mcburton

You are correct that CMU and Pitt are not on the same level, but you have your dirctionality flip. Pitt is in top 10 in research expenditures nationally[1], I don't think CMU is even in the top 50. Don't ignore the significance of a medical school. NSF has a 7 billion dollar budget, but NIH is 30 billion. Don't even get me started on endowments.

Pitt+CMU == complementary research institutions that have had a long tradition of collaborating (for example the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center) and BOTH provide strong intellectual anchors for the city. BOTH are significant.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Pittsburgh#Res...

+1 for digital humanities folks. Your emphasis on well written documentation is a strong argument for agate over more powerful, but more confusing, data processing libraries. I'm already thinking about using agate in my digital humanities workshops!

The SAXON XSLT processor implements basic XPATH 2.0

http://saxon.sourceforge.net/

Video games and programming languages ARE being studied in the humanities [1].

This is, in part, what the Digital Humanities doing, engaging with digital modes of cultural expression [2].

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

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_humanities

It should be noted that the IPython Notebook is being developed to support multiple backends. People are working on backends for Haskell[1], Scala [2], and Julia[3]. I'd love to see a Clojure backend.

All of this does not obviate the challenges of setting up IPython, but that could also be (somewhat)resolved via cloud services[4][5][6].

[1] http://gibiansky.github.io/IHaskell/

[2] https://github.com/mattpap/IScala

[3] https://github.com/JuliaLang/IJulia.jl

[4] http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/python/tutorials/i...

[5] https://www.wakari.io/

[6] http://blog.picloud.com/2012/12/23/introducing-the-picloud-n...

The IPython Notebook is part of the IPython interactive computing environment[1]. You must to install IPython locally(or in the cloud) and run the notebook web server to load and execute the notebook's code live in the browser. These are static HTML representations of the notebooks, think of them as previews, but you can download the JSON .ipynb file and load it up in your IPython Notebook environment and execute the code.

The benefit of the IPython Notebook is sharable JSON file and interactive REPL-like environment that blends code, results, and narrative prose.

[1] http://ipython.org/ipython-doc/stable/interactive/notebook.h...

edit: I should have refreshed the page before I wrote this redundant reply.

asciidoc support would require an ansciidoc renderer written in javascript, which does seem to exist[1](although I haven't used it). This also highlights some of the problems with markdown because it is an insufficiently rich language for generating semantically meaningful markup for use-cases beyond blogging. There has been some really interesting work on "scholarly markdown"[2][3], but given the social and technical complexities of markdown implementations and the community[4] seems like adding asciidoc is easier than fixing markdown.

[1] http://asciidoctor.org/news/2013/05/21/asciidoctor-js-render...

[2]https://github.com/scholmd/scholmd/wiki

[3]http://blog.martinfenner.org/2013/06/19/citations-in-scholar...

[4]http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/10/the-future-of-markd...

I haven't started meaningfully playing with nbconvert yet, but I think one of the really promising features are the nbconvert templates[1]. From what I gather you can make custom templates with jinja and invoke them on the command line. It would be interesting to create a docbook, msword, specifically formatted pdf templates which would allow IPython Notebooks to flow into existing print publication workflows (if I recall O'Reilly uses docbook, yes?). I haven't been able to find documentation about the nbconvert templates so I'm dragging this out of memory from an email or a tweet I saw once upon a time.

One thing I'm hoping to figure out is a way to transform IPython Notebooks into PDFs that satisfy my university's dissertation formatting guidelines (one inch margins, 12pt times, etc).

[1] https://github.com/ipython/ipython/tree/master/IPython/nbcon...

YES!

I would also love to see a publishing workflow that could render IPython Notebooks for print on dead trees.

I see this degree as a huge boon for folks in the technology sector who are already working, but want to pick up a masters degree (for professional development or promotion). This isn't a replacement for the face to face college experience, but individuals who are working full-time don't necessarily want/need that socialization.

This is cheap enough that I could easy see tech companies offering to subsidize this degree as a perk for their employees, assuming the employee gets accepted to the program.

"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...

ugh. I'm still using (and loving) my nexus one but app bloat and the small about of disk space is increasingly making it impossible to use.

You should include a link or more description about Elsevier's awful publishing practices for those who aren't already in the know.

I guess the dream of a fully EPUB 3 standards compliant authoring tool was too good to be true. The devil is in the CSS.

Funny, I remember meeting these guys at an RSA conference years ago, must have been in 2004, and thinking "this is the only innovative thing I've seen here." It was pretty cool tech at the time, interesting to see them branch out from information security.

I would have gone too, but I decided to get married this weekend instead.

now that the spec has been released and (somewhat) settled, I wonder if Kobo will support epub3.

excellent. Maybe now there well be an elegant way to go from .markdown to .docx

I'd like to share my SCSI joke, but I already told it 7 times.

I struggled reading past the "Netflix is a better librarian" comment. Netflix is not a librarian, it is a library-like PLACE. Netflix probably hires librarians or information professionals trained in librarianship to organize their data and user experience. The public library system is only one of many endpoints for a library trained information-professional. For the past decade library schools have been re-branding as iSchools; producing UX/HCI professionals who go on to work at places like Netflix (hence the "Netflix is a library-like PLACE"). In the interest of full disclosure I am currently getting a PhD at an iSchool so I have a different understanding of the social categories "librarian" and "library." Even so, as every schoolboy knows, a thing cannot be a librarian. IT'S PEOPLE, NETFLIX IS MADE OF PEOPLE.

When dealing with failed replicability it is important not to conflate a poorly designed experiment with a poorly written methods section. Often there is tacit or socially negotiated knowledge required to properly replicate an experiment. This doesn't mean the science is bad, it means science is more social than some would like to admit. For some interesting reading on this check out Harry Collins's paper "The Seven Sexes: A Study in the Sociology of a Phenomenon, or the Replication of Experiments in Physics"[1]

[1] http://soc.sagepub.com/content/9/2/205.short

These would be amazing to build with a 3D printer. If I had the time I'd try building one by hand using legos.

Please forgive me, but I feel the need to say: "this is a shop i can tell from the pixels"

Barnes and Noble has indicated they are launching an Android App store of their own [1]. Although, judging by that discussion, I think they see the opportunity they've created with the NookColor but they are still trying to figure out how to take full advantage and win developer's trust.

[1]http://connect.nookdeveloper.com/t5/General-Discussion/Nook-...

You are on the right track IMHO. What is key is that 'best friends' or 'school friends' are highly contingent and ambiguous constructs. They are not fixed, but rather are dynamic through time–people flow in & out of circles for a multitude of reason–which is very hard to operationalize technically. More engineers & techies should at least be familiar and respect more social theory, not because it represents some 'true' representation of how real social interaction works, but more as food for thought when designing social/technical infrastructure(or as we say in the biz sociotechnical ;). I see echos of Erving Goffman, Harold Garfinkel, Anslem Strauss, and Emilie Durkheim in RWW's description of circles.

I'm pretty sure at any given RSA conference there are multiple folks who might personally/privately identify as members of anonymous, ie. they wouldn't need to "sneak in" to the conference b/c they are already there as legitimate members of the security community. <pure-speculation> Hell, there could be employees of HB Gary who think of themselves at anonymous. This would support your speculation that HB Gary made the sign, but complicate the motivations. </pure-speculation>

I do agree that HB Gary should be investigated as much as–if not more than–anonymous since there is some evidence of illegal or unethical business practices in the released email. I would like to think that we hold corporate security companies up to a higher standard of practice...

That was fun. My screen dimmed after 30sec and shut off right at the 2min mark. I even resisted clicking the FlashBlock icon so I had no sound. Would this work with the <audio> tag?

Comments like this are what keep me coming back to HN...at the expense of my productivity ;)

There is a growing population of urban farmer's moving to Detroit, precisely because of the abundance of abandoned cheap land. Perhaps most significant is Hantz Farm: http://money.cnn.com/2009/12/29/news/economy/farming_detroit... Although Hantz Farm isn't' without some criticism: http://markmaynard.com/?p=7243

I much prefer the clojure to the mathematical notation and secretly wish academics would use code instead of traditional notation (when possible).