Student Evaluations: Feared, Loathed, and Not Going Anywhere - <AUTHOR> https://chroniclevitae.com/news/1011-student-evaluations-feared-loathed-and-not-going-anywhere

<comment><USER2> If you have to cook evaluations, something is very wrong.

That having been said, allow me to paraphrase the statement I give to my classes when I teach:

"You're supposed to think I'm fair. You're supposed to think I'm competent. You're supposed to learn the subject matter. I demand your respect, not your affection. That's not part of my job description. This entire class can hate my guts by the end, but if you know the material, I've done my job. Are we clear?"

Most classes like me, by and large, because I work very hard to be good at teaching. But not all classes like me. <shrug> So it goes.

<comment><USER3> As a former academic who used to go through this game I learned that evalutions are inversely related to workload. Once I worked how hard I could push my students I would load up my student to the maximum level possible that would keep my evaluation just above the minimium I had to maintain.

The thing I always found hard to take was comments along the line that the whole course was worthless. I never cared if a student personally liked me or not, but to have a student tell you the subject was worthless made me feel like I totally failed - luckily I only ever got a few of these comments.

<comment><USER4> "The student doesn't get to decide what's important."

Never forget that. They can decide if they liked the course or not, if they liked your teaching or not, but they are simply not qualified to make a general judgement of its worth.

<comment><USER3> This is true, but I always felt that I had been unable to explain to them that the subject was important. Anyway it is not a problem I worry much over these days :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One fundamental problem in evaluating the effectiveness of educators is that the value of an educational experience is realized a long time after it is performed.

<comment><USER6> Anecdote: When I started high school, we had a teacher in literature who everyone just hated. He was harsh, his tests were hard, the subject was boring, etc. In the third year though, most of us realized that he was very good at teaching, and the things he taught actually stuck. Many years after high school, I consider him the best teacher I've ever had.

He never tried to make himself popular, but he was relentless when it came to teaching. A student evaluation program would have been disastrous for him, and everyone would have been worse off.

<comment><USER7> So why not just do the evaluations a year or so later or even more?

<comment><USER8> At my university it is already hard to get students to fill out the evaluations (they aren't mandatory but probably should be). Asking them to do so a year later would result in a near 0 response rate.

Even if evaluations were mandatory, that is no guarantee they will be taken seriously. A lot of students just "Christmas tree" their evaluations and don't offer comments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Make every class a TED talk. It will be hugely impactful for the 15 minutes of high or buzz that follow. And then little of impact would have been achieved.

Being popular is not important. Getting the job done is.

</comment><comment><USER10> Given that student evals are one of the few tools students have to fight back against truly horrible and capricious teachers, they need to stay for that reason alone.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you guys deal with your overheating macbooks? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Curse every time I open anything remotely intensive (certain webpages, After Effects, games etc). Sitting in a 18°C AC'ed room helps.

</comment><comment><USER3> not sure about macs as theyre not really my deal but with other laptops your best bet is to replace the thermal paste with something better, undervolt the CPU as much as you can and if that doesnt work get a cooling pad with fans

</comment><comment><USER4> replace them with some other vendor</comment>


Analyse Asia #30: Twitter in Asia Pacific with Aliza Knox - <AUTHOR> http://analyse.asia/2015/05/17/episode-30-twitter-in-asia-pacific-with-aliza-knox/ <comment><AUTHOR> Synopsis: Aliza Knox, the managing director for online sales for Asia Pacific (APAC) & Latin America (LATAM) joined us for an interesting to discuss Twitter's footprint in Asia Pacific. Aliza offer insights to how twitter is used in Asia Pacific from all walks of life, from citizens using it to communicate during major disasters (for e.g. Nepal and Japan), political leaders from Indonesia and India keeping in touch with their citizens and businesses & brands such as Toyota and SingTel leveraging on the social media platform to deliver advertising campaigns and engage customers in real time on service issues. Last but not least Aliza offered great advice on joining company boards for aspiring career professionals.</comment>


Tachyum Starts from Scratch to Etch a Universal Processor - <AUTHOR> https://www.nextplatform.com/2020/04/02/tachyum-starts-from-scratch-to-etch-a-universal-processor/ <comment><USER2> Beautiful example of design driven by physics. I love it!

However, like all VLIW processors, no one knows how this will work on real workloads until they are in the wild.

I'm principle, it's great just to see something different.</comment>


Tor battles swarm of Bitcoin-stealing exit relays - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/12/tor_exit_nodes/ <comment><AUTHOR> TL;DR: Someone added a large number of exit relays that act as SSL stripping MITM servers. They rewrite any bitcoin addresses in intercepted communications so that people will send money to them instead of to the intended recipient.</comment>


about:internets - <AUTHOR> http://robert.accettura.com/blog/2008/09/03/aboutinternets/

<comment><USER2> On Vista I just get the message "The Tubes are Clogged!" and a blank screen.

<comment><USER3> Same thing on Server 2003

<comment><USER4> The article explains why.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'll upmod anything that talks about big trucks and tubes!

My wi-fi network is called "This is not a big truck".

</comment><comment><USER6> Damn, it's even fast drawing pipes.

I'll say though, this is certainly a hacker news worthy post.

</comment><comment><USER7> I would give you double karma if I could, this gave me a good little giggle.

You sir, are both a gentleman and a scholar.

</comment><comment><USER8> yes but where are the teapots?</comment>


This New AI System Can See What You Are Thinking - <AUTHOR> https://interestingengineering.com/this-new-ai-system-can-see-what-you-are-thinking <comment><AUTHOR> Preprint of the article on BioRxiv (PDF):

[https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/12/30/240317](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/12/30/240317)</comment>


Changing the Hotel Pricing Model  - <AUTHOR> http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/08/changing-the-hotel-pricing-model/

<comment><USER2> I'm sure the price reflects a compromise in savings between the hotel and the consumer. While this is a simple example, removing inefficiencies like this is a good thing for the company, and a good thing for the consumers.

By the way, much like the new reduced plastic bottles by Poland Spring, this is a great example of company innovations spurred by the environment. So many cost saving ventures would have been out of the question for companies due to image (What? You expect me to get excited about the fact your bottles are more flimsy??), and are now up for grabs. Companies that recognize this opportunity will do well.

</comment><comment><USER3> This sort of pricing is relatively common where I am right now in Lithuania (other side of the world). You pay a daily rate, and then you pay for the cleaning at the end of your stay (or more then once if it's a long stay).</comment>


Show HN: High quality COVID19 clinical dataset (symptoms/lab results/xrays etc.) - <AUTHOR> http://covidclinicaldata.org/ <comment><USER2> Thank you for sharing this. I apologize if I missed this, but would you mind describing the population being tested, e.g., all-comers vs inclusion/exclusion criteria? Also, for the following statement, "Clinician- assessed symptoms are sparse for data published on 04-07 due to some criteria having been added later," do you mean "prior to" instead of "on"? Thanks again for sharing the data.

<comment><AUTHOR> Population: California (bay area and LA area). This anonymized data

We (Carbon) don't exclude any patients (whether asymptomatic or not). One reason the dataset has other results (like flu/strep).

<comment><USER2> Thanks, I appreciate you taking the time to respond.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Spy Codes: free booklet for kids - <AUTHOR> http://www.secretgeek.net/codes <comment><AUTHOR> I made this as a fun weekend activity. If people enjoy it or have feedback on it I can make more interesting printable code activities that build on it. Cheers.</comment>


27 Huge Publishers Join To Replace The Banner - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/27-publishers-including-nyt-forbes-espn-try-huge-non-banner-ads-2009-3

<comment><USER2> Is the goal to ensure that every major browser turns on an ad-blocker by default?

Seriously, these things are going too far. I guarantee people aren't going to click through more often, but they are going to be more annoyed.

I wish websites would just charge me money for their content. It is much easier for everyone.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> More: [http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/200...](http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2009/03/will_fewer_but.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> I guess the following is a rant. I'll post it for the sake of the question at the end.

I would be willing to look at -- or at least let co-exist -- more ads with the content I view, if those ads respected both my interests and my needs.

\+ Don't move. Ever. No exceptions. (And no bleeping music, either.)

\+ Intrigue me with appealing _information_. Tell me what, concretely, you propose to do for me.

\+ Don't move! Don't think it's cute to slip in an animation after waiting a bit. I don't care if it's the "Firefox girl" from Daily Tech News. Don't move.

\+ Don't be more garish than the encompassing page design. I am only frustrated by people who think "Hotdog" is a legitimate color scheme.

\+ Don't track me. I'm not interested in a "more extensive relationship" with your marketing efforts. Concentrate on delivering a tolerable, appealing ad for _this impression_. I'm sorry if you feel this hampers your effectiveness; as far as I'm concerned, you're putting your effort into the wrong end of things. I may be willing to flex on this point, but you'd better make it _real clear_ how you are protecting my privacy, with an iron clad commitment, and provide me controls for turning on and off the tracking.

I've learned of some useful things from ads. And I don't mind a respectful presence on the page. Ads in print newspapers? No problem. Bouncing monkeys on a yellow banner -- big problem.

What I've been wondering about, recently, is why no one has tried to organize a codified and instantiated compact between browsers and publishers/advertisers. E.g., as a browser, I'll let this class of ads through -- probably provided by a set of whitelisted URL's. I understand doing so helps to support this site that I value and may offer me additional, useful information for consideration. In return, you promise not to violate the above (or whatever the set of rules ends up being).

Perhaps this is to say, ad brokering should be a two-way communication and not a one-way communication. Bringing together viewers and advertisers on mutually agreed terms. I suppose this is not realistic, and I'll welcome any explanations as to why.</comment>


Ask HN:Are you building/running resources for developers or designers? - <AUTHOR> Hello everyone,
I am building a page with resources for Developers ( https://www.colorsandfonts.com/developer.html or https://www.colorsandfonts.com/designer.html ) and I was wondering if you want to be featured on it.
I need: - Section. ( Code Editors, CSS Framework, Design Tools, etc,... ) - A working link. - An image. - Short description. - The page you want to be featured in ( Designers or Developers ).
Thank you and have a great day! <comment><USER2> Hi Mike, I'm building Box CI (boxci.dev)

Section: devops (developers page)

It's a CI service that lets you run builds on your own hardware. Aimed at engineers who want full control of their CI builds, to make them faster, cheaper and more secure.

Logo image in the favicon @ [https://boxci.dev/favicon.ico](https://boxci.dev/favicon.ico)

Cheers, have a good day yourself!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Davnicwil,

You are thank you so much. You can see Box Ci here.

[https://www.colorsandfonts.com/developer.html](https://www.colorsandfonts.com/developer.html) under DevOps tab.

I am still building the section tho.

Thanks a lot !

<comment><USER2> Awesome, thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> You welcome.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


James Lipton, Creator and Host of 'Inside the Actors Studio,' Dies at 93 - <AUTHOR> https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/james-lipton-dead-actors-studio-909382 <comment><USER2> He did a great interview with Kevin Spacey.</comment>


Like the 'shatterproof' Droid Turbo 2, Motorola's Maxx 2 survives shatter tests - <AUTHOR> http://www.networkworld.com/article/3003167/smartphones/motorola-shatterproof-droid-turbo-2-droid-maxx-2-tests.html <comment><AUTHOR> When we drop tested Motorola's shatterproof Droid Turbo 2 we needed another phone to demo how devastating a four foot drop onto granite is. We chose the non-shatterproof Droid Maxx 2 believing that on the first drop it would shatter and the screen would explode a spider web of cracks

Try as we did, the Maxx 2 screen didn't shatter. See the video of the Maxx 2 bouncing down concrete stairs.</comment>


More than 200 kids virtual worlds in development - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2009/01/26/more-than-200-kids-virtual-worlds-in-development/

<comment><USER2> Wow, there are about 197 companies that are going to end up seriously disappointed...</comment>


C++17 constexpr Compile-time Ray Tracer (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tcbrindle/raytracer.hpp <comment><USER2> There's seemingly a lot of negative responses to articles concerning constexpr in modern C++ (you can see some here in this thread). I suspect this is partially because there's a general outsized dislike of C++, and partially because typically these articles focus on toy problems where the capacity to run at compile time isn't actually beneficial, rather than cases where constexpr can provide some real benefit towards production code.

Like any syntactic construct in a turing complete language constexpr presents a convenience - in this case the ability to rectify compile time generated data and runtime code paths/data. There are some practical cases I've seen where it can be a real improvement to hygiene (i.e. you can replace a compile time script/program generating data with one unified code base). e.g.

1\. Perfect hash generation. Rather than using a separate gperf run you can generate your hashes during compilation of the relevant TU.

2\. Format string lookup tables. For fast formatting you can push an index and positional arguments to a queue, and handle formatted string construction in another thread. Broadly speaking lookup tables in general can be generated at compile time rather than static data imported into code.

3\. Complex starting conditions for physics simulations. If you have, say, some initial matrix that doesn't change between simulation runs - you can exercise existing code to generate this matrix at compile time rather than needing a separate process run or script.

These approaches are not without their downsides - particularly if the translation units in question need to be recompiled often, or if you're using whole program optimisation - but the benefit of keeping generated data in lockstep with the code consuming it can be worthwhile.

(That being said, I personally find articles like this incredibly edifying.)

<comment><USER3> 4\. Things you want to not run at runtime. If you can demand of the compiler that foo is run only at compile time, you can eliminate some performance outliers, with good protection against accidental later regressions. (I suppose this could apply to security too — anything run at compile time is definitely not vulnerable to crafty user input from a malicious user.)

5\. My compiler is a rackmount somewhere; even if constexpr evaluation is somewhat slower than runtime code in a particular case, I may prefer to use the rackmount's plentiful power rather than the slim, light battery on the device where the final code will run.

<comment><USER4> 6\. A constexpr function is guaranteed to have no undefined behaviour (when evaluated at compile time, anyway)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Author here. I wrote this on a rainy weekend last year and mostly forgot about it, so it was a bit of a surprise to see it pop up on HN this morning!

Happy to answer any questions (including "why on earth would you do this?") :)

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the article. Seems nobody seems to have asked anything.. i'll start...

Why on earth would you do this?

<comment><USER4> > Why on earth would you do this?

Good question! :)

It actually started out as a learning exercise -- I didn't (and still don't) know much about ray tracing, and so I thought it would be good to study a simple example by translating it from a language I didn't know (TypeScript) to one I was more familiar with.

This involved writing a simple vec3 class, and it seemed natural to make that constexpr. Then as I went through I realised that many more functions could be made constexpr too. And then if I hacked together some (admittedly very poor) replacement maths functions, even more of it could be constexpr...

At this point, it became a challenge to see whether I could make the whole thing run at compile-time. The only tricky part was avoiding virtual functions \-- I'd originally naturally translated TypeScript "interface"s into C++ abstract classes. I ended up using two different approaches: firstly using std::variant and std::visit (the any_thing class in the source code), and secondly using a struct of function pointers (for the surfaces) -- because while virtual calls aren't allowed in constexpr code, calls via a function pointer are just fine.

In the end, I was pretty satisfied that I'd managed to push constexpr as far as I could take it. I had intended to blog about it, but never got round to it ... and now 18 months later someone has saved me the job by posting it to HN anyway :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There also was a talk at CppCon on compile time regular expressions in C++20: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM3W36COnE4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM3W36COnE4)

</comment><comment><USER7> > Believe it or not, this is actually decent performance

The _ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED_ of programming.

</comment><comment><USER8> Impressive! Interesting as a benchmark to test the performance of different compiler implementations.

</comment><comment><USER9> There is no misuse of anything. Stop being so presumptuous and shortsighted, especially on _hacker_ news.

Is there some theoretical bounds or anything preventing the compilers to be faster or is it just implementation/optimization details?

(GHC tends also to be quite slow.)

<comment><USER10> C++ compilation is massively slowed down by the sheer existence of the preprocessor. This could be drastically improved by the usage of modules which are coming soon(tm).

Both MSVC and Clang already support them experimentally fwiw.

<comment><USER11> To be fair, what slows down compilation is not "the sheer existence" but the extensive use of large and complex #include files.

<comment><USER12> Indeed. IIRC this topic is covered directly in Meyers' "Effective C++" book, including the trick to use pointers + forward declarations in headers to avoid including other headers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> D did this a long time ago too.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7530692](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7530692)

[https://web.archive.org/web/20151113173822/http://h3.gd/ctra...](https://web.archive.org/web/20151113173822/http://h3.gd/ctrace/)

It should be noted that this was done in very old D, before a lot of compile- time improvements that modern D has. I guess makes this feat more impressive for the time, while the same exercise today should be more pedestrian.

It's really nice that D was built with this sort of application in mind instead of having it added 30 years later. It makes the language feel far more cohesive and inviting for this sort of thing.

If C++ were able to discard old features, I might not be so scared of going back to it. The way it keeps growing without pruning does not make it feel very inviting.

<comment><USER14> The annoying thing about C++ is you need a big huge book to tell you which features are safe and how to combine them and stay safe.

Maybe if they started defining a 'modern c++' subset that you could limit it to via compiler flags and/or pragma's it would make life a bit easier when starting new codebases.

Obviously you can always make a personal style choice on what to use, but then you have to find one. Anyone have a favorite set of recommendations for c++ feature usage?

Also, if you start with 'X did this a long time ago.' You always end up in a LISP-hole. :P

<comment> 0-_-0 > Maybe if they started defining a 'modern c++' subset...

Here it is: [https://github.com/isocpp/CppCoreGuidelines/blob/master/CppC...](https://github.com/isocpp/CppCoreGuidelines/blob/master/CppCoreGuidelines.md)

<comment><USER15> Great reference, although none of the hyperlinks on the page work for me. I tried Firefox, Chrome, and Edge. I also tried all of the older tagged versions.

<comment> 0-_-0 For me neither, try this instead:

[https://isocpp.github.io/CppCoreGuidelines/CppCoreGuidelines](https://isocpp.github.io/CppCoreGuidelines/CppCoreGuidelines)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Apparently it doesn't compile because of how the pow function is implemented. I am not able to figure out what the issue is right now.

</comment><comment><USER17> Ye gods. And I thought build times were long enough already!

</comment><comment><USER18> In awe.

</comment><comment><USER19> So this is basically misusing the compiler as an impractial script interpreter?

<comment><USER20> I'm not sure if it counts as misuse, compile time evaluation is intended to be used to do computation at compile time. But "an impractical script interpreter" is certainly one way to view it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> so, c++ becomes greater?

<comment><USER22> C++ has a whole scripting language embedded into itself. They're trying to reinvent lisp, of course a much less efficient lisp.

<comment><USER23> > They're trying to reinvent lisp, of course a much less efficient lisp.

yes, please show us all those high performance libraries written in lisp

<comment> ur-whale It's OK.

Lispers live in a parallel universe, where performance issues are mere distractions from the higher level thinking.

<comment><USER22> Not every performance issue needs lower level optimization. Most performance issues can be solved by (1) optimizing algorithms and (2) abstracting lower level code in FFI C functions. C++ helps for 2 but not for 1 because if you don't have a clear high-level understanding of your algorithm, system, pipeline, it's harder to optimize or maintain that optimized code.

<comment><USER23> > C++ helps for 2 but not for 1 because if you don't have a clear high-level > understanding of your algorithm, system, pipeline, it's harder to optimize > or maintain that optimized code.

I strongly disagree. C++ has very nice tools for abstraction: higher-kinded types, dependent types (to some extent), lambdas & function objects, overloads, etc. It's a pain to design a data flow in C, but in C++ for instance it can just be something like this : [https://github.com/RaftLib/RaftLib/wiki/Linking- Kernels](https://github.com/RaftLib/RaftLib/wiki/Linking-Kernels) or this : [https://ericniebler.github.io/range-v3/](https://ericniebler.github.io/range-v3/).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Fun project, but C++ sure is getting more ugly and arcane by the day. I think it's time it went away. I have great love for C but C++ has just always turned me off.

<comment><USER25> I felt this way too but was using C++ for work and have grown to like it. If you can use only the newer language features it is actually quite pleasant. You can avoid a lot of the pointer arithmetic and off by one errors that occur in C. I didn't realize how productive I was in the language until I found myself writing a small script I would normally have written in python in C++ instead.</comment></comment>


Sergey Ananov: Two days on ice with three polar bears - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-34281218 <comment><USER2> It's one of the best stories I've read on HN in a wild.

My question is - why did not he take off his life suite as soon as he get out of the water? Since t was filled with water, having it on your body will only increase effect of freezing, no?

<comment><AUTHOR> I've worn a survival suit. They are reasonably well insulated, and proof against wind and water. Having got the excess water out of it, the remaining water will warm up and act as further insulation against losing heat through conduction. The clothing under the suit holds the water, so you don't lose heat by convection, and the suit is a rubberized fabric, so it doesn't lose heat by radiation.

Wearing it gives him a chance. Without it he would lose heat by all three methods, and probably die in a few hours.

<comment><USER3> I have never seen a survival suit. But you mention convection. I wear a wetsuit while surfing in Western Canada (Tofino, BC). So if the suit traps water than it probably start acting like a wetsuit[1] .

[1] [http://ffden-2.phys.uaf.edu/212_spring2011.web.dir/nicole_wa...](http://ffden-2.phys.uaf.edu/212_spring2011.web.dir/nicole_wade/thermodynamics.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly so, but a survival suit is intended to be a dry suit (when used properly) so the mechanism is not identical. However, when water _does_ get inside, it heats up, gets held in place by your regular clothing underneath, and then the suit acts like a hybrid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> >Ideas such as: Send helicopters, not planes, to look for survivors

low range

>•Make survival suits that you can actually fly in

no clue about that one

>•Attach mini radio beacons to the suits or life rafts

Breitling emergency watch from top gear comes to mind

<comment><USER5> "Make survival suits that you can actually fly in"

refers to

"Then I undid my safety belt and opened the door. Instantly I was up to my neck in icy water. I was wearing a survival suit, but only around my legs and waist - the top part hung loose because I find it quite impossible to fly with one covering my arms and upper body."

..as i read it. Incredible story!

<comment><USER4> I mean Im not familiar with survival suits nor flying planes, so cant comment if there are any currently on the market fitting his requirements.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> First he manages to 'semicrash' his helicopter in icy waters, then retrieve his life raft from beneath the sinking heli in freezing water, then survive in extreme weather for 36 hours with half a litre of water and a few protein bars, and the energy to stave off 3 polar bears!

You obviously have to have presence of mind, some training I suspect, but also dollops of luck. What if the polar bears were a bit more hungry, a bit more determined?

What a great read! Kudos and a big congratulations to Sergev Ananov for surviving this! What a relief for his family and friends and I don't think they are going to let him try again, at least not without a crew.

</comment><comment><USER7> One of my friends does oil exploration work in remote places. Just sent me an email from north of the Arctic Circle off the coast of Norway.

Anyway, he frequently has to do emergency helicopter evac training, and has shown me the pictures. They have x amount of time to escape from a helicopter chassis which is rolled over and dunked upside down into a tank full of freezing water. I don't remember any of the numbers, but I have seen the pictures and it doesn't look like fun at all.

Ironically he used to work on land but that started getting too risky because of where the majority of the work is. Shows how bad it was getting to volunteer for helicopter insertions into a workplace in the North Sea.

</comment><comment><USER8> Here's a fascinating 10-min audio interview with BBC Outlook's Jo Fidgen a month back: [http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02z7xl6](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02z7xl6)</comment>


Update on the Homeless Man Taught To Code - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2013/09/26/video_leo_the_homeless_coder_speaks.html

<comment><USER2> I find it somewhat off-putting that the author keeps pointing out how homeless the guy is, while the subject is clearly trying hard to get the message across that he's just somebody learning to code.

Still, a great 'feel good' piece. Here's hoping that he can find something interesting and lucrative to do with his new skill.</comment>


The Japanese Military Is Getting Offensively Cute - <AUTHOR> https://news.vice.com/article/the-japanese-military-is-getting-offensively-cute

<comment><USER2> Talking point: Would this work on American youth today? Is the Call of Duty Franchise a parallel to culture such as Wayne's Green Beret?

</comment><comment><USER3> That cartoon was offensively terrible. Like, "you wasted your money making this" terrible. I can't see it working for anybody. There are some artists that could make an amazing SDF cartoon, like Kenichi Sonoda or Katsuhiko Nishijima, who have done anime with amazingly rendered aircraft and guns respectively. So much missed opportunity. I know the video was for kids, but even the old crappy pokemon cartoon looks better than this.</comment>


Google Instant: It Searches Before You Type - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/08/google-instant-its-search-before-you-type/

<comment><USER2> Other submissions on the same subject:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672391> <\- This has _lots_ of comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672388> <\- This is an explanation

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672346> <\- First

... and more by the minute. How many of these are we going to get?</comment>


In Law Schools, Grades Go Up, Just Like That - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/22/business/22law.html?&pagewanted=all

<comment><USER2> _If somebody's paying $150,000 for a law school degree_

Colleges don't sell degrees, they sell educations - you have to earn the degree. Or you used to, anyway. Why not skip all the lectures, coursework and exams and save time?</comment>


On Internalised Misogyny and Why You May Not Be as Progressive as You Think - <AUTHOR> https://urbanwomanmag.com/internalised-misogyny/ <comment><USER2> Made me think. I know that against my conscious stated desires I am far too aware of race to say I am indifferent to race which makes it very hard to believe I am completely un-racist. Seems analogous to the specific case here.</comment>


A Move Away from SQL Server - No Longer Buying Aircraft Carriers - <AUTHOR> http://datachomp.com/archives/no-longer-buying-aircraft-carriers/

<comment><USER2> I have to confess, these days I use Postgres more than SQL Server. But that said I do a LOT of GIS work, and weather you like it or not SQL Server just does not follow the spatial SQL simple features standard, well not correctly anyway, as I said in my presentation in spatial SQL at Last years DDD, "it's the most compatible, incompatible spatial SQL implementation I've seen."

Postgres also does a ton of stuff the SQL Server can only dream of and it runs fantastic on a Windows based OS too.</comment>


What do you do after you make a zillion dollars? - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/21/facebook-shareholders-what-do-you-do-after-you-make-a-zillion-dollars/

<comment><USER2> Google realized that it was going to make a lot of millionaires when they went public, so they hired financial advisers to give lectures at Google, explaining to all these soon-to-be-rich people how to manage their money. Here's some of the advice they got: [http://web.archive.org/web/20080109024137/http://www.sanfran...](http://web.archive.org/web/20080109024137/http://www.sanfran.com/home/view_story/1507/) (The original seems to be gone, so I'm linking to an archive instead.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Human interest stories always makes a good read, but reading it on techcrunch was the actual surprise.

Hope I can apply some of them, when I make my payout

</comment><comment><USER4> I would run ads on tv that wouldn't sell anything and instead teach random scientific things and debunk popular myths. After seeing the same video for the hundredth time I think it wold stick.

</comment><comment><USER5> What a great article</comment>


Remove stubborn Apple icons (Newsstand, Voice Memos etc) without Jailbreaking - <AUTHOR> http://rag3hack.no-ip.org/ Visit this link on your iPhone <comment><AUTHOR> Open the link on your iPhone. One thing you should know, the icons will re- appear after a device reboot.</comment>


Looking for feedback on Happi. Free hosted infrastructure software - Reece-Happi We have recently launched Happi and want your feedback to make Happi as good as it can be.
Happi's a software tool where you can find, buy and network servers, switches etc to create your own hosting environment. Happi is free to use, and at the moment you don't even need to sign up.
http://www.get-happi.co.uk/ <comment><AUTHOR> If it meets the guidelines, this might make a good 'Show HN'. Show HN guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

I am curious about the nature of the "partner" relationships Happi lists on its site. It's a lot of logos of many well known companies...for me, more than would inspire confidence.

Good luck.

<comment> Reece-Happi Hi, I will definitely check that out.

A partner is anyone we are working with. We want more so if you have specific tech vendors or service providers, let me know and we will reach out. We have even more in our next major update.

Thanks so much for your feedback, we are getting loads of people onto our site but having it open and free to use limits us the ability to chase for feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> > Happi is free to use

How do you make money then?

<comment> Reece-Happi Where it "makes money" for us is a bit of a long story - our hope is that it becomes a standard method for buying and deploying all hosted infrastructures (and later, application provisioning). As one of the partners plugged into it, we think we're pretty good at what we do, in the region where we do it - so we should live (or die) on the quality of our service and range of our products, and therefore we're hopefully we would be the chosen service provider where we operate.

In a nutshell, we hope to grow through 'indirect growth', in regions where I/we provide the actual services.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's weird that the site still store cookies after I decline

<comment> Reece-Happi Just looked into it and found out the only thing that gets saved is the opt out.</comment></comment>


Hadoop buzz continues to excite the cloud - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-13846_3-10345769-62.html?tag=mncol;title

<comment><USER2> Basically an ad for a Hadoop conference in NYC; no technical content here.</comment>


Sprint Review Meetings - <AUTHOR> http://www.mikebz.com/2013/08/sprint-review-meetings.html

<comment><USER2> In normal Scrum terms this is what they call a retrospective, right? A sprint review is one where you present the resulting potentially shippable product to stakeholders.</comment>


Ask HN: Geo-balancing DNS providers? - <AUTHOR>

Does anyone geo-balance their DNS? Looking for recommended providers, thanks!<p>Our server has been able to handle tons of hits (like 6 requests per second at peak) but the DNS acts flimsy under pressure. We just have the server handling it at the moment. <comment><USER2> It's cheap and easy to use a distributed network of DNS servers with locations around the world. There's much less network latency when the edge locations are closer to the end user. There are dozens of good DNS providers out there. We currently use DNS Made Easy, and we're thinking about using Amazon Route 53 as well.

If you have multiple web servers servers in different locations, you might be thinking of "Geo-DNS" -- this actually directs the end user to the nearest web server. There are pros and cons to this approach, namely that the end user may be using an intermediary DNS server that's not actually very close to the user. For example, you might end up sending all Comcast users to your east coast USA server, no matter where in the USA they actually are. I'm not familiar with providers who offer this service, but here's a Server Fault thread on the matter: <http://serverfault.com/questions/30567/geo-dns- providers>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Ryan, DNS Made Easy looks like exactly what we need.</comment></comment>