HN user
I don't know what your station is like but my wife and lots of others do this from Bristol to London (~235 mile round trip by road).
http://goo.gl/xscqD - image search for Bristol Temple Meads bike rack
Fortunately my trip between uni/childminder/home is quite short so I'm going to try running it when term starts again.
What would you use instead?
LoC isn't a perfect metric but it is very easy to relate to. Given some extra context like the type of application, the size of the company or the age of the codebase one can mentally account for some of the weaknesses of using LoC as a metric.
If this were a study using LoC as a sole metric with no other context I'd agree with you but LoC seems perfectly adequate in this case.
What's worse, in my experience, is when people are unable to provide the necessary information, even when questioned directly, because they don't understand or appreciate the assumptions they've been making.
That's the case - no adverts any of the bbc's television channels or radio stations in the UK. Most broadcasts are available on iPlayer too, always without adverts.
My mother doesn't even know what a VPN is. Even if she did, she wouldn't know how to use one to watch the bbc coverage abroad as a license fee paying UK-citizen.
That wasn't supposed to be a comment on the material, simply the way it's being presented. This was a discrete mathematics course, don't have time to look it up right now. (edit: Relatives are faffing - here it is: http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/cs221/CourseRev/1)
I personally think there's room for many services like coursera and udacity to serve different levels of academic experience and expectations.
And if you encounter a term that you missed by skipping the introduction it's easier, with a book, to quickly find where it's defined courtesy of the index.
udacity has gone too far the other way for me. It seems very slick but I switched off after a couple of minutes because I felt like I was watching a kids tv show.
I've been watching the lectures for the same course. Having them split into short self-contained videos (~5-15mins) has made it very easy to fit in around university and a toddler.
For example, whenever I do the washing up I put my tablet on the windowsill and watch a video. I've also been watching them instead of browsing the web as a more structured break when studying. The fixed length of a video makes it much easier to be disciplined with the length of my breaks. The subject matter is different enough and presented in such a digestible way that it really is a good break.