I've hacked on this interpreter some, it's pretty nice to read! It implements a very limited subset of JavaScript, something like ES3.
I'd be really interested to hear about other similar implementations of JavaScript in JavaScript. I stopped working on https://github.com/thomasballinger/hotswapping-js-interp#js-... partially because copying the state of the interpreter was relatively slow. I'd be interested in implementations that would handle this better by using a more bytecode-like VM or immutable data structures.
I feel similarly about autocomplete (particularly the "best way to learn Python" bit) and suggest Python users looking for autocompletion similar to zsh at the command line pip install bpython (which I work on).
I'm not sure if it's just me, but I couldn't find a list of shortcut keys in the documentation and I kind of went back to IPython. I think half of it is that the F1 key was bound to help in the terminal, so I couldn't look with that, but you may definitely want to add something to the site to list keys and features.
Great point, particularly relevant to autocompletion: IPython magics are tab completable and therefore more discoverable than bpython special keys. Real quick, they're emacs-style readline keys but with ctrl-r for undo. F1-F10 do things too.
The F1 issue with GNOME terminal is frustrating, I agree a cheatsheet-style help page on the site would be good. I've been meaning to do this for a while and might finally get time to work through backlog next week :)
The page you linked technically has all the information I need, but it's hidden among emacs-style movement commands and is a bit cumbersome to read. Consider something like:
* F8 - Upload current session to pastebin.
* F6 - Reimport everything.
* F5 - Watch imports and re-run entire session if one of the imports changes.
That would both showcase these fantastic features (I didn't know about them until right now when I tried to write this comment), and allow me to try them right away in the bpython interpreter I have just installed.
I had spotted a very nice hotkey that takes you to the source of the function that was being autocompleted but I can't find it again on that page. That's how bad the current page is :P
How do you find this in practice? I mention this in the 3rd footnote of the post, but didn't have much to say about it because I haven't used it myself. The one person I've talked about this says it's rather awkward right now because Swift doesn't provide great tools for working with these objects.
Another facilitator here - I'm two weeks behind in responding to emails asking for feedback after being rejected, but I'm getting to them soon, and appreciate that folks are asking.
Would you send a note to admissions@hackerschool.com with the email you used on that application so we can sort that out? We certainly don't mean to ignore any applications, and if you didn't hear back by the date stated on the app when you applied, I'm sorry about that and I would like to figure out what happened.
I just searched all our applications from our past four batches (our first two batches didn't have a formal application), and we never got an application from anyone with your email address. I also did queries on your first and last names and didn't find any matches.
Maybe you're confusing us with a different program (or could you have applied with a different name)?
Very odd. I could have used a different email, but I can't imagine having used a different name. I just went back to the application page and went through it to test and make sure it did a submission after just filling out one page of stuff. I do clearly remember both the questions and the look of the thanks for applying page. Given you just went through the DB, though... I don't know.
Either way, I'm clearly not the deomographic your program is looking for. There is another program with a different tuition model that I was really pursuing. That's the one I had really pinned my hopes on.
I get exactly this with white noise, subtle chime sounds on a pentatonic scale. It made me want to do the realtime frequency analysis to see if I wasn't imagining it.
I don't think it's a stretch though to call this "need-based aid for women" as Nick does in the post. The term is often used in this way by traditional educational institutions.
I felt very fortunate to have the money lying around to take three months off of work to attend Hacker School, and I imagine there is a large pool of entirely qualified candidates who are financially unable to make this work (several of them posted on HN last time around). If we assume happening to have the money socked away and being a passionate hacker are a bit independent, then this need-based aid for women will increase the number of entirely qualified women who are able to attend. This is the right, least-artificial way to "[encourage] the community of women programmers to apply to Hacker School on their own," as is possible for an organization that doesn't happen to run a k-12 educational program or other major institutional social change agent.
Although 5k for three months will modify the incentive structure, it's less than the average American income for that period, and your living expenses are going to increase if you're moving to NYC unless you're coming from Paris or similar. The only expected changes in the applicant pool are qualities I don't give a lick about, having to do with educational loans, having a job that can be done remotely for a few days a week, having money saved up, or personal financial conservatism (willingness to spend money on an unknown 3-month commitment). From what I've observed, Nick, Dave and Sonali are 100% about maintaining the excellent quality of people in their program, and I trust they will ensure that financial aid for women in no way undermines that.
This hopefully will "artificially inflate" (what wouldn't be artificial? just waiting until the problem is solved by someone else?) the number of women applying, some of whom will be accepted and hopefully become better hackers, contributing in a small way to fixing the problem. Should more drastic steps be taken at a primary / secondary / college education level to attempt to "organically" grow the community of women programmers? Sure, and I'll continue to vote for elected officials who say they'll try to fix this as I always have, but in the meantime the Etsy scholarships are trying to make concrete progress growing that community right now.
Thanks James - I remember reading that comment three months ago and being encouraged by it to apply, and it's been a stupendous experience so far.
I was one of the lonely programmers Nick describes in the post - it's been fantastic to spend so much time with so many people I now hold in such high esteem.
I'd be really interested to hear about other similar implementations of JavaScript in JavaScript. I stopped working on https://github.com/thomasballinger/hotswapping-js-interp#js-... partially because copying the state of the interpreter was relatively slow. I'd be interested in implementations that would handle this better by using a more bytecode-like VM or immutable data structures.