skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Kesden is letting us use any language in 440 this semester, Go included. All of the handouts are still in Java, but we were told multiple times to use whatever we want. The only catch is if we want any help on the projects from him or the TAs then we have to choose from four: Go, C, C++, or Java. (I actually think I might do project 2 in Rust, FTW).
So why is debt being monetized? Because it's politically better to owe it to yourself than to owe it to someone else?
You can find out the answers to the factual questions you raise (not from anecdotes, but from published, peer-reviewed research reports) by looking up the publications of the two main international educational studies, TIMSS and PISA.

http://timss.bc.edu/

http://nces.ed.gov/timss/

http://www.oecd.org/pisa/

Simply put, you are mistaken if you think that the United States is especially disadvantaged by how the national sample surveys on which those programs are based are constructed.

AFTER EDIT: Following up on the two replies now shown, the PISA FAQ document does not imply that there is any systematic different in national sample characteristics by learning disability, which is the claim farther up in this subthread. Further, people who have read the extensive research literature on learning disability identification in varying countries will be well aware that the United States is particularly generous in identifying students as having "special needs" as compared to other countries, so a general student sample from other countries would be more, not less, likely than a United States sample to include unidentified students who have personal special learning needs.
I hate, hate, hate floating "share bars" like the one on this blog. Yuck.
It's all about the funding.

Standardized tests are not new. I took them in the 70s and early 80s: a few days of sitting in home room, filling out circles with a number two pencil. Big deal: they had no affect on my actual grade. What they were was a benchmark for the school.

As I understand it, what _is_ new is the pressure on the schools to produce kids who can pass the test.

Since there is now a great deal on the line for the district ( funding ), a lot more time is devoted to producing students who can pass the tests. This is only natural, and was easily seen as a consequence of no child left behind.
Indeed, dehumanization appears to be an important issue.

The most unusual occurence I had was with VFS Global (visa handling company) employees. Every one of them had a paper sticker with a number on their tie; and all refused to tell me their name (asked out of courtesy), insisting I refer to them by their number if I have the need.

Is that a common thing in the US/UK? All this looked distinctly dystopian, and mildly surreal, to me.
Excel can be extended using .Net for quite a while now... this even allows you to add to the functions within excel.
Writing Custom Excel Worksheet Functions in C# http://blogs.msdn.com/b/gabhan_berry/archive/2008/04/07/writ...
How To Create an Excel Macro by Using Automation from Visual C# .NET http://support.microsoft.com/kb/303872/en-us
How To Create an Excel Macro by Using Automation from Visual Basic .NET http://support.microsoft.com/kb/303871/EN-US
You should try: http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/gmail

If you click on each sub-forum, you can see from the official response icon column, on the right. That most of the threads do get an answer. That's far from non-existent. I think their big failure here, has been to poorly communicate how people can get help, most don't know about the forums.
You could go the Zappos route of actually empower customer service reps. But at the very least, I would expect Google to build better in house CRM tools to feed helpful content to the support reps rather than making them repeat themselves.

From what I've heard from friends at Google, internal tools like this have a notoriously hard time getting engineering resources. I wish they could turn it into a sexy machine learning project and actually get some resources on fixing this issue.
I could imagine a board manufacturer doing something like this for an expensive, low-volume NIC. I still don't see how Intel could help.
Stats of Twitter Emotions
This is a great idea! I think as developers we take for granted just how foreign html/css/js look to a beginner.
yep see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5208950
DreamWorks Animation to develop first Netflix original kids' show
Could limit the # of people you could click on to 5 or 10 or whatever. Could be a different number for guys vs. girls. Or could equalize by charging guys per click and girls click free or something.
Unfortunately, one actually cannot say there is a contiguous & homogeneous Finland sized segment of Americans that know 2-3 languages, travel extensively and are well educated and informed about reality.
They're not cheap.
This probably isn't the place to have a debate on Latour, but let me just say that it is possible to read him unsympathetically (as Sokal does) or sympathetically, to try to understand the viewpoint he is trying to get across. I've found it worthwhile to do the latter, but YMMV.
Email Marketing Is Still Working
Wow, I spent a lot of time with this game when I was eight or so. Brings back the memories. I'm pretty sure my Atari 800 is still in my parents basement. Just need to find a TV I can hook it up to...
We are looking for new 100 blog authors
Bingo.

Full disclosure: I've worked on eDiscovery products and may be biased. This is a net good thing, I think, for a company to reduce its dependence on arbitrary communication that is written and backed up forever.
> Of course; this goes without saying. But when programming in an OO style, programmers often override methods thinking that they are only changing the behavior of that one method

This is not a problem with using classes or overriding methods, its a problem either with either failure to document behavior on the part of the library author or failure to read documentatio on the part of the library consumer.

Neither of those is any less a danger in the case here the design of the library involves parameterizing functionality by passing functions around as parameters.
I thought bitcoin transactions were signed with a personal key and added to a blockchain which is distributed to every bitcoin user worldwide?

If somebody can match your key to your person they can see your entire purchase/sell history.
I think the supporters of a law should be required to demonstrate that the problem it supposes to solve is real and even conceivably solvable by government action. In the absence of that it's safe to condemn any legislation on the topic, particularly when there's such a bad track record of alternately useless and harmful laws in the subject areas.
Any company the size of google can't provide support for their free products. It's not that it's too expensive, or that it's too hard, providing support for a product like gmail is simply impossible. If they opened up a support line for gmail they would simply become overwhelmed with requests like "help, i can't find the send button" or "somebody's spamming me, cna you tell them to stop". Real actual support queries would never get through the noise.
> good uptime

Which is funny because Linode has pretty bad uptime.

When I was on their Fremont DC it went down all the time.
Tufte would be proud, beautiful work!
Ask HN: why did the box.com promotion disappear from HN
Hi,

I am curious why that link that was submitted on HN for 50 gigs free disappeared from HN.
I feel it was something useful for many of us.

Are promotions in violation of the rules of conduct ?
Your examples sound rather easy, relatively speaking, to accomplish technically, but are certainly legally dubious. In fact, it seems most things that are "technically impossible" come down to social issues and not technical issues at all.
I use octave quite a bit by SSH via connectbot to a linux box and there is no visual difference between native octave port and connecting via SSH for text-mode. I don't graph what I'm working on very much so the graphics mode doesn't matter... although I do have a VNC client..

However, connectbot is 676 precious K of storage vs 22 megs for the native port, and I can do a lot more once connected via connectbot than just octave. I can't afford to use the native port, which is too bad.
Can you name some examples of successful startups which did not get big fast?
There seems to be a common temptation to chalk student performance solely up to teachers. This despite the fact that there are plenty of things that are out of teacher's control that strongly affect how well a student performs. Here in Maryland, there have been a bunch of recent articles about an alarmingly high percentage of students coming to school without getting adequate nutrition outside of school hours. This has a huge effect on concentration acquisition of new material. In general, socioeconomic and cultural differences between communities have very strong effects on schools; teaching in a school district with highly involved parents gives a huge boost to test scores vs. districts with largely uninvolved parents. Same for rich vs. poor districts, rural vs. suburban districts, etc.

Also, what makes you think school administrators have some answers that teachers don't when it comes to how to do the job, or have any idea, really, how to fairly and correctly evaluate teacher performance. Similarly, why do the same people who routinely call for teachers to be fired for poor performing classrooms never seem to want to hold administrators and school boards to account for their poor performance? Why do state and local governments who cut education funding year after year get a pass?

I think it's a comforting world view to think that if we could just bust the teacher's unions and start firing people, we'd get real results. But it ignores the fact that the system is broken in may more ways—and in many worse ways—than just the teachers.
If I go with an in-Wordpress solution, it'll probably be Disqus. I initially liked the idea of having a clean troll-less page for users who don't care about commenting. Maybe this is just vanity. I also like having the entire discussion in one place, instead of a thread on HN and another thread on my blog.
Testing is a good idea, if it's done well. Measurement is always a good thing, unless it's expensive (tests aren't), or the measurements are used in a stupid way (which ... they are).

It's like measuring productivity by SLOC. Good programmers write more code. If you reward programmers for writing more code, though, they'll punch out boilerplate code which won't really do anything. They'll actually get less done, because they are writing meaningless lines of code, instead of actually solving problems. Steve Ballmer claims this a big reason why Microsoft beat IBM when OS/2 was coming out - as IBM rewarded their programmers for more SLOC, so they screwed everything up.

If you reward people for good measurements, they'll find ways to screw with the measurements.

Big tests mean, the students and teachers will focus on beating the test. They'll teach exam techniques, and stick to what they think will be on the test. It's fairly easy to teach a "shallow" way of solving problems, if you can guess the problems. Learning to solve unseen problems is hard - you actually have to understand the material. But most tests won't have a lot of difficult questions, so teachers will focus on getting their class to memorise the algorithm used to solve the basic questions.

Rote learning is good, if it's an enabler. Learning your times tables helps you do higher mathematics. But if you only worry about rote learning, then you can go through school without actually understanding what you are doing - you just follow the rules, and hope there aren't too many trick questions. Rote learning can be the foundation of higher learning, but creating nothing but foundations is a waste of effort.

It's also a huge waste of resources, as teachers will be spending all their time trying to figure out the test parameters, instead of worrying about whether their students actually understand the material.

Finally, there's the opportunity cost. Instead of saying "the good teachers are the ones which get good test results", they could do some deeper analysis. How do the "good" teachers control their class? What kind of homework do they set? What is the format of their lessons? What can the "bad" teachers do, to emulate their success? The "bad" teachers mostly just don't know how to teach well. There's probably a few idiots (who can't teach because they don't understand the topic), a few ones whose personality makes them ineffective, and some who are lazy or burnt out. But I bet most teachers would be much more effective if they knew what the "good" teachers were up to.

If the tests are high stakes, you'll just find that the "good" teachers are the ones who care most about gaming the test, not the ones who are actually good teachers. If the tests aren't high stakes, then the good teachers will naturally do well, and it's worth studying how they became so effective.

It would be justifiable, if the incentive of high stakes tests was strong enough to actually bring the kids up to a certain level, but I don't think it has. Instead, it just creates bad incentives, and is a distraction from serious quantitative research into teaching.
> The report card.

Grades are assigned in three ways

1) Relative to the skill your teacher believes you have

2) Relative to the rest of the class

3) Absolutely based on what the teacher individually believes constitutes mastery of the material.

The report card is almost meaningless.
"IP multicast" refers to an implementation detail, not to a product feature. Several other ways exist to implement similar functionality.
Probably because google doesn't make it's money directly from the majority of people using it's services.

And those that do pay do get support http://support.google.com/adwords/answer/1385067?hl=en

And I believe there is some support for apps for business.
>But this writing reeks of Microsoft astroturfing.

Wow. Google really can do no wrong.
I signed up with Rackspace a while back to host a new site I was putting together. I found the "onboarding" process so creepy and off-putting that, even though they accepted me, I went with Linode instead. Like, if that kind of weird bureaucracy was what I had to look forward to when I needed support, no thanks.

Also, their sorta-cloud-sorta-VPS setup for Rackspace Cloud seemed awkward to me. It made the control panels more confusing than they needed to be.
Ancient languages reconstructed by computer program
In what universe does a $299 nexus 4 not count as cheap?
The part that gets me is that teachers always complain the government is imposing testing requirements on them, but if anybody mentions taking the government out of education, or switching to a voucher system, then the teachers unions are the first ones rallying against it.

They can't have it both ways. If they're going to be part of the government then they have to accept the fact that voters get to decide how their performance is measured.
Okay, where in those studies do they mention which students were sampled? I cant find anything. I highly doubt Hong Kong, Singapore and China include children with disabilities in their tests.
Google gets a free pass on customer support? You can't go a day on HN and many other places without people bitching about Google customer support. Unless you want some sort of legally mandated level of support, I don't see what you would like to happen. If customer service is important to you (and Google is clearly betting it isn't that important), then don't use Google services.
indeed ...but: try explaining to someone who has just went through the effort of picking up a general purpose programming language why does he need to learn "a retarded query language that doesn't even have functions, loops and assignments" :) ...of course, you can answer him "well... but actually it does" and expose him mercilessly to the world of sql extensions before he even learned basic sql.
For a $5 vps you don't have to wonder, just try it out for a couple of months if you have time and incentive (like many Linodes).

I think it would more fair though to compare a $20 Linode with a $20 offer from another provider.
As a DBA/Developer working in the Property/Asset Management Industry for decades I can tell you that Excel will NEVER go away so long as the executives are making the decisions. When it comes to the typical executive and even high level accountant/controller/comptroller, the knowledge level and understanding of things computer related is highly restricted outside of Excel, PowerPoint And Outlook with Excel being the big daddy app among this group.

In my experience the typical executive user would prefer spending hours or even days working on a spreadsheet then spending even a few hours learning how to properly use some other task specific software regardless of whether or not it’s better suited for the task at hand. It’s not so much that the executives don’t understand the issues with using Excel so much as how Excel lets them do what they need and more importantly, want to do and all without having to learn a new system. The Excel model (how it works using rows & columns ) is intuitive to one with an accounting mind. I’ve had executives ask me before why can’t our really expensive <fill in the blank> Enterprise Ready Application Do X when Excel can do the same thing and easily? This is especially true when dealing with what I term JCL, Judgment Call Logic. Unlike programming structures (If/Then, CASE, etc) , JCL is perspective based and results in a different value based on who is assessing it. This is why its “judgment” logic and not natural logic. Excel users don’t understand how you can’t code JCL into software.

That said there is certainly a need in the software world to do things better, smarter. The world of software engineering needs more byte artisans and less bean counters. Too often short term decisions are made with negative long terms effects, all done in order to meet some artificial deadline that has more to do with someone getting a commission for meeting a deadline then for delivering something of quality.
Why UI design so hard for some developers
> Has the art of using the engine to slow down become so unknown that it is no longer considered a way to slow down a vehicle?

Most cars now have automatic transmissions, and in many such cars the habit of slowing down by downshifting will destroy the transmission's bands and wear down the rear differential, neither of which is designed for the stress caused by downshifting.

I'm not speaking hypothetically -- I mostly drive manual transmissions and I'm accustomed to downshifting to slow down. I then acquired a car with an automatic transmission, but didn't change my behavior. Within 20,000 miles I had destroyed the transmission and the rear differential.
What Should We Call the Language of Mathematica?
For anyone who provides feedback, please let us know if you would like a special coupon for LowerThis.com. Just drop a note to the email contact on the website for users and mention you saw this on HN. Thanks!
There are plenty of things that are literally technically impossible, given the state of current artificial intelligence techniques.
It's hardly just Google. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter all get away with the same sort of thing. Try and find a phone number to call them.
"We had a measure of how kids were doing: The report card."

Report cards are as deeply flawed as standardized tests. If I were to tell you that I received a D in middle school algebra and an F in English, would you assume that I found algebra challenging and that I had literacy problems when I was 12? If so, you would be utterly wrong: I was beginning to understand limits and integration was I was in 7th grade, and I was reading at a "post-high-school level" according to my school.

The reason my grades were not even remotely related to my aptitude was simple: grades are not meant to reflect aptitude. Aptitude gets you a D- if you do not turn in your homework, even if you did not bother with homework because you were busy learning more advanced material. I am neither the first nor the last person to have been given grades that did not reflect my understanding or talents in any subject.

Report cards try to give a one-dimensional view of a student's academic performance, and in doing so they favor a particular kind of student. Obedient students who do exactly as they are told and nothing more, who only learn what their teachers expect them to learn, receive the best grades. Second best are those who try really hard to be compliant but who lack the talent or understanding needed to answer every question to their teachers' satisfaction. Last place is reserved for students who either do not care about being educated or those who care but fail to properly follow instructions or fit into the neat view of people that American teachers have.

Our education system is meant to train people to follow directions to the letter, and the switch from report cards to standardized tests has not changed that.
Another anecdotal story would be in my classroom in 1980-90s Canada, where not all the students wrote those international testing exams, and of those that did, only a select few had their tests submitted by the school for grading. This was confirmed to the school's PTA (Parent Teacher Association) after concerns were raised about taking time from teaching for an exam that was not felt to help the students' learning.

Having discussed the issue with a senior education ministry official in Singapore, they pre-select which schools and students write the exam. Even if all students in those schools write the exam, not all exam scores are submitted. She did a study in China recently (not yet published), and there only elite urban schools are tested, primarily in Shanghai and Beijing, with a similar selection process.

I would much prefer my children to be taught in a middle-ranked Canadian school, than any I have so-far visited in Singapore or China, no matter at what level the students supposedly score on international tests.
A couple of problems with Excel [edit: actually just spreadsheets in general], which I think fundamentally restrain it:

1. Difficult change control. It is very difficult to diff spreadsheets. So changes to a model are very hard to verify for correctness.

2. Massive code duplication by design (eg. the fill function). So it is easy to introduce an error by failing to update all relevant cells.
The “Above the Fold” Myth Debunked
> have traveled and met people of many different cultures/languages.
Traveling to different countries is much easier to do in Europe than the US. There you can take the train for a weekend trip, here you need to save up thousands of dollars and take your kids out of school for at least a week (if not done during the summer).

Also, I think that Americans interact with more cultures and languages daily because it is a land of immigration. From a young age I learned how my nationality's ethnic dance, traditions, and customs. I have also learned about my friend's traditions from India, Germany, England, South Korea, etc... all without leaving my city.

However, I do concede that there should be a stronger push for becoming fluent in foreign languages at a younger age. Unfortunately there is a prevalent attitude in society that it isn't "American" to do so.
Why is it that Comcast has a free pass? I think there is something to do with monop... some board game.

BTW, Comcast brand has been damaged by their bad customer service (and bad service in general). So they just renamed their service to Xfinity.
Wasn't a whole lot of spam in 1978 when first published.