skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What's the difference between KA's videos and something written? If I don't know something, can't I just look it up on wikipedia or some other website? Or, a book?

Here's what I'm getting at: NOTHING about KA is revolutionary. Nada. You can read a book as quickly or as slowly as you like. If you don't understand something, you go back.

"Ah, but these are videos. It's an actual human speaking." Well, yeah, the recording of an actual human speaking. Problem is that there's no pedagogical theory that supports the idea that a passive recording is especially effective when it comes to learning.

People don't like being told that they have misconceptions, especially about subjects that they take themselves to be experts in. And smart people consider themselves experts about learning. But the truth is that there's a research science concerning learning, and there are some surprising findings. Further, the truth is that smart people are resentful towards this science, because it challenges their views, and that teachers are more likely to be experts in this science than anyone else.

Fact: Passive learning techniques aren't especially effective at the kinds of learning that matter most. Listening to a video is passive learning.

Important (free) reading: http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=9853

The problem with Khan Academy is two-fold: (1) the pedagogy is lousy and (2) the delivery actually isn't that revolutionary. The ability to move at your own pace is provided by a book. To the extent that Khan's videos are easier on a person than reading, that's because they're less effective (because they're more passive).

There's a way to use the web to revolutionize education, but it's not by making material more accessible. It's by making people -- teacher, tutors and students -- more accessible to each other.
> It's very simple: eat less, exercise more.

It's not simple all. 90% in succeeding with a diet is psychological. Will power won't do it, which is why I like the article: it gives advice to make it easier on the mind (don't starve yourself, manage your environment etc.).
This doesn't have to be an either/or conversation about the relative importance of teachers vs technology.

Teachers will always be needed and valued (above everything else, someone has to create content for technology to disseminate).

The thing is, not all teachers are created equal. I'm sure we can all recall certain teachers that were obviously not concerned for the betterment of their students. Hell, some are downright hostile. Then, there are those teachers who really do care- the ones you remember for life.

Likewise, technology isn't created equal. There are some downright terrible online learning courses.

The difference between now and a few years ago, is that the education system is finally seeing the value in online technologies to aid in the classroom.

Ideally, you have a synergistic effect. A good teacher aided by a curriculum we can actually track and measure on an individual scale.

The students are happy because they can learn at their own pace (or not- you can't win them all over), and the teachers are freed from having a one-size-fits-all solution to a problem that requires a more nuanced approach.

What about this is negative? Are jobs at risk? Probably. They have been for a while now, but not because of technology. Our public schools are just plain underfunded.

In the end, technology will actually create MORE jobs- as I said, someone has to design and teach the online courses too.

Khan Academy isn't designed to replace teachers, it's designed to aid them in the classroom and free up the time and resources to provide that QUALITY education we all desire so badly for our children.
Yuk, this page hit me with a "don't leave this page" alert when I closed the window. A good book will sell itself.
You don't need to know chef, its a simple DSL that is quite wasteful resource-wise.

I'd pick ruby over python, but thats just me. I'd still choose perl over either, but thats because things like threading and the low memory footprint are appealing.

DevOps is about running the stack. If you don't understand the stack your, you're not doing devops.
The Target Isn’t Hollywood, MPAA, RIAA, Or MAFIAA: It’s The Policymakers
My education at Carnegie Mellon has made me a vastly better programmer because it has given me an extensive understanding of how the machine works. This allows me to implement code that actually does things, such as memory allocators, rather than just piecing together code that other people wrote. Also, it has taught me how to prove things about code I write so I can ensure, for example, that integer overflow will not allow an attacker to cause the system calls in my kernel to overwrite kernel memory or memory belonging to another process. Things like these validate the importance of obtaining a top CS education.
AT&T's overage rates are pretty reasonable. They charge $10/GB, which is about what you pay for the initial monthly data plan anyway. Of course, there's probably leftover sentiment from times when overages were much less reasonable, and there are still plenty of such places remaining.

The second two I agree with, but they're sad reasons.
Are we sure that this isn't the same guy who just attacked Amazon? His arguments are equally off point and equally worthless. And that is without taking into account that the arguments come from the side that is losing! I no more think that Khan Academy has a lock on 'the one true way' than any other approach to the problem of education. What I do think is that for what ever reason the approach seems to be working and that is a great deal more than than can be said for the system currently in place. I will also point out the number of top end colleges that are beginning to think outside of the box in ways that greatly resemble Khan's---something that I don't think is an accident...
Sorry to correct you again (I'm a biologist...I can't help it!), but cell death is actually a very good thing. Your cells are programmed to die so they don't turn into cancer, or start degenerating into something equally unpleasant.

Aging occurs because your body becomes less capable of replacing these cells over time, and either replaces with less robust cells or stops entirely. Or you get cancer.
I totally with the author's suggestion that we invest more in teachers. It's incredibly important.

But I hate, HATE, arguments of this form:

"[proponents] have been making similar claims for years, yet [outcomes] are as bad as ever"

It's absolutely just as vapid as "It will be different this time", yet I hear people make this argument over and over.

Things happen until they don't. Sometimes it's a tiny event that precipitates the change, sometimes it's a massive event, and sometimes it's the accrual of thousands of chancy occurences. Past performance is a useful indicator of future performance only if aggregate statistics are your sole concern. If you care about individual situations, like whether a single property of classrooms will change in response to a single new technology, past outcomes in similar situations tells you very little.

And yes, if someone tells you "things will be different solely because of X", where X is something that's happened dozens of times before, they are full of shit.

But anyone who tells you "things will be the same because X happened before too" is just as misguided.
And not to mention, kids love games! If fun and play makes things more engaging, and we learn better when engaged, why not make school more fun?
More barriers to entry. You need to wait longer in order to rank, so it's better to get started asap with some content instead of waiting until everything is perfect.
How does Pinterest generate revenue?
I see no problem with having the monthly plan include 250GB of data. Where it gets stupid is what happens when you go over. Rather than charge you extra, they give you a warning and then cut off your service entirely.

This completely baffles me. Why pass on the opportunity to collect more cash?
I understand you can get Bochs for iOS, so maybe you could install a small distro inside that.
Lazysmart people are good people.

People who are eager to get up in the morning and toil in the sweat of their brows are deeply suspect in my book.

I don't see much good coming out of that kind of attitude - when will they stop and ponder the inescapable nuances of life?

The world needs more lazy inventor types laying around daydreaming on lazyboys, not extra widget crankers milling around mindlessly in labyrinthine office hives.

IMNSHO, of course :)
I think C++'s template feature is pretty unusual in languages. Lisps have macros, which are much more fully-featured and more hygienic than C macros, but I don't think any Lisps are fast enough to be interesting to you. I know that the Scala community is working on putting macros in.

Have you looked at Ocaml and Scala? Those might be close enough to suit your needs, and I think it's only a matter of time before Scala (or something like it) starts outperforming C++ on parallel problems.

What I'll say for C++ is that, in the style of development you're doing, it's definitely faster. The problem I have with C++ is all the use of it that occurs where it's not appropriate and actually makes performance worse because per unit time, programmers can accomplish less in it.

It's clearly possible for expert programmers to optimize the hell out of C++ in a way that just doesn't exist in GC languages, but I don't think average-case code is better, especially if it's framed as an economic problem and programmers of equivalent skill are involved and given the exact same amount of time to do it. Under those constraints, for a large problem, I would bet on Ocaml and Scala winning just because the programmers would have more time to spend on optimization. For a small problem, though, I'd bet on C++.
Frankly that shadow has always bothered me too. I've changed it up now, hopefully that's a little easier on the eyes.
As a biologist, this is a major pet-peeve of mine: we don't need "medical nanorobotics". Not only is this a nonsense term, but nature has already provided a much better solution.

It's called an enzyme.

Enzymes are hugely efficient "nanorobots" that don't require science fiction. They "manufacture molecules" all the time, every day, at catalytic rates that would make high-tech manufacturing factories blush.
That's true, but not quite what I meant. It's conceivable that if everyone made a digital backup of content then it almost certainly be available in one form of another.

I'm speaking more of the topic of the article. If the content holder has decided to no longer make content they control available to the masses then it is almost a moral obligation for someone to digitize that content for uploading to the Internet so that is not lost. How much content have we already lost that should be in the public domain but no one has the content any longer to digitize?

But I'm not talking just movies and tv shows. This could easily cover other mundane topics of life such as sporting events, interviews, documentaries, newscasts and so on.

This is the time that someone in the future, say 100 years, could have a near perfect record of what's going on today with the sheer amount of data we are producing on a daily basis. Not just video content but emails, texting, forums, Twitter, Facebook, etc. If only we could keep copies of content somewhere convenient so that people can get to them whenever they wish.

Now, be clear, I'm not saying that this content should be freely available the moment it is completed. The creator should have the right to recoup their costs plus make profit. Especially since profit might be required for the creator to create more. But we should have saner copyright laws in place so that it doesn't take near 100 years for something to become public domain. That kind of nonsense guarantees that something we feel is not important today may be lost and missed later. The missing early episodes of Dr. Who that keeps getting mentioned is an excellent example.
Algo trading at the bigger banks. Any head hunter in NYC can help you find such a position.
Been in the classroom for 17 years in higher education. I'm much better at my job now than I was 17 years ago. I've learned a lot in the intervening 17 years. Wisdom and experience count for something and imparting this onto other is useful.

Professional development can be helpful and to suggest that the goal is simply to employ teachers is ignorant and naive. I've never met a single teacher who has proposed an innovation with the goal of employing teachers. There are people who do care about teaching and some of those people are teachers and educational leaders. It does not appear to me that your cynicism is rooted in reality.
I'm with you, except I'm sticking with Emacs ;-)
Things I like about Go:

The compilation speed is super fast which makes it feel like you are developing with a scripting language as opposed to a statically typed language. I typically edit code, run the tests and correct my errors without any noticeable time lost waiting.

The Go parser and pretty printer are exposed as a libraries in the Go distribution which allows for interesting meta-programming.
11% comes from credit and (as we know) 12% comes from Zynga.
Solid effect but not a fan of how it breaks the back button.
Site banned from AdSense restored after appeal to regulator
Wow, it's like a blind date where you're trapped in a small tin can together for the better part of a day. Do not want.
Personally I don't understand how one would go about teaching math without using step-by-step instructions, especially considering his example of teaching slope. He never says what would be a better way to teach slope than the textbook/Khan methods, he just claims (without submitting any proof) that those methods are completely ineffective. Well, it seems to be working for KA students, and it seems to be working for other countries.

I agree with pinchyfingers: Students are getting worse at math because they don't want to put the work in. And I don't think it should necessarily be the educator's burden to make each individual math topic more fun and exciting to try and trick students into using their brains. We need to find a way to get kids motivated about learning in general again.
مشاهدة قناة صوت الشعب اليوم بث مباشر 6/2/2012
How was NMDC traffic blocked, do you know? By IP, or by packet inspection?

You can run the hub on any port you like to circumvent the first (let's see them try and block port 80!), and use an ADCS server to circumvent the second - still compatible with DC++ and recent mods (ApexDC, StrongDC et al)

You might also want to look into DTella to decentralise your network.
Expect haters when you're doing something disruptive. The term 'disruptive' itself implies you're pissing someone off.

I'm sure Henry Ford had people who thought cars were a bad idea.

Carry on.
California. Attended California State Universities. They have gone up a bit since I graduated about 7 years ago but not that much.

Average for all CSU's - $5,285

Link: http://www.calstate.edu/budget/fybudget/2011-2012/documentat...
Link 2: http://www.calstate.edu/sas/costofattendance/
As long as SE's are still run by algorithms, you'll always be able to O. That said, this has been the year that many SEO "professionals" lost their ass because in the span of a couple months you suddenly needed also to be: a ux expert, a landing page expert, a writer with exceptional talent for engaging people, and a hosting expert.

The old adage holds true: it sucks to suck.

Josh
iPhone
Good stuff, Add some shading for a 3d effect, looks "2D"/flat.

Vertical would also be awesome (think notepad [of paper])...
This is a good point that touches on what seems like a communication disconnect. While Khan advocates using it as an enhancement, many in education think it's more than that and use it accordingly (disclaimer: based on my experience, totally anecdotal). Perhaps decision-makers are viewing Khan Academy as THE SOLUTION, which is what the author takes issue with.
I agree with you completely.

As engineers, our instinct is to build things. Business discipline requires focusing on profitable uses of time.

It's highly unlikely that building expense tracking software was the best use of time for the original author. He writes that thinking about the POTENTIAL future costs of expense tracking software ($1000/year) upset him.

If one realistically considers the costs to "roll your own" in terms of time, maintenance overhead, hosting & administrative cost, and opportunity cost the obvious conclusion is that this is not a good use of time and energy.

If Tom had instead spent that time fixing a bug, doing hard sales/marketing work it would have been worth much more to him.

No for us, engineers, doing hard, repetitive work is the real discipline. Automating things and finding systems that can be made more efficient is the easy work. Picking up a phone and making a sales call, trying to improve ad words advertising....these are things that are likely more valuable than rolling your own expenses email system.
The real problem is nobody is even trying. Then they all die.
Producer vs. Consumer
Can't we use New York software engineer salaries as an analog here? It's another market where good engineers are highly sought after. $200k for an engineer with 8 years work experience is not uncommon.

Hedge funds pay $250k consistently.

Wouldn't SV look something similar?

Your argument is technically right but It sounds like an excuse to punt on a practice that most of us find f$cking despicable.
Interesting take on Googler - Jeff Dean
If I understood this article as I think I did, your line of reasoning is exactly what the author highlights as the center of a cultural misunderstandings regarding the effects of alcohol. The kid's rowdiness isn't so much a consequence of his drinking than it is a social conditioning that taught him it's ok to be rowdy when you're drunk, it's expected and it's understood. Under different circumstances (in another culture), he would drink exactly the same, but would act completely differently.

I think the main point he's trying to convey is that, rather than focusing on attacking alcohol on all fronts, some effort could be put forth in culturally redefining our belief of what people are supposed to act like when they drink (see the passage on first generation Italian immigrants).
Perhaps economics and game theory will in the long run but here and now the Department of Justice and the class-action plaintiffs are doing a good job taking down the cartel.
The font on the "page" gets blurry when the corner becomes clickable (at least on my machine, and it uses a ton of resources).
Lot of flickering and flashing under Safari
This is cool and I don't mean to disparage the work that went into it, but at the same time I hope nobody actually uses it because just plain old vertical scrolling web pages are way more practically usable.
How do you know you're better at your job now than 17 years ago? Does an effective teacher evaluation system exist in your country that you can use as a reference to validate your claim?
According to Amazon's 10K filing, EGM currently accounts for 60% of the business. And that's precisely where the big trouble lies.

And 40% of the business is not in EGM. Compare that with 5 years ago, when 0% was not in EGM. I call that the opposite of being stagnant. I call that lateral growth.
>They do talk to each other, users pay for the privilege.

what exactly service are you talking about? what kind of communication, between which parties?
You are confusing DevOps with full-stack engineering. These are two different things.

DevOps is about continuous deployment, continuous integration, automation, infrastructure as code.
Your choses to do infrastructure as code are Chef (Ruby), Puppet (Ruby), CFEngine (C), and BCFG2 (Python). You will not get very far with DSL-only knowledge of Chef of Puppet only. The case is the same with CFEngine and BCFG2. All infrastructure as code frameworks assume you are going to customize.

As for the resources, the most valuable resource these days is engineering time. Chef specifically and Ruby toolchain overall are hyper-efficient when it comes to engineering time.
Why don't you write an offline Javascript app to do it? Use one of the javascript syntax highlighters for the editor, the localstorage api to save, eval() to run, etc.
I don't understand how you can think this is a valid argument against piracy. Community is available on iTunes, Amazon Instant Video, netflix, hulu and NBC.com. Plenty of perfectly legal places to watch it not on broadcast TV. Some of which are even free. In this day and age, that's very similar to asking college students how many of them bought Community Season 1 on VHS.
Ask HN: How many programmers/hackers are there in the world?
Wolfram alpha says it's about 400k (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=programmers+in+world) which I think is too small.
Instead of simply looking at the absolute value of the cost per employee, compare it to the time lost to the current method of accounting. Do you lose $9/month in work per employee on expense processing?

If it takes employees an average of 5 minutes per month, you don't have a problem. If it takes them 2 hours per month, investing $9/employee/month is a net win.
What does the degree add exactly, particularly in regard to something that can't be measured by another metric?

I can't think of any key indicator of why I would want to hire someone that can't be demonstrated in some other way besides a degree.
Oh! Well, that would explain why I can't find a service like this...
Chrome cannot play WAV files
This really highlights the font rendering problems (blurriness) of current browsers when using HW accelerated CSS.
Wow, that's the best impl I've ever seen of this effect. It looks and feels very realistic in chrome.
It doesn't seem to load on my iPad. Works in Chrome, however.
I was experimenting the new version of Twitter Bootstrap 2.0 and the responsive design. It turned out pretty great and then I have decided to extended it to more additions as the following:

* http://bootstrap.io/ for layout design / responsive design

* http://backbonejs.org/ for router (collection/view will be added soon)

* http://url2png.com for web thumbnail

* http://subtlepatterns.com for background wallpaper

* http://icanhazjs.com for rendering template

I am still improving the site as I am learning more about bootstrap and backbone.js. I hope you guys are enjoying the site.
Voice Sentiment Analysis Startup Saygent Predicts A NE Patriots Win
The "rah rah" social types railroaded us into a terrible cubical-based environment

It wasn't anything other than economic rationalism.

Hell, one of our big banks - the kind that report record profits every quarter - moved a segment of staff into new offices... and only provided 80% of the seats. "Everyone will work from home one day a week". They hotdesked these staff - no guaranteed desk, no personalisation, no real way to even know whether a colleague was in or where on the floor they could be found. The kicker is that this wasn't minimum-wage call-centre staff oe similar, this was six-figure employees.
Marble – An Open Source Alternative To Google Earth [Linux]
Why is that? You're not adding much to this conversation just by saying "That's an awful way of thinking."

Why is it so awful that I realize that technology and business can be learned much faster, much cheaper, and more indepth by actually doing them than going to school for them?

Why is it so awful that I value someone figuring out a better way to spend a recession than in school learning something that may or may not help them and for most of them puts in solidly in debt with few options after graduation.
Rates have gotten better, I agree.
Isn't that illegal (IANAL)?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frivolous_litigation
Obligatory comment about competing on features/image/design/story/etc.. anything but price.