When should you call it quits with your game? - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/blogger/comments/hmzraf/when_should_you_call_it_quits_on_your_game/ <comment><USER2> I think with everyone, it's important to have boundaries, realism and your motivation for the project.

If you are asking the question, yes, it's probably too late.</comment>


NASA announcement concerning perchlorates on Mars - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciam.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=perchlorate-found-on-mars-makes-soi-2008-08-04

<comment><USER2> Dr Robert Zubrin has long been an advocate of setting up a fully automated rocket fuel factory on Mars prior to a human landing there. This should strengthen his position.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow, that was... anticlimactic.</comment>


Modern Physics From Scratch - <AUTHOR> http://theoreticalminimum.com/ <comment><USER2> For programmers interested in classical mechanics, "The Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics" is a highly unique - and outstanding - introduction to Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics. Available free online:

[http://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/s...](http://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/sicm/book.html)

The idea behind the book is to make the "mathematical notations be explicit and precise enough that they can be interpreted automatically, as by a computer." Since Sussman is involved, that means that they (and you, when you do the problems) write scheme programs.

In a more traditional vein, _Mechanics_ by Landau and Lifshitz is (in my view) among the 2 or 3 best physics textbooks available. It's a great supplement for two reasons: (1) it takes a somewhat different approach to the material than most other textbooks (emphasizing the consequences of symmetries from the very beginning) (2) it's quite short, which I find to be very helpful when self- learning.

<comment><USER3> Cool book. That's from where I learnt the Euler-Lagrange equations first.

Sussman also wrote a book, in his characteristic style, on Differential Geometry, that doubles as a possible introduction to special relativity, and bridge to the general theory.

[http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6946/calculus- inde...](http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6946/calculus-indexed.pdf)

<comment><USER4> And one on quantum mechanics, though by a different author: [http://www.amazon.com/The-Structure-Interpretation- Quantum-M...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Structure-Interpretation-Quantum- Mechanics/dp/0674843924)

<comment><USER3> I've read some of it, and it's not even in the same sport, much less league. SIQM has _no code_ and uses all the handwavy notation you could read in better books (Landau, probably; or Feynmann, for an intro). It struck me as the Ford Fiesta to Sussman's 911. In fact, after that read, I was pissed at the author from riding the coat-tails of the Structure and Interpretation series.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _"A number of years ago I became aware of the large number of physics enthusiasts out there who have no venue to learn modern physics and cosmology. Fat advanced textbooks are not suitable to people who have no teacher to ask questions of, and the popular literature does not go deeply enough to satisfy these curious people."_

It's as if he made the courses just for me! :) Thanks for sharing this.

</comment><comment><USER6> In 2004, Roger Penrose published "The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe" which is 1100 pages long. <http://staff.washington.edu/freitz/penrose.pdf>

"One of my mother's closest friends, when she was a young girl, was among those who could not grasp fractions. This lady once told me so herself after she had retired from a successful career as a ballet dancer. I was still young, not yet fully launched in my activities as a mathematician, but was recognized as someone who enjoyed working in that subject. 'It's all that cancelling', she said to me, 'I could just never get the hang of cancelling.' She was an elegant and highly intelligent woman, and there is no doubt in my mind that the mental qualities that are required in comprehending the sophisticated choreography that is central to ballet are in no way inferior to those which must be brought to bear on a mathematical problem. So, grossly overestimating my expositional abilities, I attempted, as others had done before, to explain to her the simplicity and logical nature of the procedure of 'cancelling'."

<comment><USER7> Penrose, huh. I was reading the intro to Scott Aaronson's new book on quantum computing, and in it he says,

> More pointedly, one wonders who the audience for this book is supposed to > be. On the one hand, it has way too much depth for a popular book. Like > Roger Penrose's _The Road to Reality_ – whose preface promises an accessible > adventure even for readers who struggled with fractions in elementary > school, but whose first few chapters then delve into holomorphic functions > and fiber bundles – _Quantum Computing since Democritus_ is not for math- > phobes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There is a book that comes with the course: <http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/046502811X>

The intro chapter is quite good ... very condensed material, but could be very interesting read.

<comment><USER9> I worked through the entire core sequence over about 18 months, along with texts recommended by friends and on forums. In particular, Shankar's Quantum Mechanics, and Taylor's Classical Mechanics were great supplements to the first two courses. I recommend that approach because, while it is great to have the "theoretical minimum" delivered in lecture format, its also nice to have a more thorough text on hand for the topics that really get you interested.

With that said, I hadn't even heard of the official text book AFAICR Susskind never mentioned it in any of the lectures.

<comment><USER10> What about the math background ? Is someone who barely touched calculus able to follow through the classical mechanics course ?

<comment><USER9> Approximately speaking, first year undergraduate maths level is assumed, but no more. Most topics are elaborated on as required to teach the content.

You'll need to _understand_ calculus, i.e. understand the principles behind derivatives and integrals. You certainly won't need to be proficient in manipulating them. A brief book, like Martin Gardner's updated edition of Calculus Made Easy, is the type of background that you need. A bit more specifically, having an intuition for vector calculus and partial differential equations is important.

For QM, you will need to understand what linear algebra is for, and how it uses abstraction to simplify certain types of operations. Here's a good introduction: <http://betterexplained.com/articles/linear-algebra-guide/>

Honestly, I can't think of anything else that you would necessarily need to know before starting, but to get the most out of it you WILL need to follow along with his working in pen-and-paper, and get used to rewatching, or looking up topics that you struggle with.

<comment><USER11> > _Martin Gardner's updated edition of Calculus Made Easy_

I've seen several (quite a few actually) books with this title on Amazon. Some of them written by Martin Gardner and Silvanus P. Thompson, others written by Thompson alone. Do you recommend a particular edition? (and what's the deal with the plethora of different editions?)

> _For QM, you will need to understand what linear algebra is for, and how it > uses abstraction to simplify certain types of operations. Here's a good > introduction:<http://betterexplained.com/articles/linear-algebra-guide/> _

Could you recommend a wood-pulp version of this kind of material?

<comment><USER9> > Calculus Made Easy

Thompson wrote the original edition a century ago. It is now Public Domain.

<http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33283>

Gardner's revised edition adds introductory material, a problem set, and updates the language to keep it roughly in line with what is taught now. I can't speak to the differences between modern editions, but I have this one:

[http://www.amazon.com/Calculus-Made-Easy-Silvanus- Thompson/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Calculus-Made-Easy-Silvanus- Thompson/dp/0312185480)

> linear algebra

To be honest, all abstract algebra is tough on new-comers. Compared to undergraduate calculus, the "aha" moments have more pay-off, but usually take a lot more time. The significance and power of vector spaces is just not something that is easily learnt, other than by working through problems with pen-and-paper math, and while doing so, constantly asking yourself "why do mathematicians do things this way, rather than some other way?"

I bought a copy of Gilbert Strang's Linear Algebra And It's Applications when I was an undergrad, and still refer to it now. It's brilliant, but it's a traditional text book, and definitely not a "primer".

It's not the type of maths you would call "hard" (integral calculus can be infuriatingly "hard") but it's the type that takes time and work to understand. Once you understand vector spaces, QM is surprisingly straight- forward.

<comment><USER8> I haven't seen the updated version, but the one on gutenberg is gold. The old language is comical on its own: he cracks jokes and it is funny because of the jokes //and// because of the old language.

This book is so good, that gutenbeg volunteers took the time to typeset all the math in latex so the PDFs are very good for reading or printing out.

excerpt:

       PROLOGUE.

       Considering how many fools can calculate,
       it is surprising that it should be thought
       either a difficult or a tedious task for any
       other fool to learn how to master the same tricks.

       Some calculus-tricks are quite easy. Some are
       enormously difficult. The fools who write the
       textbooks of advanced mathematics—and they are
       mostly clever fools—seldom take the trouble to
       show you how easy the easy calculations are.
       On the contrary, they seem to desire to impress
       you with their tremendous cleverness by going about
       it in the most difficult way.

       Being myself a remarkably stupid fellow, I have had
       to unteach myself the difficulties, and now beg to
       present to my fellow fools the parts that are not hard.
       Master these thoroughly, and the rest will follow.
       What one fool can do, another can.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm the OP and originally posted the link and a brief review here: [http://www.latestlesson.org/the-theoretical-minimum- modern-p...](http://www.latestlesson.org/the-theoretical-minimum-modern- physics/). If anyone has other suggested physics materials for those who are not professional physicists, I would be interested in reviewing them for our site. We're trying to create a comprehensive list of resources for STEM learners.

<comment><USER9> SICM belongs in that category!

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_and_Interpretation_of...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_and_Interpretation_of_Classical_Mechanics)

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely agree and it will be added to the list. Initially, we're interested in K-12 resources and something that might be a little bit easier for students still in school (although SICP can be used by advanced high school students). There do not seem to be that many good cs books for younger students, so any ideas on that front would be especially useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've watched a few of these just for fun. They are very watchable even if, like me, you don't have the first clue about the actual mathematics he uses. He explains enough of the physics in words that you can just let the forumlae wash over you and not worry about it.

The maths is kept into self-contained bits, so a lecture will typically be 40 minutes of words and pictures, then 20 minutes of calculation. I'm sure if you do get the maths then it will be perfect for you, but I encourage you to watch it anyway.

Overall, highly recommended, especially the cosmology ones.

EDIT: actually my memory is probably biased towards the cosmology course. I imagine the classical/statistical mechanics stuff does have a lot more maths running through each lecture.

</comment><comment><USER13> I have been following his lectures for quite some time. Hat's off to Leonard Suskind.

I did Quantum Mechanics, Classical Mechanics, and now General Relativity. All of them enlightening, provides pure joy that only science can. And he is incredibly easy to follow, despite being a leading and esteemed Physicist of modern times - falls in similar class as Hawking. (The holographic principle anyone?)

</comment><comment><USER14> For those interested in QM I highly recommend this intro Quantum Mechanics for Engineers <http://www.eng.fsu.edu/~dommelen/quantum/>

</comment><comment><USER15> I've been reading this and it's fantastic - approaching the subject from the tools needed to understand the way the material works mathematically (Lagrangians etc) rather than as a series of separate physical problems is an excellent idea.

The video lectures in combination with the text would, I think, be a great subject for a regular meet up - its dense enough that there's lots to discuss but doesn't have too many prereqs. Anyone in London interested? Shoot me an email if so (Thomas dot m dot McGrath at gmail dot com)

</comment><comment><USER16> This is interesting, I've watched Professor Susskind's lectures on Quantum Mechanics and they were very good. Was able to understand how QM actually works for the first time.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm going to check this out, but the cadence of the lectures (just by looking at Classical Mechanics) seems pretty high for a 1.5 hour lecture, getting to Lagrangians in the third lecture seems pretty advanced for a survey of the subject especially targeted at enthusiasts.

A lot of the stuff covered in this series of courses wouldn't even be touched in a lot of undergrad Physics programs, outside of a small survey/project as part of a more broad course.

<comment><USER9> From another point of view, the lectures are purely focused on giving an intuition behind concepts in modern theoretical physics, which is only a very small part of what is taught in an undergraduate program.

Lagrangians are a difficult, and abstract concept, but they doesn't mean that they can't be communicated in 3-4 hours by a skilled educator.

<comment><USER18> Agreed that these are geared towards intuition. Though for reference: in my undergraduate degree, Lagrangian Dynamics and Hamiltonian Dynamics were each given semester long treatments.

<comment><USER19> That's interesting. In _my_ undergraduate degree (which I believe to be fairly standard for the US), Lagrangian and Hamiltonian dynamics were both part of a one-semester classical mechanics course, along with much else. I'm quite envious, though---both Lagrangian and Hamiltonian dynamics are beautiful, and I need a better background.

If you don't mind my asking, where did you do undergrad?

<comment><USER18> The University of Edinburgh, Scotland. They were two of my favourite courses, I was amazed at how simple some classes of problems became with the techniques. You should be able to find the course notes somewhere, but I'm not sure if they'd be much value without the lectures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Oh my, this is exactly what I was looking for. I'm going to dive in into this but does anyone maybe know about similar online resources you could learn some more advanced physics topics? Btw, Susskind is such a great man, love his way of work and persistence.

</comment><comment><USER21> See also: <http://motionmountain.com/>

<comment><USER22> The author seems to have some non-mainstream views on physics/cosmology:

<http://motionmountain.com/research.html>

I'm not really sure what to make of it.

<comment><USER21> Hmm I never got that far to be honest. But it does seem a bit out there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> You can probably do better by going through Feynman's lectures. And maybe also his QED.

<comment><USER24> Or perhaps by folowing the reading suggested by Gerard 't Hooft: <http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~hooft101/theorist.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is very interesting

As someone that has studied physics in an undergrad course, and who has learned a lot, but is disappointed that these courses don't go very far, this is very interesting.</comment>


Astropad for iPad Pro – Turn your iPad into a Mac drawing tablet - <AUTHOR> http://astropad.com/ipad-pro/index.html <comment><USER2> It's awesome that this works with wifi.</comment>


Linux Subsystem for Windows is here - <AUTHOR> https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/commandline/wsl/install_guide <comment><USER2> It's "Windows Subsystem for Linux", as the URL suggests.

Though it'd be nice to have Linux Subsystem for Windows, too.</comment>


Phone Cameras Comparison: Huawei Mate 30 Pro, iPhone 11, Samsung Galaxy Note 10 - <AUTHOR> https://reportagram.net/gadgets/1272-cameras-comparison-huawei-mate-30-pro-iphone-11-pro-max-and-samsung-galaxy-note-10.html <comment><AUTHOR> Poll: In your opinion which smartphone shoots better in the dark?

 _1\. Apple iPhone 11 Pro Max_

 _2\. Huawei Mate 30 Pro_

 _3\. Samsung Galaxy Note10+_</comment>


Bye Bye JavaScript Promises - <AUTHOR> http://sriku.org/blog/2014/02/11/bye-bye-js-promises/ <comment><USER2> And thus does the javascript ontogeny finally finish recapitulating phylogeny, and we arrive at the inevitable end point: The Erlang/Go way is the best way to do this stuff after all.

If you still end up using Javascript at the end of the process, hey, great, go nuts, but after years of swaggering optimism in the JS community about how somehow their stuff was so much better than anybody else's despite "event- based code" being _extraordinarily_ well-trodden ground since the 1990s (as in being the _default programming model_ for all serious code and entire major dominant operating systems), it might be worth people taking a moment to consider whether some more listening at the beginning of the process might have cut some years off this journey of discovery. The Javascript community has not been leading the charge of writing asynchronous code... _they just caught up_.

<comment><USER3> Wow, what a mean-spirited comment. You should seriously think about why you hate a community as bad as you obviously do.

<comment><USER4> That was not a mean-spirited comment, especially if you imagine someone with a bit more experience seeing the same thing recur needlessly. Grouchy with a touch of get-off-my-lawn, yes. Mean-spirited, no.

Over-exuberance sometimes requires admonishment, especially when there is such a colossal waste of energy and effort like in the JavaScript "community" (OP's word, but still...). If JavaScript programmers spent more time listening and reading and less time posting "so I wrote my own" blogs we might have had things like Reactive libraries for JavaScript years ago.

Throwing a word like "hate" around tells me you're likely too young to really understand what that means.

Also, you picked on his tone and let the Go comment slide? Really?

In short, get seasoned, dude.

<comment><USER5> Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Even I, (young, unseasoned) know that criticism, admonishment and even a little "I told you so" do not equal hate.

Ugh, that word.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Bluebird also solves 2 and 4:

2\. Promise.prototype.bind 4\. You can put try / catch / finally anywhere. It doesn't have to be in the end, but it does have to be close to what you want to wrap (just like any other try / catch).

Coming form a large node project where I have been spending the better part of my waking hours for several weeks closing memory leaks caused by holding onto closures indefinitely, I would advise against the sort of meta programming advised in this article.

</comment><comment><USER7> Promises + ES6 generators (Promise.coroutine() in bluebird) solve all of these problems.

<comment><USER8> Will promises still be needed with generators?

<comment><USER9> yes generators can help you control the flow as you do async programing, but you can't use generators to do something like an ajax function which gives you an async value, you'd need promises or something for that, generators allow you do use those async function is a more natural way.

<comment><USER10> Promises _are_ an async value. By yielding promises you're doing exactly that :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> JavaScript and C++ have a similar problem. There are so many ways to do so many things, that the result is endless stylistic fragmentation and tons of library bloat. C++ is getting better as C++11 introduces standard ways to do things like lambdas, tuples, etc., but JavaScript is obviously still in its experimentation phase.

</comment><comment><USER10> IT's very easy to criticise a technology when you're not using it correctly. Please consider reading the Bluebird usage examples, what you're doing is _definitely_ not the recommended usage.

You can achieve what you're doing without any macros, with better throw safety, better debugging traces and more.

</comment><comment><USER12> It seems like there's two ideas here: new error handling syntax, and new asynchronous task handling syntax. About asynchronous tasks: I think many people here might be interested in taskjs which combines Promises and ES6 generators ([http://taskjs.org/](http://taskjs.org/)) and the similar ES7 async function proposal ([http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=strawman:async_functi...](http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=strawman:async_functions)). You can use await on a function that returns a promise and write code just like the code in this article (besides the error handling stuff). In basic sequential code, you never have to call .then() on a promise, but you're still able to dive down and do that if you have some non-linear asynchronous code that requires it.

</comment><comment><USER13> While reading this article, I remembered this: [https://github.com/jlongster/js-csp](https://github.com/jlongster/js-csp), which explicitly relies on es6 generators. I wonder if anyone can help us out by comparing and contrasting this to the subject of the article ([https://github.com/srikumarks/cspjs](https://github.com/srikumarks/cspjs)).

</comment><comment><USER14> tldr; macros

Yes but No.I personally think macros are the "root of all evil". Because they just make languages unreadable. That's one thing to have a complete different language that compiles down to JS,but as soon as you introduce macros is your code you make it harder to understand and document.I'm glad it works for you,but in my opinion the use of macros should be banned.While limited to nodejs, I personally think fibers are better alternative.

4\. I actually think that it makes promises elegant. You can chain 20 then and have a single catch in case things are wrong,but you need to adjust the logic accordingly.Using different Error "classes" and checking the type is usually what I do.

I still believe promises are an elegant way to deal with async programming,and ES6 lambdas will make them even less painfull.

I'm not sold on generators for async programming strangely ,for multiple reasons(lack of support in browser land,especially on mobile).

EDIT: macros are fine in LISP likes because it's not like these languages have a complex syntax. And in C,well you cant program without them. My point is javascript has enough features to make macros unnecessary.

<comment><USER15> I don't think you understand the ability for macros to make code _more_ readable.

"However, as we confront increasingly complex problems, we will find that Lisp, or indeed any fixed programming language, is not sufficient for our needs. We must constantly turn to new languages in order to express our ideas more effectively. Establishing new languages is a powerful strategy for controlling complexity in engineering design; we can often enhance our ability to deal with a complex problem by adopting a new language that enables us to describe (and hence to think about) the problem in a different way, using primitives, means of combination, and means of abstraction that are particularly well suited to the problem at hand."

[https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book- Z-H-25.htm...](https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-25.html)

<comment><USER14> see the edit.I still think they are unecessary in javascript.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's interesting to me that people seem to be trying to bridge Promises with CSP. Why aren't more people investigating the more straightforward async/await transformation that the C# compiler does? CSP just seems like one transformation too far.

<comment><USER17> async/await is trivial to mimic with yield - run the outer-most generator in spawn, use yield* with "async" methods, and use yield with Promise-returning methods. Projects like Regenerator already know how to convert yield to straightforward JS. So you already have the transformation the C# compiler does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm sure the JS world will just cook up 3 or 4 libraries to bolt on the desired functionality...

<comment><USER19> ...each of which will have distinct bugs, leaks and gotchas. All of which will be incompatible and conflicting with one another.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> A bit off topic but in the context of promises and Angular, I love the ability to set a set a promise for the timeout parameter. This is super valuable 'cause it lets me manually cancel any request instead of waiting for a response or timing out via time.

<comment><USER14> > I love the ability to set a set a promise for the timeout parameter.

please explain .

<comment><USER21> You can pass a promise into an $http request as a parameter. If you hold on to this promise and resolve it before the request returns, it cancels the request.

[https://docs.angularjs.org/api/ng/service/$http](https://docs.angularjs.org/api/ng/service/$http)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> There seem to be two major ideas going on here: CSP, and modifications to try/catch syntax. It would be easier to understand the former without the latter.

</comment><comment><USER23> The 'code' blocks on this page are all using variable-width fonts, making it quite difficult to read the examples.

Consider changing the 'font-family' to 'monospace'?</comment>


A mailbox of the digital era - <AUTHOR> http://momb.socio-kybernetics.net/invitation/joinbox

<comment><USER2> Isn't this what FB is doing now with their "One Inbox to Rule them All"</comment>


Ask HN: Raise your hand if you're tilting your external Display - <AUTHOR>

Hi everybody, I'm thinking about buying a laptop plus docking station so I can easily connect to a second display. I'm used to working on a System with at least one added extra-Display.
As smaller my Latops got from purchase to pruchase, I've noticed how different display heights as well as resolutions can irritate me somehow when moving my cursor from one screen to another.
For example: a small laptops display-top usually rises up to the half of my added Monitor while the laptops display-bottom is below that of the monitor. So configuring windows graphical output helps - but not enough.
So what about positioning the extra monitor ABOVE the one of your Laptop? Maybe even having the external monitor flipped on the edge, resulting in an eased difference on the passage between laptop and external display?
Is there anyone here who had experiences with this? <comment><USER2> I have a 24" hooked up to my 15" MBP. The Monitor is up and to the right of the laptop. It does not bother me to have different height monitors because my workflow is such that I use keyboard shortcuts to move windows to the other monitor.(sizeup and cinch are the best apps that I have purchased) If you have/are getting a mac look into sizeup and then map the keys according to this scheme: [http://zacharypinter.com/2009/06/15/keyboard-driven- window-m...](http://zacharypinter.com/2009/06/15/keyboard-driven-window- management-in-osx.html)

with one addition from me: ctrl+option+command+k should center the window in the screen. This is useful for making the window the left half of the screen with ctrl+command+j and then centering the smaller window. (sometimes pages are too hard to read on a large monitor but you don't want to have the window off to the side.)

Edit: I personally would not like positioning the monitor above the laptop because I use the 24" much more than the 15" and always looking up would be extremely bad for ergonomics.

<comment><AUTHOR> _always looking up would be extremely bad for ergonomics_ that's true.

Buying a small laptop is great, because I think laptops are there for mobility, so small = easier to carry = better. But the resolution height decreases with physical height. Thinkpads achieve 900 pixels in height. But i want to code in there!

What I've noticed is, that it bothers me writing on my laptop keyboard while staring at my external screen. I find it more comfortable having the keyboard right beneath of what Im typing.

<comment><USER2> I guess I should have mentioned that I have a Bluetooth mouse(the magic mouse, I love the scrolling on this so much that I can live without two separate buttons.) and a ps/2 to USB adapter for my Microsoft keyboard. It's like I am on a desktop but I can take it to go. I would love to have 3 monitors but I might go with a 30" in the future to mitigate that desire.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I just use the external 24 (or 25) inch display, and turn off the laptop display. I paid a bit more for 1920x1200 pixels, not the 'HD-TV' x1080 screens they're selling more of nowadays.

I also found simple plastic laptop stands with USB hubs. Plug regular keyboard and mouse into stand, shove stand+laptop to the side. As good as a desktop machine, plus it suspends with the lid shut.

As for the 'second screen', I just use multiple desktops/spaces. Less aggravating than switching screens, unless you really, really, need both visible simultaneously. Linux works fine, Mac seems a bit weak on moving windows around. Dock or 2nd Gnome toolbar on the side.

P.S. My local IKEA had on exhibit a good DIY monitor stand. Made by screwing 11cm Capita legs onto an Effektiv file frame front 80cm wide. I built a couple of those - they're great to place the display and laptop, with space to shove the keyboard and whatever underneath. (Sorry, no URLs, seems IKEA now thinks you have to login to browse the catalog - news to me.)</comment>


Indian Newspapers Balk at Mom's Ad Seeking Groom for Gay Son - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/indian-newspapers-balk-at-moms-ad-seeking-groom-for-gay-son-1432351828

<comment><USER2> Link that doesn't require registration:

[http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2015/05/20/indian- newspap...](http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2015/05/20/indian-newspapers- stop-mom-placing-ad-to-seek-groom-for-gay-son/)</comment>


Starting as a web developer? Here are 5 things I wish I knew - <AUTHOR> https://www.jagtalon.com/starting-as-a-web-developer-here-are-5-things-i-wish-i-knew/ <comment><USER2> Make your text readable without requiring JavaScript.

<comment><USER3> Confusing.

Nothing on the page shows up with JS disabled... But the entire text is in the original source.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article is content-free.

<comment><USER5> Yet the scrollbar is 5 pages long :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What the hell is FOMO?

<comment><USER7> Fear Of Missing Out</comment></comment>


Samsung Galaxy Note 7: Second 'safe' replacement catches fire - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-37600014 <comment><USER2> Interesting that both incidents took place in Kentucky:

 _> A man in Kentucky said he was "scared to death" when he woke to a bedroom full of smoke, local media say._

 _> On Wednesday a replacement Note 7 caught fire on a Southwest Airlines plane due to fly from Louisville, Kentucky, to Baltimore, Maryland._

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't think these are just "coincidences". I used to believe that business, esp. the kind of business Apple and other tech giants are doing, is ethical, clean, and beautiful. I can't emphasize now how much different I believe this is.

A little conspiracy here, but what if Apple had indeed sabotaged the Note 7 production line? We know they had no new features to add to iPhone 7 and they already knew the new iPhone is not going to be a big hit. So what they did instead is they ruined the face of their biggest competitor (Samsung), so that desperate Note 7 buyers will turn to iPhone 7+ as their only option.

The same conspiracy can be said for the latest Yahoo hack. Isn't it weird and suspicious that _just_ when Verizon is going to buy Yahoo, this huge hack happens? Add that to the news that Verizon now wants a sweat $1B discount on their deal with Yahoo... It's all fishy man.

<comment><USER4> > _what if Apple had indeed sabotaged the Note 7 production line?_

Here's a better hypothesis: building a smartphone that is very thin yet has decent battery life and charges quickly is _really hard_. It requires tricky engineering that is possible to screw up and Samsung did in fact screw it up. Although the first explanation that came to mind was "the batteries were bad" that was not the correct explanation. The correct explanation is that the _design_ was bad. Maybe this case is too small and inflexible to allow for heat expansion, maybe some contacts are too close together, maybe some material that wasn't supposed to be conductive is (sometimes) conducting a charge.

Making an iPhone-competitive phone is hard. Making a _million_ of them to ship all at once means even a one-in-ten-thousand risk of catastrophic failure is way too high, so at the same time as you're pushing the limits of what engineering is capable of you have to build in a very large safety margin or have an extremely good QA process or both.

When you think about it, the amazing thing isn't that the Note 7 design failed, the amazing thing is that this doesn't happen more often, either to Samsung or to other manufactures.</comment></comment>


From Markdown to RCE in Atom - <AUTHOR> https://statuscode.ch/2017/11/from-markdown-to-rce-in-atom/ <comment><USER2> I get clowned sometimes for using emacs but this is a great example of why using a "long in the tooth" editor can be an advantage.</comment>


Using IRT Instead of Traditional Grading to Assess Students - <AUTHOR> http://www.knewton.com/tech/blog/2012/06/understanding-student-performance-with-item-response-theory/

<comment><USER2> Could a bayesian approach work for this kind of thing? You treat each question as a separate test, and use it to update your believe in the hypothesis that the student is an A student. Do this for all questions, to get a final degree of believe that the student is an A student.

Do similar for the hypothesis that the student is a B student, and so on for C, D, and F. Then give them the grade that ends up with the highest degree of belief.

Yes, I didn't say anything about how to assign your initial degree of belief.

<comment><AUTHOR> You've got the right idea--there's lots of recent literature treating the typical IRT problem as a Bayesian inference problem. Some of the references listed at the bottom of the article (especially the Kim one) provide great literature surveys.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I didn't really follow the math here but is a simpler solution just to give different questions different points?

1\. What is ...? (Worth 1 point) 2\. What is ...? (Worth 2 points)

It looks like IRT is for somehow determining the difficulty of a test given the answers of students.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, the article seems to start at a weird point. An algorithm to find out how many points a given question is worth might be better than having the teacher just decide what is worth how much. Or it might be worth.

But what kind of stupid school system would grade math per question instead of per difficulty?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd agree, if finding such an algorithm was easy! :)</comment></comment></comment>


Bulgarian Company Competes with Explorer, Firefox with New Web Browser - <AUTHOR> http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=100758

<comment><USER2> looks like this is the company page:

<http://www.creative-lines.com/></comment>


John McAfee for President - <AUTHOR> https://mcafee16.com/ <comment><USER2> See, if McAfee says the right things, I think he'd end up doing well - as well as a fringe/joke candidate could do. He's pro-gun and quite anti-government. If Trump can do it, why not McAfee?

And the scrolling seems off or hijacked in some way, on the "How to Vote" page, it's the digital equivalent of having your breaks cut.

<comment><USER3> The Trump phenomenon is built on three decades of national, tabloid level fame. His name and image recognition is the primary reason he's out in front of the other mostly bland or non-recognizable candidates (not to mention the obvious anti-establishment thing going on that has been much discussed).

McAfee can't do what Trump is doing, because he's not actually famous on any meaningful scale. Relatively few Americans know who he is or would recognize him. They also would be unlikely to automatically associate the name with the anti-virus product, "McAfee" means nothing to most of the population. Practically anyone in the US born between 1940 and 2000 knows who Donald Trump is.

<comment> at-fates-hands >> His name and image recognition is the primary reason he's out in front of the other mostly bland or non-recognizable candidates.

Perhaps initially, but its not true now.

The reason Trump is killing it in the poles is that he can't be bought, and he doesn't pull punches and he speaks his mind. Something people who are fed up with the political correctness have been starving for. He's also resonating because he's talking about doing things voters want to hear - securing the border, getting tough with China, creating jobs, and taking out ISIS.

<comment><USER4> I think the public is breaking down into 3 groups.

1\. The people who like what the Democrats under Obama have been doing. They are likely to support Clinton or Sanders at this point... or Biden or Gore or Kerry, etc. should one of them get drafted. They won't be interest in Trump, who is attacking their guy.

2\. The people who consider themselves Democrat but aren't crazy about what the party has been doing the last 6 years.

3\. The people who definitely don't like what the Democrats are doing and are voting Republican to try to change things. Actual conservatives are completely disillusioned with the GOP and people who see them as a way to check the Democrats are also being very let down. But, when you only have two evils, you have to figure out which is the lesser.

4\. Establishment Republicans who like the status quo.

Group 4 consists of people in office and U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other interests who are milking the system, but can be discounted in terms of actual votes (but not in terms of their very powerful influence). They are backing Jeb Bush and definitely don't like Trump.

Group 1 also won't be interested in Trump.

Group 2 may be attracted by Trump.

Group 3 will probably be attracted by Trump, and like him (like me) even if they (also like me) don't think he'd actually be a good President. Trump, despite his flaws, is a much better cheerleader for the GOP than almost anyone inside the GOP.

Group 2 and 3 are most of the country. If you don't, there is no good alternative because the Republicans have pretty much pre-emptively surrendered on everything and it's clear the party honchos like the establishment guy (Bush).

So who can you look to? Trump plays the media like a fiddle, and he's naturally attracting most of the attention, but Carson, another non-politician is #2 in the polls. Fiorina is rising quickly as well.

No one likes the GOP right now.

<comment> at-fates-hands >> No one likes the GOP right now.

Correction - nobody likes the current two party system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wait, THIS John McAfee?

[NSFW, Rated "R"] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpRvaQsGIY8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpRvaQsGIY8)

<comment><USER6> He did an AMA recently [https://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/3hr9f0/i_am_john_mc...](https://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/3hr9f0/i_am_john_mcafee_ama/) and an interview with Uses This a while back [https://usesthis.com/interviews/john.mcafee/](https://usesthis.com/interviews/john.mcafee/)

Edit: To clarify, the Uses This interview was done while he was being threatened in Belize. That's why it's all paranoid.

<comment><USER7> I'm a big fan of his Slashdot AMA, which he mostly spends informing you about the best ways to bribe policemen and smuggle drugs while you're in Central America.

[http://interviews.slashdot.org/story/14/04/06/2344201/interv...](http://interviews.slashdot.org/story/14/04/06/2344201/interview- john-mcafee-answers-your-questions)

<comment><USER8> Ha. From the end of that AMA:

> I would never run for office, neither would I want to be in office, of any > kind. I would rather drive a nail through my foot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> ...should I feel guilty for fantasizing an apocalyptic WW3 scenario with the USA lead by MacAfee and Russia led by Putin? the world would turn to ashes, but boy it would be fun to watch :)

<comment><USER10> "Don't blame me -- I voted for Trump"

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Apparently the ultimate way now to show off how you have money to throw away (or other people's money to throw away) is to run for president.

It is the ultimate conspicuous consumption item.

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't know what problem people have with him... Imagine he was serious about the campaign...

>He is a murderer

Well that is still not proven and the government of Belize is not exactly the most trustworthy entity about this, so in no way is it this clear. Even if it was true, let's face it - after their presidency, every former president is a murderer.

>He is a lunatic and insane

And Hillary Clinton is not?

>He is paranoid

Well at least he's more paranoid about the STATE than about the CITIZENS so that would sway things around a bit.

However, I'd love to hear his stance on abortion, gay marriage, etc. I presume he'd be quite liberal, again, a point for him.

But yeah, sadly, he doesn't even stand a chance.

</comment><comment><USER13> I must say I find his speech in the linked video [1] very well written. I certainly was more used to his usual erratic behavior.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=246&v=sMz6GV3b1ys](https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=246&v=sMz6GV3b1ys)

</comment><comment><USER14> I could get behind McAfee. I think I agree with him on his views on privacy and surveillance at least. I just need to know more about where he stands on foreign policy, taxation, and a few other things.

But I still think he'd have been better off pursuing the nomination of an established (albeit "3rd party") party than starting a new party from scratch this late in the game. That is, unless his ideology truly is completely different from that of any existing party.

</comment><comment><USER15> Once hes installed as President we'll never be able to get rid of him

</comment><comment><USER16> I made a news timeline of McAfee if you'd like to catch up: [http://newslines.org/john-mcafee/?order=ASC](http://newslines.org/john- mcafee/?order=ASC)

<comment><USER17> It's like reading a trainwreck in chronological order.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I prefer McAfee to the other front-runners in the U.S. election. That's for sure.

</comment><comment><USER19> The funny thing is that whomever becomes head of state, most of the system and it's influential players stay the same. Basically, the way I see it nothing changes, just a different face on the news.

</comment><comment><USER20> John McAffee, Wrong on Security, Wrong on Ashley Madison, Wrong for President.

</comment><comment><USER21> Previously:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10189288](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10189288)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10190859](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10190859)

</comment><comment><USER22> He has become a double entendre parody of himself, it's really the quite an amusing play on the state of the American political system.

While I think that Stephen Colbert could make a fine president, John McAfee; while playing a similar game, could not.

</comment><comment><USER23> Already enough megalomaniacs in politics...

Still, I would probably vote for anyone who isn't a warmonger (tragically, doesn't seem like either major party will nominate someone who fits this criterion)

</comment><comment><USER24> I'd rather vote for Frank Zappa if he were still around.

</comment><comment><USER25> Right, and his running mate will be Hans Reiser? Seriously, last I heard, the guy is pretty clearly a murderer. Or lunatic. Or both. [http://memeburn.com/2013/01/john-mccafee-anti-virus- pioneer-...](http://memeburn.com/2013/01/john-mccafee-anti-virus-pioneer- escaped-murder-suspect-master-spy/) etc. etc.

<comment><USER26> AFAIK he was never really under suspicion. But being possibly paranoid he thought he was, and he didn't trust Belize justice system (and is possibly right about that).

<comment><USER25> Of course he was a suspect. He'd had an escalating battle with his neighbor, who coincidentally turned up shot to death. [http://gizmodo.com/5959812/john- mcafee-wanted-for-murder](http://gizmodo.com/5959812/john-mcafee-wanted-for- murder)

<comment><USER26> He was only ever a "person of interest", if they had anything material against him he'd have been officially suspect likely.

And there are various citations of unnamed Belize officials, stating that he's no longer even a person of interest in that case.

<comment><USER25> An actual quote reported by an actual journalist who was actually there at the time and actually heard from the lips of "Marco Vidal, the head of Belize's Gang Suppression Unit": McAfee is a "prime suspect" in Faull's death.

[http://www.wired.com/2012/11/threatlevel_1112_mcafee/](http://www.wired.com/2012/11/threatlevel_1112_mcafee/)

<comment><USER26> [http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin- america-20315415](http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-20315415)

> Raphael Martinez of Belize's Ministry of National Security said no charges > had been filed in the case and Mr McAfee was simply "a person of interest".

> "It's too early in the investigation," he told the Associated Press. "To say > he is a suspect would be a bold statement."

And in 2015 "not a person of interest anymore".

If they had anything tangible, why wasn't he charged?

<comment><USER6> He says the government was harassing him for bribes, shot his favorite dog, and burned his house down. Since he's already out of the country and out of their hair, they might not want to drag all that back up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Anyone know where this video was shot? Is McAfee a big book collector?

<comment><USER28> In front of a green-screen, if the halos around his hair are anything to go by.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I am legitimately confused, this is a prank right? right?

</comment><comment><USER30> I love the music playing in the background of his video.

</comment><comment><USER31> I.... Wow, that was actually a good speech.

</comment><comment><USER32> He looks seriously high..</comment>


Dynamically generating MIDI in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://www.sergimansilla.com/blog/dinamically-generating-midi-in-javascript/

<comment><USER2> Of course the HTML5 audio tag doesn't support MIDI. MIDI is (basically) a command set for interacting with tone generators, and beyond that, has nothing to do with making sound. Think of it more like an electronic equivalent to sheet music.

Nonetheless, implementing MIDI through javascript would be kind of cool. I'm about 90% done an HTML5 emulation of a Boss DR-110 (warts and all), and while the timing of the audio playback ain't great, I'd be curious to see if better results could be achieved by sending the sequencer data out as MIDI instead.

Considering how picky folks get about latency in audio software though, generating MIDI with Javascript seems more useful as a learning tool than an actual music production tool.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, latency is way too important in that scenario. I made that as an experiment, I never thought of it as a professional tool.

I am curious about your Boss DR-110 emulation in HTML5, are you going to publish it somewhere?

<comment><USER2> I'll definitely be posting it freely online when I'm done. At this point I'm pretty much down to the 'polish' stage. I'll probably post a link here, along with some observations I made while creating this.

After I publish it, I'm going to work on better knobs (they're a little clunky now) and the ability to store your patterns. As it stands now, if you leave the page and come back, it's like you're running off a 9v with no batteries. I'll either store the array in a cookie or make it something you can download/upload.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> An option for browsers that don't support Quicktime is a Java to Javascript bridge that exposes portions of the MIDI framework (could be used as a fallback): [http://mudcube7.blogspot.com/2010/08/dynamic-midi- generation...](http://mudcube7.blogspot.com/2010/08/dynamic-midi-generation- in-browser.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> I wrote something vaguely similar, but it relies on App Engine:

<http://midiserver.appspot.com/> <https://github.com/skybrian/Midi-Server>

Agreed that this stuff is way too nonportable.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've been wanting something to translate old Commodore 128 PLAY strings to MIDI. This might just be the ticket. Thank you, Sergi! I'll try and let you know how this works out!

<comment><AUTHOR> That sounds like fun, can't wait to hear about it! Keep an eye on updates to the library, and if you run into bugs (you will) don't hesitate to nag me, or even solve them :)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Cow.chat – anonymous location based chat - <AUTHOR> https://cowchatapp.herokuapp.com/ <comment><USER2> I don't understand how to use it. Is there a tutorial?</comment>


Trying to find parking? Let's solve it with a game - <AUTHOR> http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/parking-defenders/id509196275?mt=8

<comment><USER2> Also available for Android (<https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.parkingd>) and for Windows Phone([http://www.windowsphone.com/en- US/apps/709e8965-0662-4f39-91...](http://www.windowsphone.com/en- US/apps/709e8965-0662-4f39-9183-56297c2b07ec))

</comment><comment> Tim-Boss The greek FAQ isn't crystal clear when translated, and "seekers" is only making me think of quiddich, but definitely seems like a way to turn finding a parking space in a busy/heavily populated dense city into a game, not sure it would work anywhere else though!

<comment><USER2> You can watch the English how it works video here: <http://www.parkingd.com/Home/HowItWorks>.

Also if you download the application, there is a demo mode inside and you can see the real application functionality with test data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you own a car, you'll definitely find it useful. Really well designed and great execution. As every crowd sourced app, needs support from the community, so it takes time to build. It will get there.

</comment><comment><USER4> Love this app! Greek dev's rock again.

</comment><comment><USER5> excellent!!</comment>


Extracting Audio from Pictures of Gramophone Recordings - <AUTHOR> https://mediapreservation.wordpress.com/2012/06/20/extracting-audio-from-pictures/ <comment><USER2> Well _that's_ a good hack!! _that's_ why I read HN, not for some Arrington story.

I wouldn't have guessed there was enough data left in the picture of the gramophone track to recreate audio from it.

Which makes me think about Shannon theorem - my guesses would have been wrong, so I wonder just "how wrong".

What would the minimal resolution (dpi) be to store say 1 minute of audio at 8Hz? Would there be an easy way to calculate that (just a back of the envelope calculation, to get a rough idea)

What was the resolution of the printing press ca 1880, to know how much audio could have been "stored" in a single page for posterity? In the picture there is a lot of text, so obviously a lot of lost space.

And I wonder how we could make 2d barcodes to store uncompressed wav audio, which might be more resistant to noise, but only because it'll be like a "lower resolution", ie less easily disruptible. Which leads me back to Shannon.

I'm not into audio processing but that raises a lot of questions I'll be pondering over with some coffee tonight (obligatory xkcd reference- <http://xkcd.com/356/>)

That's the kind of article I love :-)

EDIT: downvotes, whatever. Haters gonna hate. I'll have some hours of fun thanks to this article anyway!

<comment><USER3> Twibright Optar stores 200kB per A4 sheet, or 25 seconds at 64kbits/s. 64kbits/s is high quality stereo audio if compressed using Opus. Most music sounds great at this bit rate. 64kbits/s is also 8kHz µ-law PCM, which is the standard for telephone lines in North America--so, terrible but intelligible. Opus can be turned down to 6kbits/s, which gives you about 4.4 minutes of muddy but intelligible speech per page.

By extrapolation, we can calculate density for microfiche. Assuming a resolution of 120 lp/mm, microfiche has about 5 times the resolution of the paper used for Optar, and the dimensions are exactly half. This means that microfiche has 6.3 times the density of A4 paper, measured in bytes per sheet. This gives us one high quality, durable recording of "Ring of Fire" on a single sheet of microfiche.

I wouldn't bother with uncompressed PCM. (You use the term "wav audio", but WAV is a file format.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Mind-blowing.

It does give me pause to wonder how much of the movie of our day-to-day lives future generations will be able to replay, via goodness knows what mechanism. (DNA testing of blood and hair is another example of this theme.)

</comment><comment><USER5> Following along while listening by looking at the linked German text of "Der Handschuh"

<http://www.has.vcu.edu/for/schiller/handschuh_dual.html>

helps immensely in sorting out the speech from the noise (at least for me, with my beginner's knowledge of German). It's amazing to hear the inventor's poetry reading diction from so long ago.

</comment><comment><USER6> related, render an audio file as an photoreal image of a vinyl record, then recover the audio from that image: [http://www.renderman.org/RMR/Examples/srt2011/audiblyPlausib...](http://www.renderman.org/RMR/Examples/srt2011/audiblyPlausibleRendering.pdf)

<comment><USER7> This looks interesting

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Someone at the French National Audiovisual Archive ( <http://www.ina.fr/> ) showed me that they have been doing about the same thing for years to get the sound back from heaps of broken records of various origins, mostly radio recording from the 30s and 40s -- nothing nearly as old as this. IIRC they even almost completely automated the process, including matching the groove across missing bits in the high resolution picture from the scanner.

</comment><comment><USER9> Reminds me of 'Digital Needle' <http://www.phys.huji.ac.il/~springer/DigitalNeedle/>

</comment><comment><USER10> Great work!

It reminds me of an X-files episode where Mulder and Scully find a first century ceramic cup that supposedly contains a "phonograph" recording of Jesus Christ's words during the last supper.

</comment><comment><USER11> Certainly that circular whumping noise can be digitally removed to allow the voice to be heard more clearly?

It seems to be a precisely repeating pattern, prime for filtering?

</comment><comment><USER12> Sadly, it seems that all of the audio samples are dead

<comment><USER13> worked for me, just took a long time to load the first time. Quality is really lousy , though still a minor technological miracle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Works for Berliner-style lateral-cut grooves, wouldn't work at all with vertical-cut records like Edison's!

</comment><comment><USER15> Reminds me of Godel, Escher, Bach.

<comment><USER16> How? Serious question, I'm not challenging!

This work reminds me of what 'analogue' means. There is no _coding_ of the sound, each stage in the analogue process represents the varying intensities of the various pitches as some _variation_ in a property of the storage medium.

Any form of digital representation (CD, mp3 whatever) requires a _convention_ to interpret the raw stream of numbers. If you don't know the convention then you have a string of numbers.

<comment><USER3> Analogue signals do have encodings and conventions, and the information is incorrect or possibly mangled unless you decode in the same way.

So you're recording on a record. How fast does the record spin? Do you want a constant angular velocity or constant linear velocity? At what angle does the stylus move? Is there equalization that must be removed afterwards? Is there some kind of modulation?

The convention for LP is 33⅓ RPM constant angular velocity, with two channels each cut at 45° from vertical, the groove moving from the outside in, and the RIAA equalization curve. If you don't know that the audio modulates the groove position, then you just have an oversized coaster.

Digital conventions are just a little more demanding. However, PCM is quite simple and you can dig it out of unknown file formats with relative ease.

<comment><USER16> " _So you're recording on a record. How fast does the record spin? Do you want a constant angular velocity or constant linear velocity? At what angle does the stylus move? Is there equalization that must be removed afterwards? Is there some kind of modulation?_ "

Fair points. A possible elaboration is that analogue encoding is _discoverable_ from the medium. _If_ we know that a recording is of a voice, then we can recover the amplitude signal and speed up/slow down until it sounds right or until the spectrum matches what we know of the source. Digital encoding is not discoverable from the medium in quite the same way...

<comment><USER3> Well, no, it's not that easy. You can't always just speed things up or slow them down.

For example, try to extract audio from a CD-4 / Quadradisc record. Two of the channels are modulated with a 30 kHz carrier using something called FM-PM- SSBFM, and they won't be audible unless you demodulate them properly. You won't get anything resembling music unless you know exactly what you're doing.

By comparison, I've recovered audio from undocumented proprietary PCM-based formats from video games made in the 90s. It was no problem.

So I think the distinction between analogue and digital is not as important as the distinction between simple formats (mono/stereo records, linear PCM) and complex formats (FM-PM-SSBFM, MP3).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


China's Ghost Cities and Malls - <AUTHOR> http://www.sbs.com.au/dateline/story/about/id/601007/n/China-s-Ghost-Cities <comment><USER3> Lived in a ghost estate in Dalian, China for about 2 years. Could have loud music and parties and was never really bothered by anyone. Moved to Beijing, real estate in 2007 was at a premium. Its even more so now since the Olympic games. Apparently prices have risen dramatically, the demand is incredible.

The same cannot be said for the rest of the country. Many apartments are owned by companies anticipating renting the rooms to their workers. One of the buildings I was initially staying in was a dorm room sharing with other developers in my team. With wages so low it was difficult if not impossible for many of them to afford an apartment.

Many other apartments are owned by overseas Chinese, investing in their locality, awaiting their return.

<comment><USER4> My wife is from Dalian. I've spent a lot of time there, -nice city.

I just returned from Shanghai and Sanya. There are a lot of dark apartments in Shanghai at night. I know a few Chinese who own multiple apartments, some more than 10, most of these are empty. There are limits to how much they can invest overseas, and I believe investment in real-estate is greatly increased by this.

I feel they have a real-estate bubble of incredible proportions. Everyone talks real-estate too much, and there are too many advertisements for new developments. I don't think this will end well.

<comment><USER5> I live in China right now, Shenzhen. It's amazing to see how many real estate agencies there are here. Every single street corner has one, they're more prevalent than any fast food chain. Inside each agency, there are maybe four to a dozen people working. All trying to sell apartments.

One of my friends is a real estate agent. She told me recently that she and a friend had purchased a condo.

Me: Oh, so you're going to move in there soon?

Her: No, no.

Me: Oh, you're renting it out to tenants?

Her: No, no. If someone lives in it, then the value goes down. So we're going to keep it empty and then sell it next year or in a couple of years.

This cannot end well.

<comment><USER6> Serious question: how do I buy a Chinese credit default swap?

<comment><USER4> I don't believe it is possible. I've considered alternate ways of leveraging this. Right now the Australian dollar is supposedly propped up high by selling commodities to China: [http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/128654/20110330/australian-d...](http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/128654/20110330/australian- dollar-all-time-high.htm) That seems one way for a non-Chinese investor to put chips on that number.

Geez investing is so cynical. :/

<comment><USER7> You could also short our two big mining companies, BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto.

<comment><USER8> But most of China's raw materials importing is driven by their huge expert market, how would a collapse of domestic spending affect that? Isn't it everyone _else_ that's buying Chinese goods that's driving the demand for resources?

<comment><USER7> China already has a large and fast-growing domestic market.

Insofar as they want to build apartment blocks and manufacture cars for Chinese consumers, the Chinese need steel. For that they need iron ore, and for iron ore Australia and Brazil are the main sources.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What occurred to me while reading the article was this: There is a value in cities, and much of that value is density i.e. concentration. Not just of people but of industries: NYC and fashion, publishing, finance—everything, really. Silicon Valley and technology. And so on. I've recently read—wish I had the reference at hand—that even smaller cities provide concentration value.

As I drive into NYC and the skyline comes into view it humbles me as a Philadelphian. But then I think about those infographics—featured on HN, of course—showing how China is birthing a New York every twelve days or whatever the duration is, and I wonder: Will NYC cease to be relevant?

There is more than a little home-town pride at stake, and not the way you think: in the (nonexistent?) fight between NYC and the Valley, I am New York all the way. I deeply want New York to matter.

And so that colors my thinking, but, back to this article, I wonder: Building an city, or even building and filling a city with people, does little if it doesn't sort people and industries out in a way that makes them more efficient, more vital.

Again, I'm a Philadelphia. Everyone from West Philly says, "Oh, I love West Philly. The trees! The parks!" I love trees, I love nature, whatever that is. But I disagree with these people with their love affair with Philadelphia West of the Schuylkill River. I love people, people in quantities and densities that don't exist over there.

I don't discount the benefits of living in West Philly, or even a Chinese ghost city—all night parties without neighbors!—but you—we, society, humanity—lose something, or you don't gain something, when we put people in close proximity to each other in ways the lead to fruitful exchanges.

<comment><USER10> You have to get the people there. This is something that "organic" cities like London, New York and Paris can do well, because there is a "virtuous circle" in action - people want to be at the centre of culture, culture costs money, these cities can attract the wealth creators who want to spend their wealth, and so it continues. Culture being whatever you're into, art, opera, fashion, publishing, fine dining... Cities like these are dynamos of both productivity and pleasure.

But in a sterile, planned city, that is initially empty... How do you get the ball rolling? How do you initially attract the people who can work anywhere in the world? The three cities I mentioned, and a few others, have solved that.

<comment><USER11> You say solved, but there was nothing to solve in your example cities since they were not planned or built from whole cloth (yes there were plans - <USER2> NYC grid, the Paris hub-and-spoke - but the cities, as you point out, grew and evolved).

<comment><USER10> Of course there was something to solve. London is 2000 years old, but NYC is much more recent. How did it become the hub for finance and media when there's Boston to the north and Washington to the south?

<comment><USER12> NYC had a better port. Back when this mattered, a deep-water port at the end of the Hudson river was a big deal (D.C. was never in the running, but up until 1815 or so Boston and Philly were bigger commercial centers than NYC.) For the first 100-150 years of its existence the early colonies traded more with England than with each other, so a good port was a necessity for a city but it did not need much else beyond that. Post-revolution most trade was still external rather than internal but England and France shut down most of this trade during the Napoleonic wars. At this point the advantage went to NYC because by sitting at the end of the Hudson river it was able to serve as the trans-shipment point for goods coming down from the Hudson river valley out to the other states. After the Gibbons v. Ogden court case established federalist supremacy over interstate commerce the maritime merchants of NYC were better positioned than their competitors in Boston, Philly, or Baltimore to take advantage of this explosion of commercial opportunity.

The reason people gathered at a certain buttonwood tree in lower manhattan was to trade shipping interests -- early finance was all about commercial shipping and the fact that NYC was an early leader in shipping led to the development of a finance hub and the two sides of the same coin propped each other up.

<comment><USER10> So how would you do this today? A better airport?

Here in England there is growing concern that Heathrow is stifling growth in London as it doesn't have capacity anymore and expanding it is politically infeasible. So it's not a far-fetched scenario...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> They have a "build it and they will come" policy. But really I can't understand how apartment prices keep rising here so quickly, surely there must be a crash.

<comment><USER14> There will undoubtedly be a crash. Prices are rising for two reason:

-Speculative buying (that's the cause of all the empty appartments in places no one wants to buy)

-Cultural reasons. When a guy wants to marry a girl, he has to own his own appartment. No when, no ifs, no but. If a girl were to marry a guy with no apartment her whole family would lose face. Because of the sex imbalance in China, there is a large "demand" of girls, and little "supply", so the "price" (quality, location and numbers of appartments) keeps rising. So this means parents of boys are constantly upping the ante, to get more and bigger appartments to try and ensure their son gets married. (my girlfriend is Chinese, so I am very aware of these issues...)

While the first reason would seem to indicate that the bubble would burst sooner rather than later, the second one seems to indicate that demand for appartment won't fall anytime soon.

<comment><USER15> Was your girlfriend born in China? It seems this kind of mentality has gradually changed with the rise of the communist regime. China is now one of the most feminist countries in the world with women and men on equal feet in most spheres of society. My girlfriend is also Chinese, has always lived in China and as far as I know, her family doesn't care whether I own an apartment or not. Perhaps the rules are different for foreigners...

<comment><USER14> Probably depends on the family. In my case (she was indeed born in China), it's not so much her parents as her who cares a lot about that.

<comment><USER16> When discussing the characteristics of their ideal husband, Chinese girls will occasional joking (not really) say, "有车,有房,父母双亡"。 Which means, "[He] has a car, a house, and both of his parents are dead." Filial piety is hard work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> There is an excellent presentation by high profile short seller James Chanos on betting against China: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99HNFCn5RP8>

(from a year ago). About an hour long, but well worth it.

Edit: I meant to say, the focus of his talk is mainly details of the property bubble. Great information.

</comment><comment><USER18> I wonder if such places will end up like Kowloon walled city. When there is no one around it's easy to sneak in. And the poor are in need of a home (because they demolished there home building these cities).

(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City>)

</comment><comment><USER19> Why have I not heard about this before? This really makes me doubt China's growth (which is _all_ you hear about these days) even more.</comment>


Harvard investigates 125 students for cheating on final exam - <AUTHOR> http://bostonglobe.com/metro/2012/08/30/harvard-investigates-students-for-cheating-final-exam/RIb6915NqHQ73nQQxoZOpO/story.html <comment><USER2> One thing that I really appreciated at MIT was that when we were given take- home tests or other take-home assignments, it was _expected_ (and often _encouraged_ ) that we collaborate with our classmates. Writing down the exact same answer as another classmate was fine, so long as you documented who you worked with and who contributed what to the assignment. It provided an important lesson since collaboration has been a huge part of my professional career.

Now if those Harvard students broke the rules, well, they broke the rules. But I can't help but think that if Harvard is restricting collaboration in take- home assignments, that they're doing it wrong.

<comment><USER3> Perhaps, but isn't there the risk that a charismatic leader could get team members to essentially do the work for him/her? Sure, you could say that's a lesson in life, but ideally, you want a passing grade in engineering mechanics to mean that that person has competency in engineering, not merely the politics and management of engineering.

Of course, this risk is mitigated by having the final weighted much heavier than the rest of the coursework and _not_ being take home. But that approach ends up going to the polar extreme of valuing collaboration

<comment><USER4> The mechanism to avoid having a charismatic leader unfairly being granted credentials in courses not based on their knowledge is have a pass/fail (heavily protctored) exam at the end of the sememster drawing on knowledge from all the sections of the course. Fail the exam, fail the course. Pass the exam, you get the grade you earned throughout the semester.

We had a few of those at SFU, and they were awesome - the only ones who ever failed them were the cheaters - The ones who had actually done all the work/exams finished them in about half the time allocated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think cheating is one of the signs of the crumbling of our civilized society. It is a scourge that doesn't stop at final exams, but as we can see in the financial sector one that continues on through life.

That said, we lay all the blame on students, but universities themselves are also cheating. Multiple well-known universities in recent years have been exposed as lying,[1] about their enrollment statistics to rankings organizations.

Emory was exposed for its lies just a few days ago: [http://blogs.ajc.com/get- schooled-blog/2012/08/21/fallout-fr...](http://blogs.ajc.com/get-schooled- blog/2012/08/21/fallout-from-emory-scandal-former-deans-resign-current-jobs- still-unclear-why-this-mess-happened/)

University of Illinois was exposed earlier this year: <http://abovethelaw.com/university-of-illinois-college-of-law>

One of the reasons my father moved us to the U.S. from his home country of Bangladesh is that he couldn't stand to raise his children in a culture where he had to pay a bribe just to get his phone service hooked up. When I see tacit acceptance of cheating amongst students in American universities, I see the exact same elements of cultural dysfunction that my dad saw in Bangladesh. I fear without stiffer penalties for cheaters, both for students who cheat and university administrators who cheat, our culture of basic American honesty will continue to crumble.

[1] Everyone uses the term "misreporting" but "misreporting" is what happens when you intend to write down 1470 and accidentally write down 1740. "Lying" is the appropriate term for what happens when you instead write down "1500" for a period of a decade.

<comment><USER6> About 5 years ago MIT's graduate management Sloan School had a "cheating" incident where potential students could see if they were admitted before they were officially told by trivially modifying the URL of their web account. It was widely discussed on mailing lists with detailed instructions.

When the school found out, it delayed admittance for those students that did so by a year, saying some crap like "in this new post-ENRON age we need to teach that ethics matter." But the only ethics they taught was "don't make the guy in charge look silly."

(I tend to fall on the "don't hack into things" side of arguments here, but the ease of the "hack" as well as the incredibly minor impact it had on anyone of importance just made this all seem way overblown. _EDIT_ Plus, it was MIT. Can't you take a joke?)

<comment><USER7> I haven't thought this through at all, but what is problematic about students finding out their admission results before whatever magical date? At first glance, it doesn't seem like the students are worse off (they have more time to plan/act based on their admission result and are free to not look at the information if they don't want it), nor does it seem like the school is better off (I can't think of a good way for them to take advantage of students' uncertainty right now).

<comment><USER6> There's not a thing wrong with it. But it got the school's attention and so they had to Do Something.

<comment><USER8> It's a sad decline from the era where the President of MIT celebrated student hacks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I hate to say it, but this isn't that surprising. I recently came from one of these top universities and there's a problematic combination of factors at play:

1\. Students are under a ton of stress, have very little time to do work and have very high standards for themselves. 2\. Guidelines are not clear defined or communicated as to what is and isn't cheating. There's a ton of grey area. 3\. It is incredibly easy to cheat and get away with it.

I doubt there is a single person that wasn't guilty of it in one shape or form. For most, it was just things like working with other people on problem sets (which for some courses is considered cheating), not "serious cheating". But still, when "cheating" is this rampant, the university needs to reconsider its policy.

Personally, I liked a grad CS professor I had. On the first day, he spend 20 minutes talking about this. He very clearly defined what was and wasn't cheating, when we were and weren't able to collaborate, and the consequences (guaranteed F in the course, for even minor transgressions, and possible expulsion from the university). It was a very strict policy. He even told us that the answers for all of our labs and homeworks were available online if we looked, and even looking up the website was tantamount to cheating. If anything seemed like a grey area, we were required to get written permission from a TA or him to do. Draconian? Perhaps a bit. But I liked that it was very black and white, and frankly I don't know a single person that even considered cheating in the course.

<comment><USER10> At a school like Harvard, with their much-touted financial aid where students aren't supposed to have to hold down outside jobs to pay for tuition, how do students end up with very little time to do work? Class itself should take, what, three to five hours on a typical day? That leaves a lot of time for homework and studying. Do people just overwhelm themselves with too many extracurricular activities?

<comment><USER11> There's been a steady decline in amount of work students are willing to put in for study over the past decade.

By and large undergraduates at university just refuse to put in the hours for study. If you assign any reading of more than 50 pages, maybe 5% of the class will read it. Some of them are incapable of focusing for that long, some of them simply refuse to. what they do instead differs from person to person, but what is clear is that students simply expect less work and given the rampant grade inflation professors often go along with the students expectations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's funny how they think it's a problem of educating students about what isn't considered acceptable behavior. The students knew what they were doing, they just compared the probability of getting caught with the reward and made a decision.

<comment><USER13> I agree completely. I remember that cheating in college (at least on a small scale -- e.g. copying homework in certain STEM classes with a "right" answer) was common and not viewed as risky behavior. I doubt that any of the people who cheated would have said that they felt they were morally in the right or even in a gray area if confronted. Cheating is more akin to stealing a laptop from an empty dorm room than it is to running afoul of some arcane law that few people have ever heard of.

Given the high value that many desirable career paths (e.g. consulting, finance, academia) place on a good GPA, and the low probability of getting caught, the risk/reward tradeoff from cheating is naturally going to tempt people to make the unscrupulous choice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Very unfortunate. Obviously cheating is a very serious issue, but in this case I feel like something is systematically wrong with your class if half of your students are cheating.

Putting people in the position where cheating is such an alluring option is bad user experience. Evolve or die!

<comment><USER15> Please, let's keep the responsibility for this where it belongs- on those who actually cheated.

<comment><USER16> Why can't it both be true that the students cheated and deserve to be punished and that there was something fundamentally wrong with the course that drove half the students to cheat?

If I had to guess it was a basic requirement students had to take whether interested or not and cheating seemed like the easiest way to pass while devoting more time to other pursuits perceived to be more intellectually stimulating. Pure conjecture though.

<comment><USER17> Oh, come on. It's not like the course held a gun to their head and made them cheat. They didn't cheat to feed their family. It's (nearly) impossible for a college course to actually "drive half the students to cheat". They're big boys and girls, and they need to be responsible for their decisions.

The point of taking a course isn't to get an A. It's to learn something. If the students are too thick to grasp that fact, then Harvard made a mistake in admitting them and would do well to kick them out and give their places to students who get it.

<comment><USER18> > _The point of taking a course isn't to get an A. It's to learn something. If > the students are too thick to grasp that fact, then Harvard made a mistake > in admitting them and would do well to kick them out and give their places > to students who get it._

Schools generally do a bad job of communicating this if it's actually true. If you get all As but retain nothing, you are rewarded handsomely. If you learn a lot but fail all your courses in the process, you'll be punished severely. If the school is too thick to align its incentives correctly, whose fault is that?

<comment><USER17> > If you get all As but retain nothing, you are rewarded handsomely.

I certainly haven't found this to be the case. Looking at my peers 11 years after graduation, the successful ones are by and large the ones who focused on learning, not the ones who focused on their GPAs.

<comment><USER18> > _after graduation_

That is out of the school's control. It isn't really relevant to the incentives set by the school.

<comment><USER17> What handsome rewards do you imagine are heaped upon A students while still in school?

If the students in question are incapable of looking ahead 1-3 years, that doesn't exactly speak well of them either.

I won't pretend that there isn't pressure on students to get As. But that doesn't mean we should condone students doing whatever it takes to get an A; it may mean that we should reduce the pressure on the students to get them.

<comment><USER18> > _What handsome rewards do you imagine are heaped upon A students while still > in school?_

Scholarships, honors, Dean's List, general praise, etc. And students who get bad grades are given the stink-eye no matter how clever they are. In general, students who get good grades are just treated better than students who fail. Is that not your experience?

This case is actually a good example of the phenomenon. The students don't appear to have been punished for not learning. According to the story, they didn't copy any answers — it just looks like they _discussed_ the subject matter. It may well be that these students learned better from collaborating than they would have from working separately. I know I usually did in school. But because it gave them an advantage in the grading system that the school didn't want them to have, they were punished for it. Learning doesn't appear to be the primary concern here.

(I don't mean to say that I think they _should_ cheat. I'm just pointing out that they may well have learned better than they otherwise would have, but that doesn't matter because learning is not the overriding concern here.)

<comment><USER17> Harvard doesn't award scholarships based on grades and they don't have a Dean's list. I can't speak to honors at Harvard, but at the Ivies with which I am more familiar, departmental honors carry a lot more weight than that magna/summa nonsense, and are awarded based on advanced work in your major, not on your GPA.

I'm sure that students are praised for getting 'A's, but are they men and women, or are they golden retrievers? I was mostly an 'A' student as an undergrad, but I certainly never felt that I was "given the stink-eye" on the occasions that I earned a 'C'.

To be clear, I'm not saying that 'B' and 'C' students are better off than 'A' students; I'm just observing that in my experience, they are also generally no worse off at the Ivies.

I agree that there are silly incentives to get 'A's. We should probably do something about that. But that doesn't make it unreasonable to expect the alleged "best and brightest" to be able to see past those silly incentives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "Nearly half the students in a class of more than 250 are suspected of jointly coming up with answers or copying off one another, said Jay Harris, Harvard's dean of undergraduate education. Independent groups of students appear to have worked together by e-mail or other means on responses to short questions and an essay assignment"

Involving others in cheating with you greatly increases the "leak vectors" for the "crime" to be discovered. Loose lips sink ships.

It's unclear from the story the size of the actual groups that were cheating but it seems to be that the groups were not 125/2 groups of 2 but much larger groups of students helping each other.

I guess that is one life lesson that all the education in the world doesn't provide that people with street smarts might have had.

No doubt that the administration was tipped off by somebody (or would have been if that's not the way this went down.)

</comment><comment><USER20> We've known for a while just how widespread this is. Surveys have shown 2/3 of undergrads cheat at some point in college. Students just don't feel they're doing something immoral when they cheat.

[1] [http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1286242...](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128624207)

</comment><comment><USER21> Something really doesn't add up here. 125 students collaborating on a final would not only be difficult to organize but would require a lot of coordination. Not to mention getting 125 students to collectively decide to cheat and not discuss it.

How would this even happen?

My educated guess would be a complete, graded test from a previous year passed around. That would not require 125 students conspiring together, only that one test was somehow available.

This problem was rampant at Vanderbilt where fraternities and sororities would keep old, graded tests for every class on campus. It was widely recognized for the reason that Greek GPAs were higher than non-Greek. I dated a sorority VP and got to see the massive file cabinets with all of the tests and watch all of her "sisters" use them constantly, without any concern for the morality of the action. (edit: To be clear, I was offered and refused access to the files)

<comment><USER8> Any decent professor hands out old test answer keys himself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Having just finished graduate school I think the cheating issue often comes down to a misalignment between what is being taught and the skills actually needed in the real-world.

Most students are at college to get a "piece of paper" that makes it easier to get a job. Unfortunately, I think most of them are also intuitively aware that what they are learning will more than likely be irrelevant in any real business environment. In the realm of CS, how often does one use calculus, linear algebra, unusual algorithms, or automata theory in the standard 9-5 coding job?... Rarely - thus the incentive in students to minimize hard learning in these topics

</comment><comment><USER23> About five years ago Columbia threw out the final for their Western literature course that every freshman takes because one professor gave the thing almost in full to her students and it spread like mad (through the football team and friends, mostly). I didn't get it but I heard people talk about getting it mailed to them by five different people in a day. So it may be something like that - one massively better "study guide" that got spread around.

</comment><comment><USER24> It's incredible how high the punishments for cheating are. 1 year suspension for collaborating on a take home test?

<comment><USER25> You can cheat on a final at Harvard and not be expelled?

<comment><USER24> The article mentions the blurred line between collaborating and cheating. Seems like this is the former since it requires analysis rather than just comparing matching answers.

<comment><USER26> But the point is... does the line even exist? Why should a line that does not produce optimal results exist? Wouldn't you be able to come up with a better articulated answer to a question if you see the responses of all your peers first? The problem is well then we can't grade you because we can't separate you from your peers. But then why go to school in the first place? To get affirmation or to learn?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Let's see them burn. Many would give their right arm to be given the opportunity they had.

<comment><USER18> Many would give their right arm for the opportunities you have had. Should we all wish for your demise? That seems quite unreasonable to me.

<comment><USER27> No but in case I squander those opportunities, don't hesitate to fill up the gap.

<comment><USER18> You're on Hacker News expressing schadenfreude toward some college students instead of doing something that makes the world a better place. Congratulations — you're squandering your opportunities.

<comment><USER27> They need to get what's coming to them, and that is not schadenfreude. Don't compare cheating on an exam to my condemnation of it. "Doing something that makes the world a better place" Could you possibly be more general and irrelevant?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I know this comment will be unpopular to many who feel the injustice of cheating trumps all else.

I can't help but feel like this is push-back against academia. This is illegal file sharing all over again. This is students working together using internet resources to share knowledge to advance and succeed, to disrupt their education in a way their authority figures thoroughly disapprove of. To me, it's very similar to people working together and using internet resources to share music and movies, to disrupt their entertainment experiences.

I'm not sure how to feel about this. Cheating isn't always the correct answer; usually it's not. But to say it doesn't have a place in the toolbox of life is a bold-faced lie.

<comment><USER29> _I can't help but feel like this is push-back against academia. This is illegal file sharing all over again._

I really don't see the parallel. If you want to justify illegal file sharing as push-back against the music industry, you would say something like "the music industry insisted on selling CDs when consumers wanted MP3s" or "the music industry was seen as charging an unfair amount for digital music when their cost of production is clearly much lower than old distribution media." What is the analog for Harvard? The students want a diploma and a high GPA, but decided that it was unreasonable to have to learn/work for it? Nobody forced them to go to Harvard. I don't see what injustice or bad treatment they are pushing back against here. They just want to obtain a grade without doing the work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> take home exam and collaboration? take home exam is just asking for that in this day and age. I thought the idea was it would be easy, but only the students that put the work in would learn something that they'd need to know/use in a harder exam later.....

</comment><comment><USER31> Why use your hand to stick a nail into the wall when you have a hammer?</comment>