Made even more difficult by the fact that the current generation did not "do the deed" so to speak. In your example of Palestinians or Native Americans - the "occupiers" were born here, this is their home now, the original conquering generation is very much gone, what solution can there be?
Encarta had a time and place when I, as a child, had access to disks and wikipedia did not exist yet. What is the point today? Vastly inferior in terms of content by volume, controlled by a single corporation with black box changes to articles (as opposed to Wikipedia's history tracking), impossible to dynamically update after release... I could go on.
Edit: I absolutely cannot stand the smarmy "I wrote code that you use" on his homepage. Sorry buddy, you probably don't.
Right? People raise bees. The people may be black. They may be white. They may be yellow. Or Brown. The people might me muslim, or jewish, or atheist. The bees don't care, and neither do I. I have no idea why it matters.
1) Disappointing HN thread - all about race and little about article?
2) Disappointing article. No depth at all. How is the money spent? How many bees are there? Where does one get bees? Are there flowers around for the bees? How did this person get into beekeeping? Why beekeeping and not, say, an organic garden?
3) Disappointing site - tons of flashing banners and ads everywhere.
What sounds like an awesome, uplifting story that may be replicate-able across the country was turned into an overall disappointing puff piece.
I think you are conflating the notion that, at a given time slice, a majority of the popular sentiment about the future may not have always been positive, with your own opinions of modern engineering.
For vast swaths of human mind, popular opinion tended to see the future as bleak and the past as filled with greater men, accomplishments, etc - the good days are behind us. Post industrial revolution thinking and adoption of science has mostly changed that opinion to hope - the good days are ahead of us.
As for people who can optimize code like back in the day: I am not sure where you work, but I bet if you look at the best engineers in the best tech companies today (google/ Facebook / Netflix / amazon / Uber / palantir) you’ll find a lot to be impressed with.
Rewriting is a very healthy part of software engineering. Sometimes you just didn’t anticipate what the company or product was going to do. The solution you wrote for 1k/qps probably won’t work at a million qps, and it is kind of silly to expect it to.
Agreed. There’s a reason the most educated and capable Chinese move the the US and become Americans. America’s cultural and technological dominance comes from its flexibility borne from a willingness to take in hard working immigrants from anywhere. America is exceptional in that it is a country of immigrants.
Correlating brain size to intelligence or complexity is a common amateur mistake. Let’s for a second pretend all animal’s brains are black boxes, and we can neither see nor measure them. Instead, let us say we can only judge brains by their impact on the world. Would you then not put humans so far above the other animals as to make it almost silly to compare?