skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's pretty much what my wife goes through. Her kids have iPhones, Blackberrys, Android phones, (a lot of them are dealers) yet they can't bring a notebook or a pen/pencil, she's got to supply them or nothing would be done. She's teaching 9th grade Biology and Earth Science, yet her students are often 10th, 11th and 12th graders who fail year after year. Some of the 'kids' are 20 years old. 3 of her classes are special ed who's she's suppose to have a special ed co-teacher, but doesn't have one. As well as class size with over 35 students. She's expected to get them all to pass the NY State regents, nothing else matter. One of the biggest problems is students don't show up consistently and class length is only 40 minutes.
i changed it to that, although my apache log files aren't really giving me anything helpful. where are the cloudkick guys when you need them? ;)
The VMware Tools driver (vmt) is a nice to have.
"French search teams last week found the outer casing of the so-called black box recorder, but not its memory."

(EDIT: This is incorrect, sorry. The article is poorly worded. Would you rather I delete this comment?)
Having watched the NOVA episode, it'll be very interesting to see if this data can confirm their suspicions.
Antwerp, Belgium.

Given the location I expect nobody to find their way to us via this comment, but hey...

Full time web dev job, PHP and ExtJS. We're a small team that decides its own destiny technology-wise. We work on a single product that's continuously developed, with lots of functional variety (there's plenty of non-CRUD work). Also, there's lots of opportunity for a developer to influence what they end up building.

http://www.mcs.be/index.php?id=web-app-analyst-developer

We also have an opening for a Delphi developer, if we can find such a rare breed.
It would be interesting to see where the money really goes. Cause it's NYC it's sure not to the teachers or for getting the students books. Not that the students would even use the books, and whatever books they get they never return at the end of the year.
There are good debts and bad debts. If you use loans to pay a property which earns you $10,000/month whereas your monthly payment to the bank is only $8,000/month, why bother using cash to pay for the property?

You can leverage your cash well and scale the business to many properties and the total down payments you pay might be even less than the price of ONE property.

Good debts are those debts with higher returns elsewhere than the interest of the debts themselves. Using credit instead of cash here is simply free cash-flow.
I sort of looked at the last Spotify Programming Challange, and found the stuff pretty difficult.
Anybody have some resources to practice on this sort of stuff?
Seeing as its without the trailing 's', I think a lot of people will end up going elsewhere......
A tip for when you have a spare half hour - switch from Apache to nginx :)

Let me convince you as to why: I have a 1GB VPS with prgmr.com, and it's comfortably survived being top story on the Hacker News homepage, all whilst running my regular web apps running in the background.

Edit: If you're feeling really brave (or foolish - always a thin line), you could try setting up nginx now on a random port (e.g. 8080), and if it looks OK, kill Apache and move nginx to port 80. All depends on how much your server is struggling - would it be worth 20 mins downtime now if you don't have to worry about it again?

Edit 2: Looks like you're using Wordpress - are you using a cache plugin as well? If not, install W3 Total Cache right this very instant :) If you'd like any help with this, I'll be around for the next couple of hours, email is in my profile :)
or, you know, just donate to the project.
I don't think that's relevant to what he's saying. He appears to be claiming that teachers have a pretty sweet deal already, such that any hardships they encounter are already balanced by the perks.
...And they just found the memory unit (which is designed to detach from the recorder in the event of a collision) today.
A picture of the actual memory unit in question: http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/05/01/world/europe/01...
Oh please. I went to a (religious, not preppy) private school and the the non-unionized teachers did just fine. My family also paid about between 5 to 9k a year (complicated reasons for the range, basically the school over charges single child families and undercharges multi-child families, but also gives you a break if you have kids in an elementary school and a high school) Canadian dollars (so at the time, it would have been 3k to 6k American) for two children in private school. The average the province of Ontario paid at the time was 11k per child.

The market can handle delivery of education just fine without complicated unions and pay scales. All we need to do is to ensure that every family can afford to send their kids there (vouchers, or whatever).
Location Labs is hiring in Emeryville (East Bay).

We are a an extremely fast growing, profitable company building mobile and location based solutions for family safety. Currently we are working on mobile platforms that are already getting wide distribution through carriers.

We're looking for infrastructure and mobile engineers, as well as product managers for building new safety products and extremely scalable platforms such for spatial storage, location services, and remote device management for smartphones.

email me (address in HN profile), in case you want to know more about the kind of work, environment or other things.

http://www.locationlabs.com/jobs/
SEEKING FREELANCER - Android developer, San Francisco / Remote OK

We are a small startup founded by a group of ex-google engineers in San Francisco. We are building a set of companion mobile applications for our primary product, and are seeking to hire a freelancer for the Android app (we've built the corresponding iPhone app).

Shoot me an email - spinlock AT gmail.com - with some links to android work you've done, and we can setup a time to talk.
They described it as Disqus meets Quora.

http://socialcam.com/v/4GWNAQJb
If someone were to do this to me, it would bring me from on-the-fence firmly into the "no" camp. It shows a blatant lack of respect, IMO.

That was my initial reaction as well. But after thinking about it - if the guy emailed me every day with a good reason, I think I'd start to be gently amused. Could work. Irritatingly ;)
This is nice but it probably belongs on a blog. It's not really HN content either. I think the success of HN is causing too many extra posts. We need a little more focus here.

Create a Haskell, Clojure, or Scheme blog or site then it becomes a number one story.
It took me a while to figure out that the way to close a split is ^Wc

Probably because I'm not a huge vim user, and was only previously aware of the :q syntax you mentioned.
An Excellent Review of "Good Calories, Bad Calories"
I think the text based nature of the site is a challenge you need to overcome - Why would I want to read any of these descriptions? A few thoughts for solutions:

- Let people upload cover art: This will let people who have decent design chops/family in the business/etc. Stand out a little more. And as Amanda Hocking's books show the cover can be a stock image with a genre appropriate font well within the means of anyone with PowerPoint.

- "This + That" pitches: I know some VCs and Hollywood types love this format e.g. Alien is "Jaws in Space". What if you could pull in a couple images from Amazon to illustrate that this pitch is for a book that is sort of like "Game of Thrones" meets Robert Ludlum.

- Author photos: let the authors make connections with the sponsors. Let them tell their stories "I'm a stay at home mom who has been dreaming about this book for a decade"

- Rewards: Galley copies if it gets published, Buy the "For:" in the front, etc.
Note the rhetorical sleight of hand in this op-ed piece. The op-ed piece, and the advocacy group sources it cites to back up its claims, take care to write about "teachers’ salaries" rather than write about "compensation packages for teachers." The rhetorical reason for this is to divert attention from how expensive it actually is to taxpayers to provide the total compensation package for a typical schoolteacher, including subsidies for "professional development" (which most professionals pay for out of their own pocket), family health care benefits, and defined-benefit pensions. And that's not even to mention the issue of schoolteacher job security

http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2008-05-06-teachers-t...

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41956922/ns/nightly_news/

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2011/0414/Why-N.J.-te...

which exceeds the job security of almost all other forms of employment in the United States

http://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/28/nyregion/teachers-and-tenu...

http://www.schoolmatch.com/audit/jacksonville/articles/teach...

whether or not the teachers are able to teach the subjects they are hired to teach.

http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf

http://www.nctq.org/p/

http://educationnext.org/evaluating-teacher-effectiveness/

Education reform is not a simple issue, and much basic research still needs to be done and assimilated to bring about improvements.

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2066577,00.ht...

But to begin to get United States schools on track to meet the standards met in other countries, policy analysts in the United States have to be honest about what the overall framework of regulation now is, and just exactly what teachers are accountable to do, for what level of compensation, under current contracts in most school districts.

P.S. I should make clear that an effective teacher is worth the teacher's weight in gold, and currently the best teachers in the United States are mostly substantially underpaid. But they are underpaid, in large part, because they haven't mobilized their own political participation to unshackle their pay from the lockstep pay scales that also are granted to ineffective teachers. That's why I do my teaching on a contract basis with public school districts or through my own nonprofit organization, so that I can deliver quality lessons without bureaucratic interference and gain professional recognition for the results of my teaching.
Donations do help to fund the OpenBSD hackathons but buying CDs is still important. You can find more details here:

http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=201104192...
Ahhh. Thank you for clarifying the article. That's amazing!
It's a minor issue, but if you frequently add integers to dictionaries you can easily add a category on NSDictionary with your new method. That's a feature I miss in C++.
I think that may be the part that bothers me more -- this could well be beneficial to me, but by showing me a complete lack of respect, he's ensuring that it never happens. If, instead, he provided me a couple good reasons upfront, we'd probably make things work, without emails badgering me.
I don't think the meaning you give to "dynamic" here has much bearing on the difficulty of just-in-time compilation, except for reflection.

In Scheme you can define and create new functions and macros at runtime. There is not much else that is dynamic about the Scheme standard[1] because... there's not much else to the Scheme standard.

As for reflection, I see that mainly as a tools/debugging aid, and therefore very implementation-specific stuff. "Dynamic" languages have reflection in their definition because they are mostly defined by implementation.

That said, the Scheme standard doesn't preclude reflectivity at all, nor seems particularly compile-oriented to me. Nowhere it is assumed that implementations be compilers at all.

I think most of the things you find missing there were not left out for efficiency, but because it was rightly considered that they don't belong in the language spec at all.

[1] By the "Scheme standard" I mean R5RS.
Forgot to mention something. One of the other side effects of not going to university is that I wasn't exposed to the "pop culture of education" as I call it. That is to say, I wasn't exposed to common classical literary works, authors, composers, music, etc.

Often times I find myself in the middle of a conversation about greek philosophy with some coworkers, for example. Mind you none of these people are anywhere expert level in these topics but they all have an introductory set of knowledge to draw from. I have nothing. Luckily, my parents (as crazy as they were) were HIGHLY intellectual and infused some knowledge in stubborn brain. When I was a kid, my mom FORCED me to spend 1 hour per day reading classic literature. Damn I hated that. So now when people bring up War and Peace, I'm like, "Yea I read that" (whoo)

Anyway, point is there are side effects that are usually untold.
Where did you see this? There are plenty of bullshit "opportunities" forwarded around CS student mailing lists. You'll learn to bin these soon enough.

My favourite was an ad for a PHP Ninja, where you needed to be a PhD student in order to maintain their CRUD webapp, but they might be willing to glance at your CV if you only had a Masters.

If an advert emphasises what you will gain from an internship, in terms of skills and in terms of money, that is a good sign.

Just ignore anything that doesn't feel right.
Air France Flight #447: Data Recorder Is Found
EA is no longer using Erlang, at least none of the code related to this project. I was engineering manager for the rupture team at the tail end of our time at EA. Our entire backend was built using Erlang, and ufortunately the existing MySQL drivers were less than stable, forcing us to build our own.
You could use a tool like fivesecondtest.com. Not affiliated, btw.
For some time, I've lamented the negative effects that the government's effective monopoly over primary education has had on our system. Eliminating choice eliminates the natural incentive to improve that results from consumers choosing better alternatives.

I found the monopsony problem you've pointed out on the employment end of the system quite insightful. Entering an industry with a limited number of employers generally isn't a great idea. However, there's a simpler solution to the problem than more unionization, which in practice requires non-voluntary membership to be effective. I think we'd all be better off if the government continued to fund education for those who can't afford it, but stopped actually running the schools themselves. I don't understand why voucher proposals find such limited support.
SpiderOak (the backup and sync company) is on the verge of launching a S3-like service, tuned for for archival class data. It's in beta now.

It's also entirely open source, so you could run it on your own hardware if you wanted. It uses parity instead of replication for storing data (but with arbitrary effectively replication levels.) So with R=3, you need a minimum of about 10 nodes to be efficient.

The beta uses AMQP internally, and the upcoming release version is Python/zeromq/gevent based.

https://spideroak.com/diy/
Sexy website.
If teachers with experience aren't any better then they shouldn't be paid more for experience (not exactly true with a finite teacher supply, but close enough). Shifting money to newer teachers is going to drive newer teachers away from teaching jobs? I don't think you thought this through.

Regarding personality conflicts, having some teachers fired because they can't get along with their boss is a small price to pay to get rid of the worst teachers easily. Principals should be incentivized to keep talented teachers, and thus discouraged from firing them for petty reasons.
Does the article say that they found the cover of the second recorder but the data on the 1st? Thought the wording was ever so slightly ambiguous
Ask HN: Best Solution for Aggregation Payments?
I was told by Paypal's compliance department that my startup was not allowed to use their service since it considers my business model an aggregation site, where I would take payment from one party and release it to two others after an action is performed.

Amazon's FPS Aggregator/WebPay service requires users to have or setup an Amazon account, which is fine for some users, but not the best solution in this case.

I need my users to have an account that they will add funds to in order to pay for items, and also need options as far as getting paid back out on the selling side (online, snailmailed checks, direct deposits, etc.)

Are there any other recommended payment aggregation services that might be a good solution for this?
Kalahar79movies
It takes one teacher to teach 20 students.

Where my wife grew up, it took one teacher to teach 60 pupils. A class size of 50 was an exceptionally small class size. Several of the countries that best the United States in academic achievement

http://timss.bc.edu/PDF/t03_download/T03_M_Chap1.pdf

have much higher class sizes per teacher than the United States has. It is definitely possible to improve teacher productivity over the low level maintained in the United States. There are whole books on the subject.

http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Gap-Schools-Japanese-Educatio...

http://www.amazon.com/Smart-Schools-David-Perkins/dp/0028740...

http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Gap-Improving-Education-Class...

http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematic...
When that property stops earning you $10,000/month, you'll be in a heap of trouble pretty fast if you can't keep making those $8,000/month payments.
It's not a bad thing when employers continually raise the bar on their expectations for both full-times and interns.

You should still apply to these seemingly daunting positions because many times employers want to see you have the capacity to learn (remember almost anyone can learn anything given some reasonable amount of time) even if you don't know something right now.

Also well-known companies know they can suck people in through name alone and not pay them as much as other firms.
As an individual (not a company), I see my credit card as an interest-free loan until the end of the month. I pay my CC bill in full every month but were something to come up in an emergency I could allocate money as needed and pay the minimum whereas if I had already paid for everything in cash I might be out of luck.

If you feel comfortable and are fairly sure you know what you're spending is going to be like in the next year, it's also possible to take advantage of those "No interest for a full year!!" deals but carrying a high balance (a high percentage of your available credit) can negatively effect your credit score.

Be careful out there :)
NewsCred - New York City

We're hiring information retrieval engineers and sales people. More here: http://platform.newscred.com/jobs.

We've created a single API for all the news in the world. We are backed by three top-tier VCs, have a product in the market and real revenues.

Lots of perks, plus unlimited vacations! Email me: shafqat at newscred dot com.
Actually it will run Portable OpenSSH. If you really care about donating for that cause, contacting the porting team might be a good idea.
There is nothing anarchistic about the legal ways in which the press is protected from prosecution if a source reveals classified materials.

The person who had security clearance and violated it to leak the materials has committed a crime, and sometimes such crimes are committed by people who discover an abhorrent practice and decide that revealing it is worth the price (possible prosecution).

Any organization will have rules that prevent insiders from leaking certain information, but ultimately every employee must be guided by his/her own moral compass. Loyalty to the institution would ideally result in the employee pursuing things internally within the organization first. But in some cases the crimes are so deeply rooted or so broadly ignored that the employee faces the tough decision of whether to blow the whistle or to become complicit in the abhorrent acts.

No legitimate organization would wish to commit abhorrent acts, and so we must recognize such acts as an artifact of bureaucracy and corruption. Thus, like lymphocytes in an organism's immune system, whistle blowers benefit the organization by helping rid it of such toxins.

US law protects the press b/c this phenomenon is understood to effect organizations of all sizes, including governments. Individual whistle blowers are often viewed as heroes because of the personal risks they endure to save their beloved organizations from corruption and malice.

What self-respecting member of the military would countenance such abuses as Bradley Manning learned of when he viewed the war logs when he decided to release them? Loyalty is perhaps a virtue, but it comes below a person's own individual integrity and sense of right and wrong.
Maybe the number one reason is that debt forms a tax shield: Interest payments are an expense which reduces your tax base while dividend payments don't. (see the trade-off theory)

Asymmetric information is another possible reason to prefer debt: If somebody wants to sell something, it often means that he's not happy with it. So what does it tell a potential investor if management wants to sell equity? Thus, management will often prefer to issue debt as to not send a negative signal to the market. (see the pecking order theory)

It's interesting to note that Modigliani & Miller have proven that the financial structure (ratio of equity to debt) wouldn't matter in a frictionless market. There are many theories concerning many different market frictions, e.g. bankruptcy cost, agency problems, etc.
Ferry — Database-Supported Program Execution
I wouldn't read the emails after day three, I'd probably have them automatically filtered by day five.
I don't understand why you'd characterize it as "greedy," "dangerous" or "tempting fate." Nobody's advocating doing anything legally or medically sketchy — that's why he said to get the plan approved by the people who know what's OK and what isn't.

I also don't understand what PG's cut of ViaWeb has to do with anything.
I've survived front page of HN and Slashdot with a 512 MB Linode, Wordpress and Apache. Configuration is everything and Apache's distro defaults are usually the problem, not Apache.
Certainly a fair question. We use it as a signal. Of the 100+ UI folks I admire and respect, I think all of them use OS X. So while it's certainly possible to be a great interface developer using a different platform, in my experience such people are exceedingly rare.

By focusing on those that use OS X we can narrow down the applicant pool and spend more time with folks that are likely to be a good fit.
Then you could make a similar argument for Microsoft scraping Google search results via their browser toolbar.

Writing code that has users doing the scraping for you is still scraping.
Most people do not talk about total compensation in the U.S. when discussing salaries. My total compensation is around $65,000. It is much less than anyone I know in the private sector with comparable education and experience. And this while comparing my total compensation with just their salary.

Most professionals do get health coverage and some sort of pension coverage (usually 401K matching funds). I don't think it's fair to include these things when talking about teacher pay unless one does this for non-teachers as well. As a society we usually don't include these things when talking about non-teacher pay. Heck, most people think that they only pay half of FICA and that the employer pays the other half.

Given the hours worked, emotional stress, and grief that many teachers experience I think teachers are underpaid. Very much underpaid. I'm a teacher and have an obvious bias. At my school our contracts are being negotiated right now. It's clear we are going to take a pay cut. I haven't had a pay raise in 2 years and will be taking a pay cut over the the next two years.

The job is becoming less and less desirable. I strongly encourage anyone who will listen to me to not go into teaching. It's a bad career choice in my opinion.