skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Either have the lesson be able to provide an accurate and correct mental model, or make the learner explicitly aware that what they are learning is incomplete/unprecise/whatever."

Khan does the latter, it is called an overview. I think this aspect of the original critic's article displayed his lack of understanding of an incremental and iterative approach. If we waited until he had completed every lecture on history, we'd never have any. Given the current state, and even considering the future state, it is nonsensical to judge it on the basis of being the "sole source" of information on a subject.

The second bad assumption is that Khan's work is somehow inferior to other high school teachers' presentations of the subject. In my experience, at a high school frequently referred to as the best in the US, we barely even made it through the Vietnam war, and the "mental model" presented was merely a random collection of facts.

If only this author could see the average high school history teacher in action, he would be demanding that they stop teaching kids to glue garbage on a piece of poster board and teach his version of the subject. The difference with Khan is that it's all out there. He's open for review, and the videos can be improved.
I guess the point is that he doesn't care about the money. I don't think he's purposely denying himself things he could afford but doesn't buy so that he can add another 1000$ to his bank account.
Forever 21 Threatens Blogger with Lawsuite Over Satirical Blog
I worked at a place in Santa Monica called the Water Garden and it did seem isolated. And seeing cities like NYC and Taipei and even downtown Ann Arbor, I realize the benefits of new urbanism. However, I wonder if there is a new model emerging here in next generation corporate work centers.

Buildings will get so large that they are act as their own cities, creating space that can be returned to ecological use. Such buildings would be so large as to need their own rail systems.

But the problem is living spaces being separate from working spaces. I do hope that buildings like this get closely integrated into mass transportation. Not every couple work at the same place with their kids at the corporate school. If public transportation is not very intelligently integrated, the desolation of the parking lots that this beautiful building replaces will continue in the social dimension. From the presentation it seems as if this will be addressed by buses.
> The things we learn from history that are important become part of our culture, not our curriculum.

How does it become part of our culture if it's not part of our curriculum? Given my own personal tastes (when I was a child), I would have skipped everything in history except for WWI, and WWII. Even with WWI and WWII, I probably would have only focused on the battles and not the social issues if given the chance. I wouldn't have learned about things like the Trail of Tears, the Japanese Internment camps in Hawaii, and so on.
We couldn't possibly help those users, because the MobileMe is built deeply into the system apps. On Android (and I don't want to sound like a fanboy too much here, although I'm sure I do), we could drop in a replacement calendar and email app to replace the system ones. On iPhone, that's a no go.
I'm with you but some of this article is just hyperbole. The quote from 1984 seems out of place at best given the context.
The newer videos have more sophisticated drawing and recording software; he simply hasn't redone the old ones. Example:

http://www.khanacademy.org/video/object-image-height-and-dis...
From a couple of presentations I watched and reading online, nodejs advertises that it makes writing web servers easy. Do everyday programmers actually need node or is it meant to be a niche language?
Lots of American cities are very spread out so you don't have to be in a rural area in order to have to travel more than five miles to satisfy your every day needs.
RBC does, but they use the RSA SecureID thingy that's been in some form compromised in American defense contractors.
When you've learned two subjects with some depth, you start seeing some analogies. Paul Graham thinks that hacking is very much like painting, and this guy thinks that writing code is like writing English, and at one point in my life I believed that coding in Perl has a lot in common with calculating cross sections.

That doesn't really mean that these things are any more similar than two random areas of human activity. Our brains are just good at finding analogies, finding analogies is like spotting patterns, we see them even when there aren't any and when there actually are some their appeal is difficult to overcome. And if you know two subjects well you have more material to cherrypick analogous things from.
"Imagine the consequences if his videos did become the DOS or Windows of education: tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of young minds, all fed by Mr. Khan’s fizzy version of history. Not only would all students absorb the same value judgments, goofy comments, and cultural relativism, they would also conclude that Mr. Khan’s factoids constitute knowledge of history. "

Isn't the simple solution to this problem is to hire other teachers than just having Mr. Khan do everything? In addition to Mr. Khan, hire some Japanese, Germany, and Russian history teachers so we get another perspective in addition to an American one.

Perhaps Khan Academy should become the universal platform for teachers from around the world to deliver their curriculum. Then we would have a much richer education system with a plethora of perspectives--which would even beat our current system of one teacher teaching everything in a classroom.
(I think you meant opt-in)

How would Facebook be able to innovate if everything they released was opt-in? This isn't some privacy-leaking piece of the site, it is a feature that helps one of their core components be better.

This is definitely cool technology, and FB does have the right to do whatever they want. Kudos to them for also providing a switch to allow users to turn it off.

However, "How would Facebook be able to innovate..."? Isn't having a FB account opt-in? They're not exactly in a dearth for more users - if they want people to be happy with the feature, then educate and sell the feature to them.

If they're worried that by providing an option, people will ignore it and some developer's pet project is going to remain unused, then you might as well consider this feature mastubatory: FB is having fun doing face detection, and the users are getting nothing out of it.
Business Appraisers - Finding the Right One
"Karma" sounds a good point to promote:)
Travel-loving front-end devs: we have the perfect job for you... [global]
You don't think driving requires huge taxpayer subsidies to exist?
I agree strongly with the Author's issues with presenting history in this manner. History is a living document of clues that are merely interpreted by us- very little is fact.

I've been studying Egyptology for about 6 years now and it's amazing what perspectives have changed in that time. We're even starting to see stories now that are challenging the "Out of Africa" theory. Whenever I hear a teacher/lecturer describe something historical as fact, it makes me cringe because so much is left to interpretation.

Khan doing history in this manner is dangerous. But at the same time, the ways our schools do history is dangerous as well. Presenting singular perspectives and presenting them as fact only breeds misinformation.

I believe khan academy is superb for math and sciences, especially for quick overviews of concepts. But the format is absolutely terrible for presenting historical topics. Understanding history requires reading from many resources and coming to logical conclusions. A copy/paste job from wikipedia is simply pathetic.
If you're looking for a few quick poll questions, take a look at http://gopollgo.com
The thing I remember was almost always missing in the education process I went through right up to the university was the big picture.

What do you think the learner's responsibility is in the educational process? I am a teacher, and I do attempt to provide both big-picture ideas and detailed supporting facts and examples as I teach my students. (I try to elicit a lot of those from my students themselves, with a discussion format with lots of questions and answers as I present new concepts.) But I would hate to be in the position of my high school American history teacher, who was frequently interrupted by one of my classmates who would ask, "How am I supposed to write that down in my notes?" When I was in university studies, I read a very interesting book called Speaking and Listening

(It may be this book on Google Books, but I am not completely sure:

http://books.google.com/books?id=sOp5MbE6-jYC&q=Speaking...

as it has been a long time since I read the book)

in which I learned about the style of note-taking that many people call "Cornell notes"

http://lsc.sas.cornell.edu/Sidebars/Study_Skills_Resources/c...

http://coe.jmu.edu/LearningToolbox/cornellnotes.html

http://coe.jmu.edu/LearningToolbox/printer/cornellnotes.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornell_Notes

in which it is the note-taker's responsibility to sum up what the lecture means and what the main points are. Taking that approach was very helpful for me in my university studies and especially in my postgraduate professional school studies. I think Einstein too would agree

http://learninfreedom.org/Nobel_hates_school.html

that ultimately it is up to the learner to seek understanding of the main points of any subject.
Outbound Marketing is Dead. Long live Inbound Marketing. | Joanna Ciolek
...in China?
You are measuring others by your own standards.

Perhaps he doesn't care about how much he consumes, but rather at how much he produces. It's not about what one is taking to the grave; it's about what one is leaving.
Scientists Create Artificial Brain With 12-Second Memory
Text Easy To Convert Plastic Text Effect In Photoshop
Text Easy To Convert Plastic Text Effect In Photoshop,In this Photoshop Plastic text effects tutorial, we're going to learn how to use Photoshop's Layer Styles to easily make Plastic text effect Tutorial.
I don't mind opt-out, as long as I know it's opt-out.

The way FB rolls features out is they do it silently in the background, which is sort of grating. I wouldn't mind at all if there was a one-time "Hey, we made this cool new thing, I'm going to turn it on now, but I'm giving you a chance of not using it if you want" message on my next login.
Yes, good point. Now that I look over the comments, everyone seems to say the same thing. That's enough to lead me to believe it should be re-examined. Truth is, I once watched half a video but got bored.
It's a very interesting building. You can tell that it was made with a focus on people walking from place to place. I think there are tours open to the public (but require a reservation). I'm pretty sure it's the only tour in the U.S. that features a Marine walking backwards for over a mile. I think there are over 15 miles of hallways in the Pentagon. There are 5 levels with 5 rings each, so you can imagine that's a lot of places to walk.

One of the things that isn't so nice now is the anti-radiation film that got placed on the windows after 9/11. The film is bright yellow, so everything that sunlight touches has kind of a gross pee colored tinge to it.
If he didn't care about money then why wouldn't he distribute it to his employees in some sort of profit sharing? Noted he's a philanthropist, but he's also the 3rd richest so he's keeping a hell of a lot of the money. There's nothing noble here, just greed in a different form.
Olark is a great tool. We (UserVoice) often use it when we're launching a new feature or change to our sign up onramp.

That said you can quickly find it overwhelming (and distracting). It's great feedback but you really need to dedicate someone to doing it. UserVoice comes in for all those times when you're not able to be online and dedicated to just talking to customers. We use UserVoice to deal with any support issues that coming in (via our Helpdesk product) and to sequester any good ideas and build up support for new features before we build/launch them (via our Feedback product).

If you're really early stage then definitely use Olark but if you're getting any sort of traction at all you'll want to have UserVoice to cover the rest.
Social Media Startup Demos At Philly Tech Meetup
I have recently relocated from Hyderabad to Bangalore. Would love to meet hackers in Bangalore.
And many people don't learn about those things because they are brought up in difference cultures. But to claim that some history books are better than others is just wrong. (I know you are not claiming that)

You will naturally learn your countries history albeit not to the point where you can become a history professor but it's not the end of the world.

History is perspective it can't be anything but perspective. There is no right or wrong teaching in history. Only survivors to tell the tales.
It's interesting that you put all the focus on "transcendent beings". Although that's certainly understandable given you believe that's the entire point of our existence.

For those of us who don't believe there is some transcendent being out there waiting to either embrace us or condemn us to eternal suffering in the afterlife, this is all we've got. We don't have faith that our good deeds and beliefs will rewarded or punished. We don't have faith that there is some larger purpose to life than what actually happens on this planet.

Instead, we try to build societies so that we can place faith in people, and ideas. Is that goal any less noble because the universe will at one point, billions of years in the future, turn into a cold, dead cinder?

Nobody, except those who commit great harm, will be remembered even 100 years from now. Some people might know the name Bill Gates in 2111, but most people will have forgotten what he actually accomplished, just as most of our generation has forgotten what Rockefeller, or Carnegie, or Vanderbilt did. Does that make their contributions to society any less important or righteous?

For us nonbelievers, transcendence isn't about becoming one with "god". It's about becoming one with the ideas and values we hold.
Show HN: Want to learn regular expressions?
I couldn't find a similar resource last time someone asked me about regular expressions, so I've been working on this the past couple weekends. It's a simple, interactive set of lessons and examples where users can apply what they learn as they go instead of just consuming the information.

Any feedback or suggestions would be appreciated!
Seemed to be down in NYC. Actually, I think it might have been a browser issue.

Chrome worked. Firefox did not. I think chrome was falling back to IPv4. Tried a few wgets ... some versions correctly falled back to ipv4 (cygwin). A friend's wgets (not sure which distro) kept trying v6 addresses.
I've tried it. Or rather, my students did.

Back when I was teaching, I know many of my students found Khan more understandable than me (or at least complementary to me). I started encouraging everyone to go watch Khan videos and see if they liked them. Many did, and learned quite a bit from them.

I didn't like Khan that much - his style didn't work well for me. But it worked for many people. It's a lot to expect a single lecturer to be perfect for everyone.

What would be really great is if we had multiple Khans, each teaching in different styles.
User Experience Lessons from Kickstarter
I'm a fulltime iOS developer. Standing there waiting for it to compile was a considerable length affair (multiple minutes)

2-screen iPhone apps with no media might compile quick enough, but development of the type of apps which make money that would be a huge productivity suck.
Probably the best Twitter advice I have heard
Thank you - I am now enlightened.
It is a lot easier to write an essay critique than it is to sit down and fix the problem by recording your own set of video lectures that teach people what you know.
> I am hoping that my son grows up being taught by postmodernist that don't present history as fact

How else could it possibly be presented? Could you elaborate on what you mean when you say that history is "a perspective"? Can one change history simply by deciding to view it differently, somehow?
I guess just setting the phone to state to sending file while uploading the logs to the server was the solution. Is there a better way to solve this issue? The user did not put it as part of the article.
The way the author writes, it's as if he thinks there is some superior alternative that Khan is displacing. Last I checked, there ain't.

Fact is, Khan's videos are considered good because the actual history education that most students take away from classrooms is even worse. Like most other subjects, that's what you get when you try to deliver a comprehensive, objective, detail-oriented education to students who (within a small margin of error) couldn't give a shit. Never mind the Bolsheviks or the timeline -- what percentage of randomly sampled American high school graduates would even know that there was a Russian Revolution if you asked them?

If we can replace zero history with a fifteen-minute-chunk version of history, I'm for it.
> I once took out $5K cash for a transaction where I had to show some money and an internal this-is-not-normal alarm went off. While it was an inconvenience, I'm glad that the bank did not let me walk out with the money without checking up on me. So I think that the bank from the article was very irresponsible.

I agree 100%; I know it can be done because I've had similar experiences with WF. We have been traveling and I've gotten phone calls from them within 5 minutes of a transaction saying, "hey, we just want to make sure this is legit."

The fact that they ignored the alarms is important and I agree, negligent. But it doesn't look like it was enough for the judge to find them liable and more importantly, make it stick and not get flipped on appeal.
I seriously doubt a history lesson in 15 minutes that covered WWII to Vietnam is meant to be comprehensive. With that said, when I was in school we regularly covered a thousand years in a single page. And in many cases complete eras as pertained to geography were skipped altogether. To this day I don't think I could tell you the name of a single African King pre-1900.

With that said, one of the things I still prefer about Khan's lectures, even abbreviated ones like these stated, is that I can pause them at any time, and look up the Japanese oil embargo. And start right back up where I left off in the video. With live lectures at best you can take a note of it, and look it up later, but then other facts that build upon this in the lecture are missed -- and you may not even know that you missed them.
One of the author's points is that the essence of history is "who & why", not "what & when," and that Khan is completely omitting that essence in his summaries.
There's not a chance in hell that Apple would trust something so core to their business to someone else - let alone direct competitors like Microsoft or Amazon. Next.

I do find it interesting that internally developers were using AWS/Azure. Maybe they were doing it as a learning experience?

In any case, an interesting insight to Apple's internal developer culture. I'm pretty sure that Azure developers would get chided were they to ship code that communicated with AWS (and vice-versa).
Misleading headline. It implies that >50% of developers are coding for Android exclusively, but that's not the case. It would be just as (in)accurate to say that "Most developers are coding for IOS."
"It's especially hard to affect UX when developers are typically given requirments from someone who has a specific (bad) design in mind."

I agree, but that's because I think it's hard to write good software when developers are typically given requirements but aren't a part of creating those requirements. The best scenario is when developers are engaged with the users and actively participating in design. While this approach has gained a lot of credibility over the last few years, especially with the advent of the "developer-driven culture", there are still plenty of projects and groups that want to treat development as the "construction" phase of a project, something that happens after design and, perhaps these days, "UX".

As a developer, this has been my big worry about "UX" so far. It seems like it could turn out to be another version of "coders know how to code - but UX designers know what software really ought to be, so we'll design it, and when we're done we'll let you know what to code up in your cubicle. Oh, and could we have some work estimates? Thanks!"

I want to be sure I recognize that developers have their own version of this. "I'll write up the software, but it'll have a crappy UI. Here, designer, pretty this up for me would ya? Should take you about a day, right?"

I liked the 37signals notion of the "three musketeers" (http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch03_The_Three_Musketeers.p...), a developer, designer, and "sweeper" who can play both roles. All three work very closely together in a project.

I think UX is a great idea and could be an important park of a development project, but I'd recommend UX advocates start thinking about how it would fit into a small team (no more than three people). You really don't have room on these teams for people who don't contribute directly to the working software application. As ThomPete pointed out, this means you can't afford staff who work in abstractions.

I'd see this as a skill set that people in design or development roles should strive to obtain. If you mainly do design, wireframes, or front end work, see what you can learn from UX. Same for back end development - sometimes projects do start with very simple UI and focus on application functionality, so it could be hugely helpful to consider the context of UX.

As others have pointed out, this is also something you can invest in, because you get a tangible product.
NINTENDO Wii U – Fly With The Gaming Console
When I used dig to get the AAAA record, I only saw 1 address for google. What gives? Surely there are more than 1 addresses ... I thought dig would show them all. It does that for AA records. I'm very confused.
The attitude towards android in general is dismissive. You need look no further than this HN thread. Imagine how different the posts would be if the numbers had broken in the other direction, in the iPhone's favor.
Language can be expressive in ambiguous ways

Having more ways a statement can be interpreted does not make it easier to identify the correct interpretation, so I don't think this is really a reason people have a harder time understanding code or mathematical notation than they do their native language.

And mathematical notation offers plenty of ways to express a given statement (transform with De Morgan's law, contraposition, shuffling and negating quantifiers, etc.).
Too many people these days think they are entitled to everything for free, especially on the internet. I dabble in angel investing and you wouldn't believe how many people think they are entitled an investment because they think they have "the next big thing" -- if they are so sure, bootstrap it and prove it!
Can Nike Get the Traditional + Social + Crowd Mix Right?
"Khan does the latter, it is called an overview."

It is an overview, but absurdly condensed. A skill like calculus can be thought in brief, clear overviews; you either understand _it_ or you don't.

History is no such _it_.
A Case Study on the Impact of New Technology
Some good "lessons learned" here. Applicable to anyone using the SAAS revenue model but also applicable to other kinds of web enterprises.