Readit Newssudont commented on Did The Harappan Civilization Avoid War for 2,000 Years? io9.com/a-civilization-wi... · Posted by u/fillskills
Unfortunately Pinker is as guilty of just-so stories and easy essentialism as those he criticizes. What fraction of modern Americans are dying in wars again? Be wary of 'human nature'. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/11/25/what-comes-natu...
sudont commented on A failed experiment: How LG screwed up its webOS acquisition gigaom.com/2014/08/28/a-f... · Posted by u/cpeterso
Money quote, no pun intended:
LG had a policy in place to reward managers with
bonuses or even promotions if their features were
part of the final product. The result was a constant
feature bloat, as everyone tried to add on one more
thing.
I found this here, it's a really good paper that backs the idea that goals are pretty tough.
sudont commented on PhoneGap Developer App Preview for Firefox OS hacks.mozilla.org/2014/09... · Posted by u/rnyman
I spent some time (>18 months ago) testing PhoneGap for potential use with what would become http://recent.io/, but PhoneGap was too slow on actual devices to be usable. Launching a "Hello, world" app took something like 30 seconds on an iPhone 3GS. Maybe hardware speed increases have helped to fix that problem.
I haven't tested Ionic, though the Creator utility looks promising. Do you have any experience in how well Ionic interfaces with native APIs, like Twitter/Facebook on iOS and sharing on Android? And how do Ionic-built HTML apps perform in terms of speed?
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.
sudont commented on PhoneGap Developer App Preview for Firefox OS hacks.mozilla.org/2014/09... · Posted by u/rnyman
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...
sudont commented on Google's fact-checking bots build vast knowledge bank newscientist.com/article/... · Posted by u/spountzy
>> "Behind the scenes, Google doesn't only have public data," says Suchanek. It can also pull in information from Gmail, Google+ and Youtube."You and I are stored in the Knowledge Vault in the same way as Elvis Presley," Suchanek says.
I really hope Google does not use Gmail data for projects other than ads. They really needs to ask users to opt-in to this kind of data sharing. I'm ok with gmail being read for ads, but almost anything else is unethical, especially some experimental knowledge base.
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."
sudont commented on Show HN: ZipLocate, a free API for zip code geolocation ziplocate.us/... · Posted by u/nathancahill
That's a great idea. (Un)fortunately it's all client-side.
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!
sudont commented on Yubari, Japan: a city learns how to die theguardian.com/cities/20... · Posted by u/oska
> Ah the "no looting in Japan" myth.
Oh, come on. In the countryside farmers put vegetables in unattended booths for people to grab and put a coin in a hole for payment. Nobody's stealing. Where else in the world do you see that ?
Rural Wisconsin. I worked on a road crew during college and we'd rarely have guys buy stuff during breaks/downtime.
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What's are the initials BJC? My searching turned up nothing that immediately fits the context, and I'd like to read more
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."