skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Or it might have just been merged into the time module. The datetime module is mostly a single class which wraps the functions in the time module and adds a few convenience methods. I wouldn't be surprised if the reason for the separation is just historical -- say, time was written to match the C library, and later someone donated datetime as a set of utilities with an OO interface.

Anyway, since the common utilities in that are all attached to the datetime class in that module, there's no harm in importing the class directly. You could even fix the naming yourself, if you were so inclined:

from datetime import datetime as DateTime
DateTime.now()
I would recommend Ruby because its loose syntax is more forgiving, good for new programmers. Then on top of that, learn Shoes for a graphical interface for creating games. Ruby+Shoes is the modern Basic.

Then again, just have him learn Basic. :-p That's how I learned.
I have an objection to the OP (the page at bbc.co.uk) and I would like you to acknowledge that my objection is valid. "China is using an increasing number of paid 'internet commentators' in a sophisticated attempt to control public opinion," begins the BBC page. Not a word on the page suggests that this goes on in any other country except China. But the U.S. and the U.K. also have "an increasing number of paid 'internet commentators'" -- including the writer of the BBC page, who works for the U.K. government!

And I humbly suggest that the reason references to "the Establishment" and "the Man" sound laughable to you is that the faction making those references has since the 1960s completely trounced the referent and are in control of the New York Times, the universities, etc, which I suggest are the central organs of power in the U.S. because of their influence on public opinion and public discourse, which in the U.S. and the U.K comes not from police powers but from gravitas, credibility and the ability hold attention -- and that gravitas, credibility and attention-holding are maintained by whole occupational groups of highly skilled "paid 'internet commentators'".
That's a great idea. We could also set up a google group(or something similar) if people were interested.
Hype, SEO, backlinks and to expose Techcrunch to a wider audience by indirectly forcing finalists to link & talk about Techcrunch on their respective sites.
I love Python, use it for all sorts of stuff, but I remember there were some things that went over my head learning it because I didn't understand OOP, and until I saw its beauty and the important aspects of writing clean code I hated the forced indentation. Plus I wasn't using vim then, and my lazy butt still doesn't like having to manually indent two-to-four spaces, depending on the project/language.

So maybe PHP would be better--tied with XHTML, CSS, and little by little some JavaScript. However, he's 13, so I don't think doing things in C or even Perl would be too daunting. (I can't recommend pure shell stuff with no graphics to people younger than 10 (sometimes 12) or so; it's just not that interesting for them.)

So then again Perl might be a better choice if you want to do a bunch of shell stuff. Have fun explaining cat.pl to him:
#!/usr/bin/perl
while (<>) {
print;
}
What I'm objecting to is perhaps not what you are still arguing for - that book titles are often "inaccurate, or cheesy, or stupid."
This is such a simple idea that it's hard to imagine it staying concealed for very long...
I've wondered myself about the market for allowing people to drill down through multiple fetishes. the vast majority of sites organize by single fetishes. what if you could input a bunch of fetishes and it would automatically find the videos that have the most tags in common with your search? this would work best with something that supported user tags, so people could find and tag specific elements.
I'm not sure that this "please think of the children" argument -- the one which asserts that the sight of PHP will forever warp the minds of children and risk turning them into script kiddies, or Blub programmers, or crack addicts -- can be nuked. It's really old. People were apparently using it when I was thirteen -- except that the guilty party back then was not PHP, which was more than a decade in the future, but BASIC. And I obviously didn't know about the controversy at the time, because I was too busy using hunt-and-peck typing to rekey my BASIC apps over and over again. (At the time my school's brand-new Commodore 64s didn't have tape drives, let alone floppies.)

And the kids were alright back then, and they are alright now. Applesoft BASIC makes PHP 5 look like Haskell (we're talking about a language with nothing but global scope, here), but the generation that built the Web grew up using it and it didn't hurt anyone. The smart kids just moved on to better things as they became aware of them.

Teach the kid something fun. For a thirteen year old, that's very likely to be Javascript, Actionscript (i.e. Flash), or PHP, though I certainly might give Shoes or Hackety Hack a try, or maybe this Scratch thing: http://scratch.mit.edu. Try several of these and see if any of them stick. But don't get hung up on the details. The guy is thirteen. There will be plenty of time for him to learn how ugly, fragile, insecure, opaque, and unmaintainable his code is. Try to let him have some fun and get hooked before he's forced to learn the truth. He won't sit still for it, otherwise.
I just want oversight. I have a feeling the money allocated under TARP last year went into a black box with relatively few outputs.
I'd consider it. But the subject of the book isn't interesting to me, so there's a lot to overcome.

At this point, I'll probably pick it up in a book store, flip through it, and read a few passages.
A slightly longer quote:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f61KMw5zVhg

Brilliant!

However, it makes me kind of sad that PG goes to shit like this instead of working on Arc :( 100 year languages don't discover themselves...
Duplicated item ...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=428003
I'm in too
Arduino has a nice simplified C language and a friendly and simple IDE. I recommend skipping the Basic Stamp.

Other than that, bare-metal programming on microcontrollers has the advantage that the boy can get a mental picture of the entire machine in his head; not so easy with an SDK of hundreds of megabytes for a modern high-level language.
The world badly needs a hard currency that is independent of political control.
Hello, gold. Mugabe can't inflate it unless he's a real alchemist. I wonder if the US could get into this sort of situation?
I don't like honors (Richard Feynman)
Yeah I would be interested. I've already started going through the lectures and some of the exercises, but it would be cool to work on them in groups.
Appjet (http://appjet.com/learn-to-program/lessons/intro) would be really cool. When he wrote a program, he could share it with his friends instantly just by sending them the URL.
Toward a new mathematical theory of computation.
Here is an outline of a new lisp I plan on creating. I am deconstructing lisp and finding what is really meant in lisp and reconstructing it utilizing category theory and logical programming.

By reconstructing I mean actually taking axioms of lisp and retooling them into logic and category theories. Lisp becomes something different and instead a subset of the language. Lisp will be fully expressable as a turing complete language but there will be other paradigms in the language.

Functional programming is still a part of lisp. We also add monads to represent computation. Category theory is based upon morphism and we apply this as morphisms on HOFs. The base data types are graphs and topos. Since all other data types will be defined in this manner we have a interconnection between functional data structures and categorial. Sort of a fusion of scheme and haskell.

The virtual machine is my own design which is also based upon an upcoming arxiv paper. The first step is to get it working on that register machine. The special part of this register machine is that it is intended to work as a hypercomputer although if that fails it still is easy to implement parallelism due to its matrix based design.
for more information.

The kali scheme system will be ported to scheme48 1.3 and used for parallelism. It was a abandoned research project at NEC but it was still functional. This would be a subproject of the total project.

Join me in #categorizer on freenode.net or zitterbewegung@gmail.com on gtalk/email if you want to discuss
----
Further reading

Category theory from haskell wiki http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Category_theory

A proposal for a Galois Machine
See http://arxiv.org/abs/0812.4009 also
http://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/7nh74/ask_mathithelp_this_is_my_first_paper_in/

Charity papers on cat theory
ftp://ftp.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/pub/projects/charity/literature/papers_and_reports/dataII.ps

Github source repository for implementation

http://github.com/zitterbewegung/categorizer/tree/master

Kali Scheme Revival

http://community.schemewiki.org/kali-scheme/
Sure, count me in.
It looks like there is at least a few people interested. Should we all leave a comment with contact info (if it's not in your profile)?

My email is chris.m.conley at the goog.
How about an IRC channel on freenode too.
May have something to do with it being a "special agro-cheque", though knowing nothing of Zimbabwean currency, I'm not sure.
Confessions of a man who does the layoffs
i'm in. i'm on chapter 2 right now. i think irc meetings are a good way to go.
"The theory of interstellar trade": http://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf

"This paper, then, is a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics." Although he calls it "serious", it's full of little jokes, some of them very good.
http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html should work fine until then
I'm interested, too. I'm up to chapter two in the exercises, FWIW.

vokes dot s at gmail dot com
The texinfo SICP (http://www.neilvandyke.org/sicp-texi/) is good too, if you're working in Emacs.
I think there is also the concept of bribery there. Give a few pats on the back of big companies, and in return hope that the next time they need to release info, they'll leak you the inside scoop
Have to give it to them though for getting Zuckerberg, Ozzie, and Marissa Mayer to show.
I think it's shortsighted to think that Apple's shortcoming is any of those missing features.

In the end Palm has completely out-done Apple is one very crucial area: workflow. The iPhone has a great UI, but horrible workflow. Anyone can figure out how to do anything on an iPhone, but it's neither simple nor fast.

Palm is clearly not going after "trend" users, but rather the hardcore productivity types who need to get things done efficiently.
Review of the Spore 3D Printing Service
Immigrants See Charter Schools as a Haven from American Youth Culture
Forget the email thing; we'll set up an irc channel :)
It certainly sounds good enough, and I'm stuck on Sprint, so I think this will be my phone unless an interesting Android phone hits around the same time.
What You Don’t Know About Gaza
use chatterous.com -- it's great for small group chat.
This idea would work really well if you implemented it in wireless access points since they are already listening for Probe Request packets from stations that aren't associated to their network.

This means that if anybody opens a stolen laptop in the vicinity of one of these APs it would be detected without requiring that the laptop be associated to the local network.
> Oh, and computer science papers never leave out trivial steps or assume domain knowledge?

That's irrelevant. The guy's argument is that computer programs don't leave out information: "If all this information isn't available in some form, the program simply will not work, as the interpreter/compiler will not know what to do with the program. This forces a certain intellectual honesty on the process of executing a program; nothing can be left unspecified."

Clearly, computer science papers are written by humans and will typically lack rigour, which has both advantages and disadvantages. Human communication can contain bullshit, but you can't bullshit a computer.
how does ##hn-sicp sound?
Some demented version of .toLower() done in C, maybe? Apparently the bug first appeared in WinXP and IE6, so they could have been working without some of the better-tested library functions included with the platform now.

(Edit: can't think of a sufficiently subtle off-by-1 error for a function that does just this. Microsoft would never hire me.)
Sure, and there are also lots of other things that work well on lower, local levels, too, but that might not be appropriate for national-covers-everything-and-everyone style laws. But that's are not cut and dried, either. Some stuff works better at a national level.
I'm currently a junior in college. I decided on a good (but not great), liberal arts school with about 1800 students over going to Univ of Florida, where I was also accepted. Here's my analysis of that.

Advantages up to this point:
* Flexibility -- There is a lot of flexibility in my choices of courses and in life here in general. A lot of students here are able to double-major, travel abroad, etc. because of that flexibility.

* Cost -- with financial aid, it's cost me a little bit more than a public univ but not by much. ($4k/year difference max)

* Personal attention -- I can show up at a prof's office and chat about anything. They know my name, my interests, and my abilities. This has helped with solving bureaucratic problems, enabled me to get great letters of recommendation, find professors to do research with, and helped me to gain access to various academic programs. If you're at a research school, most profs. don't care about you, the lowly undergrad, unless you can do something for them. And some of those prestigious schools have profs. like that.

* Size and Selectivity -- Eckerd is not the most selective school I could have gone too but I have found some peers (although not most) who can challenge me. The advantage of this is that you can quickly find the other cream of the crop and challenge each other, but at the same time, I have found it easy to gain access to research programs, awards, TA positions, etc. on campus because I could easily get myself noticed and show myself as the cream of the crop.

* Time -- My courses aren't always very challenging or time consuming so it's easy to take overload or to use my free time to do other things, particularly things related to research or future academic endeavors.

Disadvantages:
* Challenge -- I feel like few of my courses have really challenged me. But, I have friends who transferred here from schools like Rochester Inst. Tech and Univ of Rochester who say that those schools don't offer more of a challenge necessarily, either. However, they have also said that maybe you have high quality peers there in your field, but they tend to lack social skills. (This may change as I get farther into the courses for my double-major in math.)

In my case, Eckerd offers a lot of advantages in terms of accolades, letters of recommendations, good grades, etc. which will help me get into grad school (which is my goal). But at the same time, it's been frustrating over the last few years since I've rarely run into people who know more than I do or who have are more skilled than I am.

(I should also mention that I have done research not only at Eckerd but at the University of Connecticut for the last few years... I've tried to take advantage of resources outside of Eckerd to supplement its small size.)
Yeah, this book has been at the top of my wish list for a while. I think it would be great to get 5 or so like minded people all starting near the beginning of the book. Simple irc room, and weekly chats about material would be great.
This sounds like a good way to keep motivated, having tried and failed to get through SICP on my own. Count me in.
I would suspect a good IDE might be better than a headful of little things a kid has to remember. ("Hey buddy, see how you missed the ; here, better add that!")
Computer Science is a super easy major, imo. I would suggest that people at least double-major in math or something else to stretch their mind.
14% of U.S. Adults Can't Read (63% of Prison Inmates)
This is a really interesting counter-adaptation. I wonder what the mechanism might be. Does it prevent echolocation or is it eliciting a pain response?

It would also be interesting to see the counter-adaptation in the bats to this counter-adaptation in the moth. The approach which first comes to mind is passive sonar.
Every fiction writer has a different working style, but I've seen lots of them suggest that it's good to bang out prose at a fairly steady pace. Jim Macdonald:

http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showpost.php?p=82327&...

When you're writing, don't slow down.

Yes, you will do research ... you'll need to know exactly what kind of car your guy is driving, but during the outline/first draft stage isn't when I do it.

I'll research a bunch before, and after during rewrite and revision. The rule in the middle is "don't slow down."

In fiction you're trying to describe a time stream of events and conversations, and it's easier to feel the pace of your prose if you're typing it at a steady clip. Musicians get the same advice: Get in the habit of playing through your mistakes while staying with the beat, or you will develop a style that sounds choppy and hesitant and that calls attention to every mistake.
The closest site I know that does something similar is http://www.MeetUp.com

You can probably create a "Chicago Hacker Meetup" and start scheduling meetings.
Getting folks on an email list to announce the bat-time and bat-channel might be the way to go.

Otherwise, everyone will completely forget.

Anyone have a quick service that allows folks to create a very simple and small email list of folks?
In Civil-Contempt Cases, Jail Time Can Stretch On for Years
ASUS AIRO laptop prototype video
I'm in as well, and my copy is being shipped too :) Ordered it a few days ago.
serious revenues (not necessarily profit)
I'm not an expert in C, but I would think that would die in an obvious fashion if domain had an odd number of chars.
Firefox in Russia dumps Google for Yandex
Well, not really. I guess they got sick of the same how do I write a CGI? questions again and again.

Perl was popular for the web for one reason and one reason only: It was the only dynamic interpreted language that was widely available, and it was widely available for the simple reason that your sysadmins had already installed it for their own use. Back in the early-mid 90s, you got C, C++ (maybe) and FORTRAN compilers on the typical institutionally-owned (university or corporate) large, Internet-connected Unix box. The choices for any ordinary user wanting to put something dynamic on the web were, umm, C and that's about it, or Perl. Lots of people got into Perl just for CGI like nowadays they get into Ruby just for Rails (or Tcl just for Tk).
Six iPhone games still worth playing
There's lots of good advice here, and I've upmodded the ones I agree with. But, really, it doesn't matter. Anything that lets him create something is good.

Some people here are concerned about "best programming practices" and learning certain lessons. He's 13. Just let him play, and if he likes programming, he'll continue learning.
The reason that we're not isn't technical capability: it's a lack of demand. Why spend hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars to put 10,000 people in space? Because we can? Not good enough...space exploration and colonization will only really pick up when we must do it to survive and/or there's a serious financial incentive.
Look out, Microsoft Surface - the iTable might just trump you in every way
Cut the US defense budget in half and we'd have 10,000 people on Mars in 20 years. It's an issue of priorities.
They cut 10 zeros from the currency in august---100B was converted into whatever 100B/10^10 is, and they restarted from there.
I wouldn't say that. Have you read any of Rand's books?
I'll second python, even though I learned the C route.

I'm a stubborn bastard, only reason I kept going.
If you use chatterous.com you'll get your own room that you can hook Email or IM into. You'll also get a one-click url that will bring you to web chat.
Either by using that money to lowering taxes or finance NASA.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=dca...
Or when Nanotech will have made it cheap enough. (At least unmanned missions. Humen in space are mostly a PR gimmick anyway.)
Python and teach him early library Pygame. For 13 the motivation is the key and nothing could beat creating own games.
Ahh---sorry for the self-promotion but I really believe what I am saying: I wrote a book called Game Programming for Teens, which teenagers tend to like because it teaches them to make video games off the bat (using a modified version of BASIC), gets them interested in programming, and then helps them move on to learning more difficult languages b/c they already have some programming concepts down. The book is here http://www.amazon.com/Game-Programming-Teens-Maneesh-Sethi/d...
Israeli Butchery in Gaza
Hahaha, yeah it's like: oh, wait a minute, I'll just get my economics degree and I'll be rrrright with you :P
His humility is redundant to the point of arrogance!
Deconstructing Starbucks Gold
I think the comment does carry that implication, though it's not obvious to most people because they are looking for a messiah, benevolent dictator, wise group of elders, etc.

Your own views would be summarized as pragmatism, which I think is inevitably the way any policy gets implemented.

However the purpose of philosophy (which is what Atlas Shrugged is) is to enable the mind to think about a broad system of beliefs and their consequences logically, and to outline the purposes, goals, desired ends, etc.

The same could be said for the communist manifesto. I respect both works as solid philosophical texts, as they provide ample fuel for critical thinking about the issues.

What's interesting about the comment about "running the world" is that it does suggest a world view very biased toward central planning, and so it's hard to take any conclusion that follows from it as unbiased.

Many similar biases exist all over the place... the idea that wanting federal dollars to be spent on x implies support of x and not wanting federal dollars to be spent on it implies opposition to it is one example.
Freenode channel ##hn-sicp has been setup for weekly meetups and/or ongoing discussion.

I also set up http://groups.google.com/group/hacker-news-reads-sicp for arranging discussion times and any other miscellaneous things if needed.
My NSA polygraph experiences
I find that it's not the criticism that's the problem: it's the presentation.

If instead of saying "this dialog box sucks," you say "the user might find it easier to use if you move this button over here" you accomplish the same thing, but with a much less negative impact.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=331284
I'm not a mathematician, but I can imagine some sort of "library of derivation" whereupon, in order to prove something, say, based on arithmetic, you include (the language directive, not the verb) the specification of arithmetic derived in Principia Mathematica. Then the proving system follows your logic to its logic, and then to the logic they relied on, and so on, until everything is completely explicit. Basically, formal execution of bibliographies.
the problem is that there is nothing to do in space. If there was some mining of asteroids or lets say trade with aliens...then sure space colonies would make sense.

All we need is some gold rush for unobtanium, and there'll be 100,000 in space in 5 years
Those are good points. However, I don't think Haskell is that much harder than something like SQL once you really understand what's going on. Although it's not much more than an informed hypothesis, I do think that a precocious 13 year old could do well with it... but I would definitely teach an imperative language too.