462100
submission
KDan writes:
How do you recognise good programmer? It's not as easy as it sounds. CV experience is only of limited use here, because great programmers don't always have the "official" experience to demonstrate that they're great. In fact, a lot of that CV experience can be misleading. Yet there are a number of subtle cues that you can get, even from the CV, to figure out whether someone's a great programmer. This article presents those cues in a way that non-programmers should be able to understand and use.
461164
submission
KDan writes:
With astonishing regularity, articles or posts come out claiming that the popular Ruby on Rails framework sucks in some way or another. People complain that Rails isn't as easy to deploy as PHP, that Rails just didn't do it for project XYZ. They range from the articulate and well thought out to the frankly inane and stupid (and wrong). Recently, there's also of course been the spectacular nuclear rant by Zed Shaw, which was more a rant against random elements of the community than against Rails, but was still presented as a rant against Rails.
Here's an article that tries to put some perspective on why these opinions are irrelevant to whether or not Rails suck.
99808
submission
KDan writes:
As seen on CNN and other places, "Scientists in eastern China say they have succeeded in controlling the flight of pigeons with micro electrodes planted in their brains". Whilst everyone focuses on the weird and fun aspects of remote-controlled pigeons and points out that "The report did not specify what practical uses the scientists saw for the remote-controlled pigeons", a number of obvious uses jump out to me. Flocks of remote controlled pigeons could be used in warfare as very effective weapons delivery systems. They can take out low-flying planes and helicopters by being flown into their way. In fact they can probably be used to take out any target. Electronically controlled pigeons could lead to a new expansion of the concept of self-healing minefields... How about a patrolling flock of payloaded pigeons that target anyone identified as an "enemy"? The important factor is that whereas building a mechanical equivalent of a pigeon would be expensive, growing a pigeon and implanting some electrodes is comparatively cheap so that large numbers of RC pigeons could be "manufactured" and used for any purpose imaginable. A missile costs tens of thousands of dollars — why bother when you can raise a flock of pigeons and "upgrade" them for a fraction of that price, and proceed to send them to the target?
Perhaps most importantly, however, the remote-controlled pigeons will finally allow us to create an efficient implementation of RFC 1149 and RFC 2549.
