To your point they also, like, wrote their own PHP interpreter. If you asked your Facebook interviewer about PHP you'd probably get an interesting answer!
I think the example of video games and movies is instructive - there's always a ton of "cut content". In software, we can always change the requirements to meet a deadline :)
No, the mysteries that "are deep, hard to understand, and not worth the effort" are why Scientific American is publishing this junk article. My lay theory is that SA hasn't been worth reading in decades and basically nobody can write well about quantum mechanics for a casual audience..
That’s because quantum mechanics is for making predictions not answering theological questions. Casual observers generally want to know what this says about our place in the universe and quantum mechanics is way too probabilities based for the average joe.
The skill-based matchmaking that's popular today is optimized for setting up a fair game, ie. theres a roughly 50/50 chance of either side winning. It makes logical sense, but it turns out nobody actually wants a fair match!
The old style of games had privately hosted servers, each able to host about 30 people. These games allowed people to drop in and out at will. Newer games are more match focused, with shorter matches and a focus on players completing matches. It would still be nice to join a small pool of 30 players and create smaller matches from that pool, but this would require people in the pool to sometimes wait for the next match to form. Balancing would not be hard, just make sure skill is as evenly distributed as possible. All this would allow match focused gameplay while keeping the pool of players small enough to build a community.
Someone recently commented on HN that online cheating is a social problem, and can be solved by playing with a curated group of players. I agree, and think this could also help with cheating.
Rather the opposite - us-west-2 is big but not the biggest region, or the smallest, or the oldest or newest, it's not partitioned off like the China or GovCloud regions. Because us-west-2 is fairly typical it tends to be one of the last regions to get software updates, after they've been tested in prod elsewhere
It's probably been in a lot of movies, but I've always loved this scene in THE CORE where they land a space shuttle in the LA river: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GG1RwE_x6Vg
He's not saying Trump is just a joke now, I think. But Trump really did start off as a mostly joke candidate- wouldn't it be funny? Can you imagine? Etc. And then he used his racism and psychopathic tendencies to win the race.
