skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just got a part time job teaching college algebra at a school that mostly teaches nursing and massage therapy. The pay is ok.

The reason I got the job is that the state and regional accreditation boards require that anyone teaching college level courses must have a Masters degree and at least 18 graduate credit hours in the subject.

The previous teacher they had to let go has a bachelor's in math. I've got an M.S. in EE. I sat in on his classes my first few days on the job; he's an excellent teacher.

So what ended up happening is this school, which can't afford to pay much, now can't find anyone with an M.S. who's willing to teach algebra full-time. (surprise, surprise)

While the board has the intention to raise the standard for algebra teachers, the rules have the opposite effect since they limit so strictly who can teach that the schools have to hire anyone who meets the criteria whether they're good or not.

It's not so much the pay but the unbelievable amount of hoops you have to jump through to teach. I'm sure a lot of smart people would love to teach part-time if it didn't take years to get certified.
Yes, thank you. In my efforts to properly cite and reference things for fellow readers, I sometimes forget a citation. 'Appreciate it, Mark.
It's going to be difficult to find many places that have four bedrooms in that area much less affordable. Most in that area are two bedrooms with some three bedrooms. If you guys don't mind doing like a two two-bedrooms, the Avalon isn't too bad. They got like three buildings and all are in a row, across the street from the Caltrain for easy access to the Valley.
It's like Weeds meets The Guild!
This was exactly the point I was trying to convey :)

"Speeches and beaches" -- my man, such a desire is a wholly lazy and narcissistic dream.
Perhaps you're right. Personally, I would be more interested in comparing actual finished apps, as opposed to meaningless benchmarks.
Which chart? They are numbered, you know.

[edit: I'm guessing you are referring to chart 6, but that data is restricted to "days when they did at least some work".]
You're kidding right? College students in particular are always trying to get into sections of classes taught by professors they know are good either through first hand experience or word of mouth recommendation.
I am not sure how accurate your history of IBM is since I myself am not an expert.

I agree with your last 2 statements completely though.
Before you get worked up over this topic, realize that there are some teachers who are exceptional and others that are quite bad.

The main difference between teaching and other fields is that once a teacher is hired, it's very unlikely he/she will ever be fired for poor performance.

As a result, many schools contain both a few exceptional teachers and a few real duds. Sadly, the exceptional teachers are paid based on seniority just like the duds are, and some duds have been there a long time and are earning decent salaries and very generous pensions.

I don't think anyone would object to paying exceptional teachers more... the problem is that we all know of some really horrible, lazy teachers whom it would be a travesty to pay more.

Sure, if someone waved a wand and doubled teacher salaries, the quality of new teachers entering the profession would increase, but this would not address the vast majority of existing teachers.

It's not complicated... the only reason any firm is able to hire and retain skilled employees is because skill is rewarded compared to mediocrity. This is not the case for teachers, except in the form of non-monetary rewards (often exceptional teachers are greatly respected, but this doesn't pay the bills).

As long as we pay teachers based on seniority and other backward measures, we'll have people who are just not cut out for teaching responsible for educating our children.

I'm not advocating any sort of across the board measurement of what constitues success. This should vary by district. The important thing is that just like any other profession some people should fail to make the cut and should find work they are better suited for. As it stands, we give these people an incentive to continue teaching our children. It's no wonder they resort to trying to strengthen their union... they certainly aren't getting any rewards from being bad at what they do.

Note, I'm talking about the 20% of teachers who could be considered poor. I'm not all that concerned about the ones who are average or above average, since they are not the problem.

The issue of pay is a red herring, btw.
Why would you expect people who want to be teachers to do well on an admissions test for law school? Engineers do almost as poorly on the GRE Verbal, but does that mean they're idiots? I understand the LSAT has little to do with law, but just think of the selection bias of people in that bucket.
What about the future generations of doctors who had poor teachers and won't make good doctors?

I don't think it's a zero sum game - the world changes and different skills are required at different points. New industries are constantly born that require a whole new set of people. The population of the world is always in flux as well - does that mean every additional person has to split the limited resources?

I think a great teacher is a very leveraged way of taking students and giving them passions, goals, and skills. Students who've been lucky to have had these great teachers are the ones who will be passionate and become great in their chosen fields.
Lawyers make more money because teachers are willing to work for less than lawyers.
Number 6. Sorry, the color description was completely useless.

Edit: I'm tired, and I'm making a bunch of stupid mistakes. Figure 6 and figure 5 are directly at odds with each other. I can't account for the discrepancy, so I'm going to reduce the signal to noise ratio, and get rid of some of my other comments. I apologize to everyone for spamming stupidly.
In an ideal world, this is true.

However, pay attention to what the ingredients of that seed are.

That is why there are "startups" (the type I described in the article) and then there are Startups.
Suggestions on Releasing my startup
Hi Everyone,

My web-startup will be opening in a Closed Beta stage soon and even before then I wanted to get ideas for its release and how I could really become noticed.(especially when publicly released).

Developing the website and its features is going well however my downfall has always been marketing.

I have indeed found many websites that have huge communities of members that would fit perfectly into our sites niche and have started the process inviting them to also comment on the sites idea etc..

However I am looking to get 'noticed' by people and/or other sites and wondered what path you think I should follow whether it's particular websites to submit to, people to see and contact etc..

I appreciate any feedback including any suggestions to the site. The sites name and Beta page design is fairly self-explanatory of what the sites about but contact me if you would like to know more!

http://www.wheresyourduckbeen.com
I always wonder about this - I used to be completely touch-avoidant, and trained myself to be less so (As you can probably tell, I'm not a sales/marketing guy). I don't think I'm unnatural about it, but how can you really tell?

It's only blown up once.
To be fair, the Xoom has 1.3x as many pixels as the iPad. The iPad 2 is still faster taking this into account, but the graph is misleading.
Potentially, yes, but I do NOT believe this definition could be applied universally.
"I never understand why people get overly emotional about teacher salaries but not other public positions like fire, police, military, etc."

Firefighters and Police were notably excluded from the recent anti-union legislation legislation they passed in Wisconsin. My guess is because if they had included the Police then who would have kept order in the capitol building? The police would have been out there on strike with the teachers.
It's no surprise, slave labor only goes so far.
I'm looking for a 2BR
Katamari Hack
Being there in the old days, I really liked two things.

1) Any question I had, someone could either give me the answer, direct me to the book (yeah, that long ago) that had the answer, or do the back and forth so I could figure out the answer with the knowledge I already had.

2) Rip the sh*t out of my code in a way that, while humiliating, made me a much better programmer.

You went in thinking that you're the smartest kid in the room, but while I was there, the mean IQ was 132. It was a place with a bunch of smart _adults_ who also had a significant amount of knowledge and experience, and very few hoarders of that information. After all, how can you show how smart you are if you keep quiet when someone is wrong? My niches were that I had K&R memorized (that's really embarrassing now, but "actually, free(NULL) is legal," beats a full house) and my proof of concept client code made its way into SDKs.

Joel Spolsky talks a lot about the same time era, basically Microsoft pre-Internet. Many of us ex-MSFTies idealize it to a certain degree, but that's fine–take and keep the good and drop the bad. Many of us are engineering leads/CTOs/flounders elsewhere, and the rigor present in the hierarchy of ability-to-execute helps to excel in other companies or industries.

But most of us secretly would like to go back to a few thousand nerds in a rainy forest and hack products all day. :-)
A few women wear the niqab, and quite a few more dress in low-cut tops without drawing a second glance.

There is a women-only 1/2 car on a long metro, ie men are prohibited, but women can use any car they want.

Women don't have to be escorted and can drive alone without a second glance.

Alcohol is widely available in hotel bars and liquor stores, although you have to show a liquor license indicating you're not Muslim in the liquor stores.

So yes, for whatever faults, it is the most socially liberal place in the region.
I really, really wanted to teach high school physics. I fell in love with physics, and I fell in love with my high school physics teachers. I've always liked kids.

My Sophomore year of high school, I really thought about getting the teaching physics degree. It was basically a teaching degree with a Physics minor. I went and talked to my high school physics teacher, and he told me this:

Don't. We went over all the salary benefits, and all the possibilities. I'd be starting at 29k (Utah), about 4k more than I would make fulltime working at a grocery store. The max salary was about 55k if you'd been there a while and had a Masters I believe. We also talked about student loan forgiveness that comes along with teaching at a Title 1 school.

He told me to do this:
Go into physics. Get a real degree, maybe a masters. Work in physics, make some money, save some money, live your life, etc... He said I was a smart enough person that I won't have any problem with this (kind, encouraging words)

He told me after I did this, if I still want to teach, not only would I be in a better position to teach, but I'd be a better teacher from the real world experience.

So, someday in the future, I plan to teach. Right now, I have a degree, a job, and I'm paying off student loans and saving up money. Someday, I'd still love to teach. I got a taste of it being a TA for a bit in college. I still talk to this teacher once a year or so.
lallysingh was describing a merit->pay cycle. You are describing a merit->opinion cycle.
Meters are stupidly based on the size of the Earth (literally, given some of the ways the meter was originally defined). Give us the reactor dimensions in attoparsecs!
>Why would a lawyer earn more money than a teacher?

Apart from governemnt lawyers and academics everybody is in private practice or working for a company. Their employers/clients have them to deal with money problems. Whoever is close to the money gets to keep some. Also, teachers have tenure, great pensions, work only 9-10 months a year, and within a few years of being hired, work under 40 hours a week on average.

>Only your ingrained cultural expectations suggest this. Can you strip those out and suggest any objective reasons that lawyers are worth more?

If you mean morally, no, it's a value discussion, and those are always boring because nobody ever convinces anybody. If you're talking about how much their labour is worth... A good lawyer makes their client money or stops bad things happening to them. This is a much more valuable service than childcare/socialisation/education to the people handing out the money. Children have no money or freedom after all.

>Do they train for longer?

Not relevant

>Is their work more important?

Value judgement; all heat, no light

>Do they need better school grades?

Yes, but that's also not terribly relevant.
> but while I was there, the mean IQ was 132

Only 132? Are you serious? How did the IQ-105 people get hired, and what were they doing — opening envelopes in the mail room?
I wish more attention would return to Kohana (kohanaframework.org), which is basically CodeIgniter done better by a community of coders, except the documentation for 3.x is sparse and IMO certain things in 2.x were better.

This idea for CI is nice, but the video reminded me of one of the more annoying parts of CI: $this->load->whatever()ing everything, which should be rightfully obsoleted for everybody running PHP5 as it is in Kohana, because PHP can autoload classes with your own custom __autoload() function. It's wasted effort to manually load everything and the collisions created in the local namespace are intolerable.
I'll put aside the fact that before you had even posted your original comment, the situation was already at the stage of debatable fallout.

Until the results are in there will also continue to be a lot of nuclear-is-perfectly-safe sensationalism (in the past hour I saw a couple of them on CNN). Do you expect and/or hope for retractions on those wildly optimistic statements by "experts" if there is "some" fallout, as you'd like to see in the reverse scenario? If so, I suspect you won't get them, though it does not really appear you'd be looking for them anyway.

Additionally, it's not clear to me why one case where there are no adverse affects (again, ignoring the fact that there are already adverse affects) is of monumental importance (a type 1 error), but the numerous cases of historic failures are not valid considerations in the same degree. Put another way, why should the hypothetical of a positive outcome of this situation have any more weight than the negative outcomes of numerous previous situations?
Pi sounds like nothing. cos(2.pi.f.t), on the other hand...
At most, how much were you making per month selling gold on Wow?
Clickable:

http://twitter.com/timeouttokyo/
In my experience New Yorkers hate to make idle chat unless they've been given a reason. In general, we're happy to give directions, and we are happy to talk to people if we're in some constrained situation, like standing on line together, commiserating over transportation, that sort of thing. But if we're on the street or in the park and you approach us to talk, odds are good you're homeless, crazy, grifting, or you want us to sign some god-damned petition.
Are these data averaged across the entire year (including summers)? The summary is not clear about that, although it does include data from summer interviews.

If it is averaged across summers, you can have a teacher working 50 hrs/wk during the school year, 0 hours during the summer and have the average come out to less than 40.
Before and After pictures of Japan
Couldn't agree more.

starting a company as part of an entrepreneurial class is not entrepreneurial. Why? Because you were told to innovate. You just followed orders. [1]

[1] http://blog.fairsoftware.net/2010/06/10/will-you-be-a-great-...
College is so different from primary school that your stated objection is completely irrelevant. Students at the vast majority of US primary schools do not get to choose what material they learn, or who teaches it to them.
Paying teachers more does not necessarily get higher quality teachers. If teachers were judged on merit and poor teachers were fired, then paying teachers more might be reasonable. But since teachers unions insist on tenure, have pay based on seniority, and make it exceptionally difficult to fire poor teachers, paying teachers more will not generally result in better quality education.

As someone else pointed out above, there are much more fundamental issues than pay--notably being able to fire poor teachers, elimination of tenure, pay based on merit/not seniority.
Right, I'm saying that the managers in charge of interpreting this data are undoubtedly aware of this effect, and so they're looking for those effects besides technical skill. It's like every Google manager already has an engine (they took care of that problem several years ago), now what can they do to make sure that there's always gas in the tank?
You don't need to have the best engineers/doctors teaching. Being an expert on something doesn't make a person a good teacher, which is a more important factor than the knowledge of that person.

But a person can be a good teacher without being the best in his area.
My four point plan for decent education:

1. Eliminate credentialing programs and requirements: complete waste of time and money, plus they weed out the smart people who can't abide the thought of wasting 1-2 years of their life.

2. Eliminate tenure and fire the worst 5% of teachers about whom there is a consensus that they suck.

3. Go back to traditional curriculums: lots of homework, lots of memorization, lots of reading the classics, lots of writing.

4. Zero tolerance for bad behavior in the classroom --kick them out of school, make it the police's problem that there are thugs on the street without babysitters.

This is how good private schools do it.
I think it's interesting to tie this to recent news about Khan Academy.

According to various talks by Sal Khan, many kids used the free videos to educate themselves about math etc. to a level better than most kids achieve in a school.

Better eduction, without teachers, for free.

If you look at YouTube's numbers for how often those videos are watched, it's in tens or hundreds of thousand of views.

I assume that most of those are from kids who watch them to learn something (I can't fathom a different reason for watching a video on multiplication).

That means at least tens of thousands of kids have been educated - the model works as a mass education medium.

I think that the current school model is broken for many reasons and lack of quality teachers is only a small portion of it, so discussing how to rise quality of teachers by paying them more misses the larger point.

We should be thinking how to fix all of the problems.

It just happens that Khan Academy model is the only realistic way (that I can see) to actually fix the system. The fix is by inverting the traditional model. Instead of one person (teacher) lecturing 20+ kids (who all differ in their current understanding of topic and how quickly they can learn new information) for an hour and giving homework assignments, the kids learn from videos, at their own pace, and teacher are there to assist when a kid reaches a stumbling block.

The above description doesn't fully convey how this works but you can find out more via videos on http://khanacademy.org. Khan Academy is already doing pilot studies with some schools and results (unsurprisingly to me) are promising.
Mean IQ, so if we assume IQ is normally distributed and there're a few people with IQ > 170, that'd imply that the bulk of people have IQs in the 125-130 range. This seems eminently believable to me.
http://pittsburgh.about.com/cs/history/a/tmi.htm

Quote: A new analysis of health statistics in the region conducted by the Radiation and Public Health Project has, however, found that death rates for infants, children, and the elderly soared in the first two years after the Three Mile Island accident in Dauphin and surrounding counties.

http://www.unc.edu/news/archives/feb97/wing.html

Quote: Exposure to high doses of radiation shortly after the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island may have increased cancer among Pennsylvanians downwind of the plant, scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill say.
From the third paragraph of the article I linked to:

With the exception of chart 1, all estimates presented are restricted to persons who were employed during the week prior to their interview and who did some work during that period. Thus, a teacher who was on summer or semester break during the week of the survey is not included in this analysis.

A great way to answer questions about an article someone cites is to actually read it.
The core message of the column makes perfect sense.

Expensive technology and boutique classrooms don't improve student performance without great teachers.

Just like a business, you can't buy excellence with furniture and computers - you can only hire excellence with great people.

I would fully support tripling teacher pay in general, with merit-based payscales and greater accountability.

Find the money by changing the student-teacher ratio and getting rid of expensive technology in the schools.

Where would you rather have kids go to school - in a large classroom taught by Richard Feynman or Bucky Fuller, sitting at wooden desks with a blackboard; or in a small intimate setting with iPads and Cisco Telepresence systems, but taught by Gladys from the DMV?
This is still largely the case at Google today.
This is amazing. I'm definitely going to keep this in my bookmarklets collection! That said, can you give us a way to re-generate the grid data? I want to roll up everything in Google Reader. (Maybe when the bookmarklet is run, if it's already active, re-generate the grid. It currently creates a second Katamari, which is also awesome.)
I thought it sounded quite beautiful. Gave me chills.

On a related note, a tech metal band called "After the Burial" wrote a breakdown according to pi. The song is actually called "Pi (The Mercury God of Infinity)"... and for those of you who are unfamiliar with the term "breakdown" (in metal these days)... it's typically just chugging a certain pattern on a low note (sometimes a few more) with everyone in sync.

Here's After the Burial performing Pi live:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_Msy-YUs4Y
(The Pi pattern starts at 1:10 but I like the intro hehe...)
is there are recording of the talk that goes with this deck?
I am a tad bit tired of articles like this that fail to point out private school teachers are actually paid less than public school teachers. So, if your doing comparisons of similar positions, government workers are making more and have better job security.

That said, I would be happy to pay teachers more for a 9 month position if they had a 4 year BS in Math, Physics, Chemistry, etc and a minor in Education. The general Education major for 7+ grade teachers is a joke and doesn't give our students someone who knows the subject.

Paying an English teacher and a Math teacher the same is also wrong. One degree has a higher market value and we need real Math teachers, not general Education people with some Math classes. I guess I'm saying I would like the Education degree removed for a minor or certificate program for High School.
Hi Tom, I think most people (me included) would agree with your last sentence)

Question for you though: which do you think creates more wealth for the most people:

Short-term greed or long term greed?