skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Where are the decent elearning platforms?
Hi guys,

I'm working on a small startup to deliver training courses to a niche market via an online learning portal.

I'm trying to avoid writing my own platform (yak-shaving) and have been looking at all the existing learning management systems (LMS) both open source and commercial.

In general, they are all rather bloated and ugly. I'm after something fairly slick and simple to just manage users, deliver lessons via slides, screencasts, quizzes and discussion forums etc.

Surely someone has attempted the 37Signals of elearning? Although, I suspect that's not what sells in this overcrowded market.

Do you know of a nice option I might have missed or been through this yourself?

Thanks so much!
New Antifreeze Molecule Isolated in Alaska Beetle
I don't think most vegans/vegetarians delude themselves that they're not doing any harm through their consumption, but rather are content to be doing less harm.

Anyway, still a fascinating article if for nothing else than the sophistication of plant behavior it highlights.
That's one of the best arguments for accessibility (and the associated host of issues like semantic HTML and Javascript). Sometimes things you do in the name of accessibility will bring other benefits.

I read an interesting analogy in an article (which I have since lost and so cannot give credit) about accessibility: Oxo, the kitchen tools company, started by designing tools for people with arthritis. Having designed tools with nice soft rubber grips and large handles, they discovered that non-arthritic people really liked the tools as well, and now Oxo is sold at your local Target (and they are probably raking in cash).
As someone else pointed out the Church holds that the right to live is greater than the right to [individual?] ownership of property. This has some interesting consequences which I'll enjoy meating out with friends in the Church in the next few weeks - very apposite.

Begging, agreed. Though when I look at it hard and consider that begging demands the poor to give up their dignity then it reinforces in me that we should endeavour not to leave people in a position where it is ever necessary.

I think just the fact that so many are now considering the position of the poor facing moral choices of theft or starvation makes this an excellent sermon.
A proposal only an insurance company could love.
Ruby is pretty poetic
Woz discusses both of these toward the end of his biography "iWoz" - which is a great read.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393061434?ie=UTF8&tag=...
It doesn't. It does shield shareholders. Sharesholders control what a company does, by choosing its directors, so if they are made responsible for a company's misdeeds, they'll have an incentive to police it.
What sort of harm, though? Instead of the (arguably renewable) leather windbreaker, now you're pumping oil out of the ground to do it with synthetics.
Twitter needs to be off-the-charts profitable...eventually.

In the meantime, ordinary profitability would relieve a lot of pressure to optimize for the short term in order to raise money.
Personally I don't think that we should link to articles like this. The whole point of these types of articles is to generate controversy and draw page hits, by directing more traffic to these articles we are just supporting the practice.
I do this too, and it's very convenient. Especially if you have multiple websites.

I actually put the rsnyc command in a Makefile so I can update by typing `make`.

I have a folder in my ~ directory which contains a folder for each of the remote machines I work with. I can update any remote machine by going into its folder and typing `make`.
Dear Steve: all I want for Christmas is a Mac OS my kids can use
Begging in public is a crime in many jurisdictions, though one that tends to result in simply being chased off by the police rather than arrest. I don't think anyone is morally required to lie down and die if they've exhausted all legal avenues for basic survival.

Indeed, the cost to society of someone dying from starvation/exposure (in terms of autopsy, administration and other expenses) would seem to be quite a bit higher than the economic loss of some food. So I would suggest that stealing sufficient food for survival (rather than for profit) is more morally acceptable than passively dying.
talk to markbao founder of classleaf.com
(1) CSS frameworks work whether or not client disable Javascript.

(2) Many of the problems this article's thesis lays out with CSS are solveable server-side, by preprocessing CSS.
The new one is much better. Clear and crisp. The top one looks like someone played around with Photoshop. Reminds me of the beginning of the web when it was popular to render 3D logos.
This whole idea is creepy as hell - someone from threadless just says it's "serious" and refuses to give any details as to who these people are or why they want to suddenly play net-nanny. In the meantime, here's a handful of cash for whoever decides to play big brother. It's a bad thing to start, and a bad thing to encourage.
International tax law begs to be hacked. It doesn't feel very rational due to the conflict of national interests.
First you speculate that salt was not easy to find:

> The fact that we like it so much, as with sweets,
> suggests that it was hard to find.

Then you claim salt was abundant:

> With salt it's possible to eat too much: that makes us
> feel bad. That suggests that salt was abundant,
> otherwise we wouldn't need the counter system.

Which is it - according to your speculative theories,
was salt abundant or not?

Your speculation on sweet being difficult to find is also
nothing more than (poor) speculation. The link I provided above
is just one example showing that fruit WAS abundant, as regardless
of what those creatures were, fruit was easily accessible.

It amazes me how much people use "evolutionary theories" to
speculate about just about anything to reach just about any conclusion.
As soon as you need to embed an image of the chart in a pdf you may run into issues with these libraries.
Good point - though I was specifically thinking about tech startups/companies in general. I've long since given up on working for companies whose bread and butter does not revolve around my work (e.g. IT departments at non-tech companies)... it's a recipe for abuse precisely for the reasons as mentioned above.
F, Lacks Conclusion, See me
Exactly my thought. Are these people on the Threadless hit list or something? And the fact that they avoided the question when someone asked...
The Science of Managing Search Ads
To be honest, I am more interested in the production than I was in the movie.

Maybe this means that Avatar was done well, but I wasn't terribly wowed by anything in it. Yes, it looked real, but...so do movies that have no CGI at all.

I guess my point is that the back-end stuff from this movie is the interesting bit, so the PR is welcome.
I've camped out in sub-zero temperatures and been unfortunate enough to only afford one meal a day (but a good sized one). Surely being homeless and living on a bowl of soup most days, in winter, is going to leave one close to starving.
We don't just kick them out without basic economic support. Especially for some classes of criminals, like sex offenders, we put a large sign on their back saying "I'M DANGEROUS". We ostracize them from society and make them feel like they don't belong. So it's only natural for them to want to go back to prison, where their troubles are the same as the troubles of the guy next to them and where they feel like they do belong.
as the article states, "CSS frameworks (haml, sass, less) are meant for server-side templating and we need client-side templating."

this is intended for client-side templating and dynamically assigning CSS classes and properties at run-time.

:-)
Who Gets the Highest Ad Rates Online?
"scottvdp 33 min 29 sec ago
We cannot say, for legal reasons. I can tell you that if you find them, we will pay you handsomely.
"
moral acceptability != rationality.
Wow. If you watch the trailer, the gate that closes on a monster actually crumples where the monster gets stuck underneath it. This seems like one of those guys who really nit-picks down to the very last detail. It's probably like having a Steve Jobs around, except without the sense of urgency for shipping the actual product. Saying to your team "we could build for 5 years and not deliver anything" is probably not the right attitude you want to instill in a gaming upstart.

I was really blown away when a friend showed me that you could blow up parts of buildings in a recent popular game, and then I realized that the effect wasn't all that glamorous after buying the game. It wasn't as if you were dynamically destroying buildings, they just had pre-calculated bits and pieces that would fall off if you shot near them. Broussard would have said "no, the buildings have to be destroyed dynamically" and at that point, the game would never have been shipped.

On top of that, 18 developers? The effects they were after seemed really cool, but as the article pointed out, game teams are growing:

"The long grind began to wear on the staff. The Duke Nukem Forever team was unusually small; by 2003, only 18 people were working on it full time. This might have been adequate back when the game was announced in the mid-’90s. But in the years that Broussard had spent tweaking Duke Nukem Forever, games had become bigger and bigger. It wasn’t unusual for a developer now to throw 50 people or more at a single title. In essence, 3-D games had grown up: It’s as if Hollywood had evolved from tiny hand-cranked three-minute reels to two-hour epic blockbusters in half a decade."

I don't think this guy had anywhere near enough people to get this done.
Does anyone have numbers on how much those 10 years cost, and how much they made on TF2?

I got TF2 for free with the orange box, which I bought primarily for portal and HL2e2.
They use a PR company, and there is a small but avid market for information about the production techniques - that of other film producers and technicians. Workflow management and server administration is a standard line-item expense on pretty much any film budget nowadays, same as it is in other highly-constrained engineering contexts.
That reasoning is kind of circular, isn't it? Why do you need client-side stylesheet dynamism?
> The lack of a counter system for sweets suggests that it
> wasn't abundant, at least not to the degree that we could
> eat enough of it to prevent us from reproducing.

There is a counter system to eating foods that are sweet, provided foods are eaten in their whole, fresh, and ripe state.

Try to overeat on fruit - it's imposssible. You'll feel full and be tired of "sweet" long before you could ever overeat on it. Fiber and sufficient blood sugar have a way of telling one when they have been satiated.
The page does seem to be missing a "disadvantages of JSSS" section.
Harm to the animals. The practices in the livestock industry are pretty horrible. There are some places where a percentage of the animals survive the 'kill' stage and are still alive as all of their parts are harvested. There are places where the animals that are too lame to make it through the slaughterhouse are just tossed onto a pile of dead bodies to freeze/starve to death (rather than at least killing the animal first).

The livestock 'industry' has turned animals from living beings into 'moving lumps of commodity resources.' Is this necessarily a good thing? Don't we lose our humanity at some point?

I haven't look too far into it, but for things like livestock raised for meat, we grow a lot of food just to feed it to livestock. I've seen some numbers that put a large portion of the farmland in the US as growing livestock feed exclusively. How much of our resources are being diverted into raising and feeding the livestock which could be used for other purposes? These are all questions that no one asks because it would mean that possibility of limiting the amount of meat/dairy/eggs that they eat (or eliminating it altogether). People would rather live in ignorance of these issues that face the possibility of having to undergo a lifestyle change.
nice tip... love it
Why It's Better To Pretend You Don't Know Anything About Computers
Create from Scratch versus Extend from Existing
Classleaf looks nice, but I'm not sure it solves the problem the poster asked about (though I may be projecting my own problems onto the question). Classleaf handles administrivia for brick-and-mortar classes. E-learning platforms roll out, deliver, and track progress for entirely online classes.

I wonder if Mark thought about doing a simplified version of Classleaf for small businesses. My brother runs a small music school/studio with 5 teachers, and my kids go to martial arts class down the street, and both of those companies would benefit from scheduling and class logistics.
DIY Bedbug Detector
That's how I read it - a Swiftian proposal to make more fortunate people think what it would be like to be in a situation (e.g. 100 pounds to live on for six weeks) where shoplifting is the best option. At least, it made me think about that.
In "Les Miserables" a poor and needy Jean Valjean steals a loaf of bread to feed his family and that one act haunts him for a long time, even after he becomes a very wealthy man.

For an interesting contrast, see this article about those who shoplift out of compulsion or thrillseeking: http://www.nytimes.com/1997/09/28/nyregion/shoplifting-life-...
I used to use Ubuntu, and at the time it was because of the community - it creates the next best thing to commerical support, IMO, and it's completely free. I also found Ubuntu to be an all-around very easy to administer and robust system. I've since switched to a BSD, as it seems like Ubuntu might start going downhill soon. I had all sorts of problems with the most recent release, and I think they've lost their edge.
I wouldn't say it's nice but moodle is an option... haven't used it in several years so I'm not sure as to the current state of the project...
Contextual private messaging.

Many threads on HN and elsewhere get burdened by 1:1 dialog that adds little or no public value. "Why am I being downvoted?" dialogs are one example.

I propose adding a "reply privately" function. A private reply is only visible to commenter and parent, and appears in-thread.

Effectively, this creates a new 1:1 communication channel, without having to add a PM engine, while preserving the message's context.
if used in conjunction with a traditional CSS framework and you require javascript for your page, there are really no dis-advantages.

in my rich internet applications i will use traditional CSS for the initial "base" state of the application and then JSSS for all further states which are generated via JS (no page-reload)
I like Sam Walton because he increased the spending power of a lot of Americans by making retail more efficient. I like that he aligned his business with his customers' interest. His business did well in proportion as it made his customers' better off.
We just do subversion checkouts. Of course, we have the proper .htaccess rules set up to prevent access to the .svn folders. Subversion also allows us to commit database exports straight back into the version control system from the server.
Google prepares to launch iPhone rival
The East-Coast Blizzard from Space
Allowing those around you to die for lack of a minimum amount of food or shelter does not seem to me to be more morally acceptable than stealing.
The semantic part isn't even what really bothers me. I'm more concerned about requiring javascript for something that shouldn't need it.
The meaning of open
I would be interested to test
صفحة بداية موزيلا فايرفوكس
I'm not a big OS X user (I had a Macbook pro for a couple of years, that's it), but it always seemed to me that the OS wasn't really based on the idea of "windows." Obviously it's possible to tile windows, but the way the top menu bar adapts to the action application, plus the way some applications like Photoshop work (with the toolbars being separate windows with no central background window) always led me to believe the intended paradigm of OS X was quite different than that of Windows.
Fund Structures for Angel Funds and Early Stage/Seed Venture Funds
Many markets have a notion of the a volatility break. If the price moves too far in a short period of time, trading on the stock is suspended for a few minutes, while limit orders are collected. An auction crossing is then held to reopen the stock. This can happen several times in a row.
> Don't we lose our humanity at some point?

I'd argue that the mere act of killing the animal would strip us of our humanity, industrialized slaughterhouses or not. In any case, there is also the implication that industrial agriculture kills millions of animals per year by robbing them of their habitats, or where they get caught and ripped to shreds by industrial machinery during harvesting.

Simply put, I do not buy the idea that by being vegetarian I'm doing significantly less harm - I may be one slight degree more removed from the animal that has to die to put food on my plate, but morally it makes little difference, and technically it makes even less difference.

> These are all questions that no one asks because it would mean that possibility of limiting the amount of meat/dairy/eggs that they eat

I object against this presumptuous attitude. Plenty of us meat-eaters ask these questions - and we decide to continue being omnivores while being entire conscious of its consequences (as well as the myriad of negative consequences of pure vegetarianism). "Them ignorant meat eaters" is all too common a presumptuous attitude I get from self-righteous vegetarians. Thanks for portraying us as a bunch of ostriches with heads in the sand, while heroic vegetarians lead the way. On, comrades!
Ask yourself: Will this get my users laid?
I've been doing this using fabric, which provides the rsync_project built-in:
http://docs.fabfile.org/0.9.0/api/contrib/project.html
Er, what? Do you have any idea what you're talking about?
This will be SLOW. Also not having vars in CSS is a blessing in disguise: otherwise business logic would be built into the stylesheet by some genius and I would Auvergne to support it. No thanks.
> If my company paid me, they are poorer by $1.

Yes. But presumably when you earned that dollar you somehow contributed to making something that somebody wants. Now that thing is slightly more common, so it should be slightly easier to obtain than it was. Thus you've given a tiny little bit of value to everybody who participates in the same economy that you do. When millions of people do this we get modern civilization.
Well, I choose Ubuntu as a desktop environment because it runs all the software that I want for free and most of the software is easier to install than Windows which is not free. My perception is that Ubuntu is more stable and responsive than Vista and the GUI is just as slick.
Stringing a conductor between the cloud and target is what I meant to exclude by "the confines of the device". I figure that if you can successfully get something physically attached to the target, it probably makes more sense to skip the whole overcomplicated lightning business and just use a bomb or something that's more reliable.

"Shock and Awe" is nice, but at some point it comes down to who's killing who more effectively, and wasting time with sci-fi-ish boondoggles doesn't really do much on that end.
Actually, I quoted that line because I believe that while resignations are an unintended consequence, they are easily forseen by any manager who stops trying to achieve local maxima and thinks of global maxima. While the quote is funny in the context of the movie, it's a perfectly sensible question to ask on a regular basis: It's a way of reminding yourself to step back and think big picture.

Which is what disturbs me about the story. A CFO is paid to think big picture, to confer with the CTO about morale, and so forth. In a well-run company I would expect a middle manager to suggest quashing free drinks and the CFO to demur after conferring with colleagues.

Given the story as told, I wonder if an Engineering-Business war was breaking out and if the CFO new exactly what was going to happen.
1. jQuery and sizzle are pretty fucking fast

2. if you cant separate your business logic from your views....you have bigger problems to deal with....
Yeah, I absolutely would never take a job at a huge company whose core wasn't tech. On the other hand though, I think most tech startups are chasing the hard money. I'd be very keen on joining an early stage "traditional" business in an established market and use technology to gain a competitive advantage. The trick would be that the founders would have to either include me (tough because I don't have any experience or contacts in any of these industries) or they would have to recognize the value I bring with proper incentives (tough because traditional business people who understand the effect of user experience on sales will probably go to an overpriced agency because it's a lot easier and reliable than finding real talent to bring in-house).
If your infrastructure cannot handle the move of a machine, you're doing it wrong.
yeah, i was noticing error messages in chrome linux beta w/ gmail yesterday, too. would pop up an error dialog that said some features did not load, etc. though i could read and reply to mail just fine after i dismissed the dialog box.
To be fair: that's completely by design. S/O was a direct reaction to the perception that the perpetrators of the Enron and Worldcom scams were essentially unprosecutable because of the difficulty of proving their knowledge of the events. So the new law puts the presumption of knowledge onto the senior executives via the certification requirement.

Now, one might argue that this is bad, or has unintented consequences. But it's not a surprise. It's the intended effect. If you lie (even, perhaps, unintentionally -- though I don't think there's been a test case of that yet) on your company's financial statements in the modern USA, you are a criminal.
The article cites a few more facts than you do. Sure, maybe Google and MS pay less than 35 million combined, and maybe their operating costs are more than 25 million. If so, then they aren't profitable. But if those numbers are right, then they are profitable, plain and simple.

So the article is not just kool-aid drinking.
I needed this article as a daily blogger. Thanks for the save. I'm a terribly abstract, generalist. I'm surprised more readers haven't gouged their eyes out after reading my work.
Demand Media only produces for their own properties, though. I think he is thinking more along the lines of http://www.textbroker.com .

I might see about exploiting them in the New Year, incidentally, for non-core content tasks for myself. I mean, my article on How To Create A Bingo Card can't possibly be worse than eHow's, right?
"The way a program looks in the end is not important because there is rarely an end, and if there is one it isn't planned." -- Richard Gabriel

Developers should think and work with this quote in mind, but management (whether it's company management or a person's internal monitor) has to steer them to specific milestones and release points. A release schedule with feature goals imposes a peristaltic rhythm on development, which prevents developers from getting stuck on one aspect of development or straining for a too-distant goal.
Clojure’s :pre and :post
Yeah, that's right. Looking to put the material online and the students work through it by themselves. Taking the approach that the teacher can be replaced by the community helping one another. This is a whole other debate though isn't it... :)
Turns out a lot more plants are carnivorous than previously estimated (as with obvious cases like Venus Flytraps):

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/6727709/Tomatoes-c...
Harper (ex-Threadless CTO) just tweeted:

Threadless got robbed again - but there are pictures! $1000 to anyone who can identify these two Chicago jagoffs: http://bit.ly/7C8XHn

http://twitter.com/harper/status/6908083982