Without a doubt, web is s crapshoot of browser inconsistency and standards. Imagine this hypothetical scenario: No more local apps, but you have a web server running locally, which when you install an app, installs to the local web server. Your entire desktop is in a browser. What are the problems with this? Many: 1. Serialization to HTML/CSS/JS is slow and unnecessary. The code path to put a red rectangle on the screen is absurd 2. Those interfaces prevent direct access to local hardware. 3. Operational Latency - the back and forth across the web-client/web server barrier is prohibitive for many apps. 4. Start-up Latency - downloading 3D textures and meshes and other assets can take hours.

What is more likely to happen is we have local clients that use web content within the local client.

And then there is the"fog". I call private clouds the "fog" because it's around you, not up in the sky. The web does have the ease of software distribution on it's side. I think eventually when all this NSA stuff shakes out, we'll move to local clouds with self-hosted data as a way to protect and manage our data. There will be an industry standard super server you install apps to which will mimic local apps. Then for your data to be accessed rather than serve a warrant to your hosting provider, they have to serve the warrant to you directly.

Really, I see the privacy and 3D (coming virtual reality) to bring back focus on local apps.

I'm showing my age here, 38, but no talk is complete without mentioning the Dunning-Kruger Effect. I have witnessed this first hand, even with myself. When you are young and full of vigor, you charge forth into the great unknown t eagerly writing lots of code. As you gain experience the code decreases but is of higher quality. I've now taken to assign a valuation to each line of code as liability vs added value. because in a few years some kid will come behind me other the other side of Dunning-Kruger and change this without really knowing what it is doing. I also spend more time doing research on what I am doing so my execution is flawless. Experimentation is rare. In the Art of war, the battle is only the last step and the preparation is really what determines the outcome. Similarly, code is only written when the planning is complete. This is the difference between code monkeys and engineers.

But older engineers often get complacent. I too went through this phase. Many get comfortable with one technology, (Java, .Net) and no longer keep up with new efforts. But in the past 2 years alone, I've taken to learning Machine Learning, Node.JS, mobile platforms, Big Data.

My advice is if you're old, don't get complacent, keep learning. If you're interviewing one of us veterans, keep an open mind. We might not be as cheap on paper, or outwardly enthusiastic. But if we're still in it after 20 years, we love what we do just as much as a new guy, and we will pay dividends in the long run.

I believe at that point the poster child was OpenSSL/SSH, not a kernel.

No, I can't. I started out and I sucked. I got better eventually through experience. In order for it to be truly bimodal, people have to start in either camp A or camp B and end in the same camp they started in. Because if you transition from one to another over time, any point in time will capture a group of people in between the modes. Now, you can argue that people don't spend much time in between those modes but you haven't presented any evidence for that. What's more likely is you have geocities coders on one tail and John Carmack/Linus Torvolds on the other tail. And in between are people like the presenter and I. And since I'm not instantaneously going from bad to good, the reality of the situation is most likely some degree of a normal curve filled with people trying to get better at programming or even just getting better though spending lots of time doing it and learning a little along the way.

For all your attacks on the presenter, your argument of a bi-modal distribution sounds more flawed to me. I would love to see your study and hear your argument.

To be fair, you can spend a great deal of time talking about something and make progress on the issue without solving it.

For example the current metrics are abysmal so it's worth explaining why they're abysmal. I just was able to delete several thousand lines of JavaScript from one of my projects after a data model change (through code reuse and generalization) -- yet I increased functionality. My manager was confused and thought it was a bad thing to get rid of code like that ... it was absolute dopamine bliss to me while he felt like our production was being put in reverse. KLOC is a terrible metric. But yet we still need to waste a lot of breath explaining why it's a terrible metric.

Another reason to waste a lot of time talking about a problem without reaching an answer is to elaborate on what the known unknowns are and speculate about the unknown unknowns. Indeed, the point of this article seemed to be to advertise the existence of unknown unknowns to "recruiters, venture capitalists, and others who are actually determining who gets brought into the community."

Perhaps ... but that would imply that one does not transition over time from one hump to the next or if they do, it's like flipping a light switch. When I read this I assumed that he was talking only about people who know how to program and not "the average person mixed in with programmers."

But you just said there's no way to measure this ... how could he have collected data? What data set could have satiated us? The answer is quite obvious and such collection would have been a larger fool's errand than the original article's content.

Right, which is why I added the second sentence. My point is that it could've been phrased in a manner that avoids implying Moscow is a trap, e.g. "unable to return home." I'm sure there are schools of propaganda training that are more subtle and don't pooh-pooh that sort of structuring, but at the very least it implies some restraint on the parts of the authors away from being a proverbial anti-US slant.

I'd really love to see some examples—I've been watching demo competitions for years and I can't recall any efforts that really focused on authentic portrayal of humans.

Yes, I'm very aware that demoscene groups form (often very excellent) game companies, but I don't think any of those endeavours have resulted in products with anything like the quality shown in the video.

And! And: it says Snowden is "trapped" in Moscow, which is not very agitprop-friendly. Workable, but not exactly jingoism.

What does that really matter? Almost by definition, a demoscene prod involves clever choices in what to make and display on screen in order to achieve an effect. I'm pretty confident the winners of the competitions for the last few years (a) don't have the same flexibility for artists working with their demo engines as Square-Enix does and (b) would never be able to assemble enough assets and people to do the facial expression stuff with anywhere near the same quality (an area in which, AFAIK, Nvidia has been almost entirely pioneering.) The achievement of this video isn't diminished by the achievements of the scene, nor vice-versa.

Someone I know had to go in for basic hernia surgery. However this person was an avid flint knapper. He asked his surgeon if he could furnish obsidian blades for his scalpels since obsidian, when fractured properly, creates a edge just a few atoms thick, far thinner than the sharpest steel blade. The result is a perfect cut that leaves very little scar tissue, and no perceivable scar.

I don't know why there isn't a bigger obsidian scalpel industry.

Sure, if you want to kill someone, you're right. I think the argument against drones is that if you push a button and someone dies on the other side of the Earth and you didn't have to go to war to do that ... well, fast forward two years and you're just sitting there hitting that button all day long. "The quarter solution" or whatever you want to call it is still resulting in deaths and, as we can see here, we're not 100% sure whose deaths that button is causing. Even if we study the targets really really hard.

No, no we don't. You might say "Al Queda hit us now we must hunt them to the ends of the Earth" but it doesn't mean that diplomacy and sovereignty just get flushed down the toilet. Those country borders will still persist despite all your shiny new self-appointed world police officer badges. Let me see if I can explain this to you: If David Koresh had set off bombs in a Beijing subway and then drones lit up Waco like the fourth of July and most of the deaths were Branch Davidians, how would you personally feel about that? Likewise, if Al Queda is our problem and we do that, we start to get more problems. Now, that said, it's completely true that Pakistan's leadership has privately condoned these strikes while publicly lambasting the US but that's a whole different problem.

Yep, think of the children -- that's why we should use drone strikes, right? Look, war means death. Death doesn't discriminate and neither does war. If you're hung up on it being okay to take a life the second that male turns 18, you're pretty much morally helpless anyway. War is bad. Drone strikes are bad. There's enough bad in there for them both to be bad. This isn't some false dichotomy where it's one or the other. It's only one or the other if you're hellbent on killing people.

News flash: you can argue against drone strikes and also be opposed to war at the same time. It does not logically follow that since you're against drone strikes, you're pro war and pro killing children. That's the most unsound and absurd flow of logic I've seen in quite some time.