skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I use Blackboard as professor a lot, and while pedagogically it can do amazing things technically it's poorly done and annoying. I think the author wrongly poo-poos the one-stop-shop feature of Blackboard. The fact that the annoying quiz making facility grades automatically and posts grades to the annoying grade center that can't even do weighted grades right is still pretty great compared to the alternative (which is what? Getting my students to get their own logins to some other site, take a quiz, scrape that data automatically somehow to some kind of password protected database and get them to sign in to that and then check there)

Everyone gushes over the Kahn Academy approach of expecting perfection and permitting failure; they're right and I can run with it in Blackboard.

What I do:
Write random question pools using Blackboards obnoxious question writing web interface.

Randomly generate quizzes from a series of different pools by subject.

Let my students take the quiz as many times as they want; offer zero partial credit

Blackboard automatically puts the latest grade into grade center (which is almost always the highest since they stop taking it when they're satisfied with their grade) which they can then access with their university login at any time without revealing confidential information about other students

There is a terrible, ridiculous, hackery way to dump to question log files into excel, clean up the data (takes about an hour) and get feedback on how often each question in each pool is answered correctly, so I know which subjects the students are struggling with. We go over those topics in later lectures.

This has had a huge effect in my sections because it feels like the students work twice as hard but are half as stressed about it. They can fix just about any result for the better by learning the material.

So tl;dr I love learning content management systems and by implication Blackboard despite its many egregious flaws.

In terms of startup ideas, I think there's plenty of space to work with Blackboard rather than try to replace it i.e. I don't think their proprietary quiz formats would be difficult to decipher at all, which means a clever startup could make a "We make making Blackboard quizzes easy!" product and do big enterprise sales with it. Universities love to feel they are on the cutting edge of "technology" and clearly have deep pockets for this stuff (if you didn't click on the expensive link in the article you should)
After hearing endless complaints about Blackboard at Hofstra, I was just left wondering what the computer science students at all these schools were doing. This stuff doesn't seem that hard. One undergrad or Master's thesis, maybe a seminar on web development, and you've got it.
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Please email me at <my initials> at nobulb.com. :)
What is the reason for Blackboard and eCollege's dominance? Is it truly because the school "IT departments are dominated by Microsoft-trained technicians and corporate-owned CIOs" or is there another reason?

I understand that Bb is very litigious and has a pretty broad patent on "eLearning" but that doesn't seem like it's stopping its competitors.
Has anyone come across any benchmarks as far as battery life or performance go yet? I know benchmark3d has been including the leaked versions in their game benchmarks.

http://benchmark3d.com/benchmarks
Every time I've looked at my Netflix queue and seen how few of the items in it are available via streaming, I've question whether to drop Netflix streaming now that it's a separate plan. Now that it's a separate non-integrated service, it's an easier decision for me. I wonder is this is part of the plan though? If you can't add non-streaming content to the streaming queue in the first place you're not constantly being reminded of what's missing or how little is available to stream.

Every conversation of late about Netflix streaming seems to focus on the lack or pending lack of content when the Starz deal expires. A streaming service that didn't make lack of streaming content front and center to the user experience would seem to have a better chance of succeeding, especially for new users that quickly try and build up a queue only to find that particular item they now browsing isn't available to stream. Once you separate out the everything's availability of a huge DVD catalog, perhaps user won't miss what's not there quite as much.

I also wonder if those users that care about DVDs primarily care about having access to more than just recent movies and content that will never stream via Netflix (HBO shows?) and that perhaps the future of streaming is more about more recent movies and TV shows. However, if Netflix streaming doesn't progress to the point where it has a catalog breadth like the current DVD catalog, I worry what that means for those who enjoy having access to all of that long-tail content, especially now that local DVD stores with large catalogs are pretty much non-existent.
We use a system built on sakai at my university. While it isn't horrible, it isn't brilliant either.

In the CS department we have a command-line utility for submitting homework and grades, and the classes just have a simple website. Everybody likes that system more than the one based on sakai, which should give you a good idea of how much functionality sakai brings.

Additionally, everybody is now using a system called piazza[1] as an online forum for the class instead of using the one provided by sakai. I rather like it and it has met considerable success in most of the classes that deployed it. Of course, some of my professors are very enthusiastic about this system; one of them even has a testimonial on piazza's main page.

[1]: http://www.piazza.com
Ampegy .....A waste of energy or a bright spark idea?
HResume is a microformat for publishing resumes and CVs
nathanmarz does the work at BackType, Twitter gets the credit
Just for posterity's sake, I'll join in on the "this is a great move" side.

I know there's a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth by current Netflix customers with established movie watching habits who will now face more inconvenience.

However, I use Netflix exclusively for the streaming, so I'm very excited about the future here. If they can sell off the Quikster (sp? dumb name) business and then use that capital for all sorts of good streaming stuff, then that's good for me.

I remember reading an interview with Hastings a long time ago where he said his vision was all about streaming content (hence the name, "Netflix" from the start, and nothing locking him down to DVDs, which he felt would someday be obsolete leaving his company with an anachronistic name). At that time, though, so many people only had dial-up that it just wasn't feasible.

It's interesting and somewhat amusing to me that the interim "send DVDs by mail" business got to be so huge and successful, but I see Hastings as finally trying his hand at his initial dream.

More power to him, I say, as a decade or two down the line, it will be streaming all the way, no doubt.
My point was that compared to the Android-option the iPad is more expensive. The minimum config Transformer is cheaper than the minimum config iPad.

I've even backed my statement up with numbers. What part about that is trolling? You are the one with blanket-statements and no data.

Also, seriously? 'My old account evidently got flagged "troll" for speaking against the Apple-worship cult found on HN.'

PG emailed me telling me I had been a bad boy. Now that account is thrown in the deep end of the QOS pool and the site is slow as fuck unless I log on with another account. Besides that votes are not recorded (which is easy to verify using two accounts) and the account is not allowed to submit stories to HN at all.

So yes. Seriously.

Edit: Sigh. Downvotes?
Have to admit that these are cool ways of looking at the fundamental objectives of a 'good' user interface.

Honestly, looking at the laws and to interpret them literally does no justice to them.
I hardly think requiring a Word document is the same as "treating you like a temp from ManPower". Maybe ease up on the hyperbole a bit. We are talking about a file format.
PalmOS 5! A tad outdated, but still running fine. It's "fun" to write apps in Pascal.
Props to you for using LaTeX! I too trod the road to CV perfection, from the early unwashed days of MS Word (bah!), to HTML (blah!), LaTeX (shucks!), XML (arrgh!) and finally to ReST (hooray!).

Sadly no one cared; recruiters wanted MS Word or RTF and employers valued beauty in phrasing over beauty of typesetting and so I hired a CV writer and stuck to Open Office / Google Docs.

Hope it works out for you though!
I'm certain you'll be happy with them. :) Thanks for using my referral!
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OS X already has the app store, now it just needs the restrictive policy.

You might think it'll never come; well, people said the same things about Windows. In fact, they were far more outspokenly confident about Windows because Microsoft has historically been much less control-freakish than Apple.
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"A very nice attribute of the MongoDB storage engine is its use of memory-mapped files. In this model the cache is the operating system’s file system cache. Restart the mongod process, and there is no reheat issue at all."

This is not correct, even if the operating system handles the cache it needs to reheat the pages that are used in order to cache the memory mapped file.

So usually for instance you have a big MongoDB database but the application accesses the database in a very biased way, there is an obvious working set. Part of the working set ends being cached on memory pages by the operating system virtual memory system, so many times when you do a database read operation you read reading from memory.

If the server is rebooted and the MongoDB process restarted the file is not cached in memory, so the first access to every different "page" of the file will actually seek and read from the disk.
Storm can be used with any programming language. I still need to finish the documentation on this, but I have notes here: https://github.com/nathanmarz/storm/wiki/Using-non-JVM-langu...

The gist is: Storm topologies are just Thrift structures, and Storm can execute processing components in any language by communicating with subprocesses over a simple protocol based on JSON messages over stdin/stdout. Storm has adapters implementing this protocol for Ruby and Python, and it's easy to make a new adapter for any other language. The adapter libraries are ~100 lines of code and have no dependencies other than JSON.
> So few people are willing to admit that the reason women generally don’t get into tech is because they’re not interested in it. I don’t know many females in my life who’d rather spend hours focusing on impersonal abstractions rather than people.

You're partly right, I think, but you have to take into account group psychology. People like being in groups. A lot of women probably don't go into tech (or condition themselves not to be interested in tech) because there are few women in tech at present. For example, assuming you are a male, pick any occupation (even a well-paid one) where 95% of employees are women, then spend a few weeks there. Very soon you will be tired of listening to other women talk about nails, babies, and other female business. Now the same applies, in reverse, to women who are afraid of joining a male-dominated field. It's a self-perpetuating pattern.
Having just pulled the plug on one of the startups I have invested in, I deeply sympathise with your situtation. Please go read _Fooled By Randomness_ and then _The Black
Swan_ by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I guarantee it will make
you feel better, if you haven't read it.

One of the great problems we have as people, especially smart people who did well in school, is that we expect success to be the result of cleverness. We put faith in _a crafty plan that is bound to work_. This is not wise. And, since the people you meet in elevators believe the same thing, they will be asking you for _the stupid thing that made it fail_. But I know, and by the time you finish reading these books you will as well, that the thing you did wrong may have been nothing.

This is not what one generally tells people that fail. And, goodness knows, many more things fail because people did something wrong than 'you were just unfortunate'. So in general, analysing your failures in an extremely self-critical way, in order to learn from your mistakes is a beneficial activity. What you aren't told, alas, is that sometimes the answer is _nothing_. And beating yourself over the head for not being able to find out what you did wrong is not helpful if there is nothing there to
find.

I am in no way competing in your area, and have a bit of a problem understanding what "social advertising ecosystem trending toward openness" actually means, but for my money
if you want to shut people up about your failure, there is
nothing surer than saying we needed XXX amount of revenue
by quarter Y, we only had YYY, and we couldn't get another round of financing because the market continued to be uncertain. Techies, who generally want a technical fix,
tend to shut up at this point. Of course if your problem is that it is the financial people who want to rip open your wounds and comment on what is inside, then your pitch may be the cat's meow. :-) Whatever works.

And you have to get up again, and start the whole damn thing
over. Which you may have to force yourself to these days,
but I promise you is worth it. But, after reading these
books, and learning all about hindsight bias -- there is one
question I would leave you with. Did you, in charting the business direction of your company, leave enough room for
different possibilities for success, or were you stuck with
a 'make-it-or-break-it' fragile plan that either had to work or you were all dead? Because your post did not make it clear.

Make-it-or-Break-its are often a good strategy, because if you are going to fail, you want to do so quickly so you can get up and do something else as soon as it is clear that this is not it. But it's not the strategy for something you put your heart and soul into.

And something in your writing made it clear to me that you are hurting right now. Been there. Done that. Deeply sympathise and wish things were different, and that we could all succeed with the things we love.
Aren't you asked to turn electronic devices off when you enter a hospital? I don't understand why there's an exception for the iPad. And at least from what you can see in the video their iPads are not in airplane mode, but are actually connected to WiFi and the AT&T network.
> (Not to get OT, but inevitably someone's gonna ask "what stops their customers from buying 1 license and deploying on 10,000 servers?" Nothing,

That's very germane. It means that they would earn significantly less money. 10,000 times less, in that particular instance, which is a lot.

Instead of being a 35 billion dollar company, they'd be a 3.5 million dollar company. That's enough to pay a team of, say, 10 engineers and a few other people, which is, uh, significantly different than the number of people they have now.

So you'd have to fire massive numbers of people at companies like Oracle. But not just them - think of all the scientists at drug firms. Their income would be right out the window too. Many best selling authors would have to work some sort of day job to earn money to live on, and thus would be able to write less. Movies? Maybe independent artsy ones done on a shoestring would survive. Performed music might do ok, but recording would probably be an afterthought to market shows. And people like Brian Wilson, who are the studio genius types, but kind of shy and not big on the live thing? Out with them too.

I don't think your numbers add up to 'more creative output', myself.
Qwikster: well, that's awkward...
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Metro and WinRT: Too early to call, but I’m paying close attention
Things to remember about Netflix while scratching your head about Qwikster
Conversely, the fact that you don't have a LinkedIn account is a red flag to many employers potentially looking to hire you.
The HR department's "inflexible procedures" are there to save the company money. Which do you think is higher: the activation energy (in terms of time, money, resources, and frustration) to retrain and retool the HR staff to accept resumes i whatever format (PDF, LaTeX, ODF, etc.) or the activation energy it takes you to stop whining and use Word like everybody else?

It doesn't make you a staffer from ManPower. The CEO probably submitted a Word resume.
Harvey Mudd's taken that approach for a few courses, having student projects develop fairly course-specific management/grading/feedback tools. They're less general, but tend to be less crufty and a good fit for the course as a result. The tools for the intro C++ & data-structures course, for example, integrated with revision control, a submission system, gcc compiler, tests, and various lint-type tools, and an automated early-submission system that would give students basic feedback on whether their submission was compiling and passing sanity checks. Also, there was a grading interface for entering comments (with some things pre-selected, like failed tests, and easy cross-reference to the source code), which would then record the results, and produce & email nicely formatted results emails when done.

It was an amazingly bad awakening when, after that was my first-ever TA experience, I TA'd a course in grad school using Normal Course Management Tools, which by comparison didn't really automate much of my job at all, nor particularly seemed designed to fit with what the course was doing.
I've been wondering that about webOS. I've started making a few apps that fill my own personal wants for the platform; and it seems that in the short-term it's a platform primed for opportunistic development.

Hundreds of thousands of consumers have recently gotten their hands on a Touchpad, and the HP store has so little new content coming into it that competition is pretty much non-existent. There are also plenty of gaps that are entirely unexploited by existing apps that haven't been found in iOS/Android since they launched.
I believe that development is still a profession in its infancy. Or maybe it is an infantile profession. The books written on it may as well be saying that we should be leeching people to cure AIDS. Nothing considered of much substance deals with people's personalities, tendencies, etc. Everything is about some process applied to everything like a hammer. And it doesn't work or it isn't new-and-shiny so someone else will invent some other language or tool or process and that will be the hot thing. Are we trying on clothes for a fashion show or are we trying to solve problems? Why in the hell do we need a new version of Mac OS, Windows, Linux, ...? Wouldn't the old version have gotten it done 1000000 times faster? Solving problems does not and should not involve new and shiny. We should all focus on: (1) our differences: we are not the same and we change- we should do work in a way that best utilizes our potential productivity- psychology/neurology should play into planning teams and projects, (2) better data collection and reporting: we should all be analyzing metrics about development and the services and products we provide, with A/B testing, feedback loop, etc. (3) Solving problems together: we need to limit forking to small R&D groups that do A/B testing and present their findings back to the core group, imo. (Why is Linux still not the most popular OS for the Desktop? imo, the reasons are variation and lack of cohesion in the community- not because it is mostly a free and volunteer effort. Linux sucks on the Desktop because we aren't working together on it- we don't have to use it, so why should we? Limit options and focus!) ... So basically, you are saying that we are skirting around the fact that you have to have a certain type of mind to do well in development, and I agree, but I think that is a problem, not a solution.
Spending all of my programming time these days doing HTML5 Canvas stuff (work, personal projects, writing tutorials, helping people on StackOverflow, and helping those who email me for help)

Canvas is definitely on a slow-but-steady rise in popularity - there are a lot more questions each day on SO than there were a year ago. It's kind of nice to watch it grow, in a way.

I picked "Mobile-friendly Web development" though amusingly Canvas works in strangely different ways on mobile devices/different browsers, so it's more "mobile friendly" than Flash but still not quite the friendliest thing!
I hate programming tests during job interviews, but you would IMMEDIATELY fail with me for using globals. There are VERY few things you could do in Python (or Django for that matter) that would be complete deal breaker for me, but you managed to find one.
I wish I could uprate you more than once.

This has gotten my 90% of my fulltime jobs, and 100% of my contract gigs.

If you are well connected, job boards and listings become a distraction.

If you are not, there is still hope. This is a highly valuable and transferable skill (and part of the overall career-building skillset involving self-marketing and interview skills).

Being well-connected isn't just for the rich and lazy, it helps in all aspects of your career.

Useful Links:
http://www.nwitimes.com/business/jobs-and-employment/article...

http://www.informationweek.com/thebrainyard/news/social_netw...
I agree with most of the lesson presented here which is surprising for me! I might start becoming wiser!
I'm making lesson 13 and 17 my own for the next few months because I kind of struggle with these.
I disagree. I play Piano on concert level and still have this problem in other fields. Learning an instrument between 7 and 15 doesn't automatically make you a more disciplined person.
How is calling it "batman.js" not a trademark violation?
I feel that :-) is rather naso-centric, isn't it? What about folks who've lost their shnozzes, or were born without them? :)
Competitive gaming: The 10 best moments in Pro-gaming history
"Not to be Ignored" but we ignore it
[I'm not a Google employee, but I am a Ph.D. student who has gone through the academic publishing process a few times ...]

Publishing in academic conferences is not the only way to be "non-secret", nor is it the fastest way to get early feedback on usability and systems design issues. In fact, it's a pretty slow way to get feedback. The sorts of conferences that Googlers submit papers to have an acceptance rate of 10% to 25%, which means that most papers get rejected; moreover, it takes a ton of effort to write up and present a paper to an academic audience using writing conventions that are very different than those required to write engineering design documents. Given those low rates of publication "success", it's not surprising that Googlers put their efforts elsewhere.
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Development, sure it could run natively like iOS does(they just reroute the system calls), but it means you have to do more on device testing since the translation layer isn't bug for bug compatible with the device os.
I think this is a great project. I wonder a bit about the size of the board (in that it is not clear to me that making the board smaller helps beyond a certain economy of PCB square inches).

It is fascinating to see 'microcomputers' done all over again, which is to say that back in the day when computers were $100,000 and you could build your own computer for less than $1,000 with over four thousand bytes of memory :-) but they were simpler machines and great for learning on.

Now we're seeing projects with AVR's and ARM chips which are similar (although without some of the independent interactivity of those older machines sometimes) and I find that great because to 'learn' computers it really helps to start on something where you can keep the whole OS in your head rather than say a modern Linux distro or a commercial OS.