sudont

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."

http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6114.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7897662

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.

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...

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."

Not sure what would be more performant, REST or a websocket. Not doing anything would be the fastest, though!

http://redis.io/commands/HINCRBY

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.

1: http://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/

It seems like there might be a niche for a "Delphi for the web" stack of reusable components and standard backend systems.

http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/09-083.pdf

Original discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7897662

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPgqfnKG_T4

Yes, there is a lobby.

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.

Case in point:

https://github.com/mbostock/d3/blob/c247e1626118de41b3d40e2a...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...