It's hard to understand body language without knowing the person well but on all pictures I've seen it looks like Lucas's left hand is trying to stop his right hand from signing the contract. It would seem he might have been hesitant about the deal.
72 karma · joined June 20, 2012
It's behind a paywall, but you can read a number of commentaries, e.g.: http://news.columbia.edu/googlememory
Actually very scalable. Social networks grow faster the further you reach. I got my first 'serious' internship thanks to my friend's girlfriend's dad. I'm from a small town and I worked at a place 2000 km away from home.
I often read HN at work. The page interface is very simple but the bright color of visited links makes it easy to navigate and spot new top stories.
The problem occurs when I go back home and check if any interesting news were added. I have to navigate through a long list of links and the only way of knowing if anything new popped up is to read all the titles again.
It would be helpful if HN could memorize visited articles and change the link color accordingly regardless of the browser history.
What do you mean by "his closest people chose to participate in such a tragedy" and "it wasn't him choosing to commit suicide alone"?
Terrible website and lots of language mistakes.
Though it's generally true that most of my friends prefer Java over C/C++. I might be different because I learned programming in high school and started with C.
It might be different for people with very strong personality but I think it is generally true that we are strongly affected by the people we surround ourselves with.
Interesting thing, the effect is somewhat "laggy". I spent few months with a very hardworking person but I didn't really start following in his footsteps until after 3 months. When I stopped interacting with him, I kept my new-found diligence for 6 months before starting taking things easier again (though I can say I do work harder now than a year ago).
During my first few months here I also started paying more attention to punctuality. But when I started spending more time with my constantly-late friend I lost it somewhere along the way.
So yeah, people around you do affect you in many little ways. It's possible you don't see it, because the change is usually small and happens over time. Would I select my friends basing on their success? Hell no.
In writing homonyms use different kanji so there is no problem differentiating them.
While the "insignificant" part would usually have to be really large to influence the running time, it's often the case that one algorithm is faster than another due to the second one having a large constant multiplier, even though the Big O notation would suggest otherwise (e.g. O(10nlogn) would be faster than O(1000*n))
It's also common that even if one of the algorithms is slower in the worst case scenario, its average case performance is better than asymptotically better solutions. A popular example of such might be the quicksort algorithm, which has the worst-case running time O(n^2) but in practice is usually faster than most O(nlogn) sorting algorithms.
I don't defy USA has a great contemporary culture but it's just one side of it. Another side is what you so easily dismiss - the history and traditions. Culture in the sense we're discussing is not something you can associate with one person. It's a collective term that basically describes the full range of learned human behavior patterns, which of course includes the baggage accumulated over the years (in some cases thousands of years) of history. Which USA doesn't have in the same degree as most of other countries, simply because it is a relatively young country.
Maybe I put too much stress on the traditional side of culture but coming myself from culturally very uniform background I always thought about USA as a multi-culture nation. Hence my surprise at pixie's statement. Shared media, history and education are basically common traits of every country (except for the ones that changed borders recently). Unity of values and the perception of the surrounding world may really be unique to America, though I'm not sure if putting Black people from Boston and immigrants from Asia and Mexico in the same bag as Rednecks from Florida is not an overgeneralization.
What you describe as a part of culture I see as a proof of multi-culturality. Can multi-culturality be a part of culture? I guess it depends on the definition. But I would argue that American culture is not uniform (of course many aspects are but I think most historically rich countries are much more uniform in that matter).
I admit it's kind of remarkable how everyone is religious in America. A bit less if you look at the crime rate (what happened to Thou shalt not kill?) but still. However I still stand by my previous statement - all the things you mention are not characteristic only to America. Maybe you can't appreciate it because it's a foreign culture to you but culture of many countries is just as uniform as American and often richer thanks to the hundreds of years of history. And wealth is hardly an American-only thing. As I mentioned, all these points together apply to Japan as well and many of them (not necessarily all at once) to other countries as well.