EzGraphs

Yeah Audacity seems to follow the traditional reverb and digital effects route. You choose a few parameters (frequency modulation, amount / time of delay) and a generic "room" is available to pass a sound signal through. There may be a way of getting more fine-grained with the inputs to exactly simulate a specific room, but this is not evident to me from looking at the docs.

This seems like the closest - from a UI perspective. The screen shot indicates the ability to design a room in 2D (rather than 3D). App appears to be windows only and closed source.

Had someone ask me this recently - and I talked around the actual question a bit. Sampling techniques for instance can provide similar results. Visual special effects are in constant demand (where physical scene creation can be expensive or dangerous) while most audio effects can be created cheaply and safely. Still, it is an interesting question - when you boil it down to physics, it's all just waves y'know :).

The typical university tuition is over-priced. Once can get employable credentials or education with much less of an investment. That said, a comparison with the housing market does not provide a particularly clear parallel of the dynamics involved.

* In the housing market, there were a significant number of investors speculating and "flipping" properties. A major difference with college degrees is that they have a single owner.

* A brand new pool of college applicants becomes available each year. Based upon borrowing practices and selection of majors, they for the most part appear unaware of the consequences of the expense. The initial four-year degree is generally only acquired once per buyer.

* A house could be sold or re-possessed to immediately recapture some of its value. There is no way to resell a degree to effectively withdraw a portion of its cash value.

The common factor that will have a more immediate effect is the availability of government loans. If there would be a "credit crisis" for education that would result in student loans becoming more scarce, the resulting reduction in demand could lead to something of a "bubble burst" scenario.

Agreed. There are similarities between the higher ed and housing bubble:

* Lots of quick money available

* Government loans and programs,

* Speculation about the relative return on investment that does not match the observed reality

But a house is an asset with a specific tangible transferable value. A college degree is a certification and not transferable in any specific way. It muddies the waters to see the bubbles as identical, and it suggests that they will resolve themselves in exactly the same way (which is at least questionable).

There has been discussion from time to time about the time of posting affecting HN responsiveness... sometimes a good post will die for lack of interest during a down time. The hn4d.com site provides a bit of insight into when the activity level on news.ycombinator.com fluctuates.

Includes v1.0 of the Mongo-Hadoop connector for MongoDB on Hadoop’s MapReduce and Node.js Driver v1.0.

Thanks - that is a benefit.

As someone who uses ruby for the sheer joy of it (and finds ObjC a bit clunky), I want to be more excited about this. I am just not seeing the benefit yet.

Ruby syntax is nice, not having autocomplete available is a problem, especially since a good deal of time is spent figuring out the appropriate calls to underlying libraries. Maybe this will be remedied in future releases.

I tend to like command line / REPL interactive development... but does this really add any significant benefit when making iPhone Apps? I would imagine if you have a lot of calculations or String manipulations involving non GUI/device interaction this could be handy. But every actual test of code is going to involve running rake and the emulator, which is not an advancement from running make (by clicking a button in XCode) and the emulator.

Finally, what about running an interactive debugger or memory management tools? XCode/ObjC has a number of benefits that eliminate some of the need to be intimately acquainted with some of the underlying painful details. There is not a lot of appear in trying to write an App in Ruby, backing out and rewriting it in ObjC/XCode, and then porting it to Ruby.

Still, it was just released. Perhaps improvements in these areas will be forthcoming in the future...

This is a K-12 Initiative - so a different target audience than MITx.

It is pretty clear that when there is more activity (specifically on the "new page"), a site is more likely to be upvoted. It's one of the reasons I built http://hn4d.com/ (but this currently is only tracking the main page).

The challenge is - others know this, so the number of submissions at prime time tends to increase and your post can get knocked down the list pretty quickly.

Hmmm - fair enough... besides free public and private repos they appear to have an educational plan as well.

http://www.atlassian.com/software/views/bitbucket-academic-l...

That is a great offering. It is an excellent idea to have students using standard "best practices" for their software projects, and will help teachers organize the review of these assignments.

Thank you github.

It depends on your intended audience. Although I appreciate the sentiment of learning programming languages by solving practical problems (rather than reading overly abstract descriptions) I don't expect there to be a major change in the way tutorials are made.

Back in the day when java was just being introduced, nearly every tutorial presented it in terms of how it compared to C++ (presence of garbage collection, use of references rather than pointers etc.). This is because languages don't live in isolation, they are part of a larger tradition. Java was created to address certain problems and short-comings of C++ and the target audience was therefore C++ programmers.

Most folks that I know who have become programmers made a concerted decision to accept the discomfort and pain of pushing through the challenge to picking up the nomenclature used by the programming community. I certainly appreciated tutorials that were geared for beginners when I started, but - in the end - simply immersed myself by reading so many different books and tutorials that the short-comings of one were overcome by the other. Terms that were left undefined in one were explained in another. There is certainly some responsibility for the person creating the tutorial to clearly define terms and consider the beginner. There is also the responsibility of the learner to accept their ignorance pursue answers outside of the presentation of an individual tutorial.

An Oracle DBA pointed out to me years ago that MySQL performed better under certain circumstances. It seems like PostGres does a pretty good job keeping up with Oracle features and is much more open and customizable. I am sure PostGres excels in many areas and is a suitable substitute for Oracle for many projects.

Does it have equivalent functionality to some of the more recent Oracle features like flashback queries and analytic functions (with windowing etc)? Are there any areas where Oracle clearly excels?

Or here: http://diznix.com/2010/07/27/

Definitely agree. The place where ruby syntax might shine a bit is in code that does not interact with the Cocoa/IOs specific libraries (e.g. doing calculation, parsing/manipulating strings).

Gradesquare (http://gradesquare.com/) was launched with the idea that folks would want to plan and track their (perhaps diverse or fragmented) online learning experiences.

I tend to think about learning in two different categories:

1) Learning for the sake of the subject itself: the goal is simply to learn - no need to specifically prove competence to a third party.

2) Learning for credential. We need to pay the bills - or want bragging rights. Credentials are required to signal that we have obtained competency in a subject area.

For myself (not-quite-youngish with a BA, MA, other graduate work/certifications) , I sign up for online classes with 1) primarily in view. For my kids (high-school age and younger) 2) is also a concern.

It is likely that Coursera (or Udacity or MitX) will eventually create certifications based upon groups of programs. A third party might well group classes in logical sets across institutions. So I hope you are not too fearful - change may bring about some remarkable new opportunities :).

Yeah, that route could work... but it is a bigger investment in time to learn another language/development environment in greater depth. At least part of the appeal for PhoneGap and other third party tools is that devs are trying to avoid XCode / Objective C development. There is something painful/time consuming about the process in comparison to other comparable programming tasks.

It seems like there are two ways of approaching GUI/language development:

1) Apples way: Keep building on a base language (C). Add new features (Object orientation, XML rather than proprietary configuration, Code Generators). Maintain backwards compatibility (your old devs will be wowed by each new release's automations and syntax improvements. New devs that have not been part of your programming tradition will require greater up front study time to grok the process).

2) Microsoft's approach: Make visual development "primary" (closer to the way one uses a GUI rather than builds it). Ignore underlying language constructs and best practices (e.g. make everything global).

Having worked with Microsoft, I thought that Apple (especially with their attention to UI design) would give developers a more intuitive interface. Perhaps it is intuitive to those who can build GUIs in code, but it was not to me. This is in stark contrast to Microsoft, where someone who knows very little about programming can create a usable GUI (and get themselves in trouble quickly as well). Don't get me wrong, I am not a Microsoft fan and spend little time in that world. However, I was able to jump in on several projects and be productive with very little ramp up time. Apple development required a greater investment of time and energy up front to be productive. Enough that I have considered PhoneGap and other tools as alternatives for subsequent development.

Great post. Having dabbled in mobile dev (and spent lots of time in web development), I always want to leverage my existing skills rather than learn new languages/dev techniques if possible. Still, a hammer - no matter how useful - is not always the right tool for the job...

For all of the attention to user interface design, I find iPhone development one of the least intuitive environments going. Objective C isn't bad, but wiring up GUIs ends up being a headache. It seems to make sense if you understand what is going on behind the scenes and look at it from the perspective of dragging / dropping / connecting widgets rather than taking corresponding steps by writing code, but I have not been working with XCode for years and don't see it that way. Most other visual development environment that I has felt somehow more intuitive (some VB, other small third party UI design tools).

Corrected URL: https://www.coursera.org/course/automata

Obviously, some tech/startup news items get covered by the big media sites, but the number of these - often several covering the same story - don't even meet the qualification of being a primary source.

For more efficient discussion/analysis of polls on HN :).

Definitely think it helps. The individual, personal interaction portrayed in the videos is more engaging than flashing images and text in front of students. His diagrams are clear enough, so little would be gained by using prefab charts or pictures. Besides, his text-on-blackboard style tends to be tightly integrated with the narrative - so each concept is being reinforced by two senses rather than one.

In general, python is a more "regular" language with less unusual cases - so it tends to show up a bit more often in traditional programming 101 courses. It also promotes readability by making indentation a part of the language syntax.

That said, Javascript is readily available (a runtime in your browser), so no additional installation steps are necessarily required to start. Javascript also follows C syntax patterns which also appear in a number of other languages whereas python is a bit unusual in the way it distinguishes code blocks (using indentation).

Either will work, I think that python is a bit more straightforward for your first few programs.

Got to love the fact that another HN link hovering around this one reads:

"Fact based, data-oriented news (s0rce.com)"

If you mean SQL specific resources, Joe Celko (who's book "SQL for Smarties" was mentioned in the article) has written a good deal. He generally expresses himself using ANSI Standard SQL (and served on the standards committees). But I think that the various NoSql solutions are far more popular for large scale implementations like LinkedIn/Facebook.

Good point. This does imply that the teacher is watching the monitor rather than helping another student and then actively intervenes. So it is likely a different dynamic than a classroom where a teacher is observing the whole class at once and can take a somewhat more subtle action (i.e. speak louder in a direction of a student who is falling asleep). Khan academy may well be much more effective. It would be great to see studies that make clear comparisons of where it is most effective.

Granting that startups frequently change direction quickly and radically... I would still evaluate someone who is moving in a direction differently than one who is not. Choice of a direction (including an active decision and specific concrete work on a project) is also a reflection of character (a personal characteristic - not merely ideas).

To Quote Martin Fowler

"Often when you come across something new it can be a good idea to overuse it in order to find out it's boundaries. This is a quite reasonable learning strategy. It's also why people always tend to overuse new technologies or techniques in the early days. People often criticize this but it's a natural part of learning. "

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&#...

It is good to see some studies being done in this area (even if the one in the article is not particularly rigorous). I am convinced that there is tremendous value in the new online opportunities (Khan Academy, Stanford, Coursera, Udacity, etc), but there are limits to what they can accomplish. For one thing, an online course being done individually requires a higher level of student discipline than a learning activity involving the personal interaction of a teacher. My mind is less likely to wander when a teacher is staring me down :).