So insightful! This idea that some people just like the puzzles and some people like the control struck me. I get why Factorio is addictive but I can't really stand to play it much. I'd rather be refactoring something useful. And the idea that the same mentality covers forum mods. This is incredibly helpful to understand some of my friends and colleagues a little better.
It's funny, I read all through that with my rose tinted glasses thinking they'd created a local IMAP server on the phone, which would have been clever (and, I think, doable)... in fact I was running this perception until
"Our proxy server is written in Ruby using EventMachine, which allows it to efficiently handle many concurrent IMAP connections"
And I thought, why the heck would one phone be issuing so many concurrent IMAP connections. Oh my naiveté.
"[iOS 7] opens many IMAP connections at once for searching each folder concurrently. We’re not sure on the upper bound on the number of connections it will make, but saw at least 10 in one case."
Great perspective. There are some celebrities who seem to live and die by the hype associated with those sorts of stories. And there are other celebrities who have a distinguished body of work and only incidentally appear in those rags. Which kind of startup would you rather be: the Kardashian or the Helen Miram?
If anyone here remembers the game Netstorm, we're doing a remake of it here, http://risingstormhq.com. It's not entirely opensource at the moment (and built on unity), but I'm the only coder and I'm releasing components (especially generic ones) as I go (as they are cleanly separable). In the end, I'll release all the code I feel I can without making the team unhappy.
The evidence is this: Words can alter perception. This is the purpose of rhetoric. For condescension to be successful the speaker must appear above his subject. Someone insecure assumes he's the worst or near the worst. By using condescension he can with words alter the perception such that he's not as bad as the subject. Thus definitely not the worst.
This isn't a water proof argument, however. A waterproof argument for human emotion isn't yet possible.
It would be funny to ask someone who was affecting that something like "Then what have you accomplished?" See I could picture Linus being completely oblivious to celebrity, there's a seriously big deal that he came up with while he was busy not watching popular movies.
If the person saying "oh football what's that?" hasn't actually done anything really impressive then what are they doing if too busy to notice pop culture? Just living in a cave and staring at the shadows?!
But that's after the point at which anything can be done educationally. My point wasn't helpful and friendly, illiterate people aren't any less helpful or friendly than literates.
Here's a very tiny "company" anecdote. I'm volunteering on a remake of an old game for fun. So far I've been the only programmer. I've had conversations with two other programmers who considered joining, and the conversations went similarly. That they seemed eager to tell me about something I was doing wrong and needed to do differently. I'm not really against that (even less if it comes with a patch...) but I guess it was the delivery that got to me.
For instance, in one conversation the first thing the other programmer said to me (after chatting with the guy introducing us) was "I've found tons of bugs in the build." My initial reaction was "well duh" :) But it didn't really set a good tone for the rest of the conversation. Haven't heard back from either of them. But it got me thinking in part about why I had such a negative reaction to it, but also what draws people like that. I figured it was because it's a game, but after seeing this I guess it's common in the industry (I'm not sure if I should be happy or sad).
Perhaps it's because we're working in relative anonymity on this game and a large corporation has a similar feel that it still would remain only there. I hold out hope.
It's too bad because it could take one more step and do something slightly cooler.
I just do counting in MapReduce, but it was to use Expectation-Maximization on mixtures of Gaussians to cluster a data set of 16 million documents. Although computing the Guassian's isn't really trivial, all you do at the end is sum up and normalize.
It's very cool and isn't much more than counting (replace the map step). In fact the paper I took it from (and the whole Mahout on Hadoup thing) is a bunch of machine learning algorithms that are just big summations at the reduce step.
