It isn't limited to Google. At the end of 2014 Facebook put this thing in my brother's feed that said "It's been a great year" and then put in post he made right after our mother passed away. I wonder if it's a being young thing too?
Facebook, specifically, is struggling with the issue that strong correlation doesn't imply semantic value (i.e. posts with a lot of activity can be really good OR really bad) and corner cases. The semantic value issue they're addressing with the multifaceted "like" button.
The corner cases issue may not be fixed. As harsh as it is to say---and as unacceptable, perhaps, as it should be to work this way---there is a train of thought that goes "Even if we get the occasional bad result, when we have a billion users and 99% of the results are good; ship it. That's 990 million happy customers." The 1% bad results have to be really bad to tip the scales.
For such integral products, I'd expect them to have some sort of concept of "out of all your users, some of them will be having the worst day/week/month/year of their lives while heavily interacting with your product".
> I can tell an amateur programmer from a professional by looking at their order of priorities when they grow a code base.
> Amateur programmers tend to put code de-duplication at the top of their priority list and will burn the whole house down to that often-trivial end.
To be fair, lots of how to program books spend a lot of time on teaching you how to abstract, and sing abstractions praises to the heavens, as it were. It takes some experience to learn that real world stuff is not like the toy programs in books.
Novices are inexperienced, journeyman and masters are more skilled and experienced.
A novice can have a ton of knowledge (from books), but be too inexperienced to apply it.
A novice can be a professional, this is what internships and entry-level jobs are supposed to be for. Paired with mentorship and structured work assignments (structured in the sense of increasing complexity, scope, and responsibility) they're brought up to journeyman and, later, master level.
They can also be amateurs. Given forums, books, manuals, mentors (real-life or online), they can be brought up to journeyman and master level as well.
Besides I think everybody who e.g. makes some side-projects, or is active in open source is in fact amateur in the sense of "a person who does something (such as a sport or hobby) for pleasure and not as a job" :)
In general, if a professional also donated their time to something it doesn't make them an amateur. See lawyers doing pro bono work, or carpenters building a habitat house as examples.
Professional means you teach (notice the word root in "profess" as in "professor"). It really means you know enough that you can teach others how to do it right, not about get paid for it per se.
You have the etymology of "professor" and "professional" completely wrong. You can't just notice the same root in two words and then completely reinvent the meaning of one to make it have something to do with the meaning of the other. The evolution of language is complex. Here: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=etymology+profession
Do professional football players teach playing football? Some, probably, but not all. We don't call those who don't teach amateurs. They're getting paid. The amateurs are the high school and (arguably) college players, along with rec club and pick-up game players.
You're noticing a common root, but not the meaning of the word in the modern day.
Decimate means to destroy 1 in 10 of something (like an opposing army). But today we use the word to mean destruction of a large percentage.
I suppose an argument can be made that modern use of amateur is more akin to what used to be novice. However, I'd have a hard time accepting that except when it's used as a slur. We talk about amateurs in many fields, but don't intend to dismiss them as unskilled or inexperienced, we're classifying them as non-professionals. In a forum like this, filled with amateur programmers, it seems, to me, that it's wrong to misuse the term in this manner when a large portion of the readers here are amateur programmers but of moderate to high skill level.
Of course. You can't learn that sort of judgement (when to use vs when not to use) from a book.
But our profession's training material, at least in my experience reading, drills it in your head to use all these abstracting devices.
It's certainly true that you can get some "book knowledge" that tells you that you can over abstract. I mean, this blog post is one example. But I only hear this sort of stuff from things like blog post from experienced devs, it seems to me. (Or maybe I just read the wrong kind of books?)
Sounds like the books actually teach poor practise, divorced from context. The harms of abstraction is nothing that can't be printed - this isn't qualia
I can only partially answer your question for Pascal: Look at the Free Pascal compiler.
I learned (Turbo) Pascal many years ago. Recently I've revived my usage while writing a video game. I wanted a mature, compiled, no GC language that worked well on Windows but wasn't C/C++. For the most part I've been happy with it.
It's still an alive project (version 3.0 released this year). It supports a wide selection of platforms, and a few Pascal dialects including Delphi, although I've been sticking to the old school procedural style in my game. It easily interfaces with C libraries (I've tried SDL and Lua).
As for the language itself, it seems to have lackluster support for template / generic programming, so I avoid it. That's a little disappointing to me but I think I can live without it. It does support old scool C++ style OOP, but try to avoid it because OOP's not cool anymore :).
There's plenty of documentation on the Internet, but not the amount of some of the more hip languages of today (and the websites tend to look older).
The number of tools is lackluster. It has an IDE called Lazarus that I've never used. The IDE seems focused on GUI development, which doesn't interest me. It comes with Turbo Pascal like IDE that runs in a console window, which probably won't be appealing to most people. I mostly use Notepad++ and script building in PowerShell for my game. I do miss the features from Visual Studio, like Intellisense though.
The closed form will become inaccurate at some point. However, there is a way to calculate Fibonacci accurately with O(log(n)) time (ignoring the time to multiply - otherwise O(M(n) log(n)) where M(n) is the time to multiply two numbers of n digits).
I used wifi, since that's what I have access to. Wifi is in the same (rough) band as microwaves. It's probable that the one I tested with was old and crappy with bad shielding. When it's running, it's noisy enough that it will tend to kick any wifi connection from the 2.4ghz into the 5ghz band.
(I live in the boonies, and cell signal is 0 bars till I get out to the road, and even there I really only get texts)
I was thinking about driving before GPS recently and I had to go somewhere I've never been to before. So I resolved to just look at Google maps before hand and then just try to driver there and back without my GPS unit or resorting to my phone. I really enjoyed it. I had to pay attention to where I was and what direction I was going. I feel like I actually learned the area better. So I get what you're saying.
That is why grass/trees are green - they consume only the edges of the spectrum (about 10-15% of the total sunlight coming through) bouncing the rest back.
With respect to the original point about orange being average color of Internet photos - keep in mind that most photos are produced by digital CCD cameras which are more sensitive to orange/red than green/blue.
Why does that explain why plants are generally green? If you had told me that the energy peak was at X wavelength, I would have guessed that plants absorbed most of that wavelength in order to not be wasteful rather than preferentially reflecting that wavelength.
Plants are actually pretty miserably inefficient at turning sunlight into stored energy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency (not only do they reflect away most of the light, but photosynthesis isn't linear at all graphed against light intensity: most of the noonday sun is wasted)
There's no real consensus on why. (There's some wild guessing that green photons might be too hot to handle: smashing fragile biomolecules apart rather than powering them... (http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=500) but then why does chlorophyll run fine on purple light?) You'd figure that there would be incredible selection pressure on increasing photosynthesis efficiency, but maybe they're stuck on a local maxima: it's not like a single mutation can turn a C3 plant into a C4 plant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C4_photosynthesis
>If you had told me that the energy peak was at X wavelength, I would have guessed that plants absorbed most of that wavelength in order to not be wasteful rather than preferentially reflecting that wavelength.
the plants consume edges of spectrum, so they would bounce the X wavelengths (green in case of our Earth) as it is just an unnecessary heat for them.
> In a similar timeframe will anyone be able to read our digital thoughts?
Lots of famous writing from the ancient world doesn't survive in the original and had to be copied; what we have is copies of copies of copies, etc. And plenty of ancient works are lost.
We will need to copy to newer media what is important for archival purposes even now it seems.
Most mainstream music (i.e. stuff that makes it into Billboard's charts) is obviously targeted at teenagers and maybe people in their young 20's. I'd say the same thing is true about movies. I guess I wouldn't call any of this for "children" though but I guess this becomes a boring semantic argument at this point.
Tangentially, now that I'm over 30 it's starting to become painfully obvious that new music is geared towards younger people. I don't want to be one of those people who are stuck listening to music of their youth, but its so difficult to find things that appeal to me. I.e. music and films that are mature but still are progressing and not relying nostalgia.
