skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
it's also relevant.

mac's come with sqlite3, python, a terminal, a decent developing environment (extra cd). it's probably not a big deal for windows folks to download languages and developing environments, too, to say nothing of ubuntu.

the web is a trove of treasure tutorials. open source and the web are thriving, the community is more inclusive and inviting than ever. more and more i run into artists, non-video game players, females, mechanical or electrical engineers and young folks discovering the joy of programming (arduino, processing, openframeworks, scratch and python are examples from recent interactions i've had).

video game consoles might be less programmer-inviting than they used to be, but they're also catering to a more varied and more expecting audience than they used to.
What about LÖVE? http://love2d.org/

It's really easy to program for; Lua is a language you can pick up without much effort. It's reasonably fast and built upon a few fairly ubiquitous libraries. Game distribution is easy (zip and change the extension to ".love").

Obviously it doesn't come pre-installed anywhere, but it's not hard to get. It would probably take a little work to make it run on game consoles, though, depending on how many of the libraries it depends on are already ported.
A Colorado school district does away with grade levels
Hi jfarmer, I love your blog and I am an avid reader though I wish you posted more.

I would recommend you take a look at http://mixpanel.com and I think you'll see it's exactly what you've been itching for.

Feel free to contact me and I can set you up with an account:
suhail[at]mixpanel[dot]com
Sure, but I think _why's point is less about availability and more about approachability. As a 10 year old playing with BASIC, it took me all of a day or two to begin writing my first text adventure game. A few weeks after that, and I was writing graphical interfaces.

Available tools are worth nothing if it's not painfully obvious how to make them do something interesting...and you have to remember that interesting is different today than it was when I started programming. I doubt today's 10 year old would be impressed by a text adventure...unfortunately...
Whoa, I love the sound of this as far as development process... But what really blew me away is: 3D Chat makes $1M/month? Really? Or did I find the wrong IMVU?
That seemed to the obvious answer to me. Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft aren't going to open up development on their consoles because they make money off of licensing fees.
I learned to program on my TI-83. Over the past few decades, computers have built more and more walls between typical users and programming, whereas on my calculator, it was right there... on a whim, I could, say, make a program to calculate the area of a trapezoid. At the time, if you asked me to do the same thing on a desktop computer, you'd be getting a blank stare.

Graphing calculators today are essentially the new programmer's playground that all computers were 20ish years ago.

Why seems to be making great progress toward reversing this change with Shoes and Hackety Hack, but I think the ultimate solution right now would be some sort of programming environment built into iPod Touches. (EDIT: Heh, I stopped reading before the end. I guess that was his idea too.)
I miss how difficult it is to get into graphics programming nowadays. DirectX and OpenGL have somewhat high learning curves for new programmers (especially kids). Even the "simplified" graphics libraries are usually OOPified and take some learning.

I miss the days of mode 13h!
Pfffft. You guys are smarter. :D
AHA! second link looks groomed for me.

Thankee!
Kindle and its model fits into this discussion somehow. Where's the itunes of publishing? I know it sounds silly to pay for something you'll read only once, but perhaps if it was cheap enough and super convenient.

Many of us would pay for Hacker News - is that because of the variety of news sources, the discussion, the community?
iphones kinda come with a 'how to program an iphone app' tutorial, where by come with i mean the internet. presumably most of the comments here are focused more on the existence of tutorials at all, not on implementation. still, the state of open api's is growing tremendously (twitter, facebook<--confusing as all heck but lots of tutorials, greasemonkey).

i don't get what people are talking about. maybe that's because i'm not a video game or linux nerd. i don't like c or assembler or l33t h4x0ring. i mean, i'm not very good at it. but in the past 2 years i've learned how easy it is to program and make things. wow--i can make a twitter app. wow--i can make a robot. wow--i can make a real website. there are so many opportunities that weren't available before, especially in the realm of tutorials and thoughtful introductions.
try scratch or alice for kids programming
try processing or openframeworks for graphics
Contraction Also Slowing in Non-Manufacturing Segment
Our eating habits are causing serious and pervasive health problems. For instance, life expectancy is several years lower than other rich countries. Increased demand for medicine due to overeating-induced disease is straining our economy, and is a serious point of political contention.

"Ruinous" may be an exaggeration, depending on how you interpret the word. But it's fair to say that overeating is a serious problem for society and the individual.
Define ruinous. They've destroyed our health, and turned our health care system into the laughing stock of the first world. We haven't fallen into anarchy yet if that's what you mean, but if so you're probably taking the original author too literally.
Not at runtime... This occurs at compile time by assigning to a variable of type Expression.

F#, like OCaml, supports proper quotation and allows you to create executable code, or ASTs, or both using metadata attributes that the compiler is aware of.
Well, I know that Heisenberg does not apply, except insofar as - no wait, you're right, it does not apply at all. Anyway, my point in a nutshell was that making energy analytics available to all might not help that much. After all, having information about how much energy we're using is not the same as being arsed enough to change our usage patterns, but the effort of gathering the additional information will definitely consume more energy. It may be a negligible amount for one person or even a household, but multiply that by all the people on the energy grid and I bet you'll have a significant number, no matter how sophisticated the technology.

I guess the question of whether such a project is ultimately worth the trouble comes down to the amount of energy that will be saved by the people (which my cynical nature inclines me to think will be a small minority of the total population) who care enough to actually alter their usage patterns for it versus the amount of total energy consumed by the project. Then again, the people who care, like yourself, are probably already careful about the amount of energy they consume, so my guess, though I hope I'm wrong, is that the nett effect of the project will be to increase overall power consumption.
Nice article... as Amish become more and more an urban people, farming can no longer be their only livelihood. As time rolls on it is interesting to observe which locales adopt new technologies, sometimes out of necessity.
today's 10 year old is probably writing a twitter script in python in 2 days.

as a non-video-game-playing female i didn't find programming approachable then, but i have found it approachable in the past 2 years. i can't speak for 10 year olds, though.

there are numerous improvements in the approachability aspect (scratch, alice, processing, arduino on the educational front). i suspect approachability had little to do with you success as a 10 year old. your argument is simply that BASIC was available when you were 10 and now you can't think of modern fun tools and fun tasks. letsmakerobots and instructables come to mind as good starting places.
> Also, MySQL has known fatal bugs in the production release so mysql isn't exactly a safe choice.

Outright FUD.
the fundamentals haven't changed; the gateway drugs are just different :)

php and rails tutorials, html, flash, even custom myspace profiles (for example) are the BASIC for today's kids. then you get your facebook apps, iphone apps, etc as you move up the food chain to more sophisticated languages.
How high does the quality have to be before the average user pays for it?
Google's Website Optimizer offers A/B and multivariate testing at https://www.google.com/analytics/siteopt/splash
I haven't used it personally, but it may be worth checking out.
Never mind arms, I just need enough muscle/neuron attachment to control 101 inputs! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_keyboard)
This is long overdue.

http://learninfreedom.org/age_grading_bad.html
Wait, was there supposed to be some content in there? That post was basically flamebait. You can sum up everything useful in there with news that's already made the rounds, "MySQL founders left Sun."
Yeah, I learned on my TI-89. Ironically, made a DnD character stat generator and a function to calculate the first 6 elements of an infinite series... (calc class was quite boring).

I abused the GOTO statement, though... hey, it wasn't like you were going to care about elegant code design at age 14 on a TI...
The reports of "raping and pillaging" during the Katrina crisis were vastly over exaggerated by the media.

http://www.reason.com/news/show/36327.html

I mean, the reporting was really over the top.
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That's not really true. They both do it so that they have the ability to relicense the code to their ends and defend any legal challenges against the code-base as a whole. If MySQL just wanted to be able to use the contributed code they could simply require that it be under a less restrictive license (BSD, MIT, etc.)
You can just cat the game on to the love executable, and package it together, so that people wouldn't need to download love, according to their docs.
You would lose the sequence of submissions, which is itself quite interesting information.
That's neat, but really, do you do heavy matrix and vector computations from your web application?
This actually kind of bring warmth to my heart, that CEO's trust their wives to hold their assets from them.
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I think this is a great idea, and there's a lot of weight behind it. In trying to teach my little cousin how to code one of the biggest blocks I faced was that there was nothing right at his fingertips to play with. I had to spend an hour or so getting him to install stuff, and by that time, he was disinterested.

What got me started was that in 10 minutes, I could have a program running on my TI 89 that did something cool, even if I never looked at it again. We need something like that for this generation that uses this generation's portable technology.
completely agree.. even building a basic html webpage hits a decent amount of his marks (transportable, improves connectivity, etc.)

is it so obvious that it was overlooked?
"Microsoft has a habit of not using its research for anything commercial"

Really? Looking at Wikipedia [1], I see at least 10 projects that have evolved into successful commercial endeavors. The most notable of which are in programming languages and graphics.

I also know of at least a few hush, hush projects which are currently evolving into commercial products or features.

Once again, I feel compelled to defend my slightly misguided employer. We try hard, we produce some great software and some crap software. The web only wants to remember the crap, but that's probably because you probably aren't a target customer for any of the great stuff.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Research#Research_pro...
Waledac Returns to Spread Malicious Love
The Waledac botnet is apparently using another upcoming holiday in an attempt to spread spam emails with embedded malicious links in a seemingly innocent Valentine's Day message.
Gmail can now add your location to your signature
http://adam.blog.heroku.com/past/2008/9/3/ddl_transactions/

"MySQL doesn’t support DDL transactions;"

Meaning you can't change the schema transactionally. InnoDB handles data transactions ok, but I hadn't realized that it doesn't handle schema changes. It seems like I'm always discovering some little nasty about Mysql when I am forced to use it.
I have an old MP3 player that has a volume control, play/pause and skip in the earbud wires that go to a 3.5mm jack (but the earbuds have a 4-conductor plug). Also, the 4-conductor 3.5mm doubles as the USB port for uploading songs to it. You can also use normal 3.5mm headphones with it, you just loose the volume control functions.
"the superficial impression is that they've mostly catched up to a decade-old commercial project"

I think that is pretty much where they are at. The hope is that it provides a solid base upon which to build.
The only person who has ever had that vision, consistently, is Alan Kay.

The Apple was programmable because it was made by hackers for hackers. There were a few firms that would do software consulting for corporations and institutions, but the notion of consumer software barely existed.

Apple didn't mind it if a few people wrote third-party software and sold it. But I think in the beginning they expected to provide all the important software themselves, just like every computer manufacturer of the era.
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European World Travel
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Blogging Hits Crossroads: A-Listers Giving Up
I remember when I first started using BeOS- it was version 3. My Brother purchased it at Best Buy, along with a copy of the BeOS Bible- I still have the BeOS Bible in storage. Fascinating history. I thought it was a great OS, but never had much use for it (I was in High School and primarily interested in PC games at the time).

The only other person I ever met that used BeOS was a guy that had bought one of their net appliances.
There's nothing simple about dating.
Reasons to put ads on your site that have nothing to do with revenue
Possibly, but PHP limits you to web-style interactions. You have to be excruciatingly clever to get it to act like a chat server or something. And forget about doing animation or sound or anything fun.
Ok, who else here has

HGR: HCOLOR=3:

burned into their corneas?
Seems like we agree, but what do you mean with "dating myself" ? :)
Quite possibly. When you submit something that's already been submitted, it counts as an upvote. So although things would fly off the New page too fast for most people to see most of them, interesting things would still get enough upvotes to get a toehold on the front page.
This whole thing forgets Aaron Greenspan, another Harvard alumni who has a claim on coming up with the concepts behind Facebook:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/01/technology/01facebook.html...
Tcl and Tk are pretty simple ways of getting started and putting something on the screen.
I've written in light detail about this in a few places; I'd be glad to share more. Here's an assortment off the top of my head. Feel free to ask anything else you'd like to know.

http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/2009/02/continuous...

http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/2008/11/five-whys....

http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/2008/09/new-versio...

http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/2008/12/continuous...
And, I speak as somebody who used to hand-compile SHAPE files on the Apple II. These were a sort of vector graphics which you had to first painstakingly draw on graph paper, unspool as a series of draw/turn commands, and then translate into bitmasks according to a lookup table, and then cut those up at seven-bit intervals, and convert those into decimal numbers. This is not something that anyone ever conceived of as a children's toy. Even though some kids (like myself) persevered.

Hm, I wonder if pg's concept of Languages For Smart People applies. Is it possible that kids just don't like kids' languages, like Logo and so on? I have to say that I certainly didn't, although I was exposed to it much later than Alan Kay would have preferred.
Khmerblock.com - myspace code,games,music,video,friends
khmerblock.com - play free games online,edit profile,design layout, music, video, blogs, photo, forums, polls, glitter text, make new friends and many more.
Yaw I was in the jobs industry. There's simplyhired.com and jobster.com ...

6-9 million uniques isn't really worth the funding any of them received, I don't think.

They didn't ask permission for the data any more than Google did. Scrape/index/refresh/repeat.
Agreed. It will reduce spam as well - startupnz.
> I don't know if you can tell someone today just getting interested in rap to listen to them and understand how different and new and unique they were. You almost have to listen to a ton of rap and then go back to the roots.

The first rap I ever heard was the album De La Soul Is Dead. I happened to hear some of it at a friend's house, and his big brother was kind enough to lend it to me. I just liked what I heard, but of course didn't analyze why.

In any case, I don't think there's any harm in even a new rap fan listening to "the classics". It helps them get on the right track. Learning to appreciate the classics should come naturally later on.
Our health care system is the "laughing stock" of the (industrialized) world because of the way it is funded and managed structurally. If we shook off the cartel of profiteering private insurers... well, maybe then we could attribute our problems to food.
All seems very subjective to me. The research, I mean.
Argentina around 2001 could serve as example.
This is a really good question- I wonder the same thing about Facebook.
Not quite:

MySQL GA release with known crashing bugs: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=380092

Comparison of MySQL and PostgreSQL releases: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=381899
Increased demand for medicine, straining medicare budgets, is a side effect of the increased availability of life-prolonging medications that weren't available to our parents; for instance, one of the largest pharmaceutical blockbusters of the last decade has been Lipitor, the market substitute for which was simply death.

It's a particularly lame, superficial argument to point out that overeating (or, in my opinion, the saturation of our diet with high fructose corn syrup and partially hydrogenated fats) causes health problems. Of course it does. Despite that, our life expectancy continues to increase.

Where's your evidence that it's lack of personal responsibility that is straining the health care system? From my vantage point, the problems we face are structural; we have a uniquely fragile and inefficient health care system, and --- what a coincidence --- a uniquely corporatized system of private health insurance funded by employers.
The BASIC of today is HTML/CSS/JavaScript.

Then there are things such as http://tryruby.hobix.com/ and processing.
Fully automated bisecting with "git bisect run"
I think approachability is absolutely key. Kids wrote programs on their Commodores, Ataris, and TI calculators because the environment was already setup. You could type in a few commands and instantly have something running (a program that solves the area of a triangle or one that plays a cool sequence of tones). There's only one editor and one language.

The majority of today's 10 year olds are not writing twitter scripts. It requires a significant amount of understanding and time to do so. You need to pick a programming language, install it, figure out how to write your program and how to execute it. The barrier is a lot higher than writing a program for your calculator during math class.

It'd be much easier for you to find people who wrote trivial programs on their Commodore when they were 10 than it would be to find 10 year olds who are writing python.
The problem is solved for email because MTAs and mailing list programs go through contortions, documented in a long series of RFCs and Internet-Drafts, to avoid loops.
Someone at MS cares:

MS Small Basic
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/devlabs/cc950524.aspx
Oh I didn't mean to imply it's a common need. But yes I do - in my case it really makes the difference between it being feasible and not-feasible.
I disagree with that (and with endtime below).

The reality is that we don’t know how many good stories are submitted by those people trying to boost their karma points. Nor do we know for a fact that finding good stories is easy. So by taking those points away the community would risk lessening its effectiveness.

In fact, I’d argue that’s the most likely outcome. In my experience people work more effectively when they are being rewarded for their actions. That in mind I’d consider it more likely that those chasing points are the ones submitting the best story. So taking away the points for submitting stories could deprive the community of some of its best conversation pieces.

I could be wrong but since there’s no way to prove that either way
I actually had my younger brother try this out, and it did what it set out to do very well - that is, it's very sandboxed, but at the same time gives you access to change certain things such as your desktop background, etc.

Pretty well done, at least in my opinion. The one problem is that there's really nowhere to go after that - if you stay with MS tech, it's far too large of a leap to build anything larger than what you can already accomplish with Small Basic.

Just my two cents. shrug
Open Source Resources
Second. Also, its kind of funy and very disturbing when researchers think they can analyze so complex a subject like differences in behavior in relation to wealth with such a small sample-size and with so many free variables. It illustrates a hubris that I am afraid has become far too common. Science is about asking questions and nowadays, researchers aren't asking enough of them.
I have this exact same problem. I don't forward traffic through SSH but I run a service that has almost 30 servers. Sometimes I have connections open to 10+ of them, sometimes (shudder) all of them. When my connection dies I want to throw my computer out the window.

I haven't read the comments here yet but hopefully someone will have at least a partial solution to save my sanity :)
Yeah, of course all of this is opinion. We can't know anything without data, unfortunately. I just think the community would be best served if people had something interesting to say about what they were submitting rather than just trying to submit something that appeals to the general audience here. I think that just has too mcuh potential to lead to gaming the system without giving anything back other than a link.