How useful is the API for speech on iOS? Do you have a link to the docs for it? I did a quick search for "speech recognition API for iOS" but I didn't see anything official from Apple on the results. (Is there an official one?)
I've seen, in my decade of experience in tech, that a well-worded and keyword-packed marketing ploy is as irresistible as gravity to many. As the seductive promises and successful toy examples accrete around the neutron soup of buzzwords, a marketing mass finally reaches an influential Schwarzschild radius. Businesses that come within this radius are pulled in and obliterated, but they have no knowledge of their destruction. They've passed the event horizon and are now in a place where causality and reason have been up-ended. Their demise would only be detectable outside in the faint Hawking radiation that is drowned out by the background noise of self-congratulatory back-patting.
These pie-in-the-sky companies are necessary in the tech galaxy. Their primary purpose is to weed out those businesses who don't have the wisdom or tenacity to take on the challenges themselves. Their secondary purpose is to teach future tech leaders a hard lesson: there is no silver bullet.
I don't think any of these are anti-patterns. They are behaviors that may be completely reasonable to use in a given circumstance. The author is misapplying software engineering terminology to software engineering management.
Actually, I used the terminology that Hoffman and Cantrill used. The point is not that the behaviors are unreasonable "in a given circumstance" but when applied continually.
Then you have to define "continually." It's probably better to say it's unreasonable when it eventually fails, but you can only make that determination after the fact. The truth is that any managerial behavior, when applied continually, will become an anti-pattern. So choosing particular behaviors, organizing and labeling them is just an autistic exercise.
I've solved some coding challenges I come across, but mostly because I wanted a little diversion. Generally those problems give me an excuse to practice lesser used languages or languages I want to learn. I've been contacted by companies after solving these, but I always decline.
In regard to the change in hiring practices, "social presence resumes" are just a passing trend. It may result in better candidates in the short term, but people will learn to pad these new resumes and it won't be much more effective than paper resumes.
The best hiring practice will still be tapping your employees' social network and hunting down talented people who aren't happy in their current positions. Anything else is usually a shot in the dark.
This is the case in the U.S. as well. Apple products are considered chic, and people merely buy them for the fad value. Apple marketing has been very good lately - a stark change from "Think different." Their product release cycle and pricing are magnificent as well. While other computer makers are reeling from the crisis and subsequent changes in the market, Apple has created a small ecosystem that is very well designed to pull you in. Once you buy the peanut butter, you also need the jelly, the bread and the butter knife.
"Apple products are considered chic, and people merely buy them for the fad value."
Yeah. A "fad" that lasted for 12 years now, since the introduction of OS X with ever-increasing Mac/OS X/Apple sales. Are you kidding me?
Have you ever been to a conference for geeks/hackers/programmers? Most of the laptops you'll see are Macs. Go to Python, Ruby, Rails, Mongo, MySQL, Node.js and whatever conferences -- hey, even in Java conferences, despite Apple not caring about the language at all. You can also try visiting a university such as Stanford and see which are the most popular laptops there. Most people on Hacker News use a Mac too (according to a recent HN poll I saw).
You seriously believe that all those highly technical and capable people are victims of a 10-12 year old "fad"?
Btw, even Linus Torwalds (which doesn't like OS X's os tech) admitted that he wrote his autobiography on an iBook, running OS X and using Word. (Torwalds also used an Apple G5 as his desktop machine for a while, though he run Linux on it).
> Have you ever been to a conference for geeks/hackers/programmers? Most of the laptops you'll see are Macs. Go to Python, Ruby, Rails, Mongo, MySQL, Node.js and whatever conferences -- hey, even in Java conferences
Hell, go to Google I/O, half the machines there seem to be macs.
He's making a consumer/producer dichotomy. If you can't produce software, then you are relegated to only consume it. This is true of all technologies and advances though. Lofty arguments aside the article is mostly a subtly placed ad for Codeacademy.
If you're currently living, you will be able to make it to your grave without any knowledge of programming. There's no reason to learn to code if you don't want to. Sure, you won't be able to take advantage of many things that technology offers, but that won't seriously degrade your standard of living to the point of hopelessness.
A better bit of advice would be "Learn to understand systems, get a job".
Being the pragmatist that I am: Why bother with public social media if you want to say something in private? Also, from a social behavioral view, this is very rude. It's the online equivalent of 2 or more people in a group switching to speaking another language so someone else in the group can't understand the topic.
Neko.io is a utility. People post links to social networks all the time. The above link might look long and scrambled, but most services are shortening it automatically.
Neko.io looks like it's trying to solve the access control list issues that Facebook has been plagued with since... forever. But it gets no further. It only exports these issues to all social networks.
Watch Zed Shaw's "The ACL is dead" presentation and you'll understand why.
Also it requires yet another non-standard authorization utility (Mepin?) or a separate login. I'm phatigued by phishing.
And we will likely never get there. A good place to start reasoning about programming languages is the philosophy of language. Frege, Hume, Wittgenstein, Searle are some interesting figures in this space. Many language philosophers believe there are some basics of language that everyone grasps, and the particulars of a language evolve from necessity. Fortunately there is little agreement on what these basic elements are. This is what makes it interesting.
"Evidence-based programming languages" won't solve anything by finding natural-language equivalents for difficult syntax. What natural language will these equivalents be created in? English, Japanese, Arabic? All languages? Will Japanese programmers share their code with English programmers by means of a Babel fish?
The idea of a poorly designed language is nonsense. All languages that exist or have existed were designed precisely for what and when they were needed.
At its core programming is about appropriate abstraction. To be widely useful the programming language's wheels should tread lightly, just touching the road. If there's too much abstraction, there's no friction and you go nowhere. With too little abstraction you're pegged to the ground and expend enormous amounts of energy to go anywhere.
My experience with gung-ho githubbers is the same. It's great to try out new technologies, but gitguys take it to an extreme. They'll shoehorn any new technology into their stack without a second thought about product stability.
Gitguy: "I used EC2, Blazboo and Chingbang to create an HA job queue that will never fail! It uses counting Bloom filters and I wrote it in Brainfuck."
Me: "What do you use it for?"
Gitguy: "Sending password reset emails."
These Rube Goldberg wannabes are generally more trouble than they're worth. You end up with a system that's a technological pastiche. The drawback is apparent when you try to hire new teammates. It turns out you can't find someone who knows the 12 esoteric packages your business is running on.
The state of programming is so awful, that I'm literally just looking to know: do you write fat controller actions..or whatever equivalent exists for the specific technology you used.
That, to me, is 100x more important than "how many zeros are in 100 factorial"
I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks this. I really like the energetic fluorescence of some open source communities, but the punning names, over-extended metaphors and religious devotion to novelty uber alles are really starting to take their toll.
