skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> They also help, by identifying bad teachers and bad schools.

Aside from the arguments posted in sibling comments about what's being measured, you also have a problem of unaligned incentives. In particular, your claim only has a chance of being true if the students are actually interested in scoring as high as they can on the exam. Even at the AP level (I teach at university level and interact with secondary teachers that teach smart, high-level students taking CS), there are students who have decided that they don't care about the subject, or maybe even like the subject but have no (perceived) benefit from a high score due to their chosen college not giving credit in that subject or whatever. Such students may leave their answer book blank, or doodle in it, or maybe just blast through for the easy points and finish early and not worry about thinking about it.

This isn't even necessarily a particularly irrational choice on their part!

But it's a strong argument why the exams shouldn't be used to evaluate the teacher or the school. In a lot of places the students aren't permitted to opt out of the exam, even if they don't care about it, but there's no penalty to the student for taking a dive on it (and any penalty you could try to assess would have false positives and false negatives and still not motivate many of the students with differently-aligned incentives).

All of these problems are going to be a million times worse on a general-education primary- or secondary-level assessment than they are on AP exams.
Let's say the labels are gone... Do you think that simply posting a picture of you with your child on your professional home page could also trigger warning light in the visitors? The only think I could think if is "Not again, there's too much of this on Facebook already."
Android 5.0 Jelly Bean To Be Launched In Q3 Of 2012
The goal of brainfuck is to be as minimal as possible. Being bad is just a side effect of that.

If you want a language that was designed to be bad look at Malbolge or INTERCAL.
TechCrunch never ceases to amaze me. Pushing blogging forward? With a simple markdown to post converter with a crappy editor with an "idea" button?! Give me a break, man. Its too early for this.

An entire article about some designer elitist's super-cool-too-cool-for-you-bro-because-I'm-a-superhero closed blogging "network"?

Svbtle (dumb name.), is garbage. It looks like something I designed in 7th grade, yet it's getting so much attention that arguably the worst tech blog on the Internet did a write-up on it?

It was copied in 12 hours for a reason, it sucks.

Hacking is about openness, not snobs rubbing their clout in everyone's faces.
Go ahead, touch the cornballer, you know best!
Shellscript - both sh and csh. It has horribly inconsistent syntax, a myriad of ridiculous quoting rules that always explode on you whenever something unexpected shows up as data, almost zero data structures, and you have to fork a process to do anything. If not for the fact that it comes standard on every UNIX system, everybody would be laughing at anyone who tried to write anything serious in it.
If we are being pedantic: it should be "greatest common denominator".
Not every lottery, but it does happen.
http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-08-11/news/30004911...

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/02/02/statistician-crack...
I don't think so - to me, the tone seems informative: "hey, did you know that data centers might not need all that cooling? here's an example."

Plus, humans can work for about 80-90 minutes at close to 100 F (albeit not comfortably)[1], so we're not really talking about conditions that would kill people. One can extrapolate, of course, but it's quite possible that the servers would break down before the humans do.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9183079
You cannot have a sane ORM that works with nosql and sql databases without compromising features & complexity.

Well, people don't need all the features all the time.

Else, they would use Oracle and not MongoDB.

In the same logic, they get by with Django ORM just fine.

As for the complexity, I don't think anyone ever called it complex...
Pinterest Vs Fancy
"Creative approaches to maths are usually verboten in education"

I will quote this.
Perhaps the JS community you portray doesn't just exist in two discrete attitudes. As far as I see it, JS is a fact of the current web so trying to get the best from it is the easiest way to dull the pain of what is often clumsy and irritating. There are certainly places and uses where static typing would be great and the web is no exception but JavaScript isn't suddenly going to go away just because it's easy to write bad code, or because a load of 'hipsters' are making some flavour of it popular at the moment.
Interesting. Do color-coded layers have meaning?
From the AT&T Archives: The Unix Operating System (Video)
Tips on How To Avoid Credit Card Debt Lawsuits | Answering a Summons
Why Magicians Are a Scientist’s Best Friend
Has Location Lived Up to its Hype?
Princeton Review teaches students to use logic and some knowledge to exclude wrong answers, to help the top 10ish percent raise their scores. Students who are capable of using these techniques are much more intelligent/education than students at risk for failing state tests.
Indeed. And not just those subjects. Computers are still a very long way off from judging the correctness of say a human written proof or solution to a physics problem. Even in technical subjects universities will be impossible to replace without major major leaps in AI.
Foursquare talk on Machine Learning with Large Networks of People and Places
I certainly didn't write it to be incendiary, and I don't read it that way?

I'm not going to go back and edit it, but I'll ask you to give me the benefit of the doubt that I meant it to be as as far from incendiary as possible.
You're quite right, though of course you don't get the Cocoa libraries. GNUStep might give something of the same flavor, perhaps.
Ha, what a neat way to wake up -- my blog on HN. Thanks guys.
I'm rather surprised that there are 30 people on HN that know COBOL well enough to dislike it most.
Creepy, but brilliant.

I'm imagining what it would be like to be born into this world already having a facebook account, to already have begun being tracked, to already have a web presence. Your parents would manage the account until you came of certain age, then a present on your birthday could be control of your facebook account...
Eric Ries speaking about the lean startup phenomenon
There's a reason that there's no path to doing this legally.

1) Have you ever flown an RC plane? Do you know a) How difficult it is? b) How little control you have? c) How dangerous it is if not controlled? That's why (sane) people fly their planes in big fields away from people, trees, power lines, clotheslines, satellite dishes, etc.

2) More broadly, we are only beginning to have good algorithms for awareness of automobile traffic conditions. (Google's work with driverless cars, for example.) This is basically 2-D work on roads, which are specifically designed to avoid interference from external sources. None of these apply to drone aircraft. In addition to the obstacles above, how do avoid all the potential objects (other drones, birds, party balloons, etc) in proximity? We're nowhere near close to solving these problems.

3) Yes, there are accidents by delivery drivers every day. But it's clear who's responsible for any damage: the human driver(s) who are presumed to be carefully monitoring the entire process. Are mom and pop taco houses (or any other sized business) prepared to take the full liability of an autonomous flying thing? I doubt it.

All the videos we've seen (and I admit some are breathtaking) have been created by people firmly at the controls, whose full attention is focused on the task, and who are prepared to take the responsibility for any problems they cause.
> Teaching degrees in the United States ... consistently attract the dregs of the college applicant pool.

I have to take issue with this statement because it unfairly paints an entire discipline with a broad brush. First of all, I don't think it's true that the teaching programs are particularly scraping the barrel (I'd pin that on some other programs, like business and criminal justice), and if it's truly "consistent" I'd love to see a cite. My suspicion is that the average intellectual quality of ed majors is about in line with the average student in general.

Second, even if that subgroup average were lower than the middle of the general curve, your statement implicates all teachers as bad, and comments like this contribute to undermining the classroom authority of all of them. I have no problem with calling out incompetence where it may be found, and there most certainly are individual incompetent teachers out there---we've all had a few. But if we paint all teachers as the "dregs" of academia, we make the job harder for the many competent and the several outstanding teachers that are also out there.
I'm pretty sure you got downvoted for writing something that didn't add anything to the conversation.

"Oh, verelo's never been excited about Ruby? Well that changes everything! I'm sure glad I know his personal opinion, offered without any commentary related to the content of the article or even off-topic supporting reasons!"
If only. There's a good chance that some of the important systems at your friendly neighborhood hospital are running on MUMPS.
I had to use "PerfectScript" for something once. It was an awful awful experience.
"but it would suggest there are larger patterns at play."

That, I do not see. If there are some guarantees as to having guaranteed prices per roll, one can see the lottery as the sum of small, per-roll lotteries, possibly combined with a larger one to distribute the truly large prices. There is no reason to assume that those per-roll lotteries will be correlated in some way.
I don't think anyone will be pulling out C# marketing videos from their archives any time soon. Like AT&T archives' the unix operating system http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3749496

It will be interesting to see what happens with C# if Microsoft succeeds with Windows 8 on the desktop, tablet, and phone.
I think the main takeaway here is that rather than creating a product that needed to elbow its way into an already-crowded market, they solved the problem by creating a new market. Seeing how people really cleaned minor spills and dirt was the inspiration for what is essentially a moist paper towel at the end of a stick.
No Limbo? Dennis Ritchie will be let down.
The biggest improvements that VS2008 and VS2010 made over the previous versions is that it became much more light-weight, they did a lot of work to remove cruft. If you haven't looked at VS in a long while you might be surprised.
Pinterest More Copyright-friendly as It Preps API & Private Pinboards
Duuble.me: pen your digital diary, we'll print it!
What you suggest could work, but I'm not sure how useful that would be in the end when you still have to declare the type for fields initialized in the constructor. The var keyword inside methods covers most cases of using variables. A "var" keyword on the field level would cover less than half of the cases. Plus, you'd have to add a new keyword to do it as "variable" doesn't quite fit the meaning. Just not sure how useful that is.

sugared tuples and destructuring doesn't really fit. You'd have to make special case syntax for it and it would just feel bolted on to the language. Plus, tuples lose their usefulness if you have to declare its type to pass it between methods.

Though his first point about getters and setters does make sense, I didn't quite comprehend it the first time around.
It now says villain because he is an ass. His snobby attitude got him hated on his HN post of Svbtle and he threw a hissy fit[1].

It should read, "Dustin Curtis is a crybaby."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3742617
Ashkan Karbasfrooshan: Get Rich or Die Trying
>Yes, both those articles confirm Apple has created the "20/20 display" not the "retina display" (which turns out to make a difference to a large part of the population). The article I linked to talks about pixel density calculations, I'm sorry if this was too much effort but all the numbers are there for anyone that cares about the actual resolving power of the retina.

We don't care about the resolving power of the retina for some bizarro "Heroes" type people with super-sight, or in the abstract. We care that we can't distinguish individual pixels or nearly can't distinguish them. Which is the case.

That "large part of the population"? Actually minuscule.

>Surely you're not going to suggest there are serious scientific sources that focus specifically on Apple screens? I thought actual research was what you made your initial comment about.

I didn't suggest such at the first place. What I wrote was that "actual doctors and optical specialists" agree that the claims are accurate. Plus, you don't need "actual research on Apple screens". If you know their DPI and the viewing distance, you can work it out from general research on the eye, and it will hold true for any other manufacturer too.

So, here's another actual expert (noticed the Ph.D and vision scientist parts?):

According to William H.A. Beaudot, Ph.D., a vision scientist who was a research associate at McGill University in Montreal and founder of KyberVision. “In my opinion, Apple’s claim is not just marketing, it is actually quite accurate based on a 20/20 visual acuity,” said Beaudot.
(...) Dr. Soneira also claims in the Wired article that the term Retina Display is more of a marketing term and is “superamplified imaginary nonsense.” Beaudot doesn’t agree. “Since this display is able to provide a visual input to the retina with a spatial frequency up to 50 cycles per degree when viewed from a distance of 18-inches, it almost matches the retina resolution according to the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem,” said Beaudot. “As such, Apple new display device can be called without dispute a Retina Display. Could it get better? Sure, but so far this is the closest thing ever done in display technology for the consumer market that matches the human retina resolution.”

Plus, as a tech geek, shouldn't you be jumping with joy that we have achieved widespread adoption of such high DPI screens, instead of arguing for minor details on their naming, and if they match the retina perfectly or just 20/20 vision etc?
Why wouldn't they sign a long-term agreement with the content providers?
Sony Handycam HDR-PJ760V and HDR-PJ710V Camcorders with built-in Projector
Mobile apps are a sequestered experience. It is easier to maintain a users attention inside your app. Many apps now, also include access to their settings and preferences inside their app to prevent users from 'thinking outside their app'. web apps leave you with the same feeling you get when paying attention to something and have HN and twitter on the monitor.
there is also the matter of your app's identity. Unless you are using sencha or a similar tool, i think it is easier to convey the purpose of your a software much easier if it is an app.
I (accessibility consultant) was going to suggest the same thing, along with some tweaks to the color scheme for people with vision impairments. Email me if you want some guidance.
The fact that some teacher can't see the correlations using an inappropriate plotting technique (he uses a scatterplot, he should use hexbin or other density plot) doesn't mean they aren't there. And the numbers he gathers and dismisses show the correlation actually does exist.

A simple numerical example, where the correlation is guaranteed (i.e., I took y=x+noise):

http://i.imgur.com/rrmUI.png
https://gist.github.com/2183927

Most of the correlations he expects to find are present. They are noisy, but present.

The fact that in one case, reality is "contrary to what every teacher in the world knows" just suggests maybe teachers don't have a great grip on reality.

...if you took the teachers from the "worst schools" and put them in the "best schools" and vice-versa the results the following year wouldn't look noticeably different...Does that mean that teacher have no impact at all?

Not quite, but almost. It means that variation among existing teachers impact less than the size of measurement, and the current crop of teachers are basically interchangeable cogs.
Although you certainly have a point I think your judgement is a bit too harsh, and the the logic "it was copied in 12 hours [therefore] it sucks" just doesn't follow.
> The problem is that programming is a far more heterogeneous task than teaching.

I read this part of your comment, and immediately assumed that you were not a teacher. Then you said you were, and furthermore that your "methods were exactly the same", which surprised me for two reasons. First of all, the task itself is extremely heterogeneous within-task even if you re-teach the same subject several times; second, no two classes are really the same, and although there are classes I've taught seven or eight times now, the particular dynamic of the particular classroom required adaptation, using different examples, different activities, and in some cases different evaluations. Not to mention all the different levels and subjects of classes that I've needed to teach.

At least, that's what good teachers do. (I don't mean that as an attack on the parent poster's teaching---I find it at least possible that they did all these things but didn't realise how much variability there was in the task.) There are, of course, mediocre teachers, who get through their task by learning a pattern and doing it the same way each time. But that kind of gets back to the OP: it may be that the middle is easy to measure, but the high end, not so much.
>Svbtle Is About Pushing Blogging Forward? That is like Scoble saying that Quora is the biggest innovation in blogging over the past 10 years.

I recognize the words, but that whole statement seems like complete gibberish.
Out of curiosity, what is your favored alternative for web applications? Server-side rendering of complete pages? Client-side manipulation of pure HTML?
Information Retrieval Pioneer David Waltz Dies at 68
After several years of Java programming I am now in the position of being able to turn down offers of work. I consider having been a Java programmer akin to having appeared in a porn movie. I was young, naive and needed the money.

I am seriously considering excising Java from my cv and replacing it with something I would be more comfortable with - like Mumps :)
E.g., if the question begins with "Why ..." the answer is 95% (c)

This sounds like a job for random.shuffle.

Incidentally, independent (i.e., not funded by Kaplan) investigations of test prep centers show minimal effect on performance.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124278685697537839.html
I chose PHP because it's gathers everything I hate about any language in one spot.

* It has everything including the kitchen sink but nothing in the decor matches. There is no unifying principle to help you grok the language

* The Community is all about quick hacky fixes to already broken code and this approach seems to flow from the core developers out.

* It's not type safe, not even at runtime. I don't know if I ever want to work in a language that doesn't have proper type safety as a guard rail. (Note I'm not talking about compile time vs runtime type safety I'm just talking about type safety period)

* The code is just plain ugly to look at and I used to be a pretty heavy perl coder so that's saying something.

I know some of these are pretty subjective but for me php just manages to hit every single one of my top programming language gripes.

If you want to know my favourite that's a much harder question to answer. Golang has been pleasing me lately although it's interfaces have a very tiny hole in the type safety.

ML and it's varying descendants have as close to my ideal type system as I've ever seen. But the chances I'll ever get to use it for a job are slim to none and it seems the community is a little too academic for my taste.

Lisp has the most awesome metaprogramming built in and I had a brief heady love affair with it until it's lack of good type safety brought me back to earth.

I suppose all this means I'm one day fated to write my own "ideal" programming language so it can be featured in a list like this :-)
Groovy: Added two hours late and out of alphabetical order. Not the most popular language, but definitely a rising star. Too bad it's not getting a fair shake in this poll.
NASA cannot make a simple DNS change
Fairly certain he is talking about fire fighters folks.
Hopefully you have a reference to a coworker were you just left. It is better than no reference and will more than likely fillin the gaps in the story if someone calls. With that said, no one calls references these days. I have been listed for years as a reference and the few that do call me are just 'calling to check references' not usually interested in learning anything. The last guY that called had names confused and gave my name as the person applying for the job! Don't stress over it. Stay positive in the interview and good luck!
If you use EMR or just roll your own Hadoop in EC2 then:

1. Hadoop runs on EC2
2. Data is stored on S3
3. Intermediary results stored in EC2
4. Hadoop loads the data from S3 to EC2
5. EC2<->S3 bandwidth is not that fast or efficient (S3 proxy, network contention, TCP/IP processing)

Hypothetical MapReduce/ZeroVM/Swift scenario:

1. Data is stored on S3/Swift
2. Map and Reduce functions are run inside S3/Swift secured by ZeroVM in majority of cases accessing data locally without networking/proxies getting in the way.
3. Intermediate and final results are also stored within S3/Swift.
4. Local data access is efficient, fast and predictable
5. Local networking within S3/Swift is more efficient, fast and predictable than S3<->EC2 / Swift<->Nova

Accelerated Hadoop scenario:

Exactly as in #1, just Hadoop makes "predicate pushdown optimization" into S3/Swift secured by ZeroVM.

Regarding 'due to security restrictions' I meant that cloud vendor would not let you run your own code in S3 or CloudFiles. Why? Because you could mess up other people data and storage system itself. Why not run in VM inside S3? well I guess it would be impractical due to long provisioning time of conventional VM.
I'd love to see a cite.

The common citation is this one: http://www.ncsu.edu/chass/philo/GRE%20Scores%20by%20Intended...
Tracking & recoverying a stolen iphone using AP finding SW
It may be, but I really don't take lightly to snobby people acting like the crap they make is better than anything anyone has ever seen.

I have a markdown editor, too. It's called VIM.
I made a chrome extension just to try it out and I agree, you can basically see everything on the page and make calls out to your own server. Including keylogging and such. Since these extensions are all javascript it would be nice if the code for the extension was published along side where you get the extensions. Then people could inpsect the code and see if it's doing anything malicious. You wouldn't expect everyone to do this but it would only take one or two people flagging it to effectively weed it out. Users could flag it if it's bad and someone at Google could verify the bad behavior and block the extension if necessary, or contact the extension maker. Just an idea...
I don't like people here dismissing the ideas in Svbtle because of the smugness of its author.

I agree with everybody else that Dustin presented it in a very elitist and smug way, but that doesn't discount the fact that the ideas are good. Nor does the fact that it's easy to clone.

The minimal blog platform is cool, as demonstrated by the fact that people reaction has been so strong when they discovered they couldn't have it. Revolutionary? No, nothing is revolutionary in this industry, especially three days after the first release.
I learned to avoid bash really fast: the first script I wrote in it took more then half an hour to get right because I wasn't expecting it to treat 0 as true and 1 as false in the if statement.