The way the rule is stated and repeated in modern culture is a vast oversimplification, and so a critique is fine. As some have noted, the argument was also about the "ability and drive" to put in the 10,000 hours. Certainly, individual factors do play a role. The only reason this is controversial is when people try to apply it to certain populations, where there is no evidence for that at all (in fact, plenty to the contrary). The article itself notes this.

But, it does raise a question: Are there skills require innate abilities to truly master, and if so, what are they and how do they differ from those that don't? There is evidence to suggest that the former is true.

This rule is often linked to how to be successful, but the studies have all been on skills that have no direct links to financial success. Brilliant musicians don't get paid well by default. Chess players aren't sport stars. Artists struggle.

I am curious if programming is a skill that does require an innate mindset to truly master (I do believe these skills do exist), or if it just a skill that demands disciplined practice. I've seen no evidence either way, so anything would be speculation on my part.

That's a useful chart, but it shows that the growth of coal in Germany is far larger than the total portion of solar. So if you want to call that growth a "fluctuation," you should call the contribution of solar a "rounding error" or something. What I learned from the chart is that in Germany, the burning of household trash produces twice as much power as solar, and this is growing much faster than solar. I bet it's also costing the customers far less and provides other benefits, like municipal hot water. So yes, Germany is having a bit of a trash burning revolution, and I applaud this. The solar thing though, I don't think that's going so well for Germany.

Soo, their CO2 output in increasing, their energy prices are highest in Europe, and a broad coalition, which includes the chancellor, is now pushing to have the program cancelled. ... SUCCESS!

Um, you tell me about the coal burning plants that Germany shut down, and I'll hunt down the links for the 12 ginormous coal-burning powerplants that have opened up since 2010. The largest of these are designed to burn fucking lignite (brown coal, the dirtiest thing we have ever used for power in the history of mankind). This is not 1812, it was 2012. CO2 emissions are growing faster in Germany than anywhere else in Western Europe, while US emissions are sinking over the same timespan. Germany acts like it's some model citizen because everyone loves to hear about solar this and that, but most of their power comes from coal. Also, most of their new capacity comes from coal. Every year this decade, even the proportion of German power that has come from coal has increased. Yeah, coal. For this I hardly think they deserve any congratulations.

Yea, that was great, but Redis did actually turn into a useful tool compared to Memcached.

I've conducted a lot of interviews (in an academic setting in the humanities), and I can say that it's risky guessing what exactly the interviewer is trying to accomplish with a question. Sometimes a question is asked neither to see if someone knows the answer to the question nor to see the content of the interviewee's answer, but to see how the person handles being asked such a question. I could see someone deliberately asking a question that he know the candidate not to know the answer to just for such a purpose, though personally I would avoid doing it as it's neither nice nor useful to stress out the interviewee even more (but I might do it in a mock interview preparing someone for a real interview).

So the interviewer might be interested to see if the interviewee honestly, humbly and politely says: "Would you like me to tell you the container classes I use the most? The others I have to look up when I need them", or if the person pretends to know the answer, or rudely bristles, or tries to weasel out of the question by changing the topic (of course it might be a bonus if the interviewee actually has a great memory and knows all the container classes; but then another question might need to be asked to gauge character).

There's a sad lack of proper work for PhDs in our field. I'm in the same boat, but I am working now as a contractor.

Sure, people say that there is a glut on the market, but nobody notes that this is due to drastic cuts in research funding at all levels. Maybe that'll change and we there will be more research and academic positions.

As a practical matter, I disagree with leaving your PhD off your resume. You'll have a large gap to explain (what did you do in all those years) and it's not hard to find out that you do have a doctorate.

The best thing to do is explain that a PhD is one of the best examples that are you are self motivating, able to work on a problem diligently and independently, and that is valuable to any employer. Then, get out there and try to find a employer that gets that (in other words, is worth working for). That's hard, but that's what it'll have to be.

I'm seriously considering a hefty pay cut and trying to get a postdoc, because I do miss working on actual interesting problems. Don't discount this either.

Sure, it looks like it, and there are plenty of people with jobs out there that can lash something together. I worked with somebody at a startup would was struggling to get a web page working. After a few minutes, I realized the problem. She had no idea that you could loop through an array backwards.

We don't need more "coders". We need more software engineers and computer scientists.

Actually, maybe not. Maybe we need a workforce that is organized and that would stand against employers who insist on completely devaluing our field in a search for easy money, tossing aside qualified people in search for exploitable labor. That's the problem. I think we should be defending our industry and those that have the proper skills to do it well. Just because the latest, most visible trend is to hack together a mobile application or web site for a quick buck doesn't change the need for fundamentals.

Things like data structures, algorithms, discrete mathematics, computer architecture, etc. do matter. Not having a basic understanding of computers and computation leads to an astonishing amount of bugs, security holes and wasted effort. Some people have just accepted this as the cost of business. I say it's past time that we really stood up and say, no, things should be better. But since we can't collectively bargain, we are stuck.

I know, who cares, the money is awesome. It'll be like that forever, right? What does it matter that nobody can count on having a career after ten years because they are seen as too old with an outdated skill set.

This isn't about school, although I think a proper CS education is still the best way to learn this stuff. But you can get it with diligent self study and experience as well. In the end, real programmers have the conceptual understanding to adapt and excel in the long term. That's what we need more of. Real careers, not just jobs.

To address the summary, the difficulty is in proving certain security aspects, as current models don't fit the assumptions that RIBE models use. In practice, it could be fine.

The article seems to propose a set forward in a scheme to manage the keys by combining two previously proposed methods in a novel way. I can't judge if this is indeed an advance as I am not familiar with this domain. The main advance claimed is that the publicly needed parameters is constant. This suggests that other schemes had an issue in which the public information would keep growing as the number of issued keys and users grew, causing a scaling issue that limited practical, widespread applications. Again, I can't judge if this is indeed correct.

But, as noted, this does require a trusted third party to ultimately decide if a key is valid. Also, a lot of the work seems to be temporally based; the identity is combined with a timespan to create a key that is only use for a given set of time.

It's an interesting idea overall. It avoids the public key problem by making the information you need the channel in which you communicate on. (For example sending a encrypted email in which the key is the email address),

I don't mind the start screen too much, but a proper start menu is a good start, and bringing Metro apps to the desktop is a start. The library for metro application actually has a long of good ideas in it, so expanding it beyond touch applications is a good idea.

The toughest part is that Windows 8/8.1 came with some really noticeable kernel and userland performance improvements. The switching between metro and the desktop is pretty smooth on all the hardware I've used. If they get back the power user desktop functionality, it's a good start back.

I wish that people would stop this silliness about population controls. Have you been asleep for 40 years? Right now, in an age when European politicians are pulling out their hair trying to get people to make more kids, it's hard to find an industrialized country that it making children at the replacement rate. Many countries are actually shrinking, including populous ones like Japan, Italy, Russia, etc. Many more would be shrinking were it not for immigration. In countries like Mexico that are traditional sources of emmitrants, fertility rates are plummeting as well. It turns out that all you need is a bit of prosperity, urbanization and female education, and you can quickly generate negative population growth rates. If there's a reason to worry about global population, it's that we won't have enough kids to care for the world's retired.

While there are many things about startups that are attractive, in the end, it's just a job, not a lifestyle. It's best to work to live, not live to work. These efforts to create all inclusive environments for programmers will just lead to burnout when the bubble pops. And yes, it is a bubble. We don't need yet another mobile social enabled whatsit pieced together quickly.

If this was an environment to create new formal verification tools or other revolutionary software tooling, then I'd be interested. Right now, it seems we are going a bit backwards. It's harder to create a nice UI on the web than it was on the desktop more than ten years ago. In the last few years, this is the first time that my job is becoming harder. For the longest time, editors got better, debuggers got better, frameworks got better and there were more tools for the job than before. Now, there's no real commercial breakthroughs in static analysis, security, formal verification, domain specific languages. It's all just mobile apps with no depth. Sure, this has driven some new useful stuff (say, Hadoop), but when big data is just for marketing and ads, what's the point?

Basically, this method of searching for aliens returns a positive whenever there is something producing heat which we don't see/understand. I have a feeling that the universe is quite full of such things. But maybe explaining these will help us make scientific advances. When astronomers first discovered a pulsar, they labeled the signal LGM for "little green men". But since then, we learned a lot about astronomy. Explaining apparent anomalies is good for science, and if you want to make the process sexier by talking about possible alien civilizations, I don't see much harm.