skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Currently in 11th grade. Can highly relate. I've been working on a few startups for a couple years, exited a few things (not for a lot), working in PHP and now Rails, and it's far more exciting than hs.

http://markbao.com (old, somewhat crappy stuff there, new stuff http://files.markbao.com/newstuff.jpg)

I'm not thinking about dropping out, though. The risk is too great to just drop out and work on startups. I'm trying to make the most out of my little time left as a teenager socially and educationally (albeit the subject matter is relatively less useful than I'd like), go to college with a business focus (if I can get in with my low-ball GPA), and see where it goes from there.

I'm mostly in the startup game now to make connections, understand a foundation of startup business and entrepreneurship, and then move on in the future with that knowledge as an advantage.

For any other high school people on HN: there are three laws to follow when you're attending a strict-time institution like HS:

- Bust your ass.
- Manage your time correctly.
- Being under 18 doesn't make you special if you don't do special things. i.e.,
have credentials and work to back yourself up, and forget about age for a bit.

Learning how to manage my time and bust my ass (both of which are like hand in glove) have helped me highly in managing schoolwork plus a few startups (Avecora/Avecora OnDemand/AdSocial, Ramamia, TickrTalk, DebateWare, Classleaf.)

In fact, school gives you an interesting time constraint and advantage. 37signals, who used to be a consultancy, had just 10 hours a week to work on Basecamp. And you know what they did? They busted their ass. And what came out of it was how to use time efficiently, embracing constraints. (Source http://www.37signals.com/svn/archives2/constraints_breed_bre...)

And with the last one, don't get arrogant because "ZOMG, I CODED AN APP, @web2personality WRITE ABOUT ME BECAUSE IM UNDER 18." You're not special if you're under 18. You've developed an application, and you've developed coding skills a few years before people generally do. What separates you from the general young entrepreneur press and YOU is a few years. Don't kid yourself into thinking you're all special because you can code @app, because in the long run, without actual skills and knowledge you're hurting yourself. There are some people who put on the façade of "Wow, you're a high school entrepreneur, that's so awesome. So what do you do?" but see through that and it's not really genuine most of the time. It took me a bit of time to figure out that nobody really gives much of a shit, so learn that. That's what I've noticed and stand by–your mileage may vary.

(I'm always glad to meet new high school entrepreneurs and people in general. My contact details are in my profile.)
This is so true. In fact, I'd wager that my perl skills are ultimately the most valuable component of my resume. I learned perl in 10th grade by hacking on AIM robots, messing around with the Net::AIM module I found on CPAN.

Then I got a job [still in 10th grade] writing a robot for some woman in Canada. This was fundamentally a huge thing, because it opened my eyes to the possibility that I, despite my lack of formal credentials, could generate income based on my skillset.

Honestly I haven't touched perl in years, and now most of my hacking is in PHP/JavaScript, and honestly I'm happy that I don't have to deal with perl anymore...but it definitely gives me some cred.

Llama book 4 lyfe!
Try Tab Mix Plus

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1122

It has a whole bunch of features, one of which is to force all links to open in the current tab.
I actually have little issue w/ learning abstract concepts like rewriting functions as series. But my classmates often cite that as a reason they shouldn't bother putting in the time to really learn it.

I'm saying that a good way for teachers to engage students more is to show them examples that actually have some reflection on the real world, so that they can't say "this is totally useless. I won't bother learning it."
Putting it in a poorly-drawn web cartoon doesn't automatically make a trivial observation funny. Isn't this the topic of, like, 438973489 blog posts and essays?
Not only that, but you should do homework because it forces you to learn the material through spaced repetition, which will create more access cues for your long-term memory.
Would be far more useful if you prune duplicates and segment the log into 4 sections "today, last week, last month, older".

Like the concept though.
Is that what happened here, or did a bunch of random people flag it, plus you, without reading (or, alternately, caring about) the comments?
First thing I thought was "greasemonkey" when I read this. But the extra features of your script sound pretty sweet.
Is it online somewhere?
The Picwing is also not as much of a breakthrough as the iPod was, to make an obvious point.
"In the current study, they show that the capacity of interneurons to remodel is not predetermined by genetic lineage, but imposed by the circuitry within the layers of the cortex itself."

That was the most interesting sentence in there, imo. I suspect that just as the "Queen Bee" in a colony doesn't tell the bees what to do, there is no "Master Neuron" that tells all the neurons how to wire themselves. If that is the case, then I'm guessing there might be a decentralized system/algorithm that the neurons relies upon to regulate its own networking and growth.

Whatever that might be would not only be interesting to study, but also interesting to apply to say...networking home appliances.

But for now, it's speculation.
I find that the preface of a book is often highly indicative of the content of the book. The preface of a good book will generally talk about a few abstract themes which guide the exposition. The preface of a poor book will be a sort of random collection of notes, ideas, and guidelines. One textbook I looked at (on EE) started with a paragraph that went something like "Scientists understand the world by creating models. A model reflects reality. A model has components, each one of which corresponds to something in the world." The book was, unsurprisingly, no good.

In a similar way, Java's verbosity in even the simplest examples speaks to a certain kind of language design. Java's design is based on indulgence in the idea that difficult things can be made somehow easier or more reliable if the difficulty is hidden by a lot of simple, but needless verbiage.
Surely you haven't even looked at Google's privacy policy, which spells out exactly how they don't do this with Chrome.
MySpace v. Facebook Advertising Showdown. Which Platform Is Better?
My 11th grade:

Coding at night
Sleeping at school
:p

Hoeworks? I thought they dont give any after 8th grade..
Ugh. Why is it that self-professed "nerds" are always so blatantly anti-intellectual? It's such short-sighted nonsense; nothing but pandering to the immaturity of every 16-year-old throughout history who day-dreamed his way through the classes that he didn't like, and justified it by whining: "when am I gonna have to use this?"

You know what? Sometimes you have to learn things that you don't think you'll "use in real life". Sometimes you have to learn how to read and write, and make persuasive arguments to something other than a machine. Sometimes you have to eat your vegetables. Sometimes you have to go to bed early, brush your teeth, and pay your bills. Life is full of hardships. Deal with it.

To all the high school kids who are reading this and thinking about dropping out, with visions of startups dancing in your heads: don't. Just don't. If you're truly the brilliant, self-guided whiz-kid that you imagine yourself to be, you'll dispatch with the homework quickly (it's easy, right?), and use the rest of your prodigious free time for more enjoyable tasks. If I could do it, so can you.
The term "bug" is too confusing. I thought for a while when reading your page that I point this service at my website and it somehow searches for errors in the programming. I only kept reading because I wanted to figure out what neat trick you had for that.

I get the spy novel reference now, but I think it's just too abstract and too close to a conflicting term to be of use. Especially when there are terms for that (spyware, cookies) that everyone knows already. Don't reinvent the wheel.
sprinkle in a little "oh my god i had sex with a real girl look guys look at me she was real and we had actual sex im a god" and you've summarized my opinion of xkcd. thanks for the help.
please, take your high school/general education seriously
ATI catalyst's software caused problems for me, even on Windows XP. I uninstalled CCC and I just use the driver. My computer runs much better since I did that.
No Mark. Take advantage of college to do things you'll never have the chance to if you lock yourself into a software-only world. Show up for lectures on music theory, astrophysics, history. Try to learn a foreign language that works completely differently from English, like Chinese. You can audit most of these courses without signing up for them: just show up and never ask for permission unless it is a small course where you're personally noticed by the professor. And if nothing catches your curiosity, repeat the process again with different subjects the next semester. Get a healthy extracurricular life, since you'll learn a lot that way, especially about the importance of respecting your own value judgments and dealing with other people.

Never sell yourself short (i.e. "most likely") and don't form preconceptions of things because those are often self-fulfilling. Even if you do end up creating software, some of the most interesting coding work is solving specific challenges no-one else runs into because it is specific to a problem you and no-one else has. Find problems that interest you and you'll be driven to learn ways to handle them.
It makes sense once you understand what Ghostery is doing, but it has too many other well-known and totally different meanings. When you first read the page though, it's just confusing. Just call them spyware cookies or some catchphrase everyone will understand immediately.

When you're trying to explain what you do it's best to go with words people know and leave coining new terms to Snoop Dogg.
You're 100% correct. But I'm hoping they'll add the ability to use filters on the whole firehose in the near future.
Chicks Love hackers
How did you decide which twits to pick up? Did you just have a list of keywords that were weather related that you picked up? Or did you use some other method?
This well drawn cartoon tells the story more completely and succinctly than any blog post. And yes, it is funny.
I know what you're getting at. Although I agree that it's very important to find extracurricular and extracareerular interests as well (and I am seeking other interest areas), I'm (although this must sound naïve) certain that entrepreneurship and business is my passion and thus I set it as my focus. I find drive, excitement and motivation in nothing else than startups.

I think college will be a great and eye-opening experience, which is why I'm not dropping out before college.

By the way, 你好。 I'm a native of China, born in Harbin, China.
I have exactly this problem with xkcd too --- girls apparently make hackers feel slightly squicky --- hilarity ensues! Let's have sex in a room-sized ball pit! Awwwww!
Playing with Lua is a blast. I don't have much experience in using it for anything but a third-order language (e.g. writing programs that write programs), but it's very lightweight, fast, and easy to pick up. I view it as a language that I use when I need the power of a programming language (as opposed to a one-off program), but not enough to justify using Perl/Python/Ruby.

There are some parts that I did find annoying, however, like the fact that in the standard libraries array indexing starts at 1 instead of 0 and that it gets a bit kludgy when you try and add lots of things that are not part of standard language features, but nothing you can't overcome.
There's a spectrum running from Bill Watterson to Jim Davis, and I'm entitled to my opinion about where Randall Munroe falls on it. :P
College Prowler Caught Using Fake Facebook Accounts + Groups to Build List
Maybe I'm misinterpreting you, but you seem to think that high-school kids who are reading this are arrogant and stupid. I'd be willing to bet that most aren't, and most know that the long-term gains of staying in high school will outweigh the short term losses due to boredom.

As for learning things you won't "use in real life"? I agree, it's good. But I'm sorry, some classes don't just teach you things you won't use - they just don't teach you. How much good will it do you to analyze dozens of books in essays about their arbitrary qualities, eh? Not that much. Maybe English would be more useful if the high schools didn't have to cater to the lowest common denominator. But public schools have to, and the end result is that many classes are slow-paced, repetitive, and thus, boring.

And please. Please, please, please, can you stop considering high school nerds as anti-intellectual, narrow-minded, arrogant idiots? The amount of people who share your view make tolerating being one very difficult at times, especially when your administrators or teachers refuse to comprehend the idea that maybe it is possible for people to learn things on their own and not have to repeat them in class.

I'm sorry if this response sounds feels overly acrid or acidic, but honestly, as a "self-professed nerd", I find your comment extremely insulting, probably because I've had to deal with many people who base their entire opinions of me on such ideas.
"Maybe I'm misinterpreting you, but you seem to think that high-school kids who are reading this are arrogant and stupid."

You are. I'm talking to the people who see stuff like this, and think about dropping out. Clearly, that set doesn't include all high school kids.

"As for learning things you won't "use in real life"? I agree, it's good. But I'm sorry, some classes don't just teach you things you won't use - they just don't teach you. How much good will it do you to analyze dozens of books in essays about their arbitrary qualities, eh? Not that much."

...and when I was in high school, I said the same stuff. "Why do I have to learn about Keats?" "Why must I write structured essays about James Polk?" "What will I ever gain from knowing the rules to basketball?" "Why can't I just learn more about programming?" On and on.

But you know what? I was an idiot. Back then, I didn't have the perspective to know what was important and what was unimportant (for that matter, I'm still learning what to value). Had people let me study whatever I wanted to study in the 10th grade, I would have missed out on exposure to a lot of stuff that I find very valuable today. I would have turned out to be a very one-dimensional person.

Try not to find this advice condescending, and see it for what it is: one nerdy guy who has been there, telling you that you don't know everything, and don't have enough experience to make good judgments about what knowledge is valuable in life. In the meantime, you can learn something from every situation -- just so long as you want to learn.
All the school work I have leaves me not enough hacking time.

Turn on noprocrast and get back to hacking. The constraint of school is useful, in that in terms of productivity, feeling like you don't have enough time is better than feeling like you have plenty of time. You just have to learn how to make the most of the time that you do have--which isn't easy or intuitive--because you'll need that skill no matter what you do later.
Will This Economy Finally Push the Toyota Way Into Software Development?
How Alan Greenspan Tricked America
Two different workstations, one Linux one Vista.

Linux:
Intel Q8200 Quad Core
4gb Corsair RAM
BFG 9600GT Overclocked
320gb HD space
2 22" LCD's

Vista:
AMD 5600+
8gb Corsair RAM
EVGA 9800GT
1 19" LCD
320gb HD Space

Servers:
4 Linux servers with 320gb to 1tb of space, all with dual core AMD's Athlon's.

I love my set up.
In the US we just call it lobbying and campaign contributions.
Contact the local universities and high schools. The computer science teachers at local high schools all know the stand out programmers who are hungry for work and experience. Most colleges have an internship program where CS/EE students will work for next to nothing for the recommendation or experience.

If you can afford to, offer to pay them, especially if they'll be making money for your company. Treat them as regular employees by bringing them in on meetings and listening to their advice. Even if they lack the experience of a full time employee, they can always provide insight that you would otherwise not have.

Be flexible with their schedules, especially around exam time.
This is a fantastic analogy, and I think you can explain a lot of early stage situations with this. Theres no turning back!
Maybe you should have entitled this one "What's wrong with this country and how can I convince people it's a good thing?"

Some founders seemed to like running their companies and did OK while they were at it: There's Bill and Steve, of course. And Michael Dell. And Larry Ellison. And Jeff Bezos. And they guys from Sun and Ken Olsen at DEC, and Bill and Dave over at HP - yeah, almost every company that's really mattered in the IT world. If DHH want's to run with that crowd, or just run a good, healthy little business, then good for him.

On the other hand,"pump and dump" mentality you seem to favor is exactly the mindset of the multi-millionaires on wall street and in Detroit today who continue to line their pockets while their companies fail or go on the dole.

Really Paul, I know you VC guys have a short attention span (ugh, i mean, investment horizon), but it seems like you're starting to believe that what puts money in your pocket is by definition an absolute good.
Any crashes with my NVidia card just lead to a restart of the Forceware driver (no reboot).
Don't drop out for a startup. You could do what I did and drop out to go to college early. But you got to keep your eyes on the goal of finishing.
I'm a high school drop out that has managed to have a pretty good programming career thus far. A couple things I've found that have helped me the most though is drive, contacts and a lot of luck. Drive to keep me going when it seemed like I wouldn't get a job, and to be willing to start out low down in a company with good odds of progression. Contacts to get my name to the front of the list when new roles came up and luck to be in the right places at the right times and those chance conversations with people at the bus stop that ended up being really important to my progression.

One of the best things my family ever did for me was allowing me to take a year off high school to try to start my own software company. After that I never went back but if it hadn't of worked out the worst that would have happened is I'd be a year behind.

The one good thing about a high school degree is that it's easier to get into a university program later on if you want to. I'd love to go to university now to study a couple things I'm really interested in but have had difficulty getting far.

Also don't underestimate the college experience in shaping your life. I was lucky that when I was starting my career I was surrounded by students and lived with them and did the same things as them so I got some of the experience but I'll always regret not having the full 4 years of college life.
Ah that's cool. I'm just thinking of possible issues in the future. Giving one of these to a grandparent, and then them being emailed goatse etc would not be a good thing.
Thanks for the response, I appreciate it. I guess you get a wider perspective as you age, and I don't really have much of an idea about what I'll think later.

Though I might disagree with you on specifics, I agree that it's important not to restrict yourself to a limited set of things. I guess I was slightly annoyed mainly due to the fact that a few of my school admins sound very similar, except they don't bother to take the time to explain their views in a less condescending sounding way.
* computer science teachers at local high schools all know the stand out*....

The same is true for other subjects, in case you weren't hiring programmers.
Software methodology is just a way for people who don't know what they are doing to sound like they know something, isn't it?
I wouldn't be surprised if it does. The conditions are right for it. Agile was gaining popularity even before the economy imploded.

Rails, TDD/BDD, and the general tenets of agile are things most in the industry have heard of.

The only issue is that any change is a risk and will require time, initially nullifying the time-to-market advantage they would get. Companies are not eager to take risk right now, nor are they thinking about something that will help them only once they adapt. They're in panic mode just trying to make it through the quarter.

That said, the benefits might be enough to entice at least some to give it a try.
I just pruned all the duplicates right now. Will work on the today, last week, last month sections tonight.
I co-wrote (with Steve) SoundConverter for Windows:

http://dekorte.com/projects/shareware/SoundConverter/

The interface talks to an Io "server" which handles business logic.

We're currently working on a shopping aggregation startup. The crawler is written in Io.

Pixar's RenderMan image tool uses Io as its scripting language:

https://renderman.pixar.com/products/tools/it.html

Io is still under development so you might run into the occasional bug. Bugs are encountered more often in the addons than in the core interpreter (which is stable).
When you first start coding, it's very addictive, because it gives you frequent 'success bursts'. All you're doing is chasing endorphins, you are likely not actually writing anything useful. You think it is, but it's rather rare that people of that age actually code any good.

You're physiologically addicted to this, if you drop out of school, you'll have a lot of company in all the other people who are addicted to other things that give them those moments of pleasure.
Fifteen years ago, a friend of mine was paralyzed in a climbing accident. Research like this gives me hope that someday he will be able to walk again.
"Don't Mistake Ambition for Entitlement" - http://mattmaroon.com/?p=573
Maybe I should introduce RSS in the web app too. But, I like http://feeds.feedburber.com/HNWatrcoolr

But, it is not a directory that collects all the top stories. Anyway, Google Reader will cache them all in their databases too. So, Google Reader can actually serve as the directory for the RSS.
The deductible bribe was true in much of Europe until the mid 1990s, not just Germany. The US pushed them to change the laws.
"Because the ability to just suck it up & get things done even when you don't enjoy every minute of it is a very important trait to have."

I think that this is true, but after four years of working hard at a demanding high school I was actually substantially less able to "suck it up and get things done." I don't know if that's because high school burnt me out or because I changed mentally during high school or something else, but it makes me a lot less willing to accept that forcing people to work hard on boring shit makes them more likely to work hard on other boring shit in the future.
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