pseut

So... you're saying that selling nice chairs is an obviously bad business model?

"ostracizing" is a pretty extreme way of putting it.

Not an experienced entrepreneur, but FWIW, don't take on Blackboard's existing products. Make a gamble on what's going to be important for managing courses in 5-10 years and start building that.

Online testing is probably going to be more important; video-delivery of lectures is going to be more important; mobile access (especially for instructors) is going to be more important; massive enrollment is going to be more important. It's hard to imagine that Blackboard will do any of those well.

Re: grading in blackboard, oh fuck is it bad. I invariably download the component grades, work out the custom grade on my computer, and reupload.

"Imgur for Excel" is the most disorienting startup summary I've ever seen. We must use imgur differently... or Excel.

If any of your ideas would be potentially useful internally too, you might be better off hiring people rather than finding a cofounder.

From the article, that seems like the most accurate description you can get in one sentence, especially since the conversation will go,

---I'm a programmer at "hacker school"

---Cool, what's "hacker school?"

I came across your website googling for how to set up emacs w/ clojure... for someone with prior emacs experience, your step 2: "Delete ~/.emacs or ~/.emacs.d if they exist" seemed... extreme. If you have a time, maybe listing the key packages and what they do (and what they replace) would be really helpful.

>I had always understood rebase as a mechanism that replaces merging a feature branch onto master, that allows you to squash all the 'messy' development commits on the feature branch, onto a single nice clean commit on master.

For squashing into a single commit, you can even use

    git merge branch_name --squash

But, yeah, rebasing is a nice and more general way to do it.

"Programmer" seems as good a word as any.

>Without absolving the textbook industry (prices are nuts, have been for ages, dig up Supreme Court Justice Stephens' essay on the topic from the 1960s/1970s), this is in some ways a problem of the market-capitalist system.

The textbook industry is different, even from other publishing, since the book is chosen by the teacher, who gets the book for free. Whether a professor teaches from his or her text is largely irrelevant.

But that was more about bzr's trajectory than its popularity. My (uninformed) impression is that Fossil is niche but actively maintained.

Um… bluetooth earpieces? See them left in lately?

Just to add to that: it seems like stack overflow/exchange is really helpful when people can verify for themselves whether an answer is correct or not. Did the shell script modify the right files, does this SQL query return the right results, etc. It breaks down where beginners can't tell which of the answers is correct, which is usually the big conceptual stuff.

Maybe analogies that require programmers to have a lot of familiarity with conducting aren't super helpful here :)

SQL :)

More seriously, R is more of a functional language than one would think, but it's certainly not a great general purpose language.

That phrase is from the Declaration of Independence, one of the US's founding documents:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/declaration_transc...

I've become a fan of bitstream charter lately[1], available through the mathdesign package

    \usepackage[bitstream-charter]{mathdesign}

I am not a designer, but I think it looks good with adobe's source code pro[2]:

    \usepackage{sourcecodepro}

[1] http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/bitstream/charter/ [2] http://store1.adobe.com/cfusion/store/html/index.cfm?event=d...

I was going to disagree with the "cargo culting" statement, but then read the OP...

Yikes, "First commit" is a beast! Were you using something other than git at first, or did you squash the history up to that point?

That is a really nice README, by the way.

Amen.

;)

Additional reading (links from the article):

http://www.philnel.com/2013/12/18/kansasregents/

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/12/19/kansas-regents...

For mobile safari, the browser goes into incognito mode.

To get rid of comments, you've now hard-coded the algorithm into every call to `disambiguateRecordsByGroupID`. What happens if something changes and you need to disambiguate records by something other than group ID? It seems like a short comment is a pretty small price to pay for some additional robustness.

For me, the ability to spread the paper across a table and look at many different parts of the code simultaneously. It's like having a giant high resolution monitor.

Also, faster and more flexible annotation (drawings, etc), but that's secondary.

> Some other journals will outright reject the article because of its "prior publication".

I'm pretty sure that's a decision made by individual journals' editorial boards, not by the publishers.

s/password/large binary/

Git is designed for project maintainers, and a lot of the complication is necessary for them (that view helps me, at least)

It's not incoherent, it's an idiom.

Sort of, but if you think about some of the businesses that use this, three or four swipes can mean longer lines at peak times, which can make some people decide to go somewhere else.

So they may not successfully collect money from people at the end of the line.

You're missing the point, because what you'd need to claim is "there are no dumb backers on kickstarter." Even if kickstarter backers are smart on average, the point of the spelling mistakes, etc., is to find only the dumb ones.