skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"...The thing about measurable goals in teaching is that all of them are awful..."

I learned to fly people around in airplanes using various instructional techniques, including at times studying for the test. So do most airline pilots. Seems to work for them. The military has been training people for over 200 years with measurable teaching goals. In fact, some of the best teachers are ex-military. I could continue if you'd like.

"...if you're working anywhere worth working--there'll be a much higher non-formal bar set by your manager, your team, your customers if you're in contact with them..."

You are throwing out all requirements from any outside bureaucratic structure and then assuming that some informal standard of quality is going to fill the void. I don't know what your experiences are, but this kind of "let's see what happens" mentality doesn't trend toward good things. It's a tragedy of the commons problem. Why do a little bit extra here if somebody else in the organization is going to look at it anyway?

Instead, we find that really smart people are great at arguing on and on about technical stuff that has nothing to do with delivery. The only thing that naturally limits this is having testable work due on a fixed date. Otherwise, people would much rather create little complex systems that mirror their favorite technical book or management philosophy. There are no fights that are as vicious as academic fights over the smallest things.

The answer here is simple: if it's not measurable, we do not pay for it. I am sure there are lots of teams of really great people leading fulfilling lives creating quality in an ad-hoc manner that will continue doing so. We call these folks artists. There are also people who live the same kind of lives but have measurable results at the end of their creative process. These folks are usually called artistic professionals.

Teachers cannot be artists. The public cannot afford them to be so. They can certainly be artistic professionals, but like other artistic professionals there will be some kind of loose structure around their work product and it will be judged at regular intervals. This measure will be centered solely around students, which is natural because the only reason any teacher would be paid would be because of a student.

There might be a great argument about how the current tests are bad. But I think that's another discussion.

As a side note, and I want to make sure I hit this the right way, I do not care about teachers as such. Yes, I care about the dignity and humanity and kindness we show to all people, but teachers do not get some special place above, say, policemen. Or doctors. They're just like the rest of us. If you try to split up each profession and say we should treat them all in special ways due to the nature of their jobs, it gets much too complex for me to manage. Instead, when I meet somebody we pay our taxes to help us out, I usually try to say "thank you"

It doesn't matter to me whether we employ one teacher or ten million. If we could teach all of the students of the country with one teacher, that would be fine with me. The same goes for those other professions.
CVs are usually emailed and then printed on the office printer, so thicker paper may be redundant.

What is incredibly useful is understanding how those in a hiring organization read CVs, what they expect, and what they assume.

In terms of format: A lot of organisations, especially larger organisations for roles at more senior levels, output their internal candidate profiles, generated from internal systems, in landscape format. They will print a sent-in portrait document in portrait, but what is internally generated is often in landscape, with one left pane and one right pane. This spreads to computer-based viewing: Widescreen monitors are also becoming common place in offices, while laptop screens also tend towards a widescreen format. Why waste 2 large borders on each side of the page in default Word setup, Word being the default in large organisations.

I've never seen an externally sourced CV in landscape. Food for thought. Creative, or practical?

Also remember that eyesight tends to deteriorate with age. As an applicant, if the interviewer may be older, keep things legible.
Borderlands 2: Four potential problems (and what the developers do)
"Exclusive?" You rent a plane and fly over it.
could you estimate for me how much it would cost ycombinator-backed companies if the Free software they used did not feel the need (promoted by zealots like him) to be free? How many of these companies could not exist at all?

Look at your stack. How much of the software in it are you paying for, and how much is RMS's zealotry paying for? Did you contribute anything yourself to that stack? I think you should send RMS a paycheck and some hemp, to keep doing what he's doing.

pedantic point. a lot of open source isn't Free in RMS's terms, but he does promote the whole open source movement as a whole, despite being to the left of some of it.
Bobby Jindal is helping fix education by destroying the bureaucracy. Jindal triumphed this past Thursday in his bid to embark on an historic overhaul of public education in Louisiana, receiving final House passage of his centerpiece proposals.
In a state where student performance lags the nation, the complex bills will make it harder for teachers to gain tenure while establishing a statewide voucher program for private school tuition and multiplying the ways to create charter schools. The bills also lessen local school board authority in hiring and firing decisions, expand online schools and restructure public financing of education.
The measure also creates new paths to start up charter schools, which are publicly funded but run with broad autonomy from state and local education officials. Nonprofit corporations with an "educational mission" will be allowed to authorize charter schools, rather than just the state or local school boards.
It also will be easier for the state to take over a failing school.
Local school board authority will be lessened, strengthening the hand of superintendents and principals in issues of hiring and firing and giving the state education superintendent more review of local school board contracts with their own district leaders.
Current teacher tenure practice will end. Those with tenure now — or who are poised to receive it before the fall school year begins — will maintain the job protection as long as they aren't rated ineffective under a new evaluation system tied partly to student performance on standardized tests.
Anyone without tenure or who loses it because of an ineffective rating would need to be rated "highly effective" for five of six consecutive years in order to reach the job protection.
Statewide salary schedules for teachers will be scrapped. Teachers won't lose any of their current pay, but raises will be tied to decisions by individual principals and school leaders. Seniority won't be a primary factor in layoff decisions. Source: http://www.nola.com/newsflash/index.ssf/story/final-passage-...
What I find most interesting about this Kickstarter trend is that it is proving game publishing companies wrong. Publishers think that it isn't worth the money/time to build games like this. They want the next Angry Birds/Modern Warfare, full of DLC upgrades, in-app purchasing and facebook spam with the core gaming experience being secondary at best.

While the investors/publishers don't think its worth it monetarily, users are demanding higher quality games and putting their money where their mouth is.

Its also a huge shift. Instead of guessing what gamers might want, putting money in, and seeing how the game does- this enables developers to get their idea fully vetted monetarily and demand-wise upfront, then take the time to develop the game.
I found the in depth reporting at the Atlantic last month a bit more revelatory:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/01/making-i...

Though it sort of agrees that supply chain is important, just frames it differently.

The reason Standard Motor still employs (expensive) low skilled US workers like Maddie is because it wants to have her seal up a part immediately after the high skilled worker (Luke) finishes his precision machining role. Workers of Luke's caliber (with knowledge of metallurgy, coding, specific machine training) aren't reliably found in the lowest labor cost countries (at the moment, Poland is getting competitive here).

If robots for Maddie's job get cheaper, or demand grows such that the factory needs to run multiple shifts, or if the factory can somehow move Luke overseas, then Maddie loses her job. If any of these things happen, but firms like Standard keep their Maddies, they get bought out by gigantic German manufacturers, or just undercut on the store shelves until no one's buying their products anymore.
I have a pet theory about why so many[1] people find him "threatening". I believe it's because people do think it's important what he talks about - but feel he talks about it in the Wrong Way[TM].

Anecdotal data points to support my view: The most hateful comments against Stallman usually appear in highly technical forums - I have yet to see that amount of negativism in the comment sections of main-stream media articles about him. Most technical people, I think, know very well what free software is, and how, generally, it helps us getting stuff done. You would be hard pressed to find a programmer nowadays who has never used any free software for his or her programs. Even if they "only" used Eclipse to write proprietary enterprise code.

Yet, some technical people are - it seems - completely against free software, and completely against RMS. But consider:

They wouldn't rally against Stallman if they didn't care about free software at all ("Ah, that freedom guy again, how cares"). They wouldn't rally against him, if they thought that free software was completely stupid ("Ah, that freedom guy again, well that whole free software thing will be going down the drain, anyway"). No, the only real reason to say something against Stallman is if you are supportive of free software as an idea - but think that he spoils it.

If you think about that, then the people writing the most hateful comments (minus the trolls, of course) are the ones that support, and care about, the idea the most. And with that conclusion I can accept these comments, knowing that the idea of free software still has supporters, and still has people caring. Caring so much, in fact, that they even feel they have to insult a human being to get their point across - because it's obviously _that_ important. More important than Stallman.

I also have some anecdotes of why their fear of Stallman "spoiling" the idea is ungrounded: None of my non-technical friends know Stallman. None. Not one. Some do know Linus Torvalds "wrote Linux", some run Ubuntu on their laptops, and some know what open source means - but nobody of them thinks RMS is the sole speaker of the free software movement, as it were. I believe that even if they'd ever read an interview with him they would still be able to separate the idea of free software from the person Richard Stallman.

[1] I mean "many" here more in the sense of loudness, not necessarily of quantity - on the internet, nobody knows you're holding forty-two anti-Stallman accounts.
And, if you look at the winners of the netflix prize they are people who were working in heavy research laboratories (Yahoo, AT&T, etc). Very few people can really compete.
Major tech and gaming companies unite to purge sex offenders from online games
Mind fart. The analogy is so bad I don't even know where to begin. It's comparing an intellectually intensive, almost craft-like, infinitely complex piece of work to a physical resource that can be routed around.

[snip paragraph about capitalism/FOSS]

I also think open hardware and standards are much more important than software. They mean you can build anything you'd like yourself, while allowing developers to live off their work.

Also: Nobody can (physically) stop you from using electricity in a way that is not "approved" by the provider of your electricity. Of course they can. You can't rig a 330v outlet in your house without permission from your provider. Can't build a tesla coil in your garage either. Draw too much power and they will cut you off unless you switch to a commercial contract, if you're allowed. If I were into bad analogies I'd say here that it's like having a data cap. There is an intricate fabric of things related to economy, work, engineering, politics and society in general, the combination of those what makes electricity available in our homes. Same goes for software - you can't take how society works out of the equation.
Five Great Things About Procrastination
I don't feel like it's 'crap' that I'm 'putting up with'. As others have said, it's a convenient social mediums interact with a wide spectrum of my real life grins, after variou circumstances caused us to drift apart geographically.

I post status updates and comments because it strengthens my ties with those friends to a point where I can resume them again when we might meet up again. My status texts may seem irreverent to others, but they're a reflection of what makes me me, and often times, that's why they're my real life friends.

I don't install a ton of apps there, but I'm not too concerned with any of my likes or data being 'abused'. I honestly couldn't envision a scenario where I'd care if a corporation thought they could abuse that info.
4 Rules for Raising Money in a “Recession”
A great many teachers have been laid off due to the funding crisis in local government. That crisis was caused by a decline in tax revenue, especially property taxes due to the housing bubble. It was delayed by funding from the Recovery Act but RA payments ended a long time ago.

The result is that this country's local governments are spending much less on education than they were a few years ago, and therefore employ many fewer teachers. Because they have a mandate to educate basically the same number of children as before the crisis, this means larger class sizes, etc.

To suggest that these unemployed teachers are 'surplus' in this environment is to mis-characterize the situation almost to the point of dishonesty.
Where, specifically, does the article conflate what you are saying?

They explicitly list both work rules and the need to satisfy minimum test scores in the 6'th and 7'th paragraph.

Yes, it would be stupid to not give a teacher or programmer instructions, but we're talking about each individual school not being able to do this, right?

Right. Similarly, you don't hire a contractor, and ask him to write the spec for whatever he wants to build. He'll just cook up some easy to meet standard and report success when it's met.
These rules would mean something if they bothered to train their screeners. Just this week I got conflicting direction about iPads, and that was at Chicago O'Hare and Detroit Metro, two busy airports.

It seems that nobody worries about phones and kindles, and anything that is laptop-sized has to come out. The iPad seems to be the point where the confusion starts.

Considering how popular the iPad is, it would be nice if there was a consistent, definitive answer.
Here’s What A Facebook Response To A User Data Subpoena Looks Like
Get Your Site Viewed
> if they stopped an actual weapon they would certainly do a full press release about it.

They stop about 20 to 30 handguns each week. I don't know how many guns they don't stop.

Some of those are loaded. TSA doesn't care about handguns in checked in baggage, they even advise people how to travel with guns. They do care about handguns in carry on bags.
var foo_raw = raw_input("Enter")

What language is that? I don't find 'var' as a listed Python keyword:

http://docs.python.org/reference/lexical_analysis.html#ident...
I think it will be a brand new computer game based on an existing pen & paper RPG.

According to the video other games were made based on the same RPG (I never played any of them) but the video hints that these were not so popular with the "true" fans of the original RPG and this game aims to right those wrongs.

At least that's the impression I got.
It isn't even a new policy. These are the same terms AT&T gave me when I needed an old Motorola RAZR phone unlocked in 2006.
Ok, so fix the metrics.

Something interesting that I've observed is that most of the people complaining about metrics are really complaining about the goals of the system. I.e., many people want the school to increase mean(student scores), and then complain when the school attempts to increase count(student score > CUTOFF). If you want the school to have different goals, say so. Don't blame the goals of the system on the existence of metrics.
Keep Compiling CoffeeScript in OS X
Wow, could these people miss the point more? It isn't about "removing measurable goals", rather letting each school set goals and not the DOE.
Another option is to load your profile data with tongue-in-cheek humor that your true friends will understand as such and which can never be properly parsed by data miners. Course I say this now but haven't actually done this myself.
If programming worked the way the education system worked, it would be more like this: As a customer, you pay a company to build software. Due to federal law the programmers must fill out paperwork for (arbitrarily) each class they build in Java (the universally mandated language accepted as the best compromise by the government, after no small amount of backdoor lobbying by Oracle). The resulting code must pass mandated federal unit testing standards of "100% code coverage" due to the No Line of Code Left Behind Act. (Various measures of quality were discussed on the federal level, but things like overall code complexity, terseness, flexibility, etc. didn't resonate with the public as much as the slogan, "100% Coverage--you want it for your car insurance, why not your software?", which got several freshmen congressmen elected) In order to ensure compliance the programmers must run a special tool that verifies the coverage. Programmers who don't achieve 100% coverage have their pay docked and/or face dismissal. Shops that consistently fail to achieve 100% coverage face closure.

As a customer you're looking for a one-off administrative web application. In several years it's delivered (along with a warehouse of paperwork) in all of its 100% unit tested glory. As required by Federal Web Compliance 625, it uses EJB and JSP against an Oracle database. One of the tables has data duplication, requiring Federal Normalization Exemption 835.

It's so late because there was a brief controversy during development. One of the developers had increased his productivity by using a code generator to achieve 100% coverage. Suddenly he had a lot of time on his hands--he spent it refactoring the code, building prototypes, knocking out requirements, etc. Due to management oversight his transgression wasn't identified for several months, and the mysterious increase in productivity was hailed by local politicians as a shining example of how the system is working. Once identified, he was escorted out of the building, and a new developer had to rewrite his code from scratch. There was a brief splash in the local papers but that blew over, thank god...

During the meeting in which the resulting steaming pile of crap is delivered to you, the customer, one of the programmers breaks down crying. You can't put your arm around him and comfort him because it's against the law.
I live I'm Sweden and my 100/100Mbit full duplex connection is part of my rent, so basically I get it for free, but that is one of the perks living in a large city. And yes, I really do get the full bandwidth all the time.

Smaller cities usually have decent connections over DSL or Cable though, so bandwidth is usually not a problem anywhere you go in this country.
Ask HN: How is your Start-Up Chile experience?
I applied for the current round and will know by next month if I get accepted. What I read are mostly positive, however I'd love to hear your experiences.

Are the required events very time consuming?
Can you get by easily with the maximum salary you can take?
Is it easy to find local talents with good English skills? What's the average salary for an intermediate web developer?

Thanks!
There doesn't seem to be mention on a Linux version at all, rather just a Mac version.

I have to wonder, if you create a Mac version of a game how difficult would it be to port it to Linux?

I understand that games designed specifically around Windows (and therefor DirectX) are going to be a pain to port over to a platform without DirectX.

Surely though Mac versions of games are all based on OpenGL and most Linux distributions have OpenGL support too (as well as both being Unix type OSes) so surely the port is not that difficult?

It almost seems justified to have some project that aims to make it easy to port Mac games to Linux, if that was the case then you would see a massive increase in the number of Linux games available.
Remember how everyone used to have a TV, a stereo, a paper notebook, a VHS, a landline phone, etc? Now that you can get all that in a computer, an ever increasing number of people see no need to have each thing in my list above. FB is becoming / has become the new all-in-one, I might add, under the false notion that by sitting alone in front of a computer you are somehow being "social".

That being said (and with no research to back me up), people seem to get the same high received from actually being social as they do from being social online. The medium/means doesn't matter for them.

The standard answer given for what percentage of communication is non-verbal is 93%. This means the Internet generation is, in effect, losing the ability to read such cues and effectively interact with others in the real world.

My FB is bare-bones and I seldom use it. There are purposefully only 15 people on my friend's list (because I use it for my actual friends). Unfortunately, I find little use for the site but just like I gave up household 15 items for a single computer, I'm in a somewhat "continuously temporary state of acceptance" when it comes to using the medium my friends use for email and invites to events.

What it comes down to is we consume things in 'bits and bytes' nowadays. Be it a status update, a tweet or a blog post. FB plays to this very well. There's the idea that by taking small bites of something, you eventually consume it whole. I disagree but many people would disagree with my disagreement these days.

I'll end with this thought. I've been fortunate to see trends and movements between 6 months and several years before they happen (more like a sense than a certainty, yet they always happen). Some years back, I realized that with everyone spending more and more time online, there would be a movement against this wherein people would look to use the Internet as a means to connect in the real world (think: Meetup.com). I think it's still coming (to fruition).
Wow! a bunch of people put in $10,000...
One of the most egregious "old media disrespects new media" stories I've seen was last year when The Daily Mirror lifted a complete blog entry by comedian Dave Gorman and printed it in the paper. They did give him credit, but never asked permission or paid him for his work. (He decided not to take action against them for it, but it seemed that was mostly because he thought it was pointless to go up against their legal team.)

http://gormano.blogspot.com/2011/12/ctrl-c-ctrl-v.html
They are largely underpaid, but in the past few years, people on the right have decided to target public employees in general and teachers in specific (for some reason) as being The Problem with America.

Teachers' modest salaries, have, for a long time, been countered with good benefits in other areas: pensions, health care, vacation time, job security. Most working Americans in the private sector have none of those things anymore, so the right points at the teachers and says "see, this is the problem right here, these public sector health plans and pensions!"