Learning to program now is easier than ever before.

Last week my partner was in Spanish class and the teacher told her that the most important languages to know in the future will be English, Spanish, and a programming language. Programming is the new literacy. She decided she wanted to learn to program. We opened up Terminal on her Mac laptop, typed "python", and used Mark Pilgrim's Dive Into Python as a guide. Done.

With a PC you at least have access to JavaScript (and Marijn Haverbeke's Eloquent JavaScript tutorial) which is more than suitable for a first language.

The first lecture in this series mentions that the discussion groups are also available via video. Has anyone found these?

The issue isn't about math. The opinion of anyone who's maintaining a profitable business should be given extra attention.

I don't agree with that. Running a profitable business doesn't automatically make your opinions on everything unusually worthy of consideration.

Perhaps it would be simpler to pass the interval modifiers as functional arguments:

  (def mapr (f x y . fs)
    (let r (range x y)
      (map f r
             (apply map + (map [map _ r] fs)))))

  arc> (mapr (fn (x y) (prn x " " y)) 1 3 [+ _ 10])
  1 11
  2 12
  3 13
  (1 2 3)

  arc> (mapr (fn (x y) (prn x " " y)) 1 3 [expt _ 2])
  1 1
  2 4
  3 9
  (1 2 3)

  arc> (mapr (fn (x y) (prn x " " y)) 1 3 [+ _ 10] [expt _ 2])
  1 12
  2 16
  3 22
 (1 2 3)

Pretty amusing experiment. The site doesn't seem to like pg's informal writing style.

Very cool website though. I need to use this on my blog posts.

would be nice to see a before and after of Paul Graham's essays - it would demonstrate how this site can "formalize" something informal :)

Nice post. The author's list at http://www.usnews.com/blogs/outside-voices-careers/2008/6/24... is great. I wish my workplace understood this, especially #3. Few businesses are ambitious enough to tackle #7.

As a hacker who's always been fascinated with multimedia applications I thought it was a perfect fit.

Just clarifying in case that didn't come through as I thought, that was sarcasm. It wasn't a bad post. :)

The sarcasm didn't come through, sorry.

Recently it seems like almost every post has a comment thread about how the post isn't hacker news... those threads end up being more annoying than the posts imho.

I've noticed that too. These comments are in the same category as people complaining about being downmodded; they don't make very interesting reading. Perhaps I should put something in the site guidelines about them.

Even more concerning to me is how frequently these "not hacker news" comments are added to posts that are off the beaten track (i.e. not about code, startups, and such) but which I find genuinely interesting. The last thing I'd want for this site is diminished diversity. I don't like the spam or bait posts either, but I'm glad you haven't cracked down on them in a way that triggers this other, imho more significant risk.

Edit: while I'm at it, the "not hacker news" noise belongs to a more general class that I've been training myself to tune out, which is the "meta hacker news" category. A bad day here is one in which there's more discussion of the site itself than anything else. And yes, I'm fully aware that I'm doing it right now. :) But I've been resisting it successfully for weeks...

Perhaps before posting any post that contains red flag words or phrases should require an additional confirmation:

This post contains words that suggest you are being boring. Are you being boring?

Strings that stick out: "belong.*on hacker" "doesn't belong" etc...

Interesting idea. Though of course the way to do it is to train a filter...

I can't wait to read a post on the use of Markov chains or Bloom filters to prevent boring posts.

If your Markov chain can plausibly generate the post - it's boring?

Please do. It's really getting ridiculous at this point.

Meh. I had really meant the above post to be a sarcastic satire of the 'this isn't hacker news' posts you all just mentioned. Sorry, I suppose it sounded different in my mind.

>Recently it seems like almost every post has a comment thread about how the post isn't hacker news...

Most of the ones I've noticed are on stories such as "entertainment celebrity x dies", "politician y does z unrelated to tech", or "OMG we're all going to die as soon as the economy collapses and we devolve into cannibalism and the last survivor is driven insane from Global Warming and kills himself".

I don't read every comment thread, but it's mostly those stories that I see "not Hacker News" on.

> "...they all screwed up lexical scoping."

I have read a number of comments like this recently. I am very curious about what this implies but the person making the statement never gives an explanation.

I can't wait to see the mascot/logo for SearchMonkey.

I seriously can't understand why two companies, Yahoo and Microsoft, with such a fetish for pointless pseudo-3D characters couldn't manage to come together as one.

Pics:

http://www.biancolo.com/jim/search_dog.jpg

https://login.yahoo.com/config/mail?.intl=us

In "Being Popular" you mention that the Dream Language has a "thin" manual with "lots of good examples to learn from." Can we look forward to a book on Arc?