freshfruit

I have noticed a pattern of negative coverage of China by the New York Times from "hacking from China" (often indirectly implicating the government), to currency manipulation, to goods dumping. I'm concerned that I may be consuming a warped perspective. It seems like the New York Times is creating a case against China. Is it merited?

It's important to make a strong effort to substantiate negative claims. So, it is in that spirit that I ask: is the criticism raised in this article fair? Does China have an anomalous record on freedom of the press by comparison to other nations of similar development (BRIC, APEC, etc)?

I think you're promoting a healthy degree of self-awareness.

A noteworthy risk however is that you'll make false connections -- ie. garlic is good for fight off HIV.

> Always great to see studies looking at the mental implications of non-psychoactive drugs.

... also great to read about the mental implications of priming. I'll be more punitive/forgiving depending on the unrelated thought I had minutes earlier...

> That you jest about journalism is just an example of the systemic problem in society writ large...

The last thing I wanted was to jest about journalism. I'm an avid reader of long accounts of events. My point in putting "journalism" in quotes was that you seemed to be offering a definition to a specific term as opposed to discussing the capacity to convey information through various media.

I didn't want to argue semantics -- I wanted to discuss the capacity of Twitter to convey information quickly.

> What you should be complaining about is quality, not the function itself.

Sorry, I don't follow.

Hmm... perhaps that's a productive definition of "journalism." ... But I guess I don't understand your point.

If you're saying that meaningful information can't be conveyed in 142 characters then I think you'd be dismissing the majority of spoken conversations, chat, sms, etc. A good example to the contrary: https://twitter.com/Boston_Police

But I think I've missed your point...

Of course. ... but I hope my point wasn't lost.

A perfect analogy.

You're right and Slate is right as well.

However, yesterday a couple million people really needed to know what was going on immediately. For those of us who live in and around Boston, it's a really small town (that punches wayyy above its weight). It seems like everybody I know in Boston was nearby to some part of the craziness. Those who weren't had a loved one nearby.

Everyone in Boston can say something like, "my friend crossed the finish line a half hour before the blasts," "my girlfriend worked right by the finish line," "I walked through Kendall a half hour before the MIT cop was shot," "my neighbor went to the hospital with a somewhat serious wound."

Given the proximately, we simply needed to know where stuff was happening immediately. People will point to the journalistic errors and say we were dangerously misled at times. But that is the risk of all information that pops up on the internet. Everyone living in the internet age has learned to attach probabilities to everthing we read. I give CNN breaking news 60% probability of getting it right. I give @YourAnonNews 30% probability of getting it right. Although Twitter reports are often wrong, the right story is usually in there, and thoughtful people are always questioning the right facts.

I just want to come back to where I started. You're right that breaking news is broken. But yesterday, the chatter on Twitter alerted us of risks hours ahead of sound/verifiable reporting. Although many of those reports were quickly rescinded, I believe many Bostonians made prudent, timely choices as a result.

I guess my point is that news has different purposes for different audiences. For at least one audence yesterday, I thought the information coming over good accounts on Twitter was a blessing.

Whenever the world is shaken by some awful tragedy, the event is followed by an outpouring of kindness. I remember a trip to NYC right after 9/11; the good will was palpable from our cabbies to our friends. Sandy Hook had a similar affect...

In every case I can think of, the cumulative good will so vastly outweighed the malice behind the incident that it felt like the worlds Karma account was being made whole again and then some. From what I've seen, most everybody pitches in with some kind gesture.

Regarding @paulg's Tweet, the volume of RTs/Favorites so vastly outweighed the few negative comments, I'm led to believe that most people empathized with the reaction to do something kind.

As for the few who reacted negatively: It seems that any comment that is heard by a sufficiently large audience will be misinterpreted by some. I tend to doubt that they willfully misinterpreted the intent... but that's just a hunch.

When you say "too expensive," I'm curious what you mean... Are you including time/labor in your cost-benefit analysis? For me, Heroku allows me to buy more engineering time (and less sys ops complexity) to devote to other problems. From this perspective, do you still consider DO cheaper? If so, at what ~number of dynos, does it become cheaper... (I realize this is an impossible number to pinpoint...)

According to Alex: When you show people respect, something magical happens, people respect you back and it pays off. Suddenly, they want to help you win.

This reminds me of one of my favorite rules from Stephen Covey: Seek First to Understand [1]

According to Covey (and I paraphrase), good conversations begin when one party makes a real effort to understand the other. This generally triggers a similar reaction on the part of the other person. It seems like a small change in conversational style but what happens as a result is revolutionary.

Alex says: people will "want to help you win". In my experience this seems to be the case. It's also just a more pleasant way live.

[1] https://www.stephencovey.com/7habits/7habits-habit5.php

This is very helpful from a technical angle. I'm interested in the full cost-benefit analysis. Any thoughts there?

Awesome. Does DO not yet have a comprehensive command line tool?

I'm curious if any Hacker News readers have successfully migrated from Engineyard/Heroku to Digital Ocean. If so, I'd love to hear about your experiences. I am specifically curious about:

1) How complex/big was your Heroku/EY deployment 2) Time invested for migration 3) Stability since migration 4) Ongoing maintenance commitment 5) If you could turn back time and invest this investment elsewhere, would you?

I love Heroku, but I'm a bit concerned that we're becoming too interwoven/dependent on them. We currently have an issue with the stability of one of the Heroku 3rd-party redis tools timing out and feel a bit trapped... I would love to hear an analysis of others' migration experiences.

Awesome. I'm a sucker for a good visualization. What about adding a fixed nav to toggle the image size... sort of a zoom in/out effect?

Link shorteners have the potential to dramatically reduce the robustness of the internet. A single failure point can break a lot of stuff. To my knowledge Twitter justifies their link shorteners with a security argument: they can easily prevent outbound clicks to suspicious sites. Although there is certainly value there, I'm skeptical. I bet it's more a matter of getting data on the kind of outbound traffic they're driving.

Fixed... the issue seemed to last < 10 minutes

Try clicking any of the links from @nytimes or any other Twitter page...

The last paragraph seems particularly noteworthy:

On whether he's taken a MOOC class: "I've never made it through a complete MOOC," Thrun confessed. Much as books have been shrunk down to the size of 140 character tweets, Thrun says he expects that we'll continue to compress education. "I believe that 50 years from now, education will be as short and sweet as Twitter is today. It will be like an evening talk. And that will be a fantastic moment."

Could this be a solution to the engagement problem in education that pkrein recently discussed:

http://rein.pk/online-educations-dirty-secret-awful-retentio...

I've used the word "founder" countless times to mean founder of a company, but have never remarked that the primary definition is "to fail."

This isn't a coincidence it turns out. The root of the word is bottom ("as in foundation"). I thought it was interesting how "bottom as in foundation" can go two ways. 1) Failure, as most fledgling pursuits don't go very far and 2) Prime mover, because all things must originate with a dedicated person/team at the base.

The parallels between the etymology of "founder" and the nature of starting a startup are fascinating.

If you are not updating gems, does it hurt to continue deploying with a custom buildpack? Heroku shouldn't repull gems if the gemspec hasn't been altered. Is that logic correct?

Does anybody have another suggestion for safely working around this issue? I don't have a clear sense for how long this will take to resolve and don't wish to slow down our release pace too much.

I posted this article because I thought it showed a remarkable lack of understanding of startups. It was frustrating and I'm surprised VentureBeat published it.

First of all, the authors issues with edTech startups might apply to any startup vertical: not doing enough customer research (ie. not "knowing your user"); solving a niche problem; working with slow-moving large institutions... etc. I'm convinced that every entrepreneur makes these mistakes at least once (no matter how many sage advisors counsel them otherwise).

Second of all, the author presumes that winners can be picked through pre-product research. Learning is intensely complex. The notion that building a product around existing assessment data is intriguing insofar as it informs a v1 product. ...but beyond that, shooting in the dark, learning from users/learners, and evolving the product is the generally accepted path in organic startups (and empirical research for that matter) -- and education is no different.

Third, the author is highly critical towards startups, using the word "suck." He doesn't seem to realize that this critical tone with which he now brushes of edTech startups out of hand is the embodiment of the intransigence that plagues academia.

It's almost as if the article was written unwittingly as a parody...

I don't think we're disagreeing on your first point. A cooperative dynamic is hugely important for some personality types. I would argue that such a dynamic arises in student centric teaching.

As for your second point, I too was a teacher a few years ago. Great teachers can work wonders with a good textbook. For example there is a lot of great evidence/support for the Direct Instruction model which requires extraordinarily well curated material.

But the real question remains, how do we repair our STEM education system in this country (and many other parts of the world) for happier, more capable workers and a more competitive work force?

Student centric learning tools offer amazing potential for scalable and cost effective solutions.

I'm no fan of "big publishing," but they do a/b test learning objects... This is a labor intensive job. That is why a new textbook edition costs historically 1M to produce(200k for a re-release).

You're 100% correct! It's absurd in the US too. The way the publishing industry releases their attractive young female salesforce onto college campuses (I heard this from a somewhat biased source - would love verification) and then bribes gatekeepers at resort "conferences" would be funny if it weren't such a tax on our education system... But this paradigm must be overturned with disruptive innovation not mimicry!

In a forum full of hackers, we should all be able to agree, information is information... Whether its letter order, word order, sentence order, paragraph order or topic order... There is a continuum when it comes to deciding what information is protectable IP. If I order 10 topics, that information is probably not protectable IP. However, if I order 10,000 topics in a tree, that is definitely complex labor-intensive information and should be protectable in the same way that an author can protect his ordering of 10,000 words.

Is there complex information in the ordering and organization of a 2000 page text book. I would tend to say yes, although I look forward to seeing what the courts say.

It's true that they are actively trying to keep their textbooks as the primary content source for as long as possible. This is their highest margin product and don't want to lose it. This is unfortunate.

However, they do have a remarkable number of digital initiatives. Checkout Pearson's partnership with Knewton for a great example.

I think you'd have a lot of trouble backing this up with examples. Most open source textbook initiatives, including Wikipedias, haven't gotten very far. Closed source textbooks have a much longer history setting curriculum and setting a content standard for courses than open source.

Broadly, I agree with your arguments. "Content wants to be free" and the publishers are fighting this reality. However the best way to move forward is not to knockoff their product and market it to their customers! The future does not hold textbooks in store, neither the real thing nor knockoffs...

It holds student-centric, self-paced products. The big publishers will pound their fists swatting away Boundless and miss the real revolution.

At a certain point layout, organization and curriculum constitute IP. Imagine if I comb through legal archives and present case summaries to help you understand a legal concept. That is an extraordinary task, much MORE difficult than summarizing a case. The same can be said in producing educational material for a neuroscience or psychology class. I am teacher and I believe that publishers are producing complex "information" beyond the word order (ie. content order, curriculum) that should be copyrightable.

If you disagree, run this issue through the GUCCI KNOCKOFF TEST: would this product have even close to the same value or marketability if it weren't for its close resemblance to the original?

If they were to use the same material (in this case reworked Wikipedia articles for the most part) but not use existing layouts/curriculum would it have the same value to university students?

In my view, their production costs would rise substantially because they would need to hire curriculum experts and their get to market strategy would disappear as they lost their value to university students.

I'm frankly surprised that their investors bought the "alignment" argument.