chrishenn

Recently I started using Khan Academy a lot more.

At first I too felt like a lot of the videos needed more polish, as well as some other aspects of the site. But eventually I accepted that it really didn't matter whether I was watching one of the newer HD videos or the older pixelated ones. It wouldn't help me learn.

I think the informal style is a plus. Making the videos more professional would risk them being the same thing as a textbook. In my math class, we occasionally do "flip teaching" using brightstorm [1]. Its basically a more formal version of Khan Academy, and I think the videos are super boring to watch compared to something like Sal's video on the squeeze theorem [2].

[1] http://www.brightstorm.com/ [2] http://www.khanacademy.org/math/calculus/v/squeeze-theorem

Did you ever feel like it got in the way?

I've been using it on new projects, but always found customizations a little awkward. Are you changing the actual bootstrap files (typography.less or whatever) or simply overriding them in your own style file?

I feel like a lot of complaints about Rails 3 being harder to use are coming from Rails 2 developers who don't know it as well.

I've only played around with Rails 3 (I'm following Michael Hartl's tutorial) and have never used Rails 2, but I don't see how new Rails features like `has_secure_password` or the asset pipeline (which is super dead simple) make Rails 3 any harder. It seems like the opposite — perhaps someone who has developed on both major versions can enlighten me?

The infographic is kinda weak on information, and it doesn't do much to make those numbers any more understandable (what's 138 million books?)

The subject, however, isn't looked at enough in America. I remember being shocked the first time I read about what the NSA does in this New Yorker piece: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_fact_...

I highly recommend reading it if you're at all interested in this. Fantastic reporting.

If you can stay true to the quality over quantity goal, BetaKit could very well become one of my most read sites. But I suspect it would be very hard to do so — everything I've experienced with online journalism suggests that quantity of posts is what pays the bills.

Best of luck to you though!

Glad to see the FOIA worked in this case.

AP did a report last year showing how ineffective FOIA and similar laws are: http://hosted.ap.org/interactives/2011/foia-global/

Arch is great, but my favorite thing about it is that it stays out of the way. It led me to using new tools like XMonad and MPD. I could be perfectly happy with using the same setup on debian-unstable, but never would have got there without Arch.

The package manager Arch uses, pacman, recently introduced package signing (albeit with a few bugs to iron out.) I wonder if more people will start to use Arch as a server OS now.

I believe its Hover that you're remembering.

http://help.hover.com/2011/07/07/hover-secures-passwords-wit...

Is there any logic to blocking China or a specific country? Is that where most malicious attacks come from?

This may fit into the same category of way too optimistic, but I think it should be something that's in school, from an early age. My high school has a mandatory computer literacy test, but it only tests a few skills like MS Office or "What is an ethernet port?"

It'd be nice if it taught stuff like "how not to be an idiot on the internet."

I hope that trolling can be kept out of HN by the simple goodwill of the people using the site. I can't think of many forum systems that can effectively remove the incentive to troll.

I put up a forum online for people in my journalism class. They're nice people, but something about the fact that the conversation was online turned the discussion into something pretty dumb.

My hope is that people who grow up with the internet their whole lives will realize that you still have to be civil online. It's no different than real life, yet no one is teaching you manners online.

As a Gaug.es user, I think my normal reaction to an acquisition would be negative. But I really trust GitHub because I know they make great things.

Looking forward to seeing these products improve (they are fantastic already!)

Is there another way to control it besides campfire? (like through the web part)

Yeah I think one of the assignments at the end of the year is to take a photo demonstrating some physics property. There is some really cool photos that come out of it, and he puts the best in the book.

Lazy kids have the power to change a lot :)

I think kids are supposed to print out the relevant chapter before a lesson. It's probably a waste of paper, but at least the teacher can make sure everyone has the reading in class.

I've never actually seen a digital learning experience, whether it's a textbook or online lesson or whatever else, work. Things like the Khan Academy are great but you have to be motivated to use them. It's too easy for people to blame their inability to focus on the technology being hard to use.

I have a U.S. history textbook that starts off every chapter by listing the California standard that will be covered.

It's pretty lame, but the good teachers are totally capable of making sure they cover the standards that people seem to value so much, while still teaching they're own unique experience or style. It just sucks because first year teachers are handed the bare curriculum/standards/readings and don't realize how much freedom they have to make it way better.

One of the physics teachers at my school wrote a textbook for his students. He did so because he wasn't happy with whatever you can buy. I haven't taken the class yet, but it's supposed to be one of the best at my school.

The district won't let him sell the book to his students, so they have to print it out online. (It's here for anyone that's interested: http://www.tamdistrict.org/Page/3217)

MPD with ncmpcpp is nice and straight to the point. MPD is available through homebrew.

I love Vox.

There's no database that songs have to be added to, it's just whatever the file/folder structure is for your tracks.

One idea I experimented with was using pytagsfs to mount a virtual file system based on ID3 tags. I could never get it to work though, and the last update to the project was 2009 :(

http://www.pytagsfs.org/

It doesn't make sense to use ALAC on mobile players. It's lossless so the file size is huge — you can't tell the difference between an ALAC file and whatever is sold in the iTunes store on a mobile device. Especially when the storage space is so little.

Vimeo is going for a different market. It's like YouTube except for artists and creative people (not that YouTube can't be used for this.) And they seem to be doing just fine with that.

"RSS without full-text is little better than no RSS."

I totally agree. I use Reeder on both my phone and computer, because it's able to take those annoying excerpts, and use readability to turn it into the full text right in the feed reader.

I've got a friend group of a few hundred high schoolers (high schooler myself.) While many complain about changes in Facebook, none of them ever do anything about.

I have a few friends who have decided to leave Facebook, but it's always because they don't like the addiction aspect of it, not any trivial changes Facebook chooses to make.

That said, I really like the new features rolling out. They are definitely an improvement (except for the timeline, that shit's dumb.)

XMonad is great. For anyone who finds it a bit daunting I recommend Bluetile[1]. It's a great introduction to the best window management system I've used (I really miss XMonad on OS X.)

[1] http://www.bluetile.org/

I just found out that NIC.IO (a common domain registar for .io domains) stores my password in plain text. Whoopee. I wonder how many startups use it.

We all know what we see on T.V. and from places like CNN suck, but that doesn't mean it's journalism.

Journalism is talking to as many people as you can about a story, then putting it together in a really straightforward, no bullshit report.

It's just sad that popular news organizations are calling themselves journalists when in reality they are just advertising for someones beliefs.

Markdown focuses on getting anything that isn't content out of the way. LaTeX defines it, rather explicitly.

I use both. I used to use LaTeX for everything, but I realized I didn't really need the power. Now I use Markdown, and have a custom style sheet for the html it creates (for printing, using the awesome Marked.app).

When I bought a new Macbook and wasn't able to run linux, XMonad was really the only thing I missed. No matter how much Apple focuses on it's interface and making it easy to use, it's still incredibly slow and unintuitive to me.

The government has way over stepped it's bounds in response to the terrorist threat. I realized it first when I read a New Yorker article on the NSA[0].

In the past few years, the N.S.A. has built enormous electronic-storage facilities in Texas and Utah. Binney says that an N.S.A. e-mail database can be searched with “dictionary selection,” in the manner of Google. After 9/11, he says, “General Hayden reassured everyone that the N.S.A. didn’t put out dragnets, and that was true. It had no need—it was getting every fish in the sea.”

...

Even in an age in which computerized feats are commonplace, the N.S.A.’s capabilities are breathtaking. The agency reportedly has the capacity to intercept and download, every six hours, electronic communications equivalent to the contents of the Library of Congress. Three times the size of the C.I.A., and with a third of the U.S.’s entire intelligence budget, the N.S.A. has a five-thousand-acre campus at Fort Meade protected by iris scanners and facial-recognition devices. The electric bill there is said to surpass seventy million dollars a year.

[0] http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_fact_...

Textmate 2 seems pretty much non-existent. There hasn't been a lot of information as to what it will actually bring. That said, Textmate 1 is still a very good editor if your into macros instead of vi-style full keyboard control.

The problem I see is that every new editor isn't featured enough so it falls short compared to peoples editor of choice in some trivial way ("I don't like tabs" or "There's no go to file feature.")