skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The nice thing about big conferences is that everybody makes an effort to show up. People aren't going to fly in from all around the world to attend a free meetup, whereas they might for a big conference. So the big conferences are really the best chance you're likely to get a large part of the community together for a chat. At the free meetups you'll mostly just be running into the same few people who happen to live less than a 45 minute drive away.
However, what about for the avg working person who's buying a house with money that isn't his (a mortgage) so that by the time he retires, he isn't burdened with paying for a place to live.

In that light, it also feels odd to consider a house as a source of cash flow. A lot of analysis I've read seemed to miss the fact that people pay for houses because people need places to live.

And then this article uses a Manhattan apartment/condo as its example, so I don't think the advice is even meant for the "avg working person."
Let's not forget that Rhee was only at it for 3 years. The kind of reform she's aiming for will probably take decades to implement.
That peer review system that was mentioned seemed nice. I wonder about how well it works.
I just want to note that if you look at the maintainers list for webkit, it's full of Google employees. I don't know specifically who contributes to the inspector though.
I don't buy Erlang camp's reports.

A GC will always trash the cache, and that's the worst issue right now in hardware. (If you take out HDD I/O.)
Today will be an interesting day to watch web stats.

I'm really happy they are doing something about the programming/scraping sites. Asking the same question and getting the same answers from top 3 or 4 results was driving me bonkers.

Playing contrarian, though, I wonder how much of these changes are generated by actual user feelings? I am concerned that there is a very vocal minority (which is probably represented the most strongly inside the hacker community) who is now starting to determine what makes a good site or not. If Google starts getting swung around by 2% of its user base simply because they're the loudest, I don't think that would necessarily result in a better product for all -- even though so far, so good.
Does anybody else feel that Google has been figured out now, and that they are now just applying patches to a system that is fundamentally broken (in the same way Excite and AV did)?

I don't. I think they do a much better job of actively improving their offering. No matter what the system is, someone will always try to game it. Even if the people running the system are very smart and try very hard, the smart gamers will (briefly) succeed. That's ok, though - it pushes the people running the system to work harder to improve it. It really is in Google's best interest (IMO) to return great search results, so I think they'll continue to improve what they do.
This is a solved problem. The solution is Value Added Modeling. This has been known for many years, but unfortunately it doesn't fit within a soundbite.

You build a statistical predictor of student performance, then you pay teachers proportional to Actual Performance - Predicted Performance.

If teachers pick elite classes to improve their performance, the bar is raised. If their class has a predicted score of 80%, then the teacher needs an actual score of 90% to get a bonus. Conversely, if you get a class of low quality students, the predicted score might be 20%. To get the bonus, you need to achieve 30%.

The only incentives you have are hand pick classes of students that you can improve. If you are great at moving students from the 50'th percentile to the 60'th percentile, but suck with other student groups, your incentive is to get a class of students in the 50'th percentile.
You may well know a lot, but I bet 100% of them are serious tech interest people which accounts for a tiny tiny % of the internet. You could argue that tech people drive the trends that spread out to the masses but in this case I think it's just bashing the big guy cos he's an easy target.

The idea that most people really care about the purity of their search results, let alone would understand what all this means even if the BBC or NYT ran a proper article is just unrealistic.
For Linux/Unix systems, definetely shell scripts (or perl for more complicates tasks).

Those are everywhere by default.
Additionally, I think Rhee saw herself as the "Bad Cop" that DC needed to make the unpopular decisions, shake things up, and pave the way for a "Good Cop"^ to come in and build the system up in a more positive way. Rhee certainly wanted to stay longer than she did - but she had to know that she couldn't keep alienating folks and keep her job.

^Kaya Henderson, the interim chancellor, may very well be this "Good Cop."
It's a very good strategy, well worth the investment now to remain at the forefront while more and more businesses shift to the cloud.
Your best bet might be to register your trademark with doubleclick, then lodge a complaint against your competitor using your product/company name in their advertisements.

Try here: http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...
Inside Libya – A Photographer Reports
Speed isn't all. The system should be based in algorithms with manageable worst case time.
Unions are based on the idea that fungible "workers" need to unite against "management" to avoid being replaced with workers who will accept lower compensation. The primary interest of unions is to preserve for their members jobs that pay above-market compensation.

The presence of teachers' unions means that teachers see teaching as an industrial factory job in a mature field where no more innovation is possible. Students in such a world are the products of the factory. They come into the school system at 5 years of age as unprocessed raw material and they exit 12 years later as high-school graduates, ready to take on a job.

This whole mindset is wrong. The industrial-factory model of schools should be abolished. People, whether young (students) or old (teachers), are not fungible. They should not be viewed as factors in factory. They are not.
Maybe not in quite those words, but there certainly have been politicians who have made abstinence-only sex-ed a part of their platform.
I think Fred means that you shouldn't spend your marketing budget on advertising.

I agree with you that it sounds a bit like a mantra; for instance, you may want to foster your growth with advertising to get network effects faster.
A New Facebook ALternate... The Teaser
How should such sum ($100k) be counted?

Do you take a company car into account?

Bonuses?

Yearly stock grants?

Employer deductions into pension?

Or is it just the base salary?

Because all of this can make a big difference
Actually, I'd argue that almost anything on an iPad looks pretty gorgeous. I do believe Kevin means demoing one-on-one. Novoda builds Android apps, so I guess he keeps screenshots and demos of those apps handy to show prospective clients.
Indeed. Hofstadter and GEB are very cool. I was geeky enough to have referenced Hofstadter's law in a margin note on my resume/CV: http://benhoyt.com/cv
I'm pretty sure at any given RSA conference there are multiple folks who might personally/privately identify as members of anonymous, ie. they wouldn't need to "sneak in" to the conference b/c they are already there as legitimate members of the security community. <pure-speculation> Hell, there could be employees of HB Gary who think of themselves at anonymous. This would support your speculation that HB Gary made the sign, but complicate the motivations. </pure-speculation>

I do agree that HB Gary should be investigated as much as–if not more than–anonymous since there is some evidence of illegal or unethical business practices in the released email. I would like to think that we hold corporate security companies up to a higher standard of practice...
And what is the difference between low income and middle class schools? There are two significant ones - teacher quality and student quality.

If the difference is teacher quality, then Michelle Rhee's war on low quality teachers was on point and exactly what was needed. The article disputes this.

Thus, it must be student quality.
Just to add to that, coming to a full-blown TCP/IP connection from dialup was mind-altering. When I was a young teenager, I started using BBSes in the early 1990's. With those, there was not really a notion of doing several things at once. If you were downloading some file, you couldn't browse around and post to message boards or anything in the meantime. If a download was happening (ahh ZMODEM, oh how we loved thee), that was all you could do. Full stop. I distinctly remember the first time I discovered I could launch Netscape and be using FTP at the same time. It took a while to get accustomed to the fact that multiple things could go over my connection without me having to worry they would stomp all over each other. Now I can't imagine things working any other way. I'd bet that most people just slightly older than I am have no idea this was ever the case.
Just a small correction:

The equivalent to "print 'hello'" is not "sys.stdout.write('hello')" but "sys.stdout.write('hello\n')".
This is common practice. Google's policy is different depending on country and it changes pretty frequently. There are two issues here: Appearing on searches containing your company name and using your company name in ads.

The latter has a better chance of being removed upon complaint, especially if the landing pages don't have anything to do with your company.

In some countries (not the US, UK), Google usually acts in favour of the trademark owner and pulls both ads and keywords upon request.

You can make the complaint here: http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&... Send it by mail or fax as well.

If they're doing negative advertising, you could also try going to them directly (or maybe via a lawyer). It could easily be a 3rd party agency writing these ads and the company management might be embarrassed to be caught.
For those who haven't seen it:

http://www.mckinsey.com/App_Media/Reports/SSO/Worlds_School_...

The experiences of these top school systems suggests that three things matter most: 1) getting the right people to become teachers, 2) developing them into effective instructors and, 3) ensuring that the system is able to deliver the best possible instruction for every child.
I guess this only really applies to consumer web startups with some kind of viral aspect. What if your marketing to businesses in a certain field that makes it unlikely for you to get more than a trickle of word of mouth uptake and your app doesn't get any external exposure from the business.

That kind of thing closes the door on a lot of the methods mentioned, depending on your field to you might need a decent budget just to get a look in on industry events.

Interested to hear others with more B2B based products and what they think about advertising early on.
This should be pretty successful in the right markets. We started doing a somewhat similar idea at a hotel a year or two ago (though not slick): http://wellsbeachmaine.com/roomphotos.html

We've found it's absolutely great, and both reduced complaints and helped sales. (How do you describe a view over the phone? There have been times when a person thinks you described it wrong over the phone and is upset) People enjoy knowing exactly what to expect, and not having to worry about surprises.
I bet huffpost gets a lot of direct traffic.
Twitter and Facebook are shields against future genocides
Siún Ní Raghallaigh, CEO TunePresto, Ireland, Pitch like a Professional
The article doesn't actually dispute that the difference is teacher quality. The article just claims that teacher quality can be improved without doing battle with teacher unions. There's a nationwide struggle to get high quality teachers into low income schools that I don't think anyone on either side of the ed reform debate would deny.

Additionally, as a teacher in a low-income school, I'd argue very strongly that you should replace "student quality" with "student attitudes." The latter doesn't suggest that poor kids can't learn.
We don't own the trademark (I mean, we never registered it officially). Since we are small, we are putting our money on things that we thought mattered more.

I guess we will have to register it.

thanks for the tips.
I think the real attraction to upper management is blame management. Job security probably motivates the obsession with checkboxes, etc. more than any desire to see the lower echelons more productive.
Miso Adventures in Scaling: Using REE
I prefer ruby for scripting but if you are working on multiple *nix systems then you really do need to stick with "the basics".
Love travel? Awesome at UI/UX design? Adioso (W09) has the perfect job for you.
Not sure, but more info on DC's (non-peer) eval system here: http://dcps.dc.gov/DCPS/In+the+Classroom/Ensuring+Teacher+Su...
I would think the best way to measure performance would be overall improvement rather than overall performance. That way there'd be more opportunity for higher compensation in poor schools. Or better yet, let the market decide who the best teachers are. If teacher A's students are consistently graduating from college and teacher B's students are not, parents are going to vote with their dollars and send their children to teacher A. In the current system, this isn't allowed to happen.

"if there was one employer in your town (as there effectively is in many rural areas when it comes to schools), should you relocate because of abuse you have received?"

Yes. That, or start a competing company. If the abuses are really bad, you'd no doubt attract a lot of other disgruntled employees who'd prefer to work for a better company. Jobs are not a right, no matter how badly people want them to be.
After two years and a rant that happened to get posted to a major tech news site. Doesn't really sound like "paying attention to customers" to me. How many times has this happened in the past two years and why haven't things gotten any better?
Ask HN: CRM/project management system delivered to you as a Virtual Machine?
Dear HN,

I'm doing http://www.discoursehq.com - real-time team collaboration system where you can manage deals, projects and more - and I can see a lot of customers have issue with buying hosted software from a startup. Basically it's all about trust (will you be there in 2 years from now?).

I'm thinking of selling our system as a SaaS AND as a downloadable, ready to use Virtual Machine (VMWare virtual machine) so people could host it themselves.

Wanted to check if someone here did that before? Any tech/support problems? Any advice on pricing here?
Education is a popular target for funding cuts simply because it makes up more than 1/3 of local government spending. Local governments spend more on education than they spend on police, fire, prisons, roads and health care put together.

http://usgovernmentspending.com/piechart_2009_US_total

Teachers work fewer hours than the average professional, which includes time spent working at home.

http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf
My ads weren't even allowed to go live until I removed the word 'apple' from the heading. It was auto-flagged as infringing. This is UK so maybe they treat marks differently here?
Clickable link: http://www.discoursehq.com
Sysadmin: Python, Perl and bash.
Infra: Python and bash
Deployments: Fabric (so, more Python)
> The context I was speaking is projects who still want to support 2.x

This is also what I was speaking about. And to reach that goal, you have generally 3 options:

1) write code that works with Python2 as well as Python3

2) maintain your code in Python2 and use 2to3 on release time

3) maintain your code in Python3 and use 3to2 on release time

Given you don't want to do 1) for whatever reason, my argument is that 3) seems to be the preferable solution. It allows you to use our loved Python3 right now, while still supporting Python2.

However, "in the wild" we see 2) way more often, and I don't understand why this is the case.

Why do so many projects prefer 2) over 3)?
Usually I don't like the "mee too" posts, they always appear childish to me. But this time I'd also "sign this petition".
The problem with this theory is in schools and regions without teacher's unions, as the article notes, there isn't an improvement.

The fundamental problem is that as a whole there is neither some better performing nor cheaper workforce that is being blocked access to teaching today.
I'm with you on the boomers, but you can't just blame unions here. You also have to blame the executives that caved to their ridiculous demands with no consideration of the long-term consequences. Yes, the union would strike, but so what. That's how battles are fought, and the execs didn't want to fight.

If you haven't, read Lee Iacoca's autobiography: http://www.amazon.com/Iacocca-Autobiography-Lee/dp/055325147...

He wrote it in 1984, but everything he says applies to the 2008/2009 collapse of the auto industry. For that matter, go back a little further and read John DeLorean's On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors. It's pretty amazing how long these poorly run companies managed to trip along, and these books make it pretty clear it's not just the unions to blame.
I Feel the NEED, The Need for Speed (Chrome 10 vs Safari)
Poor engineering in the auto industry was not caused by unions. The unions are basically assemblers -- how does the assembly line create engineering problems? I have no love for unions but what you say is way off-base.

Anyway, if you want to look at excessive compensation and benefits in the auto industry, look a little higher.

And at any rate, they only got what they negotiated, so if you want to blame anyone, blame management for poor negotiating, poor planning and just generally screwing up.

Finally, if unions ruined the auto industry, why is Ford doing well relative to GM and Chrysler? I drive a foreign car at the moment, but my next car will be a Ford because they did not take bailout money, and they make excellent, reliable cars (nowadays).
Probably many people will recognize the book right away from the URL of the page (author's name and all), but why not add "Javascript: " to the title of the post?
Common practice? I did a lot of search for popular companies / domains and didn't see such an add.

I really thought it wasn't allowed, but I guess I will try to fax/mail a complain...
Highly credentialed != highly skilled.
Is QR Code Too Dull? Add Colors To Your QR Code.
That's what I thought. But I couldn't find a simple way to report... From the other comments I guess I will have to fax/mail a complain to them.
Thats exactly what I do. Mind you, not usually within a crowded tiny room. Sometimes talk is just not enough to earn trust, people want to see evidence. A phone with the apps and shortcuts pre-installed is live demo hazard ridden but generally a tablet is a nice backdrop to conversation.
> It communicates that wealth is a zero-sum game, and encourages a mindset whereby ideas about wealth are oriented around ownership of real-estate.

I think you're probably reading to much into this. It's just a game. I don't think it's particularly promoting anything.

> A better wealth game is Pit/Billionaire. It's zero-sum, but that reflects the reality of the setting (commodity trading)

How is commodities zero-sum and property not?

> The likes of Monopoly give board games a bad name.

That's like saying Star Wars gives movies a bad name. It might not have the best script, it might not have the best acting, but it's a movie that has and continues to appeal to young and old alike, that is still watched like a gazillion times a year.

Edit: the original star wars trilogy obviously, not the recent triple travesty of video game-esque inanity.
Instead of a string containing code, you should use an anonymous function.
New development in quantum computing research
Once a person can reproduce, that person should be able to live independently and support himself/herself. The current educational system keeps fifteen-year-old men and women couped up together in a "school" and treats them as children, giving them no real responsibility and no chance to be independent. The problem is not that teenagers are fulfilling their biological purpose and starting families. The problem is that teenagers are forced to remain in a state of infantilism and not encouraged to take on adult responsibilities.
From #ruby-lang a few minutes ago:

08:56 < banisterfiend> erikh: the pull request was rejected right?
08:56 < erikh> banisterfiend: after about 200 people commented on it
08:57 < erikh> banisterfiend: you know, he's working on a better solution
08:57 < banisterfiend> i didnt know :)
08:58 < erikh> nobody fucking asks that first before sending a bunch of
propellerheads to troll though

So I guess we'll see something to fix this anyway?
I find it to be very confusing and difficult to do very complicated things with. You have methods like position, or height, or width that all deal with the element. But size deals with the size of the collection and not the element. There are multiple ways to add events/delegate events and some are frowned upon in favor of others. The plugin system doesn't allow you to make reference to the instance of the plugin (without what seems to be a hack), I really dislike the fact that you have to constantly wrap element in the jQuery object, even if they exist in a collection inside of a jQuery object, and I just dislike how it uses argument overloading for most of its methods (sometimes its an obj literal, sometimes it can be a string, if its a string then the args found in the obj liters go in this order after the string, etc)

But like I said, I would rather use it than have to come up with a bunch of cross browser supported js on my own. The guys behind the lib are clearly JavaScript rockstars :) while I am fan. I just find the lib's api and general approach to problem solving to be a bit wonky and dont really understand "the ease of use" that everyone touts it having.
WordPress add featured thumbnail to admin post columns
Location and Social Media: Is the Location Trend For Real?
Given that NOONE knows how to measure teacher quality they use proxies. That doesn't seem all that unreasonable.
Yes. http://www.facebook.com/common/browser.php is a direct link - and displays from Safari 5.x or FF 3.6.13/Mac

EDIT: So, presumably one could access it from IE as well (not something I can test from here).
Fun and Games with Cognitive Biases
Monopoly is good game to learn how to negotiate deals. You can work out a deal to exchange properties, or buy someone else's properties.
Huawei’s PR Strategy: Everything But the Boss
If you are running ZFS this release marks a major improvement.

ZFS v15 really helps with the overzealous memory allocation that earlier versions were plagued with on FreeBSD. Upgrading to 8.2 gave me a 20% - 30% R/W performance increase out of the box without any sort of tuning or optimization.
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Import OpenOffice Presentations as ODP Format & Export ODP to PPTX
We are pleased to announce the new release of Aspose.Slides for .NET 5.0.0, which includes the long awaited feature of importing OpenOffice presentations in ODP format and save them as PPTX. The feature for creating and updating charts has also been enhanced in this release. Many issues related to presentation load /save and cloning have been resolved in this new release. The slide cloning for both PPT and PPTX has also been improved. We have also enhanced the rendering support for PDF and thumbnails generation.
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