it took me so long to enter this field." Good one. :)
Gnip, the authorized re-seller of Twitter's stream, includes Klout scores as part of its augmented stream. I'm guessing a bulk of those 2B calls are from that.

But yes, MANY social CRMs are using Klout scores for ... I don't know what, but they are.
Sounds like a good one. But I think only teaching high school students is so. A professor in the university spent most of their time writing proposals (mostly on computer).
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All the things you are listed are about Getting Better...

Your conversations shouldn't be reciting self-help books to each other. Sharing stuff you think is awesome and kicking around projects are both great examples of bettering each other. Gossiping about celebrities or talking about that new World of Warcraft expansion pack are not.
Your right that whether it's faster is going to depend on queuing time. Just counting the time being served or self serving a decent person on checkout will do it faster. Generally here though the time to wait for self checkout is zero or under a minute whereas the line for being checked out can take a lot longer.
I'm an instructor for a university course that is taught in a computer lab, so that every student has a computer in front of them. Each week, I setup two "community notes" pages using some etherpad clone and let them write their notes for the day in that fashion. I have to setup two, because apparently there is a hard limit of 12 users per etherpad, but it's completely changed my students' view of notes.

There's no more clamoring each week for the powerpoint that I refuse to make. They're now using each other to build notes that are better than anything they could build individually.

When we get this technology into everything, the world will be a much better place.
Perhaps Klout will become the killer-app to help educate the public on the 'dangers' of putting too much information the Internet. It is time people become more wary of 'free' things too.
"parsed and codegenned" he said. Any Lisp compilers like that?
Sort of, it does get cheaper in some places.

When I went through college in Canada a few years ago, the majority of degrees were between $2500-4000 a year. Not quite as affordable as Belgium, but far more affordable than most places in the USA.

And then I moved to WA state, where there is no state income tax, only federal, and I figured that this was simply a matter of taxation vs. subsidization.

And then I moved to California, where I find that my overall tax rate is as high as it would be for the same income in Canada. So... for the same amount of tax paid, in Canada I'd get health care and heavily subsidized college education for all people, and in CA nobody gets nothing.

What's up with that? Where's all this money going?
My first encounter with TP was as a high school senior in 89/90 in an AP programming course. What a blast.

Anyway, for those who miss it, the binaries for Borland TP/TC were released some time ago. Probably linked off the Wikipedia page.

The entire Borland Turbo series was cool. I had Turbo C, Pascal, and BASIC. Though Quick BASIC was the gold standard (and almost as fun), my heart will always have a soft spot for the original Borland DOS text-based IDEs.

In terms of utility value per byte of executable, that was such an interesting time. There were so many cool boot sector viruses and utils during that era. Anyone else remember that full-featured DOS-based .COM text editor that fit in a single floppy disk sector (512B)? The original text-based DESQView? So many, many neat programs given the limited hardware.
I've actually written a snippet in this once as a personal challenge. The GOTOs don't work properly in the interpreter I used, which just messed everything up.
69 days to 30
Don't throw the word "sociopath" around so casually.
Yeah! Slight small headache when I see my code from then. It's not great now, but luckily I progressed somewhat.
Cool post, but I really like this paragraph from his "recovering programmer" page (linked in the sidebar):

"Somewhere along the lines, I realized I was looking at everything backward, from an implementation point of view, not from the perspective of a finished application, not considering the user first. And I realized that the inherent bitterness and negativity of programming arguments and technical defensiveness on the web were making me bitter and negative. I've consciously tried to rewind, to go back to when programming was a tool for implementing my visions, not its own end."
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The part of the infographic showing the average cost of private college by state seems mostly meaningless to me. The top private schools compete nationally and are around the same cost regardless of where they are, so for smaller states that don't have a lot of regional private schools, all it takes is having one top private school and they'll be near the top. Massachusetts gets particularly nailed, as it is a small state and it has both Harvard and MIT.

The most interesting thing I see on the infographic is the section where it shows the schools that give the best value. Note they are all top private schools. They are the most expensive schools, but they have very good aid packages. Out of curiosity, I've went to the cost calculators that some of these schools provide and worked out what it would cost if I had kids and they wanted to go to these schools.

It was somewhat surprising--it turns out that if I had a kid and sent him to Harvard, for instance, our total cost (parental contribution, contribution from kid's summer work, and some combination of kid's work during school or loans) would come out to about $5-7k/year. The rest would be covered by need-based grants and scholarships. Results are similar at other top private schools.

Doing the same at top public schools gives a much larger total cost.

It's not clear to me why the top private schools are able to offer so much better aid packages.
That is true, but only partly so. Assuming the people from the us don't end up in Belgium (and therefore won't pay taxes in Belgium) it will literally cost €10000 for the entire 4 year degree (although if it is like in Denmark, a bachlors degree will only take 3).
I notice a basic difference between men (which most ppl here in HN are) and women is that men's first impulse is to be critical, while women lean towards being supportive... nothing inherently wrong with either approach, both have its merits at certain times... if you're looking for emotional support, absolutely DO NOT go to men. They're horrible and want to suggest solutions, while you just want to be listened to.
First, they didn't red out all of the ads on some of the English-language websites. I'm guessing this is an honest mistake.

Second, if they masked all of the non-news 'news' things would look a lot worse, but that's another issue entirely.
Grocery bagging specifically is an interesting point culturally. Bagging helpers do exist in the UK, but 99% of the time you will bag your own groceries as the cashier scans them. It gives you something to do while waiting, and enables you to pre-organise the bags any way you like.

There is something of a time loss if you can't keep up with the cashier, but that's not often much of a problem. The few times I or my husband have started bagging stuff in grocery stores here in California, though, we've gotten strange looks - and often, at Trader Joe's, where the cashier often bags after scanning everything - words of thanks.
I have been using 960.gs and I had rolled some of my own css styles for text and other formatting, but Bootstrap has already taken care of all of that, and it looks great. There are example layouts included as well.
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Graphics were lightning fast on my first 1MB VGA card ... good old times
I think Scheme comes the closest to being an ideal teaching language. It has all the same advantages adduced (great books, simplicity, power) in even greater measure. For instance, there's no 'funcall, 'apply, and sharp-quoting everywhere, and no powerful but baroque object and package systems deeply integrated into the language. Scheme macros are a bit complicated (especially implementation-wise) but can be sugared over (e.g. define-syntax-rule or CL-like syntax for basic macros) and at least they're "correct".

Scheme isn't perfect, of course, and I'd love to see a modern Scheme-like Lisp with a canonical implementation and borrowing freely from Haskell, Erlang, and friends while preserving its minimalist ethos (somehow neither Racket nor Clojure is this).

Of course, the readiness is all ... while there's a beauty in simplicity, can a novice without any higher mathematics really appreciate the style of programming one does in Scheme?
nostalgia?
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Google Chrome deserves an honorable mention here. I just found out yesterday that chrome's built-in debugger has stack traces. I've been debugging for years with firefox/firebug and forgot how helpful it is to actually know where the source of your bug is.
Er...depends on why the students want to program, right? I studied assembly and I may be taking for granted the computer science foundations that it gave me, but it has almost no bearing in what I do in my current day programming. And I had learned C, C++ and Basic before my assembly classes.

Teaching students assembly as their very first language seems akin to teaching students Latin before they can learn French, German, Spanish, etc. Sure, it's helpful and...IF they get pass that first dry session.
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I think the MS-DOS version is not smaller than the CP/M 80 version I learned Pascal with ;-)
I wanted to share a document with a friend, in a view-only sort of way. Google Docs was overkill for what I had in mind, since the document was basically a text file. But I also wanted to be able to update the file so emailing it was out of the question.

So I built Hawk, which lets me turn text files in my Dropbox account into static webpages, processed using Markdown. Even better, I can edit the text file right on my desktop or on my phone (using Nebulous Notes), and the changes are instantly synced to the page.

Would love to hear your feedback!

Sample page: http://www.hawk.io/tp/sus2011 (my (very incomplete) startup school notes from yesterday)

(ps. I'm somewhat ambivalent on the name, alternatives there are welcome too)
I can't read the FA right now but a strong +1 for Python is the student can use it on any machine for any purpose, and tweak existing softwares.
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When I worked at Spock we had pretty much the same policy. Spock mined everything it could, including corporate bios, news articles, phone directories, etc. It wasn't deeply thought out; we just didn't have time to work it out fully.

There was a time when people were regularly upset and surprised at what search engines came across. It's not that the data are public, but how they are collated and presented. Over time a balance was struck, mostly in favor of the search engines.

I'm not sure what the right balance is here. At the very least there should be some sort of opt-out in the same manner as robots.txt or removing yourself from Facebook search results.
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Here's a few things I've seen work for a shoestring marketing budget.

Reach out to bloggers in this niche. If this is something that doesn't exist in some capacity and can really help people, maybe some bloggers will mention it and you can get a few subscribers.

Look for parallel partners. Maybe you can negotiate where someone mentions your daily deals in their daily deal email and you can mention their deals in four of yours to mitigate their risk.

Trade resources for mentions. Maybe you have a specific expertise that you can sell to someone in a similar space. Instead of charging money, barter a mention in their newsletter or blog.

Start a blog and create catch titles that people can get attached to in your niche. Something like 8 secrets to a free vacation in Dubai can go viral.

Write featured blog posts for related blogs. This is nice because it usually guarantees an existing audience will read your post.
Yup, that's where I got mine a year or so ago. Then, a week later, I found the 1st edition at a thrift shop for a buck.

The quality of the domestic version is so much better, but not $50 better. The price of a legit copy is shameful.
Yes I was speaking of Gnome3. And No. It's not only "Install it from the repositories". Maybe it worked easily for you.. but for me t'was horrible. And yeah, I ended up having to mess around in the terminal and lynx to solve the problem (I had no other computer and was not going to always reboot to windows to Google something while tidying everything up). But yeah you can always say that's because I'm a noob, and was unable to do it right... but that's exactly the problem. A "newbie" should not have that kind of problem.
Great chat app by the way!
Oh yeah? Well, by learning Ruby you get all that and you become a Rockstar. Kids love being rockstars. So there.

Edit:
To the downvoters (and feel free to keep downvoting, if that rocks your boat): the "+1 for Python, because" comments were as empty as this one, and less warranted at that.

Ultimately where you start isn't as important as where you go. It's just a matter of picking a language, any language, some books, and shutting your ears down to everyone telling you that it doesn't get any better than that.
Klout is odious?

People's need for ego-stroking is odious
Here's a better list of schools that spend a lot on students: http://www.collegeresults.org/search2d.aspx?sre1=50000&s...

It includes a few high spending schools your list misses.
80% of what is on his blog is worth a read. The entries are terse, insightful, and nostalgic without being sappy.
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