skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The second link summarises an OFSTED report into the teaching of mathematics. The report suggests that teaching to the test is a problem in some UK schools. The report says that teaching to the test damages understanding in maths. I accept that the short abstract I linked to may not provide evidence of those things.

"How do you know you get this without uniform tests?"

The health or otherwise of our small companies, and the creativeness of artists, musicians, mathematicians, and the vigorousness of our politics.

"And for that matter, what does it even mean?"

It means what it has always meant! It means young adults who can take responsibility for themselves and others and who can act in society. Seriously, there is a level where one has to simply point rather than define (Wittgensteinish argument).

"I just don't see how avoiding careful measurement, clearly stated objects and transparency helps a political system give better results."

Because there are different stakeholders, and each part of your process will be challenged, and interpreted differently by some, and others will 'collapse' the wider concept of education down to a narrow focus on measurable outcomes.

Not sure if I'm making sense here because I'm in a different place I suspect.
Do they identify bad schools? Or do they identify schools with children that are harder to teach?

This is a genuine question.

I'm also a bit disappointed about the lack of rigorous evidence base with education. (Well, with everything, really.) In the UK the Department for Families and Schools has a lot of power over education. In theory that should help with an evidence base because they should be flowing good research down through to schools. But there's such a political atmosphere about teaching that interference from government is often seen as unwelcome. And, sometimes, that attitude is correct be government is suggesting something that's stupid.

There's also a problem that bad teachers are difficult to remove from teaching.
Is there a more graphic term than "circle jerk" that I'm allowed to use on HN? If so, that term describes this situation.

I don't know how Dustin Curits does it, but anything he does attracts an insane amount of attention.
If Google and Facebook were cities
But then there's python.
What Teachers (and all of us) Can Learn From the Trayvon Martin Case
Willnthe real IT security researcher please stand up
Dom Leca's blog looks like that, and maybe Daniel Zarick's. But the others look more substantial. Also, the blogging has barely started so I'm not willing to jump to conclusions about what it's going to look like 2 days from now, let alone long-term.
"you’ll get an impressive range of options for how to stay in touch"

Except for actually staying in touch, unfortunately :-)
Brainfuck has the goal of being a bad language.
That sounds weird, given that Java and Python are almost antitheses of each other. So ActionScript somehow manages to meet two entirely different philosophies in the middle?
Didn't vote. I don't dislike languages; I dislike environments. And I try to separate one from the other.
My sister-in-law found a winning bet for the New York Lottery.

There was a special promotion at the racino she goes to -- you could take your loser scratch tickets in a certain game to the casino, they'd put them in a big jar, and then whoever won the drawing got a trip to Las Vegas.

She saw there weren't many tickets in the jar, so she bought about $150 of these scratch tickets (she won $80 back so these only cost her $70) and submitted them. Her mom did about half as many.

A few days later her mom gets a phone call and she won a trip to Las Vegas worth $2000. Then she goes there and does some tricks with her loyalty card and now she's on an $800 junket.

I worked it out with decision theory and found that they had played the raffle almost optimally -- it blew my mind since I figured anyone who messed with scratch tickets and video slots would have to be completely impervious to probability theory.

Raffles, in generally, are good for people who play to win. My family regularly wins multiple prizes when they have raffles at the school because we're smart enough not to put tickets in for the Battleship game all the boys want or the hula-hoop all the girls want.

There's always some prize which is cooler than the muggles think that it is, and I'll walk home with it.

Now, you never see books about "how to win at raffles" because unlike Poker and Stock Trading, there's no motivation to suck in players who are just a little bit worse than you.
I don't hate it, but I hate it's growing popularity. It is the little things, for example functions like len() that should really not be standalone but belong to string or array or whatever (I am not that deep into python). Or the the crippled lambda.

To me it is roughly equivalent to JavaScript - both have some syntactic sugar that the other doesn't have. But JavaScript has full power lambda and is overall much more elegant in my opinion (in the sense of needing less concepts to achieve more - basically it is all hash maps and functions).

Perhaps CoffeeScript is the solution, haven't really tried it...
Barcelona is willing to pay 42 million euros to buy David Luiz
There are two important things raised by this article but completely missed.

Firstly, what dcurtis made is not as ground breaking as the article makes out. It looks very promising but this trend towards simplification is happening everywhere. On the mac you have iA Writer for writing things. If you look at productivity apps (names escape me), the trend is to strip things down only to what is required to be most productive. Same things are happening in bug tracking and message boards.

dcurtis has come up with something that is really neat but saying "it looks like a better Tumblr" after seeing two screenshots seems a bit premature. There was also mention of "competing with Tumblr".. its a closed beta with 6 users.. the hype machine needs to calm down.

The second point is everything dcurtis has been working on being completely ripped off in a couple of hours is almost completely ignored. We not talking about someone being inspired by the idea. Nor are we talking about duplication of functionality. Instead someone cloning the concept, functionality AND design of both the front and back end!

For the developer to then open source it on github should be story. Now anyone else can rip off dcurtis' site. Its not acceptable. There is nothing wrong with being inspired or copying functionality from another website. However, cloning both and front and backend then open sourcing it to encourage others to participate... not cool. This should be the story. Any hype is premature.
(http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/05/random_number_...)

Even smart people using good software can make mistakes.
I really, really, really wish that anyone posting updated TOS (and similar contract-y documents) would include a diff with the old one.
I see that another generation has discovered HN's poll feature. ;)

The pleasure of watching the old classics come back for another run is tempered by the fact that what has come back is yet another language war.

Oh, well. My favorite least-favorite programming language is the Central Dogma. Gotos. Self-modifying code. Code that deliberately recompiles other people's code. A potentially infinite series of build steps. Not intuitive to read. The output often makes no sense. Very few comments. Nobody seems to have written a manual. And the bootstrap process takes a really long time.
Layers of temp agencies save WalMart money via illegal working conditions
I agree with you and thankfully it looks like the "forked" was edited out.
trivia
ex-Akamai-ite here: Danny Lewin was one of the co-inventors of this.
RIP.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Lewin)
link to original paper: http://www.akamai.com/dl/technical_publications/ConsistenHas...
I couldn't figure out what changed from this page, so this is from their email to their users:

We'd encourage you to read these changes in their entirety, but we thought there were a few changes worth noting.

Our original Terms stated that by posting content to Pinterest you grant Pinterest the right for to sell your content. Selling content was never our intention and we removed this from our updated Terms.

We updated our Acceptable Use Policy and we will not allow pins that explicitly encourage self-harm or self-abuse.
We released simpler tools for anyone to report alleged copyright or trademark infringements.

Finally, we added language that will pave the way for new features such as a Pinterest API and Private Pinboards.

We think these changes are important and we encourage you to review the new documents here. These terms will go into effect for all users on April 6, 2012.
A fast paced stock exchange trips over itself
The problem with long descriptions in the Apple App Store
I have a Pinterest account merely for seeing the application and having some vague understanding of how it works. Being an account owner, I received the email notification for this change, which is omitted from this link.

Our original Terms stated that by posting content to Pinterest you grant Pinterest the right for to sell your content. Selling content was never our intention and we removed this from our updated Terms.

We updated our Acceptable Use Policy and we will not allow pins that explicitly encourage self-harm or self-abuse.

We released simpler tools for anyone to report alleged copyright or trademark infringements.

Finally, we added language that will pave the way for new features such as a Pinterest API and Private Pinboards.

I thought they did a nice job summarizing and convey in a concise, understandable way, the changes they've made.
The data has proved to be virtually useless in assessing teachers. See http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org/2012/02/26/analyzing-re...

They're useful for showing students are underperforming. But you can't say anything about teacher quality. In fact I suggest 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. I don't believe that. But I do think the large gaps in achievement are systemic problems more than the problem of teacher quality at certain schools.
Ruby the language isn't bad, but the VM is very primitive.
For next time, there are multiple languages such as Python, Perl, Ruby, Java etc that could do the automation and not have to use Windows.
And granted about PHP. The big problem it has is its inconsistency in terms of function parameters. Slows the developer right down.
I wish there was some way to vote for that abomination in the poll. Personally, writing Java/Html hybrid templates that are served as html documents and then further manipulated by dynamically altering the DOM in javascript on the client is the stupidest programming style I can imagine.
Do they identify bad schools? Or do they identify schools with children that are harder to teach?

Test results are a measurement of how well educated the student is at a point in time. That's all.

You can measure the effect of a school by studying value added - how well a student performs after education compared to how well they performed before. Or similarly, how well a student performs compared to statistically similar students.

You can determine that some subsets of students are harder to teach by correlating observable characters (parental income, race, gender, etc) with outcomes.
At the extreme, I can be taught to identify metadata in the test and use that to answer the question. E.g., if the question begins with "Why ..." the answer is 95% (c). If the question is an inequality with an irrational number than answer is almost always (b).

Princeton Review was particular good at teaching metadata identification in helping to "guess" when you didn't know the answer.
Should SQL really be up there?
It means "don't submit to authority".
鼻头缩小
My only complaint would be how hacked on Core Animation is in comparison with UIKit. For example, WebView doesn't like having a layer, but this isn't mentioned anywhere in the documentation:

http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa/...
Yeah, most people know M4 from Autotools, which is a poor use of it really. M4 was created by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, the same team that created C. So there was some expertise behind its design. I've only use it for assembly programming, where is was very handy. But yeah, Autotools is probably why most people hate it.
Svbtle Is About Pushing Blogging Forward? That is like Scoble saying that Quora is the biggest innovation in blogging over the past 10 years.

Whether or not this is the future of blogging, I've learned something from this whole episode... don't go on Hacker News to show off a two feature minimalist pet project, arrogantly state it's close to elite members only, and not have it re-implemented in hours. It's called Hacker News for a reason.
Hope that mindset does not come to pervade the nuclear power industry. :-)
I'd be interested to see the results of:

Poll: What programming language will provide the most career benefit over the next 5 years?

Maybe someone with enough karma (20) could create it?

Or maybe:

Poll: What language are you going to learn next?
I don't know about languages but one thing is for sure, Haskell evangelists are a plague.

You know, those people who cannot form a sentence without the word "monad", who are all about purity and disdain for everything not Haskell.
5 Simple Ways to Reduce IT Costs for Your Small Business
I didn't see my option on the list. My dislike for the abomination that makefiles are made of knows no bounds. Most of the languages above I can avoid (I simply don't use the languages I don't like), but I curse every time I have to open a makefile, because I know how painful it's going to be.

(makefiles are turing complete, so I think it qualifies as a programming language)
Sigma.js - A JS Library To Draw Graphs, Using The HTML Canvas Element
http://norvig.com/design-patterns/ illustrates the role of design patterns in dynamic languages: some are less important, others stay.

But you could come up with that for yourself by comparing the need for a visitor pattern in, say, Java and Python respectively its implementation in both.

[EDIT] Of course other programming paradigms can develop other patterns, if they are confronted with problems they cannot solve from the outset. That was more raganwald's point.
Omnis
Social news service with machine learning from scratch
I have had the same experience with C++. But it is not the language’s fault. It is people who use it and call themselves “architects” who know shitload of “patterns” and “good practices”, and make all these unnecessary abstractions and distractions.
Funny, the answers looks a bit like:

- "I love you"

- "Me neither"
Monorail.js - An Ultra Lightweight MVC Framework For Node.js
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I'll upvote your makefile suggestion :)
Indie Royale returns with the Ninja Lightning Pack
Sounds like your complaint is against mediocre programmers and enterpriseyness, not C# (which in my opinion is a technically superior language to Java). I use it all the time for simple one-off tasks and while it can be a bit verbose it's never really been a hindrance.
Perl only 70 points? :)

My vote for Perl
BabelEXT - A Cross-Browser Extension Development Library/Boilerplate
She's 100% right. Standardized testing is a disease to the education in this country.

The grade school system in this country is nothing but a babysitting program for people who aren't old enough to vote.
I havent used Python and Java a lot, but Python seems like a more laid back Java. Add static types, get rid of functions, and one class per file, and you almost have Java.

In ActionScript everything is an Java-like object. Adobe decided to implement the unfinished ES5 draft where you have JavaScript with "classes," they also put the Java-like limitations of one class per file/package, and having classes do almost everything (instead of functions). If a Java gal went to AS she'd, optionally, want to incorporate closures as a tool.

You can approach Python lot like you would JavaScript -- some functions, some classes, passing around functions/classes as arguments, closures, etc. (I bet that I could replace my JS with Python pretty easily if browsers supported it). If a Python guy goes to AS all he'd really have to do is add types, put every class in its own file, and drop functions (in a few cases).

I wouldnt necessarily say that it meshes the two together, but I do feel that anyone who is comfortable with either Java or Python could be very productive with Actionscript in a short time because of how tightly loose it is, lol.
Direct Link: https://github.com/runexec/Monorail.js
Direct Link: http://sigmajs.org
How we made a social news service with machine learning from scratch
Direct Link: http://babelext.com/
You know, what I hate is the JS community. It seems JS is split into two camps:

1. Ordinary people trying to get something done. Often not professional programmers. These people account for most JS on the internet.

2. JS hipsters. The kind of people who use Node.js and worship Crockford. They refuse to accept that anybody might want to use a language other than JS on the web, or that if you only accept the "Good Parts", you'll be set for life (where's my static typing, bitch?).

Languages are as much people as they are technology. I use Python because I like the people who use Python. I use Haskell because the people who use Haskell are really gentle and humble.

Good, reasoned people lead to good, reasoned code. I don't see that with the JS community.
20 Things to know to get more downloads for mobile apps (iOS)
We do and that was my original impression. Yet you listed a number of items even though they all boiled down to the same thing as far as I could tell. Nothing wrong with having different tastes, I just wanted to see if I was missing something deeper in each point.
The goal of Java was always to be able to "write large programs quickly." In some ways that sounds terrible by itself, but I think it turns out to be legitimate.

I've been on python projects that need to grow but struggle b/c all the things that make it easy to get a lot done the first few weeks become liabilities very soon. Adding developers to a project that doesn't declare types and encourages just passing around hashmaps is brutal. All the stuff you can't do in Java makes it easy for someone else to understand it and edit it.

I would believe that C# might be a bit better but only being fully supported on MS is a non-starter for many server side situations.
I'm curious what your queries look like, because these performance numbers are awful.

I'm currently running an index that is 96 million documents(393GB) using a single shard with a response time of 18ms.

If you're comfortable with it, I'd suggest profiling Solr. We found that we were spending more time garbage collecting than expected, and spent some time to speed up an minimize the impact of it. Most of this was related to our IO though.

Second, don't use the default settings. Adjust the cache sizes, rambuffer, and other settings so they are appropriate for you application.

I'd also start instrumenting you web application such that you can start testing removal of query options that may be creating your CPU usage issue. You get a lot of bang for your buck this way, and you may find the options you were using provide no meaningful improvement in search. A metric like mean reciprocal rank can go a long way to improve your performance.
I came in here to add MAGIC as my "most disliked" language.

I spent a few months writing reports in MEDITECH and their macro language is a variant of MAGIC. Documentation is a closely guarded secret but you can get a taste of what it looks like here: http://www.99-bottles-of-beer.net/language-meditech-magic-38...
Facebook wants you before you are born
Java is good for enterprise IT consultancies. It requires a lot more detail to attention to implementation most enterprise app features, yet it still works acceptably in the end, maximizing consultancy fees.
This. And resdency is not the life destroyer people make it out to be anyway. You can find plenty of single residents in the bars of Baltimore. Whatever the demands of their program may be, its not like they're spending a year on an aircraft carrier or whatever. There are certainly downsides to the gig, but the "overworked and underpaid" idea really needs a reality check.
Here is a plot of the votes (updated hourly):

* http://koldfront.dk/misc/hn/wyfpl/data.png
In my consulting work, I seem to have benefitted greatly from a shortage of people still versed in old-school systems work, heavy C, Perl, and solid knowledge of the esoteric feature sets of traditional RDBMs. There is a decreasing number of people in the market who really know their way around Linux and other Unices as well, and who can bring some historical insight to bear.

I am not a bearded hacker. I'm only 26, but it seems that everyone in my age group has moved onto fashionable web programming tool chains, Ruby, etc. Personally, that's just as well; leaves me with less competition. :-)
Any language that is embodied in XML.
Group on started off using an affiliate business model. However, running one deal per day means there isn't much recurring revenue to be had especially when cost of customer acquisition can be high.

However, if Group on can prove their value as an online marketing channel, then they can earn a steady revenue stream. One of Andrew Warner's interviewees did that, running a largely automated platform
Here is a plot of the votes (updated hourly):

* http://koldfront.dk/misc/hn/wymdpl/data.png
The standard for "having standing" legally is quite low: To file a lawsuit in court, you have to be someone directly affected by the legal dispute you are suing about[1].

Is Facebook directly affected? Yes - people access their servers.

Harm, authorization etc etc can all be argued in the case, but there is no doubt at all that Facebook does have standing here.

[1] http://www.courts.ca.gov/9616.htm
Is that the language with `pass`?
The anecdote told in this article makes no sense. The plain "Swiffer Sweeper" product is not used for wiping up spills, but for collecting dry dirt and dust. It wasn't until later that P&G introduced several wet products, which, again, aren't for cleaning up spills, but for getting stains up off the floor after you've used the dry Swiffer Sweeper. As far as I know, there is no circumstance in which it would be appropriate to pull out a Swiffer after spilling a cup of coffee.

Perhaps the true story is that Continuum noticed that people don't use mops to clean up wet spills, so they made something for cleaning dry floors?
You may be on to something there. I despise BASIC and would never use it as an introductory language to someone learning how to program.
You can still join. The exam will count for 100%, instead of 50%.