skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Standardized tests typically measure how good a student is at adding, subtracting, and reading a paragraph and using the information it contains.

Why do you feel we don't care about that? What information should we care about?
Thanks for the Ansible reference, looks interesting.
> There is also a relatively heavy premium for 16Gb more internal flash.

Market segmentation. The goal is to make more money off people who don't care much about the price without losing those customers who do.
That's mixing up measurement for achievement.

We make mental body builders.

But they make terrible people and thinkers. The idea of educated here is lost. Most of the debate the average person can create is middlebrow at best.
Disclaimer: I'm a Programmers moderator.

The original version of Programmers was called "Not Programming Related", and it was created as a site for anything and everything that didn't fit Stack Overflow (What's your favourite programming cartoon, etc).

What you are describing is actually the current scope, that seems to be working just fine. You're right that questions that fit within the site's scope rarely have a definitive answer, but a definitive answer is not what we are looking for, just a finite and somewhat limited set of good/great answers.

Here's a few recent example questions that probably explain what the site's about better than I could ever:

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/167305/what-f...

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/165380/how-ca...

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/161568/critiq...

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/162643/why-is...

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/161794/is-it-...

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/159637/what-i...

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/154247/experi...

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/158779/how-ha...

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/155488/ive-in...

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/154733/my-bos...

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/145669/what-s...

None of these questions would make it on Stack Overflow, and that's the gap Programmers is filling.
While it appears clever it is in fact inhumane. While people suffer and die during these days and every spare pair of hands is in need, you'll be making a movie out of it to entertain masses and make a buck.
Younger employees show up on the job with an existing social-media presence, which they aren't about to abandon—especially since they see their personal brands lasting longer than any single job or career.

This seems like a rather biased formulation. It's not because they're a bunch of arrogant little Millenial shits. They're responding to the collapse of the bilateral social contract between companies and career employees that was said to have traditionally existed, in their parents' generation and so on. In other words, this is reactive. A few years is the most you can hope to get out of any company now, not a lifelong career.

That's not the Millenials' fault. They didn't ask for that.
So is it pushed?
Now this is some interesting stuff. I wonder if they have any plans to make a dual instruction-set processor that can run both x86 and ARM-based operating systems... That's the kind of crazy design that just might work ;)

Aside: I wonder if it's possible to have one processor core with an ARM instruction set, and another with x86 - obviously, reading from different [segmented] memory locations, albeit simultaneously. I just wonder, since they mention in the article the new Opteron cores are designed by ARM, but the rest of the processor indeed will follow AMD's design.
I wonder why google would choose to randomize assignments instead of recruiting for a particular skillset for a particular project/role.

If they are afraid of leaking information about what projects they are up to based on their job openings, that's actually easy to solve - advertise heaps and heaps of openings for many, varied and niche skill sets. Of course, only some of these adverts are real openings, but no one but outside google will know which ones are real openings. Hence, your competition cannot sniff your job openings to see what you are working on. This simply costs fees in administration and you reject every fake advert application.
Read the article on the Verge. They left out LTE to stay out from under the thumb of Verizon and their track record of delaying updates to the previous Nexus Phone.
The Windows Phone UI is the one thing in my mind that actually is different, though I have a little skepticism about it as I'm not convinced that it's solving a problem many people actually have (certainly not one I or most people I know have) and it doesn't seem to be something consumers are queuing up to get their hands on. Meaningful innovation surely has to be something for which there is a demand?

Kids corner I would love on my iPhone but it's a more polished version of what I can do with restrictions so I'm not really sold on it being that revolutionary.
This is probably the second or third time I have come across this language in an HN comment. Every time I see it, I click the link, and try to click the links on bondi.it.uts.edu.au, only to get 403 FORBIDDEN responses from any link whose path starts with `~/cbj/`.
We are currently building out Chef to handle change management for 3000+ servers :), loving it so far but we are also a RoR house too.

Know of another big hosting company using Puppet and they love it, for about 10k+ servers.
Always wear your white belt
Seems that link doesn't work at the moment.
love this, good luck guys
It wasn't just the moderation policy, the actual purpose of the site was changed from anything "Not Programming Related" to "conceptual questions about software development". That led to moderators shutting down the active community that had formed around career development, office politics, equipment, etc.
It's only showing off if you think Haskell programmers are better than everyone else ;-).
There's a general "smear" feel to Project Shame. YMMV. I don't find the information at the link compelling.
I'm guessing a complete evacuation of the building would have been required regardless, which makes things a little trickier.

Would they be able — or would it be advisable — to leave the fuel pumping, generators running and all operations unaffected without any staff on site?
It's really not that bad. I ended up back in academia getting a funded MSc, and at this level I'll be interviewing in summers or at the end of my degree for industrial positions that are more in line with what I want anyway. Why not walk to the door that says, "Research and Development Engineer" rather than "Generic Software Engineer N+1"?
Gangplank - collaboration over competition
I recently had occasion to look at Cfengine, Chef and Puppet.

I chose Puppet.

http://chester.id.au/2012/06/27/a-not-sobrief-aside-on-reign... (scroll down if you don't enjoy my windbaggery).

The short version is: Puppet best fits the way I think about how such systems should work. Despite ostensibly belonging to the same genre of system, the three of them have subtle but very important differences.
I'm asking you what evidence (if any) would change your belief. Perhaps no evidence is capable of changing your mind.

That's fine - you've just adopted a different philosophy, one of the "other ways of knowing" rather than science.

My point is that NCLB...

I'm not arguing for NCLB, I'm arguing that objective, comparable and reproducible measurements are the only viable way to optimize a system.

If you want to argue some specific metric is flawed, do it. Explain what should be measured and how the particular metric differs from it (i.e., details). So far, not a single person in this thread has actually done that - the closest we came was this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4713558
But if "what gets measured gets done", then teachers will likely take time away from these more complex skills to spend more time going over what's on the test. This is especially true if you tie compensation and continued employment for teachers, and college admission and scholarships for students to test performance.
Yeah this sounds more sensible, look for someone who can deliver the same experience… not for someone also successful selling electronics because all other electronic shops are fucking horrible (Especially Dixons which I haven't bothered to step into for nearly 10 years now)
False equivalence: clever (here: profitable) vs humane.

You can easily be one without being the other. Or both, or neither.

Moreover, people suffer and need every spare pair of hands these days just as they do every day. In NY, in NJ, everywhere. What's your excuse for "making a buck" and not helping, the rest of the year?
I'd love to read some of these, got a link?
If you are a vim person, you might want to try Pentadactyl/Vimperator. You can use the ":b $searchterm" to search your open tabs, and ":buffers" to display the list of open tabs. Very handy.
> Aside from prices and selection (for some reason the number in USD is equal to the number in GBP for almost everything, even when GBP is 1.6-2.2x the USD)

Completely irrelevant to the discussion
Oh? I can guarantee you that if I went and interviewed any graduates of a high school or university that concentrates on rote learning I could shred any notion that, on average, they had basic competency in the materials they are alleged to know.

The sad truth here is that it is possible to "fake it", at every level. For the most part a person can be productive in even the most technical of jobs without fully comprehending most of what they are working with. People talk about cargo cultism a lot, but in the real world cargo cultish behavior often works. A lot of times just going through the motions is enough to get by.

But that's no excuse to continue to wallow in mediocrity. We can and should do better.
We use babushka at 99designs for setting up servers and development VMs. I highly recommend it.
Developer here. Hope you like the app. Would be glad to get some feedback.
Hey. We hope so too! The plan is for us to operate independently and continue making it easier for designers to work with type on the web.
The official example appears to work as expected: http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/examples/carousel.html
4 Reasons New Dohop Will Make You Happy (while saving you money on flights)
So you've had months to prepare this and you're still not ready? You knew about this storm for the past week and didn't scramble to finish before it hit?

Hitting a deadline "no matter what" is a great metric for effective entrepreneurship. Your users, customers, prospects, business partners, investors, and regulators are unlikely to cut you a break. Why should YC?

(I don't mean to sound harsh on so many who are suffering now. I really wish them the best. I'm just saying that a good business person takes care of business (submits YC application) before the storm and focuses on the really important things like family and safety during and after.)
Same goes for this stupid piece of shit http://www.wthr.co
Reports Claim Forstall And Browett Were Asked To Leave
More like 3 years but still impossible
Eight tips on successful adoption of collaboration solutions
Education can be divorced from indoctrination. An educated person can display particular skills and knowledge, they don't need to believe that knowledge.

(See, e.g., Einstein displaying knowledge of quantum mechanics without actually believing it, or assorted creationists who actually understand evolution.)

I think your claim that criminality is the best measure of knowledge is interesting. Among other things, it suggests that the best way to increase knowledge might be to shut down the education system and implement a police state. (For the cost of the current education system we could increase the number of cops/courts/prisons by a factor of 6.)
That last paragraph specifically is what I think is completely without any connection to reality and utterly disrespectful towards those that right now put their humanity before their financial or career interests and that spend the time helping their fellow human beings.

No great company is going to be left out because they could not show how resourceful they were.

There is a time to be hustling and there is a time to put a human face on things, natural disasters are not the time to show off who is resourceful other than in helping to combat the disaster if you're in the area.

If you don't have your priorities straight at times like these then you shouldn't be running a company.
So they have more sense than DirectNIC had during Katrina http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2005/09/68725
Not that interesting, anyone familiar with his work could tell you he's a bad fit
How do I delete the above. It was a quote I mistakenly posted as a comment. See here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4716779
Given, that was a pretty bad citation. Still, it's a good guess that he heard about MultiMarkdown somewhere along the way since he considered and initiated the use of Markdown on Stack Overflow / Exchange; he's been personally involved with it for roughly 4 years now. (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/05/is-html-a-humane-ma...) (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/10/treating-user-myopi...)
Yes, I am only claiming that it results in shorter code for the code which deals with problems in that specific domain. In general -- obviously not! But the overall gain is still significant. I don't care if e.g. some library dealing with some specific type of string manipulation is longer in Erlang than in other languages. This is a completely isolated modular component of the whole system. It does not prevent me from understanding the important bits. I do care if the core components are bloated, but are only describing some very simple behaviour.
I get the same bug there as well. Chrome/Windows
Women Smokers Quit Smoking and Gain Life
Women Smokers Quit Smoking and Gain Life
or do the really have these faults, but if they had investigated your claim, you would have kept quiet and let everyone think that it's a fantastic place (as far as you were concerned)?

Disparaging an ex-employer in the public, even if the ills disclosed are minor-- which in Google's case, they are-- can do considerable damage. Or it might not. It's hard to measure the cost of lost opportunity (in this case, lost recruiting). In any case, it's a move to take seriously, because it involves downside risk for both employer and whistleblower and the upside is quite minimal. It's not something to do just because you have a negative experience, because 3/4 of work experiences are pretty negative (by which, I mean they get less out of the job and the company than they should) for most people. If a company is going to get a public smear, it has to earn it.

If Google had done the right thing and investigated, then terminated the person, I probably would still have warned my friends about the death of "Google culture" but I wouldn't have leaked Perf and the death of 20%T to the public.
Me too, Firefox/Mac
And the interview did its function properly - the position isn't a good fit for that person. If nerding out during the interview about lazy evaluation and purity isn't happening, then its probably all for the better that the interview failed, then to have a disfunctional team with the odd language nerd.
...evaluation of performance based on the performance of a different group.

I'm confused - what group of people should we be measuring, if not the students exiting the education system?

...there were a number of interesting topics that we had no time to cover because it was more important to teach to the test.

Again, I stand by my claim that your problem is not with standardized tests, but with the goals of the school system. You wanted schools to cover topic B, but the political system decided they must cover A.

The only role the tests played in this story is that they are an effective mechanism for making sure teachers actually do their job.
Letterpress game strategy guide
A Parade of Horribles: Limits of First Sale
Ask HN: Which DNS service/s outside of AWS to use?
I'm on the look out for a new DNS provider which offers dynamic fail over and location based routing out side of route 53. Ultimately I'd like to have 2 such services to allow for redundancy in providers.

What solutions do you guys use?

Any wisdom is appreciated!
It's not really something I know much about, but I recently went to a talk where the guy said the ultimate difference between Puppet and Chef is Chef is ruby scripts, but Puppet is a config file - which means that Puppet can guarantee that its actions are idempotent.
Wear reinforced gloves for storm clean up
yeah me too. IE throws a warning. In a corporate environment.
Totally. Entrepreneurship isn't fair, and there's never enough time.

But if it genuinely has hit the fan, and you're honest, then people will usually cut you a break.

EDIT: A day is kind of arbitrary anyway.

If you get an outstanding application a couple of days late, from a team who literally spent two days without power or phones, and instead of submitting their application they helped their neighbours clean putrid mud from their homes, would you reject it?
You can bookmark entire trees, though, preserving the hierarchy.
It's not really a fair comparison. Atom was an attempt to hug the low-end of the computing market with a low-power CPU for use in netbooks. ARM on the other hand is a smartphone/tablet system-on-a-chip which is in a completely separate performance/power-usage realm. Different design goals, different tradeoffs.

However, Intel found out that the power/performance tradeoffs for the original Atom were not what the market wanted and they've continued to evolve the design. Today there is the "Medfield" Atom system-on-a-chip which is already making its way into smartphones and already giving ARM a run for its money. Given Intel's history and their initial level of success with this first generation SoC design it's definitely far too soon to write off Atom and bask in ARM triumphalism.
Always have Opera i stalled and the UI is cool but frequent crashes...

I completely understand. I have a sort of love-hate relationship with Opera myself. The features and UI are miles ahead, IMHO, but other characteristics are so frustrating. The Windows version doesn't crash often, but there are plenty of web sites that don't get along with it.
As a designer who studied typography and spent a few years working in print a long time ago, I love typecast. But practically speaking, Google Fonts has serviced most of my needs. It's free for one, and that's a pretty big deal. And two, I just prefer its lean implementation.

Type design is an interesting industry. It takes years to master which is not appreciated by the market. And I'm not a qualified type designer, but as a creative director (and purchasing gatekeeper) -- I feel the pricing model is really dated and beautiful type is being held hostage because of it.
I haven't experienced any kind of friction when it comes to editing files. Springpad is intuitive for me, even on the iPhone.
Poland found explosives on wreckage of president's plane-report
> What makes you think one is important but not the other?

Because Google already did that and is doing other, more radical, things?
And does that make the european crisis a localized thing? If any, such anecdotal evidence shows us that it is possible for a company to thrive even in the worst of scenarios (which is a positive thing, I agree), but extrapolating any macroeconomic data from that makes no sense.

Even considering that there are sectors that don't suffer as much (or even get some benefit) from this crisis and that you're working in one of those, everyone will be worse off in the long run. Or is your job the only thing in the economy that influences your well-being?
> I should note that you probably made that decision before you had a negative perf in your record.

where would such a negative perf come from? And what is that sort of record's nature? Is there any managers here who could clarify how this whole shebang works?
Are you certain of that, or is it speculation?

Was he pushed to do Maps, and he told everyone it was going to be a nightmare, and then made the best of a bad situation?
Could be because it's hosted on Sourceforge.
Thanks Paul, nice to see the CEO reads HackerNews +1 ;-)
> Their managers are just giving them low scores to keep them captive.

From reading these comments in this thread, it seems that this score is used to evaluate whether to allow the said employee to transfer.

Now, a manager has incentive to keep the best people in his/her team. Is this 3.0-3.1 score something they do so that a good programmer but is somehow "bored" with the crappy work (and face it, there is always crappy work) don't try to all leave?

IF that is the case, then there is something wrong.
Very true. Although the answer can be "both". In this case it sounds like there was some specific severance package negotiation and I suspect there was a more specific non compete put in place for the exchange of $$'s
Read the book "Masters of Doom". There's a part where John Romero wades across a flooded river during a huge thunderstorm to get to their secluded house where they are building what will become the game Castle Wolfenstein. He makes it across the river and into the house, and finds John Carmack already there, coding, who and had done the same thing to get to the house.

Push a deadline back because of a storm?

Really?
It's beautiful.

And it's further a demonstration of how magical Bob Ross was; without his narration, it's just an insipid landscape, if the clouds are not happy and little, and the left cloud does not have the right cloud as a friend.
"If Rand is so bad ..." the problem is that most people haven't read Rand, even so called "adherents" and "fans", and so they don't know what the heck they're talking about. the few people that have can see through the bull.
Anybody notice how similar the promo video is to Apple's product intro videos? The tone, pacing and even language come across as strikingly similar - all they are missing is the stark white background.
Ok, got it. :) Let me prepend my original statement by "Since the A500 and the subsequent failures, ..."
i get the same bug =/
> Were it not for the perceived value of a CS degree, I suspect a substantial number of students wouldn't even bother, and probably flock to Coursera, etc.

Yes, well maybe they should get on with it then.

The beauty of CS is that the theory is directly applicable to the practice of software engineering. And because of this close connection between code and theory, you can develop significant coding skills just from doing the problem sets. As per the usual academic refrain, you get out of it what you put in.

If you think they should just be teaching you industry skills then you're wasting your time and money because college will never be as instructive as taking an internship in an actual company shipping code. Not only that, but you're paying for the privilege instead of being paid. Even if they rolled over and decided to go this route, academia does not have the knowledge or experience of what it takes to be successful in industry, must less impart that knowledge to you.

If you're going to go to college, take advantage of the academic strengths: the deep knowledge, the curiosity that goes beyond the immediate problem, the great minds you have at your daily disposal.

On the other hand, if your CS program sucks then it sucks and I'm sorry.
You're saying people should focus on family and safety during and after the storm? I should think family comes first, before the storm. When did Noah build the ark? Before the flood. A good business person can balance work and home life, and especially the safety of one's family. I'd rather delay an important project and take care of mine than rush a crappy job.
This is how we work with clients