skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Relativity is about the perceived passage of time as observed in reference frames traveling at different velocities relative to one another. So it would have happened two weeks ago to someone traveling very (very) fast, but that's got nothing to do with how far they are from the event itself (i.e. where they're standing).

The frame of reference here is not one of location but of relative velocity. You are allowed to account for the distance the light had to travel before it reached you (and you observed the event) in Relativity, just as in anything else as far as I'm aware.
I groan every time I see someone advocating building data structures out of cons cells. I use Lisp at my day job, and I can tell you that some of the hardest code to maintain is the code that uses lists instead of defstruct. Once you need to add a field to that structure, you have to manually trace down every spot that uses it, and make sure it can cope with your longer list. Last time it turned out to be easier to just replace the list with a defstruct.
I’m Having A Party. Here’s $50. Bring Cool People — Or You Owe Me $100.
Does Facebook Make Businesses Any Money?
If high school was better, would we need college?
The milestones are a welcome addition, but the removal of priorities and voting is a real pain. I had a bunch of issues painstakingly sorted into priority order and they're now essentially shuffled.

The UI is still a little bizarre as well - no bulk select? No way to go to the previous/next issue from the actual issue? Colours of tags not displayed in the issues list view? I can sort by number of comments but not order them myself? I guess some of these might be considered bugs which will be fixed with time but others are really strange choices which don't quite seem to fit with the rest of the GitHub UI.
The $100 million pond
And you can't simply throw the Twig classes in app/classes why? Oh ya...no reason. Why should we lock people into a specific templating system? We are working on something for v1.1, but it will still not be core...it will be a package.

You could add Twig into Fuel in the time it took you to write that comment.
Improbable Research: Research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK
Sorry, but you insist on phrases like "obvious increase in utility" when that is not at all the case, as I just pointed out.

I could just as easily talk about the "obvious increase in utility afforded by real physical books."

This isn't even a case of rational or irrational behavior. It's a case of an economist misunderstanding the real value of a product to consumers.

Just because people buy ebooks doesn't mean they view them as having greater utility than real books. Does a movie from iTunes have greater utility than a DVD? An MP3 versus a vinyl record with beautiful sleeve art, gatefolds, and liner notes? Is an iPad "magazine" more valuable than a physical one?

Digital simulacrum of real-world objects are popular because they can be purchased on a whim, and produce instant gratification. That doesn't make them inherently superior.

One author friend of mine, Margaret Weis, has seen ebook sales outpace her physical book sales this year. At the same time, her physical book sales have not suffered at all.
What has happened is that people have been buying ebooks for instant gratification, then going back and purchasing the real thing later. That would seem to speak directly against your opinion that ebooks have an "obvious increase in utility."
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Yes. It would be immensely more difficult if we could not look back in time. There would be no microwave background, for example, so no knowledge of the fluctuations in density soon after the Big Bang.

As a comparison, do you think it would be easier for an alien to figure out the life cycle of humans if they could see a few humans at every period of life (like in astronomy) or if they only saw middle-aged humans, but many more of them?
The Easiest Way to Succeed as an Entrepreneur
1) Accidental discovery is a major virtue of the internet.

2) But you didn't have to walk fifteen miles to a small library to do it. The generation you grew up in had a major barrier to entry removed, but the effort and time was shifted elsewhere. The same thing is happening to this generation.
Bottom Types in Dynamic Languages
Don't flag articles for being bad. You may wish to flag articles for being about politics, though.
Sure, but do any actual people use them? You know, ones who are not being paid for a performance?
I'm not so sure I buy the premise that jquery is unsuitable for large scale applications. I think it is based on an assumption that jquery should provide a framework for these things, but really - what jquery is, is a framework for the controller layer of an application. If you want to use it, you have to provide the model level framework your self. I don't think this is the fault of jquery anymore than it would be the fault of Sinatra.rb to not provide the functionality of Rails.
I read a course on Python for a semester, and I tried to use a similar approach: relatively few tests, a minor project for warmup and a major project (with emphasis on attendance & communication). I think it went fine, but it's not as easy as it looks. In particular, students would "show up", but it's not easy to motivate them to do more serious work.
On the other hand, it would be possible to effectively communicate with distant species, who in turn might have existed for a long time and have records of past events.
Please, keep it running. It's a useful and valuable thing. Especially the comment count. Adding date posted would be lovely too.
Same (Japan). I wonder how much this sort of nonsense (i.e. region-specific releases) increases piracy in the places that don't benefit. It's not like it's any harder to hop on a torrent in one place than anywhere else, and seeing one region get the release while you're left out in the cold pretty much ruins any moral objection you may have had to just grabbing it.

Anyway, I hope it's a lot (the increase in piracy, I mean).
You could probably find some poor US based star trek fan that is pirating their content and pay for a netflix streaming account for them. I know it sounds a bit odd, but you could kind of look at it like buying carbon credits.
Study: Users judge your web page for visual appeal within 50 ms of opening it
Definitely reading any book is in a way like meditation, you get more out of it than googling some facts on some random website.
Paying for social: Google hits middle age
How to write a great follow-up email
I think that Khan Academy is based on the idea that the curriculum schools currently follow and the way the curriculum is taught is not ideal. So, in that regard, the fact that Salman Khan has no experience in a formal teaching environment could actually be an advantage. Also, I think that Khan receives a significant amount of feedback in the form of Youtube comments, including questions regarding the subject matter he has discussed in a video, so he can actually interact with students.
FYI, the term for directing internet vigilantism at an innocent third party is known as a "Joe job"(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_job). It originated as a spammer's revenge tactic.
.NET Little Wonders-little items that make life as a developer that much easier
Heh, that can easily be done, e.g. by modifying the Gist which I posted earlier and connecting it to Google API ("I'm Feeling Lucky")
Hey! That's exactly how my jQuery code looks! I think I just got seduced by all the closurey goodness that comes with Javascript (my day-job languages don't let me do that.)

I'm not going to ask how to write good code, but I think this is a fair question: can someone point to a coding standard / style guideline for Javascript + jQuery?

E.g., when to choose a single-use named function over an anonymous function? When to bind jQuery results to variables vs. go crazy with chaining? Any advice on good selector practices? Good html naming conventions?

I'd love to see all that stuff documented in one place. It must be out there somewhere.
I think (I'm a mathematician and I have lectured and taught in the University) the poster has valid points... but will be trashed in the comments (here and elsewhere).
Not only is it not proper quicksort, it's very memory inefficient.
Anything posted on twitter is for the general public.
Isn't that just semantics? Is a master woodworker not an artist? I have seen some really beautiful furniture in are galleries (functional furniture too).

Don't the best craftsmen consider themselves artists?
In our (http://dydra.com) case, ZeroMQ's misuse of assertions proved to be the deal breaker.

We evaluated using ZeroMQ for inter-shard communication in our distributed database engine, and while ZeroMQ had a lot going for it, in the end everyone on the team was so frustrated with attempting to reproduce corner case assertions and debugging ZeroMQ internals that we decided to bid it good riddance.

We were working towards a deadline, and ZeroMQ in the end proved counterproductive towards that goal; during the time we used it, we ran into some half a dozen different ZeroMQ asserts, some of them very difficult to reproduce, and of which I believe we managed to solve or work around only two or three.

Some of the problem may be in expectations. If you go in expecting it to be a mature and solid black-box solution (as its versioning might seem to indicate), you may be expecting too much. If you mentally prefix a '0.' to the version number and think of it as fast-evolving alpha software, you'll be happier.

I still believe the concepts behind ZeroMQ to be viable and laudable ones. We may reevaluate it in the future, but not anytime soon.
The advantage of the Khan Academy is that the teaching method:

- Shows how the work was done in a step by step manner

- Cuts the subjects up into short, easily digestible chunks

(note that both of these could be attributed to the medium, as screencasts require showing nearly everything unless you want to edit heavily, and YouTube has a length limitation)

The poster's points are valid - Khan's videos exist pretty much in a vaccum, and having no active feedback means that people who don't get a concept are sunk.

That said, there are solutions - I could imagine a teacher assigning "Watch videos 1-3 on subject X" to a class, then in the class sessions students would have to demonstrate competency and could get help.

I don't know anyone who thinks that Khan's work is the end-all solution to teaching problems.
The best answer is not a better vacuum you lug around. Rather, install a whole-house vacuum. It will cost as much as a few decent vacuums, but will also last as long as a few of them. More importantly, it will eject all the air (laden with all manner of things you'd prefer not to breathe) outside.
For Photoshop, the box is just a way of getting the product to you.

For a book, the physical object may be as much a part of the product as the information contained within.

It's not an apples-to-apples comparison.
I was hoping for a Backbone.js mention. A tool like that will get you a long way in structuring your frontend code.
The poster may have valid points but the post is useless. Anyone can sit back and say a maker didn't do it right. I actually don't think his points are all that good.
EPubNub: An Erlang API for PubNub with example.
I dont think the poster has valid points really, at the khan academy a student can follow in his or hers own pace, when they want as they want. That is not something that can be done in a lecture room.

Also in a lecture room you cant participate in the lecture 40 times so you really understand... unless you record the lecture, but in the khan academy.. if you need to watch a video 300 times.. goahead
マイナビ看護師の口コミ・評判で学べるニュース
"I could imagine a teacher assigning "Watch videos 1-3 on subject X" to a class, then in the class sessions students would have to demonstrate competency and could get help."

In fact, this is exactly how Khan advocates that his site be integrated into existing education.
When reading this article, the thing that came to mind was his TED talk (http://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_rein...)

I think Salman Khan's biggest point in the talk seems to address this guy's complaint. He's not aiming to replace the teacher, he's aiming to replace the lecture. Students go home, watch his videos at whatever pace suits them, and then they go to school and have the really important interaction with the teacher and other students, which can also happen at the student's desired pace.
Oh God, the German dubs (and the Hungarian ones for that matter) are truly atrocious.
> how does one become a good, non-spaghetti-code javascript developer for the web?

Just like anything else, it will take time and active effort. Till then, I suggest work with frameworks which help you structure your code. I use backbone.js and I have heard good things about YUI.
The OP seems to forget that the goal of the Khan Academy is not just to produce videos. Of course there's no feedback with a one-way video lesson.

If you watch his (excellent) TED talk [1], you'll see that his organization isn't just about video lectures, but rather an all-encompassing suite of tools that allows students to learn at their own pace, repeat lessons that they didn't understand at first, and provides teachers with analytics to target their attention towards those students who need help.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gM95HHI4gLk
WWQD?

Words to live by.
Did he really claim ownership of the idea? Sounds exactly like what Moore pointed out in 1991 via "Crossing the Chasm". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm
IANAA (I am not an astrophysicist) but isn't the accompanying image very different from what actually happens when a star crosses the event horizon of a black hole?

I thought that when an object crosses the event horizon of a black hole, to an observer outside the event horizon, it will look like the object just slowed down and sort of "suspended" there. I didn't think it would emit a burst of radiation.

(This is just from reading Brian Greene and Michio Kaku, so my understanding could be way off the mark.)
I've done this and it didn't work. It was a disaster. Students weren't willing to watch the videos. They weren't willing to do even this small amount of work.

My experience is that they prefer the lecture/test format. It allows them to slack off. A couple of days before the test they will study. The prefer to go through this cycle 4 or 5 times a semester than to continually have to work.
I might not be the best solution in the long-term, but it's certainly a start in the right direction.

Teaching is roughly the same as it was 50 years ago. We're yet to harness the power of computational revolution and Khan Academy shows the way.
Do you have a link to the stuff on Rockefeller? Sounds like an interesting read.
> can someone point to a coding standard / style guideline for Javascript + jQuery?

backbone.js is good. That gives you a fair idea about structuring your application. If you webapp is designed in a RESTful manner, backbone.js maps quite nicely to your backend.
Wow, if toy ad vocabulary is reinforcing gender stereotypes rather than simply catering to gender preferences then this is a great startup opportunity. Produce and market toys for boys with words like "love", "friendship", "babies", "magic" and "mommy". You'll be rich!

If you really think everyone else is being irrational, stop writing blog posts. Put your money where your mouth is and arb it.

Of course, if boys really want ultimate special forces power battle swords and girls really want mommy&me friendship magic wands, you will lose your time/money. But you are confident that won't happen, right?
I always understood Khan Academy as complementary to conventional classes.

To cover all topics of high school and college curricula doesn't necessarily mean supplanting high school and college or redefining education. If that is the case, I think the OP has a point. I don't think it is the case, though. No reason to worry.
Downloading movies/series is not illegal in the country where I live.

Is that country not yet part of the WTO by any chance?
Building data structures out of pairs is one of the features of Lisp that introductions to the language tend to focus on, (particularly in academia) as it feels very simple and elegant. This kind of disconnect between theory and practice is part of why I often find it hard to take writing about Lisp programming at face value.
Why $10,000 for a domain name is still cheap
"First, Khan has never lectured."
"Second, Khan has never taught."

Odd, because I'm pretty damned sure that through his lectures, he has taught me a good deal of basic chemistry.

Results are the only thing that matters. If and only if people find Khan's material valuable, it will become popular. Guess what? It's pretty damned popular.
I've definitely had moments where I threw together a pile of crap just to get a working product, and then went back later and used better naming, method extraction, more elegant error-checking, comments, sometimes a more obvious way of manipulating data, etc. No unit testing involved. Doesn't it still qualify as refactoring?
How Professor Maxwell changed the world
You can what I do, I use a ssh tunnel to a server that I have in the us to watch them... Netflix does geoip but doesn't check the country of the credit cards paying the subscriptions...
I failed the first tine I took a class on scheme. A the second time.
I have been training for a marathon while doing a startup. It is a substantial time commitment each week and while you might think running would be a great time to ponder startup problems, I tend to focus completely on the run. This break also let's me come back more efficient and more energetic.
Create 3D effect email icon with reflection
How in the world does a lecture/test format allow students to slack off unless they have material they can visit at their own pace at their own time? (either a book, or recorded lectures)

Your particular failure to successfully implement an idea doesn't indicate a flaw in the idea as a whole.
matlab has probably taken a lot of ideas from apl too, but i wouldn't really call either scientific or banking number crunching mainstream. a bit too specialised a niche for that.
This actually points out the issue perfectly: Khan Academy is great for people who are actually interested in learning. They seek out the website themselves and are already motivated to watch. General education seems to me like it contains a lot of teaching things to the unwilling.
I have a Miele canister vacuum, and this does not hold true. It's quite powerful until the bag fills up.
I've observed that students often aren't willing to do even a small amount of work in some classes, take every opportunity to slack off, and study a few days before the test in some classes, while in other classes those same students are engaged; work hard, enthusiastically, and willingly; and in general are model learners.

I have no explanation for the split personality these students show. Theories, anyone?
But it is "paradoxical" (or lets' just say, confounding) from the perspective of traditional economics -- i.e., it is hard to construct a model which accounts for this behavior if you consider consumers as rational actors.

Actually it's easy, and the last comment on the article nailed it. Ebook pricing is an iterated "ultimatum game": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimatum_game. A copy costs the publisher essentially nothing, creating a large amount of economic surplus to be divided between the seller and buyer. By setting the price higher than a physical book, the seller is attempting to capture almost all of the surplus, similar to keeping $99 and offering the other player $1 in the ultimatum game. In both cases if it's the only offer you're ever going to get, it's rational to take it because it's the best you can do. But in reality there will be future interactions with sellers. Refusing a slightly beneficial deal (and encouraging others to do so, in the case of reviews) will likely encourage them to offer more favorable deals in the future, producing a net benefit for buyers.
There is utility, and then there is liquidity. Believe it or not, digital copies are less liquid than hardcopies because they cannot be resold.

I own many specialist technical books in the $70-90 price range as well as art books in the $100-150 range which I would never even thought about purchasing if I knew they could not be resold. I suppose many consumers think this way as well.
The first thing I think of in reference to online "reputation" is forums.

Daniweb's a pretty good example - post count, up-vote count, solved threads and reputation points which determine a user's power to affect other people's reputations.
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When you go to a process critique rather than argue results that's the sign of a weak criticism. The article is more concerned about how he does what he does rather than what he accomplishes. Khan has a system of which the videos are just one part. Teachers are a key part of his program, they are just freed to tackle more salient aspects of teaching, like helping kids get over problems. It's an open source business model. The source is free, use it if you wish, but for service, there could be a fee. Teachers could actually be paid to teach and mentor instead of lecturing and giving tests. It's a successful model elsewhere and worth trying in education. Teachers and others can produce the content and then anyone else can charge a fee for teaching using the infrastructure. There's no reason the lectures can't improve over time, but you have to start somewhere, and he did. And the other parts of the system are still very valid. Inversion of lecture and help time, a test until success testing model, go at your pace, short modules that build on each other, a dashboard helping teachers track progress and proactively solve problems. Why is that a bad approach?
I think you may be confusing the event horizon with the Roche limit. The event horizon is the distance where not even light can escape. The Roche limit is the closest a body can come to another (more massive) body such that it can stay intact with itself, as opposed to being torn apart by tidal forces in the massive object's gravitational field.

I suspect, but do not know for sure, that the Roche radius for a black hole and regular star is much larger than the event horizon for the same black hole.
> Sadly, I wouldn't be surprised to see this research get packaged into SQL Server (or worse, Azure).

Is there a reason for this? I would have thought that finding a practical application for research is actually a good thing?
To quote a reviewer: "We should not let the publishers hold us hostage because we prefer to read the electronic format.”

I think you're missing the principle matter: people are complaining that ebooks shouldn't cost as much as physical books because they cost less to produce. Nobody is saying they prefer physical books because they are physical objects, and nobody seems to be treating them like anything other than the same thing delivered in different ways at different costs. Find me evidence please that this whole thing isn't driven by the perception of fairness in what the product costs to produce.

Edit: Vote me down all you want, but lack of evidence is still lack of evidence. I guess when emotions run high people lose the need to make rational points and just downvote. Give me some justification. Argue with me.
There is a nice talk by Perlin here at http://www.noisemachine.com/talk1/, too.
> If the student in the “audience” is struggling, he is free to turn the video off and try something else.

That's what his guided exercises are for http://www.khanacademy.org/exercises?exid=linear_equations_1
tl;dr

Salman Khan is not an insider, and therefore I reject his attempts at disruptive innovation.
FYI that is typically attributed to Peter Drucker quote, not Tim Ferris :)
My first real project was writing a game engine, and then using it to write a couple games. After that, I learned a whole lot writing a compiler for a C like language.