While I respect that others may have a different opinion, I should add that in my experience the change from 0 to 1 was more profound than that from 1 to 2. Without kids life most likely entirely revolves around your needs, interests and priorities (if you are not a caregiver). The first kid turns that world upside down. The second kid to us mostly meant more of kid stuff. Yes, I agree that it is not a good way to think about having two kids as something that equals to twice having one kid. But a lot that comes with the second will be somewhat familiar, and practice will make you better at it, even though your second kid will probably be very different to your first.
My friend wrote in an email that "When we had our first, I thought a lot about what the hell we had done with all the free time we used to have on our hands. Since we had our second, I haven't had time to think." I should add that after having their third, he has barely found time to write emails to me a few times a year.
TLDR; step size between 0, 1, 2, etc. kids is subjective.
Agree. When we had one kid, I started a business. Looking back, it was totally doable. When we had two kids, I was a solo freelancer, worked a ton, and don't remember any issues. The third one, though, we called him The Crusher. Even though he was as easy as the first two, all three constantly demanded attention, and we were outnumbered. There was no "relaxing with the baby". As they got older, the sheer logistics with school and multiple activities got ridiculous (let's say 3 children x 1 activity each x 2 days/wk (1 practice + 1 game) = 6 afternoons/evenings gone). Expenses suddenly got out of hand (preschool++).
Of course, wife & I always wanted three. I was not going to not have three kids, just so I could spend more time coding. I would never tell anyone who has < 3 kids that they have it easy, but this was a very interesting sub-topic of the OP.
Our company has doubled down on Meteor. We start all greenfield apps in meteor now.
The biggest negative is simply the immaturity of the ecosystem. Everyone has different standards. There are no de facto standard packages (yet). Everything is changing rapidly. What worked well last week may not work well this week. The bleeding edge truly bleeds.
From a pure technology perspective, I'm excited about meteor because (to use a cliché) it shifts the paradigm. I wouldn't compare it to Rails/Ember/Backbone/etc because meteor is full-stack. There is no client/server. There's no ajax. Everything is one codebase. Even though it's built on top of node, it doesn't even feel like node because of the reasons above, and most of meteor is synchronous.
We wrote a couple blog posts about making the jump to meteor. I think the 1st one directly answers your question. The 2nd caused quite a stir here on HN.
Yes, teaching to a test should be easy, and it is easy to your median 15-year-old. The gigantic problem with NCLB - and something I've not seen mentioned in this HN story - is that NCLB is a one-size-fits-all mandate, and there is NOTHING about education in the US or anywhere that is one-size-fits-all. Hundreds of factors influence the raw material (children) that teachers have to work with every day.
Countries like Finland do not try to graduate all of their children in the same way. 43% of Finland's HS graduates graduate from vocational schools (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/Why-Are-Finlands...). The US has slowly moved further and further away from this type of "tracking" since the 70's. Things like NCLB and the over-valued notion of a college degree has only accelerated this problem. I am not optimistic.
Competition for the top graduates is incredibly tough in many countries. In many countries the education system can't compete with the private sector (in terms of salaries and opportunities) in hiring the best, in Finland the competition is smaller due to fewer opportunities existing for top-tier graduates so they can afford to hire them.
As I was scanning the comments on this post, I was a bit surprised by the all the "This post was too basic. You are clearly an amateur and wasting my time" comments. Well, to those authors, not everyone on HN is an l337 hax0r such as yourselves.
Yes, the author still has some work to do. Maybe if he spent another couple weeks just on this, he could get response times down. Maybe he should use a reverse proxy or maybe he shouldn't. As with most problems of this type, the answer is, it depends.
To a young programmer with a few years experience who may be working on his/her first high traffice website, I thought the blog post was fantastically written. It was clear, concise, explained well the low-hanging fruit of optimization, explained the difference between performance and throughput, and decisions-making/tradeoffs made when preparing for a traffic spike. Well done.
This is the key takeaway for me from the article (and also supports my own beliefs). If teachers in the US started earning like doctors and lawyers ($100K-$200K), then many of our education problems would go away. Why? You'd start retaining good teachers, and attracting new, good teachers. Then these folks would continue to solve education problems. You'd be amazed at what highly paid, motivated professionals can accomplish. But low-paid teachers, no matter how dedicated, get burnt out a few years into a career. Bad teachers would eventually work their way out, due to increased competition. (Read the article about how applications shot up.) Some of the money (thought not all) for higher salaries is in education, but it's just not being spent in the right places.
The 2nd interesting point I took away is the ability grouping. Not grouping by ability works for young children, say K-6. But once older, the gap is too much for a unified curriculum. Taking this concept further out, Americans need more vocational high schools, like Finland. College is overvalued in this country, and a large segment of high school students are being misled by the college myth.
$100k-200k would probably bankrupt just about every US school system.
Why do you think bad teachers would work their way out of the system due to competition? Ontario pays teachers generously and as a result has a glut of teachers (widespread unemployment amongst new teachers, people going abroad, certainly many of these people would be good teachers). There's no "competition" because the challenge is to get on the supply list, and then get hired into the unionized workplace. Once you're there, don't worry about getting fired. The main struggle is getting in, not avoiding getting out. High pay does necessarily lead to the sort of competition that I think you have in mind.
Re: competition. When I mean work their way out, I mean retirement. Ineffective teachers will retire, and with higher pay, the increased number of applicants for teaching positions will raise the bar for new teachers. In the article, it said like 6000 applicants applied for 600 spots. That's the kind of ratios we need in the US.
As far as I can tell, teachers don't take up the majority of spending, though. It varies a lot by school district, but typical figures are that ~40-45% of education spending is on classroom teachers' salaries, with a declining trend compared to a few decades ago (when it was more common to have 50-60%).
Facilities and materials aren't cheap. Admin is about 10% of my school system's budget and that counts total admin, not just the principals and the like (there are tons of low paid employees in administration).
