cproctor

Same here. The recent examples of people finding it difficult to delete Facebook because of social logins to accounts on other sites reinforces how social logins lock you into a service.

Read Mindstorms (Papert, 1980).

This offers an interesting take on Moore's law.

And it's changing quickly. Here's the same statistic from the last 30 years:

1988–1994 54.9

1999–2000 64.1

2001–2002 65.6

2003–2004 66.5

2005–2006 67.3

2007–2008 68.3

2009–2010 69.2

2011–2012 69.0

2013–2014 70.7

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/2016/053.pdf

Finally, I broke 500! If you get your ship circling so that it appears briefly in each corner, you can get a nice stationary cloud of dots.

I feel bad for human customer service workers. It's already a job that demands a lot of emotional labor, without customers shouting "representative!" at them.

Have you seen the Runit Dome? https://goo.gl/maps/55YfnL15iWN2

It's mesmerizing to scroll around looking for circles in the ocean. And then to spend all night reading depressing wikipedia articles about past behavior of the US government.

This is an interesting thought experiment, but I imagine it having precisely the opposite effect. Modernism, as a technology, works precisely by making power relationships seem obvious, natural, and therefore not something subject to critique. These relationships include definitions of gender, race, and class, as well as capitalist and colonial relationships, and many more. Probably the most salient power relationship to this article is deciding who should benefit from the work of robots. Acting through computers amplifies this effect, and makes it easier to uphold oppressive power relationships while keeping one's hands clean.

I recognize that this is not immediately an empirical claim, but I will observe that discarding it offhand in favor of the equally ideological dominant interpretation would be exactly the dynamic I'm pointing out.

If you want to follow this idea further, I highly recommend Scott's "Seeing Like a State." It's an analysis of how states exert power by imposing legibility--insisting on having access and to measuring in certain ways. His thesis is that this legibility is actively corrosive to other properties that don't show up in the measurement. The book starts with an account of how 19th C European forestry managers imposed legibility on their forests in terms of lumber production, and ended up killing off everything but a monocrop, which then collapsed. Eventually he gets around to education, where it's pretty clear there are big externalities to the way we insist on measuring what happens in school. There are broader lessons here for the technocratically-inclined.

To put it in terms that might be more familiar around here, obsessing over finding the right partner is like believing that a successful startup is mostly about finding the right idea. (And from there, it will just work out on its own...) Sure, some ideas are more likely to work out a priori, but your success is going to be dramatically influenced by the amount of work you're willing to put into it, your willingness to learn, change, and grow along the way. I'm inclined to believe that there are tons of people with whom most of us could be compatible, and each would open onto a different future and a different version of you. If you want a long-term partner, choose someone who feels promising, bring all you've got--intellect, emotions, empathy, humility--to the relationship, and stick with it.

I wonder whether NSA uses syntactic watermarking[1], imperceptible changes to word order or sentence form, keyed to the user accessing a document. This, or other techniques of embedding a fingerprint in the text itself, would allow a leaker to be identified from just a transcription of the document.

What is the right amount of fuzzing for a news organization to perform on leaked documents, to protect a source while providing credible evidence to support a claim?

Meral, H. M., Sevinc, E., Ünkar, E., Sankur, B., Özsoy, A. S., & Güngör, T. (2007, February). Syntactic tools for text watermarking. In Electronic Imaging 2007 (pp. 65050X-65050X). International Society for Optics and Photonics.

ingenuousness? English is such a mess!

Beautiful, and looks thoughtfully-designed. I'm looking forward to seeing this develop. One bug: In "Distributions", when you add several different values, they are graphed in lexical order, not numerical order: -5, 104, 12, 8.

I bet it would look really cool to have 3D primitives that can be oriented with respect to the time dimension. So for example, a spherical primitive would be a circle that grows and shrinks as frames progress.

Oops. I thought this might be an attempt at rapprochement with their janitorial staffs. Perhaps the wrong nomenclature for our new era.

Vue looks great; a good move away from jQuery's low-level imperative paradigm, and I would definitely recommend it to an intermediate student interesting in leveling up. However, having taught middle-school CS for two years, I disagree with the author's assertion that it would be easier for beginners to learn.

Beginners want to make something happen. Like making alert windows pop up or (oooh!) modifying the text on a page. For these kinds of things, you actually don't need to know any of the underlying mechanisms. You just need to know that you put an id attribute on the thing you want to mess with and match it in the script. Similarly, throw the script at the bottom of the body, tell them to keep it there, and dispense with $(document).ready(). I haven't done the research (yet), but my experience tells me it's best to start people off somewhere in the middle of the ladder of abstraction, high enough that you can do something interesting right away, but low enough that you have some sense of the mechanism.

For beginners, brevity contributes to simplification. I used to write explanatory comments in scripts I gave my students. But their eyes don't parse the comments effectively, and therefore they perceive the comments as extra complexity. For this reason also, I would stick with jQuery.

But I'd love to find out. Anyone teaching intro CS who has time to run a comparison?

So set up your own camera next to the state camera, and diff the results. There's your list of VIP plates.

How is this different from "casting out tens," or just checking the accuracy of the digit in the ones place?

I just had a look at the information Google has been keeping on me, and noticed that when I visited the visitor center for Zion National Park earlier this year, there was a photo of my car's license plate was associated with the event. Any ideas what's going on here?

I agree that becoming a professional requires socialization and sustained practice. I intentionally left the scope of the question open, but am most interested in approaches that help move people from being novice users to being literate: able to accomplish their own goals using programming (at a hobby level) and reason thoughtfully about programs.

There are a huge number of ed-tech apps and products being developed with the intention of "teaching X to code," but they mostly seem to fit into a taxonomy of approaches that was already in place 30 years ago. Approaches such as interfaces where syntax errors are impossible (Scratch), toy worlds that present puzzles to solve (Karel the Robot), or full-power programming languages that are fundamentally oriented toward teaching by providing graphical feedback on program execution state (Swift).

I'm curious about others' sense of what's really new, but am not very interested in saying novelty is good or bad as compared to working on a previously identified approach. I thought Bret Victor's DBX talk (http://worrydream.com/dbx/) was an interesting exploration of this space.

Turtle is also part of Python's standard library. Re-implementing geometric puzzles we already solved in Scratch works well as a transition to Python for my seventh graders.

I'm a middle-school CS teacher; the woodshop teacher and I have been collaborating on using a Shakeoko at our school. It works great!

http://burks.girlsms.org/maker/?p=115

I like when I'm on a run thinking about adding something to my website, and then I get home to find that very feature, nicely implemented, posted on HN! (Also, as a former English teacher, I can't resist pointing out a typo: "(Explanation: The value of deta-purplecoat-toggle must match the value of data-purplecoat to make this all work.)"

I remember playing with Logo 18 years ago too. My 7th grade students just had their second day of Python, after working with Scratch during 6th grade. Turtle is part of the Python standard library--makes for an easy transition. If you're interested in educational technology and haven't read Papert's Mindstorms, it's inspiring.

A note on 3: It's not really a dichotomy between communication skills and content knowledge. Pedagogical content knowledge builds on content knowledge--it's about knowing the structure of knowledge--the paths different learners will take through ideas, the common misconceptions and the examples that will resolve them, the ability to infer the shape of a learner's web of ideas, and knowing your way around the content knowledge well enough to offer something just beyond what the student has considered, but which is close enough that she can make the leap and thereby add it to her web.

I'm a middle-school Computer Science teacher at an all-girls' school where CS has been promoted to a core subject. And a software developer.

I don't see much substantial disagreement between the OP's post and the comments here--she's basically making three points:

1. The (secondary) education system's role is to show students how to engage with the field, not tailor their training to the specifics of a job posting. It's more important that students be able to pick up new paradigms than it is that they know any particular language.

2. Education is iterative. It's ok to learn something that fudges the details or that's not a best practice if it means you're making things now. We all return to domains of knowledge with finer granularity when we need it.

3. Content knowledge is important for teachers, but their expertise is in pedagogical content knowledge--the knowledge and skills of how to productively open a domain to new learners.

Do we disagree about any of these? Sure, there's some unnecessary heat in the post. But that's true of the comments here too. I wish some folks here were able to bring more introspection and empathy to conversations about education (yielding insights about who they are as learners, and how others are different). And I wish we stopped dumping on teachers as the source of all our problems (let's talk more about why this is happening later...), so teachers didn't have to feel resentful and defensive in public fora.

If you're interested in CS education and you haven't spent any time in a classroom/after school club/coder dojo, I'd invite you to come get some firsthand experience. I teach in Palo Alto, come on over...

I can't help recalling a post here a couple of years ago about the concept of "hellbanning" scammers on ecommerce sites--in short, making it look like everything is going fine, while actually isolating them completely from your business logic. Orders with stolen cards appear to go through, and send confirmation emails, but no real order is generated... In this case, you could transparently poison the results served to identified scrapers with 5% bogus vulnerabilities.

Or is that about as ethical as spiking trees to prevent illegal logging?

I won!

Nobody reads Joyce anymore.

It seems to have inadvertently collected North America.