skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Want to change the conversation? Don't sit around critiquing things; get off your ass and produce some content that includes your oh-so-much-better approach. Right now, you're just bitching about it and -- this I can promise -- nobody will care.

This is the problem when hacker news tries commenting on Education. Readers here tend to be wildly ignorant about what's actually going on Education. How do you know that these teachers aren't doing things? Do you mean, they should be making a website? What if they don't think that rote e-learning is an effective way of learning (something that is greatly supported by the evidence)?

You see this video and you don't know about the years of criticism that has been laid against Khan. You don't see the suggestions that have been offered (and ignored). You don't see these things because you're not a member of that community. Just like these teachers probably have no idea about what's going on in the Rails community, you really don't know what's going on in theirs.
"Who knows how many of these companies could grow into something bigger without the pressure of generating a return for early investors in just a few short years."

It seems to me like this is part of a more general trend - namely that a lot of startups might do well to figure out how they can make a profit first, instead of going the venture/acquire/cash out route. It's not incubators that are hurting startups - it's that a lot of startups should probably figure out how to be profitable first.
One of the big things that Apple got amazingly right was the App Store install process. From a Linux perspective it's mostly an evolution, but for the mainstream customer that has had to deal with Windows installers it's unreal how easy it is.

I saw this link in one of the comments in the microsoft.com design preview post:

http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2008/06/24/full-text-an-...

Contrast that to how easy it is to install something on iOS. It's little wonder that people don't mind paying for iOS apps - they're easy and cheap.
Interested in a St. Louis Ruby conference? Let us know
Amazon RDS is having issues (read: RDS is Down)
I so agree. Do something right and you have just done something right. Make a mistake and learn from it, your knowledge has grown.
Thanks. This one is working: http://confreaks.com/videos/77-mwrc2009-the-building-blocks-...

He mentions that back in the 70s he was writing Fortran for NASA and his mentor recommended he read a book called Composite/Structured Design. "Structured Design" was the big thing back then and the controversy was using if-else and while loops instead of Gotos. Nobody was worried about strongly vs weakly typed langauges (perl!).. Key chapter in that book is on Coupling and Cohesion.

Junp to the late 90s for his second book recommendation: "What Every Programmer Should Know About Object-Oriented Design", really just the third part of the book which introduces "connascence". Two pieces of software share connascence when a change in one requires a corresponding change in the other.

I love the historical angles on this stuff.
Having worked in the killing machines industry, this is not a win. This is a loss.

GPL should also read:

"The software must not be used for the purposes of warfare or to inflict suffering on any individual."

EDIT: I can see America has woken judging by the number of downvotes being received.
Seeing stealth aircraft isn't about resolution. The key to seeing something with radar is signal-to-noise ratio. From the article:

"it becomes possible to measure the properties of individual raindrops greater than 0.5mm in diameter due to the low concentration of such drops in naturally occurring cloud systems and the overwhelming dominance such drops have on the measured radar reflectivity when present in a field comprised of smaller particles."

It's easy to distinguish an airplane from something with a similar sized signature, say an insect, since the airplane moves at 1000knots instead of 1, but you have to be able to see it through the noise. That's tricky. If you use a radar like this (high power, really narrow beam) you might be able to see a stealth plane. But, you'd have to know where to point it. Therein lies the challenge.
I'm pretty sure it was solely because Zuck happened to have a LAMP host at his disposal at the time.
Amazon EC2 and RDS in US-EAST zone down
multi-az deployments affected too.
What is the point of posting this on stackexchange? I found the comments quite childish:

> Put your bosses name in that field for every bug. Convince your teammates to follow that practice, then wait how long this nonsense will last.

> Quit. No, don't look back. Just... quit. In your resignation letter, put Person to Blame: [Boss's Name]

What I would do is try to explain to them calmly and patiently why this is a bad idea. If this does not work, then just refuse putting blame on other people, and encourage others to do the same. If you really must do something childish to protest, put your own name on every bug that you file together with a nonsensical reason why are to blame for it.
The SR-71 is probably too small to carry a space-faring rocket, but the concept is reasonable: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_launch_to_orbit#Supersonic_...

This splits combined-cycle propulsion into multiple vehicles: air-breathing propulsion for the aircraft, chemical rocket for the spacecraft, thereby improving the efficiency of the whole launch.
Git-flow with rebase
dicts and lists are fast, but that doesn't mean a threading approach which must protect your dicts and lists with various kinds of locking will be that fast, because your program will now be waiting on locks. What are you trying to do with memcached that it is not fast enough?
In my experience with Python, the issue of the GIL comes up far too frequently. I use Python first as a prototyping environment, and once I have a proof of concept I like to optimize for performance (without re-writing the entire program in a more appropriate language). Most of the stuff I do is CPU-bound, but also involves large amounts of data. So, without writing C code as an extension, I can either suck it up and deal with single-core performance, or I can use the multiprocessing module and hope that inter-process communication isn't too expensive or difficult to code (and no, it's not always as simple as just using multiprocessing.Queue). I am under no delusion that the GIL will ever be "fixed", but I am disappointed that I spent years working with Python before I got into more CPU-intensive tasks and eventually hit the brick wall that is the GIL. And of course, comments like you mentioned, which attack my competence as a coder, are not constructive.
Redis Sentinel design draft 1.1
Anyone have a full article on how to build a site with just Python and not using Django? This would be more helpful than bashing PHP.

The article would have to show us how to install Python, configure it, get it working on the server, what to upload, how to deal with forms, cookies, etc. I've yet to see this kind of article. I wouldn't mind learning Python for web use, but every book I've seen suggests you just use a framework or has a very small chapter composing of a few pages. Such an article or even a book, would get more people off PHP, if that's what people want. Until then PHP gets stuff done and that's all clients care about, no one cares if I use Windows, Linux or Mac OS X when I work. Granted I'm not a l33t programmer like most on here, I'm just here to learn from better coders.
Why Manipulation of the LIBOR Rate is Important to You
Cannon.fm Launches Local Music Streaming Radio App
THC-WarDrive - Tool for mapping your city for wavelan networks
You're not getting it: This isn't some special military privilege. You or I could do the exact same thing. Anyone can take GPL'ed code, modify it, and keep the changes to themselves.
Chris McKinstry was also fed up with the Loebner Prize, but instead of making a chat bot to break it, he invented a less subjective intelligence test, the Minimum Intelligent Signal Test (MIST) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_Intelligent_Signal_Tes...
Yeah, military drones using Linux, what a big win. The fact that the military uses Linux is a big negative for Linux in my eyes. If you support Linux, you're indirectly supporting the U.S. military and by extension murder, aggression and terrorism.

I wish more software licenses had a clause forbidding military use of the code.
IOW, the double-claw "hammer" is just what you may need if your job is to pull nails out of houses that are unsafe because they were built by carpenters who used double-claw "hammer"s to hammer in the nails. Got it.

The analogy is almost perfect! Except that PHP doesn't pull out nails very well.
Well, in terms of total revenue, they appear to be more than twice as large:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2012/apr12/04-19fy...

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2012/04/24Apple-Reports-Seco...

Microsoft's third quarter 2012 and Apple's second quarter 2012 seem to be the same timespan, ending on the same day, and in that period Microsoft reported $17.41B, while Apple reported $39.2B.
You should read the first answer, not the comments on the question.
Xi Jinping Millionaire Relations Reveal Fortunes of Elite
They could but they would have a lot of developers sniffing around the edges trying to figure out if HP was really serious this time. Last time I went to their developer conference they said they were really serious, and then 3 months later dumped the entire thing.

Unlike Google, they actually had a decent tablet OS. They had ceded the smartphone market to Apple and Google. But at the time the only real tablets were coming from Apple. Some idiot bean count of a CEO saw the competition (iOS and Honeycomb) and got scared.
Trouble at the Olympics from Argentina? Remind them of their Nazi-backing past
> If I make a string: '<P>' . $var . '</P>'

I'd say don't do that, refactor into templates instead. With your preferred approach to generating markup, you're largely on your own in protecting against XSS. Hopefully all the developers using your code are awesome at spotting and pro-actively dealing with XSS issues.

Still, with a HTML escape everything default, either turn it off, or use a raw "I know what I'm doing" method instead.
Solve the eCommerce Hack Day programming challenge to get a free ticket
Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4175399
Mad Mimi new design
Um, when did we forget how to write our own abstractions? It’s not black and white, either jQuery or vanilla JS with no helpers.
Thanks to the fact it is open and published under PLoS's "limited warranty" everybody can read the actual paper and are encouraged to judge it. And this is good, because papers are voices in the discussion not an indisputable statements of truth.

Nature and Science pursuit for perfection is not only futile (Schön) but also slowly changes them into scientific tabloids.
Security Vulnerability in MySQL
They don't have any hardware to run it on. The Touchpads are shutdown, finished, gone. The tools have been dismantled and the workers sent elsewhere. Enyo is little more than a project looking for a purpose at this point.
Great point. I am viewed as anti-Microsoft and pro-Apple. But all in all Microsoft has been made to look bad by really bad OEMs.
smaller images coming this weekend (with prices, descriptions, and sorting on the homepage)
My understanding is that the actual drones themselves do run a hard realtime operating system. Linux (and formerly Windows) is used to run the workstations on the ground that the drone pilots use.
Seth Godin: Do we have to pander?
This article contains a number of fallacies. Storing sessions on disk? Over NFS? In the database? Please - no-one does that. And random MySQL bashing? What's that based on? MySQL is used by many high-volume shops to handle huge amounts of data. (See - I don't have to quote examples either!) And magic Oracle scales to infinity? For the kinds of database setups you need with high-performance web apps you can throw the same amount of money at percona.com and get there as well.

[Edit - didn't notice this was a 2004 article]
Whiteboard Alternative – The Bamboo Board
Here we go again...

Maybe it does suck. You can certainly tell it was not designed by computer scientists. In many ways, it throws away years for programming language best practices.

This being said, what are the practical alternatives? JSP? Servlets? ASP? Python/Django? Ruby/Rails? What?

I am sorry but JSP, Servlets, ASP, Python/Django, Ruby/Rails are just shit of a different kind. But they do not deserve that holier-than-thou aura.

I suggest bad programmers keep blaming their tools for their own shortcomings.
I suggest that when bad programmers have produced enough horrors to sully a tool, they blame the tool and move on to the next tool.
Seth's blog is always 'must read' material, but I especially like today's post.
It's amazing how you people really believe all this.
I don't mean to offend anyone, but I hate when people think of themselves a beautiful butterfly. Common people, employees, plumbers, etc. also have ideas, also have "bold blindness", they also have a willingness to create from nothing (who think created the thousands of open-source apps that are part of GNU and/or Linux, entrepeneurs?) is not that what separates you from them. You have disposable money and instead of a nice boat or car you put it in a business. And you know how to talk people into putting money in your idea, and you probably live in a country so terribly full of money that people are willing to risk it. That's it. Unless you are an entrepeneur living in some hellhole african country, in that case, respect to you, bold african entrepeneur.
I was just thinking of indie tech... tech & indie... tindie. I'm still shocked the URL was available
Warren Buffett practices, "praise by name, criticize by category." This is the opposite.
But of course. Comments on StackExchange are for quips that aren't whole answers, and they're limited to 600 chars so that can't be much more than quips. The real high quality responses are in the answers.
I'm a long-time PHP programmer and have been programming with Lua (for gaming) for the past year and Python for command-line (NumPy) based scripts for the past two years. Obviously, in comparison, the syntax in Lua and Python are a thing of beauty as are the data structures (Lua tables FTW), but I always fall back to PHP for web projects since I haven't had the chance to completely grok the Python deployment process.

Is there a simple guide to deploying Python web applications (preferably with Flask)? I know there are quite a few options (WSGI, FastCGI, mod_python), but what is the best way to do it.
This is one of the more notable contributions the DoD has made to Linux: http://www.nsa.gov/research/selinux/
a new solution for this will be out this weekend. smaller photos with more context. this is my top priority at the moment
It's also worth noting that Apple's revenues are growing ~ around 5x faster than Microsoft's:

http://caps.fool.com/Ticker/MSFT/EarningsGrowthRates.aspx

http://caps.fool.com/Ticker/AAPL/EarningsGrowthRates.aspx
I don't know about realtime features, but the point of the article, ( not necessarily the point the military is trying to make) is that open source produces more secure software. The power of open source is somewhat proportional to its popularity (in the sense that it is based on the whole concept of "more eyeballs"), therefore Linux is clearly a better choice.

Also, I don't think QNX is necessarily more obscure. It may not evolve on the desktop/server market, but it is an industry standard in its field.
>Seriously, you want to "raise the level of the discussion" with this type of piss-poor commentary? The only thing you're accomplishing at the moment is simply re-inforcing the stereotype that traditional education teachers are threatened by this content.

I'm a classroom teacher, in mathematics and computer science. I can say, with certainty, that no teacher at my school is threatened by Khan Academy. That's a straw man. We became teachers because we want students to learn, and any resource that helps them do so is wonderful.

If we do criticize Khan Academy, it's because we're less than thrilled with the implementation and instruction, not the site's very existence.
> ... 'we write code anywhere and deploy it anywhere'. There's an additional build step in between the developers and the final product, rather than just straight up serving PHP as is which is one of the biggest PHP recommendations.

According to him there's no explicit build step the devs have to perform and they're just writing PHP and using open source packages--meaning they are in fact making use of the "write once run anywhere" ideal at least in some places since the open source packages were made to run on Zend and now they don't. The "write once run anywhere" ideal is kind of a myth anyway since there's always configurations to do, and language-wise was even more of a myth when PHP 5.3 was new. (Some hosts still don't support it, and I'm sure a lot of us remember hosting services who dragged their feet just getting off PHP 4.)

It seems like you think the Zend backend is the One True PHP runtime and anything else isn't PHP. This is like saying PyPy isn't Python. It's just a bad argument.
>is there a problem of reaching students with good educational content?

Actually, you've hit upon the root problem. Truly effective education doesn't scale. Why? Because truly effective education is personal and personalized. A teacher is very effective when teaching small classes, because they can give students individual attention. That teacher is not going to be as effective when teaching 100, or 1000, or a million students. There's no way to provide individual attention there.

It can be hard for us to understand, because readers of HN are likely to be autodidacts to some extent who don't need that kind of attention. We need to understand that this isn't the norm. The research has been very consistent on this topic for decades now.

That doesn't mean that mass education a la khan and some of the other solutions that are out there are bad. The frustration educators are feeling about these rise from several different areas:

1) We know that these are not the most effective means of teaching. Most students do experience long-term learning in these environments.

2) Mass education is very dehumanizing. This isn't just websites that experience this, but teachers in actual classrooms who have to teach larger and larger class sizes every year. It's a dehumanizing experience.

Basically, to me it seems like we don't care about 2 any more, and the sacrifice of effectiveness is one we're willing to make in order to get quantity. I don't like that, and many teachers out there completely reject that idea.

So if you can find a way to scale personal (in the social sense), and personalized education, you're going to be positioned very well. Khan academy isn't it, and I'm not even sold that doing it on large scales is even possible.
My friend John wrote a Pac-Man clone called PET-Man for his Commodore PET in machine code - no assembly required. I watched him do it...for a few minutes.
If you want to prevent that then you want to take general recursion out of your programming language and if you're gonna do that you might as well make it Turing incomplete.

These aren't "circles" per se, they are partially evaluated recursive structures. If you expand them you end up with evaluated list structures that are non-self referential.
WTF? An amazon ad?!?!?
You do have to work faster sometimes, but maybe not in the way you think. Recall the tortoise and the hare. It really is a similar story. Except the moral shifted from "never underestimate an opponent" to "even if you're slow, consistent effort will bring you far".
In 1992 I designed an asynchronous CPU that would use only TTL-logic chips
I need to solve a puzzle to be allowed to sit down in a room with other programmers and code? You've got to be kidding me...

I'd rather buy a coffee at a coffee shop, I could care less about 'posers' I do have other things to talk about besides whether ruby/php/python is more scalable.

At least the coffee shop isn't trying to disguise selling coffee as recruitment, pretty soon your local microroaster will be holding 'baristathons' and asking obscure questions about coffee to weed out the 'posers'.
I can't remember who said it, but the best language is the one that surprises you the least.

To frame that statement into the context of this post and its rebuttals, working daily with the language in question has led to many surprises for myself.
How did it happen?

Apparently there's a single-serving site for that: http://barefigur.es/

The short answer is the iPod, iPhone and iPad. Starting in 2004, Apple started releasing hardware products so popular they made its previous unit sales look like a rounding error, and then they kept doing that in new product categories while continuing to sell the old ones, every three years like clockwork. In each case they made huge bets to control the supply chain, keeping margins amazingly high and keeping competitors technologically behind for crucial months. Apple is now twice Microsoft's market cap because investors are betting they can keep pulling off this trick. (We're due for another one in 2013 -- the Apple TV?)

The really interesting question is, how did that happen? Personally I'm inclined to buy into the Cult of Steve Jobs. Because the other company reliably churning out blockbusters in the same time period, using surprisingly similar organizational methods, was ... Pixar. But there were probably some other people who contributed too.
So if the Federal Reserve has helped the economy since 1913 I ask to think about this. How many economic crisis have there been before 1913? How many have there been after 1913?
I had it happen on Twitter recently after me and someone else were tweeting about Spotify UX choices, I had to chastise the guy from a rival service (I won't say which) and said "If you have to put your competitor down instead of praising them and telling me why you're better, you've failed."
By that logic, you're supporting the same things by participating in any aspect of civilization.
I think he's implying that if there was a question about it being shared with other organizations in the government (or other governments or defense contractors), they would use that to justify not re-releasing the code.
Yep - Forums are exploding
I know what's going on with my own kids and the KA content. Mocking that content, while producing nothing else as worthy alternative that I can find, is counter-productive at best and offends me at its worst. If they think something different is better, why didn't they produce a video that explains that and then -- better yet -- offer that up as an alternative?

> What if they don't think that rote e-learning is an effective way of learning (something that is greatly supported by the evidence)?

I don't care about criticism of KA, I care about results for my kids. And I see positive results, so I have my own evidence that's contradictory, I guess. Given my "wild ignorance" of the education community, that's apparently the only measure I can use anyway, right?
If you click on the price plans, it takes you to the email signup form. I am recording who signed up by clicking on free or who by paid. Perhaps the call to action is not very clear on the price page. Thanks for bringing that up.

Mentioning competitors in pitch was tricky - I did it because the obvious questions are what is different from those.

I definitely have long way to go with this, so thanks for all your points.
Hi,

Apologies for the downtime.

It turns out ulimit was set to 1024 when I thought I'd configured it to unlimited.

As for paulbjensen.co.uk, I removed that site about 3 months ago but didn't remove the link to it in HN. As for your question about the same bricked server, the answer is no, I run Dashku on a different server to the server that was hosting paulbjensen.co.uk.
> They don't have any hardware to run it on.

Hmmm, you do realise that Enyo is cross-platform right?