skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sweet! I'm completely unfamiliar with Ruby, which I think is half the problem (edit: and git/github, which is probably the other half). If there's a different file(s) to download for that fork, I can't find them -- everything in the github project seems to link back to https://gist.github.com/323731, which is the Intel build (edit: e.g., the Readme.md file). I tried replacing my copy of brew with https://github.com/sceaga/homebrew/blob/powerpc/bin/brew, but that complained that it can't find brew.h ("no such file to load -- brew.h" on line 77) ... at that point, I decided that I'd spent too much time trying to get pianobar upgraded and moved on to other things.
You're both half-right. due to the state and county segmentation of education, union influence and educational job security varies widely. In places like New York, unions are very powerful and dismissals are difficult. In some places, it's far easier.

Likewise, some places have very high academic standards, and in other places creationism is considered a valid element in science currricula. Academic quality is not strongly correlated to unions' bargaining ability, as far as I can tell.
Productivity in teaching is not how many students can be taught by one teacher. It is how effective the teacher is at helping students learn.
I know it's truly equivalent and the differences between Haskell and math are illusory, I just think that it would be easier for non-technical people to go "oh, that's math!" if it was in the form of a calculus and if running it involved more than telling Haskell, "here's a Haskell source file, go for it."

The point that one can, in fact, make an interpreter for mathematical statements is not lost on me. That's more or less what metamath.org is making, after all.
The thought you can rid yourself of all or even most bad teachers is absurd.

Eric Hanushek shows steps of reasoning, based on facts, in one of his published articles,

http://www.stanfordalumni.org/leadingmatters/san_francisco/d...

suggesting that if the United States systematically persuaded the bottom 5 percent of teachers to leave teaching for some other occupation, year after year after year, it wouldn't be long before the academic achievement outcomes in United States schools would be as high as those in schools anywhere in the world. The issues he considers in his article are quite interesting, and show that he has thought a long time about education reform and side-effects of education policies.

As for the claim that the bottom 5 percent of teachers leaving the occupation couldn't be made up numerically (you mentioned 10 percent, but I am following Hanushek's figure), I disagree with that claim on several grounds.

1) Previous studies of the issue have shown that there are many credentialed teachers who are not currently actively teaching full-time. Again, I am still Googling for studies as I post this (this is a fact I read in books years ago), but it's fairly widely known that there are teachers with credentials who currently don't participate in the teacher labor force.

2) On the basis of international comparisons of class sizes, and on the basis that a bottom-5-percent teacher probably does more harm than good, we might just as well persuade the worst teachers to do other kinds of work, and have the top 95 percent of teachers divide up the students for slightly larger class sizes each, and perhaps a share of the compensation packages formerly allocated to the worse teachers who have left the occupation.

3) Supply of labor is generally elastic with respect to demand (especially in the current United States economy, with high unemployment). If schools around the country announce that they are dismissing teachers who don't perform well, and still sticking to the same class size targets, something else will change (perhaps the prestige of the occupation of teaching, as it becomes known as an occupation that doesn't tie the fortune of competent teachers to pay scales designed for incompetent teachers) and new workers will be attracted to make the investment, whatever that is, to enter the occupation.

See Hanushek's article for more details. I think this is an important issue to discuss, and I'm glad you joined issue about what is possible, and what should be done.

The biggest thing that probably will get overlooked, even by what I'd like to do, are bright students at poor schools.

I'm glad you mentioned that issue at the bottom of your post. That is an issue of great concern to me too. My reply to the article submission in this thread, with a link to an article by Kenschaft on mathematics teaching,

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

is motivated by that concern. Best wishes for finding people to collaborate with to help improve education for able students from low-income backgrounds who currently can't afford to shop for schools.
Sweet indeed... would love to hear more about this.
I actually think teachers shouldn't have entire summers off. That's a great time to review teaching methods and materials, prepare curriculum, hold teaching conferences, and other things that would free them up during the school year to focus more on class time. Trying to do those things after teaching hundreds of students all day long is really difficult. It's amazing to me that teachers even manage to do as well as they do.

Moving to yearlong schooling with a shorter summer break and a longer winter break, plus longer breaks between each quarter would be better though. Students who aren't exposed to reading and writing English at home wouldn't slowly fall behind year after year due to the long summer vacations.

I have to agree with you though. The policy makers do more harm than good, but the truth is that by setting some bureaucratic benchmark, they feel they can wash their hands of any responsibility on the matter without spending more money on education.

The problem with these standardized benchmarks is that they only punish students and schools for cumulative educational deficiencies instead of allowing them to slow down and address them, so as students go from grade to grade, they're gradually robbed of the education they should have had.

I think the current educational goal of having all students meet some standard benchmark of academic achievement is flawed. Instead, we should simply try teaching students as much as they can learn at the pace at which each student learns best, or better yet, teach them a love of learning and the ability to continue learning on their own. If that means slowing down the curriculum for some students, then so be it. It's better that they master what skills they can in the given time they have in school than to force them into more and more difficult material with an ever poorer and poorer foundation to work off of until they give up.

Honestly, we should only provide standard individual benchmarks to assess where an individual student stands in their development so that teachers can adjust the curriculum to match each student regardless of how well they know that student or where they came from. And then we should also give teachers the freedom, time, and flexibility to adapt to their students' individual needs.

The way it is now, we force teachers to treat students like products in an assembly line. The benchmark-based punishment and reward system we have now even incentivizes this treatment of students. It's sad.
Those are both good orgs to donate to. However when you consider just how much callous loss of life and suffering is being caused by the stuff that Wikileaks is revealing about the US, it really is enough to give any reasonable person pause.
I have little to add beyond pointing out that this is discussed in the comment-section by more commenters than the one I am linking to now:

edit:
Replaced with better link: http://torrentfreak.com/wikileaks-police-arrested-movie-pira...
i noticed phusion passenger is supported on nginx as well, i'll look into doing this. thanks, hopefully this will work nicely on the 512 that i had with linode.

also, i'm installing w3 cache right now. you'll probably hear from me.
"IPsec stack audit was performed, resulting in:

Several potential security problems have been identified and fixed."

...nice euphemism.
Congrats on your success! It seems like your hard work has definitely paid off.

Just a few nit-picky things: Not sure if you are a native English speaker or not, but your analysis was somewhat difficult to follow. Spelling was okay, but there were just weird little things here and there that were confusing. Also, please link images such that they open in a new window/tab. I can't even tell you how many times I opened an image, then Xed out thinking it was in it's own window.
The article describes techniques for setting up RAID(0) against EC2 local ephemeral storage for performance gains. As there's no way to replace a failed drive RAID 10 wouldn't provide any benefit.
Ohh.... bummer. It's on a Tuesday. I'd have made the trip if it were the weekend.
salesforce.com, inc. [CRM]
San Francisco, CA

My team is hiring a front-end UI developer/designer to work in Product Marketing. We build cool demos that leverage the latest technologies out there such as backbone.js, CoffeeScript, etc. We also build a ton of our apps on Heroku, our new Ruby cloud. :)

You'll be working out of our HQ which is pretty much located in the best part of the financial district across the street from the Ferry Building and close to transportation.

We pay very, very well and we have great benefits. Medical, dental, vision + fitness reimbursement. You can choose between Club One membership or $100/mo towards any gym you want.

We want someone who is passionate about technology but also has a bit of an "edge" for business. If this sounds like you, send me your resume: kwu@salesforce.com

P.S. I've been interviewed by YC four times but never got through. Got accepted once, but was not able to join due to family circumstances. I'm an entrepreneur at heart offering someone out there a chance to move to SF and learn something about enterprise software.
metamath.org How have I never seen this before?! So much for the rest of my weekend.. thanks! (really)
> including subsidies for "professional development" (which most professionals pay for out of their own pocket)

To be fair, they're required to take such classes by law. At least, when my mother was alive, she needed to take so many credits per year to retain her teaching certification.
CS is one of the fields where you really can get a good education outside the traditional system. I feel like I did. Don't let anyone tell you that these things are scary and hard, and you need a university to guide you.

I hear MIT's OCW is quite good now, though I haven't used it much myself. Might be a good place to start. Honestly, there are many great resources out there; just pick something and get started.

Cheap schools are a good idea, and I completely agree with that. But it can be hard to work and learn on a schedule; many people would do much better if they are able to learn at their own pace.
I experimented with an Archbang + wmii setup on my netbook for a few months. I don't see how this app comes close to emulating that experience. I suggest a VM setup.
Everlane
FULL TIME
San Francisco, CA

Hey HN!

I'm Jesse, one of the co-founders of Everlane, and we're hiring engineers.

Check out our website at http://www.everlane.com, and my personal blog at http://20bits.com

We're trying to re-imagine retail online and make it easy to find products that match your taste and style. Right now we're focused on mens fashion, but our ambitions are much larger.

pg did a good job of explaining the opportunity, here: http://ycombinator.com/rfs2.html

Here's a sample of some of the user feedback we get daily:

* I can't wait until you open a store.

* When are you going to start selling things? I want to spend all my money with you.

* It's like you entered my brain and turned it into a store.

* I want to buy all my husband's clothes from you -- please start selling!

We're well-funded by really awesome investors and need engineers who are interested in building the next big online retail destination.

Our current stack is Ruby, Rails, MySQL, and Heroku, but smart and hungry beats knowledge of specific languages.

If you're interested send me an email at jesse@everlane.com and mention this post. The most important thing is for you to be excited by the opportunity, so make it clear.

Bonus points for including a solution to this exercise in the language of your choice: http://static.everlane.com/everlane_exercise.pdf
Another comment that this looks great! I've been using MacVim as my main editor and love it, but totally appreciate the polish of Vico -- looks wonderful.

My wishlist, right off the bat (note I know some of this might be unreasonable, but that's why it's a wishlist ;) Mostly centered around a quick transition from MavVim to Vico...

* Would be excellent if I could import a vim colorscheme

* Would be excellent if it could read/use my .vimrc

* Would be _excellent_ if it supported vim bundles/add-ons, but I know that's basically asking for vim :)

* In editing a Ruby file, I wrote 'def' it colored and indented my second line, but only colored my 'end' -- didn't outdent it properly. Small annoyance. Also would be great if I could configure it to auto-insert an 'end' for every 'def' or 'Class' or 'if' etc....

Keep up the great work and get an RSS feed up on your blog so we can keep track of updates...
Or grab a digital projector off eBay and project a video loop of moving clouds or flowing lava. Less painting, more interesting.
Microsoft has magic iOS to WP7 conversion tool?
Like I said, it's not necessarily a rational decision, it's just that the pain of being invested into a platform only to have it become completely unsupported way before I'm ready to spend money on the Next! Great! New! Thing! has been burned into my brain. It's just not a hassle I need to deal with, not when I'm equally comfortable in Windows, Debian, or Mac.

It might be understandable if this was some kind of resource-hungry multimedia application, but a text editor? Like you say, "come on".

Also, Apple is notorious for wanting to own as much of their vertical as possible. They hate dealing with other companies for critical components, especially processors. They've become quite good at the processor transition at this point, and now that they own their own microprocessor and are using it in all of their mobile devices -- and touting the superior benefits of their processor every chance they get -- I'd be willing to make a pretty big bet that moving at least their entire laptop line over to the A series processors is already on their development roadmap.

I think the writing's on the proverbial wall and, like I said, I'm just tired of getting caught by it every time it happens.
I know a number of teachers and administrators, and caterping's comments ring true. It sums up what I hear over and over.

At this point it comes down to what is the low hanging fruit? Of these problems what are the easiest (and/or best value) to solve? The biggest change I've seen is the relationship between teacher/school and student/parent. That same problem is all too often described as a "student's attitude" problem. But really the school administration and parents are just as complicit.

We all had the same ornery students around when we were in school. Arguably I was one of them. The way I remember it is we just had a much shorter leash. So, in the end, I was forced to just comply and "play the game". Which was a healthy life lesson. If I was given the options that these kids were, I'm sure I would have exploited fuck out of it. And I can promise I never would have learned that sometimes you just have to jump through all the hoops and "play the game" to get things done.
I realize the topic of discussion here is whether or not college is important/useful, but as a sidenote I just have to say that your animation was absolutely stunning! Excellent work!
http://wastm2released.com/

MacroMates totally dropped the ball. What a shame. Everybody was suing TextMate, everyone was talking about it a few years ago, and they didn't capitalise on that.
Is there any good evidence that the main problem with our schools is bad teaching? In other words, if you're going to spend money on improving educational outcomes, should you spend it on "better" teachers or on something like early childhood interventions, as per arguments like this:

http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/03/james-heckman-educ...

(Ignoring for the moment that spending people's tax dollars on better teachers is politically more acceptable than spending it on targeted interventions.)
Game Closure - Palo Alto CA.

Have you built your own sweet HTML5 game? At Game Closure, we are building a cross-platform HTML5-based gaming SDK (iOS, Android, and browser for now). Shoot us an email at jobs@gameclosure.com.
We will pay for your travel if we want to interview you.
We are hiring for the following positions:
Game Developer: Experience building games and knowledge of javascript. Show us your games!
Platform Engineer: Deep expertise in some of the following - iOS, Android, WebGL/OpenGL, javascript, HTML5.
Network Engineer: Deep expertise in real-time networking technologies on the web.
In the US, by the Feist precedent [1], strictly factual directory information isn't copyrightable. Now, Apple Legal could surely muster some case that Apple has creatively enhanced this data, but their strategic interests might be more helped by examples of legitimate user-embraced uses than a strong claim of proprietary ownership.

(To the extent that there is creative expression in the individual users' logs, it could be in their choice of travel routes, making the user the holder of some copyright interest in the time- and space-ordered paths.)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural
Colours cold start problem
I understand why in a world of easily destructible tape memory, there was only one, non-replicated flight data recorder memory. And it must've been quite heavy.

I don't understand now why in an aircraft strewn with various datalinks, there aren't a dozens or more inexpensive, lightweight easily findable flashdrives as datarecorders. You could place these at the wingtips, in the tail, in the landing gear, in all sorts of places that are known to survive.
Also known to install FBI backdoors:
http://cryptome.org/0003/fbi-backdoors.htm
If there is voucher money available, then the poverty of a neighborhood is a lower factor than it is for, say, retailers.

On the other hand, poor neighborhoods can be more dangerous and involve greater academic and social challenges. The solution is not to measure schools in poor areas against those in good ones and declare them worse because they perform more poorly (due to circumstances beyond teachers' control), but to measure students' baseline ability and then fund and reward relative improvement, rather than on the basis of absolute outcomes.

For example, say you go into a neighborhood on the first day of school and find that only 50% of 10th graders meet expectations for literacy. The best teacher in the world is not going to be be able to bring that up to the 95% level in a wealthy area on the other side of town, but if the proportion of students who are literate rises to 75% by the end of the 12th grade (correcting for dropout %ages), then that's a huge improvement. In economic terms, it's worth adding more funding right up to the point where marginal net gain falls below zero.

There are obviously willing and committed teachers willing to take on these important challenges. Maybe they would do better by setting up nonprofits and applying for funds to establish charter schools instead of abdicating their negotiation power to the national unions.
> $15 per audio hour may seem low, especially considering that one hour of audio may take up to 4 hours to transcribe. But when you look at the conversion rate, it’s not that bad. $1 USD converts to 83 Kenyan Shillings. I paid around $800 total for the transcribing, which converts to 66,400 Shillings. That’s about a month’s worth of rent in Nairobi, the largest city and capital of Kenya.

This bothers me. Yeah, rent and food is going to be cheap in Kenya, but an iPad will cost the same. There's a good chance it'll be costlier because of import taxes.

Of course, this is a unique case where transcriber had no feedback. In general though, you shouldn't be paying someone based on your opinion of their cost of living. It demonstrates a lack of respect, and shows that you don't treat them as an equal human being.

Maybe it's idealistic nonsense.
Actually, this format works out quite nicely. If you're browsing this thread and seeking work, you ctrl+f "SEEKING FREELANCER". Likewise, if you're seeking a freelancer, you ctrl+f "SEEKING WORK". Makes finding exactly what you need a breeze. And those responses that include neither of these terms are overlooked, for better or worse.
Conshohocken, PA - Monetate

We have fun problems at scale - real-time decision making plus web scale data. We have hired people from HN before and are always looking to meet new people.

We sell SAAS to internet retailers allowing them to test site content, target to visitor segments, and personalize web experiences.

Currently hiring for positions here: http://monetate.com/about/jobs/ - primarily product engineers, front-end developers.

We work primarily in Python and Javascript but are looking for talented engineers of any background who like solving new problems.

We are backed by First Round Capital and are growing quickly.

Please feel free to email me at tjanofsky at monetate.
Actually there are a few things that have a measurable upward effect. One of the better documented ones is running an hour a day. Not only does it show measurable improvements on intelligence tests (for both rats and humans!), but it increases the rate of neurogenesis. Slightly less certain, but still very compelling is the research related to taking up a musical instrument as a child. I'm confident that it's just a matter of time before we have more targeted training regimens and smart drugs that are both powerful and safe.
To quickly run through these in order:
1) The program was extended. And regardless, the original company investment was made during the holiday, so as long as I roll over within 60 days, I'm OK.
2) I did hire a tax lawyer, which is why I understand the circumstances pretty thoroughly. What they weren't able to do was recommend a specific course of action based upon firsthand experience, which is why I'm asking here - either for someone who has that experience, or a pointer to a lawyer who's specifically experienced with this particular cranny of law
- It's not feasible to delay without wrecking the deal
- A stock transaction is not an option for the acquirer
- We're a C corp
- I asked a CPA as well since what I'm looking for is experiences and strategies. I concur with the gist of this advice and will have a tax attorney look over it if I come up with anything.

Thanks for taking the time to weight in.
Unpaid internships are illegal in Canada, by the way, so you'd have to be hiring/getting help from someone out of the country.