skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In the 1970s, the US DoD had what one could parallel to SOA. They had hundreds of languages; they'd start a new project and with it came a new programming language, stack and toolset. They created the High Order Language Working Group which worked on a document of requirements for one language to rule them all, the Steelman. A competition was had to which 4 colorful languages were entered. The winner, Green, became Ada which coincidentally has just wrapped it it's latest language revision process at ISO. Much of the Steelman focused on maintenance, reliability, readability and other traits that make for good software that will last. It is a good thing take that step back and make sure we are programming up to her level.
I'm sure there are other utilities that behave like this, but yours seems very aesthetically pleasing.

I'm going to try this with some friends that are struggling. I'll be sure to report back with its effectiveness.
Example: Chicago Cubs
The problems with this essay are legion. I find it ironic to be correcting an essay of a teacher complaining about the lack of critical thinking in the youth. Or perhaps "sadly ironic" would be a better phrase.

I think the worst offender is the idea that people who don't do X cannot sit in judgment of those who do X. Our entire system of democracy -- of jurisprudence -- rests on informed citizens making judgments about areas where they spend their money. Nobody gets a free ride. I get to vote on whether the fire station gets a new truck whether or not I've ever been a fireman, whether or not I've ever driven a truck, and whether or not my house has ever been on fire. To do this any other way is insane.

The saddest part is that the public education system took a reasonable request -- measure your performance -- and turned it into a bureaucratic nightmare. I hate to be blunt but I'll just say it: these folks shouldn't be trusted with sharp objects, much less our kids' education. They (the administration, the consultants, the "blob", the politicians) are part of the problem, not part of the solution. Testing has nothing to do with anything.

As sharp as my criticism is, I mean it in the aggregate. There are no bad people here, only a bad, overly complex system that is failing our children. It's a scandal, and removing testing isn't going to do anything but make it less visible. This is very much akin to the attitude of "Why do we need testers? All they ever do is complain!"

I'm not going to continue my analysis because this is an old, tired road, and full of little homespun essays like this which are supposed to make us take sides. I refuse to. We need tests. Period. In my mind once the tests leave, the teachers leave, because I'm not writing a check for something I can't measure. The rest of it? I'm perfectly open to discussions about the kinds of tests, the types of measurements that would be acceptable, and so on. We've taken a good idea and made a monster out of it, yes. But that doesn't make it a bad idea, that just is another indication of how totally screwed the system we've created is.
1.

There are no demographically homogeneous parts of America, perhaps the ghetto may qualify, but thats not your point.

2.

Even in the most elite school, you would be hard pressed to find somebody who can speak 3 languages. This is for the predictable reason that the state of Indiana is not bordered by 3 distinct linguistic regions.

3.

The differences between American and Finnish schools have been summarized here : http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/Why-Are-Finlands... . All American students are subject to the crippling exams and tests mentioned many times over. It is my opinion that the elite groups are ones where their families can make up for what is not taught in school: which often means connections to a culture outside of the US. For example, Finnish. The only hope for American children is to stop being American.
Oh! The book is by Don Lancaster! I missed that. His electronics books were a key part of my self-education in the early 80s, as I'm sure they were for a lot of computery types my age. Guy is a hacker in the most hackerist sense possible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Lancaster
Post doesn't even try to answer the original question.

> ...how do I basically tell [the customer] “You can’t understand this. You have to trust me” without sounding like a prick?

The post concludes with "you have to tell the customer to trust you".
"I apologize because they made me do a lousy job." Well, why didn't you leave earlier, to go somewhere and do a better job? Because you would have made less money and gotten less retirement.

Now the OP sounds like someone who _deserves_ more money. But this is impossible in the current education regime, the teachers' unions are adamantly opposed to this sort of thing. And not entirely without reason, public schools are political institutions with political accountability. It's only a matter of time before discretion over compensation is used not for institutional purposes but political ones. Because whether a public school does well or poorly, it will continue to have students and budget to pay salaries.

Salaries are currently politically controlled, by unions, to subsidize a large-proportion of subpar workers. Currently the alternative is administrative political control, where principals and superintendents will vary salaries for who knows what purpose.

No Child Left Behind was an effort to improve obviously sub-optimal results by imposing some kind of "standards", a regulation of the quality provided by these centrally planned institutions. It's no surprise that these regulations proved as brain-dead and counter-productive as any other management by regulation.

But if we remove the standardized testing, we'll be right back at trusting the discretion of _some_ political entity for the management and control of the schools. The miserable track records of these entities is what lead to standardized testing in the first place.

The root problem in the schools' governance the public schools' effective monopoly on education. Schools are accountable to _politicians_, not parents, because they get budget from politicians. Giving parents control of the politicians only changes the politics. Only when parents control where their children go, and the budget with them, will we move towards governance that actually cares what parents think, and thus acquire a focus on educating kids. Because only then can administrations have the necessary discretion to pursue real qualities, within a check on the usage of that discretion for its intended purposes.

Until we fix that, all the complaints about education and its obvious problems will be so much water under the bridge. The schools are lousy because no effective actor has an interest in making them good. Give the parents effective power to hold schools accountable and things will change. And not before.

In the meantime we'll have pious complaints from the politically indoctrinated about how they were forced to do a bad job. No, sir, not so. You chose to do that job, and you chose it for the money. You were free to do better, albeit at a price, and you chose not to. The responsibility for that is yours.
That is a fascinating set of stats - thank you :-)

* No-one gets up early on a Monday to rob a bank,

* 1 in 10 bank robberies leave without a penny - one in ten !

* Perps die a lot more than anyone else.

* They only identify (catch?) 50% - but incredibly 95% of robbers can have their race identified (doesn't anyone wear masks anymore?)

* There is a high number (78% of those caught) of first time bank robbers. (Then again that might be obvious)

Well they can all go on my list of things I did not know yesterday.
> That said, it would be ridiculous for them to do that. Wouldn't that imply that they can perceive problems and act on them--a faculty this story illustrates they are profoundly lacking?

Why would it? That could be an automated response to chargeback — block all the services for that person. Just in case.

> Are you going to keep hosting your email with a company you trust so little you actually think they would disconnect you from their free service over a chargeback on a product they actually failed to provide? I get more and more glad I'm not a prisoner to their "free" services every day.

You are right, of course, but gmail brings a lot of value to me. I know that I should take a day off and get my own domain, set up regular backup from gmail and change accounts on various services to new domain, though.
Sorry, this bit about ditching is tongue-in-cheek. I don't actually expect them to do so, although I do feel that eventually this will happen and we'll all be back here discussing why it's different because of X. I'm also confused why the overwhelming majority of HN readers manage to claim that a HTML5/PhoneGap app is inferior to a native one, but then somehow bob and weave when 37signals does the same thing. Confusing!

I have a problem with people speaking from authority, claiming their philosophy works well (which I agree with) and then slowly proposing the opposite. Again, as a frequent reader of their posts and philosophy, I'm confused as to why providing reference to this philosophy is considered blasphemy.

I'm also confused by the very vocal and opinionated damning of security in other platforms by DHH while Rails suffers security issue after security issue. Suddenly, DHH isn't all that opinionated on security. And I'm the jerk for pointing this out, right?

I know every person who disagrees with DHH or JF is automatically a troll without examination, but I'm a little tired of being considered a 37signals hater while I pay monthly for Basecamp, purchase their books and follow their line of work.
Spreadsheet error commission and detection rates are almost identical to those in programming, mathematics, and writing. And professionals make about the same number of errors as novices. What is different in spreadsheet development is the amount of testing. At companies like Microsoft, 40% of development time is spent in testing, and their usually is one tester for each Dev. In spreadsheet development, professional testing is rare. Here is a link on human and spreadsheet error. https://dl.dropbox.com/u/20338447/WhyThinkingIsBadPublicCopy...
He can't even get his (Republican) SecDef candidate confirmed. I'm sorry, I know that in the frictionless intellectual void that is message board arguments, it makes sense that Obama should be able to get bipartisan consent for defense measures, but in the real world that simply isn't so.
I'd take that situation any day over a monolithic monstrosity written in only Java. Small losely coupled services that do one thing is the only way to build a large system if you want to keep your sanity.
Japanese baseball teams are based around corporate sponsorship.
Even good metrics would be resisted by teachers. Unionized workers don't want their performance to be subject to metrics when it can instead be subject to more subjective measures they can more easily game.
What language is this project in? Github doesn't seem to know what the ".S" files are...
You do not have a "business relationship" if there is a huge knowledge gap. If there's no meeting of the minds, no way to evaluate each other, no way to sensibly compete in a free market, you're well along the path of a provider/consumer relationship or pure faith or at best something like feudalism or lifetime sharecropping.

A good analogy is asking about the business relationship between a parishioner and a priest. Its the wrong tinted glasses to look at the relationship. That doesn't mean it has to be a bad relationship, and no value judgement of inferiority. Its just evaluating the relationship via inappropriate criteria.
>VPS provider like DigitalOcean with "mission critical stuff"?

You do realise that in the past user VPSs were rooted, Bitcoins stolen and Linode users had to find out from Reddit that their VPS was potentially hacked.

If you trust Linode (or any VPS really) with mission critical stuff then you are (being) an idiot. I am sorry but you are.

Edit: The idiot is a reference to behaviour not anything personal.
Your Job Ads Are Driving Away Talent
interesting article about how to make job ads more human to reach a broader audience.
http://taxes.about.com/od/payroll/qt/payroll_basics.htm
The 72 Companies Speaking At API Strategy & Practice
I have found that young adults who are in an environment similar to those of the "Gen x/y Finnish" have similar traits. However, the United States does not have the luxury of having nearly the entire country living an environment like that (compared to the relativity small and highly metropolitan European countries).

To draw a comparison in the way you have is disingenuous.
This completely. If you cannot explain something to someone else whom has no innate knowledge of the subject, using plain language, then your command of the subject is questionable at best. True command of a subject in my opinion contains within it the ability to relay what you know and make it understood.
I know using a phone is so 20th century but Google Play actually has a dedicated call center for providing support. When I ordered a Nexus 7 back in July I was wondering when it would arrive so I called. Within 2 minutes of waiting I was talking to a friendly human.
I'm curious about this myself. My paranoid side says because it competes with Dropbox. My sane side says that its still just an advert... but a useful one, since I signed up for box to get it.
The keyword in the first paragraph is "niece".
A link back to HN is generally enough when I'm on a blog post.
What Ever Happened to OS/2?
Wikipedia lists "is sound only sound if a person hears it?" as "The most immediate philosophical topic that the riddle introduces."

This is the question that Eliezer addresses. You may have been introduced to the tree falling riddle in a different context, but he's dealing with the most common interpretation of the question.

You can't accuse him of straw manning simply because he didn't deal with some other possible philosophical question regarding trees and sounds (the wikipedia article lists a few others, including something like yours). He clearly states up front the exact argument that he's dealing with.
Agreed, I'd be in the market for such a book.
Here's his full-size, zoomable visualization: http://fbmap.bitaesthetics.com/
This seems to confirm the hypothesis that Bit9 does not store the private keys it uses to sign executables on an HSM. If it's appropriate, can you describe the system that stores those keys? Is it somebody's desktop? Is it in a secure area? How many people have access to it? What other software is installed on it? Is it connected to a network?
I think that interpretation of the discussion died the moment the first recording device was invented.
It's okay, hammer grammie is still around.

http://consumerist.com/2007/10/19/legend-of-comcast-office-s...
‘Apple is the center of innovation,’ says Apple CEO Tim Cook
tl;dr: As a teacher, you can't expect me to teach students the facts on the tests AND how to write clear sentences.
That definitely looks like assembly :)
I am a big Google proponent, and Android user. But the problem is deeper than just a smooth launch, and the number of issues at launch.

It is a systemic customer support issue that, while perhaps understandable for a free product, is horrendous for a merchant or paid product. I don't think people would care nearly so much about launch hiccups, even major, if there was customer support to help resolve the issue. But as it is, whenever you order something it can feel a bit like Russian Roulette with Google. I hope this changes soon, because otherwise they are doing awesome stuff.
Ask HN: Review LowerThis.com
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A rational thinking community

On what basis did you establish this as fact?

Did you read everything on the site and determine this to be true based on exhaustive "rational" analysis, or did you simply assume it to be true based on a few hunches without doing any sort of deep inquiry and "rational" investigation?

It's quite easy to believe others are "rational" (and right) when you assume them to be "rational" (and right) from the very beginning.
I upvoted you, but I really have to ask why you can't just fail those students who aren't motivated to study or work for their grades. I assume that the students you are teaching are over the age of 18 and are paying tuition to attend your college. They're adults and should be treated as such.
I disagree. We teachers have plenty of time to properly assess student work. But we also have to give accurate, consistent and fair grades and usually written feedback as well, and that's what usually takes forever.

An hour a day with 30 kids is enough time to meaningfully interact with each student if you're not wasting the whole class period lecturing.
Ask HN: Resources to learn Angular JS?
I've been learning Javascript for a while now and am quite impressed with what Angular JS can do.

So now that im ready to get my hands dirty, where should I start first?
How I got my friend’s stolen bike back
Agreed. I'm a non-programmer, Excel power user for finance. The HN community seems to think that Excel is the primary cause of all these financial catastrophes and that some new software solution will prevent them going forward. In reality, the problem is user error, missing checks and balances, and oftentimes, complete lack of common sense.

An organization that doesn't have the discipline to incorporate some checks into its influential financial models or doesn't have quants who can "back of the envelope" gut check the model is going to make errors regardless of what number crunching software it uses.

I could see a consequence of taking the calculations normally in Excel formulas and making them even more blackbox so only the software engineers can check the calculations to lead to MORE errors, not fewer because its less accessible to the people who know the math.

I could go on and on about how mid-sized private equity shops like mine would never adopt some proprietary solution over Excel because then they'd be too dependent on the developer to make changes, but that's not the point.
A lot of responses here seem to say that support for cheap/free phones is not profitable. That's not a good excuse. Amazon doesn't really make much money on the Kindle hardware, but the support is amazing.

That raises the question, why didn't Google just let the factories ship to Amazon and let Amazon handle sales and customer service(related to shipping, not technical)? I guess the Play Store was an attempt at branding similar to Apple store, but the customer experience seems to be damaging the brand.
you should use mtr and something like gist.github.com or pastie. ICMP over mobile networks is quite unreliable. Even some linode responses vary from 54 to 101ms…
It's easy to forget just how developed our pattern-matching abilities are as seasoned programmers. The inability to recognize, find and fix transcription errors is the single biggest challenge I see new folks struggle with. (A close second might be the realization that, yes, every single character matters.)

I can't even remember how long it took me to develop those skills, but it's interesting how far back I slide when working with a new language or toolkit.
Yikes. I was just skimming HN before a meeting to talk about how we are going to handle payment flow. Literally just put a huge question mark next to Stripe on my list now.
Are you Open Source? How can I be sure? However, I'm sure some people are so much busy and worried by their mails that your tool will be helpful.
This. Say what you will about the Ribbon interface introduced in 2007, but Tables are really the reason to use Excel.
I could make a Heisenberg joke here, it's hard not to laugh, but I'd rather not make light of the fact that the act of measuring the students' progress is almost certainly having a negative effect on their progress. I wouldn't argue for an open-loop system, I like the idea of assessments. But somehow, despite all the recent effort that's gone in to education reform, it seems to be going wrong.
I didn't realize DeepDuh was talking about a 1990s event; I thought he meant some Swedish crisis that was much longer ago.
After I got my retina macbook, I disabled the 3G on my Cr-48 running Ubuntu (with Unity) and let my 10 yo daughter use it. At one point, all kids got all their screens confiscated, and it sat in my dresser for a few weeks. A week or so later, she started using my old white 2008 MacBook. It's got an Intel SSD and 4GB RAM: far superior to the Cr-48, minus the 3G radio.

While re-arranging the garage, I found some USB speakers and ran across the Cr-48, and set it up for some music in the garage. My daughter immediately wanted it back. She prefers Ubuntu with Unity to OS X and prefers the Cr-48 even though she agrees it isn't as snappy as the MacBook.
If you randomly assign students to teachers (which is already more or less the case) and each teacher has a large enough sample size of students (which is already more or less the case), aggregating the performance of all of a teacher's students will say more about the teacher than about these confounding variables, since all the other factors would be shared between all teachers at the school.

Of course there are other problems to be solved. But the fact that there are no effective controls whatsoever on teacher performance, and that teaching is not a highly selective profession, is still a problem.
So, were they rejected or "kicked out", i.e. accepted only to get thrown out?
And Microsoft can only do wrong.
I am interested in hearing how much was in RubyMotion. I would have been more excited to hear the whole thing was. I am not knocking the architecture. They have proven to know what they are doing when it comes to development and business. I am just waiting to hear about bigger projects for RubyMotion.
Mass-Marketed Nuclear War Protection for Families
I am not sure where you went to school, but in the New York City public school system, report card grades followed a formula of roughly the following:

65% exam scores / written essays
25% homework
10% classwork

A 65 was basically a D-, and anything less was an F. In other words, a student who receives perfect scores on all exams or written essays (depending on the subject) could receive a D-, as though they had only the most minimal understanding of the subject matter.

So while the report card is meaningless, it is meaningless for a different reason than you suggest. It is meaningless because it has nothing to do with aptitude or education and everything to do with obedience.
"If you cannot explain something to someone else whom has no innate knowledge of the subject, using plain language"

If the someone has enough raw mental horsepower and an infinite supply of spare time... Let me teach you everything I know about electrical engineering, it'll only take 10 to 20 years of your time assuming you're smart enough to keep up.

Also note that its quite possible to get stuck unable to explain something to someone smarter than you, if you have an inherent talent and or huge experience that results in talent far beyond what your horsepower "should" produce. So both sides the student and teacher have sort of a "must be this smart to enter" carnival ride requirement.
Architecture is not as important if you're building an app that will scale slowly. But if you're betting on scalability to make money, then the story is very different.

Relevant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rV_GIGzXrvA
Some googling tells me it's assembly, but it's nothing I recognize...

Thanks! you beat me to my edit.. ;-)
According to his latest Tweet, he's planning on going through the code and adding comments.
https://twitter.com/billb/status/301403958415618049