skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Peter Cech is nearly a foot taller. England international striker Peter Couch is more than a foot. Christiano Ronaldo's stature is in between. The Brazilian great "Garrincha" - aka Anjo de Pernas Tortas - lived with physical deformity.

What they have in common is having enjoyed the opportunity to express their unique abilities and the will to develop them to an elite level. A high red blood cell count won't make a Trinidadian into a world class cross country skier.
Right. Gameplay experience still matters to a company like Nintendo and for that they need to have full control of their own hardware.

I've seen many suggest that Nintendo should port their back catalog of games over to iOS simply because "people would buy them" - ignoring the fact that these games need dedicated input control and smudging your fingers up against glass with no tactile feedback is a terrible experience. This would never happen (yes I know about emulators).

Nintendo recognizes Apple as their main competitor now and it's hard to compete with a company that refreshes their hardware yearly, making the old "console advantage" not much of an advantage anymore.

Nintendo will always be around, they hold the keys to the greatest video game franchises of all time[1], but I think their future will be in handhelds. You can already see a shift happening as the majority of their focus has been on the 3DS this year.

Their next handheld after the 3DS really needs to be a hit for them.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Nintendo_franchises
Bam looks really interesting, definitely a lot simpler than Sparkey, and the basic principle is the same. I have been hesitant to use perfect hashing for Sparkey since I wasn't sure how well it holds up for really large data sets (close to a billion keys). Impressive to write it in less than 300 lines of clean code!
None of your examples are relevant. Andy Grove did not found Intel, and his accent is not incomprehensible. Likewise Tim Cook did not found Apple in China.
Using Firebase (https://www.firebase.com/index.html) as your backend, you can write entire applications in JavaScript without any server code. It also provides a Node module if you want to run your own servers: https://www.firebase.com/docs/nodejs-quickstart.html
The difference is that the TGV you mentioned was a highly modified version just for this speed record. The L0 [1] shown in the video is planned to be the production train and run 500km/h in actual service.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L0_Series_Shinkansen
Generalizing from the Valley to anywhere is insane. The Valley, right now – like it or not – is the NFL for geeks. (For better and worse.)
Although not Podunk by any means, here's Google's Wisconsin satellite: http://www.google.com/about/jobs/locations/madison/
CatTube Cartoon
This article is content marketing for Appcelerator. It builds a straw man of enterprise development that is convenient for Appcelerator's business model (scaling JavaScript applications), neglecting to consider other concerns such as stability, maintainability and support.
You picked up Android programming in your spare time, after having been a programmer for decades. That's not a counterexample, and even if it was, I certainly didn't say that all older people are unable to learn a new career, I said that many people are, especially older ones.
Suburbia would have to disappear - at least for those who can afford to not live there - because when we were spending 16 hours a day there we'd realize what a terrible place it is to live. Big cities would still be desirable places to live - they still have theatres and concert halls and museums and art galleries - in fact they might become much more so, as car ownership became less common. At the same time, since leisure travel is a much poorer source of income for mass transit than commuters are, rail and bus services would decline - so overall transport would be poorer, and the gap between rich and poor - city and country - would widen. Small towns would shrink and vanish, because many of them exist solely to support one or two industries in that town.
If the enterprise wanted as much compile time checking as possible, why haven't they adopted something like Haskell years ago? The checks done by the type systems of the JVM and CLR are laughable in comparison. There must be some different reasons at play here, too.
If we are talking front-end, then Javascript is already the dominant language for EVERYONE (for the web anyways.)

> Big brand names like GM, Yahoo, Dow Jones, Walmart and Dell have all deployed Node.js and are touting its merits.

It's as if the borg is chanting node while it slaves away on its corporate machine. I bet if I asked Michael Dell what he thinks about Node, he would probably tell me to F-off.

I googled LinkedIn and the first result talked about how they replaced their Rails app with a Node app. Right, when I see an article talking about how X huge corp replaced their Scala app with Node then I might be more convinced.

We don't need to be locked into any one tool though. As we learn how to build things better we find that we can route our pipes to different boxes which handed different things rather than having one huge box handling everything.
I wish this mode of transportation would be practical and affordable here in the US. I like the light rail in Denver, and the subways in San Francisco. Made getting around town really easy and affordable. Unfortunately with the distance between cities here it is more practical to take a flight.
Here's my list of why other frameworks have become the language of the enterprise: (you can draw your own conclusions as to why JS won't fit).

1) Large resource supply - .NET, Java, etc resources are cheap, quick to deploy and abundant.

2) Pay-for library support - I can pay Oracle and MS gobs of money to support me when things go wrong. (how quickly they fix things is another question for another discussion)

3) Supported engine - Enterprise customers pay IBM, HP, MS, etc for support of JVM's, etc in order for the code to run.

4) Scalability - There is a reason programs at scale are written in languages that are written for performance. "Enterprisey" languages are verbose and have to be compiled because they allow for better control of performance at scale (notice I didn't say they perform better, there is a big distinction)

Lastly, JS is already an Enterprise language, but mainly for front-end only. So the argument is whether it becomes a back-end language.
I don't think demand for silicon(measured by area) for high end manufacturing processes had dropped. It might have shifted from pc to tablets/smartphones. but it's there.

According to darpa , the end would probably come due to money. But even assuming unlimited money, 6nm is the size of a silicon atom. to go below we'll have to split the atom :)
I've conducted my tests with zero extensions/add ons, and I've never made a user profile.
> Who said Mexico and Brazil are friends of the US? Mexico and Brazil both represent significant economic threats to the U.S.

I'm sure the US won't get any goodwill from other nations as long as it keeps seeing any other economic power not in decline as an enemy.

Why the condescension for people who don't accept realpolitik as a fact of life?
> a hobo claiming he keeps the airplane aloft by snapping his fingers every 3.2 seconds
Interesting comparison :p Sounds like it might be rooted in personal experience. Is it?
Nintendo already has a device that targets mobile gamers.
It's only going to be ready by 2045? Won't better tech be developed in that timeframe making this train obsolete?
the visas they have are for jobs u can't find americans for. i guess it would be tough to find an american willing to live in horrifying slum and clean toilets for $0/hr.....
Readable Chrome Devtool Theme
I haven't tested nor cared how something appears in IE in years. Since like 2009. I have worked on major frontends for a couple of big companies all this time and recently a startup. IE is the new opera. IE needs to make sure that everything works. It may have large marketshare, but it's the market that's irrelevant to anything I've worked on (IT and business related tools and control panels).
There are some parallels but the analogy falls apart. Even the most perfect car does only one thing very well: get people from point A to point B.

That is, there is a finite amount of autorepairs and new car manufacturing that is done and will ever be done, and that ceiling is related to how many people own cars or want to own one at any given point in time.

But the potential domains for software automation are unlimited.

The demand for software programmers will keep increasing, continually, until all the work that people do in their lives is automated by software. The time to enjoy being a software developer might be finite, but I don't see the plateau happening any time soon.
I am not the author, but i think this is really really useful.
Read my comment again, and point out where it was being absolute and implied that something was always true. You've been arguing against something quite different than what I wrote. Perhaps you're overly sensitive to potential age-related discrimination, since the age factor wasn't even the main point of my comment.
Exactly. Reading the whole document, and realizing I already knew every single piece of information in it, almost made me want to cry. The fact that I've spent so much time accumulating knowledge that, in the end, is such garbage.

But at least I've had the luxury of accumulating it slowly, over what has been, by now, almost 20 years. I can't even imagine showing this page to someone getting started in web development. They'd think the whole thing was designed by insane people.
Let's not forget one thing. Computer Science can be
extremely boring for many young people. It's a man made
science(meaning it's different than, let's say, biology.)

As a younger lad, I couldn't imagine having to spend my
working life in front of a computer screen.

These are just my observations, and yes--some of you will
have jobs for life.

In all honesty, I don't love computers, or even the Internet. I was forced to get involved in the Computer
economy.

Actually, I'm going to turn off all my screens for awhile,
and try to enjoy the rest of this day---outside--scary kinda? What happened to me?
half of the time, or more, "we offer a competitive salary" is code for "Our salary is not very competitive."

Define a range, so you aren't wasting your time or other people's time.

Disclaimer: I am not interested in the position, just providing an observation about a lot of job postings of this nature.
What I find really interesting about the NSA is their Suite A: classified algorithms (!) used to protect the most sensitive documents (!!) with hilariously bad security records (!!!).

Take for instance the Skipjack cipher (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skipjack_(cipher)), a Type I cipher ("endorsed by the NSA for securing classified and sensitive U.S. Government information") which was evaluated, for the purpose of security, by "some of the world's most accomplished and famous experts in combinatorics and abstract algebra", and finally declassified due to concerns expressed by other cryptographers about its security.

Biham and Shamir broke it the day after it was declassified.
Demoscene wetdream
> The reason we are currently enjoying an alternative employment universe, insulated from the rest of the economy, is that the mass of unemployed people predominantly couldn't break into this field if they wanted to.

Art major, advertising minor, employed as a Software Engineer right here.
Which is why 'nanotechnology' of the future will be (and of the past was) done with proteins & nucleic acids packed by lipids. Want to build a nanobot? Build it out of organic material. The rocks we build iPhones out of do not maintain their useful properties at the nanometer scale.
I don't think so. Diluting a speakers content into cultural bias implies that the content of the speech is understood to begin with. This is not the case for what I'd call a strong accent. Those strong accent are too far away from a locution I can make sense of. A strong accent makes it hard to grasp the words that are said. And if you're in a venture perspective and nobody can make sense of the words that are getting out of your mouth, I believe it's fair to say that your strong accent is a problem.

From my limited point of view, I have noticed that some speakers with strong accents seem to be oblivious to the fact that they are hard to understand. They speak grammatically correct sentences and they sit on that knowledge seemingly thinking it's enough, that it's me who's stupid for not understanding what they said. The problem in those cases is that through their confidence, they try to speak too fast for their ability to clearly pronounce words and their syllables, which results in a long stream of garble to my ear.

English is my second language, French being my native tongue, and I do have an accent myself, but I try to speak individual words and syllables clearly. I still have an accent, maybe 'strong' but I'm pretty sure everybody can understand clearly the words I speak, or at least most of the time.

My wife is also learning English as a second language, Vietnamese being her mother tongue. Recently she's been improving a lot in her classes and begun to be overconfident in her ability to speak, trying to use contractions everywhere. Consequently, she's been having a harder time to communicate with others. My recommendation to her was to slow down and pay attention to say every word clearly before jumping into more artistic manipulations of the language. Surely it was frustrating to her, feeling she was moving back to a more primitive use of english. But she's also been improving her ability to be understood by other speakers.
I should have been clearer. They didn't.

We saved for several years and let them know last spring that we'd be quitting. We had expected to travel longer than 8 months, so we had sold all of our stuff, including our house, and then quit our jobs.

Upon our return, my old boss (now at a different company) asked me if I wanted to come work for him.
Enough with Typescript. using a transpiler doesnt make the language better.
I believe that you described lisp :)
A Brief Vacation From Myself
So, I don't know if people remember the early 2000s, but it wasn't a terribly great time to be a programmer. All the jobs were going out to India. However, I learned a very important lesson. You have to be competitive. If you were someone who couldn't see past cobol, you did become obsolete. While programmers in India are still relatively less expensive than their counterparts in the US, top programmers are still sought after and make significantly more than the rest.

Sure the barrier to entry is "low", but it isn't that low. I think one of the main problem is, calling someone a programmer is an extremely "broad" term. I know some who can barely string together a few lines of PHP code and other who design and build complex systems which run the world and improve people's lives. If you're a programmer who just "codes" HTML, which you learned over one weekend and haven't take the time to improve your craft, sure you may be working now, but you're likely to get wiped out easily since the barrier to entry into your line of work would be very low.

In a sense the OP is right in that programmers shouldn't be complacent. I know a lot of C coders who have serious BS ego issues and refuse to do anything but C and then complain that they can't find work after being laid off.

BUT, I'm not shivering in my boots due to Stripe and Wordpress. Any programmer knows there's a bunch of crap that's tedious work which can be automated away. The good ones automate them and improve their craft and focus their energies on building better systems. I think that even with Wordpress, Stripe etc, there's a lot of room form improvements in the way we develop.

I recall spending days getting a dialog box UI just right in MFC. I thought it was stupid then and after using C#, never used MFC to build a dialog box ever again. Result wasn't that I'm out of a job. I actually have been able to produce a lot more. Programmers are in ever more demand than before. Sure the field will probably get tapped at some point, but to say it's going to be due to "automation" which has been a staple in our profession since the very beginning is simply inane.

Going with the autoworkers analogy, there are people who turn wrenches and people who figure out six sigma. If you're doing something as simple as turning a wrench, sure, you will get easily replaced by robots. But if you're innovative and competitive, you'll be significantly harder to replace and you can probably find applications for your skills in many more places. There are certain skills you just can't automate away so easily.

I would argue that programmers/developers will have jobs long past even doctors (maybe). Repetitive tasks can easily be automated away, creativity and innovation on the other hand aren't quite as easy. (FYI, the reason all programming jobs aren't just in India is because the US still rocks when it comes to creativity and innovation, based on my own experiences as an employer/manager and in speaking with others in the same position who have programming staff worldwide)
still, if there was no competition for a word processor, then WordPerfect would have been the only option for customers that wanted a word processor...
>> The level of sacrifice required is dropping, and it's dropping like a rock.

What have changed , just ruby on rails type frameworks , or something beyond ?
Maybe it depends on the language? I could see something like this in python:

if not callable(something): make_callable(something)

Which can (sortof) be read off in English.
For things like "while", "do", "return", "public", "private" I definitely think of it as "real English text".

For things like "for", "wend" (while-end), "class", "switch", "main", they're divorced enough from any real English meaning that I just think of them as arbitrary coding words.

So, it's kind of both, at least for me.
I wouldn't take the risk .. he might sue you for copyright infringement.
Ageism is when you don't hire or promote someone on the assumption that an older person can't do the job or won't be as good at it because of their age. What I was referring to are the people who don't even apply for the new job because they don't believe themselves capable of changing careers.
> Don't get it by skimming? Must be crap code.

Well, there is some truth to that. Anecdotally, most lines of code will be read many times before they are changed/discarded, and most of this reading will be skimming, where the reader is either: 1) trying to understand the structure of the code, or 2) trying to figure out where to make modifications.

Code that's hard to understand quickly (e.g. by skimming) is technical debt. I think a good litmus test would include not just the effect on error rate, but also the effect on the time it takes to understand the code and to make changes to it.
Project Cybersyn (1971)
> Antai Theesis turning into antithusis would be more phonetically correct but wouldn't preserve the etymology of the combination.

The pronounciation of the separate words doesn't preserve their etymologies either. This is my main gripe with (spoken) English: greek and to some extent german words (and probably most other words taken from foreign languages) are completely and randomly mutilated, the result confuses everyone who knows what they mean and how they're pronounced properly.
Yes that is one annoying feature of quora. But sometimes that site does produce some interesting stuff to read.
I don't think a "business" co-founder is any more likely to have good communication skills than a "technical" co-founder.
The Baby and The Baath Water - Syrian interventions by Adam Curtis
NASA Crash Test Aimed At Safer Helicopters
Haha...that's the hard part. I wish I had a good source for this, but, honestly? I learned through the guidance of a good friend (ex-nVidia). I wouldn't have gotten there without it, but at this point I can reason about (parts of) OpenGL as it "should" be reasoned about. Not all of it by any means--there is a lot of deep magic there--but I have the foundation to understand what other engines and tools are doing.
The original story has a bit more to it, this is just a relink to the older blog entry which is here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/the_baby_and_the...
Grove not being the founder of Intel is a very pedantic point. He was there since day one of the company and had the biggest influence on Intel’s domination of the industry since it was startup (more than anyone else in the company’s history). Also, you need to have a distinct definition of what a strong accent is. If Grove has a clear accent not sure who we are talking about. Every time someone gives a counterexample of a founder with a strong accent, the pro-PG retort is that he actually doesn't have a strong accent (presumably because he is successful).
Built on standard Web technologies except for HTML and CSS, you mean; these are replaced by proprietary "equivalents." Which rather throws the "built on standard Web technologies" thing into some rather severe doubt.
Huh? Aren't you basically tied to an employer with H1B? I know you can move to another company but my understanding was that the process is a bit involved. Plus isn't part of the attraction of the H1B program being able to get skill but pay them less than an American would try to negotiate?

It's better but overall it sounds like the same thing to me.
Nintendo isn't doomed. Period.

People have been saying this since the Gamecube days, and what happened after that? Nintendo Wii. This link[1] has an enumeration of quotes saying things like "Nintendo should stop making hardware", dating back from 2003.

[1]: http://kotaku.com/5986942/nintendos-doomed-they-should-go-th...

Footnote: I loathe Gawker as much as most people in here, but it's the only place I could find a compilation of such quotes.
It would be really cool if the HDD's were not wiped, although it would be illegal to sell it if it had the leaked info (I think, not a lawyer here)
575km/h is hardly the peak speed of "normal" trains, V150 was a custom trainset (higher than normal power output, AGV bogies on a POS trainset and 3 cars to the standard 8) and running on a prepared track (increased catenary mechanical tension to handle the speed, and increased voltage from the standard 25kV to 31kV for increased power)

Also note that the MLX01 demonstrator (a better equivalent to the customized trainset used in the TGV record) has reached 581km/h. It's also done so on the 42km Yamanashi Maglev Test Line where V150's run took a ~140km section of (non-test) track.
As someone who is a native English speaker, but close to native level in Portuguese (lived in Brazil for 8 years), I'm curious what you mean by English being less expressive -- I've never heard that before.

Both languages have their expressive poets, authors, etc. It's easier to rhyme in Portuguese (it's almost like cheating, since the verbs all end in the same syllables), it's easier to modify the grammar classes of words in English (turning nouns into verbs and vice-versa), they both have rich vocabulary (although English seems to give more multiple meanings to individual words, and have more synonyms too). But in the end, I'd never call either of them more expressive than the other...
Anything that was invented in Scotland, e.g. telephone, television, ultrasound, MRI scanners, radar, cast steel, refrigerators, etc.