skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Because that penalizes the kids whose parents are less engaged, for whatever reason. And the less engaged parents are more likely to be the poorer parents, so you're reducing the kids' chances to escape poverty.

It is effectively what happens in urban areas where richer parents send their kids to private schools and disengage from the public school system.
OMG what about those

They're also the first to blame "GCC/Python/JVM/etc" and saying there's a bug there.
Now you're talking about school choice and maybe admission exams, both of which are anathema in US educational politics. As a Euro living in the US I can see why the busing policy implemented following Brown v. Board of Education seemed like such an urgent necessity, but it seems to have ended up as an unworkable mess, with those who can afford it (most of whom are white) sending their kids off to private schools and leaving the public school system circling the drain.
College-educated means nothing unless you are talking about Africa. With all due respect, people got into education is not really the brightest bunch...
Fair enough about the medical practice thing, and I suppose that in a many-life-critical context like becoming a doctor or lawyer you would prefer to have a very low false-positive rate coupled with a high false-negative rate.

I can't help but feel that the problem lies in a fatal combination of non-filtering teacher training (as sentimented by "oh, anyone can teach", and as mentioned by that recent Finnish education post), community culture that talks more than acts about the importance of high quality education and self-motivation, and a lack of funding for those (like OP) who give it their all.

edit: I also think that we should encourage a sense of trusting (maybe government-trained) educators with being able to identify which children in their class need to learn what, better than a test could. I'm not so sure what the benefit is to ignoring the individuals at the 'dx' scale of the educational calculus.
The notion of "smartguns unlocked by an owner’s thumbprint or a radio-frequency encryption" is a recipe for making guns - an inherently quite simple tool - into something vastly more complicated, expensive, and failure-prone. The NRA doesn't actually oppose the development of "safety features on firearms", but they do oppose the legal requirement that guns should all include features that don't yet exist and haven't been proven to work.

Imagine that people were regularly being killed by hammers. Or better yet, baseball bats. Now somebody comes along and claims that if we spent an extra $500 per baseball bat to bolt some complicated new mechanism onto the side of the bat, that would prevent some deaths. Said mechanism hasn't been invented yet, hasn't been proven to work, hasn't been proven to prevent any deaths, and is guaranteed to inconvenience every normal law-abiding user of baseball bats - from now on people would have to spend extra money for a feature they don't want or need. Congress proposes legally mandating this mechanism. Shouldn't the bat-making equivalent of the NRA oppose it?

Do you have an iPhone that unlocks via thumbprint? Have you noticed that the (otherwise quite impressive) sensor doesn't work when your hands are wet, or sticky, or greasy, or you're wearing gloves? If you thought you might need a gun for self defense, would you rather have one where pulling the trigger simply fires the gun, or one where you have to have clean bare hands to work and occasionally it stops working reliably and you need to spend a few minutes figuring out how to retrain it?

As for that "public-health research that might show...", our public health organizations have already supported a large number of truly terrible politically-motivated studies on the subject. Do we really need to fund more people like Kellerman to give us more nonsense stats supporting positions they already had going in?
When you use nginx as ssl termination loadbalancer - do you just do a proxy forward to varnish, or is it anything complicated ?
I went to Bellevue Community College in 1992, right after high school, and was fortunate enough to take part in their nascent "Multimedia Design" program. Considering the neighborhood, we had software and support from a lot of the local tech companies. I got to use early versions of Director, Photoshop, even Linux, which definitely set me on a more productive path with computers. I ended up going to a University the following year, but that was due to other circumstances and not that I didn't find the school and the education I received there valuable. Indeed, it very much set me on my path.
"I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won't have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them." -- Jerry Falwell

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Falwell
23andMe and Genentech in deal to research Parkinson’s treatments
And the worst thing is that to a limited extent, the caring-only-at-registration strategy does help that family some, because their kids will at least be in a functional learning environment for part of the day. It only falls apart when the families that care get diluted enough that the teachers have to spend too much time dragging along the unengaged students.
I find it hard to believe that someone would pay you a salary for three years to do something that is completely useless to everyone.

At the very minimum, the fruits of your labour are useful to your boss/customer. That is already a single positive impact in someone's life right there.

Most likely, your boss/customer then used your developments in their primary business, which, no doubt, affects even more people in a positive way.

I believe being in technology, we have the capability to positively affect many orders of magnitude more people, than in most other industries. So cheer up! ;)
um.. firstly, not a straw man (seriously? and then you start crapping on about mormons?), a logical reduction to find out if you think the consequences of believing that either the intention is important or not.

so how do you differentiate between "intention is completely irrelevant" and (from your other comment) "because these people choose to ignore facts". are we back to thinking that they are 'choosing' in bad faith? they believe because they do not understand. surely the way to reach them is to build an understanding rather than get angry at them about their beliefs.
Stupid post. What is a personal computer? It definitely is NOT a kit. Kit requires an engineer, not an ordinary person. Same with scientific calculators, all forms of boxes with switches and lamps, not to mention devices that cost more than a house.

Personal computer is a home appliance, something ordinary person can buy in a corner shop and use by himself. Look at that list again and what do you get? Apple I. Wozniak is Henry Ford of computer industry.
"-Challenge--this must be very carefully balanced. It must be sufficiently tough to make the player want to keep trying, but not too hard so the player gets frustrated quickly. Having different skill levels is helpful, but you still have to balance the game so it is progressively harder. It should be fair."

I'd like to add my hate for "balanced play" that punishes success. I was just playing 18 Wheels of Steel Across America and I purely hate how your truck suddenly handles like crap and loses power simply because the numbers in your bank account are larger than somebody thought you should have.
I wasn't referring to the content of the article, just the fact that schoolleadership20.com seems to have ripped off the original article and added a linkbaity headline.

i.e. blogspam
Python Download Manager for One-click Hosters
Say all you want about a hypothetical person's intellect, but there's no doubt that college education debt is dangerous to all career paths selected other than by salary. (And the comment about African students/scholarships is no less patronizing just because it's simultaneously mocking American teachers..)
Tom and Jerry Cartoon Best Episode
Anti-government conservatives. Republicans in general fall into this category.
There are several factors in play, which push it toward about 80-90% cases:

1. The IT world in the [geographic] area of the UK I live/work in is small (this is critical, because experienced candidates have a high likelihood of being known).
2. The company I work at isn't a tech company.
3. The company operates in an unfashionable sector.
Why Résumés in LaTeX help you stand out when applying to a Job/Internship
Well you are working with a self modifying system. Sometimes it may well be best to reset it back to a known good state and try again when the changes goes wonky.
No teacher deserves a shitty system because they didn't 'do their research' beforehand (which they are 110% aware of while starting their career in education).
I don't think there is another profession who's need is so widely advocated for, yet so pathetically enticed. Put some money on education, make it a desirable job, and then watch the world change as talented people try for those positions. Now, just figure out how to get the money committed to education instead of people giving RollsRoyce, Bentley, Ferrari, etc their best years ever.
state of the art classification accuracy/range, not speed.
The simpler objection is that smartgun technology - being a brand new thing - is likely to be expensive and complicated, which makes the guns that use it expensive and complicated. Forcing people to install it anyway is like a tax - it makes gun ownership more painful and expensive. If you care that lower-income people should be able afford guns for personal defense and that guns should be easy to use, you ought to oppose smartgun mandates as a matter of reflex. At least until the technology in question actually exists so we can see just how expensive and complicated it turns out to be, and probably well past that point.
LimeLight – Day 6
Much of programming is mindless plumbing, but the problem of specifying what problem you're trying to solve will never go away. Focus your attention there.
Just Launched: Need Node Developer Feedback
> after being short-changed with only a 23% raise in income in the last 10 years

Inflation has been ~40% in the same period you know...
The value of /r/science isn't much in the articles, but in the comments reviewing them. And for example in your link about barbie exposure[0], the second comment from the top, with 1257 points starts a thread with good, strong criticism of the lack of value in that research.

This is a common occurrence in /r/science.It even becomes common(and popular) whenever some article comes with a "breakthrough" to ask "why isn't this true, like the rest of the noise we hear from the news"-and get very good answers.

And the discussion is very good, with scientistcs chiming in, explaining the details, the implications, and how is it related to other research(for example to other disease).

And AFAIK, it's one of the best places on the web to get critique and review and discussion scientific research- that is available to layman.

[0]http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/22vbpp/barbie_expos...
> Except it’s not, because everything goes through a router, so how’s that different from using an HTTP server in terms of moving parts?

It gives you the API to work as is and the speed of it for RPC is close enough. If you had to do it with HTTP, you'd have to code the linking mechanisme, make use you use keep alive and manually drop the headers.

> - Can work outside of browsers.

> So can HTTP.

Yes, but is has no routing system. You'd have to code it yourself, again. And since it's not websocket, make sure all clients use keep-alive (most default settings for lib such as urllib2 do not), create a standard for all the clients to talk to each others, drop the headers, agree on serialisation, include exceptions handling, wrap that in an async API. And even with keep alive, websocket is x10 faster than Ajax in my tests.

> - Allows independent microservices.
> Again, so does HTTP.

And again, you'll have to hack around HTTP to get this. HTTP is not made for this, it's made to be stateless. It's made to be text. It's made to be simple. You can do anything with HTTP, you could even use it to say, send the packet to sync a starcraft game LAN. But you don't, because it's not efficient. You can cut your meat with a spoon, provided you sharpen it and hold it in a weird way, and force. But you don't. You use knives.

> - Has push and pub/sub.
> Ok, but so does anything based on websockets, I don’t see how that’s an argument for this protocol.

You don't have primitive to do pub/sub with raw websocket. Websocket allo you to push data, but the registering logic, the serilialization, the exception hanlding and the routing are not included. WAMP is a standard for that.

It's not trying to be magical. It's not pretentious. It's not revolutionary. It's just that : a standard to do efficient RPC and PUB/SUB, with clean, simple API that works in the browser, and outside of it.

And it's good at it.
Well, some things people should remember - how to calculate the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle, or who the parties were in WW2, or what makes a metaphor different from a simile.

But you can also give problems, like 'here are the dimensions of some real-world problem, and here's a formula used to solve such problems, apply one to the other'; or 'here's the text of a poem by so-and-so, explain what you think the poet means and support your arguments with reference to the text.'

I know essay answers take longer to evaluate and are harder to score, but I get the impression that way too much of k-12 educational testing involves multiple-choice questionnaires.
And pales in comparison to Kahn.
Bussing is stupid, having rich neighborhoods get better schools is more stupid. All schools should get the same. We fund all schools equally, across the board, no questions.

The fact that property taxes funded schools IS THE CRIMINAL construction. It sounds democratic, but so does pulling ones self up by their bootstraps. It only cements the class order.
+1. That should always work as an exmaple of "crash only" programming. It's nice to get shutdown working for valgrind, but it should never be necessary.
> The overall environment matters more than the teacher. We've mentioned it here not too long ago as well.

For an exploration of this idea, I recommend "Lives on the Boundary" by Mike Rose: http://www.amazon.com/Lives-Boundary-Achievements-Educationa...
This appears to be a presentation of part of the work of VPRI[0], you should check it out, they made a whole OS and the (word processor, PDF viewer, Web Browser, etc) in under 20K lines of code. There is more info on: http://www.vpri.org/vp_wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Besides Nile, the parser OMeta is pretty cool to imho.
When I was in school, we took a test in first grade that lasted less than a day, and was probably a screen for learning disabilities. I screwed it up, and my mom had to persuade the school that I didn't need to be in special ed. The teachers had many ways to evaluate student progress: Simply watching students, giving assignments such as worksheets, problems, quizzes, tests, and more elaborate homework in high school. My parents got to see my report card.

So, I have no problem with testing, per se.

Today, I've got two kids in school, and they are inundated with tests. A testing season (preparation followed by one or more test days) can last weeks. Little is learned during that time. Bright kids have already mastered the material on the tests, and are bored out of their skulls. Dull kids are getting drilled in a remarkably narrow range of topics. One of my kids received, as homework, a worksheet on "test taking skills" to review with her parents, consisting of ways to improve her odds slightly on questions that she couldn't answer.

The tests cover math and reading, though a new regime of even more tests may change that, by imposing narrow set of easily memorized factoids on the science curriculum. An effect is to give short shrift to other subjects such as music and just playing outside.

The sheer amount of testing, and the stakes involved, distort what is taught at school. And I don't think it gives parents any actionable information that they couldn't have learned by talking to the teacher or looking at a report card. If kids are in a dysfunctional school, they probably can't escape from it. The state (WI) has a charter school system in one region, but the charter schools perform no better than the public schools, and discriminate against kids with disabilities. Oddly enough, in its first attempt to expand the charter school system to the entire state, the legislature wrote a bill that would have exempted charter schools from the same "accountability" imposed on public schools.

If you work at a large corporation, as I do, think about the quantitative goals that you are given for your job. At one place where I worked, purchasing bought a bunch of stuff because they were measured on getting price breaks from suppliers, and manufacturing threw it away because they were measured on inventory. High stakes metric driven management of complex organizations creates a web of perverse incentives.

/rant
This seems to anthropomorphize cells.

There is no logic, because life do not do long term planning.

You don't have to go back many generations before being in your 40s was impressive. It was highly likely that the combined stresses of living would take you out in some way or other.

Once we reach the age of procreation, evolution is pretty much done with us.
You can't just fix something with more money. Analogously, it would be like fixing a soup with too much salt by pouring in more water and sour cream, might work, might not.
I know this is easy to say from abroad but something that keeps coming to my mind when reading these statements is: what is needed are (also) teachers with the guts to act freely and teach what they deem necessary DESPITE whatever the government says and scraping the bureaucracy. Be not afraid of being fired.

Yes, very easy to say but, as I see it, the only weapon against the Leviathan is your conscience.
> With all due respect, people got into education is not really the brightest bunch...

Is that grammar meant to be ironic? :|

Anyway, broadly demeaning a giant group of people is offensive, and the suggestion that most teachers are not bright is ridiculous. Many (most) teachers are very intelligent people, enthusiastic about education and greatly desire to give their students the best possible education they can. Unfortunately in America we have such little respect (and pay) for teachers, and the job itself has so much baggage associated with it (as this blog post discusses) that the best and brightest are often discouraged from becoming teachers.
Ask HN: Handling price objections correctly?
So I am running into a lot of similar situations where:

Prospect loves my SaaS and the tool, sees a ton of value but says they won't pay more than low double digits per month for it.

Common reasons include their supervisor is stingy, they are able to use teams in India etc.

My software has already saved thousands of man hours for customers who are paying the full price, and for these folks they don't seem to object to the price, rather they understand that the software saves them time.

How do I respond to these price objectors who demand a whopping 86% in discount, yet interestingly enough they are the MOST demanding when it comes to support and feature requests.

"Oh but I can get someone in India doing it for $2/hr to do it for me"

Are these people simply not a right fit? Should I drop them? IF so, how would I tell them that they might not be a good fit in a polite way?

OR is does this signal a poor market-fit of the product and the price needs to drop?

I just don't understand why the current customers paying the full price are so happy while the new prospects seem very stingy and selective, even after claiming they see the value and the time it will save them.

If saving 100s of hours is worth very little to someone, doesn't it mean that their time is probably worth very little? Where as someone who's time is worth a lot (executives, managers) saving 100 of hours would pay off greatly?
> There was no need to resurrect Objective-C and Java and write native apps. That’s a pretty strong statement I realize, but I started programming when an 8 MHz 68000 was considered a fast CPU, and even then, graphics processing totally dominated usage (like 95% of a game’s slowness was caused by rasterization). So today when most of that has been offloaded to the GPU, it just doesn’t make sense to still be using low level languages. Even if we used Python for everything, it would still be a couple of orders of magnitude faster than the speed we accepted in the 80s. But everything is still slow, slower in fact than what I grew up with, because of internet lag and megabytes of bloatware.

It's even slower when you write it in Python or Lua. I've built an app heavily relying on both on iOS and Android and it's a pig. This was last year, too, and outsourcing most of the heavy lifting (via native APIs) out of the language in question.

"Low-level languages" (as if Java was "low level") exist because no, web browser just aren't fast enough. There may be a day when that changes, but it's not today.
man, everything is not black and white. you put your children's lives and the lives of others at risk everyday, due to your ignorance, ineptitude, or indifference. that is life.

what you are talking about is an issue of scale.. grey area stuff. a compounding issue of lots of people choosing to do something that collectively causes a major problem. not unlike driving as it happens (ie. chance of accident, increase in pollution). 1.3 million people died last year as a result of car accidents. have you looked into the correlation between driven kilometres and car accidents? do you care?

you did not answer my questions. are you selfishly enraged at only actions which you do not engage in, that put your childrens health at risk? how otherwise is this not just an emotional argument? who does it serve for you to get enraged?
Yes, that was my point, thank you for repeating it.
The Pirate Bay Mystery
So, there's a bit of a mystery going on with thepiratebay's site. In the source there's been various clues that have been changing over time. A couple of folks over at reddit were working on it, but I don't think anyone has come up with anything.

Basically, in the source, they have stuff named like:

"key lowercase" and "WeAreTPB"
"aes.png" and class="pipe vi Makefile"

There also appears to be an image of an AES key on the page. And before they allegedly had "thecluesareallthere" as one of the classes. I'd imagine there's some kind of encrypted thing in the image or video. Maybe somebody here will find it interesting.
Do we care more about student progress or our appearance?

We care about both, and we have to. Proposed solutions will have to cater to this reality to have any hope of success.

Why can’t we start a movement to walk away from these tests?

Because a ton of scared people think the tests are the safety net of education. They are the last resort. If you got a bad education and can still past the test, it's a quantifiable bare minimum.

Why can’t we shift our focus to critical thinking and relevant educational experiences?

Because while great teachers exist, they are sitting on top of a pile of good, decent and bad teachers that largely can't be fired or forced to improve. Kids in those teachers' classrooms need to come out with some bare minimum of quantifiable education.
I've always been in need for some kind of coding project standards wiki.. Maybe I should just make one!
And if they win they might get a giant pile of money. Hence, rational lawyers take on contingency cases based on the strength of the case relative to the potential payout. A weak case with high payout could be a better option than a sure-win case with low payout. This very website is created by people who practice this strategy in investment and they seem to be doing just fine.