HN user
It's in the article.
"Snap is the programming language for UC Berkeley’s Beauty and Joy of Computing curriculum (BJC), which aims to bring introductory CS to a wider range of students than the typical intro to programming does. BJC is also used at the high school level, and is a curriculum for the new AP Computer Science: Principles test."
I found this here, it's a really good paper that backs the idea that goals are pretty tough.
Creator does look great, but so does Interface Builder. IB has caused me to leave the computer in a state of shock from frustration, so I'll have to reserve judgement.
Performance is fairly good. I get around 5 seconds on a 4s, and about 8 on a Nexus S, though I haven't tested with recent code on the Android Phone. The only native API I've used has so far been push notifications. While there's a plugin for that, it works as a pretty thin bridge between native code, and a couple of dispatch functions that use stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString. I've had to fix things, so it means having to understand Cocoa code anyway.
There are also some visual issues with the code, in that the view will save its state if the user uses a route in a view to change the current view. Normally this would help, but if it frequently updates the view changes back and then it flickers.
Overall it's ok if you really love web tech, but I'm learning native iOS development in response to my experience.
Curious to see how this works out, with JS being the native way to write applications. Been excited about the Firefox platform because of this for a while (especially for POS/embedded/tablet applications), but I'm developing a cross-platform app for both iOS and Android in Ionic, and I'm much less interested in PhoneGap now that I've actually done something with it. (I'm a big proponent of Angular at work, it's not that part.)
I think I was able to get about 40% of the way there in about five hours in Cocoa, the only real stumbling block was dealing with ViewControllers and UITableViews. Unfortunately for non-native platforms, if PhoneGap is positioned as a good starter for low-barrier apps, it doesn't bode well if a developer can go in fresh and with about the same amount of effort build one platform in whole, and about 20% of another...
Reminds me of Doctorow's Scroogled. http://craphound.com/scroogled.html
The funny thing is Doctorow makes references to "just metadata" years before it became a public issue, however this goes beyond metadata, and will eventually contain facts about people, not just tangential stuff.
"This isn't P.I.I."—Personally Identifying Information, the toxic smog of the information age—"It's just metadata. So it's only slightly evil."
Guessing you could probably put everything into a redis instance and just hincrby/incr for either the individual queries ie "902", "9021", "90210."
Not sure what would be more performant, REST or a websocket. Not doing anything would be the fastest, though!
Rural Wisconsin. I worked on a road crew during college and we'd rarely have guys buy stuff during breaks/downtime.
Management. Business Analysts. "Metawork" in the words of a coworker who used to architect BPM implementations at the parent corporation of my job. Getting consensus from possibly hundreds of stakeholders.
Generally, the disconnect is that management is under the assumption that you can manage your way to success, so they add more overhead to watch and prod at the proceedings. Development is almost always an afterthought in most business projects. The first thing they do? Get consensus, which is generally everyone putting in ideas so that they seem involved—see Atwood's Duck[1]. After you have a ton of often contradictory ideas, you need to have them prioritized. And since nobody managing the project is technical, they need to hold countless "prioritization meetings with stakeholders and implementers." Often times the meetings will grind to a standstill while process analysts and engineers argue over the wording of things. Usually the analyst will tell the engineer that the business has standardized on a set of terms, of which are not the trade names for things. Maybe everyone uses a set of terms which aren't the "correct" wording.
After things are prioritized based on the wrong criteria, they're then pushed off to an engineering group who are tasked with implementing things exactly to spec. Since the definitions are incorrect, they need to constantly circle back and check with the stakeholders to double check. Occasionally checking in will involve a "subject matter expert" who is on vacation, and the only one allowed to answer the question. (Thus stalling that item and anything depending on it.) Others will often say "it's above my paygrade" in an attempt to avoid culpability.
After the project has run long and only has a majority of the features complete, people are reassigned to other projects, and the app is sent to QA to hand-test features. Sometimes it will involve the "stakeholders" sitting in a room for days or weeks, manually clicking their way through the interface. Maybe the project is declared a boondoggle, deleted, and replaced with someone else's pet project.
So yes, not logical.
At my day job we generally will bundle small procedures/scripts into a simple webapp with either flask or express.js. For our backend systems, we're looking into rundeck to allow non sudoers the ability to restart a system service. That might be potentially useful.
It seems like there might be a niche for a "Delphi for the web" stack of reusable components and standard backend systems.
From the article: "At age 18, arrest rates were 12 percent for white females and 11.8 percent and 11.9 percent for Hispanic and black females, respectively. By age 23, arrest rates were 20 percent for white females and 18 percent and 16 percent for Hispanic and black females, respectively."
Hmm, is there historical data of this sort for many companies? Sounds like it could make an interesting survival analysis project.
You'll enjoy this paper by the Harvard Business School which pretty much destroys the concept of systemic goal setting in a business. It describes your exact situation: when people have to deal with shit goals, they figure out how work the system.
http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/09-083.pdf
Original discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7897662
Maybe not. http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/25/uberauto/
I think the general idea behind driverless cars is that they can be JIT-rented, and since Uber would have the infrastructure in place, they would be the natural market leader.
Indeed. Here's something somewhat related, from PyCon 2012. It deals with using computer vision to fire a squirt gun at squirrels. The principle is basically the same.
https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00002211...
Yes, there is a lobby.
Definitely, I'll send an email over. I've spent a lot of time mulling over these type of agents, would be nice to do something practical based on it.
Great idea. There's a lot of calendar apps out there, but the data feeds powering them are the same old crap. The concept of an agent doing stuff with the app feels like 60's-ish virtual assistant futurism.
I wonder how usable an "intelligent" autonomous agent putting things on a calendar would be. (That is, to extend the generation of a calendar feed with more clever bits.) Say there was a weather component that would only schedule sunsets when the weather would be conducive for photography.
Yes, via a new install to an iPad.
I'm guessing it's just his prompt. The Node/JS community has a bit of thing for using unicode characters everywhere.
Case in point:
https://github.com/mbostock/d3/blob/c247e1626118de41b3d40e2a...
Hopefully it wasn't a "Clever Hans" type of demonstration for the second one. IE, someone watching on camera and then manually entering data into the interface from a different room.
I personally only buy the frame, and build a table-top for it. You can get pre-glued boards like this, which are quite easy to finish: http://www.menards.com/main/building-materials/lumber-boards...
If you're worried about the wood getting damaged by repeated disassembly-reassembly cycles, you can use insert nuts to screw a machine bolt into: http://www.menards.com/main/tools-hardware/fasteners/nuts/mi...
The nice part is that an actual wood top not only looks and feels better, it's a bit cheaper than the particle board tops that IKEA makes.
Let's ignore all of the arguments around Khan Academy (pretend it's a foregone, rational conclusion that it is superior) and focus on people:
Humans are irrational by default (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDAzsZLvfPw). This is more or less proven in many behavioral experiments (Too lazy right now to source them) when people will do the obviously wrong thing based on internal logics.
Because of this, we can look to the irrational beliefs of people that influence the schools. Namely, social and physical proof. And the social proof has a major benefit: it's less likely that someone is bullshiting credentials if they have an actual degree to back it. http://xkcd.com/451/
Still, it will be a while before irrational opinions catch up (or are leapfrogged by locations like Ghana that embrace the new medium) and that there are ways to catch cheaters.
I agree with your signaling hypothesis for the earning potential. I personally think that weddings are already taken for other signals, though since language drifts, these signals could as well.
This is entirely anecdotal, but currently there are big, expensive and pragmatic weddings. These lavish wedding party tends to be signaling for the family in relation to others in a diaspora situation. As an American, I think our concept of "love" and Christianity have blurred the original point of marriages which have existed for long before our current Victorian ideals.
As an example: a friend of mine is ethnically Cambodian, and weddings in her social circle tend to be orchestrated on reputation as well as connection. IE, at the wedding participants will leave an envelope with the name of the clan who gifted it. Supposedly the bride and groom (or, possibly their family members) will spend part of the wedding accounting for the debts to neighbors. Her wedding, largely put together by her father, involved more than 500 people of a group that is not very populous in my area.
As she put it, lavish weddings were fundraisers for capital investments for members in a spread-out community. They are tabulated and redistributed to other newlyweds after a while, effectively socializing it.
"The Entertainment" was a video tape in the book that "so entertaining to its viewers that they lose all interest in anything other than viewing it and thus eventually die."
Depending on your scholarly beliefs, it's either just a metaphor for addiction, or in addition, a critique on media and media consumption. I chose to believe the latter, in that it could stand to be a critique on how our pastimes are intentionally becoming more engaging and addicting.
I'm not sure on the visual representation, but the thing would have been a Rauchenberg-ian collage of video, text and audio, layered together and becoming more "recommended" for the user, based on physical cues from the physical input devices, as well as choices. The actual recommendation algorithm would have been relatively primitive, most likely a decision tree, or if I could figure it out, an ensemble algorithm that would have created better media recommendations in real time to show to the viewer from trending topics, imgur, youtube, that type of junk.
Indeed. I preordered the DK2, but I'm not sure if I should try to get a refund.
I'm not on Facebook, and I don't want to develop for their platform. Although, one of the ideas was to replicate DFW's "samizdat" as an art project. Something tells me Facebook wouldn't look kindly on it pulling all your friend data to entertain you to death.
Ah, thank you! I'll definitely be signing up there, then. I'm not in the UK, and our version (craigslist) doesn't really have the userbase for language lessons, but I might try posting a want ad.
Where did you find the people online? I've looked at http://www.italki.com/, but not much else.
I agree with your sentiment about sprawl being toxic, but I think that time and population migration will solve the problem via urban renewal. The suburbs seem to be (If you believe the Brookings institute) on the wane as families grow smaller and can be accommodated into the tighter spaces of a city. Few of my friends have moved outwards as they've had children, and even then it tends to be those who grew up on farms, and moved to cities for technical jobs.
Brookings report: http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2013/05/28-city-g...
Related, an excerpt from Hustwit's Urbanized talking about the same issue in Brasilia: http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2012/11/05/brazillia-an...
I can vouch for the value of the material. I took yours last year and it definitely helped with both work as well as my personal projects. In particular the components on functional knowledge are things that other courses tend to ignore.