skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Chiming in at 21 as someone who learned to code when 13-14, I actually found the make-a-game approach somewhat boring. I preferred picking up random projects (programming a styrofoam Roomba with proximity sensors on a BASIC Stamp, building a graph algo that would solve a Rubika cube, etc.).

Maybe it's because I was always more into board games than video games, but I don't think the games-size-fits-all mentality is universally appropriate.

Generalising it to task-oriented (versus skill-oriented) learning may be more precise.
I still have a set of those drawings (Empire Strikes Back) - they've managed to make several moves with me. For some reason, I've never been able to get rid of them. It's a set of large, widescreen, pictures (for want of a better word). I think I'll have to break them back out tomorrow.
I can say the same about programming languages. I'm reluctant to learn a new programming language because I don't want to spend time learning the library, the syntax, and any other intricacies. All I want is that one cool feature that X language has that Y doesn't.
People argue that the current system works because capitalism is more efficient. But when the prices are hidden from the customer by either fudging prices or hiding costs behind a fixed fee in the form of insurance the system is broken.
Working on it, I promise :-).
for (int i = 0; i < n; i++) { ... }

instead of

int i;
for (i = 0; i < n; i++) { ... }
If you don't distribute said demon, you're ok under the GPL. (You might not be under the AGPL, but this project is GPL).

Either way, write a polite note to the powers that be: "Our stance with respect to GPL software is causing us an estimated $15000/year cost in maintenance and development on project X". (Substitute $15000/year for a reasonable, justifiable estimate).

Your lawyers don't have to justify their GPL stance today. Make them. They'll probably win at the end in this company ... but change can arrive if enough people do this.
No need to wait for YC, there are many, many entities operating in the "tech toy" scene.
To name a few...

LaunchPad toys (http://launchpadtoys.com/) are doing some amazing things with the iPad.

Chris O'Shea (http://www.chrisoshea.org/) is a British designer in that space who did a fun little app recently called MakeGo which got great reception.

Cynthia Breazal's group at the MIT Media Lab did some mind blowing things with Tofulandia (http://robotic.media.mit.edu/projects/robots/tofulandia/tofu...).

Keita Takahashi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keita_Takahashi), who comes from a video game background, did some interesting work on playgrounds (how to make a 21st century playground?)

Yes, this is something I'm quite passionate about :)
Similar queries give incredible accurate results ("movie with Brad Pitt and Edward Norton","movie where james stewart is afraid of heights") , but it seems to work just with movies...

I got spottier results trying with music and games related queries. Google probably picks up the words "movie" or "film", and than search the rest of the query restricting the first few results to movie-related websites.

Still, it's clearly not a "Number of French military victories" kind of gimmick, search is definitely going in that direction in the following years.
Bearing Witness in Syria: A War Reporter's Last Days
I think the entire discussion would be helped by the simple realization that programming is not really all that glamorous nor scientific. It seems like a lot of programmers have math envy, but programming is much more like managing an office staffed with savants than it is like discovering a proof; You tell the workers in the office what to do, using very specific instructions because they can't figure out what you mean, no matter how blindingly obvious it is to you, even though any one of them can add two numbers together in a billionth of a second.

Given that, we can probably look to progress in the "science" of management to get a feel for what progress in the "science" of language design is going to look like. That is to say, we probably can't expect anything at all in the way of progress. It's funny that there's a parallel between the conclusions in William Whytes' "The Organization Man" and "progress" in language design. Whyte concludes, one, that management in the abstract doesn't actually exist and, two, "management" taken as organizational oppressiveness and intrusion is actually a parasitic load on people trying to get work done, and ought be minimized. Look at the success of weakly-typed scripting languages like perl, js, ruby, python, and so on: the fewer strictures they impose on the data, the more work you can get done!

Researchers are just going to have to get over math and physics envy. The "truths" they discover are very unlikely to be anything like nearly as universal as physical truths. Structured programming, OOP, AOP, functional programming, or whatever else aren't ever going to fit into a proposition like "If we adopt ____, we find that blah," where blah is any kind of contingent claim relating to bugs or productivity. All we'll ever get are notions that whatever paradigm worked well in one context and poorly in another. Again, this is parallel to management. You can't manage programmers like auto workers like farm workers like service workers. Outside of algorithmic analysis, computer "science" has as little to say about programmer efficiency as management science has to say about how many weeks of parental leave you should give your employees.
Doesn't DDG use Bing as it's primary search provider?
Overview of 11 Places Data APIs
RSS: please add to each <item> a reference to the user that posted it.
This makes a good case for open-ended video games with material from existing franchises.
Manoj Kumar & Vinod Bhardwaj Summer/Resort 2012, India
It seems useful to address the question of why people create new languages - either DSLs or full languages. Would anyone know of work in such an area? The answer to the "why" is not the reasons people say they make a language. I mean the question as a probe into the psychological urges to "linguate" (is that a word?).

One possible kind of answer could be that, given formal systems are powerful tools to model some interesting corner of reality, the urge to create a DSL could be related to an urge to understand a domain by creating an automaton that can be mapped to domain aspects.
We funded Launchpad Toys.
It confuses normal US people. I'm pretty sure normal British people are perfectly comfortable with .co.uk, Australians with .com.au, etc.
Wait a sec .. I just realized you're copying the entire stack. If I understand correctly, that means that when you move stuff to a compute_lthread, the addresses of local variables change, don't they?

I often take addresses of local variables -- if I understood correctly, this deserves a huge warning in the documentation.
Given the way mobile computing hardware has been going, plus stuff like Siri, it seems like the time is ripe for "Furby Done Right." shudder
Bullshit comes from interviewee and interviewer. The asymmetric information (interviewee knows self better than interviewer) and conflict of interests (interviewee wants job; interviewer wants best person for the job) is what makes it difficult. This is before accounting for the Dunning-Kruger effect, which states that people are useless at evaluating their own abilities.
Just a word of warning: Don't expect much in the way of future upgrades or improvements to this. Adobe have already stated that they see the future of Flash as being a games and high end video solution. They expect HTML5 specific tools(Read:Edge) to solve everything else. I just went to Adobe Refresh where they re-iterated this in very unambiguous terms.
Oh I was kidding - kinda. We applied to do exactly this for YC W12 and we got an interview, but didn't get selected for funding. We've got decent traction and are continuing regardless. Focused on iOS for now, but with plans to extend to physical toys as we grow our user base. So far, so good.
My six years old son is currently learning (fast) to read and write and he already wants to be "hacker"; either "white hat" or "black hat", depending on his mood.

I don't think he sees computers as "magical instruments", though. He is excited by them, by the games he can play on them, by the knowledge he can acquire with them, by the code I write on them… of course. But he is certainly more used to them than I was at his age. To the point where, when coming back from a computer lab organised by his school, he says "I'm not very good with Windows, I prefer mom's computer or yours".

I mean, he is only 6 and he already prefers one platform over another.

I'll wait a bit before his first "Hello, World!" (English not being our first language), but the chances that it's going to be a flash game instead of a small command-line executable are pretty big.
I suspect that C11 support is closer than C99 support (and it would be good too). Things like variable length arrays are now optional.
One of the best replies I've ever read. I learnt more from it than from the haXe home page ;-)
I tought a highschool level intro class in C++ programming. Sadly, it was very short, only 1.5 weeks of 2 hours per day, so we didn't even have time to cover classes.

What I would like is to walk the class through implementing a naïve Brainfuck interpreter, optimizing it, then implementing a Brainfuck-to-C compiler and optimize that.

It would bring a whole lot of understanding I didn't gain until much, much later.

After that, a simple text based adventure game engine to illustrate data driven programming.

That would show the difference between hard coding behaviour in assignments and creating actual usefull applications. It would also show that doing it properly isn't necessarily more difficult, and definately less code.
Volvos (among others I presume, since this feature is 4 years old by now) do that http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPO6iRetpyc
In the past 30 years have you heard of any medical innovation or drugs coming from anywhere other than the US?

Of course the MRI machine was itself invented in the US

I have no way of judging the value of their respective contributions to the field, but I do know that the Nobel prize for magnetic resonance imaging didn't even go to Damadian, but was instead shared by a different American and a Brit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_in_Phys... (2003)

The development of the MRI machine falls a little outside this 30 year window, but at almost exactly the same time that IVF was being developed in the UK. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louise_Brown

For more recent innovation, how about cloning? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolly_%28sheep%29
This kind of problem seems fairly widespread in America. Americans are incredibly self-confident, innovative and have achieved a great deal as a nation. They are also extremely proud of their country.

Unfortunately this combination often leads them to assume things are good purely because they are American. They tend to accept their own familiar values and ideas and readily dismiss alternatives because that would be admitting failure. As a result you get incredibly conservative attitudes in some areas side-by-side with world leading innovation in another.
Some people want to know those rules, they end in linguistic courses.

Learning a language, learning programming, learning any craft is almost always done with a goal other than the learning itself.
Are you talking about the Socratic method?
About Usability Testing – Recruiting
MRIs aren't much use for screening. They can't be used to diagnose many diseases at all, and for many others, their sensitivity and specificity are quite low. In addition, they produce a large number of huge, highly complex images that have to be reviewed by a human being, and it's incredibly easy to overlook something if you don't know what to look for. If I had a coffee for every time our radiology specialist has said some variant of "I wouldn't even have noticed that if I didn't know that's where the pain is -" well, let's just say, I'd find it a lot easier not to fall asleep in the radiology demonstration.

If you want one yearly screening procedure available to anyone, there are many better choices than MRIs, especially considering their high costs (even in non-US countries.)
Goodbye Google, hello Diaspora
I disagree that regular expressions should be deferred to later. For professionals who are trying to figure out what value programming has for them, regexes have more use than game concepts
Grossman's book is at least 10 years old. Selection processes may have been optimised over the intervening time to increase the 2-5%. After all, sociopaths can stay in combat zones much longer and will not suffer PTSD.
great example!
another improvement from google - recognize search queries typed in wrong keyboard layout, ie:
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%D1%81%D1%80%D1%88...
There's already Spyder, so I'm not sure how much value that would add. Plus, Spyder is still fairly new, so it's probably easy to find things to do there: http://code.google.com/p/spyderlib/wiki/NoteForContributors
You don't need to be a doctor to run an MRI scan, but you do need to be one to interpret the results. In addition, you should really have at least one doctor around to decide exactly what you need to MRI in which way for optimal results for any given clinical problem, as the doctors who ordered the MRI done aren't usually specialists in that area.
If you like this sort of bit-level puzzles, this is a nice book: http://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Delight-Henry-S-Warren/dp/0201... -- probably the only book at such a low level I remember buying in many years.
http://blakemccreary.com/2012/03/banksy-on-advertising-quote... *

"You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs." -- Banksy

* Just one of _many_ hits on google reproducing it, I'm not endorsing that blog in particular…
Actually my point was, that rather than an absolute ("no amount of time can replace time spent off work with family"), there was a market mechanism that did a pretty good job of letting individual employees/employers manage the tradeoffs between work and non-work. Somehow (Republicans) that mechanism became deprecated, and has been replaced by conflict and bullshit.
Jason Kottke Uses this
Non-final invalidation of James Gosling patent is major blow to Oracle
Similarly MedLion (http://www.medlion.com/) provides primary care in Santa Cruz and Silicon Valley for $59/mo + $10 visit in part by not accepting insurance (they claim on their website it saves them 40% in costs).

Insurance works great for catastrophic things, just like car insurance and then it clearly makes sense to make it universal. If you could only buy gas through your car insurance--who occasionally would decide you drive too much and not cover this months' gas--you can bet prices would go sky high.
We actually require that our users use SSL on their payment pages. We describe the requirements (and motivations) in more detail at https://stripe.com/help/ssl.
http://postimage.org/image/g0hm3z2mj/
2.7 seconds. need more proof?
I'm not a kid, but I'm late enough to the game to be considered a youngin'. My first computer was a 160mhz Win98 box.

I started programming in '99, when I was invited to a programming class by my typing teacher. His first year long class were split between C++ and Visual Basic. Don't cringe yet! The first semester was all C++ to learn what it is to program in a strict language. The second semester was VB because, now that we did the hard stuff, he "wanted us to have fun with programming." That's when we made all those cheesy games, like tic-tac-toe and connect four. If we wanted to continue next year, it was all C++ for the rest of the curriculum. I ended up buying a C++ and Visual Basic compiler just to program at home.

I believe a group of peers really helps bootstrap the learning process. You want to compete to learn more to create cooler stuff to share and get excited when a friend pulls off something pretty spectacular. Excitement and passion are contagious as all hell.

I was also part of the "I wanna make games!" crowd as well. At the time I was playing Half-Life and Starcraft. I think deep down you know that it will take work to make those kind of games, and so the "Hello World" program doesn't seem so bad because you are only learning. I also think games precondition you to learn the basics since most start out with a tutorial and a gentle learning curve that build on things you learned before. In a way, programming is one long protracted game. I would be curious to see if being a gamer today correlates with getting into programming more often, even if you don't end up making games.
The Recovering Programmer (2007)
What Hits Like Facebook And Pinterest Have In Common
To make it "easier" for people to use their engine. Obviously this is wrong.
Instapaper has several (not offical, but good non the less) android clients:

https://market.android.com/details?id=com.codecarpet.reading...
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.homelinux.hilo.eve....

there's only one readability client, which is not that good....

https://market.android.com/details?id=com.fahimk.readability....
Self referential search results re: the phrase "I don't mean to be" coming right up.
How to read code – a primer
This applies to a business negotiation. Not a series of them and much less to a career made out of busines negotiations. Business is life as usual: sometimes you must decline of something but generally you have to play the bigger game where it matters how you treat other people, even at the expense of optimal business or a short-term gain.

I would say that playing these social games IS what constitutes business and while it's important to bond to allow for future business sometimes, actually, the right thing is rather to not to play along if your gut says no, even if it was good for business.
Startpage search engine protects your Privacy
Article author here. If you have similar pain, you can show your support for this here: http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studi...

I know this is probably a losing battle, but I feel better at least being able to express my displeasure about the issue.
While I agree privacy is important, I always find it funny how far people will go in order to achieve a false sense of privacy. If you want privacy, cancel your internet subscription and take the battery out of your mobile. And avoid places with lots of people. They have traffic cameras. Only to follow and analyze you. Because you're that important.
Online Logo Maker - Free Logo Creator - Free Logo Maker
Online Logo Maker was created with a single purpose: to bring a free professional logo design tool to everyone, focusing on usability and quality.
logo creator, logo generator
The cleanest comparison I can think of is, nobody wants to work out. They want to look good, feel good about themselves and be admired and have their pick of their opposite sex.

This makes sense, as does the fact that working out can get you there. They don't want to work out, they want to _want to_ work out.

At the University of Pennsylvania, we (CS club) held a Codecademy-style event (hackertrails.com) targeted mainly at business folk. We had 150 folks, mostly MBAs, show up to the first event and maybe 15 to the second.

They want to start companies, and get that programming gets them there. But they don't actually want to learn to program, they _want to_ want to.
Have you seen Ubooly? Uses iPhone + voice recognition.
When, as a teen, I discovered programming I was immediately hooked. It was the only "toy" that
managed to match my immagination.
That was a lovely read, thank you.

I think a lot of the comments are going to focus on how to make "more toys, better toys", and maybe that's inevitable given the audience, but I think that misses the point a little.

All children need is a prop and imagination; the more vague the prop the more things it can be. Realistic toys are, frankly, an adult obsession, because they will always fall flat in the face of what a child's mind can conjure up.
That's a valid comment. The tone is all wrong, but I guess it's intentional judging by the nick.
Because there exist fools who bow to every word they say.
Though it looks like lawyers are the only ones profiting from it, also blame the sue-happy culture in the US, and the lawmakers for making that possible.

And due to the chilling effects, only criminals and crazy people even dare to do anything anymore. Others listen to the advice to "be afraid" and sit cowering in their homes.
This is not only for your own email on your site. Especially on comminity sites your you can protect your users' emails with mailhide API http://code.google.com/apis/recaptcha/docs/mailhideapi.html
Thanks - 5.9% + $0.95 is a little pricey though. Stripe alone is 2.9% + $0.30.
I think there was no promise of C. There were two guys that needed somewhat portable compiler to avoid tying them to one system for their ubiquitous by now operating system.

Kernighan, Richie, UNIX and C.

Or to take more lighthearted - If there really was promise, there would've not been need for a preprocessor.
As I sit here, past 3 in the morning, playing with an Arduino for the first time, I find myself thinking...

GOOD LORD THIS IS FUN.

The Arduino folks have this whole thing nailed. The install process (especially for something that involves, you know, buying resistors) was super-easy. The examples seem endless (they have a UDP implementation? Nifty!). The troubleshooting page is relevant and specific. The default environment is so stripped down it hurts, but you know what? I don't care.

This _feels_ like I'm just getting started again, and I'm totally jazzed about it. This whole system is approachable, understandable, and _fun_.
Technically if you read GPL'd code, you can't reproduce it as whole or in part under anything else but GPL (as this creates a derivative work). One of the reasons why some people take extreme care when dealing with GPL'd sources - one person reads it, then describes to others and they act on that.
I'm not exactly a kid anymore but I never got interested in programming because I found everything somewhat simple that I could actually program myself already existed. All the crazy stuff that I wanted to make was completely unachievable. So I never really had any positive feedback from my work. It was either stupid and redundant or died on the vine. Not much fun.