skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A few years ago This American Life did an excellent episode on what happened in Washington Irvine Elementary School when teachers were given more autonomy and then what happened when it was taken away[1].

I just listened to this episode the other night and the themes presented parallel this discussion nicely. The narrative presented suggests that one of the best things Washington Irving did was to have carefully constructed report cards that measured what specifically was being taught to students. The other thing was removing poorly devised standards.

That being said, at the end of the episode, one of the teachers interviewed, when asked about whether the temporary success of Washington Irving was due to some hard to measure effect of having good teachers at the right place at the right time had this to say:

> It can't just be magic. It can't just be fluky things landing people in the right places, and the chemistry being right. It just can't be that. What's the hope for the rest of the schools? What's the hope for Irving in the future? What's the hope for any school, anywhere?

The apparent tension between a need for measurement by standards and a need for teachers' autonomy was palpable and heartbreaking. It is well worth a listen.

As for a solution, I can't help but wonder why there is such a focus on making and enforcing standards at higher levels of administration. I imagine it gives a feeling of productivity and control. I wonder if it would be more useful if those bodies focused on studying and informing. Of course studies are harder without standards but it might be worth expending the effort, since it would give a more natural view of what is effective in promoting learning.

[1] http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/275/t...
Ok, that makes more sense, but isn't how you phrased it initially. (No one would call that "testing teachers").
Because the world is a complicated place and I am ignorant, I was confused by this remark. So after ten minutes on wikipedia, I thought I'd share what I learned, to contextualize DeepDuh and kragen's references to economic collapse.

Note that I am not an expert, this is just what I gathered from WP and a few other sources.

Sweden had a financial crisis in the early 90s (perhaps 1990 to 1993). This was partly due to a real estate bubble in the 80s which collapsed. Unemployment "soared" (from ~2% to ~10%, which many countries would be fairly happy with). The central bank at one point set overnight interest rates at 500% (!!!). Yikes. At one point the federal deficit was 15% of GDP. Sweden recovered through the mid-90s. Their unemployment rate continues to be much higher than pre-1990, but they've run a budget surplus most years since 1998 (everyone is envious).

Argentina had a completely unrelated crash, about 10 years later. It started in 1998 (by which point Sweden was firmly recovered). There was an IMF bailout, but Argentina couldn't hold up their end of the deal, and the bailout collapsed. 20% economy shrink, 25% unemployment, peso devalued by 75%, rampant poverty, holy crap that sounds really really not fun at all. In 2002, there was a two week period with five different presidents, what the hell. Macroeconomic indicators start getting better by 2002; the government has run a small budget surplus for most of the time since then, and unemployment returned to the single digits by 2007 (still worse than a lot of countries, but 7% today is a hell of a lot better than 25% in 1999).

And that's what I learned this morning. Who knows what the afternoon will bring?
Finding a service to pack up and ship your stuff is an alternative to hiring an actual employee to do it. Outsource everything but your core.
I believe I just shared that. Our company's used RT since 2003.

Over the years we have also tried ZenDesk, Tender Support, etc. They have their place. For example, I like Tender Support for adding help to a small end user facing SAS web site.

But RT can provide automatically structured metadata for extraordinary volumes of internal, client facing, and end user facing email.

If you email some company's support address, and get an email with something like "[company #12345] Your original subject" in the reply, and you can simply reply to that without quoting the original and without any "paste your reply between these lines" nonsense, there's a decent chance they're using RT.

I see Kayak, Yelp, and DynDNS on this list:

http://bestpractical.com/rt/who.html

Like those, Stripe likely has enough volume to warrant looking into it.
Yes, and that makes not that much of a difference because you find almost no time to properly grade their assignments.
Tons of info, thank you!
Having worked as a bank teller, that figure is much, much lower.

So this claim surprised me -- I'm always willing to be wrong, but didn't think I was here -- so I went bouncing around in my backfiles to find the statistic I had quoted off the cuff.

It turns out, after following a few citations in papers, that the FBI keeps fairly accessible info on this.

http://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/bank-crime-st...

$7.5k per incident, give or take.
>Support for their flagship products, gmail, google docs, etc is non-existent

How are they flagship products? Their flagship profit maker is ads and I hear their support for advertizers is top notch.

I doubt Gmail makes enough off its ads to justify its costs, I think its value is more in getting people to sign in to Google so that if you search for something at work, ads related to it are shown at home etc.
God says

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_there
While it's always great to see android apps being made available for others to investigate and learn from, I have to ask: Are you sure that there isn't something else going on that would explain this behaviour?

I've just installed the app on my own device (Galaxy S2), and the app is simply terrible. It's slow to respond to clicks, scrolling is laggy, I actually can't view any videos because the click event isn't triggering anything (I can see in the debug logs that it's happening, it's just not doing anything)

All I'm wondering, is if the chargeback was because the buyer was unhappy with what he/she got?
3 Trends To Win In Enterprise Sales
I was hoping for an N-Philly or a N-DC solution.
Thanks for sharing!

Do you find that the fact you are paid by parents for your work has any effect on the motivation or performance of your students? How about your own motivation or performance? What percentage of public school math teachers do you reckon would have the success that you have had if they tried to what you do?
IIRC Vietnamese has the highest syllabic information density of any natural language. Chinese being a close second (about 94% that of Vietnamese).

Edit: found that article http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2091477,00.ht...
Perhaps in the pop-up editor, the names of the parameters could also show their current values on hover (where possible), so that one could debug the function live, in a similar way to the sheet showing live numbers most of the rest of the time (with show-me formulae).

Also, by doing functions like this, one could have some documentation too...
It's kind of interesting how every teacher I've talked to that's taught for a decade or three agrees that NCLB is awful, yet among the general populace (HN comments), that's considered more evidence that teachers are incompetents.

Possibly the best thing I can say about NCLB is that it's fueling demand for good exclusive secular schools. Which is all well and good if you live near an urban center, but too bad for you if you're growing up an hour away from the nearest magnet school.
If one bothers to learn about tools and why they are useful, they can think a little bit deeper and understand why some intellectual argument do result in software that ships. We write Scala at my company because we've found that with the right developers who seek to understand type systems and fp we can ship fast as fuck. I'm dozens of times faster working in Scala than I ever would be in php. We want to beat the average, not be the average.

http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
Tim Cook: 'You Don't See A Large Number Of People Writing PC Apps
I think the real problem is that nobody has any good metrics that will work 1) cheaply enough and 2) at scale.

Give me 25 students and two hours, and I can write a paragraph for each kid very accurately detailing their strengths and weakness in writing computer code (my area of expertise).

But even with 15 years of classroom experience, I still can't design a curriculum that works for someone that isn't me.
Author does not know the difference between a caching layer, a transactional RDBMS, and distributed non-structured data store.

The author was not referring to using memcached to store the results of a query, but rather the new memcached API in MySQL 5.6. With this API, you can access data in InnoDB just like you do with memcached (key/value get/put/update), while at the same time retaining SQL query flexibility.
http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/whats-new-in-my...
Yes, I agree that Excel is a programming language. This is one of the ways I learned programming also! Good way at looking at programming.

However, VBA is not the answer for most Excel users to move past because the expectation is set by Microsoft; it requires nothing more than introductory courses and common sense. This is where most people will use Excel.
The best approach that I have found, at least when making websites or creating a CMS, is to really dumb it down. Don't think about how you would like it to be, because it will almost always be too complex. Beyond making software super intuitive, make sure it's extensible enough to adapt to customer needs. Pretty much anything is possible but if your client is consistently asking for stupid things then I think it's time to find a new client.
Curiosity Uncovered: We discover what's in the cube
Armadillo Aerospace update
Adding autocomplete to an application using elasticsearch
If you go out and meet gen x/y Finnish people they are in general shockingly more educated, intelligent, and well-informed about reality and events in the world around them than are Americans in the same age group. Most also know at least 2-3 languages and have traveled and met people of many different cultures/languages. They are in general also significantly more physically and mentally healthy.

America really is not doing well as a society at the moment.
Rest of the world == Europe.
Show HN: Crowdsourced index of concepts in CS lectures
It was just meant to be shorthand to raise the issue of the different highs. I don't really subscribe to the hard-line distinction; I was just trying to be succinct.
2 months of sales & usage stats for my first iOS game.
I can see Yammer not quite working right for this scenario. But HipChat came to mind.
Asks for your physical address then takes payment in bitcoins.

Seems like a pretty good way to defeat Bitcoin's built in anonymity system.

Seems like it would be pretty easy to build a database to cross-reference bitcoin addresses to physical location this way.

Or to put it shortly: "Seems legit."
Formal education, in a lot of ways, is a very dehumanizing experience.

Vanishingly few students give an iota of a damn about critical thinking, about understanding the implications of what they are reading or studying, trying to make connections to other facets of knowledge. The emphasis is on throwing some shit hastily onto a paper (gotta reach that word count), memorizing mathematical algorithms (just because you can integrate a function, does not mean you understand what you're doing), passing the exam, and moving on to the next topic.

SAT Essay Test Rewards Length and Ignores Errors

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/04/education/04education.html...

I had to do that. You have 25 minutes to write an essay. But you're not graded on the quality, you're graded on the quantity. You're rewarded only for getting as many words as you can onto the paper. Purposely writing like shit is an absolutely horrible experience. It's like intellectual suicide. Why aren't there congressional hearings about this? Why is this acceptable?

Occasionally getting a good grade and learning the material are one in the same pursuit. That's an amazing feeling. You feel like you're not wasting your time. You feel like you can trust the system to educate you and you can see your progress and knowledge reflected in your grades.

I don't know if there's a better way to do education. It's not an easy problem. If you want to maintain your intellectual integrity, the best strategy is to learn what you can from valuable classes, teach yourself on the side, and get decent enough grades to get you into a college with a decent brand, rinse and repeat there. And if you don't care about your intellectual integrity then you can Google for guides on how to get into Ivy Leagues and follow the steps there. Note that that is not to say that no one who attends an Ivy League has intellectual integrity.

Only a year to go and I'm done with academia forever.

/rant
agreed. Just because someone can use a pocket knife and some twine to lash together a chair in 20 minutes doesn't mean someone is going to buy that chair.

Craftsmen care about their tools, and great craftsmen ship. Shitty ones can ship too, but it won't be good.
How much does hip surgery cost? Somewhere between $10,000 and $125,000.
The Caleb Moore Crash: Watching Someone Die on YouTube for Fun and Profit
I like your article and you do bring up some really valid points, however your portrayal of Science seems overly critical in that their subscription products don’t make any sense.

You say:

“Their strategy has been to focus on unnecessary subscription start-ups with vanity customer acquisition proof points”

and you talk about Dollar Shave and ELLIE as examples.

Theoretically, subscriptions for razor blades do make sense because it’s something you buy often. I’m not a user so I’m not qualified to speak on their product and quality, but as far as the model goes, there’s nothing wrong with it and it’s not unnecessary.

Subscriptions for clothes on the other hand does not make sense because like you said you don’t really need two pairs of workout clothes every month. However, what you failed to mention was that ELLIE is not solely a subscription based company. They do sell their products for set prices, and you can choose to not receive products on a given month and simply roll your credit over.

Note: I’m not affiliated with Science in any way; in fact, my start-up competes directly against one of theirs.
The Future is Flat
Radium. Chocolate for your ears.
Quote:

For instance while I have not yet reached the end of the string I would feed my characters into a buffer until I found the end of the string

The point however is that instead of reading characters step by step some lexers will instead have a look at a buffer of a certain size and move a pointer around in that buffer and modify some bytes in place (in-situ).

He talks about this buffer, at one moment in terms of bytes, another moment in terms of characters.

It's a pedantic quibble, but an easy source of errors, especially if you're using a language that doesn't distinguish strongly between the two concepts, and e.g. you encode your characters as UTF8 with a weak alias to unsigned char just like bytes.
Introducing People Commerce
Designing to Reward our Tribal Sides
Some forms of diversity we want to lose - the current Syrian culture stands as a good example, China's own culture of terrible human rights abuses is another. On a more usual definition of culture diversity of attitude towards race or sexuality covers diverse opinions such as the KKK and that guy who protests at gay funerals.

Not all diversity is positive - and given that the norms on the forums this passed through are themselves widely different is a indication of how culture will disconnect slightly from geography.

A genepool is strong if it has variety and if it can spread the beneficial genes widely. This can be dichotomous, but trust me 4chan proves generating a wide variety of memes quickly is something we can do.
London, England - Full Time - Local Only (with flexibility to work from home on occasion)

Optim.al (https://www.optimalsocial.com/) is currently hiring full stack engineers for our London office, working on a variety of projects that cover real time bidding, analytics, data science and front end web applications.

Requirements:

* BS or MS degree in computer science, maths, statistics, information science,
or related field.
* Good understanding of web technologies HTML, Javascript, HTTP, JSON, REST
* Must be able to demonstrate that you're a great
programmer in any one of Python, Ruby, Java, Scala, Clojure, Haskell,
F# or Kotlin
* Must be happy to work in either Python, Ruby or Java
* Must have a good understanding of a Unix based operating system
* Some experience of databases and at least one web application framework

If you love programming and would like an interesting job with a steep learning curve and a wide variety of challenges, please get in touch.

You can email me personally at jamie@optimalsocial.com or use the following Jobvite link: http://hire.jobvite.com/j/?aj=oYH2Wfwn&s=HackerNews

No recruiters please.
I assume the NCLB standardized tests cover things which are widely considered to be core reading and math skills. PBS has a number of sample questions here: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/indepth_coverage/education/no_ch.... The topics seem pretty core to me. If teachers broadly find themselves having to devote significant additional time to these subjects in order to pass the tests, what does that say about pre-NCLB curricula? Learning to take a test is a skill which would not necessarily be taught in the pre-NCLB world, but how much time does that really take? Are there any real studies of this? It seems to me that a child with a decent grasp of the subjects appearing on that test would not require an inordinate amount of instruction in test taking.
My wife runs a teen drop-in center. Believe me, sometimes the teacher (and any other decent adults in the kid's life) is the only way that kid is going to get any intellectual stimulation whatsoever. Sometimes the parents are useless.
Different people are looking for different answers, and a non-technical person rarely wants a detailed technical answer.

"Will I be able to do X?"

"No, because that's technically impossible." or

"No, our product doesn't support that feature yet." or

"Well, you could, but it's not a documented feature, and you risk losing everything you did during next upgrade." or

"Yes, but it will take several more months of development and associated cost."

Generally, the asker will be satisfied at this point, because now they understand enough of the problem to make an informed decision.
I recently talked to an Intel engineer about why they don't have an Intel phone out yet. And he reached into his pocket and pulled out an Intel phone! Apparently, these phones are already available in China, but because Intel does not make the LTE chipsets, they have been unable to get it out. I asked him why Intel did not have LTE chipsets in their phones, Ans:"Because Qualcomm owns all the patents and makes the latest chipsets"
I Want My Kids to Be Drug Addicts
"gmail filtering + email forwarding have been broken for over a year"

Could you elaborate on this please?
I was recently asked to fill in a 'customer experience report' for my Nexus 4 purchase by Google. Lets just say, that whilst the service I got wasn't quite the clown car special that this guy was given, it wasn't great either. Not that I expect them to take a blind bit of notice of my carefully worded response.

At this point, I wouldn't advise any of my friends or family to buy physical hardware from Google Play: the customer service is just atrocious & if anything went wrong I'd feel responsible.
> "SUM(A3:K754)" is not very meaningful. If only named ranges were more discoverable and useable, we might end up with more examples like "SUM(ProductSales2012)".

Convert your unstructured cells into an excel table, and besides all the eye-candy, ability to filter and sort your data, you already have that.
Why is it that Google gets a free pass on customer support?

We somehow implicitly trust that they're doing good in all other areas, but there is absolutely no circumstance in the entire company where a customer can reach a person and receive true support.

Why do they get to do this, and no other company can?
Thank you for proving everyone else's point that there are a lot of humourless dummies in our industry, and that you're one of them
Slightly off topic, but are there any good books or other sources for experienced programmers who quickly needs to get up to speed on the more powerful features of excel/VBA? I've just been asked at work to take a look at a huge importan excel 'program' that's not quite working the way it should.
I really love these articles. You're solving very practical problems with a depth of statistics that most people never appreciate. It's really great work.

I'm sorry to hear that you feel the opportunity cost pain so severely. It might not be worth it to you in the larger scheme of things, but I think you could definitely package up and sell an expanded version of this series that spends more time elaborating the value proposition and provides some simplified decision processes for various common situations. More Fisher than Jaynes.
This man has far more faith in Google than I do... I ordered on day one, and gave up after about 6 weeks. While the Note II isn't perfect, I could buy one in a store right away.

On the robot CSRs: it honestly seemed like they had been given about 4 hours of training, which consisted of madlibs-style repetition of whatever you said. I got a bit hyperbolic in a later support call, and one of them honestly said:

"I understand it can be a bit frustrating when, uhh, companies play with your emotions and lie about when your Nexus 4 device (tm) will arrive."

This wasn't a text chat. This was someone acting like a 80's AI over the phone. After they parroted my complaint, they would immediately escalate me to a specialist. Once I talked to a manager, who escalated me 'differently'. I have no idea if any specialist ever replied; I got a few follow up emails which basically said 'Thanks for calling! Keep on keeping on'.

Cancelling was actually the best, easiest thing I did with Google. Ordering was painful, waiting was aggravating, but telling them "I don't want the damn thing" went over surprisingly well.
How did we get from talking about learning outside the curriculum to students physically overpowering teachers?

Such a blatant attempt to muddy the waters of the discussion does not help your position.
You can say the same thing about many segments of the American population of the same size and demographic homogeneity as Finland...
They are effectively worthless if it can be shown they are added automatically to every mail. Privileged communication requires something explicit or genuine intent, i.e. the sender writing 'privileged' at the top. It actually can be quite bad if it's shown that the privileged communication was abused (either in terms of piercing all veils or censure).

My experience is people add these signatures because they see other people doing it and they assume it's a good practice or seemingly professional. It may be some inexperienced lawyers recommend it so they have something to say about email policy. It's not hurting anyone beyond eating up mail quotas, right?
It amazes me that people on here are so quick to forget about the Linode Bitcoin incident.

Because it is during security incidents that you really find out what type of company you are dealing with. With Cloudflare they informed users quickly, were transparent about what happened and took their licks. With Linode they didn't inform users and we still don't know what happened.

As a former customer I would never, ever use Linode again.
Maybe our definitions of "not particularly hard" differ, having looked through some of your source embedded in the page...