skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I stands to reason that in the information economy there will be its own commanding hights, and that different groups of people will strive for control. I would call this opinion warfare and there is certanly a lot of combatants involved.

Most of the combatants are governments but really everyone with a budget and a profit motive (monetary or otherwise) is participating.

An interesting front is open right now between Russian government and its opponents. The coverage of Khodorkovski's fate was seriously slanted on both sides of the border. Well, unsurprisingly as a lot of money and power was at stake on both sides. Later the coverage of Russian-Georgian conflict suffered the same fate and just now there is a row over natural gas supplies to Europe which gets some odd coverage.

The most interesting battles to watch are the ones where usually rational discourse turns into a foaming-at-the-mouth fight with a lot of stretches. There are plenty of nuts online, but I can't help but suspect that money is involved when a normally rational and thought-out source starts really reaching for conclusions.
I'd also recommend Ruby and suggest you take a look at Shoes (http://shoooes.net/) which makes it very easy to code GUI-apps with all sorts of fun-stuff in them like animations, downloading data from the web, videos.

The most important part in teaching a 13 year old programming is to let him have fun and a give him a sense of achievement. The rest will come.
You can already see discontinued $100 billion notes for sale on ebay... 10 for $40
Javascript is interesting but it has many quirks and powerful features. I'd say start with Python first, since you can start off with just the language. I actually enjoy writing in Python myself because I feel that it pushes me to stick to coding standards. Also, Python's class-based OOP might make more sense at first to Javascript's prototype system.

Good Javascript programming requires coding differently than you would in Python and C, you have to understand and use strange but cool features like closures and prototypal objects.
Let's keep rehashing how a language creates terrible code and how none of it has anything to do with the guy sitting in the chair pushing buttons.

Seriously, can we just nuke this argument?
We did periodic performance reviews at the startup I worked for (which had about 15 employees at the time). It wasn't anonymous: I wrote up a document that evaluated my own performance and how I felt about the working environment, and my boss and I went over it together. I found it quite useful, and it was a good opportunity to step back from the daily routine, discuss plans for my future within the company, and set goals for the next year. One thing that I felt was important was that my boss really took the time to think about the work I'd done, and gave me some legitimately useful suggestions for improvement (the feedback wasn't just "Work harder.", for example).
we have an analogous situation here on HN. Karma ... People upmod because they agree, or because they think the post is interesting. This blends two quite different characteristics into one number.

False analogy. Karma-score blending is arithmetic. Latent factors of mental-ability tests (or latent-factors of anything) are derived non-arithmetically.
the only pre-keynes material I have been able to find is keynes' ideological predecessor Jeremy Bentham.
Keynes is the one who popularized the approach and introduced policies that were actually adopted by government. control over monetary expansion to the degree that is required wasn't possible until the Federal Reserve was established.

When I say that keynes created the fetish of full employment, I mean that post-keynes it was a continuing concern of government, whereas pre-keynes it had not been.
So many straw men being attacked so lamely.

He writes:

"First off, the unstated goal of most libertarian doctrine is basically the following:

1. Corporations are more “efficient” than the government because of the “natural selection” of our capitalist system.

2. Corporations are therefore better than the government at everything.

3. Corporations should be the government, or at least in control of it."

That's just plainly not true. The "anarcho-capitalist" bunch may be saying that, but that does not qualify as most Libertaran doctrine, and certainly not the mainstream libertarian doctrine. Point 1, yes, but not 2 or certainly not 3.

Force corrupts everything, especially the production of wealth. That is why force needs to be separated out. Individuals and corporations must not be allowed to initiate force against others, that's why we have the government to enforce that. But since the government can and must use force to do its necessary duties, it is inherently inefficient at everything else. That is why we need a separation. Corporations should not "be the government" or be in control of it.

He then goes on to talk about Libertarians defining "efficiency" as "speed" and knocks down that position. I have literally never heard a Libertarian make that argument and I have been quite involved in the movement for years.
Since making stuff should be fun, I'd recommend Python with the Facebook API. It's really easy to learn and allows him to show off to his friends.
Another example in which, interestingly, the prey goes silent instead: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/09/060923105230.ht...
Some colleges like Amherst College and Swarthmore College will fly a student out for an all-expenses paid weekend. If he is not yet a senior, have him apply to those weekends (or just look into them for the various schools he is interested in).

A friend of mine went to at least 6 such weekends, though he is a minority student, which makes a difference.
I guess it's a matter of definitions. The kind of linguistics Chomsky worked on were rather mathematical, for example, see the Chomsky Hierarchy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy) which is used extensively in Computer Science.

And Krugman's actual papers are basically pure math. I'm having trouble finding many of his papers that aren't behind a pay wall, but see http://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/scale_econ.pdf or http://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/geography.pdf. And if memory serves, didn't he also write a paper on the effects of special relativity on the time value of capital? (I can't seem to find a copy ...). I know econ is only a 'dismal science,' but don't be too hard on it ;-)
I love evolution.
Regular expression slip-up, maybe? Or, more likely, a weird bug in their regular expression engine?
Here you go:

1. Flow of the signup form. I think this was mentioned before, but the "login" field should be titled "username" since you have it on the login field to the right.

2. Can you add a lighter color to the footer? I think it may look better with three variants of the black on the page.

3. Can you direct me to a tour of what Mugasha does, rather then pointing me to text with a "Find out more" pointing me to an "About" page with copy? Give me a guided tour, show me what it is and why it's useful!
That'd be just about a mole of currency. Yikes.
Wow, thank you guys so much for sharing your thoughts here. Excellent idea to share what you're looking for rather than keep it a secret.

I especially like #30 Startups for Startups.
Squeak (http://www.squeak.org/) is fun. It's designed for teaching, has lots of high level libraries available and it's simple (everything is in one system).

This isn't going to do much to help with Unix/Linux mind, but as someone else pointed out programming is supposed to be fun.
> I still feel pain from my early days of trying to debug Perl via CGI.

At Linuxcare, we used mod_perl. That made CGI look like a walk in the park... I remember one weekend where there were incompatible versions of everything that we were trying to sort out to get things back on line... shudder.
If he's a little on the fence whether he really wants to get into programming, I would start with something where he can do stuff that looks impressive with relatively little effort.

C is a horrible choice by this standard, starting with the modify-compile-crash development cycle and especially once you get into manually managing memory.

It's not really coding per se, but HTML is a good thing to get a feel for whether you get a kick out of bending a computer to your will, and would let him show off his creations to his friends. He can also earn some spending money if he gets proficient.

After that he can get into JavaScript and maybe something like JQuery which makes doing more complex stuff much less tedious.

At that point he can probably decide if he wants to learn "real" programming, and you can introduce him to scripting languages, compiled languages and whatever APIs and frameworks he is interested in.
Week in science: building a fusion reactor, five-minute PCR, and weighing the Milky Way
Also consider Hackety Hack from _why. It is very involving, giving step-by-step instructions and crystal-clear explanations (like TryRuby).

http://hacketyhack.net/reality/
http://processing.org/
Anyone else find technology conferences disturbing?
Perhaps it's just that I come from an academic background and fail to see how people could get excited over conceptually uninteresting things...

But what happens with the Apple keynotes at Macworld borders on technology worship. It's bizarre.
There's already a name for the thing your nonstandard definition refers to: "The Establishment." Also the more informal "The Man." Both terms now seem somewhat laughable, for reasons they deserve. Mainly, I think, that the underlying thesis was false.
"Spin nurses?"
I agree. The original post is echoing many of the views expressed at more length by Sussman and Wisdom in their book "Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics." There they showed that a computational expression of classical mechanics was much more explicit and rigorous than the standard mathematical or physical treatments. They also have a similar long paper on differential geometry from a computational perspective:
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/wisdom/AIM-2005-003.pd...
Python + sage
The only thing I can think is maybe they are processing characters 2 at a time, and messing up on the end case if there's an odd number of characters. Not sure how the uppercase comes into it though, pretty obscure.
It's not the populist thing to say, but I'll say it anyway.

The top colleges are a great place to be because of the friends you'll make and the level of competition at those places. You can meet amazing people anywhere, but generally speaking they are in higher concentration at more competitive universities.

If you're going to be a hacker, go to a top CS school if you have the opportunity. The competition will be more hardcore, the faculty will be great (and will have written some of the textbooks!), you'll be heavily recruited by top software companies, and maybe you'll meet your cofounders there. If it costs a little more, then do it anyway -- does it matter if you're a good hacker? Even at the top schools, if you had to pay for most of them with loans, you'd be making more than enough to pay off the debt in short order after graduation.

Debt IS bad though -- you want to avoid it if you can because it ties your hands when it comes to starting a company right out of college. But then again, working for a few years and earning a solid salary for a bit can be a great thing too. Make your mistakes on other people's time. =) Worked for us.
If it were legal it could be implemented as a collaboration system such as

http://fold.it/portal/

http://galaxyzoo.org/

http://noisetube.net/

http://qcn.stanford.edu/

http://stardustathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/
Do you understand that ruby is similar to python, and some people consider the differences to be advantages?

Also, there are arguments that Lisp is better than everything else. Especially when the goal is to learn something (rather than get a product out the door, which makes it more important to have existing libraries, and to be able to hire people who know the language).
Top credentials are useful for raising money. But it only helps a little on that front. It's a stamp on the forehead that helps some angels and some VC's feel a little better about investing in people who have never started something before. It's a minor effect, I think, not enough to really consider in your decision.

The more valuable aspect of more competitive schools is the people you'll meet. It'll be easier to meet cofounders. People will be a little more ambitious. It's a significant effect -- it always helps to be surrounded by like-minded people who know they want to escape the rat race.
"what would explain the outliers"

Precisely that, they're outliers. There's fully grown human beings that weigh 60lbs and ones that weigh almost 1000, it's not normal it just exists because there's 6 billion of us on the planet.

There's hundreds of countries, so obviously not every single one will follow due to statistics.
I'll never forget how much I looked forward to getting the Sunday Times when living in NYC in the early 90's - it was the ultimate paper with objectively reported in depth stories from around the world. Now it leans so heavily I hardly recognize it - the bias started with the current editor - a shame to loose such an incredibly valuable source of news.
Texmacs. Apparently there are only three.
Closures aren't that weird, and JavaScript makes them a lot more easy to understand than Python...
I know, but I mean something more portable.
You can't take the microscope around looking for stuff.
Bring the lens to the bug, not the bug to the lens.
How long until they have a trillion dollar bill like the one Castro stole from Homer?
JavaScript, Python, Scheme, Ruby.
weekly IM chats about material?
If we can get at least 5 people I'm in.
Another Big Newspaper Biting Dust: Seattle Post-Intelligencer
he expanded the money supply in 1995 and again in 2000 in order to create growth. Since you can't create growth out of thin air these bubbles eventually burst. This is blatant Keynesian economics, the opposite of the free-market.
Um, the rest of that paragraph is sarcastic, too, FYI...
It's interesting that "Ivy" has come up multiple times in this discussion, because I guess Ivy is synonymous with prestige. And I'd say prestige helps a little but not much if tokenadult's goal is to start a software startup after college.

However, a quick note about the Harvard diploma. I have a bunch of Harvard friends, and they're really great people. And the one thing that's interesting about them is almost across the board, they expect to do great things. And this can be both obnoxious and incredibly inspiring. The overwhelming desire to change the world and (for some) absolute conviction that they will is something that I do think gets forged into some people in some institutions like Harvard. That very feeling can be worth it in and of itself.

The other thing I'd like to point out is that in general software startups (and the big guys like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Adobe, etc.) that are hiring don't necessarily care as much about Ivies. They care about TOP CS talent. And that's Carnegie Mellon, UIUC, Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Caltech, etc. If you want to start a company after college, you want to come out of one of those schools if that's an option. I think I've mentioned this elswhere in this thread, but your peers will push you harder and the competition is great. You'll meet super smart people who will push you to be better, and these can/will be your cofounders in the future. And cofounders will make or break your startup.
Who can take an angry monkey with a helmet seriously?
does anyone still consider facebook or twitter to be startups? whats the generally accepted cutoff?

* a million users?
* a year of existence?
such is the fate of any popular message. if you would see your ideals widely disseminated you must be prepared to have them so radically misinterpreted that people arrive at beliefs that are diametrically opposed to your original message.
It is a matter of definitions. They aren't in the harder sciences. Try reading Chomsky's language books. (The Chomsky hierarchy is an exception.)

Both have a large body of work based on sound mathematical models with tenuous connections to reality (hence, soft science). Both have also been full-time pushers of a certain intellectual orthodoxies for as long as anyone can remember.
Don't understand your first sentence totally. You do admit...

Adjust your sarcasm detector.
I'm also in! My copy is being shipped at the moment, though. Should arrive around 3th Februar :/
Just another anecdote, but I never found that pressure existed in college. In fact, heterodox "surprising" papers tended to do better than average.
I am all for physical keyboards, but comparing it to a full size touch keyboard isn't exactly fair. There's about 5x more stuff going on with a full size keyboard.
Isn't there some Web 2.0 app that organizes book clubs like this?

I have a couple books (signal processing, compilers, programmable logic) that I'd really like to work through with a couple people; what I really want to do is get together every other week or so over beers in Chicago, though.
homogeneous societies have an easier time of running collectivist programs without incurring wrath of the populace. no one minds if tax dollars go to other people just like them.
Maybe so, but it's hard to make the case that web development tools aren't faster than compiled ones for many things.
It's called nationalizing and any serious business concern would like to avoid it.
I come from the city where Wedgwood was founded.

The one thing this article fails to mention is what I believe was the company's ultimate downfall. The pot works of Wedgwood and Royal Doulton (another pottery company bought by Wedgwood a few years ago) were slowly being closed down and replaced by production in Indonesia to save money. Towards the end, the company was even looking at moving its main HQ to Jakarta. Royal Doulton became just a label - the site of their old headquarters in Burslem lies empty. Thousands of people have lost their jobs in the pottery industry in Stoke-on-Trent (an area KNOWN as The Potteries) over the past ten or fifteen years or so.

What they didn't bank on was the fact that the predominantly foreign (American and Japanese) buyers of the top-end Wedgwood wares didn't want Indonesian-made pottery, they were buying into luxury goods made in England. By cutting costs, they took away their selling point and couldn't differentiate themselves from the mass-produced Chinese stuff you get in a supermarket. There are Far Eastern "Doulton" dinner services selling for a shade over a tenner in big discount shops - and they're absolute junk. They've killed their brands.

This area has centuries of heritage in pottery and thousands of people with the skills to design and produce excellent quality wares. We are, without a doubt, the best place to make pottery in the world. But it's soulless business people with their eyes firmly on the bottom line rather than on trading off that heritage that have killed it off and condemned our city to what feels like a future of minimum wage jobs in nail distribution warehouses and mobile phone call centres. You can make stuff cheaper by outsourcing it to the Far East - but do you really want to compete with everyone else doing that when you could be producing a uniquely British product?
Structured process you must know to develop a web application
Reinforcing good practice shouldn't need to negatively impact having fun; some would argue that Python's strict enforcement of syntax and structure means one less thing for the kid to worry about deciding for himself, thereby reducing the complexity of learning. When you're just starting out, having some (meaningful) rules in place can be a good thing.
Ad companies would probably like that anyway...they wouldn't be wasting their money advertising to people who were not interested in their ads.
It's easier to code and deploy using PHP than Python for web-app.

It's easier to code and deply GUI app in VB (and .NET environment).

For a beginner to start coding web-app in Python would be like a non-geek trying out Linux with just command-line.
I've been going through SICP, albeit slower then I would hope so. I'm only into the initial sections and I would definitely be up for something like weekly IM chats at a scheduled time to discuss the book and help each other understand.

That would be great, so count me in if it happens.
Forrester Research predicts 10% iPhone SMB marketshare 2009
"Job Trends for Salary Slave"
I giggled.
Excel spreadsheets come to iPhone
It’s sad because the Biosphere 2 is pretty close to this by all accounts. But the disastrous second mission (which had nothing to do with technical problems, see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2#Second_mission) really hurt the development of biosphere’s on earth which in turn hurt the cause as a whole.

But the reality is this...

1. Biosphere 2’s first mission was an overall success, albeit with a few glitches

2. The International Space Station exists and is working relatively well proving we can put a self contained environment in Space virtually without problem

Combine those and you see that the technology is really in our grasp.It’s simply been held back by a few unlucky events that have kept us from ironing out all the bugs.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think we’ll have a 10,000 person colony in space any time soon. But I think an artificial environment off the International Space Station is possible and I wish more research was being done.
This not true! Everyone loves China anyway, and nothing bad ever happens here, so why would the government ever need to pay people to do this? Silly nonsense!
I went with the college that had the "best" program. I loved every minute of it and got a ton out of it. The quality of the professors and students in a top notch program is invaluable. They provide you with stimulating material while you're in school and great connections when you're out.

People say that just doing something is more important than where you went to college. That's true, but it's not a coincidence that a large number of successful startups and engineers in general come from Stanford, MIT, and the University of Illinois (and a few others, of course). The network can't be emphasized enough.
Why?

I thought BASIC is very good to teach basic programming concept such as Loops, line-by-line execution, etc. Really, for a beginner, one must have that kind of mindset.
Haskell as a first language... I've seen it work, but the learner was a physicist working on his PhD. "Finally a language that makes sense", he said.

For a 13-year-old who has probably not been exposed to much mathematical rigor at school, I would not recommend Haskell, though. Haskell makes it hard to write a program that, as ugly and unmaintainable as it may be, somehow mostly works (e.g. you have to plan ahead which parts of the program may perform I/O).

Therefore, I'd go with an imperative language and reserve Haskell for the day when he asks "is that all there is?".
http://preview.tinyurl.com/ebay-100B

There seems to be $100B note. What am I missing?
They're second-class outlets. A blog author can say whatever they want; their posts are first-class elements in Google's corpus; the medium encourages stand-alone writing instead of meaningless squibs.

The original vision of the "blogosphere" rejected comments. "Write a blog post, instead." Here's an old, well-known example:

http://www.markbernstein.org/Apr0401/Whyblogcommentsarebad.h...

The problem right now is that the affordances favor comments over posts. The first step is to adjust them; it just so happens that by making a threaded blog-group reader, you're also providing a lot of value to people who don't care that comments are evil, but do find it hard to follow 10 different blogs talking about the same thing.
Obama Raises Estimate of Job Creation in Plan