sinkwool

so aliens did build the pyramids!

of course they are. The Chinese team selection tests are notoriously more difficult than the IMO, and they enforce a one-time participation limit. If they were to send 24 people, not only would they probably be returning with ~20 golds, they'd be taking away the golds of the other nations (as only the top 1/12 get gold)

Yeah, that was a very weird comparison. Not only do those countries send 6 people each, those four started participating in 1959 while US started in 1974 and China in 1985. Though arguably, those first olympiads featured fewer countries, (with presumably stronger competition) so they had to compete against each other for medals.

Another factor might be the number of distinct participants. I believe the Chinese enforce a one-participation limit, though I don't know if that would make it more or less likely to get gold.

There's gotta be something between Satya and "C-tier code out of rural India".

There are of course lots of bad coders in India, but there are also many really good ones. And whereas in the past they had to emigrate to US or Europe to fully make use of their talents, nowadays some(many?) choose to remain in India and work remotely. It's silly to dismiss and underestimate their skills.

As far your experience with developers that follow the specs literally, in an almost maliciously compliant way, that might be learned behavior from working on projects where the tasks are spec-ed and estimated and any attempts at going above and beyond ultimately result in late delivery and punishment, so developers quickly learn to only do the bare minimum of what is described. Granted your examples are extreme and pathological, so maybe you just had the misfortune of working with really bad people.

Additionally, unless you pick the developers yourself, you're at the mercy of the agencies who assemble those offshore teams, and often the economics are such that it doesn't incentivize them to hire the best people available. From my experience, many good developers find work on their own, outside of an agency, contracting directly with the remote company.

aren't most languages invented and initially developed within a private company? Go, Dart, Java, JavaScript, C#, F#, VBA, Kotlin, Erlang, C(at AT&T), Rust (at Mozilla). The list is probably very long

> I always find out both fascinating and alien how much focus the US system puts on extracurriculars

One factor could be that, AFAIU, schools in US have many more electives than in Europe. As a student you have the choice to take more advanced classes for one subject, and only basic in other subjects, whereas in Europe, the curriculum is standard for all. So Universities in US need to compare performance on different axes.

> Of course, that also has its downsides. People end up re-taking HS exams year after year, because someone beat their GPA with a decimal point.

Another downside to the one-size-fits-all standard curriculum, is that it forces you to care about classes that you don't really care about, while not being able to focus on the subjects that you're really interested in. I think in US, if you're really good at something, universities may ignore average-to-poor performance in other areas.

I believe what GP is saying is: coming from python, which uses `and` and `not` and `or` you expect those to be the binary operators in ruby as well. You are then surprised when they behave unexpectedly. Who is then to blame for your frustration? Is ruby a bad language for having both `and` and `&&`, or are you at fault for not doing enough research? (I don't see why someone coming from python would look any further after trying `and` and seeing that it seems to work just fine). I think this is an unfortunate situation, but one that doesn't really happen to someone that does ruby day-to-day; so it shouldn't really factor in as an argument to write ruby off.

But then is being surprised by `["0","1","10"].map(parseInt) // => [0, NaN, 2]` in JavaScript a sign of bad language design or does it just mean that you don't have enough experience with the language yet?

Kotlin is very ruby-like and performant, check it out. If you don't mind using JetBrains IDEs, I'd give kotlin a try.

> Writers merely append new content to the end of the WAL file. Because writers do nothing that would interfere with the actions of readers, writers and readers can run at the same time. However, since there is only one WAL file, there can only be one writer at a time.

I think the OP meant that updates have to run sequentially.

Or it could be a typo (as in man-made) My guess is that they only use Youtube videos that already have subtitles in the target language.

But I'm curious to know how exactly they've built their database of videos/transcripts. I wonder if they curate the videos manually at all.

But they don't have the same area. The donut seems to be at least 1.5x larger than the cup (check out the screenshots posted by latexr in another comment. The area covered by the donut is half that of the cup but it's clearly less than half that of the donut, it looks more like a third or even a quarter of the donut)