skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In a chapter titled “What College Could Be Like,” Mr. Khan conjures an image of a new campus in Silicon Valley where students would spend their days working on internships and projects with mentors, and would continue their education with self-paced learning similar to that of Khan Academy. The students would attend ungraded seminars at night on art and literature, and the faculty would consist of professionals the students would work with as well as traditional professors.
--

This is what we do in what we call "Zoho University" within our company. We hire students out of high school, and they go through a program that has a mix of classroom instruction focused on extensive programming exercises with a heavy dose of interaction with people building products. Basically education combined with context - why should I learn this? Why is this relevant?

This comes from my own personal experience doing a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Princeton. I would rate my PhD as idle mathematical game playing. That would have been OK as a hobby, I just wish I had not gifted 4 years of life to its pursuit. And I definitely take issue with the fact that this was tax-payer-funded pursuit - in fact, tax-payer-funding has something to do with how abstract and detached from reality these things get. So I ended up repudiating the whole thing. Zoho University is my atonement.

I passionately believe that the vast majority of students (myself included) would get far more value from this type of a "contextual education" program.
Great post. Especially useful for a lot of us "engineering" types on HN who may not think of themselves as sales people. Turns out that if you're a problem-solver, you can be successful in sales. You just have to think of the customer's problem holistically, and from their point of view.
Doesn't work for me (Firefox 10). But the list of URLs is available in the JavaScript here: http://www.theuselessweb.com/js/uselessweb.js.
Being able to draw basic geometric figures in 3D space is the fundamental skill. Drawing a cylinder instead of a circle is not that much harder, but it sets you in a totally different mindset.
You can always pull request on it.

Linux support is on the roadmap, I would need some beta-testers though
Objective-C already has garbage collection in OS X, but it has been deprecated as of v10.8 in favour of ARC.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective-C#Garbage_collection
All lawyers take the bar exam. No law firm or government organization asks for a lawyer's score on the bar. They only thing that matters is your GPA, given to you by your own university. Law GPAs are heavily curved; most students can only receive A's or B's. Everyone knows that law schools regularly adjust their curves to give their students higher GPAs and therefore an advantage in the hiring market. Still, nothing changes in legal education. If anything, legal education changes less than other forms.
Indeed. XP and IE6 are tired in the enterprise but, they are paid for, they work and apparently, we fear change. Those are the big three that I hear on a weekly basis from management. At this point, if Windows 8 was super enterprise friendly and completely free, we still wouldn't budge I am sure.
I'd go that it's even more straightforward than that. Linux on what is essentially a consumer laptop - i.e. one that is being marketed to individuals rather than enterprise - will entail much higher support costs.

While Microsoft has a huge free support infrastructure accessible to end users and top quality onboard help, for most lay people Linux support is inadequate.

Dell will in many cases be taking on support for ideologically motivated non-hackers who don't know root. The higher price also weeds out the worst kind of customer, the person who just wants Linux because it's free.
If you want to got to all the useless sites with one button click: http://jsfiddle.net/crismanNoble/jjAaf/embedded/result/

Warning:

1)Put headphones in.

2) Your computer might crash hard.
played a lot of Dune II in programming class back in the days. Also got caught a couple of times. Learned two thing you can't teach in a class room, culture and how to slack like a pro
The Trouble With Homework
Only the Canvas JS API. Everything worked pretty well.

Only HTML5 Audio is a bit buggy thats why you can hear the looping not being smooth. Plus loadeddata support is kinda weird in Safari.

Apart from that it was pretty good, I am planning on making more games :) also I'll be posting most of the experience and information on my blog http://codetheory.in
This is a very important point. The problem, particularly in the US but not exclusively so, is that at the top universities the best faculty are not necessarily the best teachers. You can be a world class researcher and still be a terrible lecturer.

A truly great lecture is akin to a piece of theatre, especially in the humanities. Really, that's one of the problems with the methods that Khan promotes: they appear to work very well for quantitative subjects that can be accurately tested, but that doesn't apply to many of the arts.

I don't see why the humanities should be relegated to "ungraded seminars at night on art and literature". And, as others have pointed out here, one of the reasons Nobel laureates who are faculty may have little time for students is because they have a lot of other things to do: the same is surely true for the professionals Khan wants to advise students?

I don't want to sound as if I'm against the Khan Academy - it's fantastic. I think there is real value in implementing many of its ideas into standard education, and I know that's already happening with projects like edX and the like.
Windows 8 Pro is currently $39 retail. I suspect Dell gets it for less.

Dell is not a charity. It is a business. One driven by profit, not FOSS ideology.
I know the Super Scope relies on CRT scanlines to operate, but I was fairly sure that the NES' gun should work on any display that can change fast enough to black out all the screen except the targets, which (IIRC) go white with striped lines; is that not correct?
> And cumbersome? Really? Could you point to an example site?

It's definitely cumbersome. I've hit a bunch of sites recently that threw up an interstitial requiring me to "opt in" to cookies. This is obnoxious, and I go through the same thing on every device. It's not that one site doing it is especially cumbersome. It's the aggregate behavior.

I didn't realize that a new EU law was responsible for this until I read mibbitier's comment, though.
To be clear, I don't want it in Rails core. I want someone to make a framework that can run in Rails where I can pull in giant duplo-blocks of functionality.
Now loads of people have asked me to do that. I am definitely gonna take a look at ejecta although it would be cool if some ios/android guy gets in touch with me. :)

I need to do some research on this topic.
I think the nail in the coffin was the last quarterly report. At this point Zynga is priced right around the liquidation value of the company. Nowhere to go but up (or out of business)!

Long Zynga 2014 calls in the hope they pull off a miracle of online gambling.
Interesting. Since Qt will be the way to develop apps for BlackBerry 10, I wonder if they can grow a common ecosystem together with Jolla's Sailfish:

http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/jolla-sailfish/
The collission detection being off was done on purpose to make the gameplay less harder - I have mentioned that in the description below.
IMAGiNE BitTorrent Piracy Group "Sysop" Jailed 40 months
Apple iMac and Mac mini review (late 2012)
>There's a problem if your technical edge is disruptive devices. In order to maintain that edge you have to keep disrupting.

True, but why "maintain that edge"? Apple was doing just fine with just the Mac like pre iPod. And then it did phenomenal after the iPod, iPhone, iPad.

Even just with those, it's a tens of billions dollar business they can continue milking.

It's not like "disruptive" is what marks Apple. The iPhone 5 is not disruptive anymore, but it sells like hot cakes.

Incremental improvement and more especially high class machines (design, build and software integration) is what marks Apple. They can milk that for decades.
What DNA actually looks like
A minor point here - from practical experience, if a website owner does indeed carefully select and test ads, there's no guarantee at all that the annoying ads won't be found to perform better.

Often, a LOT better.

The same applies to ad placement. Just because you - or most users - find an ad layout obtrusive, doesn't mean it wasn't carefully split-tested and kicked the ass of every less-obtrusive layout. Certainly, the floating banner at the bottom of my 400k unique/mo website outperformed anything thrown against it 2:1, despite being annoying.
Richard Branson First to Hit 1 Million Followers on LinkedIn
I have never, ever, ever found or observed such management-initiated profile collections to serve any useful -- or any observable -- purpose. [P.S. Let me qualify that. No useful or observable purpose with respect to their stated intent or my own assignments and workflow. Hidden "Management" purposes may be another matter.]

Given it's probably a required exercise, I'd probably fill it out in a manner favorable to myself without being outrageous. Then forget about it and get on with my life.

Except, I agree with some others here. It may be a sign that you want to at least keep an eye out for a better culture to move to.

Also, I guess, beware of this being the start for an outsourcing exercise. Such... "asset inventories" can be the beginning stage of a larger, "hidden" Management project.
"My experience has been that Community Colleges already do a lot of what he's suggesting"

That was my thought exactly. The CC system is quite good at educating people, yet, I feel like many folks pontificating about the "future of education" focus only on "Research 1," or more correctly, doctoral granting universities with very high research activity[1].

[1] "Research 1" is a deprecated, although still widely used, term from the Carnegie Classifications of Higher Education. http://classifications.carnegiefoundation.org/descriptions/b...
So, would my SSH client just map the colors to the closest available one in its' palette?

I'm kind of naive - I figured every application run within command line (not terminal) was restricted to a specific 256 palette.
One of the key issues for RIM is that the complete change in the underlying architecture of BB10 means that all existing 3rd party apps are going to have to be rewritten for it.

We have a fairly significant BBOS 6/7 user base in the corporate sector but with what's happening to RIM at the moment we can't come close to justifying that sort of rewrite when we could be putting that effort into Android or iOS.

Anecdotally even Windows Phone is getting more interest from our corporate clients, all (literally all) of our BB customers are seeing RIM as dead in the water and looking to move away.

Now we're in a particular niche but it's one where 18 months ago RIM looked like they might own it, now it looks like it's all over for them here at least.
Here's my entry bro - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4853042
Interesting what the http://isitchristmas.com/ site is doing. It's using websockets. Anyone can figure it out?
Free transportation for life
This is terrible attitude, and it greatly devalues necessary work. Yes, if you are an engineer, you see stocking grocery store shelves as a technical problem to be solved, but other folks look at it as a way to make a rather meager living. Contrary to popular belief, not everyone can do white collar labor for a reasonable middle class salary.

Don't get me wrong, I think some work certainly could be automated, but at the same time, we need to consider the human cost of automating that work. A glib response of "learn how to write specs" or referring to people that do some tasks as "fucking idiots" does very little to advance the conversation.
Let me be clear: I don't think there's anything wrong with this vision. This approach would probably be a success. It may be needed. The problem is this: somehow we mutated universities into a place where everyone goes in order to get a job. I think we benefit from having more people being educated at a university level, but that benefit is not purely practical. I don't think the point of getting higher education is getting a job.
--

I think the vast majority of us (I include myself) would be better off focusing on learning and finding meaning through work. I have learned to appreciate the finer things of life (literature, philosophy, art, music) outside the context of formal education, as I gained life experience and learned to reflect on that experience. I don't believe I could ever have appreciated philosophy as a 19 year old. I just did not have the life experiences to appreciate the questions it tries to ask. No professor can supply those experiences, and the best the system can do is to simulate it.

So the traditional University, seeking truth, would continue to exist, but people would go there when their life experience propels them towards it.

In crass business terms, we unbundle training in specific skills, the important task of earning a paycheck, from the abstract pursuit of truth. In that sense, the University becomes closer to how a religious institution operates today. Commercial job skills get to be imparted by commercially driven entities, with employers playing a prominent role.

This could dramatically alter the economics of providing those skills, as we have found out from Zoho University. We not only don't charge students, we actually pay them from day one, and yet, over a 3 or 4 year period, their dramatic gain in productivity effectively pays for the investment in skill building. Yes, this is not the "abstract pursuit of truth" but that needs to be unbundled.
The EU cookie law faff from earlier this year shows that's probably not what would happen. Various people tested opt-ins for cookies. It didn't go too well.

Instead, any site running a system like that, except those for which there genuinely is no alternative whatsoever, would see their visitor numbers plummet.
Not forgetting http://zombo.com/
Here's a list of some of my use cases; I'm sure I'll discover more with time. I keep my iPad passlocked with a strong pass, so Siri is sometimes really convenient. Also, I tend to keep the iPad next to my bed, because very often when I go to sleep I get all those ideas about what I need to do the next day.

1) "wake me up at ..."

2) "Remind me to...

3) "Do I have any new emails?"

4) "What do I have to do today?"

5) "What is the EST time?" (the starting time of some live broadcasts were given in EST and I'm in London)

6) "Set the timer for..." (when I study, or boil eggs), "Stop/resume the timer"

I actually use Siri at least a couple of times every day.
Learning Python the Hard Way was perfect for me. I did some procedural programming with Pascal and C in the 1980s, but nothing with programming for the next 20 years. 3 months ago I started learning Django/Python. Python was the easy part as I breezed through exercises 1 through 36 in less than 2 weeks. I agree though that exercise 37 is overwhelming and that's where I stopped learning Python and began building Django apps. I did also have to carefully study OOP.

I fervently wish there were something for Django along the lines of Learn Python the Hard Way. I HAVE been learning by doing projects and every few days I get stuck for hours on something confusing about Django I don't understand. I would love guided exercises - especially on some of the more confusing aspects of Django like the cumbersome HTML template syntax, HTML template inheritance, passing the context around, directory/file structure (and the kinds of issues to expect if your files are not in the right place), customizing forms, etc.

Of course, I understand there are different learning styles. Code Academy is even more pure learning exercises but I found that very frustrating as it keeps saying your correct output is done the wrong way but won't tell you why. Learn Python the Hard Way is in between because you have latitude to implement your own way and gives you creative license on some exercises to do extra if you're interested.

TLDR: Took less than 2 weeks to go from exercises 1 through 36. Taking me months to get up to speed on Django, which has no such exercises.
The typo is sheer genius. That just is perfection. YourAnAmerican!
It's a shame if Saint's Row is losing them money. The Third one is actually pretty great. I thought it was a lot more fun than Grand Theft Auto 4.
http://HasTheLHCDestroyedTheEarthYet.com/

<script type="text/javascript">
//Technically, this will be accurate...
try {
document.write("NO");
} catch(err) {
document.write("YES");
}
</script>

IIRC, the /robots.txt (now sadly missing) used to read, ``the robots will not save you''.
You could just shorten the whole thing to "You're another whore at the capitalist gang bang, period".

Everyone's selling something. Try talking to an actual professional artist and ask them if they're following their dreams and expanding boundaries or if they're mass-producing different variations of the same 2 paintings they've been able to sell consistently in between kissing asses at galleries.
IBM Opens Giant Big Data Facility in Ohio
There is a difference between making something and talking about something.

Bill Hicks was referring to talking about something you basically only have a monetary interest in.
>> I don't think the point of getting higher education is getting a job.

This may be true for traditional students (18 year olds going right to college from High School who need to learn about life/ the world). But for lots of people, the goal of going to college is 100% to get a better job.

40% of college students today are non-traditional (older, single parent, works part time more than 35 hours per week, etc). These students aren't going to college for any other reason than getting hard skills they can use to get a job. Khan's vision is much better suited than the community colleges that primarily serve this segment now.

There's a bigger discussion here about whether you should need a college degree to get a job/ pay raise and there are lots of arguments that suggest that a college degree is overvalued. However, right now most jobs do require a degree so candidates need one to get hired (e.g., we were helping a company hire for admins -- some of the candidates had been admins for 20 years but the recruiters wouldn't look at their resume because they didn't have a college degree). Some professions also get a pay raise when they earn a degree (I believe teachers and police are among them but may be wrong).
If anyone is wondering how practical Minix 3 is for daily use, consider that "Currently, only text-mode browsers are supported under MINIX 3."

http://wiki.minix3.org/en/UsersGuide/WebBrowsers
The obvious question, how much? (I'm aware you can't give precise numbers, but would be nice to have a feeling how much 1 year startup is valuated at).
I use adblock but I only actually care about blocking < 1% of ads. I hate autoplaying videos with sound and popups, banner ads and google ads rarely bother me at all.

I imagine a lot of adblock users are the same.

I could whitelist sites with acceptable advertising but in reality I don't because I'm lazy (like most people).
I agree. Even now (2012 - almost 2013) there are still lots of services needed but when I was a teenager I unfortunately kept looking for a type of job that my friends had instead of looking for a need to fill (I eventually did land a very different job though working alongside field workers).

Today I've seen adults in their 30's and 40's jump out of the IT industry to start their own business scooping dog poop out of back yards and making enough money to live on. Same thing with cleaning swimming pools. There are lots of services they could provide.
The license is LGPLv3.
UPS delivers to my door too - but they literally drop it there, ring the doorbell and leave.

If it's raining, the package gets soaked.

If the neighborhood kids are particularly rowdy, my package is gone when I get home.

Dropping it off at a specific location and requiring me to show up and prove my identity before I can take it home fixes these issues, among others.
"on app annie, a iTunesConnect/Google Play financial report parsing service"

This says more about where app Annie's customership is growing than anything else.

These are not global stats for all customers. Nor is it a random sample.
Anecdotally even Windows Phone is getting more interest from our corporate clients, all (literally all) of our BB customers are seeing RIM as dead in the water and looking to move away.

This is the real challenge RIM faces -- in an ecosystem-based market people's buying decisions are driven as much by the health of the overall ecosystem as by the merits of an individual product within it. So when it becomes conventional wisdom that your ecosystem is unhealthy, you enter a death spiral: people won't buy your products because the ecosystem is unhealthy, but the only way to improve the health of the ecosystem is to get people to start buying your products again. It's brutal.

The only way out of it is to come up with a product that nails absolutely everything: great hardware, great software, great third-party support, great price. I'm not sure anyone's ever managed to pull that off, though. Palm tried with their webOS devices, but while the software on those was excellent and the price was reasonable, the hardware was abysmal and the third-party support anemic. So they weren't enough to pull Palm out of the death spiral.
Time Capsule for $25 (Using Raspbery Pi)
I'm not sure that's anything other than a strawman. The company I work for has about six broad categorizations, and no problem segmenting further as needed. Are you sure "companies" are routinely making that mistake, or is it just your mental model of a company that makes that mistake?
Is this just tracking ad clicks or is it tracking actual conversions on something?

When I get a really annoying ad I often try and click on anything that I think might make it go away and the ads often seem to interpret that as a click and redirect me to the target page.
They are just using their customer data, ignore it.
Is this the biggest breakthrough in propulsion since the jet engine?
Facebook is also enforcing new terms for its developers: From December on, applications that run on external domains instead of appearing as an iframe inside facebook will be severely restricted in their access to facebook[1]. This move is supposed to force indie developers to move their games to facebook where they can't use AdSense (it's not allowed by facebook) and can only use facebook's own payments system (it's mandatory).

Zynga could have used this 2 year time window to grow an independent social gaming network, but they failed to do so. It was inevitable that this would happen.

[1] https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2012/09/05/platfor...
I'm not going to attempt to predict unpredictable disruptive technology, but the landscape is certainly changing, though by how much is still predictably uncertain.

The cost reductions available to Apple are also available more widely. There's a lot of hardware work going on by lots of actors, and I don't think we should assume that restrictions on supply, for example with Samsungs Exynos 5, will continue indefinitely. It depends in the end on competitive advantage viewed from different perspectives.

Apple is a great design company, and it's economies of scale are impressive. As these economies constrict, so does the advantage and within such a scenario disruption can more easily occur.
I really hope that BlackBerry becomes the 3rd platform for mobile devices, and not Windows, because that will increase the chance that both Windows (on the PC) and BlackBerry (on mobile devices) will use open standards accessible to all.