CoreDumpling

For me, Python has at some point or another been in each category, though at most two simultaneously.

And for those of us who do web development, "bread and butter" can easily include a half dozen languages or more. After leaving a project where I personally (no joke) used AS3, Awk, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, and SQL (sqlite, MySQL, and Postgres!) [1], my current position is just a trivially "polyglot" mix of C++ and Java desktop apps. Before that, I was constantly afraid that I'd forever be doomed to be a jack of all trades, master of none, but now the majority of my time is gobbled up by languages I don't like very much. Can't have it both ways...

[1] mostly by accident, as the powers that be could never make up their minds about what they actually wanted

Additionally, there's another entry further down for VB.NET at 0.323% -- if it is added to the VB percentage, it would bump it above Python and C#.

http://alllooksame.com/exam_room.php

I scored no better than random for face recognition, though some of the other quizzes had fragments of text that gave the answer away.

[1] http://books.google.com/books?id=2mgnEzzaJrIC&pg=PA37...

Instead, I choose to integrate exercise into my lifestyle rather than go out of my way to do it. Serious gym rats will scoff at me, but it's far more satisfying to carry a 10-kg watermelon home from the supermarket 3 km away.

It's also a lot easier when the exercise is compulsory. Twice a day I pass through 1.5 km of hilly terrain to reach my bus stop, and the panoramic view of the city along the way is certainly a nice bonus.

Be careful with who you say this to. Although this probably won't be a problem with an internship, an employer may be reluctant to consider someone who demonstrates a lack of commitment.

I was told of a student who said to one of his interviewers at Electronic Arts that he "wanted to be the next Jenova Chen." (Jenova Chen left EA to found thatgamecompany.) Needless to say, the interviewer was not amused.

She contends that a soapy washcloth under her arms, between her legs and under her feet is all she needs to get “really clean.” On the go, underarm odor is wiped away with a sliced lemon.

Some of us ought to note that it's not necessary to be the model customer in order to build a successful business.

Personally, I'd have a hard time getting over the cognitive dissonance, though.

Given this situation, the famous Prelude in C♯ minor by Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943) dates from 1892 and technically is still copyrighted in Europe until 2013. At the same time, there is a public domain recording made in 1919 (by the composer himself!) that is available on Wikipedia, where it is presumably legitimate under US copyright law [1].

Meanwhile, various machinations by parties without the best of intentions, coupled with a special case in French law to extend copyright because of the world wars, make it such that Boléro (1928) by Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) still won't enter the public domain until 2015, with royalties sucked up by a "management agency" while the composer's own home falls into disrepair [2].

On the other hand, it looks like Ottorino Respighi's Ancient Airs and Dances No. 3 (1932) would be public domain in Europe while not in the US because of the automatic copyright.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sergei_Rachmaninoff_perfor...

[2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2001/apr/25/arts.highere...

EDIT: Argh, it took me a half dozen tries to get the first URL right. Apostrophes seem to get dropped from URLs HN comments, rather than encoded with %27.

For instance, the first image has the Filyovsky Park metro station (Филёвский парк -- not too hard for you to recognize if you know a few Greek letters). Transliterated into Chinese, it became 菲列夫斯基帕尔克 -- "fei-lie-fu-si-ji-pa-er-ke" (apparently they transliterated the word "park").

It'll be interesting to see what happens when the Google Translate team starts to work with this.

Exponential growth will ultimately trump all other linear factors, even if the exponent is small. And that's also what makes small differences in that exponent so important (hence why computer scientists go through great pains to reduce complexity of matrix operations from O(2^2.51) to O(2^2.36)). Even if the investment only earned 1% per year, he can just sock it away in a 100-year trust fund:

    >>> 1000 * (1.01 ** 100)
    2704.8138294215287
    >>> 523 * (1.005 ** 100) * .45
    387.54342961962465

Plus, he has deliberately framed his scenario to take the maximum hit from taxes at every step. Corporate tax eats into his dividends? OK - invest in a growth stock instead of an income stock, and pay capital gains taxes when realizing the profits instead. Estate taxes steal most of the money from his heirs? How about he write a check to the university on behalf of his grandkids -- Uncle Sam won't see a dime of that.

Technology, while a potent equalizing force, is also a moving target, and it's one that depends on creative input much more than an infinite supply of cheap labor. Even if we have a post-scarcity society by 2025, I don't see any reason why the "elite" will not have access to some expensive, difficult-to-produce, meticulously customized product or experience that is coveted by people without it.

EDIT: Seems like someone changed the submission to point to the linked article. My point seems less valid now, but I would still maintain that creative activity will not be cheapened as much as Mr. Bookstaber seems to think.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_holidays_in_the_United_...

While the Large Hadron Collider is experimenting with particles less than 10^-10 m in size over distances on the scale of 10^4 m, computer scientists can easily run into combinatorial explosions that would make 10^9! seem puny. (Not just computer scientists, too -- you can probably find code that tries to operate like that on the Daily WTF.)

"[P]rograms must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute." -- Abelson & Sussman, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs [1], strangely misquoted by Paul Graham [2]

[1] http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/sicp/book/node3.html

[2] http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html

One question I have: how are you going about adding new flight information? Do you do them in an automated manner, using a web service, or perhaps by scraping? I'm primarily interested in flights between USA and East Asia, which as of now is still rather difficult to find with your site, but I'd be interested in hearing if that would be available before the end of the year.

BTW, I was a bit confused by the TechCrunch headline. To me, "keeping options open" means something like being allowed to change my mind at the last minute, for cancellations or rescheduling. I hope you don't adopt that as your byline, unless you plan to address that aspect of the flight search problem as well.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes_of_Sinope

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epictetus

That said, 70 years is still beyond excessive.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Memoirs_of_Ulysses_S._...

Lots of other incredible demos on his portfolio page: http://mrdoob.com/blog

No, instead what they are after is further restriction on fair use and preventing threats to their business model from open source software and domestic procurement policies. What a surprise.

"That awesome gal you hired in engineering has job options and she knows it."

I can totally imagine him lobbying for more H1-B visas so he can get "captive" employees who are stuck without options to leave.

In terms of "getting things done in the world," how is making iPhone fart apps any more of a contribution than, say, publishing a screed in a tabloid? I'm trying not to set up a straw man here, so I'm deliberately choosing lowest common denominator activities.

I don't think it's fair for us technical folk to rest on our laurels simply because we have mastery over some very specific kind of knowledge that has a great deal of useful applications. We have to get out there and get real things done, too.

Linux, as a kernel and as a platform, has matured, but there's still plenty of opportunity for new people to explore new territory. Some of it may be extending the existing "boring" infrastructure, which the author seems to blame for turning developers away, but nobody should feel restricted to working on those things. There's still a lot of exciting application development to be done, and as an added bonus, if the platform needs improvements to support your application, you're encouraged to contribute those as well.

Also, if you want a counterpoint, the Arch Linux developers page certainly makes me feel old already: http://www.archlinux.org/developers/

I liked the explanation given by my high school physics teacher: in the end, it boils down to frame of reference -- since both the moon and the pen are in orbit (aka perpetual free-fall), the earth's gravity basically becomes "background" to the situation and has no effect on the relationship between the pen and the moon.

It's not the concept of gravity, the mathematical formulas, or anything else that's really hard to grasp. Looking at things from the right frame of reference is hard, and not just in physics either. I struggle with this in my daily work, even for simple things like getting widgets to align correctly relative to each other.

"Dell Denies Discussing China Move With India Minister": http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a5Hy...

Something tells me the tech media is a bit too eager to jump on the China-bashing bandwagon.

Counter-point: If cat is becoming your performance bottleneck, you're doing it wrong: http://sial.org/howto/shell/useless-cat/

Yes, the GNU version looks dreadful, but I think that really doesn't matter that much.

EDIT: Well, I guess I didn't consider the case where you want to put cat in a chroot jail. On Solaris 10:

$ ldd /usr/bin/cat

    libc.so.1 =>         /lib/libc.so.1
    libm.so.2 =>         /lib/libm.so.2
    /platform/SUNW,T5240/lib/libc_psr.so.1

    libnsl.so.1 =>       /lib/libnsl.so.1
    libc.so.1 =>         /lib/libc.so.1
    libmp.so.2 =>        /lib/libmp.so.2
    libmd.so.1 =>        /lib/libmd.so.1
    libscf.so.1 =>       /lib/libscf.so.1
    libdoor.so.1 =>      /lib/libdoor.so.1
    libuutil.so.1 =>     /lib/libuutil.so.1
    libgen.so.1 =>       /lib/libgen.so.1
    libm.so.2 =>         /lib/libm.so.2
    /platform/SUNW,T5240/lib/libc_psr.so.1
    /platform/SUNW,T5240/lib/libmd_psr.so.1

Probably time to turn on noprocrast.

This is both frightening and disappointing. I can hardly imagine how much advancement in the field is being held back by this attitude.