Troll_Whisperer

For the past 400 years human energy consumption per person has been growing at a relatively smooth exponential curve, despite changes from wood-burning to coal to whale oil to petroleum. Even a cursory unbiased study on the subject will show that. Interestingly, for nearly the entire time, malthusian doomsday prophets have enjoyed more popularity than more rigorous analysts.

>It's true that if you look at most areas of technology they are advancing rapidly. Except energy. Energy has stagnated since the 1950s.

This is demonstrably false. Solar power generation, for example, has been enjoyinging the same kind of Moore's Law exponential price/power over the past 15 years that computer processing power has. This is hardly surprising due to the fact that silicon wafer solar panels often use the same semi-conductor suppliers that computer hardware manufacturers do. Newer thin-film solar panels represent a jump in paradigm that promises even greater price performance.

I could have brought up similar points about the progress of wind-power, bio-fuel, or a number of other fields. Energy has anything but stagnated since the 1950s.

tldr: Stay off the peak oil scaremongering sites. They'll blind you.

Then I guess I've been living in some fantasy world with Starcraft II, Diablo 3 beta and new games every week at Kongregate. I like it though, so please don't wake me up. I can barely even imagine an RTS on a console and I don't think it would be worthy of even playing let alone watching e-sports casts of others play!

You just asked the commenter to spell it out in your previous comment. Chastising him/her for doing so really, really doesn't move us forward. His comments about requiring sign-up (particularly on services that don't allow minors under 13) were an excellent explanation.

Evidence for the role of genetics in running, swimming and a variety of other sports is equally overwhelming. In short, he (and others like him such as gladwell) sell a fantasy that millions, possibly billions would like to believe. It's an excellent strategy for selling books and developing a base of hard-core fans, but it's just not true.

Considering that that "full 10%" of the people you speak of have broken their terms of service and are running a non-sanctioned OS, why should Apple be obligated to publish their reviews? I understand the anger at Apple bricking jail-broken phones, but I really don't see how they should be obligated to accommodate them.

Better still his start-ups are actually changing the world for the better. They're not just a bunch of smartphone apps. Today I toast the man who believed in solar power, space exploration and electric cars so much that he put he was willing to put his entire 8 figure fortune of 2 decades on the line! Elon, you're a tribute to the human spirit!

I've been going through dozens of iOS and webdev resumes a week and about two in three have the right keywords. Their skills don't correlate strongly with those keywords. What has gotten dramatically better results for me has been this: put programmers through some automated programming tests (kind of like an in house version of interviewstreet.com), and filter any graphic artists / designer entirely based off of their portfolios.

That has quickly weeded out those who can't code (or design).

In his defense, I think it was just meant to be an arbitrary example. You could avoid this problem by dramatically lowering the point values assigned to college degrees and LinkedIn profiles and upping the credit assigned to having Javascript skills.

The real problem is that there's no distinction made between someone such as myself who knows a bit of Javascript and someone who is an expert in it. Some criteria are binary, others are not.

Please speak for yourself about trolling wikipedia. I simply responded to the lazy GP's need for a citation with a google search of a relevant phrase. That said, the very article from which you quoted a sub-section has this in the header:

"Recent research suggests that the Flynn effect may have ended in at least a few developed nations"

This claim carries a citation on wp.

Your link at the bottom about educational attainment is completely irrelevant to the discussion. Intelligence and formal schooling are two different things.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=recent+flynn+effect

Right at the top is this excerpt from wikipedia: "Recent research suggests that the Flynn effect may have ended in at least a few developed nations"

This from neuroanthropology.net: "A long-term rise and recent decline in intelligence test performance"

and so on

But it might confuse people into thinking it will.

Why now? Because the technology is finally competitive with humans across a wide range of tasks. Yes newer, some new jobs opportunities do open up, but they're often jobs that those displaced are simply incapable of doing.

The US hasn't had a base in Taiwan for 30 years. Maybe you're thinking of Korea?

It's also worth pointing out that I'm US born and bred, spent 7 years at universities and was unfamiliar with the term. It sounded pretentious to me.

Improving the rate by 100,000 times is only a six step improvement and that's if they haven't surpassed the limits of the human eye. I much prefer 72 frames per second to 36, but giving me a thousand frames per second is a waste since my optic nerve can't process most of them.

You've commented repeatedly on this thread about how it's THE LAW and how certain people's brains essentially shut off when evaluating ethics vs legality. Furthermore the tone of your comments make it clear that you have some respect for this sort of non-thinking.

Bringing public stoning into the discussion is a ridiculous straw-man. Isn't the fact that over two million Americans are in prison, and over half of them on non-violent offenses staggering enough already?

Don't be a dick. You yourself have undoubtedly committed dozens of felonies this year alone. The sheer quantity of criminal legislation makes it almost unavoidable, and nobody is in a position to hurl stones at the unfortunate who get caught in the crossfire.

legal != right

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870447150457443...

I hate how much work Java makes me do to get things done.

It doesn't matter if you're writing "hello world", an English to pig-latin converter, a web server or a lisp interpreter. In every case, it's a lot less code and a lot less work to do in Ruby than it is in Java. Java is just too low-level of a language for anything I'm working on, and in those cases where I do need to get closer to the metal, it's easy enough just to use C.

Lion's just another big cat name, right? Within seconds, we were on to the next slide, where Jobs was pitching the new release's message: not "king of the jungle" or "the biggest big cat," but the "back to the Mac" theme underlying the entire event.

I don't miss the karma. However, it was interesting to see this petty, gang-like downmodding behaviour from HN. More interesting still was that I provoked it merely by acting upon a desire that any nerd should be able to love-- a desire for correctness.