SMUSH Kickball

June 5, 2013

Hogwarts for Hackers:

Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy

AURORA, ILLINOIS — As a teenager in the early 90s, Peter Chu was obsessed with an online game called DikuMUD. He spent countless hours playing this Dungeons-and-Dragons-like computer creation, but playing wasn’t enough. He wanted to understand how the game worked and, more importantly, change the things he didn’t like about it. As luck would have it, DikuMUD was open source software, so he was free to download the code that underpinned the game and start hacking it — and that’s what he did.

The program was written in C — a language he didn’t know — and he didn’t really have much experience with any kind of programming. But he was in an environment where he had the time and resources to teach himself. He was a student at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, IMSA for short, a public live-in high school with a unique approach to education. Every Wednesday at IMSA, students are free to work on whatever they want — to follow their particular passions through self-directed study, internships, or other projects. Chu used his Wednesdays to hack DikuMUD.

“I had to learn what the programming language was, learn what a compiler was,” he remembers. “I found books on it and talked to upperclassmen. But basically had to learn it on my own.”

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The Great Defriending of Facebook

Facebook is changing. Surely you've noticed. Your best friends are getting buried beneath memes; your mom is getting pushed aside by image spam. Your social graph is becoming secondary to your interest graph.
Worried about competitors like Tumblr and Twitter, and urgently in need of new revenue flow following its rocky IPO, the biggest social network in the world is drifting away from its social core.
Say hello to the new Facebook. You won't find many people here. But you will find a lot of trash.