Linked List: May 11, 2017

Thursday, 11 May 2017

The Girls’ Soccer Team That Joined a Boys’ League, and Won It 

Raphael Minder, reporting for The New York Times:

The ponytailed forward cut through the rain and the defense and drove a low shot past the outstretched arm of the goalkeeper. The pinpoint strike — her 38th of the season — confirmed Andrea Gómez as the top scorer for her championship team.

The boys Gómez left in her wake, though, were not the first ones forced to retrieve one of her shots from their net. Gómez, 13, and her teammates had been confounding boys all season, playing so well that their girls’ team recently won a junior regional league in Spain over 13 boys’ teams.

“I always try to show that soccer isn’t just for boys,” Gómez said. “If you’re technically better, you can compensate for being perhaps physically weaker.”

Quite telling who gave them the most heckling trouble:

The transition was not easy. The girls finished 12th in an 18-team league in their debut season. But as the team improved, and began to beat boys’ teams with more regularity, its progress generated unpleasant reactions.

“It’s really been more a problem for parents rather than their boys,” Salmerón said of comments directed at the team during matches. “It’s strange, but most of the macho comments and insults have come from the mothers of some of the boys we play.”

David Robinson:

On a typical day, developers ask over 8,000 questions on Stack Overflow about programming problems they run into in their work. Which technologies are they asking about, and how has that changed over time?

Today, we’re introducing the Stack Overflow Trends tool to track interest in programming languages and technologies, based on the number of Stack Overflow questions asked per month. For example, we could compare the relative usage of three programming languages.

MacPaw’s Museum of Apple Hardware 

MacPaw, on their acquisition of TekServe’s collection of Apple hardware:

As the shop grew and became a landmark Apple dealer, the Tekserve team found themselves surrounded by beautiful Macs of all kinds. In twenty years they decided to turn the best of them, groundbreaking models, as they put it, into a museum-like exhibition. And later, when the shop was shutting down, an Apple Lisa, an alien Nextstation Turbo machine, and the rest of the grand collection had to find a new home on an auction.

The prospects looked pretty grim, because a collection like that had a high chance of ending up in some millionaire’s basement. Luckily, MacPaw’s CEO Olexandr Kosovan heard about the auction and made an instant decision. He secretly bought all of the iconic Macintosh computers before the collection was taken apart and sold piece by piece.

That is how almost 40 Macs from every generation were reverently moved to MacPaw’s Ukrainian office, to the uncontrollable joy of a hundred Apple fans who work here. We think there’s hardly a better place for historical Apple computers than our futuristic Apple-inspired office. And hardly a better audience than a team of passionate Mac developers.

Just gorgeous.

(Via Stephen Hackett.)