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StackOverflow Update: 560M Pageviews a Month, 25 Servers, and It's All About Performance - High...

The folks at Stack Overflow remain incredibly open about what they are doing and why. So it&amp...

Click to view the original at highscalability.com

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Rachel Aviv: A Middle-School Cheating Scandal Raises Questions About No Child Left Behind

According to statements later made by teachers and administrators, the cheating process at Parks Middle School, in Atlanta, began to take the form of a routine. During testing week, after students had completed the day’s section, principal Christopher Waller distracted the testing coordinator. Then,…

Click to view the original at newyorker.com

Hasnain says:

This is a sad story about how No Child Left Behind and data-driven teacher evaluation policies forced over a hundred teachers at forty plus schools to cheat and modify standardized test scores (at times without the students' knowledge).

Posted on 2014-07-19T06:48:37+0000

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Hasnain says:

"How fast was it going? We don’t know for sure, but a line drive from a major league batter can easily exceed 100 miles per hour. We know some other things. We know that a baseball weighs five ounces. We know that force equals mass times acceleration. We know that Fred Fletcher’s six-year-old daughter, whom he will identify only as “A,” was sitting precisely 144 feet from home plate. The laces on her sneakers were knotted in neat bows. And she—well, not just she, but everyone around her—had less than one second to react to Cabrera’s line drive."

Posted on 2014-07-19T06:36:31+0000

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Programming is not math, huh? • Jeremy Kun

You’re right, programming isn’t math. But when someone says this, chances are it’s a programmer misunderstanding mathematics. I often hear the refrain that programmers don’t need to know any math to be proficient and have... | Jeremy Kun | ∈ Mathematicians ∩ Programmers

Click to view the original at j2kun.svbtle.com

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Evan Sultanik | A Page of Personl Deification (and Other Self-Deprecating Incongruities)

Sometimes taking the easy way out isn't nearly as bad as it might seem!posted Thursday February 13th, 2014 at 08:19:00Tagged: Math

Click to view the original at sultanik.com

Hasnain says:

"That's really surprising, especially realizing that this applies for all NP-hard problems, if formulated correctly. So, simply choosing a random solution is often effectively as good as the best approximation algorithms that are currently known. In fact, in our paper we linked above we present some empirical evidence suggesting that the random solutions are often even closer to optimal than ones produced by state-of-the-art approximation algorithms."

Posted on 2014-07-18T00:57:30+0000

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Seth Mnookin: Fighting a One-of-a-Kind Disease

What do you do if your child has a condition that is new to science? Until recently, Bertrand Might was the only known patient with a certain genetic disorder. His parents began searching for others.

Click to view the original at newyorker.com

Hasnain says:

This is really really moving. A story about a couple's fight to figure out what was wrong with their son.

The father in question is Matt Might, famous for "An illustrated guide to a PhD" and "Hunting down my son's killer".

Posted on 2014-07-18T00:50:44+0000