skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's far from the only real difficulty in measuring developer output.

Large companies generally have very low standards for software quality and employee productivity, so they are hardly proof that the problem is easy.

Some obvious factors that make it hard to evaluate both developers and teachers:

- An important part of the output is in effects on the team
- The true test of the output often comes years down the line
- The work is done out of sight of the evaluators
- There are many confounding historical factors
- The profession is subtle and hard for outsiders to evaluate
- Poor management often limits worker effectiveness

And in many ways, teachers have it worse. Teaching is much less like writing software than it is like management.
How difficult would it be to tie this to an arbitrary user model.

I am thinking along the lines of using this on a rails app.
Ancient tsunami devastated Lake Geneva shoreline
When more and more everything is digitized, it seems like pro-property-ownership will mean pro-idea-ownership and vice versa. Finally Nous of Anaxagoras becomes true.
Nothing against these employees, but PayPal is a bad company and needs to die
Sony NEX5 vs. Panasonic Lumix GX1 Cameras
The install base of silverlight is pretty low, but way higher than I expected. Its hard to get hard reliable numbers but I've seen from 50% all the way up to 70% or so. Its much higher than I expected, but not high enough to count on. I don't get the draw when flash has an install base in the higher end of 90%. Once again its hard to get reliable numbers, but there is no doubt it trounces silverlight.

Even java plug-in install base beats silverlight's which is pretty bad. I know netflix and mlb.com use it, but I don't know a lot of others. I'm sure they are there, but it doesn't scream lively tech to me.
Kellogg Alums Shine at the Chicago Innovation Awards
Do YC partners find stories such as "I grew up poor and in low income housing. My parents didn't graduate from high-school. By all measures I shouldn't have made it to a university nor should I have succeeded. But I paid my way through college and graduated with a high GPA in Computer Science" impressive?

I ask because it is my story albeit it is neither technology nor entrepreneurship related.
Well, if you try to view the site on a brand new SurfaceRT using Metro IE...could be some problems.
New Program Funds Current, Future Entrepreneurs at UT McCombs
38.5 hours is … unrealistic. It also ignores the fact that health care and benefits have been slashed heavily in recent decades so while there may be some older teachers enjoying the fruits of stronger unions, a prospective new teacher is looking at something roughly equivalent to what any software engineer would receive as far as benefits go. Salary is probably lower unless you're comparing a teacher in a very rich / urban area with a software engineer well outside of SF/NY/LA/etc.
With all due respect, you have absolutely no fucking idea what you are talking about.

First of all, every damn time someone brings up the "you just have to double
click the installer on Windows" argument, they leave out the steps before that
(most prominently, locate and download a safe copy of said installer).

Second, I don't know what FUD you have been told about Linux on the desktop, but
contrary to what you assert about it, no, installing applications on almost all
widespread Linux distributions I can spontaneously think of - except Gentoo -
requires neither compiling nor messing around with dependencies.

Third, no, not everything on Ubuntu comes from the "Ubuntu store" or "Apitude
store" - in fact, neither of those exists. If you are talking about the Ubuntu
Software Center, that's basically just a fancy front-end for APT - as is
Aptitude. If I remember correctly, the UCS also allows purchasing of some
commercial software as of recently (I don't use Ubuntu).

In addition, Ubuntu (and derived distributions) have a thing called Personal
Package Archives, whose very concept is to make it possible to easily add your
own package sources to complement the official repositories. The UCS can handle
those, too.

Also, there's a very important distinction between a package repository as used
in many Linux distributions and a closed app store: the former is, at least to
an extent, managed by the community and the users. You cannot say that of the
latter.
affirmative!!
Err, I read the article and I have no idea how you found this to be the most important part.

I studied in India, and had a chance to study abroad as well.

Currently, for reasons that escape me, you lot (Americans) seem to have decided to import those banes of thinking and real learning - standardized tests.

Perhaps in order to have some sort of proxy or measurement for what is inherently a chaotic and un-measurable system of children.

From experience - this is generally a BAD IDEA, but its one whose pernicious subtle problems show up after years and possibly generations of being married to it.At which time it becomes too hard to get rid of it.

Firstly - everyone will stop teaching, and focus on acing the tests. Learning is irrelevant, and students know it.
This will bring in rote learning, and soon - tuition classes. I don't know what you guys will call it but expect kids to start studying year round.

Then comes the self fulfilling prophecy - you did well in your tests, so you must be good. You must do well in your tests if you are to be good.

And at this point you aren't even creating or nurturing students, but manufacturing mental athletes with specialization in testing well.

IF you throw in STEM fixation - (Well he should have known better to take a degree in humanities) and you damn students with no interest in science or commerce to do exactly that.
BTW, Microsoft did back down from that policy (not allowing games like Skyrim and its ilk): http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/10/microsoft-to-allow-mat...
"being more familiar with Scala than Java" is a few miles east from "cannot/will not write pseudocode comprehensible to people who don't grok functional languages".
Android still has a long way to go. I have the Nexus 7 (I should divulge I am an iOS/Cocoa developer) and I kind of like it, but it still has a cheap usability feel to it. The parallax is pretty obvious which translates into issues like laggy typing and occasional awkward pauses. The select/copy/paste is just bizarre. Video playback is crappy.

Android is to Toyota what Apple is to Mercedes. They both essentially do the same thing, will get you to the same places, but it's a different kind of ride. Some people like Toyotas, and that's OK.

I also don't think the kind of people that buy Android devices are the same people that buy iOS devices. Not mention the homogeny of the whole Apple experience and how much smoother that gets with each iteration of OSX and iOS. I can pick up one device where I left off on another one. Because Google doesn't own that kind of end to end experience, it will be hard for them to compete on a whole.
Thanks, I've been trying to use Sketchbook Pro for a while and somehow it gets overwhelming. I'll give Quill a go.

There's still definitely space for a proper drawing app on Android.
Firefox 16.0.2 available, Cross site scripting attack patched
What Does a Beta Look Like? 19 Days. 3,718 Unique Visitors. 154 Signups.
If you are looking for a PDF annotator, I really like EZPDF ( https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=udk.android.re... )
How far are you from Sandy center
Simple page that just tells you one thing, how far you are from the center of the hurricane
Smartphone everywhere, mini-tablet if you're carrying a bag, Kindle if you have time to do some reading, laptop if you need to get work done. Larger tablet always stays at home.

That about covers it for me, anyway. The 10" tablet now feels like the least desirable device, unless you have a relatively rare use case like reading a lot of big PDFs.
People are giving you software answers, but I think the answer is actually about hardware. Monitor manufacturers realized they could brand their screens as "1080p HD" to match them up to the TV marketing pitch. Why bother trying to make a screen with 1600 vertical pixels when you can just use that magic word, 1080p?
An actual Microsoft Surface buying experience
Sure. One would be when you mouse-enter, a small circle or bar appears that fills in as you hold your mouse there, indicating something will happen once it becomes full. Another would be to have the other thumbnails "peek" out on mouse over, which provides the user a place to click to activate the browser mode to see them.
Study: Startups Led By Stanford, Harvard Grads Score More VC Funding
Actually it works perfectly on mobile safari on my iPhone. I wasn't expecting it to, being a hover effect, but was pleasantly surprised.
France Calls on Google to Settle with Publishers
I totally agree. It's amazing what a little bit of thought into the problem can do when designing a logo. There's gonna' be a lot of cookie-cutter logos in competitions like this - but one with insight and aesthetic taste is hard to come by. Most good designers move past this type of freelance work pretty quickly by virtue of their trade.
According to the NEA, that's only scheduled hours, not actual work hours.

http://www.nea.org/home/12661.htm

That certainly matches the teachers I've known; they put in a ton of non-classroom hours, and often put in a fair bit of their own money.

A Gates Foundation survey puts it at 53 hours per week:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/survey...

And for teachers involved in extracurricular activities, the average is over 11 hours a day.
I'd argue that if you have enough traffic to look for 1-2% improvements, you have enough traffic to do basic segmentation and to start measuring value.

That said, I agree with your greater point that you always need to make sure your tactics are aligned with your situation and strategy. For instance, if you're still seeking product/market fit, don't worry about micro-optimizations; just follow best practices for the big items and optimize them later.
LiteWerx  TRSAC 2012
It's nominally independent, but those pesky bloggers keep finding information that they weren't supposed to.
This was not my point: the headline and the whole post were meant to be thought provoking. If I spent time to apply to YC it means that I obviously care about it. And it's good that a program like this attracts a lot of smart people. I just think it is really wrong to pass the message that YC is major goal itself, at the point you need to "hack in" or attend online specific preparation classes. It looks to me this approach just risks to shift too much the baricenter from making things to showing off some standard sexy stuff.
A much more positive experience than has previously been reported.
I have strong opinions on whether or not the U.S. should go to war with country A. My opinion counts as far as voting goes. I have opinions on tactics involved in fighting a battle. My opinion counts for very little because I am wholly ignorant about fighting wars. My opinion in this should count for very little.

Sometimes it's best to leave implementation to the experts. Sometimes not. One should be careful about when/where such intrusion takes place.
soon to be released Django 1.5 (currently in alpha 1) will have custom user models https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/django-developers/EI... I guess then you could just replicate your rails user model in django, of course if django-drip by will be upgraded to support those custom models (https://github.com/freakboy3742/django/blob/t3011/docs/topic... models.ForeignKey(settings.AUTH_USER_MODEL)), you will just have to make sure you include the fields referenced by django-drip.
I've visited Montessori classrooms that did some of that. But I think that kind of engagement is contingent on good student/teacher ratios and a fair bit of unstructured time.

Standardized testing pushes in the opposite direction, alas. It encourages teachers to push for the sort of rote learning that is instantly forgotten when the test is past.
That's what I thought would happen before I got an LTE phone, but in practice, I'm not burning through it that much faster – I'm mostly just following the same usage patterns I had with 3G, just spending less time waiting.
These seem like distinctions that matter little, and yes, I saw the paper you refer to.

I posted here because I thought someone might have something new to add to this story -- the above info seems to be all circa 2010.

Yes, BSCS, BSEE. My roommate worked in Morley's lab.
I rarely sign up for betas but this is pretty intriguing. Great job, I look forward to giving this a more in-depth tire-kicking.
I probably should have been more specific; I'm interested in remote pair programming. As it stands now, we end up using Mac's built in screen sharing app but this has a less-than-stellar responsiveness that's typically needed when two people are going back and forth making changes to the code..

I've written up my thoughts on what is needed ( https://gist.github.com/1999816 ). TL;DR - a lightweight protocol to share buffer updates, tab changes, opening files, etc.
Awesome, was literally talking to a Python-using startup in the UK about their options for doing this less than an hour ago. I'll tell them about it.
"Impossible" seems a broad claim - I don't see why it shouldn't be possible to put the information in a form, possibly decorated with details from a rigorous analysis, that makes pattern matching work. If the pattern matching is otherwise proving effective (itself an empirical claim, to be sure), we should be careful about teaching doctors not to pattern match.
you can drag the splitter between the navbar and searchbar to adjust the sizes as you see fit...

VS2012 is still a problem though
Although it is a Nexus device (And a new one) so I'm sure it will be updated soon.
As someone married to a teacher in one of the highest paying districts in the country (DC), this is completely unlike our experience: less salary, longer hours, far worse working conditions - schools tend to be run like factories a generation or two ago, with rigid top-down management, not information-age businesses, and don't forget significant hassles like inflexible hours and vacation schedules. This is for someone with a subject-area Ph.D and an education masters compared with any normal software engineering gig requiring only a BS.

Since the source is Forbes I would strongly recommend scrutinizing the original data to see how they cherry-picked it. A disturbingly common deception tactic is to only count actual teaching time, which is akin to reporting a software developer's hours by focusing on time typing new code and ignoring testing, documentation, meetings, research, HN, etc. Similarly, you frequently hear "3 months vacation" bandied about when it's typically closer to 2 months and ignores weeks of district/school professional development, pre/post-year planning & prep, mandatory continuing education, etc. We typically have only one or two options for a two-week vacation during the entire summer break.
The idea that someone owns the part of my brain that has been indelibly imprinted with their copyrighted expression sounds silly to me.

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. -Thomas Jefferson

Ideas are fundamentally different from bicycles. One cannot share a bicycle indefinitely without each user having proportionally less access. One can share bits and ideas. Show me where in silicon the color of a bit is stored. The entire concept of colorful bits is a fabricatiion of the human imagination, not a fundamental property of the universe. The atoms comprising a bicycle, on the other hand, can indeed be under the control of the atoms comprising a human being, to the physical exclusion of others.
that was not the list of applications, but a guide on how to write one with and example at the end
For anyone that knows anything about the current system, its almost obvious. Education in the states is much more of a wreck now than it was BB (Before Bush). The only thing kids have improved at now is....taking standardized tests.
>But asking them to give up their mp3 players, chat programs and background tasks while they're gaming?

Wat.

Linux programs like Pidgin have support for almost all IM protocols known to
man, it can handle any Portable Media Player with sane behavior (read:
identifies as removable storage, which pretty much all players except the
shitty Apple ones do) and last time I checked, Linux is capable of multitasking, too.
False dichotomy. Your responsibility as a parent is to your children. Your responsibility as a citizen is to run your government effectively.

Captain TLDR above is basically saying "fuck other people's kids", which is abdicating his civic responsibility.
The purpose of the education system is to create a well-informed citizenry prepared for a productive life and for the duty of running a country.

Could you be specific? In particular, how do I measure whether a citizen is prepared for a productive life or not?

Heck, we could start by testing the hypothesis that getting everybody to focus lots of classroom time on standardized tests improves actual education.

How would you set up the experiment? In particular, how would you compare group A (no tests) to group B (with tests)?
The first hand experience of people having been a student once isn't enough information in which to judge a whole profession. If that were the case, we should be letting only users of software direct how software is made.

Also, experiences can be really variable for different people. Some students might have many great teachers and be in a position where school is very positive for them. Other students could be facing an entirely different picture about the kind of schools and teachers available to them, esp. given the variances in local and state politics, class levels, income, and attitudes towards teaching.
Are you aware that iPhone sales have outstripped Mac sales pretty much since the beginning? So how is it that you cling to the idea that the people who buy iPhones could only be a "core" audience of Mac users?

Let's see if you start to understand the meaning of numbers.
It does not cost $175 to make, that's just the estimated bill of materials (BOM) cost. The actual cost to manufacture includes labour, design, shipping, testing, storage and dozens of other things.

Apple's gross margins on its devices, essentially the selling price less the manufacturing costs, is about 30-40% company-wide. That translates into an operating margin (which includes all costs) in the 20-30% range.

That's high for a consumer electronics company, but not as high as the $700 - $175 comparison makes it sound.
>At risk of being callous, why should they? If an employee already dislikes a company to the point that a recruitment letter angers them, why should the company go out the way to accommodate them?

So that they don't write blog posts like the one we are commenting on? So they don't actively try to convince other (possibly talented) potential employees to ignore your recruiting efforts?

The entire comments section here seems to be "is Google a horrible company to work for and does Google+ suck, or are they merely ok?" If you're looking for new talent, wouldn't you rather have prospective employees asking "is Google a fantastic company to work for or an outstanding company to work for?"
If you are building your own computers anyways, it's not that huge of an issue
to watch out for Linux compatible graphic cards. Really.
I agree. Even to watch the pictures correctly and one at a time, I had to learn to move the pointer really slow.

I really like the concept and the execution anyway.
Web server in 50 lines of bash
PhoneGap advice on dealing with Apple application rejections
> "But when I open Sublime Text and type "ctrl-p" to go to another file, it just works plain better than any vim plugin can achieve."

You are not talking about the same ST2 I've tried out. Mine was limited to files contained in "the project" (so none, if you just open a single file, not even nearby files) and the only way to open a a file outside of "the project" was to use the classic Ctrl+o. How "modern" that was!

> "Now, these aren't just "I want my editor to be pretty" issues. A lot of these things are functionally important to get working faster on your code."

But, somehow, all the issues in your list have something to do with looks and that's one of the most subjective subjects possible. RoundRects don't help anyone write better code faster: they help you feel better and more confident but nothing more. I'm actually a fan of minimalism and text-based interface and the "fixes" you want would be of no interest to me.

> "- Making pop-up boxes, a-la Sublime Text, that moves you to a new file. Simply cannot be implemented in a nice-looking way in vim."

I'd say that LustyExplorer looked quite good and now CtrlP both looks very good and does a lot more than ST2's Ctrl+P window.

> "- Making some fonts smaller or bigger, to display extra information that isn't code. Simply impossible to do, because vim is a one-size font. This alone is a huge limitation."

I fail to see how such a feature would make Vim or any editor better.

> "- Making a decent-looking code-folding system. The code folding in vim doesn't look good, and since you're limited to one font size and to only putting in characters, you're stuck with the very ugly way of doing things. I'm a huge fan of vim folding, and the way of controlling them is just amazing. Except for the way it looks, which is terrible."

Subjectivity again. How it looks is totally irrelevant: how it works is what matters. `za`, `zM`, `zR`, `zj` and friends are the important parts: add a nice gradient, a right-pointing shadowed arrow and rounded corners and you simply have the exact same feature… with a shiny look that suits your taste. Maybe not mine.
Indeed, it is a specific instance of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knapsack_problem
An app to find scantily clad pics of your FB friends
Took the pre-asvab in high school back in the 90s, got a perfect score. The recruiters called a lot. Took the full ASVAB at a recruiting station, still got a very high score. Too easy, how can that be a real test? My ACT/SAT scores were good but not perfect.
Hi pg. Like I said, my evaluation is opinion and yours carries a lot more weight than mine, so I'd love any insight you have. Maybe I've got something wrong in my analysis.

Do you feel that Square's raise was successful even though it was a lower amount at a lower valuation than it anticipated? Maybe not a huge miss, but that seems like a miss to me. Thoughts?

(PS: I am using the term miss in terms of raise/valuation, not in terms of company success).

As for PR, having worked hard to get press both with PR and without, I feel like I have a sense of when it is being used and when it is not. In this case, Dorsey's coverage seems extraneous, flashy, and sometimes out of nowhere. Why are there so many articles about him and Square from so many publications seemingly all the time? Why all this hype around someone that, while immensely impressive, is still only one of a large number of people doing amazing things? Why do we not see so many articles on Elon Musk and Space-X from every magazine on the planet? I can't seem to go a day without seeing a profile of Dorsey or about Square. Feels to me like a very well calculated PR plan. Again, I may be wrong and would appreciate your thoughts.

Thanks and sorry for the entrance into the dismissal corpus. Promise to do my best to stay out of there in the future.