Christ, I hate Blackboard - <AUTHOR> http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2014/01/christ-i-hate-blackboard <comment><USER4> Disclaimer: I'm involved in a small LMS startup

It's funny to me because there's so much low hanging fruit in the business training industry but the clients tend to be absolutely fearful to make decisions beyond the norm.

The hardest part of convincing businesses that they don't need Blackboard or Moodle is reminding them all the features _they don 't use_. Last year I featured our application to a client. I have a pretty scripted event that starts with creating a course with content in a few minutes and had people clapping because of the simplicity.

Despite that the first questions are always going over the "Feature Checkboxes" (Oh, you don't have wikis? What about a ticket system?)... it can be a very long sales cycle.

That and SCORM, oh man do I loathe SCORM

<comment><USER5> In the context of the above: Here's a question to the experienced entrepreneurs. If a startup wants to take on Blackboard. What would be a good way to go about doing it?

<comment><USER6> We tried the typical SaaS startup freemium model for what we thought would be our Blackboard killer (hint: it wasn't).

We offered it for free to individual teachers with the strategy of enlisting an evangelist group of dedicated and passionate teachers at institutions. The plan went that once a critical mass of teachers from a given institution where onboard and using it, we would trigger the enterprise sales approach and sell the product to the institution.

We had some uptake from teachers, who universally loved the product. They raved about it in fact. We were super excited. We thought we were onto a winner.

They told their friends and colleagues who in turn signed up, and they too loved it. And raved about it. And told their friends about it.

Unfortunately the vast majority of them never actually delivered a course on it with live students. We were stunned.

After prodding and asking, and eventually getting to the bottom of it, we found that whilst the vast majority of teachers loved the product, and loved the idea of using it for their courses, they wouldn't use a product that wasn't centrally supported by the institution (or even in quite a few cases, couldn't use a product that was specifically prohibited by their institution - they were only allowed to use the prescribed LMS, which in most cases was Blackboard or Moodle).

So my tip for entrepreneurs trying to break into the enterprise LMS space is appreciate your an enterprise sales company. Your users are not your buyers, and even if they _love_ your product, if you aren't selling it to the buyer you'll die.

I don't believe this is a market in which you can offer a freemium product to the individual with the intent of penetration reaching the masses through viral or other growth strategies. It might be worthwhile to do this to help get exposure, but don't expect to get actual sales, or actual usage, off the back of it. This isn't an industry in which a Yammer approach works (IMHO).

<comment><USER7> I wonder if a risky marketing tactic of "Everyone hates Blackboard but no one has the balls to use a better product [like ours]" might work to bait buyers in these situations? Liken it to the majority buying PC when kids might prefer Mac. Imply "Do you have the guts?" "A lot of prospects we speak with haven't had the authority to step away from the herd." i.e., do they want to think of themselves as having the authority, being at the forefront, having the balls, etc.

<comment><USER8> Not sure if that's a good approach. Why do they need balls or guts to use your software? It's that risky? If your software is at the forefront, why is no one else using it?

I think most schools want to see something that's proven, low risk, and beneficial. If you can show them some of the top schools are using your software, and their faculty and students are raving about it, and how it's making their lives easier, reducing costs, and how the transition from BB was seamless.

The problem is obviously getting the first few schools. You need to eliminate as much risk as possible. You need a lot of credible sources backing you in this situation to make buyers more comfortable.

<comment><USER7> I acknowledged that it was a risky strategy, but the alternative is to not get noticed at all because the buyers get stuck comparing checkboxes rather than realising that feature creep can make for an unwieldy behemoth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As someone who deals with a lot, it is garbage garbage garbage, and as some have guessed, little competition and enterprisey licenses and lock-ins guarantee they thrive.

Recently, I discovered their mobile app requires an in-app purchase to even use in iOS, provided that your university has the proper server-side set up (good for them they let you check with their database on the BB site without purchase).

I was under the impression such dirt-bag nonsense was even permitted by the App Store (there is zero functionality with this app, at all, until you do the in-app purchase (which is per year). I hated them before, but this put them in the scum list in my mind permanently.

</comment><comment><USER10> Could someone please explain to me -- why do people actually _use_ this software enough to hate it?

I am a math professor at a university which uses it, and so I use it to mass e-mail my students and to record grades. _And for nothing else_.

I can see it has a billion other features but can't fathom wanting to use them. It looks like it is designed to make simple tasks tedious and clunky, and the article confirms this impression.

Is it that professors don't want to learn HTML and maintain simple course webpages? Are faculty trying to do some kind of automatic grading? Do administrations _require_ profs to use the obscure features? Are ... ?

<comment><USER11> From a student's point of view: I hated professors who made their own webpage just about as much as I hated Blackboard. A big downside to Blackboard was that every professor had their own way of using the tool, but it was worse with professors who made their own sites. At least on Blackboard _some things_ were standard, and everything _could be_ standard if the professor wasn't an ass. On their own websites, _nothing_ was the same across classes. I'd have to learn how to use the site again every time I took a new class. Doubly true on both accounts for online classes.

Blackboard sucks, but at least it takes some work out of being a professor. Making your own site takes extra work, and extra work on top of that to make it friendly for students. They both still win out over the atrocity that is the Respondus LockDown browser, which my school required for some tests. Google it. It's bad.

<comment><USER10> An interesting point. I don't really understand it, so please allow me a question.

Is there anything you would find disagreeable or unfriendly about, e.g., the following?

[http://www.math.sc.edu/~thornef/math142/](http://www.math.sc.edu/~thornef/math142/)

To my way of thinking, this is obviously _the_ way to present my course materials. Any friction points I'm not thinking of?

<comment><USER12> Another student here with my two cents.

Your course website looks very clear, easy to use, etc. (also, I like the approach you seem to be taking with the material, I learned from the same book and always thought the convergence test guesswork was silly)

Part of my personal frustration with custom Professor sites, and that of other students I know, is simply that it's yet _another_ site to keep track of. For all the failings of large LMS's, they are effective at centralizing coursework into a location a student can check daily. When a few professors have custom sites, it's easy to forget to check one Prof's site for updates, announcements, etc. Even just for syllabus info, I have more than once gone to my LMS and groaned when I realized that I had to look up the address for a custom site or dig through bookmarks. I once had a semester where every Prof used their own site, and I had to cycle through 5 bookmarks daily to keep track of everything.

TL,DR: it's simply one more thing to keep track of, increasing the friction of information acquisition from a student's perspective.

<comment><USER13> > Part of my personal frustration with custom Professor sites, and that of > other students I know, is simply that it's yet another site to keep track > of.

It's worth noticing that this is a symptom of a much larger trend in academia: professors tend to be naturally siloed and need to put in effort for presenting themselves and discovering others' work. Journals seem to have some positive effect, but Elsevier seems to negate a lot of that effect.

Contrast this with something like the open source community, with its registries of projects and package managers and the current (long-lasting) trend towards platforms and APIs.

I think what I'm describing is what SCORM is supposed to be, but I've never actually used it, and I suspect SCORM is the XML of it. The "Yes, it does the job, but ohgodclunkymassivehugepain, save us Douglas Crockford, you're our only hope."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Blackboard is still around because it was early to the game and higher education values tenure.

No one who has power really wants to change it. Professors don't care. Administrators don't care. Students are the only ones who want to change it, but they aren't even close to being powerful enough.

Using a good online learning software is not on any high school students list of why they want to go to a college.

Reputation is #1. If taking an action doesn't add to the reputation of the school, then they don't take the action.

There are 1,000 things Uni. admins care about before the UI of their online learning software.

<comment><USER15> I used to work at a large university. (Actually a couple universities.) That was _sorta_ the case. IT people hated with a passion Blackboard and Talisma. Administrators hated it sometimes, but that isn't their job, because they aren't developers / IT people. Professors often jail break out of it if they can by running their own webpages with HTML table layouts because even that is preferable.

The bottom line I saw is that nobody _once_ admitted to liking either of those systems, but the total amount of work and politics involved to change from those systems meant it was a conversation that never really even occurred.

Some observations I had with respect to migrating away from hulks like Blackboard and Talisma:

1\. There were pretty talented people supporting Blackboard and Talisma working for the universities full-time with salary. Both systems were frustrating for them, but the huge amount of work to migrate away from those systems generally stops any hopes of beginning a conversation. Can it be done over summer break? If not, will you do it in parallel? Won't that require more salaries to be hired? can you get the buy in of the other departments who you'll put extra work on because their system already has been coded to chug along and work with those?

2\. Politics. I once saw a different university choose an awful CRM because they did a better job courting the top IT advisors at the school. I've seen a university choose Microsoft over Google even though students voted overwhelmingly for Google (emails announcing the Microsoft win were sent out before the students could even have voted)

3\. Politics, but this time personal ones. There are people whose role has been to support Blackboard or Talisma _for a decade_. Their kids are now in high school and all that time the household was supported because their role was Director of Something but really it meant, "make sure your team keeps Blackboard or Talisma going". They'll obviously be hesitant to switch.

(In case you haven't heard of it this is another hulk in higher ed that people don't like, but it persists: [http://www.talisma.com/en- us/solutions/highereducation/pages...](http://www.talisma.com/en- us/solutions/highereducation/pages/higher_education.aspx))

<comment><USER16> As for 2, I'm currently studying at a university that this occurred in, I'm not sure if it was the same one, however mine was in the north east of England.

One of the reasons that was given (and which I felt was totally reasonable in this case) was that Microsoft provided assurances that the university could manage their own data, and none of it would ever leave the UK - <USER2> which Google couldn't do.

This was pre-Snowden, however I suspect that this was a big reason why Microsoft was chosen over Google.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I used to work in this space. A little background on the primary LMS Companies:

Blackboard Desire2Learn Instructure - Canvas Moodle (Open Source) Sakai (Open Source)

Blackboard was first to market, went public and gained tremendous market share across Higher-Ed. They acquired much of the competition along the way (WebCT and Angel).

Desire2Learn was boot-strapped, slower to grow but had traction with state- wide systems. Blackboard sued them over patents, went into a whole legal mess and ended with a cross-liscence agreement for the 'greater good' of education. After litigation, Desire2Learn grew substantially and took on 80M of venture funding in 2013, and is on-track for IPO.

Instructure (Product called Canvas) is the newcomer and 'next-generation' platform. It's designed well and marketed far better than the incumbents. It's growing much faster (for good reason) then the others, and on-track for IPO as well. They've done a good job of UX and getting involved at the professor/teacher level to create a following for the platform.

Open source: Sakai is a collaboration of several Higher-Ed institutions to develop their own platform. It was never great and last I heard support is dropping.

Moodle by market-share is the largest. There are several companies which offer hosting/support for Moodle (A large one in NA being Moodlerooms, which Blackboard also acquired).

</comment><comment><USER18> The old adage always holds true: if the people buying the product aren't the people using it, the product will suck.

</comment><comment><USER19> Great writing. Who's competing with Blackboard in the educational software space? If they're really this awful there's probably a great opportunity.

<comment><USER20> Blackboard bought out most of their commercial competition (WebCT, Angel) and tried to patent-troll the rest out of business (Desire2Learn for one).

Open-source wise there's Moodle (PHP based) and Sakai (Java based).

But from my POV within higher ed IT, my impression is that many of the big guys (Michigan, Indiana, Cal, NYU, Yale, MIT, Harvard, Stanford) are desperately searching for what's next. edX (Harvard+MIT along with contributions from Stanford) has open-sourced their software, I have no idea if it comes close.

The problem with starting up is that to make anyone happy, a new Learning Management System needs to have two things working spectacularly well:

1\. An online testing engine supporting both automated grading and human grading with a wide variety of question types and an easy to use test builder.

2\. A gradebook tool that's easy to set up, can import and export spreadsheets, and can support any wild scoring system a faculty member can devise (and they can come up with some doozies). It also needs to integrate with any and every other tool in the system, as some faculty somewhere will want to grade every single type of activity students can perform in the system.

In addition to those two baseline elements it needs a world-class collaboration system for file-sharing, plus messaging and forum tools and online chat. It needs to support multiple class sections with unified resources, ad-hoc class groups, and student-initiated study groups. It needs to support fine-grained permission schemes based on classes, instructors, grad assistants, sections, individual students, and groups.

Every file, test, assignment, forum, and chat room all need to be able to be gated access based on student activity so that, for example, a quiz must be passed before getting access to a document which leads into an assignment followed by a forum-based discussion.

Research is also critical to support, and your system will need to be accessible in a secure way to collaborators, guest instructors, and remotely- enrolled students around the globe, in a way that doesn't make the faculty wait more than a few minutes to grant those people access.

All of this will need to be provided in a fully responsive user interface that scales well from 4k screens down to tablets and smartphones, including the testing and gradebook engines. You'll also need a free mobile app that provides all the same funcionality in a reliable native interface on iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry OS, and more.

You also need to integrate with the University's student information system, and update enrollments in courses and sections on the fly as students add/drop and courses change, and send grades to the SIS in return. You need to integrate with external tools at the university such as wikis, message boards, and eTextbooks; and outside including cloud-based calendars and document sharing tools including Google Apps for Education and Office365.

You'll also want a instructor evaluation system, electronic portfolio functionality, program-level assurance of learning awareness, institutional assessment reporting, user activity monitoring.

Oh and all of this needs to be customizable to match the traditional way of doing business at each of thousands of different universities. Business processes are not up for compromise.

Notice I've left out concerns of usability, security, performance, stability, ease of deployment and upgrading, etc. That's because those are at the bottom of the list of priorities for the people with the money.

So... good luck.

<comment><USER21> I've never used Blackboard but I wouldn't ever recommend Moodle as an alternative for anything (and neither would my Java professor to judge by his rants about it...)

<comment><USER22> I've used Sakai in the past, and Moodle for years now. (I think I used Blackboard once, years ago.) They're all a pain, but it would be hard to hand- code something that has even just the features that I use regularly myself.

That being said, Moodle has some serious issues with dataloss if a user's session times out (and for a long time, the default timeout delay was just 24 minutes). If someone hasn't specifically clicked "Save" or "Submit" before time runs out (even if they were typing constantly the whole time), then those buttons invisibly turn into "Throw away all my work and make me log back in and start from scratch". It's _horrific_. [https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-11972](https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-11972)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Blackboard isn't all bad—fixing many of its inadequacies was one of my first big side projects in high school.

There was one Blackboard dashboard unit that allowed you to embed arbitrary HTML, and I injected some JS onto the page that allowed you to set a background image, made clicking on links pop open new tabs (instead of whatever abomination of javascript they had), and all kinds of other little tweaks. I even got most of the way through writing a drag-and-drop module rearranger before I graduated. Maybe 60% of what I knew about JS and CSS at the time I learned through trying to add features to Blackboard through script injection.

Naturally, I wasn't the only one frustrated at Blackboard, and the script travelled by word-of-mouth to a pretty sizable chunk of the school. At that point, it was probably the most widely-used thing I'd ever built.

<comment><USER21> I'm both impressed and horrified.

<comment><USER24> Any JS-injection-based software that's actually good enough for people to use is probably going to be impressive -- and horrifying. If you try writing some, you will know my words to be true.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Such a rant, I think it comes close to conveying the author's distaste for the product. The Google link is pretty informative as well. I wonder how some product that is so loathed by clearly a number of people, manages to stay in the market. Understanding that question might actually shed some insight on what it would take to create a successful education targeted company.

<comment><USER26> From what I've read the problem is patents: Blackboard owns a huge number of them and threatens to sue any potential competitor out of existence.

<comment><USER27> I would love to know what the more important patents are, if anyone has been looking around and happens to have a list.

<comment><USER28> As far as I know there was one main patent -- 6,988,138 -- which was utter garbage and was invalidated in 2009.

It was this patent which BlackBoard used to try to shut down a competitor named Desire2Learn in 2006. The invalidation forced Blackboard to retreat, and they've since been much quieter on the legal front.

<comment><USER27> Interesting - Thanks. It's downright annoying to read a patent like that, and I'm happy to hear it was invalidated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Academic software is notoriously hard to get right. Every school does things slightly differently and has a slightly different culture from other schools. Sadly, the people who are in the best position to design good course management software -- the students themselves -- are also the least trusted for the task (and also tend to be less reliable as workers, given the realities of being a student).

What really saddens me is when a school does design its software in house, then throws that away and buys Blackboard or whatever else.

</comment><comment><USER30> As a current student user of Blackboard, the main problem lies within the professors. The professors either struggle to grasp the Blackboard system, or are technically sound to hate it enough to want it to change. The learning curve is unfortunately very high for most professors, which happen to be of an age greater than 40. I think the system could be more user friendly to the professors and students, but convincing a university to make a large scale upgrade will not be easy.

<comment><USER31> This is not a problem with the professors. It's not about their age either. It's a problem with Blackboard.

Blackboard creates a lot of potential work for professors which often has unclear educational value (or is expected in addition to their regular work). It's not evident that it's a good investment of their time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> i started writing a serious replacement for what i considered was a completely broken, dis-engaging format for online course delivery.

then i discovered Canvas was already a product that was 90% what i was developing/imagining and got discouraged from writing more code :(

i think the most difficult part isn't the software dev, it's getting past all the entrenched educational bureaucracy and unfortunately huge existing ecosystems. if you get a foothold as Instructure has, you're already waaaaay ahead of the competition.

<comment><USER33> UK: Split between Blackboard (which swallowed WebCT) and Moodle.

Moodle is GPLed of course and free to download, but you administer it yourself. The Open University decided to hack on Moodle rather than invent their own system some years ago and the code was released back into Moodle[1] (I recollect the 'roles' system and an add on e-portfolio).

 _" it's getting past all the entrenched educational bureaucracy and unfortunately huge existing ecosystems"_

Teachers often _work around_ the structures. Use email/FB/Whatsap/BBM/Other free things to reach students on an ad hoc basis. Who actually _needs_ course management other than the bureaucrats? Its a dialogue![2]

[1] [http://docs.moodle.org/26/en/About_Moodle](http://docs.moodle.org/26/en/About_Moodle)

[2] [http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~rjr/dolweb/docs/laurillardmoddoc.h...](http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~rjr/dolweb/docs/laurillardmoddoc.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Idea: GitHub for e-learning. Most lesson content is public and can be taken, forked and pull requested. Lessons can submodule/include content from other lessons.

Businesses/schools can pay for hosting private lessons (that can include public submodules) and for tracking employee/student progress.

<comment><USER35> [http://www.blackboard.com/sites/xplor/index.html](http://www.blackboard.com/sites/xplor/index.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This article's substance is 100% covered by the title. I'd be much more inclined to upvote an article that actually discussed the technical reasons why BlackBoard is bad, as opposed to a long-winded and flowery hyperbole that can be summarized in a single phrase.

</comment><comment><USER37> Shameless plug, I'm a member of FenixEdu, a open source academic and learning management system. I think that people might find it interesting.

[http://fenixedu.org](http://fenixedu.org)

FenixEdu was designed for a single school for the past 10 years and now we are trying to refactor it to be installed anywhere. We want to create that can tackle the needs for the next decade of teaching. If people are interested in this kind of thing please talk with us, we are most welcome to receive any kind of suggestion or feedback.

</comment><comment><USER38> Honestly, I had the same feelings about BB until the beginning of last semester. What happened?

My university switch from doing all blackboard support (updates, helping teachers, etc) to contracting it out to blackboard, suddenly, the entire interface was modernized, and continues to get better every couple weeks, teachers got better at doing what they wanted, and it just felt like a huge breath of fresh air.

There are still things that need to be fixed (the Discussion Thread format is one) but overall the experience is getting better.

</comment><comment><USER39> I have fortunately not had to deal with Blackboard in my role as a software developer at a university, who -- despite their otherwise questionable choices -- have fortunately migrated to Moodle. I've used Moodle as a student and it seems pretty good.

Anyway, my hands are still dirtied by plenty of other similar systems. They are almost all terrible: expensive, badly designed and even more poorly implemented. It's endemic in the sector to be sold snake oil. I had a thought why this might be the case, which I wrote about [1] In summary, despite the seemingly low-hanging fruit -- i.e. the problems these packages solve aren't difficult -- there's no technical incentive to disrupt such a closed market.

However, I cannot fathom how this happened in the first place. Presumably, 20-years-ago, when these types of packages were first on the market, they wouldn't have been much better than using bits of paper (their modern descendants aren't, so it stands to reason). Thus the only conclusion I'm able to reach is that it's a "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine" situation that has persisted and grown out of control.

[1] [http://xoph.co/20130823/on-enterprise- software/](http://xoph.co/20130823/on-enterprise-software/)

</comment><comment><USER40> We started work on a Blackboard Alternative last year[1] (using Django), for a 2nd year Group Project module at University. Not mature enough to replace Blackboard yet, but we tried to address some of the issues that lecturers and students had with it, and received some good feedback. We open-sourced it at the end of the module.

[1][https://github.com/JosephRedfern/CM2301-9](https://github.com/JosephRedfern/CM2301-9)

<comment><USER41> I made something similar a few months ago, also using Django: [https://github.com/equirio/movide](https://github.com/equirio/movide) . It's really hard to get teachers on board in a bottom-up way. There are a couple of classes using it, but it took a lot of work to get there. I am interested in talking more if you are still working on your project.

<comment><USER33> _" It's really hard to get teachers on board in a bottom-up way."_

Try getting them to 'score' their idea of what online course elements might provide using the scheme in [1]

Do they want a filing cabinet, an online classroom, or some kind of student led Reddit/HN thing around their course materials? Gets a discussion going.

[1] [http://www.sohcahtoa.org.uk/legacy/blog/ilt-ideas/alan- stale...](http://www.sohcahtoa.org.uk/legacy/blog/ilt-ideas/alan- staley/index.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I make plugins that works with Blackboard as part of my undergraduate research, specifically making SCORM modules. The only thing that Blackboard is useful is that it does the authentication and authorization bit for us. We could easily roll out our own Django service and have students run code instad of having to log in BB and click on assignment to start coding.

The other thing is BB does have tincan API but only newer version does. I think the BB we use now has been upgraded and does have TINCAN API so I am going play with it.

BB is horrible in terms of support and user interface. It has so many functionality but hardly anyone use most of them and that's where I think BB engineers need to re think. They should slim BB. And there is a BB mobile app? Fuck that shit (excuse my Chinese). Useless piece of shit.

There is an open source version called Moodle but the interface is even worse. It tries to solve all the problems BB is solving... I have played with it for a few years and the interface just hasn't improved.

</comment><comment><USER43> "If it is a bad piece of software we can build a business by selling a better one" does not apply here. Many have tried and failed. The reason being the users are not the buyer here. And the buyers will always lean towards the decision that will preserve their job. After all no one got fired for picking IBM.

</comment><comment><USER44> Our uni has been working with a new startup based in the UK working on a completely new LMS kind of system. It's really cool and well designed and takes on features from popular internet services and builds them into education (ala. Facebook, it's also really well designed, I think there are some ex-Apple/Google people working for them). The company though has also been working with Students / Lecturers and Administrators so they've done a good job of integrating with our systems (disclosure: I'm the LMS Technical Manager). But it's also built from a learner and teacher perspective and they guys we've given it do really like it.

If anyone wants to talk about it you can email me at rusdyas {at} gmail.com (kind of non-disclosure, over at least the details anyway)

</comment><comment><USER45> Please, you can make your point without profaning the name of Jesus Christ, a man whom many of us worship and who is dear to our hearts. To use the name of any sacred personage in this manner, as an expletive, conveys a lack of understanding and respect for other people.

<comment><USER46> you created your profile 666 days ago you demon

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Yes and no. When I was in college, Blackboard once lost all my previous grades in a calculus class, when we were close to the end. I was averaging maybe a B. No other records existed.

It was awesome! The only grade that counted, as a result, was the final - <USER3> A.

Also - fantastic writing.

</comment><comment><USER27> I hear Bb has been adding some talented people and taking a hard look at their product. Turnarounds can be difficult, but at least they are cognizant of needing to take serious stab at the problem.

<comment><USER9> Well I know they fired their CEO or he "found something better and pivoted" not so long ago. I find this ironic because he started the product after graduating from our alma mater, who is terribly locked into this garbage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Whenever I read about Blackboard and the universities that use it, I can't help but consider that these are the institutions which are supposed to be capable of teaching software engineering.

</comment><comment><USER49> College instructor here, yup that sounds like a Blackboard user. Fortunately I have the ability to choose not to have any online classes[1] but I have heard similar tales from my colleagues. Our aging IT decision makers aren't spared the vitriol, but their leather ears are deaf to the pleas of the faculty and of the students. This torture shall continue until morale improves, or until the gutless boomers in charge, aren't.

[1] And I have chosen not to, mainly to avoid having anything to do with BB.

</comment><comment><USER50> My kids' school district just switched from Blackboard to Schoology. Major improvement.

Blackboard is so poorly designed that they couldn't force teachers to use it.

</comment><comment><USER51> Piazza, a class discussion app, seems to have good adoption even at schools that use Blackboard. I'm hoping to do similar for homework collection with Classhand.

I expect a switch to a basic platform with apps like Piazza that offer tailored features/user experiences. Not unlike the Salesforce ecosystem. That may be Blackboard's future role.

[http://classhand.com](http://classhand.com) for those interested.

</comment><comment><USER52> Whats with the title, is this a prayer?

In any case, I cant help notice a ton of the features people desperately want from a LMS system seem better developed and added onto something like (brace yourselves): sharepoint. It has all the group/collab stuff you could want. Am I crazy? Plus given how pervasive it is in the enterprise space, seems like plenty of development talent to extend and customize per school as needed.

<comment><USER53> At least in American and British English, "Christ", "Jesus", and "Jesus Christ" are used as exclamations:

[http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/british/jesus-...](http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/british/jesus- christ_2)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> tl;dr: The author passionately hates Blackboard but never once tells us why (just links to a Google search: Blackboard sucks).

This piece has zero information content. Very colorful language and prose are used, but there's no meat in the essay, just filler. I'm not familiar with Blackboard or this space in general, and I'm none the better after reading this. Not sure why it got so upvoted.

<comment><USER55> Given that this is a link to a personal blog, you've got to get your expectations set correctly leading up to reading a post titled "Christ, I hate Blackboard". You have to go into it knowing that you are about to read a rant, and that it's going to be pretty colorful.

It's possible that the rant was more meant for his cohorts or his social circle, which may already know why Blackboard sucks. I doubt he wrote it specifically for the HN audience.

If you don't care to do the research as to why Blackboard sucks, just enjoy the amusing rant and move on. Don't worry about why it sucks, you wouldn't appreciate how bad it sucks unless you've had to use it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Pardon my ignorance, but what is this about? The language is too tough for me to understand, I being a non-native English speaker.

<comment><USER57> Blackboard is a piece of software - although calling it that discredits all real software - used by universities and colleges to manage student marks and assignments in a way that's supposed to be easily accessible to students. Speaking as a first year who's had to endure it for only a semester so far - it's a complete mess. In addition to the above two features, it _attempts_ to do lab group management and acts as a dropbox-like file sharing platform between profs and students.

It is good at neither of these. File sharing is inconsistent. Rather than having a single, designated file area for each class and each prof, every prof can customize where it's located in what can loosely be called a directory hierarchy within the webapp. Additionally, they can even link to their own sites (and the linking is a calamity too - but that's another story).

Group management is tolerable when it works. More than once has there been a missing asset issue, or a permissions issue, or a straight up JSP error that prevented my peers and myself from joining appropriate lab groups and uploading assignments on time.

All of this is worsened by the scores of profs who haven't a clue how to use this.

Lightly put, this is one of the worst user experiences one can have, and rivals Windows 8 on desktops in terms of user unfriendliness (read: user hostility).

<comment><USER56> That indeed looks like a mess. Thanks for your response.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> My school (University of Texas at Austin) is currently in the process of switching to Canvas ([http://www.instructure.com/](http://www.instructure.com/)) and plans to completely drop Blackboard by next Fall.

</comment><comment><USER59> My school dropped Blackboard for their own home-brewed system... FINALLY. [http://lsinfo.byu.edu/](http://lsinfo.byu.edu/)

However, it has its own share of problems.

</comment><comment><USER60> As someone making a very niche LMS offering, it makes me very happy to read this thread.

I'm so sorry.

</comment><comment><USER61> If you think black board is bad you haven't used podium from whipple hill...

</comment><comment><USER62> digedu (www.digedu.com) provides an alternative for K-12. Much more comprehensive -- not just software, for instance-- but our Learning Engine is a sort-of next generation LMS. (disclosure - I work for digedu.)

<comment><USER62> www.digedu.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> How clueless is me? I don't know what Blackboard is.

<comment><USER64> This might help: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_learning_environment](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_learning_environment)

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> You got it backwards again.</comment>


Measuring abstract reasoning in neural networks - <AUTHOR> https://deepmind.com/blog/measuring-abstract-reasoning/ <comment><USER2> I think that neural networks of the current design will have trouble with abstract symbolic logic because they do not have any structures to support that type of reasoning.

That said, they are great at recognition/prediction and it is likely that you can solve some simple symbolic logic problems by recognition/prediction but only up to a degree.

Neural networks currently are very much like the sensory processing areas in the brain and sometimes they are mapped directly to actions for control of video games.

But symbolic logic as human explicitly do it, and what we consider as thinking (planning, imagining, evaluating, deciding) is not done just in the sensory areas of the brain but involves mediation by executive control centers and self-stimulation of the sensor areas in sort of a loop.

I am not sure that trying to deal with abstract reasoning in just the current sensory NN designs that we have is going to be super effective. But I guess measuring abstract reasoning will allow us to realize the current limitations and then push forward with better structures that enable it.

(Although even if the NN do not have structures to support symbolic reasoning in the way that humans do it, I guess DeepMind will just write custom code around the NN do enable NN do help with symbolic logic? Sort of how they combined NN with other search structures to create AlphaGo?

Personally I think it would be easier to combine NN with existing symbolic reasoning tools to get a better result rather than just sticking with NNs. Use NNs to recognize and evaluate patterns and feed that to the symbolic logic tools to get reasoning solutions. Much more efficient I would think and tractable. And for extra credit run NNs on the symbolic logic reasoning tools to see if you can make some "intuitive" jumps sometimes instead of pure reason.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Frankly, I doubt that neural networks can "reason" in an abstract way. Correct me if I am wrong but it looks like you got what you ordinarily except from a neural network. The network was successfully trained to pick out certain progressions (or properties) in the training images. It's not doing any reasoning at all - just the usual thing neural networks do.

<comment><USER4> Abstraction is looking at some properties, while abstracting others (removing, ignoring). Even simple artificial neural networks for computer vision can do so - e.g. ignoring noise, small rotations, reflections or the background.

If, or when, it gets to human-level (for a given task) is another question. But saying that computers cannot learn how to abstract data is demonstrably false.

Vide [https://distill.pub/2017/feature- visualization/](https://distill.pub/2017/feature-visualization/) for internal representations.

<comment><USER5> I'd say neural networks abstract over successive layers until the answer becomes self evident. That's not the same as reasoning though.

<comment><USER4> What do you exactly mean by "reasoning"?

<comment><USER6> Reasoning is whatever is left after you take away everything neural networks do. Obviously!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Being a software engineer and a big DL enthusiast, this is getting a bit worrying for 2 reasons: 1- We already can easily build an NLP-related model that can write code in a certain language without making syntax/build or runtime errors. 2- I wasn't worried so far because the code a model could write doesn't carry any business logic. And I've realised that, as long as reasoning is still yet to be "discovered" in AI, we would be fine. DeepMind seems now to start focusing on just exactly that. If a job as complicated as implementing code with business logic in it can be done by an AI. I do not care whether it's an AGI or not, it's already a bit troubling.

<comment><USER8> I guess we'll first see IDEs with a built-in code-completion function. I suppose this could work first in cases where coding is boring, such as when refactoring code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is specialized pattern recognition - not abstract human reasoning. It could potentially solve IQ tests better than humans(would make a great PR stunt) by training on millions of possible IQ tests(Raven Progressive matrices) to develop a generic association map with symbol-clusters it detects, enough to handle a rare unfamiliar shape.

These patterns don't translate to anything outside their domain, it would just prove IQ tests are not measuring intelligence - they measure the absorption of specific pattern data(association maps) in our brains, essentially forcing a brain to become a reactive "association-puzzle" automaton fitting symbols into RPM patterns.

</comment><comment><USER10> This work does not engage with Searle's Chinese Room argument, as far as I can tell, nor do the authors use any shockingly novel network architecture or advances in approach beyond normal DL approaches.

My position, then, is that the system they describe cannot be said to be reasoning at all.

<comment><USER11> I think I've never completely understood the Chinese room argument, to me it seems like that whole chain of examples and counter examples are the product of people playing word games and discussing definitions.

If your 'room' 'understands', but no part of the 'room' can be attributed with having 'intelligence', doesn't it stand to reason that the _room_ itself is the intelligent actor? I really don't see the problem with the fact that the human 'cpu' doesn't speak Chinese, the room itself 'understands' Chinese just fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm starting to get tired of this antropomorphized terminology for neural networks. "Belief propagation", "abstract reasoning"... No wonder that laypeople think we're on the brink of the AI apocalypse.

<comment><USER8> Yes, sadly, even scientists use marketing-speak. And I guess companies use this style of terminology to attract VCs and to push their half-baked products.

Not sure if complaining about it would help though.</comment></comment>


How a low-level Twitter employee was able to deactivate Donald Trump's account - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/how-a-twitter-employee-was-able-to-delete-donald-trumps-account-2017-11 <comment><USER2> This is fundamentally broken. There should be peer review prior to any such actions, given Twitter's importance in Internet speech these days. Yes, I realize Twitter is a company without any obligations to uphold free speech, but their entire PR schill plays up free-speech as integral to company culture.</comment>


Emulating Server Push with Service Workers - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/wheresrhys/server-push-polyfill-demo <comment><USER2> I never got the point of service-worker caching. What's wrong with cache headers?

<comment><USER3> Cache headers can't ensure that your site works offline—that's a big difference.

There's Application Cache, but it's treacherous and deprecated.

Service Workers get near-total control over outgoing HTTP requests, which has many various uses.

Then there are the coming features. You'll be able to push messages to your service worker even if your site isn't open in any tabs, for example.</comment></comment>


Solving the TinyUrl centralization problem - <AUTHOR> http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/03/07/solvingTheTinyurlCentraliz.html <comment><USER2> There are two things to take into consideration here. I agree with the premise of what the author is saying, that URLs should be as short as possible, but I also think URLs should be informative as well. The amazon.com/wii url is great because it contains information about where you're going. If that was amazon.com/sD5E, I would have no idea where it's going to send me. This is the biggest problem with Tinyurl, I think.

URLs should be as simple and short as possible _but not too simple and short_. It should still tell me where I'm going, just extremely succinctly.

I see developers make this mistake all the time. They make their URLs look like this: _<http://example.com/users/dcurtis/profile> _. That has at least 14 useless characters in it. It could be changed to _<http://example.com/dcurtis> _ with no loss at all, because /users and /profile both are useless structural information.

<comment><USER3> As always, it depends. Arguably, <http://example.com/users/dcurtis/profile> is short, but not too short. If a website/service is centered around people, it makes _more_ sense. Else, the longer URLs seem to make more sense. <http://www.amazon.com/wii> is only as useful as someone knowing what the Wii is.

I wouldn't consider the users and profile namespaces a mistake. People get cute and it can create a large constraint how your architecture works. Also, URLs structures as such are often a result of some framework behind it. <http://example.com/model/controller/view>. It expedites development and managing code something fierce. Perhaps there is opportunity for a shortening widget within the MVC pattern. I need to think about it -- or let other smarter people than me think about it. :)

<http://www.amazon.com/shamwow> is invalid, along with the other permutations I tried. Amazon doesn't have core shortening service, it seems.

I think the issue is more around URLs which can be parsed by a human vs the proverbial querystring. A TinyURL solves technical problems and looks nicer which is 2/3 of the way there. The remainder makes sense to a person.

<comment><USER2> You can't use the excuse that "the software urges me to do it this way, so I'll make the user's experience suffer." As a developer of user-centric software, it is totally your responsibility to do al the hard work for the user. That includes the couple lines in your routes file to fix the /model/controller/view default.

/users and /profile do not ever have extra information, except in extreme cases where you have /users and /aliens and /pants that your app is centralized around.

<comment><USER4> /users and /profile could easily have extra information. a GET /users could provide a list of all users. the /users/dcurtis might be the blog or home page, while /users/dcurtis/profile is specifically the person's profile.

Having a hierarchical resource namespace makes plenty of sense in many contexts. If nothing else, it's more likely to be long lived because it makes URL redirection easier in the future if the system changes. When version 2 of the site software comes out, someone can easily redirect all the /profile urls to a legacy system or parse them into the new system. Whereas a flat namespace is much harder to migrate and keep constant.

And besides, we shouldn't confuse the two issues of readable URLs and short alias URLs. Both have very legitimate uses.

<comment><USER2> You're right that /dcurtis could have different information. But I am talking about webapps that would return a 404 for _<http://example.com/users> _. The vast majority of major apps do not use urls the way you described.

Unless you absolutely positively have to have another extra layer of url hierarchy, and you can justify it extremely well, please don't. It's just a burden on the user when they go to share/copy/read it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Long URLs don't bother me. The actual URL is an implementation detail for the computer. As a user, all I should see is an underlined description of the link. When I click it, the computer takes me where I need to go. It doesn't care how long the URL is, because it just doesn't matter that much.

I have successfully cut-n-pasted long URLs into IRC, Email, and IM, and it has never not worked. It may be a bit ugly, but who really cares?

<comment><USER6> One time when URL shortening is useful is for paper. I write legal briefs that sometimes have to cite to web pages, and for that URL shortening services are very useful. You can't expect a human reader to type in 200+ character URLs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Services are already doing some of this. TipJoy can do their own URL shortner, FriendFeed has ff.im, Posterous has post.ly, etc. This is getting pretty common.

If you're not going to make your own, and are obsessed with shortness, though, we just launched our own shrinker:

<http://tinyarro.ws>

<http://➡.ws/퐐>

</comment><comment><USER6> TinyUrl is run by one dude in Minnesota, an avid unicyclist named Kevin](http://www.gilby.com/whois.html) Gilbertson. It gets 1.75 billion hits per month. How long is this going to last?

<comment><USER8> Is there any reason that it won't last just because it's a one-man shop? He's kept it going strong this far.

<comment><USER6> It's tied to the life, and devotion, of one person. He could get sick, he could die without making arrangements, he could stop being able to pay his server bills.

<comment><USER9> He could, but is there any reason to assume that he will? There's always out- of-nowhere conditions that can kill off an operation. He appears to be having no trouble thus far, so I don't see any reason to predict that he will encounter trouble without a basis in reality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> the solution has been at our fingertips since the web was born:

a href="longurl" : shorttext</comment>


Show HN: Pdf.to A website to do things to pdf files (compress, jpg to pdf etc.) - <AUTHOR> https://pdf.to/?ref=hackernews <comment><USER2> Can you add 'remove password from pdf'? It's fairly simple on command-line [https://gist.github.com/pstaender/7412245](https://gist.github.com/pstaender/7412245) at least for the usual print protection.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll add that in later today</comment></comment>


Cross-Platform Desktop Development (JavaFX vs. Electron) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://lnu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1081105/FULLTEXT01.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> I found one of the conclusions of this study particularly interesting: desktop apps using Electron ran much faster than JavaFX apps!</comment>


Ask HN: Startups and student debt? - <AUTHOR>

Merry Christmas! This has been weighting on me for some time & I don't know what to do. Was wondering if anyone else has this problem or ideas.
I took out a LOT of debt to go to a well respected school got a Masters degree in CS. Now  I'm coming out, I want to do the same thing I've always wanted which is start a startup. The trouble is, my family helped me get that money, and while I'm more than happy to live out of a shoebox for a while, I feel like I shouldnt risk their money. But I don't want to work for someone else--the thought is completely repugnant to me.
I've been thinking I might try for YC and if I get rejected, then suck it up and get a regular job till my debts paid. <comment><USER2> When you say, "my family helped me get that money...I feel like I shouldnt risk their money," do you mean that your family helped to co-sign your loan or act as guarantors? If that is the case, then no, you really should pay off the debt. And idlewords is right, you can use the time to learn about working in a team. Or even network to find cofounders. From your statement "I've been thinking I might try for YC", I'm guessing perhaps you haven't found co- founders yet? Paul Graham's essays tend to stress the importance of good co- founders.

But if they helped you get the loans in some way that doesn't involve their credit getting damaged should you fall behind on payments, maybe you should talk to a financial counselor about options, like consolidating loans or asking for a forbearance due to unemployment/hardship. That's going to make your loan principal grow very large though.

So I also think that working for a few years to pay off the loans is the best idea because then you can focus on your startup without the stress of looming monthly loan payments on top of earning no salary whilst developing, but perhaps you should ask someone who can give more specific advice. Not to sound harsh, but it seems that by asking internet boards, you're looking for a way to alleviate your conscience, both to yourself (in terms of your life ambitions) and to your family (in expectations and finance). Don't worry too much Good luck with whatever decision you make!

</comment><comment><USER3> Pay off your debts. You have a degree in a field where salaries are high, it won't take long, and you're likely to learn a lot about the dynamics of working in a larger team that will help you in your startup later.

As you say, you can't risk other people's money unless that's what they signed up for. Get a job.</comment>


Merging PDFs With PDFBox - <AUTHOR> http://opensourcereleasefeed.com/article/show/merging-pdf-s-with-pdfbox Merging Portable Document Format documents using PDFBox couldn't be simpler. The developer(s) of PDFBox has taken care of all of the hard work and encapsulated it in one class of their Application Programming Interface. All you need to do is use it. <comment><USER2> This past week I needed to extract+merge PDF pages, looked around a bit. From my notes:

(PDF tools, pdftk 2006, toolkit is win/linux cli)

<http://www.pdfhacks.com/pdftk/>

<http://www.softpedia.com/get/Office-tools/PDF/GUIPDFTK.shtml>

(using PyPDF)

[http://pieceofpy.com/index.php/2009/03/05/concatenating- pdf-...](http://pieceofpy.com/index.php/2009/03/05/concatenating-pdf-with- python/)

(2 from softpedia, freeware - Junko OK, 1.3 MB zip)

[http://www.softpedia.com/get/Office-tools/PDF/silkodyssey- PD...](http://www.softpedia.com/get/Office-tools/PDF/silkodyssey-PDF- Merge.shtml)

<http://www.softpedia.com/get/Office-tools/PDF/Junko.shtml>

(uses C# free lib <http://itextsharp.sourceforge.net/>)

(Mac: PDFLab at:)

<http://www.iconus.ch/fabien/>

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a Java solution. If you want to create PDFs in PHP, FPDF ( <http://www.fpdf.org/> ) works great and has tons of addons. The library FPDI ( <http://www.setasign.de/products/pdf-php-solutions/fpdi/> ) uses FPDF and is probably the closest thing to PDFBox in PHP when it comes to working with existing PDFs.

A few years ago I wrote a library using FPDF + FPDI that can overlay barcodes on existing PDFs: <http://chir.ag/projects/pdfb/> and it has proven to be a very stable and capable setup. We use this at my work to generate over 10,000 pages of PDFs daily from a tiny Apache server.

<comment><USER4> And here's a library for Python: <http://pybrary.net/pyPdf/></comment></comment>


Show HN: I'm Looking for Python Stories - <AUTHOR> http://compellingpython.com/ <comment><USER2> I have recently automated image renaming on Dropbox to rename thousands of image files. Also wrote a script to do on-the-fly translation of Excel sheets from German to English.

Are these two "stories" compelling enough to get your attention? :)

<comment><AUTHOR> If you feel like sharing how you went about it, I'd be happy to publish your stories. Feel free to send a draft to firstname.lastname@example.com, or let me know if you'd like some help getting started!

<comment><USER2> Sure. I will send a draft soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> My plan right now is to publish about one story a week -- I'll also tell some of my own Python stories, mostly about using Python with cloud services and data analysis.</comment>


GUI for Neovim - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/vhakulinen/gnvim <comment><USER2> I wonder if these people are aware of Gvim and Macvim. They offer features such as listed in [https://vi.stackexchange.com/a/2458](https://vi.stackexchange.com/a/2458)

The screenshots of GNvim look as if it doesn't use the code base of Gvim.

<comment><USER3> Gvim is GUI for vim (afaik its part of vim's code base). Gnvim is GUI for neovim, and is its own project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For ppl interested in guis for nvim, i just came across [https://github.com/yatli/fvim](https://github.com/yatli/fvim) which has some nice qol improvements (compared to neovim-qt). I haven't tried it on Linux yet though

</comment><comment><USER5> I've been using it in-terminal the last 3-4 years. I don't feel like I'm missing anything. Am I?

</comment><comment><USER6> Irony at its finest:

> GNvim - Rich Neovim GUI without any web bloat

> sudo apt install libwebkit2gtk-4.0-dev

:-)</comment>


Israeli Entrepreneur Hacks Girlfriend's Facebook Relationship Status to Propose - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2251307/Do-want-change-relationship-status-The-amazing-Facebook-proposal.html she said yes! <comment><USER2> Daily Mail? Keep that trash off of HN.</comment>


CEDET 1.0 Released (Emacs tools) - <AUTHOR> http://cedet.sourceforge.net/

<comment><USER2> If you'd like to try CEDET out, but you don't feel like setting anything up, CEDET is now included in emacs 23 which means you just might be able to open a C/C++ file and turn it on by doing the following.

        M-x global-ede-mode
        M-x semantic-mode

To really "see" what is going on a bit better check all the boxes in the "Development" menu.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've seen this, but haven't looked into it. Can anyone recommend this project?

<comment><USER4> In my experience, this isn't the sort of framework that Emacs users or developers really want. It is too much under one roof; a way to edit and maintain Makefiles, an object system (eieio), a reimplementation of tags, "smart" completion, a parser generator library, ...

These components would be useful on their own, but as a whole, it's not very useful. EIEIO only supports the exact subset of CLOS that the author needed for CEDET. The parser generator is only good for parsing C and C++. Etc., etc. The reality is that I don't want to write this stuff myself for every language, so I appreciate the generic-ness, but it's just not the Emacs way.

Take a look at SLIME, for example, and notice how it doesn't try to generalize to all languages. And yet people have implemented SLIME support for various non-Lisp languages, and the support is actually useful.

What Emacs users really want is a mode for their language that fits like a glove, but shares common functionality with the rest of Emacs. M-. is the general "find me this thing" command, but it's good when the mode-specific integration layer extends this to actually understand your code. What's not good is when it becomes another generic mechanism that doesn't quite work.

Anyway, the Lisp community is still learning about libraries. (I write a lot of Lisp, but I come from a Perl background. Perl gets libraries. Emacs Lisp does not.)

Eventually Emacs will have "packages" and people can start factoring the libraries out, and then people can start cleanly improving them. Then CEDET should be excellent, because you can reuse most of the code as you're creating $perfect-integration-layer-for-your-language. Until someone takes the initiative to refactor, though, people are just going to do their own thing.

(First we need a package system. Then we need some way to write unit tests. Then we need to write the unit tests.)

Incidentally, I have noticed a few projects that depend on eproject now... which is exactly the use case I designed eproject for. Yes!

<comment><USER5> 24 will have ELPA as the canonical package manager, iirc. So in a way, we do have the package system.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, ELPA is a start, but it's nothing like CPAN. For one thing, every time you do a release, you have to involve a human other than yourself. This is way too much effort for me, so I don't bother.

(On CPAN, I even get _bug reports_ from robots!)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


High-precision linear algebra in Julia: BigFloat vs. Arb (2018) - <AUTHOR> http://fredrikj.net/blog/2018/07/high-precision-linear-algebra-in-julia-bigfloat-vs-arb/ <comment><USER2> Fredrik's post is two years old. It would be interesting to try again using the ArbNumerics.jl [1] package that wraps the Arb library in a different way than Nemo.jl, which Fredrik describes

[1] [https://github.com/JeffreySarnoff/ArbNumerics.jl](https://github.com/JeffreySarnoff/ArbNumerics.jl)</comment>


Generating domain names using Markov Chains - <AUTHOR> http://codeismightier.com/2008/10/generating-domain-names/

<comment><USER2> The new Web 2.0-esqe (or dare i say Web 3.0-esqe) nomenclature is dominated by "double-vowels" (Wii, xumii, mobee) or "vowel-combos" (cuil) not often found in normal english. So this approach will not succeed in giving you a really innovative name. Probably you need to perturb the Markov-chain to achieve that or waste a lot of free time digging your cognitive faculty!

<comment><USER3> But those names suck.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, but you have to remember that those names will affect the perception of similar names. The Wii, for example, being a monster hit is going to affect the way people perceive names.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Chattly.com Beat you to it"

Registered 10/19. Nice. :)

</comment><comment><USER6> As an aside - Markov Chains are a key tool in Bioinformatics (Hidden Markov Models).

</comment><comment><USER7> Very cool ... but I don't want the code, I just want a web app to generate names for me (and check that the domain is available, of course).

C'mon, where's markovr.com?

<comment><USER8> I used the tool to make the name markovable, got the domain and made this: <http://www.markovable.net>

<comment><USER9> Keep that site up :) It's a great tool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> All this script needs is the bulk-whois gateway on the other end. But seriously, anyone know of a whois service who allows free high-volume lookups?

<comment><USER10> don't bother with whois; query the root/gtld nameservers for a valid NS record for the domain to see if it's registered. dns is much quicker and nobody's going to shut you down for using it.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> You guys killed my server! (256 slice) I can't even ssh into it now!

<comment><USER11> Does the web console (at manage.slicehost.com) still work?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep. Thanks for the suggestion. After I logged in I realized that Apache was basically in an infinite loop where it kept trying to create new child processes but those where instantly being killed because of a lack of memory. After a hard reset it seems to be working now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> someone should make this a web app.

</comment><comment><USER13> Silly python people always writing lots of code. This should be, like, 15 lines.

[http://search.cpan.org/~rclamp/Algorithm- MarkovChain-0.06/li...](http://search.cpan.org/~rclamp/Algorithm- MarkovChain-0.06/lib/Algorithm/MarkovChain.pm)

<comment><USER14> It'd be nice to include the actual library:

[http://search.cpan.org/src/RCLAMP/Algorithm- MarkovChain-0.06...](http://search.cpan.org/src/RCLAMP/Algorithm- MarkovChain-0.06/lib/Algorithm/MarkovChain.pm)

…so, 165+15 = 180 lines total?

<comment><USER13> Try closer to something like 800 lines in the library. It comes with demos, a test suite, etc. And I think you're skipping the base class in your naive count.

I'm not really sure how the line count of a library is relevant to anything?

<comment><USER15> For pretty obvious reasons?

      import generating-domain-names as gds

      print gds.genName()

2 lines of code to do Markov-chain-generating doaminnames!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Co-founder or no co-founder? - <AUTHOR> http://www.roundbreak.com/2012/06/05/co-founder-or-no-co-founder/

<comment><USER2> Completely agree, but I think PG assumes that anybody who is smart/good enough to get into YC is going to have a solid co-founder.

I wonder how many YC companies have failed due to a co-founder break-up.

Outside of YC, I hear a co-founder break up is one of the top reasons a company fails.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's true. But I am somewhat skeptical about the fact that a smart person necessarily is the one with good networking skills or the one capable of forging sound relationships. There are times when a truly smart person, either due to his own eccentricity or the environment, doesn't get to have a chance of having a good co-founder unless he relocates himself which is hardly possible in many cases.</comment></comment>


Reminder: 11/11/11 11:11 - <AUTHOR>

11/11/11 11:11 is coming up.<p>I wonder if there are any websites that are taking the special date into account. Perhaps it would be cool to launch something new! <comment><USER2>
      In the Rhineland, the Carnival season is considered to be the "fifth season of the year", starting on November 11 at exactly 11:11 a.m.

From <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasching>

</comment><comment><USER3> That day is already taken for something more important than a launch in UK <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_Day>

<comment><USER4> WWI ended on the 11th. I imagine that the UK is not alone when it comes to 11/11 having a special place on the calendar. In the US the 11th (or closest weekday) is Veterans Day.

Rememberance Day seems to have more in common with our Memorial Day than our Veterans Day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> In the U.S., remember Veterans.

<comment><USER6> In Poland it's Independence Day (Poland regained independence after 123 years of occupation in November 1918, 11th was choosen as holiday).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm waiting until 20/11/2011 20:11. Doesn't clash with anything.

</comment><comment><USER8> The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim!!! Although, not launched at 11:11..

</comment><comment><USER9> I'd expect a link that can add an event on this date to iCal.</comment>


Why you should be time blocking and not just writing to-do lists - <AUTHOR> https://blog.zenkit.com/why-you-should-be-time-blocking-and-not-just-writing-to-do-lists-b0c84052f6af <comment><USER2> Hey! Something on HN I can finally comment on.

I've been time blocking for two years. It's the only strategy that works in my open office.

I've invested in a nice pair of headphones (Bose QC35s), in order to help convey the message to my coworkers that I am unavailable, as well as set an outlook appointment on a weekly basis for what hours I'll be blocking out.

You probably won't be good at it, at first. In the beginning for me, I still checked email, I still glanced at my phone...it was really only to stop interacting with my coworkers to focus on tasks.

However, over time, I got better at finding music that kept me focused. Placing my phone on DnD, and placing it in my bag, and closing outlook.

Colleagues began to understand what my 'time blocks' meant. As I did it more often it became effective.

Now people check my calendar for my daily time block to see when to come bother me, and I am able to be hyper focused on tasks for 2 hours a day.

My advice to anyone wanting to attempt this, is to be diligent and persistent. Have a list of polite ways to tell people that you are unavailable for this time, and learn how to deflect questions to others who may have the answer. I would definitely recommend good, noise cancelling headphones. Avoid listening to music you like, and know the lyrics to. Find a random station that plays lyricless, low-tempo music. Your brain will eventually begin to associate that music with focus.

</comment><comment><USER3> Contradictory to its title, the article points out that in an appropriately engineered environment -- which in social or monetary terms might be prohibitively expensive, but might not -- time-blocking is unnecessary, and a to-do list is sufficient.

</comment><comment><USER4> Any recommendations for a good paper day planner / notebook?

      Hobonichi Techos  - too maximalist imho
      Writepads - Pocket Ledger excellent for short term plans/notes
      Eberhardt Press - A5/A6 1cm grid spiral bound, usually out of stock/low volume
      Daiso / Muji - sprial grids here are great, and very inexpensive

Personally, I've found grids and dot grids with a spiral bound and/or removable perforated pages tend to reduce clutter and provide the most utility for creating a custom day planner.

I'm also experimenting with scheduling apps, and open to any recommendations.</comment>


Bank Had the Worst Password Policy We've Ever Seen - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/kz4jjv/this-bank-had-the-worst-password-policy-weve-ever-seen <comment><USER2> I would not have published this article. Someone at the bank made an error, and

> After we reached out to FinecoBank for comment, a spokesperson said that "we > understand the criticism and we decided not to suggest anymore to our > clients to do so."

Ok. What's the story?

The article also complains that, "to make matters (MUCH) worse," the bank charges to physically mail a new password. Well, sending a letter costs something, and takes someone's time, and attaching a fee to it incentivizes people to use the online password reset, which as the article states, is free.

One of the claims of the article subheading was always false, and the other is no longer true.

> A European bank makes customers pay to change their passwords, and suggests > they Google their password to check if it is secure.

<comment><USER3> The policy was listed on their website and confirmed by a customer service representative. Just because they saw the error of their ways after being contacted by the press doesn't mean they didn't actually have the woeful password policy in the first place. There's no evidence anywhere that "someone at the bank made an error", in fact it says right there in the same quote that you quoted that the bank "decided not to suggest anymore to our clients to do so".

Your other claim is also false! Just because it costs something for the bank to physically mail a new password doesn't mean that they weren't in fact charging their users a fee to change their passwords--they were! Just because you feel that the fee was justified doesn't mean that they weren't charging a fee.

To conclude, everything described in the article was completely true, and everything you claim is completely false.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> FinecoBank, a bank with more than 1.3 million customers in Italy, makes customers pay to change their passwords, and suggests they Google their password to check if it is secure.

Saved you a click.

<comment><USER2> This is perpetuating false claims in the article, though. I would revise this to:

> FinecoBank, a bank with more than 1.3 million customers in Italy, used to > suggest that customers Google their passwords to check if they are secure, > and charges a fee to change a password by snail mail instead of online.

<comment><USER4> Those words were copied directly from the article and pieced together.</comment></comment></comment>


The Millennials Disrupting Boston's Transit System - <AUTHOR> https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/10/25/what-works-boston-transit-221839 <comment><USER2> Of course, the article has absolutely nothing to do with millennials, other than the fact that the people running TransitMatters happen to be "mostly" millennials (which could mean that a number of them are _not_ millennials).

Generational language like this does nothing to curb ageism, and it detracts from an otherwise interesting article.

<comment><USER3> I really don't understand the focus on generations. Why don't we just use labels for age groups instead of birth year ranges? Most of the behaviors of a given "generation" change as they age, so it's not very helpful IMO for much of anything.

I also agree that it doesn't really matter what age group the people are in, especially for this article.</comment></comment>


Interview with Editor of Business Insider: 'There Are No Must-Read Publications' - <AUTHOR> http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/interview-with-henry-blodget-editor-of-business-insider-a-1092698.html <comment><USER2> Says notorious aggregator.... I kind of disagree with Blodget. There are actually several must-read publications. Der Spiegel, the publication interviewing him, is one of them. They publish ground-breaking reporting several times a year. And that distinguishes them from many other news organizations, including Business Insider. So the real question is: How frequently can one publication succeed at being a must-read? And the deeper insight, I suppose, is that the Internet unbundled publications as such, so that now you only have must-read articles that surface in other companies' platforms, like Facebook's news feed...

<comment><USER3> > _now you only have must-read articles that surface in other companies ' > platforms_

As it should be, imo. There never really were must-read publications so much as publications frequently containing must-read articles, and the amount of such material makes it so you can't get to everything even with a lot of time dedicated to reading and staying on top of things. Aggregators (e.g. HN) and review articles are (at least partial) solutions to this problem.

For that matter, a lot of "mere" comments and discussion threads on articles are more "must-read" than the median article even in a good publication. If the article itself is mediocre, the commentary on it may still contain valuable discussion, which is (part of) why you end up with effects like people tending to read top comments before, or instead of, reading the article. Another reason being to determine if the article was even "must-read" in the first place. Aggregation is great, what's really needed is better ways of separating the wheat from the chaff, across all publications and media types, including comments and entries on obscure blogs...</comment></comment>


Which is the "most serious"/payable business, allowing users to login with FB? - <AUTHOR>

I can only think of Skype and Groupon. Would you mind helping me with a few more examples?<p>Muchas gracias. <comment> opionion-matter Spotify is one I can think of.

</comment><comment><USER2> Ticketmaster

<comment><AUTHOR> I can't find the FB login on Ticketmaster ... Where is it? Thx.</comment></comment>


Mac gaming renaissance coming in 2011, powered by Steam - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/08/mac-gaming-renaissance-coming-in-2011-powered-by-steam.ars

<comment><USER2> I posted this to HN forever ago, it's a list of games coming to Mac OS X in 2010 and 2011: [http://neosmart.net/blog/2010/our-list-of-highly- anticipated...](http://neosmart.net/blog/2010/our-list-of-highly-anticipated- games-for-os-x/)

Only games scheduled for simultaneous release on both Windows and Mac or Mac- only releases are included in that list. Games that are being ported to Mac after being available on Windows or gaming consoles previously are not included. StarCraft II is the first of the bunch, and there are a _lot_ more exciting games to look forward to. I think the days of OS X gaming are finally upon us.

</comment><comment><USER3> It seems that Mac games do not have the same performance as PC games, even on the same hardware. Maybe not surprising with Valve, who is new to the mac platform, but it is surprising with Blizzard who's been Mac from way back. I can only assume that it's either an OSX issue or bad drivers.

Either way, hopefully this is the start of a virtuous circle where more games = better drivers = more gamers = more games.

<comment><USER4> Is it possible OSX just has more overhead? I mean it's not like Valve or Blizzard write the drivers, Apple does and they've of course been with OSX from day 1.

I know when I ran Warcraft III on an OSX machine, it felt like a little app in a window/box, whereas on Windows it's allowed to basically take over the machine.

<comment><USER5> "Is it possible OSX just has more overhead?"

Most likely, it's because Apple hasn't cared much about 3D performance in the past -- and even if they did, they'd be behind, because nVidia and ATI can dedicate entire teams of people specifically to opimizing drivers. Apple really _can't_ do that, because Apple makes operating systems and consumer electronics, not graphics processors.

And as the graphics processors get more powerful and evolve toward being ever more general-purpose, the driver gap between the specialists (ATI, nVidia, and eventually probably the Larrabee team at Intel) and the likes of Apple will only grow.

And the case in point -- Microsoft provides reference drivers, nVidia and ATI provide the real deal... those highly optimized drivers aren't Microsoft's code.

<comment><USER6> Graphics drivers on OSX don't come from Apple. They're written by ATI/Nvidia. However, for a variety of reasons including larger development teams and end user upgradeability, Windows drivers just have the cutting edge tech available first. Just like with Apple, were you to go to Dell.com or HP.com and download manufacturer certified drivers, you'd find them woefully out of date also.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was hacking around in jME (a game engine for Java) today, and I am pretty amazed by how much work goes into such software. This is to all appearances and amateur production which has still received an incredible amount of work. Comparing what it took to get a bit of code running in that versus j3d made me realize that a good, cross-platform engine for developing games could be a serious economic advantage for a developer. And it appears that that is what Valve is doing here. Very impressive.

</comment><comment><USER8> The Mac gaming renaissance has been announced every other year for the last 15 years... Macs are at an all time high in the households, that's a huge plus. But with shitty drivers, and most games written for DirectX, I don't know how it will turn out.

We will see, but I have low expectations.

<comment><USER9> As I get older - I'm beginning to really only play the AAA stuff unless I'm really passionate about something.. And that means Blizzard (who make Mac games), Valve (Who have ported Source to Mac and are releasing all new games on Mac), Firaxis (aka Civ V).. The mac can now pretty much cover all of my PC gaming needs.

<comment><USER10> It's a shame that Firaxis haven't given commitment to Civ V on the Mac .. yet - [http://www.tuaw.com/2010/03/13/gdc-2010-civilization-v- proba...](http://www.tuaw.com/2010/03/13/gdc-2010-civilization-v-probably-mac- bound-eventually/)

<comment><USER9> Good thing I don't have a mac. :) I was going on the basis of ComputerGuru's post here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1587352>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Yeaaah... I've got a 2010 MBP 13' and steam there sucks. Everything is slow and takes ages to load, I had to install windows.

Edit: also not just graphics, for example Europa Universalis III, it took a couple of minutes to *loadé on my 2004 windows xp PC. Now on this MBP with OsX it takes like 10 minutes.

<comment><USER12> It sounds like the real problem is poor programming - maybe game developers need to use better algorithms and profile their code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think one big issue with Steam is the fact that it won't work on path- sensitive installs of Mac OS X, and when I filed a support request the response was that they (Valve) have no intention of fixing this.

</comment><comment><USER13> A note to anyone who wants to play games powered by the Source engine, don't upgrade to 10.6.4. The graphics performance is very poor. I will bootcamp into XP just to play source games.

[http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=13144...](http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1314406)

</comment><comment><USER14> I think we should wait til 2011 to make this conclusion.</comment>


Ask HN: What note taking app/software do you use? - <AUTHOR> I have tried options like Evernote(premium) and OneNote but neither felt essential enough to replace classical pen and paper, so I'd like to know what you guys think is the best and why. <comment><USER2> I still miss notepad.cc (A web·based, password protectable notepad — RIP), so for now all I use is just one (local) single iA Writer document, containing everything I want to note/remember. (I also tried keep.google.com, but this is still too bloated for my taste.) Maybe you'll like milanote.com? (Mood boards meet note pads.)

Edit/Addendum: And nothing shall ever replace Pen & Paper. ;)

</comment><comment><USER3> Replacing pen and paper is hard but I use Google Keep quite a bit for saving links and small notes. I like Keep because:

* No need to create accounts on multiple websites

* Accessible from web and phone

* Clean interface

* Allows checklists, drawings, images and has OCR</comment>