skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Pick a coast. Wait for temperate weather. Borrow a car. Arrange with admissions departments to crash with students. Give yourself a couple of weeks. Heck, why not a couple of months?

I did this with a friend of mine looking to transfer schools. She visited 4 or 5 schools on the east coast this way.
python or ruby are good choices. They can be used to do UNIX scripting, and each one has some really cool modules to do graphic stuff. I'm learning ruby just now, so that i can do GUI programming with shoes, and im using _why's guide: http://poignantguide.net/ruby/index.html

I don't know which one is better for a 13 year old, just pick the one you know better.
They are choosing to do security updates to their products.

The article notes that since the virus was added to the list of malware removed by Microsoft's Malicious Software Removal Tool, the numbers of computers infected by it have shrunk significantly. This suggests that the computers will are still infected are those which are not choosing to apply security updates.

Regardless of whether Microsoft would be "within its rights" to start something like this, it would still be liable for any damage caused to computers which became broken by the cleaning (see the next to last paragraph of the article).
It has always been a well-known fact that the founding fathers of Perl had only a passing interest in all things web.

It shouldn't be completely surprising, because of this, other technologies have slowly displaced the language. For the longest time, if you went to #perl on IRC, you'd get booted for asking web-related questions.

I still contend that one of the smartest moves ever -- was for the PHP boys to make their language "just work" on millions of web servers. I still feel pain from my early days of trying to debug Perl via CGI.
> As I said, what differentiation there is is due to the initiative of instructors.

This is clearly true. I just don't see why it merits devaluing an assessment of the courses. Quality of instruction clearly matters, and that's why I put professors immediately after. But if certain courses play to one's intrinsic motivations, this can be considerably more important to one's learning.

A great instructor teaching a subject you care little for can only do so much. But the opportunity to work on things that genuinely excite you can override having a poor instructor.
CoralCDN: positive experiences?
Have you ever used CoralCDN (http://www.coralcdn.org/)? Did you like it?
PHP's how I got into programming too. It's a relatively easy language to learn as it doesn't worry too much about typing and it's syntax leaves a nice bridge to C which could be just what you need.
Whatever language you choose: write a lot of (small?) shell scripts. This is very unix-y and also easy. The composing of those scripts using unix-pipes also will give him a little bit experience with things like modularity.

Also, I'd choose a language I like and that I'm familiar with. I think OCaml would definitely be a good start. Strongly typed and strict, lots of possibilities for abstraction, it's all pretty cool. Or teach him (and yourself) Haskell using RWH or something.

If you go for an imperative language then Ruby or Python would probably be a good idea. Those languages are really a lot like English and have a lot of momentum. If you go for Ruby, take a look at http://hackety.org/, I think it's awesome for young programmers.
A road trip is a lower cost way to travel.. though compared to the cost of college, and the greater cost of picking the wrong one, at least a visit to the final choice is worth it. Visiting all the local colleges could be enough of a comparison to that.
It would be nice if he adds Groovy to the list
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=427621
I wish I could upmod you twice.
1) Go to the best school where you can get a full ride. Convince your parents to use the money they saved to fund your startup some day. It's a far better use of money than college tuition.

2) Either major in a hard, useful, technical subject, like mechanical engineering or computer science, or find a super easy major where attendance in classes is mostly optional. If you do the second, you can work full time on your startup during college, and get it to the point where you can live off of it by the time you graduate.
I've given this question lots of thought over the years. I really started loving programming when I found Garry Kitchen's GameMaker. It wasn't very elegant, but it was damn fun.

I'd push him toward PHP.

The goal isn't to make him a great programmer with an amazing language. The goal is to get him doing fun stuff fast, so that he sticks around.

When things are fun, kids stick around.

I'm guessing that many readers here got hooked on a language, not because it was a functional language, but because you could accomplish things quickly.

Introduce him to PHP and work with him on coming up with a very specific project he wants to hammer out. Then you can sit down and walk him through the various phases of putting it together.
I would suggest a language like newlisp (http://newlisp.org), that has enough libraries to do unix scripting.
Also, you should consider teaching him awk because it has simple semantics and it will be simpler for him to switch to C later.

Btw, why do you hate C ?
> Throughout my schooling, 98% of my learning came from books, self study, and friends.

This is probably reflective of your learning style more than anything else. While I've certainly learned more from the books (there's only so much you can cover in lecture and section), I've also benefited a great deal from instructors who could convey their passion and communicate clearly, and I'd wager this is true for more people than not.

> But if you are choosing a college based on the professors, look for professors doing interesting work, not necessarily good teachers. Basic instruction you can get from a book. But if you can be near someone who's at the top of their field, you can learn stuff that is not written down anywhere, and gain valuable contacts.

Only a few undergrads will actually generate a working relationship with a professor who's at the top of their field, and this depends heavily on what their priorities are. It's certainly not the default advice I would give to a college applicant.
Python and probably a lot of shell scripting. I like zsh a lot.
Seconding Ruby, just for _why's guide. I've never read anything that makes me so immediately enthusiastic about coding, and it still has that effect when I reread it. I wish I'd known about that as a kid.
Ruby.

Give the Why's Poignant Guide and you can't go wrong. Plus he'll love the cartoons, even if he doesn't get the strangely subtle adult humor.
Hrm. I was going to respond and say that I didn't think it registered on enough of the metrics I use, but I went and checked and it does get hits on Amazon, Freshmeat, and even a few job postings on Craigslist. I guess I should consider it.

By the way, while we're on the subject, what do people think of adding ColdFusion? It's sort of a weird hybrid... yeah it's a language, but it appears to me to be even more web specific than PHP. Does it even have a standalone interpreter of some kind? I really don't know that much about it.
This is good advice.

I personally thought VB6 did a good job of letting you build something quickly in its day, in spite of its other faults.
This is not a bad idea. Interfacing with hardware can be really fun, but basic enough that they can be creative.

"Hey, see if you can make those 8 LEDs do like the KITT car!"
Same here, I started with QBasic and VB but never really accomplished anything in them. PHP is when I really started to "do stuff."

These days though, I would recommend teaching him Python or Ruby.
Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu/) is a good way to learn the basics of putting programs together. It's done visually and it may feel like just a toy, but you can do some pretty cool things, it has a very shallow learning curve, and it can intuitively guide you to learning some important concepts which then have applicability to traditional programming.
I can say from my experience that while it's not Guitar Hero or Rock Band that keeps me from practicing guitar, the author's example of psychedelic music is an apt one. The sheer amount of guitar material available to me is almost paralyzing. There really is no scarcity to help motivate me. I'm borrowing my friend's guitar and he burned a couple instructional DVDs for me. There are tabs online for just about any song you can think of. There are hundreds of instructional and example videos on YouTube. When I plug the guitar into my Mac I've already got a little recording studio and an amp with more settings than I care to know about and 30 different guitars.

It's never been easier to learn guitar. Except that for some reason the ease of it all makes me take it for granted and even makes me bored. I'm just a quick search away from hundreds of videos of people who play better than I could ever hope to. Sometimes it feels like everyone and their dog already knows how to play except for me. While I ponder the futility of it, I get distracted by all the other neat stuff that I can learn.

I have to consciously fight laziness. There are so many easy and fun things to do nowadays that it takes some extra discipline to focus. I like to think I'm succeeding. Sometimes I start out working on my personal project and then a little while later here I am responding to someone's interesting comment on an interesting article.

There is an interesting problem in a society like this. I've lost too many friends and family to World of Warcraft to deny it. Perhaps it's not worse than the problems faced by earlier generations, but it's definitely different.
Selfishness isn't selfishness if you lose something.
Not quite. A ratio of 7 to 4 means that the number of heterosexual males is 7/4 times the number of heterosexual females. Since the ratio of men to women in the US is ~50-50 (as well as in most countries), If that statistic is correct, at least 42% of all men are homosexual. A laughable claim. Whenever you read statistics, _always_ take them with a grain of salt and run them through a common sense analyzer.
Your comment suggests that you believe the world needs to be "run" by a wise planner of some sort.
Logo isn't too bad. It's open source, scheme derived, and very easy to make games (beginners like immediate feedback). http://education.mit.edu/starlogo/

At 13, he may be too old for it, but Logo was one of my first languages back in elementary school, and I remember being very excited that I could write my own galaxian clone in just a day or so.

Otherwise, I would stay away from JavaScript and Ruby (I like them, but they are hard for beginners) and stick with Python.
Second on the idea that it should be quick and easy to make useful stuff, but I have to disagree on PHP. Most of the example code out there is terrible, out of date or both. It's very easy to make a mess in PHP.

Python seems to be the teaching language of choice these days, and it lets you do useful stuff without getting in the way. It's certainly not the only language to learn, but I'm inclined to say it should be the first.
Thanks. From reading those comments I should clarify my comment a bit more. I don't suggest they make any contact, I am just wondering if they have considered the idea of licensing. I think that broad sweeping software patents are a result of the patent system not truly understanding modern computers but I do think there is an important place for the patent system to protect developers of new technologies. Sometimes, I believe that the idea of licensing gets lost behind the abuse of software patents in general.
Please also see:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=426778
"Why waste your time on people less aware than that?"

Because it takes more time to find the people that are more aware.
I want to do this one day, but have no plans of doing it any time soon: a playlist generator for different sized mp3 players. An app I install locally that will scan my music library and then I select a song and the app mashes up with last.fm and generates a playlist of the best similar songs that I currently have that is a maximum total size in MB so all I have to do is put that playlist into whatever I transfer my music to mp3 player with and everythings done. Easy way to fill up my mp3 player with fresh music every day.
Just having the degree period is much more significant than whether or not it's a top-flight school. (We discount schools that are clearly a joke.) Likewise, just being at a top-flight school is more significant than which particular one it is.

Being at a place with smart professors doesn't benefit you much if you don't like them or if none of them happen to like you. Being around smart fellow students isn't so good if you don't get along with them.

Far better to find a dynamite mentoring relationship at a good school than to just float through at the best school.
I’ll be the first to admit that we’re seeing way too much political rhetoric on Hacker News lately but I’d like to defend this article. The point of this article isn’t that one side is right and the other is wrong it’s that people who are thoroughly entrenched in their positions refuse to listen to each other.

When we at Hacker News or out in the blogosphere discuss issues we tend to believe that logic will win out but that isn’t always the case. Knowing that is important and seeing it in a field that’s supposed to revere logic (academia) makes that point very powerfully.

So let me give just one example of how this could be considered technology related. Much of the tech surrounding "web 2.0" companies relies on the wisdom of the crowd and the idea that the crowd will be impartial and judge things on their merits. The question about motivations, biases, etc... is never brought up even though it’s a huge flaw in that system and something that should be discussed.

This article’s powerful statement on that subject might serve to open some eyes on that.
Don’t prop them up
http://klarquist.com/home.aspx

They are in Portland, they are IP experts.
The need to break the law to stop a criminal is interesting. It seems like that is well established in physical confrontations. The police can shoot people threatening others, and you can kill someone in self defense.

Surely researchers fighting a botnet should be covered under the same logic. The patch they force on 3rd parties should remove windows or force the use of Firefox.
When Vista's beta came out, MS ran into the same problems. So someone put up a torrent of the iso (On legaltorrents.com i think) and linked to MS's site saying to go there for serials and to file bugs. MS still sent the legal team after it to have the torrent shut down fairly quickly.

Interesting sidenote: Microsoft's research labs made a "Bittorrent Simulator" - http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/20d68689-9a8d-...
Not quite. What you are referring to is vigilantee justice and most countries are not very fond of it (for good reason).
The difference is, not many people in the public have Vista SP2. Whereas everyone can grab Windows 7 if they so desire.
Real quick follow up point. How many times have you seen two educated, well thought out comments on a Hacker News item but one has 27 points and the other has 3 because the 27-point item is the one everyone agreed with?

I vote items up when I think they're smart whether I agree with them or not and I think others should do the same. That's the point this article makes and that's why I think it should be on Hacker News.
I recommend NetLogo. It is simple to learn, LISP-inspired, and makes it trivially easy to do all sorts of graphical work. It runs on the JVM.

(I took a class in which we used NetLogo to run agent-based economics simulations. Lots of fun, although the LISPer in you will start to hate it after a while.)
CNN "Going Solo" Feature
I wouldn't imagine facebook is a representative sample of the serious developer community...
I agree that you can come away from the book with that message (much more so with The Fountainhead). But the much more explicit one, I think, is Objectivism. :)

Though I now disagree with her philosophy, I do think she wrote inspiringly about some of her heroes. Roark and Rearden were always my favorite of the bunch.
* Convince your parents to use the money they saved to fund your startup some day.*

Would that advice generalize to a student whose parents are not providing any funding for his education? (That's not my son's situation, but it's a situation I've seen more than once, and one of my son's friends is in that situation.)
I wonder how communities go from "a few of the founding members don't really care about X" to "if you mention X on the channel you'll get booted". That seems like a huge and disturbing jump in fanaticism, and a decrease in popularity is well deserved if they really have that mentality.
The government (most of them anyway) can do this almost immedeately as nearly all of them have some clause allowing action in the event of known criminal activity (whether they will after this goes through all the beaucracy is a different matter). The question with the parent is would private citizens be within their rights to do something like that. To that, the answer is, for the most part, no. I do not know of any countries (except palestine) which condone vigilantee justice.
Testing Monte Carlo Algorithmic Systems
Whatever you teach him, teach him something that you love. You will infect him with your enthusiasm and that matters an order of magnitude more than which language.

Heck, there are plenty of situations where exactly this happened, and the programming language was COBOL or Assembly!
They will be writing this article about the New York Times within a decade: how the current leaders lost the winning recipe of the founders and drove it bankrupt.
Zimbabwe (British-relative) national IQ: 66

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_IQ#National_IQ_and_QHC...
"I don't like honors" (5:30)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qILEIio8jZU#t=5m30s
ActionScript was the first programming language I learned. I found some tutorials on how to make games and little by little learned by changing the source code. Being able to create graphics was very rewarding and the popularity of flash made it easy to show my friends what I had done. The feedback loop was very important in keeping me interested in programming.

Project sprouts (http://www.projectsprouts.com) makes it easy to get started in ActionScript and is also a good introduction to writing support scripts in Ruby.
Please name the regulation that said that any bank had to give a loan to someone with No Income, No Job, No Assets?

Please name the laws that are (you claim) still forcing banks to make loans to unqualified borrowers.

Now I would agree that there were many failures of regulation in the mortgage industry; but if you are trying to claim that things like http://www.usdoj.gov/crt/housing/title8.php forced banks into making bad loans you are full of shit. Racist shit, that doesn't even make sense.

But since you can't even name the "laws that forced banks to give out loans to those people." I'm guessing that you or your fellows will try to nail me on the use of profanity rather than addressing the facts.
Why do you think the first question layout is simple? I preferred the second question layout because it requires fewer mouse clicks.
Right, but there are also many who are simply discouraged from striving at all, possibly jaded. Rand never considers the forces behind this fact: she simply casts them as villains.
Yeah, PHP isn't an excellent language but it does do one thing and do it well. Just 99% of examples or scripts you find are absolutley horrible. Seriously, I've seen blog posts on PHP from IBM which contain bad programming practices.
What a strange attempt to solve their problems. Maybe there is something wrong with your system if you can't print money fast enough to keep up with inflation.
In August last year, the RBZ slashed ten zeros from the currency. But the zeroes have bounced back with more vigor.

That means in before August 2008 these would have been 500,000,000,000,000,000,000 notes. Yikes.
It's hard to measure the brand value of an Ivy League diploma. There have been studies that show that ivy league grads earn more than grads of other schools, but their controls haven't been very good. Earlier in the decade though, there was a study published that took great pains to get the control group right. Their control group was people who'd actually been accepted to an Ivy League school, but chose to go elsewhere. When comparing "ivy league material" that chose to go elsewhere, with those that did end up going to ivy league schools, they found no significant difference in earning potential down the road. Between the two groups. Neither the ivy league education, nor the connections that supposedly come with it, nor the prestige of the diploma made a significant difference when comparing between equal starting material. There was one exception, students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

If you accept post-college compensation as a proxy for the value placed on educational credentials, it appears that, in the end, there is little extra value from, say, a Harvard diploma.
It's amazing how thoroughly has been completely destroyed in the last decade. What I think most first-world readers miss is that Zimbabwe is not one of those (previously) ultra-poor, undeveloped countries -- it's had a frighteningly long fall to get to where it is now.
Um, I hate to break it to you, but none of that is Palm-specific. In fact, it's all available on the iPhone already. It all comes out of WebKit, which is mostly developed by Apple. Going back further, the canvas was developed by Apple for Dashboard before it was ever standardized.

I agree that it's neat--in fact, I expected that in the way of an iPhone SDK long before the native one existed (and given the number of ex-Apple employees on the team maybe that's where the idea came from)--but I wouldn't call it a mini-revolution. It's just an SDK built on an existing open source platform.
BASIC will scar him. You might as well go with ruby or python, you get the same facility and start off with an extensible paradigm.
Probably more than most of us want to admit.

I am very, very careful to avoid anything that might give me some preconceived notions about the candidate. If you think that someone is smart before they even walk into the room, just because they have a Ph.D. from MIT, then nothing they can say in one hour is going to overcome that initial prejudice. If you think they are a bozo because they went to community college, nothing they can say will overcome that initial impression.

Joel Spolsky, http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/GuerrillaInterviewing...

Think about a hiring manager who is less conscious of his biases than Joel. Even if he professes not to care much about credentials, will it affect him unconsciously?
Ask HN: Anyone want to work through SICP together?
I've starting reading SICP but haven't been too good at keeping at it. Does anyone want to join in to help each other work through the exercises and stay on track?
Racist shit

To what, specifically, in his comment are you referring?