Hacker News comments are assigned reading for UC Berkeley CS 10 course

Scratch is a good introduction to programming concepts, regardless of age. How fortunate for your sixth grader; if such courses were common in earlier grades, a course like this could start with more challenging material.

This is not an EE class, it's an intro CS class, one that's not for those with prior knowledge who know they'll choose CS as a major. This kind of course can get new people interested, those who didn't think they'd like or could do CS. Even if they don't major in it, by taking this one course, they know more about an important part of what makes our world work.

CS50 at Harvard College [0] is also a very large, popular course that gets more people interested in CS as a major but is also useful to those who don't take another class. It also starts with Scratch though it switches to other languages very quickly and appears more challenging overall than this course.

[0] https://cs50.harvard.edu

I don't see why. n-gate sometimes makes reasonable points, but not usually. Even when it does make a good point it is rarely of any help to anyone who wants to learn about something concrete like algorithms.

>N-gate said it's just an app that makes you creepy because you stalk your family and your best friend.

It's not just n-gate, I think Monica is creepy as all hell. Keeping in touch with my best friends and family is texting, chatting, and calling each other once in a while. Putting them on a "CRM to manage" is like using LinkedIn for my personal life.

Then the whois info for a given domain must vary from region to region. Here is what I see:

$ whois n-gate.com Domain Name: N-GATE.COM Registry Domain ID: 3552897_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.gandi.net Registrar URL: http://www.gandi.net Updated Date: 2017-12-30T01:40:58Z Creation Date: 1995-05-21T04:00:00Z Registry Expiry Date: 2018-05-22T04:00:00Z Registrar: Gandi SAS Registrar IANA ID: 81 Registrar Abuse Contact Email: abuse@support.gandi.net Registrar Abuse Contact Phone: +33.170377661 Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited https://icann.org/epp#clientTransferProhibited Name Server: A.NS.SCIOPS.NET Name Server: D.NS.BUDDYNS.COM Name Server: E.NS.BUDDYNS.COM DNSSEC: unsigned URL of the ICANN Whois Inaccuracy Complaint Form: https://www.icann.org/wicf/ >>> Last update of whois database: 2018-02-12T21:55:31Z (+legalese...)

I don't get this whole 'creepy' thing. I remember chat was creepy. I remember interacting with any stranger on the 'world wide web' was creepy. And then of course we had 'weird' (which usually just meant creepy without direct social implications), which applied to us nerds having a digital calendar and a pocket computer.

Almost everyone I know uses tech to augment their relationships, whether by keeping a gift list, putting birthdays on their calendar, checking friends' fb feeds, etc., and while I perfectly understand discussions about the (negative) consequences of all this, it really irks me how there's some kind of magical 'line', obviously right where the deemer deems it to be, beyond which something is creepy.

On a more personal note: for people like me, the help of tech, including something like Monica, can really have a positive effect on the relationships I have. Chat, gaming forums, and places like here offer me a degree of social interaction that has no real world equivalent. Gaming basically saved my life, back in my lonely teen years. And yet throughout my life I've often felt vaguely or outright ashamed about all this, because of people calling these things creepy for, what appears to me, no reason other than that it is different from what they know.

Let's not forget 'coffee shops' and 'books' were going to be the end of our society too!