hardmath123

Another thing: you get lots of interesting results for names, such as http://quiztionary.com/search?q=thomas

What bothers me is how you can find a lot of common words with many contrived definitions listed: things like "dog: a member of the genus Canis (probably descended from the common wolf) that has been domesticated by man since prehistoric times", "table: a piece of furniture having a smooth flat top that is usually supported by one or more vertical legs", etc. I really hope there aren't any schools making kids memorize these definitions.

My first thought was that these might be sets for English language learners, but the language used in the definitions generally uses a pretty diverse vocabulary. I doubt it's meant for beginners.

In particular, they use the BJC (Beauty and Joy of Computing) curriculum (http://bjc.berkeley.edu).

(5-year Scratch veteran here.)

Even though Blockly (and it's predecessor, "App Inventor") is made by Google (the great and the powerful), I have to say, I would rather be introduced to code by Scratch than by Blockly. Scratch is much simpler-looking, it has a beautiful interface, and (most importantly) it has one of the friendliest communities in case you need help or want to show off a project.

Yeah, Marpa is quite amazing—it inspired me to build nearley. It's probably more powerful than any other parser generator out there right now (and the fastest, because it has Leo optimizations and Aycock-Horsepool nullables). In fact, Kegler responded to this same article with http://jeffreykegler.github.io/Ocean-of-Awareness-blog/indiv...

Shiny! It's like a mature Club Penguin.

I don't normally use Github's search. Most of the time, it's a Google search such as `python markov chain github' and get lots of Github links. Perhaps you should try to optimize that, instead?

The best part is how the server-side code is barely over 100 lines. <3 nodejs.

This is great! The hardest part about writing is getting started, and many times it's hard to come up with a non-cliche, interesting introduction. I wish our English teacher taught stuff like this.

http://github.com/Hardmath123/nearley -- A (rather powerful) JS parser generator. I lost interest in optimizing it; all the papers on optimizing Earley parsers are intimidating… I'd be really grateful if someone could either explain them to me, or even go ahead and implement them.

On my browser (Safari), pressing arrow keys scrolls, making the game really hard to play. You should be able to `event.preventDefault()` or something to prevent scrolling.

I'm a high schooler/coder, but I like to think of myself as a hacker. I dropped by to make the case that being in the software industry and being a 'hacker' are not correlated very strongly. The hacker culture revolves around code because the culture likes code, but the culture itself has a deeper significance than the ability to make a photo-sharing site or something. See http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/meaning-of-hack.html

Anyhow, for the sake of adding to discussion: I browse HN for the interesting links, especially reading others' blogs, and the distinct lack of memes you find on other link-sharing sites like Reddit.

Usefulness of SSL aside, is anyone else terrified that Google can essentially dictate what it wants developers to do, with low search rankings as the penalty for not following them? In my opinion, this sets a scary precedent.

I wanted to mention that you can install Scratch 2.0 offline—it runs as an Adobe Air app. See http://scratch.mit.edu/scratch2download/

The offline editor also lets you import extensions, which means that if you're adventurous, you can hook up Scratch to your NXT, your Arduino, your LEAP Motion, your Sphero, your Kinect, anything. That should be pretty exciting for new coders. A friend of mine's speaking about this at the Scratch conference now-ish.

Amazing. Japanese culture is the only one I know of where suicide is encourage and respected—is there any reason for that?

You don't want to end up with a circular structure…

Pressing 'up' scrolls up (on Safari/OSX, at least), making the game far more impossible… :(

Music! Build playlists that help you get through tough times. My personal favorites are classic rock like Stairway to Heaven ("If there's a bustle in your hedgegrow, don't be alarmed now / It's just a spring clean for the May queen"), Bach (in particular, WTC pieces), and instrumental jazz (Miles Davis is really uplifting). Find songs where the lyrics mean something special to you, and listen to them. Sometimes it helps you look at the big picture, and sometimes it makes you feel like you're not alone. Either way, it's uplifting. :-)

I've been hacking since I was 10, and I started off with Scratch <scratch.mit.edu>. It's visual programming, and it has a remarkable zero-to-sixty time. I've run a couple of Scratch events, and I've had kids come in cold (no coding experience at all) and code pong in 2 hours flat.

And Scratch has a great community.

Aww, c'mon, it's not that hard… npm's a really nice package manager.