skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Parents need to understand that KA is not a substitute for the teaching paradigm, but rather introduces a great tool for self-enrichment - as the article suggests, a "supplement" to homework and education, KA is great. But the "education" itself is a varied and dynamic system that cannot completely rely on a child to be self-motivated. Few 7 year olds are self-motivated to master math, and gamification is just another arrow in the quiver, but not the panacea. Learning is IMO at least a 2 step process, requiring participation beyond simply multiple choice and listening, it most importantly requires exploration and deep problem solving skills. For example, being assigned a math word problem where the child must read, re-read and attempt to find the answer using at least 30 minutes of analysis before realizing the true nature of the word problem. That 30 minute process is an important mental exercise that cannot be circumvented. KA is a great way to quickly understand a concept, but true mastery requires application, and having a teacher present to gently guide without revealing the answer is an art.

Being a parent that closely monitors his child's learning process, I'm very careful to never give my child the answer, but just enough hints to keep him from being frustrated - ultimately, HE must figure it out, never me. KA is a great way for my son to learn about a subject, but the next stage is when I take him away from KA and start applying those concepts to real life problems.

Parents need to understand this 2 step process.
Yes at a simple level you're right, but you could use the same argument about lots of things, for example I could opt-out of using the Internet but that should not give ISPs carte blanche with my personal data.

As to your question, I use FB fairly cautiously and I'd also rather not exclude myself from a social forum which friends prefer to use.

What I'm suggesting is a simple compromise, rather than give social networks an unlimited license to my data I'm happy to give them a more limited one.
Being that I haven't added any, when I click on 'Favorites', it's empty. So what if the site knew which pages I spent the most time reading, and those were factored into suggestions for my favorites?

Then, when I was done looking at the 'Favorites' tab, it took me a second to figure out I had to go to the left section of the top bar on the other side of the search box and click on the title to get back to where I was when I began. I was expecting there to be a way to go back to the front page in the group of links to the right of the search box.

Other than that, my first impression is good- it looks classy, as it should considering the subject matter.
Oops, the correct method is toDataURL(). See comment above.
As someone who is extremely interested in getting started in the e-learning space, what are some ways to offer credentials to people via your e-learning company?

I imagine there is a host of options, ranging from formal university credits (which would require teaming up with some educational institution) to just an email saying "congrats, you done it bro". I'd imagine the interesting options lie somewhere in the middle?
Let's be blunt: Amazon is just another department store, except they have no physical storefront. But lack of a physical storefront doesn't mean they won't suffer the fate of all the unwieldy, poorly managed department store chains that have gone before. History has a way of dealing with do-too-much retailers (and now, e-tailers).

The author treats the fact that they don't have a physical storefront as just a minor quibble. As if it wasn't the fact that Amazon didn't have a physical presence, was accessible from the comfort of your own home, and had incredibly reduced labor costs, that didn't end up being the disruptive change that put Amazon on the map.

To survive in its present form, it badly needs to acquire an Airborne Express (except that AE has already been acquired by DHL), or maybe a railroad and a package delivery company. Ideally, it also needs to acquire a payment-processing system (a PayPal). Why not just admit the obvious? Amazon needs to acquire eBay.

This is ridiculous - what business reasons does Amazon have for acquiring these companies, saddling themselves with physical infrastructure and additional labor costs, which may only earn them marginally more income?

Why would Amazon rush to acquire a shipping company and more labor costs, when shipping companies like FedEX are trying to reduce their labor costs by shifting the burden of local delivery to the United States Postal Service? (http://www.fedex.com/us/smartpost/).

There are so many differences between physical retail businesses and an online retailer, that the analogy cannot account for.

There are many cases to be made for challenges that Amazon faces, but this is not one of them.
I agree that KA is a wonderful site, but not a panacea.

What I miss from the article is to present the solution for it.

My girlfriend is a teacher and she tells me about her days. Generally it's like taming lions many times. Kid's don't get the stuff they are being taught, because it's endlessly boring and they don't care. Not a bit. I assume they generally hate math classes.

And I can see why: they don't actually accomplish anything, have no context, just pound on basic formulas (which the article actually highlights well in the beginning).

So, I think that the solution is to package the knowledge in creative tasks. Give the kids assignments that they can creatively engage in. Give some leeway on the solutions. Let them work in small groups. This would give a bit of cooperation in the groups and competition between. Give good grades to the most efficient solutions. Structure the tasks so that the students need a basic understanding of the current topic that has to be learned and add them the resources (like KA). Then you might end up with them actually learning something.

And knowledge that is acquired during the solution of particular problems actually tends to stick longer than the next test.
> "Khan Academy and its donors may preclude better products from coming along"

The author is just bitter. One website on the internet does not preclude another. As you said, there are many startups. Focusing on just KA, the author might be wearing horse blinders.

If he is a teacher, he should be counseling his students instead to repeating the same lesson that can be learned from a video. There will always be a need for direct human tutoring.
With 8.7% market share, Apple has 75% of cell phone profits
Well, the anti-drinking populace are telling him not to drink. And it's good advice, considering that if he's rowdy he has probably exceeded the government recommended maximum consumption level. He can never satisfy everybody anyway, so what is the problem here? I don't think the youth have problems with people not liking them drinking.
Pointless summary of http://www.3ders.org/articles/20120203-83-year-old-woman-got...
Be Most Memorable Person in Room
As far as I know, while it's perfectly OK to share the physical disc with your friend, it's not legal to distribute copies of the movie to others (including your friend) even if you own a legal copy.
That sounds like an awful way of thinking.
Agreed. If you're going to cheat, you'll cheat. It might even be easier to detect, e.g. enrollment and registration coming from one IP, but all coursework submissions happening from another. Or other more subtle detection mechanisms could be developed I'm sure.
Why not use WebWorkers?
Wish background-repeat had a repeat-diagonal option?
From what i read, today's online learning is pretty social , not self learning.I guess that's a big part of what enables so many people to be successful in learning at home.
I posted this a while back:

Eat Like A Caveman To Lose Weight

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/237563.php

It's obvious, but missing from the title is the fact you also need to add exercise.
Yes, but the point is not to simply state 'this common citation in software engineering is bullshit, which indicates they're all idiots and full of bullshit', but to get the reader to actually think about and agree to the logical argument before revealing the specifics of it being software engineering - before readers can engage in self-justification and criticism and confirmation bias 'oh we're special it's not as simple as you think'.

It's like if you took a speech by a politician, removed the obvious identifiers, and showed it to his enemies who agree with it, and then reveal who it was by - you've demonstrated something interesting about human biases. And his enemies may even learn something.
"you were also allowed to treat women as women"

Whatever that is supposed to mean?

As for the alcohol, true, I don't mind. However, I don't really miss it either - it wouldn't be sufficient to make me want to live in a Mad Men world. And there does not seem to be happening much else besides drinking and philandering.
The excess computing capacity story is a myth according to Werner Vogels, Amazon's CTO, see: http://www.quora.com/Amazon/How-and-why-did-Amazon-get-into-...
I think it's a mistake for them to throw KA in the same category as traditional K-12 education in the first place. At least from my experience with it, people don't go on Kahn Academy to try to learn everything; it's more valuable when you're looking for knowledge about a specific subject, and you already have a reason for wanting to learn it.

The article's main criticism is that KA doesn't try to talk about all the possible uses of the subject matter. I'd rather they didn't, or at the very least kept it separate. Unless someone's being forced to sit down and watch educational videos, that doesn't add enough value to justify the time spent.

It may be that other competitors (including the ones you've mentioned) will try to fill the gap and take a more traditional education role. But saying something's bad just because it's not occupying the exact niche that the author wants it to? That's not a very useful criticism.
And what projects have you recenly have created..I recently got accepted to an incubatoy to develop an iOS product, i only have the idea sketched and a business plan..i about to have some intital funding from it...And right now i need a technical cofounder to develop this project, in order to beacome my future partner...if you're willing to help me don't hesistate to contact me: arturo_g_p@hotmail.com...i'm willing to give some equitity for the company in exchange...

good luck trying to expand your portfolio!
The problem is that there is no immediate solution. You could bang away at the problem for the better part of a decade and still be 'almost there.'
What about the OccupyWhatever movement? I don't miss commies, but I don't think in the commie hunting days everybody who was hunted actually was a commie.

What would you stick up your neck for? I mean what things would get you into trouble? Wikileaks is the only example that comes to mind (and pretending to be a terrorist, obviously).
Because this wasn't clear to me: are you arguing that his point is wrong, or that its amount of cynicism displeases you?
Anchor: a lightweight CMS for art-directed blogs
Excellent - thank you for clearing this up!
Or maybe the cells that should die but fail to do so?(cancer cells)
Who really benefits from putting high-tech gadgets in classrooms?
When did you launch? Weddings are generally pretty seasonal, so I would guess you'll get a lot more traffic in the next few months. Also, is anybody linking to you?
Are we comparing same levels of drunken-ness here? What about the difference between 4 drunk teens each walking alone vs. 4 drunk teens walking in a group (where it's possible to look out for one another)?
Seriously he thinks they might make a loss on kindle fire. Of course they freaking do. I'm pretty sure they were open about why earnings were down.

Does he not realize how much freaking money they will make on the backend of that selling digital stuff like apps and ebooks and also more physical stuff I bet.

Doesn't mention anything about Amazon Prime. Is in Australia so possibly doesn't know much about it, but yeah Amazon is a beast. Consumers don't wanna search the web they want 1 click buy.

Amazons other meaty asset is all its reviews. Take any so called obscure category he mentioned and you will probably find more reviews in there than all other ecommerce sites combined.

Consumers want easy, fast, trust, peer reviews, cheap prices. Amazon does all that. Article a good reminder to get me some Amazon shares and short sell on traditional retailers.
Personalized eCommerce Is Already Here, You Just Don’t Recognize It
Fascinating example of peer review not working out. It reminds me of the Sokal hoax, except that this one doesn't look like a hoax.
well if i want something to look and feel like a button, i won't ware about tab navigation. its a button after all. Its like saying i can't use a div to make it look like a button because it cannot be accessed through tab. Its a div, not a link. If i want tabbed navigation i will use a link not a button.
I'm all for new publishing models in academia, but this post doesn't address the fundamental difference between the web in general and academic papers: expert curation.

The web's "curation" works (to whatever degree it does) because there are thousands, if not millions of people who can rate the quality of most articles/essays/websites. But in many scientific fields, there are often only a very small number of people who would be qualified to review a particular paper (usually well under a hundred, sometimes as few as a handful).

And make no mistake, this is a numbers game -- there's the well known 100/10/1 rule for content websites (for every 100 viewers, there are 10 who rate content, and only 1 who creates content). The exact numbers vary quite a bit from website to website, but the point is that it's orders of magnitude difference. That's all fine if your initial pool of people is huge, but if you start with 20 qualified people...you see the issue.

Another related point not addressed is that peer review is fairly demanding work. You're not just saying "accept" or "reject", but you're obliged to write a page or two suggesting the strong and weak points of the paper, things to improve, etc. You need some mechanism for enforcing this (even if it's via social norms), otherwise review quality deteriorates quite severely, which in turn affects paper quality.

In lieu of this article, I'd recommend seeing lectures by (or essays by) Michael Nielsen, who's thought about this problem in much more detail and (I believe) has a much better understanding of the way things work.

http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/essays/
I really enjoyed this, thanks.
Top uses of Cloud Computing [Defination]
I married a couple of years ago, and I remember there were a LOT of wedding ideas sites on the web. Your site looks clean, the information is presented well and I had fun reading, so no problems there. My guess is that your main concern is being found, when I search for 'wedding ideas', 'wedding sites' or 'wedding blog' your site does not show up on the first page.

Darren Rowse (www.problogger.net) has tons of resources and tuts to get more users. It's really worth looking into.
I've had two bad experiences with open plan offices, two good, and one excellent.

The first bad experience was shortlived - I was temporarily in a large room with half-height desk dividers with people doing sales and support calls. I asked to move.

In the other bad experience, it wasn't sales, but a bunch of reasonably unruly, not young, but childish developers (edit: could have been a culture/value mismatch, the company was a "corporate" supporting a long-lived product, my team coming from start-up environments or preferring them working on a new product). I managed to get my team moved to another location in the building, and a room for three of us to sit in (facing outward). (I stole the window seat.)

The first good experience with open plan was where our group was together, with a small gap between our group and the next, with some head-height dividers.

The second good experience was, I admit, not really open plan. In a long space, we had pods of 8-12 people with full-height glass walls, with frosting up to just above sitting-head-height. This was an interesting environment - we mixed support staff (non-phone support), operations staff, developers, designers, and so forth equally between the pods. (This was at Yola. Before we moved to new offices, we were in rooms in a house holding 5-7 people in each room.)

The best experience has been at Facebook, where I am here. Especially at our new campus in Menlo Park. Basically, open plan broken up with small "lounges" and curtain-closable rooms, with gaps between groups working on different things. Plenty of meeting room space, with tons of 2-4 person unreservable rooms, and whiteboards everywhere.

There are exceptions. Like in the old office, there are a few people who need serious quiet/lack of distractions to work, and they work in their own rooms. Some teams go into "war rooms" when they're near release to facilitate even higher-bandwidth discussions.

This applies to the bulk of the company, including, for example, the CEO, CTO, VP of Engineering, and VP of Product.

Anecdotally, open plan doesn't work at all well when you mix certain job types (sales and engineering, for example), doesn't work as well when you mix people working on different products or without break-out rooms or gaps between groups. It seems like it can be done well, and it probably needs motivated employees (employees already unhappy are likely to respond more aggressively to distraction). Some people just don't work well in the environment, and catering to them is a good idea. Having meeting rooms or collaboration areas located close by, but not distracting to those working, makes people tend to use them to avoid annoying those nearby (have this happen every few days when conversations go over a few minutes, or have more than a few people).
well, this method downloads a file without a .png at the end (and most users are overwhelmed with the task of renaming a file)

think there is something coming with BlobBuilder and FileSaver, but i haven't hat time yet to give it a spin http://dev.w3.org/2009/dap/file-system/file-writer.html#idl-...
and an example here http://updates.html5rocks.com/2011/08/Saving-generated-files...
Sucess and the Shrug Effect
I can't imagine working in a cubicle environment without the ability to block out distraction and hope to maintain any level of productivity. Any major project I'm working on involves some planning - yes - but even more long stretches of uninterrupted productivity and writing/coding/creating/implementing. I'm the owner of a small web company and while our team works from home currently, when we eventually do move into office space the priority will be ensuring everyone has a real office with access to collaborative space when needed.
NYT's target audience is not HN. I think many people who use FB don't realise there are any privacy issues under consideration, and I think it's good that the NYT is pointing them out.

While I'd expect most HNers to have made a conscious choice whether to trade their data for FB service or not, that's not something I expect regular users to do (I think they should, but that's another matter).
Agreed, this was exactly where I started to get suspicious.

Author: "Gamification is bad when applied to eighth grade."

I kept looking for the support for that claim, didn't really find any. The IPI study was tossed in, but it dealt with a tangentially related educational program, and seemed to endorse methods focused education over memorization of answers. This article was attacking process focused aspects of Khan, so I'm not sure IPI was the best study to cite.

It's a drawn out article, and light on evidence. I wouldn't look to the author for advice on teaching others critical thinking.
There is one group of people who hardly ever need to have this pointed out to them: eighth grade students. They know how arbitrary it can be.
Apps We Can't Live Without
An Overview of Hadoop
I've said this elsewhere. Good lectures, even good exams, must be matched with good projects and discussions with peers (refereed by a deeply knowledgeable teacher). I wonder if a cottage industry of local study groups will form around these lecture sources. Perhaps Udacity could even spearhead the creation of these and offer some kind of certification to vouch for the local teacher.

Then you have the best of both worlds: an internally consistent curriculum with good lectures and digested information paired with one-on-one instruction and project development / discussion which will serve individual students in their own unique ways.
That may be, but I think you want to think about specifics, not "seems like it's already pretty big!"

Apple had 8.7% of the phone market last quarter. It's as low as that because the majority of phones sold today are not smartphones. Do you think that will remain true for the next 10 years?
Uh, this is actually a pretty good idea, if you could implement it. It would have to filter out background noise, and would be tough to make it work in a crowd, but it seems like a decent aid, at least for those who are lucid enough to understand that they have a disorder.

As SoftwareMaven explains below, many schizophrenics experience visual hallucinations in addition to aural hallucinations, but this doesn't seem like a huge stumbling block.

Bigger, I think, is the paranoia aspect. If you really, truly believe the plants in and outside your house are vampires who are waiting to kill you (true story, unfortunately) I can't imagine you're going to put too much faith into your wristband.
I agree with some of the thoughts of the author on this topics, but some of the value of the Khan Academy comes in the use of video and private study as an opportunity for students to learn. Some students thrive in a classroom with lots of other students, others do not. The use of video allows some students to pause, stop, rewind and take copious amounts of notes without the potential ridicule of classmates. It also lets teaches that may be great lesson planners or one-on-one teachers and not good lecturers have the very best provide the lectures, letting them focus where they might be better suited.
Turn.js - The page flip effect for HTML5
turn.js is a plugin for jQuery that adds a beautiful transition similar to real pages in a book or magazine for HTML5.
would be great to start seeing "Udacity meetups" or something
Khan Academy provides a low-overhead, on-demand learning environment. The format is good, but it's not novel, and the format isn't the point.

Khan Academy allows me, with no overhead whatsoever, to pick (or refresh a skill), whenever I want. If my math skills aren't up to snuff for a hobby project I'm working on, Khan Academy is there. If I can't remember how a transistor works ... Khan Academy has me covered.

Compare this with the incredibly high overhead of high school and 4 year degree programs. If I just want to take a refresher engineering class at the local University or Community College, I have to go through the full admissions process, provide a full academic history, justify my reason for being there, and then work at a preset pace and on someone else's schedule. If I'm stuck at the undergraduate level, I have to take a slew of general ed courses totally unrelated to what I actually want to do.

Contrast this with frictionless learn on-demand education.

There are, obviously, downsides:

- Not all topics are covered.

- The depth of coverage is not on par with a university education.

- No access to very expensive university equipment

- No one-on-one access to a professor

- No student discounts on expensive software

Despite those downsides, the format has worked great for me.

In my ideal world, formal K-12 and college education would be comprised of:

1) Elective projects that rely on a broad swath of skills.

2) Courses to be taken in concert with the projects to provide requisite skills, as those skills become necessary.