> a linguist (with some understanding of development)

Your wish has been granted: Larry Wall, Perl 6.

Please note that Perl 6 has been renamed to Raku (https://raku.org using the #rakulang tag on social media).

And, for that matter, Perls 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

https://perldoc.perl.org/perlhist.html#INTRODUCTION

> Einstein, Dirac, Pauli

It sure helps to be dead by now. Try James Watson for a really motivating example.

A good idea if you want your personal relationships poisoned.

> A good idea if you want your personal relationships poisoned.

not how it works for me! i have friends on fb that i haven't talked to or seen since high school. i don't use fb proper but it's good to know that it remembers everyone so i don't have to. i guess it goes the other around as well.

> it's good to know that it remembers everyone so i don't have to

There is something wrong with this for me.. If you don't remember people, are they really worth kepeing around ?

It is a great way to reach someone you want to get in touch with after a really long time, but that scenario is far more rare than people claim when they speak of the 'magic of facebook'.

> If you don't remember people, are they really worth kepeing around

How in the world are you ever going to know if you never contact them again?

:) I guess I just keep a select group of friends that I want to be with. What I don't know wont kill me and all that, but fair enough. Each to their own !

It's not that rare. I met some friends in middle school about 10 years ago. When I move to the US, FB is the place to connect them again because we keep FB connections. A lit of people around is also in the same situation. Like the above comment, you never know.

The guy has been doing the TED circuit for ages. I once looked closer at his claims and his supposed proof by simulation and came to agree with the more negative takes at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11588698

> Without a doubt, C has "lost" nothing, because it barely changed

Thanks to UB exploitation, C as implemented has been changing a lot over time. Old C was a decent low-level language. New C is barely usable.

I'm not following. Can you give an example of such changes which make C less-usable? Also, are you referring to changes in the C standard or just the implementations?

Controlled compromise of privacy for the sake of scientific insight seems like a good idea, until you realize that we either get profoundly non-replicable junk "science", or continued and unlimited re-breach of privacy for the sake of replication. Neither is any good.

I'm reminded of Raj Chetty who publishes papers based on exclusive access to IRS tax return data. (https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/05/how-two-economists-g...) Not real science unless you can have access to that data, too. You can't.

While I'm normally all for access to raw data used in research, that's pretty hard to do with IRS data without massively violating Americans' privacy and exposing them to identity theft. It's fair to be skeptical of anything using locked-up data, but I don't see a good way around the problem.

> How do you prevent nepotism

Why prevent nepotism when everybody is a cousin?

There is a difference between hiring someone related to you vs. hiring someone related who is incompetent over someone else who is competent.

I don't think we can simply assume that starting position matters to "pulverization" after 1500 years.

Mobility is more likely; the mobile object moves along with the ice, the stationary one gets pulverized.

I think even moving things that started on the ground would probably be crushed by the weight, since they would be at the bottom.

> Some just choose to ignore them

Some... like smart people with lots of money.

Because, you know, the prediction market in nice oceanfront properties beloved by the coastal elites hasn't collapsed, even tough their tongues say they believe.

Going on title and comments only, sorry, but why does "it's genetic" count as an explanation for anything?

An explanation for this would need ecology. Why is it beneficial for some of us to need less sleep, but not for all of us? What are the trade-offs? It seems like needing less sleep has no downsides. Is it a novel, all-beneficial mutation that just didn't have the time yet to sweep the population? Or do short sleepers experience serious downsides?

There is no explanation in "we found a gene for it". Pretty much every personality difference is genetic, that doesn't explain why such differences evolved, or persist.