skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> They've both got flaws, but Gladwell in particular likes to coin phrases and say things that are easy for others to parrot, and this cap rates thing is among them.

He does make it easy for people to parrot things. But the human capitalization rate is a genuinely valuable concept. I read an article recently (possibly here?) about someone working on glasses that the users could adjust themselves, eliminating the need for an optometrist. He's trying to get these distributed on a really wide scale in countries which are too poor to afford optometry, because failing eyesight stops a great many from being able to work.

> So obviously some people are escaping the stupid, impoverished culture.

Individuals definitely do rise up from poverty, but that's a sociological rarity. Most people who grow up poor among other poor folks are indoctrinated into the idea that this is just how it is. It's extremely rare to find a poor person who's able to step back from all that and defiantly work his way up.

> I think that in Atlas Rand does abandon villains, but I feel that's because she's relying on her readers to have read The Fountainhead so we can already understand their justifications.

It's been a while since I read Fountainhead, but the only prominent villains I remember are Keating and Toohey. They seemed to be remarkably capable men, but Keating sabotaged his potential by constantly seeking others' approval. Toohey, I guess, was supposed to be the apotheosis of that mindset.

I'm thinking more about, say, the jaded bum from Atlas Shrugged, or the workers who don't have a love of what they do and aren't highly competent at it. Rand seems pretty happy to just treat them all with contempt, rather than understand where they're coming from and why.
There's a good point there, if you can get through the awful writing that it's wrapped in.

It's just too easy to play a video game or read a blog post instead of write code. And in the short run it's more fun (if this isn't you, count yourself lucky). Three hours later you realize you've completely wasted an evening.

I have a friend who has natural musical talent. After watching him whip up on Guitar Hero, we talked about getting together to play actual guitar sometime. Maybe we will, maybe we won't, but I am quite sure we'll play GH again.

The lure of fake gratification and fake accomplishment is awfully hard to resist for a lot of us. It is a problem and worth talking about. Also I think we'll be able to figure out better ways of managing a world full of shiny fake rewards as we get more used to it.
My 9 year old son is pretty facile with Scratch, and my 7 year old daughter loves playing with it. I second this recommendation for younger kids.
I suppose it depends why the parents are not funding his education. If the parent cannot afford to pay for college, they probably cannot afford to help fund a startup either, no?

Also, it's not startup funding is a better use money than college. A down payment on mortgage, money for travel, or even just an outright grant of cash is a better way of giving your kid a head start in life than sending them to an expensive college.

From the student's prospective, paying as little tuition as possible is even more important if you have to pay for college yourself. Entering life with more than $20K of debt is a very bad idea.
There is preening, and there is criticism. Some combine both, and I agree, it's pretty silly.
"Urgent information: Your computer needs a scan. You have not scanned for spyware in 0 days".

I was hoping all the niggling non-resizable dialogs and pestering messages would be sorted this time. They aren't, and there are more of them.

Despite that, I like it more than Vista already.
perl, javascript, haskell.

perl: practicality + fanatically helpful community, and it's in unix's dna
javascript: nice skill, something you can make money in if you're good, immediate gratification on web pages
haskell (or lisp): get some theory in there. i'd vote haskell because of the community
A lot of those people were only going into EECS to make easy money too; many of them were only going to stay for 2-5 years before coming back for an MBA or a law degree to go after IP law.

I guess the simple question is, are there fewer people going in to medicine now? It's incredibly difficult to become a doctor.
This is why there are guitar teachers, right?
Yeah, it used to be considered a model African country, with the highest increases in standard of living year/year of any country in the world.

Robert Mugabe destroyed Zimbabwe.

Wikipedia has some really excellent further reading on Mugabe and Zimbabwe:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Mugabe

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimbabwe

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Zimbabwe
How can an economy survive with such an inflation? How can you work, knowing that the salary you agreed to at the beginning of the day, is now worth 10 times less
I've always liked Chris Pine's tutorial (http://pine.fm/LearnToProgram/), because you can go through them with someone who's paying attention in about two hours. I do love _why for self-teaching, though.

My biggest recommendation, though, is that once the kid has any sort of "foundational" programming language under his belt, you write a Scheme interpreter together, in that language, and then show him that the interpreter you just wrote can run Scheme files that already exist (possibly ones you pre-prepared.) That's the best way, I've found, to burn into someone's head that there's no one-true-language, and to get their mind started experimenting with "what if the language was different in way X? Could I code that?" trains of thought.
smalltalk, absolutely.
It looks like the People's Republic is moving to a more sophisticated model closer to the one used by "the U.S. Government" in which dissenting voices are not silenced with police force but rather must compete with and are spun by professional non-dissenting voices.

For my comment to make sense, "the U.S. Government" has to be defined in a nonstandard way to include for example Time Magazine, the New York Times, Harvard University, the misleadingly-named "non-governmental organizations", and as of the last few years professional bloggers like the ones at Daily Kos -- but I advocate such a nonstandard definition. Added: thanks to non-professional blogger Mencius Moldbug for teaching me the nonstandard definition.
Damn, just when I bought the $25 billion of eBay.
Getting rid of Mugabe and reinstating private property rights would go a long way in the right direction.
I didn't get that out of the comment. I read that as neither collectivism or objectivism is a completely flawless method, and we should take from each as the situation, rather than the ideology, dictates. I also read that as capitalism seems to have been obviously more successfull than communism, so solutions most often will be derived from objective philosophy.
Zimbabwe president: Robert Mugabe

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Mugabe

I'm pretty sure their government has much more to do with the hyperinflation.
When I was at your brother's age (roughly), I started with dBase III+ and QuickBasic because that's what was installed on the discarded IBM PC/XT my father took home from work.

What kept me motivated was that interactive programs were just an INPUT A$ and a LINE(x,y,x1,y1) away. Today, I'd have to write dozens of lines of GUI code just to get a program with input and graphical output.

You may want to check out Processing at http://www.processing.org/ which offers a bit of that good old simplicity.
I like the "vote up smart comments regardless of agreement" approach. My Kantian nature then expects to see interesting comments at the top.

I also like the "vote to agree or disagree with the 'poll' (aka comment)". This prevents dozens of "I agree/I disagree" responses.

The second approach is my first instinct. They're voting triangles, right? Like a poll?

The first approach yields less answer-based statistics but more interesting reading material.

One button fits all v too many buttons problem.
It'd be a start, but sadly just that. That's what's truly sad. The economic destruction has been so thorough, the wave of emigration away so massive, that Zimbabwe will need a generation or two to recover.
"""There are, in fact, laws that forced banks to give out loans to those people. Laws which have not been repealed. Entire non-profit groups making sure those laws were enforced, and who have not learned anything from what happened."""

Oddly enough, the original commenter does not actually name the laws that allow "those people" to get loans to the detriment of us all.
At 80% unemployment, I guess they don't.
Euro pulling Ireland down
Should Ireland leave the Euro?
I'd imagine a sort of barter system takes the place of the currency. You could also try to rely on foreign currencies.
I would say Python also. But why do you care about the Unix/Linux component? Better to focus on non-OS specific stuff.

After Python, you could also try teaching him Scala.
In terms of article content, academics and education seem to be of interest to the HN community, both because it tends to be a college-age and college-going crowd and because change often starts with education.

In terms of article quality, I found it confusing and almost unreadable.

[edit for spelling]
I'm pretty sure their government has ... to do with the hyperinflation.

Indeed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_reform_in_Zimbabwe

Land reform in Zimbabwe began after the signing of the Lancaster House Agreement in 1979 in an effort to more equitably distribute land between ... blacks and the minority-whites who ruled Zimbabwe from 1923 to 1979.

.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_reform_in_Zimbabwe#Economi...

The results of the post-2000 land reform have been disastrous for the economy of Zimbabwe. Prior to land redistribution, land-owning farmers, mostly white, had large tracts of land and utilized economies of scale to raise capital, borrow money when necessary, and purchase modern mechanised farm equipment to increase productivity on their land. The reforms broke this land into smaller tracts (thereby destroying the economies of scale) and gave it to former black farmworkers and peasants
If a student needs their self confidence built, then maybe this makes sense. Otherwise, though, the people who disagree with you are wrong, and probably second rate in their own right (I'm only half joking).

For me, having great profs who were committed to teaching was really important, but even more important that my classmates were smart and committed to learning. Pretty much everything I learned, I learned by working and talking through things with other students. The professors set the stage, and helped us through the sticking points, but for most of my courses, the 3-4 hours a week I spent with a prof were generally met with an equal or greater amount of time spent in academic interaction with classmates.

I know that there are some people who can't cope when they go from being exceptional in high school, to be being average in a school filled with people who were exceptional in high school. To the extent that this can be predicted ahead of time, I think the right thing is not to steer them to a less rigorous school, but rather to help prepare them to find motivations other than being "the best," and, perhaps, to direct them to an institution that where the tone is more collaborative than competitive.
This is how I would go too. And if/when he really likes it and wants to move on, LISP.
When will they start using scientific notation on the notes? I'd invest a few dollars at whatever exchange rate just to get a hold of some $10^23 notes.
That tells you more about the inadequacy and bias of the IQ system in measuring and representing intelligence, than it tells you about African people.
Salary is in foreign currency. As everything else.
One thing to look for is lots of other disciplines around, where you can interact. I got some of my best experience programming while writing control code for a bunch of mechanical engineers.
I might be feeding a troll here(2 day old account - http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=opticksversi ) but IQ is more a measure of a nations current economic development than something inherent in the population. See the Flynn Effect - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
Boing Boing Gadgets at CES: Day 2 Report
Why should he be worrying about what some hiring manager thinks if his goal is to found a startup when he gets out of college? How much are customers going to care where he went to college? Some potential investors and employees might care, but by the time these people really matter, there should be better evidence (the progress of the startup) upon which to make the judgment; if they still care about his undergrad institution, he'd probably be better off without them.
It's still selfish if you gain more for yourself than you lose.

What is Rand losing in this case?
There's nothing wrong with PHP 5. As long as he's learning about all the latest stuff, it's a perfect language. It features functional aspects to get him started and then he can graduate to OOP concepts. Since he's learning from scratch, stuff like objects and public/protected/private members might be a little farther down the line. PHP lets you get the basics of variables, arrays, functions, etc. out of the way without having to switch languages or set up some construct you have to ignore until later, when you're more adept at the language.
the inadequacy and bias of the IQ system in measuring and representing intelligence

Why do you believe there is inadequacy and bias in mental ability testing (the IQ system, as you put it)? Have you read this Citation Classic on the subject?:

http://www.amazon.com/Bias-Mental-Testing-Arthur-Jensen/dp/0...
Ah yes, the "Ministry of Truth".
to do some healthy self-promotion, what did you think?
Maybe there's some HN value here - I've been thinking for some time the next great establishment to lose most of its influence due to the Web will be academia.

Universities seem like record companies ca. 1996, or media companies ca 2000 - too confident and self absorbed to realize reality is routing around them right now, making most of them obsolete with a few years.
I've seen Horowitz on a news show and I couldn't forget how inflammatory he was and he didn't sound any different than any other right-wing pundit I've seen.

What is the criteria for left-wing bias anyways? Any criticism of any right-wing person or policy? Not being "fair and balanced" on each issue when in fact one side IS right and the other side IS wrong? Not allowing the teaching of Intelligent Design in biology classes?

Has anyone looked at "right-wing" bias in universities? Maybe the left isn't shouting as loudly as the right.
I think the Programming Collective Intelligence is going to go down as one of the most important and influential books of the decade.

I'm a product manager, but was a Java & Perl programmer previously. I didn't know Python before I read this book. But the concepts are presented so clearly, the examples use web APIs, and the spark of creativity each chapter brings too great, that I could not resist the urge to fire up iPython on my Mac and play with some of the algorithms.

The book's examples are all command-line driven. But I've also converted a few of the examples into web projects to help me explore the possibilities more efficiently and demo/prototype some things for my company. Python works perfectly well as a CGI web application and you don't need the overhead of Django for learning and taking examples from this book to the next level.

I've since read several data mining and machine learning books, and must say that none come close to the breadth, programming detail, and hands-on ease presented in this book.

The book has created a rich opportunity to learn and explore concepts such as collaborative filtering, clustering, optimization, decision trees, and text mining with Bayesian classification.

Python is easy to read and learn.
Python is a good choice because it is clean, easy to learn, and has a large choice of libraries like pygame. It is important to choose a language that encourages good programming practices. For that reason PHP and Basic are bad choices. Some of the worst code in the world is written in PHP or Basic. I would also stay away from languages like perl.

Avoid languages like C++ or Java because there is so much to learn before you can produce a simple Hello World. There is no reason to learn OOP to do a simple task.

I think JavaScript would be a reasonable second language. He should learn programming firs before having to deal with browsers, the DOM model, and OOP.
Javascript. It gives him a chance to create GUIs pretty quickly by saving any page he sees on the internet and tweaking it. And he can create things that are useful to him pretty quickly if you show him Greasemonkey.
On the one hand, I think too much emphasis is placed on going to the one best college -- for most students, there is likely more than one good fit.

On the other hand, the cost of doing campus visits is going to be a tiny part of the cost of their education, which is, itself, a foundation for their adult life. I think the advice to tackle one coast at a time and make it a road trip is a good one. A week spent doing that is probably at least as valuable as a week spent in high school senior year.

When I was applying to transfer away from the state school I spent my freshman year , was wait-listed by my first choice and we paid the deposit it my second choice. I ended up being accepted by my first choice, but I wasn't going to go, because, among other things, we'd already paid the deposit at the other school. My father put it in perspective for me. The deposit was small change compared to the total cost of my college education.
IQ is more a measure of a nations current economic development than something inherent in the population.

If that were the case, what would explain the outliers -- high-IQ nations that are poor, and low-IQ nations that are rich?
The most important thing to get a programmer started is to get them a project they want to finish. So, get him on something with good feedback.

Does he play any games that have scripting languages? Lua's pretty popular. Additionally, there's TorqueScript, for the torque engine (garagegames.com).

If he's not a gamer, dump the imperative stuff & have him start on scheme or lisp. If you haven't broken your mind into imperative thought like most of us, it's actually pretty straightforward. And it'll probably fit well with the math classes he's probably taking right now. Teaching him how to solve homework problems in code can really drive usage.

If he's interested on the web side, generating HTML from a functional language is pretty straightforward.

Please, no PHP. Friends don't let friends do PHP.
I highly recommend JLogo:
http://www.bfoit.org/itp/itp.html

This site and JLogo are geared toward first time learners.

It is very easy to take oneself through the lessons and learn all the basics of programming. After going through these lessons, taking AP computer science (Java) was much easier for me.

(And if you are in the bay area, consider having him apply to the summer program: http://bfoit.org/)
I don't see the point in wasting time and money on a super-easy major. Or is the idea that this is a trick to get parental support and student loans to help finance living-expenses while working on the startup?
I agree with your point. Far too many teachers in the humanities use their position to push their political views on their students.

For the record, neither Chomsky nor Krugman are in the harder sciences. Chomsky is a linguist and Krugman is an economist.
Wow. What I don't understand is, why do they still do this? Push IMAP is pretty popular, and there's a bunch of other proprietary solutions (as you mention) that also don't have this issue, which is problematic for private enterprise as well as governments.
Superloud Moth Jams Bat Sonar
A Case for Inspirational Leadership
Close: solutions will most often be derived from the real world (trial and error), and real economics, which says that capitalism is the best system, albeit an imperfect one, and therefore needs some tweaking now and then. How much and what tweaking is of course a matter of ongoing debate between reasonable people, and probably depends a lot on what various communities and peoples prefer. I.e. most people in Sweden are happy with a more collectivist version of capitalism, most people in the US are happier with another sort of system, and so on.
Why I thought we'd all be living in space by now
I think many of you have completely forgotten what sucked you into hacking.

Here's how to get a kid hooked on programming:

1. Programming should be fun.
2. Programming should be fun.
3. Programming should be fun.

Who really cares if a child isn't using "good programming practices"? When I started writing code, it was downright shameful.

But in time, my internal desire to advance my art led me to nuking my globals and having some kind of naming standard. Eventually I fell in love with elegant languages.

Give the kid a fire. Let him decide if he wants to improve himself over time.

When I started, I just wanted to make games. Not learn Greek. Kids just don't care about Python or Ruby's elegance.
You are feeding a troll, a deaded account whose link style, phrasing, and thoughtprints betray him, however:

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=DabAsteroid
I would contend that bias has to do more with interpretation of facts, than of facts themselves (although, obviously, you can create bias through selective presentation of facts as well). Basically, it reduces to which side of the is-ought dichotomy (Hume) a statement falls on. Anything on the 'is' side is fair game. Anything on the ought side is opinion (which is fine), but should not be enforced.

An example of bias might be a professor positing (outside an econ class) that we should bail out the auto industry. That statement, while on its face reasonable, implicitly assumes a number of 'positive rights' that most conservatives don't grant. It further assumes that a bailout is the best way to guarantee those positive rights, which is outside the purview of anything but an economics class.

Improper bias may be the teacher grading assignments disagreeing with his thesis (and its implicit liberal assumptions) more harshly than papers agreeing with his thesis. Obviously, this would be very hard to show - but if it is happening, it would be extremely bad.

And honestly, you'd have to be a complete moron to think there is right wing bias in american universities. Liberal professors outnumber conservative professors at least 5 to 1 (far more in some departments/schools). As proof see http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8427-2005Mar2... or http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/10/08/politics. Or any other survey conducted on the topic.
I got kind of a chill when I read this. It hits close to home.
Right. If you can get a scholarship and/or have parental support, your cost of living will be far lower than your cost of living after you graduate. So you might as well attend, it's cheaper than paying for an apartment yourself. Plus, the environment is a lot of fun.