dfield

There is truth in comedy. Reading this convinced me to take a nap after working for 36 hours straight. I think it has merit.

Last summer, I had the privilege of attending a talk by Mark Pincus at Startup2Startup. One of the tips he gave that really resonated with me was to "gamify everything."

For example, if users have to enter information to make your service more usable, give them a progress bar. In general, let the user "grind" - give them small, repetitive, mindless actions that are easy to accomplish and give instant, positive feedback. Above all, make the experience simplistic enough that they know what to focus on but interesting enough that they don't leave.

Reputation systems that have an effect in a community can also make people come back. Just look at HackerNews ;)

Pretty sure it's just seed content...

In my opinion, this is an excellent article because of the attention given to both Schmidt's remarks and the reporter's individual insights. Wired could have easily misquoted / twisted Schmidt's words, as seems to be the practice these days, yet instead the reporter included Schmidt's corrections in the piece. Very objective reporting. Can all articles be like this?

I like it... maybe you can improve the difficulty of your AIs some?

I used Alice to start off a beginning programming class at the high school level. It worked great - they got really into it and loved to make things. I think it helped my students' programming intuition as well as retain some of the girls who were very hesitant about taking the class.

In case you didn't catch it, that Colbert Report video was taken in January, 2008. Even back then, he totally nails what is happening in Iran right now.

So, taking the contrapositive: The better you communicate, the worse you program? I don't think that's true at all. In fact, in my opinion, the mark of a truly great programmer is someone who can talk about his or her code.

Google had a neat feature related to this in implementation but not goal since 2007ish. It was called Google Datasets and let you mail in a hard drive. Google would then host the data on the web. It's audience was purely academic, though... no money exchange involved.

Anyway, it got cut back last Fall. Cool to see it's still living on in some form.

If the attacker wanted my password that bad, they would be at my house and I wouldn't be on HackerNews.

As long as HackerNews hashes my password with a semi-modern algorithm, I'm fine. Storing in plaintext / something that can be decrypted is not cool, but sha1 is alright by me.

This looks awesome, Alexis! What a great idea.

I'm a high school senior right now and attribute my success in high school to a dual enrollment program I've been taking advantage of. Basically, I worked it out so that for the past three years my education is supplemented by college math classes. I've also been interning over the past year at a well known company in the tech sector. It's been a lot of work, but it has also paid off. I've learned a ton and haven't gotten bored. When things get dull in regular high school classes (basically when I go to class), I do homework or program.

If I hadn't done the dual-enrollment program, I would have probably taken the proficiency exam and gone to a community college. Instead, I'm graduating with the rest of my class and going to an Ivy League university. I can't emphasize how great dual-enrollment is.

Olin is a great school. Just be cognizant of their admissions process; it is very thorough.

As in limited PR/Marketing tickets. They want developers there.

Correlation does not imply causation ;)

A really fun one that will be going on soon is Startup Weekend. Here's the URL: http://sf2.startupweekend.com/. It's from April 3rd to 5th.