skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> They assume that negative evaluations (both individual and group) will put pressure on the service organizations to evaluate their internal operations, fire some people, promote others, reorganize resources, change their operations to improve customer evaluations, or go out of business (and fire everyone).

This isn't really true for any given business. In theory that's how businesses get better, but there are so many examples of businesses doing something horrible for their customers or society at large and then doing nothing to change their internal processes or staff.

> Then there are unionized or government operations, where people are protected by "the contract" (real or figurative), don't have any clear sense of who their customers are, and rise up in great umbrage at the impudence of outsiders thinking their work should be evaluated. (Customers, to people who don't understand the concept, are "outsiders" or "civilians.")

I don't know other unions, but teachers unions aren't generally opposed to being evaluated at all. Standardized testing isn't the only way to evaluate a teacher and it is argued that student test scores are a bad way to evaluate teacher performance.

> I'm generation four of five generations of school teachers, but don't talk to me about who is and isn't allowed to have an opinion about the way our education system operates.

Everyone is entitled to their opinions. The author of this post was lamenting that his experience as a professional teacher wasn't relevant to those making policy decisions because they are making their decisions are ideology and personal belief of how things should be.

> I'm generation four of five generations of school teachers, but don't talk to me about who is and isn't allowed to have an opinion about the way our education system operates.

I've always wondered about being a customer w.r.t. public education. How exactly are you a customer? What good are buying with your money? I don't consider students to be a commodity, so I'm curious as what exactly you think you are getting.
This post makes some good points about whether or not spending time working on rails templates for the use of your team will pay off. But if you're just using a template that someone else created -- RailsApps, by Daniel Kehoe, for example -- then there's no time lost to you or your team.

I also think that a great use case for templates is to try out new gems before deciding on whether or not you'd like to use them.
i spent a couple hours talking to a guy who had supposedly done approximately 60 mg print back in the day.

one component i didn't see in this blog post was what he described as "A PIERCING WHITE LIGHT". :)
It’s Always Chile in Norway: the Five Types of Territorial Morphology
There is another way to protect question on SO - http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/52764/what-is-a-prot...
What is a "Rails template"?
Good to know. I just set up a $5 a month server with a $20 promotional coupon code. That's 4 months free, yeesh. I love linode too, but my needs are modest as all I really do is host a few small traffic sites for friends and staging sites for clients. As much as I love linode, my next year of hosting will go from $240 to $40. And with their prices if I'm happy I now have a great affordable host to recommend to clients.
Really? Every time I try to use my Xbox, I have to deal with the idiotically slow UI. Seriously, if I press the Xbox button, it pops up a grey rectangle, and takes several seconds to load in details. The dashboard is cluttered with ads (although only one tile is labeled so).

Browsing games to buy on the Xbox itself is painfully slow. Many, many, seconds, just for simple screens to load.

This guy totally nailed the reason I don't start up my Xbox as often as I'd like: It's annoying to get into. Once I'm in a game, it's _usually_ OK, although the slow saving thing is jarring. But the thought of it starting up, asking to update and reboot (usually 2 or 3 times in a row) - ah screw it.
Show HN: My first web app trains your ears
Hi HN,

I've been taking guitar lessons and one thing that is recommended to most musicians is ear training - where two different notes are played and you must identify the number of steps between the notes. My app, Earbuilder, should help with that process.

You can find it here: http://www.earbuilder.com/

It's my first web app, and my first real foray into JavaScript. You can take a look at the source and you'll see that it's pretty poorly structured, but I've picked up a book and hopefully things will improve with my second web application.

Please let me know if you have any comments, suggestions, or hate because I'm looking to improve this over the coming weeks!
That's a situation particular to you and your team, unless you're saying everyone would do a better job in scala?
"It's not like you _have_ to use IP multicast to solve certain classes of broadcasting problems"

Then why did NATO get their own dedicated lines to multicast on? Why don't they run their 100,000 simultaneous user systems without multicast and save that expense?

But OK, we'll pretend you're right about that one. What if someone asks for a job shop scheduler for predictably giving optimal schedules for 300 machines interactively? NP completeness is no problem, right?

Or what if someone asks for an in software modulator for the entire radio spectrum? The non-existence of the necessary hardware is again no problem, right?

Or how about when users asks for just plain contradictory requirements huh? Never happened to you? Because these ones are not just physically impossible but also logically impossible.

The fact is that some things are constrained by engineering. It is also a fact that some non-technical types in positions of authority push back when told "no" because of technical constraints, and ask "Why not?". Attempting to give them a reason is a trap, because they are asking the question as an opening negotiating ploy.

Because these idiots in their ignorance think an engineering constraint is a negotiable item.

I feel very sorry for the engineer in the original post because it sounds like he's stuck in such a rut.

And it's simply infuriating to hear somebody respond to that plight with the nonsense that "in IT anything is possible".
TJ as San Diegans call is not as safe as it used to be. But, there is more to Mexico than TJ.
(I suck at HN. I thought I could post text AND a link... anyway, here's what I wrote.)

Hi HN,

I've been taking guitar lessons and one thing that is recommended to most musicians is ear training - where two different notes are played and you must identify the number of steps between the notes. My app, Earbuilder, should help with that process.

You can find it here: http://www.earbuilder.com/

It's my first web app, and my first real foray into JavaScript. You can take a look at the source and you'll see that it's pretty poorly structured, but I've picked up a book and hopefully things will improve with my second web application.

Please let me know if you have any comments, suggestions, or hate because I'm looking to improve this over the coming weeks!
How is the analysis flawed? It specifically looks at density. Quoting from the paper:

> We analyzed a dozen historically dense, small cities from around the country in which the shares of residents getting to work by automobile range from 43 to 91 percent. We compared the rates of automobile use to the number residents and employees per square mile.

The underlying abstract says:

> Theory suggests that as automobile mode share increases in a city, the amount of land used for transportation also increases, whereas the land available for other uses decreases. This can result in a loss of activities from the city. This study compiles data from 12 cities in the United States to test these theoretical relationships. The findings suggest that on average each increase of 10 percentage points in the portion of commuters traveling by automobile is associated with an increase of more than 2500 m2 of parking per 1000 people and a decrease of 1700 people/km2.

It's saying that the more the city promotes car commuting, the fewer activities are in the city ("decreased robustness").

Small cities can also be dense cities. The paper included Cambridge, MA and Berkeley, CA in the study. Both have populations around 110,000 with a relatively dense population.
Slightly off-topic, but I hadn't seen jsonip.com before this and I really like the way you did http://jsonip.com/about.
Brings to mind a quote from the mayor of Bogota, Colombia: "A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transport."
I'm one of the (10) original developers of Excel.

I would say people love spreadsheets (Excel just happened to be a particularly well done implementation of a spreadsheet when the GUI became the most popular desktop platform) because:

a) Easy visual data entry - everyone understands a table of data.

b) Non-procedural programming model.

c) Simple analysis tools (batteries included): charts and pivot tables.

There just has not been much imagination applied to improving on this model - there are great gobs of ground for innovation for someone willing to take a stab.

1) Make spreadsheets "functional" - i.e., allow a whole spreadsheet model to be used as a function definition (I was amazed when I first learned spreadsheets and found they lacked this capability).

2) Make it easier to sling large data sets around - and especially share and work with dataset repositories.

3) Better hooks for developers to integrate spreadsheets with more advanced functionality and features. There is too much locked up in the spreadsheet as a monolithic application. I can publish my Python program easily - why can't I do the same for an application developer in "spreadsheet language"?

There has been relatively little thinking about how to organize and manage collections of spreadsheets and models. Most people still deal with one spreadsheet at a time; it's its own little island - largely cut off from the rest of the world. In the era of cloud infrastructure and hosted data, why aren't there better systems in place to manage data and models in the aggregate? What if you married the best of GitHub and Excel together, for example?
I think it's like ERb or Haml
A rails template is what railway construction workers use when laying track. It’s a 2 feet wide rig with a place to put the lumber and iron pieces.
It'll be interesting to see what happens when the OUYA becomes available. A lot of major developers have already committed to support it. I can't wait to get my Kickstarter unit in a few months.

I met with them last year when they were talking about possibly acquiring Bionic Panda Games (which unfortunately didn't happen) and they seem to have an interesting business model. Every game will have a free version, either a full but limited version or a playable demo, and they'll have their own store similar to Google Play.

The only deficiency is that they don't have a motion controller like the Kinect or Wiimote.
Show HN: Lunisolar - A Python library for handling the Chinese calendar
wow - neat. i'm glad people capture this stuff for posterity. i remember doing stuff like that back then.
Bugwolf Announces: 2nd Beta Bug Bounty Contest — Starts Feb 16: BOUNTY $1,000
Its actually pretty safe now if you stay out of the obvious ugly parts (zona norte,eastern Tijuana).
Violence escalated 4 years ago because of the heavy handed approach against drug gangs from our former president, now It's been pretty tame with a couple of incidents, nothing compared to whats happening right now in northeastern cities.
I note that "It's like tripping your balls off on LSD" is missing from the list. But, funny thing: It's the most accurate. Instead you get a bunch of gobbledygook about death, eternity, and direct messages from god. The fact that you might just be having an episode of impaired cognition does not actually enter your brain.

Let's not make this more complicated than it is.
I never liked Rails templates because I felt the quality of the final product was never on par with what you would setup from scratch. To that end, I created my own system that I call a Rails application prototype. If you are interested you can learn more about it here.

https://github.com/metaskills/holy_grail_harness

I can see both sides of the argument here. My application prototype is really slim and focuses on bootstrapping an application with a major emphasis on testing tools. Even tho it has a JavaScript MVC framework (Spine.JS) it will remove all traces depending on your setup questions. This approach to a lean prototype means it can easily be updated like a normal Rails application and changed/forked as needed. Best of both worlds hopefully.
The larger point is more about the philosophy of using a template, and the impact on the culture of the team.
My experience in the late 80s and early 90s matches your own, except I got the impression that poor teachers did teach to the test extensively. I didn't get that impression from good teachers; they just seemed like good teachers. Looking back, I hypothesize that merely competent school administrators used standardized tests to identify problems, while smart administrators identified problems with the tests but then didn't actually cite the tests when dealing with those problems. Because after you've put a few losers on performance plans and blamed their test results when they asked why, the other losers in your school might catch on. (This seems to imply that administrators at schools I attended were merely competent, which implication I cannot contradict.)

If such a dynamic did exist, one could predict it would take hold on a national level with the advent of NCLB. Then one would expect that NCLB had the effect primarily of making standardized tests less accurate...
My point isn't that NY real estate is the result of deflationary currency. My point is that its an example of what happens when assets appreciate without investment, like currency does in a deflationary system. The old people just end up owning all the wealth, in a very dramatic way.
Spending an hour or two with your accountant is cheaper than getting raked by banks or tax authorities.
There is routine 10x variation in disk performance between different VPS's on Linode. It's luck of the draw and performance will change (i.e. get worse) over time.

You'd need to provision and benchmark a bunch of Linodes to get meaningful numbers.

That's one of a dozen ways in which a VPS is not like a real server.

5 second benchmark which corresponds well to real-life disk performance:

sysbench --test=fileio --file-fsync-freq=1 --file-num=1 \
--file-total-size=16384 --file-test-mode=rndwr run --max-time=10 \
| grep "Requests/sec"
Optimize Your Search Space
How do multiple people use such spreadsheets? Are they opened from a share drive?
This article is spot on. Why are indie developers not racing to develop apps for Xbox? Xbox should treat all apps, games, music, radio stations as equal, be they from indie developers, microsoft or from big name publishers. Provide a seamless tile space navigable via touchscreen.

Oh, no wait, Apple is doing this already, and when it comes to the TV, we'll stop wishing Xbox could do it.
I guess strictly speaking it's a false dilemma to say you're either arguing endlessly or shipping, but I don't really think that was the spirit of the quote. Unless there are infinite productive hours in your day you have to choose your stack and go for it, and the less boilerplate you have to do to get your stack running, the more time you'll have for productivity.

It's nuanced. We all of us owe our careers to the people who came before us asking, 'what if we could do it this way?'. But, you have to draw the line between intellectual wanking and thoughtlessness. It's a surprisingly hard line to draw - more for some than for others.
Does Steve Ballmer ever read articles like this?
Given enough time, everything becomes assimilated to look "normal". Consider the words RADAR (RAdio Detection And Ranging) and LASER (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation) -- what started as initialisms became normal words after people started using them regularly. It can presumably happen to newer words like "Xbox" and "Gmail" too.
Facebook style sidemenu from scratch with Rubymotion
Lawyers and accountants just aren't that expensive. Really. For the common case ("I just want to set up a company") you could be in and out in an hour and face only a moderate premium over the underlying fees.

I mean I don't try to do my own dentistry. And like others on HN I make fun of people who think they can program after doing a mail merge.

So why would I try to do my own legal and accounting stuff? Given the potential downsides, that's just crazy.
> Rocko's Modern Life.

Best show of the 90s right there. Thankfully Netflix has had the entire series on streaming for a while now. Great times.
Yup, definitely not a new thing.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (had lots of turtle toys when I was a kid). My brothers and I would mix them in with other random toys, like Lincoln Logs and do cross-overs. Nothing wrong with cartoons and marketed toys in moderation and expands creativity if done right.

Even The Simpsons had toys and games.
Storyteller: a puzzle videogame about building stories
I travel to San Diego every month. The locals there warn that Tijuana is much more dangerous than it used to be. Even the more adventurous partiers that I know avoid Tijuana for fear of being robbed, beaten, and/or killed.
Try reading this: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B008DZEWF8 for another point of view on LSD and the impact it has.
I wish it well but my assumption is that it will fail :(

Hardware is hard; software is hard; distribution is hard; but they want to do all of it all at once. I wish them the best but I don't see them lasting unless they get acquired
I don't think there are many large companies with 50%, but they at least have a significant amount of female engineers. I thought Google was at ~40% but I can't find the reference anymore (searching just shows Google+ stats).
I know 10gen (MongoDB) has at least some female engineers just because one of them helps run the local python meetup
I remember finding this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uFzhEDdexc when I read that article
This doesn't seem like a good idea.
But then how many people remember that the PS2 (just the previous generation) was Sony's second console ever?

What was surprising about last generation was how Nintendo kicked everyones butt in the beginning.
I hardly think you will find MSNBC by poking... NYT reporters or Christian Science Monitor reporters (not to mention al-Jazeera, BBC, RT, etc.)

I assume this is a joke, particularly the NYT. And I'm not seeing ABC, CBS, NBC (owned by GE, which has gotten massive "green energy" subsidies from Obama), PBS, the former Current TV, not to mention almost every newspaper in the US, anywhere in your list. Kinda lopsided, huh?

As for the foreign media organs, the BBC, al-Jazeera, and RT are all famously anti-American. Obama still manages to get much better press that any Republican. They hate America and they like Obama. Odd.
The best "complete" product.
This would be the one sticking point for me: it seems Apple has never really cared about games, so it is unclear they will start caring.
I have now read quite a few articles and comments on HN with teachers attacking either testing or MOOCs (some links below). There comments share a strange incoherence, tending to ramble on about irrelevant but emotionally charged issues (e.g. the rant on disrespect for teachers here) while ignoring pertinent facts (e.g. any evidence pre-NCLB students were better prepared than today's students). There is also a strange paranoia as if there is some grand conspiracy to "damage" education and harm students when as best I can tell the targets of this wrath (e.g. Bill Gates) are tying to help solve what they see as an extremely critical problem.

Is this really representative of the "thinking" of our teachers generally?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5162105
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2633341
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5124993
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5118174
Anecdote: In college I earned a few bucks working as a tutor. One of my jobs was to assist a blind student. I think they were an EE major. I wasn't tutoring, though; I was dictating an engineering textbook onto cassette tapes.

The school was in a converted office building. I was given a portable tape recorder (this was back in the paleo-Eighties, when analog ruled the Earth) and I would go up to the top of the stairs by the fire exit and sit in the landing to do my recordings. It was a reliably quiet place. (Also a good place for a mid-day nap.)

The book was, of course, filled with equations. At first I tried to read them aloud and that's OK for some things but some were just complicated. That's when I was given a special drawing board. It was a clipboard with rubber padding and clear plastic sheets. I used a stylus to write on the plastic, pushing down into the rubber padding to leave an indentation.

I hope technology has a improved a bit since then.
It is off-topic, though, for StackOverflow. By rights, the question should be on the Programmers StackExchange site, where it would actually have relevance. (On the other hand, ProgrammersSE isn't exactly a hospitable environment itself, so migration might not be such a great idea. Which may, in fact, explain the fact that it was locked rather than migrated when ProgrammersSE came out of beta. It was supposed, originally, to be more about the programmer than the programming, but it seems to have lost its way.)
Adobe reduces Australian pricing after summoned for government pricing inquiry
That would be great, it would just be a $400,000 vehicle right now. It would be an awesome machine.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin have invested in Tesla since it's beginning. I think they both own a Tesla Roadster and probably both own a Model S (wouldn't you if you had $20 billion).

Tesla could either sell batteries and the electric powertrain to Google or Google will could just autonomous vehicle technology to Tesla and others. Musk likes to sell it's technologies and parts to other companies.

Imagine if the car drove off to charge itself. There wouldn't be any miscalculated trips (like the NY times article). The car could be programmed to not let you run out of energy.

It's coming, just hang tight. There are a lot of people fighting this kind of technology (not sure why, money) and that's unfortunate.

The best part of autonomous vehicles would be turning around the front seats to eat, sleep, play cards, anything. Autonomous vehicles will provide a whole new industry for America, new parts, news services, new shops. It's a good thing, I guess.

Apple needs to get in the "helping the world" business. They should invest some of their $100 billion in future technologies. The world made everyone at apple extremely rich, and Steve Jobs was never the charitable type, isn't it time Apple gave back to humanity? $5 billion from Apple would be nothing to them, but would be everything to a company like Tesla.

The military could even invest in Tesla. I'm sure they would have tons of uses for high-quality batteries and electric powertrains.

Tesla sure has a bright future ahead of them. As soon as a bad review comes out they respond publicly and are not afraid to call out bad journalists.
The Soft Bulletins
Actual title of article: REMux: An Experimental Approach to Responsive Web Design
The PS3 is Sony's third console, ever.
This rebuttal only works if they were comparing, say, New Haven to New York. However, they chose three different cities for each of their "bins," and those cities all are relatively equal in size.

New Haven CT: 129k
Hartford CT: 125k
Lowell MA: 107k
Cambridge MA: 106k
Berkeley CA: 113k

For Arlington, I don't know which city they're talking about. It appears, regardless of the state, that it's the odd one out, so I'm not sure why they included it.
Arlington MA: 42k
Arlington VA: 216k