I'm guessing they lived lives of incredible luxury with no worries about money in any sense other than recreationally. Just like the year before and the year after.
Good teaching largely consists of setting the learner up in situations where they can practice effectively. To pick just one example many people are taught to improve the quality of their writing. This largely consists of giving guidance on what writing to attempt and (more importantly) guidance how to reflect on the quality of the writing you've just done so you can improve.
We've got 13 years worth of data stored in mysql (5 million visitor/year). It's a pain to query there so we keep a copy in clickhouse as well (which is a joy to query).
I only track visits to a product detail page so far.
Basically,
some basic metadata about the user (logged in only),
some metadata about the product,
and basic "auditing" columns -- created by, created date, modified by, modified date
(although why I have modified by and modified date makes no sense to me, I don't anticipate to ever edit these, they're only there for "standardization". I don't like it but I can only fight so many battles at a time).
I am approaching 1.5 million rows in under two months.
Thankfully, my DBA is kind, generous, and infinitely patient.
Clickhouse looks like a good approach.
I'll have to look into that.
> select count(*) from trackproductview;
> 1498745
> select top 1 createddate from TrackProductView order by createddate asc;
> 2023-08-18 11:31:04.000
what is the maximum number of rows in clickhouse table?
Is there such a limit?
I'm a website 'publisher' for a non-profit that has zero advertising on our site. Our entire purpose for collecting analytics is to make the site work better for our users. Really. Folks like us may not be in the majority but it's worth keeping in mind that "analytics = ad revenue optimization" is over-generalizing.
Of course analytics from 13 years ago doesn't help us optimize page load times. But it is extremely useful to notice that content that has gotten deep use steadily for a decade suddenly doesn't. Then you know to take a closer look at the specific content. Perhaps you see that the external resource that it depended on went offline and so you can fix it. Or perhaps you realize that you need to reprioritize navigation features on the site so that folks can better find the stuff they are digging for which should no longer include that resource. We have users that engage over decades and content use patterns that play out over years (not months). And understanding those things informs changes we make to our site that make it better for users. Perhaps this is outside your world of experience, but that doesn't mean it isn't true. And we also gather data to help optimize page load times.....
Can you give some examples of changes that you made specifically to make the site work better for users, and how those were guided by analytics? I usually just do user interviews because building analytics feels like summoning a compliance nightmare for little actual impact.
We generally combine what we learn from interviews/usability testing with what we can learn from analytics. Analytics often highlights use patterns that are of a 'we can definitely see that users are doing 'x' but we don't understand why' genre. Then we can craft testing/interviews that help us understand the why. So that's analytics helping us target our interviews/user testing. It also works the other way. User testing indicates users will more often get to where they need to be with design a versus design b. But user testing is always contrived: users are in an "I'm being tested mode" not a "I'm actually using the internet for my own purposes" mode. So it's hard to be sure they'll act the same way in vivo. With analytics you can look for users making the specific move your testing indicated they would. If they do great. But if not you know your user testing missed something or was otherwise off base.
I've decided to either stop working or keep working on some things based on the fact that I did or didn't get any traffic for it. I've become aware some pages were linked on Hacker News, Lobsters, or other sites, and reading the discussion I've been able to improve some things in the article.
And also just knowing some people read what you write is nice. There is nothing wrong with having some validation (as long as you don't obsess over it) and it's a basic human need.
This is just for a blog; for a product knowing "how many people actually use this?" is useful. I suspect that for some things the number is literally 0, but it can be hard to know for sure.
User interviews are great, but it's time-consuming to do well and especially for small teams this is not always doable. It's also hard to catch things that are useful for just a small fraction of your users. i.e. "it's useful for 5%" means you need to do a lot of user interviews (and hope they don't forget to mention it!)
Can you offer any evidence or reasoning as to why I should believe this? It would seem to assert that somehow student success/failure currently sits entirely in the hands of teachers: they know what is needed and could do it if only they were marginally more motivated. I'm not a teacher myself but have been involved in the system my entire life and this doesn't ring true at all. Even if it were possible it would almost certainly result in teachers focusing all of their efforts on the best students and none of it on those who are struggling. Which seems to run counter to the goals of public education.
Having a base salary plus incentive pay for meeting objective goals is commonplace. Companies wouldn't do that if it didn't work. In my own company, Zortech, the staff was paid a base rate plus a cut of the gross sales for the month.
> it would almost certainly result in teachers focusing all of their efforts on the best students and none of it on those who are struggling
Actually the reverse would happen. The best students would automatically attain grade level performance, and likely exceed it. They'll already get the bonus for those students without any effort. The gold is in getting the underachievers to achieve.
In companies where bonuses are based on, say, revenue booked per quarter, salesmen play all kinds of games to jack that number up as far as it can go, regardless of the collateral damage. Piss off the engineers by promising the impossible? Who cares, I closed that McScully deal. Sold a customer a product that won't actually solve their problem? Cha-ching, bonus time!
Now, when you figure out how to tie sales bonuses to positive outcomes... that's a different story. Then the incentives match the actual goals.
But that's really hard to do. Outcomes can take years to measure, if they are measurable at all.
Hence why you end up with all kinds of really screwed-up corporate behavior. It's not because people or corporations are evil -- they just take the shortest path to the win, even if that's not really the road you wanted them on.
Schools are equivalent to large companies, and large companies can screw the proverbial six ways from Sunday for years before it hurts their bottom line, for any number of reasons.
Many Americans seem to have this mental disease whereby they think every problem can be solved with more money.
Large companies still have plenty of incentive pay.
Currently, teachers have zero incentive to get results. I bet you'll see results that follow incentives. Of course it won't be perfect - but I bet it'll be much better than the current disaster.
People like money. Especially the people who say they aren't motivated by money :-)
I work for a large company notorious for shooting itself in the foot because someone’s personal incentives to ship a shiny new thing and get promoted causes long-term repetitional harm as older things get abandoned. We pay for performance too, and quite well at that :)
While that might (or might not) mitigate one perverse incentive, there are lots more. It's important for policy proposals to take unintended consequences into account. What others can you foresee and how would you mitigate them?
I suspect the problem is how you can reasonably write a general spec for that which doesn't systematically doom some teachers, especially during the bootstrap phase (arguably quite a few years).
In an ideal world, our perfectly spherical students would enter the classroom "at grade level" and ready to proceed to the next level.
But what happens if you inherit a class of students that's barely above "remedial"-- starting one or two grades back on day 1-- what's the right metric for success? Getting all the way up to "at grade level" is probably unrealistic, but should we expect them to make up 1.25 grades per year, or 1.75? Or are we in a "we started back, and are going to beat them by going slower" mentality, and even getting 0.75 grade per year would be a win?
Conversely, if you're at a magnet school, you may be taking in students already a few grades above the norm on day one of class. There are kids who can absolute bury the needle on a standardized test-- "12th grade equivalent" at 5th or 6th grade. You could simply babysit them all year and still clear the bar.
I also expect there's a huge amount of dealing with Karen parents too-- I suspect an firm hand in holding back underachieving students could result in parental backlash. Too many parents would rather see the kid tossed out the moment he turns 18, even if they haven't gotten them career or independent-life ready.
> But what happens if you inherit a class of students that's barely above "remedial"-- starting one or two grades back on day 1-- what's the right metric for success? Getting all the way up to "at grade level" is probably unrealistic, but should we expect them to make up 1.25 grades per year, or 1.75?
Well, obviously, they've been making less than 1.0 grades per year so far; you'd expect them to keep going at that rate, not to suddenly double their rate.
but it doesn’t really work in the private sector. MBOs are common for US companies and to this day i’ve got teams across other departments that haven’t met MBO at 100% for years but the higher management seems it okay. the minimum work is still done but the full goals are never realized and these departments are just stuck in a rut. but, who cares? the minimum work is done, the progress numbers still go up, just we don’t have the ideal end result, just an acceptable one.
teachers already run the line of barely enough compensation to make it worthwhile except for those who are inclined towards teaching.
teachers are expected to do too much and there are too many goals imo for the position. whether we want it to be the case or not there is a huge social and mental health aspect to their jobs, and the standards look to be wildly inconsistent even within the same city as to what a successful education means.
like would you want to put a ton of effort in on a project knowing that the very next quarter you’re going to have to basically change the entire stack you’re working with and have a completely different set of regulations and project goals? and on top of it all, you need to get your team to even take the project seriously? and to make it even more fun a bunch of your teams’ families and friends are telling the world that the language you picked is awful and evil and are trying to regulate it out of use?
how much would you want for conditions like that every single project?
Performance reviews aren't always based on "objective goals" and it'd be bad if they were, because almost anyone outside of sales could game them.
Typically it's a kind of stack ranking based on how you performed relative to peers, where relative means in the vague opinion of your management tree.
Public teacher unions are adamantly against subjective reviews, which is why I suggested an objective mechanism.
> in the vague opinion of your management tree
I know it's popular to believe that management has no idea who the real performers are. But every office I've worked in, everyone knew who the good performers were and who the deadwood was. Including the managers.
It's also true that every person I've talked to who had been laid off was sure he was unfairly targeted. Even the ones who'd come to work strung out on coke.
Let's apply this to bankers, too. They must give a checking account to anybody who shows up, and their pay can be based on how much money is in those checking accounts at the end of the fiscal year.
a teacher's job is to teach their students. a "banker" (at the sort of bank where you might open a checking account) isn't expected to grow your checking account for you. you're supposed to do that, and the bank is supposed to hold it safely. I don't understand the comparison you are trying to make.
> because almost anyone outside of sales could game them
Perhaps you haven't worked in sales? My experience of sales meetings was that most of the meeting was taken up with discussions of how to optimise commission. The sales manager was totally in on the game; after all, he got a skim of his salesmen's commissions.
In no other environment have I seen people so obsessed with juking the stats.
Even sales manipulates them -- giving away way too much to lock in a longer deal this quarter because it makes this quarter's numbers look better had been a problem at places I've worked.
Pervasiveness seems to be more a function of whatever the latest workplace fad is rather than based on underlying assessments of how well it works. I've heard upper management outright say things like they're mandating return-to-office simply because everybody else is doing it.
Since the phrase 'piece work' first appears in writing around the year 1549, it is likely that at about this time, the master craftsmen of the guild system began to assign their apprentices work on pieces which could be performed at home, rather than within the master's workshop.
Did you not have any history classes in your early schooling?
I bet piece work was paid for the piece, i.e. results, not time in the seat.
I never wrote that all work was done in the office, sheesh. Besides, any organized labor project is going to need the labor on site. Piece work can only be done if no coordination or teamwork is needed.
> the master craftsmen of the guild system began to assign their apprentices work on pieces which could be performed at home
Sounds like speculation to me. Where are those apprentices going to get the tools? Is he just going to carry the anvil home with him? How about the forge? Even hand tools have historically been pretty costly items, up until just a few years ago.
> Did you not have any history classes in your early schooling?
Not much history is taught in public schools - not my fault. But I have a cite for you:
"Chapter 2 examines the material and religious foundations of
capitalism that were laid down during the so-called Dark Ages."
Huh? No, it's not. The first step may be learning what "capitalism" means. It's a specific economic system that developed in early modernity. It's not some "natural state of man" any more than feudalism was before it.
The opinions of Rodney Stark are neither unkown, uncontested, nor definitive.
At best they are niche and contraversial (admittedly it's the phrase "revolutionary and controversial" that most commonly appears on his book reviews).
I spoke of modern capitalism which is a well understood term, as acknowledged by bandrami.
If you wish to speculate on undocumented pre history then it's reasonable to assume that work from home predates first documentation and goes back as far in time as large works with small parts existed.
I've read Stark, and he goes way out in front of the actual documents we have. The high middle ages contained elements of a market economy that eventually developed into mercantilism and thence capitalism, which is very different from your claim that capitalism is a lot older than 1549. (You also seem to be conflating mercantilism and capitalism, incidentally, but either way the result is the same.)
from back in 2008 "the Petroleum Equipment Institute, a trade group, found that there were at least 170 static electricity fires at gas stations from 1992 to 2006. Considering that the American Petroleum Institute estimates that there are 11 billion refuelings in the United States a year, the problem probably isn’t a big one." from https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/automobiles/27STATIC.html
I'll note that in the state I live (MN) it's technically illegal to get back in your car while pumping (you have to be " in close attendance to the dispenser nozzle").
Wages paid by grants in general have to match whatever the institutions 'standard' pay scales are. So it's the institutions deciding pay rates. At least in the U.S..
My wife is currently in the middle of a fight over this. Her salary is paid by a grant from an organization that has a minimum pay scale for postdocs. The university has its own standard pay scale for postdocs, which is about $20k/year lower. So far they've refused to budge. It's not even their money, there's just 4 layers of bureaucracy who have nothing better to do than ~enforce policy~ no matter the cost.
While this may be novel in residential buildings in the U.S. there are a number of college campuses that have been going this route (providing a large number of buildings with heating/cooling/hot water via a centralized system that leverages heat pumps and the earth's thermal mass) for awhile. See for example: https://energynews.us/2022/02/07/colleges-see-untapped-poten...
Yes, there's lots of folks doing this and currently it looks like combining results from an LLM based index and a standard text retrieval indexes (e.g. using BM25) may beat either alone. Note that you can add and search LLM derived vectors from within Elasticsearch: look up 'dense vector search' in the docs. Check out the Haystack conference next week for lots of discussion of current practices: https://haystackconf.com/2023/
Right, there are a lot of administrators, janitors, technical support staff etc being paid by the university. But I'm surprised they aren't paid by the students tuition fees, since are so ridiculously high already.
There a too many administrators imo, who are often paid quite a bit. I don't think a University needs so many associate deans, assistant deans, and directors. Unfortunately it's people in those roles that make future hiring decisions so minimizing spending there isn't usually their goal.
Student tuition is high but not a high part of the budget. 40 years ago tuition was mostly covered by the state and tuition charged to students was basically just a copay to ensure you weren't terrible. But since the end of the cold war there's basically been a one way ratchet: every time a recession hits the states cut uni funding to balance the budget, the unis raise tuition to compensate, and when the recession is over this now the new normal.
The immediate question that would come from that is why is a technician or grant admin paid off tuition, when a student will never benefit from that?
That also doesn't account for things that don't "feel" like your typical university but are major research centers, like medical schools, where a lot of faculty are purely research.
