"Why are our cities suffering from the same problems that every other city faces?"
I don't even know what to say to this. How can the author even be asking this question?
Here's a basic outline. It feels weird typing this because it should be obvious, but here goes.
Northern California cities are cities just like any other. There are people of all income levels doing all sorts of different jobs, or not doing any jobs. There are a disproportionate number of tech workers in that region, but other than that it's pretty much the same as anywhere else. People are still people are still people. The reason a shirtless man randomly punched you is because he was crazy. The more people you have concentrated in a small area, the more likely you are to meet up with a crazy person when you're walking down the street (that's just statistics/probability). I live in NYC, a much bigger city, and I see crazy people all the time. When you see someone not wearing a shirt in public, babbling or shouting, hanging around on a street corner by themselves, etc., etc., they are most likely crazy. If you see a crazy person, stay as far away from them as possible and do not make eye contact. Definitely do not engage with them in any way (this includes taking pictures of them) because it will provoke them. Welcome to city life!
Chrome is dropping NPAPI support, which includes the Unity browser plugin. Unity will be temporarily whitelisted probably through the end of 2014 but the goal is to remove support entirely.
I personally think it's just incredible that vertical centering in CSS has been so woefully neglected over the 16 years we've had CSS. Every time I read another article about how somebody just maybe has figured out a kludgy way to vertically center things with CSS, I just shake my head. Aren't there any graphic designers on any of the W3C working groups surrounding CSS? Back in the old days when everything was a table-based layout, there was a clean, one-to-one mapping between the grid framework that your graphic designer created and the code underlying the page.
Then the semantic web pedants came along and decreed that tables shall never be used for layout. Fine -- but nobody ever bothered to come up with a DIVs+CSS replacement for the grid-based layout that any serious graphic designer uses to build a page.
And do you know what happened to the web? Debate cause and effect all you want, but webpage designs are far more boring now than they were 10 years ago. Now it's all just blocks of large-print scrollable text, some images here and there (or maybe a wall of them), and a cute logo. It's like everything is a Geocities page with better fonts and color choices, minus the gifs. I feel like I never see anything really cutting edge or creative in the design space on the web.
The internet is a really young medium of course, and it will naturally go through phases, where certain types of design come into fashion while others go out. And I would love it if somebody would prove me wrong by posting some links to some really kick-ass-looking sites. But from where I'm sitting these days, from a design perspective the web is a big yawnfest. Maybe today's websites are more usable and easier to index and work well on a screen reader, but from a graphic design perspective... zzzzz....
Most arrogant quote I've ever heard coming from a developer. I hope this sounded different in context because that is one of the most horrible and elitist things I've ever heard pertaining to our industry.
The museum of natural history was not built post-1995. It's probably giving that as the date because they added the new planetarium in 2000. Which raises the question, is this true for other buildings -- is it showing the date of the most recent renovation of the building (as opposed to its construction date)?
I believe the way PLUTO is organized is with 1) a value for when the building was first built, and 2) up to two most recent dates of building modification. The building modification data is itself worth exploring in some way, if anyone wants to give that a shot.
This map shows the 'first built' column, so it is strange that they would get the museum of natural history wrong.
I ask them to guard my laptop, which they usually do since I suppose they will get in trouble if it's stolen. Actually maybe the fact that I'm asking them to watch over my laptop expedites the actual patdown, because I never have to wait long.
I love how he felt compelled to excuse his omission of castling and en passant moves by explaining that they were added to chess "later" (14th and 15th century)... maybe he started working on this project before those rules were added? :)
"sending a message" == getting you to doubt, think twice == instilling fear == creating terror == being a terrorist
Fighting terror with terror. How can it be that no one in the UK government agencies responsible for this can see the irony? How can it be that they don't understand their actions are degrading society just as much as those of the terrorists?
"Funding some local education or beautification initiatives could go a long way to reducing the gentrification backlash."
Or maybe California could relax its constitutional restriction on city and county income taxes, which would make much more sense than relying on random benefactors to make the city more livable.
I hear this over and over again and I wonder why nobody frames this as a generational thing. The Apple II came out in 1977. I'm 41 now, so back then I was 8, still learning how to think, how to process the world. I wrote my first computer program in 6th grade -- I grew up with computers. But somebody who is 51 now was 18 when the Apple II came out, already well into their teenage years, and probably already thinking about what they wanted to do with their life. Unless their parents were scientists or researchers there was very little chance they had ever seen or laid hands on a computer.
One thing I fear is that there's a rise and fall to this. In other words, the fear is that younger generations are just not as interested in computers anymore... in other words, the past 20-30 years or so has been a "golden age" for computers that is slowly coming to an end. Data bears this out:
http://www.collegian.psu.edu/archive/2008/03/21/computer_sci...
Let's look at popular music. Baby boomers grew up listening to records and the radio, and in their run they made some amazing music. It was an exciting time to be in a band, everyone was doing it, and some really great music was made. Back then, they said "if it's too loud, you're too old." Everybody talked about youth then.
What happened? People kept on believing that rock and roll was for the young, and there were more and more ways to access music and the technology for making music got better and better, but the reality was that the music itself just got worse and worse. The moment was over -- the Vietnam war, the sexual revolution and womens’ movement, the civil rights movement -- it was all in the past, and kids in the 80's, 90's etc. just had nothing to write songs about anymore, and (very much generalizing here) nobody practiced their instruments anymore because -- why? It was all about getting that record deal and getting famous. The more you unpack it, the more dismal it appears. Those great hits you remember from the 80's, 90's, etc? Look more deeply into it and you'll find in many, many cases there were baby boomers advising, producing, writing, performing -- basically still running the show. These days, popular music is a shell of its former self. Which isn't to say that there's isn't good music being made. But the quantity and the quality of the music just isn't what it was.
There have been plenty of other "golden ages" throughout history, in the arts, philosophy, literature, architecture, etc, etc. It's reasonable to assume that there will continue to be “golden ages” with regard to more modern pursuits, such as rock music and computer programming. Who knows how long programming’s first “golden age” will last? Maybe it’s just getting started, maybe it's coming to an end, or maybe it’s already ended. Regardless though, it's probably safe to say that someone who is currently in their 50's pre-dates programming’s first "golden age" and probably doesn't parse the world the same way as somebody who grew up in the thick of things. Which doesn’t actually mean that someone in their 50’s can’t be a good programmer, by the way, it’s a generalization, not an absolute.
These days, when I come on hacker news and I see another yet another article about a completely boring social-media who-cares php-based startup with kids at the helm, when I see how weak Facebook is as a technical platform (28 year old CEO) especially when compared with Google (40 year old CEO), when I see how much kids these days rely on bolting shit together and copying and pasting code without even knowing how that stuff works, it makes me fear for programming. Again, I’m generalizing, there are plenty of good programmers under 25, and plenty of good programmers over 40, please don’t take offense if you’re outside of that age range. My worry is not that good, young programmers don’t exist, my worry is that their numbers are decreasing.
Minor correction: 51 year olds were 15 when the Apple ][ came out, not 18.
And they had seen computers, just not personal computers. Exhibits showing line printers printing ASCII (or, more likely, EBCDIC) art were fairly common views. Any technically inclined kid in a rich country would have seen one (touching is something else)
Also, I don't think we have fewer good low-level programmers; they just get lost in a sea of glue-blocks-together experts (that, by the way, has its place, too)
I don't even know what to say to this. How can the author even be asking this question?
Here's a basic outline. It feels weird typing this because it should be obvious, but here goes.
Northern California cities are cities just like any other. There are people of all income levels doing all sorts of different jobs, or not doing any jobs. There are a disproportionate number of tech workers in that region, but other than that it's pretty much the same as anywhere else. People are still people are still people. The reason a shirtless man randomly punched you is because he was crazy. The more people you have concentrated in a small area, the more likely you are to meet up with a crazy person when you're walking down the street (that's just statistics/probability). I live in NYC, a much bigger city, and I see crazy people all the time. When you see someone not wearing a shirt in public, babbling or shouting, hanging around on a street corner by themselves, etc., etc., they are most likely crazy. If you see a crazy person, stay as far away from them as possible and do not make eye contact. Definitely do not engage with them in any way (this includes taking pictures of them) because it will provoke them. Welcome to city life!