skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I started in the mmorpg server-emu "scene". Stuff like World of Warcraft servers, etc. At that point I knew just basic HTML before jumping in. There were some people offering to make login, registration scripts, etc. for server websites. Along with a handful of people throwing around python in IRC rooms, IRC bots, etc.

It was a pretty natural process, from looking at some of their scripts and wondering "wtf" all the way to downloading the mysterious PHP interpreter and asking for help on rather trivial problems.

When I got to high school the BASIC class disgusted me. The teacher had zero experience and no style. Every assignment or lesson was out of a book that must have been 10 years old.

Edit: I've never used any books. It's really amazing how much is out there with a single internet connection.
Since it means not having to support VLAs, yes.
My math teacher in the 8th grade in 1971 made up a virtual machine with an assembly-like instruction set. He had us write programs and then 'execute' them by thinking about them as though we were the VM. Once we got the hang of that, we learned Fortran and got to send punched card jobs to a computer on the other side of town. Turnaround time
was measured in days. It's been a wild ride since then.
Selling your soul for a narrative: understanding the Gleick fraud
"about" when then, were you about 14 or about 20 or so?
I have installed the bookmark recently and on the iPhone it does not ask for confirmation. Maybe they have changed the code?
An 'Angel' delivers you cash rather than salvation.

The word 'Heroku' doesn't conjure images of a Japanese Superhero.

You get as excited, passionate & loud about your idea as Gary Vaynerchuk!

Running Lean doesn't mean jogging to lose weight.

You quit your job the day after attending a Startup Weekend.
Was probably found from the same source that I used when researching the worrying fact that, as it turns out, 78.2% of statistics are made up on the spot.
[Inc Magazine] Norm Brodsky on the New Breed of Entrepreneur
It's probably all C++ -clean, so they can compile everything as C++.
Every assignment or lesson was out of a book
that must have been 10 years old.

Why does a book for introduction to programming need to be newer than 10 years? SICP is almost 30 years old.

I assure you no revolutions in elementary BASIC programming have happened since 2002 :)
Not 'yet' valid? Check your system clock...I'm willing to bet it's set a few years in the past!
I started at 9 but I don't think you have much to be jealous about. I did it because it was fun and I probably had a bit of a head start in terms of debugging skills, but really I don't think the intellectual maturity of someone <= 13 is great enough to severely impact the trajectory of your programming skills and where you find yourself in terms of programming skills at the age of 20 or something.

What I know about software architecture and programming concepts now at the age of 20 entirely dwarfs the accumulated knowledge and skills I gained from 9 til 13. I just did not have the intellectual maturity to really understand in a conscious way concepts like closures, types (sums vs products, unions vs records), data structures, algorithm performance (other than a visceral understanding of what is faster), static vs instance functions/variables, manual memory management. And so much more.

I think my knowledge and skillset grows exponentially year over year, but in the beginning I did not have much to compound and not enough maturity to gather and own much knowledge and experience. Would I be roughly where I'm at now if I had started at 14 or 15? I've thought about this a lot and I don't know.

Other thoughts on this are appreciated.

To be clear, I don't for a second regret the time I spent early on learning how to program; it was so much fun and intellectually stimulating. I'm actually quite proud of how early I started.
I always had the idea that American health care is more expensive because there's not much competition - there are just a few major companies that control the pharma industry and the hospitals, and it's pretty much impossible for someone to just barge in and start offering their services at a lower price - they'd have to pass by the government first (with their impossibly high fees and heavy regulations), then if successful, they'd be harrased to bankruptcy by the established monopoly.

It's much easier to open a private practice or hospital in the EU, for example...
I started learning to program the day after we got our first computer. When we got it, there were only two things it could do:

- play games if you plugged the cartridge into the side. We had one cartridge "Popcorn", which occupied Christmas day.

- if you didn't plug a cartridge into the side it dropped you into a BASIC interpreter and sat there with a blinking cursor waiting for you to program it.

So on Boxing Day I started reading the BASIC manual and started learning to program. I still remember parts of that first program, a bingo number puller.

20 IF N=1 OR N=2 OR N=3 OR N=4 OR N=5 OR N=6 OR N=7 OR N=8 OR N=9 OR N=10 OR N=11 OR N=12 OR N=13 OR N=14 OR N=15 THEN PRINT "B"

now get off my lawn.
I'm confused, could you name a situation in which this wouldn't be the case? The profits that an insurance company makes are the amount it charges for its services minus the amount that it pays out, it seems that reducing the amount they pay out would necessarily increase profits.

I'm not aware of any insurance companies that charge on a cost-plus basis, and the insurance companies can't just charge companies as much as they want (or else they'd charge an infinite amount).
I like the idea of DDG but it is quite frankly of little use to me. For most English terms it works reasonably well but for other languages such my mother tongue, Swedish, it is more or less useless. I found most results to be close to useless but I have not used DDG to a great degree because of this issue.

I rather take relevant results results in multiple languages while being logged than less relevant results without being logged.
Maybe they've switched to using a C++ compiler and C linkage specifications..
I think, in general, a book that old is a turn off to many (high school) students, especially those who might not have wanted to take the class in the first place.
If there isn't a profit motive behind the actions, it's hard to see what you'd gain from the burden of being incorporated instead of being a non-profit. Getting laws passed where there is a profit motive is not really a problem.
I'd be willing to buy that imaging is sometimes underused with some patient populations, and sometimes overused -- just like medications, even painkillers, which are dramatically overprescribed in some places (old people, Florida, pill mills for diversion) and underprescribed for others (some chronic pain patients, terminal care).
I was born in 1983 and was fortunate enough that my parents got our first computer at 1987 (I always had a computer since then and probably started programming in my early teens).

However there are plenty of people who are far less fortunate and were not exposed to programming until much later in life (I know quite a few good programmers like that), is it fair to disallow them of a CS education at the because they don't have a portfolio at the age of 18?
As long as is not javascript i am ok with it. It look kind of like c# or java which i like though.
Meanwhile, jahitr, your comment traversed through Cisco routers, all of which use Tcl as their core internal scripting language, to make it to hacker news. Dead indeed.
I'm building a public API in my current job and, a few weeks ago, I was scouting around for the good API design advice. Absolutely far and away the best resource that I found was this Google TechTalk by Joshua Bloch:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAb7hSCtvGw

If you're interested in the topic and haven't seen it yet, I urge you to do so ASAP.
I'm amazed by the amount of people starting before 12. I started at 13, I was looking at random YouTube videos, and ran across a video entitled something along the lines of "How to make a web browser in VB." I then began to look at more of these videos until I could make a calculator, web browser, and progress bar. Then I left programming for a year. :( After a year, i picked it back up with a tip from a friend to not use VB, but instead use C#. After that I started to build stuff on my own and wrote a game in C#. After that I picked up a book called C++ Primer Plus from a local book store (I was 15 by this time), and read through it in about a month. Now, 2 years later I am working on a start-up using mainly C++ with bits of several other languages with the friend that tipped me off to C#. Cheers to you friend.

It also interests me that so many people started with HTML. I never really "learned" HTML, nor was it the first language I used. I just had to use it once to build a website, and it came extremely naturally after a bit of Google searching for tags.
Exactly. Back in the earlier episodes when they were talking about development they were pulling the topics from concrete problems that they had solved.

Their topics now seem to stem from random anecdotes from their lives and their "expertise" on these topics is questionable at best.

I fear what will happen is once Marco's child is born, half of every Build & Analyze episode will be about Dan and Marco's children and how they manage their time. It is their show and they can talk about that if they want but at that point they will have finally stopped talking about topics that matter to me.
When I was 7, I was writing .bat dos scripts and playing around with my PATH. Then I discovered the web, some Delphi and PHP.
About the same year, although I was 9 at the time. I discovered that there was no requirement to have an account to submit a job to the High Speed Job Stream in UofT’s Sanford Fleming building. You just typed your program up on punch cards, prepended the deck with a special card that instructed the system whether to use WATFOR, SNOBOL, or LISP (I did not try PL/I), and put it in the hopper behind everyone else’s job. Moments later, the line printer a few feet away would spew your output at high speed.
I was first introduced to computers at age 9 (I'm not that old, the internet had been around for a little bit) when my "girlfriend" got me to talk to her on a chat site over summer break.

I started getting more and more interested in the things I saw like the way the chat programs worked (they were java applets), exploring them as a user and mod and learning how to "hack" them. It wasn't long before this lead me to communities where I was also shown HTML and I started learning about it.

When I was 10-11, I got into modding boards like the InvisionFree ones, which taught me a lot more about HTML and exposed me to JavaScript as you only had limited access to them so that's how all the modding was done, and a lot of those communities intersected with ones about making your own forum systems and/or modifying forums you had more access to (like hosting your own phpBB or IPB forums) which got me interested in PHP and MySQL.

By that point I'd heard a lot about C, etc. too and I was a lot more curious about computers than I was my schoolwork so I'd spend as much time learning about everything I could as possible. I started migrating to more general programming and hacking oriented communities when I was 12 and would stay up literally all night most nights and make up the sleep on the weekends, and I haven't had a proper sleeping schedule since.
22. I had first done a very small amount of FORTRAN programming when I was 16, which made me decide I never wanted to program ever again. Then at the age of 22 I found Lisp :)
I need some advice on how to promote an e-commerce startup both online and offline profitably.
(FTFY)

In my business (PPC), we speak in terms of two main metrics: market demand (measured by potential revenue), and cost per acquisition. We can take just about any company that has a large enough market demand, and run a profitable campaign for them. The first month or two you should have a reasonable budget to allow for testing of the market and optimization, and from then on it is smoother sailing with reducing conversion costs.

To compete in PPC, you should have a pro work on it every day. I really recommend outsourcing it if you dont have the time or knowledge. Costs in India are probably much cheaper; around here it would run you 12% in management fees (with a $1500-$2000 monthly minimum fee).

If you think your business is worthy of targeting a large market, I guarantee you that you can run a successful PPC campaign, while spending many thousands of dollars a month in ads.
Everything fun in life boils down to that, eh?
I feel so lowbrow, but sometimes a catchy toon that appeals to a wide audience can convey more than one might imagine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_J5rBxeTIk
This post illustrates the reason I cant seem to shake my Google addiction.
Except if the government wasn't taking their cut, the private executives would be working on their THIRD vacation homes.

The government is a shield against abusive private industry, they just happen to be bad at it and expensive.

Giving the government less money won't make it more efficient, just worse at it's job.
I prefer the one I did http://drbl.in/cBbb

But then, I am biased. :P
Your comment is subsumed by Hamming's point. Dressing properly does not always mean dressing "up".
I've started a small experiment in self-documenting REST APIs.

It's a quick and dirty Ruby gem that exposes CSV data with RESTful endpoints (read-only for now) with a pretty docs page that automagically gives you:

1. Example code

2. Documentation for every single function

3. Human readable requests/responses

Automatic generation of client SDKs is a big TODO.

If you're still interested, check out http://github.com/adelevie/restivus.
$10,000 App Challenge: Connect Businesses with Government
Building the API for Pwinty (http://www.pwinty.com) I found the Dropbox API docs to be a really good example of how to structure your documentation - http://www.dropbox.com/developers/reference/api

All the resources are documented in the same way, it is nicely formatted, and easy to understand.
That comment seems to claim that the French government is keeping the cost per scan low by having less scanners available to people.

Now, I'm no economist, but that argument does seem to make absolutely no sense whatsoever.
Haxe is not new. I was using it years ago.

It started out as an actionscript (which is javascript) compiler for flash that was simply enerated far faster swf files than the macromedia toolchain.

From this grew an actionscript like language called haxe that strives to solve what were seen as the wrongs of the javascript language. And in my opinion it succeeds.

Its cool to see that the cross platform angle grows and i hope haxe reaches the mainstream awareness it deserves.

You should try it :)
I don't agree at all that this phenomenon is restricted to database programming. Thinking in terms of higher-level operations is always more readable and often more efficient (the logical conclusion being things like Haksell and Prolog where there aren't really operations at all).

For example, to find the common elements in two lists, you could use a for loop, or you could follow the OP's advice and use set operations to do something like:

set(list1).intersection(set(list2))
My grand-parents, at 86 and 87, recently had multiples surgeries: eyes, hips, pacemakers... They are quietly approaching the bionic state.

Those are costly procedures, taking place in public hospitals without any extra. Yay for socialized medecine !

Which brings me to my question : what kind of surgeries can't you get at 80+ years old in France ?
You could bing for incidents like this.
I used Instapaper for quite a while, even wrote a small Android utility app to quickly bookmark a link to my Instapaper account and read it later on a bigger screen. But it was a long time ago.

I use Read It Later these days. Simply because it's a better product than Instapaper. It runs on all devices I own and use daily: iPhone, Android phone and tablet, MacBook, Linux laptop, Linux workstation. I bought Instapaper app and still have it on my iPhone mostly to check if its latest update has anything great which I miss in RIL. Nothing.

PS Marco's personality certainly "helped" me switch. But it's minor.
That's not a requirement of such a system, though; France has a dual public/private system, where everyone is guaranteed service at the public system, but well-off people who wish to pay extra can purchase private care.
The beginning of the end of Putin
Why I use VIM
Download CDBurnerXP Pro v4.4.0.2971 Portable | Andra Little Notes
I think that the TI-83 is basically the perfect programming environment for novice programmers. All of the functions and language constructs are tokens accessible only through menus. They're all listed in menus, and it's very easy to wonder what the "For" statement does, for example, after you scroll past it for the hundredth time.

If you give a 12-year-old a Python repl, then they'll be paralyzed. There's just too much freedom. In years of tinkering as a child (in between booting and launching WIN) the only things I ever figured out how to do in DOS were press the enter key to make lots of C:\ prompts appear, and type things to get a "Bad command or filename" error. Compare that to the TI-83, where I was able to figure stuff out with minimal introduction.

Another aspect that shouldn't be discounted is that students can practice programming during math classes...
I agree that the second link is saying more about the effects from malpractice reform. I have seen the Kaiser study, and what I think they are not taking into account is the culture of defensive medicine that may physicians don't even think about. For example, an MRI is more likely in a US Emergency Room than in a UK Emergency Room. UK practice is (in general) evidence based, and they won't order it unless it makes sense to do so. May US physicians would not identify this as "defensive" because the practice is so widespread, although the root reason for ordering it stems from that cause. I am not aware of an analysis that takes this into account.
Also like art, it should be a subject in schools. It can replace the pointless "how to use microsoft office" classes we're wasting kids' time with now.
>I fear what will happen is once Marco's child is born, half of every Build & Analyze episode will be about Dan and Marco's children and how they manage their time.

Yeah. That'll be a mess. I'm a big 5by5 nerd, so I listen to almost all the main podcasts on there. And when I need advice about time management, I'll listen to Merlin. I don't need a half assed Merlin impression from someone with no employees or bosses.

You are right about it being their show. It's just a shame because I think it fills up a time slow in the 5by5 schedule which could be better utilized by finding someone who wants to talk about development topics. Without that discipline everything devolves into life-coach wankery.
My parents got me a Timex Sinclair 1000 when I was 10 or so, and I started programming out of the need for having something I could do with it. It became a Commodore 64 a couple of years later and that changed pretty much the rest of my life.
Bender Bending Rodriguez Elected to School Board
Parse's blog has a pretty good article on documenting APIs[0], with links to a number of nicely one API documentations (not dropbox's, but Github's, Stripe's, Backbone's, Mailgun's and their own)

[0] http://blog.parse.com/2012/01/11/designing-great-api-docs/
In my opinion yes.

Comparing the two, they have the exact same functionality that I care about and Readability has a Chrome extension which is a lot better in the Instapaper bookmarklet to me.

Instapaper does have a collection of previous articles that I still want to read which makes the scales basically even but Marco's arrogance and his...I don't know if sense of entitlement is the right description but regardless I don't have the urge to suport him just because he is the "little guy".

For iOS user's I think Readability and Instapaper are interchangeable but the big difference will be Readability's Android support. Marco is on record saying he will never have an Android version because he never wants to hire anyone. He always wants Instapaper to be a one man operation.

In the end competition is good. Hopefully Readability will bring some new ideas to the table and if Marco has the capacity to either keep up with them or innovate in other ways then these "save to read later" tools will just get better.
There was a Dutch magazine called "Zo zit dat" or (roughly translated) "That's how". It always had a computer section of two pages which I was interested in every time, and some day it featured how to build your website (save as htm, type <html><head><body><img src=etc.). It also linked me to a website with more information, where I learned more basics.

Not much later I started experimenting with Javascript, which did not go too well because I didn't know of the existance of error messages (using IE6), had no experience of course, and there was nobody to guide me. I also hadn't discovered forums yet, and none of the classmates I had on MSN were into coding yet. But I learned it eventually :)
I don't think VLAs would be that difficult to support as the underlying functionality (alloca) is already implemented by the compiler.
thank you all so much for answering.
<story>

I think I was 11 or so when I went to a summer camp with my new laptop (an old thing that I got for free on the fleamarket). The idea was to play games on it - unfortunately it hadn't any on it.

One of the parents there then remebered that there's often some sort of BASIC preinstalled on these DOS/Win3.11-machines which normally had some demo-code (including games).
It turned out that there was indeed one (Gorillas, an artillery/worms-like game), but got quickly boring. So he showed my friend and me some basic commands for QBASIC and the rest is history ;)

I have some fond memories of that (and subsequent) camps, like trying to figure out if RAND() would actually return 0 or only bigger numbers. So we just wrote a program that generated random numbers and would stop if it encoutered a zero. Then we let it run while we went hiking trough some mountains.

Another fun thing was to figure out new instructions. There was a manual, but we couldn't read it because it was in english. But it had a nice list of all the commands. So we took one that sounded cool and tried to figure out what it did.

After that, my friend got a laptop too and we would try to out-code the other. One time, we tried to implement an "operating system" (it consisted of a long and fancy start-up animation and a nice menu to launch other programs). Every time, one of us implemented a new feature into his "OS", he increased the version number, copied it on a floppy and went around screaming "Guys! Look! This the newest version of my OS!"

</end of story>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Mongolica

While the Mongol empire was split up after Genghis Khan's death, it didn't just collapse. There was a fairly long period of stability that followed.
Yeah I really liked the development topics. I suppose it is time to start looking for another podcast that fills that void.

Don't suppose you have any recommendations do you?
I use DDG about 2/3 of the time. Like others have said, its initial search quality is not up to Google's, and also its speed isn't either.

However, I do think that DDG is a more truthful search engine: it seems to search for what you ask for, not what it thinks you want. This provides, in my opinion, a more nuanced web, where interesting things can turn up that aren't highly "ranked".

And, I do prefer Gabriel's focus on anonymity and non-bubbling.