HN user
charlie@pickcode.io
(OP) In my post, I actually ask the question of whether a student would _want_ to interact with the tutor, not if the tutor is capable of providing good instruction. These are drastically different critiques.
I’ve been in the habit of emailing myself a lot, I’m excited to give this a try! I had thought of building this myself, so I’m glad I don’t have to :-)
I loved programming for Pebble back in the day. They actually had a pretty nice in browser IDE and IIRC their APIs were fairly well documented.
I remember making watch face bitmaps with paint!
Our customers are split between the US and Europe. There are a lot of decision makers in the process who need to approve a purchase at school, so things are pretty time consuming.
If you go to https://app.pickcode.io/lessons you can do some free Pickcode VL lessons without an account. Later this year we’ll probably add some Python or Javascript to that page too. URI storage would be neat!
Basically just a lot simpler. Replit has a million features (and AI ghostwriter) that in my experience are distracting for kids (I used to be a teacher and still tutor kids 1:1)
This post (just thinking of use of Unix tools within game software) reminds me of that bug a few years back within steam itself that accidentally deleted user’s root directories
Dark mode/light mode unreadability has bitten me a few times on sites of my own…
And it seems as though it’s happened to the best of us, more or less the entire YouTube iPad app is unreadable in light mode
Palantir is a classic example of what is a hybrid services => product business. It was a _very_ long road for them to get to a point where their product could actually scale without massive implementation effort, but I think they’re finally getting there (they offer a cheap self service option now AFAIK)
How does this compare to magnet? Magnet has worked well for me for years, although recently I was trying to clean up my menu bar and realized there was no way to remove the menu bar icon. I’ll ask for some advice on that here actually since there are some Mac experts, is there some terminal incantation to remove a menu bar item?
This is cool, and some of Demaine’s other work is amazing too.
https://erikdemaine.org/papers/Origamizer_SoCG2017/paper.pdf
^ provides an algorithm for generating any 3D solid via folding a 2D net (origami style)
Clarinet! I go to community band rehearsal every week and perform with them
The kind of follows the standard midwit meme progression one sees in programming as well
1. Making stuff is fun and goofy and hacky 2. Coding is formal and IMPORTANT and SERIOUS 3. What cool products and tools can I make?
I feel like this pattern probably happens in many fields? Would be fun to kind of do a survey/outline of how this works across disciplines
Yeah definitely worth fixing... This seems overall rather thoughtfully designed but that bug hurt
OK, I tried it out. First thing I did was type a website into the big bar at the top and got an upsell modal for an AI thing... I get the need to make money but this was not a good first experience for me
Curious to give this a try, how would you compare it to Arc? I used Arc for a while but eventually just ditched it for going back to chrome
(Also, landing page nit, but the kerning on the H1 is pretty wide, and the kerning in the wordmark is a bit tight IMO.)
CMD+z is one of the few keyboard shortcuts I'd recommend beginners learn on day 1, it's a very useful life skill IMO
Texts for minor logistics, phones for P0
That was a lot of bullet points, but doing more communication asynchronously is good. I have a small company so it’s obviously easy mode, but we got rid of slack and it’s been great.
Basecamp isn’t necessary though, Github discussions is a very decent answer for forums and discussions. It feels like things that go on in discussions are much more permanent and searchable, and can be tied to tickets, etc
Oh duh... well my question was not insightful but yes your answer makes sense, there are no bishops on the board lol
"Pawns may not be promoted to bishops;"
??????????
For real, I would absolutely love to know why that constraint was needed. Does anyone have info on why?
We recently replaced slack on our team with Github discussions and phone calls/texts for really timely P0 type stuff.
This seems like a similar idea with a nicer UI. I don’t really see a huge upside on the “feed” aspect, but this would probably be an improvement over slack.
After getting rid of slack I feel this huge weight lifted off me, and there are far fewer distractions for stupid shitposts and little status updates that frankly just aren’t important to look at more than once a day.
Is this using canvas graphics? I don't think I've ever seen that before for a modern web app. Reminds me of the Mac OS 9 in the browser demo. Can we get SnapCode running in there?
Just saw a demo of this last week. The most exciting use case was when multiple tags “programs” composed. For example, one program measures a value, passes that to one that accumulates values, and another that plots.
I think there is a very cool version of this where the primitives are simpler and easier to compose (the composition demo I saw was a bit difficult to pull off). Then, rather than program the purpose of individual tags, you can create programs physically on the table
The /s was omitted for comedic effect
I thought this looked pretty cool, and downloaded. Messed around with the demo for a second and hit CMD+s to save my thing somewhere and realized this was actually literally just a simple scratchpad. This will be my daily driver!
An 8 year old would set the Pickcode record by one year, no reason not to try!
The keywords are there on every line to make them easy to verbally read. This is most important in the case of set x = 7, the keyword makes it clear that we're trying to mutate a variable, not assert equality.
Even though technically we could make forward() a method at the top level in the context of a paint program, we chose to make things more OOPy to prepare them for later when students get to the 2D game engine and there can be multiple sprites to control.
Wow, thanks for all the feedback! I agree that expression level editing can get pretty cumbersome at times, it's the biggest design challenge in the editor I think. One thing we may add is a toggle to edit expressions in plain text and parse them back into the visual bubbles.
Re: the fact that syntax errors are possible: it is really really hard to make an editor where invalid states are impossible while trying to make expressions easy to enter. Scratch and other block languages do this by forcing you to write code in prefix order. I want to PLUS 2 and 3, vs in Pickcode where you write 2 + 3, and the expression is in an invalid state before you enter the 3. Rewriting 2 + 3 to 2 + (2 + 1) is really hard when you have to think in prefix notation. One advantage that we have is when there are syntax errors, they are necessarily at the expression level, so in the worst case the student can just scrap the line and start over, vs in plain text where the error message for a mismatched paren could land lines later.
Nice idea! Adding a ticket for it