It's a clever trick. Unfortunately, it breaks the referential integrity of the post. I don't think we can allow it as the submission url, for the same reason we don't allow link shorteners. People who are already posting links to Google searches in comments, though, might want to post these instead.
Quite a few of your comments about editorial decisions (changing URL, changing title) include a note about what the original was. I really like that, it helps people make sense of the conversation.
The only problem is now when you click on the submission link you can't view the article because you need a FT subscription. If you clicked the link that sends you via Google you can view the article due to the FT allowing limited free views via search engines.
Yes—that's why the trick is clever. But this has been the situation for a long time, and much as we're all annoyed by the annoyance, it would clearly be inappropriate to have all paywalled links show up in HN as "google.com". If people want to post links like this in comments, that wouldn't be a big deviation from current practice.
Maybe, in cases where the initial URL submitted redirects, the title should show two domains: the initial domain, and the final domain reached when the entire redirect chain is followed. Or we could try to convince the HN community to favour other sources over FT; this story, in particular, isn't short of write-ups elsewhere.
EDIT: BTW, I can view the article. Is that because I'm coming from outside the US?
This way you can skip the FT paywall, since it looks like you're coming from search or google news.
It exploits the daily allowance of free articles shown to users coming from the search engine.
From their status page it appears that there was an unscheduled maintenance and within a hour it was back up but then something went wrong and since then its still down.
I used to work right on Old Street roundabout in the BT building on the NW corner, back in the late 90s. This was about the time that some of the old buildings nearby were just being converted into loft apartments. I guess the writing was on the wall even then, although the area was a backwater languishing in geographical obscurity. The pubs were unbelievably seedy dives (or worse). There was one bright spot, though, which was the street market in Whitecross Street. I don't think that exists any more. Oh well, that's what passes for progress, I suppose.
Softcover is based on the Rails Tutorial model, which differs from Leanpub in several key ways. I actually think Leanpub is a great service if it meets all of your needs as an author, and in fact if it had met all of my needs I might not have bothered building Softcover. (Of course, Leanpub didn't exist when I first started publishing the Rails Tutorial in 2009, but I might have used it for follow-on products.) Here are some of the important differences:
- Softcover comes with an industrial-strength, open-source production system. This means you can write heavily formatted books with cross-references, code listings, tables, etc., and interactively build them locally, all without being locked in to a proprietary system.
- Softcover's HTML books are first-class citizens. The online version of the Rails Tutorial is a key part of its marketing strategy, so it has to be polished and prominent.
- Softcover gives you your customer list. Letting customers opt-in to share their email is fine for more casual authors, but it isn't ideal if (like me) you're trying to build a business.
- Softcover supports custom domains. It's important to me to use a custom domain for branding/SEO and so that I own my own traffic.
Interesting and challenging article about most current online education offerings. It would be interesting to see if the problems of maintaining engagement in a MOOC were at least partly due to students realizing that some or all of the requirements for authentic understanding were not being met.
As I understand it, there is a different MOOC philosophy that has not gained much support (probably because it's much harder to scale) - the connectionist approach. Perhaps that would support some of the requirements.
(PS: interesting that many of the comments here try to rise to the ice-cube challenge...)
