skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The point is, if you have some kind of human discussion, close examination of coursework, etc., it’s possible for a sensitive expert teacher to figure out what kind of misconceptions and misunderstandings students have, and talk through them, making sure that students leave a course with a correct model in their heads. By contrast, this is very difficult to achieve via lecture alone, whether in person or online. [And certainly many traditional classes fail at this.]

In particular, all of the Khan Academy lectures I have seen (admittedly, this is only about a dozen random ones) do quite a poor job compared to the good teachers and professors I’ve had. They don’t seem to me to be grounded in much understanding or appreciation of how people learn.

(In theory, online courses should give people access to enough interactive tools and communication infrastructure to discuss and question and properly figure out the gaps in each student’s understanding. In practice, I haven’t seen any which do this at all well.)
It does use Khan Academy as a strawman though. "Let's say that Khan Academy is the be-all end-all of education, then prove that it's not."

In reality, sites like the Khan Academy aren't intended to replace classroom education. They're meant to reinforce it. Get the lectures on your own time, so that you can get to the deep learning with teachers in the classroom. Spend classroom time on the socratic method, rather than lectures.

He beats up the tool that he should be using to improve the classroom experience.
I don't see any clouds in your picture.
Yeah I noticed, thanks for the heads up. I guess this is why there are no usernames left.
Content Strategy 101 – SlideShare
As the responses to this HN post demonstrate so clearly, an intuitive understand of what Archimedes Principle means in the real world is not something that is easy to acquire: I'm sure most of the commentators on this HN post are intelligent people who probably did well at school, yet the majority of the responses here are completely wrongheaded.

If it isn't transparently obvious that the water level will neither rise nor fall but stay exactly the same then you don't really understand Archimedes Principle.

The author's question therefore is: how is the Khan academy approach supposed to improve on this situation? A bare explanation of Archimedes Principle clearly isn't enough, nor is the ability to parrot said explanation after viewing the explanation it as many times as required for the viewer to learn the required words. How then is a learner going to acquire authentic understanding from Khan academy videos?

(Note that traditional education has clearly failed here too! But that's a side issue: the question here is why should we expect Khan academy to do any better?)
Confirmed. I tweeted about it: https://twitter.com/MikeSchroll/statuses/4640740009320448

Pic: http://twitpic.com/37g3li
No. It isn't now, it hasn't ever been, and I would be surprised if anyone expected it to be so.

The more important question is: will it still be possible to earn a respectable crust doing web development in Ruby in twenty years time? Any person who claims to know the answer to that one is a liar.
In computer science classes, the best professors do inspire you to see the joy of an elegant algorithm. But I can't remember any class in which the joy of language was ever espoused (when I was a student, we learned C, then C++, then Java). It wasn't until I learned Ruby did I grok that writing and reading code could be something of a joy.
They didn't do a good job of explaining why the difference in wealth is a matter that should be addressed.

Yes, some people have more than others. That doesn't mean people are entitled to more things.
compare and contrast this whitepaper with arguably one of the most common optimization apps out there:

https://help.optimizely.com/hc/en-us/articles/200133789-How-...
Because we had them and they didn't sell.
I can think of examples of myself being each one of those at different times...
This Is the App That’s Fueling the Uprising in Venezuela
A look at the app that's fueling the uprising in Venezuela.
Whatsapp's footprint (memory & battery) on Android is negligible. I love that it just silently works in the background. If I wanted Skype, I'd be installing Skype, so please Whatsapp, do what you do best. Oh wait, there's that new manager of yours who wants to be a part of everyone's private lives. So long.
Um... the whole point of all this hoopla is that you can't.
Reminds of this classic comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Guy complaining that dropbox is useless because "For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem."
Oh god do I agree, I could write pages on the different ways in which Skype sucks.

Just one example....when the connection is bad, it degrades audio and video, so neither is usable. And we won't even start on the nightmare that's the UI.

That MS paid a king's ransom for this and has done nothing with it since boggles the mind.
How much do app developers plan to charge in 2014
Khan might not be perfect, but it is still pretty high quality. The lessons are certainly higher quality than most of what I encountered in school.
Best Productivity Tools for Small Teams
Elite: Dangerous with its scientifically accurate 1:1 scale Milky Way galaxy looks the most promising to me.

http://elite-dangerous.wikia.com/wiki/Elite:_Dangerous_FAQ
€2,000 is a cheap lesson in the grand scheme of things. (The context of the original article is 600K) You did right by experimenting small.
I agree. It's about time Skype had some real competition.
RubyInstaller is usually a few days behind, but updated properly nevertheless.
They failed to set up a proper testing pipeline. They failed to fix known issues with their BitCoin implementation after months. This would have been much easier had they actually built up their organization with all the profits they were seeing. As CEO Karpeles should not be touching code - he should be managing what was a large and growing company and building up a competent organization so that it could adequately manage a quickly growing amount of other people's wealth. But judging by the fact that Karpeles has still been coding himself, Gox did not build up its organization at all.

It seems like he probably wanted his overhead to stay low and avoid paying people who were better than he was to fix the rather significant problems with their BitCoin implementation. Which means this isn't just a tale of incompetence it's a tale of greed.
Artificial Intelligence: Evil or Genius?
Right? It seems like he's railing against the Kahn Academy but it's not as though a public school (or most private school) educations are much better. With a student/teacher ratio of 30:1 (or worse) and absolutely no tailoring of teaching method to student's optimal learning methods (verbal, visual, writing, etc) it's not as though traditional schooling is a paragon of getting everything 100% right and MOOCs are terrible by comparison.

Kahn should get a lot of credit for giving students the option to go back and re-watch things they didn't get the first time. If they learn by hearing or seeing (instead of reading) then that's an incredibly valuable tool.

If we want to complain about anything I think we should be complaining that there's no standardized testing of learning methods and then informing the students of their results (and what those results mean) so that they have the opportunity to try and optimize their learning and thus hopefully get a damn diploma. Why isn't that a national goal? Seems like it would be a small incremental change that would make a huge difference in terms of raising education levels across the board. It helps smart people and dumb people and everyone in between.
It goes on in student newsrooms all the time, but the only time I've ever seen it in real newsrooms is from recently hired students.

It's much too easy a mistake to make, and in some places using "real" text is a discipline offence, so it's much more common to see "cgclcgl" or "hdyhdyhdy" or "123123" or eye-catching text like that. (Lorem Ipsum doesn't leap out at the eye enough).

I once wrote a headline about an invasion of a new breed of octopuses coming to our waters, along the lines of:

"Indian Octopus

Heading Here"

but seeing it on proofs freaked everyone out too much and it had to be changed.
Ask HN: GRMBL... Work and "web application" development
I'm wondering if anyone was in the same position as myself.

We have an online invoice application which constantly has to be adjusted per client...

For example, when it was finished, i had to change the table articles to include ArticleDetails, where all prices went in.

Then another table Model, Type and Color for declaring size (eg. for clothing articles). Now this also effects the layout of my invoice screen + the print (totally different)

All my tables of my webapplication has to be the same as their old Windows Application (which was created in Access and VB 6).

I have 3 different import methods and 3 different export methods (on top of an API for communication..).

Other grmbl design decisions i had no choice but to implement:

- Every client has their own database, so i have one MasterDatabase (for logins, permissions, ...) and then i have a SlaveDatabase for every client...

- Variable visibility of tabs and html elements

- Variable requirement of elements on creating (eg. clients), eg. one requires Tax Number, someone else requires a different sort of tax number (eg. for French customers it's called differently). These changes also affect orders/invoice/... + print + overview of orders + editing orders)

- I had to put clients in my test-environment --> migrating databases haven't been an option because of different pk's between test-environment and live-environment -> hadn't had time) and the complex migration that would occur..

Off course, these irritating design decisions have a huge impact on

- Progress of development

- Huge ammount of almost not used features (for example: logging the drivers + costs for a airport/taxi service + a restaurant reservation system)

- Errors -> It's getting difficult to get a grip on all the different scenarios that have been implemented when testing the web application. Currently, i can manage it, but i don't know how long.

- Errors outside of my environment -> Eg. I have lots of network dependencies for importing old Access Databases and exporting them to SQL Server...

I already explained this to my boss at the start.. .But he frankly doesn't seem to care.

The company where i work never did any webdesign before i arrived.. Now i have a WebApp that is 656 MB in size and contains 8.325 files and 1.317 folders... (LOL :s)

Have you ever been in such a scenario and what did you do? (there aren't many employers in IT in my neighbourhood)
Interested in startup? RECOMY is hiring Rubyists
Have a look at the rest of the label. Now, you seriously think that?
The Increase in Cyberbullying
The problem with FB is intent. Lots of impressions, quite a few clicks, but nobody is there to actually buy something (except "check-out aisle stuff" of the gum and gossip magazine variety, eg games, sub $20 impulse-buy items, etc etc). For a more nuanced discussion see link below.

This makes sense. I go to Facebook to catch up on friends. Google is more when I'm actually searching for something. I would think that Google could charge a higher premium as a result.
I’ve tested 10 connected bracelets, here’ how I feel about it
Easily distributing a parallel IPython Notebook on a cluster
The reason I'm confident that in the long term MOOCs will succeed where traditional education fails is not that MOOCs will come out of the gate a superior product. The reason is that MOOCs can be tuned and developed over time in a way that a classroom experience can not, because every class room experience is too unique, delivered live, unrecorded, etc. It will take time for this to happen, but it is likely inevitable, and eventually the idea of flinging out an "education" into a room, where it shall disappear forever with no feedback or development, will be considered as archaic as the horse buggy.

(And also people can't seem to help comparing the perfect conventional education that does not exist to the worst of MOOCs, which may feel good, but is not relevant.)
So in the current EU/US political climate, MtGox would be bailed out, meaning people who didn't invest their money with MtGox would be forced to make the people who did whole. Whereas in the current BitCoin climate, the investors suffer and will be forced to sue MtGox to reclaim their money.

Which is morally better?

No libertarian will tell you that either of these is a preferred outcome, but out of the two, the morally superior one should be relatively obvious.

Edit: The reason I say it would be bailed out is not because they are investment accounts but precisely because it was so huge in the BitCoin economy.
Vegemite #ScavHunt2014 #CrazyScavengers
can't agree more. I have been studying education sector in India, home to largest number of potential beneficiaries of khan academy. I would say khan academy is already bettering normal education. most teachers here would have no clue of archimedis principle atleast khan academy is giving the right information whether all the students are able to absorb is another matter
What about the densities of salt sea water and frshwater iceburgs?
That's true, but they're at least similar in function.
An article about digital currency and Africa and not a single mention of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation?

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do/Global-Development...

Also this: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1xj56q/hello_reddit_im...
That may not be true. Look at the low end Lumia, they are moderately spec'd. Even Lumia 720 which is Nexus 4 level device has a quarter of the RAM & works great.
Its more code, more variables. I sometimes do this with complex conditions, but for your example I find it counterproductive.
I hope it doesn't work out. I would hate to live in a HTML-JS only future they are trying to build. And please don't tell me about transpilation, because it's crap.
"If you answered “Yes” to this last question, then you just experienced the Illusion of Understanding first-hand."

Bzzt wrong it could mean you're thinking like an engineer instead of a scientist. And its not binary, so fuzziness would be partially one or the other reason at the same time.

Possible engineering challenges all contributing a really small delta, all of which add up to so few sig figs a good engineer can't predict what will happen to the water level:

1) You don't know how well mixed the cup is. I assure you, especially on the "summer day" in the article you can get a spread of 20 or more degrees in that cup. So the liq at the bottom is already way past the max density temp and expanding while the top still has some ice.

2) You don't know the starting temp of the water and ice. In addition to #1 above, the ice in my freezer is well below 32 and who knows the starting temp of the water. Maybe its barely melted meltwater or maybe its out of the tap or maybe the coffee maker. So its going to go thru some wild temp and density swings based on unknown initial conditions.

3) The pix shows massive condensation on the glass AKA they're running the experiment in New Orleans not Phoenix also in written form they're running it in the summer. Realize that there's nothing magic about surfaces and condensation... if a sq inch of 32F surface condenses 1 teaspoon per 5 minutes, the top will condense just as well as the sides. On the other hand if you run this in an environment with a dew point below 32F like where I am today, then water will steadily evaporate away depending on the intensity of energy striking the surface, although not too fast.

4) Ice stacks up nicely and clogs pipes. So you'd need more like a slushy to make sure that icecubes are not mechanically sticking up above the surface by being jammed by the cup walls. The supplied pix strongly indicates the middle ice cube is mechanically jammed way above flotation level. One thing for sure, liquids don't have much shear strength and thats going to eventually melt and drip down and raise the water level... how much, who knows.

5) How does water surface tension vary WRT temp? I donno. Probably does, a little. So how much the level can go up or down before it drips is a mystery. You might be able to tolerate a rise of 0.1% if the surface tension enables a "lens" above the top of 0.2% because of increased temp. Or maybe it goes the other way and surface tension drops so "just barely overflowing" at 32F means a flood (well, at least a drop...) at a liquid temp of 40F.

Its probably possible to very carefully engineer the perturbing contributions to a low enough, or counteracting against each other enough, level (oh the pun) such that the science principle will be demonstrated. Or given way the heck more engineering data, a properly engineered answer might be provided, maybe with enough sig figs to mean something. Or maybe not enough sig figs to mean anything. I'm feeling the latter.
If you want to read about the very first Oberon implementation, here is some info,

http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/ProjectOberon/

Afterwards, there were improved systems which provided a better experience, improved the programming language and had some parts moved from Assembly into proper Oberon. Namely EthOS and Active Oberon (AOS/Bluebottle).

If such systems had got industry support, who knows how mainstream computing would be now.
EXACTLY.

By providing ready access to a stream of digital data and metadata about yourself, you're making their job easier.

Even if you use crypto, the mere fact that you use crypto is interesting enough to draw attention.

The point is to blend into the background. Do you think that crossing a border using the Blackphone isn't going to raise eyebrows? In denied areas the idea is to use equipment that looks ordinary and boring: a wristwatch or a calculator.

If for no other reason than an adversary might not know who you are, you reveal yourself to them by using a special-purpose tool.
There are some really clever people in this world.

One to make it.

One to take it apart.
I'm probably heavily biased, but to me Perl is the best command-line regex tool. Perl was invented to gather data and report on it, and its regex engine is incredibly fast and powerful. As an added bonus it supports some Python and PCRE-specific extensions. But this Q app is useful for people who either don't know Perl or can get what they need done faster with SQL than with scripting.

In terms of 'verbosity' you can embed comments inside a regular expression, or build a regular expression over multiple lines, or make a set of regex objects and interpolate them into larger regex's. Perl has copious amounts of documentation to help you understand the many ways to use regexs in Perl.

http://perldoc.perl.org/perlrequick.html http://perldoc.perl.org/perlretut.html http://perldoc.perl.org/perlfaq6.html#How-can-I-hope-to-use-...
Should Marijuana Be Decriminalized Nationwide? – Posner
Obvious joke is obvious.
The corollary of that statement is that whenever a team does something good, the manager gets the credit.
IMO, car horns should be as loud inside the car as they are outside. That would teach people quite quickly that they're for emergency use only...
Ustwo release pixel precision handbook – app design guidelines
Solving mobile connectivity: Artemis pCell demonstration video
Browser based liquidsoap (icecast) client
For the love of Gore: The Linda Liukas story
Did FB overpay for WhatsApp? Tech acquisitions, cost per user vs total users
And what about the people who will never have professors, and have never had sensitive expert teachers?

Do we just explain that they can't afford a good education and that it sucks to be them as the people who could afford that education are now fighting tooth and nail against any move to democratize learning?
And thus: uneducated youth. So, the rPi is a good thing since it allows us to continue to educate youth on the value of reprogrammable computers in spite of the best efforts of your wholesale heroes to make everyone stupid.
The article conflates two separate connotations of "better" which are commonly applied in educational contexts. When we talk about better teachers like the author and Mr. Kahn himself, "better" refers to the average effectiveness of the teacher's methods on individual students. We would for example control for class size and socio-economic status of the students when deciding whether the author was a better teacher than Mr. Kahn himself.

But what "better" often means in terms of educational infrastructure is more access. We would measure the effectiveness by looking at the institution's effect on an entire population. Here we can look for the effects of access and raw numbers matter. A MOOC course could produce a significantly lower average achievement among individual students but produce orders of magnitude more highly successful outcomes.

It appears likely that they do based on my anecdotal experience. If there are 100x teachers and again I believe that there are in the context of adult education, then MOOC's can be better in both senses. Mr. Kahn may not be a 100x teacher, but he is a 100x educator.

Dan Grossman of University of Washington has taught "Programming Languages" on Coursera. I took the second section. Here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1T4IQrOJr5U he talks about data he collected from the first session. Particularly interesting are what "number of students" and "passing" mean.
Does anyone know the answer to the "turn signal problem" he poses? Why does the beat frequency he observes match what he calculated?
Viber already has voice and messaging, WhatsApp just has more users.
My father worked on the ITER project for many years. This article goes some way to express the shear scale of this project, it's absolutely vast.

When I was a lot younger I was taken on a tour of JET (http://www.efda.org/jet/) and was overawed with the size of it. ITER is an order of magnitude bigger.

The machine that follows ITER is where things get really interesting. Called DEMO, it's still in the planning phase - but will provide a template for future commercial fusion power generation. They're talking about possibly putting fusion generated power into the grid by 2040. Truly exciting stuff.
But ... but it's black !
Checking accounts, savings accounts, and CD are protected by FDIC. Brokerage accounts for doing FX speculation are not insured. [1] http://www.fdic.gov/consumers/consumer/information/fdiciorn....
Not sure you understand quite what free market means.
That link doesn't work for me
I agree that having a "Show code" button only at the end prevents disrupting the reading flow.

In terms of "code with explanation" layout, I really like todos.js' approach: http://backbonejs.org/docs/todos.html

It also works with images: http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Mac+Pro+Late+2013+Teardown/20...

Most layouts nowadays fail to take advantage of the horizontal space available. It's just 2 colums in the end, but it goes a long way.
I hate the 80 character limit. I find it counterproductive. Its usually faster to find a closing brace on the same line, than scan lines until you find it. Kind of the opposite effect of Python's whitespace.
I like to leave my lines longer, as I find if gives my code shape that I can recognise.
Blackphone: available to order now
MtGox is an exchange, not a bank. I'm mentioning this because there is an important third person with a bank: the customer, not the investor.

With mtgox, every customer is an investor. When bailing out a bank, however, the rationale is often to help out the people who cannot be blamed: the customers.

I'm still not claiming that bailing out I banks is a good thing, but the comparison you make is a small apples/oranges thing.
I would rather have a good 1.0 release than a quick one. If Go really is a better language for the applications Rust is aiming for, then it's fine for Rust to fall behind.