skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Eric Hanushek has produced many peer-reviewed papers on the importance of teacher quality"

All school effects put together are smaller than non-school effects, and teacher quality is only one aspect of school effects. So while teacher quality is fairly important in terms of how much kids learn in school, it's not clear that it would be possible to improve teacher quality enough to produce meaningful improvements on those international tests.

Even if improving teacher quality were capable of improving test scores, it's not clear that it's the most cost effective method.

And the idea that federal standardized testing would improve teacher quality is completely unproven, and the idea that merit pay would improve teaching quality has been soundly disproven.

Not to mention that redesigning the school system around becoming more 'competitive' on standardized tests is extremely dubious to begin with.
Is Iran Behind a Wave of Cyberattacks Against U.S. Banks?
A good question with an unfortunate answer: the demand curve is a curve, not a line, and it's a curve that changes shape when measured. If you test at $100 and then at $50, what you're testing isn't the demand at $50, it's the demand for a $100 product that has been discounted for some reason to $50. Some will wonder why it apparently wasn't worth $100. They'll be less likely to buy, even for $50. Others will wonder if the $50 is temporary and jump on the deal. Which group will be bigger? How would you know? If you restore the price to $100, you'll be testing the demand for a product that is now better known than when it was originally $100, so it should sell more than before, but many of those new people will think of it as a $50 product with a jacked-up price. They'll regret not having bought it when it was $50 and not want to feel like suckers paying $100 now. So your demand at $100 won't equal your previous demand at $100, and you won't be sure what the "real" demand is, even at the numbers you've tested, much less at numbers you haven't.

Even if a genie granted your wish and gave you today's demand curve, it would soon change shape the way prices in the stock market move around. If you could predict the future shape of your demand curve, you could just go into fulltime investing in the stock market and make a killing.

I hope this helps make it clear why you can't make it clear.
I was thinking similar thoughts. You want to hire the best people possible, not those who have jumped though various hoops. Shrinking the pool of possible people you can hire is never going to raise the quality of talent available. How could it?
CNCCookbook is my solo startup:

http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2013/01/06/a-solo-bootstrapp...
Are you an MMO noob? Get your crash course infographic right here
The Nokia Express browser and Opera Mini are built this way and technical folks know this. These browsers are used in resource constrained devices that cannot run a full fledged web browser and also conserve on bandwidth which is crucial for countries like India where 3G coverage is still patchy and expensive. I think user has the right to be better informed in this case. So is the case with Google Chrome which relays each and everything you do back to Google servers.
The Gimp (free, open source) should be able to open it. You can convert it to pretty much anything from there.
K'Nex rock my world. About 6 years back, when I turned 18, I finally ordered the 'back of the catalogue' 3000+ piece Big Ball Factory set on eBay, after spending hours imagining how cool it would be to have it back when I was little.

It was awesome. My mates and I still build it occasionally.
Apply for Scholarships in a Flash With 'Personal for Education' App
I actually wrote a static site generator written with Make and m4. Never used it in production, just as a proof-of-concept: http://old.storytotell.org/blog/2009/07/13/how-to-manage-a-w...

If the question is "why didn't Unix win?" the answers are basically historical. The original way to create pages dynamically was CGI. The idea was that you'd have some Unix crap on the server you wanted to expose over the web, so you'd write up your form and the form target would be a CGI script. The way CGI is specified, the arguments show up in argv and a bunch of incidental stuff winds up in the environment. This is one reason why PHP's global situation is so strange. Anyway, the request would come in, the server would parse it, fork and exec your CGI binary passing in the data and whatever came out got sent back to the client.

CGI is a great piece of classic Unix engineering, because it's completely language agnostic. Your CGI scripts could be shell, Perl, C, anything. The cost is also classic Unix: it's expensive, due to a lot of forking and re-doing the same work, and it's a bit of a security problem since it raises a lot of questions about which permissions are relevant and who should be running what. These questions led to a couple interesting solutions (suexec and fastCGI) that were apparently too much like epicycles and not enough like ellipses, or we'd all know about them.

mod_php and mod_perl basically killed CGI themselves by solving the performance problem and paring the security problem back down to just the web server itself. I suspect there's heavy inspiration from server-side includes but I wasn't there for that part so I don't know if that's true or just sounds reasonable. The other side of the tree, the Ruby/Python/Java side, wound up deciding that HTTP wasn't so complex it warranted doing a lot of backflips just to go through Apache, so they wound up creating their own servers so they could manage state (both application and interpreter/VM) more appropriately for their platform. This school of thought seems to have won the day, except for PHP and Perl which still tow the hard line for integration.

I have wondered for a while if CGI's performance penalties would really be all that noticeable today, for lightly loaded sites. It would be interesting to take a look into. If so, the problem is really just that one request shouldn't map onto one command. FastCGI was an attempt to create CGIs that endured longer than a single request. My impression is that it didn't become a big deal because by the time it was invented CGI was already on the way out and it's somewhat more brittle.

If there were a reasonable alternate way to represent the request that maps well onto Unix it might be possible to revive the dream.
Don Melton, welcome to my bookmark folder.
Exactly.It is the main reason i double majored in Math and CS:CS being the temporal and math the eternal
I'm not a fan of more certification, but I think part of the problem is that school bureaucracy doesn't treat teachers like professionals.

I have a close friend who teaches elementary school and the teachers in her school are treated almost exactly like low level retail employees.

In my opinion the rigidity with which you're managed determines whether you can be considered a "professional" or not.
like webkit?
Now if only some entrepreneurial soul manages to import similar in Europe at no more than 500USD.
Fantasy MMO Tera goes free-to-play nine months after launch
hi josh,

as one of the people responsible for publishing those rules, I feel obligated to mention that they're somewhat out of date. The more correct rule today, given browser enhancements is, "It depends".

Asynchronously loaded code is obviously better. Stick it into the head, and allow it to download in parallel with the rest of the page. It doesn't need to execute until much later, but it's the downloading and parsing that takes the most time, so get that out of the way as soon as possible.

Within your script, you can check for the existence of the elements you need to manipulate. YUI does this quite well, but if you're using something else, just poll infrequently for the nextSibling of the node you want.
Two new (one "critical") Ruby on Rails vulnerabilities
Creating a new name for your project
8 Excellent Tech Habits to Adopt Right Now
Added both of mine in; One we've launched already (but still recently) and the next one is almost finished development.
How many use Java applets still? It is high time browser plugins for Java are killed. But the article advises to uninstall Java, not understanding Java browser plugin is different from Java.
Applied to YC solo with this:

http://www.solitaireinfosys.com/demo/will_brown/index.php

A social network combining YouTube and Google Earth. I plan to launch within 30 days. So you can get as far as launch.
The term "solutions" lost all meaning for me about 10 years ago when I was shopping at Wal-mart for ground turkey. On the back of the package, I noticed that it was manufactured by Cargill. Their tag line? "Cargill- Meat Solutions". Jargon hall of fame!
Surprise, I would hope. :) And lack of recognition, I suppose.
Would it be acceptable to set the form's submit button to disabled in the HTML, attaching the custom event handler and enabling the submit button in a document-final script? Seems like you still get reasonable behavior in the low-bandwidth environment -- maybe even better, since the user can now access the other elements of the form while the script is being loaded and run.
Bank Hacking Was the Work of Iranians, Officials Say
Ruby off the Rails security hole puts 240k sites at risk
I've yet to be asked for any type of degree (I don't have one) for places I've been hired for, consulted at and/or interviewed for. I've also seen people highly decorated with degrees and certificates that can barely get an interview. I think it all depends on the person, their attitude, their ability to connect with people and willingness to learn from others.
It seems strange that your app is so broken with a minor version update. Are you sure you are changing just the last number in the string, and not trying to jump a full version of Rails?
I have had an account for 4 years and have never managed to hit the magic number. I swear it always goes up just as I get close.

Not that it matters, it just always feels just out of reach.
I don't have the book at hand now, or I could make a better example here, but I'll give it a shot.

The trouble I had was with dissociating my thinking mind, or Tolle's ego, with that of the observer mind; in reality, and materially, they are one and the same. As I remember, he draws a sharp demarcation between the two types of mind, labeling the egoic mind as a sort of curse on humanity.

To me, his egoic mind parses as the rational mind, or the thinking mind. Therefore, his dismissal of this aspect of our consciousness leaves much to be desired in my case.

I mean how am I supposed to read and understand his book, written in English, without the aid of a rational mind?

Perhaps it's because I didn't make it past the first few pages that I didn't understand his message, but I found Chopra much more accessible in this regard.

As to your question here: "Who is this "my" who has a goal in meditation"

The my is me; all of me. Not just the observing me, not just the thinking me, or the feeling me, but the inseparable combination of the three.
Does anyone know the real location of these pictures? I tried the waypoint in the picture, and it takes me to blurry mountains.
You own the Pittsburgh Pirates. Your team stinks. You want to turn it into the Yankees. Do you have your players work longer hours for less pay? Add lots of testing? Go after the players' union? Or do you just do what the Yankees do, and pay more for better players?
Or that one is a dog owner.
Just watched the Keynote announcement of Safari and I finally understand what 'Snapback' is (was?)

I have been using a Mac since 2005 and never figured out what it did, then I stopped noticing it was even there.
With modern monitors you might as well skip the dongle and go DisplayPort.
If I use Thunderbird to send an email to foo@example.com, via Gmail, submitted with TLS encrypted SMTP on port 587, and Google decrypts my transmission and forwards it to mail.example.com unencrypted, is Google performing a MITM attack on my communication with example.com? No, they are providing the service I requested.

The Nokia browser is essentially a thin client that communicates with a remotely hosted web browser. The remote web browser, running on Nokia's servers, does all the complicated JavaScript and advanced CSS stuff, and converts it to a dumbed down version that can be displayed on the phone.

There clearly is a cost savings in using low-end parts. Not all screens are created equal, for example the Nokia Asha 306 uses a 240x400px resistive touchscreen. If you have ever used a phone with a resistive touchscreen you know how bad they are. It also has 32MB of RAM, 10MB of user storage, 2G data (not 3G), and no GPS. You can't run a WebKit + V8 browser on a phone with those specs, you just can't.

The BOM for a Nokia Lumia 900 (high end, with a 480x800px capacitive touchscreen) is here: http://www.isuppli.com/Teardowns/News/Pages/Nokia-900-Carrie...
What I was saying was that it's not a perspective on us not wanting a machine to reflect our language and how we us it back at us, as you originally said. It's just the normal clean decent image that companies prefer to present most of the time.
Those are the only protocols that can handle the resolution. It's not a product limitation, it's just a law of nature.
Seems like you found my 2013 TODO list... I'm also hoping to do a RasPi case at some point, but as I haven't actually ordered one to play with yet...
(Australian here) I built http://www.trackmyride.com.au from scratch by myself. The system took about 10 months to build working on it daily after I saved up the initial capital. It has been tough work but recently with a change of marketing we've been gaining some good traction in both the private and business industries now. All our customers love the software itself so that's a big positive but I think I need to redesign the landing page again. I'll do that after the project below is completed.

Since June 2012 I've been working on a new project, solo again putting in a few hours here and there as I can which should be ready to launch hopefully in another week. That project is still in stealth mode until it's unveiled though. I was hoping it could have been completed much quicker but you know how these things turn out. Though the TMR business' hardware and software can work anywhere in the world the marketing for it has been aimed at Australians so hence all our customers are aussies. The new project will be aimed primarily at Americans so that should be an interesting learning curve.

As for bottlenecks, by far the biggest hurdle with Track My Ride has been the marketing. As a programmer by trade when I first started out I had no idea how to market the system and mostly it's been a case of throw a lot of $ and see what sticks. Having a co-founder with marketing know how would have helped a lot. That being said though revenues and sales are still increasing each month so as a solo venture it's turned out pretty well so far.
Why you shouldn't jump on the SPF bandwagon
Ask HN: What web hosting do you use for your personal sites/blogs?
Just looking for a simple host, with really great performance. As the title implies, it's for a simple static site/blog (likely using Jekyll).

I'm sceptical of the much hyped Media Temple offering, and definitely don't want to hand over cash to GoDaddy.
Actually I found a lot of value in the HN comments to this post. Thanks to 37signals for inspiration!
Neat to see a different side of a coin. In our lab, individual measurements can take as long as a year. \sqrt(N), when constrained by human realities, presents a wall beyond which we cannot pass without experimental innovation.

As the derivative of \sqrt(N) is 1/2*1/\sqrt(N), your first measurement teaches you the most. Every measurement teaches you less than the last. In general, we measure as much as we must, double the size of the dataset as a consistency check, and move on. The allocation of time is one of the most important decisions of an experimenter.
> a white page should look like your room lighting if we do things right.

as someone in the "those colors look weird" camp, this might convince me to give it a try. it implies that those i've seen using it have it set up wrong.
In general, if the process that shrinks the pool is better at chopping off the low end of the distribution than the process that selects individual members from the pool to employ is at avoiding selecting from the low end of the distribution, then shrinking the pool by that method prior to selection will, in fact, raise the quality of talent actually selected.

More specifically, "jumping through hoops" selects, if nothing else, for motivation, which is a not-unimportant qualification for teaching.
I've been working remotely about 2 years and I guess that if company and peoples really want to work remotely they will do it (in my case many team members located in different countries). At now it's very easy, if you have clear mind - we have skype and other tools for day to day meetings, many project tracking/documentations systems like redmine or basecamp that could be started from scratch in few hours, github, bitbucket, dropbox, aws etc.
But not all peoples ready to deal with this, mostly because they can live without it and don't have enough motivation to change something in their current corporative systems.
Let's ask God His favorite swear word.

God says...

2:26 And his host, and those that were numbered of them, were
threescore and two thousand and seven hundred.

2:27 And those that encamp by him shall be the tribe of Asher: and the
captain of the children of Asher shall be Pagiel the son of Ocran.

2:28 And his host, and those that were numbered of them, were forty
and one thousand and five hundred.

2:29 Then the tribe of Naphtali: and the captain of the children of
Naphtali shall be Ahira the son of Enan.

2:30 And his host, and those that were numbered of them, were fifty
and three thousand and four hundred.

----

Let's ask God what He pays His interns.

God says...

II word impotent studious cracks_me_up changest However
congratulated flocks sealed temporal joineth minded trouble
precedest gnawed vowing enlargedst wondering passages
replace privacy contemn burnt speech Canst frame rolled
encumbrances appointment you'll_see recess dejectedness
breathedst search officer lovingly you_think_you_could_do_better
temper Sweden metres immutable heinous strange rockstar
moulded prison vigorous worketh Whereas displease owns
close_your_eyes add mourning sought early trustees presiding
decayeth drinking unthankful boink sat crimes scantling
scorned imagine environing excellency thousand cud conscious
griefs measure Might Will Wow interpreting plausibility
SUCH Next godless remembrances require AS profligate chair
I_donno pwned occupy Guatemala emerge study manifoldly
public death seek preparing showing do_it remittest breasts
phantom disprove sights where mere Royalties jointly currents
Epistles parting deluded predict concupiscence Patricius
proceeded growth catastrophe extricated departure counsels
disorder saved confessions- forceth WANT disturb hurt
created exude transgressors hunting craftier stoop goest
generally whitherto wit phantom trembling such BBC influence
united apprehending intercepting tragical
Interesting. 2003 - Safari launches. 2013 - a salvo of blogs is fired.

I'm thinking either an NDA just expired or a lot of folks are feeling nostalgic about the 10 year anniversary.
Thanks for the story! Love to hear stories from the team when Chrome was first released.
Are Game Developers Standing Up for Their Rights?
This is awesome, thanks for sharing! Why is it so fast? Is it angular???
Actually, the problem isn't just school districts being funded by local taxes -- even states that have statewide policies that equalize funding have the same problem. The thing is, poor school districts are often, comparatively, unattractive and unsafe places to work even with the same expenditures of funds (because they are often in unattractive and unsafe communities), so teachers often don't want to work there.

(And NCLB wasn't created to fix this problem, it was created to divert funding from education to private testing vendors and provide a mechanism to rate public schools as failing as a political maneuver to build support for privatization of schools.)
No wonder I was confused. I wonder whether they are really buying the team or the community. It seems that there are less activities going on at Forrst these days.
Don, i am trying to understand why you (not you in person but Apple) went the open source route for safari but not for itunes etc.

Can it be that, at that moment when you made the decision, web sites 'made for internet explorer', were too many. And you wanted the rendering engine on Mac to be widespread by getting from and giving to an open source project.
I use S3 directly (+ Route53) for my static sites, with EC2 micro instances for things that need a CPU. Previously I used Linode and was happy, but when I decided to cut administrative overhead, and go with just one vendor I went with amazon.
You can usualy work out when a ATM is in batch mode by the length of time it takes to process. Though as a rule public holidays tend to be the best ones to find a ATM in batch mode as its a great time to update the banking mainframe software and other lovely updates with the least buisness time impact.

Also according to a ISO standard on magnetic cards with used by banks - track 4 as will have stored the last amount taken out. So even if you have say 1000 units of money in your account and take it all out and then try to take it out again, the cashpoint (even in batch mode) will know. Now if you cloned your own card prior to the transaction and then used that clone, you may or may not be able to withdraw that money again - but would also have to use a different ATM is the one you just used will have a record itself.

Bottom line you can defraud banks out of there money, but it involves breaking the law like any other form of imoral gains. Only true way to rob a bank is to be another bank somebody once said, may very well be the thruest and with that sadly the only way legaly.
In your example the certificate you're being given when connecting through SMTP is for smtp.gmail.com.

It is this certificate that proves your connection is to smtp.gmail.com and not somebody else. That's the whole freaking point of HTTPS. What Google does from there, it's their business, but NO, they are not the man in the middle, as you explicitly and willfully connected to them and allowed them to send email on your behalf.

On the other hand, connecting to HTTPS with one of these Nokia phones leaves you with the impression that HTTPS connections to google.com are secure, when in fact the Nokia device is LYING TO YOU.

The example you've given couldn't have been any worst.
Other than the architecture of their multi-cluster management system, which us certainly fascinating, I found two interesting points.

1) Use of S3 as the data storage platform allows for Production, ad hoc, analytic, and "personal" clusters to all work with not only a full-size data set but the same data set. Brilliant.

2) The investigation of Amazon Redshift as a Teradata replacement. First, it validates Amazon as a new competitor to on-premise relational data warehouse implementations. Second, it would seemingly move substantially all their data to the cloud. Third, what does that mean for their other apps such as "traditional" BI? No sense having Cognos on a local server if all the data is in the cloud.
Would be great before CS6 since there's already a search function in CS6.