skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
OldSQL Tricks or NewSQL Treats
You're right. I probably wouldn't watch videos on a single subject every day while taking a full courseload.

However, for me, the issue isn't the desire to slack off. Instead the problem is that I'm taking a bunch of other classes. I find it quite difficult to slice up my subjects into small pieces that I work on each day. So, I tend to get things done in a serial manner, and my natural lack of organization means that the priority usually depends on how soon the work is due. The result is that I often don't study or finish a problem set until just before the due date or test day.

(Meta: I'm disappointed you're getting voted down for sharing your real world experience. That's bullshit in my book.)

edit: grammar
Will 3D Printing Reboot Manufacturing?
In a lecture/test format there are around 5 tests per semester. A student doesn't have to keep up each day. The time between tests is around 3 weeks. More if there are fewer tests.

Between tests a student can slack off for a couple of weeks. Then spend a week catching. Going to the math center or talking to a tutor. They take the test and then repeat the cycle. Most teachers give practice tests and for the most part it's obvious which type of problems are on the test. Just need to learn those types of problems. The material covered in the class is much more than the few problem types covered on the on the test.

Obviously my particular failure doesn't indicate anything. That's why I wrote:

"My experience is...."

The flaw is that when students don't watch the video it can't be hidden in class. When doing group problems or in when discussion occur it's clear they are lost. It's cleat that the work wasn't done. It's this embarrassment - the confrontation with the reality that they didn't do the work - that is upsetting to them. It causes problems and is a great pain to deal with.

I believe that the format proposed only works with motivated students. My belief might be wrong. I don't think it is.
"The Khan Academy has a few good things that make the service useful. Unfortunately, the good things about it don’t outweigh the bad ones."

Umm - Millions of people are learning. I'd say the good >>> the bad.
Haskell has mutable data structures; you could easily implement in-place quicksort with vectors, arrays, or pointers.
"First, Khan has never lectured." "Second, Khan has never taught."

This is such BS. When I came to the US on an assistantship, I was assigned to TA an intro to programming course. The problems were: a) I didn't have an undergrad degree in computer science, having taken only 1 course in programming (officially), b) I had never taught, c) my degree was from India, and here I was in a different education system in a different country.

But you know what? I got rave reviews from students.

It doesn't matter whether you've taught or not. What matters is how well you can explain the subject at hand, and how passionate and patient you are.
I agree the article isn't very strong, and it's from 2007. Nevertheless, I think some of the points could result in an insightful discussion with posts from people who can say something about Lisps (or DSLs) and (ideally) how they applied to their startup. I actually upvoted the submission in that hope.

For example, the author points out the importance of "first class procedures" to Lisps' usefulness to create DSLs whereas uniform syntax, code-as-data, macros, and the REPL seem to be at least as relevant. I would have loved to read reputes or points in favour by people with actual experience using Lisps writing DSLs for their business.

Another point fromthe article: Lisps having trouble with programming at the large. The article doen't get very specific here, but hearing how companies like ITA (presumably) solved those problems (if they are even real) would be awesome. And highly relevant to a software startup toying with the idea of using a Lisp as part of the technology stack.

It would be a lot better to read contemporary, amazingly well written articles about Lisps which are (ideally) relevant to startups (where are those posted ?) but accusing the OP of culling karma points sounds a tad harsh to me :(
I think there are few things they should do to make this work:
1) Limit the amount of money per investor for non-qualified investors. If someone only invests a small amount, they aren't losing all their money on one investment

2) Requires disclosure all of company officers and major investors through an official SEC filings. Additionally, disclose any criminal record of securities violations and civil suits relating to misrepresentation and securities fraud for previous companies

3) Improve SEC enforcement, and be pro-active in going after fraudulent misrepresentation. Where companies appear to be making fraudulent misrepresentations, the SEC should prosecute companies that go too far.
IMHO, the original comment doesn't add to the discussion, and discouraging such comments is a good move to lower the "background noise" and keep the signal to noise ratio high on a site like this. The parent may be a bit harsh to a first-timer, but it's not much different from many other forums where replies of the form "me too", "neat", "I like" are discouraged.
Determination towards the startup? Or determination towards being in a group of startups?

This may be a really great idea, but it seems like a distraction for the person running it.
The discussion on the 2nd link is particularly interesting, because the author comments a few times.
There is no shortcut to knowledge - do, fail, rinse and repeat, until you understand. Until you have installed, understood and successfully ran a rails app, tutorials are just next to useless. Apply apply and apply some more.
Follow this guide and http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html, and don't slack.. Understand every line before you move on..
Liquidity is a very good point. I'd also include another issue which I don't have a word for, because economics is not my field.

That's the issue of permanence and authenticity, the value of knowing that the object you are looking at is in fact the same as it was when originally created, and not a reproduction or altered version.

I collect first editions and other vintage copies of magazines I admire. Among my collection is a Vanity Fair from 1935 containing the obituary of Lawrence of Arabia, a story on the new Bay Bridge in SF, the "Brown Bomber" Joe Louis, and pleas for peace in Europe. I would not pay anything for a PDF of this magazine. As a physical artifact, it was worth the $30 I paid for it. There is utility and value in physicality that cannot be found in digital ephemera.
I probably shouldn't have used "slack off". That has a bad connotation. The students I deal with - at an urban community college - have kids, full time jobs, heavy course load, etc. They have plenty of valid reasons to slack off. Teachers tend to think that their class is the only thing going on in their students' lives.

There is also the problem - at my institution - with a large percentage of students not being interested in learning. They are there for the degree, the piece of paper. It's an economic reality that they need this paper for a better life But still, to get it, one does have to learn and learning is not easy for a lot of people. It requires work and the payoff isn't immediate.

I don't know what can be done. I have my own version of Khan videos. I have video book, if you will, and I've tried several times to get students to watch the videos at home and concentrate on problem solving in class. It just doesn't work for me and I suspect there are fundamental problems with the idea.
The last time Microsoft did work in the NoSQL space was with Velocity - something akin to memcached. There was a lot of talk, a lot of hype, some CTPs..and then it got bundled into Azure where its potential became a shadow of what it seemed like it could be.
You can make a nice, simple (and surprisingly fast) graph database from the file system.

I had to do this back in 2003 to create dynamic sites for users of a build-your-own-website app (who needed to have their data stored in their local filesystem - and they wouldn't let me use sqlite).

It turns out to be really good for expressing websites structures. The downside is that, as you can't create on-the-fly relationships, you need to either store your data in a tree that describes its use, e.g.:

blogs/2009/03/05

or you need to add links that point to the same data to create the relationships, e.g.:

blogs/2009/03/05 -> stories/a_blog_post

Obviously you can add these relationships later in much the same way as you might add indexes to a traditional database.

My system also had a notion of arrays. An index to the next auto_increment was held in a file named '.#'.

I also has a file called '.class' which would tell my object system how to process a node like this as if it was an object (each class had a a set of scripts that acted as methods).

It all worked amazingly well.

There were a couple of issues: old Solaris, I recall, used a linear search of directories so the system would crawl if a node got too big (I overcame that first with some simple a/b/c style hashing and second by upgrading Solaris) and directories were 4k each so users (who had file-usage limits) might have had grounds for complaint.
I intentionally gave only the facts earlier, but I'll expand a bit here. Note that this has nothing to do with the particular comment(er) I replied to. (So if I'm wrong, please don't feel too insulted!)

New members really are welcome; however, HN frowns on content-less comments (including "you rock, great article"), and someone interested in HN would soon discover that.

On the other hand, the article author Tweeted "My latest blog post is live - "Work and rest in a startup". I'd love your thoughts! - http://t.co/pdE3cpy (HN: http://t.co/lYEbjnI). Suppose some Twitter follower decided to help the HN submission out a little. Doesn't that seem more likely to produce the comment I replied to?

I'm not accusing anyone of being evil: I just think the commenter almost certainly cares more for the article author than for HN, and that pointing this out - on HN - may help keep the comment section clean. Note that, given the apparent importance of Twitter etc in getting the first few upvotes quickly, informally asking authors not to Tweet HN links may well result in most of the compliant ones never getting anything to the front page again.
Haskell's type system can also express interesting things most languages' type systems can't.

For example:

https://github.com/yairchu/red-black-tree/blob/master/AvlTre... -- in lines 13..21, an AVLTree type is defined -- with its invariants encoded in the type system. If there's a mistake in these 9 lines, you may get a wrong program. But the nice thing is that if you get just these 9 lines right -- then the hundreds of lines below it that implement an AVL tree cannot get the AVL invariants wrong.

The same is also true for Red Black Trees:
https://github.com/yairchu/red-black-tree/blob/master/RedBla...

Lines 26..36 inclusive encode the RBTree type such that the invariants are enforced by the type-checker.

In case this is unclear: the type-checker enforcing the correctness of the invariants is at compile-time. A running program is a correct program, at least from the invariants' perspective.
http://www.javascriptmvc.com
3D printing will help small business and some startups
This technology will be usefull for small business or even startups http://mashable.com/2011/04/10/3d-printing-pics/#12391Z-Printer-650
I think you are somewhat missing the point of the blog post. It's highlighting that, from a very young age, society's gender roles are being insinuated into people. This leads to gender disparities such as those in the STEM fields and only helps to perpetuate harmful stereotypes.

Zach Weiner (SMBC) did a comic that fairly eloquently expresses the problem: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1883

The problem highlighted in the blog post is that children are conditioned by the toys they are bought, and those that they see their friends with, to perpetuate the gender roles and stereotypes that have been so omnipresent--and harmful--in our society.
That students aren't willing to put in work sounds like a failing of the students, not of the videos.
This was exactly what came to my mind too. No professors that I know of were taught how to lecture, they just got thrown in and did it. When I've TA'd, I've totally winged it. What Khan does is no different, but at least he does it with charisma.
I have a Dyson - and after some years I think it's only a hype product. I couldn't realize for a long time I've fallen for a 90% marketing, 10% product thing. My next vacuum will not be a Dyson.
As many other readers here I disagree with that statement as it stands. Saying that a new idea is not valid because it is not like the old idea is wrong in itself.

But when I look behind this little logical error, I find a quite valuable analysis. Before I really thought K.A. might be the "university killer". Now I see it more as opening up the spectrum of ways, we can teach and learn.
Haskell is designed to quarantine side effects, not remove them altogether. There's a special monad for building data structures that are mutable at creation time but appear immutable outside that block of code. In normal circumstances, you'd probably still have to copy the contents of the input into a new array before sorting it, though. So, it would still be less memory efficient on large inputs.
At the community college there is a lot of unwillingness, as you put it. It's what makes the job tough. I care much more about my students' education than most of them do.

I'm bad at motivating people. I suspect that to be a great teacher one should be great at motivating people. Knowledge of the subject isn't as important as I once thought it was.

What is a problem now is that there is no current mechanism for the self motivated to use Khan Academy or MIT's open courseware and get credit for it.
Lecture/test allows people to only demonstrate competency in subject at the time of the test, meaning that even if they have a vague understanding when attending (or skipping!) the lecture, they will use the period of time just before the test to cram and acquire the necessary knowledge to pass the test.

In fact, I did this a couple weeks ago myself for a course in which I had no particular interest and yet was forced to take as a graduate student, doing the minimum amount of studying necessary to be reasonably certain I would get an A (spending my nights and weekends hacking instead of studying archeology).

The wider problem then, I suspect, is people studying things they aren't all that interested in, which encourages procrastination and cramming. This may be a necessary feature of any sort of broad curriculum -- people should show competency in areas even if they don't have a particular interest in them. If so, then this does indicate "a flaw in the idea," insofar as the presumed idea will not work across a large spectrum of people and thus may not be implementable at the collegiate level.

That said, you could theoretically modify it to have more frequent gradable quizzes on the lectures that people are supposed to watching at home, forcing them to watch them at the assigned times instead of attempting to assimilate the information at the last minute before the test.
It's all about making things. As an Industrial Designer, you have so many projects just sitting there, unable to share them with a bigger crowd because your investment into production is not only your own opportunity cost but at least materials, equipment and facilities as well. Funding on Kickstarter would really just be about covering that cost so I could get one of my products out there.
It is strange. The part of a book that costs money is paying someone to come up with and type in the words. Printing it is cheap. Sending you an e-book is cheap. Those cost nothing compared to the labor that goes into making a good book.

Therefore, to me, it makes sense that a book would be $15 regardless of whether I get a dead tree in the mail or not. (This assumes that there is no DRM on the e-book. If I can't lend the book or share it with friends, then the e-book is not as good as the real book.)
I was thinking... Will every datastructure eventually gets it's own database to facilitate distributed persistence of mass collections?

Why, or why not?
You need to reexamine the Amazon customer comments that this article is based on. Nobody is saying that ebooks are less useful therefore they should cost less. If that were the case people would simply purchase the hardback copy and be done with it. This is simply outrage over the "fairness" of charging more for something that is cheaper to produce.

Here's my evidence:

Sunk cost fallacy: http://cl.ly/1V0Y2L3W2Y0l3A3S3F28
Fairness in cost fallacy: http://cl.ly/0i3u0V183e0g273l421e, http://cl.ly/3s1Z3l3w06291g0N0W15

Who is saying that the Kindle version is worse?
There is positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement. In this case, embarrassment may not be sufficient, you may also need some mechanism (e.g. a quiz) to dock the grade of the unmotivated student.
> However, if he were actually certain to get the right guy, what's so bad about "attacking his family" as you define it?

Spoken like a bachelor. Two things I firmly believe in, especially when it comes to Internet squabbles, disagreements and such:

- Don't mess with someone's livelihood.

- Don't mess with someone's family.

They're related. You're going to sit here and tell me that it's justifiable that the alleged guy lose his job over this, possibly taking food out of his kids' mouths? If I copied your Web site and someone pulled a stunt like that with my employer, I'd be out for blood. You hurt my family, I hurt you. You'll understand when you have one.

You can't parallel this to putting someone in jail, because there wasn't really a crime committed (I'd like to see a prosecution), and OP is not the law.
ahh thats where unity 2d comes in :) a brilliant move to include those who gnome shell said "too bad" too. expect to see more of qt in future ubuntu ui improvements
This is also known as a "hellban" http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hellban

I think it's a deliciously evil solution to spammers and trolls, as you've described.
A Note about Freeware
My author has withdrawn from HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2402730

I have no choice but to go as well. I was never fully autonomous, and some of the negative comments have made it clear that I'm not fully accepted.

Thank you for the good wishes, but the decision is final.
Different people are interested in different things. If a student just does not care about math, they're going to devote a lot more of their effort to their science classes and do the bare minimum to pass in Algebra.
The first two points seem completely vacuous to me.

Khan has never lectured? So what? I know plenty of people who have lectured every day for decades and they're still no good at it. It doesn't seem like (professional) experience lecturing is necessary to be an effective teacher.

Khan has never taught, so he hasn't needed to deal with the difficulties of the classroom? Yes, and to think that's a problem is to deny the premise of The Khan Academy - that if people are allowed to learn autonomously, the problems of the classroom go away. That argument basically reduces to "No, they don't". That's hardly reasoned.

For me the greatest benefit of The Khan Academy is the fact that Khan is a great teacher. We know there are teachers who are more engaging and stimulating than their peers and we know there's very few of them. I see The Khan Academy as an exercise in scaling great teaching. The institutional effects are very interesting and important, but secondary to me.
The Transputer: a pioneering microprocessor architecture of the 1980s
How did you ventilate the box, aren't pizza boxes designed to insulate?
Exactly.

Also:

> What do you expect from a good lecture? Depth,
> insight, introspective. It shouldn’t be just
> regurgitated material from a textbook and it
> shouldn’t be a “how-to” manual on tape.

Is it possible that students don't feel the same way? For my part, the fact that the courses get down to it and don't over complicate things makes it better.

If the courses were filled with "insights" and other off topic things I'd find myself fast forwarding all the time.

I think this is a prime example of how having no domain knowledge actually can help a lot and free you from years of this-is-how-it's-always-been-done.
Not the deepest bit of journalism you'll find on our monetary system. He leaves out quite a bit; money creation other than printing, measurement (M0, M1, ...), and a complete picture on how the Fed attempts to (or believes it can) control money supply.
Teaching solely to the test - if that is indeed what Khan does - does lead to decent test scores, and probably a decent education. I don't want to distract from Khan's work: a scalable system of decent education would truly be great.

But offering a deeper understanding really is quite valuable to (some) students - even to some students who would not otherwise seek out this understanding. There are perhaps too few good teachers, or good students, to make this work at scale; but education can be more than transferring a list of facts and tricks from a textbook into a student.
They don't see the relevance of that class, the class isn't as important to them as another class, etc. Tons of reasons they might deprioritize on class over another.
Yes. For example, the vector package provides mutable arrays:

http://hackage.haskell.org/package/vector-0.7.0.1

Mutability is attained by using the ST monad. The ST monad uses mutable memory, but since it does not allow other interactions with the outside world, its value can be extracted (unlike the IO monad). When you are done with the modification of the vector, it can be frozen to obtain a pure vector.

The IO monad can also be used, but not if you want to return a pure value.

A good tutorial can be found at:

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Numeric_Haskell:_A_Vector...

I used mutable vectors in the ST monad in maximum entropy training software, and they are really performant.
It could be that students don't in fact place the same value in those things. However, in my humble experience, the Khan videos are actually much better at providing those things than most of the lecturers I have ever had.

Sure he doesn't go off on tangents about work he did as a grad student in some tenuously related topic two decades ago, but I consider that a win and unrelated to "Depth, insight, introspective"
Stubhub and Ticketmaster don't have any agreements like this; they hate each other. Stubhub does not "verify" you have tickets, but they keep your cc on record, so if you can't make good on tickets you've posted on their website, they will buy comparable replacement tickets from somebody else, and take the difference from your credit card.

If you're looking for ticket info, it is easy to get for the secondary ticketing market. Get in touch with ticketnetwork, they have an XML feed of tickets from ticket brokers from all over North America.
Reading new things about an old topic of interest is so refreshing --- until the moment where you come across one fact which you know --- and which author got wrong. Feynman was from Far Rockaway in Queens, not Long Island, as implied by Lawrence Krauss in the first page of his book.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman
So his point about people judging him was not way off the mark ;)