rubergly

Will turning off iCloud back ups turn off the auto-cleaning behavior?

I'm definitely at risk of running into this predicament as a user. I'm more worried about the hundreds of megabytes of podcasts I download when WiFi is available for use throughout the day when WiFi isn't available.

To avoid this issue and enjoy the benefits of iOS 5, I'm going to have to clear out a bunch of apps, music, and photos and ensure that I always have a sufficient amount of "buffer" space so the cleaning is never triggered. I cannot be alone in this, and the fact that Apple is making this kind of thinking necessary for end users is kind of ridiculous. I really can't see this behavior lasting for very long, and I'm sure Apple will address it soon; this is the antithesis to the traditional iPhone experience. The only scenario where I could see this being purposeful is if Apple is really trying to hurt offline apps to increase data usage and appease carriers (maybe for pissing them off with iMessage?).

I really don't understand how "configuring a text editor" implies that "you don't understand that the only thing that matters in software is the experience of the user". Good user experiences can only be written if you haven't customized your text editor to be more efficient?

I think the point is that a user wouldn't know they're overriding the design. When a user sets a uniform font, they're opting to not see whatever font the site was designed for, but it's not at all obvious to them that they'd be messing with icons.

The monthly "Who's Hiring" threads here on HN are great resources for internships.

The point isn't to sit and watch a 10-hour coding session. Even if such lengthy things are available, I imagine the most benefit would come from just watching a random 5 minutes of a bunch of different people's styles and learning from their basic approaches.

I really like the menubar popover UI. What did you use to create that?

I found the conclusion at the end of the article, that e-readers as a platform are incapable of non-linear reading, a bit silly to be making about e-readers as a whole.

These complaints are really issues of software, and UI specifically. The technology needed to add a "Go to random page" option to the Kindle is absolutely trivial; it's a matter of the UI developing enough that features like that actually surface to be given visual prominence equaling their demand. I really do find the experience of looking back a couple pages extremely painful on a Kindle; that experience is screaming for UI improvements (which are probably a lot easier on a touchscreen; I'm imaging something like iOS video scrubbing).

I'm sure it took at least a bit of time for the concept of codex page numbers to develop, and I'm sure until that point people thought "with scrolls, we could measure length to get a sense of position, and now we can only guess based on thickness"; I find this no different. The solution then was to think of a way to intuitively incorporate that need into the codex, not to give up on the codex and hang on to scrolls.

The HN title's typo is very confusing...

An environment which requires constantly lying to fit in dosen't sound like one anyone should want to be a part of.

Didn't realize this. Oh well. It's still cool and interesting, but I guess never that feasible.

Very cool idea. I don't know if I'll personally use it; as a dvorak user, it's harder to accidentally hit cmd-q when you mean it hit cmd-w. Then again, it's also easier to hit cmd-q some times because the q sits just above the cmd.

I've been meaning to follow along with the online collection of lectures from this course at some point, so I guess now's the time to actually dive in. I'm interested to see how a very rigorous course will be adapted to something that looks very similar to the Khan Academy model.

The current model is that 20-30 kids who want to be moving around and interacting with each other are forced into seats and restricted from moving for hours while teachers talk at them until they get distracted and zone out the teacher to think about other things. And then they go home with an assignment to complete which they may or may not do depending on how motivated they are. When Khan Academy flips this, they make much better use of the situation. There's no reason for everyone to be lectured at together, but there's every reason to allow students to interact and work together while solving problems. There's very little motivation to go home and complete a rigorous assignment when you can be playing outside or watching TV, but watching a couple 10-20 minute videos is enjoyable and completely digestible.

Personally, I believe that the act of working through problems is often more important to learning and development than watching or listening to lectures explaining how to work through problems. If a student's conditions at home are so unstable that they cannot concentrate on watching a single video, then they are clearly never going to be able to put a reasonable amount of effort into homework assignments in the normal education system. I would rather they fail to watch Khan videos at home and interact and explore exercises in class than listen to lectures in class every day but never put those skills into practice because they fail to do homework at home. However, yes, availability of computers at home is an issue. It would be great if Khan Academy were the cure-all for education and would be perfect for everyone, but this is never what has been claimed; unfortunately, for the time being, Khan Academy is not a viable solution for those without computer access.

I'm not sure if the phrasing of drilling exercises was supposed to imply something negative, but the goal of KA's exercises is not to drill students on a question until they can answer it as quickly as possible (this is what I think of when I think of a drill). The goal is to allow students to explore and advance at their own pace, proving mastery of a concept covered in a video and then feeling confident to move onto a more advanced topic. We try to make the exercises as modular as possible (which may make them outwardly resemble drills), but we do this so a complex problem can be broken down into many smaller and easier problems. Instead of making a staircase with huge steps that would take a giant to leap, we're making a staircase with small steps; that way, everyone can advance at their own pace.

Improving education doesn't have the same immediate benefits, but the way I see it insufficient education is at the root of most of the world's problems. With improving education, you make a ripple which turns into a huge wave.

I'm almost frustrated to see this. I just learned to use urllib2, and found that it took a great deal of effort to get any reasonable behavior. I wish I had known about this before. It really looks great and I will try to use it in any future work.

Not doing stupid shit is important, but what about not being afraid to make mistakes? Making mistakes is healthy and arguably one of the best ways to learn; if your motto is 'don't do stupid shit', then I fear that you'll miss out on a lot of opportunities.

Also, your definition of 'stupid' is going to change throughout the years. You shouldn't be afraid of trying something new now because you might realize in a couple years that what you were trying to do was stupid; doing it is what helped you become a smarter and more experienced person.

I know this wasn't actually the point of the article, but it seems like the 'don't do stupid shit' motto could easily be taken too literally into this interpretation.

Yeah, I don't see how Paul can say "usually it's not a problem" when it happens extremely frequently with every major press release.

We're very aware of this kind of issue; don't worry. We're currently working on A) displaying information to let a user know what kind of format an answer requires (for the problem in question, we require a reduced fraction written as 'A/B') and B) providing more specific feedback than just 'wrong' or 'right' for cases like this when an answer can be mathematically correct but not accepted for the specific problem. Thanks for pointing this out and reminding us of its importance!

The exercises are live at http://www.khanacademy.org/exercisedashboard.

We're really proud of the improvements we've made to the framework and how much easier we've made it to add new exercises; if you're interested in contributing, please fork the code at https://github.com/khan/khan-exercises.

We're working as fast as we can to fix any bugs that pop up, so we'd appreciate reporting any issues using the "Report a Problem" link at the bottom of every exercise page.

It would be great to get more community involvement to help with these new exercises, but be aware that over the next week our main focus will be on getting the new framework and old exercises ported to the new framework ready to ship.

Member of the KA team here. We're in the final stages of getting this new exercise framework live. If you're interested in contributing towards the new framework or helping our beta testing efforts, please check out https://github.com/Khan/khan-exercises/wiki/Getting-Involved (if you're interested in helping out our beta, look for the hipchat room on the wiki page).

Seems like a great concept for a site. I (as well as many here) am looking forward to more comprehensive results on programming subjects.

Grammar girl has an explanation [1] of the rule I've heard elsewhere and always followed---splitting it into "Jack's and Jill's" if they have separate and distinct things (so "Jack's and Jill's stories") and attaching the possessive to the compound entity if they share the item (so "Jack and Jill's story"). So in this case you're definitely correct about not splitting up the possession.

I haven't been able to find anything authoritative to explain what to do when there is a pronoun involved, though I believe the correct form would be "my wife and my..." and not "my wife and I's".

[1] http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-compound-posses...

I'm guessing someone who prefers SASS over SCSS is going to also prefer SASS over LESS.

Hey swies, I have some tangentially related feedback. I've always had ninite.com bookmarked since I found it, and the other day I was going through and sorting my bookmarks; when ninite.com loaded, I was immediately thrown off. From what I recall, the site's design used to be dark and looked very simple and professional to me; as soon as I saw this light-blue design with the "Featured in..." on the right, I thought "oh, no, the site was sold and became some park domain from the 90s...". It's weird, after that initial reaction, as soon as I read anything on the page, it was clear that everything was normal; the more I look at the design, the more I think everything looks fine and there's nothing bad about the design. But I definitely had that reaction and almost turned away from the site on the quick, and thought that feedback might be useful. At the very least, I think you should consider redesigning how the "Featured in..." is displayed; when it's a bunch of logos as one .png, it looks like a big ad and is a big turnoff until you notice what it's saying. I think something laid out more dynamically than within a box that stands out from the rest of the background would do a lot of good.

I may need to use http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2708222 to understand the relationships discussed here.

When I referred to simplification, it was more in reference to the comment about not using PyDoc than to the filename issue. Regarding the filename issue, I think you are blowing it completely out of proportion. I don't personally believe in it, but it's definitely a style thing, and it's definitely not something that only people who don't know how to program do.

When you teach basic math, do you start with introducing the student to proof theory? In any field, the natural process is to relearn how to do things. I certainly have had to change how I program, how I document, etc., and I think I am a better programmer because of learning to adapt to those things when I've found a better solution.

LPTHW looks like a great book and may be a much more thorough introduction to Python for someone who is committed to learning the language; these videos are not really focused on that demographic. LPTHW is great if you're already a programmer or go in knowing you really want to learn how to program; hopefully where these videos can succeed is bringing in new people who are mildly interested and getting them started while showing them how fascinating programming can be. One day, hopefully Khan Academy will have enough videos and interactive exercises that a programming education will be as thorough as LPTHW, but that doesn't happen overnight.

  I will love Google+ when and if all my friends show up and 
  stick around.

Isn't the phrase usually "if and when"? I wonder if this was switched on purpose.