skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "PHP shows that people would rather understand the exact details of arguments to a function instead of..."

I disagree. While yes, the function names and parameters are not always consistent and easy to remember, the point is they don't have to be, because it takes very little time to type "php.net/thefunctionorclosetoit" into a browser and quickly reference whatever you need.

Add a smart IDE that gives parameter hinting into the mix and you don't even need to do that most of the time.
That's what you have to contribute here? A blog post taking Kohn to task for his tone? It's definitely true: Kohn is an archetypical bleeding heart liberal. I'm pretty liberal, and he makes my eyes roll.

But that doesn't make him wrong. What he's saying about incentive pay harmonizes with what we as technology entrepreneuers already know about incentive comp, and with what we're already observing in school districts around the country. The teachers in Oak Park don't even get a pizza party for jacking up ISAT scores, but those scores are still a top-of-mind issue for them year round.

A reasonable person could argue that it's better not to do formal evaluations at all, rather than smothering the whole school system with meaningless standardized tests.
The target market seems to be tech-savvy. Getting on blogs (with a relevant audience) is much more challenging for b2b and most consumer apps.
totally OT:

Gordon, I sent you email regarding the lists, they are ready for download did you receive the mail ?

(my internet connection is on the blink, great moment for it)

Jacques
You could try SuperMemo:

http://www.supermemo.com/

I found out about it from this article, which was posted on HN a while back:

http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_woznia...
Twitter uses a combination of Ruby and Scala, by the way.
Just saying that PHP is not objectively fast. "Fast enough", perhaps.

It's also worth noting that where PHP does well is in direct calls to C libraries; compare the C version and PHP version of pidigits; they are almost identical. A few languages do as well with their native numerical tower, which is very interesting.
Or better yet, using Capistrano to do that and more.
Yes. That's what I'm saying. In the absence of any reasonable notion of what teacher performance means and how to measure it, tying teacher comp to arbitrary standardized performance metrics is a bad thing, for exactly the same reason as it's bad to comp developers based on number of bugs opened or lines of code committed.

The only difference I see between the two instances of this "solution" are that the incentive comp schemes dev teams come up with are simply fodder for amusing DailyWTF posts, and the punitive "incentive" schemes on the table now for schools have already begun screwing over a whole generation of kids.

We all hope the next generation sees some improvement in education, don't we?

[ps: I took the time to actually read the "Policy 2.0" report that is the subject of the AJC article. It contains no data. It builds a case for formal teacher evaluation by using the same logic you do: "studies teachers are important, so it follows that a plan to segment teachers by performance would be beneficial". I'm particularly happy to report that almost none of the study's contributors are even named, nor is a methodology specified beyond "we have an internet site, we recruited volunteers, and we led discussion groups and documented the "results".]
I don't buy the assumption that the biggest problem is teacher quality.

It's half and half. My wife has a 2nd and 4th block, same material, same environment, except the latter has such a poor group dynamic that they significantly underperform the other class. Variables here are time, teacher fatigue, blood sugar, and the students. I feel that the last factor has the greatest effect.

And I totally agree with the fact that there's an abdication of responsibility from the parent/guardian(s) in that they feel the intrinsic motivation for the student ought to be provided by the state.

But then we have teachers who have tenure that play videos all day. Good times.
I just have to say I would use your service...

Definitely going to use this strategy in the future, but hope the reach of this post doesn't flood blogger's inboxes with similar schemes.
Joel Spolsky, Snake-Oil Salesman
Things like Capistrano are the reason this person gave up Rails for PHP, and I don't really blame them.
Links about a current problem (that a substantial number of teachers are just flat-out incompetent, by any standard of evaluation), which seems to have been going on for a long time (to judge by the dates of publication of the various links):

http://www.ericdigests.org/pre-921/incompetent.htm

http://www.amazon.com/Incompetent-Teacher-Managerial-Respons...

http://www.schoolmatch.com/audit/jacksonville/articles/teach...

http://web.missouri.edu/~podgurskym/papers_presentations/pre...

http://reason.com/archives/2006/10/01/how-to-fire-an-incompe...

http://www.maa.org/features/083104pointcallforaction.html

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/31/090831fa_fact_...
This is where the term "code monkey" came from.
I hear you, but I'm not so sure that it's just about picking people to follow. That feels too yesterday... I'd like to pull trends out of the conversations at large. Can Twitter be a trending engine? Can you leverage a topic for financial gain? Is there actionable data in the random blatherings of a million people?

If I am JetBlue (I'm not) and people are ranting or raving about some experience on Delta, can I use that data? Run a promo? Give them a safe haven?

In one respect, Twitter seems like it can be the exposing of the raw conscious of "the public", that group that has been so elusive to marketeers. The trick is to extract the data, to measure the thing, without affecting that which you are measuring. One of the longest standing challenges in science.

I'm rambling, but thinking on iterations of this in my head.
> Do serious PHP developers use PHP's built-in template language?

No. However, my template engine compiles to PHP's built-in template language.

> In exchange for not having to understand abstraction or OO

My PHP code is just as object-oriented as my C++, Java, or C# code. As for the functions, you memorize what you need and have a good IDE for the rest. One of the benefits of PHP is that there's a function for just about every common task and using them is really easy. Other languages may have the same functionality in a library, but the setup and calling is far more complicated.

PHP is a get-things-done language and it always has been. You can dick around with all the abstractions, frameworks, and meta-programming you want but often that's just more complicated and a waste of time.
Why kid? It seems like a plausible/testable thing.
Also... Arrays have block scope. So if you have a function that declares an array, operates on it, then returns a pointer to that array, it's undefined behaviour.

This was very confusing to me when I learned C because it's one of those undefined behaviours that appears to work properly in trivial programs (at least with the compiler I was using).
A reasonable person could argue as well that pupils (or their parents, their legal representatives) may just as well be empowered to shop for schools strictly on the basis of their own preference, just as customers shop for technology products on the basis of whether they like the products or not. Today, pupils are assigned to schools, and have very limited choice of teachers within the schools to which they are assigned. Just as I agree with you that workplaces are more pleasant when workers are honored and valued for their capacity to make decisions, so I hope the school system begins valuing learners for their capacity to notice when a particular teacher isn't a good fit for a particular learner.
I come off like a Capistrano fanboy in this thread, but I guess that I kind of am.

I only ever used the SCP method when I did PHP stuff, but the projects were never anything that big. Now that I do Rails all the time, having a tool like Capistrano is amazing. 'cap deploy' copies my code, changes the symlink, updates my database schema, notifies my error reporting, restarts my webserver, and cooks me dinner.

Okay, I exaggerate. But seriously. Automation! It's awesome.
Awesome, congrats to Bump!
I can host it just about forever, I own & operate ww.com, which has a fairly large traffic bill anyway.

I figure if I put some 'friendly' ads on it the thing should pay for itself and that's good enough for me.

The kind of corporate superstructure that Y! puts on top of its products is what makes it inviable, not the concept of free hosting by itself.

If you figure that bandwidth in bulk costs around $3 / Mbit / month then you can serve an awful lot of pages to make back that 3 dollars.

Geocities pages weigh in at about 25K a piece from my meagre sample, so based on that cost / Mbit that's 13 million pageviews + a bit thrown in for server depreciation.

I'm not too scared about doing that.

If the need arises I can put the whole thing in a foundation to keep it alive forever.
Wouldnt that just skew all grades higher? Why wouldnt I want to give out all A's to my B and C students if it meant hire pay? Or am I missing something
Variables here are time, teacher fatigue, blood sugar, and the students.

I'd say that, at least up to some age, any problems attributable to "the students" are really the failing of the parents, though maybe that's what you were getting at.

I agree that some teachers aren't really helping matters any, but without good parental influence I don't think improving teacher quality is going to accomplish all that much.
Yes, we get it. You're a libertarian (Podgursky, Reason, even the Tennessee math professor you cited).

Also: one can simultaneously believe that incompetant teachers are too hard to fire and believe that "Race to the Top" and NCLB and charter schools are terrible, counterproductive ideas.

Two other comments about your links:

* None of them address the concern I raised, which is not a liberal one but a simple market/economics issue.

* The last link is particularly interesting because Joel Klein, the NYC superintendent who is its subject, is hugely controversial.
While some of this makes sense... this "Undergraduate courses lose their technical currency in something like five years on average" sticks out like a sore thumb.

How well would we be served if C were taught in undergraduate programs? In depth. Add to that a Lisp and Java, and who knows what we would be capable of in a shorter timeframe? C and Java have not gone obsolete, and along with Lisp, many different paradigms of programming are taught. Not only that, but technical skill with important and oft-used languages would be transferred.

I add Lisp simply to include another paradigm and because it's an old concept that's never really gone away, and seems to be gaining traction (see this site, see Clojure, see the continuing development and expansion of Scheme and CL and Gambit etc etc.)
Why? I mean, for a very basic setup, you just run 'capify .', and then change some passwords, and you're good to go. It doesn't even really take any configuring.

Here's the thing: good engineering means that you should automate as much as possible. That way, everything is consitant. One command deployment is amazing, regardless of your technology stack.
It is very hard to have incentives and competitive influences in education. It is just the nature of education -- the result of a good or bad education is not immediately obvious.

If you buy a TV you will know soon after you use it whether it is a good or a bad TV. Not so much with your kids. Although, a very bad school may be immediately obvious a lot of mediocre ones will not be and they will not be distinguishable from very good ones.

So, unfortunately, one cannot use general competition to make schools better. One has to rely on teachers and administrators desire to do good.
Interesting!! Bookmarking to see what other gremlins popup!
Can I complain about this article continuing to blur any distinction between "computer science" and "software engineering", or would that just make me sound like a cranky old-timer?
I never liked any of the group work I did in school. Sure, the teachers would assign it, but it always ended up with a few people doing most of the work or a project with as many different parts as there were people. It was fine for me to talk about ideas with other students, but when I needed to learn it, I had to go off and work by myself.
It always seems to me like private school advocates are weirdly unable to look more than a few moves ahead into this game. Maybe it's because they haven't had trouble with their school's management before, or because they've never worked for a private K-12 before.

Subsidizing private schools hurts public schools in a vicious cycle. Private schools do not, as a rule, outperform public schools with students of similar backgrounds (even on bogus standardized tests). On balance, it's pure adverse selection: state-subsidized private schools that accept only students who are likely to maintain their artificially inflated performance metrics.
Right now about 400 per second.

http://www.twitpocalypse.com/
If you have any suggestions to improve our tool, we'd be happy to hear them.

http://trendistic.com/
I wonder how long it'll take them to rig it to fire an machine gun...

the recoil will sure be a problem, but hey, it's stable when pushed.
Thanks for elaborating.

I strongly recommend you find a trusted friend/family member/mentor/etc. to talk with about your concerns. It's really difficult to get a handle on a situation as complex as what you've described without knowing you personally. So I can't really say anymore than that.

But please do take my advice. I wish you well. :)
You're not missing something. You just spot it quickly because the idea of metric-based performance pay has been such a disaster in the technology industry (pay extra for devs not to "make bugs", and they simply stop filing bugs in the bug database).
I just spent the weekend messing around with Clojure. The docs aren't great (mainly due to lack of examples, IMHO) and it's been 10 years since I seriously programmed in any Lisp so it's been a bit slow going.

But I am in love with the concurrency model. Clojure's software transactional memory is amazing. It's like garbage collection for concurrency. Instead of having to remember to synchronize everywhere concurrent access could occur, you have to start a transaction any time you want to manipulate shared state.
Boston Dynamics makes bi-ped robot
We are also thinking a javascript genius would work well too because of the nature of Adobe Air. Thanks again for looking
It is! And even if you just jury rig it! Several of my projects have a deploy script that's just a bash one liner that does a git push and does a git pull and touches a restart file on the server :-)
I think we do have it.

On the login page, click the dropdown arrow next to the google, facebook, etc. login buttons. The first textbox entry you see should be for OpenID.

A bit of a random question, why exactly does OpenID 'jive with the hacker community'? I don't quite get it.
I do have some supportive friends and family. I had really hoped this would be a general conversation about how people cope with controversy in dealing with "the public", whether it's a forum or your own website. That's part of why I didn't want to go into specifics in my opening post. I really don't think anyone can tell me what to do about my specific situation. I was hoping people would tell me what they have found helpful in dealing with their own controversies. I think that would be both more helpful to me and of more general interest to the audience here. My very specific niche worries are unlikely to be anything anyone here can really relate to.

But thanks for your concern.
WP mentions a couple more sites doing some archiving:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocities#Closure
This post is meta-interesting for me. I did not expect it to elicit 4,000+ unique visits. I almost want to put an: Update: PHP S%cks! at the top of the blog post just for fun (I wont).
It does stick out... but apparently too far as it blocked out the following qualification "(obviously different sectors age at different rates – web programming has a very fast cycle, embedded systems a very slow one)". C is a systems language, it's been around forever and is not about to be replaced anytime soon, possibly anytime in our lifetimes. It's too good at what it does. And that's why it's taught in a lot of universities.

As is Lisp, for the reasons you mentioned. As is SQL. As are several others (though I'd disagree with Java myself because it's really more set up to do things than to teach things and there are too many shortcuts in there - but many others disagree with me on that point :) ).

I'm not for getting rid of established languages from courses. C is 37 years old; C++, 30 years; Lisp, 51 years; Objective C, 23 years - these are well-established languages that won't vanish in the four-year span of an undergrad course. Java at only 14 years (and so many releases that stability is a valid question) tends (to my mind at least) to mark the start of the gray area there. Some though, like Perl and C++, are really hard to teach in compared to others and that can outweigh their stability as a factor. Still though, I look at languages like Python and would love to work them into a course. But it is still a risk for the students. Maybe for the final year work though.

But teaching a four-year course using Ruby as a primary language, intellectually interesting as that sounds, is an unethical act at the moment. It's a beautiful language, a real joy even to read - but what the students start learning on day one may not be around, or be a useful thing to know for the jobs they'll pay their mortgages with four years down the line. That's the responsibility the university is taking on when it creates a course. The student invests four years of their life - the university must produce a return on that, and conservative thinking is needed for that.
PG said to ship something fast and minimal.
True, this is often the case. I think what Joel is asking for is that students be forced to do at least one project that is long-term and collaborative by it's very nature so you learn the skill of working on a team.
It's a Computer Science degree, not a programming degree. If you want to learn a trade, go to trade school not a four-year university.

You wouldn't expect someone with a degree in English to know how to navigate a book contract, would you?
Leo: Outliner, code editor, documentation generator, and more
Indeed it does, and very impressive it is too. I cannot help wondering, though, why it is wearing shoes...unless they want to conceal some ever-so-clever technology.
It's an accounting trick. Dell needs to sell a certain amount of goods every quarter. Well they price things to move and load any debt onto next quarters books. Eventually you reach a point like today. Dell has so much debt that it eats into future earnings. This reflects in the stock price. Apple's market cap is 160billion dollars, with 35 billion in reserve. Dells cap is 30 billion dollars. Realistically, Apple could buy Dell in cash.

While the deals are great for endusers, they are cutting their own throats to move product. One thing you can't ignore about Apple, they make profit on everything they sell (no loss leaders there). To an investor, that is a good buy.
What about Billings?
This.

"Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." --Dijkstra
In my experience, LONG practice sessions are much more effective than short ones. E.g., I've found I get far more out of one 8 hour practice session than four 2 hour sessions.

I'd also say you need to do it intensely - you've got to be into and "feeling" what you're doing. If you're just sitting there waiting for your 3 hours of "practice time" to elapse so you can go chill you may as well just not do it.
I forgot to add above...the reason I was looking for interest rates was I was looking to understand how you were prioritizing what to be paid off. I wasn't sure if it was biggest + minimums first, or if it was prioritized to prevent growth of outstanding balance on all but one that was being paid down, or if it performed calculations based on "best" payoff options (high interest + low balance being prioritized over low interest + high balance, minimizing total interest paid over the period for paying off the balance, etc.).

I would highlight the method, use it as a draw point and explain it somewhere, and have the website be the tool to track progress with the method. That's the catch with credit cards, they have a limit, but the part that is never pointed out is the total amount you really end up paying including interest.
It's easy to point to Java and C as stalwart success stories in hindsight, but I can recall with Java there was a tremendous amount of histrionics from the C++ and VB crowd claiming that Java was merely another passing fad. C faced down Pascal and COBOL, two languages which were considered far more favorable to programmers at the time.

----

I feel sorry for CS/CEng departments these days, as they're facing pressure from both sides: The industry wants more vocational-style training, and students want "real world" experience but also want a world-class western liberal arts education. It's as if their idea of a perfect school is one with the prestige of Harvard married with the curriculum of DeVry. I'm afraid you cannot have both.
To be completely honest, my initial reaction was that the site was a scammer, and I only came in here to flag it...

Luckily I realized that it was a real site from reading the comments.

Maybe you could revise the copy to make it less scam-like. I think I was thrown off by phrases like "100% secure", frequent use of "free", all the exclamation points, also the second-person voice "So if you want to say goodbye to your credit card debt.."

Hope these suggestions are helpful.
Nope, I wouldn't. I'd expect them to be able to write the book and then get a lawyer to review the contract that the agent negotiates for them.

Mind you, I've not seen degrees in programming as distinct from Computer Science or Computer Engineering over here. We have one, two and three-year diplomas, yes, but degrees are all on the fundamentals over here.
If you have a function that declares anything and returns a pointer to it, it's undefined behavior. Because variables have block scope.
I don't play chess, but it seems to me "morality" would be more complicated because there are no simple right or wrong answers. Many people would like there to be but such views often lead to acts of great evil. It's very difficult to do right by many people. It's much, much easier to have a group of people "decide" (agree) on some specific value and coerce everyone into following it, no matter the cost. Of course, that leads to enormous atrocities.
Another advantage of this is that it makes you actually commit to your repository, if you're bad at that kind of thing.
And that's exactly the problem. In liberal arts educations (such as the one I'm receiving) or even at universities such as MIT, Python is the language of choice. It's great fun to teach, very easy to learn, but it's not an industry standard, and many would argue that it's too easy to use.
I'd just like to say that you guys couldn't have launched in a more perfect time. I browsed your site when I saw it linked to on HN and didn't think much of it. My mom came home the following day with a new laptop and asked me to install a bunch of software. I quickly remembered Ninite and had most of her stuff installed in no time. It was really great.
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/

The economic system is sending a strong signal.

When you can just get by in school, become a banker and still make the equivalent of an engineer, you'd be almost foolish to go with the match/science degree.

Can you do that in India/China/other third world country?