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The Camel Has Two Humps was not successfully replicated. The authors presented http://crpit.com/confpapers/CRPITV78Bornat.pdf in 2008:

"Two years ago we appeared to have discovered an exciting and enigmatic new predictor of success in a first programming course. We now report that after six experiments, involving more than 500 students at six institutions in three countries, the predictive effect of our test has failed to live up to that early promise."


The predictive test wasn't replicated - that doesn't sat anything about the original observation.


Right, programming is just very, very hard to teach. From the paper:

> And even in the most encouraging of our results, we find a 50% success rate in those who don’t score C0 or CM2.


> Eventually, one day, you're trying to board a plane and you get denied because you've been known to disseminate "false or misleading information".

That's absurd. How do you picture Facebook achieving control over whether you can board an airplane?


It's important to remember that the ads you're shown on Youtube videos are controlled by the channel owner, not by Google. Youtube itself doesn't have much control over how many ads you see.


Between them, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt hold a majority of Google shareholders' voting power (about 2/3 is what I usually hear). I won't link anything because I don't really know the authoritative source for this sort of information, but Googling [Google stock structure] turns up plenty of secondary sources.


Do you have multiple Google accounts? If you're signed in to one you don't use for things, that will cripple Now, because it won't have all the data it needs to do things. Same problem if you do all your searching and Youtube watching and whatnot while signed out.


Sure, but recognizing a picture of one of your friends is a matter of searching O(100) people. Recognizing a picture of any Facebook user is a matter of searching O(100 million) people. It's a totally different problem, and there's no reason to think Facebook, which hasn't solved the smaller problem perfectly, could solve the larger problem at all.


Objectively? That's a dangerous word; I hope you've got a better argument than this one. Hard drives are being rapidly replaced by SSDs, so their speed just jumped _way_ up (especially start-up and random access times, which affect sleeping and waking performance). 2 or 3 orders of magnitude, not 20%.


SSDs are great. But I have exactly one hard drive bay in my laptop, and it currently holds >580Gb of data. Some of that is bloat, but MOST of it is real data; I have lots of raw video, source art for games, music, and many folders of compiled object files. I'm a game developer, so I use a lot of hard drive.

From what I've read, an SSD has an expected life of about 1-2 years. Aside from not being able to afford $2500 JUST for an SSD to hold my data [1], I can't fathom paying that much every 1-2 years as the drives die. Not to mention downtime and potential lost data (between the back-up and the failure).

I'd love to have an SSD. In a year or two, I probably will, as the costs will likely drop.

But until then, yes, the performance has objectively dropped.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/OCZ-Technology-2-5-Inch-Performance-OC...


> We would never vote up a article where "father writes bedtime story for daughter, Sleeping Prince rescued by Princess". Because it is commonplace because literacy is commonplace, as are pens and paper commonplace and as are the legal frameworks to be allowed to alter the published version.

It's also _considerably_ easier.


It's only easier after twenty years training submersed in a super-literate society. The actual changes he made were minor, just in a format most of us are completely unfamiliar with. Had this been a JavaScript game I suspect it would have passed unremarked

(actually that's unfair - had it been a JavaScript game of the iconic status of donkey kong then it would still be here)


> With a standard combination lock all I have to tell someone is the combination

I don't think that's fair. The standard combination lock interface is well-known, not intuitive. "6-38-16" is brief, but it assumes the listener already knows to translate that to "turn right 360 degrees, then right 6, left 38, right 16". This lock doesn't seem any worse in that regard.


> The standard combination lock interface is well-known, not intuitive.

Indeed. Over in this part of the world, I have never actually seen one. I once looked them up on the Internet just to figure out how to use one, but had by now forgotten about the starting reset.


> Calling her a monkey is unbearably and unquestionably racist

How so?


To many people to call someone a monkey is to say that the race they belong to is less evolved; biologically closer to monkeys.


Sure, but what indication is there that the comment is referring to her race?


Absolutely none.

Indeed, to accuse an insulter of racism for deriding someone as belonging to another species is to conflate the concepts of race and species. At best that's ignorant; at worst it's racist!

As to the prosecutor's species, isn't the saga of Aaron Swartz sufficient evidence? As to her race, have a look at her picture and judge for yourself:

http://goo.gl/JNck7


Yes, because people who call out racism are the REAL racists.


Google it


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