$ epio upload -a appname. epio is epio for Django.

I'm in. How do we coordinate? http://convore.com perhaps?

I seriously think we could just do it on HN threads...

There are feature-y-er places to do it, but this place actually works.

I agree. I'm superstitious about origins. When something spontaneously happens at location X it's good to let it continue to evolve there. I say we stay where the party started. We can post occasionally and nobody who's uninterested need look at it. I also confess to tasting sweet irony in the idea of turning HN to more productive use. I feel like I've finally got my enemy in a corner. (The internet has never stopped me from working, but man has it stopped me from learning. But I digress.)

As for what book: "Linear Algebra and its Applications" by Strang does sound like a good fit for hackers. I was convinced by this review: http://www.amazon.com/review/R289C7K1TN2RO2/ref=cm_cr_pr_per.... Some cheaper copies are available on Abebooks.

There's a case to be made for the other Strang, but again - origins are magic, so unless there's a compelling negative I say we stick with tptacek's original inspiration.

How many times have I seen an ad hoc thread that people would just hit reply-all to converted into a mailing list. Instant community killer.

All of that sounds good—count me in.

Should we wait a week before starting so people can get their hands on the text?

I'm in. Got the 3rd ed. while waiting for the shipment of the 4th (possibly long wait). Let me know if you're in a similar situation.

So do we post our answers and get downvoted if wrong? (and sometimes anyway)

It's hard to beat an elegant site like this that we're already registered for, but I'm having trouble visualizing matrices in this markup.

  [ 1 0 0 ]
  [ 0 1 0 ]
  [ 0 0 1 ]

OK, worth a shot.

It may be good to hide solutions behind a pastebin link, rather than directly including them in a comment & spoiling things.

I'd think we'd mostly be saying "I liked this" or "I didn't understand that", not so much quizzing. But I don't know, never done this before.

Can always link pictures to threads if ASCII gets too hard.

As long as we don’t need to use MathML. I can’t spare an hour and a half to construct each post.

I think old threads get locked (can't post new comments) relatively quickly on HN which would make it tough, it would involve making new posts and expecting everyone to find the new one. (Feel free to correct me on the locking thing)

Once in a blue moon I go back and find hanging replies to my comments, so I'm pretty sure these things stay alive for weeks, which is as long as we'd need them to.

Works for me. Book acquired.

Convore wouldn't be a bad idea for coordination and meeting. How about it ?

Scala ticks all those boxes. http://www.scala-lang.org/

“Programmers should not be puzzle-minded… We would be much better served by clean, systematic minds, with a sense of elegance.” - Edsger W. Dijkstra

(http://portal.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id=1787249&type=htm)

One of my favourites is Hiroyuki Kojima's "Manga Guide to Calculus" (http://nostarch.com/mg_calculus.htm). It probably can't get much more informal and it's actually quite entertaining.

It somehow manages a decent balance of being fun without slipping into being trivial.

Someone anonymously sent me a copy of this. I still don't know who. Was it you? :)

Nope. Quite odd. :)

That doesn't quite sound right. The only premise I'd imagine in which it could be correct is to describe one as an "evolution" of the other.

While we can complain and fuss about incidents like this one, I doubt there's much to gain. I don't expect there'll be a significant change in public opinion till there is a sufficient number of positive stories to counterbalance the negativity.

Less than a decade ago, when most people thought about "China", the first thought that popped into their heads was probably "cheap counterfeit goods". It's clear that things have changed since then.

Until we have a balance of positive stories, I fear we're stuck with this. Time to get moving and add to the positive stories about Nigerians.

#2 - Perhaps a reasonable starting point would be improving the look of the project's documentation.

I remember the Haskell community actually sat down and had a community discussion about laying down design guidelines for the entire Haskell ecosystem (all packages should use so and so a color scheme, this is our logo, this is our font, etc.). I find Haskell sites almost always aesthetically pleasing, and it was probably due to conscious decision by the community to establish design standards.

I think OSS in general could benefit from giving a designer such broad-brush authority over an entire ecosystem.

I actually do programming in Scala and I'd have to disagree. While there's the freedom to build a "type castle", you don't have to. For the most part Scala gets things right.

When you do need/want to get fancy with types, you get some of the best tools out there to do it.

I'm guessing everyone wants a personal Watson now.

Might as well include a few machine learning packages:

PyML: http://pyml.sourceforge.net/tutorial.html

Monte: http://montepython.sourceforge.net/ http://learning.cs.toronto.edu/~rfm/montepython/monte.pdf