I like this! Consider it stolen.

The question's not bad but the evaluation is busted. What you want is someone who can have an intelligent conversation on the subject, and who understands that what type you need for a zip code is a more subtle question than it might seem at first.

For one thing, it's certainly a compound type: the zip and the +4, even just in the USA; and I can't imagine an application that stores addresses that would never need to store an international one. About this time I'd be online looking around for post code standards.

I can tell more experienced people a lot by their reactions to things like time zone handling or unicode. If you grimace and start mentally listing a lot of thorny complications and considerations, then it's something you have probably thought about before. If you start saying something glib that starts with "All you need to do is..." then you haven't.

Funnily enough, I've had the opposite experience: people who are younger, in terms of experience or age, are a lot more positive in their opinions and close-minded than older or more experienced people. I don't have a lot of theory around this, except that a more experienced person has had a lot more opportunity to be proven wrong about their preconceptions.

This matches my own personal experience. I can really only compare my "old" self with my "young" self, but I would say that the young me was more confrontational and irritatingly positive (you can use Perl for everything!), and more willing to do a lot of pointless after-hours work and be oncall. He was a lot less reflective and somewhat less rational regarding his decisionmaking. He had little broad perspective and familiarity with a few technologies that looked to him like all there was to know.

The older me is more knowledgeable, certainly, and more familiar with lots of "allied" tasks associated with programming. I'm a lot better at handling people. I'm a lot more willing to experiment or investigate new technologies for something rather than relay what's already in my toolbox.

This might seem paradoxical, but it makes sense to me. An inexperienced person has probably had few revelations like the hg example you give or using a functional programming language on a real project. An experienced person has a good feel for what kinds of tasks are no big deal and what takes a lot of time.

All that said, I dislike very much the idea that programmers are characterizable by their languages, their age or experience or their domain. Frankly I would leave that out of it and just do a straight interview (though you may be interested in analyzing differences after the fact).

The actual evidence we have is that, as a rule, for organisms on Earth, extinction is the norm rather than an exceptional event. The history of life on Earth is one of repeated mass extinctions, and continuous extinctions otherwise.

The idea that humans are "special", that in some way the rules of life on Earth do not apply to them, is attractive, and it probably has some merit. But in order to counter the actual evidence of Earth's history, all you really have is a sort of narrative about what humans are like and would do. It's as related to the real probability of human extinction as verbal arguments about "what you would do in a fight" are to actual combat.

A billion years is a very long time, and it's easy to imagine scenarios which, however unlikely, cause human extinction. A genetic disease which disrupts reproduction, that we all already have and so cannot isolate. The astronomical cataclysms you mention. Heck, our understanding of the structure of matter is pretty basic and dates to within the last 100 years--do you think that perhaps there are possible material instabilities that we don't yet understand that could somehow result in such a cataclysm?

We humans have exterminated many other species. Other forms of life we encounter may return the favor, for their own inscrutable reasons.

It even remains to be seen whether human beings can live in a self-sustaining way on planets that are not inherently habitable. When we have a thriving population on Venus, you can make the argument that something that makes Earth uninhabitable (for example, an atmospheric revolution by novel organisms, as has already happened in the planet's history) won't cause human extinction. But until then, you just can't say. And "I don't know" is a lot different than "I know it can't happen."

Use the HTML entity for Gödel?

I usually reach right back in the google results in the hope of getting one with the freshest expiration date.

I can see two or three minor arguments for using a top-level .com address: One is a result of your argument--among anyone who has a vague idea that domain names have to be purchased, they may have an understanding that it might be kind of expensive, and therefore it seems more "selective" than something which is obviously just a hierarchy. That is, the internal logic goes like this: "houston.dating.com" is just part of "dating.com", it's not special for houston, but "houstondating.com" is only for houston so there'll be a lot of locals in it. The second is that people actually just screw up subdomains to a surprising degree. People seeing a sign will remember the words "houston dating dot com"--they never remember dots or hyphens or anything like that. So they go home and type "houston dating.com" or "houstondating.com" in their web browsers and get your site. (In actuality, they often type "www.houstondating.com" as well, regardless if that's correct or not).