Guyag

> Or would that threaten too many womens' bargaining chip?

Can you clarify what you mean by this please?

Seconded. What I was looking for in a note-taking system was something wiki based, and this has a really nice take on the concept.

Big fan of Tiddlywiki for its nonlinearity. You can see how it works without signing up or downloading anything; the site is itself an instance: http://tiddlywiki.com/

Neat - I'm in the process of making a similar system which will spit out Spigot plugins, with the aim of letting kids create some simple ones themselves and hopefully planting the seed for getting them interested in programming. As part of this I included a 'split screen' view showing the generated Java in addition to the normal block work area, though this is read-only.

It's been more of a challenge than I thought it would be to design the blocks such that the end set isn't near enough a 1:1 mapping to Java - showing it to a non-technical friend of mine made it clear that my intuition was way off. Would be interested to hear how you approached this (if you don't mind).

Also interesting that I didn't find your website when I was initially researching, though I did come across https://www.learntomod.com/ (and even that was hard to find). I suspect my base search term of "minecraft blockly" isn't the most common one used by the target market to find something for their kids though.

ServerBear did exactly this, though it seems they sadly shut down. ServerScope seems to do something similar - https://serverscope.io/ though without a huge breadth.

I can't recommend Scratchapixel enough for diving deep into the concepts behind CG (although it seems to be down for me at the moment ironically). I can't remember how much it goes into libraries or if it sticks to implementing things from scratch, but I find knowing the concepts behind something makes learning the libraries much easier anyway.

https://www.scratchapixel.com

Syntax-wise, I've found learnxinyminutes.com to be a good introductory resource. I'm also looking for a good quality resource on programmatic conventions for different languages, including details on what unique/'cool' features each has, all in once place. So far I've not had much luck.

Did anyone else think that the language used in this article was really hyperbolic and over-dramatic? Loads of unnecessary superlatives I thought.

Is it not standard to have your ID checked when taking exams? I had to take my university ID with me to all that I sat at a British uni.

I agree with you that people should probably choose a career in something they're good at, but I think that's separate to the issue of making life easier for people entering the subject from nothing. The CS courses I've seen are different from those in other subjects in that they assume a whole lot more background knowledge, which is a pretty exclusionary assumption to make. Stopping this is no bad thing.

I think GP hits the nail on the head there with the homework analogy, and you with yours. Just talking to my friends in other careers about the work that I do makes me check time and time again just how many assumptions of knowledge I make when talking about anything vaguely technical (which is possibly a criticism of how I explain things, but also/even if so says lots about this issue).

What surprises me is the lack of consolidated resources addressing these basic pain points. I don't think it would be hard to come up with a list of examples just by looking at a normal work day and taking a step back; really evaluating where you're relying on basic knowledge to do even the most mundane of tasks. Once you've been doing this for a few years those tasks are just that - mundane - but for beginners it's having difficulty with those basic parts that is a real turn off. "How will I ever be any good at this if I can't even download code off this thing called Github". If someone could point me towards some kind of existing resource covering a bunch of different areas in this way I'd be really interested in having a read.

On a related note, I'm reminded of one of Dan Luu's related essays on debugging [1], which I recommend reading if you haven't already.

[1] https://danluu.com/teach-debugging/

I've seen (but can't find) some discussion on here about the movie industry in relation to this, I think in relation to what Netflix is doing with their originals. Apparently it's really heavily unionised, with people having incredibly specific jobs which only they are allowed to do, which is strongly baked into their general culture. Doubt it's the same case as SNAP, but just an interesting titbit. Can't find a source offhand.

If the Official Secrets Act applies to you, it's an offence to break it even if you've not signed it.

http://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Summ...

edit: beat to it by a minute!

Instagram engineering did a blog post a while back on implementing emoji hashtags explaining (among other things) how some are represented by >1 unicode character. Pretty interesting read [0].

[0] https://engineering.instagram.com/emojineering-part-ii-imple...

I suspect it'd be pretty different. Stories are right at the top when you open the app and are used by quite a few celebs - that must inflate the numbers a lot.

Depends what you want to get out of them. I find some are mostly focused around some of the more unique/cool challenges they come across (Google[1][2], Slack[3]), and others are more about how they solve the engineering challenges they face through software and/or about their dev process (Uber[4], Twitter[5]). Some are mix of the two (Dropbox[6], Netflix[7]).

[1] https://developers.googleblog.com/

[2] http://research.googleblog.com/

[3] https://slack.engineering

[4] https://eng.uber.com/

[5] https://blog.twitter.com/engineering

[6] https://tech.dropbox.com

[7] http://techblog.netflix.com/

Their method is detailed in the whitepaper [1], mainly section 3.2. TL;DR mturk for high level annotations (frame contains/does not contain object in class), and internal annotators for bounding boxes.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1702.00824.pdf

The style of having checkboxes next to very obviously positive statements feels really disingenuous. "Urge for the freedom to travel and work anywhere" - of course that would be nice. Maybe I'm too cynical.

Ditto, that was my entry to 'programming' - to begin with it consisted of copying a bunch Runescape stats scripts from Hawkee and running on my desktop. As it progressed I included some persistence for some feature, implemented by creating a bunch of global variables with the user's nick as the first part of it. I think I felt that storing to file was overcomplicating things, bearing in mind that I was pretty young at the time.

I do recall coming across some scaling issues, which I resolved by spinning up another instance of mIRC and running it with the name <botname>2. That seemed to work pretty well. 'v2' came next, wholly consisting of changing all of the scripts' colours to be homogeneous.

Do you know any good resources on the future of conversational agents? In terms of what need they fulfil - I don't use Ok Google/Siri/Cortana, and rarely use my Echo but for music, and find it hard to understand where they fit in. Home automation is the only thing that comes to mind ("only").

Google dictionary https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-dictionary-...

Double click on words and you get the definition, or translation if it's in another language. Works for non-dictionary words as well, normally giving the Wikipedia definition.

I believe it's a version of an old copypasta [0].

[0] https://wiki.installgentoo.com/index.php/Interjection

They actually got rid of this a little while ago, you can now share horizontal & vertical images within a range of aspect ratios [0].

[0] https://help.instagram.com/1631821640426723

I don't think tagging with something like #ad or #sponsored does nearly enough, especially if hidden amongst a bunch of other tags. (edit: And #sp - are you kidding me?) Traditional ads are obvious through specific placement on the page (sidebars) and/or a prominent "Advertisement" or "Sponsored" label and/or moreover simply having the general look and feel of a 'traditional' advert.

When your favourite media personality is gushing about some product it's really easy to forget it's an advert and they're being paid for it. I know that's what makes it great for marketing purposes, but it feels seriously dishonest and (to me) represents a decline in our standards.

Second this. Will be using this in the future, and some kind of categorisation would improve usability.

It would be nice to have the full content in the feed so I can read it in my reader. I use feedly.

Would love a RSS feed for the blog