T-R

I doubt that many HN users are really offended by the idea that their degree could be worthless - if it really is, they probably came by that conclusion on their own.

The resume/interview process is broken, too, but I think most people would consider it poor judgement to explicitly invest in those who didn't get through it.

If he really felt like the degree is just a poor indicator of performance, there would be more discussion about what metric serves as a good alternative, or focus on improving the current metric. Instead, with the age limit, he asserts that degrees are a negative indicator, which makes it sound more like he's purposefully making a poor investment to give a voice to those who have contempt for those who finished college.

I don't think "Hello World" will ever cease to be useful for the simple task of making sure everything's installed and operating correctly. Quicksort is certainly beautifully concise in Haskell, but it's not in all languages, and I want a low probability of errors when I'm just getting things up and running for the first time.

I see spaces instead of hyphens on Dolphin Browser for Android.

Interesting. I was actually thinking about Tyrian as an example of a game where random level generation would work well (in contrast to those mentioned in my above comment), and wouldn't detract from nostalgia replay value. Another example would be X-COM. Both excellent games.

The author makes a good point that randomly generated levels significantly affect the way that a game is played, but they shouldn't by any means be considered superior to handcrafted levels - players have different preferences for playstyles, and game designers should consider which playstyles they intend to appeal to when deciding on a genre and a level design strategy.

Consider the Megaman series - players are encouraged to master each level, and speed runs are a major draw and source of replay value. Similarly, part of the brilliance in the level design in Sonic 3&Knuckles (that disappeared from later Sonic games) was that it encouraged the player to try different paths to find an optimal route for finding special stages. Exploration and speed runs are a draw for the Zelda, Mario, and Metroid series as well - the quality of level design is a major selling point for the core audience of these series.

Randomly generated stages certainly have their advantages for replay value, but they also remove incentive for exploration and speed runs, which means you're potentially forfeiting the audience that prefers those play styles.

To go a step further into the realm of "video games as art", consider the RPGs and survival horror games like Fatal Frame - cinematography is a significant element, as is the player's emotional connection to certain areas. Randomly generated levels don't create as strong a connection with players, which diminishes the designer's ability to use locations as a significant story element. It would be difficult to create such strong storytelling without a high level of control over the environment.

Some genres, like Arcade Shooters, RTS, and FPS may lend themselves less toward these play styles, but it's certainly not restricted by genre, either - Bullet Hell shooters, like Ikaruga, for example, are designed with players who favor level mastery in mind. It all depends on the audience you want to appeal to and the game elements that you want to focus on.

Anything with Kirin's 小岩井(Koiwai) branding on it, Martinelli's apple juice, Earl Grey or medium roast coffee.

I had a 2GB Sony drive fail on me right as I was about to back it up. Worked on one machine, took it out, plugged it into another machine and it was dead.

I'm not really convinced that a programming language that builds products from a subset of pre-made parts by making assumptions about implementation, rather than requiring the designer to plan in full detail and iron out design/logic inconsistencies, would really be all that useful.

But more to the point, I'd imagine a lot of programmers wouldn't even be interested in programming if it wasn't difficult. There's little point to a puzzle if someone just tells you the answer. Coding is all about choosing pieces, putting them together, and questioning whether the way those pieces are used will get you to your ideal solution.

Sure, some people code just to create output. Some people exercise just to burn calories, and hate every minute of it; those probably aren't the people climbing mountains.

Articles with a negative tone seem to be on the rise lately. Maybe it's just me, but in the past I always got a more positive vibe, more like "If you want to start a startup, don't procrastinate and work hard", rather than "we try not to hire wimps" and "if you procrastinate, don't start a startup". Who is the intended audience? Has there been a recent surge in founders who don't get things done that might be dissuaded by that kind of thing? Is it a feel-good "we're not like that" kind of thing?

Control issues never struck me as significant, either on SO or Area51, and I have trouble buying the argument that correcting typos and merging similar sites are unnecessary and evidence that Jeff,Joel, and the site's users are control freaks. On the other hand, I'm surprised he didn't bring up the Community Wiki police.

The most common thing I hear about SO lately is along the lines that all the questions worth asking have been asked, or are esoteric enough that the quality/quantity of answers is low, and few points are given - if anything kills those sites, I'd imagine that'd be it. There seems to be a diminishing ROI for time spent on the site, and scores seem to be fairly biased toward those who spent time on the site early on. Maybe other subjects won't have this issue.

I think it would be more interesting to use github to devise a better language for law.

It could try to find a way to allow more specificity with less verbosity, and provide a standard way of creating abstractions that would allow for easy checking of conflicting definitions. Maybe even include a comment system for stating the intentions at time of writing, which could be taken into account when modifying the code.

I agree with the conclusion - stop worrying, start coding; but not with the arguments. Code is a form of communication; Communication has speed. Communication speed is related to things like redundancy and vocabulary.

A language with a lot of redundancy, like English or Java, is slower than one with generally less reduandancy, like Japanese or Python. Redundancy can be within syntax (like long words), or with context (like implied subjects in Japanese, writing "self" in Python, or declaring types in Java) - redundancy protects against signal/context loss, but its cost is in speed.

Vocabulary represents an abstraction of a concept. A person with a smaller vocabulary in a particular topic will take longer to express a concept than one with a large vocabulary in that area. If a language has a small vocabulary in a particular area, it will be slower than a better suited language.

In the end, getting the message across is more important than the speed of getting it there, but if you have a choice, use only as much redundancy as you need to get the signal across, and choose the language which gives you the largest domain specific vocabulary.

That particular article may not have been written by Scott Locklin, but a quick browse of his other works on the same site validates ahoyhere's point.

Regarding the nanotech article: http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2010/09/scott... I was wondering myself why that article got so many upvotes.

In paragraph 2 he seems to imply that the curriculum isn't broad enough, lamenting the loss of "useless" classes, but then in paragraph 4 he seems to claim it's too broad and that new classes are useless, as evidenced from his claim that no one is making money off of Statistics or Machine Learning, and his implication that someone who didn't start their own company would have been better off as a police officer.

He seems to imply that perhaps grading is not as strict as it used to be, referring to some higher education as "virtuous slacking", but doesn't provide any supporting information to make such a claim.

He calls higher education a status symbol, referencing the increasing prices, mentioning that many take out loans for higher education, briefly going out of his way to mention government. He reinforces with a claim that people go to college because others do, rather than because they've simultaneously converged on the idea that it's a good investment. He doesn't provide any evidence that higher education is actually viewed as a status symbol.

More significantly, though, the author doesn't propose or imply any solution for the system as a whole, or even one of his pain points. The article is vacuous and unfocused. What I've learned from this article: The author doesn't like the current state of higher education, and his mother had to walk uphill both ways to get to school.

In Japan there's a combination of things that support hiring discrimination against anyone who hasn't just graduated from college, spanning all fields.

The RECRUIT monopoly has pushed a significant amount of hiring into large recruiting events which commoditize applicants with unified application forms and an overemphasis on testing and school names (students have to start looking for jobs in their sophomore year). Job applications also require photographs.

There are also several incentives not to leave a job, such as the general assumption (read: requirement) by other companies and institutions of lifetime employment (e.g., my Gym doesn't have a way for someone to join who isn't employed or a student, and upon changing jobs, I lost my housing contract, even though I was paying for it - granted, I'm a foreigner). It's harder to leave a job, in a culture that's generally considered pretty risk-averse, and so companies are less willing to hire those who have. Moreover, there are many taiiku-kei companies, where work and social life are intertwined, which would likely favor hiring fresh out of college.

Certainly many companies don't discriminate by age, but there's a whole lot more in place to support a company that does. I'd imagine there'd be a good deal of value in reaching out to an untapped labor market in either location.

I think it's important to note, though, that ageism in Japanese recruiting isn't restricted to Programming by any stretch of the imagination. Additionally, there seems to be a view of Programming as more of a vocational field here - likely related to the small number of schools with 4 year Computer Science programs. I think it's kind of apples-to-oranges, but definitely some food for thought.

People certainly tend to group themselves by culture, but I don't think any particular culture lends itself toward failure to integrate any more than individual personalities do.

Similarly, where I went for undergrad, Koreans tended to have their own groups. Clearly they don't do that everywhere, and not all of them did - there were just enough of them that didn't want to integrate that it was easier for others to choose not to. A segment of any group does it if they're a large enough minority - it wouldn't be fair to criticize one particular culture for it.

Sorry, poor phrasing on my part - I meant "Of the Japanese people I know who are looking to go abroad, most hope to...".

I spent a year at a Japanese university with a focus on foreign languages and international communications before getting a job here - so the group of "Japanese people I know" is definitely skewed toward the side of those actively working towards finding work outside of Japan.

I think your third point can go for any group living in a foreign country. I've seen foreigners living in Japan do this kind of thing as much as I've seen first and second generation Americans do it, regardless of where they came from. The common thread was that they mostly only associated with others who didn't integrate.

I don't think it's a cultural thing - some people just decide to stay outsiders, and a subset of those people are rude by anyone's standards.

There are just lots of filters. For English speaking countries at least, TOEFL scores ultimately determine who's allowed to study abroad (and where) or able to find employment elsewhere, so it could be argued that it's partially selective based on a person's financial background (and their ability to get personal training or get into good high schools).

Those with good conversational skills aren't necessarily those who score well on standardized tests, and vice versa. Moreover, to get a work visa, those who can speak a foreign language well still usually need to have another marketable skill, particularly in places where the law requires a business to prove they've made effort to hire domestically first - making things difficult for people who've majored in a foreign language or any field where there's lots of competition.

Most people I know hope to either get their TOEFL scores high enough to transfer to a foreign school, or get into a job that will let them transfer out of the country.