skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't have the answers. I'm not even against testing. I've just seen the kind of damage overemphasis on testing can do to education and want to see it end.

When tests become a core part of how you judge someone's worth as an educator that educator is going to put all of their efforts into better test scores.

The question is do test scores mirror the quality of education or do test scores just tell you someone's potential at performing well on a test?
A lot of OS X apps are installed by dragging the app to /Applications, no installer involved, it may be one of the reasons.
The Ultimate UX Design of Credit Card Form
In all seriousness, have you ever tried digitizing old journals? It is fairly time consuming.

Writing an encyclopedia is time consuming, but we did that.

Walking & driving all over the world is time consuming, but the OpenStreetMap community has done that.

Scanning & digitizing old public domain books is time consuming, but the Project Gutenberg project has done that.

What's next?
These guys must be living in fear of Wire Fraud and Computer Fraud charges.

I'm less than half kidding. This is real destructive harm, so it's closer to the intent of the laws. The incredible churn rate is a pretty clear indication that end users dont want the software being installed. And here we have hundreds of thousands of systems compromised.

Selective enforcement of draconian laws is scary, really.
Home PC sales were a strong part of Dell's income. Smartphones and tablets (specifically the iPad) have killed the home PC market across the board. Dell still has a strong server market and a strong B2B PC market (strong loyalty) through Dell Premier, but the home PC market is irreversible dead.

I used to work for Dell and was part of their dev team when e-commerce was the next big thing and sky-rocketed late 90's. I have always recommended Dell PCs to friends and family. I write this on a Dell Precision T5500, which was a beast (and still is) when I bought it 3 years ago. The build quality on their top of the range products is excellent.

However, if my parents came to me today with a recommendation for a new PC, I'd tell them to buy an iPad. They read (and rarely answer) their email, play the odd game of Mahjong, and use Skype to keep in contact with their children and grandchildren. They truly have no need for a PC anymore.

I can't count the number of times I have had to RDP into their virus ridden, broken Windows installation, because they clicked on something they shouldn't have and installed spyware or viruses.

We shouldn't forget that the "tablet market" used to be a joke. People what chortle loudly about "stupid tablet devices" and how nobody would ever buy one. Every tablet that came on the market was an abject failure. Then Apple came along with the iPad. Everyone thought it was bound to be another tablet dud. Everyone was wrong and Dell and Microsoft got caught with their pants down - one fellating the other. Dell still haven't really got off their knees to recover, but at least they can close their mouth now.

The iPad is a genius piece of kit. You really would struggle to break it. Even my parents couldn't get PC style spyware on it if they tried. It is that problem that Dell needs to crack. Microsoft have exactly the same issue and both companies know it.

Children these days have no need of a PC either, because they have smartphones. They keep in contact using Facebook chat or Whatsapp. When asked about email the other day, a teenager we know replied "oh, our generation don't use email. That's for oldies and besides you have to wait too long".

All of this is available to them via their phones - every second of the day. They are always online and always in contact with their friends. Having a PC means a fixed and non-movable connection to the internet, and they have to share it with their parents and siblings. This includes monitoring by parents, which with smartphones, is harder to do for most non-tech savvy parents.

Dell cut 75% of their product line and focus on a product that is better than the iPad. Microsoft bought Nokia for their mobile "experience". They should also consider Dell for their hardware experience. Their build-to-order process and technology is second to none, let's not forget that.
Prosecutor involved in Aaron Swartz's case linked to another hacker's death
That's a very legitimate question. How can teachers do the best with the resources they're given and the the children they're working with, no matter how threadbare the resources are, and no matter how traumatized and disadvantaged their students are?

Whether standardized tests have a role in answering that question or in evaluating teacher performance is hotly debated right now.

But the purpose of my original post was to draw attention to a different question: How can society as a whole ensure that every child gets the best education possible?

In schools that have no problem attracting resources, great teachers, and children with mostly fortunate backgrounds, perhaps this second question can be answered by asking the first: how can we improve our teachers?

But in schools that lack resources, whose students live in abuse, poverty, and despair, what even an exceptional teacher can do will be radically limited, and society would probably be better off focusing on how to eradicate poverty -- the real cause behind the failure of too much education in this country.

Unfortunately, seriously tackling the issue of poverty is much harder (and even contrary to some dominant American ideologies) than simply demanding more standardized tests be given and blaming teachers and their unions.
I change my schedule by partying hard a Saturday night and staying awake (not sleeping since getting back from partying) most of Sunday until about 8:30pm at which point I take a hot bath, put on an eye mask and drop dead in bed. I'm usually awake at around 4:30 or 5am Monday. After that I just condition myself to be sleepy when I go into my room. If I have something to do at home after work, I do so out of the room. I basically condition myself to be sleepy the moment I enter my dark room at night by just going to sleep really early. After that I'm AOK to sleep around 9 and wake up at 3 or 4am and get shit done in the hours before going to work. Then when I get home I have time to watch a movie and check emails before collapsing in bed.

I am 28 so I might add that you might want to adjust such a process according to your age and responsibilities. Hell you might not like to party like I do. If that's the case, substitute the partying for reading a good book, working on your startup, testing to see how waterboarding and CIA sleep depravation works, or just having a crapload of coffee.

Also, I know you specifically mentioned no drugs, BUT it might be easier to take a Benadryl at 6pm and use that to wake up early the next day. You will feel a bit drudgey the next day but that's fixed with the first cuppa-o-joe of the day.

Hope I helped :)

PS: I know my methods aren't the healthiest, but they do work for me and I keep in shape with good nutrition and exercise, so that's that.
Problem is that the end user is probably going to think "My computer is full of pop-ups wtf is going on?" not "oh, I have popups because I installed FreePornApp 2.0 which came with InstallMonitizer 3, I'll make sure not to get anything with that bundleware again".
I disagree. Incremental changes are not always capable of reaching point B from point A.

A large, extremely messy code-base can make even trivial changes unsafe, let alone large changes.

The effort required not only to figure out what point B is, but also how to safely reach it from point A is immense. Much much harder than a rewrite.

However, it is a very good idea to meticulously read the bad old code and write down a list of things it handles -- to make sure none of it is missed in the rewrite.
> How is it any different than the rest of the working world where you can control some things and you can't control others yet your job is to do the best you can with what you can control?

So the argument is that since everyone sucks at measuring things that any arguments about how a particular system of measurement is ineffective should be discarded?
I believe that studies like this are well-intentioned in that those conducting the research are truly trying to improve the state of education in the US. However, the result of their work I'm afraid is the 'quantification' of teaching as a profession.
If they increase the return of malware installs, their brand will be fine. And their investors will be happy.
I think relativism does play a role on outcomes regardless of the parallels you are drawing here. However, you do make a point on a person's competence based on how well they can handle a situation but I don't think you can group one's role as a teacher being equal as one's role as a lead engineer.
I don't really understand the visceral reaction against testing in this HN thread.

You're tested throughout your working life. Almost every job interview is a test. Giving a customer presentation is a test. Finding bugs in your software for a release date is a test. Memorizing that big Cheesecake Factory menu so you can wait tables is a test. Getting your General Contractor's license is a test. Getting certified as a Pilot requires passing a test.

There should be more to education besides testing, but being tested is a part of life and it's easy to measure success - that combination means that it's a useful tool for education.
I can speak quite a bit about this "industry": We (VLC) receive 1 of those offers per day.

They are liars, shady business, IP violators and are downright dangerous.

They have all those great offers for you, but they refuse to give any details as soon as you ask any question. More than half of them are "the biggest in the world" (sic). They lie about download numbers, about download size, about number of software actually installed and about their connexions. They even lie on the actual payback price.

If you refuse, they build special websites, copying yours, with your IP and trademark and register adwords with your name, in every way possible.

They also resell their solutions/websites to other people, using "Affiliate networks", so that once you take one down, 20 appear. And the guy who you took down had no idea who you were or what the software was...

They also have deals with download.com/softopedia/softonic to change/rewrap your installer, without your agreement, often violating your license; or they give back money to those websites, so they are ranked higher than normal other downloads.

And of course, open source software are never respected.

I believe OP is very polite: There are no good reasons to not shame them publicly.
Not familiar with the OSX installation procedure, but I assume that dragging the app into the folder runs some installer script? Are there perhaps restrictions on what can be done via these scripts that would require 2 distinct actions to install say a browser toolbar and application?
This is probably going to be long and rambling: as luck would have it, I didn't have a great sleep myself last night :)

So there's the 'common' suggestions of avoiding caffeine in the afternoons / evenings and trying to 'switch off' half an hour or so before going to bed (as in, turn off the computer, put down the cell phone, dim the lights and maybe read a book).

I know you said you wanted to avoid drugs, but does that include all 'chemicals'? Melatonin is great for helping with sleep, although I find it helps more with 'keeping me asleep' than 'putting me to sleep'.

Do you have a TV or computer in your bedroom? If so, get rid of it. I don't care if it's not on when you fall asleep, you have to get rid of it. I don't know why, but for my wife and I, getting rid of the TV from the bedroom had an immediate effect. And we weren't the type to stay up late watching it just because it was there.

Have you tried meditation at all? For a long time, I did a fair amount of meditation and that definitely helps me to fall asleep... just basically running through the relaxation practice. For an even longer time (when I was in high school) I used to listen to self-hypnosis tapes. Again, just from repetition I can pretty much put myself to sleep by running through one of those in my head.

Having said all that, here's one trick I learned from a very unlikely place: some random guy on Big Brother in Australia a number of years ago :) Lay down and in your head imagine drawing the number '150' in the sand. Do it slowly and think about what you're doing... if you pay close attention, you can almost see every grain of sand moving as you do it. Once you finish '150' imagine doing '149', '148' and so on.

For me, at least, it's all about (a) trying to keep your mind off the happenings of the day, and (b) doing something that you do all the time and that you associate with sleep.

If I lay down and can start on the 'numbers in the sand' thing straight away, I can be asleep by '145', because my entire body understands the drill :)

Anyway, hope that helps!
iPhone app for collecting and sharing global health & lifestyle data
I prefer to see it this way: Y combinator is funding the future of the Linux desktop by encouraging crapware on Windows :)
I can see the future of apt-get on Ubuntu now...

$ sudo apt-get install emacs
After this operation, 86.3 MB of additional disk
space will be used and AVG Toolbar Pro! GOLD EDITION
will be installed to Chromium
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?
Global PC Shipments Continued Downward Trend in Fourth Quarter
That exchange was ridiculous. I brushed his ego by correcting him on what is supposed to be his core competency, and he resorted to bullying and fallacious reasoning rather than admitting he was wrong.

It took some work, but I managed to corner him.

I didn't want to lose this argument because he was trying to make me look foolish when I was technically right. Since he has a lot of street cred, I feared that a lot of people would take his ramblings as correct.

And some did. I got at least three down votes on the first message.
So who cares about their image then? The original software vendor, probably. If they bundle crap with your install then take it up with them. If enough people did then they would probably stop using this company. So it all comes back to them eventually. Even if it's not in a negative PR way.
The Smartphone Have-Nots
I'll take this chance to recommend the following linux distributions to those non-sysadmins who are wondering which one they can try out:

- Fedora 17 with Gnome. Out of the box it offers all kinds of installation options, like the one I always wanted and only found in Fedora (in my words): "Use all this but only this free space, and also encrypt it". The only downside is that out of the box it lacks some things every desktop user will want, like media codecs, but can be installed very easily. There are also tons of addons for Gnome that you will want to improve the UI (eg: get back the minimize button -.-), you can get them at extensions.gnome.org.

- Ubuntu 12.04 server edition. I chose server edition because it has an option for disk encryption, but it will use the entire disk, which sucks unless you have two disks like I do. Then you install 'ubuntu-desktop' and you are done. There is also a problem with both server and desktop edition when installing into some HDD's, they fail to align correctly for different block sizes. Other than that, this is the perfect distro for me. It is LTS so it will be supported for 5 years, and I hope that by that time they have rolled back the crap that they added to 12.10.

- Fedora 18. It should be released today, let's see what they got.
Stages Of The Crash: 1-3 Have Happened, Wait For 4-11
You're not being downvoted for speaking the truth; you're being downvoted for stating the obvious.
Their benchmarks don't seem all that great considering that they are supposed to have SSD's

http://serverbear.com/9806/digitalocean#view-benchmarks
So basically, they're funding the problem AND the solution. Pretty nifty business-wise, if not very ethical :)
Wow, I didn't realize ninite was YC. Awesome.
Yes, I've run afoul of the "download button" adverts before. I'm not surprised to see them on torrent sites etc, but it amazes me that some supposedly reputable download sites would allow such things.
Wow, thanks for the link to the great product!

So even on a platform that's opened up to applications, the threat of crapware can create a business case for a curated third-party app store :-)
This work is valuable, but I personally would like to put more focus on improving teaching and learning - helping teachers do better, helping students do better, creating better learning environments and curricula.

For example the budget of this study came out to about $15000 per teacher. What if instead we spent $5000 of that for professional development / training for the teacher, $5000 for a classroom set of chromebooks, and gave the teacher a $5000 raise. That alone would cause some significant improvements, I believe (not that that is ALL that is needed, and there are so many bigger issues that need to be tackled as someone else mentioned, such as poverty and inequity).

But when we talk about "good" teaching and "bad" teaching, we are treating it like it is a simple craft that is mastered or not mastered. Teaching is like engineering, it involves design, and design is about making things better (see this prezi on learning design: http://prezi.com/b44jwdgvs8nl/olds-mooc-introduction/ )
I went to the University City School District in St. Louis. It was actually a pretty strange place because it's the main district that Wash U (Washington University in St. Louis) is in, so about 10% of the students are children of (mostly white) professors and other very education-oriented professionals (doctors, lawyers, etc). Because of that, top classes (honors and AP) were actually pretty good. I, and many of my classmates went to Wash U and other top universities.

The rest of the student body was made up of poor, mostly black students who came from families where education wasn't a priority. Every single year I was in high school the state tried to revoke our accreditation and we just barely passed a state audit to keep it. I was a math tutor, and it was common for students to come in who couldn't do basic addition (in high school).

To make matters more confusing, the gap between the good students and the bad was almost entirely caused by economics (wealthier parents resulted in smarter kids, as is normally the case) but because the economic divide was almost identical to the racial divide, many of the educational issues were easily conflated with racial issues. This led to the (mostly black) teachers and administration demonstrating favoritism toward white students, and it also created tremendous social pressure on black students not to try to succeed academically (otherwise you're an oreo).

I wouldn't trade my experience there for anything. I received a pretty good education, and I experienced a part of America that more privileged kids should experience, but most of the students at my school were definitely being left behind.
Thanks for the interest in my tutorial! I only started with AngularJS a month ago while I was on vacation. I tried a few of the newer JS MVC frameworks, but had no idea how special Angular is until I got in to it. Its ability to add features to HTML (using directives) is unique AFAICT.

I think the one thing holding it back has been the lack of a basic tutorial. I really found it quite hard to wrap my head around the concepts for this reason. There will be a book coming out later this year I believe; in the meantime hopefully this ongoing tutorial series will help get folks started.

I'll be posting part 3 of the video tomorrow. Let me know if you have any suggestions or questions.
I've mentioned several times now that this company could review software that gets bundled. It's going full circle. Let's end this with: Who cares.
So the argument is that since everyone sucks at measuring things

You read something into my argument that I didn't put there, so I'm going to disregard it as a straw man.
Heh, maybe someone should apply to YC with a traffic sniffer/intercept/password cracker system so we have someone to battle, too :)
Exactly this. I'm often advising people to install VLC when they are having problems with Windows Media Player, but whenever I tell them to google for it on their own they end up with some toolbar infested crap.

So now I specifically instruct them to go to videolan.org.
The past public disparagement of Microsoft's business model and praise of FOSS and Apple, makes fodder for easy conspiracy theories.

Rather than a conspiracy, however, I suspect it is more likely just a case where YC doesn't give a fuck about further degrading the Windows ecosystem.

Next time someone complains here on HN about Microsoft's malfeasance in locking down Windows RT, remind them that they have enterprise customers who don't want to deal with shit like this.
Build a Knowledge Sharing Culture at Your Company
Indeed. This short video shows the above in action, nothing short of amazing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6m6s-ulE6LY
AMD claims managers copied thousands of files before moving to NVidia
Although I was put off initially, I think I wouldn't mind a straight ad that I see once in an installer.

But leaving spoor behind in the form of toolbars is beyond the pale.

Toolbars? Really?
That's why they do value-added testing rather than just evaluating teachers based on the score of their pupils. Obviously there are confounding factors, but if a teacher can make a statistically significant difference to the the test scores - as measured by before and after testing then that is valuable to know.
Occasional i5 programmer here (is it just System i now? Dammit IBM...)

> The majority of our code is free form

This is not at all our case. We had a contractor once who decided to try his hand at discreetly converting files from fixed format to free, introducing mountains of subtle bugs in the process. Nowadays we're only allowed to use free form if we're making a brand new source file (which is rare).

> I enjoy coding as much on my Mac as the i.

Can I ask what tools you use to code on the mainframe?

> They see green screens and freak.

I can confirm this. Our management is so embarrassed of our green screens (which are for internal company use only, customers never even see them!) that we're actually embarking on a massive project to bolt a PHP-based web-facing front-end onto our system, and literally the only rationale is so that we can use CSS to make our screens look more "modern".
IMO, some of it is due to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory. One developer starts with an advert, somebody else has two, a third developer gets paid to sneak in some toolbar, the first notices "hey, I can make money that way, too", and the ball gets rolling.

Now, the question is why this has not happened for Mac Software, at least not on that scale. Gruber (2004) claims it is due to zero tolerance (http://daringfireball.net/2004/06/broken_windows).

I think that is partly true, and it sort-of started with the original PC. Installing a DOS program such as Lotus123 was a nightmare, where people had to answer such question as "number of lines on a page" and "how does your printer do bold" to configure a printer. Installing hardware, similarly, was a nightmare (what IRQ should we use? Do you have extended or expanded memory? etc).
Good rule of thumb is to look for the smallest "Download" link on the page.
The Importance Of A Monthly Cadence With Close Friends
If I'm reading the linked page correctly, these metrics were verified by correlating them with individual student improvement on a variety of standardized tests and "more cognitively challenging assignments in math and english". This is better than pure circular logic, but until those metrics are validated, these are suspect. In particular, everything seems to test for shallow understanding.
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