TimFogarty

Interesting discussion about this issue with relation to the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physics here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNTativ_vDU

> Most of our programming is done in C (kernel) or Go (user space). [1]

It's cool that Go is being used in a project like this. For some reason I found that a bit surprising.

[1] http://www.ethos-os.org/background.html

For a great explanation of the enclaves and exclaves described in the article, you might like to check out this youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtLxZiiuaXs

The visual aids definitely help.

> I do think that Windows needs an OS-wide incognito mode, just a simple switch to record or not record data.

Sounds like switching to a guest account. Not as quick as a simple "toggle data recording" button, but that functionality is definitely already in Windows.

Yes I'm shocked by how UIs dealing with very precise things sometimes use imprecise dating like "tomorrow".

On the DHL website, if I am ordering a collection for a certain time, I have to choose if I want it for "tomorrow". If it's 23:00 BST from where I am accessing the website and I'm ordering the collection from a country in EEST, am I ordering the collection for one or two days from now?

This kind of sloppy UI from a company that does logistics (which is supposedly quite a precise thing) is utterly unacceptable.

The DHL website is a cornucopia of bad UI patterns.

This is fascinating and well written.

I tried the unrotated sofa image on Wolfram's ImageIdentify and it correctly identified a settee [1]. So it presumably gathered that from the shape of the image rather than the pattern. It is peculiar though that it can't see the shape under a simple rotation. Or perhaps the margin of confidence levels between sofa and leopard were so narrow that a rotation was enough to tip it in favour of the leopard? I'd be interested to see the inner workings of this.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/6f6Co5O.png

I go to a lot of student hackathons and I really don't see that happening. And the large majority of organizers are heavily focused on creating a welcoming event for building, learning, and having fun.

Student hackathons are and always will be fundamentally different from corporate hackathons because the motivations of the organizers and attendees are different. Perhaps we should be careful about offering large prizes for the reason you state but the focus is very clearly on learning and building and that's not set to change.

There's http://www.hackathonwatch.com/

Also checking out eventbrite is a good idea.

Non-student hackathons can be a pretty mixed bag so be careful which ones you choose to go to.

Battlehack is a pretty fun hackathon that's not just for students: http://battlehack.net/

The people who do well at hackathons and programming competitions are often excellent students. And extra-curricular activities as a way of learning more and improving yourself are generally considered good for students, right? That's one reason universities support programming competitions, hackathons, CS clubs, etc. I'd go so far as to say the best students are the ones who love their subject so much they do it in their spare time too.

Hackathons are a pretty good way of starting something like this for a college student (though obviously not the only way). I know several groups people who met at hackathons then went on to start a larger project together (often not the same project they did at the hackathon). That's one of the nice thing about college hackathons - you get to meet other students who like to build stuff in their spare time.

Yeah that kinda sucks. It's one of the reasons college hackathons are so compelling - people aren't there with their startups, it's students looking to learn. I think sometimes people judge student hackathons based on corporate hackathons they've been to but they are fundamentally very different.

Jacob is right, big prizes can suck. I'd love to see fewer big prizes at hackathons. Having some small stuff so people feel accomplished and valued is nice though. Jon Gottfried has a really good article about this[1].

I go to a lot of student hackathons and generally people are there for learning - not competition. They're certainly not there for "boozing up"!

And of course hackathon projects amount to nothing 99% of the time. That's not a problem. That's totally to be expected from 24 hours of hastily put together code. The value students get is learning about idea generation, working with others, managing a project, how to use the libraries, frameworks, and APIs, how to work to a deadline, how to debug, how to do version control, how to deploy, how to test and improve your work, how to present your work to others, and much more. And I don't think companies or VCs who attend really expect to find a next Facebook - they're probably more concerned with just meeting the kind of students who would rather spend a weekend building stuff instead of boozing. Furthermore, hackathons don't undermine the value of sustained effort on hard technical problems - but they can be the first step for students starting to work on technology outside of their courses.

You're all totally right that large prizes suck and pitchathons suck. Most student hackathons do a pretty good job of staying away from those (though some could do better for sure). As Jacob said, "hackathons should be about coding something cool, not winning, networking, or partying" - I've honestly never been to a student hackathon where that wasn't the case. So I'd be careful about throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

[1] http://news.mlh.io/are-hackathon-prizes-the-worst-thing-sinc...

Congratulations to them. I've worked with their developer evangelism team a bit and they always bring their A-game. The company really seems to understand how to engage the community and they have a very solid and easy to use product.

Perhaps... but they've made some seriously good acquisitions with Braintree and Venmo that will mean they'll stay relevant.

It sounds like you're looking for Learn You A Haskell. Great book, free too read online, tells you how to start with Haskell step by step. http://learnyouahaskell.com/chapters

Agreed. TikZ is simply an awesome tool. If people want to try it out, I found A Very Minimal Introduction to TikZ by Jacques Crémer a great resource to help get started. There are also some handy examples here: http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/

EDIT: Forgot link to Crémer's guide: http://cremeronline.com/LaTeX/minimaltikz.pdf

This is cool. I'd love to have some sort of GitHub (or just Git) integration. That would be powerful.

This was a beautiful read. I too feel an emotional connection to these great machines and the fantastic people who design, build, and pilot them. To me, our missions into space perfectly captures everything to be admired in Humankind. It represents our inexorable daring in the face of great adversity, it showcases our insatiable curiosity, and, since the the end of the Cold War, it has united people across the globe in the greatest adventure upon which we have ever embarked as a species.

From the ground the moon and the planets seem so far away, so ethereal. Yet just knowing that we have sent people and probes to touch them underlines how obtainable the impossible can be with grit and science, per ardua ad astra. It gives me hope.

I wish that the spirit of international cooperation that has grown around this endeavour will endure over the coming decades and beyond.

Not a spy movie. It was called Operation Mincemeat [1]. It's certainly movie-worthy though. Both the plan and the fact that it worked are impressive.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat

On a related note, fellows of St John's Cambridge are the only people outside the Royal Family allowed to eat unmarked mute swans in the UK: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_John's_College,_Cambridge#Ea...

That's a beautiful letter. I found a bit more information about the event here: http://www.minotdailynews.com/page/content.detail/id/519549....

What the English teacher said about the matter can be read there and it is also a nice sentiment. It seems in the end the school allowed the books to be read and the teacher (whom I believe was forced to resign) was given $5000 as a settlement.

I always find it very peculiar how people can be so offended by curse words and at the same time have such an under-developed sense of morality with regards to things like censorship or war.

URLs should be displayed for sure, but inline is far too disruptive to smooth reading. I think it would be better done "reference style" if possible. Something similar to how it is done in markdown would be nice:

I get 10 times more traffic from [Google][1] than from [Yahoo][2] or [MSN][3].

[1]: http://google.com/ "Google"

[2]: http://search.yahoo.com/ "Yahoo Search"

[3]: http://search.msn.com/ "MSN Search"

What are the supposed benefits of using module loaders over say minifying and concatenating all your JS into one maybe two files which are then placed in script tags at the bottom of your HTML?

Hey, there are many ways this could be done. I don't know how it's done exactly in Coursera. Here's an example with basic jQuery:

http://jsfiddle.net/TimFogarty/jUKwL/1/

With a large number of courses and pictures, you'd probably want to use ajax to fetch the course info every time a box is ticked.

Alternatively, you could use a framework like Angular.js: http://angularjs.org/

Hope that helps.

If you haven't seen Bill Scott's talk on Kraken.js, check it out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5yk5SZxWX4

Check out http://foaas.com/

I thought this was pretty cool. It would be fun to do something like this and I'm sure I'd learn a lot. I found a lot of helpful information, books, and websites on this Stack Overflow question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1224617/how-can-i-build-a...