skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unfortunately, all the excuses in the world don't change the fact that these tests hurt education and hurt children.

I agree, but my goal was more to share what I've seen of the process than to judge it. I think folks here are percipient enough to make those judgments independently. On top of that, I've long been out of the field and am far too ignorant too suggest alternatives, and that's what we seem to need more than critiques.
Funny enough, someone requested an API to set up a script to message their girlfriend. lol.
Seamless and High Resolution Grass Textures
What about Npanday(1)? Don't use it myself but the devs at work use it.

1. http://incubator.apache.org/npanday/
Which web programming language would you like to learn most?
Laptop
Laptop
Dual core processors allow your laptop to split tasks between two separate processor cores so that they can share the load.
Openstack Swift(Python) Performance
Nasuni study indicates that openstack swift write performance is pretty bad compared to Amazon S3. Has it got something to do with the python or architecture ?? Or is it due to some other factor ??
Cafepress free shipping
Get the most valuable tshirts and that too at very reasonable prices just from Narwhaler.com . What are you waiting for place you order now!
You seem to be missing my point.

So what's consciousness? It's the ability to think about things as abstractions.

No, it's not! (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness). Artificial NNs can also model memory (see Hopfield networks). However, I just used them as an analogy. Maybe Zombies work better for you and the Philosophical Zombie Wikipedia page does a better job of explaining the idea (thanks again xyzzyz).
They tell you when that happens? Sounds like something that could be easily abused by collusion among a few shopkeepers.
What a strange system, though I'm sure it makes the Lottery's actuaries a lot happier.
Pinterest Updates Terms of Service
My compensation is not determined by a hard metric because my employer has no way of measuring my direct contribution to the company's profits. If they did, you can be sure they'd pay me accordingly; this is why people in sales are often paid on commission, and why people in "billable hour" fields are scolded or fired if they don't hit their billing targets. In performance reviews, or (in my current line of work) consulting, it's not uncommon at all to bring up any and all evidence that you can think of to support a claim that you have (or will) contributed positively to the company's bottom line.

Granted, we lack such a clear measure of success in education, and current standardized tests are a ham-fisted approach to creating one. Don't get me wrong - most of the standardized tests we use today follow the exact same approach to testing as they did 50 years ago, and whatever it is that we would like to measure when we say "educational progress", they no more accurately capture it now than they did then.

But I'm not convinced that the general idea of measuring education through testing is wrong. I think what most anti-testing people balk at is the particular (and extremely limited) set of knowledge that most standardized tests measure - they tend to be more okay with the idea of measuring mastery of a particular subject (either through in-class tests, or even standardized subject tests, which draw far less criticism than the general tests). I'd be all for trying to figure out a way to measure general achievement in terms of subject-specific but still standardized tests (which not every student takes every one of), but there are a lot of difficulties there, too.
c++ Def (:
100 is not a sample set. It is a joke.
The prime screen real estate doesn't tell me what you do. As a first-time visitor all I see is words in the form of Adthis or Adthat, and none of them mean anything to me. If I scroll down I see headings and paragraphs that are equally vague. Jargon like 'technology', 'solutions' and so forth doesn't really cut it.

Tell me, in simple terms, what problem you solve for me.
How to get a really free blog
> If you're passing something around as values, you're gonna need to declare what its type is

I fail to see the relation this has with my issue.
Actually, it's called Grindr...
People see to be confusing "favorite language" with "language i use".
You don't even count. You're not playing the lottery any more than I am by picking up a ticket I found off the street.

Just go to your local grocery store or gas station and stand next to the machine or cash register for just 30 minutes and watch the guys that buy a ticket. They're all regulars. They're all putting their hope (even if they tell themselves they're not) in this ticket being the winning ticket. They're buying 2 or 3 tickets a day which is money that most of them really can't afford to just be throwing away (and these are people that honestly would say they can't afford a Starbucks a day, by and large). It's very sad.
The article does a good job of showing what can go wrong with Chrome, but I have a gripe with the article itself. Notice, it uses very subtle fear mongering in the way they printed the JavaScript code. At first glance, I thought it was going to be a screenshot of a Windows BSOD. I'm not sure what the author is trying to accomplish (code = evil?) but at the very least the screenshots are ugly and garish.
The other big challenge to this work was the repetition. Reading the answers to the same questions over and over was mentally challenging for people. I don't blame them. Most kids of a specific age aren't too creative when fed a question for a state test. For example, ask them who is a public figure they admire and why, and you're likely to get the bulk of the answers focusing on just a few people (athletes, popular music stars, etc.). For the written assessments, 10% of the student materials were scored twice (by separate people) to ensure accuracy of grades and as a way to identify issues with potential scorers.

I'm curious - do you happen to know whether the essay portions ever offered any actual statistical utility above and beyond the multiple choice ones? As in, do they actually measure anything that the multiple choice questions can't?

I spent several years teaching SAT and GRE classes, I always noticed that I could predict people's essay scores pretty accurately based on their multiple choice scores. Percentile ranks always tended to be very close between the sections, which always made me wonder whether there was any point in having the essay at all. I always suspected that since the overall level of competence was so low on the SAT (sadly, the GRE was not all that much better...), anyone that was writing at the level where actual quality of writing matters was already scoring top marks on the essay, so they were essentially unmeasured by the scale.

I realize that when it comes to setting up these tests, "include an essay" is likely a political mandate, because people for some reason think that essay sections are "more fair" to "bad testers" or "fluid thinkers" or something like that (I'm pretty sure ETS was more or less forced to include an essay for this reason), so it probably wasn't even an option not to include them. But I'd be curious to know whether anyone ever looked into whether they actually told you anything you didn't already know. ETS does not provide this data or analysis, otherwise I'd check it myself as it relates to the SAT.
Facebook: No “immediate plans” for password legal action
i really loved working on C# it's quite cool but for web RoR and PHP are best
Hold that thought for just a few more days. :)
Fast image lazy loader, standalone
I agree, I almost feel an engine might be conscious.

in my mind a thermostat is a brain with just two points of being, top cold-warm enough.

i wonder what does an engine feel?
'Only 10 institutions in the world delivering higher education'?

Not unless universities abandon the teaching of history, literature, philosophy, politics, economics, whatever etc., or perhaps Thrun is thinking they'll be a gigantic leap forward in developing machine intelligence able for instance to assess students' essays in these subjects. If anyone's seen the slightest evidence that this might happen I'd be more than interested to see it.
> Oddly, many modern scripting languages use ancient compiler technology

Historical: most of them are 10~20 years old, "new compiler technologies" had not trickled down much when they were created and they had no real need for the things those provided (not to mention they have drawback, a GIL has better single-threaded performances than fine-locking which is important when single-treaded is your primary workload).

Also manpower, probably, it's harder to implement a generational concurrent GC than a refcounting or a basic M&S, and it's even harder to retrofit that into an existing codebase (hence pypy having pluggable GC backends and defaulting to a hybrid GC)
I like Debian for my servers, but for my desktop / laptop I use Crunchbang, which is a Debian based Openbox distro.
Not a very funny joke.. It is a joke right? Right?
Online Teaching Degree
It's also conceivable to me that it used to be more true in the past than it is now. Computer equipment used to be incredibly fragile.
I would love to get some feedback about what anyone thinks about it so far, and any suggested improvements (I have quite a list of my own still).
The only problem with this method is that it requires that IDs are integers, start at 1 and increment by 1.

I'm using MongoDB and IDs are 12-byte values of which the first four are a timestamp. Does anyone know of a way to make this method work, ideally without adding another field to the collection?
I'd be happy just seeing prominent and clear icons for major threat types, e.g. access to personal data, elevated device access, and so forth. Make them large and suitably threatening. It wouldn't completely solve the problem, but it could take back a lot of ground.
XAMthone Plus
XAMthone Plus® Jus Kulit Manggis / The Miracle of Nature with XAMthone Plus
Inilah Obat herbal XAMthone Plus jus kulit manggis yang merupakan obat herbal multikhasiat yang ampuh sembuhkan berbagai macam penyakit kronis atau degenratif seperti diabetes, jantung, stroke, asam urat, tumor dan semua jenis kanker
Pitched this rough idea to my wife the other week and she showed me some relationship timeline (shared wall between two users) in Facebook so I discarded the idea. Looks like I was onto something after all.
I've long been out of the field

Speaking as someone that came out of high school a couple years ago and watched No Child Left Behind start taking effect, I've seen two different styles of test: one from the mid-90's, when it sounds like you were involved, and one from after No Child Left Behind. The NCLB tests today are utterly unlike the tests that your methods produced. Basically, instead of trying to rank students against each other, they began ranking every student against the same fixed hurdles. On top of that, they started testing once every year or two rather than once every four or five years, and question quality dropped precipitously as they just ran out of material. The changes were, to me, obvious, and the effects were disastrous. Null-value questions ("What shape is the end of a pencil? Cone, square, pyramid.", on a 7th-grade test), bad and wrong essays (as described in the OP), science questions that asked for rote memorization rather than actual understanding and thinking, and so on.

These observations, though amateur and unscientific, suggest a few solutions. Basically, go back to relative rankings, do a lot less testing, and start rewarding uniqueness. Teachers need to have time to actually teach outside hitting every checkbox on list for the end-of-the-year test. Teachers need to be able to teach to their own students, rather than to the lowest-common-denominator child in rural Alabama. Teachers need to be able to encourange and guide every student individually, developing artists, scientists, thinkers, and doers, rather than having to force every single child into the same standardized mold.

</rant>
QVC Promo Codes
Get QVC Promo Codes, QVC.com Coupons to avail discounts on all q v c products and save money through online shopping at couponmind.com
I'm curious - do you happen to know whether the essay portions ever offered any actual statistical utility above and beyond the multiple choice ones? As in, do they actually measure anything that the multiple choice questions can't?

I believe written assessments were relatively new to standardized tests when I was in the field. My understanding was that the purpose was to assess writing, just like we do with, say, math or reading comprehension. Multiple-choice questions can't evaluate a student's ability to respond to an open-ended question, convey ideas, stay on topic, demonstrate grammar and punctuation, etc.

But I didn't get the impression that adding writing components to the test added anything of practical value. Sure, it's one more score-based judgment that can be assigned to each student and be used to assess schools and districts, but as far as I could tell it wasn't benefitting student education. And it certainly came with a high price tag. But I was definitely not in classrooms, so that's a key caveat to anything I share.

Does writing seem any better? Well, these written assessments have been widespread for about 20 years or so. I don't get the sense from what I see that people nowadays are generally good writers. But my exposure is certainly limited, even if others I speak to seem to agree, and I'm not certain if enough time has elapsed whereby we would broadly see the effects of such a change in educational assessment.
Patio Awnings, Awnings for Patios and Exterior Blinds
Tacocopter, Drones That Deliver Fast Food?
Not all quadcopters have such serious jobs. Some have more mundane jobs. Like keeping people with a taste for fast food happy. There are rumors spreading around the Internet claiming the existence of a wondrous TacoCopter. Imagine you are home at night, watching a movie and you get a sudden urge for a Taco. All you need to get one is your smartphone. You don’t even need to give an address because your phone has GPS. Just choose your filling and wait for the TacoCopter to drop your order
"Standardized tests are optimized for grading."

And there's the money quote.
My point is that it doesn't matter if standardized testing has "meaning" or not, people still want it. They will continue to want it. People want to compare student and school and district performance, and standardized testing is how they're going to measure that.

It doesn't really matter if it "works" or not, the decision making behind it is not logical, and it never will be.

I'm not saying to center the teaching on the test, but to teach around them. The tests are here to stay. You have to do well on them. This is not something there is a choice about. But that doesn't mean you can't do well on the test and at the same time teach around it. Not for it, around it.

Also, that's a strange idea that history is about rote memorization and not about understanding. Maybe I got lucky with my history teachers, but for me it was all about understanding how it all fit together, not raw facts.
Thanks for the feedback, yes the website has miles to go !!

The problem we solve : We standardise the integration of advertising, analytics etc. for a website. So the website does not have to manage N vendors, our code abstracts all those API's out and is flexible and dynamic.

Its easy to change vendors (e.g. OpenX to Google) as we swap vendors at our end, so no changes required to your website.

You can apply rules for e.g on site 1 use Google, on site 2 use OpenX, these can also be based on geo, user data etc.
Right, I was in the field from something like 1995-2001, so I was before the No Child Left Behind style of testing. And I've been nowhere near the field in my work since.

If I were to guess, the types of questions you received were different, but the general process of how the tests were made remained the same. And that's the bureaucratic, lowest-common denominator mentality that pervades broadly given tests. And I agree with you that "[t]eachers need to be able to teach to their own students." I think that was a big part of the OP's point since that's something she does.

It's all part of the conundrum: Everyone wants good teachers and accountability in education, but there doesn't appear to be a high-level way of making such assessments that can pass the necessary political muster.
> How do you convert to a string? Convert.ToString().

Actually, I think this is a bad example because oop is inadequate in this particular case.
Converting something to something else perfectly fit the functional paradigm (take an argument, returns something, don't store anything).
Why do you need a Convert object? How would you explain this to someone not familiar with C#.

I think Console.WriteLine("hello"); is a better example.
Monster Beats Studio
Original Silent Hill developer disappointed at "poor" HD re-release
16 Free and Premium Video/Multimedia WordPress Themes
In the sector of premium video or multimedia WordPress themes the tradition has not been broken by the team of WordPress.
Narihiro Nakamura did a lot of hacking on the ruby GC ("longlife" used in twitter's Kiji, parallel marking, lazy sweeping, bitmap marking).

It's nice to see more of it ending up in the ruby mainline.
Google Chrome 19.0.1077.3 Dev Offline Installer on Downloads App
But what if you do this:

<script src='3rdpartyA.js'></script>
<script src='yourscript.js'></script>
<script src='3rdpartyB.js'></script>

You need the semicolon at both ends to insulate your script from the unknown coding style or 3rd party scripts which may be appended or prepended to yours.

If 3rd party A omits a trailing semicolon, or 3rd party B doesn't uses your semicolon prefix style then by wrapping your script in semicolons you pre-emptively prevent problems.

I believe this is an example of the wider coding style called "defensive coding".
3 Key Metrics for Evaluating Your Mobile Ecommerce Site
But online courses actually give you more options as far as personalizing education. At most universities, unless they're very large or very specialized, you're likely to have one professor from a specific subject in a field. With online lectures, even from a reasonably small number of sources you can mix and match. Two personal examples I can think of is supplementing my algorithms class with MIT's algorithms class on OCW, and watching Tom Mitchell's lecture on kernel functions to add depth to the topic as covered in Ng's Ml-class.

Even at great universities there are professors who are better researchers than teaches that still may be a students only option. If you took the top 10, or even 5 teachers on a given subject you could give students the freedom to mix and match as suited their learning style.

Personally I actually find the lectures a poor substitute for a text. I find the Probabilistic Graphical Models textbook a great addition to the pgm class on coursera. Even though the lectures for pgm-class are long and detail, there's still only so much information you can get into a few hours. The information density of a textbook is hard to beat.
So, does this mean, when implemented in a browser, I can use C instead of Javascript?
super weird - can you email us with screenshots to info@tagstand.com please?
Convert from EML to Outlook 2007
BSOD? It's a pretty known old color scheme used in many DOS programs (https://encrypted.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=dos+edito...). This one is probably from FAR Manager's editor/viewer.

What color scheme does your text editor have? Is it evil and fear mongering?
17 Unforgettable Viral Videos
Does anyone here feel that all of these programming languages have their own flaws? I started programming 8 years ago (mostly as a hobby), and I feel like all these languages are missing something. That said, my "favourite" language is Haskell, but I don't really like it. I've only used Haskell since a year ago and there are still many concepts I have to master. Maybe my feelings will improve, but if they do it won't be by that much in absolute terms.

Emacs and Vim? Twenty years later and these are still the state of the art? Even when our computers are at least 1000 times more performant? I guess there are IDE's out there trying to do better, but in the end I'm still typing text into a computer, occasionally getting autocompletes that is exactly what I want, but usually its not.

Do I like programming? Yes I do, I like programming more than I hate the tools I have to use.
Oh, no doubt; the plural of anecdote is not "data", and that's all a forum thread of complaints is.

And yet...while Google can fairly easily find out how people really view their changes, this does require them to want to assess that. And it's always been a little unclear why their app rewrite required a new UI. You'd think it might be easier to do that in two seperate passes...

A suspicious person might suspect that the app rewrite and the UI revamp were purposefully tied together in order to ward off poor customer feedback. But as you say, it's easy to be snarky and whiny. :)
The Other Mass Effect 3: The Game You Didn't Play
It would be considered theft if the other painter hopped over to picasso, took the origial picture and handed it to the woman. To add some spice to the scene, maybe he hits picasso in the process, which would add assault. But, as many others have pointed out: copyright violations are not theft.

But as the story is not about copyright, but about perceived entitlement, its also completely irrelevant.
Marriage – Worth Saving Relationship
Many people think that marriage is absolutely not worth saving or enduring but a marriage is worth saving if the two people love and trust each other and are both willing to make amends in their behavior and attitude. You should always keep in mind that marriage is the relationship which is based on trust.
How Google Stacks Up Against Facebook
In your world view, places of higher education and places of advanced research are strongly coupled. This does not need to be the case. Historically some great research labs had nothing to do with education (Bell Labs). I think Thrun's prediction is that there were be great institutions of higher education that have nothing to do with research. I certainly agree with that point.

Of course, all disruptive innovation starts at the bottom of the market. I am sure the first big wins will be giving educational access to talented and bright but poor kids in the developing world. For them, even something like access to a first world university is far from affordable, and the fledgling online classes are much better than the alternative, even if they aren't yet competitive with traditional university education.

I took the online ml-class last semester, and I am now taking the pgm-class this semester. I have or am taking graduate versions of the same classes at a traditional university.

The big discovery (thanks to Sal Khan) is that teaching fundamentally scales. It's a big waste that all over the world, there are hundreds of smart researchers each teaching 10s to hundreds of students basically the same subject. What would be best is to get one great teacher for each of the subjects of those 100s researchers, make him focus really hard (10x the effort he would have put in, but 1/10 the total effort of all of the previous combined effort) to make a ridiculously good online class. Then you have freed up a bunch of time for the researchers, and most of the almost thousands to 10s of thousands of students are actually experiencing a better class.
Another new thing you didn't mention is the new list filter framework for the admin. I've found it really useful in my projects.
Dustin Curtis' Single Mistake with Svbtle